Total pages in book: 63
Estimated words: 58412 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 292(@200wpm)___ 234(@250wpm)___ 195(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 58412 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 292(@200wpm)___ 234(@250wpm)___ 195(@300wpm)
“Yes. But you already knew that.”
She is mine. In every way. I quite literally own her at this point. And that means the intimacy between us is going to be as pure as it can be. This is tyranny, possession, ownership. This is what the world now considers to be wrong, but I know better.
“Everybody is here to witness this, not merely because your humiliation is so delicious, pet, but because this is the day you become truly owned.”
She wanted to see me put behind bars. She wanted so badly to do the right thing that she was going against her own desires to do so. I know for a fact that she is very content in my possession. I see it in her eyes, I feel it in her body.
Charlie is a little idealist, but this world has no room for idealists. It is cruel to them, destroying them a little at a time until there is either nothing left, or a jaded skeptic. I am going to keep her pure by not pretending to be anything other than the monster she knows me to be. Her goodness will be heightened by my evil.
What we do tonight will be truly diabolical. I no longer need to wear any semblance of the mask. She has already begun to pry at the corners. She has glimpsed beneath. Now she will see it all.
“Why?”
“You really are a little journalist at heart, aren’t you?” I chuckle. “Asking all the big questions. I don’t think it would help for me to tell you the answers outright, Charlie. I think you’ll enjoy the process of discovering them on your own a great deal more. You know, you didn’t have to betray me. You could have put aside all those silly Libraryleaks notions and simply become my pet. That would have been my preference.”
“I thought you murdered someone, and I thought I was doing the world a favor.”
“Don’t bother ever trying to do the world a favor,” I say. “It won’t appreciate it. The world is a whore who likes it when she is beaten.”
“Christ,” she breathes. “Who the hell hurt you?”
“What do you mean, pet?”
“You are so twisted. You wanted to be hurt so badly, you found someone who would betray you, then lured them into betraying you, just so you could feel betrayed. I’ve never even heard of that kink before, but it is extra sick.”
It is my turn to be taken aback. Charlie is a smart girl and a quick thinker. She put the pieces of the puzzle together inordinately swiftly. I had assumed it would never occur to her that she had been selected precisely because she probably would turn against me. But here we are. It is hard to expose someone else without also exposing yourself.
“Is that why you were so into Adaline? Because you knew she’d turn on you? Are you so afraid of intimacy you have to reduce a woman to an animal and then prod her into doing something you will inevitably call betrayal?”
“Ouch,” a voice from the crowd whispers.
She has me on the ropes, but of course it does not matter what she says. She will be punished.
“Yes, whip me, fuck me, turn me into an object of pity. None of this is about me, Marcus. It’s all about you.”
“You might want this, old boy,” Jeremy says, walking by with a rubber gag in his hand.
“I believe I do. The young lady has more than enough to say.”
“I don’t care,” she says.
Those are her last words before I slip the rubber between her teeth. It is a slim line gag, which will be relatively comfortable to wear, but will not allow her to keep talking.
Charlie
I’ll do whatever you want, including betray you, if that’s what you need.
He can’t hear my words, but I think he can read the sentiment in my eyes. He is looking at me with an expression that is probably supposed to be inscrutable, but touches me in my core. I feel him. His dominance, and his agony. I feel the wound at the very center of him. He tries to hide it, but at the same time, he cannot staunch the bleeding.
He is so twisted. He found someone who would hurt him, so he could be the monster and play out some protection fantasy. He wants to play out make-believe in which whoever betrayed him originally suffers and is subjugated.
He is quite literally one of the most desirable men on the planet, and yet he has to orchestrate his own romantic downfalls over and over again because there’s something inside him that not only cannot believe in love, it demands to be fed with pain.
“You’ve been a bad girl,” he says, taking a cane from someone in the crowd. I can see how this is going to go. The perverse appetites of his ilk will be satisfied by seeing me, the sacrificial lamb from the streets, beaten and forced into submission, punished for the unspeakable and unforgivable crime of being born normal, and not worshipping at the altar of their wealth.