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The pain wasn’t unbearable.  Pain wasn’t what made it so awful.  It was the helplessness of it, and the look on his face while he had me at his mercy.
He was quick, though and didn’t cut even all that deep.  I bled, but he was efficient, and he stopped the bleeding and cleaned the cut in short order.
When he was done, he took pictures.  Lots of them.
After that, he untied me and told me to look.
I sat up and studied the spot he’d been working on.
High up on my inner thigh, carved into my flesh, it read: SOFT.
After that, he let me dress, tied me back to my chair, took out Raf’s gag, then left the house for a few hours.
This also was a part of the daily pattern.
As soon as Raf and I were alone, our matching eyes would meet, the same desperate, searching fear in each pair.
“You okay?” I mouthed at him.
My son nodded jerkily.  “Did he hurt you?” he mouthed back.
I shook my head, the first of many lies I’d be telling him to shelter him from the pain of this.
“Did he—?”  Raf couldn’t even finish the sentence.
I made solid eye contact and shook my head.  “No.  That’s not his thing.”
When Earl returned that first time, he was so full of restless energy that he couldn’t stop moving, twitching.  He was hyper, excited about something.
“Would you like to take a walk, Lourdes?” he asked me, casually gagging Raf again.
He didn’t even look at my son as he did it.  In fact, he rarely looked at him.  That worried me—that he didn’t seem to notice him.
I knew it made him more expendable to the sicko.
Of course it wasn’t a real question.  I didn’t have a choice here, but I had to answer, anyway.  “Yes, Earl.”
“I changed my mind about you calling me Earl.  I’d like for you to call me Doctor.”
“Yes, of course, Doctor.”
He smiled like he was pleased, then untied me, tugged me to my feet, and pulled me outside.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
It was a bright sunny day out, not a cloud in the sky, but I barely noticed, instead intent on studying my surroundings.
A wave of despair washed over me at what I saw.
We were in the desert.  In the middle of freaking nowhere.  The small house he had us in had no neighbors to speak of.  The only road was a small dirt one, a private road, and it trailed so far off in the distance that I couldn’t see where it ended, or where any other roads might intercept it.
We were stranded out here.  Even if we managed to get free of our bonds, which was a stretch in itself, there was nowhere for us to go.
“There’s no escape here, Lourdes,” Earl said quietly, as though he’d read my thoughts and smiled his dead smile right into my soul.
I tried not to glare at him, but a hate the likes of which I’d never known was blossoming inside of me.
It was almost a comfort, how powerful that hate was.
Hatred can become sustenance.  This one was growing so huge it felt like it was giving me energy, an energy I could live off, if need be.
He was tormenting my child and torturing me, but it didn’t touch him.
None of this touched him.  Hurting me, terrorizing my family.
How did you reach a man that couldn’t be touched?  I needed to reach him.
“If this was all just to hurt Heath, you’ve made a mistake,” I said quietly.
That had him looking at me with something akin to interest at last.
“He’s like you,” I told him.  “Nothing that happens to me will hurt him.  I was a job to him, just like I am to you.  He only acted territorial because that’s who he is, not because the territory meant anything to him.”
He frowned and shook his head at me, “You’re so wrong, Lourdes.  I’ve already won.  He agreed to everything I asked, gave in without a fight the first chance he got.  He wants to do a trade.  Him for you and Raf.  He didn’t hesitate.  You wouldn’t believe how he begged me.  It was beautiful.  You broke my perfect soldier.”
I wanted to wretch.  Instead, I looked away from him to hide my loathing.  It was getting harder and harder to act serene with him.
Something had set him off, a brief glimpse of my unguarded expression, perhaps.  He was suddenly angry, gripping my chin and staring into my face.
“That was a ploy?” he taunted softly.  “You were trying to play me?  Why, you little liar, you’ll pay for that.”
That was the first time he beat me, right out in the open, because who would see him out here?
Not a soul.
We’d walked far enough away from the house that the sound of the blows wouldn’t carry to Raf.  At least he was spared that.
I didn’t cry out.  I tried to take it quietly, grateful in a way, because he seemed to be avoiding my midsection.
He knocked my legs out from under me and brought me to my knees, scraping them against the jagged ground.  Gripping my hair with one hand, he began to hit me with the other, right across the face, small slaps that graduated into open palmed thwacks that progressed into heavy backhanded blows.
He worked me over in a way that was painful enough, but almost superficial, blackening my face, bloodying my knees.
When he was finished he pushed me onto my back, pulled out his camera, and began to snap pictures.
“Pull your knees up to your chin,” he instructed me coldly, no anger present, and that’s when I realized that he’d done this, not from loss of temper, but as a calculated move.