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I’m smiling as I clean myself off with tissues.
She’s a fighter, that one. She pretends to surrender, but she’s always plotting and planning. That makes the challenge even more thrilling.
I wonder how long it will take until she’s fully, completely mine. Until she truly loves me, craves me, would die without me.
Until she doesn’t have a single thought in her head other than how to please me.
As I toss the tissue in the trash, a flicker of worry creeps through me. Will I still want her when she’s nothing but a mindless puppet?
I’ve met so many weak women over the years. Women who are instinctively drawn to my brutality. Women who would chew their own tits off for me if they could. It revolts me. God help me, it reminds me of my mother, who was too weak until the very end, and then it was too little, too late.
Now my elation starts to fade.
Is it selfish of me to steal a human being and use her to self-medicate? To give myself the endorphin rush that my brain craves?
Of course it is. Who fucking cares? Where did that question even come from? I never think like that. Sometimes I think Tamara’s weakening essential parts of me. All the more reason to hurry up and reshape her into exactly what I need. That will have to break the hold she has on me, won’t it?
But what will she be if I crush her completely?
Will she still be able to please me? Isn’t this fight, this defiance, what I need from her?
And when it’s gone, when she’s a mindless, broken toy, what will I do if I get bored with her? I promised I wouldn’t kill her. Will I still desire her if she’s a shambling zombie who craves me and never questions me?
I lean back in my chair, lacing my fingers together. I’ve never experienced a situation like this. In the past, if I wanted sexual satisfaction, I hired whores I could whip, fuck, and then throw out with a handful of money clenched in their greedy little fists.
The worry won’t go away. It’s chewing at the edges of my consciousness. I can’t see any way out of this situation, though. I don’t know how to spend time with anyone without feeling the overwhelming urge to crush and conquer them. That’s one reason I picked the business I did. I buy companies and strip them of their assets, or cut them down to size and resell them when they’re profitable. I move on. No permanency, no interpersonal contact. It’s why I’ve always held every single human being in my life at arm’s length.
Except for Elizabeth, but that’s a different story.
I made promises to her a long time ago, and I will do my best to keep them.
My father used to make promises all the time, and he’d laugh and laugh as he broke them. He’d promise a girl he was going to let her go, and then when she’d run a few hundred feet, he’d start chasing her.
He’d promise my mother he was done hitting her, and then the beatings would resume.
I try very, very hard to avoid lies. And I don’t make promises I can’t keep.
Not lying makes it a little harder to manipulate people, but that’s all right. Handicapping myself isn’t a bad thing. It makes life more challenging.
My new burner phone vibrates and beeps on the table, and I look at it, narrow-eyed. Only Elizabeth has the burner phone numbers, and that’s just so she can call me in case of true, life-or-death emergency. Right now, I am watching Tamara on the monitor, so I know she’s secured, and my perimeter alarms haven’t been tripped, so nobody’s on my property—so what the hell is going on?
When I pick up the phone, ice water washes through my blood.
Have you been a bad boy?the text message says.
I sit bolt upright.
Holy fuck.
Adrenaline pumps through me. I consider answering but decide that acknowledgment would be a bad idea.
Quickly, I log on to my computer and check the video feed that shows me a man in a large, padded cell. He’s drawing on a piece of paper with a crayon. Hmm. I wonder if that’s a good idea. Knowing him, he could find a way to make a deadly weapon out of those. Then again, he’s monitored all the time. I check the time and date scrolling across the screen at the top of the feed; it’s current.
To be extra sure, I make a phone call, using a special phone that I keep just for this purpose.
The head of the Blackthorne Psychiatric Institute answers instantly. As he fucking well better if he wants the money to keep flowing and his family to keep breathing. I have not yet ever killed a child, but if he fucks me over on this, he will leave me no choice, and he knows it.
“Is he there?” I demand of him.
