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Ursula is with me when I watch the last film. Her eyes are soft, and she makes that sad gesture again, kissing her fingers and touching Master’s lips on the freeze-frame that ends the display.
“Maybe Master home for Halloween,” she says. “Make big party.”
I sigh and try again. “Master’s never coming home.”
“But Halloween his favorite. Halloween special.”
Master dressed me in a catsuit on Halloween and fucked me with his brothers. That was the night that changed everything. That was our wedding night, in the twisted, tortured world he taught me to survive.
“Master won’t be home this Halloween.”
“We make costume,” Ursula says. “Watch movie and Master come home.”
“He didn’t film that party. He only filmed me with special guests.”
“Mein Ansel. Mein Jonas. Special, special guests.” As Ursula babbles, she moves the cursor on the screen. She opens a different folder, one labeledGeschäft. “Here,” she says. “You watch. Then we make costume.”
She clicks on another video file. Immediately, I’m on the screen. I’m wearing the catsuit, the corset, the impossible stiletto-heel boots. Master is there, and so are his brothers. He’s recorded the whole thing—the moment I walk into the room, the blowjob I give Ansel, Jonas asking for the cruet. I watch Master force me to swallow a double dose of Crash. I hear Jonas click his tongue against the roof of his mouth.
And then I watch the things I can’t remember. I see what they do to my body when I’ve lost all ability to respond. I see them triple-team me, shouting instructions to each other in German. I see their hands and their cocks and the tools they scavenge from the room. I see what they do with my boots.
My angel protected me that night. She wrapped me in the gauze of Crash. She blurred my mind, kept me safe, kept me alive.
I was raped. Brutally. Repeatedly. Methodically.
I was almost killed.
I can’t watch what the Herzogs did and call it anything but torture. I can’t make up any more stories that offer up even a shred of comfort, that explain, that justify. I can’t pretend the brothers nurtured me, helped me to find some inner strength I never knew I had.
They hurt me so badly I had to lie to stay alive. They destroyed me so thoroughly I had to forget. They broke me so completely I mistook their brutality for a twisted kind of love.
I can’t lie to myself anymore.
No man who could do the things on that video could be capable of love—not even the darkest love, the most twisted love, the most desperate kind of love that squeezes a single pixel of light from a never-ending nightmare.
I see that now.
I understand.
I finally see what I asked Trap to do, and why he couldn’t do it, and why I should be grateful to him for all the days of my life.
“Ursula,” I say. “May I use your phone?”
She hands it to me. “You call Master now? You tell him come home?”
Ignoring her, I tap in ten digits. I pray he’ll pick up a call from an unknown number. I hope it’s not too late.
The call goes to voicemail.
I try again, listening to four long rings.
Voicemail again.
I call a third time, fingers turned to marble, I’m gripping the phone so tightly.
“Prince,” he finally answers, the single syllable short and hot.
“It’s me.”
