A beam of light shone in my eyes, waking me up. I looked around in the darkness, my heart pounding. I had fallen asleep on the cold floor after crying myself into exhaustion. I had no idea how long I had been down here, if I had spent the entire day and night, or only a few hours. My body hurt from struggling against Max when he dragged me down here, and my stomach growled.

I heard footsteps and Max's figure emerged in the light of the doorway.

"We need to talk, Emily," he said firmly.

I said nothing. The way he had tossed me down here like an animal scared the hell out of me. I knew what I had revealed to him was beyond shocking, and I wished I hadn't have done it. And even though I knew that him treating me like this was wrong, all I could think was that I had to gain his trust back. I stood up off the bed that sat against one wall, my legs shaking and unsteady.

The light from the house upstairs created a shadow of the man standing in front of me. I looked up at his black, expressionless face and just wished we could go back. I wanted more than anything in the world to just go back to the way things were before I told him. I would lay on the bed and let him fuck me for the rest of my life if only he didn’t hate me. If only he didn’t look at me like he did before he brought be down here.

"I'm so sorry, Max," was all I could say before breaking into tears again.

Max descended the stairs, and approached me with a length of rope. He expertly tied my hands together, and I didn't fight him. I didn't know of he was going to kill me, and at this point I didn't even care. I welcomed it more than anything.

Without a word, he led me up the steps. He didn't seem cross with me, there was no anger in his eyes or aggression in his touch. He brought me to the kitchen, where the table was set with a plate full of steaming eggs and sausage. He pulled out the chair and instructed me to sit.

"You're going to eat this meal that I feed you, and then we are going to talk. Is that clear?" he looked at me sternly.

I nodded. I wanted to obey him, to do anything I could to make him trust me again. I wanted him to see that what I had done was for the best, and that we were meant to be together forever. But even if I couldn’t do that—even if he never understood what I’d done—I was going to make sure he saw that I was willing to do whatever he wanted.

He sat next to me in a chair and cut up a bite of food. I had never been spoon fed as an adult, and the whole act seemed embarrassing, but I knew better than to object. He needed obedience out of me, and I was going to give him whatever he wanted.

I opened my mouth, allowing him to feed me breakfast, sipping from the orange juice glass when he offered it to me.

Once I had been fed everything from the plate, he led me to the sink and washed my hands, then took me to the bathroom. He instructed me to sit on the toilet and go, while he stood in front of me, watching.

By the way he looked at me, I knew that throwing a fit was going to do me no good. He viewed me as a murderer now, no saner than his worst patients must be. Probably worse, since I had killed the woman that he loved.

Normally I wouldn't be able to do anything with someone watching, but I had been locked in the basement for so long that I was about to burst. I hadn't even bothered to look for a bathroom down there, although now I realized there probably was one. It seemed like a room where someone had lived.

He handed me some toilet paper, and once I had cleaned myself off, he led me back into the bedroom, where he untied the ropes that bound my hands and transferred them to the waiting restraints that dangled from the bedposts.

He looked at me long and hard, and I waited for him to speak, but he said nothing. Instead he pulled my legs apart, and tied them to the posts as well. Then he took off his pants and shirt and threw them in a pile on the floor. His cock was already hard, but he stood there for a moment, stroking himself and staring at my body, before positioning himself in front of my face. He offered himself to me, and I readily took him between my lips, getting his massive cock wet with my saliva and straining my neck to take more of him into my mouth.

I wanted to please him. I wanted to do everything he wanted. I had to get him back. It had killed me to see the way he’d looked at me before, and I never wanted to see that look in his eyes again.

He ripped his cock from my mouth suddenly, and without ceremony, plunged ferociously into my pussy. I was still sore from the day before, and I cried out in pain. He didn't say a word to me, didn't touch my body at all except where his cock entered me.

Max just stared into my eyes and fucked me, oblivious to any pain he was causing me. He stared down at me, but it wasn’t with the sweet smile I had seen the day before. The way he looked at me was cold and distant. A look you might give a stranger that had bumped into you on the street. I didn't care, I knew I deserved much worse. I just wanted to please him, to make him believe that I was lovable.

Max finished quickly and withdrew himself. He untied my hands for the first time since he had brought me back upstairs, and I went to hug him, tears in my eyes. He pulled away and left the room, heading into the bathroom.

While he was gone, I heard a buzzing noise. I looked down at his pile of clothes on the floor and noticed the corner of his phone sticking out of one of his pockets. I listened in the bathroom and didn't hear water running yet, so I took my chances and picked it up. I knew that if he caught me with it, things would get much worse than they already were, but I had to know. I had to know how he felt about me. If it was me that he loved. It wasn't fair that I always opened up to him and told him the truth, when I knew there was more to him than he was letting me in on.

I was surprised when the phone lit up in my hand. I wasn’t really expecting to be able to get into it. I figured a man like him would have his phone under secured passwords, or would be using a fingerprint scan—but to my surprise, there was nothing. The home screen popped up and I quickly scanned his apps, then tapped on the photos folder. The last few photos that he took looked like they had been taken on accident—blurred images of moving objects. I flipped through a few more, and an image of a woman looking through a dresser came onto the screen.

My heart dropped. The woman was my mother, and that dresser was in her bedroom. The picture was taken from high above. I scrolled through and there she was again in a state of near undress. Again, in her bedroom, and taken from a high vantage point. She didn't seem to be aware that she was being photographed.

A realization dawned on me—these were secret candid photos. My fingers trembled as I flipped through the next ten or fifteen photos. They were all of my mother. They looked fairly recent, like they had been taken weeks or even days before I had arrived back home. Probably just before her death.

I heard the sink in the bathroom and I quickly turned off the screen and replaced the phone. My heart pounded in my ears and my hands were sweaty. Max was spying on my mother. He must have installed the camera in her house without her knowledge. But the clincher was … there were no pictures of me.

Max was so obsessed with her that he needed to see her at all hours of the day, even when she wouldn't let him. Instead of being horrified at the invasion of privacy that he was capable of committing, I felt betrayed more than anything.

Max was never going to care about me the way that he cared for her. I was something else to him—and obviously that something did not involve love. I had killed my mother, and although I didn't miss the rotten bitch in the least bit, now I couldn't help but feel it was for nothing.

All this time he had led me on—all these years of flirting with me, for his own entertainment and nothing more. I was never anything more to him than a sexual plaything—a young and naïve girl who he thought he could finally feel powerful with. I choked back a sob as Max re-entered the room.

I got up to use the restroom. I felt like I was walking in a tunnel. Max stepped in front of me, blocking my path with a dark look in his eyes.

"What do you think you're doing?"

"I need to use the restroom," I replied softly, looking away.

"Leave the door open," was his only reply.

I walked toward the bathroom in a daze. I stood and looked at myself in the mirror, and what I saw, I wanted to end. I turned around to see if he was watching what I was doing. I heard him in the bedroom, fiddling with the restraints that hung from the posts, probably deciding what he was going to do with me next.

I looked back to the mirror, and tears welled in my eyes. I thought about the earring of hers that he had held on to, and now the pictures that he kept. And I thought about that night so long ago when I watched him fucking her. But he hadn’t been looking at her. He had been looking at me! I watched everything, his enormous cock entering her after he told her to roll over, then his attention turn to the doorway when he heard me.

I had spent the last few years believing that it was me that he really wanted. After all, it was me he stared at while he came inside of her.

But I had been so wrong. His heart was not with me, and it never would be. I slowly opened the medicine cabinet without making a sound, and rummaged through the bottles of prescription pills inside. I didn’t know what most of them were, but I knew some were sleeping pills and some were pain killers. Being my mother's daughter made me very familiar with the pharmaceutical names of those particular pills.

I also knew that if I took enough of them, my pain would end.

I carefully opened the lid to a bottle of high dosage oxycodone and dumped the whole thing into my palm. Then, silently padding to the doorway, I checked on Max again. While his back was turned to me I tilted my head back, dumping some of pills in, then dipping my head under the faucet to wash them down. I repeated that a few more times until I had swallowed the whole bottle. Tears streamed down my face as I emerged from the bathroom.

Max approached me, slipping the rope back over my wrists.

"Are you through?" he asked.

I nodded. I was through with everything.

"Ok, then. I think it's best that we separate for now. I'll be taking you back downstairs."

“No!”I sobbed as he pulled me down the hall and toward the basement steps. "You can't leave me down there!” I sobbed. "You can't! Please, please don't!" I was terrified that he was going to leave me down there forever. "Please, Max! Please don’t take me down there!”

He said nothing, opening the basement door and gently but firmly pushing me down the stairs and into the room.

I screamed as he shut the door and turned the lock, crumpling onto the cold floor below me.