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The term ‘trophy wife’ exists for a reason.
Selection is important.
Is she out of my league? But not so much that I have to worry (the last thing a man wants is his pride tested) just enough that she looks like a catch, making me look better in turn? Is she going to live up to my expectations over the long haul? Is she going to let herself go? Is she going to get fat like her mother? And if she doesn’t live up to the expectations of who I need her to be—if she does get fat like her mother—how do I get rid of her with the least amount of damage?
I suppose those questions swirling around in my brain hour after hour is what leads me to check the cameras. I need to know that she is missed. I want to know that I have gained something important. I want to know how her family is holding up, and maybe, just maybe, if I glean a bit of information about her daughters, I can use it to my advantage, spoon feeding it to her so that she’ll give me what I want.
And what is that? At this point, I have it down to a science. Believe me. What I want is for her to desire me as much as I desire her. Isn’t that what everyone wants, really? Isn’t this the very definition of love?
How rare and precious the timing of this is, I am coming to understand.
I realize that Rome wasn’t built in a day. It will take sweet time to get used to one another. How much time is the question. I read the other day that it only takes four minutes to fall in love. Considering our situation is a little more challenging than your average meet-cute, I entertain the idea that it might take a bit longer than that.
In the meantime, I am keeping her comfortable. She is lucky. Luckier than she seems to realize, given her incessant tears. On one hand, the crying ignites deep and unbinding lust. It rolls through me like a throbbing tooth, the ache a strong desire to possess her, to have power over her. On the other hand, it’s horrible, these never-ending, extravagant displays of emotion. The sobbing grates on my nerves, cinches my gut, makes me ill, makes me ask myself if I’ve made a mistake.
She has it better here than many people in third world countries. How easily she forgets. How easily I forget. It’s always like this in the beginning.
Excessive displays of emotion. How funny, these days, all the fragile snowflakes, the people cry over the silliest things, the petty injustices of the world. It’s easy to focus on such things when the big things, the real scary things, are not beating down your front door. How endearing it is that people think they’re so safe, that they live under this false illusion that kidnappings and ransom are far-off experiences, not something that can happen close to home. It’s too bad. That illusion is a facade.
Believe me, I do this for a living. Well, not a living exactly—that’s a lie. My grandfather was an oil man, as was his grandfather’s grandfather. What I do is not for the money, but for the love of the chase. For sport, you could say. A very time-consuming but rewarding hobby.
To date, I’ve had thirteen wives. Not legal wives, but what you might call marriages of the heart.
Training women is my specialty. It’s an art, developing another human being into what you want them to be. Maybe I sound like the crazy one, but the reality is, we all do it. Some of us are simply more forceful and honest in the way we go about it, while others spend years—decades even—duking it out using pathetic forms of manipulation and dishonesty. That’s your average marriage, anyway.
Training women is not so different than training a dog. It’s difficult and unrelenting at first, but eventually, with consistency and a proper amount of communication, which is best learned in the form of reward and punishment, they, too, become eager to please.
When it works, it’s almost easy. It’s satisfying. When it doesn’t, they die. Usually, they die. It’s common to eventually get bored. My grandfather taught me that. He bred horses and later hunting dogs.
He always said: A dog’s life is maybe a decade and a half if you’re lucky, and then you get to start over. A marriage, on the other hand, thanks to an overabundance of fairytales, is supposed to last forever. But nothing lasts forever. Which is how it’s worked out that I’ve endured widowhood thirteen times. It’s also how Charlotte Jones came to be wife number fourteen. I think our demons could play beautifully together.
Forgive me, for before. I went off on a tangent. I meant to tell you about the cameras. Never look back, my granddad always said. Solid advice. If only I’d heeded it.
If it takes four minutes for a person to fall in love; it takes less than that for everything to turn to shit.
Which is exactly what happened when I flicked on the feed to that camera. As it so happens, Mr. Jones is indeed missing his wife. He is also not who he said he was. Not in the least. It seems surprising to me that someone in his position would be oblivious to having someone not only intrude in their home but set up shop, watching his every move.
But then, if I had a nickel for every stupid move highly intelligent people made, well, I’d be rich. Wait. I am rich. But you get my point.
I learned two things by turning on that camera. Two very bad things.
One, Michael Jones has blood on his hands. And lots of it. Turns out, I have kidnapped a very valuable assassin. Turns out, I am a dead man walking.
I listened to him in his office. I listened as he made endless phone calls. I listened as he ranted and raged. I watched as he paced, relentlessly, at all hours. He made endless arrangements about getting his prized assassin back. He didn’t speak of his wife like you might a spouse. He spoke of her like a commodity, like a product that means a lot to him. And, interestingly enough, according to his phone calls, it appears that she has no idea her husband is the one ordering her to make the hits. Something I find very hard to believe. Something I plan to get to the bottom of.
In the meantime, certain things are starting to make a lot of sense. Things that I wrote off over these last few weeks as I watched her. It turns out, Michael Jones, when not building houses, has ties to the mafia.
How nefarious, for such a meek-looking guy.
How interesting.
Although, that’s not the half of it. It gets better. I notic
ed Mr. Jones comes and goes from his daughter’s room at odd hours.
At first, I thought maybe the girl simply missed her mother. This, or maybe was helping her with her homework. I thought a lot of things. But then, I went back and searched through old footage and found the coming and going happens to be a regular occurrence when Charlotte is out of town. And then, twice, it was clear as the girl came out after him. When I zoomed in on her face, it looked exactly like her mother’s. The twisted and pained expression is a familiar one. It’s exactly what her mother looked like as I slid my hand between her legs.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
