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I sacrificed my identity. My dreams. My personality. Everything to keep him happy.
And now he’s mad at me, disappointed with me, for following the rules that he created.
I struggle to regain the safe dullness that I’ve felt for the last…weeks, months? And I’m sick at the thought of what will happen to me when I fail.
CHAPTERTWENTY-TWO
JOSHUA
A sour brew of frustration eats at my gut as I head to New York.
The police contacted my lawyer and asked me to take a lie detector test after all. It’s a waste of my time, but if I refuse, it will look suspicious, so I just need to do it and get it the hell over with.
And there’s a public charity auction tonight that I promised ages ago to attend. I contributed a pre-Raphaelite sketch. I could beg off, but at this point, with the police investigating me and aware that I haven’t been staying in my penthouse, I am afraid that might look suspicious.
So I will stop off at my empty penthouse suite and don a tuxedo. Then I will go rub shoulders with a bunch of boring ass-kissers for a couple of hours, while I mentally go through the steps of field dressing them and wrapping their parts in butcher’s paper and mailing them to their families. I find these creative visualization exercises to be very soothing.
In the morning, my lawyer and I will go to the police station to do the lie detector test.
I’m curious why the police are pushing for this now. Has someone given them new information, since Sergeant Carter last spoke to me?
I am still completely in the dark about who’s behind all of this. Someone has clearly infiltrated my company, if they know that I fired Toy. And that person knows the address of my penthouse apartment and knows that I haven’t been staying there.
I’m also worried about leaving the house unguarded at this point.
There shouldn’t be any reason to worry. I rebuilt my entire alarm system. And I have the solution to any invasion of my property by law enforcement, or anyone else who could pose a danger to me. Just blow it the fuck up. It’s only money, right?
And yet, somewhere deep inside me, I don’t know if I would ever do that. Could I kill Toy if I had to? I’m not sure.
This is bad. This is very, very bad.
I’m checking the video feeds at Blackthorne daily now—but he’s always there. It’s nothim.They keep him sedated and calm and very, very securely locked up, because Dr. Barnard knows what would happen if they fail, and not just to himself and his family. Their prisoner is the only man who’s as vicious, cunning and ruthless as me, and he can never set foot outside those walls again. People would die—innocent people, not just predators. That isn’t a problem for me, but Dr. Barnard, like most people, has a conscience, and it would weigh heavily on him.
I should fly out to California to check on him one of these days, but I hate to leave Toy alone for that long.
The smart thing to do would be to run, go to ground until I can solve this mystery. I could even take Toy and Elizabeth with me. I own property overseas, and I have fake identities set up in case I ever need them. I am a very organized psychopath who plans ahead.
But my stubborn pride won’t let me do this. Only cowards run. My father taught me that. A lot of his “wisdom” was just self-serving bullshit, but not all of it. At the same time that he was torturing me, he was very painfully driving home necessary lessons in survival—not just of the body, but of the self. Better to die as the man that I am than to live cowering or submitting to another.
I will not flee from some nameless chickenshitphantomwho won’t even meet me on the field of battle.
What I will do is find him and fucking force him to fight me before I demonstrate the definition of the word “agony”.
He—or she, possibly—has snatched far too much power from me already. All hunts are on hold until I can figure out what I’m up against, and that is not acceptable. I’m feeling the need to kill again, and it’s adding to my general irritability.
The situation with Toy bothers me even more than my nameless adversary, though. She brought so much satisfaction to my life when I first captured her. She was a better high than any drug. I woke up excited for what every single day brought to me—and now that’s gone, and life feels dull and flat again.
She does everything I tell her to, and it just pisses me off.
I want her to have some spark of personality. No, more than that – I want her to fight me.
But she’s afraid that if she does, I’ll beat it out of her.
And she’s right.
I have never been able to tolerate defiance. The rules of survival were beaten into me early on. Whipped, burned, stabbed, punched, kicked into me. I am a god. I am a king. I rule absolutely or not at all. These are the rules I’ve established with Toy. She may not defy me in any way.
But I also don’t like this new thing I’ve created.
