There’s a tiny spark of hope in me. The skills he’s teaching me are actually useful. Joshua let his guard down once, and I got access to the razor. Maybe it will happen again.
I hate that tiny spark of hope, though. Giving up, preparing myself mentally to die, was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Hope is dangerous. Hope will weaken my resolve.
He’s hard on me when we’re sparring, and I’m murderous. I’m sincerely trying very, very hard to maim or kill, but of course I never do. Sometimes Joshua puts on a thick, padded suit with a mask and lets me practice eye-gouging, throat strikes, groin-kicking.
Our sparring sessions always end in fucking. Always. Rough, hard, glorious. I struggle at first, then submit every time, and it’s like it’s part of our sex play. I could refuse him, but the horrible truth is, I crave it. His mere presence, his heated glance, makes my sex damp with desire. The more violent our sparring, the more I want him. Pinned down on the floor, writhing underneath him, fighting to get away but really wanting it…just like the fantasies I used to shamefully entertain before I ever met him.
He resumes bathing me and shaving me in the morning. I let him cuff me to the tub without trying to fight, because I find it heightens the pleasure for me. And that ends in fucking too. That’s sweeter and more tender. I get the best of both worlds from him—soft, gentle sex, and brutal, hard fucking. I have an amazing sex life. Several orgasms a day, and they’re always mind-blowing, explosive, shattering.
If I wasn’t his prisoner, he’d be the perfect lover.
But I am his prisoner. I finally go and try that front door that used to taunt and terrify me, and of course it’s locked. I knew it would be, but I still stand there and cry as I uselessly yank on the doorknob.
At night, at the dinner table, as I sit there with one ankle chained to the chair and the chair bolted to the floor, he tries to draw me out in conversation. I keep my answers monosyllabic and dull.
He starts telling me about his childhood, not as if he’s looking for pity, just as if we’re boyfriend and girlfriend, getting to know each other. Except the childhood that he tells me about is so horrifying that it sounds like something out of a Stephen King novel, and it frequently kills my appetite. His casual discussions of his brothers’ deaths bring tears to my eyes.
The worst of it, to me, is that it could have been stopped early on. There were several visits to their deep woods cabin by concerned social workers—who apparently weren’t that concerned after all, because each time, after a brief visit, they left the family to their fate. The murderous eyes of Joshua’s father burned into his family’s flesh as they spoke politely to the state employees. Those idiots didn’t even bother interviewing the family separately—they did it right there in the room with Lenin Montgomery watching them. And they swallowed all the lies and went back to their offices content.
Apparently Lenin was able to put on a human face when he needed to, just like his son. But the similarities stop there.
Lenin Montgomery was a pedophile rapist and an insane survivalist with the world’s most warped notions of child-rearing. Brutal, day-long physical fitness drills. Forcing his children to run miles through the woods in the summer heat without water, to sleep naked outside in the winter, to catch and kill animals with their bare hands. Setting them against each other, making them fight and not letting them stop until someone had drawn blood. Constantly pounding his sick, twisted vision of life into their vulnerable heads. All that predator-versus-prey crap. “Eat the weak.” You’re king, or you’re nothing.
Killing Joshua’s siblings one by one. His mother, a frail, beaten-down thing, sitting by dully and not fighting until the day his father buried Joshua’s twin, Charlemagne, alive.
Joshua, watching his mother die and feeling absolutely nothing.
The sound of Charlemagne’s death rattle. The way Joshua describes it, carefully and precisely, with words leached of emotion, I can actually hear the horrible sound in my head.
The reporter who guessed that Joshua Smith was living under an assumed name was right. Joshua’s name, originally, was William Montgomery. As in William the Conqueror, because all the boys in the family were named after powerful leaders. The last name Montgomery might have been a lie, given that their father was a sociopath who lied about everything. Joshua had done some research into his family after he killed his father, and couldn’t find any evidence of where they’d come from.
I understand him now, although I don’t forgive him. The compassionate part of me wants to climb into a time machine and travel back to Joshua’s childhood with an Uzi, to rescue him, to rescue all of them. I can empathize with Joshua’s dark urges. I don’t just want to go back in time and kill his father, I want to drag it out for weeks of hideous torture, drinking in every scream.
But I stay hard. I stay strong. I’m sorry this happened to Joshua the same way I’d be sorry if it happened to anyone, but it doesn’t excuse what he’s done to me.
As the days march by, he talks to me about his business over meals. He tells me how he selects companies to acquire, and the various ways that he makes sure that he gets what he wants—some legal, some not. He’s designed software that allows him to hack into just about anywhere, so he’s always got an unfair advantage.
He’s giving me an education and a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at high finance. He’s telling me all his secrets, confiding in me like a lover, making me feel special.
When he isn’t wearing his icy mask of hate, he’s funny and witty and entertaining. I saw that side of him when I was working for him, sometimes, how he’d show his appreciation to employees who’d excelled in their positions and they’d just light up. His approval is sweeter than honey. He’s still a hard-ass, still controlling and sinister, but there’s something sexy about that too.
But I keep my walls up. This man tortured me and locked me in a cell, and he is the reason I will never be anything more than a chained-up puppet, existing only for his amusement. My world has shrunk down to the interior of a well-decorated prison because of him.
One day at lunch, when he’s talking about how he hunts his victims, he tells me about the software he uses to find the murderers. At that, I perk up, briefly.
“You could sell that to police departments, to the FBI,” I say after he describes it to me. “It could save so many people.”
But he shakes his head. “A large part of my process is illegal,” he says. “Once my software does the preliminary work of identifying disappearance clusters, my next step is to us it to hack into numerous email and social networking accounts and bank accounts of the victims, friends and family and employers of the victims, and suspects. The police could never do what I do. They’re restricted by the law.”
Disappointed, I go silent again. I still refuse to speak to him in more than monosyllables, unless we’re sparring.
So he starts offering me things. Trying to bribe me.
“Since you haven’t tried to kill yourself in the last three weeks, I am willing to take you outside.” He springs that one on me at dinner one night.
It’s already been three weeks since I was released from my cell? Fuck me. What’s it like outside now? It must be late fall, at least. Maybe winter. I’m hollow with sorrow and despair at the thought of how long I’ve been here.
This is the only life that I’ll know, locked inside these walls. The months sliding away into years. Unless I finally manage to kill him, or myself.