Chapter 9
Laura
Breakfast is a silent affair the next morning, held across a table that could hold dozens of people. I bet he likes to entertain. He seems like a man who enjoys a soiree.
“What now?”
“Now you go to classes,” he says. “I don’t want you skipping any more of them. And you have a shift later today at the restaurant.”
“So you’re not going to hold me captive against my will?”
“No,” he says. “I have a series of lectures starting in Los Angeles later today. I don’t have time to hold you captive. You’re going to have to behave yourself.”
He finishes his coffee, gets up, drops a kiss on my head, and leaves the room, saying, “Dennis will drive you home when you’re ready. Just go out to the driveway.”
Once he’s gone, the first thing I do is call my mom.
“Jake started his new school today,” Mom says.
“Really? Where?”
“Military school,” she says. “He’s going to board there. They’ll keep him out of trouble.”
“How are you affording that?”
“He’s earned a scholarship.”
“How, Mom?”
“I don’t know,” she says, sounding harassed by my questions. “I got a call last night offering a place at the school and I was told all tuition was covered and I packed him up and put him on a bus this morning. It’s time he learned that his actions have consequences.”
“He’s twelve, Mom.”
“He is. And you’re twenty, and Serenity is eighteen, and Eva is sixteen, and Sasha is eight, and Brackie and Etie are five,” she says.
“I have a lot of kids, Laura, and I can’t keep up with Jake.
He needs someone who can look after him and keep him on track.
We’re failing him. I’ve got to go to work. ”
“Okay, bye, Mom.”
I know who is behind this. Fucking Samuel sent my brother to military school.
Now he’s fucked off to Los Angeles to pretend to be a good person for money. He’s going to have hundreds, or even thousands of people hanging on his every word.
And I have to go to class and pretend like the last few weeks haven’t been an absolute whirlwind of stalking, sex, murder, and where the fuck is Dave, for that matter? I don’t want to talk to him, but at this point I’m worried he’s dead.
It’s so hard to focus in class. It’s hard to think about anything other than the fact that I got myself arrested and my kid brother thrown into military school. I was so proud of myself last night for adapting to this whole new world, but I think I might just be fucking up.
I don’t even have his number. That’s what’s so crazy. This man has violated me in every way possible and I can’t even…
Sam
“Professor Rollins, what’s your take on the new definitions of…”
I’m barely listening to the questions, and hardly listening to my own answers.
At this point these conferences no longer require real thought.
I am an accepted international expert on personality disorders, and I know the material inside out.
There are no questions that I cannot answer, so I let part of my mind unburdened by consciousness take care of this Q and A while my conscious mind is in a smaller city in California, where a sweet co-ed is starting to become unmoored from her mundane reality and blossom into an entirely different creature.
She’s so beautiful. So innocent. So perfectly corruptible.
I see the dark flower in the center of her soul.
I can imagine her potential, what she will be when she is thoroughly dominated.
“Professor Rollins, what would you say to someone who had a high profile career, public facing, but privately had a penchant for kidnapping young women?”
The question comes from the back of the room in a clear, insolent voice. I feel my lips curl up in a dark smile as I recognize the questioner. My sweet little protégé is here; my favorite student has made an unexpected appearance.
For the first time today, I feel a real bolt of excitement. She came all the way here to Los Angeles just to try to troll me. She wants my attention. How adorable.
“What would I say? I’d have to report them of course. Criminal activities undertaken while in treatment that harm anybody have to be reported.”
She’s dressed herself up in a way that makes her look a little older than she usually does. She has a black blazer and a professional dress. Her hair is swept up in a bun.
She’s stalked me.
The tables have been turned. I imagine she is incredibly proud of herself right now. She found me and she’s confronting me in a venue where she cannot be easily brought to justice.
“What if your client was high profile enough that you knew reporting them wouldn’t have any effect? What would you recommend in that case?”
Oh, she is really pushing my limits now.
“It’s a clinician’s personal decision whether or not to continue treatment with such a challenging client. There may very well be some value in continuing to pursue a therapeutic relationship in order to reduce harm.”
“How can you hold a client accountable if the world will not?”
“It’s not our job to hold clients accountable. It’s our job to explore with them, and to facilitate growth.”
“Can people exhibiting serious ASPD traits actually grow? Or are we just teaching them how to mask better? Helping them to settle into society and make fewer ripples while still preying on the vulnerable?”
“That’s a question that could be debated endlessly,” I say. “And there’s…”
“I think such individuals might be beyond repair,” she says, brazenly interrupting me. “I think they only become more sophisticated over time. But they can also overreach. Pick the wrong victim. End up in situations they never expected to be in.”
She smiles a little as she finishes her so-called question. She’s right at the back of the crowd, and she’s garnering more than a few irritated looks, but some people are finding this line of questioning interesting.
“The notion that people with ASPD cannot be helped is an old one,” I say.
“And yes, in many cases, such a patient may weaponize the therapy. In fact, in my experience, that will almost always happen in the beginning. Someone who manipulates people is always going to enjoy learning new means to manipulate. I expect it in my patients. I often use it as a hook to garner further interest and increase treatment compliance…”
I use her question to provide a deep answer that is actually quite intriguing to the audience as a whole.
The moderator takes the microphone from her and moves onto the next person with a question.
Laura smirks at me. Little brat. She wanted me to be afraid she was going to expose me.
She wanted me to feel some of the fear she feels when I appear in her world unannounced.
Unfortunately for her, I don’t feel fear the way most people do.
I feel a mild amusement and some piqued interest, and I am aware that she is asking to be taken in hand much the same way a spoiled child is.
When my panel is over, and the general throng of admirers with books to sign and questions to ask has dispersed, I see her standing toward the rear of the room trying to look nonchalant. She is not good at it. If there was ever an intense young lady, it is Laura Brown.
I walk straight up to her and take her by the hand, pulling her several inches toward me.
“Come with me.” I murmur the command in her ear, and of course she follows.
She came here to get my attention. She’s going to get it.
I take her to my suite in the hotel. It is well appointed and quite comfortable, though I have some ideas as to how to make it uncomfortable for her specifically.
“Proud of yourself?” I ask the question dryly as I escort her into the room, and close the door behind her. If she notices when I flick the latch to lock it, she doesn’t show any signs of it.
She stares around at the room. I notice she does that whenever she is taken anywhere remotely nice. She is impressed by wealth. I don’t think it is in a gold-digging way. I think she genuinely finds it fascinating, like a little mouse raised in a coal mine finding itself in a shining castle.
I let the question hang in the air as her mind takes the time to work out what I asked, and then remembers she’s supposed to hate me, and all the other little internal machinations that need to happen before she can respond.
She turns to face me, and I can see her working up both courage and anger.
“How dare you?”
“Vague question, darling. I will need specifics.”
She walks up to me.
“You know what you did,” she says. “You know what you interfered with. You had no right.”
“Still quite vague, sweetheart.”
My lack of response is winding her up. She came all this way for a dramatic confrontation, and she’s not getting what she wanted.
Maybe she thought I would be unsettled by her actions.
Unfortunately for her, people with my particular internal configuration don’t actually feel unsettled.
Fear is something I rarely get to enjoy, and it is not being triggered by this little thing storming at me.
“You know what you did!”
“It’s a particularly odious female foible to expect men to guess at which one of their sins she is angry about,” I comment.
Her temper gets the better of her. She slaps me across the face. Her soft, sweet hand makes decent contact with my left cheek with a sound that echoes through the room, which is otherwise entirely silent.
The look of horror the very second she realizes she’s actually done it is more than worth the slight sting left in its wake.
My gaze stays steady. Nothing in my facial expression changes.
It’s like when a puppy bites. You can either gasp to show them that it hurt, and dissuade the behavior that way—the method recommended by trainers.
Or you can show no reaction whatsoever. Sometimes this leads to a good gnawing.
Other times it just scares the hell out of the little creature because deep down all social creatures know that someone who does not react the way they should is far more dangerous than one who reacts a little too much.