AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I shudder at the thought of more beatings. It still hurts to sit, to stand, to walk. But all the pain in the world will be worth it if it means someday I’ll be free.
CHAPTERTEN
JOSHUA
“Come into my parlor,” said the spider to the fly.I smile at the sight of Tamara on the video camera, scanning the room, desperately seeking out avenues for escape but pretending not to. I watch her body language, learning her little tells, drinking in all the secrets she’s trying to hide from me.
What is the “bad thing” she moans about in her sleep? Why does she cry out to her mother that she’s sorry? What nightmares torment her…other than me, of course? I’ll find out soon enough.
Conquering her body is the easy part. I’ve already done that. Her soft little moans, the way she squirms helplessly as I tease her with my tongue, the way she pants with desire when I massage the numbing cream into her throbbing flesh… It’s delicious, watching her twisted up with agonized, unsatisfied lust for me. She’s strong, my girl, moving through her days in a haze of fear and sexual hunger, forcing herself to deny what she wants so badly. But she’s fighting a war that she’s already lost. The first time she whimpered for me, I knew I had her.
And what a prize she is.
I can’t fully understand what it is that makes her so different from any other woman I’ve been with. She’s pretty, but I’ve buried my cock in so many beautiful women that their faces all blur into one. Is it her inner steel underneath that sweet, spicy exterior? Is it the song of the brave wounded bird that sings to me? Or the push and pull of her desire fighting with her need to hate me? She saw what I did to George, she knows that I kill humans for sport, and she despises me for it. But she wants me. And it’s tearing her apart.
In the end, it doesn’t really matter why she’s the one for me. All that matters is that I’ll make her fully mine.
I’ll invade the dark corners of her mind and steal every last part of her. I’ll slay the demons of her past and be her hero and her destruction all in one.
It won’t be easy, but nothing worthwhile ever is.
Poor girl. So strong, so brave, so doomed. She never stood a chance against me.
I see the way her eyes wander to the window, while she keeps her head perfectly still. What she doesn’t realize is that it’s her stillness that gives her away. Most of her body goes rigid when she’s doing something or thinking something that she doesn’t want me to be aware of. I watch for that, and then I look even closer, seeing the movements that she can’t quite conceal. For instance, when her gaze slides to the window that she so desperately wants to pry open, her shoulders rise just the tiniest amount, in perfect rhythm with her gaze.
She’s announcing her intentions without saying a word.
She thinks she’s being clever, but she has no idea what she’s up against. I’ve been studying human behavior in all its forms since I was in diapers.
It started with my father; I used my powers of observation to learn how to survive him.
Then, after I escaped and found myself in a big, bright, strange world, I was forced to embark on an entirely new field of study: how to be a wolf and yet blend in with sheep. It was hard for me to fit in anywhere at first; there was a glaring spotlight of “otherness” shining on me. The expressions on my face were wrong. My reactions to everyday situations were off. Despite my physical attractiveness, people found me repellant. The things I said frightened or repulsed them.
I didn’t let it discourage me in the least. It was just another game, and I would learn the rules. I excel at winning. That’s why I was the only member of my family to walk away from my father’s house of horrors deep in the woods, with a broken little girl limping along behind me.
I started obsessively watching television and reading books, so I could see how people behaved. I read books about charm and charisma, and meticulously applied the lessons. I mimicked ordinary humans. I read fiction and biographies and took notes on the appropriate ways to react to everyday situations.
I was a quick learner. It didn’t take me long to develop the charm and charisma needed to make people do whatever I wanted them to.
I experimented for a while, pushing it to see how far I could make people go. It turned out there were no limits. I could drive people to suicide, to madness. I could make girls fall obsessively in love with me and carve my name on their faces. I could make people kill for me, give me all their money, break up marriages without a second thought.
Passing for human doesn’t come naturally to me, though. It’s a constant effort not to give myself away as “other”. Monstrous. Terrifying. Yes, it’s important that people be afraid of me, but they have to be the right amount of afraid. If they want to run away screaming, then I cannot trick them into doing things for me, nor can I lure them into a false sense of security. I need them to trust me long enough to sign contracts that will ruin their lives and make me even richer. And I can’t ever become a suspect in the various disappearances that I’m responsible for.
So I am always learning, always studying, always forcing myself to pay attention to how I am interacting with people.
Right now, as I study Tamara, I am learning about myself as well.
Apparently I am capable of a wider range of feelings than I ever knew. I still can’t name these emotions, though. This is puzzling. My IQ is genius level. I’m not used to unanswered questions.
I don’t believe that what I’m experiencing is the emotion known as “love”. The way I behave toward Tamara does not seem to fit any description of “love” that I’ve come across. After all, if I loved her, would I enjoy hurting her so much?
But I also enjoyed hurting the gorgeous escorts I used to bring back to my house. My feelings for Tamara are something different. Once the escorts are no longer useful to me, once they’ve made me come, and I’ve shown my mastery over their flesh by forcing screaming orgasms on them, I feel an absolutely urgent need to get them away from me. If I were forced to spend too much time with them, I’d probably kill them.
I don’t want Tamara to go away. I want her to stay with me forever—so, of course, I’ll keep her forever, because I always get what I want. I wonder if my strange urge to keep her near me is a good thing. Does this mean I’m becoming more “human”, and if so, is that a desirable outcome?
I frown at the screen, concentrating, as if staring more intensely will somehow reveal the answers to this mystery, but nothing comes.
The way I feel when anybody but me hurts Tamara is new too. When I kill rapists and serial killers, it’s not because I care about the fact that they’re hurting people. I’m focused on the predators, not their victims.
