Epilogue
M ary, or Mistress Maggie, as her employees and the world’s elite called her, spent the last several centuries wandering from country to country offering her services to the very wealthy. She learned a long time ago that rich men had very singular desires and were willing to pay obscene amounts of money to fulfill them. She lived well and got to degrade powerful men in the process. She considered it a win-win.
Helmut Von Albrecht was born into wealth but pretended to have built his business empire from the ground up. Having his hands in multiple industries, he fancied himself an innovator, but really he just had more money than any one person ever should and bought other people’s ideas out from under them. On paper, he looked like a thriving success. In reality, he was a fragile man-child with mommy issues who paid Mary to tell him what a piece of shit he was.
Standing over him, Mary looked down her long leather pantsuit, twisting the toe of her black leather stiletto harder on the sensitive skin of his scrotum as he squirmed under her gaze.
“And what does a nasty little bootlicker like you say? Hmm?” she demanded in her sing-song cadence of an adult talking to a small child.
Helmut grimaced up at his mistress, “Thank you, madam.”
“And will my dirty, nasty little pig disobey me again?” she arched an eyebrow.
Helmut gazed up at her with complete and total adoration, “No, madam. Never again.”
She yanked at the leash connected to the collar around his neck, jerking him to attention, “What else do you need to say, slug? You forgot something.”
Helmut yelped at the sudden tug and scrambled to find the words she was looking for, “I… Uh… Um…”
Mary spit in his face, “Apologize, you filthy fucking piece of shit.”
Recognition lit in his eyes, “I’m sorry, madame! I’m so sorry and I will never do it again. I’m your slave, madame.”
Mary smiled and patted her pet on the head, “Good boy. Now, kiss my feet please.”
Helmut smiled with enthusiasm as Mary lifted the toe of her shoe from his delicate sack and allowed him to kneel before her. He bowed to place his lips against her sleek black stilettos and she watched as he relished the opportunity to worship at her feet.
Moments like this always felt strange to her, even after so many countless years of doing it. That these men, men who wear suits worth more than nice cars while commanding boardroom conference tables before the world’s most powerful individuals, would pay her money to bow down to her. It was a mind-fuck of monumental proportions.
Mary started life doing everything right and above board. Following rules of piety and loving all. She had been in love with and married the king of kings and the kindest soul to walk the earth, or at least she had thought that of him a very long time ago.
But then he left her.
He’d not only left her behind, but he left her to live forever without any question of whether or not she would even want to. And, then, the rumors and the stories told about her as the centuries went by. Who she was became so distorted and false. They called her a whore and demeaned her at every chance. Eventually, she got tired of being called something she wasn't, so she just embraced the madness and became what they claimed her to be. That’s when her life changed.
She’d learned that men, especially the powerful ones, only respected you when you had something to offer them; so, she offered. As it turned out, life as a whore was far more palatable than the life of a martyr. It wasn’t always pretty and sometimes it was incredibly dangerous, but at least it was her choice.
Glancing up from the slave at her feet for a moment, Mary’s eyes glided past to a television hung from the wall in Helmut’s office. It had no sound, just the moving pictures from a twenty-four hour news channel. Normally nothing on TV would be a distraction for her, but her eyes connected with the image of a man on the screen and she couldn’t look away. The image was fleeting and gone before she had time to fully process what she had just seen.
She yanked the leash, tossing Helmut to the side as she scrambled toward the tv. Grabbing the remote from the table below, she rewound the live footage back. Hitting pause, Mary stared at the face.
Standing in the middle of a full scale investigation into an American politician was a man she once knew as a brother. A man she thought had died with his sins during her first life. She had cried for his sacrifice back then. She still cried for him from time to time. He was one of those faces that would never leave her mind no matter how much time passed. He was the closest thing she had to family and she was staring at him, still alive after all this time.
Helmut’s voice broke into her racing thoughts with a hesitating question, “Are we… done? I thought I was paying for the night.”
Mary turned a withering look at the man on the floor behind her in his tighty-whities, “Did I fucking say you could talk?”
Helmut returned to his submissive kneel and stared at the floor while Mary turned back to the TV for one last look just to be sure.
Yes, there was no question.
“I thought I was the only one,” she whispered to herself. She reached shaking hands toward the screen and touched the paused figure as if that might give her all the answers to her questions but it only brought a million more to the surface.
Without a second thought to her customer on the ground behind her, Mary walked straight out of his office and into the bustling hallway of his financial firm. She heard him yelling after her, no doubt demanding his money back for denied services, but she didn’t care. She kept walking, mind spinning a million miles an hour, until she reached the elevator, then the lobby, then the cool mountain air outside.
When the cold hit her face, Mary could feel the tears welling in her eyes. She tried desperately to keep them inside and finally made it to her car. As she slid behind the wheel, she let go and the tears poured from her eyes, as furiously as the aching wails from her lungs.
All this time. All these centuries.
She thought she was alone.
If she had to search every corner of this world, she had to find him.
She was going to find him.
She gripped the steering wheel as resolve flooded her consciousness, “If it takes me the next thousand years to find you, I’m coming for you, Judas.”