Riley: Defiance
I love Jack. And he loves me. It’s not exactly because of what Talia told me. It’s that I choose love. I remember, just when I need to, how Jack looked at me. There was truth behind his eyes. I’m worthy of his love. I can be loved. I deserve to be loved. I believed in truth and goodness. I believed in the world. I just didn’t believe in Jack or myself.
But I can fix it somehow.
As the plane approaches, though, I realize I have no idea how. I’m in Daemon’s clutches now. I’ve thrown Jack away. He could be on the other side of the world for all I know. And he thinks I despise him. I have no resources at my disposal.
One step at a time and eventually you complete the dance. Just manage the next step.
“I don’t suppose you’d just let me go right now?” I say to Talia. “Tell the pilot to fly us away?”
Talia smiles and I realize there’s fear behind her closed-off exterior. “I only go so far with Daemon. And I don’t like you that much. Sorry, lovely.”
Even she’s terrified of him. His own sister.
The plane lands and taxis to one of the struts. We step out onto a metal platform on the water and a large metal lift takes us up to the larger structure.
Talia walks off to meet Daemon as two of his men begin to take me away. She pauses for just a moment and looks back over her shoulder. She’s younger than me, but her eyes are full of depth. She’s already seen too much.
“I may very well not see you again, darling. I have no desire to trouble myself helping you, but…good luck.”
“Talia…good luck to you, too,” I say, although I have no idea why.
She nods, and then she’s gone.
There are several independent sections making up the complex structure on top of the rig. The men lead me inside. On the outside, it's red metal and rivets, but the inside is as immaculate as a palace. Ebony, ivory, and gold adorn everything; I see sculptures and works of art in the rooms we pass.
I'd make a joke to the men—ask them how it is being henchmen for a movie supervillain—but the fear in Talia's eyes gives me pause. I keep my mouth shut.
The men shove me into a lavish bedroom. My new quarters, perhaps. I want to find a way to escape—I saw boats moored at the bottom of the pillars. Maybe I could get to one. Damn the plan. Damn obedience. Damn sparing my family. I’ll slip Daemon and then get to them and take them away with me somewhere to wait for Jack. He’ll come find me.
But the men show no intention of leaving. And why should I expect Jack to help me now?
A gorgeous, voluptuous, dusky-skinned woman with enormous eyes steps into the room. I realize with equal parts sorrow and horror that she has no tongue. I think I know who took it from her.
“Get dressed,” one of the men commands.
“Can you turn around?”
“No.”
I don’t really give a damn anyway. I’m blushing, but I stand up straight and pull my dress off, then my panties and bra. I can see that they’re aroused and I don’t doubt anymore that I’m the cause of it.
The woman ushers me into a shower and I wash as they all watch. Her eyes look so sad.
When I’m done, I find she’s laid out my outfit on the bed. I was already wearing revealing lingerie, but apparently not revealing enough. I can feel my heart start to race; it’s almost time to face Daemon. I realize there’s no escaping.
I’ll love Jack all the same. Daemon can have my body; he can’t take the deepest part of me.
I pull on the skimpy black lingerie and stockings and look around for a dress, but then I realize that this is it.
The woman adds the final piece to my outfit: a slim black collar attached to a long, silver chain. She wraps the collar around my neck then places the chain in my own hands to carry until Daemon takes possession of me.
My defenses have, again, been stripped down to nothing. This is how I’m going to have to face the most dangerous man in the world.
I’ll survive. I’ll give him everything he wants. Everything but the heart of me. And someday I’ll get free, and I’ll find Jack, and I’ll make this right.
The men beckon me through the door back to the hallway and I realize that there’s fear behind their eyes, too. I realize that I’m about to be raped by Daemon Amontillado.
He’ll take my body. Not my soul. That belongs to Jack.
“No more delays," one growls. "Daemon's waiting." He grins just a little cruelly, savoring the chance to make me as afraid as he is.
“He wants to fuck you right away.”
I stride before the two men down a long hallway, as if I was the one leading them. I would've had such trouble in these heels just a few weeks ago, and I feel unreasonably grateful to Christie for making me do all my chores in pair after pair of ridiculous shoes. My heart is steady now. My breathing is normal. I'm not even sweating yet. I feel strangely calm.
We come to a red door that opens into a small, white room. Victor Plince is sitting there, guarding the passage to Daemon, and he gives me a sickening grin. He's playing with the gold and silver gun he took from me before we left—as if I care about some stupid pistol from the poker room.
“Maybe Daemon will toss you to me once he’s sick of you,” he taunts.
I try to look as uninterested as possible. “With you, Victor? I would be unbearably bored.”
Before he can think of a response I move on. There’s a set of large, iron doors on the other side of the room; the entrance to Daemon’s personal lair. They swing open into a large, bright-white room.
At the far end, a hulking man sits at a black desk. I count the guards along the walls: nine, plus the two that came in with me. He needs nine guards to sit in his office and meet an unarmed woman. All of them have automatic rifles in their hands and semi-automatics on their hips, though I still know too little about guns to be able to ID them.
My back is straight, my head level. I stride across the room and feel, absurdly, like I'm on a runway. I can feel all their eyes oozing over me. The lingerie is useless for modesty—it's barely there. But I can't really bring myself to care. There's one man who I care about seeing me in sexy, skimpy lingerie. His name is Jack. It's like some secret armor: I just don't really give a damn about the others either way. I'm still blushing and sweating a little now, and their eyes still trail goosebumps across my skin, but at my core, I feel nothing. I think back to my humiliation and bewilderment in the poker room a few weeks ago at being forced to expose my body and it almost makes me smile.
But then a terror does start to sink into me, not because of my nakedness but because of Daemon. His features slowly come into definition as I approach across the large room. He’s tall and dark and beautiful—his features angular, his clothing immaculate. And yet he’s hideous, too, just like those tall men in the bodega. As I look closer, his full lips look more like fat worms, his blue eyes like dirty snow. His features are angular yet somehow puffy, too—swollen. Monstrous. Grotesque.
I can tell he’s a giant, even sitting behind his desk. They never talked about that when they whispered about him. They always talked about the man’s extraordinary mind. But his stature is larger in all directions than anyone I’ve ever seen—almost inhuman. He reminds me of an enormous, bloated human spider—or what a giant spider would look like if somehow, horribly, it tried to turn itself into a human.
And behind it all, there's hate, viciousness, and cruelty that radiates so intensely from him that it's nearly palpable. It's like I'm staring at the twisted opposite of the warmth, brightness, and tenderness I felt from Jack in those good times. Daemon's hate is just as intense as Jack’s light, burns just as bright. I realize with a mute horror that it isn't even because of me. It's permanent, constant, and for all the world. This is his natural state.
“Riley Lark,” his voice rolls out across the room to me in a rich, deep purr. “You’re a fat whore, aren’t you?”
Well, I guess we’re getting right into it.
He punches each of the two words like hitting a typewriter key. I guess that’s your type, if you want me, I want to point out. I might've even done it ten minutes ago if I hadn't seen him. But looking at this nightmare brings everything Jack's told me about him to my mind. And proves it all true. I understand now that this is a man who would kill me for disobedience. It's an insult to him, not a game like it is to Jack. He's a cold predator who expects his whims to be met by the whole world.
I have to use everything in me to fight back a shiver. He looks like a serpent that’s spotted the bird’s fallen egg and is slithering towards it—he looks like something I’ve only seen in reptiles and horror movies.
“Yes, sir,” I say. “I’m sorry if I’m displeasing to you.” I’ll beg and grovel if that’s what he wants. I don’t care. Appearance is only veneer—a cloak to hide the knife beneath. I’ll give everything to him but the deepest parts of my soul, where Jack will be when I need to find him. I’ll survive. I’ll endure. One day Jack will come for me, and if he doesn’t I’ll cut Daemon’s throat myself.
“No,” he says.
I wait but he meets my eyes with his searing stare and stays silent.
“‘No’ what, sir?”
“No, don’t just accept it. Ask what I mean. I don’t demand mere obedience from you. I command understanding obedience. You think I’m playing with you—just telling cruel lies and insults that have nothing to do with the truth. But I am not. I’m just looking at you, and evaluating, and telling the honest truth. Do you understand? Ask me to explain to you how you are a fat whore.”
What a bizarre psychopath.
“How am I a fat whore, please, Master?”
“You have fat on your body, right? And you have more fat than some other women your height.”
I nod.
“No. Answer me with words.”
“Yes, Master.”
“And you could lose weight, couldn’t you? You could be many pounds lighter than you are and still maintain a healthy physiology, correct? There are other women of your same stature that are significantly thinner, yes?”
“Yes, Master.”
“So, you’re fat.”
Damn, this guy is going to be tedious.
“Yes, Master, I see now.”
“And you slept with Jack Turner, didn’t you, and enjoyed it? You sold your body into a contract for money—I know Jack offered to let your family buy you out. You traded your body for their life savings. That’s selling yourself for money. Do you understand what that makes you?”
He rambles on and on like an insane person. It reminds me of being cornered by some poor lunatic on the subway. If he wasn’t so physically terrifying I’d almost be amused.
“Yes: a whore, sir.”
“Do you think you're different because you did it for your family? For a good cause? All whores do it for a good cause. It doesn't make any of them any less a whore. You're the same thing as some filthy, hideous streetwalker. You're no different. That's your level of degradation and depravity."
Crazy people on the subway have way less weird ways of getting themselves off, at least.
“Yes, Master. I see now, Master.”
“You think your love for Jack shields you from all of this somehow. You think you can sit back in your mind and judge and laugh at me. Jack can’t save you. He’s smart and powerful but not enough. Not as much as me. I outmatch him tactically in every way. I could counter every one of his moves and kill you before he ever broke me down. And more importantly, he doesn’t want to save you. You think he loves you? That he could ever love you? He could have any woman in the world, and even if he couldn’t, he’d get sick of you eventually.
“You’re young—very young—and you’re a fool, too. No man on this earth can love a woman for a lifetime. They get tired of a single woman. They’re not meant to do it. It’s just biology. Jack enjoyed you for a few weeks—maybe even let himself feel like he was in love—but now you’re gone and he’ll find other amusements to fill his time. Stupid girl. Do you know how many years Jack and I have been working together? You’ve known him a few weeks. I’ve seen him go through this all before.”
I want to answer him obediently, but my throat’s too tight. I’m worried it would come out with the tremble of a sob. It’s not true. He’s lying.
“Answer,” Daemon demands, fury just below the surface.
“Yes, Master,” I say, my voice thick with the sob I’m holding back. He seems to taste it and relish it.
And then I think, Good. Perfect. Let him hit me and make me cry so he believes it. So that he believes that I'm breaking. I can cry all I want and not break. He'll see that one day when I kill him. And Jack loves me like I love him.
It seems such a crazy hope now. But I don’t care. I choose to believe it.
“And do you think, honestly, you've spared your family anything? Your suffering and pain and death—if I choose it—will haunt them all their lives. You've spared them the expenses of a few years, and in exchange you've given them a lifetime of guilt, anguish, and confusion. You think they won't mind because of how terribly they've treated you? Because they don't like you very much? It's not about that. It's that letting something like this happen to someone they know will shatter a very fundamental part of their being: the part in all of us that believes we could be heroic. They'll know that they're failures at what society judges us most on: the ability to protect the ones we love. Or the ones we're supposed to love—a daughter, a little sister—in your family's case."
Daemon’s relishing this. Relishing my revelation. I want to hurl back his words with my own logic, but everything he says has the force of truth. I can’t reason away from it or deny it.
“You could’ve escaped all this and done the better thing for your family. You judged poorly. You made the wrong choice in that poker room, at the moment when it mattered the very most. You simply made the wrong choice. And now you’re in my hands.”
“Yes, Master.”
I don’t want to believe it, but it seems so true. You can believe or disbelieve. It doesn’t matter. Just keep that little part of yourself ready—ready for the moment when you can kill him.
“Come to me and kneel at my desk like an animal.”
I walk to him and sit down on the floor, folding my feet under my bottom. Every part of me is exposed to these men. It's the exhibitionism that turned me on so deeply with Jack, but without Jack, I feel nothing. It's as mundane as sitting down on the subway.
“I’m going to rape you very soon,” Daemon says, his grin a burning crescent, his eyes deranged. He’s looking for my reaction as if it’s the finest delicacy to him.
I can’t bring myself to complete the act, to show my fear, at least not yet. I give him nothing. You can destroy my body. It doesn’t matter.
And then he freezes. He reads something on the screen at the desk and smiles. “We have a very unexpected guest. It’ll be wonderful, seeing what he really thinks of you—making you see it, that is.”
He presses a button and the steel doors open.
A titanic figure strides through them. He’s the knight out of every fairytale, the solitary gunslinger in every western, the hero you dream of.
Daemon says he’s not here for me. That it’s some other business. That Jack’s a coward deep down, or he just doesn’t care.
But I know that’s not true. From the moment he enters the room I can see it on his face and in his heart.
He’s come for me. He’s come to kill the beast.