Chapter Twelve

 

Joshua

I’m sitting in my office, grasping my cock in my hands. God, I can’t wait to plunge it into her pussy. Her mouth is sweet, but I want more. I want to bury myself in her tight, wet heat and fuck her so hard that my bed slams into the wall. I want her screams to sing a song of ecstasy and agony in equal measure.

But not yet.

I stroke myself, and dark images flash through my mind, the way they always do.

The images are terrible, and they pollute my sexual encounters, forcing me back in time. They sicken me, and I can’t help myself.

Skinny girls chained to the wall, with hollow eyes and tattered dresses. Dad wouldn’t let us touch them, but we had to jerk off to them.

Thor was beaten to death because he couldn’t come that way. Our father screamed that no son of his was going to be a pussy little faggot. So they went outside into the ring of stones where we had all our blood battles, and my mother watched her husband beat her thirteen-year-old son to death in less than sixty seconds.

Watching my father with those girls sickened me. I don’t know if that shows that there’s a glimmer of normal in me, buried down deep.

But we had to show our father that we were real men. All those times I watched him ramming himself into them, choking them with his cock, while I was forced to pleasure myself… By the time I was in my teens, I couldn’t think of sex any other way. If a woman wasn’t twisting and screaming, I couldn’t get hard.

Watching him with those girls…that was when I finally began to question him. All that bullshit talk of being the ultimate apex predator. Taking those girls wasn’t the action of a predator. It was the action of an inadequate man who feared confronting a real challenge. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I had never seen my father take on an opponent who was a match for him in size or strength. He beat his wife, he beat his children, he beat up little girls he stole from their homes. Where was the honor in defeating such a foe?

A faint uneasiness stirs inside of me when I think of Tamara. My bringing her here is different, I remind myself. Not just because she’s a woman rather than a girl. I took Tamara for her own good, so I wouldn’t have to kill her. My father, though, he took those girls because of the weakness in him.

The images of the crying girls swim behind my closed eyes as my hand moves up and down, gripping my cock. Usually, I replace the images with the picture of some random whore. Today I replace them with Tamara, imagining her bent over a bench and moaning, “Yes, Master,” and it’s surprising how good it makes me feel.

Thinking about her, I come in less than a minute.

I’m smiling as I clean myself off with tissues.

She’s a fighter, that one. She pretends to surrender, but she’s always plotting and planning. That makes the challenge even more thrilling.

I wonder how long it will take until she’s fully, completely mine. Until she truly loves me, craves me, would die without me.

Until she doesn’t have a single thought in her head other than how to please me.

As I toss the tissue in the trash, a flicker of worry creeps through me. Will I still want her when she’s nothing but a mindless puppet?

I’ve met so many weak women over the years. Women who are instinctively drawn to my brutality. Women who would chew their own tits off for me if they could. It revolts me. God help me, it reminds me of my mother, who was too weak until the very end, and then it was too little, too late.

Now my elation starts to fade.

Is it selfish of me to steal a human being and use her to self-medicate? To give myself the endorphin rush that my brain craves?

Of course it is. Who fucking cares? Where did that question even come from? I never think like that. Sometimes I think Tamara’s weakening essential parts of me. All the more reason to hurry up and reshape her into exactly what I need. That will have to break the hold she has on me, won’t it?

But what will she be if I crush her completely?

Will she still be able to please me? Isn’t this fight, this defiance, what I need from her?

And when it’s gone, when she’s a mindless, broken toy, what will I do if I get bored with her? I promised I wouldn’t kill her. Will I still desire her if she’s a shambling zombie who craves me and never questions me?

I lean back in my chair, lacing my fingers together. I’ve never experienced a situation like this. In the past, if I wanted sexual satisfaction, I hired whores I could whip, fuck, and then throw out with a handful of money clenched in their greedy little fists.

The worry won’t go away. It’s chewing at the edges of my consciousness. I can’t see any way out of this situation, though. I don’t know how to spend time with anyone without feeling the overwhelming urge to crush and conquer them. That’s one reason I picked the business I did. I buy companies and strip them of their assets, or cut them down to size and resell them when they’re profitable. I move on. No permanency, no interpersonal contact. It’s why I’ve always held every single human being in my life at arm’s length.

Except for Elizabeth, but that’s a different story.

I made promises to her a long time ago, and I will do my best to keep them.

My father used to make promises all the time, and he’d laugh and laugh as he broke them. He’d promise a girl he was going to let her go, and then when she’d run a few hundred feet, he’d start chasing her.

He’d promise my mother he was done hitting her, and then the beatings would resume.

I try very, very hard to avoid lies. And I don’t make promises I can’t keep.

Not lying makes it a little harder to manipulate people, but that’s all right. Handicapping myself isn’t a bad thing. It makes life more challenging.

My new burner phone vibrates and beeps on the table, and I look at it, narrow-eyed. Only Elizabeth has the burner phone numbers, and that’s just so she can call me in case of true, life-or-death emergency. Right now, I am watching Tamara on the monitor, so I know she’s secured, and my perimeter alarms haven’t been tripped, so nobody’s on my property—so what the hell is going on?

When I pick up the phone, ice water washes through my blood.

Have you been a bad boy? the text message says.

I sit bolt upright.

Holy fuck.

Adrenaline pumps through me. I consider answering but decide that acknowledgment would be a bad idea.

Quickly, I log on to my computer and check the video feed that shows me a man in a large, padded cell. He’s drawing on a piece of paper with a crayon. Hmm. I wonder if that’s a good idea. Knowing him, he could find a way to make a deadly weapon out of those. Then again, he’s monitored all the time. I check the time and date scrolling across the screen at the top of the feed; it’s current.

To be extra sure, I make a phone call, using a special phone that I keep just for this purpose.

The head of the Blackthorne Psychiatric Institute answers instantly. As he fucking well better if he wants the money to keep flowing and his family to keep breathing. I have not yet ever killed a child, but if he fucks me over on this, he will leave me no choice, and he knows it.

“Is he there?” I demand of him.

“Of course.” Dr. Barnard doesn’t need to ask who I’m talking about. “You can check the feed.”

“I just did. All right, then. He’s not giving you any problems?”

“No more than usual.”

Cursing, I hang up. I almost wish he’d escaped. Almost. If he escapes, it will be my personal Hell on Earth, but at least it would make sense. I have no fucking idea who could be texting me and how much they know about me, and this is making me angry.

I use a special software program of my own design to run a trace on the phone, but I’m not surprised when it doesn’t lead me anywhere. The phone call is pinging all over the place.

For a brief moment, it occurs to me that Tamara is a complication. If somebody is starting to pry around into my business, I should get rid of her.

I push that thought aside. This house, bought by a shell company and completely untraceable, is deep, deep in the country. Nobody knows I’m here. Do they?

Does the person who’s taunting me on the burner phone know where I live? I don’t see how, but then again, I bought these burner phones with cash, at two different stores, yet somebody has very likely gotten the number twice. That phone call that went to voice mail…it can’t be a coincidence. It’s got to be the same person.

It is absolutely impossible for anyone even to come near the house without me being alerted. If the police came here, I’d know, and I’d deal with it then.

When my regular phone rings, I’m relieved to see it’s the president of Morton Media calling me.

Mr. Morton pleads for more time to consider my offer.

I laugh. “Now you’ve pissed me off, so I’m dropping my offer by ten percent. You have forty-eight hours to respond with a signed acceptance letter, or my offer drops by thirty percent.” And given that I’ve scared off all his other potential buyers, I’m all he’s got.

His sad blubbering, his ridiculous attempts to plead for the jobs of hundreds of employees, amuse me. I know the scoop. I’ve been listening in on his increasingly desperate attempts to find a better buyer. He’s got nothing.

But my elation fades as soon as I hang up, and I set about trying to figure out who the hell could be sending those texts. I’ll have to go over all my security measures, find the holes, and plug them.

In the end, though, my very healthy self-confidence and ego save the day. Whatever the threat is, I’ll defeat it. Of course I will. I always do. I haven’t had a truly worthy opponent in a long, long time. There was an MMA fighter who beat his wife to death in front of their toddler and skated on the charges—that came close. But that was a year ago.

This will be good for me. First, fate rewarded me with Tamara, and now this.

Life is good. I always get what I deserve.