The Good Girl (8 page)

“Well, dipshit, you steal women, I’m assuming to rape and kill them, but you don’t have a drop of alcohol in your house? How can you be all high and mighty? I drink, so what? Who doesn’t? But the thing I don’t do is kidnap people. I think if either of us is worse off then the other, it’s you.”

Anger crept along my thoughts, the voices that normally whispered becoming louder and more obtuse. Thoughts of violence, of power and control flooded my head – disturbing images of what I could do to her and the lessons I could teach her with the strike of a fist or the slap of a leather belt against the colorful skin of her body. I stepped back in an attempt to place distance between us and she continued staring at me, confusion filtering through the indignation in her eyes.

“Do you have an answer or what?”

I had to remain calm. I fought with myself to avoid the violence I wanted to commit against her. “Eleni, I would prefer you keep your thoughts to yourself.” Pinching the bridge of my nose between my fingers, I cringed as the insufferable voices refused to shut up. Unfortunately, the more she spoke, the louder they became.

“Keep my thoughts to myself? Ha! Fuck you asshole. It was your decision to steal me, now it’s on you to have to deal with me. I mean, I’m going to die anyway right? Might as well get this shit over with.”

Standing suddenly, she pulled the towel from her body and let it fall to the floor, leaving her completely naked before me. My eyes traveled over the tattoos that graced her skin – the fine lines and beautiful colors that shaded the flowers, faces, words and designs that adorned her body. My eyes traveled to the angel on her leg.

“What are you doing?” My words came out on a low growl – the force of my voice rumbling through my chest.

“I’m tempting you.” She walked towards me. “You want to fuck me, right? That has to be the reason why you took me. So let’s do this. Pull out your dick, asshole. You want to ride me, then ride me.”

I backed away until I was pressed up against the cool surface of the plaster wall. Closing my eyes against her nudity, my thoughts became louder and my mouth watered in anticipation of the attack. Every scene played out in my head; my hands on her skin, my fingers wrapping around her small, delicate wrists – her throat. I could overpower her with barely any effort – but there was this smaller voice, a faint whisper, that stopped me.

When I opened my eyes again, she was staring at me. Her posture was tired and sickly looking, but it was obvious she wouldn’t back down.

It was too much to bear.

Stepping forward, I wrapped my hand around her neck. Her eyes widened in surprise, her mouth opening in an attempt to pull oxygen into her lungs. If I squeezed harder, it would hurt her, make her desperate to escape – to remain alive.  Her hands came up and wrapped around mine as she attempted to pull me away. I gripped tight enough to frighten her, but not enough to cut off the supply of air completely.

Lowering my face to hers, I warned, “I told you to keep your thoughts to yourself, you little fucking slut. I would not continue opening your fucking mouth when I’ve told you to stop. I don’t condone stupidity. Do you fucking understand?”

She was light and when I shoved her towards the bed, she flew farther than I’d intended. Her head cracked against the headboard and she immediately turned and vomited all over the sheets before springing from the bed to run towards the bathroom. Guilt instantly slid across my spine and I followed her, concerned that she’d hit her head too hard.

When she was done getting sick in the toilet, she fell back onto the ground, holding her head in one hand and her stomach in the other. I knelt down beside her and the images came back – gruesome and cruel. I wanted to hurt her, to drag her by her hair and extinguish the life behind her eyes. She didn’t deserve that life – not after what she’d become. She looked at me with disobedience and rebellion flashing across her challenging expression.

“You son of a bitch! What the fuck do you want now! FUCK YOU!”

As she leaned over the toilet again, I realized I finally had enough. If things continued, they would become worse. I wouldn’t be able to control myself. This situation had to die down.

Pushed myself up from the floor, I walked into the bedroom. After grabbing the zip ties that were on the bedside table, I turned and marched back into the bathroom. While she was dry heaving over the toilet, I grabbed her wrist and fastened her to the pipe behind the bowl. She struggled against me, but her illness prevented any type of real fight. Once I’d secured her other wrist, she was trapped in place over the bowl.

“Please…fucking - please let me go!”

I stood over her, looking down on the pathetic excuse of a human being on the floor. After a few minutes – and only when she’d quieted down - did I respond.

“You’ve chosen this life, Eleni. Your illness is your own choice and your fault. Maybe it’s time someone makes you live with your decisions. Go ahead and get sick, but understand that you’ll be forced to stare into the face of what you’ve become. Enjoy your beautiful reflection – marred by the physical proof of what you’ve allowed yourself to become.”

She sobbed as I left the room, walking swiftly across the bedroom floor and exiting through the door. When I was once again alone, I let out a hard sigh. I had no idea what I was doing and where things would go from here, but if I didn’t stay away for now…things would become more life threatening than they’d been previously.

I had to do something, I just didn’t know what.

Chapter Thirteen

~ Eleni ~

I had nothing to do but think, which was the worst possible thing that could happen. The tiniest sip of whiskey on my lips was heaven. But, the thoughts that followed only cemented my problem. As much as I didn’t want to be like my parents, I was no better than them. My poison of choice was simply legal.

His words echoed through my head, taunting me with every breath I took. I was doing this to myself. So fucking what? So what if I just want to be fucking numb all the time? He doesn’t know the life I had. He didn’t know the shit I went through as a child, continued to go through on a daily fucking basis when I became an adult. He didn’t know my demons or my struggles.

Fuck him and his holier than thou attitude.

That was when I saw it - or I should say ‘her’ - a stranger staring back at me. The reflection wasn’t me at all. She was sickly. She was ugly. Her fire was gone. Her body was worn - like she has been rode hard and put up wet.

This reflection wasn’t who I want to be. It was everything I fucking hated about me, which made me cry even harder than the dry heaving had been able to do. The only thing I had done right at all was my schooling, which was now completely fucked up anyway because of the douche-nugget that kidnapped me.

He’s right Eleni. You are fucked up. You became everything you hate because you are an addict just like they were.

The voice gets louder and louder as I dry heave the last of the whiskey his highness graciously allowed me during my fit.

My actions in the last hours were disgusting. I was disgusting. Why would I want him to fuck me? Am I that desperate to get out of my head for a brief moment? Was I that desperate for him to let me go? God! My fuckin’ mind was so clouded and all over the place that I couldn’t think straight for the life of me.

The black spots came back and I willed myself to stay awake. I didn’t want to pass out only to drown in the vomit-laced water. I didn’t want to be alone and vulnerable to him. I didn’t want to be alone at all.

I’d never wanted to be alone - not when I was a kid and not as an adult – but I never allowed anyone close enough, effectively subjecting myself to the life I was always scared I would have.

The warm bodies I fucked indiscriminately always kept the loneliness at bay. Even if it was just for a night and even without real relationships in my life, I could fight the curse with random strangers.

I hated to admit that he’d managed to get under my skin like no one had before. He made me realize shit about my life - shit I never took the time to think about. He was a monster and yet, he was the only person who could see me for who I truly was. They say like recognizes like, and I cried to think that I was no better than the man who was holding me captive.

How did I not see something that was so obvious to him?

Maybe it was the fact that I couldn’t think clearly in between the voices screaming at me and the alcohol that had kept me so clouded that I never realized I was so fucked up and beyond repair.

Blinking my eyes rapidly, I tried desperately to keep from passing out - but it simply wasn’t working. The darkness was slowly taking over as the demons screamed at me. I deserved everything I got; and, for once, I couldn’t argue with them. I realized as I stared down into the dirty water, as the acrid smell of bile rose up to burn at my nose, that I was a pathetic waste of life – an abuser – nobody better or worse than the man that held me.

I heard a noise and turned my head to lock my gaze with green green eyes just as the world went dark.

Chapter Fourteen

~ Gabriel ~

The music soothed me when I sat in the living room, comfortably relaxed against the back of the black leather couch. I listened while Mozart’s Requiem in D Minor drifted softly from the speakers. It drowned out the chaos, the burning need to commit violence, to dominate and control. It was an urge that never seemed to stop after I had her.

Before, when she was nothing more than a fascination I watched from behind the screen of a computer, they whispered. Small fragments of thought that toyed with my emotions, my control over myself. But now, with the smell of her on my skin and the knowledge that she was bound and helpless in a room on the other side of a wall, I imagined her bent over the toilet, staring at the shame of her disease. Hers was chosen, not mine. I suffered as a result of two bastard people who thought drugs were more important than the lives of those around them.

Ever since the accident that took the lives of my parents and burned my body to a point of having to cover it in inked designs, I hid inside myself – trapping myself within the walls of the home left behind by a family now dead and buried. Memories attacked me when I turned the corner: The sound of my mother’s voice calling out to me playfully as I ran away laughing; my father picking me up to throw me on his shoulders so that I could pretend I was strong and grown like him. Every so often the phantom image of a young carefree boy would tear past me and the emptiness inside my chest ached painfully when I realized that the boy never walked away from the car accident that took his parents that day. Sure, his physical body survived, but his mind was forever altered and fractured until there was nothing left but the shell of a broken and obsessed man.

I didn’t see it coming. The driving need to dominate another person, the predilection for pain inflicted on another person. I wasn’t born like this. I never heard the voices that sought to destroy me by making me destroy everything around me. Up until that crash, I was a mild mannered person who enjoyed the simple things – a child who still believed in the magic of life. But my innocence was stripped with my sanity and now I have constant companions that only reveal themselves to me. The doctors I was dragged to daily believed it was trauma to my head that caused the psychosis, but I knew differently. It was the ghosts of those demons. They took my family and followed me home that day – they whispered to me relentlessly and now that I had Eleni trapped within my nightmare, they were screaming.

My fists met the wall as I paced along the halls. I tried to focus on the music; the soothing beats and the soft swish of harmony floating up to awaken the neurons inside my mind. But those beautiful notes were drowned by the growl emanating from my chest, resonating through my body and up my throat until it escaped as an explosive scream tearing from my lips. I dropped to my knees, my hands becoming a vice grip around my skull and when I closed my eyes against the violence I wanted to bestow upon the small girl chained to a toilet in the other room, my cock hardened and throbbed.

Her eyes mesmerized me, even when they were dulled by the effects of the illness she inflicted upon herself. For months I’d imagined my hands on her skin, her breasts – her neck. It was a desire for pleasure mixed with the need for pain. I imagined the feel of her hands on my body, the sting of her teeth on my skin and I shuddered under the knowledge that she would reject me once she felt the scars that ran beneath the colors and patterns of the art inked over my skin throughout the years.

Images of naked and soft flesh invaded my mind and the thirst for violence quickly turned into a primal drive for a seductive burn. I took deep breaths, my chest heaving with the desire to taste the salt I knew would coat her skin. Pushing myself up, I blocked the voices demanding harm and focused my thoughts on the pleasure only she could provide.

Walking quickly to the door of her bedroom, I stopped myself when my hand hit the knob. I knew I couldn’t give in to the desire to destroy her – to take the ruined life left behind by her addiction and disease and plant it in the ground.

Turning the handle, I took a step in, listening carefully for signs that she was awake. The silence was deafening and when I stepped around the bed and pushed open the bathroom door, I found her with her eyes glassed over, seconds from passing out. Those beautiful blues closed and her cheek fell heavily against the seat, her hands hanging limp from the binds I’d used to secure her to the evidence of her condition.

Walking up slowly behind her, the rubber soles of my shoes squeaked against the black tile floor. I looked down to see the reflection of a man I didn’t recognize – hadn’t recognized in many years.

Kicking out, I caught her hip with the tip of my boot. She groaned in her poisoned stupor, her hands pulling at the bindings, drool dripping from the side of her mouth down the porcelain of the bowl.