AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Perhaps I should feel pity, but I can’t summon up any at all. Am I a horrible person? She’s clearly a victim of Stockholm Syndrome, in love with her captor and jealous of her new, young replacement, but she’s also keeping me prisoner when I’m sure she could free me. That makes her my jailer just as much as Joshua, and I hate her for it.
I still don’t want him to beat her up, though. I just want her to lie down and die quietly.
He’s gone for about ten minutes. When he comes back, he’s perfectly calm, not a hair out of place.
“She won’t bother you again.”
Shock jolts me. What the hell does that mean? Is she dead? Did he just butcher yet another person, so casually? A woman who genuinely loves him?
I give him a questioning look, but he just replies with a cold, challenging stare. I haven’t earned the right to speak.
I can’t ask what he did to her. I’m so frustrated I want to scream.
And then he leaves me, strolling off with a jaunty stride. I watch him go. He looks as stunning from behind as he does from the front. Those broad shoulders, that amazing, perfect round ass that looks as if it was carved by a Grecian sculptor, those long muscular legs.
As he disappears around the corner, all the things I thought I wanted him to do to me, ever since the first night I met him back at Heaven, parade through my mind. And here I am. I’m in the home of Manhattan’s sexiest, most eligible bachelor, and he’s kissing me. He wants to go down on me. He’s bathing me in his magazine-worthy bathroom, setting out a sumptuous feast in front of me, and telling me that all I have to do if I want him to fuck me is…ask.
I just never anticipated the part where he’d make me his sex slave, force me to sleep chained up in a dungeon cell, and beat me until I screamed in agony for the most minor of offenses.
Be careful what you wish for.
I hook my fingers under the collar and try to make it more comfortable as I start exploring the house. I enter a room that I guess I’d call a parlor or sitting room, with a suite of antique furniture in dark wood, elaborately carved and upholstered in pale blue silk. There are embroidered pillows on the settee and chairs, which are grouped around a coffee table with bowed legs that are sculpted to look like a lion’s paws. More classical paintings on the walls, showing hunting scenes. It occurs to me that’s a theme here; most of his artwork features some kind of hunting scene, and a chill washes over me.
No. Focus. Look for a way out.
I stroll slowly around the room before I work my way around to one of the windows, which has a padded bench seat. The windows all have blackout shades that I don’t dare lift, even though I’m dying to see what’s beyond them. I sit on the windowsill and lean back. Then I slide my hands behind me, secretly trying to open it.
It doesn’t budge. Of course it’s locked. And what would I have done if I could open it? Make a run for it, hobbled by my ankle chains, barely able to move my head? My shoulders slump in defeat.
That front door… The sheer, gleeful sadism of his pointing it out to me, taunting me with it… How can the man who kissed me like he loved me be the same man who grinds salt into my emotional wounds? Tears spring to my eyes, and I stumble over to the couch. A wave of despair washes over me. This house will be locked up tighter than a drum.
No. I can’t give up. I’m Tam with a Plan.
How does one escape from a brilliant, wealthy psychopath’s lair? He doesn’t take any half-measures. He’s designed it to hold prisoners and prevent escape. He’s faster than me, stronger than me. Smarter than me.
I can’t give up. Giving up is death.
If this were a movie, I’d find some clever way to overpower him. Bash him over the head with a vase, tie a string across the stairs so he fell and broke his neck, grind up a bunch of sleeping pills and put them in his drink, squirt shampoo on a tiled floor so he slipped and cracked his head… But this is real life. My life. My horrible, horrible life. I’m not a badass fictional ninja like Uma Thurman inKill Bill. I could possibly take on Elizabeth, or any other woman who’s my size, or an average guy like George the security guard.
But Joshua? He’s lethal. He’s fast death with a smile on its face. I wouldn’t have a chance against him. And he’s hinted that if I do try to physically assault him, I’ll face brutal retaliation.
There are cameras everywhere, all the time. When Elizabeth hit me, he was on her terrifyingly fast.
Think, Tamara. Plan, plan, plan.
The best that I can come up with is waiting him out. Nobody can be perfectly vigilant forever. In the news stories I’ve seen where women escaped from abduction, it happened after the victim had been held prisoner for a long time and the kidnapper got sloppy.
Odds are I’ll be here for months, at the very least. Maybe years. I have lost my scholarship, the one I worked so hard for. All those nights when I nodded off over my books, every penny I scrimped and saved for school supplies…wasted. I may never go to college at all.
And can I even be sure that Joshua will get sloppy someday? It’s hard for me to imagine, as obsessive and precise as he is, but it’s my only hope. Over time, if I can lull him into a false sense of security, I might be able to disable him some day. And if I did that…would I be able to bring myself to kill him? I hope so.
And then, once I’d disabled him, and Elizabeth, if he hasn’t just murdered her for hitting me…how would I get out? How would I call for help? Where are we, for that matter? This house is huge, so we must be far from the city. Would I emerge into a thickly wooded area, hundreds of miles from the next house?
It doesn’t matter.He will slip up someday, somehow,I promise myself. Nobody can be vigilant forever. That is what I must believe if I’m going to have the strength to take another step, to live another day.
For this to work, I’ll have to make it look believable. If I appear to give up too easily, he’ll suspect I’m trying to lull him into lowering his guard. So I’m going to have to continue to resist, but just the right amount. A believable amount. Not so much that he kills me.
That means I’ll have to accept more punishment. More pain.
