Page 73 of His Toy
“You need to go,” I said. “You’re not safe here anymore.”
She tilted her head. “Are you firing me?”
“You have family in San Francisco?” She nodded. “I’ve loaded your account with enough money to secure your living there for a few months. Do not try to contact me or Grant. Do not return until you’ve heard from me.”
Her brows pinched together. “But Zaid?”
I wanted to tell Donna that she was like family to me, but I didn’t know what that meant. I had watched my father kill my mother. And I wanted to kill my own father. Family wasn’t something I kept near my heart.
Blood didn’t mean affection. Loyalty did. Donna had been good to me. Grant had been good to me too.
Heather had been good to me.
“Leave,” I whispered. Donna’s eyes flickered back and forth, trying to read me, but she was wasting time. The plan needed to change. It was better if I did this alone. “Now!” I yelled, and Donna squealed again. She turned off the stove and went to her room.
After Donna left the property, I went to the cells. I unlocked the door, then tossed the key into the woods. I wouldn’t need it anymore.
I climbed down, their voices echoed around me like thousands of birds murmuring in the sky. Screams turned into chants, chanting turned into humming, and soon, I couldn’t hear anything. My mind was blank. I went through the motions.
Find the control panel.
Their bloodshot eyes surged open, their pale skin writhing, their mouths moving in angry twists and turns. The scars they wore like badges of honor as if to say: I paid for my sins, and Eric absolved me.
Unlock the cells.
The doors opened at the same time, and a few of the prisoners immediately ran towards the ladder, held back by their chains. The woman crouching, always crouching, hiding beside the toilet, stood up. Peered at me. Her fear had been drowning her alive. Her fear of me.
But not anymore.
Unlock the chains.
The metal links fell down from their arms, their legs, their necks. A heaviness weighing them down, lifted. I could imagine what they were saying, twenty voices in synchronization: We are going to Eric. Eric will kill you. You will pay for this too.
I could only hear static. A station dead on the radio. A lifeless channel.
But in my mind, I saw Heather.
The strong woman with a single goal in her mind, a person, a loved one, she desperately needed to protect. There was a fearlessness about her. Because if she didn’t fight for her family, if she didn’t have her sister, then what did she have to lose? Heather perched on the chaise, gazing out the window, her hair shining on her shoulders. The smile on her lips as she danced through the wilderness. Heather standing with her ass out, arms behind her back, her body arched into Inspect, her eyes following me as I selected the instrument to punish her for her mistakes. Her whimpers of pain, her animalistic groans of pleasure. Her need to please. Her elegant body lying on my bed, the softness of her curves, her total and complete perfection. A toy who would have done whatever I wanted, all I had to do was ask. Her breath on my neck, her murmur in my ear:I’m sure, she had said.Sure about what? I thought. You don’t know anything about me, Heather, and yet you still trusted me. You should have feared me. I shouldn’t have fallen in love with you.
Her blue-green eyes narrowing as she stared into my soul and saw what was really there.
The prisoners were gone now. I turned off the lights and waited in the open area between the cells. It was only a matter of time.
Daylight crossed over the opening of the hatch. Sunset descended upon the woods. By nightfall, steps neared the entrance, at least five men. Instinctively, I wanted to stand up, to be ready to fight. But that wasn’t the plan now.
The guards came down. Eric was last. The fucking coward only came out of his tower to prove that he wasn’t scared, but he still needed his guards to protect him.
That was one way I was like him. At ten years old, I had been a coward too. But I would make that memory right. I would take him down with me.
A guard switched on the light. The ghostly whites of Eric’s red-rimmed eyes widened as our eyes met. He motioned a hand forward, and two men took my arms, standing me upright. I didn’t fight it. The coward couldn’t let me face him like a man. He needed me restrained.
He feared me.
“Hello, Vander,” Eric said. “It’s been a while, hasn’t it? Though I don’t expect you thought your identity would stay secret from me for long, did you?”
My birth name. He had been the one to name me. I buried that memory deep down.
“It’s Zaid,” I hissed.