Page 71 of Cruel Beginnings

A week goes by, and I miss her every single day.

All day long, thoughts of her crawl through my head. I’m trying to orchestrate a takeover of a string of failing hotels, and I can’t think straight enough to concentrate on it.

Not only that, she’s not breaking this time. I don’t understand it. She talks to herself all day long, reciting what sound like classroom lessons. She looks up at the camera and laughs at me and insults me in every way possible, mocking my sexual skills, my general adequacy as a man, my need to make up lies to control her. She gloats about how many times she faked orgasms. Now, there I know she’s lying, because I felt her body clench around my cock and measured her panting breaths, felt her rapidly hammering heart as if it were my own.

And yet it actually—I have to admit this—on some level, it hurts my feelings. Feelings I didn’t know I had.

I sit in wonder at this strange, unrecognizable thing I’m becoming.

She hasn’t made me into a good man. I’m never going to let her free, and I still want to kill. Need to kill. If I weren’t worried about the phantom who’s nibbling at the edges of my life, I’d go out and kill someone new today. Maybe the judge. That would be fun. I’d enjoy it.

So if I’m not the old me, and I’m not a good man, what am I?

I play through various tortures in my head, imagining scenarios that might make Toy sorry she ever defied me. But it all feels hollow.

I thought I could rewrite her, and I failed. I believed that the minds of all prey were the same, that they could be permanently reshaped in any way I chose, given the appropriate stimuli or lack of stimuli. But the scrappy little fighter was lurking under the surface the entire time. I can torture her into obeying me, but I can never take away her free will.

One day, when Elizabeth goes downstairs with Toy’s daily gruel, Toy starts in on her. She mocks her, calls her old and ugly. “Joshua will never love you, you sour-smelling old bitch. Your twat reeks like a tuna sandwich someone left in the sun for a week. Do you see the way he tries not to breathe when you come into the room? It’s fucking hilarious.”

Elizabeth lets out a guttural howl and throws the bowl of gruel at Toy’s face. Toy just laughs at her and resumes her mockery. “Did you actually think he’d ever put his dick in that dried up snatch of yours? You dream about it all night long, don’t you? Do you touch yourself when you think of him?”

Her cruelty is breath-taking. Highly impressive. Worthy ofme. Where did it come from?

She was never like that before. Can people actually change their essential nature?

Is that what’s happening to me?

Elizabeth flashes a frantic look at the camera on the ceiling, and her face crumples in mortification. She knows I heard every word Toy just said. She runs out of the room. She doesn’t come to me for new instructions, or for punishment for throwing the gruel. She runs straight to her room, and I hear the shower turning on.

She’s washing herself because she believed Toy, because she thinks she smells bad. Toy hurt her, which means I should punish Toy, but how? If pain and threats of death won’t move her, what will?

I watch Toy lying there in bed with the gruel slowly drying on her face. That drives me crazy. I don’t want Toy to be dirty. Elizabeth lets her up to use the toilet exactly three times a day, and she doesn’t get to wash herself afterward. I can feel the filth crawling on Toy’s skin as if it were my own, and it makes me itch. Phantom stench drifts into my nostrils, roiling my stomach and putting me off my food.

I let the day drift by. When Elizabeth never comes to my office, I go find her in her room.

It’s the room of a grade-school girl. Her walls are crowded with framed pictures of fairy-tale couples. Cinderella, Rapunzel, Snow White—all of them pictured gazing adoringly at their princes. I used to think that she decorated her room that way because she was a case of arrested development—she stopped maturing emotionally after my father kidnapped her and raped her.

Encased in the amber of eternal childhood.

Now I realize that those fairy-tale couples represent her impossible dream: her and me. How could I never have noticed? Oh, right, because psychopaths lack empathy.

“Elizabeth! What the hell are you doing in here?” I snap.

She scoots back on her bed with the Ariel comforter and cringes away from me, refusing to meet my eyes. Her disobedience is a slap to my face.

“Look at me, you fucking moron,” I snarl at her. She flinches and makes horrible sobbing noises. I force myself to temper the anger in my voice.

“Toy was lying to you. You don’t smell bad. You do a very good job for me. You are very useful to me. Don’t listen to anything she says. She’s angry at me and taking it out on you. Her words are meaningless. All right?”

Elizabeth manages a dejected, miserable nod.

Then she looks at me hopefully and draws her finger across her throat.

She wants me to kill Toy.She has never before, in her life, requested anything from me, and this is what she asks?

That bizarre protectiveness flares up in me. I’ve committed such evil acts against Toy that any sane person would say I should be flayed alive, but if anyone else threatens her, I want to dismember them. It takes everything I’ve got to keep my voice steady. “I am not going to kill her. And you are not to harm her, or I will set you on fire and watch you burn. You will go down there tonight and wash her face off with a cloth and give her dinner.”

I could, of course, go downstairs myself, but I know Toy hates Elizabeth, so this is part of my punishment.

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