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I was sure as I looked up at him, refusing to break eye contact, that there was nothing quite as chilling as a smile spread as wide as his currently was that didn’t reach his cold eyes.
Fear, it turned out, made me a little, well, snippy.
Because before I could think better of it, my mouth was opening, and words were spilling out.
“Damn. I kind of hoped I’d killed you.”
It was, as you can imagine, the exact wrong thing to say.
That chilling smile fell, and his hands shot outward toward the cage, fiddling with something I couldn’t see, and then the cage top was loosening.
Maybe it wasn’t the wrong thing, though. Because, in his anger at either what I said, what I’d done to him, or possibly at the fact that I was ruining his fantasy by not being visibly scared, his hands were clumsy. He seemed frustrated with himself.
We were always told not to poke apex predators.
And, sure, men were women’s onlytruepredator.
But, all at once, I could see him for exactly who and what he was.
The kind of guy who was afraid of women, who couldn’t talk to us, charm us, and get us into bed. The kind of man who sat in Incel chatrooms, bemoaning all of womankind for not seeing his great many virtues.
Out of curiosity once, I’d gone into an Incel group.
The juxtaposition of whining and bitching while also claiming they are practically God’s gift to the world was so incredibly off-putting that I could barely stomach it. Once I got to all the posts slut-shaming, rage was simmering through me. When I reached the posts where the Incels described their perfect woman—which, invariably included virgins who lived only to cook and clean and cater to their every need—I decided I needed to get the hell out of there before I lostallfaith in mankind.
That was all this guy was.
A guy who had spent years behind a computer screen. Who, over time, became emboldened to act on his sickest fantasies by other men who shared their revenge porn stories freely without shame or disgust in themselves.
I mean, we’d seen it several times in the true crime world, hadn’t we?
Incels who went on killing sprees.
By my estimation, this asshole, though, really did seem like the most sadistic I’d come across. At least in modern history.
I wouldn’t pretend to know everything about psychology, but I wondered if maybe doing everything ‘wrong’ would be my best bet. If I kept screwing up his fantasy. If I kept flustering and frustrating him.
The more upset he got, the more likely he was to make a mistake. Yes, logic also told me that he was more likely to be even more horrific to me.
But my gut was telling me it was worth the chance.
He was going to do unspeakable things to me regardless of how I acted. I might as well try to stack the odds in my favor by screwing with him, right?
It seemed impossible to do what I’d heard many other true crime survivors do. Try to endear themselves to their attacker. To make them seem like a person, like someone they should care about.
I was pretty sure this guy was too far gone for that.
If someone wasn’t capable of empathy, why try to make them see you as a human being? And there was no way a man who’d done the things this man had done to those women could have empathy of any kind.
“You’re kind ofbig madabout me getting the better of you, huh?” I asked, forcing a smile even as my belly did sick little flip-flops at the way his eyes blazed. “I mean, building a whole cage for me? You must have no life at all.”
The growl that moved through him was both terrifying and satisfying, as it was proof of how fragile he was, how easy it was to get a rise out of him.
“Shut up. Shutup,” he hissed, throwing open the cage top, and reaching inside.
He wouldn’t shut me up, though.
I was somehow sure of that.
