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The purchaser is paying to move the media group’s operations to smaller buildings on less valuable pieces of property. Apparently, Mr. Morton cared more about keeping his newspapers and radio stations running than he did about money. A man with principles? How fucking disgusting.
All the deals I planned to make based on this one have now fallen to pieces. It doesn’t affect my vast holdings, my wealth, in any significant way, but it does affect me personally. I’m not used to failure.
I don’t know how all these different threads are woven together, but when I find out who did this to me, I will end them in horrible ways. In the meantime, I have to put all future hunts on hold. Frustration coils tightly inside me. Whoever’s doing this to me, when I find them, I’ll stage a special little hunt and I’ll make it last for days.
CHAPTEREIGHTEEN
JOSHUA
I feel an unusual nervousness as I glide into the parking spot in my building. I haven’t been to the office ever since I took Toy.
With the threat of the phantom texter hanging over my head, and all the weirdness that’s been happening to me lately, I don’t like leaving Toy alone in the house with Elizabeth. Oh, she’s chained up and safe in her cell, but with someone still out there who delights in fucking with me, and who apparently has a way to hack into my system and set off the perimeter alarms, leaving the house like this is a huge risk.
There’s one option I have if anyone attempts to breach the perimeter of my house. The nuclear option. Since I bring my hunting prey to the house, there would be too much risk of police finding DNA if anything were to lead them there. So I’ve wired my house in such a way that I can, just by calling in a certain code, cause it to explode completely, obliterating any trace of its existence—along with anything and anyone inside it.
No more Toy. Ever.
The thought creates a strange hollowness in me, but of course, if it ever became necessary, I could do it without blinking an eye.
Couldn’t I?
I force myself to try to picture my life without her, and my brain rebels. I clench my fists in frustration, opening and closing them. On some level, our roles have reversed. I’m keeping her body prisoner, but she’s taken my mind hostage.
I can’t understand Toy’s effect on me. What is it about her, specifically, that has called up something new and un-nameable inside me?
Plato believed humans were split apart before they were sent to Earth, and spent their entire lives searching for their missing half. He said that love tries to make one out of two and heal the wound of human nature.
But that can’t be the answer for me. I’d never be drawn to someone like myself; I’m a perfect monster.
And Toy is nothing like me. Oh, I know she’s a survivor—she crawled away from the wreckage of her past and rose to her feet and found her place in the world. But the similarity stops there. She is the exact opposite of me in her dealings with people, the yin to my yang. I want to open wounds; she wants to heal them.
I mutter curses under my breath as I slide out of my car and head for my office. I really, really don’t want to be here today.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have a choice.
A police detective contacted my office and asked to see me but refused to say why. He wanted me to come down to the station to meet him. As if. I can handle myself with perfect calm and control anywhere, but why hand him any advantages?
So I called my lawyer and arranged for him to meet me and the detective in the conference room of my building. My lawyer’s advice was to make the police wait until they were willing to say why they wanted to talk to me, but I think I’d better get ahead of all this.
The police detective, Sergeant Carter, is a man in his forties with jet black hair.
Like most people, he’s not good at hiding his true emotions. He means to show me a poker face, but I can see his disdain in the subconscious curl of his lip, the lines strung tight across his forehead. I don’t think it’s the typical envy and distrust that the working class have for men like me; I’m pretty sure it goes deeper than that.
My lawyer, Algernon Brooks, who looks every bit as preppy and haughty as his name, sinks down into a seat next to me. After we get the introductions out of the way, the detective places a manila folder on the table. He opens it and takes out a picture that he slides across the table for me to look at. A driver’s license picture. Tamara Bennett, who is now my Toy.
“Tamara something,” I say to him. “She worked for us as an office clerk for a little while over the summer. How can I help you, Sergeant Carter?”
To amuse myself, I manufacture an image of what she’s doing right now. Crying out to the camera, bruises half-healed, beautiful tears streaming down her cheeks, her voice hoarse with sorrow as she begs to serve me. And there’s not a damn thing that Sergeant Carter can do to save her.
“She’s been missing for almost a month now,” he informs me.
I frown in manufactured dismay. “Yes, I know—my human resources director informed me that she’d been contacted by your department a little while back. I was sorry to hear it, but I’m not sure how I can help you. She was a summer intern, and she left our firm, I think to start school.”
He ignores the question. “She didn’t just leave, though, did she? You fired her. Why?” he asks me.
Who the hell told him that?Now I’m starting to get genuinely pissed off.
I favor him with a pleasant, uninterested smile. “She acted inappropriately at a party. However, I hardly see how that’s relevant.”
