Chapter Twenty-Four
Tamara
Panic floods my body, and I involuntarily jerk against the chains, then pull myself back.
There is only one way to stop him from interrogating me and figuring out the truth. I have to distract him by going on the offensive.
“Fuck you, asshole!” I scream at him. “You’re not my master, Joshua Smith, you’re a fucking crazy loser sack of shit! I hate being here, and I’d rather die than spend one more second with you. This isn’t living. This is Hell!”
He glares down at me, face flushing with fury, but for some reason I’m not afraid.
“You think this is Hell, you spoiled bitch?” he shouts at me. “Hell is watching your father kill your brothers one by one and waiting for your turn! Hell is watching your father bury your twin brother alive! Hell is your very first memories being of hearing your mother scream while your father rapes her up the ass! Hell is watching your daddy rape little girls and being forced to jerk off to it if you want to live another day! Hell is being starved, and burned, and cut, and walking barefoot through the snow all winter long!”
“Am I supposed to feel sorry for you?” I laugh, a harsh, horrible sound. “I’m fucking glad you suffered. I wish you’d suffered more. I wish your father had finished the job.” His eyes widen in surprise. He wasn’t expecting that from passive little Toy, or compassionate, caring Tamara, but I’m not either of those anymore. My pain and desperation have forged something new. “You took everything away from me. You destroyed my life! I don’t care if this is a gilded cage, it’s a goddamn cage, you asshole, you psycho, you nut job, and you make me sick!”
“I don’t make you sick,” he says, tightly controlled fury dripping from every word. “I make you come. I make you beg for it.”
“Yes, you had to make me beg for it.” I pour all my pent-up loathing and contempt into my hateful glower. “I didn’t do it on my own. I never would have. Just kill me and get it over with, you scum-licking pig, because I am Tamara Bennett, and I will end your disgusting life or die trying. I am not Toy, I was never Toy, and I never will be. You fucking failed at breaking me, like you fail at life, you piece of shit.”
Instead of answering, he turns and storms out of the room.
As soon as he’s out the door, I hear him shouting. No, roaring. An animal sound of pure fury. I hear glass breaking and a door slam repeatedly.
I’ve made the iceman lose control.
I smile to myself.
I shut my eyes and remember that I’m Tamara again. It feels so good to be Tamara.
With nothing else to do, I start reciting lessons in my head. Algebra. I invent algebra problems in my head and solve them. Then I move on to history. I start to recreate history classes from high school and quiz myself.
After a few hours, I realize that I’m crying, but I don’t feel sad. I feel weak and dizzy and I’m floating on a strange kind of high.
My kidnapper Joshua Smith comes back into the room.
“Why are you crying and laughing at the same time?” he demands.
Was I laughing? So many feelings are flooding my body that I don’t know what to do with them.
I look at him haughtily. “You’d have to be human to understand, Joshua dick-sucking piece-of-crap Smith. And by the way? You’re a liar, you little turd-breath asshole. You lied about nobody reporting me missing. You know why you had to lie? Because you’re fucking weak!”
He lashes out and slaps me, and my ears ring, and I laugh and laugh, spiraling up into hysteria. “Oh my God. My God. Thank you for proving my point, wussy girl. I call you weak and it hurts your sad little feelings, and you respond like a puppet because I jerked your string. You just slapped a woman half your size who’s chained to a bed! You’re so brave, Joshua! Did that make you feel good about yourself? Are you going to come now?”
Just fucking kill me already. What do I have to say to push him over the edge?
“Fuck this,” he growls. He undoes my cuffs. He scoops me up and throws me over his shoulder and carries me down the hall, down the stairs, heading for my cell.
“You don’t deserve a nice clean room. You’ll stay down here, cuffed hand and foot, in the dark. Enjoy your new life.”
“Good,” I spit at him. “I don’t ever want to see your face again, because you make me sick.”
* * *
Joshua
A week goes by, and I miss her every single day.
All day long, thoughts of her crawl through my head. I’m trying to orchestrate a takeover of a string of failing hotels, and I can’t think straight enough to concentrate on it.
Not only that, she’s not breaking this time. I don’t understand it. She talks to herself all day long, reciting what sound like classroom lessons. She looks up at the camera and laughs at me and insults me in every way possible, mocking my sexual skills, my general adequacy as a man, my need to make up lies to control her. She gloats about how many times she faked orgasms. Now, there I know she’s lying, because I felt her body clench around my cock and measured her panting breaths, felt her rapidly hammering heart as if it were my own.
And yet it actually—I have to admit this—on some level, it hurts my feelings. Feelings I didn’t know I had.
I sit in wonder at this strange, unrecognizable thing I’m becoming.
She hasn’t made me into a good man. I’m never going to let her free, and I still want to kill. Need to kill. If I weren’t worried about the phantom who’s nibbling at the edges of my life, I’d go out and kill someone new today. Maybe the judge. That would be fun. I’d enjoy it.
So if I’m not the old me, and I’m not a good man, what am I?
I play through various tortures in my head, imagining scenarios that might make Toy sorry she ever defied me. But it all feels hollow.
I thought I could rewrite her, and I failed. I believed that the minds of all prey were the same, that they could be permanently reshaped in any way I chose, given the appropriate stimuli or lack of stimuli. But the scrappy little fighter was lurking under the surface the entire time. I can torture her into obeying me, but I can never take away her free will.
One day, when Elizabeth goes downstairs with Toy’s daily gruel, Toy starts in on her. She mocks her, calls her old and ugly. “Joshua will never love you, you sour-smelling old bitch. Your twat reeks like a tuna sandwich someone left in the sun for a week. Do you see the way he tries not to breathe when you come into the room? It’s fucking hilarious.”
Elizabeth lets out a guttural howl and throws the bowl of gruel at Toy’s face. Toy just laughs at her and resumes her mockery. “Did you actually think he’d ever put his dick in that dried up snatch of yours? You dream about it all night long, don’t you? Do you touch yourself when you think of him?”
Her cruelty is breath-taking. Highly impressive. Worthy of me. Where did it come from?
She was never like that before. Can people actually change their essential nature?
Is that what’s happening to me?
Elizabeth flashes a frantic look at the camera on the ceiling, and her face crumples in mortification. She knows I heard every word Toy just said. She runs out of the room. She doesn’t come to me for new instructions, or for punishment for throwing the gruel. She runs straight to her room, and I hear the shower turning on.
She’s washing herself because she believed Toy, because she thinks she smells bad. Toy hurt her, which means I should punish Toy, but how? If pain and threats of death won’t move her, what will?
I watch Toy lying there in bed with the gruel slowly drying on her face. That drives me crazy. I don’t want Toy to be dirty. Elizabeth lets her up to use the grate in the floor as a toilet exactly three times a day, and she doesn’t get to wash herself afterward. I can feel the filth crawling on Toy’s skin as if it were my own, and it makes me itch. Phantom stench drifts into my nostrils, roiling my stomach and putting me off my food.
I let the day drift by. When Elizabeth never comes to my office, I go find her in her room.
It’s the room of a grade-school girl. Her walls are crowded with framed pictures of fairy-tale couples. Cinderella, Rapunzel, Snow White—all of them pictured gazing adoringly at their princes. I used to think that she decorated her room that way because she was a case of arrested development—she stopped maturing emotionally after my father kidnapped her and raped her.
Encased in the amber of eternal childhood.
Now I realize that those fairy-tale couples represent her impossible dream: her and me. How could I never have noticed? Oh, right, because psychopaths lack empathy.
“Elizabeth! What the hell are you doing in here?” I snap.
She scoots back on her bed with the Ariel comforter and cringes away from me, refusing to meet my eyes. Her disobedience is a slap to my face.
“Look at me, you fucking moron,” I snarl at her. She flinches and makes horrible sobbing noises. I force myself to temper the anger in my voice.
“Toy was lying to you. You don’t smell bad. You do a very good job for me. You are very useful to me. Don’t listen to anything she says. She’s angry at me and taking it out on you. Her words are meaningless. All right?”
Elizabeth manages a dejected, miserable nod.
Then she looks at me hopefully and draws her finger across her throat.
She wants me to kill Toy. She has never before, in her life, requested anything from me, and this is what she asks?
That bizarre protectiveness flares up in me. I’ve committed such evil acts against Toy that any sane person would say I should be flayed alive, but if anyone else threatens her, I want to dismember them. It takes everything I’ve got to keep my voice steady. “I am not going to kill her. And you are not to harm her, or I will set you on fire and watch you burn. You will go down there tonight and wash her face off with a cloth and give her dinner.”
I could, of course, go downstairs myself, but I know Toy hates Elizabeth, so this is part of my punishment.
Elizabeth shakes her head frantically. She mouths, “Please.” She’s never refused an order from me before. In the past, she never would have dreamed of it.
I feel as if my world is crumbling away from me. I have to regain control. I just gave Elizabeth an order, and I have to make her follow it. My very identity depends on it. You’re the king, or you’re nothing.
I walk over to her calmly as she shrinks in on herself, trying to get smaller and smaller. I grab her by the hair and pull her off her bed, dropping her to the floor. She lands with a squawk.
“You will go down there, and you will feed her and wash her face, or you are no longer useful to me. And don’t ever refuse an order again.” I storm out of the room without waiting for an answer, and the sound of her hoarse, horrible sobbing makes me want to vomit.
No, whatever Toy has done to me, she has not turned me decent.
That evening, when Elizabeth goes down to feed Toy, I watch closely. The minute Elizabeth walks through the door, Toy lashes right into her.
“Well, well, if it isn’t the sad little old maid come to feed me. What does it feel like knowing your sour snatch makes Joshua want to puke? Did you like listening to him rape me? Did it get you off?”
Rape her? I never raped her. Damn, that pisses me off.
Elizabeth’s shoulders shake, and she starts to shrink in on herself.
“Your entire life is dedicated to a man who will never love you. He’s got the sex drive of a rutting dog, and how many times has he fucked you? I’m guessing never. Pretty sad, Elizabitch. He’d rather beat off than fuck you. Want me to be quiet? Why don’t you just kill me, Elizabitch, and you’ll finally have him all to yourself? Until he grabs the next one, of course. Come on, you foul old bitch! Choke me out right now—you know you want to!”
Elizabeth drops the bowl of gruel on the floor and turns and runs out of the room, screaming like a banshee.
Fucking hell.
Fury lifts me from my chair before I even realize that I’ve stood. I stalk out of my office, muscles coiled with rage.
This ends now. One way or the other.