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“What was the name on the marriage certificate? Fake?”
After a moment, she nods.
“No wonder I turned up so little information on you. It should have been a clue to do more research.” I wind my hand in her hair, wrapping the silky skein around my palm until I tug her head to the side. “Oh, beautiful, what am I to do with you?”
“You could let me go.”
“So you can run out and right into danger? What were you thinking, cornering Stephanos like that? In his lair with his strength at its fullest? And with only a few guns and no backup?”
With me pinning her hair, she can’t look at me, but she smiles at the wall, all serenity. “That’s exactly what my cousin asked me. It seemed like a decent course of action at the time.”
I move my hand, shaking her gently. “You’re too smart to believe that. You will tell me the truth.”
She blows out a breath. “All right then. It seemed like the only way.”
“That’s why you seduced that man, David. You wanted to use him to get to Stephanos. It would have worked if he hadn’t been embezzling money.” I can imagine her strapping the gun under her wedding dress. So much scheming just to put a bullet in Stephanos’ head. “You picked an idiot for your plan.”
“I know.” Her raised voice bounces off the walls. “That’s why I rushed Stephanos the next morning. I didn’t work so hard, get so far, for it to just end.”
“Is that what you thought when I took you? That you had another way in?”
She’s silent. It’s true.
I knew I was a means to an end, but it still annoys me. The most memorable night of my life and she offered me nothing of herself. Only her body. And in the morning, she walked away.
She won’t walk away again so easily.
“Well, now you’re over your head, little liar. And the only thing that will save you is how well you obey.”
She closes her eyes.
She thinks I am going to torture her. And I am. But not in the way she thinks.
I turn to survey my tools, my weapons of delicate destruction. My knives are honed to perfection, and I have a bevy of new items bought specifically for her. I was trained by a butcher. I know exactly how to draw and quarter and dissect someone.
Grooves around the table edges will allow any blood to drain away, and when I’m working, I keep a large sheet of plastic underfoot. Easier for clean up.
I didn’t lay the plastic down this time. I don’t need it. There are subtler ways of mutilating someone.
When I turn back, she’s opened her eyes again.
“One question. The man at the house when you took me. . .” She hesitates, perhaps trying to figure out how long I have kept her. Down here, there is no day or night. This deprivation is part of the plan to break her. “He was my brother. Is my brother. Is he. . .?”
“Alive. At least, that’s how I left him. If he’s since rolled his garish sports car off a cliff, it is out of my hands.”
“Fair enough. Let’s get this over with.” She sets her face in a stoic mask, ready for the worst.
She has no idea what I intend to do with her. The depths I will drag her down to. I’ve spent every waking moment since we met obsessing over her. I won’t be content until she has repaid those moments with her own time.
I rap the metal table and hold up a hand in a signal I’ll use to cue her to give me her attention. “This is my workshop. This room is soundproof.” Well insulated against my victim’s screams. It also has its own heating and cooling system. A sink. A shower. And a few feet away from me, in a corner she can’t see, a pallet in a cage.
She cranes her head to take half the room in. “Looks like Frankenstein’s lab.”
“And you will be my new creation. For the time being, this is your home. Eventually, you will earn a better one, as well as a place in my bed.”
“How will I earn it?”
I select my first torture implement and hold it up to the light to inspect it. I let the metal catch the light and flash it around the room for her to see. “First, you scream for me.”
