Total pages in book: 109
Estimated words: 104165 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 521(@200wpm)___ 417(@250wpm)___ 347(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 104165 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 521(@200wpm)___ 417(@250wpm)___ 347(@300wpm)
With that, I leave her and head upstairs again. She’s not chained to the ceiling, but she also can’t figure out how to move fast enough to follow me. There’s an art to moving when you’re double-barred like that, and it takes time to learn.
“Bye now, love. Remember, all you have to do is call and I’ll come.”
“Never!” rings her parting shout.
ELEVEN
DOMHNALL
She makes it all of thirty-two hours.
It’s quite impressive, really. But then, Mads always was stubborn.
I work from home for the day, one monitor full of code I’m barely looking at, and the other… My other screen is full of the entertainment du jour.
God, she is magnificent.
She flips me off whenever she remembers to look up at the camera, which makes me chuckle. Even after all this time, I still know her so well. Mads can barely go ten minutes without needing someone to talk to. In the only way available to her, she’s trying to interact with me. She needs to feel a sense of connection with someone. Even if that someone is me.
Being proved right brings a warring tug of satisfaction in my chest even as I watch her struggle to crouch-crawl towards the bathroom. It’s the only way to move when you’re locked up like that, and she’s smart to have figured it out so fast. It took me forever. But then again, Mads always was clever. So, so very clever.
I squint at the screen and turn up the volume when she discovers the feeder, in a room off to the side by the bathroom. I smile at the blue streak she swears. She always could swear the skin off a donkey’s arse.
I’ve got a whole arrangement set up down there for food to be dispensed into a bowl. She should be grateful—it dispenses granola.
I had to eat actual dog food when I was made to be a pet, and not the expensive shite.
She has no choice but to bend over and eat it like an animal would. Same with the water bowl beside it. The bowl by the bed was just a temporary convenience. This is the self-filling one.
Afterward she lies on the ground near the elevator. As if she thinks she might ambush me when I next come down.
But I’ve learned patience since I first knew Mads.
Back then I was young and impulsive and sure that if I just tried hard enough and sprinted fast enough, I’d finally outrun all the bad shite and get to the good part of living. When you had a little sister depending on you, you were always promising ‘em rainbows and unicorn shite like that. For Moira’s sake, I tried to believe it longer than I should’ve.
Nothing gets you in trouble faster than hope.
Sitting in my office chair that costs more than my first car, I feel a fucked up, twisted satisfaction as I watch Mads’s hope drain. She gives up her vigil at the elevator to waddle back to the bathroom, then goes for some more food.
I’ve known for a long time that something was off inside me. Bent sideways. Wrong.
Before I found the club, I just kept to myself, apart from taking care of Moira. I knew that part inside me that I never let myself look directly at was too dark to ever let out. Well, it did boil over occasionally and I’d do dangerous shite like street-racing and intentionally picking fights with bastards bigger than me. But then came Crave, and I found a disciplined way to take the beast out, on a very short leash, and only at the club.
Now though?
I watch Mads weep in despair around hour fourteen and it makes me so fucking hard. The mascara tracks down her cheeks are even more beautiful than I could’ve dreamed of.
All day I sit obsessively watching her on my screen, even when she sleeps. I’m fascinated when she wakes up screaming. Twice, she screams herself awake from little naps, as if the devil himself has just shoved his poker straight through her belly.
I lean in closer to the screen as she waves her arms to make the lights turn on. Then she curls up into a little ball. Well, as much as she can with the barred cuffs.
She knows I’m watching. Is this more performance theater, or are the nightmares real? I want to know. I’m hungry to know everything about her. I’m obsessed. I recognize it but I don’t particularly care.
My sadistic monster is the real me. The center of me. He’s hungry for her in a way I can’t explain. I need to know everything about her. What scares her? What she sounds like when she comes. When she screams.
Some things have to be real, and I’ll discover each true thing one at a time as I break her. I’ll sift out the real from the false, and then she’ll be mine completely.