Page 15 of Diamond Desire

Making myself sick wasn’t fun in the slightest, but it was the only thing I could think of to help the drugs leave me faster, so the moment the freak had undone my bindings and allowed me to roam freely, I had taken advantage. They’d given me salt on the table and though it was not pleasant, I tipped it into the bottle of water I had before downing as much of it as I could until it made me vomit.

Now, though feeling like shit, I was semi lucid enough that I was fairly sure though I was seeing things, I could make it out of the room if I tried hard enough. I would be able to run away to freedom and try to find myself a weapon of some kind if I could just find a break in the torture to get myself out.

A break that would lead me to a weapon that would be the first to be used against my remaining enemies until they were nothing but a fresh corpse.

I had been making a list in my mind of my plans on what I would do if I made it out alive without a cheeky bit of murder beforehand. My kill list had been mentally jotted down, in thebest order for me to slaughter. First, Elaina. She was the weakest target, and responsible for more pain than I could count. So vengeance alone pushed me to go after her, but so did one undeniable fact.

She was not as bad a villain as the other enemies of mine.

Sure, she tortured people and spewed violence from her tongue. She had raped people, beaten them, groomed them. She was a rotten bitch to her core, and that was all horrid and entirely inexcusable for her to do to anyone, least of all people I loved. But she worked on John or the stalker’s orders, which meant she was not as big of a threat as compared to them. So she would die first, like in a game of chess where you took out your opponent’s pawns before going for the next stage that kept their queen safe. Though Elaina was not the pawn. The Vice Kings were. She was more of a… of a knight, perhaps. Slightly better than them, but nowhere near good enough to be a hassle.

John would come after Elaina and his gangsters. I would not dare call him a king, but he might be a bishop of some kind on my board of murder chess. He was the one who would go second to last and though I wished to enjoy it – to, by all means, devour him whole for hours on end. I would not make the same mistake I had with Elaina and let him risk escape. Instead, I would put jumper cables on him and electrocute him to death, or something of a similar nature. Where I had maximum pain in minimal time.

The only thing I would do to satisfy my inner monster was to record each of his screams and see how he liked being on the other side of the twisted camera.

In my mind, the stalker was the queen piece. That meant they came last. They were the one who held all the power in the game and were the most important piece to take out of the equation if I wanted to win. There were no kings in my game except for me, and I fully intended to checkmate everyone elsein sight the minute I could, so even though everything inside me hurt, I wasn’t too far gone to care when I could concentrate on my enemies.

Right now, I had no time at all to do anything other than sit in my chair, pretending to be a good little captive who was far more drugged than she was. It made it easier to act, so when my stalker opened the door, joining me again with a gun in their hand, I could find a moment to run. I was just waiting for a chance to do so, like when their back was turned or something else entirely stupid.

My eyes lifted slowly, desperate to take in the sight of them and coming up short when I realized one thing in my drug induced haze hadn’t been a lie.

My stalker was a woman.

A woman in a facemask, black hoody and nothing that told me who she was on display. But she was shorter than me, looked softer, and even her feet were smaller. She was petite; the monster in my life was a skinny fucking bitch. Not a big scary man or monster. A little woman… fucking hell, that was a shock to the system. Not a pleasant shock, even if it was wrong of me to presume my villain had always been a man.

Women could be just as evil if they truly wanted to be, but seriously? The biggest nightmare of mine was a woman I could have easily beaten in a physical fight? The sort of person my daddy could have snapped in half with less effort than it took him to slick back his hair every morning?

That was a lot to accept.

That was a bitter pill to swallow.

“I forgot,” I rasped the words out, lolling my head and dragging each syllable as best as I could. “Do you still have the same name, or have you changed it? I always thought your name to be so pretty.”

Starting a conversation when she came near me seemed the smartest choice because it was the only way to find the information I needed. But I was also taking a leaf out of my crime shows ideas and trying to make a connection with the freak who held me. She thought she knew me, but I needed to get to know her – to get her to see me as a real person, and perhaps listen when I tried to convince her to let me go. It was a long shot, but it was worth trying, even if the idea of being nice to her made me want to slice my own throat open.

“I use too many names to count. But on the inside, I’m still Cassie.” She spoke through her weird voice change mask, and my heart beat faster with the revelation; one I could use to hunt her down and find her if she ever managed to escape me again. “I like it more than the other names I use and it’s the only one I always wanted you to call me.”

“What other names?” I made a list in my head of all the women who had access to me during my life, but that didn’t get me far. There were so many – each member of my daddy’s board had been married to a woman. There were multiple female staff members in all of our homes, and my daddy’s assistant had even been a woman, too.

Wait.

His assistant. She’d been petite. Shorter than me, even though she was a few decades older. She’d been… fuck, she had no family either. To my knowledge, she’d had no partner or kids – nobody to tie her down or be in her way when she needed to chase me around the world.

She would have known everything my daddy did. Every password, or safehouse, or fucking code to our gates.

She’d been allowed to work from home, in any office in the world, or even use our jet and things when she needed to…

My brain raced through the sluggishness still present, trying to remember her full name. Sarah. Sarah something or other. With an L I think. Fuck, if I could remember that then -

My stalker cut off my thoughts. “You like to use different names, too. Sometimes it’s fun, isn’t it? To pretend to be someone else – someone with a different life and less pain. Though I prefer being myself, it’s been easier letting the other woman inside me take control. She gets things done easier than I can.”

Her words were flagged in my brain, and I kept track of everything she said.

“Sometimes I do, yeah. It is fun to change names and play pretend.” I asked for a drink too, wanting something to take the nasty taste out of my mouth and so I could think harder about Sarah and whether she truly fit the bill.

It was looking more likely with each second that passed, but the only thing I couldn’t move past was how she had gotten away undetected for so many years. My daddy would have surely figured it was her?

Unless he’d never truly bothered looking for a woman.