Was he completely mad? I eyed him over the rim of my champagne glass. He laughed, sharing some joke. I didn’t think I would ever know for sure what he was. The mesmer infection affected him but was that true insanity?

He’d danced around me like some petite ballerina then ordered his men to fuck everything, including me. Not being able to stop myself coming when he...arranged it to be so, was what hammered home the depravity. To find joy when others suffered. Vile.

Not my fault, I kept telling myself.

And I’d suffered as much as the others.

Maybe I’d finally weaseled my fingers into that crack, that weakness in his psyche?

I’d palmed the capsules and brought them to this table. All around me men and women ate and drank. A banquet of food that I was too sick with anxiety to enjoy. His overbearing will only touched me lightly and he sat beside me, facing the other long table. So many people all seemingly happy and scoffing down food and wine. Why were we here? What was he celebrating?

His wine held more than wine. It had been my goblet but I’d held it below the table, opened my palm above. Praying no one would see what I did, I’d let the powder sprinkle onto the liquid and sift into the bubbles. Then I’d switched the glasses. Three capsules were dissolved in there.

If he found out, I might be dead soon.

If the drug worked, after all these years, what would it do to him? Would a normal Isak be kind to me, free me, before the drug wore off? It was my hope.

I didn’t even know if the drug was past expiry, or the correct dose. My stomach roiled with nausea. I swallowed bile when Vitor eyed me, as he forked meat into his mouth. Sometimes that man, who was supposed to be Isak’s conscience, and what the fuck was that, scared me more than Isak.

The people around me seemed almost normal. I hadn’t spotted any of the zombie girls he routinely fucked. If they were normal people, unrelated to Isak’s sexual perversity, I still couldn’t say anything about being his captive, about being held here immorally, if not illegally. I’d tried over the years, many times, my brain would not allow my tongue to say it.

That was one of the most mind-wrecking influences he had on me – that I couldn’t discuss anything with others. A psychiatrist would have fun with what was inside my head.

Isak turned, and took my hand, caressing it as he liked to. The radiating warmth of his body was enough to make me cringe internally. He wore a casual, tan shirt, and dark pants. I found myself staring at the small, ivory-colored buttons.

His fingers clicked. “Up here. Eyes, Red.”

I met his eyes. Drink, man. Please drink.

Around us people kept talking – gardening, the weather, who was screwing who, maybe. I didn’t listen, my attention wholly on this man.

He began to speak, the rolling low timbre of his words distracted me for a few seconds, then I understood what he asked. “The next argument of yours, girl? Why is this wrong? I’m selling you tomorrow.”

He swallowed. Oh god. How long before it worked?

Would I see a difference?

“Speak. Give me two reasons. You have one tick so far. Majority wins.” He winked.

Wins what? “You’re selling me to someone who wants to torture a CIA agent. How can I win?”

“No I’m not.” The frown seemed to say it was a truth he believed. That was impossible. I’d heard him say this.

“Who then?”

His hand arrived under my jaw, stroking the length of the bone. Such a large hand. I’d often felt its heaviness. Even if he wasn’t able to make me kneel for him and surrender my neck to his grasp, or lick his boots, those hands would still make me afraid.

“A cartel member, yes, but he just wants you for a sexual partner. He’ll harm you less than I might.” His finger tapped his glass. “The things I’d do. But I keep myself as good as I can.”

I was his key and he wanted the key far away. Or so he’d said. He said so many contradictory things. “What you let the others do to me last night wasn’t bad? Jesus.” I sighed.

Silence. His face barely changed but it was enough for me to see a hint of puzzlement, maybe even fear. Fear, in him?

I began to wonder if he remembered what he’d let them do. And if not...that bothered me. Did he not know what his monster did when he allowed it out? Was it him and was he it? Or were they two halves that barely met?

Fuck.

“You’re avoiding what I asked. Answer. Argue your side. Convince me I’m wrong to have taken you.”

“It’s bad for you,” I blurted.

“Go on.”

“You’ve been made into this monster, locked yourself away from society. You could have done so much good by living as a normal man.”

Another swallow of wine went down and I tried not to look at his throat.

“The only expert on that is me. I think I prefer this. I have years left to live and as a mesmer, I have powers. I have acquired money, friends.” His smile stilled my heart. Keep beating, keep beating. “Lovers. Before I was a lowly potential lawyer with a life in ruins after my fiancée dumped me. I like what happened, but I’ll award you a half tick. Fair?”

I nodded. Did he truly believe he liked himself as he was now? Maybe that was his monster speaking through him? Who was the real Isak and could he come back if drugged? Soon, I might find out.

“Give me another argument. The night grows old. Maybe we can all fuck you in a conga line if you get this one wrong?”

The man to my right laughed. He’d heard. They couldn’t be innocents.

“It’s bad for me then.” So true.

“Is it now?” Isak picked up a sharp knife, one smeared with food, positioned it point down over the white tablecloth and spun it, slowly. “Tell me more.”

“I could be normal, doing my job, happy.”

“But a mesmer can make you very happy. True? Have you ever climaxed like you did when I handled you.”

Blushing should be impossible after everything, yet my cheeks heated. “No. Life is more than orgasms, sex.”

“But that is a primary need of humans – sex. Agree?”

I wanted to deny everything he said, couldn’t. “Yes. You can’t deny the other things in life are important too.”

“Such as?” For once his focus seemed less fierce.

“Family, friends, being happy with simply being somewhere wonderful. Helping others.” It was difficult giving a summary of life on the spot.

“I see.” Yes, his eyes were gentler. Perhaps the drug was working. “I’ll give you another half tick. Two out of four. So, it’s a draw. Tell me about your family.”

“I...can’t.” Wouldn’t. As if. He hadn’t made this a command. I could feel the difference, always.

“Pick another topic then.”

I blinked.

“The Incans. Football. Politics in Ireland. I don’t care. Pets.”

Bizarre. How strange to have a conversation with him, but this was better than being poked or mocked or made to do almost anything else he’d wanted me to. I ventured conversation about animals, and we talked, until dessert was eaten and he’d drunk the champagne. I was a little drunk myself.

Hope was rearing its head.

He’d swallowed every drop.

“I have to do this...” Isak stood, his chair grating across the floor as he pushed it back. “I have an announcement!”

The room fell silent; people turned their chairs to see. Though Vitor stared at me not Isak.

His face...Isak’s eyes shone with tears and I watched as one overflowed and made a shining path down his face.

Something was wrong. This room was like a picture two degrees off-center.

If I put my hand up and stopped him?

He’d cut it off.

“Red and I were discussing life. What do we all value in life? Money? Sex? Power? I value trust and I’ve discovered that a guest of mine has violated that trust. The guest of honor in fact. The lady we are here to farewell.”

To farewell. Me?

A joke. Tentacles of unease crawled my insides. He meant me, I could tell, especially when he stretched out his arm and unfolded his fingers toward me.

“Red.”

Something was terribly wrong.

The room teeter-tottered. Darkness ate the walls. My vision shrank until he was all I saw clearly, though I could hear the titters of laughter. I hadn’t eaten much but it was possibly about to be thrown up all over the table.

“What did you do wrong?”

“I...” I should not say. Whatever he intended to do would happen anyway. Being guilty wouldn’t help. Maybe he didn’t know what I thought he did.

“What did you do?” Rhetorical, not a command.

He picked up his goblet and swirled the tiny amount of remaining liquid.

I said nothing. Soon the scythe would fall.

“Vitor told me. I substituted while you looked away. I should tie you down and let them all screw you.” A flicker crossed his face. His eyebrow raised as eloquently as a courtier’s, then he lifted his head and shouted. “Everyone out! Fucking out! You!” He thrust a finger at me. “Will stay.”

I waited, glued to that chair as they filed out, most of them grumbling, some laughing. It was noteworthy how he had dominance over this varied audience. His house, his rules, maybe. More than that though, the walls had vibrated with his anger when he shouted.

When we were alone, he angled my chair out from the table, roughly moving away plates en masse. A goblet toppled and shattered into pieces that slid and glistened on the table cloth before me. Calmly, he sat on the edge.

“You tried to dose me with the poison Wolfe gave me.” His teeth showed fleetingly. A façade of a smile.

I let my lip curl. Mocking him was rarely possible but disappointment overcame prudence.

“Your sacred drug, yes.” If I didn’t get this out now, I never would. I hurried on. “You should use it. Can’t you see I was right? You’re a terrible man as you are now. There is a better way. There is.”

“Stand.” He beckoned and I stood, his girl on strings, his terrified girl on strings. “Lie on the table.” He pushed up the table cloth so the glass fragments were gathered in the cloth above the bared table.

I lay with my face turned toward where he sat – the skin of my face and arms stuck to the timber.

So quiet. I waited for the storm, the lightning strike. When he leaned over me, I felt him draw my dress up. When I was exposed to above my bottom, he paused.

“Lovely ass.”

He wouldn’t.

My toes dug into my high heels. “You said you wouldn’t –”

“Fuck your cunt? And here you’ve threatened me, tried to poison me. I’d be justified in fucking you with a whole set of steak knives and forks, let alone my cock. Did I tell you to drug me? No, I didn’t.” He tugged on a strand of my hair, pulled it across my face, let it fall away. “Red hair. I named you well. Remember your old name?”

“My what?”

My old name? He named me? The tunnel collapsed in on me, the one above that led back to my real world. Red wasn’t real? Who was I? Fuck, fuck, fuck.

And I whispered, “What’d you do to me?”

Evil reigned in this house.

Flicker, flicker. There. His face. I’d spotted something. A switch of expression.

But who was I?

“What’s my real name?” I blinked away tears. “Please tell me. Please!”

“Shhh.” He patted my ass. “You don’t need it anymore.” Then he stood and went behind me, I heard him unzip. “Just once. Hmmm?”

His cock pushed at me and I was wet, already, for him, oozing around his intruding member like a well that’d sprung a leak. How dare my body do that? How fucking dare it.

I even wriggled, begging.

“Just once...you slutty temptress.” He halted though, and a moment later stepped away.

Something hard, slender, and cold pressed into me, slid inside.

“One knife,” he murmured. Another length slipped up there. “Don’t move. Two. Only handles but imagine how fun it would be if it were the other end. Three. Feeling stuffed?”

The heavy weight of the cold metal and his quiet threats had me shaking.

“Stop. Please.” I’d forgotten my name and now this.

“Really?” He churned them in me as if stirring a recipe, then the knives slid out and clattered to the floor between my feet. One landed against my ankle before it slipped down to clunk onto the others. “Damn.”

I ventured a quiet, “Thank you.” My relief – that this was his limit for the occasion – burgeoned.

“Thank you, Miss Cuntworthy? What I see back here inspires me, makes me think I can go beyond what I thought was possible.” He lay on the table beside me, making dishes clatter, and pulled his splayed fingers down my face. “Look at those tears. I was worried I’d never let you go if I took your cunt, because I’d want to keep you and then my monster would find your secret.” He kissed my cheek, my mouth. “But you tried to poison me and I’m getting compensation. Keep your hands at your sides.”

He stood and levered my front half off the table by pulling at my hair. “Keep those eyes shut.”

I screwed up my eyes, and so I didn’t understand the sounds he created as they were mostly quiet.

“Let’s see what happens when soft meets hard.”

He dragged my dress up above my breasts and kept it there with a fist between my shoulders, then made me sprawl stomach down on the table again.

Bare stomach and there was cloth under me. There was sharp that sliced skin. Glass. My mouth opened, face contorting as I registered this. He had me lying on the glass. I went to rise and shrieked instead as he pinned me and the glass writhed in the cuts. Wetness seeped, glass sliced, blood slicked my belly.

Though I frothed out a mix of words and shrieks, he shushed me with commands.

“Shh. Shh. Small sounds. Only small. Open those legs wider.”

His first thrust rode me harder onto the glass. If he’d left big pieces I might be hurt irreparably, bleed to death, but I couldn’t scream as he fucked me onto them.

Each thrust caused a muffled, gurgling whimper.

“You’re going to come, dear girl. Let it build. Your pussy likes me. Ignore the blood, the cuts.”

I moaned, unsure where that noise came from.

Another thrust and I slid, shrieking quietly, arms at my side, with a small piece embedding in my cheek. Another, and I warmed below. Tinkles above my head as the uninvolved glass pieces tapped on each other.

“I could’ve...” he began.

A thrust and I gasped at the intrusion, the swell of cock in cunt, the mesmer hold on my mind messing with my perceptions. My clit liked being squashed to the timber and pulsed, rising.

Sex was a compulsive rhythm.

“Red? Is that your name? Come soon or I might find a big piece and fuck you with it.”

What parent named a child Red?

He tongue-fucked my mouth, he invaded between my legs. Lust injected, intensified, heating me like whiskey in my veins, as he reamed me, as the glass wormed further in. I moaned and my legs shook and tensed, shook and tensed.

“Your cunt’s sucking me in, Red.”

No. I groaned, blinking away the sweat, the tears, desperate to be me, and not his toy, even if I had to feel the fragments eating at me.

A violation was to be fucked on broken glass, worse was to be made to like it.

“No,” I whispered then “no” again, cracking my throat with denials.

“Yes. You can’t say no to me.” Another fuck and slide on cloth. Rocked forward, rocked back as he sucked out. “How I wish,” he murmured into my mouth, at my face. “I wish,” was said again to my neck.

Hot breath. So many wishes. I closed my eyes. Cock pushing into me. Pain? There was none. Sobbing, I pushed back, tightened, arched my butt, squeezing down. I raggedly moaned then mindlessly slammed into an orgasm like the obedient toy that I was.

And still he fucked me, shoved me across the cloth.

“...wish I could keep you.”

He jammed into me, deep, stayed there.

His own climax was a chaotic tide of pleasure merging with the shreds of pain, with every throbbing wound in my stomach and breast.

He had to turn me over to mop up the blood. I flopped there, on my back, arms out, legs apart, knees bent at the edge of the table. Dull within a foggy world of sloth, I watched him kneel above me on the table, flourishing some instrument. He’d gone away, come back. Bloody of hand, he held me, made me be still, as he plucked out glass and punched staples into my cuts.

If I screamed, it was distant. I could barely register my heart, let alone my screams. The ceiling faded in, faded out.

“Good little Frankenstein Girl.” He grinned, lowering the stapler. “Look at that. I fucked you and I still want to sell you. What a rush.”

I half expected him to giggle.

Not that he would.

I recalled the flicker of expression when he’d switched from less bad to this, before he’d fucked me on glass... He’d almost been nice. None of him was good. Over the years the goodness had leaked away and left mediocre evil and whatever this was. This thing he was now was barely human.

He led me to the bedroom and had me stand, wobbly though I was, while he dabbed iodine on the stapled cuts. Put me to bed, collared and naked. Then he left.

I was Red, wasn’t I?

The blood that was smeared and mixed with the yellow iodine on my belly seemed to underline that idea. One cut on my breast, one next to my navel. One on my thigh. A few tiny punctures. The longest stretched to an inch. I wouldn’t die from this. He still meant to get money for me.

I wasn’t Red. Deal with it.

He’d taken away my name. That was worse than cutting me. When I held my hands before my face, they trembled.

Despite the well of my tears and the waning shock, something incongruous about the room drew me to survey it.

In the gloom, in the far and shadowed corner, sat a huge suitcase.