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He put his phone back in his pocket and regarded me with something like amusement. “How would you like to meet my parents? You’ll be playing the role of my girlfriend.”
“What am I really?” Words likegirlfriendseemed way outside the scope of anything that had or would go on between us. Still, I wanted to know how he definedthis.
“You’re mine,” he said, as if that clarified everything.
“Your what?”
“Just mine.”
Since Shannon was perfectly comfortable killing a person, he must be equally untroubled by owning one.
“And when you get tired of playing house?” These questions and concerns had been in the background since we’d first arrived. But now that things had escalated between us to a mockery of coupledom, I was even more concerned about how these things ended with a contract killer. Surely it couldn’t be a nice ending. And this couldn’t last forever.
“I haven’t gotten tired of the cat.”
This statement was absolutely insane to me but seemed reasonable to him. How could he compare me to a fucking house pet? Oh, right, because I was just another type of pet to him.
“How long have you had the cat?” I asked.
“Seven or eight years.”
He’d managed to care for a cat for that long? Sure, they didn’t require a lot of maintenance, but he had to make sure she was fed and got her shots. And she seemed healthy and well taken care of—spoiled even. He fed her a super fancy brand of cat food that was probably better quality than most kids got at school. You could put it on a plate and feed it to a kid, and they’d probably think they were eating food meant for people.
So maybe there was some credence to his view on this. From your average person, such an unusual assurance wouldn’t mean much to me, but maybe he really wouldn’t get bored. If I could make him feel something without having to die at his hands first, then maybe he wanted to keep that feeling going. If it had only been me and the white cat who’d been able to elicit anything close to a human emotion from him, we were both far too rare to be casually discarded.
I hoped.
“How did you get the cat?” Somehow I couldn’t imagine him sauntering up to a pet shop or searching the classifieds. What situation could have possibly moved him to acquire an animal companion?
He smiled, remembering back. “I was on a job. I had a contract for her owner. She was skin and bones, barely being fed or properly cared for and little more than a kitten. She was so dirty that I thought she was gray at first. When I killed him, I think she actually smiled at me. She kept following me around, meowing at me as I cleaned up. For some reason, I couldn’t bring myself to leave her behind, so I brought her home with me.”
I wasn’t sure what kind of story I’d been expecting. I guess something a little more pedestrian. I shuddered, thinking it was like she was some kind of trophy from a kill. Like me after Trevor in the castle.
An awkward silence descended between us, then he said, “So dinner with my parents?”
I couldn’t believe he was taking me out of the house. And I was very curious. I was convinced his parents must somehow be evil, and maybe Shannon was in denial about it or was simply lying. It wasn’t as if lying would give him an attack of guilt. Though his lack of shame also made honesty much easier for him than the average person. If he could control certain parameters, he could tell me anything without caring what I thought about it.
“There will be ground rules, of course,” he said. “You will not at any point give them any indication that you are the girl who went missing or anything about how you truly came to be with me. Let me handle the details of how we met when they ask. Nor will you seek their help to escape me. Don’t put me in a position to do something I’d rather not do. I’m sure you don’t want blood on your hands.”
I stared at him, not even sure how to process that statement. “You’d kill your parents if I tried to get help?”
“I’m sure it wouldn’t give me pleasure.”
Ohthatmade it better. How could he speak so casually about killing the supposedly wonderful people who raised him?
“I’m not like you. You know this. Don’t assume I’ll be held back by the things that repulse normal people, and plan your own actions accordingly. It’s likely you’d be far more traumatized by the event than I would. Just know I will go to any lengths to protect my secrets.”
“And what would theoretically happen to me if I was this stupid?” I wanted to know the worst case scenario with Shannon as he saw it currently.
“Let’s just say it would be a very long time before I took you out of the house again. You’d be an indoor kitty.”
In truth, I had no intention of saying a single thing. Where the hell would I go? In the time I’d been in Shannon’s house, I had not once developed some burning desire to have my photo plastered all over the news and have strangers in my face trying to convince me of our history together, or having everyone I met from this moment on look at me with condescending pity.
I was sure that if I were to be able to go through all that, I would additionally be able to access my money at least and put together a reasonably non-horrible life. But I had no anchor. I would always be “that girl who doesn’t remember anything, poor thing.”
Aside from the initial moment in the castle where Shannon had felt the spark of pity that no doubt saved my life, he hadn’t acted like what had happened to me was any big deal. That might sound cold and horrible, but he hadn’t handled me with kid gloves. There were some bizarre benefits to spending time with a man who lacked empathy. I was sure that if I’d been with any other person, I would have spiraled down further and further into post-traumatic stress as all the well-meaning concern made life more and more impossible to cope with. I would have no doubt mirrored and aped the reactions those around me expected.
Sometimes all a person needed was to be treated like they were normal. At a certain point sympathy and empathy become another version of aggression.
