29. Claire
Chapter twenty-nine
Claire
The gut punch of hearing him mention my mother hurts more than his fist in my stomach. It takes the breath out of me, and the world takes on a startling quiet as my brain tries to turn those words into anything that makes sense.
Just like your mother.
“I… what…?”
He laughs, knowing he’s got me hook, line, and sinker. I’m literally trapped, but even if I wasn’t, there’s no way I would be able to walk away without knowing what that means.
“Oh, yes,” he grins, stepping in front of me with a wicked smirk. “I knew your mother. She was a fighter—the most fight I’ve ever seen in anyone, probably. But she was no match for us. Just like you’re no match for me. Get it through your head right now, Claire, that you won’t win. It will be easier that way. Your mother didn’t break, and it only hurt her in the end…”
So many questions are flooding my brain all at once that I feel like I am underwater, struggling to breathe, to hear, to see straight. But I latch onto the only thing I can, pushing the words out of my stuttering lungs. “You… knew my mother?”
“Of course I knew her. You look just like her… such strong genetics.” He reaches out, running a finger along my jawline and yanking my chin up so that I have to tilt my head back to look at him. “Whoever your daddy is, I don’t think he contributed anything to your gene pool, poor fucker. Hell, I could be your father. I sure fucked her hard enough.”
His laugh at whatever fond memory he just unlocked makes my stomach drop and the bile rise. He hasn’t said as much, but the dread creeping through me is a good enough indicator that whoever this man is, he wasn’t my mother’s gentle lover. And though I know nothing about her, I imagine her going through what I did, being sold to a stranger, paving the way for me to follow in her footsteps all these years later.
Did this man buy her? Did he take her away from a family that loved her and get her knocked up with me through force? Do I have family out there somewhere—grandparents, siblings?
The air is too thin to breathe properly, and the tears that I’m stifling don’t help. I think my nose has stopped bleeding, but I can taste the copper at the back of my throat, mixing with the acid from my empty stomach. “You mean you raped her?”
He rolls his eyes, dropping my chin and pushing me away from him as if my presence disgusts him. “That’s such an ugly word, Claire. Don’t say it again.”
There’s a warning in his cold eyes, something hard and sinister that makes me think twice about saying exactly what I think of him. I’m opening my mouth to try again when he shrugs. “I took her, because she was there for the taking.”
It’s such a blasé answer that I can’t really tell if he’s serious. Apparently, he is, because he looks irritated with me when I stare at him, aghast. “It’s not like I hunted her down on the street and took her. Jesus.” He makes an effort to wipe away the pinched look of irritation between his brows. “Her life was already over. Why deny myself something so sweet when it was being offered to me?”
“Offered?”
“ Yes , offered.” He looks annoyed with me. “It would have been rude to turn the host down.”
I realize why it looked like I was underwater when a tear rolls down my cheek and drops onto my chest, mixing with the blood that may or may not be still dripping from my nose. I didn’t realize I was crying, but the tears are a betrayal I can’t control .
I’d had a lot of time, both growing up and as an adult, to consider the mystery that was my parentage. Nobody ever knew how to answer my questions about who my parents were or what happened to them, so as a kid, I’d made up the best kind of fantasies, imagining that my mother was an aspiring actress who’d been too poor to keep me, but would one day get incredibly famous and come searching for me. I dreamed that my father was an astronaut in space, and when he returned, he’d search the whole world for his little girl.
When I grew up enough to know that the world wasn’t the beautiful, magical place I’d thought, I started to be more pragmatic. Maybe my mother couldn’t afford me, so she gave me up and moved on with her life. Maybe my father never knew about me and never would. Maybe my mother chose a life of drugs over her baby—that was the case for a fair amount of the kids I’d known growing up in the system. Maybe the drugs even killed her.
I gave up on the idea of doing an ancestry kit to try and find my parents when I met Rhea, because for the first time, with her, I didn’t feel like I was missing something.
But in all of my childlike dreaming and even my depressive teenage despair, I never considered that my existence was dark from the beginning—from conception. I suppose no one thinks about that possibility; it’s too painful to entertain.
I want to know as much as I don’t want to know, but what I want doesn’t matter to this man. There’s so much that I need to be told to make sense of this situation, but there’s only one thought I can articulate.
“Who was she?”
A thin eyebrow raises in surprise, and he appraises my face. “Does it matter?”
Clearly it didn’t to him. To him, she was just a warm body. But it matters to me. For better or worse, I need to know. “Yes.” My throat closes just as the word slips past my lips, and I choke on a sob I stood no chance of stifling.
Of course it matters.
He lets go of a heavy sigh that’s part irritation and part wistful. “Her name was Lauren. Like I said, you look just like her. From the moment I saw you pop up in that auction, I knew I had to have you… that was the best night of my life, you know? None of the girls after her ever did it for me the way she did. I tried so hard to replicate that feeling with her.” His tongue flicks out over his lips, and the groan as he adjusts himself tells me he’s getting hard just thinking about it. “But she was like lightning in a bottle. It’s been twenty-one years, and no one’s ever been able to hold a candle to her. But then I saw you…”
He's slow and deliberate as he reaches a hand up to the side of my face, watching to see if I cringe away from him, if I tremble under his touch as his thumb coasts over my dry, blood-crusted lips. But I only continue to stare at him with hatred, disbelief, and a broken heart sitting like stone in my chest.
“You are so beautiful, Claire. You’re a bit older than she was when I had her, but it’s okay. I’m sure that extra time has just given you more experience, right?” He laughs. “They said in the auction that you’d spent your whole last summer fucking Remington Boudreaux, and fuck, that only made me want you more. It made a lot of people want you more.”
Hearing him talk about the night of the auction makes me tremble with rage or anxiety, but no matter what the cause, I’d take that dirty warehouse over this man’s basement. Even not knowing how it would turn out, that hadn’t been this horrible. That had been easier than being told that I am darkness itself, that my life exists because of a man’s vile actions. If I am darkness, there is no hope for me.
Darkness can’t touch the light. If I’m the product of this man forcing himself on my mother, then I am a black hole— a hostile, barren void. No light can exist in a black hole, and they’ll pull apart anything that dares get near them .
Maybe there’s a reason I’ve never known love… because I’d only manage to destroy those who give it to me. Because I’m not capable of giving it.
“I won the auction, though.” The man who may or may not be my father says proudly. “I made sure I won, put in a cap bid and luckily you were such a surprise, most people didn’t have time to hop in. I’d have spent every penny in my account to own you… and when my friend Alexandre messaged me to offer a discount if he got first dibs, I told him no because I didn’t want to share you with anyone. But then you fucking disappeared, so I had to get creative. Of course, I knew you’d be with Boudreaux. No cargo’s ever been intercepted before, so it was pretty easy to figure that much out.” He rolls his eyes, as though regaining my freedom was a mild disappointment for him.
“Do you know how easy it is to tap into digital files?” He asks, switching direction so suddenly that my head spins from the jolt. “Cameras, phones, smart TVs and smart cars. We live in a world where everything is just so fucking easy to take, if you’re smart enough to know how. Tapping into Jovich’s phone to fuck with Remington? That was just for fun… just a little attempt at keeping him humble. But breaking into the circuits in his security system? That was informational. I had to make sure you were there. And I got an eyeful.” He laughs. “Watching you two together only made me need you more. You make the prettiest sounds with a cock in your ass.”
There aren’t words for the horror that dawns on me at his admission that he’s seen me in my most intimate moments… my most vulnerable. It’s a different kind of awful than what he’s told me so far, different than whatever he plans to do to me. It’s a strange fusion of sexual assault and mental abuse, where I can’t simply retreat to some place in my head, because even that has been tainted. The best times of my life with Remy were put on display for some sick fuck to jerk off to. That knowledge makes me want to peel my skin off, particularly as he licks his lips .
“I can’t wait to hear it in real life, when it’s my cock ripping you apart.” He groans. “But you had to go and fuck everything up. You see, I was patient because I had to be… because I had to wait for just the right moment to have you. I wanted to go meet you at the airport, but it was too early, so I watched and waited. I saw all your internet searches, saw just how badly you wanted to find Wes.” He turns toward the workbench against the near wall, covered in shiny tools that don’t look as if they’ve ever been used.
It’s hard to see everything set up there, since the darkness of the basement swallows most everything. What I can see isn’t exactly comforting. Hammer, nails, screwdriver and pliers and a wrench so big it could probably fracture my skull with a single tap. None of it sends the appropriate level of fear through me though— my brain is fuzzy, like it’s already trying to protect me from whatever could happen down here.
“So, I began my game, stringing you along until I could have you. It was so easy to pretend that I was a secret benefactor, someone who would help you find Wes for just the right price. I didn’t need your money—I just needed you to wait to come to me until I was ready for you. And I’m ready for you, now.”
As he turns back to me, the light from the upstairs flashes on something silver in his hand, and I stand, ignoring the heavy metal that pulls at my neck as I go. I don’t move away from him. I run straight at his chest, hoping to barrel into him and catch him off guard.
My feet are lifted off the ground, instead, as I reach the end of the chain, and next thing I know, I’m being hoisted into the air on some kind of pulley, the metal tightening against the top of my throat and making me gasp for air, panic flooding in the space where oxygen belongs.
The clicking noise comes to a stop just a second before I do, the whole world jerking as the chain drops me back down a half inch and I scrabble for purchase. My toes don’t reach the ground, and when he comes around in front of me, his head is level with my stomach. “You were such a pretty shade of red when he choked you, but I always favored purple.”
His grip on my thigh turns bruising, but it’s a small pain compared to the panic flooding me as the pressure on my throat increases. I feel the heat of the blood rushing to my head, and while I try to kick, he only squeezes my leg tighter, pinning me in place.
The silver thing he’d been holding comes into focus, and I recognize the scissors just as he places them at the edge of my shirt, shredding it up the middle. “Such pretty skin. It will be beautiful, covered in my marks… red that fades to blue and purple. I will make art out of you, send it to galleries around the world so that everyone can enjoy your collapse. And when I’ve broken you so much that you’re no longer fun to play with, I’ll leave your body in pieces on Boudreaux’s doorstep and watch him try to put you back together like a puzzle.”
It's not the mention of my death that scares me, but the fact that he makes it sound like he’s going to take his time getting there.
When my shirt falls to the floor, leaving me in the green lace bra, he appraises me, his sharp eyes assessing every scar, every freckle. I don’t know what he’s looking for, but he does a circle around me in an attempt to find it, and then stops before me again.
The hand skates over my ass and grips the waistband of my shorts, slowing me down as I continue to kick out at him despite the fact that I feel heavy, my movements becoming sluggish, less intentional. The air that’s still in my lungs burns as it is slowly depleted.
“You…” My tongue is getting heavy, too, but I’m fighting to stay awake, to stay aware. The pressure on my neck almost makes me feel as though my head will snap off at any given moment, like the dolls some of the kids used to pop the heads off of. I don’t know if this man purchased me for the long haul or if he would really go to all this trouble just to kill me, but I think if I fall asleep, it will be forever .
So, I have to keep myself talking, awake even though it would be easier to surrender to the darkness that made me. “Could be… my father?”
“Any one of about thirty men could be your father.” He laughs and yanks my shorts down my legs without ceremony, dragging them over my knees and down past my feet, which have stopped scrabbling for solid ground. It’s like swimming against a tide trying to keep moving, when all of my limbs are growing heavier.
“Probably more. She was a bit of a whore, from what I was told. But it’s possible. Just call me daddy anyway, hmm?”
He turns out my pockets, laughing when he finds the phone I used to text him. He holds it up, letting the light from above glance over it. “Smart of you, using this. I couldn’t hack you on this one… and the security cameras set up in your apartment? Closed circuit, not accessible from remote locations. That’s smart, too. Unfortunately for you, you weren’t smart enough to stay away from me. You came here so willingly I almost think you wanted this…”
His hand on me makes me cringe, but I don’t move as his thumb rubs idly over the skin along my inner thigh, gentle after gripping me like he was trying to snap my bone—too close to a place he shouldn’t be. “Maybe you’re a secret pain slut, just like mommy? Do you think so? If I dipped my fingers into that little cunt right now, would you be dripping wet for me?”
“Fuck… you.”
“Oh,” he chuckles, “You will. But you have to be patient, too, okay? We can do it together. It’s why I’m not going to strip you yet… because I don’t think I could control myself once I get you all out in the open. I have somewhere to be, and I don’t want to rush our first time together, but I’ll come back for you, okay, baby?”
His breath hovers against my flesh a moment, and then he smells me… grabbing my waist and pulling me into him so that he can bury his face between my thighs and inhale deeply. I don’t think the noise he makes is intentional, and neither are the ones coming from me… ragged gasps slowing down as my body begins to shut down. I feel his lips on the inside of my leg, so close to the edge of my lace underwear, but my eyes are heavy, refusing to stay open as he nuzzles his face between my legs.
I’m distantly aware of the kiss he presses there, a humiliation I can’t even contend with because of how quickly I’m fading. If I hang to death in this basement, I don’t doubt that when he gets back, he’ll follow through with fucking my corpse all the same.
Each time my eyes flutter closed, an electrical shock from somewhere inside my brain demands I open them again, so I do. I do it three times, and then on the fourth, the shock doesn’t come from inside of me this time.
It comes as I land in a heap on the floor, the pressure loosening from around my neck as the blood rushes back to my extremities. His back is already toward me as he retreats up the stairs, chuckling to himself.