Page 25 of Broken Hearts

My hands shaking, I dug deeper and pulled out a folded piece of paper. A letter. In spidery, scrawled handwriting, it said: I know you love me, Alex, and I love you too. But I just can’t do this anymore. I can’t stay here. I have to go. I’m sorry. Please believe that I’m sorry. Love, Evangeline.

A lump formed in my throat and something gnawed at my stomach as I read the girl’s words. Then I picked up one of the first photos where the girl was unscathed and seemingly happier, wondering why it suddenly seemed so familiar to me. It finally hit me. There was a carpet below her—a beautiful Persian rug with an intricate pattern, exactly like the one in the smaller sitting room downstairs. In the photo, I could even see that it had a little frayed part on one corner.

The one downstairs had the same fraying. It was the same damn rug. These photos had been taken by Alex, in his own house.

I sat back on my knees again, staring at nothing, my eyes no longer focusing. My mind was a whirling dervish, blowing from thought to thought. Then a flare of uncontrollable fury shot through me, erasing any happiness I’d built up in recent days.

Whoever this girl was, Alex kept her with him. Kept her captive. Just like me. He lied when he said I was the only one he took. Looked me right in the eyes and fucking lied.

What else was a lie? What other betrayals lay in store for me?

And the things he’d done to that poor girl… my god. Those photos. He must’ve done the same to her that he did to me—kept the punishments severe enough to hurt like hell or begin to mentally break a person, but not enough to maim or permanently scar them. Then, after god knows how long, he upped the ante. He flogged and beat her so severely that she scarred and probably suffered internal bleeding, judging by the enormity of the bruising. He made her want to die.

The look in her eyes in those later photos was so broken, so haunted. The girl’s spirit had been crushed till she was nothing but an empty shell. Till she was so low she wrote him a letter saying she just couldn’t do it anymore. I can’t stay here, she’d said.

I could only presume she left him the letter before trying to escape. For a long time, she was probably torn between her love for the man who loved her back but hurt her so much at the same time, and her chance at living a life without horrible pain. The need for freedom finally won out, and she tried to leave him. Maybe she even killed herself, just to escape him forever.

Or maybe Alex killed her, growing tired of what she’d become, no longer wanting a broken toy. No longer wanting to deal with her escape attempts and therefore her disloyalty.

I swallowed bile as it rose up in my throat. Not only did Alex lie to me about never taking another girl apart from me, he might’ve also lied to me when he said he’d never kill me. For all I knew, that could be bullshit designed to lull me into a false sense of security, and one day when I was completely broken, he’d dispose of me too. After all, where was this Evangeline girl now? Certainly not here anymore, even though she clearly had been at some stage. Even though Alex loved her, like the letter said….

Clearly, I couldn’t trust a word he said. He’d always been so damn convincing, and he was capable of looking someone right in the eye and telling all sorts of lies. In fact, if it weren’t for my own regained memories, the photos in the filing cabinet, the video of my father raping a girl, and the fact that I’d heard evidence from Dan Vallone in person, I would’ve been inclined to believe that Alex invented the Circle in his own imagination.

Obviously, the Circle was real, but Alex was a hypocrite. He hurt girls too. Maybe not as terribly as them, but still pretty fucking terribly, it seemed. He might’ve even killed Evangeline. Hell, I wasn’t even sure she was the only one. Perhaps there were others before her, and I just hadn’t found the corresponding boxes.

I wondered when my turn would come. When he would begin to punish me so hard, so severely, that the pain outweighed the pleasure and I wished for death.

Shaking, I put everything back in the boxes, save for one photo of Evangeline. I wanted to take it with me and hide it in my room so I could look at it whenever I felt as if I were falling more and more for Alex. It would remind me that I couldn’t trust him anymore. Remind me that I’d been deluded when I thought this would last, and that he’d never hurt me badly.

Apparently, he would.

The other day, I’d actually wondered what it would take for the twisted battle in my mind to end; the battle between wanting freedom and wanting to be a captive. This was it. The new knowledge that Alex couldn’t be trusted at all, and that he might kill me one day, was enough for me to start wanting my freedom again, outweighing the part of me which got off on being a victim to him.

I heard a car coming down the driveway a moment later. Shit. Alex was home already. I stuffed the boxes back in the cupboard, closed it, and crept downstairs and into my room. The photo of the other girl went under my mattress.

I curled up on the armchair with my book again, blinking away the tears threatening to spill out. I affected an innocent expression as heavy footsteps sounded in the hall. Alex appeared in my doorway a moment later.

“The power is out. Are you okay?”

I nodded. “Yes. I went and found the backup generator for the greenhouse,” I said nonchalantly. “I hope the short cold snap won’t affect them.”

“It should be okay, if you did it quickly enough.” He paused and crossed the room. “How long’s it been out?”

Long enough.“Oh… not long. Maybe five or ten minutes,” I lied. I didn’t want him knowing it’d been out for at least an hour now, or he might be suspicious about everything I got up to during that period of time.

He nodded. “There’s actually a backup generator for the house, too. It’s supposed to automatically click over during outages, but I guess it’s not working.”

“Oh, that makes sense,” I said. As grateful as I was for the outage and the clarity it had given me, I had wondered why the greenhouse had a backup generator and the house didn’t seem to. “Do you want me to come help you fix it, sir?”

“No, I’ll take a look myself. You enjoy your book. What’s that one about?”

I blushed. “Oh, it’s a bit ridiculous, but I love it. It’s a romance set in some medieval-style fantasy world. For some reason there’s aliens in it too.”

He smiled indulgently at that, like I was a good little pet who’d just performed an adorable trick. “Sounds like fun.”

“It is.” I affected my most innocent expression yet. “Sir… can I ask you something? It’s about what you said the other day.”

His eyebrows furrowed. “Okay. What did I say?”

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