Chapter 2.

 

 

 

��������� Once there was a baby born named Ondahlie James, the only daughter of Albert �Puck� James, a convicted felon of African extraction, and his wife Renae.

Their marriage was a matter of curiosity (and no small repugnance to some), because Renae was white, from well-to-do parents in the expensive suburbs, and had established herself as an up and coming young lawyer in the Public Defenders� office. That she�d had the dubious taste to fall in love with one of the dangerous low-life clients the system regularly foisted upon her was a source of horror to her parents, and even something of a scandal within the city�s legal community. No one could understand what she saw in him of course, and Renae James wouldn�t explain. Still she remained loyal and steadfast in her devotion to Puck even when the bruises began to appear.

Of course it was a classic case of codependence, and although most people suspected the truth, only little Ondahlie was privy to the actual details. Throughout her formative years she was a daily witness to her parents� bizarre (but by no means uncommon) relationship. Quite frequently, she became an unwilling pawn in their obsessive struggles, and this left its mark on her.

Intuitively she perceived her mother�s secret, self-destructive hunger for humiliation and physical abuse, as well as her father�s mad exaltation at doling it out. This perverse dynamic had a horrible logic to it, and when faced with only these two role models, it wasn�t surprising that impressionable Ondahlie adopted that of the survivor. Unfortunately, this early personality decision did not make for easy family politics.

The thing was, drunk or sober, when it came to doling out the beatings, Puck James was a perfect democrat � or a perfect sadist. He�d kick the shit out of anyone, regardless of race, color, creed, or family bloodline. The latter was always favored, of course, and since so far Ondahlie was the only one alive who currently qualified, she suffered nearly as many thrashings at the hands of Puck as her mother did. But unlike Renae, in whom the whole process of physical and emotional conflict aroused some shameful, inexplicable sexual arousal, Ondahlie experienced only pure raging hatred: at Puck, at the pain, but mostly at her humiliating impotence, her insufferable subjugation.

Punishment bred only rebellion in her. Eventually, �Puck� made the mistake of misjudging that. The resulting row at last justified the fears of Renae�s perplexed family and friends, and blasted the dysfunctional family irrevocably apart.

 

 

Little Ondahlie was eleven, cowering in her bed, listening in terrified rage to the fighting in the living room.

Her small square sanctum was just a short hall away, across from the master bedroom at the rear of the house. Next to the old-fashioned upright radiator, a single window looked out on a dingy alley and neighboring brick wall. Unfortunately, this potential egress was heavily painted shut. That didn�t stop the glass from trembling in its frame, however, as thumps and crashes from the living room reverberated throughout the house. Puck had come home half an hour ago, totally shit-faced, and started in on Renae.

Ondahlie couldn�t bear to call them mom and dad, or any cute diminutive. They were who they were, Puck and Renae, her mother and father. They�d long since sacrificed any sense of filial devotion their daughter might have felt.

Dispassionate indifference was a better attitude than acid hate, so it was only at times like these that little Ondahlie indulged in other names for those who�d bore her. And these she merely plucked from the air, nodding in acknowledgement as they flew by. At the James house, there was no need burden oneself with the invention of obscenities. The adults in residence supplied a surfeit of ready examples.

�Goddamn fucking lazy no-good bitch! Useless slut-cunt! Whore! Whore! Whore! Whore! Whore!�

�Ash-hole!� Renae shrieked back at him, her own curses hopelessly garbled by the vodka-and-tonics she�d been slurping up all night in front of the television.�

Ostensibly Puck was pissed because he�d come home from a hard day and night of drinkin�, druggin�, and assorted criminal activity to find that the evening�s supper dishes hadn�t been done.

Of course, Ondahlie knew this was only the excuse he�d seized upon, the excuse Renae had purposely left lying around.

It was the same old three-act show (occasionally expanded to five) that no small child should be familiar with, yet Ondahlie had come to know quite well. First there was the heavy-duty drinking in separate locations, then the violent interpersonal conflict, and finally the screaming-loud sex acts.

Tonight�s version was well under way, and already seemed certain to feature the recently expanded playbill. That meant that at some point Puck would barge in here, beat the living shit out of her, too, and then fondle her genitals and just-lately shapely ass until he couldn�t stand it anymore. Then he would return to working on Ranae, and Act Five would get roughly underway.

�Cunt! Cunt! Cunt! Cunt!�

Meanwhile it was still Act Two, and shuddering blows reverberated throughout the small house. Ondahlie clutched the covers to her budding little breasts, squirming miserably in her narrow bed. Roaming the walls of her room like a familiar prison, her wretched gaze suddenly caught the most precious of her few prized possessions about to be shaken off their shelf.

Unlike most rooms of pubescent girls, there were no frilly, lacy, pastel adornments in here. The bare plaster walls were too hard to take a pushpin, and they crumbled under the assault of hammer and nails. A few old posters hung from yellowing strips of tape, and that was it. No one cared enough to help Ondahlie liven up the d�cor, and she herself had many more pressing concerns than aesthetics. What toys and dolls she�d managed to accumulate were all put scrupulously away. Only a hat, a few pens and schoolbooks sat on the small desk, and on the shelf above it was a rare treasure: a long rank of well-worn paperbacks.

These were highly valued indeed, but the only true concession to sentiment in her sanctum sanctorum sat a short ways beyond these. There, on the end of the shelf, right by the door where they�d be the first things to greet her when she entered her room, sat an arrangement of four adorable little brown and white ceramic puppies.

Her aloof, mysterious maternal grandparents had sent these over in celebration of some dimly remembered religious ritual. Yet despite this vagueness of occasion, they still retained a special significance for her.

She didn�t know her grandparents at all. Apparently they had washed their hands of their �stupid and ungrateful� daughter, and Ondahlie had never even seen them. Nevertheless, Puck hated them and that was enough. They represented the image of a better life for her, a world where people had lots of nice things, and enough to eat, and all the money didn�t go to booze and gambling and drugs. And while she didn�t dare become emotionally attached to such an abstract concept, such an out-of-reach idea, she could still safely transfer such powerful feelings to these beautiful symbolic objects. In a way, these four little ceramic puppies had become substitute pets, the inanimate recipients of all of little Ondahlie�s stunted, inarticulate, yet universally human capacity for love.

Of course, no animals were allowed in their rented house, not by their asshole landlord. Yet that was probably just as well. After all, Puck would have likely beaten a real dog to death within a year. Even now, as he bellowed out his drunken rage and slammed his sobbing wife over and over again against the living room wall, Ondahlie�s beloved little litter was being shaken closer and closer to destruction by the vibrations.

Before long they�d be shattered on the floor, victims of her hated enemy, and at last she was forced to leave the dubious sanctuary of her bed.

Stepping barefoot on the floor, she felt terribly vulnerable, exposed, even though all the covers in the world wouldn�t protect her from Puck. Still, just getting out of bed with the asshole on the warpath seemed an act of almost unthinkable audacity, one sure to result in ruin. Ondahlie stepped as carefully, silently as possible, graceful despite her recent growth spurt. Then sure enough, just as she approached the door, and was about to reach out to her threatened treasures on the nearby shelf, she heard her worst fears being realized.

The slurred, shrieking dialogue from the living room was now lapsing inexorably into a monologue.

Too fucked-up to put up a satisfactory fight, Renae was apparently collapsing into an early stupor. That would of course leave Puck with only one other outlet for his needs, and it wouldn�t be long before the beating and the feeling began once again.

�Goddamn, what a fucking pig! Look at you! Goddamn no-good drunk-ass pig-bitch-whore. Fucking fat-ass cunt-bag. Too goddamn stupid and ugly to even beat up, much less fuck! Jesus Christ, what an ugly-ass piece of trash!�

Sodden blows continued to thump into flesh, but Puck had apparently, for the time being, stopped slamming his wife against the wall. Ondahlie nevertheless proceeded to slide her four little puppies as far back from the edge of the shelf as possible.

Each was depicted in a different position, and she was just putting her hand on Bosco (her pet name for the spotted fellow sitting up to beg a treat), when she was suddenly startled by a loud, splintering crash.

By the noise Puck had just destroyed their flimsy coffee table, either by striking it himself or hurling his semi-conscious wife onto it. Probably the latter, for Renae at last gave another weak cry of pain.

Poor Renae. Unfortunately for Ondahlie, the little sitting-up ceramic dog was just the tiniest bit top-heavy, and when her startled hand jerked, she knocked it off the shelf and onto the hardwood floor.

Murphy�s Law holds that anything that can go wrong probably will, and Murphy must have been present, at least in spirit, at the James house that night. Little Bosco smashed on the floor, and this tiny bit of destruction elicited an automatic dismay from Ondahlie that all the extensive mayhem from the living room hadn�t been able to.

The beloved figurine she�d been risking all to save she�d instead destroyed. Before she could help herself, she cried out, �No!� her heart tearing within her at the terrible sight.

She clasped her hands over her rending breast, both hearing and not attending to Puck�s sudden pause and then drunken charge across the house. Then he burst into her room, once again incensed (ostensibly) to find her out of bed and (supposedly) spying.

�What the fucking hell is goin� on in here! Why ain�t you in bed! What the hell you doin� up listenin� in on yo� parents?�

Ondahlie was crying now, not over fear (not entirely, anyway), but with grief and loss for her dog and raging hatred of Puck, who�d precipitated this disaster. She pointed to the shattered dog, and the ones on the shelf, and was attempting a blubbering explanation when Puck suddenly swept the remaining three figurines to the floor as well, shattering all the dogs. Then he cut short Ondahlie�s disbelieving scream with such a smack to the face that she reeled backward, still trying to get a handle on the ultimate horror that had just occurred.

Unmindful of the real injury he�d done her, intent on doling out the usual physical abuse, Puck propelled her across the room, hurling her face down on the narrow twin bed. Her pajama bottoms were wrenched down, and then completely off. Then Puck�s board-hard hand, calloused not from years of work but decades of gripping prison bars and liquor bottles, was battering against her naked ass.

Such spankings had been regular since birth, but they�d been getting ever more feverish lately. Ondahlie hated them, the pain, the humiliation, but fighting only turned the open hand into a fist and changed its target to her kidneys, her stomach, or her face. It was better just to grind her teeth and wait them out, fantasizing the day of her revenge. But since she�d started budding, and the beatings had begun being accompanied by ever more intimate impositions, she�d been finding it increasingly difficult to submit. Now, with her stunned brain slowly overcoming the crippling horror and misery of her loss, with all her gut-deep pain and anguish transforming itself into rage and hatred at its author, such submission would soon be out of the question.

Still, there was little she could do to resist. Puck outweighed her by a hundred and fifty pounds, and her head still rang from that initial slap. His fat bulk crushed her to the mattress, his hand belabored her bottom mercilessly and he railed away at her in his three a.m. fucked-up fashion.

It was all a bunch of contradictory, incoherent shit about the dirty dishes, about spying on her elders and such, and sure enough, soon his hand was smacking not into her well-padded rear but rather her tender vulva.

Smarting turned to screaming in her personal netherworld, and involuntarily she started to water down there, her abused flesh trying to soothe itself any way it could. As usual, this uncontrollable reaction spurred mad Puck even more.

Calling the virgin a slut and a whore even as he defiled her, he rubbed his fingers roughly against her, stimulating her unwilling flesh even as he punished her.

Perhaps he sought to weld the sensations of sexual pleasure and brutal abuse together, and perhaps he succeeded, although not in the way he�d intended. There was too much rage in the mix for this alchemy to be successful. Instead of creating another willing slave for his harem, he only spawned a more implacable sadist.

The more Puck spanked her, or worked his fingers into her, the more furiously she would imagine his eventual castration, his flaying, dismemberment and disemboweling, all under her fiendishly delightful supervision and participation.

As introductory sexual experiences go, these were not particularly healthy ones. But then came the scene that would scar little Ondahlie forever.

 

 

Normally the fondling and probing would reach a pitch, and then stop all of a sudden as Puck caught a hold of himself. Then he would return to the other room and rape drunk Renae, conscious or not, �fat piece of shit� or not. This time, however, just as she was boiling like a runaway pressure cooker, he made his fateful miscalculation.

Perhaps he mistook her fury and revulsion, or maybe he was too drunk and worked-up to care. Either way, Ondahlie heard in his voice and movements that an another act was about to be slipped into the sequence � or perhaps it was only that Act Five was about to be carried out on a different, more personal stage.

�Fuckin� spying little bitch! Can�t sleep at night, no, got be up peekin! Got to see what her parents is up to! Well, I�ll show you! I�ll show you what mommies and daddies get up to late at night!�

Although one fat forearm still crushed her upper body to the bed, the other hand had quit pawing at her privates. The next sound was unmistakably a zipper, and Ondahlie went totally batshit. Screaming hysterically, she began bucking and thrashing, squirming to get away from the unspeakable terror approaching. Nevertheless, all her panicked energies were of no avail.

Puck punched her repeatedly in the back of the head, striking right at the base of her skull, hitting the brain stem. This structure, the medulla oblongata, runs all of the body�s most basic, hardwired functions, and stunned Ondahlie slumped into temporary paralysis. Although her eyes still saw and her body still felt, her muscles were no longer her own. Even her heart and diaphragm stopped, leaving her windless and dumb, on the bare edge of life. And then Puck�s arm and weight left her back, and he pressed himself against her, forcing his way inside.

This horrible insult galvanized her, shocking her heart and lungs back into rhythm. Unfortunately her other muscles were slower to return, and she was helpless as that huge hard thing pushed into her. Nevertheless she did what she could, expelling her first convulsive breath in an enormous sob and each subsequent one in a piercing scream.

Each cry had all of her monumental pain and terror in it, her childish desperation, and despite her contempt it was still her mother she found herself calling upon: that first, and somehow ultimate source of solace.

Her wails had all the cracked hope of soldiers dying on the battlefield, but son of a bitch, her pleas were actually answered.

Whether it was true compassion or only jealousy over the usurpation of roles, Renae suddenly stumbled into the room at top speed. Resurrected from her drunken swoon, she hurled herself against Puck�s back, screaming incoherently.

The sudden impact drove him deeper, all the way in, tearing open Ondahlie�s hymen and seemingly splitting the poor little girl in two. Again the breath was shocked out of her, and again it returned in sobs and agonizing screams.� Then the horrible insult was gone, at least temporarily, as Puck staggered back, shrugging off Ranae.

He turned, and delivered a series of punches that drove his wife from the room and then stretched her out gasping on the hallway floor. Then he immediately turned back, his crimson-stained organ not depleted at all by the interruption.

Indeed, excited by the violence, it only thrust itself up more greedily than ever. Puck had only one leg still in his pants, the grease-stained khaki pooled around his right ankle and dragging ridiculously on the floor behind him. Drunk off his ass, he lurched and staggered as he returned, shambling back toward his eleven-year-old victim like the personification of all monsters.

Weeping and screaming, her insides afire with pain and her muscles still trying to recover their use, she scrabbled piteously, attempting to avoid him.

It was no good. There was nowhere to go. Puck punched her twice in the face, and for the third time in five minutes she saw stars. He grabbed her, flipped her supine on the bed and for good measure ripped open her pajama top and pawed her brand-new breasts. Then he wrenched apart her legs, moved back in and resumed his interrupted rape.

This was agony and misery, terror and humiliation, screaming pain, shame, and rage. Yet once again it luckily didn�t last long. Game Renae returned to the fray, and this time she had a steak knife in her hand.

Screaming, she buried it in Puck�s back. Unfortunately her aim, intent, or elementary anatomy was faulty, for less than an inch into his flesh she hit scapula. The weak blade slid and then snapped, and she only succeeded in enraging the foe further.

Although he was driven down atop Ondahlie, momentarily crushing her and once again impaling her almost to the immature womb, Puck was so drunk that the blow was immaterial. He struggled back up and turned once again, determined to deal with this nuisance once and for all.

Lying in her blood, screaming in bug-eyed extremity, Ondahlie saw everything as the two bodies closed and struggled. Back and forth they tottered, Puck throttling and Renae flailing, until they at last they tripped over the dragging pants and crashed down against the wall by the window. There, while his bloodied organ spouted out its stinking, yellow-white pearls and clots, Puck bashed her head in against the angular iron vanes of the old-fashioned radiator.

Blood splashed and brains flew, semen spurted and terrible screams were raised, raised, raised, and eventually stilled. At last, his energies utterly spent, the drunken bastard collapsed next to the corpse and passed out.

Lying there in the suddenly silent house, eleven-year-old Ondahlie was left battered and bloodied, rapen and riven, seared and scarred in body and soul, but, miraculously, still relatively whole and alive.

 

 

��������� For the first time then, an innocent little girl seriously contemplated murder.

Not as an abstract wish, but as a practical possiblity. There were larger knives in the house than the flimsy one her mother had stupidly grabbed. And Puck owned an assortment of illegal, unregistered handguns. But Puck�s tales of prison, indeed his mere living proximity, daunted her. Instead she fled the house, stopping only long enough to wrap herself in an oversize coat. Down the street she found an all night liquor store, where the cold, suspicious proprietor finally called the police.

 

 

In due course Albert James was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to seventy-five years in prison. But before he�d served six months of his term, another inmate stabbed him to death under what were termed �highly suspicious circumstances�.

Retribution from friends of Renae in the legal or penal system was widely suspected. In any case, with the chance to wreak personal vengeance upon the defiler lost, Ondahlie was sent to live with her paternal grandparents.

These were Puck�s progenitors, and they were even more destitute than Puck and Renae had been. Renae had at least earned a good salary. All the elder James� had was a pension, a small stipend from the state, and a lot of emotional baggage.

Puck�s father blamed her for everything, ridiculously enough, and both of them resented the extra mouth to feed. The fact that Renae�s rich parents had refused to help support the child, or for that matter involve themselves in any way at all, was also resented. Angry, elderly, purposely hostile and disinterested, her reluctant benefactors either couldn�t or wouldn�t nurture and protect the strange, dark-tempered little half-breed girl they felt the system had foisted upon them.

The resulting situation was disastrous. Despite the breakup of her poisonous original home, for little Ondahlie landing in her new environment was like leaving the frying pan in favor of the fire.

The other kids her own age mocked her and ostracized her, making cruel fun of the traumas she�d suffered. This was rough enough, but the older children were also quick to exploit this stigma of weakness.

In the brutal, gang-run world of the ghetto, any vulnerability is often fatal. Before she grew big and strong enough, cold and ruthless enough to take care of herself, poor Ondahlie was brutally beaten and gang raped repeatedly.

For nearly three years, what Puck had first introduced her to was inflicted on her not once or twice but regularly. First by her older cousin Jeremy, and then by the rest of his murderous teenage crack-dealing ring. Cursed with white blood, a lurid history and an early-blooming body, Ondahlie was everybody�s target. And with casual murder and deadly weapons both commonplace among her tormentors, she was hard-pressed indeed to hang onto her life and sanity

Eventually she suffered miscarriages, various sexually transmitted diseases, and enough other repeated physical trauma to render her sterile. Truly it was a statistical miracle that she didn�t end up with AIDS. Yet each time the emergency room patched her up, Social Services merely cluck-clucked, accusing her of promiscuity and winking at her injuries. Medicaid was appropriately billed, and she was shipped her back to her unfeeling grandparents, and the mean streets of the Lower East Side.

Condemned thus to a living hell, Ondahlie continued to fight her violators each time. And each time superior numbers or weapons enforced her submission, she continued to fantasize gory, intimate revenge. But then one night Jeremy and every last one of his despicable �homies� got wiped out in a turf battle with another gang.

One less clique of murdering, raping, crack-peddling teenagers in the world. Small loss. But while this stroke of unexpected good luck delivered Ondahlie from their nightmarish attentions, it also once again denied her any chance to revenge herself upon those who had victimized her. This would prove unfortunate.

 

 

For a while though, things improved. Ondahlie was no longer harried at school and play. Her body and soul mended, at least on the outside, and she began to first make progress, and then to excel at her studies.

She developed a true love of interesting vocabulary. Earlier on she�d often escaped into books, salving the pain of her body and soul with unbounded adventures of imagination. Now this literary background paid handsome dividends. She could to speak the proper English her contemporaries scorned, privately reveling in the eloquence and elegance of expression she found herself capable of.

Apparently some of mother�s book-smarts had been passed down to her. Meanwhile she continued to grow up tall and strong, with the refined physical pedigree of her paternal line producing truly enviable results. Besides gaining the size and strength to defend herself, by her mid teens Ondahlie had also discovered the solace and potential offered by organized sports.

She was quite well built and athletically gifted, full of fire and buried energies that desperately needed to be vented. School coaches marveled at her abilities on the basketball and volleyball courts, and there was talk of scholarships, possible Olympic tryouts. Not only that, but a beguiling beauty was emerging in her features, a paradoxical mix of the cherubic and severe.

This embodiment of the fundamental tensions within her combined with passionate green eyes and a mouthwatering form to create a potent, feral sexuality. Before long modeling opportunities were being suggested to her, hints of a possible million-dollar career. For the first time it seemed that a life beyond the ghetto was an actual possibility. But then her aged grandfather died, and with him went the pension and social security payments that had been keeping the family solvent.

At sixteen Ondahlie was forced to quit organized sports, to abandon such fancies as training and modeling, and finally to even drop out of school entirely. All this in order to support both herself and the bitter, resentful, yet now dependent mother of her own mother�s killer.

She worked at jobs both legal and illegal then, and struggling along through miserable poverty took all of her considerable energies. She turned tricks, learned theft and avarice tooth and nail, and having suffered so much herself, she came to devalue the suffering of others. Soon she�d adopted the amoral attitude and casual callousness towards those she was forced to wrong that was a necessary survival trait in her dog-eat-dog, gang-infested ghetto world.

Thus as she grew into an early womanhood, Ondahlie James constantly honed the toughness and indomitability her nightmarish childhood had bequeathed to her. As a parentless adolescent it seemed all she had to protect her in a hard, cruel world that had already damaged her so extensively. And thanks to this deeply rooted survivor�s strength, she eventually persevered.

On the power of her verbal skills she passed the GED, easily obtaining the high school diploma that circumstances had denied her. Then she worked and hustled and fought and stole and somehow kept the wolf from both her own door and that of the embittered ancestor who had once, however reluctantly, taken her in.

It was a hard life, with few rewards and less future, but it was one she quickly mastered. And if its demands turned her old and cold before her time, they kept her busy at least, if not exactly out of trouble. But then she turned eighteen, and without warning everything completely changed.

 

 

��������� The man�s name was Harwood, Mortimer Harwood, the third, no less, and like her late mother he was an attorney.

Coming from chronic poverty, Ondahlie had no use and little taste for lawyers and such. They were part of the system that oppressed her. But he�d called the day before and insisted on this appointment.

Despite the fact that it was her birthday, despite the fact that it was a two-dollar bus ride and more to his gleaming office downtown, Ondahlie had donned her best dress and braved the halls of money and power to find the place where he worked. His intimations had been too tantalizing to ignore.

Contrary to her expectations, no one looked at her askance as she rode the elevator and walked where only the privileged were wont to go. Apparently she fitted right in. Certainly her facility with her mother�s breed of language helped. When she presented herself to the appropriate secretary, she was smiled at and shown right in. The usual supplicants wait was not required, and the rich old man who�d drawn her here even rose to greet her as she entered and was announced.

�Ah, Miss James, welcome, welcome. Thank you so much for coming. I am Mortimer Harwood.�

He was the same height as she, an even six feet, and the age that had silvered his hair had left his sturdy frame unbowed. His suit was immaculate, his body burly, and a well-trimmed goatee framed his mobile moneymaker. He rounded his huge desk and took her hand, and Ondahlie made all the appropriate responses. Then, after he�d seen her to a comfortable seat and resumed his own, he surprised her yet again, and with more than the genuine warmth of his smile.

�It�s truly good to meet you, Ms James. If you�ll permit my saying so, you�ve grown into quite a lovely young lady. I knew your mother quite well, you see, and I was present at your christening. Since then I�ve only seen you briefly: six years ago at the trial. In any case, I�m sure Renae would be incredibly proud and delighted to see you as I do now. Especially since I have such wonderful news for you.�

Ondahlie smiled coolly, hiding the thumping of her heart. She arched an eyebrow.

�Yes?�

�Yes.� Mortimer Harwood�s own eyes positively sparkled.

�As I believe I mentioned on the phone yesterday, I am the attorney for Edward and Ophelia Lawrence, your maternal grandparents. As you may or may not know, both Edward and Ophelia have recently passed away. During their lifetime, I was their private attorney for over three decades, and since their passing I have been engaged as the executor of their estate.�

He paused for a cultured chuckle, sitting back in his well-padded chair and drawing out the suspense.

�Not that it�s been a particularly onerous duty. Edward and Ophelia left a very simple will, with only a few stipulations and one primary beneficiary. That beneficiary, young lady, is you. The minute you became a legal adult,� Harwood checked his watch, �say, ten hours, six minutes and fourteen seconds ago, you inherited everything they owned � minus taxes and my executors fee, of course. Congratulations.�

Ondahlie�s jaw quite literally dropped. To say she was shocked would have been putting it mildly. All her mature self-possession fled. Despite her just-averred status as a legal adult, she was suddenly a child again, peering with wonder at the fantastical gift she�d been given. But this was no collection of little toy puppies, this was�what was this? A real chance at a better kind of life?

�But why?� she heard herself asking aloud. �Why this, why me, why now? Why, after all these years�� She trailed off, unwilling to continue.

�After all these years of neglect?� finished Harwood gently. He leaned forward once again, taking her into his confidence.

�That�s what Ophelia called it. She felt very strongly that she and her husband owed you much that you were cruelly denied. Unfortunately, Edward Lawrence was a hard-core racist. I�m sorry to have to speak ill of the dead, but I owe you the frank truth. He never forgave his daughter for marrying Albert James, and he refused to acknowledge his kinship with you until almost the very end. Only when he was at death�s door with stomach cancer did he at last repent.

�With his end upon him, he was more amenable to reason. He learned to regret what his racism had cost him, the love of a child and grandchild both. In remorse, and seeking some kind of absolution, he allowed Ophelia to amend their will. Too ashamed of themselves to approach you directly, they both died shortly thereafter. That was a matter of some fifteen and seventeen months ago. Under the terms of the will, I was forbidden to approach you until you came into your inheritance on your eighteenth birthday. Then I was encouraged to explain what I just have: their sorrow, remorse, and attempt to atone. In the end they pined for you, and wished you nothing but the best.�

Gradually Ondahlie�s cold heart regained control.

Excitement still kindled within her, and soaring joy at this unexpected good fortune, but she was affected more by the posthumous admission of neglect than the pathetic deathbed regrets.

Indeed, her grandparent�s neglect had cost her the last seven years of hell, three of them being constantly beaten and raped while a gun was held to her head. Their better-late-than-never atonement would have to be generous indeed, to be adequate recompense for what she�d suffered. She broke eye contact with the kindly attorney then, lest he read her ungrateful thoughts. For a moment she appeared to peer within herself. Then, after an appropriate pause, she asked the appropriate question.

�What does the estate come to?�

Harwood sat back, opened a drawer and removed a folder. He opened it, and went into lawyer mode.

�I will lay everything out in detail for you shortly. But let me briefly explain that it was your grandparents� hope that you would choose to live their ancestral home. This is a place called Towering Hemlocks, a substantial mansion on a sizable property in the township of New Caledonia.

�This has been the home of the Lawrence family since its initial construction in 1868. While it�s possible that you could liquidate this estate and clear several million dollars in one big shot, thanks to the terms of the will, it would be much better for you financially to keep it, and take up residence there. A series of cleverly constructed trusts have been set up to cover taxes on the property for the next twenty years. Also, certain investments pay regular dividends that go to pay for all maintenance and domestic help.

�In other words, you will have access to a mansion and servants cost-free for at least the next twenty years, regardless of the fluctuations of your other personal finances. And as far as those go, above and beyond the property and its related investments, there is also the matter of three separate bank accounts. One of these is checking and two savings, and together they contain over six hundred thousand dollars cash. Not enough money to live on indefinitely, but with proper financial management and a bit of hard work, this principal could easily be maintained and eventually made to grow like mad. If you like, I can refer you to a good financial advisor. At the very least, you and I will meet with the men who�ve constructed the fiscal edifice you�ve inherited.�

�I could pay for college, business courses, and open my own boutique!�

Light bulbs were flashing all over in Ondahlie�s head, and her excitement was growing by the moment. A million-dollar mansion in the country! Six hundred thousand dollars! Holy shit, what a birthday celebration this was going to be! She could hardly wait to tell her grandma, and call her few friends.

Harwood was nodding gravely at her. �Business school and a boutique at the very least. Your options have suddenly expanded tremendously, young lady. Here are the passbooks for the three bank accounts I mentioned. Simply present yourself at each institution, provide two proofs of identification and a sample of your signature, and the money is yours. Once again I recommend that you engage a good financial advisor, and possibly an attorney.� A quick grin of ambition came here.

�Now then. Would you like to study these papers in more detail? Or perhaps we should pay a visit your new house. I could certainly use a drive in the country. It�s up to you. From now on, Miss James, it�s all up to you.�

 

 

��������� Ondahlie made the most of her unbelievable good fortune. Following the advice of her new attorney she moved into Towering Hemlocks, an impressive wood and stone structure set well back on a sizeable plot of land crowded with the same. Those trees gave the estate a privacy and peace � as well as an arboreal beauty � that was mind-blowing to the young urban ghetto girl. It must have blown her paternal grandmother�s mind, too, for shortly after Ondahlie moved the old lady in to join her she died.

��������� Doctors suggested the stress of transition had been too much for her. Privately Ondahlie thought it was the irony of her old enemies� ultimate revenge that killed her. Either way, she was relieved to be free of her obligation to her father�s mother. With no more living relatives, she engaged the services of Mortimer Hardwood and had her name legally changed, thus erasing the last concrete link to her hateful father and past. If only his less obvious bequests could be as easily dispatched�

��������� Ondahlie James became Ondahlie Amorata, a surname carefully chosen for both business and personal reasons. Wasting no time, the new mistress of Towering Hemlocks enrolled in and coasted through a few semesters of business courses, and within a year she�d opened The Lady O�s Dungeon & Fine Leather Emporium.

As the name suggests, this was at first just a small boutique specializing in leather goods, with an emphasis on the exotic and erotic. A great fan of the works of the Marquis de Sade, Ondahlie for understandable reason was constantly driven toward the dominant in her sexual expression. She had developed quite a taste for boots and harnesses, for leather lingere and other fetish wear, and using her drive, beauty, brains, and considerable personal force and charm, she quickly developed this private personal obsession into a profitable public enterprise. Within five years� time, she�d become the successful owner of the most sought-out leather goods and fetish store in the entire state.

This was an amazing story, properly lauded by her lawyer and accountant and even the subject of a local TV news piece. But for all of its upbeat tempo and triumph it was really only half the tale, a glossy surface over murky depths.� For during this whole career-building process, Ondahlie�s real occupation was gradually evolving into something far more sinister.

Once she was suddenly financially secure, mistress of a huge old mansion way far out in the country, Ondahlie found herself growing desperately restless. School and career were far too easy, unrewarding: not much of a challenge after her brutal ghetto existence. With no enemies or marks to engage her energies, she found herself for the first time unable to sublimate or vent the primal suppressed rages at the core of her being.

Despite her vitriolic hatred of her father, she�d unfortunately inherited more than just his size and half his skin color. She also had his ready temper and a scary, domineering sadistic streak. These were deeply ingrained psychological pre-dispositions that she was helpless to alter. Not only that: her amoral adventures living hand to mouth in the city had allowed them good nurture. All along, she�d been incubating the malignant seeds sown by her fucked-up family life during those terribly traumatic formative years. Now they found the ideal conditions for growth, and quickly exploded into full, ugly flower. For every blow and rape she�d suffered in the past, she found herself driven to deal back out their like a hundred-fold. She went through lovers like Kleenex, scaring them off or leaving them crumpled, soiled, limp and bedraggled. Soon her libido began demanding more unorthodox appeasements.

Using her life at the store, Ondahlie began to make contacts in the fetish community, the kinky underground society that most of her business catered to. There the sort of sadistic passions that fired her were accepted and even valued, and she became an immediate sensation, a notorious dominatrix. The most sought-after (and subsequently avoided) domina in the city, her appetites and energies were the stuff of instant legend. But then one fateful night either an accident happened or her libido leapt its bounds, and she found herself with a body on her hands.

Circumstances (and a lifetime of adversarial experience) ruled out involving the police. The incident was covered up, and after that Ondahlie found it prudent to take her ever-growing appetites underground. One thing led to another then, and somehow, by the age of twenty-five, she�d become an unrepentant serial killer.

Capturing, imprisoning, raping, torturing, and finally killing men became at first a necessary outlet, then a hobby, and finally the defining passion of her existence, her true life�s work. She�d even developed a kind of private religion out of it. Unlike most such killers, however, she wasn�t a true sociopath. Her capacity to feel love, form attachments, or to have compassion for the suffering of others was only stunted, not nonexistent.

She had developed an ethos around the crimes she committed which allowed her to vent her deepest needs without sacrificing the social necessity of a conscience. In general, she chose her victims from men she knew to be incorrigible stalkers, spouse-batterers, or other enemies of the female sex.

Ultra-possessive asshole males who make it a habit of oppressing and abusing their women and kids, who deal violently with opposition or rejection, are unfortunately common in our society. And our male-dominated society does little to discourage, control, or punish them. Witness OJ Simpson. So whenever a particularly repellant specimen of his type came to Ondahlie�s attention, she would kidnap, dominate, humiliate, torture and finally murder the offender in fitting fashion.

Symbolically repudiating her father, she thought of this as wreaking womankind�s just vengeance on the worst of its oppressors. If the courts and police couldn�t or wouldn�t sanction such individuals, then it was the responsibility of vigilantes like her. However, she seldom wanted sex with such vermin, nor did they deserve it. So while this cruel sport served a useful social purpose, and allowed her to vent some of her worst inner pressures, and even though she achieved some level of sexual satisfaction through torture and anal rape alone, she nevertheless remained unfulfilled.

Good sex for Ondahlie meant pain, humiliation, violent subjugation, all inflicted upon a helpless but nonetheless delicious male subject. Unfortunately, not even the craziest or horniest male could endure her attentions for long, and she also had that distressing tendency to use her mates to destruction. So during the intervals between paying back assholes, or whenever such an experience left her particularly wanting, Mistress Ondahlie would go online and do a little remarkably passive hunting.

The Internet was a wonderful tool for locating vulnerable prey. Like the old on-line joke says, it�s truly incredible how many fucked-up people there are in the world � and how many of them own computers. Whole categories of newsgroups and bulletin boards were devoted entirely to the pleas of desperate males, all of them searching for a superior woman to dominate and humiliate them. Sexual submissives, most of these Ondahlie deemed to be latent homosexuals, driven to punish themselves extravagantly for powerful feelings they couldn�t admit to. Every once in a while, Ondahlie would lure one of these pathetic fools to her secret lair, where she would fulfill all of their darkest fantasies � not to mention a few of her own.

�She called this method of acquiring prey the Venus Guy-Trap: an elegant and sinister way to catch and consume tasty insects. She�d even gone so far as to cultivate great beds of carnivorous plants out at Towering Hemlocks, and to feed them tiny pieces of her victims. It was all part of her convoluted personal philosophy.

Alas, a bit of convolution was perhaps a necessity. Her secondary modus operandi was less easy to justify than the first: more of a base fulfillment of her own appetites than a righteous crusade against injustice. Yet Ondahlie�s ghetto-learned callousness came in handy here, and the lesson of her mother�s life and death hadn�t been lost on her.

Despite all reason, some people actually choose to be victims, acting in ways that ensure their destruction even as they rail against it. Consider Renae�s foolish choice of weapon, and her idiotic spot of attack in that final confrontation. Ultimately, castration and death at the hands of a mother figure is what these sissy guys truly subconsciously sought, whether they accepted this about themselves or not. By enslaving, degrading, and ultimately destroying them, she was fulfilling all of their needs, carrying out their mad, self-destructive fantasies out to their most logical conclusion.

Questionable as this justification was it sufficed for her. And even if it ultimately couldn�t compare with the powerful emotional charge she obtained from carrying out her �female vengeance missions�, using the Venus Guy-Trap was always fun, exciting, and infinitely arousing. It was also occasionally profitable, and despite her comfortable circumstances, Ondahlie knew that one could never have too much money. Anyone who didn�t think so had never been really poor.

Luckily her latest Slave showed great promise in nearly all areas. He had plenty of money, for one thing. His car hadn�t gone for less than forty thousand dollars. Also his cock was quite respectable, and his reactions to her opening moves had been extremely interesting. Leaving him tightly strapped into the dildo chair after their first quite excellent session together, she smiled to herself in pleasant, slightly wicked anticipation.

Oh, she hoped this one lasted longer than ever�

 

 

###################