Page 49 of The Monster of Hotel No. 7
But when it comes, it’s not from him.
“He forced me down here. Pinned me against this chair and… and…” Karia sobs, a loud, anguished sound in the quiet room that is the soundtrack to something cracking inside my ribcage. “Strapped me down and touched me and he… hebitme.”
I don’t understand how it is that my thoughts do not immediately shatter. Instead, as my heart breaks, I remember her shirt is shoved up, she is exposed, and there are four very dangerous men facing her. And maybe I should want her to be hurt for the words she just spoke, the trap she has so carefully laid, but it doesn’t stop me from reaching back, finding on touch alone the fabric of her top. I fumble with tugging it down, my fingers shaky, and she sucks in a loud, audible breath, like she is terrified of me.
“Please,”she rasps, and I yank on the fabric and try not to give into the desire to snap her neck. “Please, Mr. Rule.” The buckles of her straps rattle as I retract my hand without looking at her, and she tries to break free. “Can you please get me out of here? I can’t… I don’t want him to… You saw what he was trying to do.Please.”Another low, guttural sob. Real tears cause her voice to tremble. She must try to lunge from the chair because the straps clank again. “Get me out of here!” Her words sound hysterical. Nothing like before.“Let me go!”
Her mask has slipped. She is no longer trying to survive me, so she is screaming for help and revealing just how much she loathes me.
Touch me,she said.Touch me so I can manipulate you into letting me go.That’s what she left out.
Her gasps are loud, wrenching through the room, and my pulse thuds faster still. Nausea swirls in my gut and I can’t move. Can’t face her and scream at her and ask her how she could’ve almost made me believe in something like a friend.
All I can do is stare at Stein and watch as twisted, smug satisfaction curls into that smile I have come to fear.
“Constance,” he says, looking right at me as Karia continues to make obnoxious, pathetic whimpering sounds, so different from when I touched her. “Can you please release Ms. Ven from her binds?”
“Don’t touch her.”I couldn’t stop myself from saying it even if I tried. As it is, it doesn’t matter that she betrayed me. Something far worse might happen. Stein could force me to watch them assault her; it’s a punishment he would create, and quickly. And I… Ican’t.
I curl my fingers into fists, leather gloves clinging to my bones as I make myself bow my head and look up at him through my lashes, as if in submission. Karia is a brat because she doesn’t know real horror, but I force myself to be docile because sometimes, it helps soften the blows.
“Please,” I beg Stein as Constance steps toward Karia at my back, the flashlight’s glow bouncing and jarring across the small room. “Please don’t hurt her. You can… Anything you want with me, you know it’s yours. But please don’t hurt her.”
Stein tilts his head and I hear buckles clank as Constance sets to work freeing her, presumably one handed. There is a wild, stupid part of me holding onto hope that her cries were an act. That for some ungodly reason she would still choose me over safety. Me over acceptance. Me, over anything. But I know it’s a reverie, and it’s proven to me when I hear the creak of the chair, then her soft footfalls following the path of the light Constance shines at my back.
Then she’s there. Standing beside Stein, tugging down her shirt more, adjusting her skirt, and avoiding my gaze. Her hair is scattered around her shoulders, over her chest, and when she’s finished straightening her clothes, she frantically loops her strands behind the small curve of her ears, her fingers trembling.
All the while, she doesn’t look at me. She drops her gaze to the cement floor, Constance stays at my back, and Stein says to me, with one amused glance at her as her knees shake and she clenches her fists, “She will be led back upstairs to her parents. I came down with our guards as soon as we arrived, but I know they are still searchingdesperatelyfor her.”
She nods once, like she was listening. I can’t stop staring at her. Pleading with her, inside my mind.Please look at me. Tell me this was real. Tell me there was just one moment you didn’t hate me. Karia. Don’t leave me here like this.
Desperation drenches my brain, trying to claw and scramble my cells to reach her.
But she says, staring at the floor, “Thank you, Mr. Rule.”
A hoarse, broken, and pathetic cry leaves my lips despite the fact I try to bite it back.
And still… she doesn’t so much as glance my way.
Stein’s smile grows with my shameful noise. “I’m so sorry for this, Karia,” he says, but he’s looking at me.
She seems so small and vulnerable andgoodstanding next to him, only coming to his shoulders, so much of her smooth skin exposed where he is wearing a suit. I want to cover her in me, even now. I want to protect her, despite her knife in my back.I want you, Karia. Don’t leave me like this.
I knew you would. Everyone good goes, don’t they?
“I will handle my son and I assure you this will not happen again. All these years so many of you thought him lost, I was only trying to protect him from the world, and everyone else from him.”
Karia says nothing, her entire frame vibrating with what looks like terror. She loops one arm across her body and grabs her opposite elbow, her shoulders hunching in. So different from the girl who swung a flashlight at her friend’s head. I do not know this version of her at all.
It is as if she slithers into any skin she wants to wear. Pretends for anyone around her. Perhaps she helped lead me here somehow for this shattering, treacherous moment, but maybe she only wanted to go with me to add another experience to her gilded little life.
A few hours with a monster. An exotic sort of treat.
Hatred begins to take the place of despair inside my heart.
“Constance, can you please escort Karia to her anguished parents and hand me the flashlight?” Stein glances at Karia, who doesn’t look back at him. “You can step out into the hall, dear, you do not wish to see how very aggressive Sully can get. I hope he did not hurt that guard in front of you. And he must have tempered himself with you, considering you appear…whole.”
As Constance begins to walk somewhere at my back to do Stein’s bidding, Stein removes his hands from his pockets and pops open one lapel of his blazer, extracting something from an unseen breast pocket of his shirt. When he withdraws his hand as Constance moves beside me, focused on Karia, I see a familiar syringe.
