Posted originally on the Archive_of_Our_Own at https://archiveofourown.org/
works/11332335.
  Rating:
      Explicit
  Archive Warning:
      Rape/Non-Con, Graphic_Depictions_Of_Violence, Underage, Major_Character
      Death
  Category:
      F/M
  Fandom:
      Original_Work
  Relationship:
      Original_Female_Character/Original_Male_Character
  Additional Tags:
      Parent/Child_Incest, Incest, Dubious_Consent, Dubcon_Kissing, Implied/
      Referenced_Drug_Use, Touch-Starved, love-starved, Voice_Kink, Daddy_Kink,
      literal_dad_though, Power_Imbalance, Rough_Sex, Cunnilingus, Scratching,
      Father-Daughter_Relationship, Father-Daughter_Incest, Manipulation,
      Crying, Guilt, Unhealthy_Relationships, Dom/sub, Blood, Shame, Marking,
      Dominant_male/Submissive_female_-_Freeform, Emotional_Manipulation, Hurt/
      Comfort, Rough_Oral_Sex, Stockholm_Syndrome, Fellatio, Large_Cock, Size
      Difference, Hair-pulling, Uncontrollable_Lust, Slut_Shaming, Spanking,
      Punishment, Isolation, Painful_Sex, Possessive_Behavior, Non-Consensual
      Drug_Use, Psychological_Horror, Gaslighting, Choking, Facials, Forced
      Orgasm, Horror, Implied/Referenced_Brainwashing, Sharing_a_Bed, Secret
      Relationship, Nipple_Torture, Breast_Play, Quiet_Sex, Breathplay, Mental
      Health_Issues, Mental_Instability, Strangulation, Wall_Sex, Creampie,
      Dissociation, Exhibitionism, Dark, Hallucinations, Bathtub_Sex, Drug-
      Induced_Sex, Hallucinogens, Bathing/Washing, Bondage, Gags, Non-
      Consensual_Somnophilia, Post-Traumatic_Stress_Disorder_-_PTSD,
      Psychological_Trauma, Uncle/Niece_Incest, Corruption, Identity_Issues,
      Murder, Showers, Dreams_and_Nightmares, Whipping, Breeding, Drug
      Withdrawal, drug_overdose, Serial_Killers, Police_Brutality, Orgasm
      Delay/Denial, Unhealthy_Coping_Mechanisms, Face-Fucking, Female_Character
      of_Color, Threesome_-_F/M/M, Anal_Sex, Dehumanization, Chains, Riding
      Crops, Suicidal_Thoughts, Forced_Pregnancy, Stabbing
  Stats:
      Published: 2017-06-28 Updated: 2018-03-29 Chapters: 70/? Words: 349549
****** Closing the Distance ******
by YipYapYams
Summary
     Simone had long accepted that this distant, strange man known as her
     father lacked the care and affection required to be a good papa, but
     knowing that never stopped her from craving his attention... no
     matter what manner of attention she could get. Through a drug-aided
     miscommunication, she'll be horrified to find out just how deep her
     desperation for him goes.
     ===========================
     “We’ve moved beyond sins and morals, yet you persist in trying to
     hold onto what you’ve been told is right and wrong. You can’t resist
     your desires any more than you can resist mine… and you know what
     happens when you disobey my will, don’t you, my darling girl?”
      
     <><><>Feedback is appreciated!<><><>
Notes
     This is my first time back in the writing saddle after many years,
     but I couldn't stop myself from spilling this story out into my phone
     one night and figured I'd share it.
***** Chapter 1 *****
Chapter Notes
     Feedback and comments are appreciated!
Simone had always had trouble talking with the man who was so often away in her
life and never really there when he wasn't, but the way the air around him
seemed to vibrate now due to the psilocybin tea's effects made him all the less
approachable. She blinked, unable to look away from her father as she stood in
the dark hallway looking into the small bedroom he sat in, the moment extended
like a long rope of taffy. She was about to turn back and try to rouse her
passed out mother instead when she heard his rich, low voice softly say, "Come
here, Simone."
She swallowed thickly, her already reactive heart rate ticking up as she
crossed the threshold into the stuffy room, bare feet sinking into old musty
carpeting. He was looking at a toy in his hands as he told her to sit down. Not
seeing any chairs, she opted to sit on the twin bed with him. She was not used
to being invited to do anything by him and regretted not being sober for the
rare experience.
"This was my room... growing up," he told her, his gentle accent revealed in
the too-careful diction of his deep voice, still not looking at her as he
fidgeted with the toy in his hands. It looked like a plastic robot, but he was
not necessarily focusing on it so she declined to fill the silence by
commenting on it. He looked at her and she watched his gray eyes flit from her
face to her chest to her folded hands in her lap and then back into the
distance of his thoughts for a moment before he said, "You can sleep in this
room while we're here. I'm not sure when we're going to be through sorting all
this out. Your mother will be returning to the city tomorrow if you'd like to
go with her, but I would like your help."
Simone was momentarily stunned by the wealth of words her normally silent
father presented her with before she scrambled to interpret them. She cleared
her throat to borrow a moment before replying, "Yeah, uh, I can stay here, I
don't mind. Papa."
He turned his face to her, a slight smile softening his eyes and she smiled
back, a blush warming her cheeks at this unexpected attention from the man. She
was delighted that he wanted her around, actually asked for her to help him in
something, and she entertained the hope that maybe there would be more moments
like this if she stayed. She was snatched from her reverie when she felt the
warmth of his hand descend upon her knee and suddenly he tilted her chin up
toward him. She had only a brief moment to close her slacking mouth before his
moist lips locked over her own and she almost made a small noise of surprise
before choking it back. Her heart skipped in its rapid pace as she accepted the
rare and strange affection from her father.
Despite his seeming aversion to touching, speaking, or in any way interacting
with his daughter through her life, he had taken a new vigor in occasionally
doling out a very forced and awkward physical affection to her in her teen
years, no doubt due to her mother's insistence that Simone receive her father's
love so she refrained from finding male affection elsewhere. She knew that
backward reasoning for a fact when her mother had blamed her father's distance
upon discovering Simone's sexual activity at age 12. Shortly after that fiasco,
her father deigned to bestow a kiss upon her once every week or so, but he
seemed to be unable to perform this task in a conventional way.
His mouth was always soft and wet against hers, his lips molded over hers to
latch them together rather than the very simple brief surface contact that a
familial peck should be. The suck and then drag of his lips onto hers as he
would pull away indicated more seeking for sensation than a gesture, always
lingering for just a half second too long, pulling away just a bit too slowly.
She had always felt awkward and sorry that he tried and failed to fill a role
he couldn't; he was just a man who didn't know how to be a dad, he could only
kiss the way he knew how.
As she felt his mouth move against hers at this moment, the drug in her system
causing time to extend every second and every sensation amplified, she tried to
ignore the arousal stirring in her. Then he tilted his head to better fit their
lips together and his hand squeezed her knee to accommodate the adjustment of
his posture, causing her to make a small whimpering noise in her throat that -
to her horror - gave her father brief pause before he pressed closer. In her
mind, she had to cling to the idea that the drug was stretching this moment out
inexorably, that he hadn't been kissing her for this long in reality, his lips
flexing over hers in a slide of motion that derailed her thoughts into a
scrambling mess and curled her toes. The wet center of his mouth opened just
slightly, pushing her plush lips apart and igniting an unexpected spill of heat
in her abdomen as she tasted a hint of his saliva. Scotch, the cigarettes he
was supposed to quit months ago, the cashews he ate instead of going out to
dinner with his wife and beneath those things was a taste she could attribute
only as him.
Before she could stop herself, she shut her eyes and leaned into his kiss, her
hand latched on top of his hand at her knee and gave it an encouraging tug
upward. She nearly froze at her inexplicable behavior, but he was already
kneading the soft flesh of her thigh under the hem of her skirt and she moaned
into him, the frenzied rush of thought completely hazed out by euphoria. She
felt more than heard the rough moan rumble from deep in his throat, a sound so
thoroughly masculine that a primal fear mounted over her thrill and beckoned
her to begin to pull back. His moan ended in a growl at this, his hand curled
into claws at her thigh and her lips parted against his in an audible gasp at
the sudden pain. He charged forward into her parted mouth with his own, his
tongue intruding against hers and her racing thoughts returned all at once at
the glide of that wet muscle stroking hers. A panic began to boil in her mind
along with the realization of what was now happening, a panic furthered by the
acknowledgment of what had in fact been happening this entire time in her drug
haze. Her eyes snapped open in disbelief, but his eyes were closed and
expression blissfully unbothered by the numerous taboos they were committing.
His hand slid up, thumb digging into the cleft between her thigh and crotch,
searching out her cunt from over the cotton barrier of her panties as his kiss
deepened. She jerked back but his other hand was quick to grab the back of her
neck. He twisted his torso to face her so he was halfway off the bed and
looming over her. Her distressed noise of protest was muffled by his mouth
still locked over hers as he pushed her slowly backward, swinging his leg over
her until he was straddling her hips. When her back hit the mattress and she
felt him sit down on her thighs, she looked up at his face and saw him looking
down at her with such a gentle expression. Her lips were tingling from his
kiss, her skin electrified with a low current that hummed through her whole
body and spiraled tightly at her wet cunt, and she was not quite able to tell
herself it was just the drug as she held his storm gray gaze. Her fear,
confusion, and shame were at odds with the pleasure coursing through her and it
must have shown in her expression when he shushed her.
"Sshh, shh, let papa take care of his darling girl," he said in a husky whisper
more heavily accented than she's ever heard him, hunching over her with one
hand planted on the mattress next to her head and the other stroking her cheek
soothingly.
"Papa..." she whimpered thinly, the word escaping her as a tiny plea but then
the full meaning behind it slammed a harsh clarity onto her muddled state. No
matter how abstract his distance had made his role in her mind or how twisted
her starvation for his affection and approval had become, he was her father and
she couldn't let this moment of confusion risk tarnishing their roles forever.
She tried to scramble out from under him, but his weight on her legs prevented
her from budging out even an inch and the hand that had been caressing her
cheek slid down to wrap around her neck. The presence of his hand on her throat
was enough to still her struggles, the threat clear and shocking as she looked
back up at his face, closer now than it had been.
"My sweet Simone," he whispered, his other hand disappearing between them and
fumbling with something briefly before the sound of a zipper alerted her. She
couldn't look away from his face, but the gentleness in his eyes belied the
sharp-toothed grin that spread across his face before his hand traveled up
under her dress to glide over her abdomen. "I've waited so long for you to come
to me..."
Her belly was exposed the further his hand traveled up until he slipped under
her bra, then his hips tilted and she felt something smooth and hot slide over
her bared thigh at the same time his hand closed over her breast. Simone gasped
as her father's calloused hand kneaded in time with his hips rubbing what she
knew must be his penis against the top of her thigh, her body now shaking from
the sustained adrenaline. She was writhing under him now for a different
reason, her dread once more overtaken by the drug fog and lust. She had not
been this close to her father for such a length of time, never had felt this
loved by him before and she was finding this attention as intoxicating as the
hormones he was stoking. She knew she was making pathetic little breathy
sounds, her face burning in mortification, but his hard cock smeared precum on
her leg and his breath was hot with scotch against her temple so she shut her
eyes and let herself moan for him. The effect was almost instant.
"God, Simone!" he gasped, his hands moving quickly to wrench the dress and bra
off her body. She barely had time to recover from that sudden jostling before
his weight was lifted from her legs and her soaked panties were catching at her
ankle in his haste to get them off. Dizzy, she watched wide-eyed as he kneeled
over her, his dick visible for the first time to her and she had to force
herself not to stare. Such polite impulses missed him entirely as he blatantly
took in every piece of her newly exposed flesh, the cruel smirk gone and she
caught the glint of restrained madness in his eyes. A fresh wave of trepidation
chilled the back of her skull and she moved to cover her breasts, but he
grabbed her wrists and pushed them away from her body. She was suddenly aware
of how quiet and bleak it was in that small unfamiliar room, how even the light
overhead only seemed to highlight the shadows. He was outlined entirely in
darkness above her, a silhouette that could have been any man but she was
deeply ashamed that she couldn't imagine it to be anyone but her father. She
tried to swallow past the knot of shame in her throat as her legs parted to
show him her glistening cunt.
"Oh, darling girl..." he breathed upon seeing her pussy swollen with need and
slick down her inner thighs. She was blushing almost as pink as her little
cunt, unable to look at him as he bent closer to her, his hands holding her
knees wide apart. She saw out of the corner of her eye that he had begun
disrobing. The air moved cold on her molten cunt, but she waited on her back
with her legs spread as wide as he had left her, her heartbeat loud in her own
ears to fill the terrible silence between sounds of shuffling cloth.
She yelped in surprise when she felt a wetness press against her pussy, the
yelp followed immediately by a loud moan as that wetness curled around her clit
and she felt herself already on the verge of orgasm as he ate her out. She
angled her hips up, offering him more of her cunt to lick and he obliged
eagerly, his tongue dipping into her hole and dragging back up to her clit in
slow rotations. She was barely aware of anything outside of how her father, her
papa, had his face buried between her legs and made her see sparks. Her hands
were running through his silvered hair, tightening their hold when she felt him
pump two thick fingers into her vagina.
"Papa... oh, fuck, Dad..." she heard herself panting, the high voice almost
unrecognizable to her own ears. She felt him curl his fingers inside her and
rub against the front of her cunt, forcing an unexpected orgasm out of her. She
tried to push his head away, her left leg kicking out in an uncoordinated
attempt to scramble backward, heel skidding on the bedding, but his grip on her
hip was strong enough to bruise and he lapped at her clit and nearly punched
his fingers into her as she came. Her moans rose in a gasping crescendo, higher
and higher in pitch as her spasming cunt clenched around his fingers. She
panted as she came down, her skin glowing in a thin sheen of sweat despite only
having taken no more than two minutes to cum, and she looked down through half-
lidded eyes at the man responsible. He gazed up at her with an expression that
made her heart ache with the love she found there, that glint of madness gone
and his eyes now warm. She felt the urge to cry and just barely squashed it.
"Papa..." she said, voice wavering and tight with emotion. She reached down,
grabbed his shoulder and pulled him up her body, all the while babbling, "Fuck
me, please... I need you, Daddy... I need you so bad, I can't stand it, just
please…”
She stopped only when she latched her mouth onto his, tasting herself on him
and moaning into a desperate kiss. His hands roamed over her body as she
assaulted his mouth with her lips and tongue, his body curled between her legs.
She began grinding against his cock, sliding the long shaft between her slick
labia, moaning into his mouth in both frustration and pleasure. His hips jerked
in response to her efforts, the fat head of his cock dipping into her vagina
before slipping back out and up against her clit, making her break her feverish
kiss in a loud gasp.
"Please, Papa, please, please, please," she begged, each plead accentuated with
a grind against that teasing cock. He growled out a low groan and tilted his
hips, the tip of his dick twitching against her opening and he had to grab her
neck once more to stop her from sliding down onto it. She was hardly aware of
the fear, shame and despair that screamed from some distant space in her mind,
but she heeded the threat of that large hand at her throat once more. He stared
into her eyes, not letting her look away even if she tried as he slowly
penetrated her. Inch by inch, he pumped into her cunt, the almost painful
stretch making her utter small sounds of discomfort among the gasping pleasure
of it.
"I love you, I love you, I love you..." she heard herself whispering, voice
cracking and foreign to her, but she was unable stop herself. She flinched and
released a sharp gasp when he was finally fully sheathed in her pussy, the
tears that had been threatening finally spilling from her eyes. To her
confusion, a sob wracked her frame, followed by another as he began to move.
Through tear-blurred vision, she watched as his eyes conveyed surprise, almost
as though he couldn't quite believe this situation even as he drove his cock
back into her. The deep moan rumbling in his chest as he fucked her slowly made
her clench around him.
"Oh Christ, you feel so fucking good, darling girl," he growled, his cheek
nuzzling her tear-streaked face.
"Hurt me," she whispered, her voice ragged and close to his ear. At first, she
wasn't sure if he had heard her, but then his nails dug into the pliant flesh
of her hips and he started pushing into her hard. She cried out with each
punishing thrust, his already too-large cock now feeling as though he was
bruising her inside, but she met each thrust eagerly. She wasn't sure why, but
she needed him to make this a punishment. She supposed she was a terrible
daughter to have begged for her father's cock like she had. His nails scratched
painfully at her hips, dragging swollen pink lines that spotted with blood and
she hoped some of them went deep enough for a lasting scar. She thought of
looking in the mirror later and admiring them as proof of his affection when
she felt another orgasm building through the pain.
His mouth was at her neck when he began groaning out something in his native
tongue that she couldn't understand, his rich baritone rough and dark. Her
arms, not long enough to fully wrap around his powerful shoulders above her,
pulled him more closely down onto her torso and she could feel his words
vibrating through his hard chest. The voice that had so long enchanted her
throughout her entire life was bewitching her into yet higher arousal now as
his foreign words curled enticingly against her sensitive neck. His breathy
grunting words were peppered with her name, no hint of the American
pronunciation, and it stuck out in her mind that she had always felt like a
slightly different person when he addressed her, this woman he calls See-mohn.
His thrusts became more quick and short, almost as though he didn't want to
leave her cunt before he was driving back into her, staying deep and smashing
against her cervix with each ram of his hips. This consistent closeness rocked
his lower abdomen flush against her, rubbing her clit between them and she
couldn't stop her orgasm against this onslaught of sensation. Her whole body
drew taught like a bowstring ready to release, her cunt clenching down hard on
his cock and this had him gasping and his hips stuttering hard into her. The
twitch of his cock inside of her as he began to ejaculate, his deep voice
roaring out his climax, sent her pussy fluttering around him and her voice
keening as she joined him in orgasm. Her head swam as she felt him swell and
spasm inside her, spilling hot semen that tingled her already sensitive flesh,
and her vision whited out.
When she came back seconds later, he was heavily laid out on top of her, his
arms wrapped around her in an almost crushing embrace as he panted into her
neck. He was still buried inside of her, slowly softening and slippery with
both of their fluids, her cunt erratically pulsating around him from
aftershocks of her intense orgasm, her breath hitching and gasping softly at
each. Her mind was clouded, thoughts distant and muted as they stayed holding
each other for several minutes. Eventually, he slowly pulled away from her,
looking down at her sweat-slicked body as he knelt on his heels between her
legs. They stayed like that for a long silent moment, his expression unreadable
as he looked at her and she watched his face carefully.
“I'm sorry,” he said quietly, then she watched him rise from the bed and walk
out into the dark hallway, not even picking up his clothes as he left. She
dropped her head onto the mattress, stared up at the yellowed ceiling and
despite her scratched up hips and sore cunt, she felt completely numb.
***** Chapter 2 *****
Leif quickly gathered the blades from his late father's house, 26 knives of
various utilities and antiquities excluding the butter knives he decided to
ignore, and wrapped them in a towel before hiding them in the top shelf of a
closet. Deciding that the .45 handgun was safe enough remaining in the trick
back of his father's nightstand, he then gathered any axes, bats, sizable
wrenches, hammers, and anything he judged would make a decent makeshift weapon
and locked them in the knife closet. Although he doubted the necessity to do
any of this, he couldn't discount the possibility that his daughter might turn
on him violently at any point.
The folding knife that was his old man’s constant companion, still waiting for
him next to his wallet on his dresser, Leif took to the sharpening stone. He
sat in his father's bedroom on a wooden chair, the bare mattress stained and
reeking of decay from the four days it took before his body was discovered, and
dragged the blade across the rough stone. The stillness this task required of
him calmed him out of the purposeful frenzy of activity enough to think as he
sat still naked, the sweat and fluids of both his and his daughter’s bodies now
dry on his skin.
His thoughts were slow and heavy with guilt as he thought of her. His Simone,
hopefully lost to the weight of their sin in the oblivion of sleep, laid out on
his childhood bed downstairs. His Simone, the distant star of his life burning
his soul with each moan beneath him. His cock twitched at the fresh echo of her
voice in his mind and he curled his lips into a snarl at the greedy monster
under his skin. The blade sung with each swipe over the sharpening stone as his
pace unconsciously increased, frustration twisting in him at his lack of self-
control. He turned the stone over and buffed the edge of the blade smooth while
he glowered at his foolishness. Years of calculated ministrations dashed after
one heady moment in a simple kiss. He dragged the razor thin edge of the knife
lightly against his thumb, the blade easily slicing a thin line into the skin
so fine he could scarcely detect it if it weren't for the red thread blooming
open a moment after.
As he inspected the cut, he allowed a self-reassurance that he could manage the
situation he now found himself in. He could direct this new dynamic between
himself and his Simone. He rubbed his thumb along his lower lip absently in
thought as he considered the many possibilities this event had opened to him,
his blood smearing scarlet on him. As his tongue swiped at the warm liquid, his
resolve to manage how things would progress hardened.
 
Simone wasn't sure if she ever fell asleep, but figured she must have as the
next time she opened her eyes, it was to the gray light of predawn outside the
box window. Her hair was still damp and her naked body still wrapped in the
towel from the scalding shower she'd taken after lying on that small bed for
hours, staring up at nothing and trying not to think. Now in the pale light of
a different day, the previous night’s events lurked fresh in her mind and she
felt the rise of dread at what she will have to think and feel about it. For
now, fear overwhelmed any possibility of processing outside of that feeling.
She rolled stiffly out of the musty bed, the joints in her pelvis feeling oddly
and painfully separated as she limped down the hallway to the bathroom, the
green terrycloth clasped tightly over her shoulders against the morning chill.
When she flipped on the light, it took her several dazed seconds before her
eyes adjusted to the ghastly image of her reflection in the age-fogged mirror.
Dark smudges of fingerprints formed patterns on her neck and chest in yellow
and purple, her lips still swollen and dark, her skin a cast in a gray pallor
that only highlighted the dark circles under her glassy eyes. Locking the door,
she swallowed hesitantly before letting the towel drop and taking in further
proof of her sin. Her hips and the sides of her thighs were scored in dozens of
arching red lines, most of them inflamed and some beginning to scab where the
skin was broken. The sight of her body so abused makes her blood run cold, but
the memory of wanting this, of hoping for scars to wear as proof that her
father loves her, makes her tremble.
In a fit of energy, she rifled through the medicine cabinet above the toilet
until she pulled out a bottle half full of rubbing alcohol. Deciding that it's
not too ancient, she soaked a wad of toilet paper in it until it's dripping
then slapped it on the worst of her scars. Her hand gripped the counter and her
shoulders tensed into a shaking hunch as the burning pain flared from her hip,
but it was a real pain that she could control and the tears it brought made so
much more sense than the situation she found herself in.
Now that she was able to shed a few tears from the physical pain, the fear and
shame came rolling up from where she had buried them and she wept openly,
crouching low on the tile floor and curling herself tightly as her mouth opened
in a silent and shuddering sob.
 
When she padded out into the kitchen on slow and cautious bare feet, it was
closer to noon than morning but her mother was sitting at the table with the
remnants of breakfast still. Simone couldn't bring herself to look her in the
eye, opting to sit on the opposite side of the small table and busy herself
with eating an apple despite her lack of appetite.
“Leif told me you wanted to stay and help out,” her mother spoke, her voice
haggard and head leaned back in her obvious hang over. Simone froze at the
mention of her father having said anything about her to anyone. “Why you would
want to stay out in this haunted house in the middle of nowhere is beyond me.
You sure you don't want to come back home with me?”
With horror, she realized that she had indeed agreed to stay here alone with
him, but that had been before. She cleared her voice and began, “Um, actually,
mom, I uh-“
“Would love to stay in this haunted house,” her father's friendly baritone
interrupted. Simone flinched at the sound, wide eyes watching as he approached
the table with two mugs and a wide smile. She marveled at his appearance; he
didn't look any different than he had any other morning.
He set one mug down in front of his wife who waved him off with a grumpy, “I
told you, I don't want to eat any of your dead dad’s food. That's fucking
creepy.”
He shifted the mug to his daughter instead, who stared at the it like it was
the first time she'd ever seen coffee, and responded gamely, “Well, I'm sure
Simone is hungry enough to eat haunted food. Would you like some eggs, darling
girl?”
Simone's ears rang at the how Leif chose to address her; the same pet name he
had used for her last night. An echo of those same words whispered in her mind,
low and husky, and she held her breath in an unconscious effort to slow her
rising heart rate. Her eyes snapped up to see him looking directly at her, for
all appearances waiting for her reply but the way he held her gaze felt as
oppressive as a challenge or command.
“Yes, Papa…” she answered lamely, the words falling from her tongue.
His smile widened, seeming all too happy to see the girl folding under his
will. “Good girl.”
“You're in way too good of a mood. I'm leaving,” his wife groused, rising from
the table with great consideration to her pounding headache. She looked at her
daughter, who sat stiffly with a faraway look in her eye, and said, "Just
remember when you're bored out of your skull: I did offer to save you. I'll see
you in a week, sweetie.”
Simone could feel Leif staring at her, the weight of his gaze heavy with
expectation, but she kept her eyes focused on the mug in front of her as she
said, “Drive safe, mom.”
She listened to the sounds of her mother hugging her father goodbye, unable to
look as the older woman left the kitchen and left her alone with him. Her
throat tightened at the distant sound of the car starting and rolling out of
the long dirt driveway until only her frantic heartbeat and her father's
scraping around the stove remained. She flinched again when he placed a small
steaming plate of scrambled eggs in front of her and sat down next to her with
his own plate. The sight and smell of food made her nauseous, but he seemed to
harbor no such difficulty eating. In fact, she considered, he seemed to harbor
no difficulties at all. Simone tried to stop the tears from escaping, but each
frustrated swipe of her hands at her eyes only seemed to invite more of them to
trail down her face.
 
Leif watched her as he ate quickly. Those big tears wetting her cheeks reminded
him of how she had cried underneath him last night and, with a twist of guilt,
he felt his cock begin to fatten up when he heard her accompanying little
hiccups of staunched sobs and sniffles. He'd never known quite what to do with
himself when she cried, often just walked away until she finished or fetched
her mother for her, but now the impulse to soothe came so naturally as his
hands reached out and gently pulled her into a sideways embrace. To his
delight, she nuzzled her face against his chest and clung to him, her
acceptance of his touch encouraging him to pull her into his lap and wrap his
arms around her properly. Her crying redoubled and she curled against him, her
smaller body tucked under his chin and quaking from her sobbing.
“I… I'm so sorry,” she murmured wetly into his shirt. She sniffed again before
she went on, her voice small and muffled against his chest. “I ruined
everything, I'm such a fuck up. I'm so, so sorry.”
Leif stroked her back slowly, taking in this information and working out how
best to use his daughter’s apparent self-blame before placing a kiss atop her
head and softly saying, “What's done is done, pet. I’m sorry to say that
there's no going back, but I'll never be sorry for taking care of my little
girl. I want you to come to me when you're in need.”
She shuddered against him and he felt himself harden halfway, the material of
his black jeans restricting his cock irritatingly. She felt so good against
him, he didn't want her crying to stop. In the harsh light of day, without the
buildup of arousal to soften reality, he was surprised she was affecting him
this much and he became curious to see if he could coax a similar reaction from
her. His hands slid lower on her back, rubbing in slow circles that dipped down
to brush her tailbone and the top of her ass over the thin material of her
summer dress. After a few languid strokes, her sobbing died down and he pressed
on. His fingertips found the ridge of elastic of her panties and traced it,
noting how her breathing deepened and she became very still. He realized, with
a hesitant excitement, that she was waiting. His cock was now fully hard and
leaking precum into his underwear, but from its position against his leg he
figured it unlikely that she could detect it under her. His cock throbbed when
she drew in a sharp gasp as his fingers splayed over the tops of her hips, her
body tensing against him.
“Do they hurt?” he asked, his voice huskier now.
“What?” she choked out.
“From when… you asked me to hurt you,” he whispered. When she didn't respond,
he pressed his hands into her hips and she gripped his shirt in a tight fist.
When he spoke, he let his voice become stern and firm. “Stand up, Simone.”
Slowly, she slid off his lap and stood before him, tear-stained face hung low
and arms hung limply at her side. Embarrassed. Submissive. His cock ached.
“Show me. Lift your skirt.”
She winced, drawing back from him and saying, “I-I can't, Papa. Please!”
All gentleness gone from his tone, he commanded, “Simone, lift your skirt.”
She flinched, but grasped her skirt and hesitantly bunched the material at the
sides until, inch by inch, her thighs and then hips were exposed. He had to
control his breathing as he took in the dozens of angry red scratch marks, his
marks, marring her beautiful skin. He noticed that she kept her skirt hanging
low in front, keeping her crotch covered, and he took a long moment
deliberating before speaking.
“I said to lift your skirt,” he reminded her firmly. “I had meant all the way,
Simone.”
“No! No, I really can't,” she said, voice and hands shaking in panic. She hung
her head lower and whispered, “Please don't make me, Papa.”
“You can and you will, or I will do it for you,” he responded, his voice quiet
with warning.
Slowly, she lifted her skirt until only the bottom of her pale pink panties
were shown, but he could plainly see how they were darkened with damp and her
inner thighs glistened with the fluid that overflowed from her drenched cunt.
He couldn't look away, wishing to etch this picture into his mind forever of
her standing before him, mortified, baring his marks and her cunt soaking from
his touch. Silently, he slid down from his chair to his knees, his hands
gingerly gliding over her scratch marks while she watched seemingly too
terrified to move. He loved that prey instinct in her that made her freeze up.
She yelped adorably when he pressed his mouth gently to the side of her right
thigh, planting soft kisses to the abused flesh. He kissed upward and by the
time he reached the top of her hip, she was nearly panting and her legs were
shaking.
He looked up at her face, almost laughing at how she kept her eyes scrunched
closed, and moved to level his mouth to her cunt before whispering, “Let papa
take care of his darling girl.”
***** Chapter 3 *****
Simone shuddered when she felt his tongue slide up her inner thigh, the warm
muscle lapping up the wet skin in long strokes. She kept her eyes squeezed
shut, trying not to panic or react to the fact that her father was tasting her
for the second time, not sure how to react as her shame and confusion warred
with her arousal. A surprised grunt escaped her and she jerked at the feel of
his mouth pressing at the crotch of her panties but his hands were quick to
hold her steady. His large hands kneaded her plush ass while his face wedged
between her closed legs, trying to coax her open, and she began to pant in
gulping breaths at the way his stubble scraped deliciously at her sensitive
skin.
She was so ashamed of the way her body was responding, the way her pussy had
flooded when he'd pulled her into his lap, that she was sure something was deep
and fundamentally broken in her. She didn't want this, she assured herself even
as she parted her thighs for this, she didn't want to commit this sin.
She gasped when he pushed aside her panties and put his open mouth on her, his
tongue pressing on her clit and his pleased groan vibrating against her. She
peeked and saw him staring up at her, his gray gaze dark and intense, causing
her to close her eyes again from the inexplicable fear that spiked in her. Her
hand gripped the table hard in an attempt to keep standing in case her wobbling
knees gave out but his bruising grip on her ass was already mostly holding her
up.
“Papa!” she gasped when his teeth scraped lightly on her clitoral hood, the
contrasting pain and pleasure making her head toss back as the first ripples of
orgasm approached. The groan he made in response pushed her over the edge and
she bucked in his hands as she came, crying out in a thin high voice, “Oh god,
Papa, fuck, fuck, oh fuck!”
He growled into her cunt as he sucked hard while she came, making her keen from
the pain that only seemed to extend her orgasm. Her mind, having been
overwhelmed with shame and denial, was a clouded blur of muted thought as she
came down from her climax. Opening her eyes now, she looked down at him and saw
that he was still watching her, his mouth and chin coated in her fluid and
expression conveying only hunger and awe.
“You're so perfect,” he spoke softly, sliding his hands up her body as he rose
to his feet. She leaned against the table, dazed and exhausted and immensely
aroused as she tilted her head back to look at his face. They stayed like that
for a long silent moment, her mind still buzzing in the afterglow that kept her
worry and shame at bay, something warm growing in her chest as she stared into
his eyes. His hands slid up her back slowly to cup the back of her neck, his
head ducking down toward her face as he whispered in a languid singsong tone,
“My sweet little Simone…”
The warmth in her chest seemed to bloom when his lips pressed into hers, the
rich appreciative hum from his throat making her eyelids flutter shut and
return his kiss. She found herself wanting to lean into this moment, forget
about the wickedness and violation of her moral center and cling only to the
way his attention made her feel so thoroughly wanted and special. As he tilted
her further back against the table and slipped his tongue into her mouth, she
shivered and forced her mind to be blank, existing only in the haze of arousal
he stoked within her.
Never in her life had she had a lover that inspired such uncontrollable lust as
he had in the past 18 hours. She could no longer blame the psilocybin tea she
had drunken hours before their encounter last night. For whatever reason, he
could cause her body to betray her own will, dragging out an animalistic urge
to pleasure and be pleasured. Her mind started to wonder at this, at how she
could be that sick, so she pushed all thought aside and wrapped her arms around
her father to caress his back as she deepened the kiss.
This earned another appreciative hum from him, the rich sound of his approval
tingling in her ears. She rose to stand on her tiptoes, leaning heavily against
his body when she felt the hardened length of him between them. Her hand slid,
slow with hesitation, to the front of him and down to press lightly on the
bulge down the leg of his jeans. He sighed through his nose, breathing hard and
not breaking the kiss as she traced it. When she felt him throb under her palm,
she rode the impulse to unbutton his pants.
Still locked in their kiss, he helped her undo his pants and pull them down
just enough to free his cock. She finally broke their kiss to look down at him,
the hot and smooth column heavy and thick in her hand. Her ragged breathing
stuttered at the size of him, easily the largest she'd had yet, and she
recalled with a wince how her pelvis had ached from the rough pounding he'd
given her. A clear drop of precum drooled from his tip and she pumped him in
her grip until she watched, mesmerized, as it dribbled down the underside of
him and over her knuckles.
She could feel him watching her and she wanted very badly to make him happy, to
earn his approval, so she leaned down and lapped up that dribble of precum with
a long swipe of her tongue. She felt him throb in her fist and heard his deep
inhalation as she fit him into her mouth, swirling her tongue around the head
before sliding him further in. He tasted clean and earthy, the saltiness of him
pleasant on her tongue. Being thicker than she was accustomed, she stopped when
he hit the back of her throat and used her hand to follow her motions as she
slid him out of her mouth. She heard him sigh raggedly above her as she gave
him a couple pumps with her hand alone, getting him slick with her spit, and
then slid him back in between her lips.
His fingers wove into her hair tightly, giving little tugs that sent tingles up
her spine as she bobbed her head and hand to a steady rhythm. His sighs and
grunts above her filled her with an addictive desire to hear more, pushing him
into her throat until tears pricked at the corners of her eyes. She pulled down
his jeans further with her free hand and gently cupped his balls, feeling them
tense with the frequent throb of his cock and accompanying groan from his
parted mouth when she sucked him just right.
Usually she performed oral sex as a favor to her lover but in this instance she
found herself actively enjoying the act to the point she found herself moaning
softly around his cock, earning her rougher tugs on her hair and the sound of
him muttering something that was half sighs and half curses in another
language. The texture and heat of his dick gliding over her tongue felt
gratifying, but the way his breath hitched whenever she rubbed the underside of
his head felt powerful.
She lost track of how long she'd been sucking his dick, but eventually his grip
in her hair tightened and his muttering devolved into rapid panting, his balls
tensing and dick twitching. She moaned around him, readying herself for his
ejaculate, and he groaned loudly as he pushed her head down on him and came in
the back of her throat. She willed herself to relax and not cough at the salty
fluid spurting down her esophagus, swallowing harshly to avoid accidental
asphyxiation of his semen. Knowing that she brought this reaction out of him
brought a fresh wave of euphoria that left her head swimming.
His fingers detangled from her hair and she looked up at him, his softening
dick sliding out of her mouth with a string of saliva that clung to her swollen
lips. They were both trying to catch their breath, the only sound in the
kitchen was their panting as they stared at one another. She observed his
satisfied, exhausted expression and distantly thought on how she'd always
admired his angular features, but now saw his handsomeness as always having
been sexually appealing to her as well. The stray thought led her back to
thinking on just how sick this all was and she withered away from his eye
contact, his semen suddenly sitting like lead in her belly. His hand gently
cupped her chin and tipped her face back up to look at him, his thumb running
over her plump lower lip. She glanced up at him, seeing his grin and a strange
darkness in his eyes that resurrected that inexplicable fear in her gut.
He chuckled at her frightened stare, a low rumbling sound in his chest that
made her cunt clench, and released her chin as he walked back to the stove.
Confused at his abrupt change in demeanor, she licked her lips, surprised by
the blood she tasted there.
***** Chapter 4 *****
Chapter Summary
     This is where the story begins to get dark. Content warning for rape.
Simone spent the afternoon trying to ignore the tremor in her hands, telling
herself that it was from a lack of food rather than the maelstrom of thoughts
and emotions she willed herself to push down as she kept busy. She washed the
bedding in the little room, the ancient washing machine remarkably
straightforward in a way she distrusted, and dusted all around the large old
house while carefully avoiding her father. The way he had suddenly behaved as
though they hadn't just had each other's genitals in their mouths unsettled
her. She couldn't handle her own confusion over what to think of their recent
experiences, let alone guess at what he thought of them, so she shoved it all
as far down as she could. She was taking a dampened rag to a sticky stain on
the dining room mantle when she heard the faint sound of her phone chiming.
Dropping the rag, she ran into the little bedroom in the back, scooping her
cell up and answering without even checking the caller.
“Hello?”
“Hey, Sibone! How's the fuck is Vermont?”
Where she would usually be aggravated at the unfortunate nickname, she was too
relieved to hear anyone else's voice.
“Ryan! Thank god, a real live human at last!” she exclaimed, masking her relief
with sarcasm and sitting heavily on the fresh sheets. “I've been stuck in this
haunted-ass house for three days and I think I'm cracking. Is there even
anything left in the world but trees?”
“Hopefully not after the fucking apocalypse wipes us out,” her friend's voice
crackled through the speaker, the less than desirable connection making him
sound distant and tinny. “I thought you were coming back today? What happened,
is there a big corn shuckin’ down at the barn tonight?”
“I thought I was, but Papa- uh, my dad wanted me to stay,” she winced at her
slip up, continuing to talk in hope that Ryan didn't hear it, “Help with
getting this place together for my grandfather’s funeral. Probably gonna sell
it. This house is huge! It has a parlor. I don't even know what you do in a
parlor.”
“You court bitches in em, Bones,” he said. “You tell Papa that you're needed in
Brooklyn. I've got like twenty cannapsules and everyone's out of fucking town
this week. How dare you leave me to get high on my own supply while you go
enjoy wholesome family bonding time in fucking Vermont.”
“You're more than welcome to come save me,” she hated how hopeful she sounded,
hated even more when her friend cackled as though she were joking.
“Fuck you, I'm not gonna get stuck in some backwoods Deliverance town,” he
laughed. “Hey, let me know when you make it back. Don't go all Amish on me now.
I need someone who's willing to do shrooms with me here.”
Her stomach twisted at the thought of being under that particular drug’s
influence ever again. “Uh, sure, Ry. So, um, what's going on over in
civilization?”
“Couldn't tell ya, nothing but fucked up savages here. I gotta be out, so I'll
fuck with ya later, Bones.”
“Oh…” her voice cracked in disappointment and she winced again, wondering if
she'd always been this obvious, “Call me back whenever, it's dead out here.”
“Hasta luego, fucker.”
The line cut off and she stared at her phone, thankful to have gotten out of
her head for a moment. It was so refreshing to be reminded of her life outside
of being a slave to overpoweringly sexual impulses for her own flesh and blood
father, even if that life was one of an art college dropout with druggie
friends. With a sigh, she dropped her phone at the foot of the bed and stood
up, ready to get back to her nervous cleaning when she froze upon seeing her
father's tall frame looming in the doorway. The cold expression hardened Leif’s
features into something predatory and she instinctively cowered back a step
from him.
“You shouldn't be so careless where other people can hear your conversations,
Simone,” he said, his level tone belying the anger behind his veil of calm. He
stepped into the room, keeping his stare on her even as he plucked her phone
off the bed and pocketed it. “I don't think you'll be talking to anyone, at
least until I decide what to do about your apparent recreational activities.”
Simone flinched, a burst of anger igniting her to respond. “You can't ground me
like a child, Dad. I'm god damned 20 years old and I can make my own choices,
regardless of you or mom's opinion.”
“Not anymore, you can't,” he muttered. She watched in mounting terror as he
rolled up his shirtsleeves, revealing the thickly chorded muscles and dark
blonde hair of his forearms. More than anything, a morbid curiosity kept her
rooted to her spot and abated any demands that he explain his plans or stop,
having never encountered him as the disciplinarian before. That role, along
with any other parental duty beyond ensuring her basic survival, had always
fallen on her mother who relied on stern talks and revoking privileges to tame
any transgressions out of the girl. The scratch marks at the sides of her hips
and thighs ached as she considered what he had been willing to do to her when
he wasn't even upset, but seeing the cold anger turn his glare to steel had her
mouth run dry in fearful anticipation. He sat on the edge of the bed and his
voice was hard gravel when he ordered, “Come here and lay down on my lap.”
Her eyebrows shot up in realization of what was to be her punishment. “You're
going to spank me?”
“I'll do worse than that if you disobey me, girl,” he ground out. The threat in
his deep voice was palpable, snapping her into the moment and she wrung her
hands nervously as she approached. He kept his stare on her and she found that
she couldn't bring herself to look him in the face, instead focusing on his
dusting of chest hair visible from the top two buttons of his shirt having been
undone while he had been working. The sight made her realize that none of her
previous lovers had had very much body hair and shame dampened her fear at how
immediately she'd categorized him as a lover. With that shame refreshed in her
mind, she found it much easier to accept punishment and bent over his lap in
deep embarrassment. His hands roughly fixed her position, laying her so her
chest and pelvis were on his legs and giving her less mobility.
Heat bloomed in both her face and her crotch at being touched by him even under
this circumstance, the humiliation of being ordered into such a vulnerable
stance making her cunt begin to drool much to her confusion. She was thankful
he couldn't see how she bit her lip when he pulled her skirt up, hoped he
thought her sigh when he yanked her panties down was from it roughly rubbing at
her scratches. The air was cold against her pussy, making her worried at just
how wet she could have gotten in such a short amount of time, but the loud clap
and excruciating sting of his open palm striking her ass immediately derailed
all thought.
“Oh fuck!” she yelped, immediately trying to launch herself off his lap, but
his hand pinned her back down and held her squirming on him. She'd had lovers
spank her before, but this was nothing like those slaps that only gave a brief
sting and a little pink to her backside. Here, she had to pant with the effort
it took to calm herself and wait for the pain to subside.
He leaned over to her ear and in that hard gravelly voice whispered, “That was
one. If you're good, I will only administer fourteen more. For your sake, I
recommend you be good for me, my Simone. Now, count them out to me and don't
try to get away.”
Stars danced in front of her eyes when he delivered a bruising slap to her
other asscheek, her every muscle tensing with the pain that radiated from
there. She couldn't even think of disobeying him now and she squeaked out in a
tight voice, “Two!”
The next slap landed right on where the first had been planted and she jerked
and let out a disjointed cry, “Hyuhn! Three!”
Tears were flowing freely down her face and her body barely had time to be
wracked by her first sob before his hand came down again, the crack booming in
the small room and she didn't try to restrain her short scream before gasping
out, “Four!”
She was curled over his legs now, whole body trembling, not caring how pathetic
she looked or sounded as she began to sob. He didn't let up the force of his
blow at all when the next strike came, making her grab the edge of the bed in a
white knuckle grip as she forced out the word, “Five!”
“Do you like to fuck your little friends when you're fucked up?” he asked, his
tone conversational as though they were discussing the weather. Bewildered at
the contrast between his tone and topic, she tried to turn her head to look at
him but was interrupted by him bringing his hand down again.
She yelped, jerking hard, and shuddered violently before sobbing out, “Si-ix…”
“Is that what they taught you in art school? How to do shrooms and suck dick?
Maybe I should send them a donation for how talented your little mouth turned
out though,” he said. She was momentarily shocked to hear such filthy and
accusatory words from her normally reserved and respectable father, but wasn't
given time to dwell on them or her bewilderment at how he knew about the drugs
before her vision blacked out for a second at the next crack of his palm.
“Ha-AH! S-seven!”
“You must have made a lot of friends judging by how greedily you gulped down my
cum this morning,” he mused. “How many cocks have you sucked, darling girl?”
Her legs kicked out from under her in a spasm when his hand cracked against the
middle of her ass, her cry a broken grunt that was barely human. “Eight!”
He chuckled. “No, I think a lot more than that.”
His next hit came sooner than she expected and she screamed, gasping for breath
until she managed to utter a hoarse, “Nine!”
She flinched when she felt him roughly palm her cunt, his voice sharp with
disgust when he said, “God, you little minx, you're practically dripping from
this. How many greedy little punks have made you call them ‘master’?”
“Wh-what?” she slurred confusedly, but was answered with another strike, this
one somehow more painful than the rest and her mouth hang open in a silent
scream. It was several seconds before she broke down with a sob, her body going
slack across his lap as she cried, “Ten! Please, Papa, please no more! I'm
sorry, so sorry, I can't take it!”
“Why shouldn't I continue? I promised you fifteen,” he said, and she could hear
the cruel amusement in his deep voice. His hand caressed her tender backside,
making her shudder from the pain of just his light touch.
“I'll be good, Papa,” she begged, sniffing wetly, “I won't ever do any drugs
again, I won't even talk to Ryan, just please, please stop!”
His fingers drummed on her ass teasingly as he sighed and said, “That's not
good enough, my sweet Simone. What else can you offer me?”
Her panicked mind raced, her panting breaths becoming rapid until he trailed
his nails up and down the back of her thigh. Her stomach turned when she
guessed at what he wanted, both hoping and dreading that she'd be correct.
Her voice hesitant and quiet, she said, “I'll be yours.”
Another chuckle from him, then she felt him lean over her to whisper in her
ear, “Oh, my darling girl, you already are.”
She flinched when he hauled her around by her middle, a flurry of motion that
ended with her on her belly on the bed, half of her body hanging off limply.
Her mind was a blur of prayers for the spanking to be over, her arms locked and
shaking over her head protectively when she felt him propping up her lower half
to stand, ass raised in the air. A sharp gasp escaped her when she felt him
grip low where her ass met her thigh, her fear paralyzing her from reacting to
her revulsion and humiliation when he spread her pussy. She wanted so
desperately for this all to be over so she can hide somewhere and cry, but when
she heard the sound of his zipper coming down, an entirely new terror gripped
her.
She started to turn her body and ask “Papa? What are you-” but yelped when he
gripped her hair in a tight fist and pushed her head down onto the bed.
He grabbed her asscheek with his other hand, the pressure on her tenderized
flesh making her gasp in pain, and said, “I had recommended that you be good
during your punishment, Simone, now don't make me remind you again. Do you
understand?”
“Y-y-yes, Papa!” she stammered, pain and panic making her voice shrill. When he
let go of her, her scalp tingled from the abuse. Every instinct in her told her
to submit and be still to this aggressive man, her fight or flight response
giving way to the third option: freeze. Be good, she told herself, and survive.
Her eyes screwed shut and teeth gritted against the fearful anticipation of
pain, she stayed as still as her shivering form allowed.
Behind her, he hummed approvingly, the sound of moving cloth told her he was
pulling his jeans off. Her knees had begun to shake at the sounds, her leg
muscles burned in tension as she feared her joints might fail and earn his
wrath, but there was only silence behind her for several agonizing minutes.
Then a smooth, hot hardness slid against the outside of her cunt, slick from
the wetness there she couldn't explain, and his hands came to rest on her hips
as he sawed his cock between her labia all the way up into the cleft of her
ass. She shivered at the contact, hesitant to react as she feared he would
bring her pain at any moment, and waited as he continued to grind against her.
“God, you're fucking soaking,” he groaned, pushing the underside of his cock
against her pussy, the pressure pleasurable to her even despite the horrible
circumstances. The strange disconnection she felt between her mind and body
shocked her as her cunt clenched in response to this stimulation while her mind
spun in fear and confusion. That sick, sad feeling welled up inside her even as
she felt herself grow wetter against him.
“Papa…” she whimpered, her voice cracking and hoarse from her crying. “Papa, I
don't feel okay with this.”
“Too late for that,” he responded. He started to move her hips and grunted at
the slide of their flesh with this increased pace, the wet sounds from her cunt
and the creaks of the bed springs louder now. She squeezed her eyes shut tight
against another wave of pleasure, a small mewl working out of her that he
answered with a low and raspy, “Ahh, there we are, now. Let papa take care of
his darling girl.”
One of his hands left her hip to reach between them and she felt the tip of his
penis press against her pussy, the broad head spreading her open and she gasped
at how she pulsed at the contact. Her cunt ached in anticipation of being fed
that cock, her lust at odds with how terrified she was and she regretted not
just running from him when she was still out of reach. She knew that she was in
pain, that she didn't want this, that she had voiced her objection and went
ignored, so the urge to push back on his dick and fuck herself on it bewildered
her. Before she had time to gather her thoughts, her mind blanked out at the
stretch of him pushing into her and she cried out in a strangled groan. She was
still tender from the previous night, making this penetration more painful but
not as painful as the aching sorrow expanding in her chest at her own
helplessness.
“Daddy… please, please stop this…” she said in a small voice, muffled from how
she pressed her face into the bed. She winced when she felt him hilt fully in
her, his body pressing into the abused flesh of her ass. She shuddered at the
overstuffed feeling pushing inside her with the difference in their size, the
drag of his cock rearing back pulling at her inner walls with shocks of
pleasure that had her panting once more.
“Hnngh, that's a good girl,” he groaned. She gasped sharply when he reached
under her and pressed his fingers to her clit, the contact making the pleasure
of him thrusting back in overtaking her. As he fucked her from behind, his
fingers rubbed at her clit with consistent circular motions and soon her mind
was foggy and all physical and emotional pain blurred together with lust.
“Please, Daddy, oh please… please…” she breathed, no longer sure what she had
been asking for but the words bubbled out between her desperate breaths. The
way he fucked her deep between her spread legs, the dutiful attention to her
clit, and the knowledge that she was pleasing her father was enough to begin a
slow ascent toward orgasm for her. He rocked into her at a steady pace, his
cock twitching and his gravelly grunts the only response she could detect as
her cunt clenched around him with her approaching orgasm. Sweat beaded on her
forehead from the extended, slow fuck but she didn't try to increase the speed,
the tempo lulling her into an ecstatic trance.
When at last she began to cum, her moans heightened in pitch until she was
nearly wailing when she finally climaxed. He kept the same rhythmic pattern on
her clit as she rode out her orgasm, her cunt spasming around his cock, even as
he growled and pushed into her in a forceful final thrust as he joined her in
release. She keened when she felt his cock throb and fill her with his hot
semen, the feeling stirring a satisfaction she was finding to be unique to the
moments when he had cum. A foggy, nonsensical notion of becoming addicted to
having his cum inside her thrilled a primal part of her before all thought
vanished from her mind once more when she felt him lean over her and place his
open mouth on her neck. She sighed as he sucked the sensitive spot between the
side of her neck and shoulder, his cock still buried in her sloppy cunt.
“You'll always be mine,” his whisper, so close that she felt his hot breath
ghost over her ear, was soft and loving but his words resurrected a glimmer of
the fear she had all but forgotten in her lust, “because I'm never going to let
you go.”
Her eyes reopened as that fear spread, forming a tight pit in her chest. “Dad…”
she whimpered, her voice barely audible.
“You,” he continued, making her squeak when he bucked his half hard cock up
inside of her and pressed his fingers against her clit, “are exactly where you
should be. Do you understand, darling girl?”
She swallowed around the knot in her fear before whispering, “Yes.”
“Good,” he said, straightening up and pulling out of her, the drag of his cock
giving her one last shudder of pleasure. Slowly, mindful of the many ways she
ached, she rose from her kowtowed position and smoothed her dress back down.
Her hands and legs were still trembling, her shoulders hunched close as she
kept her arms wrapped protectively around her body, and she hid her face from
him as she felt their fluids begin to dribble out of her cunt. She stood still
facing the bed, feeling his eyes on her in that strange way he always seemed to
watch her when she wasn't looking, that feeling at once familiar and dangerous
to her now.
“I…” she started to say, but then the words were lost behind that choking knot
in her throat. She considered crying but didn't feel the tears come, just a
deep hollowness beyond the fear and confusion now. She nearly jerked back when
she felt his hands on her shoulders, turning her to face him, and he tucked her
into a hug. She held her breath in terrified anticipation until she felt him
gently press her head to rest on his chest, that hand petting her hair
soothingly.
“It's normal for you to be unsure of how to think right now, Simone,” he said,
his warm tone abating her fear that he would bring her more pain in this
moment. She let herself relax into the hug, her tension rapidly relenting to
the comfort of this compassionate affection. “Don't worry about that. I only
want what you want, so just trust me and we'll both be happier for it. I had to
do this for your own good, you must understand that. I love you too much.”
“I love you too, Papa,” she said. She felt so tired, she just wanted to sleep
now, but his arms and soft words were so nice. Even though the fear was still
there, she didn't feel as hurt now and her confusion seemed unimportant. She
leaned more against him and he placed a chaste kiss atop her head.
“Don't make me hurt you like that again, dearest,” he said. She only nodded,
closing her eyes and nuzzling against his chest.
***** Chapter 5 *****
Chapter Summary
     Content warning for referenced underage.
Leif looked in the pantry, sighing at the arrangement of canned sardines,
saltines and other mundane fare he had found his father had been reduced to
subsisting on in his final days. He ran a hand through his graying hair,
considered his options and, deciding he didn't like any of them, went to the
little room in the back of the house. The late spring sunset poured in through
the western window, painting his lovely daughter's sleeping form in golds and
oranges as she laid atop the bedding on her belly, no doubt to be her sleeping
position for the next few days.
His heart swelled in pride as he thought back to the previous day and how well
she had taken her punishment, how quickly she had adapted to submit under his
influence. She was breaking beautifully, almost as though she had wanted this
for herself all along. He stepped closer to her, feet silent on the old carpet
of his childhood bedroom, and observed the peace of her sleeping face. She'd
hidden in this room since yesterday, apparently reading through one of the
books she'd brought with her since he had yet to reinstate her phone
privileges. He considered perhaps letting her rest, but thought better than
leaving her alone here quite yet.
“Simone,” he said, brushing her hair behind her ear with a gentle touch. When
she didn't stir, he smiled in amusement and tangled her soft hair in his
fingers, admiring her dark swoop of eyelashes that surely didn't come from his
Scandinavian blond-haired genetics. Yet there is much of my genetic material
inside you, he thought with a chuckle. Her brow furrowed at the noise and he
watched as her gray eyes fluttered open blearily, looking at him blankly for a
moment before recognition hit and alarm made her lift her head abruptly.
“Papa! What- uh, what- what is it?” she stammered, nervousness rolling off her
in waves. He had to stifle his smile at how easily she scared; truly, his
groundwork was already mostly laid by virtue of her very nature before he had
ever even touched her.
“We are going into town for groceries,” he answered her, straightening his back
from his crouched position. “Five minutes. Get moving.”
“But I could just-”
“Five minutes, Simone,” he interrupted sternly, walking out of the room. He
allowed his smile to spread when he heard her shuffle around behind him and
then pad off into the bathroom. Still smiling, he walked upstairs to the
bedroom he'd decided to sleep in, the one that he had occupied during his
adolescence when he'd outgrown the small room downstairs. The room still had
the trappings of his teenage years; various sports and academic awards, group
photos of faces mostly forgotten, shelves lined with academic textbooks, the
odd personal item that he'd left behind. On the full sized bed was his duffle
bag, nearly emptied as he'd hung most of his clothes in the closet already, but
he pulled out a small silver pill box from under his folded socks and pocketed
it.
Facing the floor mirror propped up in a corner, he buttoned his shirt and
tucked it into his black jeans, grabbed a vest from the closet and put it on,
ran his hands through his hair, and inspected his profile before sitting on the
bed and pulling on his tan suede oxford shoes. He shoved his wallet into his
back pocket and headed back downstairs, happy to find his daughter already
waiting for him at the foot of it. She looked a bit worse for wear with dark
circles under her troubled eyes and her wavy brown hair unruly from sweat, but
she'd changed out of her rumpled dress and into a loose rose sweater that did
nicely to bring out the pink in her cheeks, a flowing patterned skirt, and tan
sandals. Not the style he planned to start dressing her in, but not unpleasant.
He watched her face as he approached her, noting how she watched him until he
drew closer, dropping her gaze to her feet in a move that would have seemed
demure if not for her obvious trepidation around him. He placed his hand
deliberately on the small of her back, pleased to see his effect on her by the
way her throat bobbed with a nervous swallow and her eyes blinked more rapidly.
Walking together, he scooped up the keys from the accent table in the entryway
and locked the door behind them as they stepped out onto the porch. When he
opened the door to his late father's truck for her, she hesitated before
stepping in and very gingerly contorting her body to sit on her hip, her cheeks
blushing in embarrassment all the while. He kept the smirk off his face with
some effort.
The old truck rumbled to life and they rolled down the dirt driveway to the
road, every bump making her wince until he said, “Simone, why don't you lay on
your side and put your head on my lap.”
“Oh, no, that's ok, I-”
“Do it,” he interrupted. From his peripheral, he watched her twist in the seat
and carefully lay down across it, stiffly placing her head atop his thigh.
While she was no longer wincing every other second, she was noticeably
uncomfortable and yet did not speak on it or move away. He rewarded her
obedience by gently placing his hand on the side of her head, his thumb slowly
tracing her cheekbone. He felt her relax against him then, her responsiveness
to his affection warming his heart dangerously. He sighed at this, not liking
the lack of emotional control she inspired in him. He had dispelled the myth of
any typical fatherly instincts in himself long ago, so this new trend of
emotional impulses she'd been causing in him was troubling. It risked his
method and made him soft, maybe too soft to go through conditioning her as
necessary.
His negative train of thought was derailed when she nuzzled against his leg,
moving her head to lay more properly in his lap. That urge to be loving and
kind toward her seemed less threatening now, and even though he'd used it as a
tool, he couldn't deny that it came from a place of sincerity. However, he also
couldn't deny that his cruelty had come from a place of sincerity too. His cock
twitched at the fresh memory of her bent over, her raised ass welted red and
bruised, her voice wet from crying as she begged him to stop. His fingers
carded through her hair, massaging her scalp, and she made a sweet little sound
of appreciation. He looked down at her and, seeing her eyes serenely shut,
allowed himself a moment of victory at how thoroughly he'd already possessed
her. He supposed he could afford to indulge wastefully in his softer urges.
It didn't take more than twenty minutes to reach the town, but the sky was
darkening rapidly by the time the truck pulled into the little shopping center.
Leif took a moment to survey the area, noting the many new buildings and
remodels to the once quite empty main street of the town he'd grown up near. It
had expanded considerably even compared to the last time he came to visit his
father six years prior. This evidence of passed time made him restless. Not
waiting for Simone as she cautiously slid out of the truck, he fetched a cart
and entered the grocery store.
As he quickly made his way through the brightly lit store, acquiring the
various staples and spices the pantry had lacked, he couldn't keep his mind off
the last trip he'd made to his father's house. He had been distracted by his
career the entire time, barely taking the time to mind his wife and child or
really reconnect with his father. He recalled it was actually around that time
that he began to notice his little Simone despite her braces, bushy hair and
late-blooming pubescent awkwardness. As he compared the cuts of pork in the
butcher section, he was surprised to remember the initial moment that had sown
the seeds of this forbidden attraction to his only progeny.
It was in fact during that past trip in the thick humidity of summer. He had
been drinking a beer and working on his laptop in the kitchen when Simone had
come bounding through the back door there, grabbing a popcicle from the
freezer. She was wearing a loose tank top and, not yet seeing the point of a
bra for her small bust, nothing underneath. She was also dripping wet from
running through the sprinklers out on the lawn and her top clung to her like it
was shrink wrapped on. His eyes had immediately attached to the gentle curves
of her growing breasts, the clear outline of her hardened little nipples, and
the slope of her defined waist before traveling up to see her looking right at
him.
He was going to dismiss the moment as having been an accidental curiosity, just
a casual observance of the changes in his child’s body, but the way she was
watching him watch her struck a new chord in him. She had been waiting to see
what he would do and in response he had wanted to do something. Time had seemed
to slow in that moment. A drop of water had crawled down her neck until it
disappeared into the low collar of her top. He had licked his lips
unconsciously as his eyes followed it, wanting to trail its path with his
tongue on her smooth skin. He saw her eyes draw to his mouth, that waiting look
changing to one of wanting, and his cock had fattened up just from her
reaction. He could almost feel a physical switch turn in his brain when he
considered what having her might mean, the full implications of potentially
ruining her emotional and psychological wellbeing forever versus molding her
malleable young mind to suit the sexual cravings he had for so long ignored.
When he had seen her little pink tongue slowly swipe the tip of her frozen
treat without breaking her heated gaze from him, he was already formulating a
method in how to transform her into his. Just as he was about to tell her to
come to him, his wife's voice had carried from the backyard to call for Simone
and the spell was broken. The girl had bounded away as suddenly as she had
come, leaving him with a hard cock and heavy guilt. That guilt hadn't prevented
him from jacking off that night while imagining her crying and bleeding beneath
him though, nor did it prevent the myriad of little touches and calculated
manipulations he'd begun to work into their dynamic for years after that. And
now he was finally getting started on the life he had wanted for so long.
With the cart stacked to nearly overflowing, he looked around for the subject
of his thoughts, snapping out of his wistful mood upon seeing her talking with
some gangly bag boy who had her cornered against the front windows. Despite his
immediate desire to snatch her away from this interloper, he hung back,
observing her interaction with the boy. Her body language was closed, arms
folded and body not facing him, eyes distracted by her surroundings, her
responses all short and half shrugs. The boy carried on idiotically unaware of
her obvious discomfort, all too eager to engage the attractive young woman in a
one-sided conversation. When she spotted Leif, her entire demeanor transformed.
Her back straightened and her body faced her father, ready to go to him should
he beckon. Instead, he walked to her, the younger man backing off sheepishly
when he put an arm around her waist and kissed her forehead affectionately.
“Making friends, princess?” he asked, not bothering to hide the blatant glare
he threw to the boy even though his tone was friendly.
“Are we ready to go?” she asked instead, leaning into him.
“We just have to pay and then we'll be home in time to prepare a late supper,”
he answered warmly, leading her away from the lad. He was aware that boy was
watching as Leif squeezed her tender hip in a reckless display of
possessiveness, but his jealousy over her was stronger than his logic in that
moment and he gloated at the breathy little gasp she emitted.
 
When at last the final bag was brought into the kitchen, Simone asked her
father, “Why are we buying so much food if we're going back home in a week?”
He didn't look at her as he reached into the pantry shelves, throwing out
expired canned goods and opened cracker boxes to make room for their purchases,
responding with a simple, “We are home, Simone. We're not going back to
Brooklyn.”
She was silent for several minutes, until he heard her ask with a voice full of
hesitant anger, “What do you mean we're not going back to Brooklyn?”
He smiled at her ire, glad she couldn't see his face in that moment before he
wiped all expression and said in a level tone as he continued to organize the
shelves, “Your mother and I discussed it and we decided it would be best if you
stayed with me here.”
“With you? Mom's not going to be here?”
He sighed, having been anticipating this conversation under more favorable
circumstances, but responded, “Your mother and I finalized our divorce while
you were away at school. We had planned on waiting until after your graduation
to tell you, but well... When we picked you up and saw the condition you were
in, we decided to delay our separation. Then, my father passed and as I am to
inherit this property, it seemed the best opportunity for all of us.”
Behind him, he heard her back hit the wall and slide down to the floor. He
chanced a glance at her, saw her clutching her head in her hands, and he
continued his task.
“And just what was I doing while you and mom were doing all this deciding?” she
asked bitterly.
“You're still unstable, dearest,” he answered. “That's why we decided that you
would be staying here in Vermont with me. Getting away from all the influences
in the city would benefit your mind greatly.”
“How is…” she stammered, then nearly yelled, “How is any of this going to
benefit my mind?”
“Simone,” he said, injecting stern warning into his tone as he straightened his
back. He fished out the little silver pillbox from his pocket.
“Is getting fucked by my father supposed to make me any less insane?” she
yelled, then barked out a mirthless laugh. “God, it's no wonder I'm ‘unstable’;
I probably got it from you!”
He frowned at how she was behaving, at how that stubborn streak of
rebelliousness in her refused to allow her to fully realize her role. He had,
however, anticipated some resistance and had prepared for it to occur
especially after the previous day’s severity. He approached her as she spoke
and loomed over her with her hunched form under his shadow from the overhead
light. He pinched the blue tablet between his thumb and forefinger as he said
in a low and dangerous voice, “You’re being hysterical. We're just trying to
help you, Simone. I think you need a dose to calm down.”
“No, no I don't!” she hissed, balling herself tighter. “What do you think is
going to happen? I'm just going to let you fuck me whenever you feel like it?
I'm not your fucking sex slave! I’m-”
She yelped when he dragged her up by her hair, her hands grasping onto his arm
to try and lessen his pull, and he slammed her back to the wall with his body.
She screamed as he pinned her there and he grabbed her chin, forcing her mouth
open and shoving the tablet against her tongue. He covered her mouth and nose
while she writhed, trying to dislodge his hand, but her need for air forced her
throat to spasm until she swallowed the pill. He had done this with practiced
ease; she was never a match against his size and strength even in the worst of
her hysterics, but it was a relief to not have to fake regret since his wife
wasn't around to watch. He let her face go and she caught her breath in gasping
coughs, her small form shaking against him. After a few minutes, she laid her
head on his chest and sobbed, so he wrapped his arms around her in a full
embrace and moved her away from the wall. He patted her back and hushed her,
feeling her body begin to relax and eventually go limp.
“I'm sorry, Daddy…” she slurred. “I didn't mean it. Please don't hate me…”
“It's all right, dearest, you can't help it,” he said softly. “I told you that
I'm never going to let you go. That was a promise. I will always take care of
you.”
She weakly wrapped her arms around his neck, having to stand on unsteady
tiptoes to do so, and looked up at him with sleepy wet eyes that made his cock
stir as she whispered, “I love you, Papa.”
“And I love you, my darling girl,” he whispered back, leaning down to press
their lips together. She tilted her head and kissed him more purposefully,
making a soft purring moan in her throat when he obliged. Her hands began to
slip from his shoulders and her head fell back, the fast-acting sedative
finally overtaking her. He gathered her unconscious body in his arms and
carried her upstairs.
***** Chapter 6 *****
Chapter Summary
     Content warning for rape, choking.
The first thing Simone became aware of was the warmth pressing against her
back. The second thing she became aware of was the urgent pressure of her full
bladder, which accelerated her waking process and had her sitting up before she
was fully conscious. Swinging her legs over the edge of the bed, her bleary
eyes frowned at the unfamiliar surroundings. This wasn't the small room she'd
fallen asleep in. She rubbed her eyes, stumbling into the hallway on rubbery
legs as the floor seemed to shift beneath her feet. Recognizing that she was
somehow upstairs, she trudged to the bathroom and tried to pull down her
panties only to find that she wasn't wearing any when her hands grabbed at her
sides. After alleviating her bladder and drinking deeply from the sink faucet,
she rinsed the bitterness from her mouth with the mouthwash on the counter, the
sting of it waking her up further but her mind was just as foggy. There was
something wrong or something she had forgotten, but she couldn't think of what
it was. Not wanting to risk stairs with how woozy she still felt, she leaned
heavily on the wall as she made it back to the room she'd awoken in. When she
saw her father's sleeping form on the bed she'd just risen from, she stood
blinking in the doorway for several minutes as she tried to make sense of it.
Why did her father get into the bed while she was in the bathroom?
Slowly, she realized that they had shared the bed last night. She looked down
at her body, seeing that she was wearing a men's dress shirt that hung down to
her thighs, and her brow furrowed at how strange this all was. Then it came
back to her. The shrooms, the kiss, the sex, his cock in her mouth, in her
vagina, the pain, the fear, all of it hitting her at once and she stumbled away
from the room. Her back hit the wall and she remembered him pinning her last
night, his face so frightfully devoid of anger or compassion or any reaction as
he forced the pill into her mouth. She repelled from the wall, sinking to her
knees and trying to slow her racing heartbeat.
There was a noise at the other end of the hallway, a door creaking open. A cold
spike of pure terror ached in her chest as she slowly raised her head towards
the sound. There in the doorway at the end of the hall, she saw a man's entire
upper body leaning out of a room watching her. She froze, unable to do anything
but breathe in short rapid pants despite her brain yelling for her to flee.
The man waved his hand to her and whispered, “God morgen!”
 
 
Leif was out of bed the moment he woke to the sound of a shrill scream, his
feet quick to hone in on his daughter's huddled form in the hallway. Seeing his
younger brother Anders reeled back from shock and her crawling backward near-
paralyzed in terror, he almost laughed at the situation if he didn't know she
would bolt the second she figured out how to work her legs again. He didn't
want to spend hours searching through wilderness for her before dawn. She was
also displaying her bare crotch to Anders and Leif definitely didn't want that.
He approached her from behind, giving him the advantage of surprise to clap his
hand over her mouth and drag her up in his arms. She bucked and writhed,
screaming against his palm, her panic breaking through her freeze response and
she fought him vivaciously. Anders watched on, his face conveying concern and
mild horror at what was happening in front of him.
She was much smaller and weaker than him by far, over a foot of difference in
height, but her resistance was admirable in effort alone. He lamented not being
alone with her at this moment, finding a potential for great amusement to be
had while she was in this state of blind panic, not knowing who was restraining
her. He pressed her front against the wall, preventing her from being able to
do much but groan and try to kick feebly behind her. He leaned close to her
ear, whispering low enough so his brother couldn't hear, "You're not going to
get away from me, lovely. Keep fighting if you want to see how badly I could
hurt you."
 She froze at the sound of his voice, all her fight draining instantly when
recognition registered. He wanted to pull her close and suck at the racing
pulse point on her neck for being so obedient, but he was mindful to their
audience. He nodded to Anders, who still seemed shocked, and took half a step
back from his panting daughter. The way she crumpled to the floor at his feet
and sat in a trembling hunch brought a cool wave of satisfaction to him.
 "...'m sorry... I'm so-sorry..." she stammered in a choked whisper.
 Leif did laugh then, turning to the man and saying in his native Norwegian,
"Well, brother, I see you get along with women just as well as I remember."
 "I didn't do anything!" Anders hissed defensively back in Norwegian. "Is she
all right?"
 Simone shakily rose to her feet, bracing against the wall for support until
Leif reached down and lifted her up by her arms. In a flurry of movement he
found endearingly compulsive, she positioned herself behind him and clutched
his shirt, keeping him between her and Anders. He felt a warm pride in how she
clung to him, how quick she was to forget the torment he had brought to her
when presented with an unknown threat.
 Leif reached behind him and petted Simone's head affectionately, a wry grin on
his face as though he were telling a trade secret when he explained, "My Simone
has post traumatic stress disorder. Makes her scare easily, as you can see. She
usually isn't this bad, but even a change in environment could make her more
susceptible to panic attacks. That's why I didn't want to rouse her when you,
Henrik and Vidar arrived. I occasionally am forced to sedate her, as was the
case last night."
 Anders ran a hand over his short-cropped blonde hair, his gaze heavy with
concern as he said, "I'm sorry, Leif. Did I just make your life more
difficult?"
 "What are you talking about?" she asked, her voice still shaking and timid.
 Leif's stroking hand curled into a tight fist in his daughter's hair, hidden
from his brother's line of sight, and he chuckled at the way she whimpered from
pain and yet pressed closer behind him. He always loved how pliant she became
and he found himself wanting to get her alone as soon as possible. "Not at all.
I know how to handle this little troublemaker," he said, crafting his sharp
grin into a good-natured smile. "Let's all go back to bed. Don't worry about
this, Anders, she'll apologize to you later."
 The other man seemed unsure and perhaps regretful, but relented with a nod and
trudged back into the room at the end of the hall. Leif waited until the door
latched before grasping the sleeve of her shirt and pulling her roughly behind
him. Her shaky legs stumbled to keep up, but in a few long steps they were back
in their room and he threw her onto the bed. The small cry she let out when she
hit the mattress in a boneless heap made him almost laugh, but upon turning on
the light and seeing the way his shirt she was wearing rode up and exposed her
bruised ass made him impatient. She was backing away from him, her muscles as
uncooperative as they were when he had first descended upon her in the hallway.
He locked the door and began approaching her. The full sized bed didn't provide
much space to retreat into before she was cowering against the wall, her gray
eyes wide with the fear he found so endearing, but he could tell that she was
no longer gripped in that feral panic. Now hers was the fear he had taught her:
that knowing dread and helplessness.
 "Plea... p-please do-on't..." she stammered as he leaned toward her over the
bed, flinching when he placed his knee  on the mattress. He let himself smirk,
knowing how terrified of being touched she became after an episode, and crawled
on his knees toward her further.
 "That was your uncle Anders," he said conversationally as he grabbed hold of
her ankles and yanked her toward him. Her eyes were wide and her whole body was
stiff with fear, some residual from her attack and the rest fresh. "My brothers
arrived last night while you were resting. You're going to have to apologize to
him later."
 He crawled over her body, pushing her back onto the bed as he loomed over her,
and she managed to say, "Yes, Papa. I'm sorry."
 "I said to apologize to him, Simone. Pay attention," he scolded. He began
unbuttoning her shirt, keeping his eyes trained on his task while she stared at
him.
 "Papa... please don't-"
 "You've met them before, you know," he said, interrupting her plea. He spread
her shirt open, baring her nudity to him, and she shuddered at being so exposed
and vulnerable. He grabbed her breasts, giving the soft mounds a hard squeeze
when she reflexively tried to jerk away from the touch, and continued talking
amicably as she groaned under him. "When we visited Norway. You might not
remember because you were quite young at the time, but they remember you. You
were so friendly then. It's a shame what happened to you."
 "Please stop," she whispered. Her small hands came up to wrap around his
wrists, but there was no real strength in her attempts to wrestle them away. He
kneaded her breasts, rolling them under his palms and pressing his fingers
against them roughly, making her gasp. He loved how sensitive and responsive
she was, loved even more how he could give her both pain and pleasure whenever
he wanted. He pinched her nipples and pulled on them, making her groan and
shiver. Her cunt already glistened with her wetness, her skin was flushed, her
voice was high and tight, and her body trembled all from a few minutes of
attention to her breasts and he reveled in how he could bend her will so
easily.
 "Does this feel good, Simone?" he asked, barely keeping the self-satisfied
amusement from his tone. She bit her lip and turned her head to the side,
humiliation darkening the blush in her cheeks. He lowered himself to be propped
up on his elbows and caught one of her nipples in his mouth, making her gasp
abruptly. He fit a good amount of her between his teeth and bit down, holding
her still with firm hands on her shoulder and hip as her back arched and she
writhed with a startled groan. When he lifted his head, she was huffing in
controlled breaths to manage her pain and he rewarded her with a soft kiss to
the breast he'd abused. His teeth marks were imprinted in dark pink
indentations that framed her left nipple, not deep enough to bleed but sure
enough to bruise. He stared at this new mark he'd bestowed on her body, his
possessiveness both incensed and sated by this fresh sign of ownership.
 "Papa..." she breathed. "I can't... not with... we're not alone here."
 He lifted his head from his trance, seeing her eyes glimmering with tears,
rimmed in red and utterly pathetic. "What's wrong? Don't want it getting out
that your father's cock makes you scream when you cum?"
 She wilted in shame, muttering, "I just don't want anyone to hear..."
 He started trailing light kisses across her chest, feeling her stiffen when
his mouth opened onto her other breast. When he began circling her tit with his
tongue, she sighed and relaxed halfway. He let her enjoy his ministrations, at
the moment satisfied with having marred the flesh nearest to her heart, and she
leaned up into his mouth when he still hadn't bit down after a few minutes. She
was moaning quietly, her head thrown back and squirming under his suckling,
obvious in her attempts to repress her cries until his fingers brushed her
soaked pussy. He hid his grin against her tit when her hand shot out and
latched onto his wrist, trying to push him away as he circled her clit with his
fingertips. She struggled in her attempts to mitigate the ecstatic moans and
sighs he was forcing out of her, biting down on her knuckles and tossing her
head in her efforts.
 "Papa..." she squeaked out, her urgency mounting, "I'm gonna- Ah!- ha, I'm
gonna..."
 "Hush now," he chided her, his lips dragging over her nipple as he whispered,
"Let papa take care of his darling girl."
 He shifted his weight to his knees, freeing his supportive hand to grab her
throat and squeeze the sides of her larynx firmly. She jerked reflexively as he
choked her, managing a shocked grunt before he squeezed harder and cut off her
airway. Both her hands had wrapped around that arm in her frenzied attempt to
escape his grip and her heels skid against the sheets impotently. No time to
waste, he rubbed her clit in tight, quick clockwise motions and scraped his
teeth over her sensitized breast. Her body spasmed stiffly from being choked as
she came, her nails digging hard into his arm and her entire back arching off
the bed, but no sound escaped her throat. When her full body tension began to
wane, he let go of her throat and let her cough violently, her body shaking
both from the effort of filling her lungs and the potent hormonal cocktail of
orgasming through what her body had perceived as a near death experience.
 "... apa..." she rasped, throwing her into another coughing fit. He patted her
chest, his other hand pulling the waistband of his shorts down to take out his
hard cock and stroke it while he waited for her to recover. He smiled warmly
upon seeing the little crescent marks she'd made on his forearm, red with the
slight amount of blood they leaked out, and he wondered with a detached
curiosity if his brothers would link these wounds with the bruises he'd just
put on her elegant little neck. Nothing he couldn't defend as a consequence of
having to wrangle his "insane" daughter, he concluded with a gloating grin.
When he figured she'd replenished enough oxygen, he held her down and moved to
straddle her shoulders.
 Admiring her bewildered wide-eyed expression, he tilted his cock down to poke
at her slacked mouth and simply ordered, "Suck."
 She obeyed, her moist eyes still staring up at him in awe and fear as she
opened her mouth and craned her neck up to take him in. He groaned low when he
felt his dick become enveloped in her warm, wet mouth. Her soft tongue worked
to stroke him and her lips were wrapped firmly around his shaft without her
hand to guide him in and out as she bobbed. Most pleasing to him, however, was
just watching her take his dick. He doubted that he would ever come to lose his
fascination with finally possessing his beloved daughter in every capacity; he
was her family, her lover, her master, and eventually she would come to trust
him as her confidant. In truth, she really didn't need anyone else but him and
he thrilled at the idea of having her entirely to himself soon enough. His cock
throbbed as he thought on this, already close to the edge, and he breathed out
a rumbling sigh as his sack tensed in expected release.
 He pulled out of her mouth and fisted his cock, his strained groan closer to a
beast's growl even to his own ears as he shot rope after rope onto his
daughter's stunned face. He watched intently as his semen coated her lips, the
thick white load dribbling toward her chin and he marveled at how her little
pink tongue scooped it into her mouth. That sight, combined with his post-
orgasm high, made his heart swell with overwhelming affection for her.
 "Oh, my sweet Simone," he breathed, carding his fingers through her mussed
hair as he moved to lay flush to her side. She watched him, eyes hazy in the
warm effect from her earlier orgasm but still carrying that ever-present fear
and curiosity, as he gathered her up in an intimate embrace. He kissed her
forehead, her cheeks, and then an extended kiss on her mouth that she leaned
into. He smirked into their kiss at how she was always so greedy for his love
and affection, just as he had designed her to be.
 
 
 
***** Chapter 7 *****
Chapter Summary
     Reality begins to fray at the edges for Simone. Content warning for
     descriptions of violence, choking.
The late spring chill that slipped through the foggy single pane windows and
withered insulation of the old house made Simone gravitate towards the warmth
her father’s sleeping body seemed to endlessly supply. She’d tried to remain
awake long enough for him to slip into a deeper sleep so she could sneak away,
but the sedative still lingered in her system and she had drifted off beside
him, waking either minutes or hours later to find herself molded to his side
with her arm and leg slung over his torso. Her thoughts trickled in muffled and
sluggish, her mind too numb to feel the myriad of emotions that drifted through
her rising consciousness like phantoms. She couldn’t think about how she
shouldn’t be sleeping next to her father, so she thought about how the bed
wasn’t big enough for two people. She couldn’t think about how degraded she
felt to have been choked and forced to orgasm, so she thought about how sore
her throat was. She couldn’t think about how disgusted she was with herself for
being so desperate for his approval as to lick up his semen, so she thought
about how much she wanted to go brush her teeth to get that taste out of her
mouth.

After a while of her thoughts still not becoming any less muddled, she let
herself drift away from her mind and instead focused on her immediate
surroundings. The sun seemed very far from rising still, but the light from the
digital clock on the nightstand was somehow enough to paint the room in varying
degrees of shadows. The time read 4:25 but she didn’t trust that to be correct.
The slightly scratchy quilt covering them was far too thin for the night
temperature, making any area not near Leif’s warm skin feel bitten by the
chill. She tucked her face into the crook of his neck and hugged her body
closer to his, savoring this contact that she could control and determine for
once. His body hair tickled her chin and she indulged her impulse to run her
fingers through the short downy hairs that spanned his chest and narrowed to a
trail leading into his shorts. She admired the swells and dips of well-
developed muscle that carved out his form. She nearly thought about how she
came to know just how powerful he was firsthand but quickly pushed the thought
and creeping fear aside. Her fingers wandered over the ridges of his serratus
at the side of his chest before sliding up the firm hill of his left pectoral,
laying her palm flat in the valley over his sternum. She watched how her hand
rose and fell with the steady pace of his breathing in sleep, training her mind
to remain quiet as her thoughts threatened to surface.

Her bleary gaze drifted towards his face, her head tilting back on the pillow
they shared as she examined his features. His wide mouth had a slight downturn
as neutral in sleep as he kept it in consciousness, but the slight crows feet
around his eyes had relaxed and given him a less severe appearance. Even before
the night they first fucked, seeming so long ago despite only being four days
since, she had considered him to be perhaps too handsome for a father, often
comparing him to the soft-bodied and dowdy dads of her friends and wondering
with some sadness at why he was nothing like those kind and outgoing normal
fathers. To her, he was more like a Greek statue in a museum than a parent; a
figure of imposing masculinity, an impressive and impassive representation so
prominent in her life but not one she could really interact with. She could
coax him only from the sidelines; waving him over with good marks in school and
achievements in her art, but his approval was always too short-lived and
uninvolved, his affection so token and cursory. Except for those awkward chaste
kisses.

Her eyes sharpened as the memory of all those odd kisses seemed to twist with
the knowledge of how eager his lust seemed to be for her now. Her skin seemed
to crawl wherever they were touching as she couldn’t suppress her wondering at
just how long he had burned for her. She was aware that this dynamic hadn’t
popped out of nowhere, that they wouldn’t have indulged in that initial night
if neither had been wanting it on some level, but she didn’t want to consider
it and she still didn’t want to even broach the subject. Too late, as her mind
replayed every chaste brush of his lips over hers in the new light of what she
couldn’t deny now. The way his mouth would linger after a few drinks until she
could taste the alcohol on her own lips when he pulled away, what she had
assumed was just sluggishness now obviously was him pushing the boundaries of
propriety. The sly glance around to ensure that they were alone each time he
pulled her close, what she had once assumed was his own embarrassment at having
to display fatherly affection now clearly was his protection against getting
caught.

Worse, the thought extended and she wondered how long she’d been harboring
these awful feelings she had for her own father. Every observance of his
handsomeness now seemed far less objective, every wandering thought of him
sexually less the fault of rampant hormones, every moment of subtly displaying
herself in a risqué pose or outfit to see how he’d react now no longer a simple
curiosity of the male gaze. She squeezed her eyes shut against the worst
thought as it dredged up from the deepest grave in her mind: the times she
would fuck her much older boyfriends, roleplaying out a daddy-daughter fantasy.
She hadn’t wanted to examine her desires then and having experienced the real
thing seemed to only make her feel worse and more confused as she resisted the
horrible suspicion that she had wanted this. The idea made her cringe, her
stomach twisting into knots over the notion that she was so easily seduced by
him because she had wanted this incestuous relationship with him all along.
The guilt and self-hatred choked her, the tightening in her sore throat and
chest disabling her from breathing deep enough and she felt another panic
attack coming on. She squeezed her eyes shut and focused on drawing slower
breaths, willing her mind blank once more until her thoughts were filled with
the self-soothing mantra of I’m fine I’m here I’m fine. Her eyes snapped open
at being torn out of her mantra from his fingers grasping her shaking hand that
she’d still had pressed to his chest. Her breath stopped altogether, caught in
a tangle in her throat as she looked at his face. His pronounced cheekbones and
brow cast shadows over his eyes and face in the darkness of the room, casting a
ghastly visage of a skull over his features. Her heart pounded in her ears, the
whooshing clamor of her blood rushing through her veins drowning out all other
sound as her panic spiked. He rolled over on top of her, his weight crushing
her into the mattress as he peered down at her from his black sockets and she
realized that she actually couldn’t draw breath now.

“Sto-op...” she wheezed, her lungs aching with the effort to expel enough
breath to vocalize her plea. She couldn’t move anything below her neck with her
arms and torso pinned under his, but her muscles fought almost involuntarily in
her panic as her lungs began to burn with need. The pain and terror rapidly
became overwhelming and her mouth gaped open, her chest convulsed as it tried
to force out the air that wasn’t there to scream. His hands grasped her jaw,
fingers hooking into her open mouth to her confusion until she realized she
couldn’t close it. Black spots danced and spread in the corners of her vision
and her hearing had begun to muffle to the point that her own pounding pulse
sounded distant.

She watched, unable to make a sound or move as his face descended closer, his
own mouth parting over hers. He latched his lips over her mouth and lifted off
of her chest just slightly. She reflexively inhaled right as he pushed his
breath into her, the heat of it filling her lungs and she fought to keep from
coughing; her ability to sense that it would displease him present even when
coherent thought was absent. He took his breath back when she exhaled, pushing
it back into her when she breathed in. They traded breath like that for several
turns, her desperation for oxygen not allowing her to think on the strangeness
of it, until that darkness receded from the edges of her vision and she was
able to abate her eagerness enough to breathe through her nose. She felt his
mouth shift over hers, not recognizing that he was kissing her until his wet
tongue pressed against hers, but she still couldn’t think through the thick fog
of her mind to interpret the action emotionally. It took several more breaths
before any thought or feeling beyond the instinct to survive presented.

When higher brain function restored, she broke down in tears and tried to turn
away from his kiss. His hands, still at her jawline, brought her face back and
held her in place as he kissed her. Her unresponsiveness didn’t deter him, nor
did her hiccuping sobs as he kissed and licked at her mouth. In fact, he seemed
to pursue her with even more vigor. Her fear of him, her shame of herself, and
her sorrow at receiving this strange abuse coalesced into an overwhelming
despair and she found that she couldn’t stop her sobbing fit. She jumped when
she felt his hands slide down to wrap around her neck, her whole body began to
shake and she was overcome with the need to please him to protect herself.
Eagerly, she began kissing him back, not even thinking twice about it with
those strong hands at her throat. Her movements were jittery and stiff but he
purred in approval against her kiss. But then his hands tightened around her
neck, his fingertips digging directly onto her carotid arteries. Almost
instantly, darkness once more encroached from the edges of her vision. She
barely had time to panic again before that darkness overtook her.
 



She woke with a startled gasp, panting deeply for breath and scrambling out of
the bed so violently that she landed harshly on the floor. Wildly, she looked
around, bewildered at finding herself alone with sunshine pouring in through
the opened window. Her heart was racing and her fear and despair invited hot
tears to run down her face as though she were still suffocating under him.
Shakily, acting only on instinct, she crawled under the bed and hid in case he
or anyone came in as she let her sobs take their course. She didn’t remember
passing out, just being under him with her vision blacking out and the next
moment she was alone and it was suddenly daytime. Her head was buzzing and felt
as though it were painfully stuffed full of fluff, making the dark little space
she hid in more welcoming than the overly bright room.

She became aware that she was drenched and a wave of mortification passed over
her until she checked to find she was dripping head to toe in sweat. Confirming
that she hadn’t regressed to peeing the bed was a small comfort. Her brow
furrowed as suspicion crawled over her mind, confusion confounding her hysteria
to a terrible stillness as a new worry crept in. She wondered, with growing
certainty, if she hadn’t hallucinated her father suffocating her. A shudder
rolled over her as she recalled the skull-like image of his face in the
shadows. Her hands gripped the sides of her head, the pounding headache
increasing as she tried to determine the truth but neither option was better
than the other.

“He’s either a monster or…” she muttered to herself above the clamor of
thoughts crowding her mind, “I’ve lost my mind more than I thought I have.”

She sniffed and swiped at her running nose, frustrated at the tears that
wouldn’t stop. Her father, for all his rough handling of her and violent
methods of discipline, hadn’t enacted harm to her without reason even if she
often had difficulty determining that reason. That logic stuck in her mind,
leaving her with the difficulty of accepting that she had hallucinated a
monstrous image of her father suffocating her in the night.

“God, this is… I’m getting so much worse,” she murmured into her hands, rubbing
her face and trying to clear that cloud of confusion. “I can’t lose it here,
I’ve gotta get help. I can’t let myself lose control.”

Swallowing painfully, her throat dry and sore, she then took a deep calming
breath and slid out of the narrow space under the bed. The sunlight was clear
and bright, nearly mid morning by her guess, and she found her bags by the
writing desk next to the door. With hands that shook from residual fear and
physical weakness of having been deprived of food and water for over twelve
hours now, she rooted around in her luggage to find it mostly emptied.
Frowning, she went to the closet and sighed in irritation when she found her
clothes hanging next to his. Her irritation spiked when it occurred to her that
he had set her up to cohabit this room with him without even asking her.

His control and dominance over her during sex was something that, while
disturbing, she could for the most part accept. But his controlling tendencies
had been spreading outside of that realm and she was quickly becoming resentful
of his presumptions and authority. More than that, however, she was angry at
herself for always kowtowing to his demands and compulsively seeking his
approval. She grabbed a pair of dark jeans and a low cut loose t-shirt, roughly
yanking them off the hangers with the irate conviction she felt as she vowed to
start standing up to him. Finding her underwear neatly folded in a row next to
his boxer briefs in the top dresser drawer, she considered messing the whole
drawer up but decided against it when the memory of his large hand spanking her
ass black and blue came nearly unbidden to her mind.

She hastily buttoned her father’s dress shirt she’d worn last night, the bottom
of it nearly reaching her knees, and tucked her clothes under her arm before
leaving the room. The sounds of her uncles speaking lively to one another in
rapid Norwegian echoed up from the dining room, her father’s deep voice among
them and it spurred her to rush into the bathroom and lock the door behind her.
Her hands carded roughly through her hair, tugging at the roots as she
remembered with heavy embarrassment the way she had panicked and screamed at
her uncle Anders and how she would have to apologize to him some point soon.

“God, I’m such a fuck up,” she groaned, shoving the moment down and brushing
her teeth using a glob of toothpaste on her finger. The knobs creaked and the
old plumbing shuddered and clanked as the shower heated up, but she wasted no
time and stood under the freezing flow as it slowly warmed. The cold helped
clear some of that sensation of fluff crowding her brain, so she grit her teeth
and hurriedly lathered her body. The thought of using a dead man’s bar of soap
was unpleasant to her, but not as much as the salty film of drying sweat that
had covered her entire body. Her toiletries were still in the downstairs
shower, so she selected what she recognized as her father’s shampoo bottle. The
familiar spicy and herbal fragrance stirred a confusing mixture of fear and
arousal in her and she felt melancholy descend on her mood. While she still
felt that familial warmth and drive to achieve his affection and approval, fear
and arousal now overshadowed the way she had once thought of him.
She tilted her head forward as she let the water rinse out the shampoo, the
slide of those suds over her sore breasts awakening her body. Her shame rose in
tandem with her arousal but the rush of hormones buffered the pain in both her
body and her emotions, so she pushed aside her self-hatred and focused on the
warmth that filled her as she palmed her breasts. She tried to think of past
exploits, of old boyfriends, of anything but her father but each time she
imagined a scenario, it shifted back to him. Her cunt throbbed, slippery under
her probing fingers as she pumped them inside, and she stopped trying not to
think of him as she rubbed her clit with her other hand. His strong arms
lifting her onto him like she weighed nothing, his rich voice whispering and
moaning filthy and foreign words so close to her ear, his cock stretching her
painfully and unmercifully…

“Uhn, oh, fuck!” she groaned, trying to keep her voice quiet. Her fingers
thrust as deep as she could reach, but it wasn’t enough. She bit her lip hard
as she thought it, her shame crashing down on her in waves of powerful self-
loathing, but she realized that she wanted her father. The weak defense she’d
held onto of just wanting a good fuck was crumbling as she was forced to admit
that she didn’t want just anyone to give it to her, but specifically and
exclusively her father. She squeezed her eyes shut, forcing back her revulsion
as she imagined him thrusting into her from behind in that shower: his large
hands gripping her hips painfully, the wet slap of their thighs, the deep taboo
of it all. She barely stifled her cry as she climaxed, the fluttering release
pale in comparison to the powerful orgasms that he’d been forcing out of her,
but it calmed her. After washing off the slick fluid from her thighs and
crotch, she turned off the taps and wrapped a raggedy towel around her. Regret
and revulsion charged into her mind, making her struggle to come up with
excuses.

“He’s just good at sex,” she muttered to herself as she toweled off. “Of course
I might think of him. That just makes sense. It’s not like I think of him that
way because he’s my papa.”

Even though you came while focusing on how dirty it is to commit that sin? her
mind supplied.

She shook her head, rubbing the ragged terrycloth through her hair as she
responded in an angry whisper, “I can’t fully control what I think when I’m
cumming. It’s just weird random hormone stuff.”

Just because you’re hot for him doesn’t make him any less your father.

“I know that!” she grumbled. She uncapped the men’s deodorant that was on the
counter, immediately recognizing from the scent that it belonged to Leif, and
begrudgingly applied it to her armpits. “I know that, but I never wanted… this.
Any of this. I just wanted to be closer to him. As a family. I never…”

But you didn’t stop this.

“I tried! I told him no but-”

But you never wanted him to stop.

Simone shook her head, trying hard to focus on working the knots out of her
hair, but that voice kept echoing in her mind. At first, it sounded like her
voice, her usual internal narrative, but another, deeper sound spoke under it.

You’ve been hoping he’d snap and fuck you for years. Always dangling yourself
in front of him, teasing and testing with your body and your slutty antics.

“Shut up,” she growled, her grip on the brush handle tightening until her
knuckles turned white. The voice shifted, no longer hers at all but now the
gravelly whisper of her father.

Now he’s finally fed up from almost a decade of your mixed signals and you’ve
got the nerve to claim the moral high ground? You’re nothing but a sick,
depraved slut.

“Shut UP!” she yelled, squeezing her eyes shut and throwing the hairbrush in a
fit of anger. The loud clatter made her gasp in surprise, eyes popping open to
see a long crack in the fogged mirror. Her stomach felt like it dropped out of
her. “Oh shit…”

Then, the sound of footsteps thumping hurriedly up the stairs made her heart
feel as though it jumped up her throat. She threw the towel around her body,
panic making her motions jerky as the doorknob rattled against the lock.
“Simone, are you all right?” her father’s voice asked through the door. “Open
up for me, darling.”
Her hand shot out to the knob before she hesitated, looking back to the cracked
mirror and grimacing. She wanted to at least get dressed before he saw that.
“I’ll be out in just a moment, Papa,” she called, moving from the door and
hurriedly pulling on her panties.
“No, you should open the door now,” he said. She could hear the command and
waning patience in his tone, but ignored it as she tried to rush in pulling her
jeans up. Her skin was still damp and snagged on the material, irritatingly
delaying the process. “Did you hear me, young lady?”
“Yes, I’m coming,” she said, trying to keep her voice from wavering. Her
shaking hands couldn’t hook her bra, so she threw it off and just shoved her
shirt on. She pulled her wet hair from under the collar as she swung open the
door, attempting a smile that dropped from her face when she saw him. His eyes
were narrowed, sharpening his gray gaze into steel as he frowned down at her
and crowded her backward into the bathroom. She flinched when he shut the door
behind them, a cold feeling spiking in her gut when she heard the sound of the
lock clinking into place.
“Why did you disobey me, Simone?” he asked, his voice level in a way that
screamed danger to her.
“I, uh, I didn’t, I just-” she stammered.
“You did disobey me. Now you’ve lied to me, too,” he interrupted. Her gaze
dropped down, unable to look at the cold anger in his face, but his hand
grabbed her chin and jerked her back up. “You will look at me when I address
you. Now answer me.”
“Answer you?” she squeaked, brow screwed up in confusion.
He sneered, his wide mouth curling up to reveal a sharp incisor as he repeated,
“Why did you disobey me?”
“I wasn’t dressed, I didn’t want-”
“Listen carefully,” Leif whispered, the venom in his tone making his words
sound half growled as he leaned close to her and held her chin up
uncomfortably. She tried to stand on tiptoe to lessen the tightness of his
hold, but he squeezed her jaw painfully regardless. “When I tell you to do
something, I expect you to do it. No excuses, no delaying. If you disobey, then
that tells me you want to be taught a lesson. Do you want a lesson?”
“No,” she croaked, her throat tight with fear.
“Good. And this…” he whispered, his free hand clutching her crotch through her
jeans. She grunted in both surprise and a bit of pain at the pressure of his
grip, holding herself very still. “… is mine to see whenever I want to, not
whenever you want me to. Do you understand?”
Anger riled up a flash of rebellion in her, but the claw-like grip of his hands
at her jaw and her groin combined with the callous scowl set in his face
squashed it down.
“Yes,” she managed to say. His features relaxed into his usual detached
neutrality, but he still held her in that uncomfortable position. She shuddered
as the memory of the skull-faced hallucination superimposed over him now, the
pounding of her heartbeat getting louder in her ears with each stretched out
second.
“Good girl,” he muttered, releasing her. She staggered back a step, her fingers
gingerly pressing against where her jaw ached. “Why did you break this mirror?”
She swallowed thickly, looking up from her dazed stupor to see him staring at
the large crack in the glass. She considered lying to him, telling him it was
an accident to avoid punishment, but a more pressing matter gave her the
resolve to say in a carefully measured but shaken tone, “I’m not well, Papa.”
He turned to her then and she waited, watching his face for any indication of
his thoughts but, like always, he remained unreadable.
“You’re never going to be well,” he stated matter-of-factly, his tone stern
with finality. She blinked, dumbfounded by his response, and he smiled dotingly
at her. When he spoke again, his tone was friendly and warm. “Finish getting
ready and come downstairs. Put on a nice dress and cover up those bruises.
You’ll find your makeup in the desk in our bedroom. Let me show my brothers
what a beautiful young woman I’ve created.”
***** Chapter 8 *****
Chapter Summary
     Content warning for rape.
Simone sat at the writing desk in the -their bedroom, the cosmetics kit her
mother had gifted her for Christmas laid out on the wood surface and a small
mirror propped up against the wall already. Sunlight poured in from the window
behind her, making it difficult to gauge her reflection so she turned on the
small table lamp and moved it close to her. The person in that bright square of
glass blinked back at her, but she couldn’t see the collection of features as
her face. The grey irises flecked with blue and brown were his, floating behind
a mask she did not recognize. She glanced at her tools, opening the color
correction palette that was still sealed in shrink wrap and looked back at that
mask. She put her cut-short art schooling to use in applying opposing colors to
the long bruises that smudged along the neck; yellow over the purple and blue,
purple over the yellow and green. Blot over with concealer, mask the concealer
with a powder, and the bruises were gone. She lightly applied concealer to the
dark crescents under the eyes and almost instantly, a happier and healthier
girl appeared in the mirror. She felt even more detached from that person she
was working on; this girl looked so much younger than she was, so pretty and
human. This girl on the other side of the glass didn’t have fangs in her mouth
and insanity in her eyes. The dark brown pencil gave those eyebrows a more
playful arch than the threatening snarl that always furrowed hers. That light
dusting of blush on creamy olive cheeks would look terrible on her gaunt and
sharp face. The sweet-smelling swipe of plum-rose lipstick could never cover up
the blood smeared on her mouth, but made those full and shapely lips look
delicious. When she was done, the girl who looked back at her seemed familiar,
like someone she hadn’t seen in years. Like someone she still hates.
She put the mirror down flat on the desk and ran a boar bristle brush through
her hair over and over again until her snags turned to gentle silky waves of
dark brown. Her mother’s hair, when she didn’t straighten it into newscaster
layers of perfection. Islander brown hair from a beach so far away from Norway
or Vermont. She wished, for the first time in her life, that she had islander
brown eyes. She wished her mother had never slathered her so diligently with
sunblock and yelled at her to stay in the shade wherever they went, chiding her
for “ruining” her “pretty light skin”. She wanted to go lie in the sunlight
until every pale drop of her father was burned out of her flesh.
She went to the closet and leafed through the clothes draped on the hangers.
Her shirts and hoodies and dresses looked so small next to his suit jackets and
dress shirts and vests, like children’s clothes. Her hands stopped searching
when she found her short violet cocktail dress. She hadn’t packed that when
they left Brooklyn. In fact, she hadn’t packed even half of these clothes. Her
throat constricted with the knowledge that he and her mother really had brought
her here to stay, that they really weren’t going to let her go home. She
breathed in measured, slow breaths, feeling another panic attack down that line
of thought and she could not lose control again. Not when he was expecting her.
Not when he would come and find her.
Ignoring the tremor in her hands, she yanked out a yellow sundress with a
sweetheart neckline. She stepped into it; the bodice clinging to her body and
narrow waist but the flared skirt left her shapely hips and round buttocks
nebulous. For once, she was pleased with her modest bosom. The effect of the
dress made her look younger, more innocent. Her thighs, often the subject of
catcalls, peeked out an unfortunate amount but she simply had no long dresses.
Standing in front of the floor mirror, she parted her hair into pigtails for
good measure, but quickly took them out when she decided that it made her look
like a fetishized mockery of childishness. Instead, she pulled the top layer of
hair back into a clip and let it all fall down her shoulders and back. She
assessed the reflection and was satisfied. Church-goer. Honor student. A young
lady, not a young woman. Maybe even just a girl, she decided, after adding a
cardigan and rubbing off the lipstick. She stepped into patent leather white
flats and tied a quaint little gold heart pendant necklace on, but removed it
when she thought it brought too much attention to her aggravatingly elegant
décolletage. She grinned wryly at the notion that she had never recognized her
womanly beauty until seeking to disguise it. Before this, she had considered
herself a scrawny art nerd who was still more of a punk kid than a woman by any
means. She snorted back a laugh when it occurred to her that her father was the
first man to make her feel beautiful in the worst way. She had to laugh or the
tears that burned in her eyes and choked at her throat would spill out.
Straightening her back, she stood in front of the floor mirror, the sunlight
pouring over her as she breathed with deliberate slowness. She’d already broken
one mirror and gotten away without punishment. Yet, at least. Her neck ached as
she remembered how he could hurt her without letting her scream in a house full
of people. She clenched her fist, nails digging painfully into her palm as she
suppressed that line of thought, willing her heart to calm once more. Another
wry smile curled her mouth as she considered that maybe she wasn’t so
debilitated by her mental instability if she could manage herself like this all
the time. All she would have to do is stay in empty rooms and never think.
Another deep breath, hand on her chest, her mantraI’m fine I’m here I’m
finerolling to block out the noise in her mind, and she stepped out of the
room.
The house was quiet. Slowly, silently, she walked downstairs and drifted
through the long hallway. The living room to her right was empty as she
surveyed the dingy decades-old maroon leather furniture and worn oriental rugs.
She turned into the kitchen and her heart skipped when she found her father
standing at the counter, large ceramic knife in his hand and shirtsleeves
rolled up his muscular forearms. He turned to her, putting the knife down on
the cutting board next to the sliced oranges and wiping his hands on a rag as
he looked her up and down.
“Very nice,” he drawled, and her illusions of appearing innocent and girlish
evaporated under his heavy gaze. She felt the heat of a blush work its way up
from her chest to her face and she bit her cheek to try and stop it. He
beckoned her to come to him with a crook of his finger and she stepped up to
him before she knew what her feet were doing. His hands, the zesty and sweet
scent of fresh citrus floating around them, gently moved her hair away from her
neck and shoulders as he searched for bruises. He smiled at her handiwork and
she glowed under his approval, her eyes lingering on that wide mouth and sharp
jawline. Her mind clawed at her to remind her to stay away, to remember how
much he has hurt her, but she never could resist the gravitational pull of his
good moods. Those hands came to rest on her shoulders, sliding down her back as
he slowly pulled her closer, and she could almost physically feel her mind fog
over when she stepped into his body heat. He held her in a gentle embrace, his
front so warm against her, and they just stood in the kitchen that way. His
thumb rubbing slowly on her lower back where his fingers were interlaced, her
cheek laid against his sternum, her mind a warm buzz of nothing but
pleasantness. This was the father she’d wanted all her life, this kind
affection and protection. A dangerous thought sprouted in her, a horrible
whisper of price.
He stepped away from her, the loss of his hold almost making her groan
disappointedly before his hand was cupping her chin and tilting her up as he
leaned down. Her eyes widened when he locked their lips together, that pleasant
fog of her mind dissipating into static, that gentle warmth growing into
pulsing heat with the slide of his tongue begging entrance into her mouth.
“No!” she said, pushing herself away from him quickly. She stepped backwards,
shoulders hunching defensively as she hugged her body, words spilling out of
her when she saw his expression switch from mild surprise to cold sternness.
“We shouldn’t! Shouldn’t do… any of that.” He tilted his head, watching her
with that detached curiosity that filled her gut with indescribable dread. She
could almost feel the adrenaline dump into her system, making her clench her
hands into her cardigan and she couldn’t stop moving so she paced. “I can’t- We
can’t do that anymore. Okay? I can pretend it never happened- none of this ever
happened- and we can be normal. I’ll never talk about it, I’ll never tell
anyone- Ha! How could I ever tell anyone that I… I…”
“You what, Simone?” he asked, all cool and sinister poise that further unwound
her already tenuous composure. He began to walk toward her, steps
excruciatingly slow. Her mouth opened and closed, words jammed in her throat,
and she felt that panic begin to spill out of her. “You begged for me to fuck
you? You asked for me to hurt you? You orgasmed by my hand, mouth, and cock?”
She stood, feet frozen to the floor, as he stopped a few inches from her. His
fingers carded into her hair at the base of her head, making her skin crawl and
erupt into waves of goosebumps, and he yanked her back by the roots. She yelped
in both pain and shock, her head craning backward and she was stumbling in her
struggle to keep up as he dragged her into the hallway. He shoved her front
against the wall hard, knocking a huff of air from her lungs and he planted her
hands up on either side of her head.
“Don’t move,” he growled next to her ear. She could only whine like a wounded
dog in response, thoughts racing until they jumbled together like so many train
cars crashing over each other, squeezing her eyes shut as he kneeled down
behind her. She felt him reach under her skirt and yank her panties all the way
down, her feet stepping out of them automatically in her eagerness to not
incite his aggression. Her heart was racing as fear pumped more adrenaline into
her system, the acute stress response making her tremble enough to have her
worry that her knees would give out, but she managed to spread her legs into a
wide stance when he pulled her ankles apart and lifted the back of her skirt.
Her mind wasn’t connecting any dots, just focused on what was becoming her new
self-soothing mantra of submit survive submit survive, so she gave a small
shout of surprise when she felt the wet slide of his tongue dragging up the
back of her right thigh. She gasped harshly when his lick ended in a bite on
the supple flesh of her asscheek, his sharp teeth sinking in enough to hurt but
not break skin.
“Papa! Papa, please stop! Oh, please-” she gasped, her words cutting off into a
high keen as he slid his tongue down the cleft of her ass. He groaned lewdly,
his hands spreading her cheeks and kneading them in a near bruising grip as he
pressed his tongue against her tight ring of muscle before angling her hips
back and sliding his mouth further down. She couldn’t stop her moans, some
mixture of instinct that her life depended on pleasing him and the raw carnal
pleasure of the act keeping her vocal.
“You’re so wet already,” he said, his voice husky and deep, the rumble of it
shooting shocks of pleasure right to her cunt. He kissed her pussy
affectionately. “Your body is always a few steps ahead of you, darling girl.
Don’t think about it so much.”
She cried out when he licked into her hole, his tongue darting in and out as
his mouth enveloped her cunt. Her mind was noisy with static and the sound of
her own wonton moaning as he tongue-fucked her, that wide mouth of his making
her almost drool with how good it felt. She was still distractedly aware of his
sharp teeth, those almost inhuman incisors occasionally scraping her in a way
that made her tense with both fear and excitement. That spot where he bit her
on her ass ached and she sobered slightly with the horror of realizing a part
of her wanted him to hurt her pussy with those teeth.
A worry wormed its way past her lust and she had to focus to say between
panting breaths, “Papa…-ahn!- your brothers… won’t they-?”
He removed his mouth long enough to say, “Backyard.” before pressing his tongue
against her clit and making her moan high and tight. Her back arched, her hips
rocking just slightly against his mouth and that tongue held hard right on her
clit, and she was only vaguely aware of the pathetic mewling pouring from her.
She was just on the edge, her cunt bearing down and tightening, her whole body
tensing when he suddenly stood up and clapped his hand over her mouth before
slamming his cock into her from behind. She screamed into his palm, the painful
stretch of his forceful entry pushing her into an intense orgasm and she kept
screaming as he pumped inch after inch into her pulsing cunt. Her knees did
give out then, but he held her up against the wall and pushed her harshly into
it with his punishing thrusts. Her eyes were rolling back into her head when he
filled her entirely, his cock bumping her cervix with each rock of their hips,
and she could feel her wetness dribbling down her legs already.
“Do you understand yet?” he asked, his voice ragged and strained as he fucked
her. She could only moan against his hand in response, unsure if she could
manage coherent words at the moment anyway. “We’ve moved beyond sins and
morals, yet you persist in trying to hold onto what you’ve been told is right
and wrong. You can’t resist your desires any more than you can resist mine… and
you know what happens when you disobey my will, don’t you, my darling girl?”
He thrust into her particularly hard then, punctuating his point by making her
wail in the pain that translated so oddly into pleasure. Her cunt fluttered
around him, quickly approaching another climax at this pace, and she was nearly
sobbing in need. He removed his hand from her mouth, wrapped it in her hair and
pulled, bending her backwards painfully. She did come then, forcing herself to
stifle her scream into a choked moan as her cunt spasmed around his cock. He
groaned rough and low, pushing into her deep and she felt him jerk and spurt
hotly against her cervix. Her pussy felt overly full as his cock swelled in her
while he came, the ache and tingling sensation of being pumped full of his
semen making her whimper.
She felt all at once sick, numb, and euphoric once he slid out of her, a gob of
his semen crawling down her thigh. Her limp body sunk to the floor weakly
without his support, but he picked her back up again, maneuvering her like she
weighed nothing. She followed his direction without resistance, hanging her
head to the side to avoid looking directly at him as he helped her step back
into her panties. Despite having just been manhandled by him, his hands now
seemed to burn wherever they merely brushed her legs as he slid her underwear
up to mold wetly against her sloppy cunt. She shuddered when the cold material
made contact with her sore and throbbing vagina. The silence in the house rang
in her ears, making the slight sounds of him tucking his dress shirt back into
his slacks and zipping his fly seem deafening. She wanted to curl up in a small
dark space and hide forever, but she had to wait for him to dismiss her or
leave. He wrenched her cardigan off her shoulders, the garment already askew
and stretched out from where he’d grabbed at it, and she grimaced in effort not
to jump away as he kneeled in front of her and used it to wipe off the fluids
on her legs. It was heavy when he dropped it on the hardwood floor.
His hands pushed her shoulders back, gripped her chin and tipped it up
slightly, straightening her neck. She only realized he was adjusting her
posture when she caught the critical crease in his brow that she’d seen him so
often have as he would look over sheets of architectural diagrams in his office
room back home. The same solemn slant of his mouth that she knew she also wore
when she concentrated on her art projects, according to her mother’s sidelong
smirked observation. You’re definitely your father’s daughter, her mother would
say, a contempt in her tone that Simone couldn’t understand then and understood
for the wrong reasons now. Her mother’s words echoed in her mind, repeating
louder and louder as time seemed to slow, his (her) gray eyes following the
gentle swipe of his thumb as he smoothed out the trails of her tears from her
cheeks.
When he shifted his gaze to hers, a question in the quirk of his brow, she
realized with a start that she had said aloud, “I am your daughter.”
“You are,” he responded, his guardedly neutral tone doing nothing to put her
stammering thoughts at ease. He ran his fingers through her long hair,
smoothing out the slight mess he’d made of it from pulling and dragging her, as
he said, “You are mine; that is never going to change. I’ve made you and I will
continue making you. That is my duty to you as your father and I’ve always
taken that very seriously. I will always take care of you. You must always obey
me.”
She stared at him as he spoke, her gut heavy with dread at knowing his words
held dangerous meaning for her but not knowing exactly how or why. Tears had
welled in her eyes again, blurring his sharp features, and she bit her lip with
the effort of keeping them at bay. His hands came to rest on her bare shoulders
and her eyes fluttered shut when she felt his lips press against her forehead,
two solitary tears escaping down her cheeks as she let out a shuddering sigh.
She recalled a fuzzy memory of lying in her old bedroom, two or three
apartments ago in Los Angeles, the pink stars from her nightlight illuminated
against a popcorn ceiling, and her father placing this same kiss on her
forehead once he tucked her into bed. The memory fled from her mind when his
lips moved over her mouth, hot and open and wet to suck in and nip her lower
lip with those sharp teeth. Her aching cunt churned his semen inside of her,
another hot glob leaking into the wet gusset of her cotton panties, and her
whole body tingled. She could taste herself on his mouth and she sighed again,
this time a breathless sound that dredged up through a shiver in her spine. She
opened her eyes to see him watching her face and shame fell over her heavily,
drowning out the warmth that had still smoldered in the cradle of her pelvis.
His thumbs smoothed away her tears again, a slight smile softening his features
as he said, “That’s a good girl. Now then, go say hello to your uncles
outside.”
“But, wait- I-” she stammered, but he was already pushing her along with him
into the kitchen.
“You look ravishing, dearest,” he interrupted, one hand placed firmly on her
lower back as he thrust a platter of fruit in her hands. The scent of fresh cut
oranges made her stomach twist into knots, but she clutched the platter in her
shaking hands. She tried to swallow her throbbing heart back down into her
chest as he led her through the back door, her hips feeling disjointed and
making her steps awkward and loose. The sunlight blinded her for a moment when
they stepped onto the grass, causing her to blink tightly without her hands
free to shield her eyes from the light. When her vision adjusted, she found her
father leading her across the uncut grass to three blonde men, each sprawled
out on dingy lawn furniture. The largest one, a rounded bear of a man with a
full beard, spotted them first and her stride froze mid-step when she saw him
rise from the plastic chair. A spike of fear hit her deep in her gut as she
took in just how huge he was as he walked toward them, a wide grin peeking out
from under that blonde beard.
“Se hvem det er! Baby Simone!” he called out, arms opening in the universal
invitation for a hug.
To her terror, her father gingerly lifted the platter from her clutched hands
and whispered to her, “That’s Henrik. Go hug him.”
She wasn’t given the option to go to him as Henrik scooped her up, her much
smaller frame lifted against his meaty chest. She yelped in surprise at the
sudden bear hug and also the dribble of semen being squeezed out of her by the
motion, the squelch of wetness warm and threatening to overflow out of her
soaked panties. Alarm quickly processed into action and she patted his back
reluctantly.
“It’s so nice to see you again, uncle Henrik!” she rasped out, forcing her face
into a smile she hoped would pass for something more authentic than a rictus
grin. She tried to angle her hips away from him, but this proved difficult with
her feet dangling a good eighteen inches from the ground.
“Se på henne! Not as baby,” a lankier but just as tall man said as he came up
behind Henrik.
She glanced back to her father and he thankfully supplied, “That’s Vidar.”
Henrik let her back down on her shaky feet, allowing Vidar to wrap his arms
around her shoulders in an embrace that felt conservative after the full body
hug. He kissed her cheeks in that European greeting that she could never quite
get used to despite having spent the last five years in New York City and being
confronted with it near daily.
“Du ser så nydelig ut,” he drawled appreciatively to her as he stepped back and
looked her over intently. Despite not knowing what he said, her cheeks heated
in a blush at the way he blatantly leered and she could vaguely interpret the
meaning.  Her fingers tensed into claws and her breath quickened, a feral
feeling welling inside her, but her mouth still held her smile. She blinked,
confused at her racing heart and the oddly comforting emotion falling over her
mind. A bubbling, hot hatred moved in her at that glint in his eye. Before she
could sink any further into that tempting sensation, a hand grabbed her arm
from behind and she turned her head to see her father looking at her with a
frightening glare.
His eyes were still fixed on her even as he growled out to Vidar, “Ikke vær
ekkelt,motherfucker.” 
A flurry of motion from the corner of her eye caught her attention and she
turned back to see Anders laughing and pushing a smirking Vidar away. She
winced as she recalled the scene she’d caused in front of him early that
morning, embarrassment eating up that feral sensation buzzing from the back of
her brain. He turned to her, smiling as he wrapped one arm around her in a
sideways hug that was thankfully far from the overly familiar manner in which
his brothers handled her.  
“Oh, uncle Anders! I’m so sorry about this morning! I was just spooked, you
know, I didn’t mean anything personally. Not like that’s an excuse, but I
apologize,” she said in a rush, her cheeks burning in mortification now. She
barely even recalled the incident; it seemed so far away now and half of it was
lost to the drug haze her mind had been in, but she wanted to get the apology
over with as soon as she could. When she shut her mouth, she looked up to his
boyish face to see him smiling awkwardly, obviously uncomfortable as he
scratched the back of his head and glanced around. 
“Hun er lei meg for denne morgenen,” her father said to him, to which Anders
barked out a short laugh and nodded. 
Anders faced her again and patted her head, saying, “Jeg er lei meg for å
skremme deg, pen jente.” 
Leif stepped up behind his daughter, wrapping his arms around her middle and
resting his chin atop her head as he explained, “He says that he’s sorry to
have startled you. None of my brothers are adept at English, so don’t bother
speaking to them.” 
“Oh…” she murmured, her smile faltering. She was surprised at how disappointed
she felt by that. She’d been unsuccessful in finding her phone anywhere in the
house and the satellite television had been shut off since before they’d
arrived. She had no connection to the outside world and no one to talk with
aside from her father, but he was hardly an option as she could barely handle
her fear whenever he approached her. She never knew which version of the man
she would encounter and the risk was too high just to fill the silence. She
realized now just how deeply lonely she’d become if the loss of talking with
near complete strangers who for all she knew were worse than Leif could depress
her so thoroughly.  
Simone was dragged out of her melancholy almost literally as her father moved
her to lay nestled against his side while he reclined on a long plastic chaise
lounge. She blushed anew in fresh embarrassment at the length of her legs
showing and the close proximity of him, the narrow space requiring that she
press herself to his side in a position horrifyingly similar to the one she’d
found herself in during that horrible night terror or hallucination from that
morning. The memory stirred a cold, hard fear in her that she pushed down, her
hand tightening into a fist in her father’s shirt. There were many things
desperately wrong with her to the point that it was becoming difficult to think
at all without being reminded, so she nuzzled against his shoulder and ignored
the heavy feeling in her head as his arm snaked under her to pull her closer.
***** Chapter 9 *****
“You look so beautiful,” he heard Vidar say, the curl of his words lecherous
enough to cut through language barriers even if his lingering stare and body
language hadn’t told him everything he meant. Leif was already close enough to
reach Simone, but he held back, curious to see her reaction. He saw the exact
moment Vidar’s intentions struck her in the stiffening of her fingers and the
squaring of her shoulders. He glanced to his brothers, but their friendly
smiles had not faltered; there was no recognition at the change occurring in
his daughter. Her shoulder and back muscles bunched and flexed, the tension in
her body running high in that split second she changed. He’d never seen it,
never actually witnessed this part of her even though he had expected to have
been the target of it with each sexual encounter. Seeing it provoked so easily
by a display so minimal assured what he had suspected: he would never be her
target. The closest he’d come was from restraining her in the dark hours of
that morning, but the moment she realized it was him, all the fight had left
her. She swayed slightly, her body assuming a lower and more even stance, yet
still no one registered what was coming. He longed to see her face, to know
what burned in her eyes with this intriguing phenomenon, but instead he steeled
his gaze and gripped her upper arm. Her muscles almost instantly relaxed into
her usual tension of discomfort, that strange reaction leaking out of her as
she turned to look at him, but he caught an edge of something truly strange in
the glint of her eye before it fell upon him.
“Don’t be disgusting, motherfucker,” he warned Vidar, not deigning to even look
at him as he let his irritation bleed into his tone. Anders and Vidar burst
into laughter at having finally gotten a rise out of their older brother and
Leif reconsidered the situation. He scoffed at how the fools assumed his grab
was for her benefit and not theirs, but this was exactly the opportunity to
display himself as the doting overprotective father he had hoped to project. As
his mind worked on how to best perform this, his daughter turned to Anders, all
adorable fluster and meekness.
“Oh, uncle Anders! I’m so sorry about this morning!” she said, voice girlishly
high in her unabashed nervousness. He considered stopping her to tell her that
Anders couldn’t understand a word of this heartfelt apology, but he enjoyed
watching him squirm awkwardly. “I was just spooked, you know, I didn’t mean
anything personally. Not like that’s an excuse, but I apologize.”
Anders glanced to him for help, obviously eager to interact with his pretty
little niece, and Leif considered letting him rot if not for her discomfort.
“She’s sorry for this morning,” he relented.
Anders broke into a sudden laughter, placing his hand on the crown of her head
in patronizing affection as he said, “I’m sorry I scared you, pretty girl.”
The overly familiar touch and compliment his brother bestowed on her was his
cue to perform, so he handed off the fruit platter to Henrik and embraced his
daughter from behind, trying to feign subtlety in the way he pulled her out
from under Anders’ hand.
“He says that he’s sorry to have startled you. None of my brothers are adept at
English, so don’t bother speaking to them,” he told her as he glared coolly at
Anders. He nestled his chin atop her hair and indulged in a small victory when
Anders' smile vanished upon glancing up at his cold expression. This close to
her, however, he could smell how she’d used his shampoo and deodorant. Knowing
that she was covered in his scents thrilled some basic primitive piece of him
and when he had caught on to her wearing them as he’d hugged her in the
kitchen, he simply had to fuck her until she was filled with his seed. The
drive to claim her, again and again, was addictive and gratifying and knowing
that she stood still dripping with him felt powerful. It was sudden and
reckless, but she often inspired him to defy his better judgment.
With greetings out of the way, the men sauntered back to their seats, so he
took Simone to lay with him on a chaise lounge ten feet from their congregation
of filthy lawn chairs around a cooler full of cheap beer. He felt it was still
too chilly outside for beer, but tradition dictated that they spend the entire
first day together throwing them back, preferably until they passed out. So,
for the sake of tradition and making the rest of the afternoon more tolerable,
he grabbed what was to be his sixth can on his way. He caught their eyes
following her as she climbed into the reclined seat with him, her soft little
body fitting against his side perfectly as he laid back. He pulled her closer
against him, letting her short skirt ride up her shapely legs further, and saw
them purposely face anywhere but in their direction, their glances quick and
low. His Simone was a sexually appealing young woman but without full awareness
of her distracting attributes; the perfect bait to orchestrate the scenarios he
required.
“When do I get a turn to lay down with her, Leif?” Vidar jeered.
“You’ll sooner find yourself lying in a casket,dipshit,” Leif answered,
cracking open the tab on his beer one-handed. His brothers erupted into
laughter to which he sneered openly.
“She must be, what? 155 centimeters tall? I would bet that 100 of those are all
leg,” Henrik mused. “God damn, look at them! If I weren’t her uncle…”
“You’d get your dick cut off,” Leif groused. He took a long draw of the beer as
they whooped in laughter, the cheap domestic lacking any bite and allowing him
to easily drink deeply.
“What are you talking about, Dad?” Simone whispered.
“Nothing important, sweetheart,” he smiled down at her.
“You can’t find an ass like that in Norway,” Vidar observed, gesturing with his
beer to Henrik who nodded in agreement.
Before Leif could quip back, Anders reached over and slapped the back of
Vidar’s head, scolding, “That’s your niece, shit head.”
“Ow! Fuck, dickwad, it’s not like she can understand us,” Vidar complained,
rubbing his head while Henrik laughed at him.
“However, I can understand you,” Leif growled. “And I’d thank you not toeye-
fuckmy little girl.”
“Little she may be, but girl? No. Those hips are all woman,” Henrik smirked,
waggling his eyebrows for effect.
“You want to go into the ground with father this weekend?” Leif asked. Henrik
bellowed and slapped his knee.
“You know what they say about the crazy ones?” Vidar grinned.
“Rot with the devil,” Leif frowned, though he was glad that the subject of her
mental instability was brought up. He reminded himself not to press the topic,
not to seem too eager to paint her as debilitated.
“Too far, you insensitive pig,” Anders scolded. Leif felt his brow twitch at
how defensive his baby brother seemed toward Simone, his mind working on how he
differed from the instigative crudeness of his brothers.
Vidar laughed, saying, “What? There might as well be some benefit to being
insane!”
“Keep saying that shit and I’ll make certain you’ll never experience that
benefit with anyone,” Leif said coolly.
“Sorry, sorry, just joking around, Leif,” he apologized, his hands thrown up in
mock surrender, but then he grinned, “They say that they fuck like animals.”
“Go fuck a meat grinder,” Anders snapped.
“Weren’t you just describing her vagina, Anders?” Henrik asked, his voice
bubbling with barely contained laughter.
“What was that?” Leif growled, though he was quite aware of the full view his
brother had gotten in the early hours of that morning when she was cowering on
the floor in front of him. Still, he was curious to see how his baby brother
would handle this. His hand unconsciously gripped her hip, but he didn’t miss
the way she exhaled in a sharp huff.
Anders blushed furiously, his eyes wide and nervous as he ran a hand over his
face and explained in a rushed voice, “It was an accident! When she got scared
and fell over, her shirt, it just- I didn’t mean to look, but-”
“Anders,” Leif interrupted, but his brother kept rambling. The younger man was
too apologetic, too flustered by the incident in a way that rubbed Leif the
wrong way. Leif needed to guide the conversation into more casual territory.
“- She was right in front of me and I just happened to see it. It was only for
a moment! I didn’t even really get a good look-”
“Anders!” Leif barked.
Anders finally stopped, looking at him and simply asking, “What?”
Leif frowned deeply at him, watching as his brother’s blue eyes stared in wide-
eyed misery, waiting for his punishment. “How did you describe it?”
“What!” Anders shouted while Vidar and Henrik burst into raucous laughter.
Leif tuned them out as they traded insults, turning his attention to the girl
who they both had and hadn’t identified as his weakness. He could feel that
unbidden surge of affection well in him as he observed the tears that clumped
her dark eyelashes damply and the slightly swollen redness of her lips from
having been bitten and abused. The arm he had underneath her pulled her up and
rolled her until she was laying halfway on top of him, the light pressure of
her small form shivering when she settled against his chest and straddled his
leg. Holding her to him with one arm wrapped around her waist and the other now
stroking her thigh, he knew what it looked like. He wondered how much he could
get away with in plain sight, how much he could defend touching her this
intimately right in front of everyone with “just being that cuddly kind of
dad”. Even better, knowing that the more he did it, the less anyone would
question it. He needed feedback from this test audience though and being a few
beers in provided him a decent enough escape should it fail.
“Dad…?” she whispered, her voice tight with uneasiness and worry about their
position even as her breathing deepened.
“Hush, darling,” he cooed back, giving her thigh a brief squeeze and a chaste
kiss atop her head. He could see in his peripheral the way his brothers were
staring, the awkward silence that had stalled their obnoxious ribbing. “You can
relax, I won’t hurt you. I know you crave positive physical contact, so don’t
be shy; go on and touch me however you please.”
“But… they’re watching…” she whispered lower. There was a breathlessness in her
voice that didn’t match her hesitance and he smirked at how insatiable she was.
In reply, he took her hand and interlaced their fingers above his chest, felt
her sharp little intake of breath as his thumb slowly circled her palm. He
nearly chuckled at how responsive she was; she was always so easy to react, it
was as though her mind and body were a switchboard he could play with
endlessly. Her hunger for his attention and affection never failed and she
began to caress his hand back, hesitant little exploring touches that traced
his fingers and knuckles like she wanted to memorize them. He glanced at his
brothers, seeing Vidar and Henrik trying not to look and forcing a light
conversation between them, but Anders was staring right at Simone.
A tinge of jealousy sparked in Leif, a dark possessiveness that made him want
to sink his teeth into her breast right in front of his youngest brother, and
he identified his uneasiness of the younger man’s defense of the girl from
earlier: Anders was uncomfortable with Simone as a sexual being. That
discomfort was far more dangerous than the easy objectification their brothers
insincerely participated in; that discomfort was a reaction to something
internal. Judging by the way he watched her hand move, Leif felt a curl of
disgust at what he knew that internal conflict might be.
The hypocrisy wasn’t lost on him. He was repulsed at the idea of Anders
harboring incestuous impulses towards his own niece. Objectively, that was far
less uncouth than what he himself was actually doing. He held no illusions to
his sins; he was fucking his only child. In fact, he was reveling in the thrill
of taking the purity and wholesomeness of family and twisting it into something
depraved and wretched. The guilt he felt at first was minimal compared to the
jubilation of coming to thoroughly own every part of his Simone. But that was
him and Anders was someone else, someone who existed within the constraints and
rules of society, so the thought of him getting hard over his own flesh and
blood niece made Leif sick.
“You want to just take a picture, Anders?” he asked flatly.
The young man startled, eyes snapping away and shoulders shrugging
uncomfortably, but it was Henrik who spoke. “You’refull of shit, you know
that?” he laughed, tilting back almost dangerously in his seat. “You only want
to show off, like you always do.”
“Hey. Do you remember when Henrik got us kicked out of that bar in
Paris?”Vidar’s slurred question popped seemingly out of nowhere.
“I remember the look on the barkeep’s face when you took that sword off the
wall,” Leif grinned, to which Henrik bellowed and finally tipped out of the
flimsy lawn chair. The brothers erupted into another laughing fit and Leif
couldn’t stop the chuckle that shook his chest, Simone looking up at him from
her daze. She seemed astonished by his laughter and he wanted to kiss her awe-
slackened mouth, barely stopping himself from sitting up to do so. He tilted
his head back, resigning himself to the possibility that he was a bit tipsy and
had to guard his inhibitions more.
“That’s not as bad as when you got us kicked out of that brothel,” Anders
laughed.
“God, I thought we were going to get killed for that!” Vidar exclaimed. “What
the devil did you even do to that whore, Leif?”
Leif chuckled, his voice husky in a way he hoped passed for either jokingly
coquettish or drunk, "She offered to do anything I wanted and then she
disagreed with what I wanted.”
“Come off it, you sick bastard,” Henrik groused. “Not a lot was off the menu in
there, so what did you do that got us yanked out?”
Leif shrugged, looked down at his daughter’s upturned face and smiled warmly at
her as he said, “I made her bleed.”
“You’re a fucking serial killer,” Henrik announced, his eyebrows raised high in
astonishment.
“Fuck, Leif, no wonder your wife divorced you,” Anders laughed.
“Wait, Lisa’s not in some shallow grave around here, is she?” Vidar joked,
looking around theatrically.
“No, it’s just Simone and I from now on,” Leif smiled. His hand, free from her
exploring fingers as she’d moved onto tracing his collarbone under the
unbuttoned top of his shirt in ways that made his groin stir, patted her bare
shoulder in a hearty fatherly gesture.
“That’s pretty rough, brother,” Anders said, all laughter gone from him now. He
took a deep drink from his can before continuing, “Do you think she’ll ever be
normal again?”
“She wasn’t exactly normal to begin with,” Leif answered, trying not to let his
irritation of his younger brother’s sincerity show.
“She’s got to go off on her own at some point, though,” Anders pressed. “She’s
got her whole life ahead of her.”
“I’ll never let her go,” Leif said. “I don’t expect you to understand, but
having my little girl need me is one of those things a father loves most, even
if it means she’ll need me for the rest of my life.”
He felt something tighten in his chest as he spoke, some derelict piece of him
that ached with the truth of his words even as he said them just to enforce his
image as a doting father. He shrugged it off, telling himself it was the
alcohol making him sentimental, and reminded himself that she was full of his
semen and sore from his cock as he had said that sappy bullshit. He reminded
himself that it turned him on and that he would fuck her again that night in
the bed they now shared, whether she wanted it or not. He told himself that he
loved making her cry. He had no right to feel guilt at this point.
“Well that’s just fucking precious, papa bear. I think I’m going to vomit,”
Vidar sneered sarcastically, making the brothers laugh and the subject changed.
***** Chapter 10 *****
Chapter Summary
     Content warning: description of bodily mutilation
Simone wasn’t sure how much time had passed, but at some point into what she
guessed was the second hour, she knew that she could stay like this forever.
The leaves from the canopy of branches above them seemed to glow green from the
backlight of the bright early afternoon sun and they rustled in the breeze with
a soothing sound reminiscent of the ocean’s waves. The temperature was a bit
chilly, but it made the radiant warmth of her father’s skin all the more
pleasant to feel. She was sprawled mostly on top of him, his large solid body
comfortably positioned beneath her in tantalizing closeness. With her head
resting on his chest, she listened to the steady beat of his heart and
breathing and felt the deep rumble of his rough, rich voice whenever he would
speak. She spent most of the time with her eyes closed, just listening to his
body and enjoying the sensation of floating away into nothingness until there
was just the sound of his heart pumping hot blood around her. Occasionally he
would catch a can of beer one of his brothers would toss him or readjust their
position, but otherwise she was allowed to just drift in the calm of his
embrace. At first, she was so unaccustomed to his gentleness that she tensed at
each stroke, anticipating that deceptive kindness to give way to pain at any
moment, but the pain didn’t come. It was all sweetness without cost and,
eventually coming to trust that, she relaxed and accepted this affection. After
being encouraged to touch him back, she greedily indulged, running her hands
wherever they wanted. She could hardly believe he was letting her just feel him
and she quickly lost any self consciousness at her uncles’ stares. Every ridge
of bone and swell of muscle felt like a fresh discovery under her wandering
fingers. Her mouth had twitched in a desire to participate, to taste and feel
with her sensitive lips in chaste and childlike curiosity, but he had not given
her permission and she did not want to risk asking. She was worried that the
spell would be broken by any intrusion, so she soon limited her sounds to sighs
and soft moans whenever his strong hands smoothed over her tender areas.
Eventually, he moved under her and she groaned in disappointment as he sat up
and asked his brothers something. Their Norwegian was just beautiful noise to
her ears, but Vidar must have said something that rankled Leif as he spat out a
short reply and moved to stand. He took her hand and she slid out of the chaise
lounge, her body relaxed to the point that her joints felt like they were made
out of jelly and rubber. Her feet seemed to float as they made their way
through the overgrown lawn, the long stalks scratching at her calves, but she
paid no mind to it as they intertwined their fingers and her heart swelled. He
wavered as he stepped up onto the back porch; an affect of the multitude of
beers he’d ingested, she figured. Her mind unclouded bit by bit with each step
into the house but she clung to her dreamlike state as much as she could, her
entire body feeling so light and tingly still. When they passed her cardigan
rumpled into a ball on the floor in the hallway, she swallowed in her suddenly
dry mouth, her throat scraping like sandpaper with the reflex. He seemed to
still be in a relaxed, almost sleepy mood however, his pace languid as he
walked more slowly to accommodate her shorter stride and the line of his broad
shoulders slack without his usual confident posture. He seemed, she realized
with an unnameable hollowness in her chest, older, nearly weakened. To her, he
had always seemed outside of age, always the form of masculine vigor with a
power in him that seemed eternally unaffected by the exhaustion and malcontent
that affected men even half his age. But as he gently directed her to sit in
the overstuffed leather sofa in the living room, one shaking hand on her
shoulder, he seemed beyond his 42 years.
“Stay. I won’t be long,” he said, his words warped by the stronger presence of
his accent. She could only nod in response, not trusting her sore throat to
cooperate. She watched as he retreated back into the hall, his tall and
muscular frame seeming too large in the confines of the old house. Simone
pressed her palm to her sternum, brow furrowed in puzzlement as she tried to
place this almost physical emotion. She recalled that the psychologist she’d
visited after her incident had given her a checklist to go through whenever she
couldn’t identify what she felt, but that list was most likely still in her
nightstand in Brooklyn. The reminder of her lack of control over her own life
brought an unpleasant mix of self pity and betrayal alongside that hollowness,
funneling into the well of anxiety that constantly threatened to overflow.
Breathing deeply, she forced her feelings back down, willing herself to calm
before they overtook her.
“Don’t think about it. There’s nothing you can do right now,” she whispered to
herself under her breath, digging the heels of her palms into her eyes and
curling her legs to her chest. Her white shoes clattered to the oriental rug
and she perched her bare feet on the plush leather of the sofa, letting her
forehead rest on her knees as she focused on the sound of her slow breaths.
When the clamor of emotions waned, she noticed a ticking sound and looked
around the decorated room. Too quiet to be a clock, it took her a moment to
hone in on the slight sound until she traced it to the fireplace mantel.
Curious and looking for a distraction, she rose from the sofa and walked toward
it. There, on the ornately molded stone surface, was a wristwatch. She picked
it up, examining the tiny cogs on the face of it under the hands, the slight
constant movement of it reminding her of a trapped insect’s flailing legs. The
mental image of a bug-powered watch made her smile.
“That’s Bjørn’s watch,” Leif’s gravelly voice said from behind her. She cringed
in surprise, clutching the watch to her chest defensively as she whirled around
to find him looming behind her. The sudden thumping of her heart jammed in her
throat and she swallowed hard to clear it, willing herself to calm once more as
he spoke on, unperturbed by her usual jumpiness. “My uncle. He and my father
came to this country to oversee the US branch of our architecture firm. They
gave him that watch for working with them for 45 years.”
She nearly gaped at this wealth of information he volunteered, her curiosity
making her fear more easily ignorable as she looked more intently at the watch.
She turned it over, seeing an inscription written in Norwegian on the back.
While she couldn’t read it, she was able to make out the number 45 and Bjørn
Valstad.
He stepped closer to her and she could feel his body heat rolling off of him as
he looked at the watch from over her shoulder, saying, “He was an odd man.
Mostly kept to the drawings while Einar – my father – handled the social
aspects of the business. He would have liked you.”
“Did grandpa get a watch too?” she asked.
“He did. I let Henrik have it,” he answered disinterestedly. He reached over
her, his arms coming up on either side of her and she froze at the loose
embrace, but he only took the watch and slipped it over her hand. He chuckled a
bit when he latched it on her wrist, the click of the clasp sending a shiver up
her spine. “Well look at that. A little big, but it fits. Bjørn was a very thin
man.”
She examined the worn brown leather straps, feeling bashful at wearing
something so personal to a man she’d never met. Leif’s cheek pressed against
her temple and she felt her face flush as he gingerly turned her wrist to
examine the watch himself.
His voice was quiet even as he spoke so close to her ear, “There’s a lot of
similarities between you and him, you know. He had amazing artistic talent and
kept to himself, but he wore his heart on his sleeve – even when he didn’t want
to. Hmph. I guess that’s why he never liked people so much. Here, let me show
you…” His fingers clutched the sides of the watch, his nail carefully pulling
out a tiny knob at the side. She watched his hands work as he spoke. “You have
to keep mechanical watches like this wound. So, every day, you pull out the
crown and twist it like so… until it resists. Then, you just push the crown
back in. There’s no battery in it; it depends on you to keep it working. This
timepiece probably hadn’t ticked in six years but it started up again like
always after I wound it.”
“No battery… it just works without any kind of power?” she asked, unable to
mask her astonishment at the little machine on her arm.
“Only the power you give it,” he answered. She smiled, admiring the timepiece
for a moment longer, then moved to take it off. He put his hand over hers,
stopping her and said, “I want you to have it. You have to keep it wound
though, understand?”
“Oh, I- uh… Yes,” she stammered. A bright happiness flooded her, making her
blush deepen, and she said more firmly, “I understand. I’ll take care of it,
Papa.”
“I know you will,” he whispered. She turned her head toward him, seeing him
watching her with a warm smile she rarely ever witnessed on his face, and his
hands slid from their light hold on her wrist to gently cup her cheek and
shoulder. For a long moment, they just stood together, her torso and neck
twisted to look up at him as he leaned down close behind her. Then, he bent
down further, his lips pressing tenderly to hers.
Her heart fluttered at the contact, a curious electricity in the kiss that was
new to her, and she found herself closing her eyes and leaning into it. The
languid tilt of his head slid their lips over each other’s, his mouth soft on
hers as he latched them together with an outward pout that parted both of them
open slightly. The slow and gentle pace they set was so different from how he
would usually force her mouth open and all but devour her; she was quickly
rediscovering that tingly floating feeling from cuddling on him earlier. It
struck her as extremely peculiar that his touch could be her greatest source of
pain and fear and yet at times extract such comfort and elation. This reminder
of the complex and overwhelming power he held over her gave her another feeling
she wished she could consult her chart about, but for now she allowed herself
to bask unthinkingly in the sweet warmth of the moment. When she felt him dip
his tongue at the wet center of her pucker, she whimpered a bit at the chills
racing pleasantly down her spine and slipped her own tongue past his. The low,
gruff groan he hummed at this made her chest ache with pleasure, her head
swimming in a rush that reminded her of being caught in an undertow. She let
herself get dragged down into the depth of that sensation, chasing the taste of
him just below the alcohol as they enjoyed the push and pull of their lips and
the caresses of their tongues. His fingers slid into her hair, making her tense
reflexively in fear he would grab and pull, her scalp still sore from his rough
treatment not even four hours prior. However, his long fingers only massaged
against her scalp, relaxing her and she let herself moan softly into his mouth
at the sensual contact.
Slowly, he pulled away from her, the loss of his kiss making her open her eyes
to see him just looking at her face. Her mind sluggish in its dreamy fog, she
could only stare back, a mild curiosity sprouting in her at the strange furrow
in his brow and almost pained look in his eyes. His nearly mournful expression
also sprouted a dull, heavy ache around her heart that seemed to squeeze her
lungs and flutter in her belly.
“Simone…” he murmured, his voice almost hoarse in how husky and low it was. Her
eyes focused on his as they flitted distractedly about her face, the strange
emotion boiling within her as she waited for him to continue. His lips parted
as though he were thinking of how to phrase his thoughts and it took him a
moment before he drew in a short breath and said, “People… experience
neurological changes when they become parents. Humans are biologically
triggered to react in certain ways from the moment our children take root in
the womb. Not just mothers, but fathers experience a hormonal shift as well. I
am no exception.”
Simone was used to his accent becoming much thicker and his voice becoming much
more gravelly when he drank, so she couldn’t blame her bewilderment on
mishearing him. He locked eyes with her, gray on gray, and held her gaze as he
continued.
“I am still no exception. I’m not going to claim that I’ve ever been a good
father to you; I know I haven’t been. But… I’ve always felt like your father.
Always. Even now… No, especially now. So don’t pretend that you’re not my
daughter. Do you understand?” he said, his fingers gripping the roots of her
hair tighter as his tone became firmer with his words.
“Yes, Papa,” she answered, trying once more to physically swallow her rising
nervousness down her sore throat. “I can’t pretend that we aren’t… who we are.
But…” She couldn’t hold his stare as she continued, focusing her vision on the
fringe of hair that hung over his temple, loosed from his usual combed back
style in an uncharacteristic display of dishevelment. “I can’t understand, if
you still want to be my father, how… how can you…” Her voice was shaking,
instinct screaming for her to stop this line of questioning, but she’d been
burning with the need to know since she’d slid out of her psilocybin haze that
first night. “How can you fuck me and still consider yourself my father?”
The silence and stillness that followed her whispered question was deafening.
She couldn’t look away from that lock of silver and dark blonde, too afraid of
what she would see in his expression as she could feel his stare baring down on
her. The skin on her scalp crawled where his hands were sunken into her thick
hair, her breath catching as she tried to breathe calmly through her nose but
the anticipation of pain had her on edge.
“Because you are mine,” he finally said. Her eyes snapped back to his then,
seeing his familiar impassive mask in place but a constrained heat detectable
in the sharpness of his gaze. She couldn’t help the tremor in her body that
shook her deepening breaths, feeling suddenly like a mouse hypnotized into
stillness by a serpent’s glare. He leaned down closer once more, his lips
brushing against hers as he whispered, “In every way, you belong to me and I
will use you as I see fit. There are no rules, no laws, no morals here to
prevent me from taking what’s mine and I will never… ever… let you go.”
His lips sealed over hers in a wet, dominating kiss nothing like the sweet and
gentle ones before, making her cry of surprise sound like a desperate whimper
against his mouth. His teeth nipped at her lower lip as he pulled away, the
sharp pain making her wince and grunt and he chuckled at her mirthlessly.
“You fill your role so well, darling girl,” he grinned, rubbing his nose
against hers in a cruel mockery of fatherly affection. She kept her eyes
scrunched shut, her body tense in preparation for whatever he might do to her
as his hands slid down her neck and chest to roughly cup her breasts while he
said, “You’ve been wondering how I could be so amorous to my own daughter, but
what about you?” She gasped as he kneaded the sensitive flesh, rolling her
hardened nipples under his palms. Every nerve in her body was electrified by
this contact in both fear and arousal, those two feelings so closely linked in
her now that she wasn’t sure which it was she was panting from. “You’re so
sensitive, so reactive to my touch and so eager to please me. Think about it:
you’ve always been mine.”
“That’s… It wasn’t like that…” she stammered, her voice tight. Her head ached,
overwhelmed by a maelstrom of blurred thoughts and panic as he spoke, and she
grit her teeth against it but he kept speaking and fondling her breasts almost
painfully.
“When you strip away everything society has told you, everything you believe
what we should be, what is it that you really feel?” he asked. There was a
maniacal edge to his tone that frightened her more than the anticipation of
agony, but her mind heeded his demand even as she railed against the
suggestion. That insistent curiosity rose above her own self preservation,
wondering at that horrible fluttering fullness that ached in her when they
kissed.
“What I really feel?” she breathed, the answer just at the tip of her mind and
she shuddered in terrible aversion to it.
“Yes,” he hissed, his breath hot against her mouth. When her mind hit the white
hot truth to the question, she blanched, twisting away from him and taking a
few stumbling steps before collapsing into a well-worn armchair. Her shaking
hands pressed against her face as she curled into herself, a sob wrestling its
way out of her despite her efforts to suppress them.
“I’m just confused! I… I don’t know what to feel, what to think and I…” she
panted, groaning in frustration at her weakness and ineptitude at processing
her own thoughts. “I can’t think right! I feel insane because I am insane,
Papa. What I feel… it isn’t ever going to be right, so it doesn’t matter.”
His hands grabbed her shoulders and she startled, not having heard his
approach. Her head shot up, seeing him kneeling in front of her, and she felt
herself frozen under his glare once more.
“What is it in your heart that you revile so?” he asked, his softer tone
mismatching the ferocity in his eyes. Her jaw clenched and unclenched, her
words jamming together unspoken while hot tears spilled down her cheeks.
Her mouth opened, no sound coming out of her locked throat for a moment until
she managed to whisper, “I am not well. I’m sick. There’s so much wrong and I’m
just confused and so fucked up because I can’t be… can’t be… I’m not okay with
this."
“Say it aloud, Simone,” he said as he jostled her a bit by her shoulders, her
hair falling over her face in soft brown waves that obscured her view of him.
She sniffed back her tears, shaking her head and wrapping her arms tight around
her cramping stomach. He leaned in closer and commanded firmly, “Tell me what
is in you that frightens you so.”
Her voice was high and tight, almost a squeak as she kept shaking her head and
said, “Dad, don’t make me-”
“Say it!” he growled.
She hung her head, hiding her burning face behind her veil of hair as she
whispered, “I just… I can’t help it, when we start… touching… I just need it.
God, I need help, Papa. I don’t want to be like this. What we’ve been doing is
fucking me up and I-I am so confused, I… It feels like I’m… in love with you,
but…” She broke into a nervous laugh, her hands pausing their wringing to wipe
her tears before she babbled on. “That’s impossible. We’re just having sex,
right? The kissing, the touching, the… pain, it’s all just for fucking, right?
We’re going through something really weird and we’re fucking it out of our
systems or something because why not? Why not fuck each other? Isn’t that what
this is? I’m just getting my wires crossed because I’m crazy and of course I
love you, you’re my dad! But in love, heh, that’s… I-I’m sorry, I shouldn’t
have even said it, it’s-”
“No,” he interrupted.
She paused, thrown off by his response, and hesitantly asked, “What… do you
mean, ‘no’?”
“No, we are not ‘just having sex’,” he explained. She glanced up at him,
confusion overriding her trepidation for now, and gaped as he went on. “We’ve
taken our relationship to a level more befitting our natural dynamic; one which
enables us access to our carnal urges, but our intimacy is not limited to
merely the physical. The intercourse we share is also an expression and outlet
for many things, including love. You’re in love with me because that is the
nature of our relationship.”
Her stomach turned and the edges of her vision blurred. For a moment, she
thought she was going to be sick, but once it passed she was left with a cold
hollow in her belly that rapidly began to fill with shame and dread. Her eyes
glanced around the room, not really seeing anything as she focused inward,
trying to calm herself while also trying to process the full weight of his
words. She quickly found that she could not do both at once.
Still, she couldn’t stop herself from asking, “And you… Are you… in lovewith
me?”
Leif’s hands slid off her shoulders to wrap his arms around her in a hug,
pressing her hunched and quaking form against his broad chest and laying his
cheek upon her head. She squeezed her eyes shut once more, burrowing into the
comfort his warmth and strength exuded. Every compassion he bestowed on her
could be so fleeting, she couldn’t waste any kindness he might offer even as
she still trembled in fear of his cruelty.
When he spoke, his voice was warm and rich in the deep rumble of his chest
against her ear, “My sweet, darling girl, you have no idea what you do to me.
No one will ever love you as much as I do. I promise.”
She pressed her face against his chest and allowed a quiet sob to shake its way
out of her, helplessness and confusion overtaking any will to argue against how
wrong she knew all of this was. The stress of the last four days was breaking
her down and she hated how easily she crumbled, but she was merely too
exhausted to confront her situation so she let herself weep in the arms of the
man who had brought her so much anguish and confusion. His hands gently rubbed
her back, his voice softly hushed and murmured meaningless words of comfort
into her hair, and he let her weep against him until she found a stretch of
numbness inside her to retreat into. The draw to feel nothing rather than the
amorphous miasma of jumbled emotions and thoughts was so strong, but her mind
churned with shame and anxiety even as she sunk from distress into a fog of
depression. Once her sobs receded and she leaned boneless against him, he
kissed the top of her head and gathered her limp body in his arms. She never
felt smaller or weaker than that moment as he carried her upstairs, her arms
hanging loosely around his neck and face buried in his shoulder.
There was no anticipation or regard in her for where he was taking her, no
concern for the way he locked the door behind them in their bedroom, no thought
to how he laid her down on the bed and peeled off her clothing. She stared up
at the ceiling as she was aware of the wet pressure of his mouth on her breast,
the sting of his saliva against the wounds there registering only as pain
without the usual panic. She closed her eyes and breathed slowly, the sting
fading into numbness. She could only feel the pressure of his teeth tearing
into her, tugging her skin open with force that slid her prone body with his
motions. There was no pain though she could feel her hot blood running down her
side, pooling into the crook of her armpit and soaking the bedding below her.
The sound of her ripping flesh seemed distant, the feel of his fingers crowding
around her ribs and prying the bones apart only registering as an uncomfortable
adjustment. The pressure in her chest when he fit his hands in through the hole
he’d dug was unpleasant, making her open her eyes to look up at the mess of
bright scarlet splattered all over his white dress shirt. His mouth was
dripping with it as he bared his stained teeth in the effort and concentration
he was putting into rooting around in her chest cavity. Her eyes trailed down
his wet sleeves to where his hands were submerged in her up to his wrists and
she noticed with curiosity that he was stuffing something inside. She craned
her neck to try to see what it was but slammed it backwards hard into the
mattress when all at once she was blinded by the immense pain that flooded her.
Through the world that was her agony, she could hear someone screaming. Then,
another voice floated into her awareness below those screams.
“-mone! Simone! Simone! Slutte å skrike!”
Her eyes popped open and she shot up, flailing against the figure who was
shaking her by the shoulders. Her hands automatically gripped her chest to
cover the hole and staunch the bleeding, only to clutch at the material of her
dress and find the wound missing. Bewilderment now accompanied her mad panic as
she looked down at herself to see no blood and find herself still clothed.
“What- what- what-” she panted, her hands searching her body, feeding her
assurance that she was so undeniably unwounded. She noticed then that, aside
from the pounding of her heart and the burn of her throat, the pain was missing
as well. Bafflement overtook her panic and she gained enough self control to
look up and see her uncle Anders watching her, his blue eyes wide and shocked
as he kneeled on the bed and watched her warily.
“You are… good?” he asked, his English coming out slow and stilted, barely
discernible in his thick accent. She stared at him, still panting, but managed
to nod. Her whole body was shivering and damp with sweat, her skin dripping
with it and she wanted to get away from the feeling of wet bedsheets beneath
her. She stumbled off the bed, knees hitting the floor hard but she flinched
and rolled away when he reached out to help her, her residual panic spiking at
the sight of his hands.
“Hva i helvete skjer?”  
Both of them turned at the sound of that deep, growled question to see Leif
standing in the doorway, an angry scowl darkening his sharp features into a
predatory snarl and his shoulders squared in a manner that emphasized his
powerful frame. Anders shot up off the bed, his hands splayed in front of him
in a placating and defensive pose as he spoke in rapid Norwegian. Leif took one
heavy step towards him, making the smaller man cringe and cower backwards, but
he turned his heated glare to her. 
“Why were you screaming? Did he touch you? What was he doing to you?” he asked,
his voice still darkened with anger. 
Simone swallowed, her throat raw as she rasped, “Nothing! He didn’t do
anything, I… I was… seeing things.” 
His eyebrows twitched, his expression and posture deflating into pensiveness.
He glanced to his brother and muttered, “Permisjon.” 
Anders quickly left the room, looking back at Simone worriedly before closing
the door behind him. She scrambled to stand as he approached her, but sunk back
down to sit on the floor as he pressed his hand to her shoulder and kneeled in
front of her. She stared, fixated on how clean and white his shirt was.  
“Tell me what you saw,” he said. She winced, snapping out of her trance once
she registered his words, and rubbed her face in her hands. Her head was
throbbing to the loud beat of her heart, overcrowded with images of her
father’s hands stuffing something into her chest, and she shuddered violently. 
“Simone, tell me what you saw,” he repeated more firmly. 
“I don’t remember,” she lied, the words burning as she forced them out. She
could feel him staring at her, his disbelief palpable in the silence, but she
felt too sick to care. 
“Can you stand?” he asked. 
“Why?” she croaked, her head pounding at the notion of moving at all. 
“You’re covered in sweat. You need to wash it off,” he said. “Let me help you
up and get you into a bath.” 
“What! No! No, just- gimme a minute, I can…” she stammered, but he was already
gathering her up. 
“Don’t be obstinate, dearest,” he chided her, adjusting her squirming body
against his torso. She noticed that he smelled even more strongly of alcohol
than before and that his speech was even slightly slurred and it occurred to
her that the sun was much lower than it had been just five minutes ago.  
“Oh, god…” she whispered when it finally struck her that she had lost several
hours.  
“I’m going to need to bathe anyway,” he chuckled, unaware or uncaring of her
distress. “It’s been too long since we had a bath together. This’ll be fun.”
***** Chapter 11 *****
Chapter Notes
     Content warning: Bathtubs, blood and descriptions of violence
“They know we’re in here… together,” he heard her say, her voice quiet and
raspy from her prior screams. Leif turned to Simone, already smirking before he
could stop himself; it was adorable how cautious and quick to embarrassment she
was about their relationship.
“Is there a problem with a father bathing his own daughter in his house?” he
asked. His deep voice reverberated off the green tiled walls of the bathroom
and he caught her wincing. He quirked his brow at her pained expression and
paused in unbuttoning his shirt to fish out a small plastic bag from his
pocket. “Perhaps you would like something for that headache, dearest.”
“No, no pills,” she murmured, shaking her head. She winced again from the
motion and pressed the heel of her palm to her forehead.
“No, no pills,” he repeated back to her, dangling the sandwich bag of a dozen
long-stemmed brown-capped dried mushrooms. Her eyes widened when she recognized
what he held, her mouth going slack before she slapped her hand over it.
“Thought you lost this, did you?”
“H-how did you…” she breathed, her shoulders shrinking in a cowering hunch.
“Did you really think I wouldn’t notice your insistence on brewing a pot of tea
the afternoon we arrived in this house? You never even had a taste for
chamomile,” he grinned, trying not to laugh at how stricken she looked.
“Then you knew … that I was high…” she said. Her eyes seemed far away in
thought for a moment and he realized his misstep, his mind racing to catch up
with the implications of what he’d revealed to her. He schooled his expression
to remain unaffected as he cursed himself internally for drinking himself this
stupid. He watched her face carefully, seeing each thought play across her
features until her eyes lowered to the floor and welled with tears. He could
work with that.
“I did. It gave you a boldness that took me quite by surprise. You were so
insistent,” he said, watching her deflate further with guilt. He stepped closer
to her, letting his voice drop an octave as he whispered, “How could I say no
when my little girl was begging me with such need? And now we’re free to
explore our love fully. You owe a lot to this little fungus.” He was satisfied
by the way she hid her face from him, so he straightened and cheerfully said,
“Go ahead and run the bath to your preferred temperature. I’ll return shortly.”
She was silent, but moved toward the large claw footed tub and he waited until
she turned the taps before exiting the bathroom. The relief he felt at
maneuvering her predilection for internalizing blame and her increasing
obedience gave him a giddy energy. The hallways were dark but a light spilled
from the kitchen, so he wasn’t surprised to see Anders sitting at the table
inside. The younger man’s eyes widened when he entered and Leif had to refrain
from sneering as he rose from his seat.
“Hey, she okay?” Anders slurred, wavering as he approached him.
“In as much as she can ever be,” Leif responded coolly, filling the electric
kettle in the porcelain sink. “No thanks to you.”
“I didn’t do anything! She was already screaming before I even went in there!”
he protested. “I’m not perverted like Vidar or Henrik. God, they’re
disgusting.”
“Mm-hmm…” Leif hummed uninterestedly as he plugged the kettle in. He had
roughly five minutes in which to avoid conversation with his brother. He busied
himself with pulling a clear glass teakettle from the cupboards and rinsing the
dust from it before depositing the full bag of dried mushrooms inside. “Where
are those other two idiots?”
“Passed out on the grass for the night, I think. Where is she now? I feel as
though I should apologize. She looked so scared, I think I fucked up,” Anders
groaned, leaning heavily against the counter next to him and squinting at the
pot. “What’s this you’re up to? Broth?”
“How can you apologize? Your English is terrible,” Leif grumbled.
“How are you? My… name Anders,” he said slowly.
Leif couldn’t stop the chuckle the bubbled out of him at that. “Awful. How did
you ever survive summers here?”
Anders grinned up at him. “I used to be much better at English when I was a
kid. We didn’t get much practice when we went back to the farm.”
“Well, go ahead and mumble your broken English at her tomorrow. I’m giving her
a bath and then it’s straight to bed after that,” Leif said offhandedly,
glancing at him in his peripheral as he tested the waters with that
information.
Anders frowned, chewing on his thumbnail as he knit his eyebrow in thought
until he asked, “You have to bathe her? Does she… try to drown herself or
something like that?”
“We’re just very close,” Leif answered simply, then at seeing his curious
stare, continued, “When you have a child, you’ll bathe her too.”
“Ah…” the younger man trailed off, but turned to lean on his side to face him
as he said, “But Simone isn’t a child and she looks… Well, doesn’t it feel
weird?”
Leif fixed him with a firm stare, taking a smug satisfaction in how his brother
looked away rather quickly, and said, “Normal people don’t experience arousal
toward their close relatives, so no, it doesn’t feel weird to scrub her back
and keep her company in the bath. Why? Does thinking of your niece in the
bathtub make you feel weird?”
Steam erupted from the spout on the electric kettle and he turned away from him
to pour the hot water over the mushrooms.
Anders pushed himself off the counter and paced, saying, “I’m not a pervert.
You know, I think it’s great you’re that close. I just don’t know where you
learned how to be close to your kid. Dad was never that caring to us.”
“I am not our father,” Leif replied. He grabbed a lemon from the fridge.
“I saw you in the living room with her earlier,” his brother said.
Leif’s hand paused mid-slice into the lemon, the knuckles on his hand that
gripped the knife turning white as he kept his voice level and asked, “Oh? And
what did you see?”
“She was crying and you were holding her,” Anders said. Leif squeezed lemon
juice into the steaming pot, the mushrooms beginning to expand in the water.
“It was just nice, the way you were comforting her like that. You’re the
scariest person I know but you turned out to be the best father I know too. I
just think that’s really… I don’t know. I’m really drunk.”
Leif nearly laughed at that, either from his relief or the irony. He grabbed
two mugs down from the cupboard, the tight coil of nervousness in him unwinding
but his relief was stunted by his self-admonishment at his carelessness.
“Well, I hope it hasn’t softened my image. I’d hate to become the second-
scariest person,” he said dryly, placing the hot teakettle and the mugs on a
tray. “Use the upstairs bathroom if you need to piss.”
“Fuck off and die,” Anders grumbled in slow, heavily accented English as Leif
carried the tray into the darkened hallway.
He saw Simone flinch when he opened the door to find the mirrors and window
glass already fogged with steam. He placed the tray on the white marble
counter, nudging his father’s complex shaving kit to make space and stirring
the scent of sandalwood from it with the motion. The traces of bergamont and
fir hitting Leif’s sensitive nose brought memories of the late man to his mind
unbidden. Specifically, the violence he experienced by his fists before Leif
outgrew him. He blinked back the stale childhood fear, a frown tugging his brow
together while he searched the cabinets on either side of the fogged mirror
until he found a remedy to his ailment: bath oil. The bottle was unsurprisingly
unopened, no doubt a gift left forgotten as soon as it was placed on the shelf
by his utilitarian father. He inhaled the scents of rose and blackberry musk to
chase away the oppressive aftershave as he drizzled a liberal amount into the
steaming bathwater. He unbuttoned his shirt the rest of the way, letting it
fall to the white marble tile floor and his gray slacks and underthings joined
it a moment after.
Aware of Simone’s nervousness rising as she adorably tried not to look at his
nude form standing unabashedly in the center of the bathroom, he gestured to
her with a flick of his hand, saying, “Hurry up, now. You’re not going to bathe
with your clothes on.”
“But they’re going to know,” she whispered. He saw her hands clutch at her
sides, fists bunching the yellow material of her thin dress. He turned his body
to face her, indulging in the rush of power he felt when she stiffened in fear.
“Would you like some assistance then?” he offered. The widening of her eyes
when she detected the underlying threat in his voice was endearing to him and
she shook her head quickly, her fingers working the white buttons of her bodice
in poorly concealed franticness. Her olive cheeks were tinged with pink while
she wriggled out of the dress. Her thumbs hooked on her white panties as she
dragged them both down the generous swell of her hips and thighs. She kicked
her clothing to the side and wrapped her arms around her now bare torso, legs
pressed together tightly. He admired her shapely form, his gaze lingering on
the elegant bow of her collarbones and the inward slope of her waist, then
turned his attention to the teapot. The mushrooms had become much plumper and
the water had browned significantly within the ten or fifteen minutes of
steeping.
As he poured the steaming concoction into the two mugs, she hesitantly
whispered, “I don’t think this is a good idea.”
“You didn’t think it was such a bad idea on Sunday,” he remarked, stepping into
the hot bathtub and placing the mugs on the flat edge of the porcelain. He
could see her biting her knuckles from the corner of his eye, the old nervous
habit resurfacing from a time before her mother had disciplined that out of
her. As he gingerly sunk into the scented bath, he grinned genially at her and
said, “Come on in, the water’s fine.”
She obeyed, taking short, stiff steps and fixing her gaze on the mugs as she
stepped into the tub. Standing knee-deep in the hot water, she deliberated how
to fit in there with him for a moment before turning her back to him and
sinking down between his legs.
He watched her submerge her curvaceous ass into the water, every movement slow
with either hesitance or adjustment to the heat, and leered at the pink stripes
of healing scratch marks and fading plum and red bruises that decorated her
creamy brown skin. He gently pulled her backward by her upper arms until she
was leaning back against his front. Her soft skin felt tantalizing against him
and the dampened ends of her hair curled flat against his chest like the greedy
arms of a brown octopus.
“There now…” he sighed, reaching for their mugs. “Doesn’t a hot bath feel so
good on a cold night?”
He held a mug in front of her until she took it with both of her hands and he
couldn’t resist looking down at her frightened expression as she just stared at
the liquid. She turned halfway and met his stare as he sipped the steaming
brew, the earthy bitterness of the mushrooms and the tart of the lemon not
unpleasant on his tongue. He doubted he would ever tire of admiring the look of
fear that widened her silvery eyes, slackened her pink little plush mouth, and
furrowed the gentle arch of her brow. Tipping his mug to her in a silent cheer,
she looked back to her tea and pursed her lips before sipping delicately at the
hot liquid. He watched the slight bob of her throat, the oval bruises from his
fingers visible on the smooth column of her neck since she’d sweated off any
trace of concealer. He blessed his brother’s lack of observational skills for
not noticing them when he’d barged into their room.
“Finish your tea, dear,” he chided her when she leaned forward to put her mug
down. “Maybe you’ll feel like telling me about what made you scream upstairs
once you relax a little.”
She paused, mid-reach, but leaned back as she whispered, “I haven’t eaten
anything today, I shouldn’t… do it all.”
“Hm. I would have thought you’d want to keep up your strength around me,” he
mused. He felt her muscles tense against him and he smiled. “Finish it.”
He joined her in downing the rest, the tea still too hot but she seemed not to
care as she forced her throat to gulp it all. He plucked her now empty mug from
her loose hold, depositing them both back on the edge of the tub before sliding
down further into the water, forcing her to lay more heavily on him.
She glanced up at him, tilting her head backwards to view him upside-down, and
bit her lip nervously before quietly asking, “Have you… done this before?”
“No,” he answered plainly. She sat up suddenly, the water splashing a bit over
the rim and splattering on the tiles with the motion, and stared at him in
wide-eyed astonishment.
“Why are you doing this?” she hissed.
His eyebrows quirked up, interested in how uncharacteristically direct she
seemed at this moment, but he retained a casual tone as he said, “I wanted us
both to be relaxed for a pleasant evening bath and a chat, dearest.”
She only stared at him, her gaze shifting from disbelief to dreadful acceptance
as the long moments crawled by. Leif considered easing her trepidation by
correcting her perception that he had no idea what he was getting them into,
but he was being truthful by this being his first experience ingesting
psilocybin and she was so enjoyable in her fearful states. After a few minutes,
her shoulders began to slack and her gaze wandered down to the water. He sat
up, reached over to the bar of soap on the rim of the tub and rubbed it
vigorously between his hands until it worked up a hearty lather. She startled a
bit when he began rubbing the lather on her chest, her little grunt of surprise
stuttering into a full gasp when he twisted his hands down to slide over her
breasts.
“What are you-”
“Hush your squealing, darling girl,” he teased her, pinching her nipples to
make her groan and twist away from him. “You don’t want to make your uncles
think I’m doing anything untoward to you in here, right? Now pull your hair up
so I can wash you properly.”
Her jaw tensed, a flash of anger sparking in her eyes before dissipating in the
calmness she forced over her features as she gathered up her wet hair and
straightened her posture. He hummed in approval and began to scrub the suds
over her wet skin, watching her calm crumble into that troubled worry she often
wore when she was resisting her own pleasure. Her skin felt incredibly soft and
smooth under his rubbing hands as he pulled her into his lap to reach behind
her and scrub her shoulders and back. He glanced to her face, finding that
uncertain pout of her mouth particularly irresistible, and he leaned forward to
catch those full lips into his mouth. The small noise that she made as he
kissed her sent a fission of pleasure straight to his groin.
“Stand up,” he rasped against her mouth, suddenly breathless. His plans of
playing aloof were quickly giving way to his hunger for her. She obeyed, taking
a moment to steady herself before rising, the rivulets of water running down
her body as she stood. He found his mouth suddenly dry as he admired her
standing wet and bare to him as though she had just emerged from seafoam wholly
formed. His soapy hands travelled up her thighs, fingers digging into the
pliant flesh as he ran up her quadriceps and around to grip her round ass
before sliding down the backs of her thighs. She moaned softly as he lathered
her up, her eyes scrunched shut and face pink in a fierce blush, his cock
throbbing with each high feminine sound. Her little yelp and flinch when his
fingers dipped into the crease between her thigh and crotch made him give a
breathy chuckle, but she surprised him by parting her legs wider. Watching her
face contort in her attempts to stay quiet, he gently rubbed his soapy fingers
between her folds, her little cunt already slippery as he slowly and
deliberately slid her clit between his fingers. Her head lulled back and she
let out a long sigh as he did this, her skin erupting into goosebumps and
thighs tensing.
“God, you’re beautiful,” he breathed. Her eyes slit open, her irises just a
thin ring of silver from how blown her pupils were, and he chuckled at how
quickly the tea had taken hold of her. She shivered at the low sound of his
laughter but didn’t look away from him, even as her sighs spiked into a hitched
groan when he slid his lathering fingers up the sensitive cleft of her ass.
“Da-ad,” she sighed while he pressed against the tight pucker of her asshole.
“Just being thorough, darling girl,” he grinned, his voice huskier than he
thought it would be. “Go ahead and rinse off.”
She lowered herself back into the water and gripped the sides of the tub as she
submerged entirely. He watched as her long brown hair swirled around her. The
swirling motion spreading to the gray veins of the marble countertop and floor
at the edges of his vision was his first realization that the tea was beginning
to take effect. He reached into the water and hauled her out by her torso,
watching as she blinked curiously at him and allowed him to maneuver her to
once more straddle his lap while he stretched out beneath her. The slide of
their skin seemed to buzz wherever they touched. A slightly queasy elation
bubbled up in his belly as she slid her crotch more purposefully against the
hardened length of him.
“Can you feel it?” she whispered.
“I think so,” he answered. His arms snaked around her middle and held her to
him as she kissed at his throat, tongue and teeth dragging across his skin as
though she were mapping his neck with her mouth. His own sensitivity caught him
off guard and he groaned, feeling the water begin to pulse back to him in a
feedback loop of sensation.
“What did you put in me?” he heard her ask. He was still caught in the loop,
but her voice was clear and so very present.
“I haven’t put anything in you yet,” he chuckled.
“Why can’t you just tell me?” she whispered, her voice tight with frustration.
The soft scraping of her breath against his ear sounded like ice cracking down
his spine. He felt a strange sensation of being lifted at a disconcerting
speed, the sensation stretching out into a brief eternity until he felt torn
out of it suddenly. He only realized he’d had his eyes closed when he opened
them.
“Well,” he sighed, loosening his grip and smiling down at her tingling form.
“This is interesting.”
She didn’t seem to have heard him, apparently in the grips of her own world as
she lapped at his chest with all the simple satisfaction in the task of a dog
licking at a bone, if that bone shivered and stroked back. He knew she was lost
to the psilocybin, her mind and her secrets too far out of reach by mere words.
He gripped her face, thumbs hooking under her jawline, and she growled
indignantly as he pulled her up into a searing kiss. The water and air moved
around him, everything still swirling against the grain of him in an
overstimulating shower of sparks. The cool oasis of her soft mouth beckoned him
to search with his tongue inside her. His sweet Simone, the mad core of his own
madness, his squirming little ouroboros. Eventually, she managed to squirm out
of his grasp, her slick body sliding down him into the water and he whispered a
string of filth when he felt her take his cock into her mouth. The floating
tendrils of her hair tickled his legs as they wandered over his skin like her
feather-light touches from when they were laid out in the backyard together
mere hours ago. For a moment, he felt as though they were still there, almost
touching the material of her dress until she wrenched him back with her nails
dragging down his torso. He gasped as she worked him with her tongue under the
water, every sensation spreading in waves throughout his entire body from
wherever she touched him and being sent back almost as strong. Tactile
echolocation, his mind supplied. That’s asinine, he supplied back.
All at once, he was worried by how long she had been underwater, worried that
she was somehow damaging herself through oxygen deprivation. He pulled her off
his cock in a frenzied motion that sent a splash of water spilling over the
edge. She struggled against him as he sat up, holding her in a tight embrace,
their splashing noisily bouncing off the smooth tiles that made up the floor
and the walls. When at last his anxiety abated, he noticed that Simone was
biting down on his bicep and he looked curiously at the thin trail of blood
leaking down his arm and clouding the water. That would not do. He sighed
heavily, resigned himself to the necessary task of disciplining his wild
daughter, and gripped her throat with his other hand. The elation of his high
was unaffected by the necessary violence he chose to bestow on his beloved
child; she would love him despite his cruelty. That knowledge of how deep his
conditioning of her already ran gave the drug’s effects an edge of his
permanent rapture.
She released her bite almost immediately but that short moment of deliberation
earned her an open-palmed slap across her jaw. Her head snapped sharply to the
side with the force of his hand, a brief shout of surprise and pain echoing in
the small room. When she turned her head back to him, her hair clinging to her
face and her cheek beginning to redden, he was somewhat surprised at her raw
expression of hunger. Her lips were smeared red and full, parted with her
panting, and her pink tongue dragged across that pouted lower lip to pull his
blood into her mouth. More blatant than that, however, was the darkness in her
eyes as she stared up at him, the animalistic voracity and reckless challenge
in them.
“God damn,” he murmured. The strong connection he could feel to her through the
network of water molecules was overwhelming despite his efforts to retain an
appearance of control. He switched in and out of Norwegian and English as he
ran his hands all over her irresistible skin and whispered, “A foolhardy thing
to bite the arm of the man who feeds you. Trying to refresh your venom in me?
You’ve already rotted my heart black without even needing to break skin.”
She writhed, growling and snarling at him in her nonverbal state, her movements
less a struggle and more of a convulsive reaction to his overwhelming touch. He
pushed her until she sunk down onto her back as he loomed over her between her
spread thighs. She fought to keep her head above water and he laughed as she
thrashed beneath him.
“Can you taste yourself in my blood?” he asked, his voice shaking with laughter
and glee. “The part of me I gave to make you? I gave you my humanity and you’ve
turned me into a demon for the favor. Hahaha! Well, that’s what I get for
making a deal with Mephistopheles himself. I won’t squander my bounty,
however.”
His cock rubbed the inside of her thigh, brushing against her slippery cunt,
and they both flinched at the electric pulse when his tip slipped into her.
Unknowing if he was pressing into her or if she was pushing up onto him, he
became only aware of the softness of her cunt enveloping him. The slick
molasses velvet of her snug cunt sucked him in until she was flush to his hilt.
When he moved inside her, he could no longer tell where he ended and she began.
The pulsing hot pleasure that connected their flesh urged him to fuck her, that
electric current pulsing through them and growing with each thrust. Water
bounced around him, lapping at his skin like a hundred hands trying to drag him
down where he was submerged up to his waist as he drove into her.
The sensation of his climax was distorted through the sting of burning remorse
and melded together with the psilocybin haze, leaving him gasping from the
effort it took just to withstand the feelings crashing through him. Wave after
wave of ecstasy and guilt wracked his body and mind as he pumped his semen into
her. Flooding that forbidden core of his daughter, he was at last released from
that crest and descended back into his own mind. It was at this moment when he
was reeling back into himself that he opened his eyes and saw her submerged in
the water, eyes shut and terrifyingly still while her long hair swirled around
her. The panic that seized him had him pulling her up and shaking her before he
made any conscious decision to act.
His mind racing, he acted before thinking once more. He held her to him to fit
his mouth over the slope between her neck and shoulder and bit down hard. She
jerked in his arms and her agonized grunt filled him with relief at last, the
hot metallic tang of her blood filling his mouth. He sucked instinctually at
it. He swallowed two mouthfuls of her blood, drawing it out of her along with
her ragged gasps, before he was able to stop himself. His hand gripping the
back of her head, he pulled away from her and stared into her pained and
astounded face, certain he was mirroring the expression. With her blood still
dripping from his lips, he pressed his mouth to hers in a needful, greedy kiss.
“You wretched bitch,” he rasped between ardent kisses, her teeth baring at him
in an enraged snarl at him all the while, “God, I would drag you back from Hell
if I must. I love you so much, Simone.”
He needed her close, to feel her moving and alive, so he held her while she
struggled against him until the bathwater turned tepid. His mind looped on the
same train of thought throughout those fraught minutes: his guilt for ruining
her on purpose, his need to have her completely, and the necessity that he
continue conditioning her to need him. A dream its way into his still conscious
mind as he stroked her back and hushed her; a futile and dangerous question of
what she would have been like now had he not done all he had to ensure her
dependence on him. He could see a happy, well-adjusted Simone living her own
life while he sat sidelined in his role as her father. A man she would regard
with the same reserved affection he afforded her over holiday visits. She would
allow him a condensed and tailored version of her life whenever he’d ask how
she’d been. He didn’t even know what his life would look like without her. His
passion, obsession, and purpose had been tied to possessing her for so long
that everything seemed gray and meaningless without her. Now that he had her,
he knew he couldn’t let her be anything but his.
***** Chapter 12 *****
The jumble of noise struck Simone as particularly annoying at this late hour of
night, even for living above a busy Brooklyn block. She scrunched her face in
irritation and turned away from it, but startled when this motion alerted her
that she wasn’t lying down. Her eyes blinked open in bewilderment, certain she
was just asleep in her bed. She then recognized that not only was she standing,
but she was in a dark hallway, looking through a doorway into her grandfather’s
kitchen and the noise that had awoken her wasn’t traffic-- it was crickets. In
nervous habit, she bit her lip but quickly released it when she found it sore.
Her eyes trailed down her body, seeing that she was wearing one of her father’s
shirts and nothing else. No wonder she was freezing.
“Simone?”
She turned her head toward the voice, finding a blonde man standing behind her.
His hand was outstretched toward her as though he seemed unsure if he should
touch her or not and his blue eyes were wide with concern. She stared at those
sky-blue eyes as a tickle of recognition burst in her mind.
“Anders? What are- why am I…” she rasped, her throat so painfully dry that she
couldn’t finish her baffled stammering.
“Jeg beklager! Du var søvngjengeri og… ah…” Anders blurted out hurriedly, then
stopped himself to close his eyes and take a deep breath before asking, “You
are good?”
His words didn’t quite reach through the thick tangle of thoughts that raced in
her fogged mind, but she found herself nodding slowly. Her eyes turned back
toward the kitchen. Her mind worked on how she came to be standing there in the
freezing dead of night but finding her last known memory was proving to be
slippery. She recalled standing in the bathroom with her father, then being in
the water, but then nothing. There was something important, something
frighteningly important about the water but she just couldn’t remember. She
gasped aloud when Anders’ hand touching her arm brought her out of her head and
she whirled around at him.
He put his hand back up in that placating gesture he’d assumed with her father
earlier. Slowly backing away a couple steps, he softly and haltingly said, “No
problem. No problem… Want… help?”
 “Help-” she croaked, interrupted by a coughing fit. As she hunched over trying
to recover, she noticed him slip hurriedly past her into the kitchen. He
returned a quick moment later with a glass of water in his hand and she looked
up to see him smiling, holding it out to her. Not trusting her throat, she
nodded in thanks and took the glass, drinking deeply from it in careful gulps.
He smiled on, apparently pleased with himself.
“You are good?” he asked again, taking the glass from her when it was emptied.
“I am good,” she whispered, nodding for good measure. Her arms wrapped around
her body, the cold making itself more apparent now that her thirst had been
slated. She smirked at how quickly her body transitioned its focus according to
its hierarchy of needs, then quickly wiped that smirk off her face. That was a
thought that belonged more in her father’s head than hers. Anders’ hand once
more pulled her out of her head, but this time she let him gently grasp her
wrist and lead her into the living room. Her feet felt numb but with his
considerate slowness, she managed not to stumble. He led her to sit on the
sofa, the same one she’d sat in with her father earlier that day. She fixed her
stare to the floor with the shame that crawled up her neck as she recalled that
afternoon in terrible clarity. Her fingers gingerly touched her sore mouth as
the memory of how he’d bitten her lower lip in that abusive kiss replayed.
Something about his teeth struck her as peculiar. A throbbing ache in her
shoulder made itself apparent to her then and she remembered how he’d bitten
her open and sucked her blood from her there. The shock of the memory made her
mouth slack and eyes open wide. She jumped a bit when Anders draped a woven
throw over her shoulders, snapping out of her disturbing thoughts once more at
his touch. He smiled down at her, giving her shoulder a friendly pat that made
her balk at the pain. He didn’t seem to notice as he took a seat next to her.
“You feel good?” he asked. She swallowed thickly, nervous at being alone with
him so near and so late at night, but admonished herself for thinking that way.
He was not her father.
“Yes, thank you,” she answered, attempting a smile. There was something
genuinely comforting in his childish grin and eagerness to help. She felt a new
kind of guilt for having assumed any possibility of danger from him even as a
part of her warned her not to let her guard down. She saw how his gaze lowered
from her face and his smile gave way to a look of uneasy curiosity. It wasn’t
until his fingers gently pulled at the collar of her shirt that she realized
he’d seen the bruises on her neck. Before she could consider how she should
react, she wrapped the collar high around her neck and reeled back from him,
heart stammering in dread. He stared at her, eyes wide in surprise at her
sudden movement. She couldn’t bare those concerned blue eyes one moment longer.
Still clutching the collar tightly around her neck, she stood up, the blanket
falling off her as she hurriedly scampered away.
“Vente! Jeg beklager!” he called after her, but she was already bounding up the
stairs.
Bursting into the room she shared with Leif, she hurriedly locked the door
behind her. She leaned her cheek against the smooth wood as she tried to calm
her pounding heart. He had seen, without any doubt, and she had let him in her
utter carelessness. Her hands wrapped lightly around her neck, caressing the
mottled skin as though she could rub the damning bruises off. In the darkness
of the room, everything was outlined in shadow with only the thin light of the
alarm clock to reveal her father’s large form sprawled on the bed. After a few
long, terrible minutes, her eyes adjusted to the low light and she walked
toward their bed. Their bed. Her father, but their bed. She felt queasy.
It feels like… I’m in love with you, but…
Her hands threaded into the roots of her still damp hair, tugging on them
roughly as she tried to burn the memory out of her mind.
No one will ever love you as much as I do.
God, I would drag you back from Hell if I must.
She growled against the sound of Leif’s rich voice echoing such sweet, sick
sentiments in her mind. Her hands rubbed her face, jerking when she pressed
against a fresh tenderness along her jaw. Memory sparked of the taste of his
blood on her tongue and his strong slap across her face. The shrooms had hit
her differently this time, had reduced her mind instead of expanded it, until
she was little more than a snarling animal. Not far from her new normal, she
considered bitterly.
Or maybe you’ve been a monster all along, Leif’s voice suggested. She pressed
the heels of her hands to her eyes, hunching until she curled up on the balls
of her feet on the hardwood floor as she willed that intrusive voice to stop
speaking, but to no avail. You’re no victim. You love that daddy is finally
paying attention to you; paying the only kind of attention you’re good for.
“Stop it,” she muttered under her breath. She tried to conjure the sound of her
own voice, tried to return her inner narrative to normal, but his deep gravelly
chuckle rumbled clear and loud above her attempts.
Just give in like you always do. You’re never going to be a normal person.
Hahahah! Not now that you’re papa’s little fuck puppet! Really, it’s going to
either be this or finger painting in the psych ward for you. Take your pick:
incest or incarceration.
“Shut up!” she hissed, then froze when she heard the real Leif stir.
“Hva er klokka?” he murmured as he sat up and rubbed his face. He turned to the
empty side of the bed, his hand reaching out for the other occupant and
grabbing at nothing. All at once, he slung his feet off the side and stood. His
rigid alarm slid into a fatigued slouch when he saw her huddled on the floor.
She could only stare up at him, his silhouette huge and menacing in the dark.
“What are you…”
“I’m still hallucinating. From the shrooms,” she interrupted quickly, her voice
cracked and panicky. She winced at the sound and the level of truth to her
words, clinging to that as the reason for the voice in her head and her
sleepwalking.
Liar.
He wavered for a beat, then bent at the waist to pat her head and muttered,
“G’back t’bed, sweetie. Be right back.”
While he walked past her and into the hallway, she crawled on her hands and
knees into the bed. The warmth of where he’d lain soothed her like a balm on
both her cold skin and fraught mind. She greedily soaked up that residual body
heat under the blanket. However, as the numbing cold left her, the aches and
pains of her body became more pronounced. The bite wound on her shoulder seared
and throbbed especially, making her unbutton her shirt and pull it off that arm
entirely to relieve it of even that slight pressure. Reluctantly, she left the
warmth and crawled over to her side of the bed, the chill there telling her
she’d been away from it for quite a while. A hard pit of fear warned her not to
think about it. She buried her face in the flat pillow and held her breath
until the urge to scream left her.
The sound of the old pipes clanking with rushing water alerted her that her
father would be returning soon, so she curled up on her good side and tried to
quiet her heart enough to feign sleep. She heard the door creak open and closed
and felt the mattress dip where he lied down. Her traitorous heart still pumped
hard and circulated unnecessary adrenaline despite her constant reassurance
that nothing was happening. His hand brushed down the curve of her curled spine
under the blanket. His freezing touch made it hard to resist a shiver but she
was determined to feign sleep in hopes he would leave her in peace. No such
luck. His hand continued its descent down the side of her thigh, his nails
dragging across her bare skin as sharp as claws.
The sound of the door opening again made her jerk up. The dread of her father’s
inevitable anger at being interrupted by one of his intruding brothers made her
glance back to see which one would be the cause, but she recognized that tall
silhouette stepping through the doorway as Leif. A shot of shock ran through
her and she sat up to see who was in bed behind her, only to see no one at all.
She stared, frozen and wide-eyed, as her anxiety and bewilderment yielded to
the terrible proof that she was losing her mind in a new and horrible way.
“If you’re going to keep dreaming, you might as well sleep,” he whispered, his
arm wrapping around her ribcage and dragging her down against his chest. She
let herself lay with her back curled against him. The span of his powerful body
tucked her into him possessively and, to her immense comfort, protectively.
“Dreaming…” she murmured, clutching onto the word and shutting her eyes. “I’m
just dreaming…”
He stroked her hair away from her face soothingly, his fingers as warm and real
as the rest of him. She grasped his hand and held it against her chest. His
lips pressed to her still damp hair in a few chaste kisses, the gesture
tingling on her scalp, and his thumb slowly rubbed back and forth over her
knuckles. The soothing affection spread a peaceful salve over her fretful state
that, in combination with her fatigue, allowed her to relax. That longing for
him to always be a sweet and caring father ached in her chest, but the
bittersweet desire was a vast improvement from her raw fear. Whatever man he
might be outside of this moment, he was being a father to her right now, so she
pushed any outside thoughts as far away as she could to enjoy this. His
stroking thumb slowed to a stop as his breathing evened out in unconsciousness.
She lied awake, feeling surrounded in his protection and warmth until sleep
weighed too heavily on her eyelids to keep them blinking in the darkness.
Listening to the steady push and pull of his breath in sleep, Simone let her
eyes rest for a moment and then opened them to the orange light of sunrise cast
over the living room. Her breath caught in her throat. She resisted the impulse
to jump off the sofa, steeling herself to remain still as she tried to
determine what happened in that five seconds she’d shut her eyes. Dismay and
helplessness crawled into where she needed her mind clear to think and she
frowned at the intrusion. The sticky emotional reactions painted everything in
thickening shades of fear and sadness. She tried harder to focus on observation
and analysis of her surroundings.
The woven throw Anders had draped over her last night was wrapped around her
curled body, further muddling the wavering certainty in her memories. She
wondered what could have happened instead of her panicked flee that led her to
wake up on the sofa. She came to two conclusions: the night had either
progressed as she had remembered it and she’d simply gone into the living room
at some point, or she had never left the living room and had conjured up a
false memory of being in the bedroom. Either choice left gaping holes in her
memory where anything could have happened. Anxiety seized her thoughts as she
tried to recall anything that could have led her to here, drawing her mind
again and again to the dreadfully vague possibilities of what could have
happened in those holes. She squeezed her eyes shut and opened them repeatedly,
trying to wake up in the bed she knew she was just in. All that met her open
gaze was the heavily ornate dark woods and complicated oriental rugs of the
living room.
She forced herself to stop that senseless impulse by sitting up and rubbing her
face. The leather adhered to her bare skin from how long she supposed she’d
been laid out on it. A sound alerted her to snap her bleary gaze to her right,
finding Anders slumped in a faded armchair with his feet haphazardly sprawled
over an ottoman and a quilt falling off him. She stared at his bare feet
peeking out from that quilt, knowing it was unlikely he’d have chosen to sleep
in an armchair if the sofa wasn’t already taken. It was thin but it was
nonetheless evidence toward the theory that she’d stayed downstairs last night.
Her hands continued rubbing small circles over her temples as she willed away
the fear to think further back. She tried to fill in the hole of time between
drinking the shroom tea and coming to in the hallway with Anders. The bite on
her shoulder seemed real, much to her disappointment. She slipped a hand into
the loose collar of her father’s shirt she wore to graze her fingers over the
wound near her neck. She both wished and dreaded to assess it in a mirror as it
burned from just that slight touch. Being able to feel evidence of that memory
provided a cold comfort.
In her efforts to recall, she felt the vague impression of having experienced
strong emotions during that time. Those emotions proved harder to define in the
vacuum without any context. She recalled the slap he’d given her, but couldn’t
place when it happened. Anger. Frustration, maybe. She could remember the feral
state of her mind but it was like it happened to someone else in a dream. Her
constant anxiety. Fear, so much fear, but amidst that was acceptance. Hope? She
gnawed at her knuckles, brow knit tight in concentration as she tried to piece
together what any of that could possibly mean, but was interrupted by the sound
of Anders stirring.
She immediately looked over to see him watching her through hooded eyes, his
sleepy countenance obviously not quite fully aware even as he whispered, “God
morgen, kjære.”
“Anders! Anders, you gotta help me!” she blurted out, scrambling out of her
blanket cocoon.
He straightened in his seat, his surprise at the girl stumbling toward him
awakening him quickly, and asked, “Hva er det?”
She fell to her knees, her hands grasping his quilt in a white-knuckle grip.
She attempted to slow her speech as she asked, “Anders, what… happened… last…
night?”
He wrinkled his brow, his uncomfortable expression revealing her failure to
communicate. She yanked at her hair in frustration and wracked her brain for a
solution, but only came up with frustrated tears stinging her eyes. She
flinched when she felt his hand pat her head, but his touch persisted.
“Ikke gråt, pen jente,” he said softly.
His petting over the wild mess of her hair and his gentle tone only made her
heart hurt. It didn’t take much to push her over the edge in the constant state
distress that was her life lately, so she didn’t even try to fight the tears
that fell down her face. He reached out with his other hand, making soft
shushing sounds that broke her down completely. He was being so sweet, his
calloused hands so gentle and offering such comfort and affection so freely
without even knowing why she was crying. She felt overwhelmed with how badly
she needed this. He smelled like stale beer and sour sweat but she laid her
face against his chest and wept. After a moment, he awkwardly embraced her,
holding her head against him as he continued to pet and hush her. There was no
question of cost in her mind with him, no waiting for him to hurt her or force
her arousal.
“Good girl,” he murmured warmly, his accent thick but his tone conveying more
than the meaning of the words. “Good girl, good girl…”
“I’m sorry,” she croaked, even as she moved to sit on the edge of the chair and
wrap her arms around his neck. He felt so safe, she couldn’t get enough. His
arms wrapped more firmly around her middle and she trembled with the ache that
felt nearly bursting in her chest at the comforting affection.
“I help you,” he whispered into her hair. The warm bloom of his breath against
her scalp felt so soothing. She nuzzled her face into the crook of his shoulder
and sighed when her weeping shuddered to a sudden stop.
“Thank you,” she breathed. She was afraid of closing her eyes and opening them
to find that this was another dream, or hallucination, or anything other than
warm and friendly human contact. She wondered if anything would ever feel real
to her again, but this moment was real enough to matter.
“Very good girl,” his soothing tone whispered as she clung to him, but he
didn’t move to disengage their awkward embrace.
She didn’t know what to do with her gratitude, so she just murmured, “Thank
you… thank you, Uncle Anders…”
He only shushed her, his hands smoothly rubbing over the back of her shirt,
never sliding down to touch her hips or ass. Just a chaste, familial touch that
she needed to trust. She leaned into it, but quickly stopped herself when she
remembered how little she actually knew him. Embarrassment wormed into her,
making her slowly pull away. He seemed to hold no bashfulness in him as he let
her disentangle, his blue gaze only holding concern. Her throat constricted at
his compassion and she found herself wanting to weep again, barely holding
herself together when he gently smoothed away her tears with his thumb.
They both startled at the sound of a loud snap behind them. They turned toward
it, dread dropping her stomach right out of her upon seeing Leif’s leaning in
the doorway. She couldn’t stop herself from cowering back when she saw his
stern impassive mask in place. She noticed her uncle watch her questioningly as
she fearfully backed away from him, but she couldn’t work to conceal her
mounting terror.
Leif stepped toward them, muttering something gruff to his brother as he
snatched her upper arm and dragged her to her feet in a less than gentle tug.
Anders seemed to protest or give some correction in response, his Norwegian
coming out in a rapid placating tone. Whatever it was he had said garnered no
response from her father as he hauled her out of the room. She stumbled to keep
up, looking back to see Anders watching her. Their eyes met right before she
was turned past the doorway and her heart ached at the pity in his stare. She
allowed herself one last indulgence in the warmth his kindness before fear
overwhelmed it.
 
 
Leif shoved the girl into their room, locking the door behind them while she
stumbled away from him skittishly. His anger boiled in him in an unruly
maelstrom, yet it only sharpened his focus. He took a towel out of the hamper
and stuffed the crack under the door with it to help contain the noise they
were soon to make in the room. Then, along that vein of thought, he pulled out
two long gauzy scarves from her drawer in the dresser. Pulling one taut in his
hands and balling the other in his fist, he watched uncertainty mix with the
fear in Simone’s expression as she stared at the length of fabric.
“I think it’s time for another lesson,” he said calmly, turning to face her.
“Wh-what are you…?” she stammered breathily as he stepped toward her. Her
shocked grunt when he pressed the balled fabric to her mouth was cut short,
erupting into a yelp as he gripped the back of her hair roughly and forced it
past her lips. Her hands reflexively reached to pull out the intruding cloth
and he backhanded her. The strike was more to shock than to hurt and it proved
affective as her hands immediately dropped. The way she cowered, squeezing her
eyes shut in expectation of further violence and whimpering like a dog, made
for a pleasing picture but he wasted no time. He wrapped the other scarf over
her mouth and tied it behind her head to secure the gag. With her oral airway
cutoff, she was forced to breathe through her nose and she seemed to struggle
with filling her lungs as quickly as fear demanded.
He moved behind her, locking her arms behind her back with one hand gripping
her wrists, and reached around her front to pinch her nostrils closed.
Immediately, she began to try to twist away, so he opened his hand to span the
bottom of her chin and tilt her head back awkwardly until she was pressed to
his chest. Holding her tightly against him, he shut her nostrils again. He
dragged her to the floor mirror and watched as her struggles devolved into
spasmodic jerking. The steadiness of the decline of her muscle control as she
suffocated fascinated him, almost as though he could see her life drain out of
her just from restricting such a small part of her. He wanted her to feel how
easily he could end her, how he held her life between his thumb and forefinger
in a simple pinch. When she began to sag in his hold, he released her face and
she drew in as much air as she could before her breaths began to stutter into
muffled sobs. He grabbed her chin again after letting her breathe for a moment
and she groaned through her nose in fear, but he only forced her to face the
mirror.
“Look,” he commanded. She obeyed, opening her eyes and he watched as she stared
at her tear-streaked reflection. She grunted when he tore open her shirt, the
buttons on the long garment popping open down to her navel.
“Do you see this?” he hissed as he shoved her forward by his hold on her
wrists, jerking her whole body. “This belongs to me. You don’t have the
authority to offer it for anyone to touch. Do you understand?”
When she didn’t respond, only blinking at her fearful reflection, he let go of
her chin to grip her neck firmly and growled, “Understand?”
She whimpered, the sound barely audible beyond the gag, but nodded fervently.
He let his grip linger on her neck a bit longer, enjoying the pleading look in
her wet eyes as she met his gaze in the mirror while he tugged on her shirt
until it unfastened entirely. Still holding her stare in the reflection, he
parted the garment until it hung open, exposing her nude form standing in the
mirror. She looked away from him as he gently dragged his fingertips down her
middle, his touch lightly caressing from her neck to her cunt. He just barely
grazed over her clit but it was enough to make her breath come out in a hitched
huff.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” he whispered, half lying between the thrill of
wielding such power over her and the quiet echo of a guilt he knew he should
feel. The way his hard cock ached at the sight of her wet tears glistening and
clinging to her eyelashes helped clear his conflict for now. He pressed his
fingers against her cunt gently, rubbing slow circles over the impossibly soft
outer flesh and making her whimper and tense as he continued, “But you keep
making me punish you. I just want to keep you safe, darling girl. How am I
supposed to keep you safe when you run off while I’m asleep to cozy up to men
you hardly know?”
She shivered, her hands giving a little involuntary jerk at the pleasure he was
giving her, but he still held her wrists tightly. His circling fingertips
dipped down to her opening and he couldn’t stop his slight gasp of delighted
astonishment at finding her so wet. Her thighs flinched shut, her cheeks
burning a deep blush and brow furrowed in shame, but he wedged his hand between
her closed legs. He spread her fluid up her cunt and slicked her clit until his
fingers could glide over it in a sawing motion that had her knees nearly
buckling and her head hanging low in mortification at the unwilling pleasure.
“Do you want to come, Simone?” he asked in a hushed and husky tone. The broken,
muffled whimper and shake of her head in decline made him grin. “Good.”
He sped up his languid ministrations, his rhythm more insistent against her as
her cries became muffled groans through the gag. Her legs pressed together
tightly, her body twisting in the limited range his restraint on her arms
allowed, but he wouldn’t let her wriggle away. After just a few more strokes,
her thighs tensed around his intruding hand and her cunt rocked against it even
as fresh tears spilled down her face and her chest heaved in shaking sobs. The
stifled sound of her muted scream when he rubbed her through her orgasm made
his cock flex and drool precum onto his pajama pants. Her sobbing continued as
she seemed to come down from her forced climax, her thighs trembling and wet
against his fingers as he slid his hand to grope at her hip.
He leaned down and whispered in her ear, “Your punishment isn’t over yet.”
***** Chapter 13 *****
Before Simone had a chance to react, Leif gripped the back of her hair and
pushed her down. She crumpled easily under his pressure, lowering to her knees
and then lying on the cold hardwood floor. Her joints were already weak and
muscles were uncooperative from exhaustion, but more than that, she didn’t want
to risk angering him with the promise of further punishment already known. He
pulled her opened shirt off her shoulders, the material dragging painfully over
the bite, and wrapped the material around her wrists. She tried to glance
backward to see what he was doing, the material drawing taut over her skin as
she saw him knotting it tightly to bind her hands behind her back. Trying not
to draw attention, she tugged subtly at the bind and couldn’t get it to budge.
She gave it a bolder jerk but the motion unfortunately succeeded in drawing his
gaze. Squeezing her eyes shut, she prayed yet again to wake up to find this had
been a bad dream, but the floor was still under her bare front and her father
still loomed over her exposed back when she opened them.
She flinched when he brushed her unruly hair away from her face and said,
“You’re doing so well, Simone. You know I’m only doing this because I love you.
One day, you’ll thank me for it.”
The thick wad of cloth that filled her mouth had prevented her from telling him
that she wasn’t offering anything to Anders and that he didn’t see her as
anything but his troubled niece. But there was a growing doubt in her as well;
she couldn’t trust her judgement anymore. As the punishment had drawn on, her
drive to state her case grew stale.
“You’ve been hiding things from me,” he said as his cock brushed between her
parted thighs. “I need you to learn what harboring secrets from me will get
you.”
She winced as her cunt throbbed in aftershocks of her orgasm, shame flooding
her again at having come against her will. Through her terror and pain, her
body had betrayed her so thoroughly, getting so wet and needy for her
tormentor. It made her feel sick and wretched. She had no control of both her
body and mind. The temptation to give her father complete control over her if
she couldn’t control her own self held an appeal she had never hoped to find.
Horrified at that thought, a thought she knew didn’t belong to her mind, she
shut her eyes and once more tried hard to wake up anywhere else.
He turned her to lie on her back. Her arms dug into her back uncomfortably, but
she could more easily see what he was doing. She wasn’t sure if that was any
better. He kept his stern stare on her face as he hooked his hands under her
calves and brought her legs up to rest straightened against his torso with an
ankle in each of his hands. Then, he leaned forward, stretching her flexible
hamstrings to their limits until she had to groan audibly to make her
discomfort apparent. Her tailbone was lifted off the floor to try to alleviate
the burn on her hamstrings and she burned with fear and shame at how it
presented her cunt as more accessible to him.
He let go of her right ankle to reach between them and she felt the head of his
cock line up to her entrance as he whispered, “Don’t hold back your screams.”
The spike of apprehension that sparked in her was quickly set ablaze into panic
when he drove his cock down into her in one powerful thrust. She did scream,
the sound pathetically muted by the gag, as her cunt stretched painfully around
him. He gave her no time to recover from the searing pain as he pulled back and
slammed into her again, setting a brutal pace that kept her screams constant.
His hair flopped over his eyes and his muscles rolled and flexed with the force
he put into fucking her, his teeth bared with each low grunt he growled out.
She writhed under him just trying to manage the bruising and burning impact of
his thrusts. Her tears flowed freely from her grimacing eyes as she fixed her
stare to the ceiling and tried to calm her panic. Her hyperventilation between
screams demanded more oxygen than she could take in with those short rapid
breaths and her horror increased as darkness crept in from the corners of her
vision. He could reach much deeper in this position and each slam against her
cervix sent a shock of blinding pain burning through her.
“Are you sorry yet?” he growled above her, not faltering in his rhythm. She
nodded eagerly and moaned, desperate to appease him and end this onslaught. Her
slight hope fizzled into dread when he grinned down at her and said, “No, I
don’t think you are. You haven’t learned your lesson yet.”
He reached between them again, this time pressing the pad of his thumb against
her clit and her eyes squinted shut in a grimace when she felt – Oh, god. Her
mind echoed the lamentation her mouth couldn’t speak as she felt the sparks of
pleasure begin to intermingle with the searing pain. Confusion rolled over in
her panicked mind, complete bewilderment at the rising pleasure in her
suffering cunt. With eyes wide in shock and bafflement, she gawked up at him to
see the filthy smirk on his face. He knew what was happening with her even
though she didn’t. Her cunt clenched. The tightening of her muscles around that
already too-large cock sent a lightning strike of pain and pleasure that forced
her head thrown back and a long, muffled groan ground out from deep in her. The
power and advantage he held over her was never more obvious than in that moment
and it made her feel so small and helpless. She wondered if she really had no
will of her own at this point as he dragged whatever sensation he wanted out of
her.
“Come for me, darling,” he commanded breathlessly, his thumb pressing harder
against her clit. “Come on your father’s cock like a good girl.”
The increased friction on her clit made every nerve in her cunt come alive with
pleasure that mounted over the pain as her hips involuntarily twitched up to
meet his thrusts. Horror, shame, and a deep sadness flooded her mind as ecstasy
flooded her body. Her broken, muffled cries sounded distant as that crest
crashed onto her, dragging her through another forced orgasm that had her
vision black out. She heard his low guttural groan and felt him push hard and
deep into her, the head of his cock mashing agonizingly against her bruised
cervix as he filled her cunt with semen. He stayed in her for several long,
delirious minutes as he panted above her. His eyes were shut, freeing her to
watch as his sweat dripped down from his furrowed brow and soaked his fitted
white undershirt to the point it became nearly translucent. Her cunt throbbed,
both in soreness and aftershocks, his semen stinging in her rubbed raw skin. He
pulled out of her slowly, almost considerately, but she still gasped through
her nose in how it pained her.
“Fy faen…” he muttered. He delicately moved her legs back down to the floor on
either side of his crouched form, his eyes locked in fascination on her aching
crotch as she felt some of his semen dribble out. “Jeg elsker deg,dear girl.
Stay there.”
She let her head fall back and eyes close when he rose to his feet and stepped
away from her. She just wanted this to be over so she can go hide, maybe
forever. Her brief relief from this horror was interrupted by a snap and flash
of light. She looked up to see her father standing over her with her Polaroid
camera, the white square of a photo held gingerly between his fingers as he
watched it develop. Her strangled groan of humiliation brought his gaze once
more to her.
“Oh, don’t worry,” he grinned. “I probably won’t be showing this to anyone. You
just look so lovely, I had to capture this moment.”
Hot, fresh tears followed the wet trails of her previous weeping down her
cheeks and her frustration at them doubled when he clicked his tongue at her
chidingly. He placed the camera and photo on the desk behind him, then knelt
down next to her. She flinched when he reached for her, but he only gently
maneuvered her to sit up. His touch, even when gentle, felt corrosive on her
bare skin and she rushed too quickly to stand just to get away from him. Her
hip joints ached sharply before her legs gave out entirely, sending her
crumbling to her knees before he caught her by her arms and hauled her up onto
the bed.
“You were so well behaved this time,” he beamed, his pride sincere in his voice
despite the grotesque context. His hands worked to untie the knot of the scarf
at the back of her head, the slight tugs making her twitch involuntarily in
nervousness. “I almost wish I didn’t have to unbind and ungag you. Isn’t life
so much simpler when your abilities have been reduced?”
The scarf fell into her lap. She once loved the gray and purple leaf pattern of
it, but now it repulsed her. His fingers pressing against her mouth made her
rear back and he moved quickly to grab the back of her hair. Holding her still,
he pulled out the wad of fabric that filled her mouth, the material heavily
soaked through with saliva. Her eyes were scrunched shut against the strange
sensation of the second scarf being pulled from her mouth, the thing having
been there long enough to feel almost as though he were removing a piece of
her. She swallowed the excess moisture in her mouth and flexed her freed tongue
in relief when it was finally extracted. His hand released her hair and she
leaned forward to clear her throat and make a slight sigh to test her voice.
Vocalizing vibrated loudly in her skull without the gag to keep her noises low
in her throat or high in her nose.
Her breath stopped when he tipped her chin up and turned her towards him, his
eyes assessing her fearful face closely before whispering, “I did miss that
soft little mouth, though.”
Her voice was hoarse when she abruptly rasped, “Can you untie me please?”
“In a minute,” he said dismissively as he leaned forward.
She kissed him back when he pressed his lips to hers, wanting to show him how
good she could be for him so he would free her arms at last, and he hummed in
approval at her eagerness. A shiver ran through her at the slide of his tongue
against her tender lower lip, but he pulled away with a satisfied smile and
reached around to her back. Having tightened due to her struggles, the knot
took a few minutes for him to undo. Her eyes trained to the wet spot on the
floor that marked where he fucked her so painfully and made her cum against her
will for the second time that day. Seeing that trite and tiny evidence felt
cruelly incongruent to the impact it had on her. She wanted to see this house
ablaze in a torrent of flame or flood with a river of blood from what had
happened, or at least something more out of place than a trivial dribble of
fluid on hardwood. When he gave the shirt knot a final tug and her arms were
given slack at last, she hugged them around her front.  They felt heavy and
tingly from having been asleep, her shoulder joints aching like the joints in
her hips and pelvis. It seems that my retribution would be yet ongoing. That
thought entered her mind in Leif’s voice, unbidden and alien. She shook it off.
 
 
 
“… Marius Larsen, Arvid Halvorson, Fredrik Hauge, andSvein Myrhemade it to
their hotel. Did you ever work with them?” Henrik asked over the screen of his
laptop on the kitchen table.
Leif didn’t pause in his task of chopping parsley as he answered, “Just once.
That was more than enough. I’m glad father’s generation of architects are
finally retiring.”
“One way or another,” Vidar smirked.
The herb’s sharp fragrance mingled with the pungency of the minced garlic next
to it on the cutting board. Anders sat at the breakfast bar that separated the
cooking area from the rest of the kitchen, his silence irking Leif even more
than his usual talkativeness. Leif glanced at him and sighed when he saw that
he was still sulking.
“I thought you never got hungover,” he said as he bundled the bits of parsley
together with the flat edge of the knife.
The youngest brother straightened from his slouch with a frown and muttered, “I
just couldn’t get much sleep.”
Leif glanced at him again to accidentally meet his stare briefly before
returning his attention to preparing the sauce. He schooled his features to not
react to the probing look in those blue eyes, but his mind was turning over
what could have sparked such a curious look. Suspicious, even.
“I feel like I slept for days and I’m still exhausted,” Vidar groaned. “Thanks
for letting me stay passed out in the backyard by the way, assholes.”
“I thought it was a refreshing experience,” Henrik grinned.
Vidar put his phone down and tossed his older brother a sneering, “Not all of
us are half gorilla, freak.”
“If I’m half gorilla, then you’re also half gorilla, you dumb shit,” Henrik
jeered, earning him a raised middle finger from the other man.
“What kept you awake, Anders?” Leif asked, ignoring the brothers as they
continued to trade insults at the kitchen table. He watched from the corner of
his eye as Anders shifted in the barstool uncomfortably, his brow slightly
furrowed and gaze downcast in consideration.
It was another minute before he turned his back to the bickering brothers and
quietly said, “Can I… talk to you later? Alone?”
Leif crafted an expression of mild concern as he answered, “Of course,
brother.”
Anders gave a curt nod in response, then slipped out of the stool. Leif watched
as he disappeared into the hallway and up the stairs, allowing his jaw to tense
as he mulled over the possibilities for the younger man’s withdrawn solemnity
and request for private inquiry. He worked backwards through his mental catalog
of observations as he kept the garlic from burning in the pan of olive oil and
scraped the zest from a lemon with small nicks of the knife. Anders had left
after obtaining his answer, which explained part of his reserved attitude if he
was biding his time until finally asking. But he was careful to hide, or at
least attempt to hide, frequent glances at Leif that he did not bestow on his
other brothers. He was not sheepish in his withdrawn pensiveness, instead
seeming almost shrewd in a way that told Leif he was perhaps expecting to
broach a sensitive subject that he did not feel in the wrong about. Perhaps
even looking for a conflict, but that didn’t match up with the Anders he knew.
Leif whisked the zest and lemon juice into the pan as he planned how to direct
the scheduled conversation away from his sexual relationship with his daughter.
His reflexive defensiveness wanted him to outright deny any such thing could
ever occur between him and Simone, but at this point it would be obtuse to
suppose no one would ever wonder at their close physical contact and frequent
seclusions in their shared bedroom with only one bed. He chose to hide in the
sun, so he couldn’t resent it for occasionally burning him. His jealousy wanted
him to blame Anders of projecting the perversion he harbored towards his niece
by grounds of his envy of the close relationship he held with his daughter, but
attacking his brother’s character directly would open him up to suspicion from
their other brothers. He would need more time to lay the groundwork for that
accusation to have any hope of sticking without having anyone examine the
counterpoint. There was no time like the present.
“Hey, has Anders been like that for a while, or just since he got here?” he
asked the other two men in the room, interrupting their sneering quarrel.
“That kid’s always been weird,” Henrik scoffed.
“I think dad’s sperm had expired by the time he was conceived,” Vidar said
speculatively.
“Has he been having trouble getting a woman or something?” Leif asked.
“He’s been having trouble getting other men’s wives, if that answers your
question,” Vidar grinned slyly.
Henrik snickered into his hand, adding, “I think he’s better off staying in the
states if she confesses to her husband.”
“Fuck that. He’d be better off fleeing to Antarctica if Louis finds out,” Vidar
said.
Leif orchestrated his next sentence with a passive hesitance in his voice that
belied the impression of poorly concealed concern. “That sounds complicated.
It’s just… I saw him with Simone this morning and—I’m not saying he was doing
anything, but… You know, forget it.”
He caught the gravity of his implication descend over their jovial mood even as
Henrik’s brow hitched incredulously while he asked, “What, you think Anders is
the creepy uncle? Did you see Vidar with his ‘oohhh you’re sooo beautiful’ shit
to her?”
“What, I can’t compliment someone without wanting to put my penis inside them?
She’s objectively attractive,shit head!” Vidar protested. He turned in his seat
toward Leif and pointed accusingly at the bearded brother. “This from the guy
who said she has, and I quote, ‘an ass fit for a feast’!”
“Objectively fit for a feast,” Henrik remarked, tilting his head in mock
propriety.
“I should gut you both with this knife right now, but look,” Leif said, putting
an edge in his tone that he dispelled with a weary sigh before continuing, “The
way he was touching her… Just tell me I’m being a crazy, overprotective father,
okay? I think I just need to hear it.”
“Well, you are a crazy, overprotective father…” Henrik trailed off with a
shrug.
“I’m sure he was just being oafish Anders,” Vidar said, waving his hand
dismissively. An awkward silence filled the room for a moment, then he asked,
“What was he doing with her?”
Leif suppressed his smug smirk by pursing his lips in the image of a conflicted
thought. He had hooked them successfully. “I’m sure I’m just overthinking it.
It was nothing. I just saw her in father’s armchair with him when I went
downstairs this morning.”
“Whoa, in the same chair? Like on his lap or what?” Henrik interjected,
scrunching his face in distaste.
“Do you think he was still drunk?” Vidar offered.
Leif ran a hand through his hair and shrugged, then said, “I don’t know. Just…
I don’t want to accuse him of anything, but seeing how he held her on him…
She’s very suggestible, understand?”
He watched as the two men frowned in the tense silence that followed. They had
taken the bait, now he just needed to start reeling them in. A plan began to
come together in his mind now.
“Look, Leif, I’ll keep an eye on him just in case,” Henrik offered.
“Yeah, Simone’s a pretty girl and he was probably still drunk,” Vidar said,
then quickly followed it with a nervous, “Not like that’s an excuse, but it
happens, right? I don’t think he would’ve done that sober, is what I mean.”
Henrik gaped at him in disgust and when Vidar responded with a shrug, said,
“What the fuck kind of horse shit is that? Getting drunk doesn’t just magically
turn you into a molester uncle!”
“I said it wasn’t an excuse!” Vidar argued defensively. “It happens!”
“Yeah, it happens if you’re a rapist, you mud-dicked bumpkin,” Henrik sneered.
“You knew what I meant, butter-fucked,” Vidar sneered back.
Leif tuned out the chorus of their insults and returned to the task of cooking,
satisfied at his success of stage one in his contingency plan.
 
 
Simone startled at the knock on the bedroom door, hurriedly pulling her jeans
up before calling out, “Yes?”
“Lunch time! You want to come?” Henrik’s bright voice came muffled through the
solid oak.
The idea of lunch made her stomach turn despite not having eaten anything
since… she couldn’t recall, but her physical weakness and lightheadedness
demanded sustenance. “Uh, okay! I’ll get it in a bit!”
While his heavy footsteps descended the stairs, she examined the wan-looking
waif in the mirror. She’d worked out the snarls from her hair after having
applied three palmfuls of conditioner in the shower and had painted over the
bruises meticulously, dressed in her comfortable ripped jeans with the most art
project stains on them and a t-shirt she’d purchased at the last concert she
went to. She looked more like the art punk she used to be just less than a week
ago. But putting on the trappings of normalcy didn’t quite bring about the
feeling of it, even as she focused on the memory of every stain and recalled
the ironic synth-pop sound of the band. She turned to check that the paper
towel wrapped around flattened cotton balls she’d folded in her underwear
hadn’t created any odd bumps in her jeans, but the abrasive material rubbed
uncomfortably at her abused privates.
She sighed heavily and muttered, “Can’t arts-and-crafts your way out of this
one, can you?”
Taking another deep breath, she steeled herself to step out of the relative
safety of the bedroom. Her father had been almost sweet to her after her
punishment, helping her to the bathroom and blessedly allowing her privacy once
there, but he’d promised a talk would occur later. The weight of the word had
struck her that this would be a conversation that she would most likely not
want to have and she dreaded encountering him out there. Limping out into the
hallway, she flinched at the sound of a door opening and turned to see Anders
exiting the room he was staying in.
He smiled sheepishly at her, eyes glancing downward shyly as he walked toward
her in three wide steps of his long legs, and said, “I am sorry. You… trouble
in Leif?”
“Oh!” she blurted, closing the door behind her in consciousness of the wadded
scarfs on the floor inside despite how little they would mean to anyone else.
Her hands wrung nervously as she tried to find the simple words he might
understand. “Yes, but it’s ok. No problem! Um, I am sorry for…” she trailed her
fingers down her cheeks “… crying. On you. That must have made you, um,
uncomfortable? Sorry, I’m sorry.”
He smiled that uncomfortable smile of not quite understanding, but squeezed her
good shoulder in a friendly gesture and softly asked, “You are good?”
She hesitated, knowing she should say yes or just nod, but the tightness that
pulled in her chest wouldn’t allow her to do either. Watching the growth of
genuine concern wilt his nervous smile, she found that her answer wouldn’t
leave her throat until she whispered, “No, I am not good.”
The hand at her shoulder gently pulled her into a slow hug as he stepped
forward and embraced her with his other arm wrapping around her back. She felt
that tightness in her chest draw taut and then release with a burst of relief
at the delicate care he handled her with and the affection he gave so freely.
The temptation to weep once more was coming on strongly, so she was forced to
disengage the hug with a smile up at him she could only hope was reassuring. He
looked down at her, mirroring that uncertain smile, and she flinched when she
felt him swipe his fingertip along her neck. The shock and shiver from the
unexpected contact on that sensitive spot instantly brought every accusation
and warning her father had made about what Anders really wanted from her to
mind. Betrayal and some strange, primal anger began to spread over that sorrow
and gratitude he’d stirred in her before she noticed him examine the stripe of
brown he’d dragged off her on his pale fingertip. Fear overrode her confusion
when she interpreted the knowing glint in his eye as he rubbed the tacky
texture between his thumb and forefinger. He’d seen the bruises and now knew
she was covering them with makeup. Dread and a sliver of hope bubbled in her as
she wondered if he knew why.
“Det kommer til å bli bra, kjære,” he whispered.
Words couldn’t make it past the thick wall of dread, so she swallowed thickly
and nodded in response. Trying and failing not to limp as she began to walk
toward the stairs, she forced herself not to flinch when he came up behind her
and intertwined their fingers. She tucked her mortified grimace away and smiled
politely at his helpful grin. His willingness to seemingly always help made her
feel both extremely grateful and so incredibly pathetic. She resented that
little glimmer of hope in her that wanted to be rescued, knowing she didn’t
deserve to be saved from this hell she helped make of her life.
***** Chapter 14 *****
Chapter Summary
     Content Warning: Referenced underage rape
Gripping the railing to not so heavily rely on his hand for assistance, Simone
walked with Anders down the stairs. Her insides ached with each step and she
focused on the pain, letting herself feel every twinge and burn as her
makeshift sanitary pad slowly dampened with the blood that oozed from the tear
her father had made in her.
As they walked down the hall and passed the kitchen, she was beginning to
suspect that she might have hallucinated the call for lunch but soon heard the
clinking of utensils and baritone drone of male conversation from the dining
room. Her mouth tugged into a frown, having anticipated being able to just grab
a plate and retreat to the safety of seclusion to eat. Instead, she found
herself stuck between Anders’ good intentions to see her safely to their
destination and the expectant delight of Leif’s smile upon seeing her in the
doorway of the dining room. Panic gripped her and she tried to disengage the
handhold but her uncle seemed intent on leading her all the way to the end of
the ridiculously long table the men had congregated at.
“So glad you could join us for a meal, dearest,” he beamed. She saw his eyes
move toward the hand Anders held and then to the man himself, her dismay rising
in the nearly imperceptible change in his expression. Numbly, she kept her gaze
fixed on the sheen of the polished wood table as she cautiously sat in the
chair her uncle pulled out for her. Terror chased away any slight appetite she
had managed to garner.
“How are you today?” Vidar’s heavily accented tone asked her slowly. She
snapped out of her dread of a second punishment session to see him and Henrik
smiling across from her, her father to her left and Anders to her right. She
didn’t remember anyone putting the plate of pasta and green salad before her
and she hoped she hadn’t been checked out of reality long enough for them to
notice.
“I’m fine,” she blurted out, forcing a smile and gripping the fork. The
silverware dug into her white knuckle hold and she took a discreet breath to
will calmness over her before asking, “How are you guys?”
“Hvordan å si…” he murmured, pale blue eyes glancing toward the high ceiling
before finally saying, “Ah! Drunk.”
The men laughed and Simone grinned along with them, proud at her imitation of
lightheartedness and feeling a little more confident that she could fake her
way through this. She twirled the thin strands of pasta around the fork and
began the process of slowly pushing food around her plate to make it seem that
she will have eaten more than she had.
“You like here?” Henrik asked as he speared his salad, his stilted English a
little less clear than Vidar’s.
She glanced to her father, seeing him watching her with interest in his eyes
and a mask of a smile on his face, before answering, “It’s beautiful. I’ve
always wanted to live in the country.”
The moment before a reply came stretched longer than it otherwise would and she
worried that she may have overestimated his English before he nodded and said,
“It is peaceful.”
“These hooligans used to come every summer break and disturb that peace,” Leif
said, placing a glass of white wine next to her plate. She looked at it
dubiously, then at his smiling mask, and decided not to risk declining it. He
didn’t look away from her until she sipped the cold fruity liquid, the alcohol
stinging where her teeth had dug into her cheek from the slaps he had given
her. Despite the feeling that he was testing her for reasons she hadn’t figured
out yet, her desire to know more about her father’s mysterious past was still
as strong as it had ever been and she couldn’t resist the rare chance to peer
behind the curtain of his privacy.
“But you stayed here with grandpa all year?” she asked.
“I did,” he answered. When he didn’t expand on his response, she wilted a bit
in disappointment, knowing any further prodding would be deflected.
“Father wanted Leif to learn uh…” Vidar said, gesturing at the air while he
searched his mind for the words.
Simone turned her full attention to him and eagerly asked, “Grandpa wanted him
to become an architect like him? Did he come to America with grandpa and Bjørn
or did he come over later?”
Vidar furrowed his brow, his face screwed up in thought as she could
practically see his mind working to translate, before Leif interjected to
answer, “Einar had me come to the US once I turned thirteen, but yes, he wanted
me to follow in his footsteps and I did.”
“So you went to high school here?” she asked. He never tolerated her questions
and she could tell he was becoming annoyed, but she was in a room full of those
who might be able to answer them and she brightened when Henrik picked up the
question.
“Ja, he played basketball,” Henrik said. He leaned forward with his elbows on
the table and said to her in a stage whisper, “I show you pictures later.”
She smiled at him, a smile that she was surprised to find came from genuine
happiness at the cheerful offer. “I would like that. I don’t think I’ve seen
any pictures of Papa from when he was young.”
“Let’s keep it that way. Henrik, Ikke gjør det,” Leif said firmly, shooting the
burly man a stern look that shot a familiar fear into Simone but Henrik merely
scoffed at.
He shot back a surly response in Norwegian that Leif dismissed with a
disdainful wave of his fork. Anders asked something now that the conversation
was in his language and Vidar replied in a sarcastic tone that made Henrik spit
something obviously insulting back at him. Simone returned her attention back
to her lunch now that the discussion had shifted out of English. Her heart
raced with a surprising amount of elation at simply having had a nice,
lighthearted talk with another person after so many days without one. While she
would have liked to ask further, the pressure of her father’s calculating stare
gave her already shaky social anxiety a much unneeded edge so she settled on
just being glad that it hadn’t gone badly. The jovial atmosphere that the
brothers’ juvenile bickering created relaxed her enough for her to eat without
feeling ill and she was able to take in a few bites before she was startled by
Anders’ arm draping over her shoulders.
She flinched, dropping her fork thankfully quietly on the napkin next to the
plate, and reflexively looked toward Leif to gauge his reaction before she
could think to do it more discreetly. Strangely, he didn’t seem upset while his
youngest brother leaned more intimately toward her. She quickly looked away,
bewildered by the amused smirk he wore, until Anders drew her attention by
gesturing toward her while he argued with his brothers. Her brow furrowed,
wondering what they could possibly be arguing about regarding her.
“Simone,” her father’s voice brought her gaze back to him. He leaned toward her
in his chair, a warm smile softening his features as he glanced toward the
distracted brothers before whispering to her, “Nuzzle up on his chest like you
did this morning.”
She blanched, certain this was a test. “I-I don’t want to, though…”
She stared, caught between the obvious order and the obvious test, confusion
warring inside her until he reached under the table and gave her thigh a
warning squeeze. The threat was clear even through the denim of her pants, so
she swallowed her apprehension and leaned against Anders’ side. Face burning in
mortification, she felt him tense as she pressed her cheek to his chest. His
arm hesitantly wrapped around her as though he was unsure what to do with it
suddenly.
The lively conversation in the room stopped until he said in a tone tight with
nervous laughter, “Hun er veldig kjærlig…”
“She is quite loving,” Leif responded sternly. “Simone, clear the table,
please.”
Only too glad to get away from her embarrassing display of forced affection,
she uncurled herself from her uncle and kept her gaze fixed on her task as she
quickly gathered the empty plates. Once she made it to the kitchen, she was
able to place the dishes in the sink before she leaned heavily on the counter
and panted through the throbbing pain in her pelvis and mind.
 
 
“She really seems taken with you, Anders,” Leif said coolly, careful to hide
his amusement at the tense frowns of his brothers as he took Simone’s half
emptied wineglass in his hand. He leaned back in his chair and focused his
impassive stare at his confused youngest brother.
“I’m going to go see if baby Simone needs help with the dishes,” Vidar
announced as he stood up from his seat.
Henrik rose immediately at that and said, “I’ll come with you.”
Anders gave the two an incredulous frown as they avoided looking at either of
the seated men on their way out of the dining room. Leif was impressed by their
quickness to judge Anders as suspicious from the moment he walked in with
Simone, surprised at how eager the seeds of distrust he’d sown in them
sprouted. They knew the young man more than he did, however, and that the
familiarity did not work in Anders’ favor told Leif that his accusations might
not be simple paranoia. He wondered, not for the first time, if underneath that
outward cheer and magnanimity lurked the same darkness in Anders that guided
him. He knew for a fact that the apple never seemed to fall far from the tree
in their family and they’d both dropped from the same rotten branch.
“Well, we have achieved privacy for the moment if you’d like to engage that
conversation you’d requested,” he said.
Anders turned to him with a bewildered shock that melted into resigned
recognition as he muttered, “Oh, yes, ah, well…” He cleared his throat and
began again, an uncomfortable smile on his face as he navigated the words.
“Before we get into that, I want to make something clear. I have no intentions
to do anything… strange with your daughter. My niece. I don’t know what I did
to cause them or you to think that I would, but it’s all been…”He gestured with
his hand as he searched for the term before abandoning it and giving Leif a
level look.“She’s a very lonely girl. It’s hard not to reach out to her. I can
definitely see how you’ve become so… protective of her, because I feel it too.
And like you, it comes from a place of familial love. I have no designs to uh…
take advantage, or whatever.”
“‘Familial love’…” Leif murmured, a wry smirk cracking through his façade at
the irony. He downed the rest of the wine in one gulp in response to the aching
twist in his gut, that twisting feeling wringing out something corrosive onto
his mood and composure. The temptation of guilt surprised him, but he pushed it
down and focused on the moment. He didn’t believe Anders’ cover, but watching
him squirm uncomfortably with the topic was at least amusing.
Anders seemed to have not noticed the change in his state as he continued, “I
think I speak for everyone when I say that we were not expecting you to become
this good parent, no offense. You’ve given up your marriage and now you’re
moving here to the countryside to take care of your daughter.” He pursed his
lips for a moment in deliberation, gaze falling to the side as he went on in a
quieter voice. “If you don’t mind me asking, what happened? What made you
choose to sacrifice so much?”
Leif couldn’t help the laughter that bubbled out of him in a dry chuckle,
devoid of humor. His throat felt like sandpaper as he couldn’t stop the truth
coming forward. “What made me choose to do this? Hahah! I have no choice! I am
driven to do whatever I can for my daughter; I am completely out of control.”
“So it’s like some fatherly instinct thing, huh? What, like, ‘you’ll understand
it when you have kids’?” Anders asked.
Leif ran a hand roughly through his hair and sighed, trying to regain his
composure, before he said, “I won’t bullshit you, I didn’t get it for a long
time. There were aspects of fatherhood that I simply couldn’t sympathize with
while Simone was growing up.” His gaze focused on the painting of a lake
hanging behind his brother, his words more to himself than the other man. “It
wasn’t until she started showing symptoms that I began to have these strong
compulsions. Maybe because that’s when I actually started to feel like she
needs me. Lisa was a great mother, but she just had no idea what to do with the
girl once she stopped being a kid and started being a problem. It feels so
natural to take care of her, even when she hates me for it. But that feeling…
that she’s so undeniably mine and nothing could ever change that… It’s a
terrifyingly powerful thing.”
“It’s that strong just because she’s yours?” Anders asked, bringing his
attention back to their conversation. Leif sat up straighter, blinking out of
his thoughts and nodded. He then noticed how troubled his brother seemed and he
worried that he may have revealed too much, given him enough information to
connect the dots. He didn’t expect the confession he received in Anders’
whispered, “I… I think I can understand that… because I am about to become a
father.”
Leif’s laugh came out as a harsh bark that tore through his throat before he
could even cover his mouth to stifle it. Anders’ wide-eyed bewilderment at him
only brought forth a torrent of more laughter until Leif was doubled over the
table, hitting the smooth surface of it as he attempted to regain control of
himself. He couldn’t believe the absurdity of their situation.
“You’re asking me for advice? On being a father?” he asked, his voice high with
restrained laughter. The confused nod he received in reply almost made him lose
it again. He sat up, dragging his hand over his face and crossing his arms as
he drawled, “Oh, God, if I’d known that’s all this was…”
“It’s not that simple!” Anders protested. “She has no intention of letting me
be part of my child’s life. I just didn’t expect to care this much. When I
first heard…” Leif watched, barely able to suppress his grin at the anguish in
the young man’s eyes. “I didn’t know what to think at first. But seeing her
belly get bigger with my child and knowing that kid might never even know about
me… I just can’t stand it.”
“That sounds like less of an internal conflict and more of a court problem at
this point, little brother,” Leif said, giving him a reassuring pat on the
shoulder that brought a slight smile back to his face. “You’ve already accepted
becoming a father. There’s no going back on that at this point. You’ve got a
lot to work out, but that’s one thing you can count on as fact. For what it’s
worth, I’m sure you’re going to be a much better father than I am.”
“I doubt that,” Anders smiled. Leif could only shrug.
 
 
Leif could feel Simone flinch in pain when he pressed between her legs, the
thickness of her jeans frustrating him as he sought out more contact with the
soft skin beneath her clothes. His mouth searched for the sensitive spots along
her collarbones as one of his hands stretched her shirt collar low enough to
give him access and his other hand had disappeared beneath the hem of it to
greedily wander along her torso. The sketchbook and pencil that were in her lap
had tumbled to the rug when he had pushed her to lie on her back on the sofa.
His erection had come on quickly and with such an incessant need when he had
found her alone in the parlor that he couldn’t bother with words to convince
her. He bit down wherever his tongue laved over a spot that made her whimper,
driving her meek little sounds into gasps.
“Papa, what are you-”
“I love you so much,” he nearly rasped from how ragged his voice came out, his
wandering hand slipping under her bra and gripping her impossibly soft breast.
The hardened pebble of her nipple dug into the center of his palm as he
kneaded, dragging out a shivering sigh from the writhing girl beneath him. He
watched, mesmerized, while she struggled between trying to push him away and
weakening to his touch.
“W-Why are you- What are you doing?” she stammered. Her voice was rushed with
nervousness and he brought his mouth to hers once more to stop her questions.
His kiss was perhaps too hard as she winced and grunted into his mouth, but she
obediently opened for his insistent tongue. His other hand was slipping under
her shirt when he heard footsteps approaching down the long hallway.
“Fuck,” he muttered, moving off her quickly and pulling her to sit up next to
him. He watched her as she attempted to recover from his rough and sudden
attentions, running her shaking hands through her mussed hair and blinking
blearily. Her full lips were even more plush and reddened from the rough
treatment of his mouth and her cheeks were tinged in a pretty pink. He folded
his hands over the bulge of his impatient erection before Henrik entered the
parlor.
“We were going to drive into town in the rental car, do you want to come
along?” he asked.
“No, you go on ahead,” Leif answered, hoping that they would leave soon so he
could fuck his daughter. The thought of not having to gag or choke her this
time made him even more eager.
But Henrik pointed to Simone and asked, “You want to come town with us?”
She answered a quick “Yes!” just as Leif said a firm “No.”
Henrik burst into a giggle as she turned to Leif and explained, “I have to… buy
something in town.”
“I’ll ask them to pick it up for you,” he responded flatly.
She frowned in embarrassment and leaned against him to whisper, “I’m still
bleeding… from earlier. I need to buy pads. Please, please don’t ask them to
buy pads for me.”
That burning, twisting guilt contorted in him again when he realized what she
was referring to but a flash of anger quickly rose ahead of that deep well of
regret.
“Did I fail in teaching you to not hide things from me? Do you perhaps need a
second lesson?” he asked sternly. She shook her head emphatically with her deer
in the headlights look that he adored, so he sighed heavily and said to his
brother, “Give us twenty minutes. We’ll come.”
“Awesome!” Henrik grinned, backing out of the room with both thumbs held up.
Leif waited until he heard the man’s heavy footsteps fade into the hallway
before he dragged his daughter onto his lap, smiling at her small yelp of
surprise.
“Now then,” he whispered, tilting her chin up and leaning down to her nervous
face. “Where were we?”
They both jerked when Anders’ voice asked behind them, “Have you seen my
wallet?”
Leif closed his eyes and took a calming breath before standing, lifting the
slight girl in his arms with him. He walked past an increasingly bewildered
Anders, not deigning to look at the young man as he walked down the hallway and
turned into the bathroom. He placed Simone on the counter next to the sink and
locked the door. When he turned back to her, she was staring at the bathtub, a
faraway look in her eyes that he’d seen before and hurried to break her out of.
“Fucking hell,” he hissed as he grabbed her by her jaw and forced her to face
him. Her half-lidded eyes looked at him but with the bleary unfocused stare of
the unseeing. He kissed her unresponsive mouth in chaste affection, an unspoken
apology passing through his lips onto hers, before taking a step back and
raising his hand. He slapped her just enough to sting, the sound echoing off
the tiled walls of the spacious bathroom. Her head was turned slightly to the
side from the force of his strike, a reddening splotch blooming on her cheek,
but she continued to simply stare in her daze. His jaw tensed in rising
nervousness. Though he knew it would begin happening more frequently under such
a duration of high stress, he couldn’t let her continue dissociating so
sporadically. At least not while there were people around.
He leaned down and whispered close to her ear, “Simone, describe out loud what
you are seeing.”
At first, she seemed still completely lost in the trance. After a moment,
though, her mouth started to move and her blind stare darted around at
seemingly nothing. He waited, patient with the process of her mind splitting
between two worlds.
“Water… but… everything is so dark…” she murmured, breath barely scraping her
vocal chords enough to make the words audible. Her eyes searched through
nothing. “Someone in the water…”
“There’s no one in the water,” he whispered quickly. “Close your eyes.” Her
eyelids drifted shut on her slack face, looking for all appearances to be
completely asleep. He stepped between her spread knees and began unbuttoning
her jeans. “I’m behind you. Don’t look. Step backward. Don’t look. Are you out
of the water?”
“Out of the water,” she parroted back under her breath. He slowly pushed her
backward, her shoulder blades and back of her head leaning against the large
mirror behind her. He yanked down her jeans, lifting her slightly to get them
out from under her and repositioning her when she slid off to the side limply.
He examined the bloodstained paper towel wadded up in her underwear before
tossing it into the wastebasket, a heady combination of worry and power
wrinkling his brow in a frown.
“There was no water,” he said as he peeled her pants and panties all the way
off. “Don’t look. Keep walking backward, I’m still behind you.”
Her rhythmic, calm breathing began to hitch and stutter but her eyes remained
closed with her face and body still slack. He lifted and bent her knees until
her heels were on the countertop, positioning her legs splayed wide and pelvis
angled forward to provide him easier access to her vagina. It was still red and
swollen from her punishment and smears of dried blood stained the bruised skin,
a thin line of brighter red marking the slit of her entrance. He swallowed in
his dry mouth, unable to tear his stare away from the sight of her bloodied and
abused cunt.
“Keep walking. Don’t look. Go slow,” he commanded softly as he gently parted
her labia with his thumbs. The skin inside was inflamed, making it difficult to
pull open and see inside. Her rattling breaths were beginning to quicken as he
slowly sunk his fingers into her snug cunt and pried her open. Though her small
size didn’t allow for him to open her as widely as he truly needed, he was able
to assess with great relief that she lacked any significant lacerations. His
erection strained distractingly against the front of his slacks and he
considered replacing his probing fingers with his cock, but he doubted he had
the self-control at that moment to not cause her more significant damage.
Sighing deeply, he pulled his hands away and washed them in the sink next to
her splayed and slack body.
She exhaled a slight purr of pleasure as he gently wiped the blood from her
with a washcloth dampened with hot water and he smiled at the sound. He adored
how pure her subtle little reactions became while she was in this state; so
free from the burden of knowledge and fear, completely unselfconscious and
unfiltered. Seeing her like this again brought a wave of nostalgia to him as he
recalled those shame-filled dark moments of first having indulged in taking
advantage of her highly vulnerable state. Those first hesitant touches that had
him so paranoid that she would wake up and scream or remember later seemed so
silly to him now with the power he held over her. He nearly laughed aloud at
the man he was, at how pathetically guilt-stricken he had been even as he had
watched like a circling vulture for any opportunity to tip her into one of her
catatonic episodes or administer a sedative. All the ridiculous rules he had
set on himself only to break them over time: over her clothes became under her
clothes became unclothed, just one kiss became countless, touching became
tasting became fucking. Throughout all of it, the assurance that she would
never know had satisfied his guilt until that too broke as she responded more
and more strongly to his manipulation. Now that he’d finally had her so aware
and awake and vivid, he knew he’d never be satisfied with just having her as
his doll ever again.
“Simone,” he said more firmly, holding her lolling head up in his hands and
leaning close to her. “It’s Papa. I’m here with you now. You can hear me. Can
you feel me?”
He smoothed his thumbs over her cheeks and her brow twitched. “… Yes,” she
breathed.
“Good girl. Simone, how old are you?” he asked.
She inhaled shakily, eyes moving under her lids for a moment before whispering,
“Eighteen.”
“No, you are twenty. You haven’t been on campus for nineteen months. You’re in
Vermont at your grandfather’s house and it’s 7 in the afternoon. Your uncles
are here. Remember hugging your uncles?” he said, keeping his tone certain and
even.
Her brow furrowed as she seemed to struggle in thought, the confusion a good
sign of her rising consciousness. “Uncle Anders…” she muttered.
His lips pursed against the flash of undeniable jealousy and he swallowed the
pointless reaction down before saying, “Yes, Anders. Where are you, Simone?”
“Grandpa’s house. He’s dead,” she answered.
“Very good, Simone. Grandpa is dead. You’re ready to open your eyes,” he said.
Her eyes blinked open, though he knew it could be anywhere between several
minutes to several hours before she would fully emerge from her stupor. Having
her conscious and moving would have to do. He pressed his lips to her mouth,
smiling when she automatically puckered into his kiss. He was amused with how
reactive she was to him, to his voice and to his conditioning, that she could
adapt to such recent stimuli to the point where she could respond nearly
unconsciously. Though she lacked any finesse, he was pleased with this
unexpected sign of his power over her.
“You ready yet?” Vidar’s voice called through the door. Leif grabbed Simone’s
wrist and checked Bjørn’s watch, both surprised that twenty minutes had already
passed and impressed that he was able to pull her out in such a short amount of
time. Hurriedly, he slipped her feet through the leg holes of her panties and
jeans.
“Ready,” he called back as he pulled his daughter off the countertop. He
steadied her for a moment, checking her dazed expression for any sign of
change, and pulled her jeans up the rest of the way when she stood
unwaveringly. Leif smiled politely at Vidar’s uncomfortable expression when he
stepped out with Simone dragging her feet after him.
“Is she well?” Vidar asked, looking at her drowsy face skeptically.
Leif took her hand, leading her toward the front door as he said, “Clearly not.
Let’s grab our coats and go.”
***** Chapter 15 *****
Chapter Summary
     Content warning: Underage rape
“…rer… dritt…”
Simone heard the distant voice in the darkness, but it was too far away to
understand. All feeling seemed muted as she drifted through a foggy awakening,
the world around her becoming more aggravatingly noisy even as she tried to
dive back into the merciful oblivion of sleep. The sensation of movement made
her cling to the firm bundle she was leaning against. Her palm smoothed over
the warm fabric and the stimulation of those fibers running under her hand
brought her further out of unconsciousness. A perplexity stirred in her
sluggish mind, a thought that worked to unbury itself from that thick haze
until it rang clear in her head.
I was not asleep.
She opened her eyes and the world crashed into her all at once, light and noise
and smell overwhelming her. She sat up quickly and her head swam but she
swallowed her initial panic and tried to catalog her surroundings. She found
herself to be in the backseat of a moving car she didn’t recognize, surrounded
by men. Unfortunately, these observations only served to fuel her rising
terror. Familiarity tickled her brain until she connected the blur of their
features as people she knew. Her father was driving with Henrik in the front
passenger seat and she was sitting between Vidar and Anders in the back.
Looking in Anders’ direction, she noticed that she had been gripping his thigh,
the material of his slacks bunching under her tensed hand. She immediately
jerked it away from him.
“I’m sorry…” she murmured, trying her best to not convey her horror and
confusion as she attempted an awkward smile. He didn’t appear to have minded as
he gave her a fond grin and ruffled her hair, his nonchalant good cheer helping
to calm her racing heart and burning embarrassment. She only realized he had
his arm slung around her shoulders when he pulled her to him and she flopped
against his side, the position reminding her that she had likely been leaning
against him while she was in her twilight trance. She swallowed nervously as
she glanced to her father. The way he watched them in the rearview mirror made
her blood run cold instantly.
“Welcome back to the land of the living, Simone,” he said, the creasing of his
crow’s feet telling her he was smiling but that did nothing to ease her fear.
Nothing was ever as it seemed with him. Her brow twitched in curiosity at his
wording, wondering if she really had been asleep or at least seeming asleep in
that block of time that was missing. She could only hope she wasn’t doing or
saying anything odd and that worry left her anxious. She found that she
couldn’t move away from the same embrace that had brought her such punishment
just that morning, but not because of the temporary comfort Anders brought. He
held her to him firmly, not responding to her slight budges and twists as she
tried to signal that she wanted to sit up. The accusations and warnings her
father had expressed to her about his brother’s intentions invoked a gut-
twisting fear in her as the hold only tightened. She looked to her father,
seeing his eyes set on the road, and then at Vidar to find him thoroughly
distracted by his phone.
“Don’t tell papa,” Anders whispered, the rumble of his voice in his chest dark
against her ear. His other hand reached out and grabbed her chin, tilting her
face up forcibly. Seeing the friendly smile still on his face, she willed
herself to calm and consider that she was overreacting. She didn’t know her
breathing had become shallow and quick until she forced herself to take deep
and slow breaths. He kept their eyes locked as his hand slid down the side of
her neck, his nails dragging along the sensitive skin gently and sending chills
down her spine and goosebumps across her skin. That hard-won calm in her
dissolved as his hand dragged lower, her body trying to jerk away from him
reflexively as he slid his fingers over her breast and caught his nail over the
tiny bump of her nipple under her shirt.
“Please stop…” she mumbled through her tight throat, but his hand kept its slow
descent. Tears welled in her eyes from the tremendous betrayal and disbelief
and spilled over her cheek when he just continued smiling down at her like
nothing at all was wrong.
“Ssh, kjære,”he whispered softly. She looked quickly to her father, both hoping
and fearful that he would see, but he didn’t turn his attention away from
driving and Vidar was still deep into his phone. Anders unbuttoned her jeans
and she shuddered in revulsion as he slid his fingers under the waistband.
“No, no, no, please don’t do this,” she murmured as she felt him push under her
panties. Her hands clenched into fists when she felt the first slow roll of his
fingertips over her clitoral hood. Unable to stand that benevolent smile, she
pressed her forehead against his chest. Her stifled sobs shook her when her
body began to respond despite the pain of betrayal and loathing.
“You feel good?” she heard him ask. She shook her head and tried to squeeze her
legs together, but that only pressed his hand closer and she flinched at the
contact. To her horror, he sped up his pace and pressed harder, sending shocks
of pleasure through her body while her mind reeled in panic and sorrow. She
felt like such a fool to have considered trusting him instead of her father.
She realized with a disturbing twist in her chest that with her dad, she had
felt loved in some sick, strange way. With Anders, there was no love, no bond,
just assault. She scrunched her eyes shut as she felt the tension of her orgasm
approaching.
 
 
“STOP!” Simone shouted, making Leif jerk his hands away from the front of her
jeans in surprise at the sudden outburst from the dazed girl. He watched warily
as she looked around the grocery store’s restroom. Her breath came in short and
rapid gasps and her eyes were wide in fear and bafflement at the gray tiles and
dingy porcelain fixtures. When she lowered her stare to his kneeling form
before her, her hyperventilating stopped altogether. He waited, ready to spring
back or spring forward and restrain her if necessary, but the tears welling in
her big eyes told him he needn’t do either. Letting out a shaking sob, she fell
to her knees and wrapped her arms around his neck.
“Papa! Thank god, oh thank god!” she sobbed against his shirt collar. His arms
encircled her and held her to him gently, petting her back as she shook against
him.
“Are you feeling all right, Simone?” he asked. She only burrowed her face
further into the crook of his neck in response. He was relieved that she came
to while he had her alone but she hadn’t recovered from an episode with such a
dramatic reaction since her incident. The way her breaths hitched and shook her
soft little body felt good against him and made it easy to slip into the role
of caring father. He slid one hand up and cupped the back of her head as he
schooled his voice into something gentle and warm to say,“Tell me what’s
happening with you, dearest. No more hiding. Let me help you.”
He could feel her body tensing as she suppressed her sobs, but it didn’t take
more than a minute before she stammered, “I’ve been… seeing things again.
Losing time and blacking out… I’m sorry. I thought I would get better, Dad, but
I’m getting so much worse again. I don’t know what to do anymore…”
He squeezed her gently and pressed several small kisses into her hair as he
said, “It’s going to be okay. You’re going to be fine, sweetheart. I promised I
would always take care of you.”
“I don’t think this has been good for me,” she whispered. “The… sex. I don’t
think we should be that way with each other.”
He kept the same warm, caring tone even as his hand brushed her hair away from
her neck. “I’m sorry that I had to hurt you today but look at the progress it’s
already brought. You’re being more honest and letting me help you.”
“That’s not what I…” she whispered, trailing off when he pressed his open mouth
right below her ear. Her hands gripped his shirt tight as she sighed and then
tried to continue, “It’s… everything. We’re family, we shouldn’t… ah…”
He lightly nipped her earlobe and then dragged his tongue over the outer shell
of her ear, making her gasp and hold him tighter, before he whispered, “Don’t
you want me to love you as much as I do, my darling girl?”
She shivered and he kissed her temple, slowly leaning her back as he kissed his
way to her mouth. She practically melted in his arms as he coaxed her tongue to
caress his, her meager resistance disintegrating when he moaned into her and
then she was soft and willing for him. He was almost giddy with how easy it was
to bend her will with the promise of a little love and affection. Years of
subtle conditioning and manipulation lead up to this exact dynamic and he
allowed himself the satisfaction of gloating in the payoff. As he pulled away
from her mouth, he watched her face and admired the effect his affection had on
her. Her cheeks were pink with the flush of arousal under her drying tears of
distress and her eyes glittered as she slowly opened them to look at him with
such an expression of adoration and uncertainty.
“You don’t want to stop,” he whispered. He leaned forward again, smiling when
she let her eyes fall shut once more and turned her head a bit to deepen the
kiss. Her mouth was hot and open to him, her little huffs and sighs making his
cock strain against his pants impatiently. Between the wet sounds of their
kisses, he whispered, “I know you may be confused right now, but there’s
nothing wrong with what we have. It’s this easy to give into it because this is
the way it’s supposed to be; you were made to be mine. I could love you so
much, Simone, if you just let me.”
Her hands caressed along his broad shoulders, nails dragging over the material
of his shirt as she parted the kiss and looked up at him with shame and lust
written all over her. He pressed the tips of their noses together, that mockery
of parental affection bringing a cruel curl to his smile as he asked, “Don’t
you love me, darling girl?”
“I love you, Papa,” she answered in a whispered voice cracking with sorrow.
“Good girl,” he smiled and hugged her to him, the sound of Bjørn’s watch
ticking next to his ear counting the dozens of seconds while she held onto him
tightly.
“Dad?” he heard her ask nervously.
“Hmm?”
“How did we get here? Where are we?”
He let out a breathy chuckle and then answered, “Henrik drove us in their
rental, sweetheart. We’re at the market I took you to the other day.”
“Henrik drove… Did I sit next to Anders?” she asked tightly.
His brow quirked in curiosity and wariness at that and he asked, “Why are you
asking such questions? Did Anders do something to you?”
“No, no, he didn’t…” she answered absently. She buried her face against his
neck and muttered, “It’s getting hard to tell what’s real anymore.”
“Then let me hold the end of your thread as you wander the labyrinth of your
mind. I will always guide you back to reality,” he said. He rubbed her back
reassuringly and nuzzled her soft hair, the scent of his shampoo on her filling
him with prideful ownership. “You trust me, don’t you?”
She flinched away at the sound of a rapping on the door and he gave her a quick
squeeze before disengaging their embrace. He took hold of her arms and helped
her up, kissing her mouth once more before grabbing the plastic shopping bag
from the floor and leading her out of the restroom by her hand. The woman
waiting outside the door looked at them and he smiled genially at her open
disgust at seeing them exit the restroom together. It was refreshing to see
someone assuming the worst of him after days of nearly rubbing his sexual
relationship with his daughter in his brothers’ faces.
As they headed through the exit, Simone tugged on his hand and stuttered,
“Wait, uh, c-can we get the, um… the pads?”
He lifted the plastic bag in response and continued walking as he offhandedly
explained, “That’s why we were in the restroom, darling.”
“… Oh.”
The early evening sky was already pitch black with a smattering of stars across
it that even in the lighting of the small parking lot seemed impressive
compared to the murky skies of the city. There were no people wandering the
main street of the sleepy little town, no movement of cars or sounds aside from
their footsteps. It was easy for Leif to imagine that he and Simone could be
the only living people in the world, a thought that made him yearn for his
meddling brothers to return to Europe and let him transform his daughter in
peace.
Almost as though she had read his thoughts, he heard her quietly ask, “Are they
still in the store?”
“It would seem so,” he answered. He leaned his back against the side of the
car, tilting his head to watch the stars and the steam of his breath bloom in
the chill of the night. He was aware of Simone wandering off, the sound of her
shoes crunching through the gravel becoming distant, but he figured she
couldn’t find too much trouble with no one around. He ran his thumb over the
antler handle of his dead father’s folding knife in his coat pocket and savored
the cold air drawing into his heated lungs.
 
 
“Come here often?”
Simone whirled, feet scraping noisily across the gravel as she turned to the
sound of the voice. In the shadow of the awning above the backdoor to the
store, away from the orange glow from the bulb hanging from the roof, she
noticed the red glow from a cigarette before the figure stepped out into the
light. She also noticed, perhaps with more surprise, that she didn’t feel the
panic that she’d come to expect when caught off guard by someone lately. This
benign boy with his wiry frame and crooked grin was too far removed from the
man she feared.
“Sorry, I didn’t know this was off-limits,” she said, turning on her heel and
beginning to walk back.
“Hey, wait now, I remember you!” the boy said. Simone cringed as she heard him
clear the distance between them and she turned back around in preparation for
polite small town small talk. He tossed back the long sideways fringe of his
hair and wore that crooked grin as he said, “You came in here the other day,
right? You visiting around here?”
“Sort of,” she muttered, feeling awkward at this boy’s overt friendliness. But
she was lonely and he wasn’t a threat. She straightened, giving him a smile as
she spoke, “I’m staying at my grandpa’s place about twenty minutes out. He
passed a little over a week ago.”
“Oh, shit, I’m sorry to hear that,” he said, grin faltering.
She shrugged. “It’s fine. I didn’t really know him. You work here, right?” He
nodded, holding the straps of his apron exaggeratedly, and she breathed out a
polite chuckle before extending her hand. “My name’s Simone. You’re probably
going to be seeing me around pretty often, unless there’s anything else to do
in this town.”
He shook her hand, laughing a bit as he did so and she wondered if that was
perhaps she made a social misstep in offering a handshake. She wasn’t sure how
people her age socialized and all her friends back home were either unfitting
examples of normalcy by any standard or much older than her.
“No, I’m afraid Jay’s Grocer and General is pretty much the most entertaining
place if you don’t count church,” he said. “Simone, huh? I like that. I’m
Bryce. You smoke?”
“Not tobacco,” she half-murmured, glancing back to the corner she’d walked
around from to make sure her father wasn’t nearby.
“What was that?” he asked.
“Oh, uh, I mean, no. I don’t smoke,” she smiled. She stuffed her hands into her
hoodie pockets, the jacket not nearly thick enough for the chill that night.
This was pleasant, she decided. Having a normal conversation with a normal boy
was something that would have given her mild anxiety just a week ago, but
normal seemed so comforting and safe to her now. Even if she couldn’t ever be
normal again after what she’d been through, she wanted to soak up as much as
she could where it presented itself. “So, Bryce, did you grow up around here?”
“Well, I wouldn’t move here by choice, so yeah,” he nodded. He took a drag off
his cigarette, the smell abrasive to her sensitive nose. “Where are you
visiting from?”
“Brooklyn. New York. It’s quite a culture shock,” she answered.
“Yeah, no shit,” he drawled. “Hey, that older guy you were with the other day,
is he like your boyfriend or something?”
She tried not to examine the odd feeling that question brought up in her or let
it show in her expression. Slowly, she shook her head and said, “No… no, he’s
my dad.”
“Oh! Ok, cool, cool,” he said, nodding again and looking away as his grin
widened. “So are you in high school?”
“No, I’m twenty,” she chuckled. “Why did you think that? How old do you think I
look?”
He laughed and she giggled at the way he shifted on his feet in his
embarrassment. “Ohh, no, no, I’m not falling for that one!” he joked.
“Are you in high school?” she asked.
“Hell no, I’m older than you are!” he said, mock-defensively.
That surprised her. She took a harder look at him, but his smooth skin and soft
features only spoke of his youth to her. There were no crow’s feet, dark
circles, or frown lines to measure age by. The absence of any of these features
struck her as odd despite knowing that perception wasn’t normal considering she
also lacked them and didn’t consider herself any other age than what she knew
herself to be. The discrepancy in her logic struck her as another subtler sign
of her deteriorating mental health and she suddenly felt very uncomfortable
talking with this stranger. She needed to escape before she did or said
anything that might reveal her insanity.
“I should get back to my father,” she said, hurriedly walking away from the
boy.
“Oh, uh, okay. I’ll see you around!” he called after her.
She lifted one hand in a wave, not looking back as she rounded the corner and
nearly collided with her father. He grabbed her upper arm and she stumbled as
he pulled her towards the car, her shoes skidding at the gravel in her attempts
to match his wide and rapid stride. Her mind raced, trying to figure out why he
was hurrying her along so roughly, eyes scanning for any reason to rush but
there seemed to be no immediate cause. She felt him shove her and she slammed
against the side of the car, the realization of his anger knocked into her on
impact. Confusion and fear swelled in her as she tried to gauge whether she
should move to straighten herself or stay crouched against the vehicle, but he
answered that by opening the back door and gesturing her to get in with a jerk
of his wrist. She scrambled to oblige and he crowded in behind her, pushing her
across the backseat impatiently.
When he closed the door, he shot her a disdainful look and hissed, “What do you
think you’re doing?”
She balked, surprised at her own hot streak of anger at him. Figuring a
punishment would be imminent at this point no matter what her subsequent
actions, she gave that anger a voice.
“You know, I must have had a million conversations with a million strangers
back home,” she began, her voice nearly shaking with restraint to keep from
shouting. Her fists clenched in her lap and she couldn’t bring herself to look
at Leif. “You didn’t give a shit about me until you started fucking me. Hell,
you would barely ever speak to me unless I was having a fucking panic attack. I
know you never wanted to be a father but you really can’t start now, not after
what you’ve done. You can’t just lock me away from society because I’m… because
of some ‘danger to myself and others’ crap! I was doing just fine without you
before and I can handle-”
Her world flashed in black and white and reeled around her from the sharp crack
of his hand across her face, the pain radiating from her cheek shortly
thereafter. Her courage fled her along with the anger that had fueled it and
left her shaking in the tremendous fear than remained. Somehow, past the pain
and terror, there was only a deep numbness inside of her even as he gripped the
roots of her hair and pulled her head back. Her eyes squeezed shut and mouth
gaped in a silent groan as he loomed over her, his other hand coming to wrap
around her neck and hold her against the seat.
“Would you say that having the cops call me to pick you up from the station
multiple times was ‘just fine’? Or showing up at our door asking questions that
I had to lie to explain?” he growled out, breath hot on her face. She grunted
fearfully as his hand at her throat tightened. “You don’t know what ‘just fine’
is. You’re only not rotting in a prison cell because I protect you and yet you
have the audacity to tell me what I can’t do. Is that ‘just fine’, Simone?”
Unable to speak past the tight grip of his hand and the fear lodged in her
throat, she shook her head and prayed that would satisfy him. She wondered why
she had even said those things to begin with, finding no reason to believe them
now beyond further proof of her declining sanity. His hands released their
agonizing holds on her neck and hair, one palm smoothing over her aching cheek
with a gentleness that brought her eyes open in apprehension. His impassive
mask betrayed nothing of his intentions, no clue as to whether he would punish
or soothe her, and her breath rattled out of her trembling chest as she stared
up at him in the secluded silence of the car. The hand that could so easily
crush her cradled the side of her face while he slowly closed the short
distance between them, a hint of his sharp teeth just barely grazing her lips
as he kissed to remind her of the still painful bite on her shoulder. Her life
had become a polarizing series of pain and pleasure, hurt and comfort, and
affection and abuse that interchanged so rapidly the lines between them had
blurred.
“I’m sorry, Papa,” she whispered when he parted from her mouth.
“Are you?” he asked, tone dripping with disbelief.
His thumb brushed down the bridge of her nose and she shut her eyes for a
moment, gathering the will to voice the impulse that welled inside of her.
“Please…” she breathed, then opened her hesitant gaze to watch as she whispered
more firmly, “Punish me.”
His eyes snapped to lock with hers, surprise cracking through his mask briefly
in the slight quirk of his brow and dilation of his pupils. “You believe you
need to be punished?”
Her jaw tensed, mouthing the word before retrying through her fear and
whispering a tight, “Yes.”
The fluttering nervousness in her gut practically vibrated as he simply
continued to stare down at her. She watched the minor changes in his expression
play across his face as his mind worked; an almost undetectable broadening of
his nostrils as his breathing deepened, relaxation of his eyelids as they
became slightly hooded, a twitch at the corners of his mouth. To any stranger,
they might not have detected any expression on him at all. But through her
lifetime of seeking any impression or reaction from the normally stoic man, he
might as well have been grinning with glee. To see him so pleased brought that
familiar swell of pleasure at obtaining his approval that she had always
sought, a thing which made her surer of her own insanity in this context. The
carnal thrill stirring in her at the darkening of his gaze certainly confirmed
it, but something else stirred in her as well.
“It’s discipline, right?” she asked, quiet voice cracking through the struggle
of her thoughts. She could hear the edge of desperation in her own tone.
“Discipline is a necessary part of training… and my mind needs to be retrained.
I think you said that to me once when I started to… to lose my mind. Isn’t that
right? I was sixteen and the school called you because mom was on a business
trip. And you came.” She could almost feel something unravel in her mind as a
memory bubbled up from a dark piece of her. She pursed her lips, swallowing
back the tears that crawled up the edges of her eyes and tightened her throat.
“I don’t even remember what I did, but… I was so scared when it was you who
picked me up. You never yelled me like mom did, but you were always the one I
was afraid of. So, when we got home and you said that to me about discipline, I
was terrified. But you only gave me a sedative and sent me to my room.”
She paused, unsure if she should continue, the memory dredging up a deep and
long-buried mob of emotions that made her shiver as she brushed the denial off
it. She thought she had completely forgotten it, shoved it so far down into the
pit of her that it should never have resurfaced. She had in fact forgotten it
for many years and the lack of explosive reaction somewhat surprised her when
the memory came back to her cool and calm.
Taking a deep breath, she closed her eyes to shield them from his constant
stare as she admitted, “I didn’t take that sedative, Dad.”
Another long and silent moment stretched on before she opened her moist eyes,
looking to see the concealed astonishment in her father’s face. Slowly, he
backed away from her, his hands retreating to rub at his face and then support
his forehead as he rested his elbows on his knees. She sat up, observing his
reaction and surprised to see the unabashed guilt etched into his posture and
hidden face. Suddenly, she didn’t know what to do. She had expected anger,
smugness, spite, but not guilt. In the stillness and silence, memories of that
incident played unbidden in the theater of her mind, almost a flashback but it
was as though she were watching it happen to someone else.
She saw herself lying down on top of her blankets, the afternoon sun filtering
through her shut blinds in thin strips of light across her body as she tried to
nap. Then her door slowly opened and her father, still wearing his full three-
piece suit from being pulled out of the office, came in and stood over her bed
for several minutes just watching her. She’d feigned sleep, not wanting to get
in trouble for not taking the sedative, so certain that he’d only come in to
make sure of just that. But then he took off his jacket, tossing it onto the
bed next to her, followed by his vest and tie. When his hands slid up her bare
thighs under her school uniform skirt, the pleated gray material bunching
around her waist as he hooked his thumbs at the sides of her plain white
panties, she began to feign sleep on instinct. That she had continued to feign
sleep would haunt her later until she would manage to bury the memory
altogether, but the shame and self-blame had begun from that moment. His hands
had pressed down the sides of her legs as he pulled her panties down, so slow
that it felt like solid minutes had passed as she felt him slide his palms
across her skin. Laying there, her cunt so exposed to him and his touch so
sensual, she was still somehow confused about what exactly was happening. A
dozen nonsensical reasons had clashed in her mind for this predicament even as
his hands had traveled up her inner thighs and parted her pussy.
It wasn’t until she felt him press his wet, hot tongue inside her that she knew
what was happening. The betrayal and violation that had crashed down on her in
that moment should have sent her kicking and screaming away from him, but her
body wouldn’t obey her. An instinctual fear had locked her inside of her mind
and only heeded the natural reaction to play dead under this large predator.
She couldn’t peek an eye open to see what he was doing, but now she watched
this memory play out from the side of the bed as her father had swirled his
tongue inside her cunt with brazen hunger. Even her breathing had held the
deep, calm rhythm of sleep until he had dragged a shuddering and terrifying
orgasm out of her. Her mind had railed against the bafflement of how good he
could make her feel physically while her world felt like it was crashing down
around her, a sentiment she noted with a hollow feeling held true in present
day for her as well.
The sound of him unbuckling his belt and unzipping his slacks had spurred her
to panic, but her body wouldn’t move even as he leaned over her and kissed her
slack and unresponsive mouth. The idea that she would spend the rest of her
life knowing how her own father’s kiss felt was something that had struck a
harsh chord deep in her for some reason. The care and tenderness he put into it
felt worse than if it had simply been sexual. It had been intimate and so full
of love that it had bruised her soul.
The width of his thickness spreading her with each saw of his hips made her
throat clench in fear that he would tip his cock just slightly and slide into
her, but he seemed to be set on satisfying himself without penetrating her. It
had been a cold comfort to her then and an odd consideration to reflect on now.
The slick sounds of him sliding his cock against her wet pussy had made her
stomach twist. Internally, she had suffered the revulsion this breach of trust
of his fatherhood brought against her, but she couldn’t make her cries external
no matter how loudly they had echoed in her mind. She could only lie under him
paralyzed until he had finished, but he took his time enjoying her vulnerable
body. The heavy sound of his panting, the restrained power in the roll of his
hips, the strength of his grip on her waist, and even the heady masculine scent
of his sweat had stirred a carnal desire in her that she reviled even as it
flooded her cunt.
When at last his thrusts became jerky and his ragged breaths became groans,
he’d taken his cock in his hand and finished with his head pushed against her
opening. That hot, gooey mess had spilling against her cunt made her flesh
crawl. He had stayed there kneeling on his haunches, catching his breath and
staring dazedly at her for several more minutes before redressing and leaving
the room briefly to return with a dampened towel. After wiping her clean, he
slid her panties back on and pressed an affectionate kiss to her forehead, a
gesture that only made the entire scenario all the more depraved in the
juxtaposition of sexual and fatherly sentiments. He had laid down alongside her
in the small twin bed and cradled her limp body against him for hours after
that as she drifted in and out of real and fake sleep, mind and body too numb
to process what had just happened to her. By the time he had left her bedroom,
she had managed to convince herself that it was just a dream. And like a dream,
she eventually was able to forget it had happened at all.
Simone watched her younger self lie there in bed and slowly regain control of
her body enough to tremble and curl in on itself, the memory warping in
darkness until she realized she was sitting in the backseat of the car between
Anders and Vidar. She felt something press into her palm and looked down to see
Anders holding her hand, his thumb rubbing along her knuckles soothingly as he
looked out the window into the pitch black night. The numbness around her heart
weakened just enough for it to ache.
***** Chapter 16 *****
“What’s the most you’ve ever lost in a gamble?”
Leif sighed heavily, hoping to avoid the aggravatingly cheerful conversation
between Vidar and Henrik as they spoke loudly between the back and front seat,
but the burly bearded man was clearly asking him the latest annoying question.
In truth, he was somewhat glad to be dragged out of his thoughts, but still
considered his brothers annoying.
“My status as an only child,” he answered, turning his attention back to
driving through the inky darkness of the country road.
Henrik slapped his arm and scolded, “Come on, jackass, give a serious answer.”
Leif entertained the question for a moment, recalling the bluff he lost against
three Japanese lackeys in a San Francisco basement and the molar they had
collected from him with a wrench, but answered, “$6,000 at poker.”
“How the fuck did you let yourself lose that much?” Vidar asked as Henrik
guffawed and Anders whistled lowly.
“It won the company a 20 million-dollar contract with a sore loser of a
client,” Leif answered. Vidar threw his hands up in disgust.
“Braggart,” Henrik jeered, but then asked, “What’s the most you’ve ever won in
a gamble?”
Leif didn’t have to think for an answer as he glanced through the rear-view
mirror at the once-again dazed girl in the backseat. “A daughter.”
Vidar groaned in disgust as Henrik mockingly cooed and Anders repeated,
“Braggart.”
Leif tuned them out once more, having apparently satisfied their game to
provide the most aggravating responses to their aggravating questions, and
returned to his heavy thoughts. He wasn’t sure where along the way he had
pinned a moral obligation to protect Simone from the knowledge of how they had
progressed through the nearly six years of his increasingly bolder actions with
her unconscious body. Being confronted with his failure to spare her of that
knowledge felt incongruently painful to the self-admittedly sick and cruel
process he was willing and frankly eager to put her through currently. He
wondered why he felt that he had committed such an offense by being caught in
something that was comparably merciful to the girl.
He hadn’t even intended to begin her conditioning at the level they were now at
until several months into their seclusion there in Vermont, but it had been her
own lust that had advanced his plans. He reassured himself that, had he been a
crueler and less patient man, he could have easily taken her while she was even
younger and more malleable. That he had chosen to allow her an adolescence in
innocence was by his own virtue. He had been so cautious to be subtle in his
ministrations up until recently. Every escalation not by his design had been
caused from a completely unexpected catalyst by Simone, in fact. The initial –
and mutual, he reminded himself-- attraction in his father’s kitchen, the
enticement in her struggles when he first wrenched the sedative out of her
mother’s inept hands and forced it under his daughter’s writhing tongue, the
blood smeared over her mouth when he had found her by the pond, all outside of
his intentions and all leading to the worst of his deeds.
It occurred to him then, as he was reflecting on the maddening effect his
daughter had on his self-control, that the source of his guilt was only
partially a natural consequence of violating his own flesh and blood so
carnally. The aspect that set it so apart from that grief was the shame in his
own moral decline. His values and decency had been present and unsettled
throughout the entire process, creating a deep chasm of cognitive dissonance in
his psyche. The defilement of his daughter cut both ways. He grinned wryly at
how pathetic and futile his guilt really was because he knew that when
presented with any scenario between right and wrong, he would always choose the
most interesting option. Simone, with her unique and fractured mind and her
inherited traits that manifested so vividly, interested him irresistibly for
better or worse of them both.
He glanced through the mirror at his youngest brother, seeing him biting his
knuckle in much the same way Simone did when she was nervous, and wondered
again at what traits that man had inherited from their father’s side of the
family. Their shared interest in Simone might not present itself in the same
manner, but he knew he could use it to influence and manipulate Anders if he
could figure out how his interest functioned. Or perhaps it would be more
efficient to manipulate how that interest functioned first. Slowing into the
turn up the wooded driveway toward their father’s house, he surreptitiously
glanced back to see Anders holding Simone’s small hand in the space between
them with her bleary gaze fixed to that point of contact while his brother
pretended to stare out the window in a ruse of nonchalance.
 
 
Simone picked up her sketchbook from under the coffee table and found the
charcoal pencil under the sofa after a bit of searching over the intricate
oriental rug. Leif and her uncles had congregated in the kitchen and
immediately began the process of preparing some dish they had seemed excited
over, so she figured she might have a while to finish her drawing in peace. Or
relative peace as her mind randomly replayed scenes from that night four years
ago, her thoughts crashing to a halt with each recalled pang of distress and
violation under her father’s touch. Five minutes into making shoddy progress on
the ocean waves she’d been sketching earlier, she tore the page out of the book
in frustration and began a new drawing.
With broad, bold strokes curving and distorting to reveal the dimensions of the
shapes underneath, she drew the long horizontal shadows that the blinds on the
window in her bedroom had cast over the scene. Then, she spilled inky pools of
shadow under those stripes and the musculature of her father’s broad back began
to appear when she used her finger to blend the more diffused and softer
shadows of skin. The texture of his skin ghosted under her fingertips as she
swiped at the thick paper. Wavering between thin gray outlines and broad curves
of dark puddles, the sweeping folds of bedding and clothing came into being
around him. Her hands flitted over the page rapidly, the image blooming from
her touches and the pencil as though she were merely excavating it from the
paper. The cloud of her hair splayed over the bedding filled in with darkness
and slits of the white paper underneath to become the texture and sheen to her
soft waves.
She revealed her face with the shadow along her cheekbone first, then her eyes
opened in a way they had not been in that afternoon. She wanted to replace her
memory with what she put into the drawing, to rewrite the scene as anything but
the painful truth. With lips parted in passion instead of paralyzed, with eyes
gazing lovingly instead of blind, with hands pulling and caressing his bare
skin instead of laying limply at her sides, with legs and back flexing to roll
her hips instead of remaining unresponsive to her screaming mind. Anything but
helpless. Anything but powerless.
“Det er utrolig!”
She jumped at the voice beside her, scrambling off the sofa and nearly tripping
over the coffee table as the sketchbook tumbled onto the floor once more. She
was shocked to see Anders sitting on the sofa, wide-eyed in bewildered surprise
at her outburst of motion, apparently having been seated next to her for a
considerable but indeterminable amount of time.
“Sorry! I am sorry! Don’t be scare!” he exclaimed hurriedly, holding one hand
out in that placating gesture he seemed to make often and leaning over to
retrieve the fallen book. Her eyes darted down to the drawing, dread clouding
over her shock as she examined it outside of her frenzied impulse to create it.
Her eyes darted between the possibly incriminating erotic sketch and his face,
searching for what his reactions could mean as he looked at it. While she could
recognize the shape and muscle tone easily as her father’s, it was just his
back, but the moaning girl underneath him was undoubtedly her.
“It’s… it’s not… um…” she stammered, still breathing hard from having been
surprised. Her hand rubbed from the back of her neck to her chest in stress
before she remembered the charcoal on her fingers and she groaned in
frustration. “Fuck.”
He was still admiring the drawing, not paying any mind to her consternation as
he gestured between her and it. “You?”
Her cheeks burned in mortification, but she nodded. “Uh… yeah. I guess I can’t
deny that.”
He pointed to the man, glancing up at her with a mischievous smirk that she had
to look away from. “Boyfriend?”
“Fuck…” she groaned again. She nearly covered her eyes with her filthy hands to
ward off the stress headache she could feel crowding the front of her skull,
but thankfully stopped herself. Her mouth twitched into a humorless grin as she
said, “No, I don’t have a boyfriend. I don’t think I’m allowed.”
He laughed out loud at that and she stared at him as he said, “På grunn av
Leif. Leif is papa bear, yes?”
“Can you… understand me?” she asked, voice hesitant in both hope and anxiety.
Her heart raced as he nodded and shrugged, taking a moment to think before he
said, “I speak… a little. Understand, ah… okay.”
Her mind raced as she tried to remember if she’d said anything problematic to
him while under the impression that he couldn’t understand English. Her head
absently turned to the side and she found herself walking toward the writing
desk in the corner, brain searching out any kind of distraction from the
stressful scenario but only finding it piled high with junk mail.
“One moment!” he announced, but she didn’t want to acknowledge him as she
pressed charcoal fingerprints into the envelopes she nervously rifled through.
Credit card offer, bank statement, coupon book, cable bill, real estate offer,
all too late to catch Einar Valstad before his exit. At the bottom of the
stacks, however, she uncovered a photograph of a much younger Einar and a short
thin man, each holding an antler of the dead buck being held up between them.
She saw much of her father in Einar’s sharp cheekbones, hooded eyes, and strong
jawline. Careful not to smudge the photo, she picked it up and examined him
closer. She could scarcely recall her grandfather, but now she could remember
the robust and tall Norwegian with the gameshow host grin and easy humor of a
man who won people over for a living. She remembered liking him, at least,
especially for the endless supply of popsicles he had offered her despite her
mother’s disapproval. A little guilt tugged at her for not mourning him as much
as she should, considering she’d been in his house and surrounded by what
remained of his life for the nearly a whole week.
“Pappa and Bjørn,” Anders said from behind her.
She didn’t jump this time, apparently becoming accustomed to him sneaking up on
her, but she did freeze as he pressed a cold and wet hand towel to her neck.
The warning bells were loud in her head, but she let him turn her with one
steadying hand on her shoulder as he cleaned the charcoal and her makeup along
with it from her neck in small, circular wipes of the towel. Memories of her
waking nightmare from earlier replayed in her mind as he held her shoulder
tighter, but this Anders would surely let her go if she moved away. This Anders
was sweet and kind and nothing like her father. She struggled to maintain calm,
slow breaths as she forced herself to allow him to clean her off and see the
bruises she hid, reminding herself that he’s seen them before and apparently
had thought nothing of them. But as he cleaned off more of her neck, she could
see concern forming in the furrow of his brow. Her heart skipped a beat as she
considered the possibility that maybe he just hadn’t gotten a close enough look
before.
“Simone…” he said, his tone quiet and more serious than she’d heard him yet.
His eyes seemed unable to tear away from the clearly finger-shaped bruises that
spanned her neck and she could feel panic rising in her. “Faen… What…?”
This was her opportunity to either cover for her father or reach out for help
and she was surprised to find herself stuck with not knowing which to choose.
She knew that she should say something, anything, even just her father’s name
but her throat felt paralyzed. Suddenly, being confronted with an escape from
the horror and pain terrified her. She deserved what was happening to her, had
even wanted it at times. The drawing on the coffee table alone proved that she
was just as sick as her father. Anders’ worried eyes lifted to her terrified
ones and she could practically see her freedom in the open sky blue of them.
Pushing all apprehension down, she rode the impulse to grab the hand that was
holding her shoulder and opened his palm over her throat. She stared into his
confused face as she pressed his hand to encircle her neck, the calloused and
warm fingers rough against her sensitive flesh, and prayed for him to
understand. A long moment stretched between them in tense silence as a flush
bloomed up from his chest to his cheeks. He pursed his lips, brow furrowing
further as his throat bobbed in a nervous swallow and his fingers flexed
hesitantly on her neck. She could feel her jugular nudging against the pad of
his thumb with her pounding heartbeat as she waited.
“Er dette det du trenger?” he whispered, seemingly unable to look her in the
eye as he spoke. She moved her hand from his, but he didn’t remove his loose
hold on her neck. She tried not to let the claustrophobic feeling scare her
off, needing him so badly to understand what she couldn’t say with her
paralyzed voice, so she tipped her chin up and looked at him with all the
confidence she could muster. She couldn’t do this without also biting her lip
to keep it from quivering and she watched his unsure stare latch onto the
habit. His tongue darted out to lick his lips before he looked away and
nervously chuckled out, “Hva gjør vi? Dette er sinnsyk!”
“Please!” she managed to whisper, her desperation spilling into the plea.
He looked back to her face and she thought that maybe he finally got it in the
solemn way he stared at her for a moment, an almost conflicted frown crossing
his features before he sighed deeply. Her hope rose in that moment as he bowed
his head, certain he understood that she was showing him evidence of the abuse
his own brother was guilty of. Her hope crashed into confusion when his hand
tightened more firmly around her neck.
“It’s okay?” he asked as he lightly squeezed her. She barely heard the
question, blinking in complete bafflement at what was happening until she
realized that he hadn’t gotten it at all. It was his unsure and uncomfortable
expression, worriedly glancing between his hold on her neck and her face, that
told her he thought she was trying to tell him to choke her. An odd feeling
gripped her as she considered how this chronically helpful, well-meaning but
perhaps dimwitted man would go so far as to try to choke her if she would ask
him of it.
“How the fuck…” she muttered, staring up in utter disbelief at the blonde man.
“… are you this kind?”
He smiled a bit embarrassedly, his grip wilting from her neck along with his
gaze. He let out a short breathy chuckle and murmured, “Sorry… not good?”
She identified that odd feeling in her as frustration just as it rapidly boiled
over the hopelessness in her situation. She began to believe he would never see
his brother’s madness past hers even as she bared such condemning evidence to
him. She thought of perhaps showing him the photo of her lying tied up and
gagged on the floor with blood and semen leaking out of her cunt, but
spitefully doubted he would see it as anything but a mad game that a mad girl
would play. That anger in her brought her hands up to force his grip around her
neck once more, this time crushing his fingers around her neck. He looked back
to her in confused shock but his unassuming, compassionate eyes only made her
angrier.
She bared her teeth as her words came out in a harsh whisper, unfiltered
through her desperate fury, “Not good. You’re not good. I know the same awful,
wicked thing is in all of you and I am sick of waiting for you to show me
yours. Just do it! It’ll be easier this way!”
That tempting, hot anger filled her as he blinked at her and bit his lip while
he squeezed her neck harder, but not nearly hard enough. He looked as though it
hurt him to do this to her and she felt some strange satisfaction in the nearly
painful conflict of his thoughts playing out in his deeply furrowed brow and
frightened eyes. A funny thought pulled the corners of her mouth into a queer
grin as her mind supplied something her psychologist once told her about how
victims would often repeatedly attempt to recreate their trauma. The thought of
this kind, compassionate man imitating the brutal things her father had done to
her struck her as laughable even as she was certain that same cruelty lied in
him somewhere. She actually wanted to draw it out of him. She felt as though
something slithered in her brain as that anger drained out of her, leaving an
entranced calmness in its wake as her hands slid off his grip. She watched his
baffled eyes follow her fingers as they gave a reassuring caress to his wrist.
“Anders,” she whispered, voice as gentle and pleading as a prayer. His eyes met
hers, fearful blue locked on imploring gray. “Please.”
“Jeg burde ikke gjøre dette…” he muttered, his grip easing slightly. She lifted
her hands and gently cupped the sides of his face, her small thumbs caressing
his cheekbones in the same comforting gesture her father would occasionally
bestow on her when he wanted something.
She could hear Leif’s voice speak through her own as she softly whispered,
“Please, just a little bit. I need you to do this for me, Anders. Please?”
His troubled brow smoothed as she stroked his cheeks and he inhaled deeply
before slowly and shakily sighing. He closed his eyes for a moment, then she
gasped softly before her airway was restricted in his stronger grasp. The
uncertainty etched into his features blurred as her vision quickly
deteriorated, but she kept her gaze locked onto his reassuringly. Her head swam
in a strange pleasant fog, something comforting and thrilling all at once in
the building pressure.
“You okay?” she heard him ask, the sound muffled and distant.
Unable to easily speak, she gave a short nod and slid her hands into his hair,
affectionately running her fingers through the sleek light blonde strands. She
wasn’t sure where this courage to be so forward had come from. A dire pang
stirred in her as she supposed that it had come from the same madness that had
compelled her to make her uncle choke her. But at least this was something she
had asked for. Something she had the power to ask for. To take. A wry smile
parted her lips before they opened in a silent gasp at the pulling sensation in
her diaphragm, her chest burning for air. He let go of her neck quickly and she
gasped emphatically to fill her lungs, her hands slipping down to grip his
shirt as she leaned against him while the room spun around her. His arms
wrapped around her in a steadying hug and she could somewhat hear him asking
her something she couldn’t make out, so she just clung to him and nodded as she
panted. The endorphins and dopamine that flooded her system from the near-death
simulation of being choked so well felt as good as any drug she’d done, but
riding underneath that organic reaction was something darker. As she pressed
into Anders’ comforting embrace, she felt what she supposed her father must
have sometimes felt after he took from her unwilling body: a sense of control.
 
 
Leif carefully wrapped the fresh sprigs of thyme around a bay leaf and tied the
bundle together in cooking twine before dropping it into the vegetables
simmering in white wine. He checked to make sure the onions caramelizing in
butter weren’t burning in the pan next to it, then turned the heat off the pot
of boiling rice and salt.
“Drain that rice in a minute, Henrik,” he told the broad man who was wringing
the moisture out of the mushrooms at the breakfast bar counter.
“Yes, chef!” Henrik barked sarcastically.
“You find the food processor yet?” Leif called to Vidar.
“Found it. In the process of excavating it from this fucking mountain of shit,”
Vidar called out from the pantry closet. On cue, a loud metallic clang and a
string of cuss words could be heard from within the pantry immediately
afterward. Leif sighed heavily, moving to rinse his hands in the sink before
grabbing a kitchen rag and walking out of the kitchen.
“I’ll be back in a minute. Just make sure nothing burns,” he said before
stepping into the hallway. He caught Henrik flipping him off but decided not to
quip back at the man as he made his way toward the front of the house. It had
been at least twenty minutes since he had sent Anders to check on his girl, a
move which was met by somewhat confused stares from the other two brothers, and
he figured he’d allowed enough time by now for something to have happened. On
silent feet, he crept past the archway to the living room, finding the leather
furniture empty of any occupants. Then the sound of Anders’ voice whispered
from the room ahead. As Leif moved closer to the entryway of the parlor, his
sensitive hearing picked up the frantic pace in his brother’s usually upbeat
cadence.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, oh fuck! That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it? That was
what you were asking for, I thought… I thought… God, I’m such an idiot! Why the
fuck would you want that?” Anders muttered, nearly incoherent even in his
native tongue.
Leif peered around the corner of the wood carved molded archway, seeing a
frightened Anders holding up a gasping Simone. He held back the impulse to run
over and see what was wrong with his daughter, suppressing the need to protect
and secure his offspring for the sake of morbid curiosity at his brother’s
words and predicament. He watched as Anders pet her hair in an attempt to
soothe her, the troubled crease in his brow and posture not easing even as she
reached up and pressed her hand to his cheek.
Her voice was a raspy whisper that Leif had difficulty picking up, but he was
able to hear her say, “Thank you, Uncle Anders.”
“God, just tell me I didn’t fuck you up any worse. Why did I fucking do that…?”
he rambled, his breathing ragged in panic. Leif watched as her head lifted
weakly from Anders’ chest but her back was turned to him so he couldn’t see her
face. What he could see was Anders’ expression turn from frenzied to guilty as
he looked down at the girl, her hand smoothing his hair in an intimate gesture
that twisted Leif’s lip into a sneer. She let her hand drag down the back of
his neck as she stood on tiptoe to press a kiss to his cheek, but the gesture
did nothing to alleviate his guilt. Leif hid behind the wall when she turned
and began walking toward the archway, but didn’t move away from it when he
heard only her set of footsteps approaching. Once she turned the corner into
the hallway, he slapped his hand over her mouth the staunch her gasp of
surprise and gathered her in a harsh hold as he dragged her. She didn’t try to
resist him as he brought them into the bathroom, shoving her against the door
and locking it before letting go of her mouth.
“Mind explaining what was happening in there, darling?” he whispered with all
the calm he could will into his tone. He hadn’t expected to feel as enraged as
he did, his jealousy begging to overtake his control and thrash the man for
daring to touch what was his, but he needed to secure his girl. She watched him
with a strange, manic glint in her eye behind the predictable fear, something
sharp and feral lurking in her dread.
She licked her lips slowly in consideration before whispering, “Uncle Anders
really admires you, Dad.”
“Speak plainly, Simone,” he demanded firmly. He grabbed her chin and forced her
to face him, her lip drawing back in a small snarl that caught him by surprise
but he chose to let it go when she quickly corrected it. “We can’t have you
start talking in riddles again or I’ll put you back on lithium. You wouldn’t
like that, would you?”
“No, Papa,” she answered quickly. She glanced away, biting her lips for a
moment before saying, “Um... I was about to go into a panic attack and Uncle
Anders helped me out of it. Nothing was happening. I just… freaked him out, I
guess.”
Leif stared at his daughter as she glanced around nervously. Her timid nature
made it difficult to detect when her nervousness was due to fear in general or
fear of something specific, but he could tell that she was hiding something. He
knew he would have better luck getting it out of Anders at this point with how
unhinged she seemed.
“Simone, go freshen up and put on a nice dress for dinner,” he said warmly,
pulling her away from the door to open it. He smiled at her owl-eyed stare and
kissed the top of her head before he walked out of the bathroom, his steps
growing heavier as he headed back towards the parlor. He rolled his shoulders
and composed himself before turning the corner into the room, finding Anders
worriedly pacing while gnawing on his knuckle.
“There you are,” Leif announced. Anders froze except to look at him with terror
in his face. “Come back to the kitchen, we could use your help.”
Henrik had thankfully strained the rice in time and had taken the initiative to
stir it into the onions and transfer it to a casserole dish into the oven.
Vidar, however, seemed too cautious with sautéing the mushrooms and Leif
quickly shooed him out of the way to increase the heat.
“Just add the cream and stir until the mushrooms absorb it,” he told Vidar,
handing him a wooden spoon and clapping a hand on Anders’ shoulder when he
drifted into the kitchen. The young man jumped at the contact and Leif resisted
the urge to crush the flesh under his grip as he said, “You can help make the
sauce. I just need you to keep whisking while I add the ingredients.”
“Yeah, you got it,” Anders said, giving a weak smile and letting Leif lead him
to the stove. Leif kept his stare focused on his face as he placed a heavy
saucepan on the lit burner in front of him, receiving a small joy in the
discomfort of his youngest brother as Anders timidly looked to the side to
avoid his eyes.
He cut butter into the hot pan as he said, “You know, I couldn’t help but
notice you’ve developed quite a connection with my Simone.”
“I’m going out for a cig,” Henrik announced as he headed towards the backdoor.
“Can I join him, chef?” Vidar asked quickly.
“Once the mushrooms have absorbed the milk, you can do whatever the fuck you
want,” Leif said firmly, handing Anders a whisk before retrieving the bag of
flour. While Anders nervously stirred the melted butter, Leif dusted the flour
into the pot and continued saying, “I suppose it’s not so surprising. You’re
only ten years older than her. That’s even less than the distance in age
between you and I, now that I think about it. So, as her peer, you must have a
very different perspective on my Simone. Tell me, if you would be so open, how
do you see my little girl?”
Anders swallowed, staring into the pot as he kept the same rigid rhythm with
the whisk, and shrugged before saying, “She’s… She’s very… creative. Warm. Um,
I don’t know. I like her.”
“I know you like her. You like her a lot. She likes you too,” Leif said,
smiling mildly. He turned and pointed at a staring Vidar, nearly shouting,
“Keep your fucking EYES on those mushrooms!” Both brothers flinched at Leif’s
sudden outburst, turning their full attention to their pans with tensely level
expressions and stiff shoulders. Leif continued speaking in his casual tone,
“She’s a very loving girl, but maybe a bit too loving. Her mental illness can
sort of… dissolve the usual boundaries one needs to function socially. Leaves
her very, very vulnerable when she’s not so clear on right and wrong. I’ve had
to be careful on maintaining boundaries with her because it can be so easy to
do the wrong things.” He paused, leaning closer to his youngest brother, and
asked,“Have you done any wrong things with Simone, Anders?”
Anders pursed his lips, inhaling deeply through his nose before sighing and
then stammering, “I, um, I don’t know if I would really, uh, know if I… if we
were doing anything…”
Both Vidar and Anders tensed as Leif poured the veal drippings into the
saucepan. He smiled at them as he then poured in the milk, eying it until he’d
added about the right amount and then putting the carton in the fridge.
As he turned back and leaned against the counter next to Anders, he grinned,
“Come on, Andy, you can be honest. She’s sexy, she lets you do whatever you
want, and you’re not made of stone. What did you do to my daughter? Don’t lie
to me this time.”
“Can I ask you something first?” Anders hesitantly requested.
“Go ahead,” Leif offered.
“Do you…” Anders began, then frowned. He took a breath and began again, “Does
she ever, um… ask you to do anything… painful to her?”
For a long moment, the only sound was the whisk scraping the bottom of the
saucepan as all three men stood silent. Then Vidar turned off his burner and
quickly walked out the backdoor without looking at either of them, leaving them
alone in the kitchen. When the backdoor slammed shut, Leif reduced the heat on
the saucepan and pulled Anders away gently by his shoulder.
He turned him until they faced each other in the center of the cooking area and
calmly said in a low voice, “Listen. You’re my brother, so I’m going to do you
a favor and not sock you in the eye this very second. That means I need to make
myself very clear and if I feel that I haven’t made myself clear enough, then
I’ll have to convince you by other methods. Remember when I said that I would
do anything for my child?”
“I remember,” Anders nodded. “That’s why I wanted to-”
Leif stopped him before he could continue. “She’s mentally ill but she still
has a right to privacy, so I’m not going to answer your question. I also hope
you’ll respect her privacy by not divulging any this to anyone. What did she
ask you to do?”
Anders blinked rapidly, his hand roughly running through his hair as he said,
“Nothing! Nothing… I saw the bruises on her neck and figured… because I don’t
think you would do that kind of thing unless she wanted you to... But I don’t
know why she would want you to choke her or-or why you would ever do that?
Could you tell me why? I’m sorry. Am I making any sense?”
Leif listened to him ramble with increasing dread and amazement. Dread that
Anders knew, without question, that Leif had given Simone those bruises and
amazement that his faith in him as a good father went so far as to not consider
that it had been abuse. The mental gymnastics Anders was capable of frankly
stunned Leif. As he surreptitiously looked around to ensure the windows to the
backyard were shut, Leif considered his options for a moment. He could leave
things as ambiguous as they’ve been, he could cover up the truth with a
palatable lie, or he could fly even closer to the sun. Looking at the well-
meaning younger man before him with a heavy stare, he knew what the most
interesting option was.
“There are some needs that, as her father, I can’t quite fulfill for Simone…
But that doesn’t mean I can’t do anything to help relieve those needs,” he
began carefully with a slowness meant to impart double meaning. He waited for
Anders to register that meaning in the slight tick of his brow before
continuing, “I would do anything for my girl. If that means I must do some
things that seem unacceptable to keep her from looking for it in men that could
take advantage of her, then I am going to do whatever it takes to keep her
safe. I hope you never have to go through that, but I’m sure you would do
nothing less to care for your child.”
It took him a minute, but Anders’ confused expression slowly melted into a
heavy and disturbed comprehension and then outright appall. Leaving his brother
to grasp the implications but have to imagine the details, Leif turned back to
the saucepan and resumed whisking the liquid until it gained the proper
viscosity.
***** Chapter 17 *****
Within the next hour, the tense silence in the kitchen slowly progressed back
to their usual boisterous chatter and agitation. Halfway through the process,
Vidar had pulled out a bottle of scotch he’d found in the back of the pantry to
speed along the recovery of their jovial mood. By the time Leif had pulled the
dish from the oven, they were quite a way through the bottle and arguing about
something none of them would concede on. Simone hovered near the doorway
listening to all of this, her neck and shoulders bare but her bruises once more
hidden under paint and powder. The bite mark was impossible to disguise, so she
had done what she could to mask the bruises and simply left the punctures
alone. It was obvious enough to her now that his brothers would never connect
the two crescent rows of healing flesh to the man responsible. She had draped a
wide gold collar necklace around her neck that hung low enough to cover about
half of it, the cold metal rubbing painfully on the still sensitive wound. She
once wore the off the shoulder lace dress to a wedding of her mother’s
coworker, her mother having made a comment about how the color nearly blended
into her skin and thus made her put on a cardigan. That cardigan was still in
the laundry hamper covered in the stains her father had wiped off her legs
after fucking her against the wall she currently leaned on, so she stood only
in her lacey false nudity and gold. It didn’t matter. She could be wearing a
full suit of armor and still feel naked under it.
She was pulled out of her bitter introspection by the kitchen door opening and
spilling light into the dark hallway, the tall and broad silhouette of the
bearlike Henrik trudging out of it. She looked up at him, unable to see his
face through the shadows, her gray eyes catching the light before he shut the
door behind him and stepped toward her. Apprehension slithered up the back of
her skull when he took her hand, the scent of scotch heavy around him and
filling her with the memory of her first taste of her father. Shameful heat
poured into her at that, rattling her already shaky hold on reality at that
moment. So, when Henrik tugged on her hand to follow, her bare feet began
padded close behind him before she could consider why.
“Ssh, ssh,” he giggled, finger pressed close to his grinning lips as he pulled
her into the dimly lit living room. He leaned close to her in clandestine
excitement, the warmth of his excessive body heat brushing her bare shoulder in
a way that made her tense, and whispered, “Don’t tell Leif!”
Simone looked to the side, a glint of light off a reflective surface having
caught her eye as Henrik pulled her to sit in an overstuffed armchair. There,
on the table next to the chair, was a short letter opener. As her uncle rifled
through one of the heavy wooden bookshelves, she picked it up and examined the
blade. A strange sensation fogged her mind as she ran her thumb over the
surprisingly sharp edge of it and the pain brought her odd comfort. Henrik
brought over a thick book and gingerly plopped it into her lap, a suppressed
snicker escaping through his nose as she opened it to find it to be a photo
album. The first photo was of a young Einar standing with his arm slung around
the thin shoulders of a tall gangly boy and the short thin man she now knew to
be Bjørn standing off to the side, the yellow leaves of autumn on the ground
around them and the Vermont house in the background.
Henrik pointed a thick finger at the boy, whispering, “Det er Leif!”
“Oh…” she breathed, eyebrows raising in surprise as recognition clicked in the
wide plains of the boy’s cheekbones and hooded gray eyes. He looked so much
softer and smoother, still possessing the rounded edges of childhood with a
thin chin and oversized ears. She flipped through the pages, watching the
effects of time turn that scrawny boy into something sharper and stronger,
something a little closer to the monster she knew. It was disconcerting to see
evidence that he had once been a regular kid with squinting grins and awkward
postures. Henrik pointed to a picture of Leif standing on a broad tree stump
with three other blonde boys.
“Me,” he said, pointing to the short chubby boy, then, “Vidar,” the sneering
one with thick glasses, and “Anders.” the one who couldn’t have been older than
four and staring at the camera with a gaping mouth. Leif towered over them all,
just a couple years older than Henrik but before the chubby boy’s apparently
overenthusiastic growth spurt. She stared at each of them, fascinated at the
way their babyish features had developed into the men they would become.
“Was Dad always tall?” she asked.
He laughed. “Ja, tall. I am more tall, haha! He needs careful.”
His hot hand squeezed her shoulder in a friendly gesture, but the cold metal of
the blade pressing against her palm kept her calm enough not to flinch. She
took a steadying breath and turned through the pages of rowdy boys running
through woods and piled on top of each other in a more hideously decorated
house. She stopped when she came to a picture of Leif standing in front of MIT,
holding up his acceptance letter and looking quite a bit more filled out than
the scrawny boy he’d been through high school. So close to her age but looking
so much younger than she could have imagined still. This was the bright and
ambitious boy her mother had fallen in love with only to fall out of love once
he would become an intimidating and strong man. Her finger lightly traced over
his open smile, closely examining the teeth that would sink into her skin a
little more than twenty years from then. The same just slightly crooked
sharpness. Unconsciously, she ran her tongue over her front teeth as her feral
mind wanted to lick into her father’s mouth and tempt that bite. The impulse
both shocked her and stoked that insistent heat in her abdomen and hips.
“Kom til kveldsmat!” Vidar’s voice called from the dining room. She reflexively
shut the book, Henrik taking it from her lap and helping her up with a wide
mischievous grin on his face.
“That was fun, ja?” he smiled to her as he led them back down the dark hallway.
“Ja,” she parroted back absently, feeling almost as though she’d seen a ghost.
 
 
Even with his back to the door, Leif could tell when Simone entered the dining
room by Anders’ expression changing from the easy grin of a drunken stupor to
the shy smile and glittering gaze of adoration as he fixed his stare on the
girl. It would irritate Leif more if it weren’t so amusing to see how
pathetically fond he had become of his niece in so short a time. However, when
he turned to assess his daughter, he had to once again question exactly what
flavor of adoration Anders held for her as he stared at her in that very
fetching tight and short dress.
Henrik pushed her forward into the room, his large hand hooked around the side
of her small waist as he announced, “I brought the meat! Let’s eat!”
She shrank under the stares of the men, shoulders drawing inward and arms
folding uncomfortably as Vidar leered from his chair, “Not a lot on her, but
just enough where it counts.”
“You’re a fucking creep, Vid,” Anders said, rising from his seat and walking
around the table toward her. Leif watched intently at their interaction, seeing
her eyes widen in uncertain apprehension as Anders walked toward her with
placating open palms as though he were approaching a nervous dog. She remained
very stiff until he gently touched her arm and smiled at her, at which point
her whole demeanor changed and she stepped to him eagerly. Leif pushed aside
his twinge of jealousy as she wrapped an arm around Anders’ middle and he
walked her to the table with a hand on her bare shoulder.
They were far too friendly with one another for Leif’s tastes and he was a
little glad when Vidar groused, “I can’t get a damn word out of her and fucking
Anders of all people has her on his dick like he’s Bill Gates at a strip club.”
“You should try treating her like a person,” Anders quipped coolly.
“She’s not a person. She’s my daughter,” Leif corrected him, reaching out and
grasping her wrist when she drew near enough. She yelped slightly when he
tugged her down onto his lap, her short skirt riding up her thighs dangerously
as he held her close to him. She tensed, obviously embarrassed as she tried to
pull her skirt back down, but he grabbed her hand away before she could
accomplish it and kissed her knuckles teasingly with a mischievous smile.
“Papa…” she grumbled uncomfortably, trying to squirm away from him.
He pressed his lips to the shell of her ear and grinned as she shivered when he
whispered, “Sit. Stay. Good girl.”  She obeyed, adjusting on his lap until she
sat across it more comfortably, and he traced her hip in a wide and slow sweep
of his hand appreciatively. “It’s been a while since I’ve seen this dress.”
“Good dress!” Anders grinned as he took a seat directly across from them. Leif
glanced up at him sharply, surprised that he’d understood the softly spoken
comment, and had to refrain from squeezing her body any more tightly to him.
Her shuddering intake of breath as his wandering hand slid down her bare thigh
under the table drew both men’s gazes to her while Vidar and Henrik were
distracted with dishing out the roast. Leif was endeared to her by the way her
hand tightly clung to his vest, the material bunching in her fist and her face
hidden in the collar of his dress shirt, then he noticed that his hand had come
to wedge between thighs. He chuckled at his drunken absentmindedness, giving
her thigh a squeeze that made her choke down a noise in her throat before
pulling his hand out. He’d have to be more aware of himself, having gotten used
to possessing such free access to her body. He glanced across the table to see
Anders staring at her, that goofy grin absent in the presence of slack jawed
awe and pinkened flush from his neck to his hairline.
“Just doing what I can,” Leif smirked, shrugging as though it couldn’t be
helped. The casual air he put on while drawing attention to the fact that they
were both aware of her aroused state was imperative to conditioning Anders that
this was all so very normal and yet still private between them. This new gamble
on his brother’s gullibility depended on Anders’ ignorance on how to handle
hypersexual behavior in mental illness, but ultimately it hinged on his faith
that his brother was a good father. When Anders responded with an awkward smile
and turned his attention to his plate, Leif was able to relax in his success.
 
She felt sick. The heat coursing through her body and the arousal tainting her
mind with delirium felt like a fever. She hated being so out of control as her
father held her on his lap, his erection pressing under her stoking that
irritating urge to grind against it. The pantyliner that did what it could to
protect her dress from her soaking cunt was a cold comfort to her as she
crossed her ankles and squeezed her thighs together in attempts to stem the
flow, but the clenching of her muscles only seemed to tease her desire for
increased friction. Her mind felt painfully split between wanting to give into
lust and obeying what she knew were her actual values and wants, but whenever
she felt like she had a decent grip on the basics of her own identity, it was
torn away from her in that mind-numbing need to fuck. She hated this. She
needed so much more.
“Are you still bleeding, darling girl?” Leif asked.
She swallowed thickly, heart thumping in her throat as she timidly rasped, “I’m
not sure… I think it stopped.”
She nearly winced at how pathetic she sounded to her own ears, but he hummed in
approval. “Good, good.”
He said something to Vidar and the man placed a plate of the dish in front of
them with a brief quip that Leif grinned smugly at. She tried to move off his
lap to find her own seat, but he held her fast to him as he scooped up a
forkful of the intricately layered roast. His hand squeezing at her waist
nearly had her gasping, that ache between her legs throbbing at the pain. He
presented the fork in front of her, smiling as her confusion became
mortification in realization that he meant to feed it to her.
“Be a good little girl and eat your supper,” he chided her.
She was careful not to meet his intense stare as she reluctantly opened her
mouth and accepted the morsel. The humiliating act of being fed unfortunately
did not allay her arousal, seeming to only increase it in this opportunity to
please the man. She hated herself for letting her lips drag slowly on the stem
of the fork as she took in the next offered bite too eagerly, letting her eyes
close in a show of trust and appreciation. Despite her deepening self-loathing,
she felt a flutter in her heart when Leif pressed an affectionate kiss on her
temple as a reward for good behavior. The chaste and patronizing gesture
twisted her stomach in a jumble of polarizing emotions. Feeling the pressure of
being watched, she turned her head and briefly met Anders’ eyes before he
returned his stare to his plate in a jolt at having been caught staring. The
fresh memory of his hands reluctantly squeezing at her neck in his breathless
panic fed a darker hunger in her. She wanted to make him go further. Her father
drew her attention back to her debasement by pressing the end of the empty fork
to her cheek until she turned and faced him.
“Eyes on me, kiddo,” he warned, then smiled warmly. “Do you like the dish?”
She didn’t even recall the taste in her distraction and embarrassment, but
nodded. “What is it?”
“Veal. A meat prized and vilified for the young age at which the animal is
slaughtered,” he answered. He scooped up another forkful and held it to her.
She tried not to frown as she accepted it into her mouth, this time paying
attention to the rich assemblage of mushrooms, meat and onion in the creamy
sauce. Her jaw tensed as she forced herself to swallow and watch him take a
bite of the meat himself.
“You obviously don’t vilify it,” she stated.
“I view it as an act of mercy toward an animal bound for the slaughter anyway,”
he responded. He locked his eyes with her as he fed her another bite. “Why
should a few miserable years be significant when their destiny is the same?”
She chewed thoughtfully, weighing the double meaning of the topic, before
forcing the rich food down her throat and saying, “Mom never let me eat veal.
She thought it was unethical.”
“Your mother is no longer with you. I’m the only one watching over you now. Do
you believe it’s unethical?” he asked.
A bitter coil pulled at her self-hatred as she quietly said, “I believe what
you want me to believe.”
He stared at her face for a long, silent moment after she’d said that. She
worried that she somehow had offended him, that he was considering how to
punish her for some unknown transgression and her stomach tightened until her
appetite had been replaced with dread. She nearly flinched in fear when he
grabbed her chin and tilted her face. Her eyes widened when she tasted the
scotch still heavy in his mouth as he pressed a sudden and intense kiss to her,
the electric shock of unexpected pleasure stifled by the dreadful awareness of
their audience. The kiss only lasted perhaps two seconds, a move reminiscent of
those just slightly too-long kisses he used to bestow on her before she had
come to know the full extent of his attraction, but the heat of it had dragged
a small moan from her and heated her face in a fierce blush of arousal and
humiliation. But the dinner conversation continued uninterrupted between Henrik
and Vidar’s aggravated tones and her father pulled away from her with a
nonchalance that made her wonder if she had only imagined the impropriety. Only
the distinct silence across from them drew her attention away from her doubt
and she glanced to see Anders once more staring at her, something in his face
like worry and curiosity.
“Er du okay?” Leif asked him. Anders kept staring at her, his fork forgotten in
his hand as he held it above his plate, and she felt strangely shy under his
intense blue eyes. Something was different in the way he was looking at her.
That distant hope and dread that he might know the truth tickled in her once
more, but there was something off about how he watched her. Something that drew
her wonder.
At last, he blinked and snapped out of his reverie, glancing up at his brother
and muttering, “Beklager. Jeg tror jeg er full.”
 
 
Leif excused himself from the table while his brothers were still eating,
either the scotch having slowed them down or his own eagerness to retreat to
seclusion with Simone expediting his eating. He noted with amusement and
irritation at how Anders had watched him leave with the girl, noting the
suspicious quirk in the younger man’s brow as his stare had lingered on where
Leif’s hand had clung to her waist. He could see the confrontation approaching,
knowing that Anders couldn’t seem to keep his eyes off her all throughout
dinner and practically broadcasting his interest in her rather obvious need.
Leif smirked as he thought on how his brother had resembled a dog catching the
scent of a bitch in heat, all perked ears and pinpointed concentration. He had
begun to doubt Anders was even aware of his own reactions in how blatantly he
had been staring until Henrik had made a crass remark on it. As he pulled his
daughter by her trembling hand up the stairs toward their bedroom, he tried to
think of what lie he would craft to counter Anders’ approaching interrogation
once his imagination had supplied enough condemning details on exactly how he
relieved her. His inability to think of any solution past outright admitting to
fucking her just to see the shock on his face spoke to him of his own level of
intoxication. His stumbling up the steps confirmed that inkling.
“Papa, are you alright?” Simone asked, voice high in worry as she knelt next to
his crouching form on the steps. He laughed at both how drunk he was and how
sweet she still somehow managed to turn out despite his torture, a pang of
stray guilt stabbing through his jovial haze at the reminder of all he had done
to her. That guilt grew heavier as she pulled his arm over her shoulders, her
small body struggling to help him up as she whispered encouragement to him. She
was too warm and caring, too easy to love. He resented how those pieces of her
had brought out the worst in him; the need to take when she was so giving and
the need to corrupt her loving nature too tempting for him to have hoped to
resist. He was overcome with the need to explain to her that he still loved
her, that she was the most important part of his world, that he was sorry she
had the rotten luck to end up with a man like him as her father.
Instead, when he opened his mouth, what came out was, “We don’t have to fuck
tonight if you’re too sore, darling.”
He winced at his own tactless crass, at his complete failure to be kind to her
for one unguarded moment, but she looked up at him in surprise and whispered,
“Oh! I… um… thank you. I’m just a little scared of bleeding… again.”
The sheer gratefulness in her tone only made his guilt heavier. As he flicked
on the desk lamp and sat on the edge of their bed, he helped her wriggle out of
her tight dress, his hands lingering on her soft skin appreciatively. While
there was a guarded hesitance in her movement and she avoided meeting his
stare, she allowed him to touch her without shying away and he kept his hands
gentle as they caressed her bare torso and thighs. He knew he shouldn’t be this
kind to her, at least not until he’d instilled complete fear into her, but
alcohol made him sentimental.
“You know I love you, Simone. That’s never changed and never will change,” he
whispered, trying not to slur. She looked at him then, such fearful tenderness
on her face, just waiting for the painful sting that usually accompanied his
kindness. Looking at her standing there next to the bed in nothing but her
panties and jewelry, her almond skin glowing in the dim lighting of the room
and light eyes glittering with apprehension, he couldn’t deny that he wanted to
sting her. He let that fleeting weakness in him recede as he said, “You’ve been
separating from reality more often lately. Tell me what visions have tangled
themselves to your madness.”
The purse of her lips and wringing of her hands told him that she was afraid of
telling him, leading him to smile and say, “I won’t hold them against you,
dearest. I just want your honesty. They have no consequence in reality, no
matter how vivid, and you don’t have to worry about me bringing consequence
here for them.”
She crossed her arms over her bare chest, her face turning away from him to
look at nothing as her jaw clenched in consideration until she finally said,
“I’ve been… seeing a lot more recently. I, um… don’t really remember but… I’ve
been feeling things that don’t belong to me. That’s new and that’s, um… that
really has me worried. I think I should see someone about it.”
“Perhaps,” Leif remarked, though he had no such intention of ever allowing her
to do that. He drew her closer to stand between his spread knees, his mouth
being drawn to feel her navel. He felt her abdominal muscles tense under the
feather light touch of his lips dragging across her skin. “What are these
feelings that aren’t yours?”
She frowned, her hands rubbing her upper arms as she seemed to search for the
words. “That’s… difficult to say. Uh. Mostly anger. It comes and goes.”
As he spoke, he gently unfolded her arms and placed them over his shoulders.
“Anger is very informative. It can lead us to parts of our lives that we may be
trying to neglect. It’s also a very natural part of transition to experience
emotional confusion. You don’t need to worry; I’ll always be there to guide you
back to what’s real.”
Her hands grasped his shoulders and she drew in a sharp breath as he took her
left nipple into his mouth and caressed her back as he drew her closer.
Unexpectedly, she asked, “How did you meet mom?”
He glanced up at her, seeing her eyes shut and mouth slack in the pleasure his
touch was giving her, and didn’t move his mouth away from her skin as he spoke
against her breast, “We met while we were both studying abroad in France. We
were very different people back then.”
“I know,” she responded strangely. She gasped lightly as he pressed slow, wet
kisses across her breasts and chest while he loosened his tie and unbuttoned
his vest and shirt. He stood as he slid them from his shoulders and let them
fall to the floor, keeping himself bent to suck on the side of her neck and
wrap his arms around her bare body. Her softness never seemed to stop being so
remarkable to him as he ran his hands over her greedily, her taste and sighs at
once familiar and still forbidden. He might have lied when he had offered to
spare her his sex. A sudden bout of vertigo hit him hard, the reminder of the
scotch he’d drunken to excess forcing him back onto the bed and he pulled her
down with him. As he held her to him, stretching them both out on top of the
bedding, he kissed her mouth and found her hungrily returning it with a moan.
“You’re shaking, Simone,” he breathed against her part lips before delving his
tongue back between them. She mewled as he gripped her thighs and spread apart
them over his lower abdomen, his hands sliding up and kneading a tight squeeze
on her ass that had her break the kiss to draw in a ragged gasp. Her soft, warm
body writhed on top of him as the room spun around them. His sweet Simone ran
her hands over his chest, her gentle touch soothing him into such a relaxed
state that he let her hands wander as they wanted. He wasn’t aware of when he
passed out.
 
 
She tried not to flinch when she heard the kitchen door open behind her,
willing herself to swallow her gasp and simply breathe out slowly and calmly.
The house had been dark and empty by the time she’d emerged from her shower,
her nervous and possibly manic energy not allowing her to sleep even if she
could bring herself to go back into the room that held her passed out father.
Unfortunately, this had reduced her to stalking about in the dark and cold
night clad only in a towel. After trying and failing to calm herself with any
of the books lining the shelves in the living room, she had padded into the
kitchen to attempt a warm milk solution. She’d been halfway through the glass
of heated milk and honey, glaring angrily at her reflection in the window and
resenting her vagina’s existence when she was interrupted. She kept her stare
on the glass to see Anders step through the door, his surprise at finding her
there rivaling her own. Her lips pursed in nervousness at being alone in a room
with him again, memories from earlier threatening her shaky composure, so she
swallowed them down and carefully avoided remembering. She watched him in the
reflection of the glass as he wavered in the doorway, his eyes wide in surprise
at finding his niece wearing only a towel in the kitchen at god knows what hour
of the night. She watched, a curl of fear twisting in her gut, as his eyes
lingered on various parts of her from behind.
“Good evening,” he whispered in the silence of the kitchen.
She gripped the towel around her tighter before turning and attempting a smile.
“Hey, Uncle Anders.”
He smiled back and walked across the dated linoleum, empty glass in hand, and
she moved to step to the side as he approached the sink. He put his hand on her
shoulder to stop her from stepping away as he filled his glass from the faucet,
the warmth of his gentle grip on her cold bare skin nearly burning and making
her far too aware of her complete nudity beneath the blue terrycloth. She
squirmed subtly to wrap it more tightly around her as that insistent heat in
her spread to tingle in her breasts and bloom a pink blush high on her cheeks.
“Good dress,” he joked, a mischievous sparkle in his eye as he drank deeply
from his glass to cover his self-amused grin.
“Uh huh…” she murmured, letting her sour mood show in her flat tone as she
looked away from him. She regretted taking out her frustration on him, knowing
he wasn’t the cause of her sexual perversion. However, as he stood close enough
for her to feel his heat rolling off him in tempting waves, the appealing shape
of his fit body outlined clearly by the way his thin nightclothes clung to him,
she couldn’t deny that he was currently contributing to her frustration. She
sighed heavily as she considered how the concept of incest had been distasteful
to her just a week ago, yet here she stood getting wet over own father and now
her uncle. Considering everything that’s happened, though, she found it
difficult to care about societal propriety at that point. It was difficult to
consider cultural norms when she was struggling to hold her reality together.
She was brought out of her self-pitying introspection by Anders setting his
glass down on the counter and turning to her.
He put his hands on her upper arms and bent down to her eye level, a concerned
look on his face as he asked, “You okay? Not sleep?”
“Not okay. Not sleep,” she frowned, trying to scrub the apprehension from her
face at his touch by rubbing the heel of her palm against her forehead. She
reminded herself that she had no reason to be afraid of him. He was nothing
like her father. A wicked thought followed that one, suggesting that she
wouldn’t mind if he were just a little like him tonight. Enough to scratch that
incessant itch inside her. She bit her lip as that warmth in the cradle of her
pelvis throbbed at his nearness, the scent of scotch and man bringing back
memories of the first night with her father. The memory made her feel so weak
and stupid now, knowing how it was certainly far from the actual first time
with that man. To her horrified embarrassment, tears pricked at the corner of
her eyes and alerted Anders to her emotional distress.
“Åh, gråt ikke, kjære!” he said warmly, pulling her to him in a hug. She stood
stiffly as his arms wrapped around her, his chest feeling almost too warm
through the thin material of his white t-shirt. That need in her throbbed as he
pressed her firmly to him, her frustration boiling over her pitiful teary-eyed
state.
“I-It’s fine, Uncle Anders, I’m just tired!” she stammered, trying to step away
from him but he clung to her. One of his hands pressed her head to rest against
his chest and began petting her hair as his other was wrapped around her and
stroking the exposed skin of her upper back. All the while, he cooed soothing
words to her in Norwegian, the foreign endearments doing little to soothe her
rising apprehension at the arousal he was unwittingly stirring in her.
“You okay, myk liten jente. Fortell meg hva du trenger…” he whispered softly,
the scent of scotch on his breath bringing her nearly to panic.
“You shouldn’t touch me like this, especially when you’re drunk,” she muttered,
even as her arms unglued themselves from her sides and slid around his middle.
He chuckled, apparently understanding enough of her words or just amused at how
she warmed to him, and she felt a spark of resentment at him for it. She
stepped closer to him, feeling a cool satisfaction by how he tensed when she
pressed her body against the front of his pelvis and felt the bump of his
genitals through his flimsy pajama pants. A fission of electricity and
nervousness thrummed through her when he didn’t move away, but she assured
herself it was because he was too drunk to notice.
“You want, ah… Vil du at jeg skal varme deg?” he asked, his voice a little
raspy.
“I wish I understood you,” she murmured, nuzzling her cheek against his chest.
His hands began to rub over her shoulders in slow, firm caresses, and she
decided to let this happen. Whatever this was, it felt nice. She felt guilty
for having been annoyed with him for not realizing what was happening with her
and her father, knowing it wasn’t his fault that he didn’t see it. He’d been so
kind to her, oddly kind at a level that made her uncomfortable, but she wanted
to let herself accept him. Anders was, for all she could tell, safe in a world
she had suddenly found little safety in. While a part of her wanted to indulge
in that as much as she could, a darker part of her wanted to prove that his
safety only went so far. A self-destructive need to push him until he showed
that past that benevolent exterior, he was just as sadistic as her father.
Wanting to reciprocate his kind touch and also push his boundaries, she arched
her back to press against him more firmly as she let her hands slide towards
his front and then slowly glide down the sides of his abdomen, down ridges of
his pelvic bones, down the sides of his thighs. With her ear against his chest,
she listened as his breathing deepened and his heartbeat thumped louder and
quicker. A nervous curiosity in how far she could go before he reacted
blossomed in her. When her reach was spent, she let her nails lightly drag back
up but much more inward. As her thumbs traced the crease between his pelvis and
thighs, she finally got him to react when she felt his cock begin to fatten up
against her and he flinched his hips backward quickly when he seemed to realize
his body’s response. She hid her smirk against his chest as he exhaled
nervously, feeling mischievous as she stepped closer to him again.
Surprisingly, he grasped her hips and held her a few inches away, that rougher
squeeze on her particularly sensitive hips making her breath hitch and a slight
moan escape her. She froze immediately at hearing how undeniably erotic she’d
sounded and he seemed to have the same reaction, but his hands didn’t move from
her tender hips. Her heart thrummed in confusion and want, apprehension and
nervous excitement keeping her locked in place as the seconds ticked by with
only his noticeably ragged breathing keeping time. Although her muscles felt
tight and rigid, she bent her head to look down and saw the evidence of his
response clearly outlined in the bulge at the front of his pants. Her mouth
felt dry when her throat reflexively swallowed in nervousness.
“Beklager… Sorry… I’m sorry…” he whispered, his voice raspy and slurred from
the alcohol.
“It’s okay…” she muttered absently. And it was, she reasoned. This was just a
bodily reaction he couldn’t control, the same as the moisture that collected in
her cunt and came dangerously close to dripping down her thigh. It was late and
he was drunk and she was broken. It didn’t have to mean anything. “Can I touch
it?”
“‘Touch’?” he repeated, barely audible in how tight his voice was. He still
hadn’t moved away, still hadn’t removed his hold on her hips, still hadn’t
stopped her from staring at the protrusion of his erection. She reasoned that
was consent enough. Slowly, she reached down between them, her heart rate
nearly humming in how quickly and loudly it beat in her ears.
 “Vente, vente, vente…” he muttered, suddenly grabbing her wrist as her
fingertips brushed his blood-hot hardness. With one hand still squeezing her
hip and the other not quite holding her wrist far enough away to stop her from
touching him, she felt like he was teasing her. She knew he wasn’t, knew he was
just drunk and uncoordinated, but she still felt that curl of resentment twist
her thoughts at these mixed signals.
“Please?” she whispered. His hand on her wrist twitched at the plea and she
recalled how he’d responded when she begged. That cruel impulse in her swelled
at the knowledge that sweet, helpful Anders had a very hard time saying no.
“Please, let me touch you a little. I’ll be gentle. I just want to feel you,
don’t worry. Please?”
She wanted him to tell her no, to just say he was sorry and drunk and tired and
didn’t want her like that. Even still, she felt that sense of control tingle up
the back of her mind when he let out a long, ragged sigh and his hand returned
to her hip. She pressed her palm to the underside of his cloth-covered cock,
her knees feeling weak and her chest aching in the need to pant for breath, but
she tried to not appear as terrified as she felt. The aching in her cunt
throbbed in animalistic anticipation despite reassuring herself that he
wouldn’t possibly let this go that far.
“Leif… ‘touch’ you?” he asked hesitantly.
Her slowly stroking hand twitched at the question, a spike of hope and fear
shooting through her veins. Her voice cracked as she whispered, “Yes.”
His hands tightened on her hips, making her breath hitch again and her fingers
tense around what she could grab of his cock through his pants. His breath was
hot on the back of her neck as he loomed over her downturned head and asked,
“Why?”
“Because…” she whispered, confused by the question. She found herself at a loss
for the answer. Because he loved her? Because he wanted her? Because she was
his? These were all answers he had supplied her, but didn’t seem appropriate to
the question coming from Anders. A bitter coil of self-loathing tugged at her
as she said, “Because I need it.”
“‘Need’…” he murmured. His accent was nearly unintelligibly thick and his
drunkenness slurred the words, but she could understand him when he whispered,
“You need touch now?”
“Yes,” she breathed.
“I go get Leif?” he asked.
“No,” she answered quickly.
She winced at his sharp and sudden intake of breath, his cock twitching under
her slowly stroking hand as he let out that breath in a trembling sigh while he
muttered, “Gud tilgi meg… Okay, kjære. Okay.”
He gently removed her hand from him, intertwining their fingers in a tender
gesture that eased her anxiety. She felt guilty for having put him through that
stress then, seeing how he was still so kind even after she was so wicked to
him. He really was safe. He still held onto her hand, his thumb tracing the
inside of her palm soothingly, as he tilted her chin up and she found she was
unafraid to meet his warm gaze. Through his drunken haze and uncertainty, he
still had that benevolence in his face that made it so tempting to trust him.
He smiled at her, just a small uptick of his mouth that she tried to return,
and leaned down to press their foreheads together in a sweet familial gesture
that drained the tension from her body. The comfort he bestowed on her made her
feel as though she might finally be able to sleep soon and she let her eyes
fall shut in appreciation of that nice thought.
“Ready,kjære?” he whispered. Her eyes opened, brow furrowing slightly in
confusion before she felt his hand slip under the bottom of her towel.
***** Chapter 18 *****
Anders never got hangovers. As he rolled off the sticky leather sofa in the
living room, his mouth dry and sour like he’d chewed on a dirty sock and his
stomach roiling like he’d swallowed that sock, he reminded himself of that
fact. His bare feet couldn’t carry him quick enough down the hallway to reach
the toilet, but he managed to deposit roughly one fourth of mostly digested
veal Orloff and about ten fingers of scotch in the sink before his body stopped
heaving. He rinsed the foul mixture from his tongue with long drags from the
faucet and then nearly vomited all that water while gargling mouthwash.
Thankfully the gagging only left him coughing his lungs out for a solid five
minutes before exhaustion alone eased the reflex. He splashed cold water on his
aching face and risked looking at his reflection, almost resentful that he
didn’t look as bad as he felt but he still looked roughly half dead. At least
it wasn’t a hangover.
As he toweled his face off, he noticed a purplish smudge on his neck. He leaned
closer to the mirror, squinting at the mark as he tried to recall how it had
gotten there. Remembering, however, proved to be a bit too painful at that
moment so he shelved it for later. The icy water of the shower that felt
straight from the frozen pits of Hell helped clear his mind, or at least numb
it as well as the rest of him, and he indulged in that refreshing habit of
morning torture as he stood under the glacial stream while he waited for it to
gradually warm. Thanks to the antique plumbing of his Pappa’s American house,
the process had more emphasis on the gradual aspect and less so on the warm.
As he lathered himself with the bar of soap and tried not to think about how it
had recently been used by his now dead father, he let his mind slowly begin to
wander. There were a lot of places to wander lately, it seemed. The baby drama
that awaited him back home, the very real possibility that he could end up
stuffed and mounted next to his girlfriend’s husband’s fireplace, the reluctant
acceptance that he had already been pushed out of both the baby drama and
having a girlfriend altogether according to their last conversation. But that
was all back in Norway. This trip back to the States to say his goodbyes to his
Pappa and enjoy a break from the tire fire of his personal life had turned out
to be a little different than the return to childhood memories he had expected.
His thoughts turned, as they constantly seemed to now, to the lovely creature
that everyone had kept telling him was his niece. He worked hard to believe it,
but there was simply no way that his Satanic brother could have made something
that soft and sweet. And sexy, his mind supplied before he could beat back the
intrusive thought. He was glad that the shower was still frigid as his mind
retaliated against his attempt to control it by recalling how it felt when she
ran her hands through his hair as he choked her.
He winced and thumped his forehead against the tile wall of the shower, pulling
back and lightly hitting the wall again as he reminded himself how stupid he
was to have done that. He just couldn’t say no to those big, gorgeous silver
eyes and sweet little plump pouting lip, even when she asked him to do
something so dreadfully, terrifyingly, horribly strange. He knew she was a
little crazy, he knew he should have known better, but he had to do something.
Choking her, in hindsight, might not have been the wisest choice even if it was
the one she had wanted. Thank God it was the one she had wanted. He wasn’t
certain of much, but he was damn sure Leif would put him into the ground with
Pappa if he had gotten that one wrong. Knowing that she had wanted to be choked
was disturbing, but then Leif confirming in every way but directly stating that
he would do it to relieve some sort of sexual frustration in her was
approximately one hundred times more disturbing.
Even if he ignored the fact that sweet, young, innocent, adorable little Simone
had a masochistic streak, knowing that his brother was interacting sexually
with his own daughter on any level at all frankly freaked him out. The way Leif
had discussed it, however, made it seem like some weird part of fatherhood that
people just politely didn’t talk about. For all Anders knew, that was true. Or
at least true for their case, given how it was framed as a completely pragmatic
workaround to a consequence of her condition. Whatever her condition was. Leif
was never exactly clear on what made his daughter so debilitated and Anders
couldn’t tell if it was anything past her getting those space spells or oddly
emotional at times. Something apparently had happened a year or two ago, but no
one other than Leif seemed to know what it was. If there was one thing he could
say about his biggest brother, it was that the man hated to be asked questions,
so he gave up on ever finding out.
Unfortunately, that prickly privacy of his brother’s also meant that Anders was
left to his imagination to fill in the big gaping blanks on what Leif had meant
when he had said he helped “relieve her needs”. Since then, that statement had
echoed in his head every time he watched them touch or interact. It was odd
enough before to see Leif be physically affectionate and loving in the general
sense, but now it was uncomfortable. Especially as Anders recalled the previous
night’s supper. Without being able to see what was happening beneath the table,
they had looked like they were basically fucking. Anders had no other context
for the way she wriggled, sighed, and even moaned on Leif’s lap. Then that
kiss… Anders groaned and rubbed his eyes harshly as his mind replayed it over
and over. He’d been quite sufficiently drunk at that point, but he was sure
that wasn’t just a little peck on the lips. That was a half-second away from
making out and way past anything chaste. He could chalk everything else up to
his own filthy mind, but that kiss seemed to be at least part of how Leif
“relieved” her.
The entire concept seemed wrong to him, yet he couldn’t help but wonder if his
problem accepting the necessity of it made him bad father material. He’d like
to have thought he would do anything for his child, but that was before he knew
that everything might also include fulfilling their sexual needs on any level.
He’d found he had been imagining himself in Leif’s place with a needing,
desperate, wild Simone who could get herself into all kinds of trouble with the
wrong men. It was obvious to him, in that scenario, that he would resort to
becoming her sexual stand-in. But that was also because he was undeniably
attracted to her. He had tried not to be, he really did, and knowing he saw his
own relative that way made him feel like the lowest beast in creation but he
couldn’t help it. She was attractive, undoubtedly, but there was something
about her personally that drew him. Something about her made his brain go
completely numb and he didn’t need any help in that department. To make matters
worse, he viewed her as a sort of surrogate offspring, an odd effect of rampant
fatherly instincts latching onto this helpless girl. He was sure that somehow
counted as double-incest and he was of the opinion that he should go to Hell
twice for it.
The water had finally warmed up and regrettably so had his cock. He’d made a
lot of dubious sexual decisions in his life, but this was the worst shame boner
yet. He felt thoroughly disgusted with himself and decisively turned the shower
taps off, forcing his body to calm down as he toweled himself off and ignored
the bastardly beast in him. Looking at his reflection with a more functional
brain, he noticed that purple smudge in the crook of his neck again. He knew
that bruise hadn’t been there yesterday, but his memory had cut out a couple
hours after dinner when he had managed to find another bottle of scotch hidden
away in the kitchen cupboards. Curious, he examined his reflection more
attentively. He saw a strange sort of half-circle of little dotted bruises
around the smudge. He touched the tender, fresh wound as he stared at it. It
looked almost as though a small mouth had bitten him. He tried to remember if
maybe he had a run-in with an animal last night, but his memory was completely
wiped. He also didn’t have any scratch marks, but had to correct that
assumption when he turned to examine his back and saw the long pink marks down
his shoulder blades. He began to feel nervous, seeing the wide splay and how
they were made in groups of four. Unless a small bear had very gently mauled
him, those could only have been made by human hands. Small human hands. Simone-
sized hands.
“Oh fuck. Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh FUCK!”
He threw the towel across the bathroom and snatched up his pajama pants from
the floor, examining them and hoping to find no evidence of his horrible
suspicion. He felt like he’d been punched in the gut when he saw the rusty
smears of blood stains soaked into the cotton. He had feared to find sexual
fluids, but now he wished that was all there was.
“What the hell did I do to her…”
 
 
“Oh…” Simone breathed, realizing what Anders thought she was asking for as his
fingers brushed the inside of her thigh. Her body burned for it, her muscles
humming in the low level electric current of arousal, setting her on fire as
the callous pad of his thumb slowly traced the wedge between her thigh and
crotch. But she hadn’t asked for it. She had told him that her father had been
touching her and he had offered to go get him to touch her. She admitted to
having a sick need for sex and touch and he had offered fetch the man who
molested her in response. She had thought there was some miscommunication but
she believed that he had understood her as he had finally stopped her from
stroking his cock. He had given her such sweet, uncorrupted affection and had
comforted her so tenderly that she was sure his offer was just bad English. But
as his hand disappeared under her towel, she realized the only miscommunication
was her misguided hope that he was there to help her escape her father.
“Du er så våt… så myk…” he whispered. Her breath hitched into a tight gasp as
his fingertips traced her slit, his roughened skin sending sparks through her
even as her mind worked to finally connect the dots. All those moments when she
had prayed and feared that he had suspected, that he had seen something, that
he had become aware of what her father did, Anders had done nothing because he
already knew and he didn’t disagree with it. Her father had warned her that her
uncle wanted to fuck her and like a weak, stupid little girl, she wouldn’t
listen to him. Now he was finally sampling what his brother had and she was
going to let him because it was true: she needed it. She probably was going to
ask for it, but he took that control from her. Just like her father so often
did.
“You feel good?” he asked. Her legs shook as he circled her clit, her panting
now high pitched in need for him. She had to lean against him for support from
how weak her knees had become and he held her with his free arm in such a
caring embrace. The way he handled her was so drastically different from her
father’s overbearing touch. Leif would be restraining her, pushing her, using
gentleness only to taunt and make the sting of his force more brutal. But
Anders held her up, not down. That tight knot of betrayal in her twisted in
confusion.
“Is that what you want? You want to make me to feel good?” she whispered
bitterly, trying to push away that seductive desire to believe he cared. He
pressed a soft kiss to the top of her head and a deep sadness pooled in her at
the sweet gesture. Knowing he had used her trust was not enough to close that
hole in her heart he had opened. She needed him to take what he wanted
viciously from her body and hurt her to stop the pain his tenderness wrought on
her emotions. She untwisted one hand from his shirt and reached down, pressing
his slowly circling fingers to her opening and biting her lip against the sting
of his calloused skin sliding against the tear her father had made in her.
“Herregud…”he groaned breathily, the arm holding her up tensing as he sunk a
single finger into her. Her cheeks burned and hips bucked unconsciously at the
sensual noise from him, making her gasp from the sting and the pleasure of
penetration. He whispered to her as she fucked herself on his hand, his foreign
words rolling delightfully to her ears even as she tried to imagine he was
saying crueler, filthier things to her than he likely was. The loving
encouragement and appreciation in his tone made her twist to rub his finger
more firmly against that raw tear, but she needed more pain to cut back the
aching in her heart. He hissed in a sharp breath as she pressed her palm to his
erection.
“Please,” she whimpered through her terror. She could feel his whole body tense
as she hooked her fingers at his waistband and pulled down. “Please, I need
this… I need you, Anders.”
 
 
He needed Simone. He had to find her and make sure she was okay. Surely, she
wasn’t, but he needed her to be. Panic had him run out of the bathroom still
completely nude, his bare feet slapping along the hardwood as he frantically
ran through the hall but he barely heard it over the rapid pounding of his
heartbeat. The parlor, living room, and dining room were a blur of nothing as
he scanned each room only for her. He burst through the kitchen door, startling
Henrik and Vidar as they sat at the kitchen table with the leftovers of
breakfast between them.
“HOLY SHIT!” Vidar yelled as Henrik roared between bellowing laughter, “What
the FUCK are you doing naked, asshole?!”
Anders couldn’t find any attention to spare them as he looked around for his
niece, but froze when he saw the blue towel crumpled on the floor. He scooped
it up, eyes wide and eyebrows raised as something tickled in his brain, almost
like déjà vu but even less clear. But he had no time for towels and thinking.
He had to find her.
“Have either of you seen Simone?” he asked, his voice loud in his panic. Both
brothers looked at him incredulously and he wanted to throttle them for taking
so long to answer.
“Why the fuck do you want to know that?” Henrik asked flatly.
“Just tell me!” he demanded.
“She’s with Leif. They went into town hours ago,” Vidar answered. Both men eyed
him suspiciously as he tangled his hands in his wet hair, tugging the blonde
locks harshly by the roots as he tried to process that information.
“Was she okay? What did they go to town to do?” he asked quickly, leaving out
the question Did Leif know?
“I don’t know. She looked pretty good to me,” Henrik shrugged.
Vidar leaned back in his seat and smirked, “Yeah, I’d say she looked good
enough to eat. I bet she tastes like-”
“DON’T FUCKING TALK ABOUT HER THAT WAY!” Anders yelled. Both men stared at him,
but he didn’t care to acknowledge them as he paced the kitchen, clenching the
towel tightly in his fists and trying to figure out what to do with himself.
“God, being naked makes you rude, Anders,” Henrik frowned.
“What are you on? Is it cocaine? Shit, if you had cocaine on you in the airport
I will actually beat you to death,” Vidar said grumpily. “And also steal your
cocaine. Seriously, where is it?”
“I didn’t- I was just drunk, I didn’t know what I was doing and I can’t- I
can’t remember!” Anders stammered, pausing in his anxious pacing to press his
fingers to his throbbing temples. His nose filled with the sweet, earthy scent
of her from bringing the towel nearer and he threw it from him as though it
burned. The effect her scent had on him had always been strangely pleasant, but
the yearning it had stirred in him then was alarming. It had to be from the
adrenaline.
“Could you please put some fucking clothes on?” Vidar grumbled.
“What the hell are you going on about?” Henrik asked, his voice growing in
volume and lowering in pitch as his patience waned. “You come in here nude and
yelling like a loon about Simone and now you’re rambling about not remembering
shit. What the hell is wrong with you? Did something happen between you and
Simone?”
Anders buried his face in his hands and rubbed at his skin roughly, trying to
ease a different panic that rose in him at his brother’s questioning. Vidar
glanced between Henrik’s grave frown and Anders’ desperate coping, his eyebrows
slowly raising in shock and understanding.
“Holy shit,” Vidar breathed. “Did you really fuck around with her?”
“No. No!” Anders quickly insisted. “Why do you guys keep thinking that!?”
“Do you want a short list or the long one?” Henrik groused, folding his arms
over his broad chest.
“Yeah, you’ve been having a lot of ‘alone time’ with her and you obviously want
to fuck her,” Vidar remarked.
“I want to fuck her? You two have been talking about her like she’s a piece of
meat since you saw her!” Anders flared.
“Okay. We only say that shit because it’s funny and we both know we won’t fuck
her anyway, so it doesn’t matter,” Henrik said. “But you creep around and get
weirdly protective, like you always do with girls you eventually fuck.”
“And deflecting is something guilty people do,” Vidar added.
“So I’m the one who wants to fuck her because I’m the only one not talking
about how I want to fuck her?” Anders asked, astonished at their logic.
“Yeah, basically. Also she wants you to fuck her and that has Leif freaked
out,” Vidar shrugged.
“God, he’s so weird about her. You think he writes his name on her chastity
belts?” Henrik joked.
“If I had a daughter who looked like that, I’d make her sleep in my bed too,”
Vidar jeered.
Anders groaned angrily and quickly trudged out of the room, pointedly ignoring
the strange looks from his brothers. He knew he seemed completely insane and
suspicious, but he didn’t care. He could never hurt Simone so their suspicions
could go to Hell. At least, he hoped he could never hurt her. Dread made each
step heavy as he ascended the stairs and entered the guest room he’d claimed,
the hard twin mattress creaking noisily under him as he collapsed onto it. None
of it made any sense. He’d seen Leif drag her off to bed last night and that
man rarely seemed to let her out of his sights. There was no way he’d let her
wander out of bed in the dead of night alone, not for any significant period of
time. But there was a lot that could happen in a heated moment. A lot he could
do to make her claw his back like that. An unfamiliar memory of her moaning his
name, her back flexing and arching under his hands, flashed in his mind.
“Fuck.”
It was just one second, maybe not even half a second, and the memory might not
have been real, could have been a dream or something he imagined since allowing
himself to think of her while he masturbated. He knew it was real though. The
undeniable reality of it made him press the heels of his hands hard against his
eyes, shame squeezing the breath from his lungs in the myriad of implications
just from one fleeting moment. The evidence was stacked against him but he
still couldn’t believe or accept it. He wasn’t such a monster as to fuck his
own niece. But if she had wanted it, if the universe had aligned in such a way
that she actually asked him to with those big eyes and sweet little pout, if
his sick fantasies had somehow come into being… Fantasy was still across a wide
chasm of terrifying factors before it ever touched reality, though. Even
ignoring the immense guilt and damnation pressing down to his very soul for
lusting after his own blood relative, no matter how exotic and appealing she
was, there were still so many obstacles preventing that fantasy from ever being
something he could allow to become real.
Each factor weighed on him like so many grand pianos falling directly on top of
his chest. She was an entire decade younger than him, still basically just a
kid, and especially naïve even for her age. He wasn’t even sure if she was able
to consent in her madness; he had no idea how that worked, but Leif had called
her vulnerable and suggestible and those words were not conductive to his
concept of consent. Even if she were to beg him, even if she weren’t related to
him, even if she were just a little older, the power imbalance between him and
her broken mind made him feel sleazy and perverted for ever having wanted her.
He found a small comfort in knowing he at least didn’t want her because of
those factors. He couldn’t think of how he would be able to live with being
that kind of monster. Leif would kill him if he had any idea. If his fears were
confirmed, Anders might just insist on it.
He shot out of the bed, his fretful energy not at all abating as these thoughts
crowded his mind, and roughly pulled on a blue fleece and whatever pair of
jeans and underwear he reached first in his duffel bag. He had finished lacing
up his boots by the time he realized he’d forgotten to put on an undershirt or
even socks. He needed to slow down. He needed air.
 
 
“Vente, vente! Ikke gjør det, kjære!” Anders exclaimed as he tried to yank his
pants back up, but his efforts faltered as Simone gripped his cock in her hand.
He released his waistband and shot out to grasp her wrist, her wetness on his
fingers making his grip unsteady even if he had put any real force to stop her.
His ragged gasp as she pumped him helped her to push down her fear and focus on
that carnal need throbbing in her cunt. She squeezed her eyes shut and gathered
her courage before pushing him against the kitchen counter, the ease with which
he followed her lead emboldening her to slide down his body and open her mouth
over his cock. When her tongue laved over his tip and scooped up the salty drop
of precum forming there, she was abruptly yanked away and found herself
suddenly staring into the equally shocked wide eyes of her uncle as he held her
a foot away from him by her shoulders.
“Ikke. Ikke gjør det,” he said firmly. She was surprised to see her same fear
reflected in his eyes, the same confused conflict between body and mind as when
her father would drag out her pleasure against her will. The thrill of power in
knowing she could inspire this same effect in another helped ease that
emotional turmoil and repelled her. This was different than just pushing his
boundaries and prodding him for reaction. This was darker, uglier, and more
soothing than that. She could shield her heart with this.
“You don’t want it?” she asked, her unsteady hands reaching out and caressing
his chest. He licked his lips nervously, setting a more resolute furrow in his
brow even as his eyes continued to reveal that same fearful conflict. She held
his gaze as she dragged her nails over his thin shirt. “I’m good at it. Or do
you want something else?”
She pulled her hands back and watched as his mouth parted in awe while she
unwrapped the towel around her, putting every bit of willpower into letting it
fall open and drop to the floor. She couldn’t stop the panicked little breaths
of her panting as she watched him look at her naked body. His eyes roved over
her exposed form, taking in every inch of her skin with a hunger that both
electrified and terrified her.
“Gud tilgi meg… Du er nydelig…” he muttered, seeming unable to tear his gaze
away from her. She tried to let his lingering stare and blatant desire bolster
her confidence, but she mostly felt vulnerable. It was her own incessant need
for sex that gave her the will to take his hands and slide them down to her
breasts. He sighed shakily as she pressed his palms to her, his uncertain gaze
turning once more to her face with an expression so raw and conflicted that it
shook her.
“Please… Please touch me however you want,” she whispered. She moaned when his
hands lightly squeezed, the flame of her lust engulfing all other thought at
the pleasure of those calloused palms rubbing her oversensitive nipples. Her
body nearly collapsed against him, making him let out a deep grunt as her
abdomen pressed against his erection, and she stood on her tiptoes to catch
that gasping mouth with her own. He moaned into her kiss, his hands releasing
her breasts to wrap his arms around her in a tight embrace, and she tilted her
head to deepen it. The passion with which he returned her kiss made her head
swim and heart ache, tempting her to lose herself in the dangerous amount of
emotion she found in it. A pain twisted in her as she realized he kissed not in
the devouring, seductive, manipulating way her father did, but with the
expression of a lover. Tears threatened to well in her eyes as his hands slid
into her hair and cradled her head, not to pull painfully or restrain her
stillness, but to support and soothe.
When he pulled away from her mouth, he pressed his forehead to hers in that
sweet, intimate gesture and she just barely heard him whisper, “I’m sorry,
Simone… Jeg elsker deg. Jeg burde ikke, og jeg beklager. I love you.”
Her heart felt as though it shattered then. Her voice shook as she rubbed her
body against his, her hands nearly clawing at him, and frantically said,
“Please, just use me. Fuck me. Isn’t that what you’re after? You like it when I
beg, right? Please, Anders. Please, please fuck me. I want you to fuck me hard,
any way you want it, just please, please, I need it!”
His hands tried to still her, his voice saying something in a placating tone,
and she wrapped her arms around his neck as she hoisted herself up by putting
her other knee onto the counter’s edge beside his hip. He froze as she rolled
her hips and slid his cock under her, her frustration climbing as she tried and
failed to angle him to slip inside. His tip dipped into her only to slip out
and he grunted as his hips twitched almost involuntarily from the brief
penetration. His accidental motion adjusted him to line up to her entrance and
they both watched, equally astounded, as she sank down onto his dick.
 
 
The sun was a hatefully bright thing to Anders’ aching head even through the
filter of the full late springtime foliage, but being in the open outdoors did
help clear his thoughts. He tried not to jump to conclusions, finding that each
conclusion based on the current clues brought only panic and crushing guilt.
Not that he didn’t deserve that crushing guilt, but he needed to be in a better
state for Simone. Whatever had happened, he needed to be able to help her. He
sighed heavily for perhaps the hundredth time that morning, tucking his cold-
bitten hands into his pockets to try to get some feeling back in them. The
memories would only come when he wasn’t seeking them, popping up completely
unexpected in flashes of touch and sound. Simone’s skin sliding against his,
her soft breasts filling his palms just perfectly, her sweet voice moaning
about need and want and please, please, please. He had always thought of
himself as a good person despite his many questionable deeds, but this one
might change that permanently.
He’d been walking the grounds of the property for well over an hour at that
point and he felt more or less together, no longer a jumbling mess of emotional
turmoil. He supposed there was no sense in delaying the inevitable. The
overgrown brush of maple saplings and weeds hid the pathways as he stepped
through them, but he was confident that his sense of direction was taking him
back towards the house. Before he judged he had even made it to the halfway
point, however, he heard an odd rhythmic sound echoing through the woods.
Curious or just looking for any distraction to postpone his destination, he
headed towards it, eventually surprised to come upon his father’s old pickup
truck. Stepping around it, he finally found the source of that sound to be Leif
striking the ground with an old shovel in the process of digging a hole.
“Leif?” he asked. His oldest brother’s face shot up in a tense acknowledgement,
his hard glare and strained downturned mouth making Anders stop his approach.
He was painfully aware of how alone they were out there, far from the house to
make any noise distant enough to go unnoticed. He glanced down at the long,
narrow size of the hole and thought it was peculiarly person-sized. Almost his
size, in fact.
“What are you doing out here?” Leif asked in an angry rasp.
Anders looked up from staring at his likely soon-to-be grave, regretting having
taken his eyes off the obviously pissed off man with the shovel, and said,
“Walking. I was just going for a walk. What are… Why are you out here?”
Leif turned back to the hole, taking a moment to re-roll up the sleeves of his
black dress shirt, a distant gleam in his eye as he looked around at nothing in
particular before he answered, “Digging.”
“Yeah. Yeah, that’s quite a hole you’ve got going. You want to tell me what
it’s for?” Anders asked hesitantly, trying to maintain a casual tone and not
tip off the man that he was currently fearing for his life.
“No,” Leif answered as he took hold of the shovel once more and resumed
digging.
Anders stood and watched as Leif worked, feeling as though he should not feel
as offended by the rude response as he found himself to be considering he was
probably going to be murdered by the man shortly.
“If you’ve really got nothing better to do than stand around, you could help me
out,” Leif groused out in huffing breaths from the effort of digging.
Anders most certainly did not want to help dig his own grave, but he couldn’t
help observing aloud, “I don’t see another shovel, brother.”
“I was going to ask you to take Simone in and clean her up for me,” Leif
clarified grumpily.
“Clean her up?”
Leif responded by gesturing with a tilt of his head and Anders followed the
direction of it to see Simone standing about fifteen meters away, calmly
watching them with her front covered in red from her mouth to her navel and
smeared up her arms.
“Is that blood?” Anders heard himself ask. He felt like his stomach had fallen
out of him.
“Don’t worry, it’s not hers,” Leif assured him, not even looking up from his
task as he spoke as casually as if they were discussing the weather. Anders
stared at the girl, remarkably relieved but no less alarmed. His feet were
stuck to the ground until his brother snapped, “Get her cleaned up already.
Don’t let them see her like that.”
He couldn’t help but run toward her, adrenaline making him jumpy once more as
he trampled unfeelingly through the brush. His couldn’t figure out how to touch
her once he reached her, every suitable option covered in red as his hands
hovered over her while she just stared into the distance as though he wasn’t
even there.
“You’re going to get covered in that when you wash her, so just leave if you’re
too squeamish!” Leif called out.
Anders frowned at him and grasped her hand, the skin tacky with drying blood
and ice cold. His concern for her quickly overrode his revulsion and he tugged
her close as she followed unresistingly behind him. He’d seen her in this
spacey state before, but the pliant way she obeyed his lead through the wooded
area disconcerted him. Present only physically and completely hollow. Although
Leif had assured him that these states were normal for her and transitory,
Anders was always anxious to get Simone back into her body as soon as possible.
Squeezing her hand firmly as they walked, he spoke to her despite knowing she
wouldn’t be able to understand his Norwegian even when fully aware anyway.
“I’m sorry. Are you okay? I really, really hope you’re okay but even if you say
you’re completely fine, I’m sorry. I don’t know what the hell happened and I
don’t know what’s happening now, but God, please be okay. It’s not an excuse,
but I don’t remember what we… what I did to you. I’m not asking for your
forgiveness. From what I can tell, I might have done something unforgivable.
Something that’s probably going to hurt you for a long time, maybe forever,
even if it doesn’t hurt now. So don’t forgive me, just know that I’m sorry.
It’s not fair that you should suffer from my mistake. I need to fix… I want to
help fix this if you’ll let me. You might hate me now… and I think you should.
You should hate me and stay away from me, but if you’ll allow me, I want to
help you any way I can. You don’t have to keep this a secret. I won’t make you
do that. I deserve to face whatever consequences will come. Tell me what you
need and I’ll do anything, anything at all. If you never want to see me again,
I’ll leave. I’ll leave this entire family so you’ll never even hear about me.
Just… just tell me what I can do.”
He stopped and turned to look at her. She was staring at him, or rather through
him, that serene absence in her silver stare so like the glass eyes of a doll.
He hadn’t expected her to respond, but a hopeless desire for her to have
somehow understand his intentions left him feeling pathetically powerless.
Eager to do the one thing he could to help, he walked her to the house and
slowed as he approached the backdoor. Peering through the window first, he led
them through the empty kitchen, listening carefully for his brothers’ presence.
Luckily, their bickering seemed to centralize from towards the front of the
house, so he crept through to hallway slowly with Simone in tow. Her footsteps
were completely silent, which although fortunate, struck him as creepy. Instead
of trudging and stumbling after him like a zombie, she moved with efficiency
and almost predatory grace in this state. Even while not in her body, the girl
was still full of surprises. He pulled her into the bathroom and locked the
door as quietly as he could manage before flipping on the light and turning to
her. With his task now at hand, he was more than ready to dive into it and
distract himself from his thoughts. If only he could figure out how to approach
this mess. He soaked a hand towel from the hot faucet in the sink and began
brushing the blood off her chin first, watching in odd fascination as she
seemed to respond to the gentle little strokes with a subtle relaxation to her
muscles. Her silence unnerved him and he soon found himself speaking just to
fill the quiet and ease his self-consciousness at being so close and alone with
the girl he had done so horribly wrong.
“This is stickier than I thought it was going to be. I guess I never really had
to think about whether or not blood gets sticky, though,” he muttered to
himself, scrubbing with the towel a little rougher. He stopped when he saw her
upper lip curl back, her red-stained tooth revealed to him in a wince that
looked strangely like a snarl. “Oh Christ, it’s in your mouth… Ohh, that can’t
taste nice. Hold on, dear.”
He turned to search the cabinets for a cup to help with rinsing her mouth but
heard her quiet, small voice mutter the Norwegian endearment he used for her.
“Kjære…”
He looked back to her with a shot of hope that she was waking up. “Yes. Dear.
Do you want some water, dear?”
She didn’t respond, that thousand-yard stare the same as it had been, and he
sighed in both disappointment and a shameful relief. For all his need to find
out what had happened between them last night and repent, he still dreaded
having to face the truth when she woke. Finding a stack of paper cups in the
linen closet, he filled one with warm water and held it to her lips. The water
just dribbled down her chin when he tipped it.
“Great,” he grumbled. With unsure hands, he gripped her cheeks with his free
hand and gently squeezed until her mouth opened. It felt oddly intrusive to
manipulate her jaw like that. “Sorry...”
He tipped the cup into her mouth again, watching closely to make sure she
wasn’t drinking it or asphyxiating it, and was rewarded with his face covered
in bloody water when she reflexively spat it out. He scrunched his face in a
half grimace, half wry grin as he wiped it off and tried not to be too
impressed with the force she had put into that expectoration.
“Yeah, I should have guessed that might happen. My fault,” he smiled
sardonically. He emptied the cup in the sink and refilled it with mouthwash.
“Well, since you’re a spitter, let’s use something more effective to combat
that nasty taste.”
He gripped her cheeks and retried the maneuver, standing cautiously to the side
this time. He became curious when she didn’t spit as quickly that time, then
panicked when he saw her throat bob as she swallowed down a big gulp of
mouthwash.
“Oh, shit, no no no!” he frantically said, dropping the cup and patting her on
the back hard to encourage her to spit it up. His beating hand was caught in a
vicelike grip when her arm shot out and then twisted painfully before he yanked
away. He stared at her, awestruck at her swift move, and shook off the slight
ache in his arm as he muttered, “Okay, okay, you can keep that in your belly
then. It’s probably fine. Jesus, you’re stronger than you look…”
Looking at her, he wouldn’t have been able to tell she’d even moved and he eyed
her warily before picking up the damp towel and working at that sticky blood
again. Ten minutes in and only achieving to reduce the red to pink on her face
and completely stain the terrycloth to uselessness, he gained a fuller
understanding of the old American adage he recalled by literally throwing in
the towel. He let out an agitated huff and turned on the taps in the shower to
begin warming the water.
“Okay, dear,” he sighed reluctantly, groaning as he knelt and began to unlace
her blood-splattered high-top shoes. “We’re going to move onto plan B.”
He took off her shoes and socks one at a time, noting with wonder at how she
didn’t even slightly waver as she balanced on one foot while he yanked, then
stood and unbuttoned her jeans with a cautious hesitance. When he pulled open
her fly and saw the pink lace of her panties with a tiny bow at the top, he
paused. With a nervous lick of his lips, he rethought it and zipped up her
jeans, moving on to grip the bottom of her thick knit sweater. He had to move
her arms over her head as he peeled it off, then regretted having done it when
he saw she hadn’t been wearing a bra. Gripping the sweater in a ball between
his tense hands, he tried to keep his eyes above neck level while he gathered
his resolve. He hastily pulled off his clothes and left them scattered on the
floor, suddenly needing to get this over with quickly and not allow any moments
for his horrible mind to wander. Down to his underwear, he very stiffly kept
his hands on top of Simone’s shoulders as he guided her into the box shower,
following in and shutting the glass door behind them.
“Okay, we are going to finally get that stuff off you, dear,” he announced,
gently guiding her under the stream of warm water.
 “Kjære,” she repeated. His guilt twisted like a knife in his back as he
worried she was awakening, but he didn’t let himself turn away from it this
time. Gently gripping her by placing his hands on the sides of her head, he
bent to level his face in front of her blank stare and swallowed his cowardice
to look her in her empty eyes. It confused him how much it hurt to do this
between the shame of what he did to her and his need for her presence, but he
couldn’t let himself continue to abandon her in this passive way.
“Simone…” he whispered under his breath, then pursed his lip to gather his
courage before more firmly whispering in the limited English he knew, “Simone.
Please, come here. I am Anders, here.”
“Anders,” she whispered.
“Yes,” he smiled, feeling like a slightly less horrible human being for not
experiencing any regret at succeeding in slowly bringing her back. “Yes, dear.
Come here.”
He watched as awareness rose in her eyes, fascinated that the process was so
visual in the brightening of that silver stare. He knew he would have to face
the reality of what he’d done when she finally came to and let him have it, but
he couldn’t stand to see her like that any longer. An odd feeling of calm
washed over him as he fully accepted the weight of his sin. That calm was
abruptly derailed when she leaned forward and latched her lips onto his in a
searing kiss, the taste of copper and mint filling his senses as her tongue
delved into his shock-slackened mouth.
 
 
Simone made a strangled moan at the feeling of Anders stretching her wide as he
panted and muttered, “Nei, nei, nei, vi burde ikke… no, no no no…”
Even as he protested, he bucked his hips, working his cock into her as she made
breathy little whimpers through her panic. When he finally hilted in her, he
let out a low groan that fogged her mind in the all-encompassing lust she
needed. She was so full of him, aching to accommodate his girth in her injured
cunt, but the pain seemed so distant to the pleasure as she began to roll her
hips. His hands that were on her waist trying to pull her off him just a moment
before soon slid down and gripped her ass to support her, kneading the soft
globes as she tried to fuck herself on him. The nearly standing position as he
leaned back on the counter made it difficult for her to obtain leverage, making
the act slower and frighteningly sensual as he had more control of the pacing.
His arms held her off the ground with an ease she found intimidating, holding
her close and high enough for him to reach her mouth and pull her into another
heartbreakingly tender, scotch-flavored kiss.
She tried to make it more carnal, tried to tempt him into biting with shy
little nips on his lips, but she found herself nearly giving into the
temptation of his simulation of love. It had to be a cruel mimicry of the
emotion. Even if his behaviors made any sense for that to possibly be genuine,
she was certain of the fact that no one could love a creature like her. When
they pulled out of that sweet, cruel kiss, she risked opening her eyes and
immediately regretted it when she saw him gazing at her with such open
affection and warmth. Her confusion was nearly palpable. None of this was
making sense.
“What do you want from me?” she asked, trying to speak as clear as she could
but her voice still trembled and she could barely get the words out between
panting breaths. His slow, rolling thrusts were meeting her in a gentle rhythm
that kept her clit rubbing against him and she already felt dangerously close
to orgasm.
“You,” he whispered. She found that wanting to believe him made it hurt worse.
He pulled her closer and nuzzled her cheek, the sandpaper texture of his
stubble not nearly rough enough to distract her from craving his lies. It felt
almost real and so much warmer than the affection her father would reward her
with. But he wasn’t her father. She didn’t have that compulsive, dire need for
it like she needed it from Leif. A strange new wonder formed in her, asking
what it would be like to experience whatever this man said he felt for her. It
was certainly a lie, but it could be a beautiful one if only for a moment.
“Oh…” she gasped, surprised by the vertigo-like sensation of being pulled into
climax. She was caught off-guard as her body bared down and clenched around his
cock, making him let out a shuddering groan and thrust with the deliberate
single-minded rhythm she recognized as a man chasing his orgasm. The firmer,
faster, shallower thrusts pushed her abruptly over the edge. Her nails dragged
hard down his back and she sunk her teeth into the crook of his neck to keep
from crying out as she rode out the intense climax. Her entire body trembled
with the force of it until she started to come down, only to crash through
another sudden and completely unexpected orgasm as he gave one final deep
thrust. She was distantly aware that he had gasped her name as he came.
That molten, tingling sensation of being filled with his seed struck an
instinctive chord in her, releasing a potent hormonal cocktail that left her
feeling elated and emotional. As they panted and held onto each other, his head
leaning affectionately against the side of hers with his chin resting on her
shoulder, she felt that bond they had formed before knowing of his betrayal
blossom into something deeper. Trying to resist the pull of hormones and
perhaps even her true feelings, she reminded herself that he was likely
tricking her and had outright stated his intention of delivering her to Leif,
but knew it was too late. Whatever this was, she cared for Anders and she knew
she was going to get hurt.
She tensed as he adjusted his hold on her and slipped out of her. He didn’t let
go as he yanked his pants back up and carried her out of the kitchen.
Nervously, she clung to him, apprehension creeping through the post-orgasmic
haze as they headed into the living room. He breathed out a relaxed sigh as he
sat down on the sofa, snuggling her close in his lap and kissing her cheek with
a lighthearted fondness that seemed out of place with the grievous sin they’d
just committed until she remembered that he was very, very drunk.
“Jeg skal ta deg hjem med meg, kjære,” he whispered as he nuzzled her cheek.
“Jeg kan gjøre deg veldig glad... Jeg lover.”
“I don’t understand,” she muttered, feeling silly for being embarrassed over
that after all that had happened that night. Still, she didn’t resist the
impulse to hide her burning face against his neck, glad he let her cower there
for a long moment until she realized he’d fallen asleep under her. The sound of
his steady breathing should have soothed her, but she felt uneasy at being in
this position in the same room her father had found them so close together in
before.
Her body shot up as she recalled her father, trepidation driving her to flee
the living room and pad up the stairs as quietly as the creaky wooden floor
allowed. Her full body tension didn’t ease until she slowly opened the door to
their room to see him still passed out on the bed. A strong wave of exhaustion
hit her as she sighed out her fear and she crept into bed, not having the
energy to care that she was naked and freshly fucked. Tucking herself against
his side, she pushed the myriad of thoughts crowding at the edges of her blank
mind down and quickly slipped into a long, terrible nightmare of violence and
pain that only calmed when she began to have a strange dream of being in the
shower with Anders.
***** Chapter 19 *****
The house, with its timber slatted rafters above high bone white walls and
liquid-shine waxed floors, had reminded Leif of the hollowed-out corpse of a
giant since he’d first arrived to begin his life as an immigrant. While he
stepped through the central hall, the shadowed beams above suggesting the
notches of vertebrae and the spanning of ribs, it was tempting to reminisce on
his coming of age in this cavernous country house. The false back behind the
line of winter coats hanging in the closet unlatched and drifted open with
well-oiled silence before he stepped down into the musty darkness. The acidic
and almost tangy scents of the photo developing chemicals soaked into the walls
had muddled with mildew from such a long period of neglect. Nostalgia beckoned
his mind to turn to his uncle Bjørn, 20 years dead and still such a present
actor in the amphitheater of his mind, but Leif hadn’t time to waste on
superfluous mourning. Not with the house so quiet and still in the darkness of
the early morning hour.
Reaching the concrete floor of the darkroom, he groped along the wall until he
flicked on all four switches. The exhaust fans stuttered to reluctant life and
all but one of the red overhanging bulbs had been burnt out, but it would
suffice. On the shelves lining the far wall, placed casually next to the
plastic jugs of fixer, was the tin Christmas cookie box Leif had come for. The
lid stuck, but with a little wriggling with his father’s folding knife, he
managed to pry it off and began inspecting the collection of tiny bottles
inside. He rifled through them until he found the lowest dose in the collection
then replaced the lid and cookie tin to its dust-lined space. He allowed
himself a smile as he knew how pleased his uncle would be that his tools were
still being put to nefarious use so long after his death, but then wiped the
silly thought from his mind. He could not permit himself to get into the habit
of sentimentality.
Under the dim light of the desk lamp back in the bedroom, with his Simone still
lost to the world in slumber, he dug out a syringe from his pack and filled it
with a heftier dose than perhaps necessary of the morphine. He tapped the side
of the syringe to loosen any bubbles and carefully pressed the plunger until
just a drop slid down the thin needle, then rose from his chair and approached
the sleeping girl.
Her quickened breaths had him worried that she might have been feigning sleep,
but the rapid darting of her eyes under her tightly shut lids told him that she
was merely caught in one of her frequent nightmares. He watched her for a
moment, smoothing her wavy hair away from her face and gently caressing her
sweat-dampened cheek as he reflected on how cruel the mind could be in its
attempts to process the horrors of waking life by producing new and revisited
horrors in sleep. Nonetheless, it was useful to him that she lacked that source
of relief. After he’d taken away a few aspects of her life and identity, she
had responded beautifully by clinging to him as her source of comfort and
reassurance. He was once more aware of his eagerness for his brothers to leave
so he could begin her final transformation in earnest. They had provided an
unacceptable distraction to his girl, especially the affection Anders had
seemed far too keen to spoil her with. Leif could let her have her comfort for
now though. He did feel a surprising amount of sympathy and – at weakened
moments – guilt for her time ahead. For all his desire, Anders had seemed too
in denial of his darker side to act on it anyway. At least not without further
prodding.
Leif gingerly lifted the quilt away from her, exposing her golden skin to the
cold open air and causing her to stir. Knowing exactly how heavily she slept,
he didn’t wait for her to calm before placing his steadying hand high on her
hip. Pressing down on the well-developed ventrogluteal muscle there, he slid
the needle into the flesh drawn tight between his splayed fingers and slowly
pressed the plunger. Within minutes, the troubled little wrinkle at her brow
smoothed into peaceful rest and her breath slowed and grew shallow as the drug
took hold. Placing the syringe on the headboard, he stayed knelt over her and
observed her sleeping form. Though hackneyed, he couldn’t help but ruminate on
how angelic she looked. Through everything that he’d done to her and made her
do, she still held an almost animal-like innocence at her core. His fingers
traced the fading bruise of the bite mark he’d left on her breast. She was so
soft and exotically lovely with an instinctive viciousness under that outward
docility. Like a circus tiger. He delicately mouthed the crest of her shoulder,
her chilled skin smooth and sweet under his warm tongue. The quiet little groan
she made as she shifted under him, turning away from his stimulation in the
natural pursuit of sleep, tugged at the tangled web of his heartstrings with
yearning and fondness for her. Even as his arousal made him want to pin her
down and watch her struggle with adorably drugged weakness under him, he
indulged in the swell of parental pride that she was blossoming into such a
fascinating and lovely young woman under his wing. He’d taken her sweetness and
dependence on him and twisted it into such interesting forms, but fatherly bias
produced relief instead of annoyance that she had retained her base
personality.
She sighed in her sleep as he fondled her breast more firmly, but he was
interrupted in his progress by the sound of a phone ringing. Damning to hell
whichever brother had turned their ringer up that ungodly loud, he began to
plot the exact vengeance he would enact on him when Simone stirred to groggy
half-wakefulness. The sounds she made as she tried and failed to convince her
brain to make coherent speech through the morphine were so cute.
“Ssh, shh, darling,” Leif whispered as he rose from the bed, his hand
affectionately smoothing over her mop of hair. “I’ll see to that racket. Go
back to sleep.”
“Frnrr… shnell…” she slurred before flopping back onto the pillow with her
sleepy eyes rolling into her head before fluttering shut once more.
He grinned, absolutely charmed, but that phone continued its incessant ringing.
Stepping into the hall, he was surprised to hear it was coming from his
father’s bedroom. After their initial morbid curiosities had been quickly
discarded by the lingering rank of death once venturing inside, his brothers
had avoided the room entirely, so this was unexpected. He entered to find a
corded landline phone plugged in under the nightstand. Why it had been hidden
from sight and hadn’t rung to his knowledge until that inappropriately early
morning hour engaged his wonder. With a hope that this might prove interesting,
he lifted the handset to his ear and waited for the caller to speak first.
 
 
It felt so good to sleep. Simone could hear a voice speaking to her, trying to
drag her out, but that blissful dreamland pulled her right back into such
restful slumber that she couldn’t even consider waking. The branches of the
trees above her were silhouetted by a sky backlit in the pinks and peaches of a
beautiful sunrise. In taking a step forward, she noticed that she stood calf-
deep in water. The crystal blue water surrounding her was calm enough to be as
reflective as glass, but when she looked down into it, she was strangely
unsurprised to see Bjørn’s image on the surface instead of her own. Once she
realized that he was under the water, she bent down and pulled him up, his
whitening blond beard hairs tickling her wrists as she grasped his head and
lifted. He wasn’t heavy, just being a head and all, and he blinked up at her
with wide gray eyes as she cradled him. His wrinkled skin was soft and loose,
folding wherever there was pressure applied, and she hoped she wouldn’t drop
him on accident as she waded through the water. He felt like an overripe
cantaloupe wrapped in bread dough, but she resisted the urge to squish him.
That would be terrible manners no matter how badly she wanted to do it. Plus,
if she found the rest of him, he could tell them why they were here.
A stinging crack exploded against her cheek and she startled awake to find
herself freezing on the cracked leather bench seat of the old pickup truck. She
scrambled to sit up, pressing into the corner between the seat and the door
when her wild eyes fell on Leif at the wheel. He was rubbing her shoulder and
smiling at her, not a cruel smirk or a plastic grin, but an almost sheepish
little upturn as the truck idled at a blinking stoplight.
“Sorry about that, darling, but I need you awake,” he said softly. She could
only guess he was apologizing for having slapped her.
“Whe… whurruh we?” she slurred, her tongue too thick and heavy to form the
words properly. Her whole body felt like it was floating in molasses, slow and
only halfway responsive to her commands to move. Apprehension crept along the
corners of her fogged mind. If she could barely remain sitting upright, there
would be little hope she could run if needed. Not that she would do something
as unwise as running from him, but it was discomfiting to be so disabled. The
hand that was rubbing her shoulder moved to cup her cheek and he held her gaze
as he spoke evenly.
“We’re in a Massachusetts town about eighty minutes away from home. It’s
Saturday, 4:45 AM, and you have been in a drug-assisted sleep but, I assure
you, you are awake now,” he explained. “We’re going to meet an associate of
Einar’s. You won’t need to participate in the discussion but I was
uncomfortable leaving you alone in that state. Do you have any further
inquiries?”
Too many, but her mouth could only say, “Nuh.”
His hand drifted away from her numb cheek, the absence of his heat making her
feel even colder than before, and she let her head fall backwards against the
window as she willed the world to stop spinning. The effort was not helped by
the movement of the vehicle turning through the town and she shut her eyes
against the sight of passing trees and brick buildings. She could hear someone
calling her again and the world shifted. She had lost Bjørn’s head, she needed
to find him again, needed to find out why they were both there in that flooded
forest. Leif was pulling her by the hand as he nearly dragged her deeper into
those woods, her much smaller hold being completely engulfed in his grip.
Whatever he was, she knew his position as her father had remained consistent
through to the true core of him and her heart ached to draw out his parental
approval. So, she smiled, finding it an easy and natural thing to do being so
free from fear in this dreamland, and her heart soared at the squeeze from his
hand in response. If only it was this easy.
“…nodding off again. Stay with me.”
She blinked, finding her head much less dizzy now that the truck was parked but
quickly discovering that any slight movement brought that vertigo back. Her
brain sloshed around in her skull as she clumsily wiped at the itch on her
chin, disgust following that move as she discovered she’d been drooling all
over herself. The sleeve of her sweater was fortunately absorbent enough to
soak up the excess saliva, if not the embarrassment she felt when she noticed
her father had been watching her with a quiet amusement written all over his
stoic face before he got out. The excruciating slowness of her muscles to
respond to her commands frustrated her as she batted at the approximate area of
her mouth. Even that small effort left her exhausted and he seemed to realize
this as he opened the passenger door and, to her increasing nervousness,
gathered her up in his arms bridal-style. The way he could handle her, as
though she weighed nothing more than a bag of flour, and the feeling of his
muscles moving as he maneuvered her to shut the truck door reminded her of his
sheer strength. It made her almost sick with hopelessness and vulnerability.
“Don’t be so worried, darling,” he said, his tone doing a poor impression of
reassurance as he carried her. Although it caused her vertigo to go completely
haywire, she rolled her head around to check the surroundings. No nearby
neighbors, a dirt road leading off into just more trees, and what seemed to be
junk littering the overgrown grass surrounding the little track house he
carried her toward. She could see the image of a man silhouetted behind the
screen door and he stepped out as they approached.
“By gosh, if you didn’t turn into the spittin’ image of Einar! I mean when he
was young, ya know, heheh!” the funny little man grinned as he held the door
open for them. Leif gave him a terse smile and a nod as he maneuvered past him
into the dingy wood paneled house and she squinted in trying to keep her blurry
vision focused on this stranger. He wore what seemed to be fishing gear and had
an odd glint in his eyes as he looked at her. Unconsciously, her hand tightened
on her father’s shirt and Leif glanced down at her before making his way into
the cluttered living room.
“Don’t mind my daughter, Mr. Renfro, she’s just a little doped up,” Leif said,
wearing his company smile and business call voice.
“Oh, you can lay her out on the sofa and we can talk in the back room, ya
know,” Mr. Renfro offered in his singsong squeaky voice.
To her mild repulsion, Leif did just that, placing her weak body on the mildew-
scented lumpy sofa. She stared up at him with uncertainty clear in her
expression and, to her surprise, he kissed her mouth without any concern toward
their audience. Her surprise transitioned into alarm when he kept kissing her
far past any doubt that this was outside the realm of familial affection, his
hands cupping her jaw to keep her from twisting away from him as he deepened
it. That pleasant warmth bloomed in her treacherous body but she pushed feebly
against his shoulders and grunted in protest under his passionate mouth. When
at last he pulled away, he met her wide eyes with a pointed stare that conveyed
something, some reason that he had done that. Her mind whirled with what that
could mean as she frantically glanced back to Mr. Renfro to see that he had
indeed seen, in fact had been staring with that odd glint, and she hurriedly
looked away when a strange grin pulled at the corners of his thin mouth.
“Is that how it is, Leif?” he drawled.
Leif rose from his knelt position next to the sofa, leveling his cold stare and
empty smile at the stranger as he said, “Let’s go have that talk.”
She recognized the tension in her father’s posture turn in that almost
undetectable way he worked. Just a slight straightening of his shoulders and
the tilt of his head told her that told her he was wary as they disappeared
around the corner toward what she supposed would be the back room. The worry
she’d had that they’d been exposed evolved into confusion at how he had
purposely exposed their relationship to this stranger. Wooziness swirled her
thoughts as she obeyed his unspoken command to figure out why. He had to have
trusted this stranger if he let him in on such a volatile secret. After all, he
was a friend of her grandfather’s. But that wariness in him, that pointed look…
That display wasn’t spontaneous, that she knew. If only she weren’t so sleepy,
if only this house wasn’t so soothingly warm, she could focus but the world was
shifting again until she stood calf-deep in dark water.
She held her instant camera, ready to shoot the quartet of blond boys rough
housing in front of her, and waited until the perfect moment when all their
smiles could be captured to take the shot. Their laughter and splashing echoed
through the trees, their mirth contagious enough to drag a chuckle out of her
as she waited for the photo to develop. But instead of a gaggle of brothers, a
lone thin man with a whitening blond beard and milky gray eyes stared back at
her through the picture.
She startled awake, her heart thumping a quick tattoo and sweat dampening her
hairline as she struggled to sit up on the old sofa. She wondered why it hadn’t
occurred to her then or why it mattered so much now that Bjørn had taken all
those photos in the album Henrik had shown her. It explained why he was only in
a couple of them. But that wasn’t what she was supposed to be pondering. She
dragged a shaking hand over her face as she tried to remember what she was
supposed to figure out. The thought was gone. Sighing disappointedly, she fell
back onto the sofa and let her eyes drift shut again. Fatigue quickly dragged
her back into sleep, that sweet darkness enveloping her with blissful peace
even as a different dream started up.
She stood in a wood paneled hallway, the musty green carpet muffling her
footsteps as she approached the sound of a man speaking from a room at the end
of it.
“He said it was an accident but we all knew that was a bald-faced lie. He
didn’t have to kill my boy, god damn it...”
Worried the camera she held was malfunctioning, she turned it towards her and
snapped a quick selfie, half paying attention to the rambling old man as she
slowly walked down the hall and waited for it to develop.
“…Oh yeah. He did tell me a little something about his granddaughter. About
what she did. Well, I guess you know all about cleaning up after someone crazy,
too. Shame that it seems to run in the family…”
Disappointment dampened her spirits when this photo turned out wrong too. She
didn’t have that lily in her mouth when she took the picture. Aggravatedly, she
tossed the picture aside and looked past the old man standing with his back
turned toward her in the doorway, seeing her father sitting on the edge of a
bed with a strange expression on his face. Through all the masks he wore, she
had never seen this one, so it took her a moment to piece together what that
cold glint in his steady glare and tautly drawn mouth meant. Though this
stranger did have a handgun aimed at him, it wasn’t fear or even hatred. Leif
was not an emotional man to her understanding, so that didn’t surprise her.
“… I know ya didn’t have anything to do with what happened back then, but
secrets like ours are worth a lot. Of course, if ya don’t wanna pay cash, I do
accept an eye for an eye…”
Her father’s eyes glanced toward her for just a moment as the man continued to
ramble, but that was all it took to finally click in her mind what his face had
been saying. He simply wanted the man dead. She let her gaze drift to the
wrinkled neck just a foot away from her, a familiar strangeness clouding over
her state as she thought on how delicate human bodies were. She was reminded of
the specialized anatomical drawing course she took in art school, seeing the
wraps of red muscle and yellowed fat from those medical textbook illustrations
now superimposed on this man’s neck. She could see those fragile soft tissues
unfold like a blooming lily to reveal the map of arteries and veins beneath,
each squirming and hot with the blood that pumped through them fast and hard
from this man’s fear. He stunk of fear, a sour scent that served to pull her
further into her entrancement. The carotid artery, a glistening and petal pink
tube, sung to her with its percussive serenade and she swallowed the excess
saliva that pooled in her mouth from her excitement. It would take a bit of
work, but she could reach it. Daddy would be so impressed.
“It doesn’t look like ya wanna go that route though, so—huh?”
The gunshot was deafening as she bit down and his screams were loud and lasting
while she locked onto that column of soft flesh and tore. Her gym teacher had
drilled proper form into her, so she primarily engaged her shoulder and back
muscles to drive her wrenching jaw. The neck was a delicate thing, after all,
and she didn’t want to risk injuring hers by depending too heavily on her
strength there. The man struggled and she was nearly bucked off, but thankfully
Leif had already been distracting him in his task to wrestle the gun away so
she was mostly unbothered by their horseplay. Under the skin, the hot flesh was
tough and slippery with blood. The muscles and fat registered less as a person
and more as uncooked meat while she ripped it apart in her search for that
artery, not entirely unlike an unseasoned and warmed steak tartar. More like a
ceviche if the dish were ever available in pork, she decided. Not good, but
nothing she would snub if she were starving.
A second gunshot made the old man jerk under her and she sagged to the ground
with him. His dancing veins decreased their quick tempo until they were weakly
leaking around her lips and chin as she tried to dig out that carotid artery
before the light faded from him entirely. But she was too late. Her father
pried her off the man and she looked down at the deep hole she’d gnawed into
that neck, a strange sense that something was wrong creeping into the fog of
her mind before the dream shifted.
A dribble of saliva and blood crawled down the edge of her mouth as she laughed
and she wiped it away on the sleeve of her favorite sweater. Seeing that she
was wearing it struck her as the most perfect thing in the world. She loved
this sweater. She followed the other sleeve and found Leif’s hand holding hers
at the end of it, her much smaller hold being completely engulfed in his.
He looked at her as they walked through the peaceful woods toward the old
truck, his gray eyes catching the light to glitter like silver and she glowed
at the fondness he projected toward her. Whatever he was, she knew his position
as her father had remained consistent through to the true core of him and her
heart still yearned to draw out his parental approval. So, she smiled, finding
it an easy and natural thing to do being so free from fear in this dreamland,
and her heart soared at the squeeze from his hand in response. If only it was
actually this easy.
 
 
Shock. It had to be shock that kept Anders from pushing Simone away, running
out of the shower, packing his bags and fleeing back to Norway that very
second. It wasn’t a lie, he was absolutely shocked at how something so simple
as a kiss obliterated all shame and sense in him. Those full, sensual lips were
softer than he had imagined as she pressed and flexed them against his, that
deft little tongue bolder than he would have figured as it coaxed his own to
return its caress, that needy moan more alluring than he could have been
prepared to resist. He was caught completely off guard when she pushed him
against the glass wall of the box shower and pressed her soft, wet torso
against his nearly naked body. When she started to slide down, it was only
reflexes that had him catch her in a nearly crushing embrace and hold her to
him as she tilted her head and deepened the kiss. The jeans she wore were heavy
with water and already sagging down halfway over the full rounded crest of her
ass, so it just took a little push for her to convince them to slide down to
her knees and let her press the front of her lacy little panties against his
thigh. He could feel every bit of her through the thin, soaked to translucent
material as it clung to her like a second skin and molded into every cleft and
cranny. His knee acted completely on its own to wedge further between her legs
and push up on her crotch and she moaned again into the kiss, that high needy
sound shooting excitement right to his groin as his cock rapidly began to
stiffen. This was all progressing too fast for him to react properly or even
think as she rocked against his thigh and rubbed his cock between their pressed
bodies with the motion.
“Please,” she panted when their kiss broke for her to breathe. She didn’t pause
in her motions, in fact rocked against him with an increased urgency that
stirred an animal part of his brain. “Please, please, please… I need you,
Anders, please fuck me again…”
Out of his limited English, he understood every word of what she had said just
then and what it had implied. Guilt doused some of the fevered response she had
immolated his higher brain function with, returning enough control over himself
to pull back when she went in for another kiss. Instead, she left a scorching
trail of open, wet kisses along his jaw and neck that apparently short
circuited that guilt.
“God damn, fuck, stop!” he gasped, his hands squeezing at her hips but unable
to put any real force in stopping her rocking motions. She sucked at a spot
under his ear that made his toes curl and it took him a moment of doglike
panting before he could begin again in English, “Stop! You need stop!”
“I can’t,” she whispered, the desperate edge of her voice so close to his ear
that it sent shivers down his spine. He groaned as her teeth just lightly
scraped down his neck and then latched onto the same bite marks she had made in
him earlier, the strong suck she pulled at the skin making his hips buck
against her. This was wrong, this was an unforgivable sin, this was
disgustingly depraved, and it was the hottest thing he’d ever experienced.
“Fuck, baby, ah fuck…” he panted, his hands sliding from her shapely hips to
fondle the soft and springy flesh of her ass. He had wanted to sink his fingers
into those round globes from the moment he saw her, and that desire that had
haunted his guilt-ridden fantasies was now fulfilled and left him only wanting
more. He felt like the filthiest villain to be doing this to his own niece, but
she needed it so bad. How could he deny her what she needed?
“Please…” she breathed. He tensed when her hand pulled at the waistband of his
boxers, the wettened material clinging to him so revealingly as to be useless
as anything but a symbolic barrier between them. He needed that symbolic
barrier to keep his sanity, however, and he quickly wrenched her hand away.
What they were doing was bad enough, he couldn’t let them go further. Nothing
below their underwear, he’d decided. He reasoned that incest didn’t count in
some places unless it was penetrative sex, so that would be his line in the
sand. He was just letting her get what she needed, after all. Leif had done
something to that effect and he was her father, so Anders can do that much. It
was comparably less sinful with him just being her uncle. Of course, he still
didn’t know what Leif exactly did to relieve her. The thought of Leif doing
this with Simone, of her straddling her father’s leg and sucking at his neck
while he guided her rolling hips under the banner of taking care of his
daughter, stirred an anger in him he knew was entirely hypocritical but there
nonetheless.
“Does Leif do this for you?” he asked. She didn’t respond, most likely not
understanding, but he had to know for his own conscience that he wasn’t taking
her beyond whatever boundaries her father had set between them. There was also
a darker, more primal drive that felt too close to jealousy and possessiveness
that he didn’t want to think about. She gasped sharply as he rucked up his knee
further, the sound feeding into that darker part of him. “Does he fuck you? Is
that why you want me to do it?”
She arched her back to lean up and this time he met her in another deep kiss.
The sensations it created in him were intoxicating him further and he started
rocking into her motions, matching her rhythm until they were both grinding
against each other in a chase for mutual release that he tried to mentally deny
even as he throbbed against the heavenly slide of her soft body. He was
supposed to just be helping her, but she felt so good and under that copper
tang of blood and mouthwash mint she tasted so addictive. They’d already done
much worse, even if he could only recall bits and pieces, so this was a
comparably acceptable concession. Besides, she enjoyed this, rocking against
him with a heightened fervor they both appreciated with heavy breaths and
moans.
His shame rose over him like a breaking wave at the realization of where his
mind had gone and he stopped his movements, much to her seeming disappointment
as she made a needy little noise that nearly broke through his guilt. He
shouldn’t be doing any of this, shouldn’t have let her kiss him, and definitely
shouldn’t have kissed her back. He knew he was hurting her despite what she
thought she wanted, but he was so weak and selfish. There was no blackout drunk
excuse for his behavior this time. In the bright light of day after spending
hours repenting and reflecting on the evil that he’d done, he had chosen to
harm her further. They might not have been having sex, but they were simulating
it. He was absolutely going to Hell.
“I’m sorry, dear, I’m so sorry,” he muttered, his hands moving away from her.
“No, no! Please, please, please keep going!” she begged. Her little hands
clenched at his shoulders and everything about her was full of desperation and
need, but he couldn’t be weak. He had to stop this for her sake.
“Ssh, shh, it’s okay, dear,” he murmured softly, removing her hands from him
and slowly easing her to sit on the tiled floor as her shaky legs buckled
without the aid of her hold on him. The spot she had been rutting against above
his knee was hot from her warmth and friction, burning him like a brand of sin.
He ached for his own release but much worse than that, worse than even his
shame at what he’d done, was the ache in him that he had to deny her what she
needed. “We can’t do this, Simone. I know you can’t understand me, but try to
understand that we simply can’t do this. I’ve probably already fucked you up
for life and there’s nothing I can do to make that better, but I don’t have to
make it worse.”
She stared up at him, confusion and pain welling tears in her eyes, and it
almost broke him down. Almost. He couldn’t bring himself to just leave her
there on the shower floor, though. He’d promised Leif he’d clean her up, so he
pursed his lips and returned his attention to the task. Working up a hefty
lather with the bar of his father’s soap, he tried to ignore the way she
trembled and sighed as he worked it over her soft skin. She turned away from
him but allowed him to touch her, hiding her face as he pushed down every
thought that wasn’t strictly condemning what had passed between them. But her
obvious shame weighed heavily on him. It frustrated him that he couldn’t make
her understand that he had failed to enforce the boundaries Leif had warned him
she was incapable of establishing herself. The shame was entirely his and he
wished he could make her see that, but even if he said it to her in perfect
English, he doubted she would agree. At least maybe not until she grew older
and realized what a cad he was to take advantage of her like that. The suds
were stained pink as they broke down the remaining blood on her, leaving her
skin once more a creamy expanse of unblemished honey brown when they were
rinsed away. As he stood above her huddled, shaking form, he felt a painful
twinge of yearning and indulged in the impulse to kneel behind her and pull her
into a hug. She tensed at first, then melted in his embrace, leaning back
against his chest with a heavy sigh.
“I am so sorry,” he said against her soaked hair, once more wishing he could
make her understand why.
“Sorry for what, Anders?” Leif’s voice rose above the sound of the shower.
Anders jumped away from the girl, wincing when he immediately realized how much
guiltier that made him look, and whipped around to see his brother’s blurry
form through the fogged glass.
***** Chapter 20 *****
Leif was not prone to sentimental whims. He did not believe in such fantastic
ideologies as an afterlife or souls. The world held enough magic and mystery to
sustain him without having to turn to fiction. He believed this disposition had
enabled him to obtain a higher appreciation for the value of life in knowing
that all that was truly was and all unseen might not be, that everyone and
everything is afforded their one chance and there are no refunds or prizes at
the end for living a life diluted by that very thinking. Nature builds upon
itself through replication and reproduction, and so had Leif in one of the most
common and impactful of methods. But in passing on his genetic code, he
couldn’t fully appreciate that he had passed on the code of others swimming in
his blood until he had seen their uncanny appearances in his daughter. She had
his eyes and his good bone structure in petite and feminine miniature with
Lisa’s more rounded islander features to soften the angles into something more
striking and less predatory. All the typical observations of parentage
manifested physically in offspring were present and noted by him with all due
joy, but it wasn’t until much later that he had become privy to just how
principal genetics were in determining less obvious traits. He did not believe
in resurrection or spiritual mysticism, but he had seen the dead come back to
life in many small ways through Simone.
Sitting on the edge of the bed in that tacky wood paneled room with the
outdated dark green carpet, he saw his long-departed uncle in the cool intrigue
of her gaze as it drifted to Renfro. She looked at his neck like one would
notice a picture hanging slightly crooked and corrected it with the same self-
satisfied detachment when her teeth tore through his jugular. The gunshot
filled the small quarters with a deafening pop and Leif may or may not have
imagined the whoosh of air as a bullet zoomed past his temple, but it did leave
his ears ringing and Renfro’s screams were distant and muffled now.
Nonetheless, he had missed and sealed his fate. Leif did not allow him a second
turn and pounced on the hand holding the well-worn pistol, adrenaline giving
the older man an unfortunate edge as it took Leif a bit of struggling to disarm
him.
All the while, rivulets of red poured copiously from the wound Simone had
inflicted—no, was still inflicting with her bite. She held onto the man’s
shoulder and craned his head to the side with a surprising strength Leif could
only assume came from her dissociated mental state. As he wrestled the gun out
of Renfro’s hand, he caught how she dislodged a great chunk of mangled flesh
with a pull of her jaw, the stringy protein of muscle and elasticity of skin
and veins stretching before snapping away. It fell at their feet, red and pink
of flesh and yellow and white of fat and skin, before she dove back in to
repeat the maneuver with a single-minded determination of searching for
something she knew to be there. Leif fired the weapon once through the side of
Renfro’s skull, not producing a clean kill as he had to mind his daughter’s
proximity, and Simone sank with him to the floor as the man’s scrambled brains
lost control of his body. What took Renfro’s life in the end was having great
gouts of his blood pour into a growing pool around him while he stared in a
vegetable state.
While he dropped the pistol and pulled his daughter bodily away from her task,
he watched the light of life fade from the man in the closest Leif would ever
concede to witnessing a spiritual event. After that fascinating moment, Simone
wriggled from his arms like a petulant child and he numbly released her to let
her wander back down the hall. Of all the scenarios he had predicted would take
place after leaving her with only a kiss to warn her of possible danger, he had
not envisioned anything as interesting as what had taken place.
Hours later, as he stood outside the downstairs bathroom door back at his
father’s house, he began to doubt his predictive reasoning when he was met with
a scenario he had not expected for the second time that day. He had expected to
find his daughter already clean and Anders waiting with far too many questions,
but he had found neither after searching the house. Instead, he was met with a
tense no when he had asked Henrik and Vidar if either had seen them and the
sound of the shower running behind the locked bathroom door. It hadn’t occurred
to him until after Anders had left with the girl that she might murder him, but
being confronted with the very real silence behind that door made his blood run
cold. The importance of family was one of the few sentimental values he allowed
himself and, despite his frequent annoyance with the intrusively helpful brat,
he did have a certain measure of affection for his meddlesome baby brother.
Silently, he worked the springs in the antique lock with a letter opener until
the door unlatched with a quiet click, then he took a moment to prepare himself
for the worst before stepping inside and relocking the door behind him.
More than anything, he was simply surprised at himself for having read his
brother wrong. Instead of lying in a pool of blood, he seemed to have caught
him in an intimate moment with his darling girl. Through the fogged glass
shower wall, he could see Anders rubbing soap over the creamed coffee expanse
of his daughter’s nude form as she knelt on the floor. Though his hands worked
with the efficient diligence of a nurse, this was beyond inappropriate even for
the ignorant bumpkin.
Though Leif didn’t consider himself a man of passion, as he placed the letter
opener next to the sink and unfolded his father’s pocketknife, he supposed he
could commit what would be known as a crime of passion. Standing mere inches
away from his brother with only the glass door between him and the blade, he
had a moment to let his rage fill him with the righteous bloodlust of the
trespassed that had driven even good men to murder. Leif was not a good man.
There was no moral threshold for him to cross, no panic of identity or values
to overcome, nothing but a narrow list of options to choose from. Though acid
pumped through his every vein and the antler handle of the knife seemed to
squirm excitedly in his fist, his mind was clear. He could kill Anders now and
very likely get away with it in defense of his daughter’s virtue, but there was
a fresh corpse planted in the yard and a long record of his name peppering cold
case files that, while mitigated due to his caution, would invite a second look
when they run him. Murder was not a federal crime, but Leif had crossed state
lines and Renfro had almost definitely kidnapped victims, bringing the
potential for retrial or investigation on a federal level even if he lucked out
with the local boys. The timing couldn’t have been worse. Besides, he was a
family man. He supposed he should be generous enough to afford his baby brother
the benefit of the doubt. After all, this might just be an innocent
misunderstanding, though a part of him hoped for a reason to harm him. The
muscles around the knife handle twisted and bunched as it begged for blood, but
he folded it and placed it back into his pocket.
Slipping out with a practiced silence to his movement, he made a detour to the
kitchen and addressed his other two brothers there, “It completely slipped my
mind until now, but could you two make a town run and pick up a leg of lamb at
the butcher block? I’ll sponsor a few beers at the counter there for you while
you wait for them to dress it.”
He barely registered anything past their amused acquiescence and he left them
with a wad of cash and a request to get moving soon if they wanted it cooked by
that night. They were already shifting to stand from the table as he left them
to fetch what he needed from his pack upstairs.
 
 
This was it. Anders knew he was going to die in the same house Einar had died
in, in the same trip he’d flown over to say goodbye to the father who had been
absent all his life. Anders didn’t know if it was poetic or ironic or anything
at all, but he was sure it had some sort of cathartic ring to it. In any case,
he knew he had failed the trial God had set upon him in the form of his
tempting little niece and he had failed spectacularly. But despite knowing he
was already a dead man, despite knowing he was a soulless sinner who had failed
his own redemption, despite insisting he was a good person who would admit and
repent his for his sins, he still didn’t want to die.
“I can explain,” he insisted, holding his hands up palm forward in his habitual
placating gesture and attempted to keep the terrified tremble out of his
throat. He flinched back a step when his brother opened the glass shower door
and looked at him with a mirthless grin and a cold glint in his slate gray
eyes.
“Sorry for what, Anders?” Leif repeated. The unperturbed calm in his oldest
brother’s demeanor as he slowly turned his head to stare at Simone’s huddled
form on the shower floor only heightened his terror. She was too naked, they
were both too naked to be touching the way Leif had definitely seen. If he had
been watching them just minutes prior, Anders was sure he would already have
been murdered.
“I-I couldn’t get the blood… I couldn’t… You told me to get her clean, right?”
he stammered rapidly. Leif’s glare shooting back up at him froze him as though
his stare was a knife held to his throat.
“Sorry for what, Anders?” Leif repeated, this time anger bleeding into the
raised volume of the question. Even in the warm steam from the hot shower
pouring over him, Anders felt himself flash cold and every hair on his body
raised at the slight growl in Leif’s voice. He’d never, not even at his most
frighteningly mad, had heard him use that voice and it was effectively
petrifying. He winced as Leif kept the shower door blocked and continued in a
chillingly soft voice, “I warned you about maintaining boundaries with her.
This doesn’t seem like very strong boundaries are in effect, does it?”
Anders’ throat wouldn’t respond to his command to speak at first, then he
managed to croak, “I… I didn’t, um, think she would… wake up.”
He regretted the words the moment they left his numb mouth, wincing again as
Leif let out a dry chuckle and shook his head in disbelief. “I know I say this
a lot, but you are the dumbest man I know. Look, I don’t want to have to do
this. You’re my brother, so I’m going to give you a gift. If you can give me
one good reason why I shouldn’t bash your skull in on the floor right here, I’m
giving you that opportunity.”
For a moment, Anders’ mind was horribly blank. He clawed at his thoughts,
trying to pull out any coherent answer or thought but there was nothing except
a scramble of static. Then, he became aware of Simone’s shallow panting at his
feet and looked down at her defensively crouched form. She was rolled into a
tight ball with her hands locked over the back of her head and he could see
that her arms were trembling as though she were freezing. She was relaxed in
his hold just a moment ago, but she was like a terrified animal since Leif had
spoken. Something wasn’t right between them. He no longer felt as panicked when
he focused on her.
“She needed help,” Anders finally responded, no stammer or placating lilt, just
a statement of fact. Leif glared at him, that impassive mask of an expression
betraying nothing of his thoughts, and Anders waited with every muscle in his
body humming to move but his mind finally clear. Whatever her mental state,
whatever relationship they had, something was so wrong between Simone and Leif
that it had her cowering in fear of his anger even when it was not directed at
her. Despite the unforgiveable things he’d done to her, he couldn’t leave her
alone with that. Something about this girl drew him in and pulled a strong
instinctive drive to protect and help her. He needed to figure out how to go
about doing that.
After a long moment, Leif asked so quietly that his voice was nearly lost in
the roar of the shower, “How did you clean off the blood?”
Anders blinked, not at all expecting the question, but answered evenly, “Warm
wash cloth. It didn’t work so well, so I took her in here. That’s when she-”
“A warm wash cloth?” Leif repeated incredulously, his brow furrowed and lip
curled in disgust. “You’re almost fucking thirty years old and you used a warm
wash cloth on dried blood?”
“Was I… not supposed to?”
Leif stared at him like he had grown two heads, then scoffed, “Every idiot
knows that hydrogen peroxide breaks down blood. That’s why Einar kept a jug of
it in the laundry room, remember? There’s a bottle of it in this very fucking
bathroom, in fact. Jesus, Anders, I didn’t think I’d have to give you written
fucking instructions.”
Anders once again found himself more offended than he thought he should be
capable of feeling when faced with his imminent destruction, but bit off his
defensive reply with a short, “Sorry. Didn’t know that.”
“Thank you for pointing out the obvious, you insipid bumpkin,” Leif seethed. He
leaned over and turned the rusted taps off, the squeal of the metal loud in the
echo of the shower as the roar of the water dribbled into quiet. The only sound
filling the room now was Simone’s panicked panting, her narrow ribcage
expanding and contracting rapidly, reminding Anders of a rabbit caught in a
snare. His palms itched to help her up and comfort her, but he had a hunch he’d
get his teeth knocked out if he tried. The sound she made when Leif pulled her
up by her arms was something between a whimper and a yelp, a noise of pure
distress that yanked hard at that odd feeling in Anders.
“Do you want some help with her?” he asked despite his better judgment.
“I think you’ve done enough, don’t you?” Leif remarked dryly, not looking at
him as he walked her out of the box shower. Her steps were clumsy and stunted
by the jeans that hung around her calves. He pulled her to the rug, a dark
green circle that matched the dark green tiles of the walls like an algae-
filled pond in the center of the floor, and wrapped a white towel around her
shoulders. Anders stepped out of the fogged glass box, watching in morbid
fascination as Leif tended to her. Her frightened stare was fixed unseeingly to
the floor, head bowed submissively while her father stood a little too close, a
little too looming, his hands a little too slow as they rubbed the towel over
her in a way that seemed a little too close to fondling. Anders couldn’t look
away from the hands that rubbed the towel over her hips, up her back, around
her front, her lip tucking under her front teeth in a bite as those hands slid
slowly along the side of her breast. Does he fuck you? Anders’ breath came as
harsh as hers seemed to.
He almost didn’t hear Leif say, “I want to be able to trust you.”
“I would never hurt her.” Liar.
Leif looked at him with a sharp smirk that made Anders wonder if he could read
his thoughts, then said, “Sometimes you have to hurt to help.”
Leif’s hands fell from the narrow indentation of her waist, then they were in
his pockets as he approached. Anders had to force himself to stay, feet bolted
to the ground, ready to accept that punch in the face that was threatened the
other day – was that just yesterday? Jesus—or that skull-bashing he had
certainly earned, and shut his eyes when he saw that hand move out of his
pocket. Instead of the boom of blunt force trauma he’d expected, he winced at
the sharp piercing pain in the side of his neck and blinked in confusion. When
his fingers brushed the syringe sticking out of his jugular, he didn’t have
time to register his fear or sudden wooziness before the floor came up to meet
him and enclosed him in darkness.
 
 
When Simone was still what people would later call high-functioning, she had
wanted to become a surgeon by her mother’s encouragement. Steady hands,
excellent hand-eye coordination and a clinical impartialness toward blood was a
combination of traits not to be wasted. Taking advance placement STEM classes
with students two grades ahead of her had stretched her math skills, but she
was able to keep up and got to dissect a lot of frogs. Her mother had appointed
herself as an authority in her social life, dictated who she should be friends
with based on their likelihood of entering the medical field and especially if
they had parents who were doctors, inviting them over for dinners and pushing
Simone through her shyness to consult them about her future career. The
pressure was as well-received as any young teenager was capable, occasionally
met with screaming matches across the apartment and slammed doors, but Simone
did want to become a surgeon and did not resent that her life had revolved
around that expectation most of the time.
That was before she had lost the rest of her mind.
It had taken her six years of infrequent psychiatric visits, research,
journaling, prodding and poking to figure out that it was all just guesswork
and science so soft it often couldn’t hold its own shape. Her mother was
waiting for a cure that didn’t exist and had left Simone alone to accept that a
paintbrush was safer than a scalpel would ever be in her gifted and steady
hands. She knew what kinds of crazy made up the patchwork of her mental
illness, had found her triggers and kept vigilant awareness of her limited
control over her own mind. She knew what types of crazy she wasn’t. She wasn’t
a killer. She couldn’t be a killer, there was simply no prerequisite behavior
in her. Even madness had a pattern.
She did not know what her father’s pattern was. He wore normalcy like a costume
and she’d watched him fool even those who would consider him their close friend
with his imitation of a career-driven man who is charming and attentive to
others, if a little reserved. She was disturbed by how envy had snuck into
where fear would usually rest while she pondered his ability to disguise
himself as a normal human being so well that he had everyone – his wife, his
friends, his brothers, herself – completely unaware of the thing that had stood
right in front of them. He was able to craft and perform a personality so well
that they only saw the Leif Valstad he’d wanted them to see, while she could
barely hold onto her own identity. She’d seen him peel off that initial layer
when they were alone even before things had changed between them. The man who
he let himself be when it was just the two of them had a much more solemn
demeanor, always watching and observing her with a quiet intensity that both
drew out her desire to please and behave well for him and instinctively
repelled her. She used to suspect, with deep sadness, that it was resentment or
wariness that had given him such a grave regard for her. She didn’t know back
then that it was simply closer to what he really was, didn’t know how much he
had been holding back until he’d let it out, didn’t know just how close she was
to his teeth until he sank them into her. Maybe uncle Anders had gotten too
close to his teeth, too.
“How do you know when you’re not dreaming?” she asked. Leif tested the necktie
he’d used to secure her wrists to the metal frame of the twin bed Anders had
been sleeping in. He glanced down at her with that reptile intelligence behind
his glass eyes.
“All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream,” he answered. She
turned her head, saw Anders slumped against the wall, his chest still moving in
steady breaths and his hair dripping water down his bare chest. Her mother used
to read her Poe, made a funny voice whenever she quoth the raven, but she had
always wanted Daddy to read to her with his nice rumbly voice that made her so
sleepy and safe. He pressed his hand to her cheek and turned her head back to
face him. “Pretend he isn’t there. It’s just you and me, darling girl.”
He’d brushed her teeth while Anders lied there on the bathroom floor with the
needle still sticking out of his neck. Until she felt the plastic push
awkwardly against her cheek, she’d forgotten how he used to have to do this
when the meds the doctors were trying on her had left her completely inept. Her
mother couldn’t even watch. Simone didn’t believe she was supposed to be able
to remember that, but it came floating up out of the dark of her mind like a
corpse finally bloated enough to surface. She was glad the taste of blood was
finally out of her mouth. His lips pressed slow and sweet to hers and she
parted for his tongue with a slight moan.
She needed to believe that it was just an awful waking nightmare in a line of
waking nightmares. The itchy, horrible feeling of being so out of control of
her own body needed to be chased away by something intense and real as touch.
She needed to fuck to forget, needed that rush of physical sensation and
dopamine to flood out the lingering horror. Anders could have given her that.
The heady brain fog of lust was doing so well to cloud any outside thought as
she fell into the single-minded pursuit of frenzied sex. It was the scent of
freshly dug soil Leif had brought in with him that had brought the horror back.
She used to help her mother’s mother garden during summer trips to her home on
Aiea. The sound of a shovel scraping the dirt echoed through the trees in her
mind as she tried hard to think of the lush tropical dark greens instead of
sparser and more ashen maples.
Leif’s hands smelled like dish soap up to his elbows. She figured he must have
washed them in the kitchen, taken the time to scrape the dirt out from under
his nails before he touched her. That was the way he loved her. He drew back
from kissing her and grabbed her chin with his soap-scented hand, craning her
head back into the mattress as his teeth sunk in bruising bites down the side
of her neck. She gasped, held her breath and then tried not to scream, didn’t
want to alert Anders, didn’t want to think too hard on how her hips bucked and
squirmed under the pressure of his pelvis with each bite. He was hard against
her, both of them bare and her cunt was achingly wet, but he just held the
underside of his cock flush along her slit. It felt good to feel him slide
against her slick clit, but she needed him inside. She needed him to hurt her
in ways that were real.
“Dad,” she whispered. He licked a stripe up her neck and scraped her earlobe
with his teeth, making her shiver in waves down her spine. Her voice shook high
and thin. “I need to go to a hospital.”
“I’m here to take care of you,” he assured her, all fatherly confidence and
care. She flinched as his tongue passed over her ear canal, his breath loud and
heavy. Her cunt throbbed.
“I can’t…” she whimpered, words breaking off as the urge to sob gripped her
throat. She shut her eyes tight against the tears and he reached between them,
angling the tip of his cock against her opening. As he pushed in, that tear
he’d made in her stretched and threatened to undo the healing it had
accomplished. Her gasps were high and sharp as he pumped into her, his mouth
still close to her ear with his forehead pressed into the mattress.
“Don’t worry,” he whispered, breath ragged and so close. He fucked her slowly,
inching into her bit by bit, taking his time and she could feel every throb and
twitch of his cock in time with his pounding heart. “I’ll dissolve these
barriers you’ve built to protect yourself.”
He growled against her neck, picked up his tempo, made her hurt but not enough
to bleed again. She was too wet for the friction of his slow thrusts to drag
that injury open quite yet, the sounds of him sliding in and out of her obscene
in the small room.
“I’ll break you down and you will rise from the ashes of your mind born anew,”
he whispered breathily into her wet hair, nuzzling against her and sealing his
promise with a line of chaste kisses from her temple to the side of her panting
mouth. His lips carried away the damp trail of her tears.
“Please just take me to a hospital…” she whispered. He hushed her and began
thrusting hard enough to make the bedsprings groan and creak under them. Her
body began to bear down in pursuit of its climax, that cock dragging against a
ridge in her that made her gasps hitch high with each pass. Her thighs parted
wider and her back bowed to drive him deeper; years of gymnastics class finally
showing their worth. Beside them on the floor, Anders groaned. Leif came in her
with a low, guttural growl as she writhed in pain beneath him, his cock mashed
uncomfortably against her cervix as he pushed his weight down into her and held
it there. She was so desperately close to coming, her body humming with the
drive to fuck up against that painful cock, but he held her solidly down as he
filled her.
When at last he let up his weight, still lingering inside her and pressing
their sweat-dampened foreheads together affectionately, he whispered, “You’re
my most precious legacy, Simone.”
“Daddy…” she breathed, voice cracking into a croak as he pulled out of her. She
pulled her legs together and curled on her side as best she could when he
dismounted the bed, savoring this now-familiar pain as it felt so much safer
than what had plagued her before. The buzzing in her head, the sex and the
sorrow, cut deep and drowned out so much. When the bed dipped next to her, she
was so far gone that she couldn’t pay it much mind, but heavy and calloused
hands fumbled to bring her attention back to whatever reality this was. Shock
and bewilderment woke her from her stupor when she looked to see her father
sitting a semi-conscious and now completely nude Anders next to her.
“Open your legs again, darling,” Leif instructed her. Simone couldn’t find the
words to voice her confusion at first, only able to cry out a sharp yelp when
her father took it upon himself to yank her ankles down and apart.
“What are you doing?!” she asked, her cracking voice making the question far
too quiet for her level of panic.
“If you won’t cooperate, I’ll find rope for your legs too,” he warned. The
threat seemed redundant considering how incapable she already was to move from
the bed, but she knew he would make it more unpleasant than she was able to
imagine.
“Please, please don’t do this,” she pleaded even as she let him push and
position Anders between her legs. Her uncle seemed only conscious enough to
stop himself from crushing her as he loomed over her body on his hands and
knees, his half-lidded eyes blinking slowly and face drunkenly slack. She
stared up at him, unable to look away, chest clenched in anxiety and
bafflement. She’d never be able to see her father’s pattern. Leif pushed his
brother’s hips down until he sat, his legs folded under him.
“Up, up,” he said, tapping her hip until she lifted her ass up onto her uncle’s
lap. She swallowed thickly when his torso brushed up against her sloppy cunt,
her eyes now seeking any clues from her father as he adjusted her hips until
they were more flush against Anders.
“Papa?” she whispered uncertainly. He looked at them critically for a moment,
judging their positioning with a contemplative stare, and then pushed his
brother’s shoulders until he was folded over her. Anders’ hands pawed at her
clumsily, his breaths labored and hot on her neck, and her body reminded her of
her unfulfilled orgasm. She winced with shame.
“Gi henne det hun trenger, Anders,” he said, smiling and patting him on the
back encouragingly. Anders responded with a dull grunt, his hands gripping her
ribcage right under her breasts more intently.
“Papa?!” she nearly exclaimed, that panic rising. Surely, Leif wouldn’t. This
was depraved, even for him.
He leaned down near her ear and grinned, “Show him a good time, darling girl.
He’ll be a lot more active in just a minute.”
The spike of dread that fell into her stomach nearly took her breath away as
she watched him walk out of the room, shutting the door firmly behind him.
***** Chapter 21 *****
Leif had learned a lot about anesthesiology in his experiments on his daughter
and had worked out a few promising routines, this specific cocktail proving
particularly interesting. While the potential for cardiac and pulmonary failure
was too risky to be considered for long-term use, the propofol worked perfectly
to render her quickly unconscious long enough for the low dose of temazepam to
interact and really bring out the disinhibiting and suggestibility effects of
both drugs by the time she had regained a semi-conscious state. Her memory loss
during that semi-conscious state was too inconsistent and seemed to be a
mechanism of her frequent psychological repression rather than an effect of the
cocktail itself, so he couldn’t depend on it even without the health risks.
However, the disinhibition and suggestibility was fascinating. His shy little
Simone would pursue him avidly and did so with such lustful and forward zeal,
not a hint of resistance or embarrassment in the debauched displays he was
tempted to entreat her to. Though he had eventually trained her mind and body
to adapt a dependency to sex, it was entertaining to see what he could unlock
in an instant medicinally.
When he’d injected the milky substance into his brother’s jugular, he knew he
was risking a certain amount of danger. Disinhibition is unpredictable in its
very nature, after all, and he wouldn’t be surprised if Anders had manifested a
violent hostility without the mental restraint to suppress it. So, when his
brother began to rouse from the propofol, he worked quickly to set up a
situation that would stimulate the effect he sought and removed himself from
the room to mitigate any undesired hostility. He would have to depend on the
euphoria of the propofol and the enticement of having sweet little Simone
writhing under him for Anders to act accordingly.
“Please, please don’t… You can’t… This isn’t you, Anders.”
Wind them up and watch them go. Or at least hear them go, as he stood outside
the door to the little guest room and listened in on his latest experiment. His
rage was evaporating like sweat off his skin with this vengeance, leaving only
a film of disappointment in the lad. Whatever sticky-fingered fumbling in the
shower that rube had intended to enact upon his own dear little niece was
undoubtedly toothless and fainthearted compared to the acts Leif had planned on
driving him to commit, but it was a trespassing nonetheless. Leif could not
tolerate anyone touching what was his without his permission. He had to teach
the younger man the simple lesson: Simone was under his control and if Anders
wanted to partake in her, it would not be by his own power to do as he wished.
Leif was happy to generously teach him this lesson; he was his brother, after
all. If he had guessed correctly – and he had, for good men did not lust after
their vulnerable nieces-- at the dark mechanisms that worked under Anders’
façade, then this method would do well to both teach him that lesson and cut
through that irritating delusion of benevolence to the bone.
“Please, just say something… Tell me this isn’t you. Please, please don’t- ah!”
He could hear the hitch of a sob in her pleas even through the thick oak. Et
tu, Brute?
Leif leaned against the door, needing to be certain that Anders wasn’t
physically damaging the girl, and distinguished the pain in her cries as
emotional anguish and not life-threatening. Guilt and possessiveness sickened
him in what he had to put her through, but the lesson was for both her and
Anders. He reminded himself that she needed to see there was no inherent
altruism in men, that every light cast a shadow and every kindness had a cost.
She couldn’t see that Leif was burning these false ideals out of her, that the
kindness she sought was in his seeming cruelty. One day, she would know and
until then, she would continue to learn. He had seen the way she occasionally
looked at his brother with such longing and hope, as though she really believed
Anders could be any different. Leif knew what his brother really was even if
Anders hadn’t yet fully realized it, but he would show them both soon enough.
From the racket of bedsprings creaking and the impact of skin slapping against
skin in there, at least Simone now knew the cruelty in his brother’s deception.
“No! You’ve gotta stop! Pleaase, please hear me, Anders!”
Leif resisted the urge to rush in and beat the man to death, but just barely.
His hands shook as they rubbed at his face and the odd tremor confused him. But
it was a long day; it was natural he’d be fatigued. Feeling strangely disturbed
at the sound of her muffled sobbing through the door, he walked outside to have
a cigarette.
 
 
She couldn’t look away from his eyes. Those sky-blue irises were just a thin
lining eclipsed by widely blown pupils under sleepy, half-shut lids. There was
no person behind them, no light of life or thought or feeling emanating from
those eyes that once beamed with a steadfast compassion and almost melancholy
tenderness at times. This husk of Anders stared back blearily, no longer the
strange ally she had come to know but a creature of her father’s making. Like a
marionette, his movements were disjointed and unnatural as his fingertips
reached out and planted on her cheek. In a poor mimicry of his tender touch,
that hand slid slowly down her face, down her neck, down her chest to cup her
breast roughly but she couldn’t look away from those horrifyingly empty eyes
even as he kneaded her sensitive flesh. His skin was cool from the chilled air
where he was folded over her except for his blood-warm cock nestled hard and
ready against her sore cunt. Although he pressed his pelvis harder between her
spread legs and his breath rattled in and out of him deeper with his rocking
motion, there was nothing of the emotional and passionate lover present in the
robotic response to her body. Like her father had done to her god knows how
many times before, he had chemically stripped Anders of his mind and created
another doll to play with as he saw fit. Seeing what it did to someone else,
Simone didn’t see how anyone could find enjoyment in something so horrifying.
“Please, please don’t,” she whispered. There was no acknowledgement in his
blank expression that she had spoken at all, but she had to believe that Anders
was in there somewhere. She had to reach him. “You can’t… This isn’t you,
Anders.”
The calloused pad of his thumb rolled her nipple and she flinched at the sharp
pain to the tortured skin, her father’s mark still tender. Tears pricked at the
corners of her eyes. It was hard not to let them gather and fall, but she had
to maintain composure. Although her body knew this man and burned for what he
could give her, she couldn’t let herself be complacent in this twisted game her
father had set up. It hurt to look at her kind, sweet uncle and see him used
this way, but she couldn’t cry or she might not be able to stop enough to help
him. Unexpectedly, he leaned down and pressed their mouths together in an odd
slide of slack lips and tongue. Her chest clenched in a deep sadness as she
realized he was kissing her when his bleary eyes fell shut and his thick tongue
slid against her teeth. Desperate for him to return to normal, she squeezed her
eyes shut against her tears and leaned up into his kiss. Her tongue sought his,
smoothly and eagerly caressing along that sluggish muscle, trying to coax some
recognition deep inside of him. His kiss that was always so full of expression
and emotion, so different from the dominating and devouring ones of her father,
felt so alien now in this absence of feeling. Even though he reacted to her
zeal with a low moan into her mouth and a more insistent push of his pelvis,
there simply was no feeling in this once intimate act except her own despair.
She broke the kiss with a sob and fell heavily to the bed, bending her head
backward into the mattress as another tight sob clenched her throat. He took
this offering of her neck to drag his tongue down the front of it, that basic
drive to seek touch and taste the only motivations she could detect in the
artless motion. Staring up at the silver and blue paisley pattern of her
makeshift bindings, she felt so horribly impotent to stop this from happening.
“Please, just say something,” she said, voice high and tight through her
useless tears. “Tell me this isn’t you. Please, please don’t- ah!”
She yelped as he pulled his hips further back and let his tip line up to her
opening, the feeling of his glans penetrating her briefly the only warning she
got before he slammed into her fully. Her back arched off the bed, every muscle
drawn taut at this sudden and painful invasion, and her mouth fell open in a
silent scream. He didn’t give her a moment to adjust before rearing back and
slamming into her again. He fucked her at a brutal pace so unlike the gentle
lovemaking he’d insisted on before. There was nothing of Anders in this
animalistic taking. Even as he tore open that partially healed wound inside her
with a burning stretch and a hot gush of blood, she didn’t feel anything but
pity and sorrow for him. She couldn’t hate him for being as much a victim as
she was in this.
“No! You’ve gotta stop! Pleaase, please hear me, Anders!” she cried. Her heels
dragged frantically over the bedsheets as she kicked and tried to squirm away,
but he grabbed her hips in a bruising grip and began fucking her even deeper.
The snap of his powerful hips drove his tip to hit her cervix with each thrust
and knocked out a high-pitched grunt from her with each painful contact. The
sounds of the bedsprings creaking and his pelvis slapping against her ass and
thighs set the rapid tempo of his sex. Her entire body was jarred with each
thrust and she yanked hard at her bindings, the steel headboard clattering
noisily against the wall with their combined motions. Below all this terrible
sound and fury, she could hear his heavy breaths growled out above her like
some hellish beast huffing with effort and mindless purpose.
Through the pain and the panic, she heard herself crying out and sobbing,
“Stop! ANDERS! Oh, god, please stop you have to stop don’t… don’t do this, ple-
ease stop! DAD! DAD, PLEASE, END THIS! I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I’ll be good
just please PLEASE DAD! Ah! Ah, god, god no, please…”
The skin under the tie was rubbed raw and sore but she kept yanking on it until
at last, with a painful skid across her hands, she slid out of the bindings.
Her hands felt crushed and possibly injured, but she wasted no time in trying
to push Anders off her. He wouldn’t budge, didn’t even seem to notice that she
was trying to get away, and she forced herself to look at him again for the
first time since he’d penetrated her. That same terrifying absence met her as
he panted and groaned above her. There was a glimmer of relief in the horror of
seeing him this way as he effectively raped them both. She knew, with sudden
and clear certainty, that Anders would never do this to her. He would never
violate or hurt her on purpose. He was always so kind even through her crude
and cruel attempts to test that compassion in him. She’d tried to push him away
and tear through that façade of compassion only to find that his benevolence
for her was bone-deep. She realized now, with a profound ache, that he had been
sincere when he’d drunkenly confessed his love for her. Looking up into his
unseeing stare as his mindless body raped her at her father’s suggestion, she
was horrified at finding that same love echoed in her heart.
“No…” she breathed between her pained panting.
Surely, it was her diseased mind latching onto his kindness or some trick of
her starved heart seeking something less harmful than the twisted love of her
father, but it ached for Anders just the same. She knew she cared for him, but
finding that scorching devotion to him was different from affection or even
infatuation. This was dangerous and painful. Her lip quivered as hot tears fell
in streams across her temples to soak into her hairline, drawing his attention.
He leaned down once more to press his slack lips to hers, but she turned her
head and he mouthed at her cheek instead. She couldn’t bare another mechanical
and absent kiss like that, not with the horrible revelation of love swirling
despair in her thoughts. She didn’t want this feeling. It was so much simpler
when it was just a forbidden lust.
“I’m sorry, Anders,” she whispered.
Though it agonized her to do so, she bared down on his dick and fought against
the pain to roll her hips in time with his movements. She had to bite her lip
to keep from crying, but that could only muffle her shuddering sobs as she
fucked past the pain. Even with how awful it felt to do this, both physically
and emotionally, her body still responded to getting fucked with that
treacherous climbing pleasure and fog descending over her thoughts. It was
tempting to give into that familiar high just to escape, but this wasn’t for
her. She needed to get Anders off and out of this hell he unwittingly entered
before whatever her father had given him wore off.
His crushing grip let up and he groaned as she began to rock against him, the
sound lighting a warmth that felt only depraved in her. Despite her horror, a
small but undeniable part of her wanted him to enjoy seeing her helplessly
fucked beneath him. If the circumstances were different, if they had come into
a similar situation on their own terms and not as pieces in a cruel game, she
was intensely curious to experience whatever darkness lurked in this kind man.
She wanted him to claim ownership over her like her father had. That creeping
curiosity and depravity at a time like this sickened her. She wasn’t like this
before, even at her most sexually deviant. It was an awful thing to encounter
the evidence of her father’s influence inside her.
He leaned more forward, bracing himself with one hand next to her head and
gripping her wavy long locks of hair strewn over the bed there. She could feel
his body tensing in approaching orgasm and she reached up with her bruised
hands and bloodied wrists to gently cup his face. His bleary eyes blinked and
she thought she saw a glimmer of presence in them, at once giving her hope and
dread that the drug was wearing off. His thrusts began to stutter and she could
feel his cock throb in her.
“Åh helvete…” he groaned, thrusting deep into her and mashing against her
cervix as he spilled his seed in her, far too like how her father had come in
her.
She shook beneath him, milking his cock as best she could while he held her
down and jerked with each throb. That treacherous warmth in her swelled at
being filled with his cum and she moaned his name as he pumped into her, the
sound of her voice wanton even to her. He responded with a hitched gasp and
nearly collapsed on top of her when his orgasm was spent, rolling to his side
and narrowly avoiding crushing her under his much larger body. His cock hurt
her one last time as he slid out of her, a gush of bloody cum leaking onto the
bed and her thighs and ass with the motion. With aching hands, she pushed him
to roll over and his unresisting body fell heavily to lay on his back,
seemingly asleep from the sedation without the drive to fuck keeping him
conscious.
The euphoric cocktail of hormones from such a savage fucking were quickly
fading from her and she could feel panic and madness eating away the corners of
her mind. She had to get away. She couldn’t do anything further to help Anders
and the absence of that purpose left her raw to the fear of her situation.
Before this nightmare changed, she had to find somewhere safe to hide. The
temptation to slip into that other world was strong enough that she could feel
the phantom rush of water up to her calves when she swung her legs over the
side of the bed, but she couldn’t give into that weakness. Not now. Not when
her father was feeling so cruel. The solidness of the wall as she braced one
hand along it her kept her grounded enough in reality to not completely
dissociate. She swallowed thickly, eyes trained forward as she stepped with
numb feet into the hall and avoided looking into the dark forest forming in her
peripheral. Get dressed, get out, get away. The instructions mixed into her
familiar I’m here I’m fine mantra until the words blended together in a jumble
of urgent intention.
She grimaced as she pushed her way into the bedroom she shared with Leif,
relief easing some fraction of the immense tension out of her to see it
unoccupied before she set to hurriedly dressing. Sturdy jeans, not the ones
with holes in them, thick socks, a few pairs of underwear with a handful of
pantyliners for the blood in her pockets, no time to search for her purse,
shirt, thick red sweater, red, red, red to be visible if she fell in the woods,
red like the hole in his neck. She tore off the red sweater and replaced it
with a yellow one. Pulling on her jacket, an unfortunately black leather, black
as the shadows but maybe it was good to blend, good to go unseen, unseen and
gone, she carried her boots with her as she crept as quietly as she could
manage downstairs.
The sunlight poured in through the glass windows on the front door,
disconnectedly cheery for this terrifying day, and freedom was just twenty feet
down the wide hall. She took one step toward it and froze when she saw the
shadow of her father approaching the glass. Panic gripped her but she couldn’t
freeze up. She couldn’t be his prey again, so she dodged into the nearest door
and found herself in a coat closet. Good. Safe. No reason for anyone to come in
here, but she hid behind the line of heavy winter jackets just the same. She
held her breath as she heard him walk past, shaking as she saw the shadow of
his feet pass under the light that poured into the dark closet in the space
under the door. Her whole body was trembling as his steps thumped up the stairs
above her head in that little closet and she tried to keep her breathing even
and slow, tried not to hyperventilate as she heard him go into a room upstairs
and then quickly move about. He was looking for her now. He knew she was
hiding. He would punish her when he found her.
“Shut up, shut up, shut up,” she whispered frantically to herself under her
breath as her heart pounded far too loudly. Her breath hitched to a stop as a
draft brushed against her from behind like a sigh. Dread cramped her stomach,
but she turned her stiff neck to see a line of pure darkness in the shadowy
corner of the closet. A door ajar behind the coats in the closet. “What the-”
Her bewilderment was cut off abruptly by the swelling of panic as her father’s
angry baritone roared out her name and she didn’t think twice before pushing
through that mysterious door. Her foot dipped down unexpectedly onto a step and
she followed the stairs into that inky darkness, sure that whatever horrors the
dark held were preferable to the ones awaiting her in the light.
 
 
“No, that should be fine. I think the visitors from Norway can appreciate
smörgåsbord, at least,” Leif spoke into his phone, taking a drag off his third
cigarette while the event planner rattled on about the caterer for the funeral
reception. He dreaded these annoying calls, but being the oldest son had
dictated that he handled the entirety of the funeral arrangements. He was more
than happy to let the event planner make every decision with a blank check, but
the woman seemed reluctant to accept full responsibility for his hands-off
approach. His patience was worn dangerously thin, especially as she rambled on
about flower arrangements. He cut her off at the third mention of hyacinth,
“Look, I trust that you will make this an elegant or whatever reception, so
again, do as you feel best. I really must get back to my family.”
In an uncharacteristic move of rudeness, he ended the call abruptly and stuffed
the damned device back into his pocket only to have it vibrate with another
incoming call right after. He almost let it go to voicemail, taking a deep drag
on the tobacco in irritation, but glanced at the caller ID to see his ex-wife’s
name glow on the screen. She’d called him a handful of times since the divorce
was finalized, all strictly business and usually unpleasant, so he picked up in
time just to sate his curiosity.
“Hello, Lisa,” he answered, assuming neutral friendliness over his irritation
as easily as slipping on an old coat.
“Would you be terribly offended if I didn’t come for your father’s funeral
tomorrow?” her haggard tone came through tinny and muffled, as though she were
walking outside. The sound of traffic in the background confirmed this.
“Of course not. You’ve got your own life,” he said, trying not to sound too
hopeful.
“Yeah, I wish I had time for a life. This client is driving me bonkers, I think
I need to take some of Simmy’s Xanax,” she groused.
“Is that what you would like me to tell her?” he asked. “She misses you, you
know. She’s still upset with you, but she does miss you.”
“Don’t,” she said flatly. “Don’t fucking guilt me. I didn’t abandon her. Does
she still think that? Should I talk to her?”
“She’s not ready to start talking to you yet,” he lied. It was an amusing and
useful lie, brightening his mood a bit, so he indulged in rubbing it in a
little. “She just needs space. I’ll let you know when she’s ready.”
“Do. Not. Leave. Me. Out,” she warned, menace building in her irate tone. He
smiled, admiring the beautiful trees of his father’s property as she went on,
“I hate this, you know? I didn’t abandon her. Shit. She just turned twenty.
Twenty. She’s not some… fucking child anymore, she should be out on her own and
making it in the world by now. I never asked for her to get sick. I don’t care
if you gotta pump that fucking clean country air into her, just fix her. Shit.
Will you tell her I love her?”
“Of course, Lisa,” he lied. “She knows that. Just give her time.”
“Thanks, Leif,” she said, all cheer after getting that vitriol out. He was
going to miss her underlying resentment that Simone had clung to him and not
her throughout her mental illness; it was always so fun watching his ex-wife
struggle with envy while paving it over with gratitude. The combination of
shame of her internalized failings as a mother concerning her daughter’s
illness was always interesting to manipulate her with, but having their
daughter finally all to himself was well worth going through the divorce and
delayed separation. “Well, you’re probably busy with funeral shit, so I’ll let
ya go.”
The line cut abruptly and Leif could imagine Lisa, jaw set in irritation at
him, herself, their daughter, the world as she struggled to reign in her
impotent frustration. It was almost too easy to alienate her from Simone after
she completely fumbled that first panic attack, requiring him to step in and
pull that sedative from her inept fingers. Recalling that fond memory, he let
himself reminisce at how sweetly young little 14-year-old Simone had succumbed
to the dissolvable pill. Her violent struggles slowly going slack in his
grappling hold had felt like love at first sight and he knew exactly how to
make her all his from that moment on. With just a few techniques, the right
chemicals, and time, he had crafted her simple anxiety disorder into a full-
blown schizophrenia-fueled psychosis that only he knew how to handle. After
that, Lisa couldn’t relate to the broken girl at all and the guilt over being
unable to help her daughter while Leif adapted so well to it ate away at her
until there was only shame and resentment left. Towards the end, the only thing
keeping them together as a family unit was her embarrassment at what she could
only suppose was her own failure. It was all so easy to manufacture. He
wondered briefly if she’d even told her family about the divorce, but he could
guess that she had not.
He was pulled from his happy thoughts at the realization that more than enough
time had probably passed for Anders to have completed his function. With his
palate cleansed of his pessimism from the pleasant reminder of his larger
goals, he no longer felt so guilty for having to put Simone through such
experimental torment. With the right aftercare, she would cling to him with
renewed devotion and shun any such childish ideas as finding kind refuge in his
meddlesome brother. The house was quiet as he stepped lightly up the stairs, a
good sign that they had indeed finished. Taking a moment to brace himself
against the upsetting sight of another man all over his darling girl, he pushed
open the door to the small guestroom and was confused to find her curiously
absent.
His brother was laid out next to the bloodstain that marked his successful
punishment, but no girl was bound to the tie knotted in the headboard. He
walked to the bedside and examined the restraint, seeing the loops where her
wrists were held stained with a bit of blood. Knowing that Anders was both too
in denial and too drugged to have appreciated such a show, a twinge of
excitement and jealousy bloomed in him at the mental image of how frantically
she must have struggled to have wriggled out of her bindings. He looked over
Anders’ unconscious form, his pale skin stained vibrant red around his spent
cock and his mouth slack in the utter oblivion of drugged sleep. Too much
temazepam, it would seem. Hopefully he would retain memory of this event or
Leif would have to get more creative.
Leif returned his full attention to the aggravating problem of finding the
girl. A slight amusement overcame his grief when he noticed the drops of blood
on the carpet leading out of the room. He took his time in fondly examining
each splatter as they led him down the hall and into his room. This little game
took an unfortunate twist as he discovered her sweater thrown inside out on the
floor in there and her boots were missing from their place in the closet.
Concluding her intent to perhaps find her way to that hospital she seemed so
insistent on going, he allowed his anger to bleed into his mind and fuel the
punishment he would bestow on her for such insolence. But first, he had to find
her. She was obviously too in pain and afraid to have gone very far, so he
decided to check around the house first.
To increase her panic, he roared out her name before embarking on this new game
of hide and seek. For her sake, he hoped this would not take long.
***** Chapter 22 *****
The darkness was absolute and the air was mildewed and acrid, but it was
safety. In the way the body knows when it’s away from danger, Simone’s flight
response began to give way to exhaustion and her resolve to stave off another
reality shift quickly deteriorated. There in the complete blackness, her legs
buckled until she crumpled into that ankle-deep phantom water, now as dense and
undeniable as the shadowy outline of trees surrounding her. The noise of the
water splashing as she collapsed to her knees into it struck her as hazardous,
but she couldn’t remember why she had to be so quiet. There wasn’t anyone here
but Bjørn’s squishy, heavy head in her arms. It was awkward trying to cradle
him with her injured hands, requiring her to balance him against her chest with
her shaking forearms. She was nervous about dropping him. It only takes a
couple inches of water to drown someone, after all. With just a couple inches
and a couple minutes, a person can become so still and quiet. But Bjørn could
not speak or move except to blink, which she could tell he was doing rapidly in
the thin moonlight. He certainly seemed like he had a lot to say though.
“Okay, big guy,” she said softly, groaning as she stood up, the water dripping
heavily from her jeans. “Hold your horses. We’ll find the rest of you, I
promise.”
She was glad for the thick sweater and jacket she happened to be wearing as she
held him tucked between her breast and elbows, needing to keep her throbbing
hands elevated. She must have really screwed something up for them to hurt this
much, but there wasn’t much she could do about it at the moment. No use crying
over spilled milk, but an ice pack would be nice for the swelling in her left
thumb at least. Trudging through the dark waterlogged forest, she dragged her
feet to minimize the noise of her steps, the unnatural movement engaging her
quadriceps to bear the work and building up a nice steady burn she could tell
would hurt a lot more tomorrow. There were probably bigger things to worry
about in the world, but when alone in the woods with nothing but a mute head to
keep her company, it was too easy to not think on it.
 
 
She wasn’t anywhere. Not hiding under any bed, tucked into any closet, crouched
behind pantry shelves, balled up in any cabinet, buried under any blanket,
nowhere in this cavernous house could Leif find sign of his girl. His anger at
her childish insolence deteriorated into an uneasy tension infecting a rashness
to his search, flipping over bedding and knocking coats off hangers as that
uneasiness grew into anxiety. His girl was gone, carrying with her a stalwart
madness and the evidence of his unorthodox punishment. He ran outside and
surveyed the land from the back porch, peering for movement between the thick
white oaks and the leaner sugar maples. The land surrounding his father’s
property meshed seamlessly into the surrounding forest, separated only by an
unmaintained split rail fence through which wildlife and people could walk
through unwittingly. He could at least limit her wandering to the back half of
the property, knowing he would not have missed her staggering about while he
was on the front porch.
The wooded land beyond the grassy clearing of the backyard was a blur of green
and gray-brown bark as he ran through it, turning his head almost wildly to
scan for any sign of his girl. Seconds passed like minutes in his race, knowing
the value of every moment he’d wasted in his search through the house amounted
to several more paces for Simone to have wandered deeper, and he had to
distract his mind from panicking. He allowed his thoughts to wander outside of
his situation to facilitate that distraction, his mind naturally turning to
similar events in his distant past. His first hunt was in this very section of
the property, bringing an interesting parallel between past and present that,
were he a sentimental man, Leif would register as a synchronicity across time.
Strangely, a different memory flashed through his mind as he searched the
surrounding flora. He engaged the same helpful piece of advice his dearly
departed uncle had bestowed on him already nearly three decades past. It was
his first Independence Day in the US and he’d gone with his uncle to a county
picnic in the town square. Bjørn was taking photographs of the event for the
local paper at Einar’s behest to make good relations with the mayor in that
roundabout pandering manner small town folk had so heartily appreciated. Bjørn,
of course, pursued his own interests after a few quick shots of the crowd and
led him into the nearby woods. There, they seemed to walk in their customary
silence for nearly an hour with Bjørn occasionally bending to check a snapped
branch or a skid in the dirt before the man spoke.
Leif could hear Bjørn’s oddly soft-spoken voice slowly and carefully explain,
“Human silhouettes are particularly distinctive among nature. When in pursuit,
don’t just look for a person, look for the human shape with its odd upright
bipedal gait and flat shoulders. It will make sighting your target that much
faster.”
He had then quickly uncapped his lens cover and snapped a photo of something
through the low foliage. Leif had peered through the leaves to see what Bjørn
had been so quick to spot: two teenage girls hiding away from the picnic to
share a cigarette between them. He was impressed with his uncle to have seen
them at all and made sure to remember his words verbatim, and so he had. He
didn’t know it at the time, but that was his first hunting lesson. This brought
him to recall the follow-up lesson in the first rule of camouflage: easily and
quickly break up your human shape and blend into your surroundings by tying
surrounding vegetation to yourself. Thankfully, he had yet to relay that lesson
to Simone. Clever as she was, there was still much to teach her. However, like
his uncle, he had made sure to secretly pass such wisdom into her without
revealing the true purpose of his lessons.
His urgency was renewed as his thoughts were once more led to his daughter, the
troublesome girl possibly up to a mile out by now even if she were injured. He
ran at a pace just slow enough to keep an eye out for any snapped branches or
skids in the dirt as he scanned for human shapes.
 
 
The sound of someone calling his name over and over brought Anders out of the
inexplicable darkness, but it was his own screaming mind that had him upright
in an instant. Before he knew what was happening around him, he was already on
his numb feet backing away from the bed until his hip hit the corner of the
dresser in a pain he did not notice. There was a jumble of emotion and thought
so powerful in him that he felt like they were too big for his body, as though
they would eviscerate every tightly tensed muscle fiber that currently shook to
contain them. Seeing the condemning dark stain on the blue bedsheets, he would
welcome that painful death without hesitation. His hands splayed over his
gaping mouth, trying to silence the rapid panting of his own breaths. There
were so many people speaking, all so loud, but all he could make out was the
memory of Simone’s sobbing cries as he… as he…
“My God, what-”
A hot liquid charged up his esophagus and he quickly grabbed the plastic
wastebasket from under the nightstand to vomit in.
“-ders, do you need an ambulance?” he heard Henrik asking him.
“Did you try to circumcise yourself? What the fuck happened to your penis?”
Vidar nearly yelled. Anders spat the bitter remnants of fluid from his mouth
and managed to glance down at the dark red covering his groin before gagging
into the wastebasket again. The smears of dried blood burned in his vision even
as he squeezed his eyes shut.
“Do they even have ambulances in this part of this buttfucking country?” Vidar
wondered aloud. “Oh hell, is he going into shock?”
“I don’t know!” Henrik scoffed.
“Aren’t you a nurse? What the fuck do you do all day, hand out lollipops and
suck doctor cock?”
“Go shove a horse cock up your huge ass and ride it out of here, Vid. He’s
probably just coked up and nicked his dick in his sleep, which wouldn’t have
happened if he ever learned how to fucking share his dope like a decent person
with basic fucking politeness.”
Anders could barely register their words, all just noise under the overwhelming
pounding in his ears. The world reeled around him and that darkness nearly
sucked him back into unconsciousness but he fought it off in his frantic need
to know that she was okay. He opened his mouth to speak but couldn’t get a
sound out before another wave of nausea had him retching into the bin again.
The spinning, the draining darkness, the struggle, and then the gagging
continued in a rapid cycle until he began to suspect that this was the eternal
Hell he had earned. Riding under the crushing wave of guilt and horror was the
bewilderment of why. Spitting a pathetic dribble of thick yellow bitterness
into the plastic bin, he asked himself and whatever god had been watching why
he had hurt her like that. He wished he could say he had no control, that it
was some out of body experience or that it was like some distant nightmare, but
he was aware of what he was doing. The ugliest, worst truth that howled from
his damned soul was that he could have stopped at any point, but it hadn’t even
occurred to him to want to cease. Like some unthinking automation, he had hurt
her and had kept hurting her without any feeling or drive but to finish the
task. He was certainly feeling now, though.
“Wh-ere…” he coughed, then choked out into the wastebasket, “Where is she?”
“What? This again?” Henrik groaned exasperatedly.
“Simone’s probably with Leif,” Vidar answered. “I think they must’ve taken a
walk around out back or something.”
Anders endured a powerful shudder, a cold sweat renewing over his skin as he
rasped, “No. No, she can’t be with him after what he did… what… we did.”
His abdomen clenched, the muscles sore from the effort of gagging, and he
worried he’d be thrown into another vomiting fit but a different eruption
puffed out of his mouth instead. After the second shaking gasp, he realized he
was sobbing and pushed the wastebasket away to press his hands to his face. He
couldn’t believe how stupid he’d been not to see what was right in front of him
until he literally saw it happen. His brother, his biggest brother who had
given him piggyback rides and had bullied him for liking muppets when he was
six, was fucking his own daughter.
“Oh God, oh fucking Christ…” he sobbed into his palms at suddenly remembering
how he’d drunkenly touched her the previous night, believing he was doing some
sort of favor to relieve her when he was really just molesting her. There were
no boundaries, no rules, no special circumstances that had allowed Leif to
touch her like that. The level of fool he was to have believed that, the sheer
denial that his brother could simply have been molesting her, would be
astounding to Anders if it weren’t so disgusting. But he’d done it to her and
he’d wasted no time in taking her at the first opportunity. Of course she’d
have sex with him; it all made so much sense that she would only do as Leif had
trained her. With a twist of his gut that wrung out another shuddering sob, he
recalled how sad she’d looked before he’d choked her in the parlor. The
revelation that she had been reaching out to him for help and he’d turned it
into some perverted game made him feel filthy down to his core. He was glad
that the mother of his child wanted nothing to do with him; he could never
trust himself to be a father. He was not the person he’d thought he was at all.
“Hey… Anders…” Henrik’s awkward tone came soft and careful as he patted his
back reassuringly. “Don’t worry, you’re gonna be fine. Just… put on some pants
and we’ll take you to a hospital.”
Hospital… hospital…
Anders shot up from his crouched sobbing and grabbed Henrik by his shirt
collar, knowing full well what a madman he seemed as he shouted, “We have to
get her to a hospital!”
Henrik swatted his hands away and quickly staggered back from him, but his tone
was still placating as he said, “Sure, sure. We’ll take her too, but you’re the
one covered in blood, sooo… put your pants on and we’ll-”
Anders’ shaking hands curled into fists and he had to clench his jaw to keep
from screaming in frustration. “This isn’t my…”
Don’t worry, it’s not hers. Get her cleaned up already. Don’t let them see her
like that.
Leif’s words echoed in his mind, the image of Simone standing there but not
there covered in blood. Not her blood. Anders pressed the heel of his hands
into his eyes until colors danced among the black behind his lids, muttering
over the loudness of his tangled thoughts, “Christ, what did he mix her up in?”
He could hear his brothers saying something, pushing a pair of dark slacks into
the crux of his elbow, but he didn’t have any attention to spare them. The drug
was still swirling in his system and made thinking a slow and distorted
process, like trying to speak underwater. Nothing made enough sense to latch
onto, but the facts were all cleanly laid out to interpret. If Leif had dug
that grave for him, he would have never woken up from that injection. If Leif
had wanted him dead for what he did to Simone, he would not have drugged him to
make him do even worse things to her.
Anders staggered at the temptation to put this all on having been drugged. He
wanted to believe that he wouldn’t have ever done that sober. There was no part
of him that wanted to see her in pain, no morbid curiosity in him at the taboo
of it especially now that he knew how repulsive it really was. He’d never
fucked like that before, like some rutting beast with no thought beyond
domination and insemination, and he never wanted to again. He couldn’t tolerate
anything less than full responsibility for his actions. Drugged or not, he’d
hurt her. Raped, he corrected himself, the ugly word stabbing through his mind
like a dull kitchen knife. He’d raped her. His hands pressed up into his hair,
tugging roughly at his roots until it hurt more appropriately as he forced
himself to adapt that title. Rapist.
“Snap out of it! Are you there, brother?” Henrik asked slowly and loudly, his
hands once more shaking his shoulders.
Anders shook him off roughly, the touch of another person making his flesh
crawl. As unforgiveable as he was, Leif was so much worse and he had to make
sure he would never get near Simone again. It was difficult to connect the man
he knew as his brother with the monster he knew had done those horrible things
to his own daughter, but Anders had to force himself to accept it. For her. He
had to protect her. He had to find her. The image of her struggling out of her
bonds and touching his face with such undeserved and heartbreaking tenderness
made him cringe in a flood of shame deeper than he had thought himself capable
of feeling, but it told him that she had freed herself before her father had
found her.
“She’s hiding,” he muttered, certain of it. Tucked in some dark space, like a
wounded animal waiting out the hounds, she wouldn’t be hiding far. Leif
couldn’t have gotten to her first, he couldn’t even consider that horrible
possibility. With an urgency that renewed his adrenaline, Anders hurriedly
stepped into his pants and yanked on whatever jacket was hanging on the back of
the chair as he threw open the closet and looked for any sign of her. No
shivering, sobbing girl there. Only so many hiding spaces left to check.
“Whoa, whoa, you gotta slow down!” Vidar warned, grabbing his arm as he rushed
towards the door.
Anders jerked out of his brother’s grasp and stumbled out into the hall,
growling, “Either help me find her or get out of my way!”
 
 
When Simone had still possessed the ability to concentrate for more than ten-
minute intervals, she had made it a point to be seen reading medical
encyclopedias when around her mother for any extended time. Not only did this
ease the woman’s temperament toward her, it had also taught Simone a lot about
diseases and conditions. Slogging through the ankle-deep water for what may
have been anywhere between the first and third hour, the specific condition
that kept popping up in her mind was trench foot. It was not the most pleasant
thought, but not very much else was happening inside her mind. She was sure
there was something she was forgetting, but she just had to hope that Bjørn
would have the answers when she found the rest of him in that wetland. She had
up to ten more hours or so to find him before she actually had to worry about
the onset of trench foot, though.
“Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink,” she whispered. She looked
down at the bundle of squishy wrinkles and scratchy beard hairs in her arms,
seeing the wet glimmer of Bjørn’s eyes flash and twinkle as he blinked in the
dim moonlight. She smiled at him, feeling a strange companionship to the head
after walking in silent dark for this long. “Have you ever had okolehao? It’s
like a Hawaiian moonshine. I’ve only had it mixed in cocktails, but it’s
disgusting. Puna—my grandma—would make me drink it just to see the faces I’d
make. Not in a mean way, though.”
He blinked three times, which she took as a reply. It was the only way he could
reply, anyway, so she decided to keep speaking to pass the time. However, she
had already forgotten what she was saying, so she plucked another thought from
her mind.
“Have you ever had okolehao?” she asked. He blinked. “It’s like a Hawaiian
moonshine. I’ve only had it mixed in cocktails, but it’s disgusting.” She stuck
her tongue out to demonstrate just how much she disliked it. “Puna—my
grandma—would make me drink it just to see the faces I’d make. Not in a mean
way, though.”
She smiled down at Bjørn, barely able to make out his blank stare. He was
always just staring. She found it unnerving that he was so quiet, so she
decided to finally speak. She wasn’t sure what to say, so she just said the
first think that came to her mind.
“Have you ever had okolehao? It’s like a… uh, Hawaiian moonshine,” she said.
Checking to make sure he was interested, or as interested as an expressionless
severed head could seem, she continued, “I’ve only had it mixed in cocktails,
but it’s disgusting. Puna—my grandma—would make me drink it just to see the
faces I’d make.” She readjusted him in her arms, mindful not to jostle her
aching hands, before hurriedly explaining, “Not in a mean way, though.”
She wished he could speak. It didn’t matter at this point what he would say,
she just wished for any conversation at all. It felt like it had been so long
since she’d really talked with anybody. She didn’t consider herself a
necessarily social person, in fact she supposed she might be a bit antisocial,
but being a human required a certain amount of personal contact. She recalled a
study on how prisoners in solitary confinement for too long had often
experienced harrowing psychological and emotional breakdowns. Not wanting to
lose any more marbles than she already had, she decided to speak just to hear a
human voice. Without paying any mind to what she said, she spoke at random.
“Have you ever had okolehao? It’s like…”
Her steps and voice stopped before she knew why, her conscious mind catching
onto the sound of breathing somewhere nearby a moment after. Holding her own
breath and knowing Bjørn presently lacked lungs, she listened for where it was
coming from. The slow, rattling breaths sent a chill up her spine that locked
her muscles still, the hairs on her entire body standing on end as an animal
part of her brain screamed danger. She held Bjørn closer, only mindful enough
not to squish him as she latched her good hand over his mushy mouth just in
case. Her feet were stuck in the soggy forest floor as though the mud had
suctioned her bare heels to it, but she didn’t dare move even if she could.
That rattling, awful breathing grew slowly but steadily closer even though she
could not hear any movement among the trees or in the water. Her own heartbeat
pounded loudly in her ears and she wished it would shut up so she could hear
where that thing was coming from.
Then, the world began to shift. The moonlight, as thin as it was, dimmed into
complete darkness. The water receded soundlessly, taking with it the stale
smell of still water and wet trees. She felt Bjørn vanish from her arms like
mist, leaving her clutching herself in fear with nothing to hold onto. A
pressure filled the acrid, musty air to tell her she was no longer in the open
outdoors. Unconscious thought suggested that she was underground, judging by
the heaviness of that pressure, and her intuition agreed with that as fact. The
memory of that watery forest was disappearing with these new yet familiar
surroundings, leaving only the sense that she had been walking for hours and
that sound of breathing. That horrible sound, now so much closer in this
confined space. Simone found herself slowly, silently backing up with her hands
outstretched in the darkness until her fingers brushed a cold concrete wall.
Pressing herself to it, she walked in small, shaky steps and felt along the
wall for a light switch. Her lungs burned to take in great gulps of air to fuel
her fear-pumped muscles, but she had to be careful to take silent breaths
through her nose and not make any sound to alert whatever was in the darkness
with her. At least not until she could see what it was.
After a few minutes that felt like a dozen, her hand brushed over the plastic
nubs of switches and she took a moment to steel herself before carefully
flicking the first one. No reaction. Her fingers slid to the second switch and
repeated the slow and controlled motion. Nothing. She swallowed the hopeless
whimper building in her throat. Sweating, praying, trying not to cry, she
pressed the third switch up. Suddenly, a dim blood red light filled the far
side of the basement room, bright enough to paint the entire space in shadows
of scarlet. Her wide eyes quickly found the source of that breathing: a person
sitting in a chair on the opposite side of the room with a sheet thrown over
them. Simone stared at that person, watching the cloth cover billow out and
then press in with each rattling breath for several turns until she determined
that they had not reacted to the dim light. She could see no part of them that
was uncovered by that sheet, only the back legs of the chair.
Looking around the room, she determined this to be a darkroom not unlike the
one she had access to in her high school film photography class. That
realization made the red light seem slightly less hellish, but was too small of
a comfort to lessen the horror emanating from the person under the sheet.
Simone was aware of two choices: she could hope that this person would remain
unaware of her presence long enough for her to know when it was safe enough to
leave the basement, or she could see if this person needed help. Her chest
clenched with the knowledge of what she now knew her father was capable of.
There was only one option.
Still not wanting to alert this person to her presence, she crept toward them
on rounded steps to keep any part of her feet from slapping the smooth concrete
floor. Her eyes were trained on the billowing of the sheet over the mouth. In
and out. Step by painstaking step. That chill wracked over her again, tensing
her like nails on a chalkboard as she drew closer, and every instinct was
telling her to run, run up the stairs, damn whoever was up there and just run.
But this person might need her help. That rattle in their breaths, that
asthmatic wheeze with each inhalation followed by a dry and almost whistling
exhalation, grew dreadfully louder with each step. A corner of the sheet was
nearly touching her toe now and she kept her eyes on this figure as she knelt
and gingerly bunched it in her fist. This person did not stir as she picked up
the corner as she rose, did not change that squeaking horrible breathing as she
gathered her courage with a clench of her jaw and a prayer. In one strong,
flourishing twist of her torso, she flung the sheet away and saw that under it
sat nothing. The chair was empty. The breathing was gone. Simone screamed.
 
 
Anders searched his father’s room next. He wasn’t sure why. The pungent rot of
death was still lingering in that room, so maybe she went in there because she
knew no one would want to go in it. Nothing in the closet except his
meticulously arranged suits and shoes and nothing under the bed except storage
boxes. His brothers watched in mild horror from the doorway, neither seemingly
willing to enter that room. Anders removed himself from the room as soon as he
determined that she had not been in there, shoving the useless men aside as he
slammed the door shut behind him and bolted down the hall to the room she’d
been sleeping in. His feet were stumbling and his head still spun, both
undoubtedly caused by whatever the hell Leif had drugged him with, but he
couldn’t let a bit of drowsiness and disorientation get in his way. He had no
idea how much time they had before Leif reappeared. He had to get to her first,
had to make sure she was safe.
“Anders, what the fuck are you doing?” Vidar asked as Anders threw open the
closet door in that room where Leif had probably violated his daughter
countless times.
He was tempted to toss the blankets off the bed and examine the sheets for
evidence of this suspicion, but he couldn’t bring himself to be confronted with
the proof that would undoubtedly be there. He made a strange noise as he panted
when he saw that she was not hiding in there, something between a lamenting
moan and a frustrated growl. She was in the house still, he just knew she had
to be. Leif couldn’t have taken her anywhere without the truck, not with the
condition she was in. The condition Anders had put her in. He punched his fist
against the closet door after he slammed it shut, the wood cracking under his
blow, but he barely felt it. He knelt at the foot of the bed, giving the
underside a quick glance before huffing in frustration at finding nothing, but
paused as he moved to stand. Next to him was Leif’s large duffle bag, mostly
empty of its contents, and he began rifling through it anyway. He wasn’t sure
what he was searching for, but he didn’t question the impulse. Rage made his
movements jerky and rough as he pushed through the mundane items. Various
cords, devices, a deck of cards, useless mundane clutter in every pocket and
then he found a zippered case tucked under some socks. His hands shook as he
yanked it out and pulled at the zipper, his teeth bared and clenched in
impatience at his drug-clumsy fingers until he pulled apart the folded pack.
Several tiny vials were held in loops along the inside of the case with a torn
open plastic bag of syringes and little squares of alcohol wipes. His eyes
quickly scanned over the unfamiliar and complicated words on some of the vials.
Tetrahydrocannabinol, pentazocine, butorphanol, scopolamine, atropine, lysergic
acid diethylamide, mescaline, phencyclidine. Some were liquid, some were pills,
some were powder. He knew none of them.
“Henrik!” he yelled. The large bearded man hesitantly stepped forward and
Anders thrust the case towards him as he pushed himself to his feet. He met his
brother’s eyes with a grave regard, trying to put every clear thought into his
request as he asked, “What the hell is all of this?”
Henrik broke their stare to look at the collection of bottles, then his brow
furrowed as he held it closer to his face.
“What is it?” Vidar asked, stepping up beside his brothers.
“Holy shit…” Henrik breathed, running his fingers gingerly under the
complicated words.
Anders did not have the ability to stand and wait for Henrik to decide what to
say. His whole body buzzed with the need to move, the need to seek, and he
bolted from the room. Neither man followed him as he bounded down the hall to
the room Henrik and Vidar were sharing, then the bathroom, then downstairs to
check every closet. There were five closets in all and he’d tried every one
until he got to one that was locked. His hope rose like a balloon as he knocked
on the door and called her name, not surprised when she didn’t answer. A wave
of nausea returned as he knew why she wouldn’t, but he knew she’d be frightened
of him after what he did to her. She would be insane not to fear him now. He
braced his foot against the doorframe and the lock broke after the second pull,
but there was no Simone. Instead, there was a collection of knives and tools on
the shelf inside, adding an explanation as to why it was impossible to find a
cutting knife in the house but raising other questions. He had no time for
other questions.
He staggered away from the closet, his body trembling and exhausted, but he
couldn’t rest. He needed a drink, he needed an entire bottle, he needed to walk
into the ocean and drown, he needed to fry in Hell, he needed to drag Leif
there with him, get him away from her, away from ever hurting her again. He
needed to think. He needed his anger at himself and his rage at Leif to stop
muddling his thoughts with violence. He needed to stop thinking about himself
and what he had done and focus on her. She needed him to do better.
He stumbled into the main hall, grasping his head as he tried to force clarity
over his mind, and sat at the bottom of the stairs as he muttered, “Please,
please, Simone. Where did you go? I can help you, I have to, just please tell
me where you are.”
He couldn’t ever make this right, but he was determined to do everything he
could to make it less horrible for her. He owed her so much more than that, but
safety was all he could give her. He’d wanted to give her so much before.
Secret fantasies of being around her, having her visit Norway, learning more
English just to talk to her, get to know her better, explain how he felt and
learn how she felt, then maybe, maybe, just maybe taking it further with her…
All of it dashed. He could never be around her after what he’d done to her.
That idea of loving her despite their relation was a sick, perverted fantasy
belonging to a filthy rapist. He was her uncle. He had no right to see her as
anything but his niece but he did anyway. He had no right to touch, to kiss, to
make love to her but he did anyway. He had no right to make her cry and bleed
under him, but he did anyway. Intention didn’t matter. He was sick. She needed
to be as far away from him as she needed to be far away from her father. He was
the same breed of beast as Leif.
His eyes blurred with tears that he didn’t deserve to shed, but he couldn’t
stop the ache in his heart as he buried his face in his hands and muttered
aloud, “God, Simone, I’m so sorry, so sorry. I love you and this is what it’s
gotten you. I’m so sorry…”
His head shot up as a muffled scream came through the walls, so nearby it was
almost right under his nose. He leapt to the door to the closet under the
stairs, throwing it open and searching but she wasn’t there. He was sure it
came from in there, but she was missing. He tossed out the coats, the boxes,
the old stacks of magazines and newspapers, everything out into the hallway but
no sign of the girl until his hands pulled out two small black lace-up boots.
Her boots. She had been there. A small sound, so quiet he must have missed it
in his feverish purging of the closet, reached his ears and he strained to find
where it was coming from. He stepped fully into the closet, pressing his ear to
the wall inside, then following that sound until he pressed to the back wall.
With his gut twisting in familiarity, he recognized the sound of Simone’s
distressed sobbing.
He couldn’t think, his body in a panic to act as he pounded on that back wall
and heard the reverberation of hollowness behind it. His fingers scrambled for
a latch or a knob or any sort of mechanism to move this fake wall but his hands
groped around at nothing but smoothness. He stumbled out of the closet and ran
to the collection of tools, grabbing the first one that made sense. The ax was
heavy but he couldn’t give into his exhaustion now, not when he’d finally found
her. Henrik and Vidar were standing outside the closet now and backed away
hurriedly when they spotted him running towards them with an ax. He didn’t
care. They yelled something at him as he swung and struck that wallpapered
wood. He didn’t hear. He yanked the blade out of the wall and swung again,
putting everything he had into the strike. It bent and splintered, but not
nearly enough. He reared back, readied himself for a third swing, then froze at
the sound of Leif’s voice behind him.
“Just what the hell are you doing?”
The ax suddenly felt light as a feather as rage deafened all else in him.
***** Chapter 23 *****
Standing there in the hallway with Henrik and Vidar, both men stunned to
silence at the spectacle of seeing Anders hacking the wall of a closet down and
then turning to them with an inexplicable rage, Leif regretted not thinking to
check that secret room. Of course, she had found it. She was always surprising
him with how like his uncle she was; she was probably born with the knowledge
of the darkroom. The flash of light reflecting off the blade brought his full
attention back to Anders, finding him standing squarely in the doorway of the
closet with the ax held towards him with both hands. Leif had seen similar
expressions before, oftentimes finding it in his own reflection. The eyes wide
and alarmed not with fear but with a grim resignation, a righteous hatred
boiling behind them. He was not surprised that this man hated him; it was
thankless work to reveal the worst of someone to themselves. He was, however,
surprised to find that his baby brother was just as quick to murder as any of
the killers in their bloodline, though he supposed he really shouldn’t be. The
apple never fell far from the tree in their family. As much as he would like to
push him further along that course, he couldn’t condone anyone threatening him,
brother or not.
“You need to think about what you’re getting into, brother,” Leif suggested,
the false concern in his tone only stoking that hot hatred in the younger man’s
glare.
“I’m giving you a choice,” Anders seethed. “Either leave and don’t come back…”
His fists twisted around the smoothed wood handle, knuckles white and wrists
bunching with muscle. “… or I’ll ensure you never hurt her or anyone else ever
again.”
The thrill of being faced with murderous intent was dampened by their slack-
jawed audience. Neither Vidar nor Henrik could appreciate the beauty of this
moment; their vices were of the simpler sort. But Anders was proving to be more
and more interesting the further they peeled back the layers of humanity he’d
wrapped around the true core of him. It was regrettable that this moment of
revelation hadn’t been met by more favorable circumstance. Leif was still
catching his breath from his marathon through the woods, his muscles stiffening
and burning with lactic acid, and Anders was very obviously still affected by
the benzodiazepine dragging through his sluggish blood. But Leif had come to
expect that violent interaction was rarely encountered under optimal
conditions, by the value of desperation so often required to inspire it.
Anders, with a tremor in his elbows and an animal fright sparking along that
churning hatred, was not accustomed to violence nor to the whimsy of it. The
uninitiated always wanted more buildup and meaning, for it to be a last resort
even past the last moment, but was no revelation or meaningful shift in
violence itself. Even if they were both in top condition with no distractions,
it would be the familiarity with taking a life that guaranteed victory each
time as it had before. Anders may have the passion and emotion Leif had always
lacked, but Leif had experience that harbored a steadfast readiness.
“You’re not in your right mind, Anders. You should drop that before you hurt
someone,” he said, shifting his weight to the balls of his feet and aligning
his hands and wrists. That electrifying tension vaporized all soreness and
fatigue from him, pulling at his mouth to grin in what he knew would be
interpreted as nervousness by their two spectators. Receiving the provocation
as intended, Anders’ anger flared but he still didn’t budge from the doorway.
Leif had to get him to make the first move if he wanted to manipulate his
family to the optimal effect, but his commitment to his act was waning with the
delightful temptation before him.
“Get out!” Anders shouted, raising the ax higher.
Leif kept their eyes locked as he weighed his options, their mutual glaring so
focused that he almost didn’t notice the trick door drift open. Anders did not
notice the yawning darkness behind him, nor the bright apparition in a yellow
sweater step from the inky shadows. He had to resist shifting his gaze to
Simone, her small frame nearly entirely eclipsed by Anders’ lean athletic mass.
This day was proving to be quite an interesting day indeed. From his
peripheral, he could see her wide eyes shift between them, that same calm
smoothness to her silent movement as she drifted closer as a repeat of her
maneuver in Renfro’s filthy doorway. Anticipation quickened his pulse and
distracted him, making him slower to react to Anders’ sudden lunge toward him.
Leif sidestepped the downwards strike as his hands shot out and gripped the
handle of the ax, but what had saved his life was not his quick reflexes, but
his daughter grasping the back of Anders’ jacket.
“Stop!” she cried out as she held onto him, the younger man staggering forward
in shock. She buried her face against his back as she yelled, “Stop this!”
While not the assistance he had excitedly anticipated, Leif was able to twist
the ax from his grip and throw it a safe distance away. He couldn’t risk
another unwieldy swing of the blade from either of them with her this close, a
regrettable but fortunate change of the playing field considering the
witnesses. Before he could recover his stance from the throw, Leif’s vision
flashed black and white and then the world tilted. Anders had surprised him
with an unforeseen swiftness and Leif wasn’t aware of the right hook he took to
his jaw until after the blow had connected. The elated swell of adrenaline
bloomed in him finally at the comprehension of physical confrontation, staving
off the pain for the moment and giving him an urgency to respond in kind. The
lure of his father’s folding knife buzzed hot in his pocket, but he would need
to create some distance between them before considering the rush of warm blood
waiting to burst from the younger man around that blade. Before his head had
even righted itself, Leif’s hands grasped the sleeves of Anders’ coat and his
knee surged up high into his solar plexus.
The deep, low grunt accompanying the whoosh of his breath getting knocked out
of him was satisfying, but Leif must have accidentally gone in too hard as
Anders collapsed in a heap. All too soon, Leif recognized the boneless sway of
unconsciousness before his brother even hit the floor. Damn. He should have
gone for a less effective blow, but his temper and instinct had gotten the
better of him. The bounty of catecholamines demanded blood and as the younger
man’s knees hit the hardwood, Leif’s fingers itched to reach into his mouth and
carve his tongue out. Unaffected by his better reasoning, his hand slipped into
pocked and curled around that knife, but a flurry of movement over his target
drew him out of the impulse. Simone crouched over the downed man, her torso
flung over him defensively.
This was not how she was supposed to behave. She was supposed to fear and
loathe Anders after experiencing his savage, basic desires. Leif had seen the
blood and had heard her crying and begging his brother to stop. He thought she
would repeat her previous murder, but she had merely prevented Anders from
committing one. He thought she would run into the familiar arms of her father,
not protect the man who had mercilessly raped her. She was confused,
hysterical, her mind dumb on fear and twisted in aggravated madness. He should
not have left her alone to cope with what Anders had inflicted upon her. She
was prone to delusions; he should have been there to influence them to his
favor instead of letting them infest freely.
“Simone,” Leif warned, his voice gruff from aggression. Her eyes only narrowed
at him, her shoulders hunched lower. His lapse in attentiveness had certainly
afforded him quite the correction to make in her. “Move away from him now.”
The insanity burning in her eyes was untouched by his command. If she had
wanted to receive a rough punishment, she couldn’t have chosen a riper moment.
He grabbed her by the back of her coat collar and yanked her up, intending to
throw her against the wall and subdue this rebellion in her by pinning her,
when she suddenly shot up and lunged for him. She was too small and lightweight
to even stagger him, but he was surprised when she attempted to shove him.
Trained impulse had him spin and pull her to redirect her force and she
careened against the wall in a loud thump. She wasn’t even fazed, rebounding
and letting out a savage cry as she lunged for him again. He wanted to keep
this up, to run her down until she was exhausted before striking back and
returning her hostility in a myriad of fun and brutal methods, but Vidar
snapped out of his bystander effect and grabbed her around her middle. Leif
almost charged at him for interfering but held back as Vidar dragged her
kicking and writhing further down the hall. He watched for a moment as his
brother held her arms locked behind her back and apologized over and over to
the snarling girl.
“Henrik,” Leif said, wiping his chin as the first tickle of discomfort and
swelling started from that sock to his jaw. The bearded brother turned from the
captivating sight of the feral Simone, his eyes nearly bulging. Leif gestured
to the still unconscious Anders and said between panting breaths, “Take him up
to his room. Don’t let him out of bed, he’s obviously on something.”
The large man nodded numbly, moving towards their youngest brother as Leif
walked unhurriedly down the hall toward where his daughter was fighting the arm
lock Vidar held her with. Vidar looked up at him, uncertainty and worry beyond
his shock, as Leif grabbed her chin and forced her head up to look at him. That
wild fury still glimmered in her light eyes, the unabashed hostility of her
furrowed glare conveying a deep hatred toward everything it focused on. As he
stared back into that glare, her tears welled and fell over his clenching
fingers. Defeat replaced that hostility after only a few seconds of facing her
master.
“There’s my good girl,” he cooed warmly. She sniffed, tried to twist her jaw
out of his grasp and he tightened it painfully. He could see the growing
discomfort in Vidar out of the corner of his eye, but it didn’t deter him. “Are
you going to behave now?”
Her lips pursed and her eyes drifted down before she whispered, “Don’t hurt
him.”
The wide hallway echoed with the sound of the back of his hand clapping across
her cheek, perhaps a bit too hard as her head snapped to the side with the
force and her high yelp echoed with it. It was scarcely within his control that
he stopped at one strike; his girl had a way of driving him mad. Vidar gaped at
him, his hold on her loosening and his eyes bugging out even wider as though he
couldn’t accept his position as accomplice to this punishment. Typical. Those
without children of their own seldom understood the disciplinary efforts of
parents.
“What the FUCK, Leif! You can’t hit her like that!” he whispered viciously.
“She’s not throwing a fit anymore, is she?” Leif retorted simply. “If you don’t
have the stomach to watch, then go upstairs and help keep Anders subdued.”
Vidar was a quick-witted man and recovered with his hand held out placatingly,
switching gears to say, “Look. We’re all upset right now, but you really should
cool off before trying to talk with Simone, okay? This has been a really weird
day and I think we should just try to relax.”
Leif smirked, his temper ripping through his outward persona dangerously at
this meddling asshole touching his girl and trying to tell him what to do with
her. His voice dropped the friendly inflection and fell into his actual
speaking voice, a thing that sounded very different from the man he was around
others. “The methods of which I choose to engage in correcting my daughter’s
behavior is not your business. If I want to slap her, whip her, choke her, and
bleed her so she learns her lesson, I don’t need your approval to do so. If you
ever try to dictate how I interact with her again, I will find out how to make
you learn your lesson as well. Go upstairs. Now.”
He was aware that he should be more concerned about the pale look of fright in
Vidar’s countenance as the man stiffly released his hold on Simone and quickly
walked towards and up the stairs, but all he felt was satisfaction. He watched
her, her scared little face still downturned and hidden from him, her hand
cradling her sore cheek, her hair mussed from all the day’s activity, and
wondered where he had gone wrong. Perhaps it was too much pressure for her to
have both committed murder and been brutally raped in one day. She was such a
delicate thing under all that untamed viciousness. He decided he would go
easier on her for a while, at least while his brothers shared the house with
them. But first he had to punish her while her misbehavior was still fresh.
She gasped as he pushed her down, his hand pressing between her shoulders until
she bent over her kneeling thighs with her forehead touching the floor, but she
didn’t resist him. She was too smart for that by now. Her fearful panting while
he yanked her jacket and sweater off was endearing. Not enough to lessen the
severity of this punishment, however. All plaintiveness and submission now that
she was caught, she remained curled up on the floor as he brushed her long
unruly hair off her back and shoulders and loomed over her to admire the smooth
expanse of her bare olive skin. She really had such beautiful skin, it was a
pity he’d have to mar it out of punishment instead of ownership this time. He
decided to treat her to ointment and bandages if needed afterward, maybe even
skip the sting of the rubbing alcohol if she were good. As he pulled his belt
off his waist, he hoped she wouldn’t be good.
 
 
Henrik and Vidar sat in chairs five feet from the bed Anders was laid out atop,
both men staring in tense silence as they began their watch for any change to
their unconscious brother. Neither of them wanted to be there when he woke up,
but neither were comfortable leaving him alone. Vidar rubbed his left temple in
slow clockwise motions to ward off a headache and give his shaking hand
something to do. He was still affected by seeing Leif turn into someone he
didn’t recognize at all.
“Do you think it’s meth? I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone that violent even
on a coke rage,” Henrik whispered, tugging on his beard as he usually did when
nervous.
Vidar shrugged, “Do you think Leif is also on whatever he’s got?”
Henrik let out a long, deep sigh before replying, “I don’t know what’s going on
with Leif. Anders has always been the wild one, but Leif? He’s different now.
Like he’s hiding something.”
“Like all that medicine he was hiding in his room? What was that?”
“That… that was some really weird stuff. Most of it they don’t even make for
medical use because it’s too dangerous.”
“Do you think it’s stuff Simone has to take? You know, for her crazy?”
Henrik shook his head. “All of that stuff would just make someone crazy. Like
cuckoo-clock-tin-foil-hat-talking-to-Mother-Mary-and-the-little-green-men kind
of crazy.”
They both sat in silence for a moment. Henrik had stopped tugging on his beard.
Vidar’s hand was frozen at his temple. Neither of them wanted to say aloud the
horrible thing they both thought. Then, they both flinched at the sound of a
distant snap and a high-pitched cry from downstairs, followed by another of the
same snap and cry after a moment. They looked at each other, their terrible
unspoken question as to what that was confirmed in the horror they saw in each
other’s faces at the third snap and cry. Vidar leaned forward in his chair and
buried his face in his hands. Henrik pinched at the bridge of his nose to stave
off the sting of tears in his eyes.
“What do we do?” Vidar asked, his quiet question muffled through his hands.
“I don’t know,” Henrik whispered. His voice cracked. He was going to cry and
there was no stopping that now that their thoughts were brought out into the
open. “What can we do?”
They both fidgeted at the fourth snap, another pained yelp from downstairs.
“Should we call someone? The police?” Vidar proposed.
“And tell them what?” Henrik asked. A fifth turn echoed from below. His voice
was high and tight as he held back the sobbing he knew was imminent. “Tell them
we think our big brother is poisoning his adult daughter to keep her sick? Does
this country even convict for that kind of abuse before the victim dies? Who
would believe us?”
“I think Anders would believe us,” Vidar whispered, but his response was
despondent as he stared at the prone younger man. The sixth snap was noticeably
louder, the cry closer to a scream and shaking with a sob. Vidar screwed his
eyes shut and grit his teeth. “He said Leif was hurting her. He was going to
kill him for it. Anders was going to kill him. He doesn’t have the heart to gut
a fish, but he was going to murder Leif with a shit-fucking ax. What did he
find out?”
Henrik took a shuddering breath and wiped his wet cheeks, but at the sound of
the seventh snap and cry, he broke down into a choked sob. Vidar stood up from
his chair and paced the small room, his hands clenching and flexing in high
stress.
“Why? What makes a man do that to his own child?” Henrik frowned.
An eighth snap then Simone’s muffled wail of “Papa!” made both men cringe.
Neither man wanted to, but each silently counted to a total of twenty lashes
before the sound of her weeping accompanied Leif’s heavy footsteps up the
stairs. The walls were thick and nothing was heard after the shutting and
locking of the door to the room the father and daughter had shared.
 
 
“FUHUH!” Anders gasped, sitting upright in a jerk. He looked around wildly,
sweat already beading on his face and he panted and scrambled to get up. The
room was spinning, the colors blending together and trailing nauseatingly, but
he was able to recognize that his was back in his guestroom somehow. Henrik and
Vidar watched him with wide and wet eyes. It was as though his nightmare was
repeating.
“Wait, wait, wait!” Vidar hissed urgently, pressing him back to sit on the bed.
Anders pushed against him, but he was too physically weak and woozy to do
anything but lean against those hands on his shoulders. His entire being felt
like a beast had shook him in its jaws like a dead rat, but that haste to find
her made staying still agonizing.
“I have to get to her,” he slurred, trying to shove Vidar away. “Get her away
from him!”
Henrik stood and moved closer to them, keeping his voice down as he said, “We
know. We know! Anders, we know what Leif has been doing!”
“You know… You know that he’s…” Anders slurred. He wasn’t sure if it was from
the drugs or from whatever Leif had hit him with to knock him out like that,
but he felt even more out of it than before. He wondered, with a worry that was
lost in the immense expanse of his current worries, if he had a concussion.
“How long have I been out?”
“About an hour,” Vidar answered, then lowered his voice, “He went downstairs a
while ago, but I don’t think he’s left. Anders, I think he hurt her pretty bad.
She’s in their room and it’s been real quiet in there.”
Anders’ chest clenched in a breath-stealing squeeze and the skin on the back of
his neck crawled as though something cold had splashed down it. At least it
washed away some of the mud covering his brain. He moved once more to stand and
succeeded, the room and his eyes vibrating at different frequencies as he
stepped past Vidar’s reaching hands and towards the door. As his mind brushed
over the murder he had been mere centimeters from committing, his stomach
churned but had nothing left to give; its last dregs of fluid were in the
plastic wastebasket. He wondered if he would have to make another attempt on
his brother’s life and found it too easy to accept as a simple probability. He
could ponder his moral decline later. He didn’t have enough room in his
overstuffed and aching skull for more troubles.
He braced his hand along the wall to keep the floor from swaying under him, his
brothers irritatingly peering from the guestroom doorway but no longer impeding
him. He had to stop thinking of them as nuisances; they now knew the truth. He
winced as he considered them finding out the whole truth of his part in hurting
her and quickly pushed that business aside. His hand hit the dark oak of the
doorframe before he was aware he’d already come upon his destination. He’d
anticipated having to kick the door in, he had not anticipated that it was wide
open. Simone, laying on her belly on the bed, saw him before he had a chance to
prepare himself, her eyes lined in pink from recently crying and tight with
sadness and shame as she lifted her head and looked at him. For a moment, he
felt the world narrow until it was just the two of them alone watching one
another, and he understood why insanity and love were often compared as
interchangeable in how they operated completely independently from the will of
the inflicted.
“You have to leave,” she whispered. She had the fake resolve that desperation
supplied, her voice quivering as she tried to speak firmly. “Go back to Norway.
Forget about all of this.”
Anders gathered his brain for the proper English, hoping she understood his
intent when all he could come up with was, “Together.”
Whether the torment that furrowed her brow was of comprehension or
bewilderment, he could not tell, though he regretted being the cause of her
pain all the same. Another drop in the ocean of agonies he had already supplied
her. He could not dare ask for forgiveness or even should hope for it secretly,
but he was greedy for any small measure of redemption nevertheless. When she
moved to sit up, the blanket fell from her shoulders and bared to him her
nudity. She seemed to either not notice or care about his discomfort as she
rose from the bed, his eyes darting down and seeing that she was now cleaned of
blood and semen. He blushed at having even looked, his shame doubling with the
knowledge that he still wore her blood under his clothes. Alarm shook him out
of his grim distraction when she beckoned him to come to her and his feet
obeyed before he could consider it, his hand slow and careful as it silently
shut the door behind him. Let his brothers think what they will; he would do
anything she wanted of him without hesitance. She stepped towards him before he
could make his way to her, her quiet feet swift to close the distance and he
panicked as she brought her arms around him in a tight hug.
He couldn’t move, couldn’t think, couldn’t even breathe as she pressed her bare
front to him and whispered, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry for what he did. You have
to leave before this gets any worse. Please, please leave!”
He had to amend his fealty to her demands; he would do anything she wanted of
him except abandon her. Despite his better judgment, his arms drifted over the
hot skin of her back to cling her to him just as tightly as she held him. She
shuddered and stiffened against him, her cheek nuzzling his chest over his coat
and he sighed at the brief feeling of absolution in her affection. He was so
weak.
“I love you,” he whispered, a cowardly boldness in knowing she couldn’t
understand him.
“I love you too,” she responded, the English phrase well enough known to him to
not require a moment of translation to churn in his mind. Instead, a calamity
of emotion churned there and whether it was the drugs or the stress or the
terror, he felt a powerful constriction in his chest and he allowed her warm
little hands to cup his face as she stood on tiptoe to press their lips
together. The heat and delirium of her kiss drained all reason from him and he
found himself gathering her up in an intimate embrace to deepen it.
The stirring in his groin startled him out of his fervor. If there could ever
be a time or place for them, this was not it. In both reluctance and urgency,
he untangled them to hold her at arm’s length away with his hands firmly set on
her shoulders. Her silver eyes and full lips were darkened appealingly, further
igniting that urge to just allow their lust to dictate their actions, but he
was too aware of the danger lurking nearby and the harm he’d already done in
sex. He had to ignore the softness of her skin and the intoxicating scent of
her this close, had to forcibly remove the memory of her small pink cleft from
his damning glance. It took considerable effort to resist the heavy pull he
felt towards Simone, a pull not dampened by shame or swayed by logic.
At times, especially at this time, he felt as though his attraction to this
niece he had barely known a week ago was a living thing inside him. He had been
too ashamed to even wonder what that living thing would do if he unleashed it,
having been able to assume that it would amount to nothing outside of his
expected romantic impulses despite the unusual conditions, but it nearly
frightened him at how it lurched at his restraint in even these circumstances.
A gnawing suspicion had dogged him since the first brush of guilty pleasure at
the scent of her that there was something alarming at the root of this
attraction. For the first time, he considered that what had distressed him in
this attraction was maybe not limited to the aspects of it being incest or a
grievous power imbalance, but expanded from something in him that he could not
or did not want to understand. But there were more pressing issues at hand.
“Where isLeif?” he whispered.
Simone’s eyes shut and her brow knitted as though a physical pain discomforted
her, then she stayed caught in that pained expression for a long moment. Anders
wondered if she had perhaps went away again to wherever her mind goes when she
enters into that absent trance, but she spoke before he could think of what to
do to bring her out of it.
“‘Secrets like ours are worth a lot’,” she said, her eyes still closed and
voice odd and spoken in a singsong as though she were mimicking someone. When
she looked at him and spoke again, her voice was barely above a whisper. “He’s
trying to change you like he changed me, but you can’t let him. Don’t let him.”
Anders translated her words as best he could, but most of his English was
isolated to nouns and some verbs and phrases. He didn’t understand. Something
about a difference, something not about a job? He tried not to frown too much
in frustration as he churned the words over and over, not wanting her to worry.
“Please,” she said. He let her step closer to him, let her lean her forehead
against his chest as she mumbled, “Please just don’t get killed…”
While she slumped against him, some of her long brown hair fell away from her
creamy back and exposed dark blue and purple between her wavy locks. The bursts
of color caught his attention and jerked a fretful reaction from him. She
flinched away when he swept her hair to the side and caught a glimpse of the
bruises, her arms clutched around her body defensively as she stepped back.
Before he could think to handle this more delicately, he grabbed her and spun
her by the shoulders, her foot catching on the edge of the rug and sending her
tripping. She fell with a grunt face down on the edge of the bed and, knowing
she was unhurt, he followed the compulsion to lean over her bent form to hold
her down and keep her from turning. He had to see what was done to her. With
his free hand, he brushed her voluminous hair from her back and shoulders, his
face grimly set as he took in the damage. A terrible feeling welled in him as
he saw the colorful stripes of bruises along her back, the unmistakable marks
of a belting far more severe than he’d ever seen or experienced in his
childhood punishments.
“My God…” he muttered in a rasp.
Even though it was horrible to see, he couldn’t look away. A rage was building
beyond that heavy and cold awfulness in him, but it was like an approaching
storm on the horizon yet. He knew his brother was a monster. He’d seen plenty
of evidence of that, but it seemed like each new one still carried shock with
it. This must have been what Vidar had referred to when he’d said Leif had hurt
her pretty bad. He lightly ran his fingertips along the edge of one of those
broad stripes. She must have screamed and wailed from the pain…
“Ahn…” she gasped softly, her back arching and flexing as she fisted the quilt
beneath her front.
He pulled his hand away, afraid he’d touched a tender spot, but that was not a
sound of pain. With sudden awareness, he looked down at their position. He saw
how she was bent over the bed with her legs standing straight, how he was
nearly pressed against her raised ass and loomed over her. He flushed at his
brutish behavior, at how he’d pushed her down in this position beneath him, at
how bare she was and how she had stayed in this lewd pose while he just stared
at her. He’d only been concerned, only wanted to check her injuries, he assured
himself. He wondered why he wasn’t moving, why she wasn’t moving, but then she
did. She pressed her ass, her round and voluptuous ass and warm center back
into him. The quivering little huff of a sigh she made when he felt her heat
against him made his groin tense in a shiver. He couldn’t tear his eyes away
again, though this time his focus was on the deep indentation of her narrow
waist leading outwards to the generous flare of her hips. His hands moved on
their own accord to grip those soft feminine parts. He wanted to grind his dick
in the cleft of her ass, he cock rapidly hardening to do so as he took in this
sweet sight. His eyes ghosted over her bruises, just looking at the womanly
shape of Simone as she raised hind end on her tiptoes to better press back
against his crotch. His hands squeezed and pulled her hips to him more firmly,
his own hips rolling to grind his clothed erection against her bare ass. She
smelled so good, that unique and indescribable scent that first made him aware
that his attraction for her was not just the acknowledgment of her visual
beauty, but something more primally linked. His hands ran up and down the curve
of her hips and his cock throbbed at how wide they were on her otherwise
delicate frame. Good hips, good thighs, good ass were good for pregnancy. His
breath came warm and quick at the thought of breeding her. He’d ejaculated in
her twice already over the past two days and he wanted to increase the
frequency. He wanted to make sure it was his, too. Take her, keep her and breed
her. He salivated at the prospect, finding it ringing truer than a mere fantasy
in him. He would do this. He would steal her and make a new family with her,
where they could live as they should instead of as they did. Husband and wife
and child, not uncle and niece and nothing. Uncle and niece. Filthy, rapist
uncle and insane, victimized niece.
Anders staggered away from her, the spell broken as suddenly as it had come
over him, and a panic fell in its place. He didn’t know where that twisted
thought had come from. He was horrified at himself. He shouldn’t have gone into
that room, should have left when he saw she was undressed, should have removed
himself from her hug, should have just searched out and confronted Leif. He
almost ran from the room, his surroundings a blur until he found himself back
in his guest room, Henrik and Vidar asking him questions he couldn’t listen to
as his mind screamed. It might have been the drugs, but a growing and terrified
part of him knew that it wasn’t. There was something wrong, something very,
very wrong in him.
***** Chapter 24 *****
Leif could slice the root vegetables at a consistent 1.5-millimeter thickness
with an adequately sharpened chef’s knife, though he did regret not having the
mandoline he had left at the Brooklyn apartment. Finding no more kitchen twine,
he had to trust the butcher had done well enough in trimming the fat from the
lamb and left it tied as it had come. His mental list of items to acquire was
growing more extensive with each passing day, speaking to the dissimilarity in
lifestyle between him and Einar. How a man could have in his possession a
complete set of Miyabi Birchwood knives and yet lack a simple immersion blender
was beyond him, though he did suppose it matched with his late father’s
utilitarian yet exquisite taste. For all the man’s appreciation for
practicality, it was often paradoxically inconvenient. He was placing the
potato slices in a layered spiral on the bottom of the roasting pan, taking a
simple enjoyment in the arrangement, when a feeling of being watched alerted
him to the presence of another.
He waited for the person to step out from hiding and when they didn’t, he
spoke, “If you’re not busy, you could give me a hand in here.”
Henrik stepped in from the darkened hallway into the kitchen, the late
afternoon sunlight pouring in from the west facing windows and making his
weathered face scrunch in a squint. Leif regarded him with an expectant glance,
not pausing from his task as he doled out the slices like playing cards in the
pan.
“I trust that Vidar is keeping an eye on poor Anders,” he said. “May I ask you
to peel three onions while I do this?”
“We have to talk about what you’re doing,” Henrik said.
Leif set aside the potato and gave him his undivided attention as he wiped his
starchy hands with a rag. He was too eager to find out how much they knew with
a distraught and vengeful Anders alone with them for so long.
“I’m going to roast the lamb on a bed of potatoes and vegetable slices, then
I’m going to make a balsamic and berry reduction. I was thinking about wilting
some kale and collards to go with it, but if-”
“You’re poisoning Simone,” Henrik interrupted.
Leif raised his brow at him. “I know we should limit red meat intake, but I
hardly think-”
“Leif!” his brother growled, completing his bearlike visage in a manner that
nearly made Leif grin. Henrik stepped forward and placed his large hands flat
on the surface of the island where Leif was working, directly across from him.
Leif looked up at him then, his face a careful arrangement of attentive
concern. Intriguingly, Henrik had the look of a man in the throes of a
tumultuous mourning rather than the righteous indignation over a disturbing
injustice. “What are you doing with those drugs? What possible use could you
have for atropine? Propofol? Leif, tell me you haven’t been… Just tell me why
you have these. Please.”
Leif frowned, ran his tongue over his sharp teeth and then adjusted his posture
to put some annoyance into it. “You snooped through my bags, didn’t you? Then
you jumped to some awful conclusion and came to me to confirm it. This is
unacceptable behavior even among brothers, Henrik.”
“Unacceptable? You know what’s unacceptable? Carrying around a sampler platter
of psychoactives! What is going on with you, Leif? What are you up to? These
drugs are being used and not by you. Can you explain that?”
He was close to what had happened, probably had most of the pieces and perhaps
suspected it already, and Leif weighed whether to mislead him or bait him
closer. He decided to go with the more interesting prospect. “We’ve done drugs
together, so what’s so mysterious about this?”
“We’ve done coke and MDMA, Leif. Party drugs at parties. A control freak like
you would never self-administer scopolamine, for fuck’s sake! What is it for?
Do not give me some bullshit!”
“What are you asking? You’ve already formed an answer in your mind, so why not
just say it?”
“Because I don’t want it to be true!” Henrik nearly yelled. His eyes were wet
and face reddened like he often used to get when they were schoolchildren. Leif
felt a bit uncomfortable seeing this muscular mountain of a man react so
emotionally, but then again, emotional reactions had always struck him as odd.
This dramatic fanfare for his seemingly harsh methods of raising his daughter
was gratifying, however. It entertained his ego to see someone else appreciate
just how far he’d been willing to go for her, even if that appreciation was
measured in horror.
“Want what to be true? Just spit it out.”
Henrik’s mouth opened and then closed. His hands curled into fists and he
looked down at the smoothed wood surface of the island countertop as he quietly
asked, “How long have you been inducing Simone’s altered mental status?”
Leif hadn’t expected his brother, even with his medical knowledge, to have come
to that conclusion on his own. Perhaps he had given himself too much credit in
coming off as a man of conventional vices, or perhaps Anders had indeed been
unwise enough to divulge the dirty details of what had happened between them
and Simone that morning. However, the first principal in nursing – derived of
the Hippocratic oath to do no harm—assured that the order of operations would
have Henrik pursuing the more immediate danger of Leif’s sexual activity with
girl. The chemical manipulation was debatably more harmful but less urgent. Not
to mention that it would have led to Anders having to reveal his own
participation. No, Henrik did not know yet and Anders was too ashamed to risk
exposing himself, exactly as Leif had predicted. While not quite how he had
wanted to achieve that stalemate, the result was as he had planned. Now to
handle this development.
He arranged his features to a mask of shock and hurt as he said, “You think
I’ve been… I can’t believe we’re even having this conversation. How could you
think I’d hurt my daughter that way? I’ve done everything I can to try to make
life better for her. I love her!”
“I know!” Henrik spat. “I know that! I also know she has some pretty fucking
fresh needle marks in her arms and neck and half the time her pupils are the
size of fucking dinner plates! I know what those drugs can do to someone and
it’s matching up with what I’ve seen in her.” He brought his hand over his
leaky eyes, his mouth drawn in a grimace as he seemed to be crying. Leif
watched, fascinated at this emotional display and impressive disclosure of both
betrayal and sympathy. “I just… I need to hear it from you. I need to know why,
why you would do this. Leif, you can’t lie your way out of this. Tell me.
Please.”
Leif considered the knife on the cutting board in front of him impulsively, but
eschewed the need for such a drastic measure yet. This was far too interesting
to cut so abruptly. He looked at his brother as he worked up the correct
emotional response to such accusations, which not an easy task without
reference. The risk was exhilarating.
He relaxed his defensive posture and spread his stance a little wider, opening
his body language and lowering his voice as he calmly spoke, “Simone was such a
bright and motivated young girl. She was always trying so hard to get ahead. It
was almost like she knew, you know… like she knew it would happen and she
wanted to do as much as possible before that. When she started to slip, we took
her to several specialists. Since my work was flexible, I was the one who took
her to every appointment. I learned a lot. A lot of different ways a mind can
break. After months of scans and tests, trials and observations, and through it
all she just got worse.”
He licked his sharp incisor, the pointed end scraping over his tongue with a
minor pain that helped distract him from gloating. He noticed the quiet horror
on his brother’s tense face and decided to steer away from the familial
approach and redirect his attention to his medical professional side. “One
doctor would say it was this, one psychiatrist would say it was that, but no
one really knew. They couldn’t take care of her… so I did. Those drugs I’ve
been administering to Simone help prevent her mania from taking over. There are
moments where I need a more powerful sedative than diazepam to keep her from
hurting herself, but doctors won’t prescribe them for home use. I’m not going
to let her go neglected in some state-run ward or go into debt to have a
private facility do what I can do for her.”
At first, Henrik did not respond. Then, with an anger that reassured Leif, he
said, “Do you know how fucking stupid that is? Do you know what these drugs can
do to her? You’ve probably done irreparable damage! If you didn’t think the
specialists you were going to were any good, then get referrals! Find someone
that fits! You can’t play doctor, especially with someone else’s life!”
“I’m not experimenting on her, this is all scientifically proven and she’s much
more functional than she was,” Leif retorted. This was going very well. If he
could continue directing this into an argument about how to care for his
daughter instead of a confrontation of what he’d been doing, then he might not
need to even threaten him. Playing dumb was cheap and usually transparent, but
playing just dumb enough was proving fruitful.
“You’re excessively controlling. I’m serious, this has to stop. It’s too
dangerous,” Henrik pressed. “Not just for her, but what’ll happen when they
find these drugs in her system? I’m not too familiar with the laws in this
country, but as her caregiver, you’re legally on the line for what’s in her
body.”
Leif had to stop himself from laughing at the crude joke his brother had
unwittingly made. The man really had no idea how right he was. A rape kit was
enough to put in him jail for a minimum of five years in New York, but Vermont
was much more lenient. All things considered, incest was towards the bottom of
his list of possible charges, but he would never allow himself to get pulled
into the court system.
He levelled a firm but unheated stare at Henrik as he said, “I’m not going to
stop. You’re not going to report me. I’ve been there for her when she had no
one and I’ve brought her back from the brink more times than anyone knows. With
all due respect to your professional advice, I’m managing her illness just
fine.”
“This isn’t your responsibility to assume. You have no idea what you’re doing
to her in the long run.”
“I know better than the psychiatrist who recommended shock therapy and my
method is certainly more effective than the specialist who only wanted to cut
gluten out of her diet,” Leif was getting irritated. He had gotten accustomed
to no longer being questioned since pushing Simone’s mother out of her role. He
had to end this topic quickly. “Believe me, I’ve tried to work with them all. I
know my child. I know what she needs.”
“She needs a professional!” Henrik yelled, stamping a pointed finger on the
countertop to emphasis each word.
“She’s been fine without them meddling around in her head!” Leif’s tone was
dipping down into his actual voice. He was aware of his mask slipping, but it
even more than that, he was aware of the temptation to let it slip. The knife
was right there in lovely Damascus-patterned steel, shining brightly enough to
illuminate how unmoored he was becoming. It should have been more disconcerting
than it was.
“Do you honestly believe you’re qualified to be the one meddling around in her
head, then? You’re so arrogant, it’s ridiculous! She needs-”
“I’m what she needs!” Leif snapped. “She doesn’t need anyone else, understand?
She belongs to me!”
It took him less than a second to realize what he’d said and when it hit, he
inwardly recoiled. Henrik stared at him, eyes wide and face frozen in
astonishment as those words rang in the silence between them, and Leif knew he
reflected that same shock. He hadn’t meant to say that. He’d meant to guide him
away from that trail, lead him toward less volatile conclusions. Henrik had
gotten a reaction out of him. Leif was not supposed to react; he was supposed
to orchestrate. It must be the fatigue.
“I’m sorry for snapping,” Leif said, smiling as he looked down at the roasting
pan. He picked up the thin yellow discs of potatoes and resumed the arrangement
as his mind whirled in what he could not admit to himself was panic. “Let’s
talk about this another time.”
“Sure, Leif. Sure,” Henrik said softly, nodding his head as he withdrew his
hands from the countertop.
“Is Anders feeling any better?”
“He’s, um, sleeping it off. I’d better go check on him, actually.”
“Of course. Supper is in three hours. I hope he’ll feel up to joining us,” Leif
smiled.
Henrik nodded, his blue eyes lingering on Leif warily before he turned and left
the kitchen. Leif picked up the knife and began those thin, precise cuts into
four cloves of garlic on the board, his steady hands not wavering as he
wondered how much longer he could let them teeter on the edge of the truth. He
could plainly see that he had not succeeded in dissuading his brother from
suspecting that he’d been poisoning Simone, as he’d put it. He had done quite
well in reinforcing that impression, in fact. It was odd to feel himself
slipping. He had expected to rail against it, to be violently seized by the
need to maintain control, but there was an inexplicable absence of that past
the reflexive anxiety in acknowledging a mistake. As he inserted sprigs of
thyme, rosemary, and slivered garlic into the pockets he’d speared into the
meat, he contemplated what harm there really was in letting his ownership of
Simone become known. It was unconventional, but if he smudged certain details,
there was really nothing they could do to deter him. Keeping up this friendly
family man act in a time when he was finally able to be open with his Simone
about their true relationship was proving too restrictive, like a too-small
suit coming apart at the seams. Perhaps it was time to create a new image for
himself, one that better reflects yet obfuscates this new era for him and his
darling girl.
 
 
Simone watched as Henrik trudged from the kitchen back towards the stairs, her
crouched position from the shaded dining room allowing her to go unnoticed as
she observed his wide and muscular frame deflate with melancholy once out of
view of her father. Revisiting this childhood habit of observing from a hidden
space brought good and safe memories of laying under her bed for hours or
reading books with a flashlight in the attic crawl space while her mother
stomped around calling for her. But the darkened spaces in this cavernous old
house were not as safe. Even alone in the empty dining room with all the
opulent curtains drawn, she felt seen. Movement at the kitchen doorway caught
her eye and she watched as her father’s shadow emerged from the door, the knife
held in his fist like a pointed extension of his arm. He straddled the doorway
as he stared down the hall, that knife hand pointing the direction of his gaze
toward the staircase, and she could see the same murderous intent emanating
from him as when he stood over Anders’ unconscious body. A cold chill ran down
her spine, but she forced herself to act. She had to remain vigilant.
“Papa,” she spoke, her voice small and thin but carrying through the silence
like a bell.
He turned to her, his wide mouth already pulled into a smile. “What are you
doing down here? You should be resting.”
She stood from her hiding spot behind a tall potted plant and smoothed her pale
gauzy nightgown as she stepped into the hallway. Her hair was finally brushed
of the nest of snarls it had been and she’d braided it in one long plait down
her back, not wanting to risk having it tangled so much again with the trend of
activity as of late. All in all, she felt like she looked ready to pose for
some chintzy Christmas card involving feathers and brass halos, but it worked
to endear Leif to her as his smile widened into something that reached his eyes
as he looked at her. Look at me, don’t look at them.
“I can’t sleep,” she said softly, padding her way toward him on stockinged
feet. “Would you mind if I helped you with dinner?”
She resisted flinching as his hand gently touched the same cheek he’d slapped a
few hours earlier, the scents of herbs and garlic strong on his fingers. “You
really should be resting, darling girl. You’ve had quite a busy day and I want
you bright-eyed and bushy-tailed for the memorial service tomorrow. Perhaps you
need a sedative?”
She reached up and caressed his hand, nuzzling against it and inhaling the
fresh rosemary and thyme before grinning up at him and tucking the side of his
index finger between her teeth. She made a show of growling and giving a little
shake with her gentle bite, wrinkling her nose to add to the pantomime of a dog
shaking a dead thing apart in its jaws. When he huffed out a brief chuckle, his
eyes crinkling with the laugh, she felt an old familiar happiness spring in
her. It was always a victory to get a laugh out of either of her serious
parents, but more importantly, it was one of her key tactics of distracting
them from their anger.
“You’re tasty, Dad,” she grinned, her words muffled around the flesh between
her lips.
 She ran her tongue up the appendage, observing how his eyes watched her mouth
with curiosity and amusement. She had never tried distracting her parents with
sex in the past, of course, but the steadfast and predatory leer in his gaze
told her that it might be more effective than humor. Tentatively, she encircled
the tip of his finger between her puckered lips, keeping her eyes locked on his
face in a bravado she certainly did not feel with her knees shaking under her
nightgown. That amusement in his gaze turned to heated interest as she slowly
slid his finger into her mouth, the trimmed stub of his nail hard against soft
flesh as it scraped the back of her throat when she reached his third knuckle.
Then, just as slowly, she pressed her tongue to his finger as she slid it out,
releasing the tip with an audible pop from the suction she’d applied. Her
cheeks were burning in a fierce blush and her mouth salivated at both the taste
of herbs and the texture of skin. With a guilty twinge, she acknowledged that
she didn’t just want to distract him from his violent impulse. That constant
need to please him thrilled at the opportunity, even after the horror he’d put
her through that day. The notion that she would never be free of him rippled
with a terrible truth in her.
“Can I help you in the kitchen, Daddy?” she whispered, her voice pathetically
small and tight despite the brave front she tried to simulate.
He didn’t answer, making her nervous as he instead rubbed his wet fingertip
over her full lips, pressing the plump flesh back to show her teeth while he
watched with that same heated fascination. The knife in his other hand moved
and she tried not to let her apprehension show, failing in that when she winced
and gasped as the cold steel ghosted over her chest. The hand at her mouth
gripped her chin, holding her from looking down when she felt the blade tugging
at her front accompanied by a ripping sound. Flashbacks to her vision of him
tearing her torso open played vividly in the theater of her mind, fueling the
fear that made her shut her eyes and whimper as that knife tore downward. The
phantom feeling of hot blood pouring down her belly fed her terror, but no pain
came along with that tugging. He didn’t release his hold on her jaw as he
walked them into the kitchen, shutting the door behind them as she stumbled to
match his wider stride without being able to quite see where they stepped. He
slammed her against the door, stars swimming in her vision when the back of her
head hit the solid oak, and then her knees buckled easily as he pushed her
down. Before she could recover, she heard him fumbling with his clothes and
then felt something warm and smooth press against her cheek. Startled, her eyes
finally snapped open to see him looming over her, that dangerous stern mask
over his features as he looked down at her and held his erection to her face.
He didn’t give her a chance to react, grabbing her hair by the roots and
yanking her up. When her mouth fell open in a pained cry, she felt him shove
the tip of his cock between her parted lips and she fought the impulse to pull
away, her instinct to submit to this violent male overtaking any resistance.
“Good girl,” his deep voice rumbled when she opened wider.
The slide of his cock gliding over her tongue and crowding into her throat
nearly had her gag at the suddenness of it and she struggled to control her
panicked breaths through her nostrils. She forced herself to relax, to allow
him into her throat, but she wasn’t ready and choked around the intrusion as he
drove deeper. Spit dribbled down her chin as she sputtered and coughed when he
pulled out and then her throat constricted around him again as he shoved back
in. Her head quickly began to swim from oxygen deprivation, darkness closing in
at the edges of her vision each time he blocked her airway and retreated with
each spastic breath she managed between coughs as he slid out. It took several
turns before she could get her coughing reaction somewhat under control, but
his pace remained unaffected by her struggle as he fucked her mouth and throat
against the door. Her face was wet with tears and saliva and her throat already
sore from trying to accommodate his girth. To prevent her head from being
knocked back with his thrusts, she held it pressed against the door and just
remained still as he took his pleasure. From the sounds of his low, guttural
grunting above her, he seemed to be taking plenty. The chill of a draft brushed
over her breasts and she realized that he had cut a deep tear down the center
of her nightgown from her collar to the end of her sternum.
“Look at me,” he whispered and she obeyed.
He stared down at her, his mouth slightly parted from panting and his gaze
burning with an intensity she could see even through tear-blurred eyes. Beyond
her terror and violation, she wondered why he chose to have her this way. She
was obviously willing and wanting, but he’d assaulted her to make her afraid
and turned this into a forced encounter. As his cock throbbed with each whimper
she managed to make when it wasn’t jammed into her throat, she tried to
understand his hunger for her fear. She couldn’t, but she understood her own
body’s shameful reaction to his dominance. It made her sick with how wet she
got from any of this, but the damp heat sopping her pantyliner wasn’t just the
slow trickle of blood from her injury. It had to be her madness or some
desperate measure to hold onto any semblance of control, but there was
something fulfilling in the pain, something almost comforting in how thoroughly
he took that control from her. No. She couldn’t let herself enjoy being his,
especially not when she had others to protect from his violence.
“Helvete, Simone…” he muttered. Those fingers tugging at her hair loosened and
caressed down her cheek as he held her gaze and fucked her mouth slower. “Such
a talented little mouth.”
She blushed at the praise, then at her shame with the rush of arousal that came
with it. This was hopeless. His thrusts began to knock into her throat with a
bruising brutality, making her pitiable grunts raise into muffled cries broken
up by the plug of his swelling tip. She broke their stare, the pain
overwhelming her obedience, and she began to sob in earnest. This was enough to
push him over the edge as he abruptly pulled out of her mouth and grasped her
hair to hold her head back as she hacked and coughed. She heard him stroking
himself rapidly as his hot semen shot across her bared chest, dribbling down
her breasts in thick trails. The humiliation was secondary to her relief that
the assault on her sore throat was over. Covered in sweat, saliva, semen,
tears, and with her own arousal leaking onto her thighs, she felt filthy both
mentally and physically. She allowed herself one shivering sob before biting
her lip against that urge to weep.
“Always such a little trooper,” Leif said warmly, his fingers disentangling
from her hair with an affectionate rub and allowing her head to fall forward.
“Thank you for helping me in the kitchen, darling. Now wash up and go tell your
uncles that I expect them all down for supper at seven sharp.”
“They-” she rasped, then pressed her hands to her neck and mouth as a coughing
fit overtook her.
Her throat was raw and uncooperative, sorer than after the first time he’d
fucked it. At least, more than the first time she’d been aware that he’d fucked
it. Suddenly every sore throat she’d experienced in her life made her wonder
with an awful feeling. She didn’t want to know. He knelt next to her, one hand
supportively cupping her shoulder and the other gently patting her back, and
she nearly recoiled reflexively at his touch.
“Save your words for your uncles, dearest,” he whispered softly.  
She wanted to tell him to leave them out of whatever was happening and just let
it be between the two of them, but she couldn’t speak. Perhaps that was his
goal all along; another joke to play at her expense. She laughed, a queer sound
that bubbled up from her without her bidding and tore through her throat
painfully. That she couldn’t even laugh at his joke without agony was even more
hilarious. She coughed, choking around her laughter as it poured out of her
only to jam at her throat. This was far funnier than any of the clever little
observations and quips he’d made with his stuffy friends from work or the
amusing charm he’d put on to impress guests.
“Don’t cry so hard, sweetheart, the worst is over now,” he soothed, his
reassuring and fatherly tone so filthy to hear while his come was cooling on
her bared tits.
Though tears ran down her cheeks and her face was scrunched in pain as her body
trembled, she wasn’t crying. She wished she could tell him she wasn’t crying.
She was laughing; it really was all so very funny and the worst was far, far
from over. She couldn’t tell him that though, so she just shook and coughed
while he mimicked fatherhood in the gentle pats on her back.
 
 
“I think we should do it tonight,” Vidar said, careful to keep his voice low.
Henrik looked at him doubtfully, his heavy brow casting a shadow over his eyes
and furrowing to deepen the weathered lines along his forehead as he said,
“With what proof? We don’t even know if she’s willing to go along with this.”
“You weren’t there when he hit her. He did it without even hesitating, and you
heard her hollering down there when he… you know,” Vidar frowned. “She’d be
crazy not to want to get away from him!”
“Well, she is crazy, you prick. And women defend their abusers all the time,
you should know that.”
“Adult women will lie to protect their abusive shithead husbands and
boyfriends, not their weirdo fathers. It’s a totally different dynamic.”
They were interrupted by an abrupt bark of laughter from Anders and they both
turned to see him unexpectedly awake on the bed. He held one hand over his eyes
as his mouth was pulled into a mournful grin, something halfway between
laughter and weeping that was entirely distress.
Henrik crouched by his side, his medical bag open and ready as he said,
“Anders, how are you feeling? You’ve been weaving in and out of consciousness
for hours, brother. Can you tell me what you took?”
“A needle full of nightmares,” he murmured, his voice raspy.
“Okaaay…” Henrik frowned, looking back at Vidar with an incredulous shrug. “How
about you drink some water and try to sit up?”
Without waiting for an answer, Henrik pulled him up with one hand while the
other accepted the water bottle Vidar passed him. Anders’ head felt no better
than it had before, but his thoughts were clearer. Whether that was any better
or not was undecided as the horrible highlights of the day replayed on a
constant loop in his mind. He shooed away Henrik’s fussing hands when the man
tried to tip the bottle into his mouth and he took it from him as he sat up
with a groan. That feeling of having been hit by a truck was still very present
in every inch of his body despite the bouts of unconsciousness that had pulled
him unwillingly in and out of naps for what had felt like days. To find that it
was just hours was not quite believable to him yet.
“Where is she?” he slurred, shutting his eyes against the brightness that
leaked through the curtains.
“Are you going to go running around like a maniac and chop down a wall again if
we don’t tell you?” Vidar asked flatly.
Anders glared at him. “Where is she?”
“She’s fine,” Henrik said, frowning at both men. “She stopped by a couple hours
ago. She’s probably in her room or something.”
“You went into their room earlier and then came running back here and freaked
out until you fainted,” Vidar said dryly. He leaned forward in his chair and
looked levelly at Anders. “You wouldn’t tell us shit about what happened in
there, or any other time you’ve been with her. Do you think you could clear
that up now?”
Anders could feel his blood pressure rising just at the implication in his
brother’s tone. He was very aware of the bloodstain under the blanket, right
next to his knee. “I just… had to make sure she was okay.”
“How long did you know he was administering her hallucinogens and barbiturates?
Why didn’t you tell us sooner?” Henrik whispered.
While grateful for the topic change, Anders wondered if he heard him correctly.
“What?”
“That pack of drugs in his duffel bag,” Vidar reminded him. When Anders stared
at him blankly, he huffed in frustration. “You showed it to us, remember? It
was chock full of crazy shit. Come on, why didn’t you say anything sooner?”
Anders blinked and rubbed his aching head. “I didn’t… I don’t really remember
that clearly. I just found it and thought it was weird, I think.”
A heavy silence fell over them, broken by Henrik’s harsh whisper, “Are you
fucking telling me that you didn’t know Leif’s been drugging her to make her
insane? You found that on accident?! You have got to be fucking kidding me.”
Anders could hear the words spoken to him and understand them on a surface
level, but there was something odd about them. It took him several tries to
piece them together in a way that made sense, like how he had to take a moment
to translate English before understanding. He didn’t know… that Leif had been
drugging Simone… to make her insane. His mouth felt very dry and his hands felt
numb. He didn’t know, but now he knew. Leif, his biggest brother, had been
drugging Simone, his… something. He could ponder his hesitance in defining what
she was to him later. He ran the sentence through his mind again. Leif had been
drugging Simone to make her insane. There was a painful twinge in his brain
followed by a profoundly deep rage as it began to make sense to him. With his
own too-recent experience in feeling out of control of his own mind and body
from whatever Leif had dosed him with, he understood with a terrible complexity
just how grievous of a violation he’d enacted on his own daughter. He also knew
why. It was so easy for Leif to make him do what he wanted. Leif had staged the
entire rape. Leif had fucked his own daughter and then turned him on her for
fun. His nails dug into his palms, the pain going unnoticed as he struggled
with the fury and outrage burning his mind. That terrible lack of control was
something she had to live with for God knows how long while Leif could do every
awful thing he’d wanted to her.
“Wait, wait, if you didn’t know that…” Vidar frowned. “… then why were you so
god damned insistent on getting her away from him?”
“He’s doing whatever he wants with her,” Anders said, more to himself than to
his brother. His voice was clear and calm, carefully measured to prevent
himself from screaming. “He’s getting away with it because she’s too fucked up
to even think to resist him… and no one would believe her anyway because she’s
insane. It’s sick. It’s so sick. But he’s not going to get away with it
anymore.”
“Anders… what exactly are you talking about?” Henrik whispered haltingly.
All three men jumped at the sound of knocking at the door. Vidar glanced at
them with a warning look before rising from his chair and cracking open the
door. Anders couldn’t see who it was, but the downward cast of his brother’s
eyes told him it was Simone’s short countenance.
“Simone?” Anders called, keeping his voice just loud enough to be heard. Vidar
waved for him to stop, but he ignored him and gathered his best English,
“Simone, welcome in.”
Vidar sighed in irritation, but stepped aside and opened the door wider for
her. As she hesitantly stepped inside the crowded room, Anders wished he could
say he didn’t feel anything but repentant shame and righteous protection for
the girl. Those urges were both present, but as he looked at her walking
towards him in that short black dress with her hair pulled up and away from her
sweet face, he felt those feelings he had no right to have again. It was easier
to be contrite and promise to atone for his sins when she wasn’t around to make
his heart race and his palms sweat. When she looked at him with that sorrowful
and pained expression, he saw none of the blame and fear he’d deserved. Her
bare feet stopped just a few centimeters from the bed, close enough to bring
her scent to him. That earthy and slightly sweet scent brought that urge to
touch and taste to the forefront of his thoughts, startling him that the urge
was this strong even in this circumstance. Even more startling, however, was
how she climbed onto the bed and began to move over him.
“Uh… hm… w-wait, ah,” he stammered, scooting away from her but she was already
in his lap and wrapping her arms around his shoulders.
His eyes darted to his brothers nervously, seeing them watching this happen
with alarm rivaling his own. Despite all this, her softness and warmth were too
good to resist returning her embrace and he carefully made sure to accomplish
this as non-sexually as possible. He had to try not to look too nervous or too
relaxed, not too excited or too eager, and certainly not at all aroused. He was
very aware of how disgusting he was to want her even with the news of her
unspeakable abuse still fresh in his mind, but by now he wasn’t surprised at
his savagery. If anything, it only made him want to claim her more. His hands
paused in their comforting and familial pats on her back, a private horror at
his own thoughts seizing his attention. She wasn’t a thing to claim.
“It’s time to eat,” she whispered, her voice raspy and thin, nearly inaudible
if her lips weren’t so tantalizingly close to his ear. His hands unconsciously
pulled her closer to him as they slid down to her lower back. She felt so good,
so right, but he needed her closer.
“What did she tell you?” Henrik asked.
Anders snapped out of his daze and scrambled to process the question. “Oh! Uh,
she said there’s something to eat, I think?”
“I guess our time here is up, then,” Vidar said, then whispered in a voice
dripping with sarcasm, “Would you like us to shut the door on our way out so
you can have some special snuggle time with your niece in privacy?”
“Vid, would you like to shut the fuck up?” Henrik glared. He turned to Anders
with an apologetic expression. “We’re all expected to show up for supper in the
dining room. This is going to be an awkward meal, but I think we should try to
talk this all out together.”
“What? What do you mean, ‘talk this out together’?” Anders frowned. He couldn’t
imagine having to sit down across from the man responsible for all of this. His
arms tightened around Simone. “There’s nothing to discuss. You said it
yourself, the man has been drugging his own daughter.”
“Anders,” Henrik grumbled exasperatedly. “It’s not that simple.”
“Fuck you, it couldn’t be simpler!”
“I agree with Anders, for once,” Vidar interrupted.
Henrik scowled at them, then said, “Listen, we’re going to have a civil
discussion with our brother and make him see that what he’s been doing is
harmful. We’re going to sit down, like the adults we are, and have an
intervention with our obviously misguided sibling. We’re going to work on a
solution together as a family. This isn’t some psychotic maniac, this is Leif!”
“I’m not going to let anyone hurt Simone just to maintain politeness,” Anders
nearly growled. She stirred in his lap, bringing his attention to how tightly
he’d been holding her and he relaxed with a self-conscious glance to his
brothers.
She leaned up, pressing her body close to his as her lips nearly brushed his
neck when she whispered, “Please. Don’t do anything to anger him. Don’t give
him a reason.”
“What in the hell is she telling you?” Vidar sneered.
Anders ignored him, too focused on the way her back arched under his hand and
the movement of her chest against him as she breathed. He was aware of the
incriminating blush that warmed its way up his neck as her strange foreign
words caressed his ear, sending a chill through him that tickled down his
spine.
“Please, Anders, don’t do anything stupid. I can’t protect you from him. I
can’t even protect myself, so please, please…”
He understood maybe half the words she used, but making sense of them was an
afterthought with how she embraced him and begged… something from him. Just
hearing how she pleaded filled him with memories of the way she’d pressed
herself to him that morning in the shower, her body writhing eagerly against
him and her sweet voice high with need. It felt like days had passed since he’d
last touched her and holding her now both slaked and incited that need for
contact with her.
“… Please, don’t worry about me and just lay low. It’s too late for me, but you
don’t have to get dragged into this any further. I don’t think I could take it
if anything happened to you. Oh god, this is all so fucked up, but I love you,
I love you and I need you, so please…”
Her whispers became breathy and desperate and he began to panic as he felt
himself harden despite their audience. This was not good. He tried to focus on
translating and deciphering what she’d said, but the phrases “I love you” and
“I need you” echoed too loudly for him to understand much past that. He bit his
lip, trying to stave off those very unchaste thoughts. If only she didn’t feel
so delightful on his lap, if only she didn’t cling to him so closely, if only
she didn’t smell like something he wanted to take home and keep all to himself,
he might be able to think.
“Please, don’t die.”
***** Chapter 25 *****
The sun was well hidden behind the maples and oaks surrounding the house,
blanketing the grounds in shadow as it began to set. What light there was
coming into the dining room was pale and dim, so Leif chose to brighten the
room by lighting a candelabra, which had not seen flame in perhaps half a
decade since Einar’s decline in health had ceased his once elaborate dinner
parties. The gold-rimmed china and silver flatware gleamed in the candlelight.
The limited illumination did not extend much past the end of the table where
five places were set, giving the illusion of cozy intimacy on a table designed
to comfortably seat twenty. Leif took the liberty of pouring a Bordeaux at each
setting, the red as deep as blood suspended in the wide bowls above the slender
stems of the wine glasses. In a large deep tray under a silver dome that
reflected the room in a distorted and curving image hid the sacrificial lamb,
standing to seal in its juices as it awaited the serrated edge of the carving
knife placed next to it on a cream damask napkin. A simple family meal of one
main dish and three sides, with a singular course and no overelaborate
distractions, a nod to the late patriarch’s preference. Leif smiled in
satisfaction at the elegant arrangement. The stage was set, the props were in
place, and all that was needed now were the actors and audience. Having sent
his Simone to fetch the others, Leif was seated at the head of the table in
waiting when he heard their shuffling arrival.
Henrik’s muscular bulk was the first to enter through the ornately molded
archway, his face sporting a smile that was nearly sincere as he regarded the
table. “Wow, Leif, this is just like Sunday supper with Pappa!”
“We all dreaded those long, stuffy suppers,” Leif remarked amicably. He smiled
at Simone as she came around from behind the hulking Henrik, extending his hand
to his girl. “Come sit with me a moment, darling.”
She bit her lip in that endearing nervous habit of hers but did well to quickly
obey, the sleek little black dress he’d picked out for her clinging to her
curves and lightening her creamy skin appealingly as he looked her up and down
for any bruises she may not have hid. He placed his hands on her hips when she
stepped within range, pulling her close and sliding down to the hem of her
dress before slowly fondling the sides of her thighs under the material.
Nothing expressly sexual, but certainly not familial either. Her increasingly
nervous glances in Henrik’s direction encouraged Leif to torment her more
boldly. He leaned back in his chair and patted his knee, pulling her close when
she obeyed to sit in his lap. None of this was unprecedented behavior for them
in front of his brothers, not yet. His smile curled into a sneer when he
detected Anders’ scent on her, an unfortunate harm of having sent her to his
room. On impulse, he nuzzled her neck to mask some of that invasive scent with
his aftershave, taking an unexpected delight in how she gasped softly at this
unintended affection. Out of view from their onlooker, his hand squeezed the
top of her ass, pressing her dress into the cleft with his finger and drawing
out a flustered huff from her. It had only been a couple hours since he’d
fucked her throat, but he found himself hardening again like a hormonal
adolescent.
“Uh… so, um… they should be down soon, but I wanted to ask you something before
they get here,” Henrik said quietly, taking a seat to Leif’s right and exuding
nervousness.
Leif sawed his finger into the cloth-covered cleft of his daughter’s ass as he
looked at Henrik and said, “Surely, anything you have to say could be said in
their presence. I think it’s time we stop harboring so many secrets in this
family, don’t you?”
Henrik smiled, a small genuine smile of relief. “I’m glad you think so. But,
they’re a little, um… upset. I just want to ask you to be patient with them,
you know, don’t let them get to you. We’ll work this all out as a family,
right?”
“Of course,” Leif nodded. Both men looked at Simone when she flinched and
stifled a yelp as Leif worked his hand under her and pressed at her asshole. He
let his mouth pull into a sly grin at how entertainingly sensitive his girl
was. “Oh, darling, are you feeling alright?”
She started to say something, but quickly ducked her face away to cough into
her elbow before she could manage to croak out a single word. He rubbed against
her hole more gently, holding her squirming body closer to him in the guise of
concern as she tried to get her silent coughing under control. The desperate
little breaths she managed to take between the shaking fits were laced with the
high grunts of stifled moans, indiscernible from either pleasure or pain, and
he wanted to slide his other hand over her cunt just to see if this stimulation
was getting her wet.
“That seems like an awful sore throat. May I take a look at her?” Henrik
offered, forehead wrinkled in practiced professional concern as he rose from
his seat.
Leif turned to him and slid his hand out from under her. “No, you may not.”
She ceased her shaking and coughing, panting heavily to recover her breath
while the two men stared at one another. There was nothing in Leif’s tone that
threatened or betrayed any ill will with his refusal, but Henrik seemed
disturbed at his response.
“I should at least determine if it’s an infection,” Henrik persisted.
“It’s not.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do.”
Henrik scowled and let out an aggravated sigh, but sank down in his seat. Leif
stroked Simone’s thigh as he turned her toward him again, leaning her against
his chest and kissing the top of her head affectionately. She relaxed into him
when it became clear he wasn’t going to do anything more than that, her cheek
resting heavily on the ridge of his collarbone. There was a fatigue in how she
melted against him that he could relate to, but he could not yet allow himself
to reflect.
“Just a bit longer, darling girl,” he whispered into her hair, one hand still
slowly stroking her thigh as his other arm was slung tightly around her waist.
She did not stir or react except to snuggle into him further in the simple
pursuit of rest, almost as though he had sedated her. Encountering the markers
of natural exhaustion in his girl held a novel appeal, but he much preferred
the utter oblivion of induced sleep for the purposes of his interests. He
grinned in private amusement at how he still thought in those terms out of pure
habit; he’d never need to hide their love from her ever again. That freedom was
still so fresh and exhilarating. He chuckled and kissed the top of her head
again, ignoring how Henrik openly stared in curiosity at his seemingly
unprovoked good cheer. Not even the entrance of their other two brothers could
dampen his mood in the slightest. In fact, the baleful glint in Anders’ glare
did well to remind him of all that was so worth protecting in his life.
“Anders, you’ve recovered nicely,” he smiled.
“Did you drug her?Recently, I mean. I really have to clarify that question,
don’t I?” Anders asked.
“Not recently, no,” Leif answered amicably, then looked at him as he
said,“She’s just had a rough day. Really rough. You know that, though.”
Anders paused in his approach towards the table, his eyes widening slightly as
though he were surprised at his own rage. Leif watched, amused at the range of
emotion the younger man could display in his features, and wondered—as he often
did— at how difficult life must be to broadcast every thought so plainly.
Anders took a few heavy steps toward him and Leif brightened with the
expectation of violence, but they were interrupted by Henrik’s booming voice.
“Hey, hey, hey! Civil discussion, remember?” Henrik warned, pointing a stern
finger at their youngest brother.
Leif had vague memories of their mother using that gesture on them, but the
memories of any time before moving to the US was very muddled. Either way,
Anders chose to sit down at the table and Simone seemed to have snapped to
attention at the scolding. He tapped his daughter’s flank to signal her to get
up and she sluggishly rose from his lap, her movements indeed as slow and
arthritic as if he’d really drugged her. As Vidar had taken his usual spot next
to Henrik, this left only the seat between Leif and Anders open for Simone.
Anders’ stare moved to her, softening from cold anger to a grave uneasiness as
she shuffled sleepily to curl up in the chair to his left.
Leif took a moment to observe his brothers before beginning. They were all fine
specimens of Scandinavian men, all sturdy and tall like their father, each of
them possessing the blond-haired, blue-eyed, strong-jawed and sharp-cheeked
aesthetic that had afforded them privileges in life they most likely never
cared to notice were not doled out to their less attractive peers. They each
lived their own lives, lacking obligation to any wives or children, as they
pursued their interests and careers without any greater purpose than to
themselves. It struck Leif as somewhat ironic that he, the one who had suffered
an upbringing at the violent hands of their father, was the one who had chosen
the family track while they, having been spared of that by being thousands of
kilometers away on their mother’s ranch in the northern mountainside, had thus
far eschewed it. Well, aside from Anders by recent accident, but that barely
even counted as a technicality. They were, as far as he could tell, complete
wastes of potential. He rose from his seat and picked up the carving knife, the
lovely patterned steel a good weight in his hand as he lifted the cover off the
lamb.
“So, no point in beating around the bush, as they say around here,” he began
cordially, spearing the meat with a long-tonged fork and driving the blade
through it with practiced efficiency. Cooked meat was far easier to work with
than raw flesh that had already been set in with rigor mortis. “Shall we
discuss how Anders had attempted to murder me first or shall we lead with the
objections to how I manage my daughter’s illness?”
A tense silence followed before Anders bitterly proposed, “How about we discuss
what is going to happen to Simone when she’s taken away from you?”
“That’s simple,” Leif answered, serving his youngest brother the first slice
and smiling in his face as he deposited the meat on his plate. “It won’t
happen.”
“I think beating her is good enough grounds to have your caretaker status
stripped,” Vidar said. He gestured vaguely with his wineglass, the contents of
which were half gone already. “I mean, not to mention regularly drugging her
with illegally obtained substances. That seems like aroyally fucked up thing to
do to your kid, if you want my opinion.”
Leif plopped down the second slice on Vidar’s plate, maintaining his genial
tone as he asked, “How would the authorities ever find out about any of that?”
“Leif…” Henrik frowned. “You’re not even denying it. Come on, how could you
expect us not to do anything?”
“I expect you to do nothing. If you do, you would be damning your poor niece to
a worse fate than I could ever construct for her,” Leif answered as he gently
slid a thick slab of lamb onto Henrik’s plate. He glanced up from his work and
regarded him with a sincere, “Thank you for your politeness, Henrik. That lack
of antagonism is refreshing to encounter.”
“You don’t deserve it,” Anders seethed. “I don’t see how things could possibly
be worse for Simone. We should have already called the police.”
“Do you know what a hospital for the criminally insane is like in the United
States?” Leif asked as he placed a sliver of meat on his daughter’s plate. He
did not wait for an answer. “They keep them tied up in tiny rooms with no
social contact, or they let them wander amongst themselves. She’ll either waste
away in a box or the inmates will use her for sex, trade her around like
currency, knock out her teeth when she attempts to defend herself, all very
common occurrences.”
“She wouldn’t end up in a place like that,” Henrik argued. “She’s not a
criminal.”
“I’m afraid she would,” Leif admitted regretfully, dishing himself a bloody
center cut of the roast. “You see, my role isn’t limited to father or
caregiver; I’m also her warden. If anything should happen where I could no
longer prevent her from acting on her violent inspirations, it would only be
responsible of me to divulge certain events that prove her to be too dangerous
to live among society. Gentlemen, you may help yourselves to the side dishes,
if you please.”
“What the fuck are you saying? Simone’s like forty kilos, how could she be a
danger to anyone?” Vidar scoffed as he reached for the tureen of wilted greens.
“Believe me, I was surprised myself the first time it happened,” Leif said. He
smiled warmly at how her fear warred with her fatigue before he took a bite of
the meat. She had that trapped animal look he found so charming, almost as
though she could sense what was coming. “She’s capable of such… exquisite
violence.”
“So your angle is, what? Blackmailing her and us with supposed proof that would
get both of you arrested?” Vidar asked flatly. “The lamb is excellent, by the
way. Any other reasons why we shouldn’t make it your last meal in freedom?”
“Like I said before, it won’t happen,” Leif answered.
“Don’t be so fucking sure. You’re going to have to do better than that flimsy
defense,” Vidar sneered, a slight slur in his words.
Leif ignored his brother’s rudeness and turned to his daughter, placing his
hand on hers dotingly as he asked, “Are you unable to swallow solid food,
darling? You should at least drink your wine. It’ll make you feel better.”
“Yes, Papa,” she whispered, her bruised throat making the words almost
inaudible as they rasped out of her.
He smiled at her when she tipped the glass to her lips, watching how she
pressed her fingers gingerly to her throat and winced as she swallowed. He
glanced at the other wineglasses on the table, seeing that they’d all been
drunken from except for his, and then caught Anders’ eye as he stared at him
with a paleness to his complexion and a telling stiffness in his face.
“Ah, I believe Anders might have a thought in his head for once,” Leif grinned.
“Care to share it, little brother?”
At first, Anders only opened his mouth and then closed it, drawing the
attention of the table as he seemed unable to form the words, then uttered,
“What did you make her do?”
Leif took his time chewing the bloody meat, savoring the naturally gamey taste
of the flesh mingling with the herbs and honeyed glaze, before casually
answering, “I did nothing. She simply has a habit of murdering those who
threaten the lives of her or of her beloved.”
“Murder?!” Henrik exclaimed.
Leif glanced at Anders, seeing him staring blankly into his plate, then at
Vidar who seemed curiously unaffected by this news. “Do you really find that so
unbelievable, Vid?”
Vidar sat up straighter in his seat, or at least tried to when his hand slipped
on the armrest and he slapped the table to brace himself. He righted with a
nervous laugh that was too loud and leaned far back in his chair, almost
sinking into it. His other brothers didn’t seem to have any attention to spare
him, but Leif noticed that Simone stared at Vidar with increasing alarm. Ever
the observant one, his girl.
“Quit joking, Leif, we really mean it when we say that you have got to stop
this!” Henrik scolded and then sipped the wine cocktail. Simone’s eyes shot to
the tipped glass at his mouth, her lips slightly parted and chest heaving in
panicked breaths.
“Sto-!” she cried, cut off by an eruption of a choking and coughing fit that
had her doubled over with her face buried in her arms. Anders broke out of his
spell to turn to her and rub her back, his hands on her irritating Leif.
“Let her be, Anders,” Leif frowned. “I don’t think your touch is all that
comforting to her anymore.”
The younger man looked up at him with a burning hatred steeling his glare as he
hissed, “Shut up. I won’t let that happen to her again, not by you or through
anyone else.”
Leif tutted him with a shake of his head. “I didn’t make you do anything. That
was all you. Take some responsibility for once in your selfish life, Anders,
and face that you’re not the person you think you are. It’s in you, you know it
is, I only gave you the key but you are the one who let it out. Trust me:
there’s no stuffing that back down once it’s out.”
“You drugged me!” Anders protested, his lip curling back in a snarl from his
teeth and showing off the same sharply pointed incisor Leif recognized in
himself.
He ignored their bewildered bystanders and leaned towards his youngest brother,
sliding his hand possessively over his daughter’s shoulders as he said, “It’s
in you. Instead of facing and accepting it, you stuff it down and build a wall
of ideals to protect you from it. You believe in your contributions to an
undeserving world and ungrateful people because that means it’s good for
goodness’ sake. But you’re not good and you’re never going to be good because
it’s in you and it’s not withering, it’s not retreating, it’s not going change
no matter how thick you build that wall around it. You can only ignore it, but
it’s never, ever going to ignore you.”
“You’re insane,” Anders growled lowly, not moving his hand from Simone’s
trembling back.
“You want to do it again, don’t you?” Leif asked, then in a whisper too quiet
for their audience, “You’ve thought about fucking her, your own niece, since
you got here. Did it thrill you when she cried and begged for you to stop? It
must have, by the way you tore her with that brutal rutting. Can’t deny that,
can you?”
“Burn in Hell, you sick son of a whore!” Anders yelled, seizing the hand Leif
had laid across Simone’s shoulders.
With a lightning quickness, Leif twisted his hand away and lunged out of his
seat to wrap it around his brother’s throat. Henrik shot out of his chair with
a shout only to stagger and collapse to the floor in a clatter of dishes as he
tried and failed to grasp for anything to stop his fall. Vidar stared in wide-
eyed wooziness. Anders’ grimace was more of rage and pain than terror, but Leif
resolved to adjust that balance accordingly. He knew his grip strength was more
than enough to completely compress a man’s trachea one-handed, but he refrained
just outside of accomplishing that.
“Tell me, baby brother,” Leif grinned, squeezing the pale column of throat each
time Anders attempted to move. “Which did you enjoy more: hurting your niece or
trying to murder me? You did both with such zest! Have you been kept up at
night, your blood pumping hot and your palms slick in your eagerness to kill
me? Hmm? Or did you come up with that idea while you were making her bleed? I
admire your ambition, but your heroic savior act only works if you’re not
intent on repeating the same crimes as your enemy.”
He felt something slide up his torso and could see in his peripheral that
Simone had recovered from her fit and was sitting up in the narrow space
between him and Anders, her hand pulling on his sleeve. He kept his eyes on
Anders, knowing the danger in glancing away in situations such as these, but he
could see the sheen of tears on her cheeks as she leaned up towards him. He
began to pet her hair with his free hand, the long gentle strokes of his
fingers running through her soft locks drawing Anders’ fevered attention.
“Sto-op… Dad… please…” she rasped, her meager strength not enough to make his
choking arm budge as she yanked hard on his suit.
“Hard to believe, isn’t it?” Leif asked. Ander’s eyes shot back to him, rage
burning in his glare. “That something so sweet, so submissive as my darling
girl could be capable of that violence. But you know it’s true; even you could
interpret the evidence.”
“Papa… Papa, don’t do this!” she whispered, trying to push him away from Anders
with all her bodily force against his torso.
“Let me tell you a little secret, Anders, one that you may have suspected in
that empty head of yours,” Leif grinned, leaning in closer and pushing Simone
back down into her seat as he moved towards Anders. The younger man’s grip on
his arm trembled. “She got it from her father’s side of the family.”
He hauled him up by his throat, enjoying the astonishment and unbridled fear
overwhelming his brother’s reddening face as he stepped around Simone to drag
him away from the table. Vidar was gripping the armrests of his chair,
terrified of what Leif could only imagine he might be seeing from the potent
hallucinogen seizing his mind while Henrik was still squirming on the floor.
Anders kicked at Leif, his hands now pulling himself up on that strong hand at
his throat to try to lessen the weight of his body pulling at his neck as he
was dragged out of his seat. Leif growled out a low grunt with the force of his
push as he all but threw him out into the hallway in a flurry of limbs rolling
across the floor. As Anders struggled to replenish oxygen in great coughing
gulps of air, Leif removed his jacket and vest. This was one of his favorite
Kiton suits and he’d hate to rip it.
“Leif! LEIF! What the hell are you doing?!” Henrik shouted, his voice muddled
and slurring as he tried and failed to get his muscles to cooperate enough to
move. “No, no, stop, STOP!”
Anders had rolled onto his hands and knees, about to struggle with getting up
when Leif came upon him in three wide steps to grab him by his shirt and throw
him onto his back. Anders surprised him with his swift reaction to lean into
the turn with a right hook, his fist connecting with Leif’s jaw in the same
strike he’d gotten in on him from earlier. Now familiar with it, however, Leif
returned the blow with a straight punch. The connection of his knuckles to his
brother’s face provided a satisfying crack, enough force in it to draw blood
but probably not enough to fracture the orbital bones. He could hear Henrik
still shouting, his words now unintelligible bellowing. He pulled his fist back
to repeat it while Anders reeled, but that unexpected swiftness caught him
again when Anders lunged up and headbutted him. Leif staggered, blinking away
the darkness that spotted his vision and the pain blooming from the bridge of
his nose, and repaid him with a solid kick to his ribs that sent the younger
man bowling onto his side. While Anders tried to recover the wind that was
knocked out of him, Leif rolled up his sleeves and then leaned his weight into
two rapid kidney punches, expelling choked grunts on each impact from his
already emptied lungs.
“Let me tell you all how this is going to work!” Leif announced loudly, his
real voice echoing deeply through the cavernous house and ceasing Henrik’s
howling. He pressed Anders down to the floor with the heel of his Italian
leather monk strap shoe, the pressure limiting the younger man’s range of
breath as he struggled to fill his lungs. “No allusions, no hints, no anonymous
tips, not one god damn word! Should I find reason to suspect any level of
indiscretion has occurred, I will obtain recompense as I deem suitable!
However, I should assure you now, you will not find the reparation to be
agreeable! Have I made myself understood?”
Leif listened for a response, hearing only the strangled breaths Anders wheezed
and the ticking of the grandfather clock in the hallway until he heard the
patter of little bare feet on hardwood. He turned to see Simone rushing toward
him from behind, the ten-centimeter-long blade of a steak knife raised high and
pointed forward. While he was impressed at how she’d snuck in his blind spot
without him noticing, he’d have to teach her more about adjusting her approach
once the element of surprise had been lost. He waited the half second it took
for her to come within range before lashing out and grasping the arm that held
the knife. He twisted her wrist until her body followed and pulled her
backwards towards him, grabbing the knife and holding it to her throat in one
fluid motion. She wrenched out of his grasp, no concern for the blade that slid
along her neck before he could move it away, and rounded on him with an elbow
reared upwards into his solar plexus. Leif grunted in the precise blow, not
strong enough to wind him but enough to stagger him off Anders and give her an
opportunity to uppercut his nose with the heel of her hand. Trained reflex had
him grab her offending hand, pull her in and bring his knee up into her torso,
knocking a choked grunt from her and bringing her down easy when he backhanded
her to the floor. He glimpsed the flash of red on her as she collapsed to the
floor and panic gripped him.
“Shit!” he hissed, dropping to his knees and pulling her squirming body towards
him to examine her cut.
Blood gushed from the thin line separating her flesh, flowing in a troublingly
broad trail down her chest like a bright red necktie before disappearing under
her black dress. The knife was still clutched in his fist as he began applying
pressure to the wound with both hands, the slick steel showing him an
approximation of how deeply it had gouged her from the centimeter of blood
along the edge. From the corner of his eye, he saw Anders rise unsteadily to
his feet, clutching his ribs as he turned toward them. Simone’s scrambling to
get out from under his hands became frantic when she saw the glimmer of the
blade turn as he adjusted it.
“Stay away!” she croaked out of her abused throat, her hands clutching his
wrists.
Thankfully, her warning went unheeded as Leif heard his brother’s trudging
steps towards him. He waited as he stumbled closer, his eyes locked with his
daughter’s wild stare. He could see the knowing dread in them, the fury of
failure to stop what was to happen, the instinctual alarm that came with
bleeding, but most of all, she watched his face with the stalwart rebellion of
the hopelessly defeated. Like a mortally wounded beast strikes out with
vengeful claws at her approaching executor, she bared her teeth and struggled
under his hands. Her nails dug bleeding trails into his forearms where she
desperately held them in a futile attempt to restrain him despite surely
knowing she was no match at all for his strength. She was his fiercely savage
and beautiful creature. He bent down and kissed her snarling lips, licking over
the teeth that had killed a man that very day, and swung his arm behind him to
stab Anders in the side of his thigh.
 
 
Anders could see the blade sticking out of his leg, but there was an odd
disconnect where he didn’t quite feel the pain. Though he fell backward and
landed hard on the floor, clutching the area around the knife to keep it still,
the thought I have been stabbed should have had more terror accompanying it.
Instead, all terror was focused on the image he glimpsed over his brother’s
shoulder. Simone shaking on the ground, blood pooling under Leif’s hands at her
neck, her face as ashen as her milky tea complexion could allow. She met his
eyes in that second before the knife came and he knew that image of her would
be among the few in his life that would occasionally jump out at him from the
dark of his mind to pull him to this moment. It seemed like he had collected
more snapshot memories of extreme horrors and vivid delights during this trip
than at any other point in his life. Looking down at the knife embedded in his
thigh, it struck him with a resounding clarity that he had changed in ways both
apparent and unseen from the person he had been just a week ago. As surely as
this wound would leave a lifelong scar, so had the events of the last few days.
Then the pain came.
He groaned loudly, growling out each breath with every throb. Instinct called
for the removal of the violating intrusion to his flesh and, despite being
knowledgably aware of it being the wrong choice, he yanked the blade out in one
swift jerk. The scream that tore out of his throat was an animal sound. There
was a static sensation around the excruciating burning that seemed to take hold
of his entire thigh, pulsing like a someone was feeding that flame with a
bellows. A dark stain quickly grew around the slit in his gray slacks and he
kept a steady pressure on it in spite of the pain it caused. There didn’t seem
to be any way he could handle the wound that would both make the pain bearable
and staunch the bleeding. His alarm shifted from a base of fear to anger as he
saw Simone fight against her father. He couldn’t see past Leif’s back to
determine what he was doing to her, but he could see how her legs kicked
against the floor in a struggle. Anders did not have the luxury of wallowing in
agony.
“Murderer! You murderer!” she rasped, her heaving gasps hoarse and her words
choked out in shrill whispers.
“Simone! Stop this behavior at once!” Leif warned sternly.
“Kill me! Go on, kill me!”
Anders flinched at the loud snap of Leif’s hand striking her, unable to see how
or where his hit landed but seeing her little bare feet stop their frantic jig
and slowly curl closer to her body. The broken groan that followed brought him
away from his own pain, filling him with the need to protect the girl. He
grabbed onto that impulse, riding it further away from fear and thought, taking
it deeper than he’d allowed himself previously. His head was swimming and his
ears rang from the punishing brawl, but his thoughts were clearer than they’d
been in days. A voice spoke in his mind soundlessly, telling him what he needed
to do.
“Sorry, darling, but I need you to be still,” Leif murmured, his bent form
focused on the curled shape of the girl under him.
Anders listened to the voice. Silently, he leaned on his good leg and pushed
himself up, the ornate silver handle of the knife tight in his fist.
“Don’t shut your eyes. Stay awake, stay present.”
Anders listened to the voice. He would take away Simone’s suffering; starting
with this beast and then by taking his place. He would become the father she
deserved. He would become the lover she needed. He stepped forward, slow in
stealth, approaching Leif’s broad back from directly behind him.
“You’re going into shock.”
Anders listened to the voice. She would make him a good man again. She would
give him the child he was due. They would be so happy together after she
learned to forgive him.
“Stay with me, darling girl.”
Anders loomed over Leif, looking down over his shoulder once more to see Simone
lying in a pool of blood. It extended around her serene face like a dark
nimbus, her half-shut eyes like the Madonna hanging in his mother’s bedroom.
She looked up at him drowsily, her paled lips parting to draw in a slow breath.
He raised the knife, the tip of the blade pointing downward, and her eyes
widened. When he swung down, aiming for his neck, he saw everything as though
it moved in slow motion as she lunged up and shoved her father. Wet beads of
red flew from her hair with her sudden motion, hitting his face like the first
few drops of a warm summer rain. The knife grazed Leif’s shoulder and her
forearm, a brilliant scarlet line being drawn on her lovely skin as it kissed
the serrated edge of the blade. He pulled away as quickly as he could manage,
as though if he moved fast enough that it would somehow mitigate the damage
he’d done, but that red line grew with the blood it began to ooze.
He stumbled sideways, the knife clattering somewhere down the wide hallway, and
hit the wall heavily before sliding down to the floor. He waited for Leif to
descend upon him with fury, for him to come bash his skull open on the floor
like he’d threatened to do before, but there was no brutal death approaching
from his brother’s honed fists. His senses were muffled, but through hazy and
blurred vision, he looked up and saw Leif gathering a distressingly limp
Simone. The world tilted, the soft sources of lights blooming blearily in the
dim of the house, and then Anders found that he couldn’t move as he felt
unconsciousness pull at his mind. Unable to look away, he watched as Leif
cradled her in his arms, his hand brushing her hair from her face as he looked
down into it with a tenderness he didn’t believe a monster should be capable
of. Anders blinked and saw himself standing in his brother’s place, every bit
the monster Leif was, before the darkness closed in.
***** Chapter 26 *****
Simone could feel something tugging oddly at the skin on her neck, over and
over, as she floated in that twilight space between sleeping and waking. Her
nightmares and reality had bled into each other and she welcomed any
opportunity to disconnect from either at this point, praying to sink back into
the oblivion of dreamlessness. But that tugging was irritating and troublingly
familiar. She lifted her hand to bat away whatever was yanking at her skin to
find that something pulled at her wrist before she could raise it only a few
inches. Annoyance opened her eyes, the world painted in splashes of colors like
a dreary Monet as she tried and failed to blink the blurriness away.
Someone was leaning above her, the figure cloaked in shadow from the overhead
light, but she recognized her father’s deep voice when he said, “Don’t move.
This will only take a moment.”
Fear ran cold in her veins at the sound, her mind supplying what her vision
couldn’t of his long fingers stitching the cut in her neck. That’s what was so
familiar. She’d watched an ER doctor sew a long cut on her wrist shut when she
was seventeen, the numbing agent they had injected around the wound enabling
her to only feel the pressure of the needle and the tug of the string with each
pull. Leif’s vehement insistence on keeping her out of suicide watch back then
made more sense now that she had all these other pieces of the puzzle her
father had turned out to be. He couldn’t tolerate the idea of anyone getting
close enough to help her.
“We are going to have a talk about your irresponsible attitude, young lady,” he
said, his tone heavy with stern disappointment.
She swallowed, or at least tried to, the reflex burning her bruised and dry
throat before she whispered, “Did you kill them?”
“Don’t be vague, darling,” he teased.
Her stomach twisted at how he toyed with her even now. “Are they alive? Henrik,
Vidar and… Anders?”
A terrible dread weighed heavily on her bones, a tight knot forming in her
chest as Leif took his time before answering, “They’re alive. For now.”
“I want to see them,” she rasped.
“Why should I let you do that?” he mused. His hands never stopped or slowed
their rhythmic work at her neck as he spoke with a deadly calm. “You’ve been
very naughty, my darling girl. Why should I let you have anything you want when
you’ve misbehaved so badly? Coming at me with a knife when I was only
protecting your future… I didn’t raise you to be so ungrateful. What do you
have to say for yourself?”
The restraints that held her to the bed were at each wrist and made of metal,
each providing only a few inches of slack and tightened almost uncomfortably
snug. There would be no easy way to wriggle out of these even if her thumbs
weren’t still swollen from her previous success. She stared past his shadowed
face to the ceiling, warding off the fear of physical torture by reminding
herself that he’d numbed her before sewing her skin. He was angry at her, but
he had shown her mercy in that action. She blinked, searching for why.
“Speak up, Simone Liliʻuokalani!”
She shut her eyes against the sting of tears that wouldn’t come as memories of
that hopelessly othered middle name echoed from the thousands of times her
mother had scolded her with it. She wanted to snatch it from the air and tear
it apart so no else one could use it.
“I’m sorry, Papa,” she whispered.
“Sorry doesn’t cover trying to stab me. Try again.”
Her hands curled into fists, digging her nails into her palms until her
thoughts aligned back to the present reality. If he wanted her to beg for
forgiveness, he could make her do that with pain. Apologizing didn’t pass. If
he wanted restitution in sex, he would have taken it from her, the more painful
the better. The edge of the scissors was cold on her skin where she still had
feeling as he snipped the end of the thread. She opened her eyes, trying to
focus on the blurry shape of him as she tried to piece it together. Perhaps he
wanted her truth.
“I didn’t want to,” she whispered. “I just wanted you to stop.”
“Do you think of me as evil?”
“I think of you as dangerous. A wolf is evil to a sheep.”
“Am I a wolf, then?”
She breathed in the scents surrounding her. The sour smells of fear and
antiseptic were stale on her skin, mingling with the sharp note of the blood
that she breathed from her raw throat, but he still smelled like herbs and meat
above his natural vetiver and thunderstorm scent. It was as if he never even
broke a sweat, but there was something in the air between them that caught her
attention. Her nails curled further into her palm. She had to stop her mind
from wandering outside how reality functioned. It was something she so clearly
recognized in herself, it was almost embarrassing that she had nearly missed it
in him. Her father was lonesome for her like she had constantly been lonesome
for him.
Her mouth spread into a weak smile as she whispered, “I’m not a sheep.”
“What are you?” he asked, his rich voice no longer holding that edge of malice.
She had to be brave. There was nothing else she could do. “I’m yours.”
He hovered above her, her vision still too weak to discern his expression and
his silence could mean anything. When he bent forward and pressed a slow kiss
to her forehead, she waited until his lips began moving down the side of her
face before accepting that he might not have violent intentions. She was still
all too wary of the sharp teeth just behind his kiss. His tongue flicked out
along her ear, making her tense from the staticky tingling it induced from the
top of her skull down through her spine. How well he knew all her weak points,
physically and emotionally, made her insides flutter uneasily. It seemed that
he would always know exactly how to manipulate the desired reaction out of her
while she struggled – and often failed -- just to keep herself safe around him.
“You belong to me,” he whispered into her ear, each syllable and brush of
breath making her want to squirm from the chills that hummed through her
vertebrae. He bit her gently and she shivered.
“Y-yes, Papa… I love you.”
“I know you do, darling. Are you going to behave?”
“I’ll try, Papa.”
With a small metallic ping that vibrated the small bones in her wrist, he
removed the handcuff that was closest to him and helped her to sit up against a
pillow propped along the headboard.
“Drink,” he commanded simply, holding a small plastic cup to her face.
With a shaking hand barely strong enough to tip the cup to her lips, she sipped
the slightly sweetened water, careful not to asphyxiate it in her eagerness to
wet her dry tongue. The moisture was heavenly. He gently assisted her in
holding the cup up when her arm began to sink down from sheer lack of strength
and she felt a gratefulness for him well in her alongside the fear of him. The
man possessed keen observational skills and such attentiveness to detail,
making him both a dangerous manipulator and a proficient caregiver. She wanted
to lament what a good father he could have been if he’d had the desire, but
that was a pain far older than the troubles that occupied her now.
“Do you remember reading about permissive hypotension?” he asked.
There was a conversational lightness to his tone that threw her off. “Yes, I
do… it’s a lot easier to read about than to experience.”
He chuckled. She wondered which one of them had been flippant. She heard him
unwrapping something sealed in plastic, but couldn’t quite see what he was
laying out on the bed next to her. Some sort of looped tube, a black plastic
pouch of fluid, and a larger bag of clear liquid.
While he arranged the various components of his kit, he spoke with a noticeable
and troubling cheer. “Well, fortune has smiled upon you tonight, for you
narrowly avoided severing your external jugular and your trachea was not
breached. You just bleed like a stuck pig. However, in continuation of your
good fortune, I keep a stock of my blood wherever I stay.”
He unwrapped a tiny white square from a paper package and wiped the inside of
her elbow with it, the cool damp evaporating quickly from her skin. When he
tied a thick blue rubber ribbon around her upper arm, she understood the
connection between his words and actions.
“You’re going to put your blood in me?” she asked, her breathless whisper
breaking nervously at the end.
Without warning, he pierced her fattened vein with the intravenous catheter,
the especially thick gauge making her breath hitch in the sharp sting.
“We are both A positive and free of harmful pathogens. I checked Renfro’s
history to make certain of that,” he explained as he attached the looping tubes
to the dark pouch.
“Renfro?”
“Never mind that for now. Darling, I need you to relax. I’ve done this dozens
of times.”
Vertigo made the room tilt dangerously sideways. “Why?”
The saline and the blood were both hooked into the forked tube and he lifted
the bags in one hand to feed the liquids into the clear line as he explained
with an exasperated patience, “Because sometimes things don’t go as planned,
but that’s why you prepare. Accidents happen. Homo proponit, sed Deus disponit.
This has worked in my favor as well, of course. I’ve been the target of plans
that had obviously gone awry, either by my own design or luck, oftentimes
both.”
She was more confused than before his explanation, a queasy uneasiness lurking
behind the many questions that followed it. He tucked the line into the
catheter and she tried not to pay attention to the discomfort of the needle
fidgeting in her vein, but winced when it clicked sharply into place. He
watched as the catheter filled with red and then hung the bags from a hook on
the wall she’d previously assumed was once used for a plant, but now doubted it
was for anything except this exclusive purpose. The mysteries surrounding her
father were unraveling only to show that they ran deeper than she could have
imagined.
“I’m going to tend to my brothers, but I’ll be back to check on you. You’re out
of the woods now if you’d like to sleep… not that it seems your exhaustion will
give you much choice in the matter,” he said airily, fussing over the IV and
laying another blanket over her.
Simone felt her lungs tighten at the idea of Leif doing whatever he considered
tending to them might entail, knowing firsthand how capricious his definition
of care could be. But she could barely lift her arm and he was quickly setting
up to leave. She had to do something.
“Dad,” she rasped. He turned to her from the threshold and she licked her dry
lips, trying to think of anything at all. “The funeral is tomorrow. Everyone is
expecting them to be there. Are they going to be alright enough to make it?”
He stood there watching her until she wondered if he perhaps couldn’t hear her
whispery voice, then answered, “I’ll make sure that they will be.”
Then he was gone, his steps quieter down the creaky staircase than she had ever
managed while being an easy one hundred pounds lighter than him. She watched
the drip chamber, her vision focusing and then blurring in a slow rhythm as she
tried to see the red fall from the bags into the tube. Leif’s blood shoved its
way into her, feeling more like he was consuming her life than filling her with
it. She laid her head back on the pillow and thought of the birds asleep
outside, high and safe in their nests while the nocturnal beasts roamed the
ground below, each just doing what they must to live another day. Animals
chewed through their bones to escape traps, sacrificing limb for life on the
chance that they would survive the effort, and Simone considered the wrist
still handcuffed. Her jaw flexed restlessly, but she was tired of the taste of
blood and she’d lost so much of herself already.
 
 
“Vid…” Henrik whispered, gently shaking his sleeping brother’s shoulder.
Vidar made a cracked sound between and whimper and a groan as he pressed his
face further into the blankets. He’d refused to wake for an hour after Henrik
had startled out of bed and now he simply refused to open his eyes or speak.
“Vid, you have to get up,” Henrik pressed, tugging the blanket off of him.
They were both in the same clothes they had worn yesterday, their shoes placed
neatly at the foot of their twin beds and their coats hung with care in the
closet. Henrik couldn’t recall the last time he’d ever felt vulnerable. It had
taken him some time to process the feeling of raw fear and indignity before he
could give it that name. Vulnerable. He could bench 150 kilograms, but he
couldn’t lift himself after he went down last night. He wondered, had he’d gone
in with his fists instead of his words, if all that had happened might have
been avoided. He tested the weight of that blame, held it under the memory of
Anders stomped into the floor and Vidar lost to whatever drug had silenced his
sharp tongue. The guilt was heavy. He had no idea what Leif had become, but he
wasn’t their brother any longer. What he’d done to them wasn’t even human.
“Vidar…” he nearly growled, angry at what had happened, angry at his own fear.
“He’s going to kill us,” Vidar whispered in a frantic hiss that was muffled
into the pillow. “He’s not going to let us escape and he’s going to kill us
because we know, we know.”
Henrik resisted the panic this stirred in him. At least one of them had to
remain calm. “If he was going to kill us, he would have done it while we were
unconscious.”
“No. No!” Vidar protested. He turned his face from the pillow, his eye wide and
rolling with alarm before it locked onto Henrik. “Don’t you see? Don’t you get
it? He was having fun! It’s all amusement! It isn’t just about getting away
with the drugs or- or anything, it’s- He was toying with us, he’s been toying
with us, and he’s going to break his toys when he’s done playing. Lei.. Le…
He’s a sociopath!”
The hysteria rising in his brother made it easier for Henrik to polarize and
ground himself in the trained response to deescalate, his brain slipping into
the more comfortable space of his profession as he said, “Listen, none of that
matters. We aren’t going to play his game. He’s just going to have to find his
fun somewhere else because we’re getting the hell out of here.”
“You think he’s going to let you walk after showing you that? He put a target
on our backs before we even sat down to supper. We’re dead. We’re dead! We’re
DEAD!”
Henrik was shaking Vidar by his shoulders, telling him to quiet down as his
voice rose to a shrill yelling pitch, when they both froze as the subject of
their fear walked through the door.
“Good morning,” Leif said casually, then gestured with the dark clothes slung
over his arm before continuing, “We need to be at the funeral home ahead of
schedule to speak with the director, so I’ve pressed your suits for you.” As
Leif hooked the hangers in the closet, Henrik realized that Vidar was trembling
under his fists clenched tightly at his shirt. When Henrik looked back to their
oldest brother, he saw the pistol strapped flat to his side. “Go clean
yourselves up and get dressed. Come, come, don’t dally!”
Just as suddenly and nonchalantly as he’d come, Leif left, shutting the door
behind him and sealing them both in the silence of the guest room. Henrik let
go of Vidar and stepped towards the door, his body moving automatically as his
mind whirled with fear. Vidar was right. Leif was having fun.
It took fifteen minutes for Henrik to work up the nerve to go outside the room,
then another ten to shower. Vidar made him promise to wait outside the bathroom
door while he showered, a process that sounded like he was badly juggling
bowling balls in there as Henrik stood wet and cold in the hallway. He’d always
been proud of being nonviolent despite his size and strength, thinking himself
a good poster boy for pacifism for those very reasons, but now he felt regret
at his lack of violent will. There was no use in being powerful if he couldn’t
even use it to defend his family. Words and empathy did not breach this
madness. He stared at the door to Anders’ guest room, feeling something like a
ball expanding in his chest until he tried the knob. It was unlocked.
“Anders?” he whispered through the cracked door.
No response. That ball in him expanded. He stepped inside. There was a serving
tray with several bloodied and wadded cotton pads and some tools on the
nightstand. Forceps, an irrigation syringe, nitrile gloves, rolls of gauze and
tape, long cotton swabs, a large half-empty bottle of saline, all of it smudged
with dried blood. The presence of blood did not affect him except to reassure
him that someone had used all of these to hurriedly help his little brother.
The bedding was thrown back, a towel folded over the mattress with a large dark
stain on it, but no Anders laid in the bed.
“He’s downstairs.”
Henrik jumped at the small voice, his heart hammering in his throat even as he
saw it was just his niece. With a chill, he noticed that she wore a light scarf
tied snug around her neck. His recall was spotty, but he had a vivid memory of
her hitting the floor with a laceration that spilled gouts of blood from the
front of her neck. She didn’t face him as she stood in the doorway, though she
clearly spoke to him. Her voice was still quiet and raspy, but she managed
above a whisper.
“I left your breakfast in your room. For Uncle Vidar, too.”
Before he could respond, she turned and hurried down the stairs. It was
alarming how normal she seemed. As normal as she ever could seem, anyway. A
suspicion sprouted in him at that, an awful mold spore of a thought that
multiplied without him wanting it to, but it gathered and latched onto reason
until suspicion became a theory. Simone was a victim of abuse, but after long
enough, he’d seen some victims become accomplices. He shook it off, reminding
himself that she had done more to try to stop Leif from hurting anyone else
than either he or Vidar had. He felt guilty for having even wondered if they
were too late to save her, but the doubt was still there.
 
 
The breeze carried a thickness to it that promised rain, a heavy one judging by
the darkness of the clouds along the horizon. Leif disliked the openness of
these wide spaces, feeling uneasy under the sheer amount of sky visible. He
felt much more secure with trees or buildings blocking out that blaring
exposure. He stamped out his cigarette and watched the big open sky until he
could imagine his heels tipping off the ground to fall face-forward into it,
then turned back to the shambling crowd some distance behind him. There were
perhaps ninety to one hundred twenty people who showed up for the graveside
service, an easy double of that had sent notice they’d attend the reception.
The funeral home had done what they could to accommodate as far as the mass of
folding chairs and pop up canopies they had propped up over the flat
tombstones, but most people had to stand through the lengthy eulogies for the
much beloved Einar.
There were many familiar faces among the crowd, but Leif had been careful to
keep an eye on his brothers as he mingled and greeted. Vidar was preoccupied
with staring fixedly at his folded hands, not reacting to any offers of
condolences or contact. Henrik had responded to those around him with a tight
courtesy. Anders was exceptionally well behaved from the diazepam and
alprazolam calming his mind, seeming more preoccupied with staring dazedly at
Simone than talking with anyone else. Leif wondered if Anders was even aware he
was at the funeral. Overall, Leif had never seen his brothers more cooperative
or mannerly than they were now in their fear of him. He was pleased.
He saw his daughter walking towards him from the crowd, her head ducked low to
avoid any possible eye contact with the mourners and only raising her gaze to
him when she was a good many paces away. He remained standing on the cement
curb of the narrow road that curved through the cemetery and waited for her to
come to him. She’d been especially affectionate and clingy all day, prompting
many to assume her to be his romantic companion despite the disparity of their
age. He had not disputed those assumptions. She pressed herself to his front
like a cat wanting a scratch behind the ears and he obliged her with his arms
loosely wrapped around her middle. He supposed she didn’t know he was aware
that she was trying to keep his attention away from his brothers, but he wasn’t
inclined to let her in on that knowledge. It was working to a degree; her
doting had vastly improved his mood overall.
“How are you feeling, darling?” he asked.
The scratchy wool of her pea coat made him want to peel it off her to touch the
softness beneath her concealing funeral clothes like he would skin a kiwi. A
daydream of taking her into the brush beyond the graves and ripping her black
tights off had played over in his mind throughout the service as men who had
never known the real Einar had rambled on about his accomplishments. He wanted
to push her compliance until she broke.
“Just a bit tired,” she answered.
Leif bent closer to her and buried his nose in the top of her hair, giving her
two kisses to her scalp and letting his words come out muffled against her. “We
could get a room if you want to lie down for a few hours. The reception is at a
decent hotel. Better than the hotels you’re used to, anyway.”
“Dad…”
“That was a very reckless habit. Honestly, did you even think about what you
were doing, going anywhere alone with strangers? You were a very young-looking
teenager, at that. What was it about those pedophiles that got you so hot?”
“What are you… How did you-”
“Did they make you feel mature? Hm? Or was it because they were all tall,
blond, and so much older? Honestly, you could have saved yourself a lot of
heartache if you’d just asked me to fuck you sooner.”
She pushed away from him, staggering back a few steps and nearly tripping over
a headstone. Finally, there was the fire of indignity. He let his empty arms
fall at his sides as she glared at him.
Her battered throat didn’t allow her to raise her voice, but the venom was
obvious as she sneered, “Don’t. Don’t. You don’t get to shame me when you’re
the one who fucked me up.”
He stepped forward and she reflexively took a step back, her hands curling into
fists briefly. His grim frown broke into a smirk with a breathy chuckle and he
ran his tongue over his pointed incisor as he savored the moment fear flushed
that anger from her. She paled, her golden brown skin going ashen with terror.
Her voice shook. “I’m sorry! I didn’t mean that. I-I’m so sorry.”
He shook his head and tutted her with a click of his tongue, then leaned
forward and spoke softly as though confiding a secret, “That’s no way to talk
to your father.”
At last, her arms hugged tightly around her body and she bowed her head low as
tears left hot trails down her cheeks. Baiting her while she was in the
delicate self-appointed position of protector to her uncles was an easy game.
He closed the space between them in two wide strides and gathered her trembling
form in an embrace, maintaining the appearance he was merely comforting this
mourning girl to any onlookers. He noticed his brothers all staring at them
from their seats in front of the lowered casket, a dreadful tension in their
posture and faces evident even at this distance.
He rubbed her back soothingly and rested his chin atop her head as he said,
“There, there, darling girl. You can make it up to me later. Now then, let’s
head back to the car. We don’t want to delay the reception.”
 
 
“We should just head to the airport. Even if he noticed us leaving, there are
too many people here for him to do anything about it.”
Anders turned his dazed stare from the plate of scalloped potatoes and cold
cuts to Henrik’s bearded face, trying to listen over the din of raucous
conversations around them in the overfilled venue. He was accustomed to loud
events, but it was hard to concentrate anything with those pills making him
uncomfortably high. He smiled at the idea of anyone being both high and
uncomfortable, the contradiction striking him a peculiarly amusing, but
remembered they were trying to escape a hostile madman with a gun. He took
another bite of the potatoes. The cold cuts were too painful to chew and
frowning made his face ache even more.
Vidar didn’t move his glare from his clenched fists on the table as he said,
“He has the keys. And our passports.”
Henrik was on his third plate of American funeral food, his old habit of stress
eating in full effect as he said around a mouthful of baked ziti, “We’re better
off hitchhiking through this bumfuck backwater countryside than waiting around
for Leif to snap.”
“Anders can’t even figure out how to walk with crutches. We won’t make it far
before he finds us.”
“We could get one of these people to give us a ride, I’m sure. At least someone
here has to be taking a redeye back for work tomorrow.”
Vidar paused, his rapidly blinking eyes the only sign he’d heard him at all.
Anders glanced from him to Henrik, a sour feeling cutting through his high.
“But he’s got her,” he slurred, putting his effort into articulating without
making his face hurt more.
“We can call the police before we get on the plane,” Henrik whispered loud
enough to be heard, which wasn’t that much quieter than his previous speaking
volume. Anders frowned, then winced, and Henrik shook his head in exasperation.
“Look, even if we managed to get her away from him and take her with us, that’s
only going to look like kidnapping to the police.”
“But we’re rescuing her,” Anders protested.
“What if she doesn’t want to be rescued?” Vidar scowled. Both men turned to him
with their brows furrowed incredulously, but he didn’t look up from his hands
to acknowledge them as he continued. “You’ve seen how she is around him. He cut
her up last night and in the morning she’s giving him kisses and doe eyes. He’s
the only person he’s allowed her to love, so why would she want to be taken
away from him?”
“That’s not true,” Anders said.
“How?” Vidar asked flatly.
Anders’ anger was slow to filter through the drugs. “Simone is in love with
me.”
For the first time all day, Vidar slowly looked up from his hands, his glassy
eyes wide and his eyebrows raised high. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“She’s in love with me. You know… She wants to be with me. I’ll take her back
to my house and she will live there with me,” Anders explained. When both men
just stared at him owlishly, he felt the beginnings of frustration stir. 
“It’ll work!”
“Are you hearing yourself right now?” Vidar scowled. “She has a weird, silly
little crush on you, she’s not ‘in love’! She doesn’t ‘want to be with’ you.
You can’t just say that shit like you believe it.”
“But it’s true! She told me herself.”
Henrik broke his stare with a nervous grin, saying, “Oh, that’s an easy
misunderstanding. English doesn’t differentiate familial love and romantic
love. She just meant that she loves you, not in love with you.”
Anders was about to disagree, then stopped as he realized that what he’d said
had indeed sounded very suspicious. He needed to watch how and what came out of
his mouth while on these drugs.
Vidar’s stare furrowed into a glare and his tone became acidic as he pressed
on, “No, no, no, don’t give him the answers, Henrik. Anders, I want you to
explain what the hell has been happening. He drugged you yesterday, we get
that, but what else happened that you didn’t tell us about? He said something
about you making her bleed. Give us a real answer this time; I can tell when
you’re bullshitting and you have been consistently tossing it to us instead of
answering. What did you do and how much does he know?”
Anders’ felt as though he should be a lot more concerned at having his sharp-
minded brother’s perception aimed at him, but the worry was curiously absent.
Instead, there was a logical awareness of the necessity to keep his
relationship secret. They just wouldn’t understand. But Vidar had scented the
trail and he was zeroing in on the truth. He had to give him something.
“I… I don’t really remember, I was so doped up, but…” Anders paused to swallow,
found his mouth still dry, sipped his cup of ice water. Vidar’s unflinching
stare fixed on him like a snake on a field mouse. Henrik was looking at him
from behind his stony discomfort, disbelief in his downturned mouth beneath his
sloping mustache. It was easier to talk about than he’d thought it would be.
“But I kind of remember, maybe, during that time I did something terrible.”
“Did Leif make you do something?” Henrik asked lowly. Vidar shot him a dirty
look, which went ignored.
“Kind of… I’d never want to hurt her, you have to believe me, but I… I did.” He
couldn’t look at them. “I hurt Simone… in a, um, a sexual manner while under
the influence of… something he injected me with.”
“What else?” Vidar asked.
Anders almost didn’t hear him over the ringing in his ears from having said
that out loud. “Huh?”
“What else did you do?” Vidar’s voice rose. “Before that, before yesterday,
what did you do that got his attention? Paralyzing Henrik, making me lose my
fucking mind, goading you into violence… That son of a bitch loves irony. It’s
not just random that he made a game out of using you to hurt her. What did you
do to inspire that?”
“Vid, what the fuck, it’s not Anders’ fault that Leif is crazy!” Henrik
scolded.
“Crazy doesn’t exclude the obvious,” Vidar said, his accusatory stare never
leaving their younger brother. Anders was confused as to why he wasn’t sweating
bullets. “And it’s been obvious. I want to hear it in your words. Did you, in
any way, do anything sexual with Simone?”
That urge to confess mounted in him, warring with self-preservation. They would
surely ostracize him from the family, but he couldn’t deny that he would
deserve that. He felt so strangely numb though, none of that panicked
repentance rushing him to beg for forgiveness for having been so weak. He loved
Simone. Simone loved him. All that really mattered was protecting that love.
“No,” he lied. He wasn’t offended by the accusation, wasn’t reacting
defensively, wasn’t bewildered that anyone would ask him such a thing. He was
able to look Vidar straight in his eye as he said, “She just has a silly little
crush. It’s… flattering, but she’s my niece. Maybe I’m guilty of not doing
enough to discourage her. I think Leif only used me to punish her for her
feelings.”
Henrik pinched the bridge of his nose in the way he always did before he’d
start to cry, his voice already going froggy as he mumbled, “God, that’s too
fucked up. Jesus Christ, Anders, I’m so sorry that happened to you. To her. Oh
God, it’s sick…”
Vidar broke off his stare, his severe expression melting into regret as he
returned to looking down at his folded hands. Anders wanted to feel more
alarmed at his lack of feelings, but every emotion he’d anticipated for this
moment had been numb and distant. There was an acknowledgment in him that Leif
could no longer use the rape to blackmail him as well as a disappointment in
himself that he’d divulged her violation without her permission. His eyes
scanned the crowd for Simone, eventually spotting her being offered a cup of
punch from some gangly boy about her age. He watched, an odd jealousy itching
at the back of his mind as this boy regarded her too familiarly. Then he saw
Leif sidle up to her, unbutton his jacket and put his arm high around her
shoulders as he grinned unpleasantly at the boy. His jacket bowed open with the
stretch of his arm and the boy noticeably paled before quickly excusing
himself. Anders realized that Leif had shown the kid his sidearm in a not-so-
subtle threat to back off Simone. Anders smirked at this and, before he could
replace it with the horror he knew he was supposed to react with, Leif met his
eye from across the crowded room and returned his smirk knowingly. A slimy
chill ran down Anders’ spine at the unspoken and unwelcome camaraderie between
them in that fleeting moment.
 
***** Chapter 27 *****
Of all the injuries that ached on and in her body, what currently brought
Simone the greatest discomfort were the four-inch Jimmy Choo stilettos digging
railroad spikes into her heels. The banquet hall that had been rented out was
not large enough to seat all the guests, leaving the chairs primarily for the
elderly and the selfish as the crowd swarmed and clumped in a cacophony of
voices droning under the string quartet. In her expensive shoes and expensive
dress that she had neither worn or seen before her father had zipped her up
that morning, she felt like an expensive decoration. Leif touted her around and
greeted a seemingly endless parade of his long-unseen faces and old
acquaintances. The crowd was disorienting and she had to fight the rising panic
of being surrounded by droves of people so upfront and intrusively close. His
hand was constantly at her waist, his long fingers splayed down and over her
hip bone possessively as he pulled her along. She found herself tucking close
to his side, wanting to press her face into his suit like a shy toddler, and
felt ridiculous. She was used to subway rides where grumpy strangers were
packed close enough to sway as one unit with each stop. Surely, she was in more
danger there than in this polite milquetoast society where people still had
room to carry around heaping plates of casserole and shrimp cocktails, but she
couldn’t shake the feeling that each of them had daggers under their skin and
acid in their spit. She forced another smile as she was introduced to some ex-
mayor or district attorney or damn elephant trainer, she couldn’t remember
already, when something brushed firmly up her side.
“Ow, ow-ow-ow!” a nasal voice yelped behind her.
Simone turned and found her hand crushing the wrist of a petite middle-aged
man, her nails drawing blood from where his skin had been exposed by his
rolled-up sleeves. Instantly, she jerked away, her mouth tasting like ash as
she stared bewilderedly at her hand. The still-healing thumb only began to ache
when she looked at it.
“Hey, sorry, buddy,” Leif said, releasing her hip to reach into his jacket. She
tensed, fearing the gun, but he only pulled out his wallet. He shoved some
indiscriminate number of folded bills into the man’s shirt pocket and clapped
him on the shoulder as he grinned, “Forget about that.”
She swallowed the ash to form a knot in her throat as Leif pulled her away from
the bustling hall and down the corridor where the crowd-averse had gravitated.
Her stilted shoes clacked with each painful step as she stumbled to keep up
until he walked past the line for the women’s restroom and took her into the
men’s. A young man at the urinal startled when he saw Simone, but Leif didn’t
even glance at him as he hurriedly zipped and walked out of there red-faced.
“Wash your hands, darling, and use lots of soap,” Leif gently commanded, still
using his friendly personable voice.
“I didn’t mean to-” she started to mumble, but he stopped her by reaching over
and turning the tap on. Withering under his commanding stare, she eagerly
lathered the sticky pink liquid soap under her nails. Her mind raced with how
to process what had happened. She raised her voice painfully over the sound of
the rushing water, “He slid his hand over me, I couldn’t help it. It was…
automatic, compulsive, I don’t know. I don’t want to hurt anyone.”
Leif waited until she had turned off the tap. “That was Gregory Bartek, a
tailor and fashion consultant. You’re wearing a tailored Chiara Boni. His was
only a professional interest, I assure you.”
“I attacked him without thinking,” she muttered mostly to herself as she dried
her hands.
He turned her by her shoulders and looked at her face closely. She thought he
would make some remark to remind her of her lack of control or maybe even slap
her and she braced herself as subtly as she could for either, but he only
licked his thumb and wiped off a smudge near her mouth. She watched as he
lingered on that wettened stripe, seeing the costume of his outer self slip in
the darkening of his eyes before he leaned down and licked her. Her heart
jumped at the low growl from his throat as he moved his mouth over hers, his
kiss mostly teeth and tongue and urgent. That sick, warm, poisonous feeling
coated her when he stepped closer, his hands holding her hips in a nearly
bruising grip to keep her still. They’d been touching all day, nice and
friendly touches except for his cruelty in the cemetery, but this was the first
time his touch had become that heated demand for sex her body couldn’t help
reacting to. It hollowed out a bitter self-loathing in her as she melted
against him, all pain in her body twisting into a muted sort of stimulation
with arousal rewiring her perception. She hated this. She needed this. Just as
her mind was finally starting to quiet, he stepped away from her. Confused, she
opened her eyes to see him looking down at her with an amused smirk, his tongue
slowly swiping over his lower lip to draw in the moisture there.
“I just couldn’t resist having a taste,” he smiled. She felt her cheeks redden
in humiliation, her breath hot as she tried to calm the needful ache in her. He
smoothed her flowing curls with soothing strokes and spoke softly, “I’d love
for nothing more than to damn this entire charade and take you back home for
some quality time together, but there are people here I am required to meet
first. Oh, that reminds me…” To her surprise, he dug out Bjørn’s watch from his
pocket and fastened it to her wrist. “There we are. I see you’ve remembered to
wind it even with all the recent excitement, my good girl. I know it doesn’t
quite match your ensemble, but it adds a sort of intriguing and unexpected
charm, wouldn’t you say? Just like the wearer.”
The watch hung a little more loosely on her than it had the first time, telling
her just how little food she had been able to keep down in the past week. No
wonder she was constantly feeling faint. The metal and leather held Leif’s body
heat and she unconsciously held it to the exposed skin of her chest between her
scarf and neckline as she bit down nervously on her knuckle, her thoughts
moving too fast and distant to catch onto any particular one.
He was looking at her, a warmth lightening the dark from his gray eyes, and she
pulled out of her mind to reflect that warmth. Despite all the damage he’d
wreaked and her life he had stolen, it was still too easy to reach in and find
that spring of need and love for him. His caring side was too precious and
fleeting for her to forgo, even in fear. Telling herself that she was only
doing it to keep him happy, she pressed herself closer to him and leaned up on
the unsteady forefeet of her high heeled shoes. Her lips brushed his in a shy
kiss just a barely over the line of chaste, something far too sweet and
innocent after the aggressive assault he’d just applied to her mouth. The
creases at the corners of his eyes deepened as he chuckled, his arms wrapping
around her waist to hold her up on her tiptoes as he imitated her shy kiss back
on her.
“Silly little creature,” he grinned, nuzzling his cheek to hers with an
affection that made her heart swell dizzyingly. Traces of authentic fatherhood
sparked at the edges of this gesture and she chased them with avid rapture,
closing her eyes to focus on this precious feeling. All too soon, he lowered
her down to her feet and led her back into the crowded banquet hall.
Hesitantly, she slowed her step once they crossed through the open doors and
asked, “Is it okay if I rest here a moment?”
“Just don’t let any scrawny frat boys bring you spiked punch,” he smirked,
giving her hand a squeeze before letting her go and disappearing into the
throng.
A week ago, she would have scoffed at that comment. Now, she only nodded and
leaned against the wall to ease the pressure off her aching feet. She wanted
very badly to take off these ridiculous shoes, but she didn’t want to embarrass
her father with that uncivilized behavior at this formal event. It was
imperative that she do as little as possible to upset him. She wondered how
much longer her uncles could remain safe around the fluctuating temper of this
dangerous man her father had turned out to be. She wondered briefly if she was
safe, but that wasn’t important. This was her station in life. Her own safety
was a constantly shifting concept tethered to the sliding scale of his tastes
and whims. Her mind was already broken and he valued her body far too much to
disable or disfigure her in any severe way. In that horrible and strange way,
she felt a border of safety with him that she was unsure if her uncles also
shared. She shifted her weight against the wall and longed for paint-splattered
sneakers and simple life.
“Bonsoir, mon Coeur. Might I ask how you knew Einar Valstad?”
Simone startled out of her dire thoughts, blinking back to reality to find the
owner of that heavy French accent was a stout old man who was definitely
talking to her. “Um, I, uh… I’m his granddaughter.”
His hazel eyes widened, his full white brows ascending to deepen the lines in
his forehead as he said, “Je n’y crois pas! Impossible. You do not appear as a
Viking.”
She chuckled at his over-exaggerated expression of shock and felt as though she
might be able to handle a conversation. “I’m only half-Viking. Mama poured a
little flavor in their gene pool.”
“Ah, I see! Allow me to guess what you are,” he said, stepping closer in a
chummy way. She had to resist rolling her eyes at the rudeness she knew was
coming. “Colombian?”
“No. I get that a lot, though.”
“Hmm… Brazilian?”
“Nope.” She turned her face from him, not wanting him to see the irritation
that was knitting her brow. She wished people were more aware of how impolite
it was to ask what she was. She didn’t like being a what, especially now that
she was so unsure of who she was. “Are you done?”
“One more guess, I promise!” he grinned, holding up his index finger.
She pursed her lips against the scowl that fought its way to her face, her
patience surprisingly thin. He wore a white linen suit that seemed to only make
his broad shoulders wider, an odd choice for a funeral. He stuck out from the
flock of black like an albino crow. The thought ‘have to cut you open just to
see some color, haole’ flashed in her mind like a fish leaping from murky water
before she could scatter the words.
“One more,” she agreed.
“Pure Scandinavian on your father’s side of course,” he began, squinting and
making a rolling gesture with his hand as though trying to place a flavor. “But
your mother… was the product of a torrid romance between a Hawaiian native and
an Afro-Caribbean naval officer from Philadelphia.”
The walls of her guard came up like the steel shutters slamming in her mind.
Her head whipped to face him, finding him grinning at her amusedly, but she did
not find this amusing at all. Her voice was gruff and scraped painfully in her
throat as she asked, “Who are you?”
“Mr. Marceau, what a surprise!” Leif’s voice called from beyond this stranger.
Marceau extended his arm to her father, both men clapping their free hand on
the other’s forearm as they shook hands. Leif glanced to her and she sucked in
a short breath at the hint of wariness he shot her. “And I see you’ve met my
daughter.”
“My apologies, Valstad, but I simply could not wait to be introduced to this
devastating young beauty,” Marceau beamed cheerfully. He turned back to her and
placed a brief touch to her shoulder that she put effort into not dodging. “You
must bring her to Neuilly; I insist you both stay at my house.”
Leif’s smile turned wooden. He moved to the other side of Marceau, putting
himself between her and the Frenchman as he held her to him with a
possessiveness that had her blushing. “Not yet.”
The Frenchman laughed, a high trilling sound, and waved a hand dismissively as
he said. “Non, no, of course not! Just for a holiday, no business. Comment est
la progression?”
Leif relaxed. So did she, exhaling a breath she didn’t know she’d held. Her
father’s French was surprisingly swift and easy from what she could tell
without understanding a word of it. “Elle est naturelle. Trois tueries
confirmes, tout dissociatif, sans armes.”
“C’est fascinant, Docteur Frankenstein!”
They both laughed with a cheer that touched neither of their eyes, making
Simone feel even more tense. Whoever this man was, he was not her father’s
friend though they obviously knew each other well. Her mind tickled with the
thought of a different man her father was familiar but unfriendly with, but she
recoiled from that corner of her mind with reflexive speed. A cold sweat
dampened the back of her neck just from brushing that nightmare. Marceau
stepped around to face her fully once more and she noticed how Leif kept his
eyes trained on him.
“Your father is one of the most talented in our field,” Marceau said, his smile
showing short flat teeth. “A man of truly great vision and technical skill. He
tells me you’re an artist. Have you thought of following in his footsteps?”
She glanced to Leif to see what she should do, but he didn’t spare her a look.
“Oh, uh, no,” she stammered, then began again more naturally. “No, I would make
a lousy architect. I can barely get myself together let alone an entire
building.”
“Good. I’d weep if you limited yourself to that miserable job. I would love to
see your artwork in person soon,” he said, winking at her before turning to
Leif. “Valstad, do you have some time for me? I would like for us to have a
private discussion in my room.”
Her father was tense, but his tone betrayed nothing of that as he said, “Of
course. Simone…” He faced her, bent down to her eye level and smoothed her silk
scarf, his fingers purposefully brushing over her bandaged sutures. There was a
threat in that gesture. “Be good while I’m gone.”
“À bientôt, monCoeur,” Marceau smiled to her with an odd wag of his hand.
Simone did not watch as the two men left together, finding an uneasy
restlessness in knowing that she was not with Leif as he stepped through the
doorway. There was something in that knowledge that made her teeth itch. She
fixed her stare to the nearest centerpiece instead. White lilies with long
stems twisted in a tall cylinder of glass, their ends hidden in a pile of
smooth dark stones at the bottom. The flowers looked like snakes coiling around
each other, their long necks raised up in search for a way out of the vases.
Each table held similar centerpieces, all the flowers just imperfect enough to
show that they weren’t fake, and she envisioned the snakes slithering in
circles while the guests at that nearest table fidgeted nervously under her
unwavering stare. A brightness beyond the glass caught her attention and she
refocused her vision to the distance, seeing Anders leaning back in his chair a
few tables beyond. His charcoal dress shirt was unbuttoned a third of the way
down and his necktie hung in two long strips of black silk from his shoulders,
exposing the pale length of his throat and some of his chest as his head hung
over the back of his seat.
The snakes still swirling in her peripheral, she stepped across the room and
sat down in the chair next to him. With his eyes closed and his body relaxed as
though in sleep, the vulnerability of his blatantly exposed neck tempted her to
lick it, but that would be rude. Instead, she examined him as he sat unaware of
her proximity, taking advantage of this opportunity to memorize his features
and visualize them outlined in pencil and given dimension with layers of
watercolor. She was too engrossed in picking apart the different hues of blue
that made up his irises to know that he was watching her until he spoke.
“Hello.”
She flinched away, her arms jerking up to shield her face in an automatic
defense before she caught herself and lowered them with a powerful shudder.
“Sorry! Sorry, I, um, oh fuck…” she stammered, then stopped by biting down on
her lip before beginning again calmly, “I’ve been wanting to apologize. For
everything. I should have stayed away from you, but I didn’t… and now everyone
is in danger.”
She couldn’t look at him, her eyes focusing on his collarbone instead as she
uttered a small percentage of the apology she’d rehearsed in her head since
coming to last night. There was too much she needed to warn him about, but much
of it was still disjointed and undefined. It was difficult to warn him against
dangers that she knew were present and at work but too illusory to identify.
She supposed that having been stabbed was enough warning for Anders to protect
himself against Leif’s more subtle ministrations. For as much as she knew her
father could revel in violence and sadism, it was ultimately another tool for
him to break people enough for him to rebuild them to his design. She could
only hope that her suspicion was wrong and Leif was only using her uncle to
further break her. It was a chilling best-case scenario and not one she could
easily explain to him even with perfect translation. She was brought out of her
dreary introspection by Anders touching her knee, comforting her immediately
with the familiar roughness of his palm.
“It’s okay,” he said.
The quiet assurance in his tone beckoned her stare to raise to his face and,
briefly, she believed him. There was a melancholy confidence in his slight
smile and steadfast gaze fixed on her, that same tender expression he had often
shown her. She’d misjudged it as compassion before finding out it was far more
than that. She blushed in shame at how aware she was of her attraction to him.
Love in their circumstance seemed inappropriate for reasons beyond the sin and
risk of it. She wanted to hide it away to keep it from being dirtied.
“It’s not okay,” she said, but she placed her hand on top of his and let him
interlace their fingers. She was weak. “We shouldn’t… Why are you still here?
You need to get away. Go home. Go to Norway.”
“Together,” he smiled like it was the most obvious response.
“I can’t go.” Her throat burned.
“Vi kan gå.”
They both startled at the booming cheer of Henrik’s voice and looked to see him
standing with a morose Vidar and a very old, very small Asian man. Simone tried
to slide her hand away from Anders’ intimate hold, but he tightened her fingers
between his and there was a resolve in his set jaw that translated a
willfulness she thought seemed foreign on him.
“Vi skal flykte sammen. You will come,” he said, gently but firmly, and she
stared with widening eyes as she pieced together what it was she found so
disconcerting in his expression.
She’d seen that same look in her father’s face each time he’d told her she
belonged to him.
 
 
It took ten minutes of riding in Mr. Kyun’s SUV through the pouring rain for
Anders to accept that they were actually getting away from Leif. There were no
headlights chasing behind them, no gun-wielding madman popping up from the
trunk, nobody but Vidar and Simone in the backseat with him and Henrik in the
front with Mr. Kyun. They were free. He held Simone pressed to his less injured
side, feeling her tremble as he tried to soothe her with whispers and touches.
With her much slighter form swimming under his jacket and her face tucked
halfway under the collar, she more resembled a shy little kid than a young
woman and it brought out a paternal protectiveness as well as a long-lingering
shame in him. He shouldn’t think of her in so many mismatched terms. He pushed
down that paternal reaction, letting his touches deviate just slightly into
indecency as his arm that hugged around her shoulders pulled her closer and his
free hand reached over and began stroking up and down the top of her thigh. He
wished he had the English to explain to her that everything was going to be
okay, that she was finally going to be safe from her father, but he didn’t.
“You shouldn’t be so physical with her after what happened,” Vidar said, his
voice quiet but nonetheless disapproving.
Anders felt a flash of anger flare up. Leif had insinuated something similar,
but they were both wrong. She needed his support especially after what had
happened.
“I’m not hurting her,” he said defensively.
“Then why is she crying?”
He looked down, surprised to see her trembling was all in her chest and
shoulders as she hung her head tucked low. Guilt doused that reactive anger in
him and he stopped his stroking hand, but didn’t move it from her thigh.
“She’s just scared,” he said.
Vidar glared at him suspiciously. “She did agree to come, didn’t she?”
“Why would she not want to get away from that monster?”
Vidar’s brow furrowed further and his eyes widened in astonished rage just
barely restrained. “Anders, tell me we did not actually just abduct this girl.”
“Of course, we didn’t,” he answered, bewilderment clouding his drug-muddled
feelings further. “We’re rescuing her.”
The hand Vidar laid on his arm was crushing, his words as hot and hard as coals
as he growled out, “You can’t possibly be that fucking ignorant.”
“What’s wrong?” Henrik asked, turning to look at them from the front passenger
seat.
Before Anders could reply, Vidar answered vehemently, “This fucker took Simone
against her will.”
“Shit, Vid, that wasn’t his fault!” Henrik scolded.
“No, you idiot, not that!” Vidar groused, then hissed, “She didn’t agree to
leave.”
“What?!”
Anders glanced between the worried and angry faces of his brothers, his
confusion and irritation only growing at their reactions. Simone’s hands
grasped his shirt tighter and she leaned into him more heavily at their gruff
tones.
“Why don’t either of you just ask her?” Anders proposed. “I’m god damned
certain she doesn’t want to be around that abusive madman.”
Henrik and Vidar shared a look that communicated something that went completely
over his head. He was used to their near-telepathic looks, as much as they
still irritated him. Eventually, it was Vidar who leaned closer to her.
“Simone,” he said with a gentleness one would use on a frightened animal. “You
want come with us?”
When she didn’t answer, Anders suggested, “Tell her I’ll take care of her, that
she can stay with me and be safe.”
Vidar shot him a withering look, but said to her, “Simone, Anders have you in
his house. He… ah… he have you… hm…”
“Safe,” Henrik supplied. “Andershave safe. Understand?”
She wiped her face with the back of her hand, the wetness coming away on her
fingers confirming with an additional pang of guilt to Anders that she had been
crying, and rasped, “I can’t leave.”
“You can leave,” Anders insisted.
A vague desperation in him needed her to say it. She had to be with him. He had
to keep her. His hand tightened on her thigh unconsciously and she looked up at
him with her gray eyes so full of tears and misery, he wanted to kiss it away.
His stare darted down to her full lips, swollen from her biting them to keep
herself quiet, and he almost leaned in.
“Why not leave?” Vidar asked, pulling Anders out of his longing.
“Papa… Leif is going to come after all of you if you try to take me away from
him,” she answered just above a whisper.
It was loud enough for Kyun to hear as he broke his long silence from the
driver’s seat with a friendly, “How is Leifdoing lately?”
Simone’s back tensed ramrod straight and she slowly turned to look at their
generous driver, her eyes wide and lips slightly parted in fear. Her words came
out breathless and small. “You know my father?”
Kyun adjusted his thick spectacles and smiled, “I met him once on a hunt. I was
more familiar withBjørn. I see you’re wearing his watch, is that correct?”
Anders watched as she slowly, stealthily unbuckled her seatbelt and slid away
from him. There was a hard glint in her stare behind the strange terror and the
muscles of her thigh under his hand were drawn taut. He adjusted his posture to
block the door in case she tried to bolt from the moving vehicle, casting a
warning glance to Vidar. His brother looked between him and Simone warily and
mirrored his posture.
“A hunt… What… What were you hunting? Deer?” she asked hesitantly.
“No,” Kyun smiled, shaking his head. He chuckled. “Bjørnwould have loved to
photograph you. He liked pretty girls. Does Leif ever take your picture?”
Simone’s breathing was noticeably faster. Her jaw flexed as she swallowed
before she answered, “Yes. Recently. What kinds of pictures didBjørnlike to
take?”
“Oh, all kinds. He liked to catch them by surprise, he liked posing them, all
sorts of interesting portraits,” Kyun said, reminiscing fondly. He sighed
forlornly, then continued. “The Lord has forgiven him, though. Have you been
Saved, sweetheart?”
“What?”
Kyun opened the middle console and pulled out a thick hardbound book, the sides
of the pages dingy and the leather worn at the corners. Anders recognized from
the faded gold text on the front that this was a bible as the driver handed it
to Simone.
“Have you accepted Jesus Christ, pretty girl?” Kyun asked. Simone opened the
book and Anders peered over her shoulder at the odd jagged symbols drawn over
the text in thick red marker. She flipped through it with trembling fingers,
her frown deepening as she scanned the drawings and words scrawled over each
page. Anders wondered what the man was saying to her that made her so on edge,
but the drawings alone were disturbing. He shifted his gaze to the stranger,
suspicious now of his generous offer to drive them out of the middle of the
reception. “Welcoming faith into my heart was my salvation. I’ve been Saved and
shown the right path. It’s all in His plan that we are here together. It has
been shown to me that I must bring you to that path.”
Simone came upon a photograph tucked into the pages and Anders leaned closer to
see what it was, but she hurriedly shut the book. Her face was a mask of horror
at what she’d seen and he glanced to Vidar questioningly, but his brother shook
his head. Neither of them had caught what frightened her so thoroughly. Anders
looked once more to this stranger, seeing no obvious threat in the side view of
his smiling face that explained the uneasiness of everyone else in the car.
“The Lord forgives,” Kyun went on, reaching once more into the center console
and pulling out a paper bag weighted down with something heavy in it. “Even
murderers can be Saved in his holy compassion.”
Anders barely caught glimpse of the gun being pulled out of that bag before
Simone lunged out of the middle seat.
***** Chapter 28 *****
“I hate to be so forward, old friend, but I must ask,” Marceau said, his French
more palatalized than the common Parisian by the bourgeois influence of much
time spent in Neuilly. Leif had adjusted his pronunciation to mirror his,
though it was with some difficulty as French was his third language. Marceau
lifted the bottle of wine and refilled Leif’s glass with a lean across the
small table in the spacious hotel suite as he asked, “Did you kill Renfro?”
Leif tasted the wine, an aged verdejo, before answering, “No, but I did shoot
him.”
Marceau unbuttoned his white linen jacket, the cream vest underneath sporting
no telltale bulge of a gun anywhere Leif could see, but he didn’t discount the
possibility.
“We took an oath not to hunt each other.”
“We also took an oath not to extort each other,” Leif said, easing back in his
chair and admiring the trees swaying in the wind and rain outside the large
windows. “Renfro nullified himself to the protection of that contract when he
breached it.”
“It’s more complicated than that,” Marceau frowned, his wide jaw tensing in
distaste with his words, “Renfro was feeding information to the FBI.”
Leif took a deeper sip, pursing his lips as he swallowed the especially acidic
white before placing the glass down and saying, “I suspected that since he was
extorting me for hush money, specifically. I helped to hush him.”
“And yet you chose to speak with me in a public setting, in front of scores of
witnesses,” Marceau said, crossing his legs. “Did you believe that I am too big
a fish for him to have fed me to anyone?”
“Renfro was a lonely hoarder and he kept the ring fingers of his quarry. It
would not have served his fragile ego to have given up his biggest secrets
early on,” Leif explained.
“I can’t help you if you’re wrong, Valstad.”
“I would never ask you to. Whether I am pursued or caught, you would never hear
from me unless you sent for me. I don’t break my promises, not with Renfro, not
with you.”
“Where will you go when they come for you?”
“They won’t. Not yet, at least. I have great faith in the good boys and girls
at the Federal Bureau of Investigation to at least be aware of me as an entity.
I may not collect trophies, but there is an expression of vanity indelible to
my work just the same. They will know me by my mark on the world and by my
legacy. Simone would enjoy a tropical climate, to answer your question.”
“Ah, Cuba,” Marceau grinned. “Beautiful country.”
“I’m aware.”
“Four generations. Far too considerable a feat to break at this point. There
was a time when there were six Valstads in the network once; we are now but
down to one.”
“My predecessors didn’t have the forensic technology of today to contend with,”
Leif said dryly. “We all have to adapt, Mr. Marceau.”
“Your pet project seems in direct contention to this concern. Where in the
modern world is there a place for a monster?”
“The only place for Simone in any world is at my side. I am close to ensuring
that,” Leif answered, letting a fraction of defensiveness into his manner. He
knew Marceau was greedy and curious like him, which made Leif wary each time
Simone was brought up. “Is that all you had to discuss with me?”
Marceau picked up his glass, the chilled liquid having formed a layer of
condensation that dripped down the stem and onto his stark white shirt. “I’m
afraid you have invited chaos into your life with the killing of Renfro. The
knowledge of his betrayal is not widely known, but yours is. I came here today
as a deterrence for retaliation, but that cannot guarantee no one intends
personal revenge.”
“Renfro had friends?” Leif smirked, though he was inwardly startled. He managed
to mask his need to know how large the threat was, but he knew Marceau could
smell desperation a mile away. The Frenchman eyed him like a hog catching scent
of a buried truffle. Leif tried not to imagine carving the nose out of that
wide face.
“Maybe not, but there are those who would seek to undo you out of principle.”
“I’m quite used to that.”
Marceau laughed his trilling chuckle and Leif repressed an irritated sigh.
Every second he was without his daughter made him increasingly restless and
this information of it being widely known he was implicated in Renfro’s murder
made him intolerably impatient for her. There were at least ten others in their
midst that evening and, although only Marceau and a few others were aware of
Simone as his unconventional apprentice, just being Leif’s daughter made her a
viable target for revenge. As though the universe responded to his worry, the
burner phone for the private security team to contact him on buzzed in his coat
pocket. Either Simone was experiencing a lapse in sanity, his brothers were
attempting escape, or vengeance had been implemented.
“Pardon me a moment,” Leif said, rising from his seat as he answered the call.
His blood ran hot at discovering that all three of his suspicions were correct.
He didn’t remember what departing comment he made to Marceau as he excused
himself from the room, his mind racing with the need to run to the car and find
the white Mercedes SUV that had made off with his daughter and brothers. The
timing was too deliberate for it to have been a coincidental offering by an
outsider. Whoever had taken her had the unbelievable gall to take his entire
family while he was with Marceau, telling him this was not for the honor of the
oath. Had he been aware that his involvement in Renfro’s death was known, he
wouldn’t have employed conventional security. These rent-a-cops could only
observe and report and they had waited until his family was off the premises
before reporting that observation to him. He could deal with them later.
Heavy sheets of rain soaked his suit and ran into his shoes as he sprinted
through the parking lot. He could have stuffed a pick of local bangers into
suits and one of them would have at least sucked a bullet before they let a man
carry off his girl. He peeled out of the parking lot in his brothers’ rental
car, the tires dragging over the deepening puddles as he cursed aloud in an
endless string of the four languages he knew well and the three others he
didn’t. Simone had a strong intuition and physical sense for attack, but he
hadn’t yet even begun her physical training. He could only hope he got to her
before whoever had her reached their destination. The engine roared as he
punched it through the rain towards the airport, cursing over the sound of his
thoughts telling him he wasn’t even sure if that was the right direction. Fear
was an unfamiliar guest in his skull, interrupting his planning and throwing
him out of his element. There were no plans without Simone. He had
contingencies and an entire alphabet of plans A through Z for countless
scenarios that checked through the flowcharts constantly expanding in his mind,
but all of them had counted on Simone being alive. Each thought leading up to
the very likely possibility of her death simply ended. It was an unnerving
revelation.
 
 
Simone’s mind was on fire with a singular command: Don’t think. As she lunged
out of her seat and grasped this stranger’s arm, she had to let her muscles
work before she could think to command her body. Thinking took time she knew
she didn’t have. The car was swerving on the wet road, the squeal of the tires
backdropped to human screams. Hers might have been among them, she could not
wonder that yet. The force drove her left and she held onto that arm as she
caught the center console awkwardly between her legs. They were all going to
die. She needed muscle.
“Henrik!” she yelled.
The car spun and screamed like a carnival ride. The man had let go of the wheel
to try to push her away and everything lurched to the right. She pulled on that
arm as hard as she could, leaning into the force of their direction, and the
gun fired into the ceiling. The thunderous boom clapped deafeningly into her
ears. She was not strong enough to get the weapon out of his grip, but she
couldn’t allow him to lower it. The vehicle trembled and bounced, tossing her
as she rode the center console like a mechanical bull. She was aware that he
was striking her, but with all the violent jostling, it was hard to tell where
exactly his blows landed on her adrenaline-numbed body and she could not afford
to care. Under the ringing, she heard herself scream for Henrik again and this
time she saw his thick meaty hands fumble over hers.
The gun was wrenched out of the stranger’s hands. The vehicle and the man
battered her as she twisted and snatched the revolver from Henrik. Her stiff
thumb didn’t falter in pulling back the hammer. Gunpowder and blood - her blood
this time- filled her nose and evoked images of red seeping into filthy green
carpeting. Don’t think. She leveled the barrel between his brown eyes, noticing
the yellowing in the sclera from elevated bilirubin levels. Old Mr. Kyun had
found salvation in a bottle as well as with his lord. Don’t think. Simone
squeezed the trigger.
The revolver bucked in her hand like a living thing as thick red exploded out
of the back of his head and onto the now splintered side window. His head was
yanked back from the force of the bullet careening through his skull and his
limbs jerked in a rigid spasm before he went completely limp. The transition
between a living Mr. Kyun and a deceased Mr. Kyun was abrupt. The car was still
rumbling on. She stumbled around the center console and kicked at his feet
until she could stretch far enough to press on the brake and put the car in
park. The SUV lurched to a jerky stop. It was over.
She could only hear the high-pitched whine of acute tinnitus ringing her ears,
but the movement of Vidar struggling with the car door caught her attention
away from the wide splatter on the spiderwebbed window in front of her. Muted
thoughts trickled in through the thick barrier of her mind, telling her that
the child locks in the backseat were preventing Vidar from opening the door.
Her joints were rubber as she swung her leg around and pushed a sobbing Henrik
until he got the hint and stumbled out of the car. The heavy rain soaked her
through as she yanked open the car doors, her stiletto heels sinking into the
soppy earth and challenging her shaky balance as she made her way around the
vehicle. Operating on automatic, she opened all four doors despite Vidar
scrambling after Anders through his side of the car. Mr. Kyun fell partway out
of the driver side door, suspended by his seatbelt. His head lolled all the way
back and chunks of blood-pinked gray matter fell in the long grass below
through the fist-sized exit wound. His yellow and brown eyes were fixed on the
sky. Simone looked up to where he stared and didn’t see anything but dark
clouds and a million silver needles of rain. There were no angels that came for
him, not then and not while she had pressed the still hot barrel above the
bridge of his spectacles before firing. The path his lord had sent him on had
ended abruptly in the middle of a field.
“Simone?”
She didn’t know her hearing had already recovered, but she couldn’t say how
long she’d been standing there. She turned away from the lonely sky and Mr.
Kyun to see Anders standing on his crutches a few feet behind her. The sight of
him woke her mind out of its haze and an overwhelming relief flooded her. His
brothers huddled together several feet away. Somehow, they were all alive. She
had protected them. She could not protect them from how she had accomplished
that.
“I’m sorry,” she croaked.
“You are good?” he asked.
Her heels had firmly rooted in the earth, so she stepped completely out of the
shoes when she walked away from the gore. Her body and mind were a static hum.
She would never be able to doubt she was a murderer. Who she was melted into
insignificance next to what she had become. The field was wide and she faced
away from the distant road, the vehicle, the men, the gore to look out at the
trees and hills stretching into the distance. An ugly tar-like feeling coated
her inside and she wanted to sink into it, breathe it deep into her lungs and
drown. Killing didn’t feel at all like she had imagined. There was no
fulfillment, no spiritual response, no epiphany or greater meaning to be found
in the death she had brought. There was nothing she had experienced before to
compare this weight to. She could only accept this reality for what it was and,
for the first time in a very long time, she felt dreadfully certain this was
real.
 
 
Neither Henrik or Vidar wanted to be the first to speak. They would then have
to speak on what the hell they were supposed to do next, so they sat under a
sprawling oak with nothing but the sound of the rain between them for a long
while. Anders sat away from them in the open downpour, his shoulders and head
visible above the long grass with Simone’s smaller form completely hidden in
his embrace. Henrik could not see where or how Anders kissed the girl each time
he bent under that cover of grass, so he could pretend it was with the
chasteness of an overly-affectionate uncle and not the desperate passion of a
man in fear and in love. But he had seen the way Anders had watched her evolve
from curiosity to heart-wrenched longing throughout this god-forsaken vacation,
so he could only pretend not to have pieced it together by now. Maybe this was
what they needed to do to cope with what Leif had made him do to her. Maybe
that was all a smokescreen Anders had fabricated to obfuscate suspicion. Henrik
knew he should feel something, some sense of injustice or repulsion, but it
didn’t seem to matter nearly as much as it should. He glanced to Vidar, but he
was not watching them. His eyes were burning coals of hatred fixed on the
grotesque Halloween decoration leaning out of the car twenty meters away, his
hands clenched on his folded knees hard enough to whiten his knuckles. They
were both going to need therapy when they made it back home.
“We have to get out of this fucking country,” Henrik said, finally breaking the
stalemate.
“He did this,” Vidar muttered. “He was testing us. Baited us with an escape and
I fell for it without thinking. How many psycho friends does the crazy
motherfucker have? How the fuck am I supposed to live when everyone I meet
might have been sent to play jump rope with my small intestine? Are we even
going to be safe in Norway? Hell. I don’t think I’ll ever feel safe again.”
Henrik couldn’t argue or lie. “We should get the police out here.”
“We’re not going to the cops with any of this,” Vidar scowled bitterly. Henrik
waited as he clawed at the soaked material of his slacks and rocked slightly.
“The fucking legal system of this shit hole... They’ll keep us here for months
if we do that.” Vidar sneered at the corpse. “Right between the eyes. Didn’t
give him a fucking second chance. God damn. And you gave her the gun.”
Henrik winced. “No, I didn’t. I had the gun, I should have held onto it, but I…
I don’t know. I didn’t think. She didn’t have to kill him. I had the gun.”
Vidar barked out a breathy chuckle. “Heh! Letting her blow that motherfucker’s
brains out was the smartest thing you’ve ever done!”
Henrik felt the warmth of vomit rising into his esophagus and quickly changed
topic. “What are we going to do?”
Vidar stopped rocking and shot up to his feet, a manic energy making his
movements jerky as he trudged through the field. When he yanked the corpse out
of the car and proceeded to repeatedly stomp on it, Henrik resisted that urge
to vomit and ran over to pull his brother away.
 
 
A severe weather warning had grounded all flights even if there was room for
all of them on the planes bound for Northern Europe. A string of bad weather
had compounded the issue further, making their original departure date in three
days the best option according to the handling agent at the airline counter.
The coup de grâce of bad news was that even though they could fly without their
passports, Simone would not be able to fly out of the country without hers.
Anders was not proud of having yelled at the clerk. He was not proud of a lot
of his behavior lately and it worried him. They sat on a bench far from that
counter, trying not to shiver in their wet clothes or pay attention to the odd
stares from passersby. Everyone except Vidar, who stared daggers at anyone who
looked for too long and spat curses occasionally with the hostility of the
truly deranged, which he very well may have been. Anders couldn’t blame the
onlookers. Bloodied and battered, their nice formal clothes dripping wet, their
faces stuck in a haunted daze, he was sure they were quite something to gawk
at. Simone’s nose still slowly leaked blood that he would gently wipe away with
the wad of tissues someone had kindly gotten for her when they walked into the
tiny international airport. She didn’t seem to care enough to clean it up
herself. He wished he had done more to protect her, but he had once again
proved useless. In their grim space in the busy airport, he reached over to dab
at the blood that had oozed down to her chin when she reached into her jacket
and pulled out a wallet. Without looking at him, she dropped it into his lap.
She leaned into his side, still not facing him as she whispered, “745 dollars.
Need a no-tell hotel. No Hyatts or Holiday Inns; they want credit cards and
identification. There was a place on the way- Golden Key Motel. Try that
first.”
His stomach dropped, weighted down with lead when he opened the wallet and saw
Edward Kyun’s Maryland driver’s license photo staring back at him before
folding it shut in a snap.
“When did you- ah,” he started, then began again in English, “When you do
this?”
She took the wallet back and stuffed it back into the jacket he’d lent her,
whispering, “When no one was watching. Let’s go soon. Need to clean your wound,
get some rest, think.”
“What’s she saying to you?” Henrik asked.
“She’s telling us to get our asses to a place called Golden Key Motel,” Vidar
answered gruffly. He stopped his aggravated pacing and pivoted on his heels, a
twisted grin marring his frown in a strange amalgamation of bitter anger and
glee as he said, “And she looted the corpse of the man she shot to death.
Anders, today I have come to understand what you find so enrapturing about our
dear little niece.”
Anders and Henrik both gawked at their brother’s bizarre inappropriateness
before sharing a meaningful glance. There was something wrong with Vidar. There
was surely a lot wrong with all of them now, but Anders had to accept that he
would have to watch him more carefully. Vidar seemed to catch their shared
glance and they tensed as he giggled.
“Oh, don’t look at me like that,” Vidar grinned, crossing his wiry arms and
stepping toward him. Anders placed a reassuring hand on Simone’s thigh. He
wasn’t sure which one of them he was reassuring. Vidar bent at the waist to
lean to eye-level with him as he whispered, “You’re not fooling anyone, not
even yourself.”
Anders felt a cold sweat break out on the already cold and damp back of his
neck at those words, their ambiguous meaning sticking to the one thing that was
constantly plaguing him. That snapshot memory of the hallucination of Leif
holding a limp and bloodied Simone, morphing and rippling until it was himself
in Leif’s stead, popped to the forefront of his mind unbidden. Vidar was
watching closely for his reaction and he had to be careful not to give him one,
knowing how well the razor-witted man could read people. Any outward sign of
hostility, defensiveness, nervousness, any reaction at all could reveal where
those words stung. Unfortunately, posing no reaction at all was also a reaction
and Vidar pulled away with narrowing eyes beading on him in blatant suspicion.
“Vid, why the fuck do you keep doing that?” Henrik asked, exasperation and
irritation clear. “Anders has gotten the shit kicked out of him twice – no
offense, Anders- so just ease the fuck off him already. Fuck.”
Vidar sneered at Henrik, then broke once more into a grin. “Sorry, you’re
right. I’ve been an asshole. I mean, who really cares about what he’s been
manipulating our niece into doing? She’ll be fine as long as we don’t
acknowledge it.”
The words hit Anders like a punch to his head and left him just as dizzy. He
could hear Henrik chewing out Vidar and feel Simone’s hand gripping his own
over her thigh, but he was reeling in his own thoughts too far to pay any
notice to either. There was no way he was like that. He’d been kind to her,
maybe a little too kind, a little too affectionate, but he wasn’t doing that to
get anything out of her. Was he? He was vaguely certain that she had come onto
him first, but he had responded to and escalated it instead of stopping it.
There was bound to be a small amount of unconscious effort on his part to
entice her, but he swore that wasn’t his intent. Not at first, at least.
Lustful feelings and filthy thoughts didn’t mean he’d approached her with an
agenda. He wasn’t a manipulator. He wasn’t like Leif.
 
 
The SUV dredged through the high winds and heavy rain with the busted window
rolled all the way down and covered with a torn corner of one of the clear
plastic sheets and strips of duct tape that were in the trunk. They’d also
found zip ties, a hand saw, nylon rope, and a pack of cheap towels there.
Simone did not remark on the obvious intended use for these items or the irony
that they were using them for their benefit. Wind batted the plastic as they
drove past the recognizable chain hotels. Simone leaned forward from the
backseat, pointing out the exit to the Golden Key Motel and savoring the warm
flow from the car heater. She was still shaking, but it was hard to tell if it
was from the chill or the trauma.
The motel was three rows of ground level, long ugly buildings where you could
park your car a few feet in front of your door and look out at it from the
single pane window. The stone-faced middle-aged man at the front desk didn’t
even ask for identification when she requested two rooms with double queens,
nonsmoking if available. They were available with cash upfront and cheap. She
took the two keys on plastic yellow tags that read “GOLDEN” on one side and the
room numbers on the other. The keys themselves were not even golden in hue.
Simone took it as a good sign of healing that she was able to chuckle at that.
“Aychihuahua…” she muttered appreciatively at how dreary the rooms were when
she opened the door.
Pulling open the thick vinyl blackout curtain did not much improve the severely
outdated and worn interior. But it was out of the open, had a solid deadbolt,
and had two beds. The men followed in after her, none of them sparing a second
glance around the room as they sat on the edges of the beds, weariness dragging
sighs out of them as they settled. It was too early in the day for them to
separate into the second room and their usual chattiness quickly resumed in the
quiet and privacy. Simone had long since given up the polite act of seeming to
pay attention to a conversation she couldn’t understand, so she ducked into the
tiny bathroom in the back and peeled off her clothes. Standing nude in the
dimly lit linoleum and fiberglass bathroom with the motor of the fan drowning
out her uncles’ deep voices, she washed the expensive dress and panties in the
sink and tried not to look at herself too long in the mirror. Her lip was
split, the bridge of her nose had an impact laceration and bruising, there was
a coffee ring stain of a bruise darkening the outline of her left orbital bone,
and her body was loosely littered in baseball-sized patches of blues and
reddish purples that added to the ones her father had crafted. The physical
onslaught couldn’t have taken more than eight seconds, but Mr. Kyun was
obviously a practiced hand. The bruises helped remind her of what she had
prevented by taking his life, though it did little to alleviate that awful
feeling of having done it.
“Sweetheart!” Vidar’s voice came through the thin door as he rapped on it. “We
going to store. You have need?”
There was a general store they passed by off the exit, the catchall kind she
knew small towns depended on. She wrapped a towel around her middle as she
mumbled, “Um… Just a sec…”
A beat of silence. “You come?”
She looked at the skin-tight dress drying on the towel rack. There was no way
she’d be able to shimmy into that thing wet with how much it fought her just to
come off. Sick of having a non-conversation through the door, she opened it and
noticed how Vidar turned away from her. At first, she was saddened that he
might fear her now that he knew she was a killer, then she noticed the stiff
silence in the room as she stepped into it. With her brow furrowed in
suspicion, she peered at Vidar’s turned face and saw that he was blushing. It
occurred to her then that they had never had wives, sisters, daughters, or
perhaps even a consistent female presence in their home lives if they were so
unsettled by her in a towel. For some reason, the burden of their gaze and
sensibilities pissed her off. She’d bled and wept in front of these men, but
bared shoulders and a bit of thigh was just too much.
“I’m going to go get ice,” she said. She needed to get away from them for just
a moment before she did something impulsive.
She slipped on Anders’ drenched jacket over the towel and began to walk toward
the door when Henrik shot out of his seat, his hands raised in front of her to
cease her steps as he stammered, “Ah, I go, uh, get ice. You… sit.”
“‘Sit’?” she repeated, her mouth twisted in a humorless grin.
Henrik eyed her anxiously, a growing nervousness knitting his brow as she
glared up at him. She knew that it was puerile to get upset over this after all
that had happened. She bit the uninjured side of her lip, trying to stave off
that rising anger. These men weren’t her father but they were all tall, strong,
and on edge. Fear told her not to test them, but this was an anger that was all
her own. She did not want to use the calming techniques the psychologist had
taught her. Attempting to walk past Henrik, she was halted by his hand coming
across her front and gripping her shoulder. Fear shot through her at the sight
of the thickly corded muscles visibly framed by the shirt plastered to his skin
in rainwater. When she looked up at him again, part of her expected to see
Leif’s slow and cruel smile. Her heart fluttered like a hummingbird in the cage
of her ribs even as she met Henrik’s sad and reluctant eyes. He did not remove
his gentle hand. That aggression fizzled out as she shrugged out of the
overlarge jacket. A week ago, she would have just shoulder checked him and
forced her way out of the room. Now, she sat down on the end of the bed,
obedient like a good dog. The anger turned itself inward to feed her self-
loathing. She could kill a man for them, but she couldn’t stand up to them to
go outside when she wanted to.
“Just drop it,” she mumbled, looking down at the thin dingy carpet.
She dug out the stolen wallet and put it next to her on the bed; a white flag
of surrender. It became obvious to her then that her uncles terrified her and,
with a vicious twist in her gut, she knew that she couldn’t have hoped to do
anything but submit to them. Henrik patted her head, his English too weak or
his nervousness too strong to convey the proper admission or admonishment, and
she shut her eyes against the sting of recognition. The pattern of behavior had
been drilled into her. Affection as reward for submission in response to a
physical threat. The threat didn’t even have to be real now. Her father had
successfully broken and trained her in less than a week.
She lowered her back onto the hard motel mattress, the metal springs creaking
with every slight movement, and looked up at the popcorn texture of the
ceiling. The same type of ceiling as her childhood home in hot and sunny Los
Angeles. She wondered what had happened to her father to have made him the way
he was and supposed she could ask him after her uncles were safely away. He
didn’t like being asked questions, especially about his past, but it wasn’t
like she had anything left to lose.
***** Chapter 29 *****
“Oh, no, Sheriff Boden, this isn’t a ghost,” Leif chuckled into the landline
phone in his late father’s bedroom.
He sat on the floor with his back leaned against the bedframe and a joint
dangling loosely between his fingers. Beside him was Einar’s black book of
names, personal information, and codes detailing what blackmail he had on them
handwritten in his neat angular lettering. It was surprisingly up to date,
considering how the cancer had ravaged him to nearly bedridden over the past
couple of years. Leif thumbed the codes spelling out Boden’s dirty little
secret as he spoke.
“Yes, thank you for coming to the service earlier today, it was nice to catch
up. Glad to know you made it home alright... Yes, well, you were sitting next
to Jackie Olson, so I couldn’t blame you for that. Hey, I was wondering if I
could perhaps call in a favor… Yes, that kind of favor… I need your boys to be
on the alert for a recent model white Mercedes sport utility vehicle. My
daughter went off on a bender with a few tall blond assholes and I just want
your men to shake her up a little, put the fear in her and call me when they
bring her in… You’re a good man, sheriff. I’ll text you a picture of her in a
bit… Yes, you too.”
There was a certain finality in the physicality of hanging up a corded phone
that was absent in the modern cellular variety and he dropped the handset on
the switch with gusto. He’d called in similar favors from local newspaper
publishers, an alcohol merchandising district manager, a statewide hotel
laundry service company executive, and now the local law enforcement to aid in
his search. All of them commanded many workers who made an honest living
driving out to widespread locations and making frequent stops. He may have
disagreed with his father’s style on many things, but he had to hand it to the
dead man: he knew the absolute worst of the right people. Leif flicked open his
Zippo and held it to the halfway finished joint tucked between his lips, taking
a long drag off it and holding the smoke in his lungs before exhaling heavily
as he rose to his feet. As fit as he kept himself, he had started to feel all
the recent activities in his joints. Forty-two years in the mortal coil would
also do that, he reasoned.
He made his way through the unlit and silent house; his usual formal attire
stripped down to a bathrobe and socks in the absence of other humans to perform
before. Standing in the darkened kitchen with only the light from the open
refrigerator spilling into it, he briefly forgot why he was there until he saw
the bottle of Armand de Brignac in the door. A gift airmailed from someone who
had reluctantly been unable to attend the funeral. He took out a glass from the
freezer and brought both items into the living room, where flicked on a lamp
and sat in the short range of its illumination as he poured the sparkling wine
into the frosted cup.
“To the dad of the year,” Leif toasted to both himself and his deceased father
with equal insincerity, holding the glass up to the lamp and watching the light
catch on the tiny bubbles.
His elbow still occasionally ached from the time Einar had bent it backwards
between the stair bannisters, so he brought his arm down and drank deeply. The
house was full of unpleasant memories that whispered to him in the emptiness,
but he was now the only one alive to hear them anymore. Throughout his hellish
transformation in this house, he didn’t believe he’d survive either Einar or
Bjørn, yet here he was. Nearly all in one piece, at that. Simone may not have
been so lucky. Desperation rallied in him to go back out into that rainstorm
and continue the search, but he was exhausted and it was already dark. A
fatherly piece of him hoped she was somewhere dry and alive as he heard the
rumble of thunder.
Being forced to consider her ending, he turned instead to memories of her
beginning. He had been tainting his girlfriend’s birth control pills for months
and had received news of Bjørn’s death the same day she had found out she was
pregnant. Grief had not allowed him gratification in that acquisition, nor in
his subsequent rushed wedding and then the birth of his offspring. But that was
all duty; the joy of fatherhood was never necessary or expected of him. Simone
was not just his seed; she was a garden through which all in his line would
carry on after death and he tended to that garden with only a practical
interest for so long. He’d spent her whole life cultivating her, priming her to
activate the genetic memories of her ancestors and reap the full benefits of
their bloodline. She had shown such promise, he had never deemed it necessary
to sire more candidates. The hunter in her just waiting for him to pull it out
and they were on the verge of her glorious actualization. They were meant to
bring so much art and inspiration into this world. It couldn’t all have been
for nothing.
Three-fourths into the bottle had him feeling the despair of her absence
harshly and he devolved into pining. He had not expected the lust that had so
unexpectedly sparked between predecessor and progeny. He ached for her soft
body and the funny things she would say. God, she could make him laugh, really
laugh. He put his feet up on the coffee table as he flipped through the curated
selection of photos on his cell phone that depicted a normal life. Luncheons
with friends, selfies at landmarks, posed family portraits, pets that didn’t
belong to him, and a few of Simone he’d copied from his ex-wife’s social media.
There was one in particular he searched for.
The Christmas party two years prior, he was quite drunk towards the end of it
and most of the guests had left. He’d spiked Simone’s eggnog with something
that made her euphoric and did a decent job to cut up her ability to form
memories of that night. Lisa had banished Simone to her room after the girl had
brought up a great pile of snow from the sidewalk in an IKEA bag and had
attempted to build a snowman in the living room. He was sitting on Simone’s bed
with her in his lap, doing the whole mall Santa routine, and she had just
whispered what she wanted for Christmas to him. They were both laughing and
holding onto each other, both merrily drunk and delirious, when Lisa had
stealthily snapped the photo from the doorway. He could feel the phantom of
Simone’s rum-sweet breath tickling his ear, though he couldn’t remember her
joke.
That was how he wanted to think of her then. Not as an aching absence or a
corpse, or even as his definitive legacy, but as the warm and loving girl
laughing in his arms. He succumbed to the exhaustion and alcohol while still
sitting in the chair, the promise to hold her like that again soon repeating in
his thoughts. He always kept his promises.
 
 
The store didn’t have everything they needed, but it had enough to make do.
Instead of forceps, cotton-tipped applicators, and silicone foam elastomer,
Henrik picked out tweezers, Q-tips, and sterile gauze to redress Anders’ wound.
He’d have to make do with eight hundred milligrams of ibuprofen for the pain,
unfortunately. Henrik was deciphering the English on a bottle of saline
solution that turned out to be for nasal irrigation when Vidar approached him
holding two different packs of women’s underwear.
“Which ones do you think will fit?” he asked.
Henrik stared at him before deadpanning, “I think you can fit into the smaller
ones.”
“Good news! I’ve decided to drown you in a public toilet,” Vidar grinned.
The plastic-wrapped pack hit Henrik in the face, but it was fortunately soft
enough not to hurt and bounced off him to land in the shopping cart. Vidar
followed his throw with a bulk of dull yellow fabric, but Henrik was ready and
slapped them into the cart before they also collided into his face. He saw that
they were eight of the same oversized t-shirts with the words “VERMONT MAPLE
SYRUP” and a drawing of pancakes on the front.
“Oh, souvenir shirts to remember this lovely trip,” Henrik smirked.
“Better than staying in your wet clothes,” Vidar groused. As he walked towards
the personal care section, Henrik heard him mutter, “Smart ass scum-fuck.”
Henrik watched his younger brother’s lean form retreat, hopeful that he was
returning to the prickly jerk he knew instead of sinking further into the
deranged stranger he’d seen all day. He couldn’t blame him. He hadn’t been able
to feel quite like himself either. Even after seeing how trauma psychologically
affected people nearly every day in his nursing career, it hadn’t been enough
to prepare him for the first-hand experience of feeling as though reality had
been displaced. He reminded himself frequently that they were hidden away as
safe as they could manage in the middle of nowhere, but that creeping feeling
they were still trapped by a violent madman squirmed in him despite the relief
of having escaped relatively unharmed. Anders and Simone were not so lucky. He
grabbed another box of non-adhesive gauze pads and tossed it on top of the
shirts. They all had to move on and start healing quickly before the damage set
in too deep.
He was running through a mental checklist of all the things they should have on
hand until their flight when he heard angry voices raising in an argument. He
shook his head at the noisy Americans and tried not to seem as though he paid
any attention to the aggravated tones until he recognized Vidar’s voice. He
could see his brother’s wind-strewn mess of hair over the rows of shelves, the
strands that were hand-combed back now flopping forward with the jerking of his
head. Henrik walked hurriedly toward him, the aisles blurring in his
peripheral, as the back of his neck strained from the tension that ran through
his body. The fear that quickened his pace was of having been found by either
Leif or another maniac he’d sicced on them, but when he found his brother
ranting alone in the back of the store, his fears shifted to an uneasy
bewilderment.
“Stop it. Don’t! Stop it! Fucking stop! Christ, I can’t!” Vidar hissed as he
swiped at the side of his head with the edge of his arm in stiff, jerky
movements.
Henrik watched until he couldn’t take it anymore, lasting about three seconds
before grabbing him by the shoulders and saying, “Vid! What the fuck is it?”
Vidar’s ocean blue eyes, the same shade as his, looked right through him and
before he grimaced in anguish and snapped to attention. He jerked out of
Henrik’s hold, adjusted his coat and sneered, “Nothing. Don’t touch me,
asshole.”
Vidar grabbed a hairbrush from the rack at random and headed toward the cart
without looking at him, leaving Henrik once more watching his back as he walked
away. Henrik attempted to distract himself from the sickly feeling of worry by
focusing on the fact that Vidar had the added detriment of having experienced
the previous night’s ordeal through the lens of a hallucinogen. The man must
have felt terrors beyond the distress of being helpless while Leif had reveled
in violence on their brother and niece. Henrik had succumbed to unconsciousness
from the drugged wine as Leif had kneeled over Simone’s prone and bleeding
body, so he did not know when Vidar had passed out. If he’d passed out. He
simply did not know what or how much Vidar had seen and the consideration was
chilling.
“God help us,” Henrik whispered.
 
 
Simone heard the clink of his belt buckle and then the slide of the leather
against cloth, making her chest clench in anxiety. The several stripes of
bruises and impact lacerations along her upper back throbbed all at once as the
fresh memory of her lashing replayed in tactile recall. When she heard the belt
thump to the floor, she let out of breath she didn’t know she was holding, but
the sound of his zipper coming down and the soft sounds of him shuffling out of
his clothing brought her right back to that tight core of fear. The coarse
motel sheets burned her back and she turned on her side. The vulnerability it
made her feel to face away from the source of those sounds made her curl under
the comforter, but she couldn’t bring herself to risk seeing him despite
logically knowing he wasn’t there. She hated being this sick. Even away from
her father, she knew she would never be free of these flashbacks no matter how
hard she clung to what she told herself repeatedly was reality. Her father’s
rage and disappointment was written in red and purple across her back and
shoulders. The punishment she could look forward to for having run away was a
morbid concept she found herself incapable of even considering without risk of
a panic attack. The whoosh and crack of leather sounded just as loud and clear
in her mind as it had echoed in that wide hallway, making her cringe and
whimper with each phantom strike.
“Kjære?”
Simone could hear Anders’ gentle tone outside of the memory. She could feel the
mattress dip down and the blanket shift behind her where he laid down in her
bed. She could even smell the stale fear in his sweat as he scooted closer and
felt the warmth and softness of skin to skin contact on her bare body when he
molded himself to her. However, she was still on her knees with her father
towering over her in her mind.
“Det er greit, kjære… You are okay… ssh…”
His whispers against her neck helped soothe her away from that memory and she
leaned back into him, needing more to keep her grounded in reality.
“Anders… Anders, I can’t see… oh god…” she whimpered, fear trembling through
her as memories clawed the frayed edges and cracks of her mind.
His kisses on her neck made her tremble for a very different reason and she
clung to her arousal like a lifeboat tossed around in a storm, the familiar
distraction welcomed despite the memories of her body being violated
threatening to overtake her mind. But this was Anders. He wouldn’t hurt her
like that again; she had to believe that. She turned and faced him, trying to
see him but it was like looking through fogged glass with her father on the
other side. She shut her eyes, clearing the fog and seeing only Leif lying
before her, his gray eyes and slight smile holding an interested amusement to
her plight. Anders’ lips pressed sweetly to hers and she leaned into the kiss
desperately, but it was still Leif she saw. His hands caressed and pulled her
closer, the callouses on his palms and fingers identifiably her uncle’s,
helping to diffuse that specter of her father. She needed more. Her arms slid
down from his shoulders to his side, caressing down the muscle covering the
ridges of his hip bones and slipping her fingers under the elastic band of his
underwear. He inhaled sharply when she gently gripped his hardened length, the
slide of his foreskin making him growl slightly as he drove forward and locked
her into a searing kiss that made the split in her lip sting. She focused on
the passion and not the pain; pain belonging in the sexual realm of her father
and not the gentle lovemaking of her uncle. It was hard not to let the hurt
infect and heighten her arousal. That ghost of Leif was a heavy presence in her
mind.
“Kjære!” Anders gasped as she pushed him onto his back and sat up to tug his
underwear down.
“Please just… get these off,” she whispered, her aching fingers clumsy with the
elastic. He looked at her, uncertainty and arousal conflicting in his pale and
haggard face, but obliged by lifting his hips and helping her slide off his
remaining article of clothing.
“You are okay?” he asked, his voice husky and his sky-blue eyes darkened to a
shade of early twilight while still somehow holding room for such caring
concern.
Her heart ached at the love she saw there, a love she couldn’t help but echo.
She knew this was all so messed up, but so was the world they lived in. She
didn’t have the will to dismiss this beautiful, horrid thing they shared
because of a taboo that spanned both of their cultures. This was never meant to
happen in normal life, like so many other things that had happened around her,
but this was one of the few oddities that brought her some joy along with the
torment. Mindful of his wounds, she carefully straddled him, holding onto the
bed frame he leaned back against. His eyes followed her in reverent adoration
with a fondness so deep, it made her shiver with want for him. She could never
feel ashamed enough to ever reject him.
“Help me feel okay again,” she whispered, reaching between them and lining up
his cock.
He leaned forward and caught her mouth in an open kiss as she slowly sunk down
on him, his girth stretching her delightfully and pulling at that tear in her
just a little painfully. His hands grasped her hips and kept her from forcing
him inside, pulling her up each time she tried to sink down too quickly. That
ache in her heart expanded at how careful and patient he was with her. By the
time he was fully seated inside her, they were both panting raggedly with want,
but he didn’t let her move yet. He gently gripped the sides of her face and
leaned in once more, his tongue sliding into her mouth and stroking hers in
another dizzying kiss. Her hips rocked against him almost unconsciously,
grinding his cock deep enough to mash against her bruised cervix in a pain that
had her already dangerously close to orgasm just from that minimal motion. He
moaned into her mouth, his cock throbbing and making her break their kiss to
gasp as her pelvic muscles tensed around him in response. He pulled her back
into the kiss and the bedsprings began to creak as her hips rocked more
insistently, the slow and deep pace making them hyperaware of each slight
sensation. His hands slid down her body to grip her ass and pressed her against
him hard as he pushed up, driving him even deeper. The added pressure on her
clit and cervix brought a powerful clash of pleasure and pain and her back
arched as she rocked into it. She was so close, mewling and moaning in a
girlish pitch that she was too far gone to be embarrassed by, but he wouldn’t
let her do anything but slowly rock against him.
“Oh god, that’s so good, so good…” she moaned, nearly weeping from this much
stimulation and affection as he kneaded her ass and kissed her neck. Her cunt
was clenching around him, edging both of them on the precipice of climax but he
denied them both with the powerful control of his grip and his darkened stare
locking their eyes. If it was anyone else, she would feel intimidated by that
forced eye contact, but with Anders it felt like safety and reassurance. The
edging felt heavenly, they could do this for hours, but they did not have
hours. Her other uncles could come through the door any moment, a possibility
that both frightened and thrilled her. “Please, Anders, please let me come, let
me come, ah-hn…”
“Vil du at jeg skal gjøre det inni? Vil du at jeg skal fylle deg?” he asked,
his voice breathless and low as he rolled her hips with just a little more
vigor. “Du vil gjøre meg til en far, kjæreste?”
It was enough to push her over the edge, making her see sparks at the corners
of her vision as he held her gaze intensely. Her voice rose even higher in a
crescendo with each stronger spasm of her orgasm as she cried out for him. At
the height of her climax, she felt him throb and twitch as came in her with a
strained moan. His hands pushed her down in a bruising grip as he mashed his
cock deeper, as though he were trying to fit his semen directly into her womb.
The perverse idea of Anders impregnating her filled her with a delirious
excitement she knew her sober mind would revile, but made her bear down on him
harder as he filled her with come. The scent of him, full of pheromones and
familiarity, made that fantasy of being bred so appealing and she kissed his
panting mouth to stop herself from mindlessly begging for it. He sucked on her
tongue and wrapped his arms around her possessively, an animalistic manner
overtaking him as they both came down, and she melted in his hold submissively.
Her body hummed in elation, her mind floated far away from the fear that ruled
her, and she leaned into the depth of love she had for him until she felt
almost lost in it. This was perfect. She was careful not to think about how
much she was going to miss him when he was far away and safe.
“Thank you,” she whispered, dragging her nails gently over his sweat-dampened
scalp through his blond hair. He hummed in appreciation, maybe not ready to
process speech quite yet, and ran his hands over her back as he coaxed her
tongue back in his mouth.
They both jerked away when they heard a car pull up near the door.
 
 
Anders felt like he had been yanked down from Heaven straight into Hell as
Henrik carefully slid the steel tweezers into his stab wound and pulled out
long wet ribbons of gauze. After the bearlike man barred Vidar from entering
and sent Simone with his snarling brother to the other room a couple doors
down, Anders knew this was going to be an unpleasant ordeal. Henrik was very
compelling when he was in nurse mode, but Anders managed to refuse his help
while he showered. He might have stayed in that little box shower for longer
than necessary as he dreaded the coming agony. When he felt the antiseptic
sting just near the wound, he wished he’d never come out at all.
“Quit squirming, trash maggot!” Henrik snapped, following it with a mild, “I’m
being as careful as I can. I know it hurts, but please try to be still.”
“Is it all out?” Anders croaked, his knuckles taut white as he gripped the
bedsheets. He had to lay on his side with his leg propped up on a towel-covered
pillow to help relax the muscle, but it took nearly all his concentration to
just breathe deeply and try not to tense up.
“It’s not as deep as it feels,” Henrik said instead of answering. Anders
pressed his sweaty forehead into the bedding as another ribbon was pulled out
of him.
“Can’t you just stitch it closed?”
“No, that would likely heal improperly and form an abscess. Packing the wound
was the right choice.”
A delirious chuckle escaped Anders. “Wow, I guess Leif really does care about
me.”
“You were obviously his favorite brother,” Henrik deadpanned. A heavy silence
fell between them. It was too soon to joke about, but they were both eager to
move on from it too quickly. Anders could only hope that one day they would be
able to look back and not cringe. His brother’s bright baritone was gruff in
that false way he spoke when he didn’t want his concern to be apparent as he
asked, “So, how are you dealing with the shell shock?”
Anders tried to think of something witty enough to throw off the scent of
trauma, but he was too affected to make up anything that would make any sense.
“I worry about later. Nightmares and stuff.”
“Flashbacks?”
He shuddered. “Simone had one of those while you were out. I didn’t really know
how to help, I just kind of panicked and… held her. It was scary to even
watch.” A sick hatred churned his stomach. “That son of a whore is going to fry
in Hell for what he’s put her through.”
“Deep breath,” Henrik ordered. Anders resisted tensing, then resisted groaning
as fire seared outward from his wound. He couldn’t watch as Henrik stuffed the
moistened clean gauze into that deceptively small slit in his thigh. “That’s
it. I just have to cover it and we’re done for today. You won’t catch infection
as long as you don’t get it wet or be a bigger idiot than normal.”
He didn’t feel like it was over. His wound throbbed and burned, making him
unable to cuss his brother out for his insult. Find a happy place. He thought
of his dogs back home, his pack of rascals with their noisy claws dancing on
the kitchen tiles whenever he opened the fridge door. He could see Simone
running her fingers through their furry coats like she ran her fingers through
his hair earlier. That was it. After a bandage was taped over the wound, the
pain began to subside into something less than excruciating.
“You do that a lot,” Henrik muttered as he stood from the bed, the springs
groaning almost in relief when he lifted his heavy weight off them.
“What?”
“Hold her.”
Anders felt a flash of fear before it plunged into irritation and
defensiveness. “She likes to be touched. There’s nothing wrong with that.”
Henrik avoided looking at him while he picked up the tools and supplies for
dressing the wound and his tone was cold as he said, “She likes to be touched –
by you. I’m sure she likes a lot of things you two do together. Doesn’t mean
it’s right or healthy. She’s had a fucked-up life, she probably has a lot of
fucked-up coping mechanisms. Don’t be one of them.”
Anders could feel his anger rising as his brother spoke, but his words stung
with the truth he’d been avoiding. What they were doing was wrong. He was
supposed to address her sexual responsiveness to him as a problem, not as an
opportunity, but he didn’t. The sex, no matter how right or amazing it felt,
was an unthinkable sin and a violation of trust. He couldn’t stop himself,
though. He really wasn’t trying to do anything but comfort her, things just got
out of hand. Not that Henrik would know anything about that.
“I’m not hurting her.”
“Grow up,” Henrik groused. “You want me to explain how psychologically damaging
it is that someone she’s supposed to trust, someone with every advantage and
authority over her, is using her as a sexual outlet? That’s real basic shit,
Anders. Even you have to know it.”
“I’m not using her for anything, she’s-!” Anders yelled, snapping his mouth
shut before he finished that statement. Sweat beaded his aching temples and his
mouth was dry as ash. He messed up, he knew he messed up, and Henrik was
glowering at him like he was going to shout him into the ground at any moment.
But Henrik’s voice was deadly calm. “She’s what? What is she? Hm? She came onto
you, is that it? She likes it? She’s too good of a fuck to pass up? What?”
“Don’t say that,” Anders muttered. His head was pounding. He couldn’t think. He
needed to see her, make sure she was okay. “She’s not just a sexual outlet.”
“Not ‘just’ a sexual outlet? Anders, have you lost your goddamn mind?”
Most likely. “No. Look, I can’t take this shit right now. I want to see her.”
“She’s in the other room. Safe. Away from undesirable influences. I’m going to
stay in this room with you tonight and Vidar’s going to keep an eye on her.”
A black, thick feeling coated him. “What? No! She needs me. What if she has
another attack or, or starts crying? Vidar’s an asshole, he won’t know how to
comfort her!”
“Just tell us how you do it, since your methods are so effective.”
Anders’ jaw clenched and it was all he could do to keep from baring his teeth
at Henrik. He hated him in that moment with a corrosive, violent anger. Simone
could be hurt or in danger and he’d be none the wiser. They were taking her
away from him. The snapshot image flashed in his mind of Leif smirking at him
from across the crowded room after chasing off that annoying fly of a boy from
Simone. That shared camaraderie in his sharp-toothed grin. His gravelly voice
rumbling low You can only ignore it, but it’s never, ever going to ignore you
at the dining table. He wasn’t like Leif. He couldn’t be. But he felt, for the
first time, a horrible understanding of him.
“That’s not how this is going to work,” he said, that darkness pumping acid
into his veins. “She needs me to be there for her. I’m not going to let you or
anyone get in the way of that.”
“What she needs is real help, not some guy who thinks he can fix her with his
dick.”
“I’m all she’s got.”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Hide her all to yourself so you’re the only
person she can love. Just like her father. I really didn’t…”
Anders could see Henrik’s mouth move as though he were speaking, but he
couldn’t hear the rest of what he’d said as those words repeated. Just like her
father.This time, there was no guilt or shame that resounded in him, just a
cold acknowledgement that bubbled up from an ugly place in his mind. Maybe he
should stop fighting it if everyone already expected it.
“You’re right,” Anders said, interrupting whatever diatribe Henrik was on.
The burly man looked at him crossly and grumbled, “I know I am. About what,
though?”
“I would like it if I hid her away so I was the only person in her world,” he
answered easily. “But that’s because she wants it to be that way. Why wouldn’t
she? The rest of the world hasn’t been kind to her like I have. She’s much
happier when it’s just the two of us.”
“Anders… what the actual fuck are you saying?” Henrik asked haltingly, his eyes
wide and heavy brow furrowed in alarm.
The words felt like smoke billowing out of Anders’ lungs as he said, “Simone
belongs to me now. I’m going to treat her right and keep her happy, so don’t
get in my way.”
***** Chapter 30 *****
“Hello, Mr. Marceau,” Leif spoke into his phone, his French clear and
unaffected by having been woken on the first ring or the headache throbbing
like ice picks trying to escape his skull. The empty bottle of sparkling wine
clinked and rolled on the floor when he nudged it with his foot.

“Valstad, sorry to hear that you have not yet found your monster,” Marceau’s
cheerful voice came through tinny over the subpar connection is in the remote
area Einar’s property lied in. Leif’s property, he had to remind himself. This
cursed land was now solely in his name, as well as the burden of his bloodline.
He leaned forward in the chair he’d fallen asleep in, noticing that it was
still dark out, inferring that Marceau was willing to appear eager by calling
him so soon after the abduction. The man was too often eager with Leif; it wore
quickly on both of them.

“The night is still young,” Leif said, cradling his aching temples in the wide
span of his hand.

Even through the haze of a stale drunk, he could hear the subtle condescension
in the Frenchman’s polite, “Oh, yes, yes. That it is, old friend. I wanted to
personally assure you that you have our full support. All misunderstandings
about your implicated breach of conduct have been purged, save for the usual
rumor mills and gossip hounding, of course. Have you had any news regarding the
whereabouts of your family?”

Leif’s mind clicked rapidly to dissect the motivations behind this call, the
alarms ringing in his head before he could piece any of it together. Marceau
was more than willing to appear eager, he was wanting to appear eager. He
rarely spoke so directly, preferring to play with each topic and preen
pedantically with allusions and branch off onto irrelevant subjects before
addressing the real issues, but he just delivered three pieces of pertinent
information in immediate succession. He was fishing and was careless enough to
have laid out his full bait upfront, thinking that Leif wouldn’t be aware the
trade was occurring. The clicking was nearly audible in his mind, snapping
memory to context to speculation rapidly. The abductor hadn’t been waiting for
Leif to be distracted as much as he was waiting specifically for Marceau to
pull him away. Marceau, the braggart, had even spoken of Simone as he was
having her kidnapped. Where in the modern world is there a place for a
monster?Leif needed a motivation and could not find one. He needed to buy time,
pull a wager of his own.

“Einar was generous with his friends,” he said, his thoughts still clicking. He
ran through the dialogue of his private conversation with Marceau. “His
reputation precedes him even in death. I have inherited many pairs of eyes to
search for me.”

“The late Valstad indeed had wealth in all things, if not health,” Marceau
said.

The last thing he’d said in that distraction: There are those who would seek to
undo you out of principle. Principle was a chief motivator to many in their
field, enough to have made the threat on the surface of that statement obvious,
obfuscating the true threat below it. This was a personal mission to Marceau,
one that required as few actors as possible, perhaps too few from the sounds of
things. The man had clout, but not enough to have had the patience or resources
to avoid whatever desperation had led to this call. Marceau had failed
somewhere. Leif’s heart soared with hope that his daughter may truly have
avoided death, but he left his rejoicing behind a shut door in his mind while
there was still work to be done. He had to figure out what the game was before
he created his role in it. There was a time when there were six Valstads in the
network once; we are now but down to one. The entire direct bloodline had been
stolen save for him. Had Marceau wanted to eradicate them, he would have
absconded the oath and done that as an assassin. No, this was deliberately done
to isolate and divide. Undo. Marceau needed Leif to believe he was the last
remaining Valstad. This was no coincidence that this had occurred at the
funeral of the only other Valstad; it fit Marceau’s taste for poetic theatrics.
Something to do with Einar, then. Leif could only imagine what that sly,
sadistic man had done to earn a blood grudge of this magnitude with the
Marceaus.
"I trust you will keep me informed should anything of interest be picked up by
your gossip hounds in the rumor mills?” Leif asked, careful to recite the banal
phrasing Marceau had used and to say it with a thin trace of desperation.

“You’ll be the first to know if I hear something.”

“Thank you, Mr. Marceau. I hope the night finds you well.”

“Good luck, old friend. We shall speak again soon.”

Leif waited for Marceau to end the call before pulling the phone away from his
ear. He had several texts, all of them superfluous reassurances from the men
and women he’d contracted except for one. The security footage from the hotel
finally had a picture of the man who had abducted them and a possible license
plate number. Leif forwarded them both to Sheriff Boden before taking a longer
look at the grainy image of the slight Asian man in his sixties, trying to
place the familiarity. He had never met this man but he had seen that skull
structure and sloping posture before. Ignoring his aching head and roiling
stomach, Leif went into the tiny room upstairs that was his father’s and
uncle’s home office, the draft tables and tall filing cabinets covered with
dusty sheets and cobwebs decorating like streamers between them. He yanked up
the trick floorboard and pulled out one of the earliest photo albums from the
cache hidden there. He flipped through the successions of scenic panoramas,
figures caught frozen in motion, sharp focus of panic over blurred backgrounds,
all of them invoking the intent of both subject and photographer. While never
shown, he could see Bjørn in each shot. However, Leif was not glancing through
these photos to reminisce. There, caught purposefully unaware in the woods,
rifle slung over his slouching shoulders, was the abductor. Carefully, he
pulled back the protective plastic covering and turned the photograph over to
read the name written in his uncle’s neat angular penmanship. Edward Kyun,
dated thirty years ago, a young man with considerably more hair who would never
recover from whatever trauma had turned him into a killer that slouches self-
consciously. Leif leaned back in the creaky drafting chair and tapped a corner
of the photograph against his long teeth, thinking.

First Renfro, then Kyun. Both men Bjørn had hunted with at least once, now
having come after his family at Marceau’s bidding. Marceau had not counted on
Renfro going rogue and getting killed because of it, but that’s what the
contingency in Kyun was for. Now the contingency had failed as well, perhaps
also due to his savage daughter’s contribution. Leif grinned with delighted
malice at the big fat nothing Marceau had in his hand now. The game was set, it
was Leif’s turn to play. It was both too late and too early to tap the proper
sources for information; he should replenish his stamina. He brushed the sour
taste of alcohol from his mouth and laid in the bed he’d shared with his
Simone, her scent surrounding him as he drifted off into a blissfully dreamless
sleep, reassured that he would have her in that bed again soon enough.
 
 

“You are hungry,” Vidar stated, placing the half-eaten box of pizza on what
Simone supposed was her bed for the night.

She turned her head from staring at the ceiling, looked at the box and felt her
stomach lurch again. “No, no I really am not hungry.”

He breathed out a loud and frustrated sigh, his arms folded over the drawing of
a stack of pancakes on his shirt. They were all wearing the same ridiculous
matching shirts and gray sweatpants to varying degrees of fit, looking like the
sore losers of some brutal contact sport team. The Flattened Pancakes, she
thought with chuckle that came out of her trembling chest like a spasm. At
least, she assumed they all had the same clothes. She hadn’t seen her other
uncles since Henrik shooed her and Vidar to this room hours ago. The look on
the strongman’s face when he came through the door and saw her and Anders lying
stiffly in their separate beds with the blankets hiding their bare bodies
reminded her too clearly of the times her mother had caught her with a boy in
her bedroom. Henrik knew, without a doubt, and Vidar had at least suspected.
Neither, of course, approved. She felt awful for causing contention between the
brothers. It seemed she brought discord wherever she went lately.

“You eat,” Vidar insisted, pointing to the box and giving her a stern look. Her
stomach should have been completely emptied after her previous vomiting, but
she had to swallow whatever dregs slowly crept up her throat at the thought of
eating and shook her aching head. He huffed again, his hands on his narrow hips
and his sharp jaw jutting out in annoyance. “You do not eat. Now you are sick.
Eat.”

“I wish I could,” she offered with a weak smile that didn’t last more than a
flicker.
“I help you,” he announced, rising from his bed.

She watched him, blurred vision and the dim lighting of the bedside lamps not
helping her avoid seeing the phantom image of her father in him. At least it
was not a hallucination this time, just a simple likeness in appearance between
close family members. It was almost comforting to have her eyes play more
conventional tricks on her. He sat down on the edge of her bed and she wanted
to sink into the mattress and disappear to where he couldn’t reach her; a
childish fantasy for safety. Instead, she could only let him pull her arms to
sit her up, an action that made her head swim as though her brain rattled
loosely in her skull. His hands, the long thin fingers of the long thin man,
felt alien on her skin. It had been so long since anyone besides Leif or Anders
had touched her that this platonic touch felt inherently sexual just by being
skin-to-skin contact. She jerked out of his hold reflexively when that
ridiculous notion became too much. She did not want to think of Vidar in that
context. The thought disgusted her like incest always should have and it made
her suddenly curious as to why her father or Anders seemed exempt from that
natural repulsion. She didn’t have long to ponder on the discrepancy as Vidar
slung his lanky arm around her shoulders, his flesh all tautly compact muscle
and deceptively strong. All these men were horrifyingly strong. That primal
fear gripped her and made her cower as the sharp scent of him filled her with
recognition. They all smelled distinctive but identifiably similar, tapping
into that most ancient method of identification and sparking through her
synapses more directly than any other sense, but they all provoked the same
immediate response: this man is related to her father and therefore dangerous.
She was so sick of being afraid. She was so sick of everything.

“Now you eat,” he said firmly, shoving a slice of pepperoni pizza to her parted
mouth, the pointed tip pressing against her teeth.

She was too exhausted to fight him even if instinct wasn’t screaming for her to
submit. The greasy subpar pizza felt heavy in her mouth as she bit off that tip
to appease him, the back and roof of her mouth aching painfully as she chewed.
Swallowing was a process that made her wince even when it was just liquid, but
solid food brought tears to her eyes. It was all she could do not to choke. He
watched her with resolve that wilted into remorse, but she couldn’t bring
herself to look at him in her shame and embarrassment.

“What is wrong? Why you are cry?” he asked.

“I hurt my mouth and throat, makes eating hard,” she whispered, hoping that
would deter him in persisting with this task of hand-feeding her like a baby.

It did something worse. It made him curious. His hand firmly tipped her head up
to look at him as he commanded, “Open. Let me see.”

“N-no?” she squeaked.

Her shaking muscles tensed in anticipation of having to physically resist him.
His sharp features hardened just slightly, but it was enough to send a frisson
of fear through her. This man lacked the jolly manner of Henrik or the gentle
compassion of Anders, possessing an asperity and intensity too similar to Leif
but without his finesse of deception. She was coming to understand that there
was a quality to Vidar that was as open and reactive as a raw nerve beneath
that hard intelligence.

“Open.”

She obeyed. Keeping her eyes fixed to the side, she opened her jaw cradled in
his hands and let him tilt her head back to shine the dim lamp light into her
mouth. Humiliation flooded her at the way he’d handled her all evening. It
seemed like whenever he wasn’t ignoring her, he was invading her boundaries and
pushing her through these demeaning acts. Far too similar to her father. In
their own ways, they were all too similar to one another, like some genetically
motivated behavior.

“Fy faen!” he hissed.

She winced at the harsh tone but resisted pulling away or closing her mouth.
She could tell he was glaring at the bruises discoloring the soft and delicate
flesh inside, her face burning in a deep flush from the memory of how she got
them, not wanting to think about that while he touched her. If she ignored the
context, this was not unlike being at the dentist’s office. She latched onto
that interpretation, much preferring a clinical detachment as opposed to
whatever this was.

“Who did this?” he asked, his voice low in anger, almost growling out,
“Anders?”

She took this as an opportunity to close her mouth, but he didn’t let go of her
jaw despite no longer even looking at her. His glare was fixed on the air
behind her, unfocused as the gears of rage turned in his mind. Seeing that raw
anger churning behind his face, she didn’t dare try to squirm out of his grasp.

Her voice was as gentle and submissive as she could manage from her sore
throat. “I don’t understand what you’re asking, uncle Vidar.”

“You… fucked,” he said hesitantly. The discomfort she felt at hearing that word
used as a verb while he held her face made her want to shrink into nothing.
“Who fucked here make this bruises?”

Simone’s blood ran cold at the question. She didn’t think he’d guess the cause
so correctly. She wanted him to suppose it was due to illness or anything but
the truth.

“Leif, yes?” he asked. That hand at her jaw tightened and his glare sharpened,
this time focusing right at her. “Tell the truth.”

She worried that she was going to vomit again, but fear kept her throat from
spasming as much as it kept her from doing anything else. Submit and survive.
She nodded almost imperceptibly.

His lip twitched once, a quick tick that she would have missed if she blinked.
His next question was whispered, “Did you like it?”

Warning alarms were blaring in her mind for her to run, get away, do anything
to get out of whatever was happening. His arm around her shoulders and his hand
cradling her jaw prevented any hope of escape. His serpentine glare prevented
any hope of deceit. She hesitated, then shook her head. His brow furrowed as
his head tilted in thought.

“No, maybe not,” he murmured almost to himself, then said, “Tell me all things
Leif did.”

A cold sweat broke out on her scalp and neck. This couldn’t be happening. It
was too late.

“Why now?” she whimpered. Her ears rang. He watched her, calculating,
analyzing, holding back some horrible reaction as he waited for her to answer.
“Why didn’t you see before? Where was this… this insight when…”

“He fucked,” he finished for her.

It was awful to hear that knowledge outside of herself. She wanted to stuff it
back inside her and hide it away from this thief.

“I did not look,” he said, maintaining that same thin veneer of calmness while
anger built within him. She flinched when she felt his hand at her jaw slide
down and wrap around her neck, panic making her pant to draw in breath while
she could. His eyes, the ocean blue of them appearing almost black in the low
lighting, never wavered from hers. “I did not look bruises here…” His hand slid
further, pulling at the loose collar of the oversized shirt she wore, poking
the still painful bite mark at the crook of her neck. “I did not look here…” He
moved his hand away from her finally, her wide eyes following it in both relief
and remaining terror. “You… help Leif. Why?”

“I…” she whispered. Her jaw clenched shut. The truth was too sick to say out
loud. She was still panting, that panic sticking in her and growing like a
rapid fungus, and a terrible feeling of dread coated her mind. She couldn’t let
herself succumb to an anxiety attack while alone with this angry, vengeful man.
“I need some air. May I be excused?”

Vidar watched her, his piercing eyes boring into her, before his arm pulled
back with a friendly pat and he nodded. Stepping out of the cramped room and
into the cold night air felt like leaving a hot and noisy kitchen, the relief
almost instantaneous as she took a deep shaking breath and let the door shut
behind her. Before she walked even three steps, she heard Vidar’s muffled yell
and a loud bang of something hitting a wall. She wrapped her trembling arms
around her aching body and walked away faster. It seemed as though they both
needed space. The smooth concrete of the walkway was cold enough to make the
bones in her bare feet ache, but not enough to numb them completely. The quiet
and solitude allowed her to focus and she found herself being drawn to the
stolen SUV parked in front of the other room as she thought on her status as a
murderer. She wondered when the police would find Edward Kyun. They’d broken
through a fence off a main road and left deep tire tracks through the mud and
the grass, leading right up to where he laid crumpled in that field. Maybe she
belonged in a hospital for the criminally insane. She was certainly insane and
a criminal, after all. Or maybe she could swallow a bullet.

“But I have to watch Dad,” she told the rain. “He needs me. And I need him not
to kill my uncles.”

“There’s no one here. You’re safe now.”

Simone startled at the voice and looked around, but there was no one else
there. The front desk was closed. The smattering of other motel dwellers were
locked away in their rooms, fast asleep or kept company by the blue green light
of their televisions. That dread coating her mind thickened and her chest
started to hurt.

“Who’s there?” she called as loudly as her throat allowed. Nothing but the rain
answered.

“The water is cool and calm. You’re relaxed. There’s someone in the water with
you.”

The man’s voice was close, too close to be hiding. She tried to run back to the
room, stumbling with rubbery knees and half-numb feet, but froze when she heard
a her own terrified voice from within her own skull.

“Stop it! Stop it! Run!”

“Fuck, oh fuck, fuck!” she panted, the edges of the world curling in and
shifting around her. She had to hold onto this reality. No more hallucinations,
no more flashbacks. She pounded on the door, barely feeling it against her
hand.

“Let the water make him still. Let the water make him quiet.”

The door opened and she fell through it, stumbling into a startled Henrik. When
her face planted into the pancake shirt on his muscular chest, darkness
swallowed her whole.
 
 

Anders was receiving many lessons in how long a minute could possibly feel
lately. At Henrik’s insistence, they waited as Simone laid stiffly on her side
on the floor, her entire body tensing and then relaxing repeatedly in a
seizure. The impulse to grab her and shake her out of it was strong, but beyond
rolling her onto her side and putting a pillow under her head, Henrik had said
they just had to wait it out. Anders could not do this. He stood up, sat down,
gnawed at his knuckle until it nearly broke skin, stood up again, then broke
the awful silence.

“Why is this happening?” he asked. "What’s wrong with her? Is this normal? This
isn’t normal.”

Henrik shook his head, not taking his eyes off the prone girl. “There’s a lot
of reasons this could happen, but I’m pretty sure it’s withdrawals.”

“Withdrawals? Withdrawals from what?”

“Barbiturates, benzodiazepines, take your pick. Leif had plenty of each in his
medicine bag. Nothing that was explicitly anticonvulsant, though. I don’t think
he was using phenobarbital or diazepam to do anything but render
unconsciousness,” Henrik theorized, stroking his beard with his thick hand.
Anders wanted to scream; he couldn’t understand how his brother could be so
stoic about this.

“Could you explain that in Norwegian now? Or just what the fuck that has to do
with why Simone is having a seizure?”

Henrik huffed out of his nose and frowned back at him. “There were a lot of
medicines in Leif’s collection that, if you stop taking them suddenly after
having been on them a while, could cause this.”

Anders waited for him to continue and when he didn’t, he tried not to scream,
“What else can happen?”

“Well, she has a lot of other symptoms already,” Henrik answered. “Fever,
tremor, perspiration, hallucinations… hard to say what will happen. Seizing
indicates possible excitotoxicity or neurotoxicity. We should take her to a
hospital… maybe.”

“‘Maybe’?”

“Well… Hospitals here aren’t really equipped to help people withdraw,” Henrik
explained carefully. “I looked into coming out here and working at an American
medical facility when Pappa was getting worse. It’s bleak, especially for
addicts. There’s not a lot of help available to them without it costing an arm
and a leg at a private rehab. If we take Simone in, especially without being
able to tell them much or bring proof of insurance, there’s a good chance
they’ll just put her on an IV and leave her to dry out while they write up the
bill. Most addicts don’t even try to seek help. It’s safer just to keep using.”

Anders’ tasted blood and looked down at his knuckle. He’d finally bitten
through the skin. “What the fuck is this country?”

Simone’s body stopped tensing, seeming to almost deflate in exhaustion as the
seizing receded, and she lied there panting and still. Henrik leaned over
Simone and pressed his hand to her forehead. Anders ignored the insane feeling
of protectiveness that urged him to push his brother away as he touched her. He
needed to let him work. Henrik lifted her hand and checked her pulse, using the
men’s watch she wore on that wrist to count the beats per minute, his heavy
brow furrowed in concentration and worry.

“Get Vid, his English is better,” Henrik said.

Anders didn’t want to leave her. He hesitated a moment, letting the weight of
logic overthrow these base reactions before bolting to the other room. When
Vidar finally opened the door, Anders saw that he’d been crying.

“Simone’s had a seizure. We need you to talk to her.”

“Simone’s as good as dead,” Vidar said dismissively, walking back into the
room.
Anders caught the door before it shut in his face and stepped through it.
Before he could shout his brother down, he saw that the room was in chaotic
disarray. An armchair laid on its side, gutted and broken, its stuffing torn
out from it like a disemboweled beast. Bedding had been thrown all over the
room and a mattress had been flipped onto a wall. Anders swallowed the sour
dread and anger at having let them put Simone in a room with this broken man.
He could lambaste his brothers later; he needed them to help her first. He
looked back to Vidar’s miserable and red-rimmed eyes, conviction hardening his
voice.

“She’s sick, Vid. She’s withdrawing from whatever shit Leif had her fucked up
on for so long. Just help us talk to her.”

Vidar smiled without humor and turned to the wall. His voice was slightly
hoarse as he said, “She’s going to go back to him, you know. She loves him, or
at least she thinks she does. He made sure of that.”

At first Anders didn’t understand what he was saying, but when recognition hit,
it hit him hard. He couldn’t stop himself from yelling, “Would you please just
fucking come with me and help?!”

Vidar shook his head and calmly said, “She’s probably going to die, if she’s
lucky. Let’s not waste her good fortune.”

That simmering rage and frustration boiled over in Anders in a flash of motion.
He didn’t know he’d moved on Vidar until he saw him stumble backward with his
hand raised defensively in front of him. His older brother stared at him in the
wide-eyed shock they both shared and Anders shook his fists loose. He hadn’t
intended to hit Vidar, but he also hadn’t intended to close in on him like that
either. It just happened. He pressed his bleeding hand into his hair, tugging
at the roots nervously as he assured himself that it was just stress. He wasn’t
a violent man unless it was necessary. Beating Vidar wouldn’t have been
necessary, even after the terrible things he’d said about Simone. It didn’t
happen. It wasn’t anything.

“Listen, just… just come and talk to her,” Anders said, unable to even look at
him.

“Sure, okay…” Vidar muttered.

Anders tried to think of something substantial to say to excuse his behavior,
but he couldn’t. He left ahead of Vidar, eager to get back to Simone. These
hours without her had him on edge believing something terrible would happen to
her without him there, but it was still surprising to be proven right. He
shouldn’t have ever let them separate her from his sight. It was a terrible,
awful thought, but there was a part of him that felt validated that something
had happened. She needed him.

“How is she?” he asked as he propped open the door for Vidar to squeeze into
the cramped room after him.

“I don’t know,” Henrik answered, rubbing his face. “Maybe we should call an
ambulance.”

“We might as well shoot up a flare for the freaks to come after us if we do
that,” Vidar quickly interjected, his irritated tone fully recovered from being
shaken by Anders’ sudden aggression. “No cops, no hospitals, no institutions
where we can be identified. Fuck, going to the airport was probably a mistake.
Don’t Americans just throw drug addicts in a box to dry out anyway? Hell, we
could do that here.”

“Vidar, just get down here and ask her some simple questions,” Henrik grumbled,
then said, “Actually, Anders, you get down here. Vid, tell him what to say.”

Vidar crossed his arms, seeming to take personal offense to this as Anders
carefully lowered himself to sit on the floor above her head. His wound pulled
painfully at the maneuver, reminding him that he’d been walking around without
the aid of crutches, high and stupid on adrenaline. Simone’s eyes were blinking
slowly, her sweat-drenched forehead furrowed in pain as she panted heavily
through her paled lips. He took her shaking hand and held it between his to try
to warm it.

“Ask her if she knows where she is, if she knows what happened, the last thing
she remembers, that kind of shit,” Henrik said as he sat heavily on his bed,
running his fingers through his beard.

“Okay, ah…” Vidar began. “Say, Where are you.”

Anders leaned over her face, bending close enough to whisper, “Simone… Simone,
where are you?”

At first, she could only groan slightly, her blinking eyes unseeing even as
they looked through half-lids up at him. Then, in a tiny whisper, “Water… but…
everything is so dark… There’s someone in the water…”

“Now ask, You know what has happened,” Vidar instructed above him, not having
heard her bizarre response.

Anders didn’t know what else to do, so he whispered, “You know what has
happened?”

Her eyes darted around, still unfocused and bleary, as though she was dreaming.
Her whispers between panting breaths were stronger, more fretful, “I know
what.. has happened… I… he… he said to… so I made him still and… so quiet with
the water.”

Henrik handed him a towel and he used it to wipe away some of the sweat from
her brow, her skin hot to the touch even through the material. She kept
whispering the strange nonsense, her words becoming more disjointed as she kept
repeating something about water. Anders sighed as he accepted what he had to
do.

“I’m going to go back to my room if that’s all,” Vidar said.

Anders quickly lifted his head, stopping Vidar’s retreat by asking, “Could you
actually help me tell her one more thing?” Vidar shrugged, but stayed.
Anders touched her face, his thumb smoothing over her soft fever-heated cheek
as he worked up the nerve to let his brothers hear this. She was far more
important to him than his fear. “I want to know how to tell her that she’s with
me from now on. That I’ll take her in and take care of her. Forever.”

“She can’t even leave the country, dumbfuck, how are you going to tell her all
that and just leave her in a couple days?” Vidar groused sourly.

Anders accepted the disposable plastic cup of water Henrik brought him with a
small smile as the large man watched him warily. He lifted and cradled her
boneless form against him as he said, “I’m not leaving without her. We’ll
figure it out.”

“That’s insane, Anders. We’ll be lucky to make it to that flight. What do you
think Leif is going to do when he catches you? It’s suicide!” Vidar sneered.

“Leif isn’t going to catch me,” Anders corrected him. “I’m not running from him
anymore.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Henrik asked grimly.

Anders held Simone’s head up as he tipped the cup into her mouth and she
automatically accepted the drink. The memory of trying this and being rewarded
with a face full of bloody water when she spat it out at him seemed so funny
and distant now. It was actually far from either, but he chuckled anyway. His
brothers stared at him as though he’d gone completely insane. Maybe he was.
He hugged her to him more tightly, feeling her soft hair under his cheek and
breathing in her fevered scent as he said, “I’m going to go to him.”

“S-stop… stop… stop…” Simone whimpered, her body trembling and curling into
him. Her hand tightened into a fist over his chest, twisting the pancake
drawing on his shirt.
***** Chapter 31 *****
When Leif next awoke, it was to the golden light of sunrise trickling between
the blinds. In that space between sleeping and waking, he was devoid of memory
or identity, existing only to see the light shimmer and feel the warmth of the
bedding. The scent of his absent daughter was the catalyst that birthed his
mind, ushering in the terrible reality of his existence and unfurling the
tangled web of his thoughts. It was with practiced ease that he pushed down his
emotional reaction to living, focusing past it in meditative technique, letting
it dissipate into vaporous nothing until he was empty again. Only once he had
made himself hollow did he allow carefully controlled thoughts and feelings to
trickle back in. First the acknowledgement that he was still somehow alive,
then what that meant for him. Today, his still being alive meant finding his
daughter and vengeance. Without rising from the bed, he took his cell phone
from the nightstand and checked for any messages. None. Disappointment was a
feeling too close to failure. He wanted blood, but he could settle for coffee
for now.
Walking through the empty house in the daylight, he toyed with the idea of
burning it to the ground, contracting one of the mafia-based construction
companies he had good relations with, and turning this graveyard into a proper
home for him and his daughter. No more bodies to keep him prisoner to these
grounds. No more memories that go bump in the night. The coffee in the pantry
was stale, but it was a beautiful morning for a drive.
Jay’s Grocer and General was just opening when he pulled up in Einar’s old
truck. Leif’s work boots crunched over the loose gravel that made up the
parking lot, the noise alarming a small flock of chickens to take their pecking
elsewhere, but for all this country kitsch, Jay’s had gone from a pit stop to a
supplier of gourmet foods and fine wines to suit the rapid gentrification of
this rural community. Unfortunate for Einar’s original neighbors who were now
on the fixed incomes of retirement benefits, but fortunate for Leif to get a
decent bag of fair trade, ethically-sourced coffee. The brand he chose touted
its support of a small village in Ethiopia and he figured it balanced out the
destruction he helped wreak on this village of retirees by feeding that
gentrification. Irony was its own reward.
“How ya doin’ this morning, Mr. Valstad?”
Leif turned to the young man who addressed him and, seeing him in the apron
that marked him as an employee, relaxed. He recalled that this was the same
gangly boy that was all over his daughter during their first supply run and,
inexplicably, at the funeral reception. He glanced at his name tag and returned
his greeting with a warm and neighborly, “Good morning, Bryce! You know, I
didn’t get a chance to ask you how you knew Einar.”
Bryce’s body language was loose and oddly unworried for someone who was on the
receiving end of an unspoken threat just the previous day, no matter how
covertly implied. Leif wondered at this as the boy turned to him more fully as
he spoke.
“We knew him as Ernie,” the boy said, his tone the respectful narration that
the genteel took on when speaking of the dead, “He was pretty well known to
just about everybody. Well, half the town was there yesterday, so that’s kinda
obvious. I’d, uh, take him his groceries on the bad days he couldn’t make it on
his own. We got to be sort of friends.”
Leif was accustomed to his father being sort of friends with hundreds of
people, but those people were usually useful to him to further his agenda or as
potential resources. It wasn’t the man’s modus operandi to chum it up with the
local bag boys.
“Well, I owe you my thanks,” Leif smiled.
“Oh, that reminds me…” the boy said, digging into his pants pockets and coming
up empty with an apologetic shrug. “I should give you the key, I guess, but I,
uh, forgot it today. Sorry.”
Leif’s surprise was enough to engage his interest. He wasn’t aware that his
father had grown so pathetically decrepit that he had to resort to allowing
near strangers access to the property. The old man had been aggressively
private for as long as Leif had known him, but sickness can weaken more than
the body. It was a shame he’d been too committed to life to take his own before
the cancer had reduced him. Leif would have gladly done it for him, but
etiquette required he wait to be asked. The disappointment that came with the
call letting him know Einar had died by natural causes was a thing that still
stung, now all the worse with this scenario before him.
“You know, I’ll just drop it by on-”
“No, that won’t be necessary,” Leif interrupted. It was troublesome enough that
Einar had been handing out keys to two - no, three- generations worth of
evidence without having to worry about anyone dropping by. “We’re having the
locks replaced today.”
“Oh, well then,” Bryce smiled, adjusting the broomstick in his hands. “It was
nice seeing you both yesterday. How is Simone? I didn’t get a chance to say
goodbye before she left with Eddie.”
Leif felt his façade collapse under the weight of all this boy had implied with
such breezily-delivered small talk. His relaxed brow and easy smile fell into
his natural impassiveness, his hostility displayed only in the eager glint of
his steel-gray eyes and the straightening of his posture. Whether the boy knew
the full meaning his words carried or not was difficult to say, but Leif was
hopeful that he could find out through pain. He was not a cruel man, though, so
he would give him the chance to avoid that method.
“Is Eddie a friend, Bryce?” Leif asked. The friendly tone he retained was a
disconcerting contrast to the cold anger behind his thin veneer of control.
The boy was already nervous, which was always gratifying but not helpful to
either of them. Not yet, at least. “Um. Eddie was, uh, he, um, he and Ernie
used to work together, I guess? Right?”
“Is that so? Please, tell me more about Eddie,” Leif said, stepping closer to
him, the package of coffee still clutched in both hands at his front.
Bryce glanced around, too automatically to be surreptitious about it, but they
were alone in the back of the store. “Well, uh… I don’t know much. A quiet guy.
He just came in with Ernie sometimes and, um, later… he was there sometimes. At
the house. Not a lot.”
“What was he doing there?”
“Um… they were friends? Look, I really didn’t know him that well,” Bryce said,
stepping backwards as Leif moved closer.
Leif took that as his cue to put a hand in his pocket, the antler handle of the
folding knife fitting pleasantly in his palm. “You know more than that, Bryce.”
The boy seemed as baffled as he was frightened, which was disappointing. He
probably didn’t actually know anything. It seemed as though both of them were
victims of bad luck and inadequate information, but Leif was quickly coming to
lean towards the idea of making this boy’s luck a lot worse than his. It would
only be prudent to be thorough. He pulled the knife out of his pocket, watching
the boy’s widening eyes follow it as he slowly slid the blade out with his
thumb.
“Mr. Valstad…?”
Leif’s phone vibrated in his other pocket. He sighed, disappointed yet again as
he traded the knife for the phone. “Excuse me, Bryce, I have to take this.”
The boy nodded and stiffly walked away, his face as pasty as it was when he had
seen the gun tucked at Leif’s side during the reception. The impression that
young man must have of him by now didn’t matter, but it did illuminate to Leif
that his social graces may have atrophied after having had a taste of the
carrot that had been dangling in front of him for so long. He was chasing that
carrot all over again and was more impatient the second time around.
“Good morning, Sheriff Boden,” he spoke into his phone, placing the bag of
coffee back on the shelf as he walked towards the exit.
“It sure is morning, but I don’t know if it’s a good one, Mr. Valstad,” Boden
said. He didn’t wait a beat before continuing; a forwardness that Leif
appreciated more and more lately. “Kyun, the driver you had us on the lookout
for? Turned up dead in the mud with a hole punched straight through his head.
Property owner found him at the asscrack of dawn when his goats got out into
the road from the fence he – or whoever- broke through. You wanna tell me what
the hell kind of a bender your daughter is on or are we just gonna dance around
that one?”
“Family dispute,” Leif responded. “Send me the location. I’m on my way now.”
“The feds took this one, so I can’t permit you a tour of the scene.”
Leif didn’t pause on his way to his vehicle, though he wasn’t entirely aware of
getting in it until he was sitting in the driver’s seat. The FBI must have been
following Kyun closely to have descended upon his corpse with such immediacy.
Perhaps Renfro had fed him to the Bureau, perhaps they had long been in pursuit
of him, but between two links to the FBI even with Marceau’s knowledge, it was
madness for Marceau to have used them in this scheme. Unless that was his
intent. Where will you go when they come for you?
 Marceau knew he was capable of slipping the Bureau but he wouldn’t leave
without taking Simone. He would be pinned and vulnerable the longer he stayed
looking for her. Even if he ran, Marceau had power over him for as long as he
held Simone hostage. But Marceau did not have Simone.
“… you there? Mr. Valstad?”
“The vehicle had been driven through a fence. Was that intended?” he asked, his
mind still clicking rapidly.
“Skid on the road indicates they lost control of the vehicle. We only got a
glimpse of the scene before it was swept up from under us. Musta been ‘bout a
baker’s dozen of them feds come swarmin up on us like locusts just twenty
minutes after we got the…”
Leif placed the phone down next to him on the cracked leather bench seat of his
father’s truck, Boden’s tinny voice still rambling through the weak reception,
and pressed his fingertips to his grinning mouth. His daughter had killed her
captor, he was certain of that. He wasn’t familiar with Kyun, but a seasoned
hunter wouldn’t have entertained the natural hesitance to violence present in
his brothers. The level of threat required for his darling girl to make such a
reckless move implied that the weapon was made visible to her, a mistake on
Kyun’s part that turned out to be fatal. His savage girl had attacked while
Kyun was driving. Leif leaned his head back and closed his eyes, listening to
the overtures of pride and relief lifting in the symphony of his mind. Beneath
that music, the clicking metronome of thought processed a plan. He decided to
search out Marceau to do breakfast with him.
 
 
Light brought Simone out from a fever dream of dozens of hands pulling her down
deep into the earth, but the engine hum and swaying of the car in motion lulled
her back into that fitful rest until the light pulled her out again. This
repeated, waking to the light and then being pulled down into dense darkness by
those hands again and again, making her delirious mind forget there had ever
been anything else to existence until one of those hands curled over her face.
The gentle caress of its calloused fingertips on her cheek sparked memory and
grounded her to the light this time. She blinked blearily in the golden
sunshine of the morning to see Anders watching her, his beleaguered and ashen
face close.
“Are you okay?” she whispered, the short question half-wheezed out of her dry
and cracked throat.
The edges of his mouth twitched into a sad smile. “I am okay. You are… How are
you?”
She nodded then started to feel the pull of those hands again before her eyes
even shut, but he was pulling her away from them and muttering Norwegian at her
as he propped her to sit up with her back leaning against something cold and
leather. It was then that she was able to comprehend her surroundings. She was
in the trunk space of the SUV, the motel comforter wrapped around and under
her. She looked into his eyes, noticing they were the exact shade of the open
sky behind him as though it shown straight through him. He was bruised and
exhausted and beautiful.
“Is it time for you to leave?” she whispered. She’d never noticed the lines in
his forehead or at the edges of his eyes so pronounced before, the slight shift
in his expression deepening them in something between contentment and sadness.
Her heart wrenched at the likeness he held to her father in that concealed
emotion and age but she couldn’t tell if she ached with longing or
apprehension. Recent experience had taught her it was likely both.
“No,” he answered, that sad smile tugging wider.
He held a glass of water out to her and she had to use the meager strength in
both of her arms to lift it to her mouth. Everything hurt but thirst was a
powerful drive. She had to go slow with it, her battered throat threatening to
choke with each swallow, and tried to ignore how he watched her with that
intense stare. He was always so patient with her, but there was a heat in his
eyes even while she was in this deathly condition. Being the focus of such
heavy attention made her nervous, especially when she was this vulnerable, but
this was Anders. He only ever wanted to help.
“Thank you,” she said more clearly now that her throat had been wetted.
Her head was clearer as well, though still throbbed with the fluff overstuffing
her skull. A thin ringing sound whined in her ears and her body was shaking and
weak. It occurred to her that she must have slipped further into sickness,
shame following that knowledge at how burdensome and weak she was. It was an
old shame, as old as the disappointment hidden in her mother’s gaze, motivating
her to push herself harder to at least seem less sick than she felt. He caught
her shoulders when she tried to push herself up, his unpracticed help at
assisting the debilitated doing more harm by throwing off her already reeling
center of balance. She had to work up the nerve to lean up and wrap her arms
around his shoulders, encouraging his hold to go lower. When his hands went to
her waist, his attempt at assistance crumbled under his seemingly endless
impulse toward affection and he pulled her to him in an almost desperate
embrace. Under the soft materials of their t-shirts and sweatpants, she could
feel the hardened tension in the lean musculature of his body pressed against
her. Danger burned in the back of her mind. Something was wrong. These trees
were familiar, the dirt road under them was the same as… She turned her head
and saw her grandfather’s house, the wide oak front door open to the darkness
within like a gaping maw. A cold chill ran through her fevered body.
“Anders… Anders, what have you done?” she asked, her voice shaking with the
renewed trembling in her.
“Sshh, ssh, kjære,” he whispered. He reached behind her and she caught a
glimpse of the revolver in his hand before he was hauling her up. Understanding
what he intended was worse than the mindless fear of not knowing.
“No… no, no, no…” she panted as he carried her, limping with his bad leg up the
steps. She began to weep as she pleaded, “Please, please don’t- You can’t go
back, you were away from him! You’re supposed to go home! You’re supposed to
leave!”
“Together,” he smiled, a grave expression that wasn’t at all comforting as it
was intended.
“I can’t- I can’t protect you from him, I can’t! You have to turn back! He’s
going to- to… Oh, God…”
She gagged on a sob, the cold of the water crawling up her esophagus but she
kept it down just barely. The shadows beyond the doorway were thick with the
curtains drawn, growing only darker as he carried her through the wide hallway.
Each uneven step grew more muffled in her ringing ears as consciousness began
to wane dangerously, but she had to stay lucid even in this mad fever dream. He
laid her out on a couch in the parlor, nearly dropping her with how bending
pained him, and sat heavily on the edge next to her. He set the gun on the
coffee table and gripped the area above his wound, holding it tightly as he
breathed heavily in pain, sweat glistening along his temple. She tried to sit
up, tried not to look like she was going to snatch the weapon, but he pressed
her back down with one wide hand on her chest.
“Rest,” he insisted, his voice as ragged and tired as he looked. He didn’t stop
pressing her down, his fingers cold where the collar of her shirt dipped low to
bare the skin below her collarbones. She felt sicker at the comfort his touch
brought her even now.
“Why are you doing this?” she asked.
He looked at her, his weary expression hardening with resolve. She didn’t want
his resolve. Resolve was for people attempting to accept a terrible decision
they think is right. Whatever he thought he was doing by bringing them back to
this house, back to her father, with a gun and steeled resolve, it was only a
terrible decision.
“I love you,” he answered. His hand sat like a stone upon her chest.
Simone bit her lip until the sting of the split there throbbed in time with the
ache in her chest. Ghosts stood in the archway behind Anders, but she couldn’t
look at the headless woman or the blood-soaked man in fishing gear. Only this
living, breathing man mattered and she had to prevent him from joining the
death this family had wrought.
Her voice shook as she spoke. “I don’t… I don’t love you. Not like that. You’re
my uncle, there’s just no… it’s impossible for me to feel that way about you. I
can’t be with you. Ever.”
That terrible resolve didn’t falter, but his warmth did. “Stop.”
Her tears hit the dark blue velvet of the tufted couch with an audible sound,
assuring her that the asthmatic wheezing echoing up from the basement darkroom
was only in her mind. In that same space, the pop of an old manual camera made
her flinch.
“No,” she said, focusing on the bruise her father created along his cheekbone.
“I don’t want to be with you; it’s sickening. What we’ve been doing is wrong,
Anders.”
“Stop,” he growled through clenched teeth, twisting his body to lean over her
and grasp the sides of her face.
She couldn’t look at how it pained him to hear this, so she shut her eyes and
pretended her throat wasn’t closing around the sobs that threatened to wrack
her as she spoke, “It’s been hurting us both and I can’t do it anymore. You
need to leave. Get out. Get-!”
His mouth settling over hers cut her off in a kiss that felt too gentle for the
forcefulness behind the intent. She grunted in effort to turn away from it, but
he held her head still and tilted to offer her mouth more easily to him. He’d
never done anything like this with her before. She pushed up against his chest,
at first only to signal for him to stop, and then in earnest to push him away.
Her pulse pounded in her ears and her panic began to rise. This wasn’t like
him, but those were his thumbs stroking her cheeks and his lips pressing hers
shut. Her breaths became short and quick through her nose, the pounding in her
head worsening from rising fear stealing her oxygen. Guilt clenched her gut and
drained her resistance. His hands moved to cradle her head after she stopped
trying to twist away and his mouth slid more sensually over hers. She needed
him to escape, but she wasn’t strong enough to lie to him. She leaned up into
his kiss and slid her hands down his body, giving into this weakness for just a
moment before jabbing her fingers into his stab wound.
He broke away, grimacing and gasping in pain, and she pushed him as she lunged
for the gun. Her body was weak and disjointed like a newborn fawn and she
stumbled away as fast as her rubbery legs could carry her, making it only a few
paces before he slammed into her back. She shrieked as they both fell in a
tumble, the revolver clattering and sliding away from them into the hallway. He
pinned her down when she struggled to get out from under him, restraining her
arms behind her and straddling over her ass.
“I’m sorry… I’m sorry…” he muttered, squeezing her jerking wrists together with
one hand. Her hip bones ached where his weight mashed them into the oriental
rug.
The gun laid between the gray feet of the decapitated woman as she stood over
it. Water flooded into the house, tepid and slow as oil, rising quickly over
Simone’s nose and mouth. This was all a hallucination, she reminded herself
even as she held her breath. She wanted so badly to wake up in a motel room
hours away from there with all her uncles bickering in Norwegian. Her lungs
burned for air but she couldn’t bring herself to breathe in that water, phantom
or not. Her struggles became jerky and convulsive, static humming loud in her
mind and darkness narrowing her vision. They had to get out. She had to find a
way. She heard Anders calling her name and felt him turning her body as
unconsciousness took her again, those many hands coming up out of the water to
drag her down into the dense earth.
 
 
There were dozens of different capsules and tablets, liquids and powders,
syrups and blotter papers in that pack. Anders didn’t know which would help
pull Simone out of withdrawal, but he couldn’t wait for Leif to show up and
administer it. She had seized again, her body jerking and shivering in his arms
as he cradled her to keep her from knocking against the floor, and she was now
burning to the touch. The pack was open on the coffee table and she laid on the
couch once more, wavering between unconsciousness and something near it,
sweating and muttering incoherently. She was only getting worse. He had to
decide.
“God help me,” he murmured, picking three of the most plentiful pills.
He propped up her head in his lap and prayed, his eyes squeezed shut and the
pills pressed between his clasped hands. This was foolish, he knew he could
very likely hurt her even more, but he couldn’t let her go on like this. He had
to do something. So, he prayed, willing them to help her. His fingers shook as
they pried her mouth open and placed them on her tongue. When she didn’t
swallow, he pursed his lips together to gather his resolve before putting his
hand over her mouth and pinching her nostrils closed. If it worked on his dogs,
it might get her to swallow reflexively. He waited, holding his breath with
her, watching for her throat to bob. Her eyes moved rapidly under her closed
lids. His own lungs began to ache. She twitched. He burned. Her head began to
jerk and then, thankfully, she began to swallow. He released her face and she
drew in a rattling breath as he gasped to catch his.
“Work,” he whispered, putting all his will and hope into the command.
He ran his fingers through her hair as he waited. There was no working phone in
this house he could use to call an ambulance if he had chosen incorrectly. As
her breaths relaxed from the ragged panting and her shaking reduced, he dared
to be hopeful. Minutes dragged by. He watched, checking the pulse point at her
neck and the steady rhythm of her breaths under her shirt perhaps too
frequently, but he needed the reassurance. He glanced to the pistol, trying not
to wonder what he would do if she slipped away. If he’d killed her. She had to
get better.
The watch on her wrist let him know that a half hour had passed by the time she
seemed to relax into a more natural sleep. The next time he looked at her
watch, it had stopped. Frowning, he took it off her wrist and wound it. There
was something odd in the construction of the timepiece. Carefully, he pried his
fingernail into a slight notch under the face and the back of the watch popped
off. It landed on her neck, right over the line of stitches holding her skin
together, and he gingerly picked it up. There were three sets of numbers and a
strange symbol written in neat, angular pen. He stared at that symbol, trying
to remember where he had seen it before. A knock on the front door tore him out
of his pondering and he popped the back onto the watch and set it on the table
before maneuvering off the couch. Whoever it was knocked again as he limped the
short distance to the door, the revolver ready in his hand with the hammer
pulled back. Peering through the peephole, he didn’t recognize the two men in
suits standing on the patio. He waited for them to leave.
“Leif Valstad, this is FBI special agent Thompson, I have some questions for
you!” one of them yelled, pounding again on the thick oak.
Anders considered letting them in. If they were really who they said they were,
they might help protect him and Simone from Leif. Watching them through the
peephole, he was about to ask them to show their badges when he flinched at a
loud bang from outside and saw one of the men go down in a splash of blood from
his neck. Anders’ pounding heart leaped into his throat when another shot rang
out and the other agent’s forehead cracked open in a splatter of gore before he
could react to his partner’s death. Anders stumbled back from the door, rushing
back into the parlor, but Simone was gone.
“Fuck,” he breathed, backing away from the empty couch. The watch was missing
from the coffee table as well. “Fuck. Fuck! Simone!”
He stumbled quickly down the hall, adrenaline numbing the pain in his leg, as
he called for her. He’d seen three men shot to death in the last two days. He’d
been beaten, drugged, and forced to do an unspeakable act. This had to stop.
They had to get out of this country. He had wanted to threaten Leif into giving
him Simone’s passport and papers at gunpoint before leaving, but seeing those
men shot dead fled any intention of that in him. Whoever was out there didn’t
hesitate to pull the trigger, swiftly and accurately, on two federal agents.
Anders had never fired a gun in his life. A sound caught his attention and he
nearly ran to it, finding the door to the bathroom locked as the noise of
pouring water echoed inside.
“Simone?” he called, trying the knob and knocking. He could hear the faint
sound of her voice within and knocked again. “Simone, open please!”
Bracing himself, he slammed his shoulder into the door, the antique lock
breaking on the first blow and sending him tripping into the bathroom. He
caught himself on the counter, righting to see Simone bathing in the tub as it
filled with steaming water. She had her bare back to him, not seeming to be
aware of his intrusion into the room as she soaped her body and sang softly to
herself.
“Simone, what… we have need to leave!” he grimaced, limping towards her.
He tried to grab her shoulder but she jerked out of his grasp, sinking her
lathered body under the rising water. He sat on the edge of the tub to take his
weight off his injury, still not feeling as much pain as he should yet knowing
it would be much worse later, and reached into the water. When his hands
grabbed her narrow rib cage, she shot out and pulled him in. He slipped off the
edge and landed in the tub, splashing as he failed to escape her surprisingly
strong hold.
“Agh, fuck, what the fuck! No, we have to- need to go! Simone, let me go!” he
said, trying to clutch the sides of the tub to pull himself out.
“Be quiet and still,” she muttered as she flipped over to straddle his front
and pushed him down.
The water rushed over his face, hot and smelling of berries and rose, and he
began to desperately push at her. She held him down by his throat and he looked
up at her blurry image through the water, wondering why she was doing this and
why he was unable push her off him. The strength with which she held him under
wasn’t natural. With a shock of horror, it occurred to him that she might drown
him. His hands pressed up onto her slippery skin wherever they could grab as
desperation filled him. The panic and fruitless exertion depleted his oxygen
within seconds, the burn in his lungs expanding through his muscles and
tingling in his mind unpleasantly. He clawed at her, not wanting to hurt her
but needing her to stop as spots danced behind his eyes and a disconcerting
heaviness began to drain his strength. Just before those spots completely
overtook his vision, she vanished off him and he pushed himself up to gasp in
gouts of air. His lungs ached as he panted, his body exhausted and buzzing, and
it took several breaths before he was able see Leif clearly as he stood
clutching a naked and sopping wet Simone in a tight embrace. Mortal panic
returned to Anders in a heated flash, but Leif didn’t even seem to notice him
as he hugged Simone. When his brother finally glanced at him, Leif smiled.
“You have my gratitude for bringing me back my darling girl,” Leif said, moving
his arm from the embrace and leveling the barrel of a gun at him.
***** Chapter 32 *****
Henrik shouldn’t have been surprised that his now apparently insane baby
brother had somehow sneaked out in the early morning with their niece, the gun,
the car, and half the cash. He shouldn’t have been surprised at that after
walking into the motel room yesterday to find them both bare but for the sweat
of their sin. He shouldn’t have been surprised after Anders had said that he
was going to go to Leif, a prospect so clearly insane that neither he nor Vidar
had assumed it might have been meant literally. But he was surprised that the
lunatic had actually done it. He was also furious at himself for not kicking
his ass for perving on their vulnerable niece. Life had been trying so hard to
teach Henrik that words and decency were just smoke and shadows in the face of
all this madness, but he had refused to learn.
“I’m calling the cops,” Henrik announced.
Vidar jerked out of his pensive and angry silence at that. “Fuck all, you’re
not! You want to be stuck in this country forever?”
“Anders is going back to Leif, specifically to do something impossibly stupid,”
Henrik frowned. “He’s endangering himself and Simone. I can’t let that happen.”
“We don’t know that,” Vidar countered. “Maybe they’re headed towards Las Vegas
to get married by an Elvis impersonator.”
Henrik slowly turned his incredulous stare toward him, unable to comprehend how
the man could be so flippant while their baby brother and only niece were in
danger. “Didn’t you hear him last night?”
“Sure, I heard him, dick meat. I just think he’s earned the right to kill that
psycho son of a whore. Someone has to do it. Neither of us wants to get close
enough and Simone won’t ever say no to daddy dearest, so it’s down to sweet
baby Anders.”
“Are you listening to yourself right now? You’ve fucking lost it, Vid. I didn’t
want to say anything, but you’re out of your mind.”
Vidar shrugged in response. Henrik picked up the corded phone from the
nightstand and dialed 911, only to be met with dead air. He tried again, then
tried dialing an extra 9, then gave up with a huff as he slammed the receiver
down. Vidar watched him in blatant amusement from where he sat cross-legged on
the bed Anders was supposed to be in.
“You’re better off not interfering!” Vidar grinned at him as Henrik marched
toward the door.
Henrik ignored his deranged brother’s patronizing tone with a sneer. If he had
to be the only sane one in the family, then so be it. He swung open the door to
find two men standing just outside it. Henrik flinched back, fear gripping him
immediately and freezing him in place.
“Well, good morning,” the brown-haired man smiled at him. Henrik grit his teeth
at the motion of him reaching into his coat, grimacing in the inevitability of
being shot. When the bullet didn’t come, he looked at the badge the man held up
to him. FBI. “I’m special agent Carter Thompson and this is detective Murphy.
We were hoping to ask you a few questions. Do you mind stepping outside for
just a moment of your time, or would you like to invite us inside?”
Henrik’s mind worked to unscramble the English, but his panic was not
subsiding. His throat wouldn’t cooperate until he yelled, “Vidar, talk to
them!”
“Hmm… No, I think not,” his younger brother responded lazily.
“Could you just fucking do it, you sack of dog shit!” Henrik growled.
“Do you speak English?” Agent Thompson asked.
“YES! Ah, yes, a little,” Henrik stammered loudly. He took a deep calming
breath, trying to shake off the anxiety that refused to leave him. It did not.
“How… how I can help you today?”
“Uh… well, we were looking for a white Mercedes SUV with Maryland plates. Have
you seen one parked around here lately?”
Henrik stared blankly at the Americans. He should have been able to understand
that, he knew the English, but his scrambled mind couldn’t translate anything.
He turned and gave his brother a pleading look. Vidar waved at him and smiled.
“We could have an interpreter call you,” Thompson offered.
“No! No, I can speak,” Henrik hurriedly said. He could. He could do this. He
focused on the American and slowly said, “We are seeing car, yes.”
“And was this man the driver?” the agent asked, pulling a photo of Edward Kyun
out from his pocket.
Henrik looked away from the photo quickly, nausea twisting his gut as the image
of Kyun’s body leaning out the car door with his brains leaking into the grass
flashed in his mind. “No.”
“Leif Valstad did yesterday take us here in the car, go away, and today
retrieve of the car,” Vidar said. Henrik nearly leaped out of his skin at how
his brother had sneaked up beside him, but he was immediately thankful. “Edward
did give us ride from funeral. He is with Leif now. You are wanting address of
Leif?”
The two Americans turned to each other and shared a smile before the quiet
Murphy said, “Yes, yes, we would.”
Henrik shared a smile with his brother, as well. He recognized that Vidar, the
quick-witted fox, had both given reasonable doubt to their involvement in the
murder of Kyun as well as shifted both the blame and police interest to Leif in
just a few short statements. They just might be safe from the madman and Anders
might be rescued from whatever violence he had foolheartedly charged towards.
Henrik clapped his large hand on Vidar’s narrow shoulder and relaxed with the
hope that this was going to work out.
 
 
Leif shut the door to the Kyun’s SUV with the fed and the cop in the backseat,
their slack-jawed heads lulled backward and staining the leather headrests of
the luxury vehicle. He wiped his hands on his slacks as he walked back toward
the house, his soaring spirits putting a spring in his step and a smile on his
blood-splattered face. His hands still ached from Marceau’s face crunching
under his knuckles and then digging up Renfro’s corpse, but it was the good
pain of a hard day’s work. For the first time in a while, Leif found a
heightened gratification in this necessary violence, nearly fulfilling his
bloodlust for now. This glorious day might sustain him for months. Walking down
the hall, he caught the scent of his daughter nearby and the sweet bath oil
wafting from further down. Instantly, the tension in his muscles relaxed in a
wave of relief. She was here. The symphony inside him swelled in victorious
fanfare; a playful and uplifting Schubert to enhance his likewise mood.
The sound of splashing from the bathroom announced her presence to him before
he turned to the open door and saw his Simone bathing in the tub, but he wasn’t
prepared for the unexpected rush of emotion upon seeing her. There was no
meditative technique that could have dulled the impact of finding his precious
child alive, her body bared to him so whole and beautiful. He stepped toward
her without thinking, his body compelled by the need to touch her, and he
didn’t notice that she was pressing down on Anders beneath her until he was
nearly upon her. He paused, observing the familiar way she held Anders under
the rising water with such intense focus as he pushed and clawed at her with
increasing frenzy. Fate had not so much bestowed him the privilege of
witnessing this pivotal event as it had brought him here to correct it. She was
only recreating a previous kill, caught in a flashback of a memory he had
buried deep in her subconscious, and she would not remember this moment for the
splendor that it was. She had consciously and willingly taken a life; there was
no use or place for these dissociative states now that she was a hunter with
her own willpower and agency. It was time to begin teaching her to embrace her
nature now that it had bloomed.
He reached out to her, tracing the trembling and flexing muscles along her
bruised back, feeling the life he had created and cultivated. His plans had
gone so awry but here they were: father and daughter, progenitor and progeny,
master and disciple, more prepared than he had thought to begin the next phase
in their life together. The needle sunk into her neck and fed the sedative into
her jugular just in case, but his darling girl didn’t even flinch from the
sting. She did not resist him as he pulled her out of the bathtub either and
her body easily followed his prompts to embrace him as he drew her dripping
form close. He indulged in the feel of her shaking form pressed to him, the
scented bathwater soaking through his slacks and shirt as she wrapped her arms
tightly around his middle beneath his jacket. Ignoring the coughing and gasping
from Anders as his lungs fought to recover lost oxygen, he dipped low and
tilted her chin up to kiss her. The inside of her mouth was hot and tasted of
fever; his daughter was sick. An unusual fatherly instinct commanded him to
comfort and protect her and he enticed her tongue into reciprocating his kiss,
soothing them both through this familiar affection. She relaxed in his arms,
that murderous intent draining out of her tensed muscles as he coaxed her from
of that flashback and into the void of the mild sedative. When he heard Anders’
panting shift from necessity to panic, he took the gun out from under his
jacket and gave his daughter one more squeeze before aiming it at him.
“You have my gratitude for bringing me back my darling girl,” he said, meaning
every word.
His brother stared at him, frozen in wide-eyed terror, as Simone nuzzled his
chest in animalistic affection. He stroked the inward curve of her waist to
calm her but that only seemed to rile her further as she brought her hands to
his sides and lethargically clawed at his torso. He glanced at her, seeing the
adoration and need she practically radiated as she stared up at him with bleary
and widely-dilated pupils, and reengaged the safety on his father’s old Glock
21. They had some time before anyone would come looking for the fed or the cop;
there was no need to rush this. They could have some fun before they had to
work. He leaned over and closed the taps on the faucet, pretending not to
notice when Anders flinched away from his approach.
“So, you have survived Edward Kyun. Were our other brothers so lucky?” he
asked. His brother only nodded, confusion mixing into his fear at this line of
questioning. Leif smiled. “I see they did not come with you. Were you intending
to kill me alone, spare them the horror in this good deed to an undeserving
world?”
“I’m not a murderer like you,” Anders spat.
“A murderer like Simone, you mean?” Leif smirked at how his brother’s brow
twitched at that. There’s the rub. He lowered his weapon, not needing to keep
it aimed on him with how quickly he’d be able to draw it if need be, and his
brother was well-behaved enough not to move at this first opportunity. “Did you
watch as your dear niece murdered a man at pointblank? Tell me, did she look
him in the eyes as she took his life?”
Anders glanced at Simone and Leif observed his reactions carefully. Sorrow.
Pity. Regret. Longing. His brother looked away from her before nodding. Denial.
That’s not unexpected; most people refuse to see what they don’t want to see in
those they love. Leif could make use of him with that. He tapped the revolver
on the floor with his foot and tilted his head curiously.
“If not to kill me, then why did you come back here with a gun?”
“Simone needed medicine.”
She looked at Anders when she heard her name. Leif placed his hand on her cheek
and turned her to face him again as he said, “How selfless and noble of you.
Did you fuck her before or after she committed murder yesterday?” Anders’ lip
twitched, wanting to curl into a snarl, and Leif nearly laughed at his
transparency. He didn’t need full use of his observational skills to dissect
this man’s simple desires. “It doesn’t bother you as much as you want it to.
None of this does. You’ve been ashamed at your lack of shame since this
started, made all the worse by how present your morals are each time they are
confronted and remain far too unbothered. You don’t have to regard it in any
way than you already do, you know. How immoral is incest if it’s out of love?
How criminal is murder if it means protecting those you care about? It’s not so
black and white now, is it? I hate to say this, but we’re quite alike. The only
difference is that I’ve been forced to embrace what I am while you have been
allowed to deny it your whole life. Tell me the truth: Do you find nourishment
in the idea of taking a life?”
“No,” Simone answered.
Both Leif and Anders looked at her in surprise. She couldn’t have responded to
him. She didn’t understand Norwegian and even if she did, her ability to
comprehend anything beyond a simple command was severely limited if she was at
all present in these dissociative states. He kissed her burning forehead and
pinched her cheek lovingly before turning his attention once more to his
youngest brother, changing tactics.
“If you wish to protect Simone from the fatal consequences of her crimes, then
there is something we will need your cooperation with,” he said, then added,
“Aside from not attempting to murder me quite yet.”
Anders’ wary tension twisted into a suspicious frown. “What is it?”
“Leave.Don’t say anything to anyone about what has happened here. Nothing
unusual occurred, everyone was normal. You had no idea about any murderers
within the family and, should it ever be brought up, you will deny any
questions that I was ever anything but fatherly toward Simone. Tell our
brothers to do the same and I will not come for any of you.”
“Leif, you murdered an FBI agent. You’re not going to get away with this.”
“No, I’m not.”
Anders watched him, his brow creasing further the only tell that he was
thinking on how to interpret that before his expression darkened. “She’s not
going with you.”
“The rental car is still parked outside, the keys are in the ignition,” Leif
continued, ignoring his brother’s rudeness. He picked up the revolver from the
wet floor, tucking it under his belt as he spoke. “Your things are already
packed upstairs. Take them, as well as Henrik and Vidar’s suitcases.”
“I’m not leaving without her!”
Leif leveled a doubtful frown at him. “She doesn’t belong to you, Anders.
You’re not her master. If you want a new pet, pick up another dog.” He
unholstered the Glock for emphasis, knowing how stubborn his brothers all were.
“Now, if you would be so kind...”
 
 
The sound of wind rustling through the trees woke Simone with a short gasp and
she opened her eyes to find herself facing the sky. Lighter branches swayed and
leaves quivered in the cold breeze. She knew the exact scrape of the brush to
create those cirrus clouds drifting slowly in the blue, blending out the bottom
to leave the sun-tipped whites crisp and bright. Taint the white with just a
little red to diffuse it, changing into degrees of lavender and gray to give
the impression of shadow and dimension as it buffers out into the blue. Her
fingers twitched with the motion of the brush, feeling the drag of the bristles
across the canvas before her nails scraped the fibers of cloth. Blankets were
spread out both above and beneath her, protecting her from the chill and the
long green grasses beneath, but a solid presence beside her provided warmth to
the pocket of fabric she laid in. The apparition of the canvas and brush
vanished when she turned her head and was met with her father’s face, so near
that he filled her field of vision and she could see the cracks of amber and
blue behind the shattered effect of his irises.
“Is this a dream?” she whispered.
The arm he’d laid across her slid up her body from under the blanket to cup her
cheek before he answered, “Not anymore.”
That rough, dark pitch of his voice alone made him seem so different from the
man she’d grown up with. He watched her without any mask; his layers of
disguise fully peeled away to reveal this stranger she was just beginning to
know. It felt dangerous to be so close to him while he was this raw, as though
they risked blending together without anything separating them, but she wasn’t
afraid. Her sense of self had all but dissolved, anyway. A bleak sort of
freedom came with that acceptance, making it easier to feel the obsessive love
in that raw core of him. It was a thing that burned and consumed, but she had
craved nothing more fervently than love from him her whole life. As he pressed
his lips to hers, it felt as though she was trying to swallow the sun through
his kiss. She tasted his heat and his heady essence as he moved to loom over
her and delved his thick tongue into her mouth. He didn’t close his eyes as he
kissed, opting to watch her as her body began to warm and tingle in response to
his hunger. She shivered from how vulnerable that made her feel.
His fingers curled and his nails dragged lightly down her face as he pulled
away and smiled, “I’d thought I had lost you, but you came back to me.”
“I can’t leave you,” she responded.
His smile grew into a grin and he leaned down to kiss her again. She didn’t
want to correct his interpretation of that statement. Thinking of her uncles’
safety, her heart clenched in the first wave of fear she’d felt since waking.
She couldn’t remember when it was she’d last seen them. She couldn’t remember
how she’d gotten here. Leif moaned into her mouth as though he could taste her
fear and found carnal enjoyment in it while his hands fondled her bare thighs
to spread them open. His caresses along her thighs as he maneuvered his much
larger body between them stirred that encompassing lust in her and muddled her
thoughts as she scrambled to remember. She was in the motel room with Anders.
No, she was sharing a room with Vidar. She’d gone outside to get some air and
then there was a wide hole in her memory, filled with terrible nightmares.
Leif’s mouth traveled down her jaw and neck, nipping at her and making her want
to squirm with each spike of exhilarating desire the gentle scrape of teeth
provoked in her. When his head disappeared under the blanket and she felt his
wet mouth and sharp teeth open over the still-healing bruise around her nipple,
her back arched and she gasped at the shock of pleasure melding with the pain.
His thumbs just barely brushed her vagina as he kneaded her inner thighs,
making her wriggle just to increase that brief contact. His dark chuckle at her
eagerness brought her out of her fervor and she winced in remorse at how
quickly her need consumed her. There wasn’t anything she could do to fight it,
but the shame hung heavy over her just the same. His tongue trailed down her
abdomen, erupting goosebumps across her crawling flesh at the slick sensation
of it gliding wetly along that vulnerable plain of her belly. Her breath caught
in a hitch and then exhaled in a trembling moan when that tongue slid lightly
over her clit and dipped into her. He swirled his tongue in her slowly, as
though savoring it, and the deep rumble of his groan made her mouth fall open
in a chorus of breathy gasps as her hands ran through his sleek hair. How often
he’d violated her body and the violence he’d wreaked upon his family were far
from her mind as his tongue stroked her towards orgasm, a betrayal of her
biology that she could now only expect he’d make use of whenever he’d see fit.
“Papa…” she whimpered. Her legs were shaking and her muscles tensed in the
effort of chasing her climax, but she needed more. He was being far too gentle
on purpose. “Papa, please…”
“Hmm?” he hummed, the sound vibrating against her and making her toes curl.
The blue sky stretched on bright and wide above her, those feathery clouds
rippling across it like the foamy crests of waves as the sound of the wind
blowing through the leaves mimicked the sound of the sea. The slide of his lips
languidly curling around her clit tilted her mind in a frenzy of tormented
pleasure and she believed in madness that she would fall into that ocean above
her. The impression of drowning as orgasm crashed down on her body and mind was
met without fear of dying, but only anticipation of it. She couldn’t let
herself die yet. He held her trembling thighs in a bruising grip as she cried
out and tried to twist away from him, the suddenness of his effort focused on
that sensitive concentration of nerves lifting her too high too quickly. Her
cries cracked into a sob and she tried to squirm away but his grip on her only
tightened. She tried to kick and he growled, his teeth rubbing against her and
making her freeze at the threat of being bitten. The blanket was thrown off her
when he sat up and pulled her beneath him as he unbuckled his belt one-handed,
the other gripped around her neck. He squeezed and her stitches pulled
dangerously when she tried to look down to see what he was doing, so she had no
choice but to continue directing her panicked stare towards that terrifying
sea. She winced as he slid into her, his rough entry burning the injury inside
her as he pumped into her slickened cunt and she whimpered from the
overwhelming sensation of being filled with him. He leaned forward, covering
her view of that sea above her, and she felt as though a rip current dragged
her deep under the waves as he kissed her and fucked her to the hilt. She was
drowning in her father’s warped love as he invaded her body.
“We’re leaving soon,” he said, his voice husky and strained as his hips drove
his cock deep and hard into her. “To where we can be together as we should be.
Ahh… Fuck, darling girl…”
“What are you…” she started to ask, but she was cut off in a gasp when his hand
left her neck to grab her ankles and pull her legs open wider. The angle
allowed him in deeper and she nearly yelped with each thrust mashing his tip
against her abused cervix.
“Marceau attempted to have you kidnapped by Kyun as leverage,” he explained,
not faltering in his rhythm even as sweat began to bead and drip down his face.
She was struggling just to keep from falling apart, barely able to listen above
the turmoil and delirium his sex submerged her into. His hands greedily fondled
and groped her body as he continued, “He wanted to take the network out of the
shadows, the fool. I don’t value the world enough to want to change it, but
you, oh, I would burn the world to ash for you. You did so well against him, my
sweet little monster…”
Her head swam with this barely intelligible information that stitched thought
together in her clouded mind. The man she’d killed wasn’t her father’s friend
or hire, he was his enemy. A strange sort of comfort came with this revelation
that she carefully identified as relief that Leif wasn’t actively trying to
murder his family. She would not allow herself to feel gratification in taking
a life even if it was one that had threatened her and her loved ones. She
searched herself and found that well of tar marked as murder to be still as
black and bitter within her, as it should always be. But vengeance and
protection carried much more honeyed connotations than murder.
“I took a life,” she reminded herself aloud, her voice tight and high with
tears and breathless with sex. “I killed him. I’m a murderer.”
Leif’s hands slid up to cup her cheeks and he pulled her up into a kiss that
nearly felt reassuring until he whispered, “Yes. And we have so many more to
kill.”
Despair burst past that thin dam of nihilism that had kept her emotions at bay
and she threw her arms around his neck as she sobbed. He held her to him
tightly, pulling her into his lap and fucking into her as she wept. His hands
grasping her hips rocked her to a steady rhythm, pulling shivering sighs and
gasps from her along with her sobs and he whispered a stream of both comforting
words and filth into her ear. She pressed her face into the crook of his neck,
her tears soaking into his shirt collar, and focused on the soothing tone of
his voice and the warmth of his body. She couldn’t ignore the pleasure that
thrummed through her with each slide of his cock into her throbbing cunt, but
she could pretend this was normal. This could be a way fathers comforted their
daughters.
“Daddy…” she moaned, rocking against him more fervently as her pleasure
climbed. The pressure on her clit in this sitting position was coaxing another
climax for her, helped along by the deep stretch of his cock filling her almost
painfully even in these gentler thrusts.
“It’s all right, darling, I’ve got you,” he whispered. He groaned low, his cock
twitching in her and making her hips stutter with the sensation. “Hmm… You feel
so good, sweetheart… You’re going to come again, aren’t you?”
“Yes, Papa,” she breathed.
“Good girl… Such a good girl…”
He kissed her cheek, a gesture so chaste and sweet that it caused a hollow ache
in her chest. The way he was fucking her, while still exerting his power and
dominance, felt almost caring. With a deep revulsion, she realized this was a
reward for murder. This soothing tenderness, this focus on her pleasure, all
for a job well done in killing that man. This couldn’t be what her life would
become. He could train her to his will, he’d been doing that her entire life
without her awareness until recently, but she had to stop this. She moved to
get away from Leif, but his hold on her kept her anchored firmly on his cock
and he thrusted into her harshly as she tried harder to escape. The pure power
in his muscular frame made her quiver in the drive to submit to him, but she
couldn’t let him think he could condition her this way.
“I’m not a killer,” she said, trying to be firm but it came out weak and
shaking. She was dangerously close to orgasm and she could feel him holding his
back in the way he panted against her.
“You can’t resist your nature,” he nearly growled out. His intense stare was
focused on her face, his tense mouth pulled back into a halfway snarl to show
sharp teeth as he spoke and fucked her harder. “You were given a gift and it
compels you to use it. Embrace it or let it consume you, but it will not be
reduced by your denial. Come for me, darling.”
“No, I-”
Her words jammed in her throat when he pressed her hips down on him hard and
growled out his climax, the sensation of his cock swelling and throbbing deep
inside her throwing her forcibly into her own orgasm. Whatever she was thinking
was blanked out completely by the white light that flashed across her vision
and whatever she was saying came out in a wordless moan nearing a scream as her
climax seemed to only climb with each throb. That animalistic fog she’d been
fighting off this entire time descended over her mind fully and she clutched to
him with fingers curled into claws. His teeth sunk into those same grooves
they’d made between her neck and shoulder, reopening and deepening them as he
bit her savagely. She howled in pain but her hips still rocked against him,
drawing out her pleasure from her father’s cock. Wet lines of blood dripped
down her chest and back from what he missed as he sucked from the wound. This
was his raw self, tearing through and devouring her. As she came down from her
high, panting and whimpering in both agony and ecstasy as she leaned limply
against him, a vivid image of Goya’s deranged depiction of Saturn stuck in her
mind. Isolating the painting from the myth, she wondered if it was madness that
drove the figure in that painting to devour his child or if it was the
devouring that drove him further into madness. Considering the myth, she
wondered if it was her role to overthrow him.
***** Chapter 33 *****
Anders drove the rental car aimlessly for what felt like days, but the clock on
the console had told him it had only been two hours by the time he parked the
rental car behind some bushes several yards away from the end of the driveway.
It wasn’t the best camouflage, but he didn’t want the car too far away in case
he needed to run for it. Both the truck and the SUV were gone, making him
wonder how they were driven off the property when he hadn’t seen either on the
driveway or the road at any point. Regardless, he approached the house from the
side that had fewer windows just in case, wishing he had worn something less
noticeable than a stupid yellow shirt that was wet and freezing. He should have
taken the time to change in the car. He didn’t seem capable of thinking very
far ahead when he knew Simone was once more in the possession of that
psychopath. Considering the bulk of his recent actions, he seemed plainly
incapable of thinking as much as he should and he wondered if perhaps he had
sustained a concussion or if he really was this stupid all along. He’d
delivered her right to him, pumped up on frantic desperation. Any harm that
madman brought her, he may as well have dealt to her himself. The key to the
backdoor was still beneath a loose brick under the patio, just as his hazy
memory had recalled from childhood summers. At least some of his brain was
still functioning.
The house was deathly still and quiet, but he still stepped carefully, checking
every room and listening for any sign of either Leif or Simone. The pack of
medicines was still open on the coffee table in the parlor and he picked up a
small brown bottle clearly marked as morphine sulfate. He held the bottle to
the light, looking at the remaining liquid and wondering with a sick twist of
his gut how many times Leif had used it to turn Simone into his drugged up
little plaything. Even after having been on the receiving end of his violent
madness and having seen him murder in cold blood, Anders still couldn’t fathom
how a man could purposefully engineer insanity in his own daughter. He couldn’t
understand the level of inhumanity that went into carrying that out on anyone,
but to his own child was something that went beyond horrible.
Anders had to push down the rage that quickened his breath and trembled in his
hands. If she was his, if Simone would accept him as her father, he would do
everything in his power to enable her to feel safe and happy again. It should
have been strange to consider her in that familial role, but he had found that
limiting their dynamic to just one facet was unfitting. It wasn’t immoral if it
was out of love. He wasn’t like Leif. She simply belonged with him and he was
going to do whatever it took to ensure that would happen. He filled one of the
thin syringes to the top with morphine and capped the needle to take with him.
Finding the first level to be completely unoccupied, he ascended the stairs
slowly, grimacing with the pain in his leg and the noise of every creak at each
step. He pulled out the needle to be ready after the third step groaned loud
enough to echo down the wide hallway, but made it all the way to the second
floor without incident. Leif very well may have carried her off elsewhere, a
prospect that Anders couldn’t decide was lucky or not. The presence of his drug
collection still there helped allay the fear that the maniac had already fled,
though. Leif would return and this time, Anders would have the benefit of
surprise. It was his only hope against him.
He was about to walk into Leif’s room to wait for him when he noticed the door
to Einar’s home office open. That door had been locked for as far back as he
could recall. Keeping alert for any sounds of his brother’s return, he gave
into his curiosity and stepped inside. The room was small and narrow,
everything inside covered in dust-grayed white sheets and the tall window at
the end had been taped over with paper. He flicked on the light only to have
the bulb burst in a flash.
“Shit,” he murmured.
There was a flashlight in Einar’s bedroom. He’d always kept one in his
nightstand, frequently retrieving it to lend to Anders until he’d got over his
childhood fear of the dark. The bedroom still had a faint odor of rot, only
detectable thanks to the family curse of an overactive olfactory sense, but the
lingering presence of death made him want to retrieve the light quickly. In his
haste, he dropped the flashlight and muttered another curse when it rolled
under the nightstand. With a considerable pain to his wounded thigh, he knelt
to the floor and felt around for it, but his hand blindly groped something
larger and oddly shaped. Curious, he slid out a corded phone and when he picked
up the receiver, he was shocked that it had a dial tone. He should call the
police, tell them everything and let them take over hunting for the madman, but
a morbid curiosity overcame him first. Before he lost his nerve, he hit the
redial button and held his breath as the other line rang and a tinny, honking
voice came through.
“Mr. Valstad, I was about to call your cell. We just got some good news and
some pretty fuckin’ bad news. Good news is we found that Mercedes. Bad news is
it was lit up like the fourth of fuckin’ July with three stiffs and some poor
sonovabitch unlucky enough to survive the fire. Still no sign of your kid but
that’s probably in the good news category from the looks of things right now.
Look, I don’t know what the hell you folks got yourselves mixed up in, but the
F B fuckin I are getting pretty squirrely about why I’ve had my boys lookin’
out for that fuckin’ car. I don’t know how much longer I can keep them feds off
your trail, sir, so you better start tellin’ me what the hell you brought into
my town.”
Anders held the phone away from his ear as he worked to sift out the unfamiliar
American colloquialisms from the words he knew. His rusty English had improved
vastly over the past few days. He nearly dropped the phone when it clicked in
his mind. He couldn’t fathom why Leif would taunt the FBI, especially in such a
startlingly provocative and brazen way, but he couldn’t understand much of what
his insane brother did.
“… Valstad? You there? Hello?”
Anders gently hung up the phone, feeling all at once sick with this
information. Adding this to the list of horrors he knew Leif to be capable of
and, worse, knowing that he had people other than Kyun to aid him in those
horrible acts was too disturbing for him to fully comprehend at that moment.
The terrors that had surrounded him without him knowing seemed ceaseless; the
world was a far darker place than he had known it to be just a week prior. The
syringe in the pocket of his sweatpants reminded him of how far he had fallen
from his previous view of himself as well, but this would be different than the
murders Leif had committed. He wasn’t like Leif. Anders was only protecting his
beloved. He hesitated as his hand rested on the phone, reconsidering the choice
to call the police. If Leif suspected the cops were anywhere around, he
wouldn’t return to the house. He intuitively knew that when Leif ran, no one
would find him or Simone again. Anders couldn’t risk losing her. He slid the
phone back under the nightstand and left the flashlight, entirely forgetting
his previous curiosity of the office.
 
 
If Leif were the type of hunter who collected trophies, he would have liked to
have kept Marceau’s garish signet ring that bore his family’s crest. He would
have collected them from each of the remaining Marceaus as he hunted them down
one by one and then fashioned them into napkin rings to set out at dinner
parties. Carrying his nude daughter over the threshold of his father’s house
like a bride or a fresh slaughter, he grinned at the amusing idea. However, the
authorities were probably still carving Marceau’s melted fat from the
upholstery of the charred Mercedes he’d left burning in front of the morgue
Kyun currently resided in, removing the temptation to retrieve that ring. Now
that he had burned him, Leif knew he had been added to the network’s burn list,
but he was glad to be finally free of their demands. The enterprising and
artful Marceau was certainly not the only one who believed the Valstad
bloodline was too tainted with insanity to be left to their liberty, after all.
They were not exactly wrong. Leif had been entertaining the idea of going rogue
since his initiation and to have finally absconded their restrictions was
indeed as freeing as he’d often fantasized. He’d long since known they needed
him far more than he needed their resources or protection, anyway. He stroked
his daughter’s back and sighed in the bliss of vengeance and victory, looking
forward to dismantling the order he and his ancestors had helped uphold for
well over two hundred years. The world felt fresh and ripe for him and his
precious disciple.
He placed Simone on her unsteady feet and held her to him in a tighter embrace,
wiping her tears away as he asked, “Where would you like to go, Simone?”
“Home,” she answered, her voice thick and cracked with sorrow.
“Your home is with me, darling girl,” he smiled. It felt so easy to be open and
natural with her now. There was no reason to hold back or disguise himself
anymore. Every expectation that he should produce an heir suitable to their
standards had been vanquished and he was now free to condition her only to his
desires. “We can go anywhere you’d like that we won’t be recognized. Fiji and
Tahiti have lovely beaches. I would love to watch you lose yourself in the
Louvre and the Uffizi. We’ll go to them all, just tell me where you’d like to
go first.”
“I want to go back to LA,” she said, her words muffled as she buried her face
into his chest through his unbuttoned shirt. “I want things to be like how they
were before.”
He loved how she sought comfort in him even when he was the cause of her pain.
He’d seen the same behavior in infant mammals whose mothers had rejected them,
reaching and crying out to them even as their need was rebuked with fatal
aggression. Usually seeing something so helpless inspired an impulse in him to
crush such a creature, but that aspect in his daughter was a thing he’d crafted
in her early on and adored in her now. He nuzzled her lovingly, closing his
eyes to indulge in her devotion as he reinforced this behavior. No matter how
much he hurt her or how hard he drove her, she would never turn that hereditary
instinct to kill on him. She loved him as indefinitely as he’d designed her to.
“There’s a boat on the coast of Maine that can take us anywhere you’d like, but
we can’t go to where we’ve been before, not for a while,” he explained, then in
a more somber tone, “They’re going to be looking for you. They’ve found Kyun’s
body and they know you murdered him. I’m sorry I wasn’t there to hide this one,
but it was only a matter of time before someone found out.”
Her shaking sniffs grew into panicked panting and her rapid little
hyperventilated breaths rustled through his chest hair pleasantly as he could
almost feel her process this information in the tensing of her body against
him.
“How many lives have I ended?”
“Don’t think of it in those terms, darling,” he whispered. “Those were lives
that left such a miniscule mark on existence that they might as well not have
existed at all, or their influence was a poison you’ve only cured. The world is
better for their absence. We are the wolves that thin the herd and make the
sheep step a little quicker. That’s part of what we do.”
He allowed her to move away from him, her bare feet making it a few steps
before she sunk slowly to her knees and wrapped her arms around her shivering
body as she whispered, “Please, please, this… none of this, it can’t be
real...”
He sympathized with her pain. It was a hard truth to bear when the knowledge of
his purpose in life had been revealed to him, as well. He placed his hand on
her bowed head, her hair still damp and heavy with the scents of black berries
and roses, before retrieving the woven throw from the living room and draping
it around her shoulders. They were both embarking on uncharted territory, their
dynamic having been far outside the realm of the typical master and disciple
since he’d decided to alter her mind without her awareness, but he had seen
what she was capable of in her subconscious and unadulterated form. They’d
unlocked so much of her genetic potential through those methods. He’d been
merciful in allowing her an entire childhood and adolescence to remain
unknowing of her ultimate role, but the time had come for her to accept who
they really were.
He knelt before her, his hands gently rubbing the blanket over her trembling
arms folded over her middle as he explained with all the patience he was
capable, “Your work will inspire many to value the preciousness of life by
taking it. That’s why I couldn’t let Marceau strip the art and meaning of what
we do. Valstads are not consumable, we do not operate based on our place among
lords and serfs, nor are we motivated by such mundane matters as politics or
power. We are artists, and art is a response that can be felt even through
centuries by the conductivity of human connection. Do you understand?”
“I don’t!” she spat, shaking her downturned head aggressively. “I don’t
understand any of this! I’ve… I’ve killed someone, that isn’t art! There’s no
‘meaning’ to it, just… ugliness. I’m not a murderer. I’m not a murderer.” Her
trembling abruptly ceased, her stillness like the sudden silence in the woods
when a predator stalks nearby. “Papa… how many people have you killed?”
“Some would consider it to be many, though my accomplishments pale in
comparison to others,” he answered. He didn’t know. He’d lost count long ago.
“It doesn’t matter. Once you’ve taken down your first quarry, you are a hunter
ever after.”
Her arms jerked away from his gentle hold and lashed out at him, her hands
grasping his forearms in a clawed grip as she snapped, “God damn it, I’m not
talking to you about quarry or art or wolves and sheep! Just please, please
talk to me like a normal person and not a…” Her grip loosened, her anger
withering from her face and tone as she finished with a muttered, “… a serial
killer.”
“A rather distastefully clinical term, but apt enough,” he conceded.
She flinched away when his phone buzzed in his pocket, falling backward onto
her haunches and gripping the blanket tightly around her in alarm. He frowned
at the interruption, but that was the prepaid uncontracted cell phone he used
and replaced monthly to be contacted by the order. He hadn’t expected a call
from them so soon after disposing of Marceau. Curiosity alone drove him to rise
to his feet and answer it.
“Speak,” he commanded into the phone.
At first, the line was crackling silence, then a whispery and distantly
familiar voice spoke, “They’re coming for you. They’re all coming for you now.
Move.”
The line cut out abruptly. Leif tried to place the voice, but couldn’t over the
urgency the warning spurred in him. Leaving his bewildered daughter huddled on
the floor of the hallway, he bounded upstairs to grab his go bag. The FBI or
the network assassins could have whatever they wanted of the house, it didn’t
matter anymore. The caches of horror, the photo albums, the keepsakes, the
weapons, all of it could either end up in some collector’s personal museum or
in an FBI evidence warehouse to rot for decades. He would have liked to have
watched it all light up in flame, but that was a pleasure he’d traded for one
last good fuck on state soil with his daughter. A fair trade, he considered
with a smirk. He was almost giddy with how quickly things had progressed in
such unexpected but ultimately beneficial ways. It was almost divine influence
how so many unfortunate interferences had derailed his plans and set him on a
better path for it. Had he believed in any god or spirituality, he would have
been thankful for such glorious blessings in disguise.
In his bedroom, he pulled the desk back and reached to grab the backpack
stuffed into the hole carved out of the wall when he caught the scent of roses
and blackberries. He hadn’t heard his daughter follow him. He moved to turn to
her when the blur of a fist came at him from his peripheral. Reflexes and hard-
wired training were all that swung his arm and deflected that blow, his body
twisting to follow the motion with a hook that connected with his assailant’s
abdomen before he could recognize him. He nearly lowered his defensive stance
when he saw it was his baby brother hunched over from the blow.
“Anders?!” he yelled, disbelief piercing through his anger. “I was hoping you
weren’t dumb enough to come back, but you’ve exceeded even my lowest
expectations.”
“Rot in Hell,” Anders snarled, glaring at him with a searing hatred Leif found
frankly amusing, but not as amusing as the syringe clutched in his fist.
“Trying to pay me back for sticking you, I see,” he smirked. “Do you even know
what you put in that thing?”
Anders charged at him, his free hand opened towards him to grab while he reared
the syringe back, and Leif slapped it away while he dodged the offending hand.
The plastic syringe clattered and slid along the floor, freeing his brother to
attack him with both fists. Leif cut through his offense by dodging his strikes
while unfolding Einar’s pocket knife before lunging forward and grabbing his
throat, dragging him bodily over the desk with the blade held in his line of
vision over his heart. The younger man grabbed his wrist, trying to push the
knife away from him and grunting with the effort, but Leif had been in this
position many times before and he had both leverage and brute strength on him.
“This is the last time we’re doing this, brother,” Leif grinned, pushing the
blade down to just barely pierce the skin. Anders grunted as blood spotted up
around the tip, his hands shaking around Leif’s wrists. “But before I kill you,
I think I should tell you something.”
“Fuck off!”
Leif let the knife sink in a little more, blood now forming a circle of red on
that stupid shirt. “No, not that. I just wanted to let you know that I’m proud
of you, Anders. For the longest time, I’d believed you were a toothless, weak
sap, but you’ve proven me quite wrong. You want to know why you can’t seem to
keep out of your sweet little niece’s body?”
Anders roared as he tried to kick him away, an attempt Leif reproved by pushing
the blade in a few more millimeters. He reveled in the anger and denial in his
youngest brother’s grimacing face as he tore the truth out and forced him to
hear it.
“It’s because her distress, her submissiveness, her vulnerability excites you.
You saw how I fostered her dependence on me and you wanted that for yourself.
You don’t want to help, you only want to be the one who wields her distress and
controls her,” Leif grinned, then whispered, “I know exactly what you are. You
and I share the same appetites. It’s a shame you won’t be able to fulfill
them.”
Anders groaned and his arms trembled in strain as Leif began to sink the blade
slowly into his muscle. This was the part Leif had often enjoyed most. That
instinct to survive crashing against the inevitability of death. The terror in
the realization that this was their final moment and the disbelief in that
knowledge even as their life leaked out of them. Not many people were able to
comprehend death, let alone their own, but Anders refused it with burning fury.
Forcing his father’s steel into his brother’s flesh millimeter by millimeter,
he watched as Anders’ rage frenzied ahead of his fear and pain. He would not go
gentle into that good night. No Valstad ever had. That yellow shirt was
staining a dark red as his blood spilled generously from the deepening hole,
leaking to pool under him on the surface where Simone had worked so dutifully
to hide her scars and bruises. It really was too bad that Anders had disobeyed
his will. The Valstad legacy would now be entirely Leif and his daughter’s
responsibility to carry out and carry on with this final farewell to his
family. He bore down harder into his brother’s chest, the antler handle hot in
his hand, and felt something sting in the side of his turned neck. He ignored
it, thinking it a spasm, but a cold sensation spilled into his veins along with
the sting. He glanced to the side and, seeing the glint of sunlight reflecting
off the syringe, turned to find Simone with her thumb pressed on the now fully
descended plunger as she pulled the needle from his jugular.
Time seemed to slow. Leif could feel the poison pulling him under like a
shadowed hand enclosing around his brain. His daughter watched him with eyes
wide with fear and a deep sorrow, her honey brown skin cast in a gray pallor,
and she drew in a shaking breath through her parted mouth. She’d held her
breath to sneak up on him, he realized. How quietly she’d entered and found the
syringe impressed him even through his shock. His vision blurred and darkened,
his awareness flickering like a candle in a storm, and he forgave her as soon
as he realized her betrayal. This was ultimately how it was supposed to end,
but not this soon. There was so much she didn’t know, so much he had to tell
her and teach her. They were supposed to have years before she fulfilled her
vengeance against him. The knife clattered to the desk as he sunk, the floor
seeming to float up and pull him toward it.
Her small hands were easing his descent until her whole body was pressed under
his chest and she collapsed to her knees as he heard her frantically gasp out
from afar, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m so sorry!”
Leif’s breath rattled out a faint chuckle at that. His softhearted daughter had
killed him with her mercy toward a man she would undoubtedly slaughter later
for his hand in her transformation. There would be no sating the beast of
vengeance in her when it came to fully bloom in her psyche. She could hunt down
every last one of them and still scream for blood. He had built a shrine of
illness in her very essence that would stand long after he’d gone and he felt
as victorious in that achievement as he was repentant of that crime. The
darkness enveloped his mind and the sensation of a rapid descent gripped him
while he was vaguely aware that she held him cradled to her. He could still
feel her warmth and her love. He felt himself slip into the garden of her
being, finding his own self planted there among the innumerable dead that had
coalesced into the impossible Eden of her life. He slipped further. Nothingness
devoured everything that he was, but he would still be there inside her and
every life afterward. No peace or rapture came to him in that depth of absence.
There was a spark of knowing and then there was nothing.
 
 
There was something wrong with her father’s face. The wrongness struck Simone
almost physically, leaving her disoriented and confused, but it was like there
was a block preventing her from knowing exactly how or why. She held his face
toward her, staring at him in bafflement, and she had to remind herself
repeatedly that this man was the same Leif Valstad she knew. There was a veil
of unfamiliarity or absence of the man, leaving something her brain refused to
recognize. He was standing as her father one moment and in the next, there was
a heavy prop in her arms wearing a mask of her father.
The grays and blues at the edges of his paling features reminded Simone of the
Saint Sebastian depicted by Nicolas Régnier, a painting she had once stared at
for hours when she was having trouble depicting the translucency of white skin
using oil on canvas. However, his discoloration was due to cyanosis, not paint.
Her mind fidgeted uncomfortably between art and medical knowledge, the two
modes of thought clashing and converging in ways that she knew made little
sense. Sitting on the floor, cradling his head in the crook of her arm and
holding his body to her as best she could manage with her much smaller size,
she saw him as two separate beings occupying the same space. A collection of
color, shapes and dimension, the late morning sunlight offering his features
unmoving and fixed to be transferred onto canvas. A body exhibiting signs of
respiratory depression, requiring mouth-to-mouth and possibly cardiopulmonary
resuscitation to raise insufficient oxygen levels before damage occurs to the
brain. She touched the blue-tinted lips, feeling no breath brush over her
fingertips, and tried to reconcile her split mind.
“Yellow ochre, cadmium red light, ultramarine blue…” she whispered as she
carefully lowered him to lie flat on the floor. “Prussian blue, titanium
white…”
She pressed her fingers over his cheeks, testing the depth of his well-defined
zygomatic bones as she constructed the shape of his skull in her mind’s eye
before trailing her fingers down to check his pulse at his neck. The absence of
a heartbeat helped shove her thoughts towards medical procedure.
“Simone…”
She heard her uncle Ander’s voice, tight with pain and stress, and glanced up
to see him clutching his blood-covered chest. Penetrative trauma to the chest
cavity risked pneumothorax or hemothorax, hemorrhage of a major systemic or
pulmonary vessel. He was alert and upright, no difficulty breathing yet, no
apparent jugular vein distension. It was possible that his rather thickly
developed pectoral muscles were not fully breached by the time she’d
interrupted Leif’s progress in stabbing him.
“Maintain a sealed and constant pressure on the wound,” she told him
mechanically, turning to the more urgent needs of the man on the floor. The man
who had been her father a few minutes prior, she reminded herself again.
Anders limped to stand over her as she did this and said in his halted English,
“Simone, you have… you need stop.”
On her knees, leaning high over the prone body, she placed her left hand flat
against his sternum and interlaced the fingers of her right hand over it. With
her elbows locked straight, she pushed down into the heel of her hand, his
sternum springing up again under hands to repeat the compressions to a rapid
tempo. Hard and fast. She had to be his heart to keep his blood flowing to his
brain.
“Stop.”
After thirty compressions, she gingerly cradled the base of his neck and his
mandible, lifting both to tilt his head back slightly. Working quickly, she
pinched his nose shut and sealed her mouth over his parted lips. He tasted like
her father.
“Simone, stop.”
She watched to ensure his chest rose with the two breaths she exhaled into his
lungs before locking her arms over his chest and beginning compressions once
more. Deep, hard, fast. Anders placed his hand on her bare shoulder. She was
aware but uncaring of her nudity, the woven blanket strewn on the floor under
her and the prone man after she’d dropped it when her father had collapsed on
her.
“Leif is… ah… død…”
It was so strange. Just a few minutes ago, she was trying to save Anders by
stopping her father from killing him, but somehow this was now happening.
Anders was alive, so she must have succeeded, but something had changed. The
world had shifted. The space this body occupied was where her father should be.
Her father was in there, she had to bring him back. Anders’ hand on her
shoulder jerked her away and she looked up at him in shock for impeding her
attempts to resuscitate this man.
“Anders, what are you doing?!” she snapped, shoving his hand off her and
reassuming her previous position. “His heart has stopped!”
“Yes!” he nearly shouted. “Leif is… is dead!”
That didn’t make any sense. She’d just seen her father and he was alive. She’d
just seen him, with the curve of his neck so available to the needle, take the
full dose of whatever sedative was in that syringe. No one had to get hurt. He
would just pass out and by the time he awoke, Anders would be safely far away.
Between her labored breaths, she said, “You have to get out of here before he
comes back.”
She yelped when Anders grabbed her and pulled her backward, forcefully this
time, as he said in a loud and stern voice she’d never heard him use before,
“Leif is dead!La ham bli død! He is not come back! Stop it!”
Simone’s ears rang at the volume and fury in her sweet uncle’s tone, his words
pressing on her mind until something snapped in her brain with a painful
twinge. Her hands gripped her forehead where a pounding agony resounded. Leif
lied unbreathing, his heart silent and still, for all the definition of the
word to be dead. She had killed her father.
Pain spread throughout her body, her muscles cramping and clenching, reducing
her scream to a whispered, “No… No, I… I didn’t mean to… Please, don’t…”
She rushed back to the prone body, her father’s body, and locked her shaking
hands over his sternum once more. Her movements were jerky, but they were hard
and fast and deep as she’d been taught in CPR class back before any of this had
happened. Before her mental illness had swallowed her whole. Before her mother
had abandoned her. Before her father had violated her. Before she had been
twisted into this monster. She breathed into his lungs, watching his chest
rise, praying for it to begin rising on its own but it did not. Her face was
hot and wet with tears and sweat, her arms and back trembled with exhaustion as
she continued chest compressions, trying to trick that heart into beating
again.
“Come on,” she panted, pressing blood through his body. “Wake up. Wake up,
Papa!”
She had to keep his brain alive. If she could just continue to deliver enough
oxygen to his brain, he wasn’t dead. He was still there, he had to be. He
couldn’t have left her after everything he’d done to her. It wasn’t fair that
she should have to live alone with this curse.
“Please, Papa!” she whimpered, her voice cracking in a sob.
She could hear and feel movement and voices nearby, but her world had narrowed
to just her and her father. Angry, loud voices and heavy, stomping footsteps.
She breathed air into his lungs, moved back to continue compressions, and was
slammed to the floor by black-gloved hands that yanked her arms viciously
behind her. Booming voices commanded her to stay down, put her arms behind her
back, all things she was already being forced to do as she watched black boots
rush around her limited field of vision. She couldn’t see Anders from her
position or hear him over the din and action, her worry going to his open wound
being stretched by this restraining method. She could see the muzzle of an
assault rifle poised above her father’s face while someone reached for him. She
had to get to him. She had to keep him alive.
“STAY DOWN! STAY DOWN OR YOU WILL BE PUT DOWN!” someone barked above her,
yanking her arms back until she could feel a burning pain sear through her
sockets.
Someone was patting her father down, taking out his cell phone, wallet and keys
before announcing, “We got a warm one! Stretcher, stretcher!”
She could taste blood from her teeth cutting into her cheek from being slammed,
the numb swelling and her panic making her words come out slurred as she
yelled, “NALOXONE! Give him naloxone! He’s overdosed!”
“Shut UP!” she heard before her temple took the brunt of the force when the man
above her grabbed her hair and slammed her to the floor again.
Her vision flashed white before the ringing in her ears drowned out the
cacophony of stomping and shouting, but she breathed as calmly and evenly as
she could manage in her harshly restrained position to stave off the threat of
unconsciousness. Seconds ticked by like minutes, the heavy knee pressed into
the small of her back and the gloved hand holding her face to the floor not
letting up the entire time. Only when she saw them place a bag valve mask over
Leif’s mouth and lift him onto the thin plastic stretcher did she let her eyes
fall shut. Unconsciousness did not come, but reality didn’t matter as much for
now. With practiced ease, she submitted to the aggressive male above her,
letting her muscles go slack and accepting that she was to finally pay for her
crimes.
***** Chapter 34 *****
The paper lining on the medical exam table crinkled as Simone shifted on it,
trying to make her lap more level to place the clipboard on. Her hands shook as
she tried to sign the consent forms, the pen jerking out a rough approximation
of her signature on the line under the words “admissible as evidence in court”.
She tried not to read it.
When she began to slowly fill in the date and time below, the nurse
practitioner reached over and turned the sheet to the next form as she spoke up
in a polite and vaguely Fijian drawl, “I’ll fill that in for you, honey, you
don’t need to do anything more than sign.”
Simone didn’t look at her as she nodded and signed where it was marked. She
reasoned that it must be the cold that numbed her fingers and chattered her
teeth. The hospital gown wasn’t much protection against the air conditioning in
the building. The feeling of vulnerability was far worse than the chill. When
she’d seen a different nurse stop in to place a bundle of folded clothing on
the counter, the nurse practitioner had to stop her from immediately dressing.
Simone hugged the billowy gown around her tighter when the clipboard was taken
back.
“Is my dad alive?” she asked. It was the first time she had spoken since
arriving at the hospital. She had asked this question to every new person who
approached her and was met with varying degrees of non-answers. There was no
longer dread in anticipating the response at this point, only the increasing
willingness to hear it.
“I’m sorry, dear, I haven’t been told anything about that. Is he being seen
here too?” the nurse responded, her deep matronly voice soothing the sting of
disappointment in Simone.
The slight contact of her gloved hands touching her as she wrapped the blood
pressure cuff around her arm made Simone want to flinch. She observed that the
nurse was curiously silent about her vitals, a schooled stiffness to her
features as she jotted them down. Simone wondered at that briefly, but it was
difficult to maintain a sense of significance in anything for more than a
flickering moment with the chorus of shame drowning it out.
“When did you get these sutures put in?” the nurse asked conversationally.
Her chest tightened at the memory of Leif meticulously sewing the cut across
her neck, the small and exact stitches providing a neat line at her throat. It
would heal nicely. She blinked away the sting of tears at that token of his
affection.
“My dad did it the other night.”
The nurse hummed in approval. “Does he work in the medical field?”
The police officer that had stood silent and uncomfortable in front of the
closed door got the nurse’s attention with a stern and slow shake of his head.
Simone observed as the woman raised her eyebrows and pursed her lips in
annoyance at the quiet command to not continue that topic. They both resented
his presence. Simone decided that she liked this nurse.
“What we’re going to do here is called a sexual assault forensic examination.
I’m going to ask you questions about the incident. If you don’t want to or
can’t answer them, we can skip them for now and come back to them. After that,
we are going to photograph your injuries and then I am going to swab for
evidence, okay? We can skip whatever you want to skip, but I want you to know
that every part of this exam is important to collect evidence. Did you ingest
any drugs or alcohol during or prior to the incident?”
“What… I’m sorry, which incident?” Simone asked, slightly flabbergasted.
“Whichever incident that brought you here today,” the nurse answered plainly,
but not uncaringly. She adjusted her bifocals with a push from both of index
fingers along the stems, a habit that Simone identified as a peculiar and very
personal tick. It was remarkably soothing to be around a woman again after this
past week of being inundated with male sexuality and aggression. A woman of
color, too. It was enough to make her suspect that the staff had assigned this
nurse to her for that reason. Nonetheless, it did comfort her and she found
herself relishing the glimpses of personality behind the professionalism of
this nurse.
“This examination isn’t to interpret the evidence, just to collect it.
Understand?” Simone could only nod numbly in response. “Okay, honey. Remember,
these are all voluntary but important. Let’s get through this so I can do my
job and get you healing, all right? All right. So, drugs or alcohol?”
“I… I think so, when he, um…” Simone muttered. She took a deep breath and
focused. It was harder to identify a moment when she wasn’t in some form of
chemically altered state. She might as well tell the truth. “Yes. I was
involuntarily drugged today.”
The nurse flipped to the third sheet on her clipboard and wrote something as
she asked, “Can you briefly describe the assault?”
“I don’t think I was assaulted today…”
The woman repeated that double-handed adjustment of her glasses. “Then can you
tell me when and what was happening when you got bitten?”
Now that the time had come to start giving voice to those details, a cold sweat
broke out all along her body and her tongue felt like lead. She looked down at
her feet dangling above the floor, aware of both the cop’s and the nurse’s
attention as she tried not to mumble, “It was… late this morning. I don’t
remember how I got there but I was out under the sky when I woke up and… he was
there.”
“Aside from the bite, did he put his mouth on you anywhere else?”
“Yes.” She could feel the cop’s pity like a moist breath on the back of her
neck and she rubbed the sweat-dampened skin there nervously. She hated him for
hearing any of this. It didn’t belong to him. It didn’t belong to anyone. She
wanted to see her father badly. “My face, neck… breasts… um… genitals…”
“Did he put his genitals anywhere in or on you?”
Simone’s mouth was dry; she was too nervous and ashamed to ask for water. She
reminded herself that this was a medical professional who didn’t seem aware of
the incestuous context and she tried to ignore the cop who seemed to have at
least guessed it. His straight-ahead stare did a poor imitation of politely
pretending not to hear from four feet away. These details would be in the case
regardless; she supposed she would eventually have to get used to saying them
all out loud. “Yes...”
More jotting down on the clipboard, checking boxes and crossing out sections.
Her sweat-slicked hand at the back of her neck slid around her unbitten side to
rub at the ache in her chest. This wasn’t what she had been expecting. She’d
imagined herself in handcuffs, locked in a small room with a one-way mirror and
two stone-faced cops interrogating her for the hard truths her memory couldn’t
supply. Instead, she’d been given a cozy ride to the emergency room in a normal
SUV almost immediately after the SWAT team had cleared for the cops and EMTs to
enter. Everyone aside from this nurse had been, if anything, avoidant of her
when they weren’t gently asking her questions or reassuring her with
sympathetic eyes. In a way, she preferred being slammed into the floor by the
SWAT officer over that vague pity from law enforcement. She didn’t want or
deserve pity. They would see that from the evidence on the men she had
murdered.
“Did he use a condom?”
“No.”
“At any point, did you notice him bleeding from anywhere, like a cut?”
“No.”
“Have you showered or bathed since the incident?”
“No.”
“Any other form of penetrative intercourse with his genitals via oral or anal?”
“No.”
“Have you had consensual intercourse within the last five days?”
“Yes.”
“How many hours prior to the incident was your last consensual intercourse?”
The memory of Anders’ rough and callused hands gripping her hips and rocking
her on his cock as he panted in Norwegian flashed in her mind, bringing the
heat of a flush from her chest to her forehead. But the sex with her father had
been consensual too, in as much as consent hadn’t occurred to her as a factor
anymore. Recalling how Anders had told her to stop even as he had
enthusiastically reciprocated, she wondered when the role of consent had left
her sexual lexicon, but couldn’t pinpoint the moment. It left an odd, hollow
pit in her to be able to objectively see this subtlety of the insidious change
her father had wrought and not know how it functioned. This wasn’t the blaring
outrage to her values and sense of self that had come with committing murder,
but something that had occurred entirely outside of her detection until this
moment. A foreboding guarantee that this was far from the limit of his redesign
to her psyche resounded in that hollow pit like a drum. She could almost hear
him whispering from the dark of her mind, too quiet to be much more than just a
presence. A horrible whisper of the price she had paid for his love.
“I don’t think I can answer that,” she said. She didn’t know she had been
breathing hard until she spoke and she pressed her hand down onto her sternum
to calm her heaving gasps. “I don’t want to answer any more questions. Can we
just skip to the next step?”
The nurse nodded, but frowned. “I know it’s hard, honey, but every part of this
is important to collect evidence. I can ask the officer to step into the hall
if that would make you more comfortable.”
The cop broke his fly on the wall act and finally spoke in a hushed but
authoritative tone, “No, you can’t. My orders are to protect her and I can’t do
that if I can’t see her.”
The nurse’s face pinched into a frown and she swiveled in her stool to shoot
him a withering look. “What’s the difference of you just standing on the other
side of that door? There’s already another two of you in the hallway. Ain’t
like anyone gonna come busting in here past them!”
Simone’s ears perked up at their wording. A mad spark of hope caught fire to
her fevered brain. “Why would I need protection? Did something happen?”
She saw the cop’s expression twist into the discomfort of being caught out as
he stiffly said, “You don’t have to worry, you’re safe with us now.”
“But is it him? Is it my father? Did he live?” She knew her tone was manic. It
was an impossible hope but she couldn’t stop it from filling her heart. “Did he
escape?”
“That’s not information I can divulge to you at this time,” the cop responded
tensely.
A wide grin pulled at the cut on her lip. She didn’t care how it revealed her
insanity to them. “It is him, isn’t it? That’s why there are so many cops here,
right? Are you hoping he’ll come for me? Please, please just tell me if he’s
alive.”
“Listen, everything is going to be just fine,” he assured her, misunderstanding
her elation as panic.
She would take a thousand lashes from her father’s belt if only to see him
alive to do it. If he was alive, then she hadn’t committed a senseless murder.
Kyun and the nightmarish memory of the old man in the filthy wood paneled house
were lives she would forever carry the guilt of having taken, but they weren’t
senseless murders. She was a monster for being able to do it at all, but there
were people she had to protect from those men. She wasn’t a killer unless it
was the only option left. If Leif had lived, then she could really believe
that. But if Leif was alive and out there, that also meant he was a danger once
more. That heated hope in her was doused with the cold reminder of her duty.
“Where’s my uncle Anders? The other tall, blond man that was there? In the
house. He’s being guarded too?” she asked, that giddy energy transferring into
real dread now. “And Vidar and Henrik. He might go after them. Where are they?”
“Baby, don’t you worry about anyone but yourself right now, all right?” the
nurse interjected with a resolute but mollifying tone.
Simone didn’t have time to be placated. Her family didn’t have time for her to
bow to the insistence of law. So long as her father was free, her prison was at
his side. She turned to the nurse and, though she hated to leave her soothing
reminder of a life outside of this madness, said, “I revoke my consent to this
examination and I refuse medical treatment until I see that my family is safe.”
“Calm down, baby. Ain’t nothing bad is going to happen to your family. We are
all here to help get the evidence they need to protect you in the long run.”
Simone slid away from the table in a tearing of paper and a flourish of blue
checkered hospital gown. She was sick of other people dictating the purpose of
her body. Monster though she may be, she was not a murder weapon, she was not a
sex slave, she was not a crime scene, she was not property. For the first time
in what must have been ages, a fog lifted within her mind and she was solid
again. It was an overwhelming sensation, like the first steps on land after
being at sea for too long. She swayed on the lost foundation of her identity
and when it didn’t crumble beneath her, she stood taller than she was before.
With deliberate and careful words, Simone spoke evenly, “I know my rights as a
patient and a citizen. I know who I am and where I am. I’m aware and alert. I’m
of sound body and mind and I am revoking my consent.” She held her arms around
her torso tightly, hugging the thin gown to her as she collected the courage to
look the policeman in his eye. She settled for his cheek. “If you force me to
undergo examination, I will sue the fuck out of your department and this
hospital. Keep me in the dark, you’ll get nothing from me on Leif, and trust
me, he’s shown me more than he thinks. So please, enlighten me. On everything.”
The cop’s lips thinned into an uncertain frown, but he reached for his shoulder
radio.
 
 
Bolle’s paws weighed down in four points on the bed, shifting the blankets as
she stepped around Anders’ feet until she pressed a heavy paw directly on his
thigh. He turned away from the dog with a pained groan and shoved a pillow over
his head to block out the chorus of expectant breathing from the other three as
they watched him from the floor.
“No, too early… let me sleep,” he grumbled from under the pillow, only exciting
them further.
The eruption of clicking as their claws danced over the floor officially pulled
him out of any hope to return to unconsciousness, but he lied in stillness out
of spite. His gang never could grasp the concept of a lazy Sunday morning. He
cracked open a groggy eye and was greeted with Balder’s long muzzle resting on
the edge of the bed as the hound gazed at him with doting affection. Balder’s
tongue peeked out to run over his snout as evidence of his excitement for
breakfast came leaking out the edges of his mouth. Anders gently pushed the
drooling face away from the bed and turned onto his other side, only to engage
the playfulness of Bolle when she saw movement under the blankets. She slammed
her front legs rather painfully over his turning torso, her fluffy tail wagging
fiercely as she tried to bury her nose in the comforter.
“Okay, okay! I’m up!” Anders surrendered.
“Hey, dipshit. Are you really waking up this time?”
He gasped at the unexpected voice, squeezing his eyes shut in a grimace when
that deep inhalation sparked a tight agony in his chest. When he opened them
again, his room and his dogs were gone, replaced by a dimly lit hospital room
and a very irritated Vidar looming over him. For a moment, his mind was blank,
his confusion the only thing existing in the blank fog of his thoughts before
memory tumbled over him. The knife slowly sinking into him, his blood hot on
his skin, Leif’s words like poison on his mind. Simone pressed into the floor,
a masked and armored demon shoving her down with a rifle to her head. Her
distress, her submissiveness, her vulnerability excites you.
“No, I- I- what-” he stammered, trying to sit up in his panic until that harsh
reminder of his wound sent him throwing himself back onto the mattress.
“Looks like you’re awake enough to me,” Vidar remarked offhandedly. Anders
turned his head and stared at his brother in a wide-eyed plea for something, he
wasn’t even sure what, but Vidar glared coldly at him as he leaned close and
whispered, “Listen, here’s what you’re going to say when they ask you what
happened: Kyun gave us a ride to the airport from the funeral reception
yesterday, but when we couldn’t get an earlier flight, he was nice enough to
take us to a motel. Then Leif showed up and drove off with Kyun in Einar’s
truck. That’s why the Mercedes was at the motel overnight and that’s when Leif
ends Kyun, got it? You don’t know that yet, so act surprised, just not too
surprised, if they let you know that Kyun is worm food. Because we all knew
Leif was crazy, right? Those details don’t change. This morning, instead of
your dumb ass driving out there, waving around a gun you don’t even know how to
shoot like you’re John fucking Wayne, you’re going to tell them Leif drove you
and Simone in the Mercedes back to the house to kill you. Got it?”
“What are you talking about?” Anders rasped, bewilderment running chaos in his
already hazed mind.
“I’m talking about the police interrogation,” Vidar hissed through gritted
teeth. The raw and barely constrained hostility in his sharp features alarmed
Anders, reminding him too closely to Leif’s predatory focus. He looked away,
seeing the door ajar and the shadow of a man standing in the hallway. It came
back to him then that he had been in an ambulance before waking up in this
room. The image of the cop staring at his gushing chest wound as the EMT
dressed it floated into his mind like a memory of a dream and he was thankfully
able to push it away as easily. None of that mattered. He had survived. He had
to forget.
“You want me to lie to the police?”
“Not just the police. I want that to be the only story you care to tell anyone.
If you fuck this up, you fuck us all. This is our chance to get that psycho
sack of shit locked up for life.”
Anders couldn’t bring himself to examine his brother’s face to see if he was
simply ignorant or absolutely insane. As nightmarish as this day had been,
there was one fact from it he was certain of.
“Don’t you know?” he whispered, his voice thin through his dry throat. “It’s
over. Leif’s dead.”
Vidar stared at him, then moved his stare to the dusk-darkened sky out the
window as he thought. Anders risked a glance at him, relieved to see that his
face had gone back to the irritable skeptic he’d grown up with. “No. No, that
can’t be it. They wouldn’t be doing all of this if they weren’t still looking
for him. Their line of questioning was too specific. These circle-jerkers are
spooked, Anders. Fucking spooked.”
“I… I saw him,” Anders started, swallowing to try to wet his tongue as the
images played out before his eyes in horrible detail. He’d never seen a man die
before this week. He’d seen time stop in the eyes of four men now. “On the
floor. Simone had… I don’t think she knew. Oh god…” He brought his hand up to
his hairline, his fingers tugging at the roots as a dire realization wracked
him. “She didn’t know that it would kill him.”
“What happened at the house, Anders? I need to know,” Vidar insisted firmly.
Anders could feel his intense, demanding stare but his mind was back in that
room, watching Simone desperately labor over her father’s body. “Tell me what
happened and I can tell you what to say to keep us all out of trouble.”
“I was supposed to do it,” Anders whispered. His mouth twitched as he spoke,
his anger at himself drawing his lips into a snarl while he fought back the
tears of guilt and shame. “I… I was the one who filled that god damned syringe.
I was the one who was supposed to stop him. But I was too slow, too weak… I let
him win. And she… she picked it up and she did it.” He bit down on his
quivering lip, trying to stabilize his emotions but there was no getting a
handle on this. Vidar waited, his steady stare heavy and focused, a sharp
contrast to the disorder inside Anders. He continued in a shaking whisper,
needing to confess his part in this sin. “She didn’t know. She’d gone into it
expecting what the needle had always done to her, but when he stopped
breathing… When he died… I couldn’t do it. After all that, I still couldn’t
kill him. And now she has to bear that weight because I was too weak. I’m the
one who did that to her.” He slid his hand down over his face, holding back his
pain. “She still loved him. I was so blinded by rage, I couldn’t see that. And
when she tried to breathe life back into him, I… I tried to stop her. I made
her kill her own father, Vid. I did that. You don’t come back from something
like that. I did that to her and I was glad when it happened. I’m not…”
He couldn’t speak. His throat was tight and clogged with grief, so he just
gnashed his teeth and held down that heavy flood of emotion until he felt as
though he might drown in it. It was a terrible thing to see what he was
becoming and not be able to stop it.
“You didn’t see any of that. You didn’t know anything about any syringe. When
they find your prints on it, you tell them you went through his bag before and
they’ll see that you did,” Vidar whispered, his decisive tone brooking no
argument, then more quietly, “Did she know it was you who filled that syringe?”
Anders couldn’t do more than shake his head in response. “Good. Keep it that
way. Don’t ever tell anyone, especially her, about that.”
“No, no, I have to tell her!” Anders nearly shouted. “I’m the one who she
should blame, not herself!”
“Keep it down, asshole!” Vidar hissed, but the shadow in the hall was already
approaching.
“He up?” a gruff voice came from the doorway.
Vidar pressed his hand to his forehead and sighed deeply, the edge of his
breath carrying an irritated growl, but he responded with a calm, “He is awake,
yes.”
“We’ve got some questions for you, Anders Valstad. We have a translator present
should we find it necessary, but we’re going to need to question you alone.
Vidar Valstad, please step into the hall. Officer Brody will escort you out.”
Anders could feel Vidar’s warning glare as he stood up and left the room, but
he couldn’t meet his eyes. He knew he had to tell the version of events his
brothers had committed to for the sake of protecting them and Simone from the
consequences of Kyun’s murder, but Vidar’s story about the syringe was
something he couldn’t bear the distaste of telling. That wasn’t supposed to be
her sin. Looking up at the uniformed police officer, he made his decision. He
couldn’t change the past, but he could start taking responsibility for it.
 
 
Henrik nearly screamed when the door to the hotel room opened, making his
relief to see it was only Vidar returning from the hospital all the greater.
Every moment he wasn’t with his family, he was plagued with the certainty that
Leif had caught up with them and had begun picking them off. As safe as these
cops had assured him they were, he couldn’t feel it. He doubted he would ever
feel fully safe again. He didn’t know how much he had taken that base level of
safety for granted until it was torn from his life.
“How is he?” Henrik asked.
Vidar threw his coat on the table, the vehemence in the action and the clear
frustration in his face making Henrik edgy. “He’s fine.”
He closed the curtains with a rough jerk of his arms and sat down heavily on
the other bed. When he didn’t elaborate, Henrik nervously asked, “But is he
going to be okay? How did the surgery go?”
“He’s fine. The surgery was fine,” Vidar answered tersely, yanking the buttons
open on his shirt.
The police had brought them clothes and had put them up in a nicer hotel, all
courtesy of some nonprofit set up to help victims of violent crimes. It was odd
to consider himself a victim in comparison to what Leif had put Anders and
Simone through, but Henrik wasn’t about to refuse the assistance based on such
a ludicrous imposter syndrome as that. He scooted to the edge of his bed and
faced his younger brother, observing the hardened lines of anger in his
features that he had always tried to hide his troubles behind.
“You’re not fine, though,” Henrik said, trying to keep any excess gentleness
out of his tone. He knew sympathy was not a thing his brother received
gracefully.
“Mind your own fucking business.”
“What is it? What’s bothering you?”
Vidar pried off his too-small sneakers, then leaned forward with his elbows on
his knees and his forehead resting in his hands. His voice was raspy with
weariness as he said, “I slept under the same roof with a serial killer. I ate
dinner and laughed with a rapist. I had no idea. None. He had me completely
fooled for years. That’s what’s bothering me. Now leave me alone.”
Henrik pursed his lips and nodded, but he continued to press him. “Did you get
him to tell the story? What did he think?”
“I don’t know and I don’t know.”
“Did he tell you anything about what happened in there?”
“He was out of his damn mind. Probably the anesthetic. Or he’s really lost it.”
Vidar rubbed his shoulder, winced at the ache in it. “Now, could you shut the
fuck up?”
He couldn’t. He had to get Vidar to talk about whatever it was before it
hardened in him like a kidney stone. “Well, what did he say that was so crazy?”
Vidar groaned in annoyance and stood up, shooting him a heated glare that would
have phased anyone who hadn’t grown up with the short-tempered man. “He was
talking some nonsense about Simone killing Leif. As if that weren’t complete
bullshit enough, he said that he’d set her up to do it. I don’t know what the
hell happened there, but dead men don’t escape police custody. There’s just
something about all this that stinks. They’re not telling us the whole story.”
“Sure, but why would they? Doesn’t a police investigation require a certain
amount of discretion? They’re still mostly undecided if we’re suspects or
victims, too.”
“Discretion, yes. But they’re going beyond just withholding details for the
sake of investigation. They’re obfuscating the truth.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean we can’t trust them,” Vidar answered in a low whisper. He sat down on
the edge of the bed and faced Henrik, his brows furrowed in grave regard as he
whispered, “They didn’t just fuck up in letting Leif get away. They asked me if
he had any friends in law enforcement. That’s been bugging me all day. Why
would they ask me that? The answer is because he did. That’s how he escaped.
Now these motherfuckers are scrambling because they know they’ve been
infiltrated.”
“Like a terrorist thing?”
“Maybe. Terrorist murder cult. You notice how all the cops who are guarding us
have been old fuckers?”
“I guess?”
“They don’t know who they can trust. They’re using everyone who has enough of a
reputation in their departments to staff this case, especially around us.”
Henrik looked toward the door, knowing a white-mustached cop was standing just
outside of it, and started to believe this insane conspiracy theory his brother
was ranting on about.
Vidar slapped his knee, grinning like he’d just won a prize as he perked up.
“That’s why they’ve been keeping us separate from Simone! They think she knows
about it! That she’s part of it!”
Henrik usually hated it when his brother went into crazy Sherlock mode,
especially when it all started to make too much sense. His gut twisted as he
waited for Vidar to point at him and laugh about how gullible he was to have
believed something like that, as he usually did when he got going like this,
but when Vidar only continued to grin and glance around at the thoughts
bubbling behind his mind, he became nervous.
“You don’t think she’s part of it, do you?” Henrik asked. “A terrorist?”
Vidar almost didn’t seem to have heard him, lost in his own thoughts, but
muttered out an absent, “Hm? Oh, no, of course not. Leif was still grooming
her.”
Henrik watched as his brother continued to grin and silently postulate like a
maniac. The entire thing should have seemed impossibly bizarre, but these past
few days had moved the bar of what he’d considered too bizarre. The distant
dots Vidar was able to connect started to form a disturbing picture that came
into focus the more he looked at it. That slim grasp of safety he’d managed to
take hold of with the police protection crumbled. They had to get out of this
God forsaken country.
***** Chapter 35 *****
Simone spread her hands open on the narrow table separating her from Special
Agents Maier and Gladwell, letting the cool of the smooth laminate surface fund
her composure. It had been nearly one hour of her trading answers to their
questions for information they had about her father and she did not have the
social stamina for this even on her best days. There was no time for the
delicacy required of her to properly navigate this give and take and it was
showing in her rapidly decreasing patience with these men.
Gladwell took off his glasses and rubbed at the pink imprints the nose pads
left on his white skin. “Simone Valstad, although we do sympathize with what
you’ve been through, we need your full cooperation. If you’re not helping, then
you are obstructing. Do you understand the seriousness of that charge?”
Simone met his weary gaze with the false poise of indignance. When she spoke to
them, the only thing subduing her tone was the physical pain in her bruised
throat. “Refusing to answer questions is not an obstruction of justice, sir. If
I’m wrong on that, go ahead and arrest me so I can invoke my right to remain
silent.”
Both Gladwell and Maier shot her the same brand of exasperated glare and she
met it spitefully. In her experience with lawmen of any stripe, there seemed
fewer things they despised more than having to interact with someone well-
versed in their rights. Not that citing such knowledge had always protected
her; she had a scar hidden on the back of her scalp to remind her of that,
courtesy of the NYPD. For all the destructive force afforded to them by the
power of law and biology, these weren’t men she had to fear. Their threat was
toward a freedom that had already been taken and a body already bled and
bruised.
“We have no obligation to provide you any information,” Maier said, his gentler
tone playing the good cop to Gladwell’s bad cop. The cup of coffee Maier had
set down in front of her at the beginning of the interview sat cold and
untouched. As dehydrated as she was, she understood these little power plays
and gestures too well. Being in her father’s company for so long had made her
hyperaware of manipulation and resentful of it. “We’re willing to extend you
the goodwill of considering your questions, but only if you answer ours.
Fully.”
“Goodwill is only as good as it gives. So far, your goodwill has given me
bullshit,” she responded dryly. “I can’t abide bullshit. Why aren’t you telling
me anything? He escaped, so he’s alive, right?”
“Why is that so important to you?” Maier asked with genuine curiosity in the
lilt of the query. “After everything he’s done, you’re still so concerned for
his wellbeing. Why is that?”
“I’m concerned for the wellbeing of my uncles,” she answered, careful to steer
away from the topic of her feelings about her father. “As long as he’s out
there, they’re in danger.”
“Yeah, well, them and everyone else in this town,” Maier added. “Except not
everyone else is under police protection. Your father killed a lot of people,
Ms. Valstad. We think you know that.”
“I don’t know that,” she insisted. “You keep saying he’s some kind of prolific
murderer, but present nothing further to support that accusation. What are the
crimes he’s been accused of? What evidence do you have? If you’re building your
entire case against him on a witness statement from me, you might be fucked.”
“You’re getting awfully defensive of a man who beat you black and blue,”
Gladwell interjected. “Maybe you’re not his victim at all. Maybe you’re his
accomplice.”
Simone’s chest tightened with the memory of bloody muscle ghosting over her
teeth and tongue as she clenched her jaw and swallowed her nervousness. “I’m
not like him.”
“But he wanted you to be, didn’t he?” Maier asked. “His obsession with you
demanded intimacy but his sociopathy prevented him from ever truly achieving
that. What better way to simulate emotional intimacy than having you become
something he felt he could relate to?”
“He had no trouble achieving intimacy with me,” she muttered sardonically,
trying to shield herself from the effect of those words but pain drained the
blood from her face and pooled nausea in her gut. She withdrew her hands from
the table in the need to wrap them around her body. They didn’t know the
details about what Leif had done with her, let alone why. They only knew him as
a murderer. This framing of his psychological dysfunction was something she
found distasteful; even she, in all she had managed to gather about the guarded
man, wouldn’t assume anything about his motivations. But they weren’t seeking
information only on Leif. They were pricking her to see where she bled and she
tried not to show it, but emotional control was far from her strongest skill.
Her neck was tense and disgust rose to the surface of her features before she
could compose herself. Gladwell misread her distaste and poked her somewhere
she didn’t expect.
“Smart, creative, clever daughter. So much potential. You know, we talked to
his ex-wife- your mother- and she mentioned that you were interested in a
career in surgery,” Gladwell said. He fixed his gaze on her as he smiled, “Did
you know that surgeon is in the top ten preferred professions of psychopaths?”
A bead of sweat dripped down her temple. Throughout all of this, she somehow
hadn’t even considered that her mother would be questioned. She couldn’t
imagine what she might be going through in knowing that Leif had a secret life
as a serial killer for who knows how long. A wave of nausea passed over her in
a shudder as she wondered how much her mother now knew about what he did. What
they did. She wanted to both speak with her immediately and never face her
again. She wondered which option her mother would prefer of her and found that
she couldn’t guess.
Shoving down that line of thought, she lifted her face determinedly to Gladwell
and said, “I went to art school instead. Did you know that artist is in the top
ten careers with the lowest rates of psychopathy?”
That wiped the smug grin off his face.
“How long have you known Leif Valstad was a murderer?” Maier asked, quickly
changing the topic as his partner’s face reddened. “Did you ever suspect or
have a feeling he could be a murderer before he began threatening them?”
“I’ve suspected that my father might be a murderer since catching him
attempting to murder my uncle this morning,” she lied. Even as a child, she’d
had a funny feeling that there was something off about him, something dangerous
and fascinating. Her mother had often touted the value of intuition, but
intuition felt too close to delusion to Simone for her to trust it. To her,
intuition often felt as though there were a dozen ghosts reaching for her
through peoples’ eyes and whispering from innocuous pieces of her surroundings.
Now that she had come to distrust even her own experiences, anything less than
fact backed by more credible sources than herself seemed as illusory as a
daydream.
“Has anyone aside from Leif Valstad assaulted you?”
Her hands clenched at the scratchy wool of the sweater the hospital had given
her. “Care to unload that question a bit?”
“Don’t do that,” Gladwell frowned. “It’s obvious Valstad had assaulted you in
at least one way. You’d do well to remember that the accounts of events from
your uncles will point out any ‘discrepancies’ in your story. Don’t go telling
us you fell down the stairs or some shit.”
Simone’s tenuous will to retain a cohesive appearance of normalcy
disintegrated. She tried to hold her breath to keep herself from hissing out
the acidic response burning in her lungs, but her hands clutching at her sides
shook with the transferred energy. These weren’t men she had to fear, so she
was finally free to hate. Hatred crawled out of that well of tar she had buried
her murder in, coating her with that thick blackness wherever it writhed. The
seams at the sides of her sweater began to rip.
“You think you have any power over me?” she sneered. The warning bells in her
mind were muffled under the din of the hatred that buzzed loudly in her ears.
Her whispered pitch was frantically rapid. “You don’t have anything. How… the
fuck did you manage to lose him? You have nothing. Nothing to offer, nothing to
take. Nothing to take, not him, not me. No, not me, not me anymore. You lost
him, you don’t get to have me. It was a mistake to believe you could help us.”
She knocked over the flimsy plastic chair when she abruptly shot up and
Gladwell rose with her, a hostile slant to his stance that she met gleefully.
At last, the blossoming of violence. A venomous grin pulled at her mouth.
“George,” Maier warned. Gladwell didn’t back down, but he didn’t move either.
“Better make it count, George,” Simone taunted, her grin pulling wider. He was
almost as tall as her father, but not as in good of shape. Her bones seemed to
resonate in the anticipation of pain that buzzed audibly through her. She
wanted to take his violence and devour it.
“George!” Maier repeated, raising his calm and level voice for the first time
throughout this interview. “Go get a cup of coffee.”
Simone’s bones still hummed even through the disappointment that loosened her
aching fingers when Gladwell left with a fuming huff. Her eyes were fixed to
the closed door after he’d slammed it, but the click of the audio recorder
being shut off drew her gaze to Maier. He rose from the table, his slight frame
moving with the stiffness of calculated calmness that betrayed some sort of
nervousness or excitement. She turned to him fully as he stepped around the
table and approached her, that hunger for punishment abating in her to be
replaced by curiosity.
“I apologize for that, Miss Valstad,” he said, stopping just a foot from her.
She looked down at his brown leather shoes on the thin gray carpet, his even
stance and proximity tickling that treacherous intuition in her. The thrum of
danger bled into her curiosity as he continued in his sterile clinical tone.
“Everything said and done here for the moment is off the record. We both have
objectives here we would like to resolve, so let me propose an agreement to
trade. Information on Leif Valstad for your full cooperation. Once my partner
returns, we will both continue on as though this moment never happened,
understand?”
Simone’s flesh crawled in a wave of goosebumps with the realization at how
close she stood to the knowledge of her father. Her stare raised in alarm to
search his patrician features, glancing over the eyes that screamed too much at
once. This was surely a trick. Turning off the recording device didn’t change
anything.
Her desperation divided into a scatter of opposing urgencies, but the need for
her father swept her focus away from the threat that lied in proceeding. “I
understand.”
Maier lifted his hand tentatively over her shoulder, pausing to ask, “First,
may I see it?”
Her brow creased in nervousness, unsure of what he was asking, but she nodded.
His hand brushed her hair back from her neck and she watched in mounting
uncertainty while he pulled the loose collar of the sweater to the side. She
held herself from flinching away when he peeled back the gauze taped over her
bite wound. There was a fascination that gleamed in his dead shark-like eyes
while he looked at the bite, a detached but very interested curiosity that
reminded her of a child pulling off a butterfly’s wings. A slight smile curved
his thin lips. She felt naked before him despite being finally fully clothed.
Her stare attached to his neck, to the writhing pulse under his skin, and she
flushed hot at the memory of blood this time.
“Do you know how long he’s been killing?” Maier asked, his voice lowered to
accommodate his proximity as he leaned closer to examine the bruised and
pierced flesh.
Simone licked her lips nervously, trying to remember if he’d ever told her.
“No.”
“He took his first life at age fourteen,” he said. “Coincidentally, or perhaps
not, you were fourteen when he began testing sexual interaction with your
unconscious body. Although, he did not fully consummate that interaction until
you were seventeen, the night before you began college.”
His words shoveled coal into the furnace of her madness and made her want to
scream from the searing knowledge, but she had to focus. She forced herself to
look in the direction of his face, not really seeing him even as she stared
right at him, his features wavering like heat off a paved road. She swallowed
her mounting terror. “How do you know that?”
Instead of answering her, he slowly began to peel the bandage the rest of the
way off, the tugging at her wound making her pant in agony while he continued
to calmly speak. “I was looking into your family history and saw a pattern. Of
course, everyone has patterns, that is often highlighted and manifested in our
line of work. But the Valstads, as far as the documents show, all had the same
pattern. That’s not just noteworthy, it’s troublingly odd. Each Valstad,
regardless of their personality, their place, their time, did not hunt to exert
some vengeance into the world or to make up for their own lacking. Despite the
horrors they were capable of or the number of hunts they executed with any
varying level of professional detachment or artistic revelry, it all boiled
down to nature.”
She watched in revulsion as he held up the bloody bandage to the light before
placing it in his pocket. The buzzing became a hundred voices humming in
unison, a sound she felt might rip her flesh from her bones as the humming
crescendoed, but resounding clearly above that was a rapid clicking and then a
pop. Panting through her discomfort, she lifted her head towards the sound and
felt her stomach drop when she saw a thin man holding up an old camera behind
Maier. He seemed unaware of the photographer even as the camera loudly popped
and whirred with each photo he took, the flash making her blink and squint, but
she’d recognized him in that split second before being blinded. She knew those
gaunt features, that blond beard, those silver eyes that glittered with
madness. Bjørn, carrying with him the sour smell of the darkroom, slowly glided
towards them as Maier continued to speak.
“Generation after generation derived the same purpose, lasting through cultural
and social changes. We could never make you do anything unless it was within
your own interest. We could never give you orders so much as try to direct and
coincide our requests with your nature. You’re like wild animals, never
completely to be trained or trusted. Leif Valstad had his humanity chipped away
until all that was left were jagged pieces that cut into him when he tries to
be anything other than what he has become. That’s why we need you, Miss
Valstad.”
She tried to calm down and focus away from both the hallucination and Maier’s
terrifying words, but was met with a horrid pain that shocked through her brain
when she resisted the pull of Bjørn’s haunting image. This wasn’t supposed to
happen when she was stable. Despite all the emotional turmoil, this was the
most whole she had felt in months, possibly years. But there he was, as real as
the agent still admiring her wound but entirely within her broken mind.
“Tick tock, darling girl. You have to keep it wound though, understand?” Bjørn
said in Leif’s voice, grinning to reveal a mouth full of pointed and jagged
teeth just inches behind the agent.
“You… w-what d… d… you want?” she sputtered, her mouth struggling to form the
words.
“We need you to be why he must obey,” Maier answered instead.
Bjørn fell to the floor in a hiss of ash that instantly dispelled that intense
humming. The silence in the room now felt solid, like she could feel it
enclosing the air around her, pressing tighter and tighter. Her fear transmuted
into rage in an instant, the meaning and implication of his knowledge igniting
an instinctive wrath in her like a spark in gasoline. Leif hadn’t escaped, he
had been taken. Simone grabbed Maier’s shirtsleeves and slammed him into the
wall, her muscles tensed and bunching with an adrenaline-fueled strength that
took them both by surprise. Her words tore painfully from her throat in a
snarled, “Tell me where he is!”
Maier didn’t resist her as she pressed him to the wall, his crooked smile
seemingly amused at this escalation. “You’ll see.”
The click of the door opening made her stagger quickly away from him, backing
into a corner where she could see both men and give neither the opportunity to
sneak up on her. Her body thrummed in the need for vengeance, a viciousness
running through her that she was unaccustomed to but carried with it such
seductive certainty that these men must pay for what they’ve done. Gladwell
entered the room with a weary bewilderment at what he’d walked into, seeing her
crouched in the corner with a death glare and his partner leaning nonchalantly
against the wall.
“What the fuck is her problem now?” he groused.
“I believe Miss Valstad is too thoroughly fatigued to continue this interview
toward any useful end,” Maier explained. “I’ll have one of the officers escort
her to the hotel and we may resume once she has recovered in the morning.”
"Give me back my watch first," she demanded. "I need to wind it."
 
 
Anders was prepared to face whatever consequences came with confessing to the
murder of Leif. He’d had no idea what this country’s courts would consider it,
but from what he had seen of the justice system of the United States in movies
and television, he’d anticipated a long haul of costly legal fees and
inevitable jail time. Whatever came would be what he’d deserved for tarnishing
Simone’s soul, first with the sin of their love and then with the unimaginable
burden of patricide. Anything he could have done to ease her pain would have
been worth the cost and it was rightfully his crime to bear. She didn’t fill
that needle with a lethal dose, he did. It was self-defense as much as it was
premeditated murder. He was ready to give his life to protect her from that,
but when he’d confessed to the officer and said he’d been the one to inject
Leif, the cop didn’t even write it down.
Anders sat looking out the hotel window into the night, the little two-bed room
a far upgrade from the motel they’d been in and not at all the holding cell
he’d expected to be thrown into. The painkillers they’d given him swam
pleasantly in his bloodstream, numbing the minor aches and pains he didn’t even
notice had collected in his body as well as the agony he was careful not to
aggravate in his stab wounds, but the pills also clouded his mind and made him
feel off. He was irrationally insulted that his life-altering confession had
gone ignored. The officer had the nerve to nod along with his entire confession
as reiterated through the translator only to thank him for his time and take
him to the hotel directly afterward. Anders was certain that he was going to be
taken to the station and was still shocked at having ended up in this cozy room
instead. It didn’t make any sense. He had been glowering at the window for the
better part of an hour by the time a knock at the door startled him out of his
consternation.
“Come in,” he called out in English, hoping he wouldn’t have to limp over to
answer it. Thankfully, the door cracked open, the white-mustached police
officer having unlocked the door for Henrik to squeeze his hulking mass past
him. Anders immediately brightened at seeing his brother still alive and well.
“Henrik! When did they pick you up? Is Vidar here too?”
“Yeah, uh,” Henrik began, waiting for the door to shut and latch behind him
before walking over to one of the beds and sitting nervously on the edge of it.
“Way earlier. We’ve been stuck here all day. Did you give them Vidar’s story?”
Anders wrinkled his nose in distaste at having done it, but nodded. “What
choice did I have? Not that it mattered. I don’t think the cop even paid
attention to a word I’d said.” Henrik let out a huff of relief and Anders
waited a beat before continuing. “I told him I killed Leif.”
Henrik’s heavy brow fell. “What the hell is wrong with you? Are you nuts? Leif
isn’t even dead!”
“Bullshit,” Anders spat. “I watched him die. I had a syringe filled all the way
up with morphine; there’s no way he could have lived through that.”
“Then why are we getting the whole witness protection treatment if he’s no
longer a threat, stupid?”
“Maybe because he’s not the only threat. Remember Kyun? For all anyone knows,
there could be a whole squad of killers ready to avenge Leif.”
Henrik paused, his glare growing distant as he considered this. “That’s… That’s
surprisingly astute of you, Anders.”
“Would it kill you to admit that I’m smart?” Anders smirked. His brother
returned his smirk, neither of them feeling the lighthearted teasing they
feigned but needing the reassurance that beyond this hell, they could return to
normal. Neither of them quite believed that either. A heavy silence fell
between them and their smiles waned under the weight of it. When Anders spoke,
he couldn’t fake his way past the haunted edge of his tone. “I killed him,
though. It doesn’t matter who injected him, I’m the one who murdered him. He
was our brother, Henrik.”
Henrik slouched over his folded hands in his lap, his head hung silently for a
moment. “Leif stopped being our brother a long time ago. You did what you had
to do.”
“No. No, I didn’t. That’s the problem,” Anders muttered, pinching the bridge of
his nose. “Have you seen Simone yet? Is she here at the same hotel as us?”
Henrik lifted his head to frown at him, his lips pursed into a thin line before
he sighed heavily and said, “I don’t think you should consider seeing her.”
Anders sat up straighter, his concern roused at the wording. “Why? What’s
wrong? Did something happen to her?”
Henrik’s frown shifted to discomfort, the wide plane of his forehead wrinkling
deeply as he stood up and walked to the desk in the opposite corner of the
room. He tapped the surface of it in thought and didn’t turn to Anders as he
spoke in a carefully guarded tone. “I just don’t think it’s healthy for you to
be around her. For either of you. You haven’t been thinking straight. I’m not
blaming you for anything that’s happened, but you… You took her back to Leif,
for Christ’s sake. You were almost killed because of that. I mean, can you
explain that?”
“And what was your plan again? Wait around and see if she dies?” Anders asked
bitterly. “Oh, wait, you weren’t even going to do that much. You’re just going
to run home and leave her here. Don’t talk to me about what’s healthy for other
people when you don’t give a fuck about anyone but yourself.”
He could tell he’d hurt his brother with his words, but it felt good to wound
him. Anders was sick of them assuming the worst of his intentions with his
niece when he only wanted to make her happy and keep her safe. He was the only
one who really cared for her and that much was made all the more evident in how
his brothers would rather just leave her to die rather than accept his
relationship with her. They could never understand. Simone was more than just
his niece, she was his, and they could either get used to that or stop
interfering. He hadn’t yet let anything get in the way of what he had with her,
not Leif, not them, not anyone. He was now glad that the officer hadn’t taken
his confession seriously. A new plan for their future began to hatch in his
mind, one where they could both be free to be with each other as they should.
“I’m sorry, Henrik,” he began, adapting a subdued tone to make this more
convincing. “You’re not the one I should be angry at. You’re a victim in all of
this, too. And you’re right; I haven’t been thinking straight. It’s hard to
stay sane when it feels like the whole world’s gone mad. We’re going to need a
lot of time and therapy before we can go back to being who we are, right?”
Henrik smiled sadly and nodded. Anders took three calming breaths to suspend
his withered patience before his appeal bore fruit in his softhearted brother.
“Well… I think I heard her just a little earlier,” Henrik conceded, rubbing the
back of his head in the awkwardness of accepting an apology.
“You heard her? What was she saying?” Anders asked.
Henrik diverted his attention once more to the desk in his discomfort,
shuffling the scant items the hotel had provided courteously. He pretended to
be very interested in a box of tissues while he spoke, “Well, we couldn’t hear
much through the wall… but she’s not in a hospital, so I’m sure she’s as okay
as she can be. Just promise me you won’t go searching her out, alright? Not
without me or Vid.”
“Alright,” Anders lied. If they were hearing her through a wall, then she was
in one of the rooms next to them. Anders would need to bring her back to his
room if he wanted any privacy with her. He was suddenly impatient for his
brother to leave. “I should try to get some sleep. Don’t think it’ll happen,
but… Oh, what’s your room number? I might want to try to stretch my good leg
and come visit.”
“Yeah, come over anytime,” Henrik smiled. “We’re in room 217. Just ask Officer
Grady in the hall. He won’t let us even go to the fucking vending machines
without him.”
“Goodnight, Henrik,” Anders smiled back, trying not to appear to eager for him
to leave.
The large man turned toward the door and paused, his voice just above a whisper
as he looked back and said, “Oh, and, about the police…”
“Yes?”
He blinked at Anders, hesitating before shaking his head and resuming his exit.
“Never mind. Goodnight, littlest brother.”
Anders stood up once the heavy door latched closed, using the cane from the
hospital to walk into the bathroom to clean the blood and antiseptic off his
body. He barely noticed the wound in his thigh, but he had to remember that was
due to the painkillers and he constantly reminded himself not to overdo it. As
he quickly rinsed off the remnants of his surgery, he wondered if he should
have felt guilty for deceiving his brothers. He didn’t and that struck him as
odd. Perhaps he just didn’t have enough room to feel much of anything else or
maybe it was the drugs. As he toweled himself dry in front of the mirror, he
nearly didn’t recognize his reflection. The skin over his eye sockets had
darkened to a violet hue, giving him a gaunt appearance, and the lines in his
face seemed to have advanced several years. That was aside from the mottled
bruises adorning his jaw, cheekbone, and encircling his right eye. Looking down
at his body, he took note of the large patches of blue and purple standing out
prominently against his pale white skin. He hadn’t pissed blood again since the
first time after the fight in the dining room, so he didn’t feel too concerned
with the damage. The knuckles on his hands were purple where they weren’t red
from the skin splitting. The bruises would vanish and the stab wounds would
close into puckered pink lines with time. He’d go back to being himself
eventually, then he would be able to make up for these mistakes and strange
behaviors. They just had to make it through this. He tugged on the softer
clothes from the box that had been left on the desk and limped out into the
hallway with the cane.
“Officer Grady?” he addressed the cop sitting with a newspaper spread in his
lap. The old man looked up at him with a weary regard, his thick mustache
giving him the appearance of a permanent frown. “You take me to Simone, yes?”
Grady’s bushy brows screwed up in confusion before raising in recognition. “Oh!
The little mulatto girl! Yeah, no, she’s sleepin’ by now I imagine.” He turned
his attention back to the newspaper. “Soundin’ like someone givin’ birth in
that room since she got in, all the blubberin’ she been doin’. Finally got some
peace and quiet goin’ on, can’t have you goin’ and stirrin’ ‘er up again.”
Anders looked down the hallway, the patterned carpet and wallpaper giving him a
headache after only five seconds of staring while he gathered his English. “I
need sleep with her.” When this was met with a dubiously raised eyebrow and a
cockeyed glare, he followed it with, “She sleep… not so good. Mare, ah… bad
sleep. Bad dream.”
“Is that some kinda thing they do in Europe? Like a touchy-feely family bed
thing?”
Anders smiled and nodded. Whatever the old man thought was fine, so long as it
got him Simone. Grady folded the paper and hissed out a strained breath through
his teeth as he rose to his feet, muttering something Anders could guess he
wouldn’t be able to understand even with a perfect grasp of English as he led
him to the end of the long hall. He gave two raps of his gnarled knuckles on
the door before inserting the keycard and turning the knob.
“Well, good luck with that,” Grady nodded, shuffling back toward his chair and
muttering all the way.
Anders walked into the dark room and depended on the layout to be the same as
his until he blindly stepped his way past the bathroom that made up a short
hall. Strangely, the only source of light was coming from under the bed. After
a moment, his eyes adjusted enough for him to see that the room was empty. The
bed was still made. He thought that perhaps Grady had taken him to the wrong
room until his ears picked up the faint sound of breathing. His wounds ached
with the effort as he knelt to the floor alongside the bed, bending further to
peer into the narrow space beneath. Simone laid on her front, her sleeping face
turned toward him and illuminated by the glow of the flashlight that had rolled
out of her outstretched hand. He stared in wonder at why she would be doing
something as ridiculous as sleeping under the bed, then stared in shock at how
young she looked.
He’d seen her asleep before when he was too drunk to recall it clearly and he’d
seen her in a drug- or illness-induced unconsciousness, but he’d never seen her
in a natural sleep. She looked far younger than her barely 20 years of age,
making him feel all at once paternal and guilty. Without the illusion of
maturity in her sensual poise or the haunted burden of experience in her gaze,
she looked more like a lost little girl than a very young woman. To add to his
guilt, he still felt that familiar stab of hunger for her even as he realized
this. His stare settled on the slight part of her full lips, the knowledge of
just how soft and plush they felt against his mouth stirring the beginnings of
an erection, and he knew it was far too late to stop this forbidden lust even
in light of this new shame. He had vowed to replace her father, so there was
already the knowledge that she was much younger than him. He just hadn’t fully
appreciated how much was much younger beyond a simple number. He lightly
brushed her outstretched hand, embarrassingly hard for her already. It had to
have been the drugs or the trauma. They said being around death often made
people want for sex, to feel as alive as possible by indulging in the act that
created it. But he didn’t come here for that.
“Simone,” he whispered.
Her silver eyes slit open, the haze of sleep still heavily clouding her
awareness until she blinked it away and mumbled in a cracked and raspy voice,
“Anders? What… what are you doing here?”
He gently squeezed her hand, smiling in adoration of her sweet confusion, and
softly said, “Come. Sleep in bed with me.”
***** Chapter 36 *****
The aging cop stood in the center of Anders’ suite, his sagging bloodhound eyes
glistening in wet fatigue from under the folds of skin that hung over them as
he delivered a rehearsed lecture on parameters and protection Simone struggled
not to sneer through. Nothing he said mattered. He wasn’t there to protect
them, no matter how many times that word hit and sizzled away in the heat of
her hatred. Anders sat on the edge of the bed, waiting with considerably more
patience for this man to finish lecturing them on why it was important for them
to remain in their assigned rooms while also contradicting himself in saying
they were free to move about this secured floor. She watched her uncle, her
eyes automatically scanning for signs of injury or distress as he nodded along
with the cop, and she wondered if she would ever look at him normally again or
if she would always be wary of his wellbeing first. It reminded her of the way
her mother started looking at her after she picked her up from that first
psychiatric appointment with a printout detailing the antipsychotic medication
she was to begin. She didn’t want to make anyone feel the way that look made
her feel, but the discomfort displayed in his rigid posture and the nervousness
in the way his thumb rubbed rhythmically over his tightly folded hands agitated
that responsibility to his wellbeing. At the moment, this stranger was
impacting his wellbeing and she responded to it with mounting hostility.
“… safety is our primary objective. In the midst of a chaotic situation, we
can’t be-”
“You can cut the crap, Officer Friendly,” Simone interrupted his third
recitation of that point. He stopped with a sputter and, sensing his immediate
offense, she responded to it like a shark smelling blood in the water. That it
might be her blood in the immediate future did not matter to her. The taste of
her own venom spilling into her words was hot and sweet on her tongue. “You
have no legal or constitutional obligation to protect us from the sick fucks
you’re attracting with all the cop cars parked at this hotel. We’d be better
off not being used as bait in this trap, so you’re fucking welcome we aren’t
lawyering the fuck out of this fucked up game your bosses are playing with our
lives.”
Grady’s complexion reddened with an anger she had no patience for as he
stammered, “Now, see here, young lady, I will not be talked to-”
“If you want it so bad, I’ll fucking give you a reason to force my compliance!”
she snapped abruptly, her teeth baring in that snarl finally unleashed in her
hunger for conflict.
“Did you just threaten an officer of the law, little lady?” Grady seethed as
his posture straightened into the practiced authority of a seasoned beat cop.
She grinned at the way the officer’s eyes bulged out from under his sagged lids
before she was suddenly pushed back by a hand grabbing her shoulder.
A shocked and panicked Anders shot out between them, one hand placatingly held
up to Grady as he stammered, “Sorry! Sorry! Simone, she-she not okay, yeah? She
is not understand, she is a, ah, sick, yes? Yes.”
“You mind her, then!” Grady bellowed, poking a gnarled finger at Anders. The
mad urge to lunge for his neck passed through Simone like a rogue wave, rocking
her already cracked composure, but her uncle kept her shoved firmly down onto
the mattress. “That mouth on her is gonna get her brains blown out if she goes
off on the wrong guy, hear? Mind her!”
“Yes, sir!” Anders responded quickly.
Simone slowly dragged her tongue over her bared teeth as the officer fixed her
with a pointed look, making him scoff out a frustrated huff and stomp away.
Once the door shut, Anders slid onto the bed and gathered her up in a firm hug
from behind, the arm on his uninjured side squeezing her back into him
uncomfortably tight. She stiffened at the pressure. Her body ached from the
violence of men and pumped fear into this contact, but this was Anders. He
wouldn’t hurt her unless he had to. As his arm pressed between her breasts and
his fingers dug like claws into her shoulder, she had to remember that it was
her sweet uncle behind her.
“Hvorfor fornærmet du ham?” he whispered harshly, his breath shaking out of him
and brushing along her neck and reopened bite wound. She squeezed her eyes shut
against the urge to shiver as each word vibrated so close to those vulnerable
spaces, the hard consonants bringing a chilling reminder of teeth. Fear and a
thrilling exhilaration quickened her breath and stirred a strange excitement in
her as he spoke. “What… Why you are… angry? The politibetjent help you. Do not
speak bad to him.”
“Are you… mad at me for that?” she asked, genuine surprise rising over that
insistent tingle of fear. She tried to turn her head to look at him, unable to
comprehend how he could be upset with her, but he grabbed her chin and kept her
face forward as he pressed himself closer.
He was nearly on top of her, his much larger frame molded to every inch of her
he could touch, and her heart began to pound quick and loud in that confusing
fear response as he whispered, “Yes. Do not speak so bad to men. You are…
liten…small and delikat. It is not good. Men hurt you.”
She couldn’t tell if he was being protective or punitive but either way, he was
mistaken. “He’s not our bodyguard, Anders, he’s our warden. We’re not being
kept here for our safety.”
“No, no, listen, Simone! Do not! Do not speak to men!” he scolded, his voice
lowering harshly. Her breath hitched to a stop in response to this obvious
anger in his tone, his embrace now feeling much more like a restraining hold
and she tried to wriggle out of it. “You need be careful! Men hurt you!”
“You’re hurting me!” she grumbled, trying in vain to move away from him. His
grasp didn’t allow her an inch of success in this attempt, feeding that
reflexive fear to border on panic. “Let me go!”
“Do you understand?” he demanded.
“I- No! No, I don’t understand! I won’t grovel to these assholes!”
He rolled them so he laid on top of her and she groaned in protest of his
weight pressing her front into the bed. This was undeniably a restraint,
disabling her from being able to move much at all or even breathe as deeply as
her lungs burned to pant in the rising panic of this position. She stopped her
voice from whimpering in fear as he growled out, “Do not speak to men! You need
understand! It is not safe!”
Her thoughts were a blur of confusion, wondering why he was acting so strangely
while her fear warred with her anger. She was intellectually aware that this
was coming from a place of concern from him, but that knowledge did little to
curtail the gut reactions to this method of displaying that worry. Her
struggles redoubled and she managed to get one arm out from under them, blindly
grasping above her for purchase to haul herself out.
“Fortell meg! Do you understand?!” he snapped, his deepened voice and
suffocating hold pulling out memories of a cloth gag muffling her screams.
Are you sorry yet?
She tried to tell him that she understood, that she would be good and stay safe
like he asked her to, but her voice wouldn’t cooperate. Panic seared through
her, making her yank down the bedding with her free arm in a futile but
uncontrollable effort to escape as she tried to writhe beneath him. Choked
little noises worked past that thick block in her throat, but no words would
form from her arrested vocal chords. This was too similar to how her father had
crushed her into the mattress, pressing her chest down until she couldn’t draw
in breath unless he allowed it. Flashbacks to so many horrible punishments
threatened the edges of her mind, each fighting to overpower her consciousness
and pull her back to those moments. She couldn’t lose any more control than
she’d already lost, not while he was pressing down above her, not while he was
so incensed, but a thick veil fell over her mind.
She had to survive. He was wounded, she could use that to her advantage and
attack those weak points to gain escape, but in this position and with him
blocking the point of exit, the risk was too great for that approach. She
needed to deescalate the violence, direct the trajectory toward something less
likely to result in her injury or death. Unable to speak, unable to move away,
unable to think, she gave into that instinctive drive to submit and to please.
Her rigid muscles relaxed, surrendering to him, and her panting slowed to
trembling breaths. Her freed hand slowly slid down to caress the fingers that
still grasped her chin and she could feel him drawing back cautiously.
“Simone?” he whispered, his anger now gone from his voice, but she couldn’t
trust that he wouldn’t still lash out. He lifted himself off her, resting his
weight on his good leg and arm as he loomed above her prone body. “Kjære? You
are okay?”
The question drifted through her, heard but not as words. The sound of his
voice only reinforced that drive to please, the success in mollifying his anger
feeding her hunch to use touch to display her submission. Not wanting to
accidentally convey a challenge, she remained lying on her front as she trailed
her trembling fingers up his arm and hoped this would calm him further. When he
grabbed her hand, her heart jumped in a stab of panic, but his thumb traced the
inside of her palm sweetly and his body lowered to cover her in an affectionate
contact that didn’t crush or suffocate.
“I’m sorry, kjære,” he said, nuzzling into her hair. “Jeg har ikke tenkt å
skremme deg.”
Her mind was still too muddled with fear, that trancelike state of submission
drowning all thought under the overwhelming need to survive this aggressive
male. It would be so easy for him to kill her. Anything less than that she
could distract him with was far preferable. The way he aligned their bodies so
his pelvis pressed into the soft flesh of her backside hinted at what she could
offer as an appeasement. With a shaking sigh, she took the risk and tested this
hunch with a slight roll of her hips, resisting the urge to freeze up when his
hand tightened around hers and his body tensed.
“Fuck…” he whispered, a throb from his groin encouraging her to move against
the growing bulge. His hand moved to trace her hip in a languid caress that
confirmed his desire to her. “Vi trenger ikke å gjøre det, kjære…”
Heat spilled over her fear, his scent penetrating that thick fog of this
dissociative state with a tug of familiarity. Thought trickled into her mind,
telling her that she knew this man, but she shoved it back down. It was easier
not to think while she did this. Thought only brought pain and unnecessary
complication to this necessary act. Closing her eyes, she fell into that pool
of heat that made this so simple and easy. Sex was useful to this man, and if
she could stay useful, then she could stay alive. There was no point in feeling
sad about it. She focused on delighting in her survival as he helped her slide
her pants down. His mouth was hot and wet against her neck, dragging out sighs
and moans as pleasure radiated so close to the stinging bite, and that heat of
arousal tingled through her body to drown out any stray thought to the
unwilling nature of this act. His touch was pleasing, his scent was enticing,
and his lust was intoxicating. She could accept her role under his domination
with little difficulty. She had no choice. There was no point in crying, but
the tears came anyway.
 
 
He really didn’t mean for any of this. He just needed her to understand that
she shouldn’t provoke people like that. She was so tiny and fragile, it was
madness for her to be so hostile to anyone. But she was mad. It was hard to
remember her insanity when she seemed so normal most of the time, making the
reminders of her mental status harsh to witness. Officer Grady was right;
Anders had to mind her or she would really get herself into a situation she
couldn’t walk away from. Holding her down beneath him, he struggled with how he
was supposed to do that when he couldn’t even convince her that what she had
done was wrong. As much as it pained him to do so, he had to make her fear.
When she had stopped speaking and just trembled beneath him, however, he
worried that he had gone too far. In truth, he knew he had no idea what he was
doing. He’d wanted to fill that role Leif had left, to take care of her and be
whatever she needed, but at the first sign of adversity from her, he fucked up.
When she touched his hand with that gentle caress, the relief that washed over
him was powerful, but when she pressed her ass against his crotch and shivered,
he was once again plunged into that uncertainty of how to handle her. Her
behavior was so erratic, he wasn’t sure what the proper response was to any of
it. But she was soft and warm against him, her motions so gentle but so intent,
it made trying to think nearly impossible.
“We don’t have to do it, dear…” he whispered even as he ran his hand over the
sensual curve of her hip.
Looking down at her beneath him, seeing her back arch to slide her ass against
his rapidly growing erection, his chest tightened in profound affection for
her. The searing lust she invoked was something uncontrollable and strange to
him even still. For all the mental resistance he tried to guard himself with in
knowing that this wasn’t the time or place to engage in sexual activity with
her, especially right after such a traumatic day, feeling her heat and inhaling
her scent was enough to make him question that very set logic. He shouldn’t
allow this to happen. He had to take care of her, had to provide her the
stability and safety she needed, but she was sliding her pants down and he
couldn’t stop his hand from tugging that offending barrier away. He’d brought
her into his room to provide her comfort, but he’d ended up doing quite the
opposite. Maybe she needed sex to comfort her.
The moans she made when he sucked at the side of her neck made his cock throb
and weep with precum, those raw and beautiful sounds wiping those trifling
thoughts from his mind. Maybe they both needed this. He yanked down his pants
far enough to free his cock and pressed it to her slippery entrance, the
pliancy of her soft flesh stretching around his tip as he teased it inside her
making him gasp. She felt too good. Each time, she surprised him with how good
she felt around him, her impossible softness threatening to make him come too
soon.
“God damn,” he groaned, sinking his length into her slick heat as she tensed
and mewled in panting breaths beneath him.
She was almost uncomfortably tight around him this time; he regretted not
engaging her in more foreplay, but there was an urgency in her as well. Almost
a franticness, as though her life depended on getting his dick inside her.
While he couldn’t deny that played well to his ego, he had to remember that she
was a small and delicate thing. He leaned his weight more heavily on his good
knee and arm, concentrating on holding his fervor back as he penetrated her
more slowly. They had plenty of time to go slow. Her hitched and shaking
panting was interspersed with high little girlish whimpers that made him want
to drive into her harshly just to hear her cry out loudly for him, but he
resisted that idea, keeping firmly in mind she was still injured from before.
He pushed down the memory of before quickly. That would never happen again. He
leaned down, dropping to his elbow to lay over her more closely, and kissed her
neck. She turned her head to expose more of that sensitive skin to him and he
greedily lapped at the salt of her sweat, but he wanted her mouth.
“Look at me,” he whispered, kissing up the side of her jaw. “Look to me, dear.”
When she kept her face hidden from him, he nuzzled her until he felt the damp
of tears on her cheek. Alarm had his hand grasping her shoulder and turning her
upper body, his terrible suspicion confirmed in the fear he found so clearly
etched in her features. He froze, bewildered at what exactly was happening and
worried at her sudden change in mood.
“You are okay?” he asked. She shut her eyes and bit her lip as she slid him in
to the hilt in one harsh thrust, the sudden motion making him sputter out a
curse and grip her tightly. “Ah! Fuck, wait! Stop, dear!”
She didn’t listen, rocking her hips back against him to fuck him into her, and
he tried to still her but found that he couldn’t do that and hold himself up at
the same time. Her fists gripped the bedding tight and her breaths hitched into
a high feminine grunt with the effort of fucking herself on him as he struggled
between stopping her or reciprocating. The wetness that dripped down his sac
from her arousal and the molten pleasure of her sex convinced him to pursue the
latter. He pressed his lower body onto hers heavily, slowing her frantic pace
and rocking into her at a more sustainable rhythm, one that wouldn’t have him
coming in a mere matter of seconds.
“Easy, dear, easy,” he soothed, nuzzling her turned cheek. She moaned as he
thrust into her in controlled rolling motions and he squeezed a hand beneath
her. “You are good, yes? Not hurt?”
She answered him with a surprised cry when he began to rub her clitoris, the
high pitch extending into her panting and unintelligible moans. Her back arched
to lift her hips higher to him, driving him in deeper and trying to increase
their pace. He almost chuckled at her impatience, indulging her by giving her a
few hard thrusts that made her yelp and squirm, but he could hear the sharp
edge of pain in her cries even as she seemed to want it. Her tolerance for
pain, or rather, her active pursuit of it befuddled him. Of course, he’d known
that there were people who enjoyed pain in a sexual context, but his sweet
little Simone seemed too innocent and victimized for that to be true of her.
The thought of her in pain was upsetting, but the thought of her enjoying pain
was just… confusing. Curiously, he snapped his pelvis sharply and produced a
cringe and a cry from the girl, though not of displeasure. Her muscles tensed
around him at the pain he’d inflicted, generating an instant regret from this
feedback as well as a disturbing thrill in him. It was just fascination. A very
morbid fascination that he shouldn’t satisfy, but he needed to know more.
“Dear…” he started, but he couldn’t think of how to phrase something so
strange, let alone in English.
He peeled the raggedy knit sweater off her instead, but came to regret that
when he saw the long stripes of bruises from the belting she’d endured as well
as the bite wound that had reopened. Still fucking her at his languid pace, he
traced the worst of those bruises. The reds and purples seemed almost pretty on
her darker complexion, not startlingly contrast like the ones on his pale skin.
At that horrid thought, he slid out of her, turned her onto her back and
quickly thrust back into her again. She gasped sharply at the sudden reentry
and he pulled her into a frantic kiss, finally feeling that plush mouth against
his as he sought to erase that strange thought from his mind. He loved her; he
could never want to see her battered or bruised, he could never purposefully
hurt her. There was nothing pretty about her pain. There was nothing about her
distress, her submissiveness, or her vulnerability that excited him.
An anxious energy drove him to thrust harder and faster into her, his insistent
kiss muffling her cries. He groaned, slowing each time he felt on the verge of
climax, his thumb rubbing at her clitoris and making her shiver and whimper as
he pulled his hand away with each denial along with him. The bedding beneath
them was drenched in their sweat and a more viscous circle of her fluid. She
was so responsive to his touch, so eager to take his cock, and so frantic for
him to let her orgasm, part of him wanted to do this all night. She was nearly
sobbing with need, her narrow ribcage shuddering with each breath, and he
pulled back to look at her in her desperation. He nearly spilled into her at
how savagely erotic she looked with the raw lust in her flushed face and her
bared skin glistening in sweat.
“Tell me…” he whispered breathlessly. “Tell me who you love.”
At first, she could only whimper unintelligibly, so he slowed his motions to
motivate her to use words. She groaned and tried to fuck herself on him faster,
but he only leaned heavily into her until she couldn’t move. Her nails dug into
his shoulders and he smirked at her fervor. She was so endearingly impatient.
At last, she took a deep shuddering breath and answered, “Y-you, Papa. I love
you.”
Anders felt a frisson of pleasure run up his spine, the buzzing pulse of it
swirling in his mind as he pressed his open mouth to her neck and sucked while
he rubbed her clit between their slick bodies and fucked her harder. Her voice
sung out a throaty moan as her cunt spasmed around his cock when he finally let
her climax, the deep pelvic muscles flexing to draw him in deeper. He knew what
her body wanted.
“Ready, dear?” he whispered raggedly, his cock tensing in the need to release.
“Yes, Papa,” Simone breathed.
He hummed in approval, then groaned low in the pleasure of pumping her full of
his semen. Her sharp little gasps at each throb and pulse of his cock drew out
his satisfaction, the thick spill of his seed filling her deep in her cunt
where it belonged. When he lifted his mouth from the crook of her neck, he
licked his lips and tasted blood.
 
 
A loud knocking at the door awoke them, but it was the slide of a keycard
entering the slot that had Simone leap out of bed with the grace of a newborn
fawn and knock hard into a wall before making it into the bathroom.
“Simone Valstad, I’m here to escort you to your interview with Special Agent
Maier,” an unfamiliar male voice spoke from the doorway.
“Nope!” she said from behind the bathroom door. “Come back later!”
“Some minutes, please, officer,” she heard Anders acquiesce, his accent somehow
even thicker as sleep fogged his voice.
“Later!” she repeated insistently.
“I’ll come back in thirty minutes,” the officer announced, the heavy door
clicking shut afterward.
“Fuck,” she grumbled. Her fingers carded through her hair and her back hit the
wall before sliding down to the floor. She couldn’t do this again. She felt
nauseous and weak, the long strange night not affording her much sleep until
the early hours of the morning with how her nightmares had plagued her. “Fuck,
fuck, fuck…”
“Kjære, you need help?” Anders asked through the door.
Her immediate reaction was to decline, but her shaking hands and rubbery limbs
told her that she did, in fact, need help. “Yes, please.”
A sleepy but surprisingly alert Anders stepped into the spacious bathroom, his
sympathetic smile at seeing her huddled on the floor making her chest ache in
some unknown longing. He ruffled her hair affectionately and turned on the
shower taps. She watched him move about, his limp noticeable but no longer so
impeding and his posture back to that easy confidence it was in those first
days. It was startling. He was, so far as she could tell, completely refreshed.
When he held out his hand to her to help her up, she could only stare at him in
wonder at what magic or madness could have possibly caused such a radical
change in him overnight.
“Come, min kjære,” he grinned, grabbing her wrist and hauling her up with his
good arm.
He began undressing, a process she did not require as her clothes had been lost
at some point in the nightmare-filled night. Or they had had sex. She wasn’t
sure exactly how much of their intimacy was real and how much of it had been
twisted by her night terrors. Glancing in the mirror and seeing the dark
splotches of hickey marks along the sides of her neck, she supposed much of it
had indeed occurred. A cold sweat shivered across her skin at the faint
details.
“Did I… Did I do or say anything, um, weird last night?” she asked.
He turned that bright-eyed smile to her with a curious tilt of his head,
grinning even as he said, “You speak bad to Officer Grady.”
“No, no, after that,” she specified.
He glanced away briefly, a shadow of something troubling ghosting over his
expression before a fond smile brightened his cheer once more and he answered
with a shrug. He pulled her into the large shower stall, the spotless clean
glass walls and stone tiling bringing her to acknowledge that they had locked
her and Anders in a rather upscale hotel, most likely an off-season ski resort.
From a modern high-rise New York apartment, to a stately country manor, to a
luxury resort hotel, her cages had always at least been gilded. Knowing this
wasn’t coming out of either the FBI’s or the local PD’s pocketbooks and that
her father’s accounts were almost definitely in escrow, she wondered who
exactly was funding their stay. She wondered if it was that enigmatic “we”
Maier had referred to, but nothing about his approach had hinted at courting
her cooperation through friendly gestures. His handling of her had already
assumed her cooperation. Her lip curled away from her teeth in a slow snarl as
impotent frustration boiled in her with the knowledge that he was right in that
assumption. She barely knew what was happening, but she had no choice but to
play along. There was no one she could turn to for help in whatever this was
and there was no escape.
She was forced out of her dour thoughts by Anders poking her bared teeth with
the minty bristles of a toothbrush and he chuckled when she flinched away from
it. His tone was light and teasing as he said, “You are not the morning person,
yes?”
She pushed aside her thoughts and feelings of her unfortunate near future and
replied in mock irritability as she accepted the toothbrush, “I’m not an
anytime person.”
As she brushed her teeth, he lathered her with the citrusy hotel soap. He
hummed as his rough hands gently worked the suds over the abused skin of her
back and avoided the open wound of her bite. There was something so infectious
about his good humor, a quality she’d nearly forgotten had initially attracted
her to him. He really seemed back to his old self, perhaps better. Whatever had
taken hold of him, she wished she could stay and linger in this welcome
departure from the misery that had consumed their lives. It was surprisingly
easy to force herself to forget the outside world when she was with him. He
laughed at her when she spat a mouthful of toothpaste froth at the pristine
glass wall and smeared it into the shape of a heart. His arms wrapped around
her middle, pulling her towards him under the warm stream of water to rinse off
the suds, and she found it so natural to stand on her tiptoes and kiss him.
She’d meant it to be only a quick gesture, but he tugged her back when she
began to pull away and tilted his head to deepen their kiss. This was the easy
and free affection she’d so often longed for in a lover, all comfort and
pleasantness to bolster her heart with against the harshness of the world. When
she slowly pulled away this time, the affection that glittered in his eyes when
he looked at her made it tempting to fantasize about having this to keep.
“Jeg elker deg, min kjære,” he smiled.
“I love you too, Anders,” she smiled back.
“Please,” he said, tugging her closer. She startled in surprise at his erection
pressing against her belly, her face heating in a blush that seemed silly now
after all her interaction with it. But when he leaned down and whispered in her
ear, the blood heating her cheeks fell in a chill as she paled. “Call me
‘Papa’.”
 
***** Chapter 37 *****
Simone stared out the window to the blur of trees they passed in the boxy
unmarked Ford SUV, her mind distracted almost entirely from the discomfort of
being driven by a stranger with a gun strapped to his hip and from the dread of
the coming interview. In her rush to get a moment alone to process all that
Anders’ ominous request had implied, she’d nearly run into Henrik as she bolted
from the suite to dress in her room. While she was glad to know he was alive
and uninjured, she did a poor job conveying that sentiment at seeing his
bewildered features harden into an angry frown. Of course, it had to be Henrik
to catch her slinking out of there like a guilty mistress. Leaving his room so
early in the morning in only a towel, her hair still dripping from the shower,
it would have been obvious to anyone what had happened in there. She didn’t
have the mental fortitude to even consider handling that with any level of
grace or humility just then with Anders’ words still wreaking havoc on her
mind, opting to avert her gaze and refrain from literally running away. Even in
the relative calm of the car, her mind still reeled too chaotically for her to
consider that situation with anything more than a cringe before dismissing it
to be dealt with later. The backlog of troubles she’d been collecting seemed
endless, but one matter rose above the others in its urgency.
“You want me to run the heat higher, miss?” the officer asked.
“No,” she answered mechanically, not considering the cold that nipped through
the baggy hooded sweatshirt and drawstring track pants she’d yanked blindly out
of the box of donated clothing.
“You been shiverin’ since we stepped outside,” he said, his tone not friendly
so much as it was simply overly familiar. She could recognize a man who was
accustomed to getting his way using such obnoxious methods by the sound of his
cadence. “I can tell you aren’t from around here because you went out on a
Spring morning with your hair still wet. Gonna catch your death of cold that
way. So, where you from?”
Simone turned her glare to this cop, an acidic quip on the tip of her tongue
that evaporated as the memory of Anders shoving her into the mattress and
commanding her not to talk to men flashed in her mind.
“Not here,” she answered tersely, turning her wilted gaze back to the blur of
green.
“Usually they tell me a little about the folks I cart around on special cases,”
he continued, much to her annoyance. She just needed a moment to think, but
that was obviously not going to happen so long as this man kept trying to bully
her into a conversation she was being blatant about not wanting. “Not you,
though. Top secret. Classified. They just gave me the who and where and cussed
me out when I wanted the what and why. You’re not a sus or a con, though. Your
juvie record is sealed, but you do have one. So, what is it about you that’s
got everyone’s panties in a wad?”
Simone looked at this cop, letting her observations spill freely through her
irritation. “You’re not from around here either. What accent is that? Chicago?
You’re too old to be an academy-fresh recruit sent down to the slim pickings of
a bottom litter Podunk back wood force. What was it that got you kicked out of
the good old boys of Chi-town? Was it this lack of regard for rules and
conduct, or did a hooker dime you out? Too bad they didn’t like you enough to
let you skate on that. Your coworkers, I mean, not the hooker. You couldn’t pay
someone enough to find your cracker ass likeable.”
The look on his face was enough confirmation for her to turn back to the window
and ignore his loud, barking offense with the same dismissiveness she would
employ to ignore a yapping dog. The anger of common men was so trifling to
encounter and simple to invoke; even the presence of his gun didn’t strike her
nearly half as thrilling as the mere scent of Leif. A scent so similar to his
brothers’. She rubbed her runny nose and looked down at her loose sweatshirt.
The curves of her body were completely concealed by the soft miasma of fabric
and the excess legroom of the large SUV was wasted on her small stature,
reminding her of a childhood that really wasn’t too long ago. She pressed her
hands to her abdomen, molding the baggy top to her body to find that her adult
form hadn’t regressed underneath. She pulled the material to billow away from
her in an irritated tug. It wasn’t as though an absence of womanly features had
stopped her father from partaking, anyway. Maier’s knowledge sat heavily on her
mind then. Fourteen. She’d still had braces. She’d still worn those modest
cotton panties her mother would buy for her by the five-pack at department
stores, the ones with butterflies and flowers on them. Her father had looked at
that scrawny little punk kid and decided to “test sexual interaction” on her.
Simone shivered, cold nausea churning her gut, unsure if she should feel sad or
angry or relieved he’d done it while she was drugged. She wished she could hate
him. She wished she’d wanted him to be dead. It wouldn’t be better, but it
would be simpler if she didn’t still feel a ravenous ache for him. An ache
Anders had helped soothe as he, unwittingly or not, had enforced his dominance
over her. She could only hope it was unwittingly.
“Pull over,” she blurted out abruptly, interrupting whatever vehemence spewed
from the still fuming cop before she clapped a hand over her watering mouth.
“Oh, don’t you fucking dare hurl in this car, bitch!” he yelled.
She considered doing it to annoy him further, but they still had forty minutes
to drive to the police station and she didn’t want to spend that time having to
hear him complain. The lurch of the vehicle as he slowed and swerved suddenly
to the shoulder brought the unpleasant warmth of fluid further up her
esophagus, making the muscles in her throat contract involuntarily. This
illness she had acquired was getting worse in waves, making eating impossible
and keeping her weak to the point that the energy she expelled in retching
brought darkness in the corners of her vision. She barely made it three
stumbling steps out into the side of the road before coughing up the water
she’d had as breakfast. The thought of having to go back to the hospital and
let strangers touch and see her body brought an anxiety that didn’t help her
nausea. When her heaving had satisfied itself to exhaustion, she noticed the
sheriff’s patrol car parked behind the SUV and the brown-shirted deputy that
stood watching her.
“You alright there, Miss Valstad?” he asked.
Simone spat into the puddle of bile-soured water before straightening and
grousing out a hoarse, “Peachy. Do you want something from me, or are you just
enjoying the show?”
To his credit, the deputy had the humor she was finding to be rare in these
lawmen to grin at her petulant response. “Change of plans. We’re taking you
home.”
 
 
Henrik could count on one hand the number of times he’d been this livid, each
carrying with it an action of violence that had always left him sick with
regret later. Watching his niece scurry toward the room she was supposed to
have been, her rattled expression before realizing his presence telling him far
more about what had happened in there than even her state of undress, he had to
remember that he detested violence. Rage billowed like smoke in his lungs and
he breathed it out slowly through his flared nostrils. A terrible energy
thrummed through his muscles, making them flex and tense in the urge to break
down the door and strangle Anders. He was not a violent man. He wouldn’t let
himself be, no matter how tempting this rare impulse was. He breathed slowly
and shut out those savage thoughts until his shaking fists relaxed and he could
imagine saying what needed to be said without the accompaniment of pummeling.
He banged on the door louder than he’d meant.
Anders stood in a terrycloth bathrobe, as wet as Simone had been and smelling
of the same citrusy soap, bringing Henrik’s blood back to a boil as his
youngest brother greeted him with a cheery, “Good morning!”
Henrik shoved past him into the room, unable to look at him as he nearly
growled, “We need to talk.”
“Sure, I think I have some time in my busy schedule,” Anders joked, letting the
door shut as he followed.
Henrik resisted rounding on him with a haymaker for being so flippant, but he
let the rage slide off him with a deep breath before he turned to look at him.
Anders wasn’t put off by the anger Henrik didn’t try to hide, sitting casually
on the edge of the bed and taping a clean pad of waterproof gauze over the
sutures on his chest. Henrik was momentarily shocked out of his thoughts at the
sight of the wound, the brief account of events from the policemen after his
interview having provided only the roughest idea of what Leif had tried to do
to him, but the carefully maintained detachment of his brother brought him back
to his rage.
“Just what the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
Anders didn’t look up from his task, gently smoothing the corner of the gauze
down before applying the tape as he said, “Aftercare.”
Henrik grit his teeth in frustration. “With Simone, stupid.”
This time, he looked straight at him, his nonchalance giving way to solemnity
as he repeated, “Aftercare.”
“Is that what you’re calling it?” Henrik jeered. “I have to admit, it sounds a
lot better than ‘sticking my dick in my blood-related niece-”
“Henrik…”
“-who is barely out of her teens-”
“Henrik.”
“- and too fucked up in the head-”
“Henrik!”
“- to FUCKING KNOW ANY BETTER’!” Henrik finished in a shout above his brother’s
interruption. Both men glared at each other, but Anders’ calm was only irking
him more. It was all he could do to keep his fists curled at his side and his
feet rooted to the floor. “Are you even going to try to deny any of that, or
does the truth just not concern you?”
“Did you want to talk, or did you just want to yell?” Anders asked, that
annoying calm driving Henrik to look away in disgust.
“What I want is to knock your head off,” he answered in a snarl. “But I’m
settling for talking.”
“Then let me say something: I owe you an apology. You were right. About
everything. I did some awful, unforgivable things… but I think I know how I can
start making up for them.”
Henrik looked at him, the urge to violence finally creeping back at the sign of
guilt in the younger man. The anger that had taken hold of him was still there,
but quieted enough for him to find the fear of losing another brother. The
madness Leif had been rife with seemed to spread to everyone around him like a
disease. Simone had long since succumbed to it, Vidar seemed as though his mind
might have been permanently tainted, and Anders had lost all perspective on the
wickedness he had been doing. He leaned against the wall, wringing his hands
anxiously in hope that this humble tone his youngest brother had adopted led to
sanity.
Anders kept his somber stare on the wound in his thigh as he spoke. “I know
she’s everything you’ve said she is. She’s a crazy, mixed-up kid but she’s more
than that. She jumped on a man with a gun in his hand and killed him to protect
us. To protect you. She saved your life; would you still call that insanity?”
“I would call that reckless,” Henrik answered guardedly. “And, yes, insane.”
Anders fixed a hardened stare at him. “Bravery. Selflessness. Loyalty. That’s
what I call it. She stayed with us, not because she wanted to run away, but
because she wanted to keep us safe. Vidar was right; she would have gone back
to Leif the second we lifted off US soil because she thought he was all she
had. Her loyalty to family is just so… I can’t leave her. She belongs to me and
I’m going to take care of her.”
Henrik groaned, frustration pounding between his eyes and he pinched the bridge
of his nose to ward off a headache. “Would you stop fucking saying that? It is
seriously, truly creepy!”
“That’s not what I mean,” Anders said. “I was… confused. Leif got in my head
and really messed me up, but I’m thinking clearly now. I feel like a monster,
but… We’re family and it’s time we started acting that way. I’m going to take
her in and look after her as my daughter.”
Henrik’s anger shifted in a discomfort he couldn’t name, a slick chill sliding
in his gut at his brother’s bizarre announcement. “You fucked her! You fucked
her just the other day and you probably fucked her last night! Jesus Christ,
you were just taking a shower with her!”
“She’s still very weak, so I had to help her in the shower. Besides,” Anders
countered, a faraway look in his eye as though recalling a distant memory,
“normal people don’t experience arousal toward their close relatives. We’re
just very close.”
Henrik wanted to believe him. He wanted to let him pull the wool over his eyes
and become blind to the signs that pointed in the opposite direction of this
truth he was trying to sell him.
“Did you fuck her?” he demanded. “Just… look me in the eye and tell me the
truth. Did you fuck her last night?”
Anders obliged, lifting his sky-blue eyes to him in solemn regard as he said,
“I found her hiding under the bed in her room in the dark. I took her back
here, we got in bed together… and I held her until we fell asleep. I didn’t do
any of that with the intention of fucking her. It just felt so natural to take
care of her. I’m sorry I broke the promise I made to you, Henrik, but I can’t
ignore her when she’s in need.”
The chances of this being true were nearly impossible, but Henrik had seen how
quickly a person could change and how little he could know someone he thought
he’d known even all his life. Maybe it was possible that a man could truly
repent. Possible, but unlikely. He needed more to quell the churning sickness
of doubt in him.
“So that’s it? You just suddenly saw the error of your ways and decided that
you, a childless 29-year-old bachelor, are the most qualified person to take in
a mentally ill girl? You’re a good guy, probably the nicest guy I know, but you
can’t do that,” Henrik said, trying not to let his voice rise or his teeth
grind. He pressed the heel of his palm to his forehead, shutting his eyes and
clenching his jaw against the urge to scream before he was able to continue,
“Simone isn’t one of your deadbeat floozie girlfriends who needs you to ‘save’
her from herself; she’s legitimately fucked up. And you helped fuck her up. You
don’t get to take her home and play house with her after that. It’s not your
role, anyway. She should be with her mother, if anyone.”
“The woman who sold her to the devil himself?” Anders scoffed, his lip curling
back in a mirthless grin as he shook his head. “No. No, I don’t think so.
Simone needs someone who can handle her, not someone who sees her as a burden.”
“Are you even listening to me?”
“I am. What I’m hearing is that you would rather leave her to the wolves than
let me have her. But it’s not up to you. I’m not asking your permission,
Henrik, I’m telling you what’s already happened.”
Henrik’s head shot up from the cradle of his hands, a sharp alarm running
through his brain. “What the hell happened to you? That sounds like something
Leif-”
“Don’t!” Anders snapped in a sudden shout that shocked Henrik into pause.
“Just... don’t. Okay? He’s dead. Let’s leave him in the past and focus on the
future. We’re going to go home and things are going to go back to normal. The
only thing that’s going to change is that I’ll have Simone. Alright?”
Henrik stared at him, seeing the darkness rimming his eyes and the sickly
pallor of his skin, and felt a heaviness stuff his aching head with a dire
hopelessness. “Alright. Alright, littlest brother. I hear you.”
His feet took him out of the room, down the hallway, and he stood in front of
the door to the suite he shared with Vidar as he tried and failed to compose
himself. He pressed his heavy forehead against the wood, shutting his eyes
against the tears he knew he couldn’t hold back, and focused on just holding
himself together for a moment. There was nothing he could do to stop the
madness from rotting away the sense in his brother. They may have escaped Leif,
but it seemed as though Anders would always hear his terrible whispers. Henrik
could only hope that their littlest brother would tell them to someone who
could help before he did something worse.
 
 
The house was buzzing with activity, the dozens of crime scene investigators
and agents wearing navy jackets with bright yellow lettering announcing their
status as FBI flitting about and concentrating on their specialized little
areas. Simone sat awkwardly on the sofa in the living room, watching a man take
gruelingly tedious interest in opening and leafing through every book in the
baroquely carved case along the wall while the forensic psychologist looked
over the test sheets she’d had her fill out. Simone’s hands were numb and
tingly, making the process of filling in the columns of true or false bubbles
almost as arduous as the alternatingly absurd and mundane questions. It had
taken her nearly two hours to complete the 567 questions and that was after
being grilled about her medical history, which when spoken aloud, had sounded
suspicious even to her own ears. She was already too exhausted to suspect the
meaning behind each question and gave into blunt honesty with an unfeeling
detachment. Sleep tugged at her eyelids each time she blinked despite the
anxiety that foamed in her brain. She must have nodded off at some point
because the room was empty when she opened her eyes.
Her ears perked at the soft sound of a voice echoing from down the hallway. Not
the murmuring and rambling of professional tones discussing evidence, but the
inviting gentleness of singing. Curiosity drove her to stand and walk toward
that voice, her hand dragging along the bone white wall of the hallway to
steady herself. Her breath was sucked out of her as her heart seemed to stop at
the sight of Leif standing in the kitchen, his broad back turned to her as he
worked at the counter and hummed out an unfamiliar tune.
“Papa?” she whispered, her voice squeaking past her breathlessness but still
too quiet to be heard.
He continued to hum, the knock of a knife on the wooden cutting board keeping
time with his tune as his arm moved with the motion of chopping. Simone’s
relief washed over her in a cleansing wave, pushing her forward into the
kitchen on shaking legs without her thinking to move. Her tears fell without
warning and they floated up from her easily, spilling hot and fast. She had not
senselessly murdered her own father. The breath that pushed out of her expelled
all the tension and toxic pain she’d carried since seeing him lying on the
floor so horribly silent and still. Her chest expanded and ached sweetly as she
drew in a deep and shuddering breath, filling herself with this feeling of
peace. There was still so much to worry about, but this moment was suspended in
the singular joy of freedom from that sin. Leif’s humming and chopping stopped
when she wrapped her arms around his middle, his warm and solid body so
comfortingly familiar that it made her throat ache in a constricting sob.
“I’m sorry, Papa, I’m so sorry…” she whimpered, pressing her wet cheek to his
back.
His hand, carrying the zesty and sweet scent of freshly cut citrus, gripped her
shoulder to keep her still as he turned. She looked up and, blinking away the
tears that blurred her vision, bit her lip against another shaking sob when she
saw his slight smile. He cupped her cheek and tilted her head back further, the
edge of the knife handle warm along her jaw and his fingers slightly wet and
sticky, and she let her eyes fall shut when he bent down. The light pressure of
his lips against hers made her breathe out a quivering sigh as a tingling
electricity buzzed in her from the contact. That feverish need for him was all
at once gorged and burgeoning insistently, squirming inside her mind in a rapid
cycle that felt almost alive, like a vicious ouroboros created by its own self-
destruction. Her mind flashed with images of the serpent’s gleaming scales
blurring in eternal motion, dizzying her as much as her father’s unique taste
seeping past her lips. He dragged the blade down her neck, the cold flat of
steel trailing wetness on her bare skin that stirred the ever-present fear of
him in her heart.
“You can’t resist your nature,” he said, his voice low in the quiet of the
kitchen and his lips brushing over hers with each word before kissing her more
deeply. The hand at her shoulder slid down her arm, gripping her wrist to bring
it up to the wooden handle of the knife pressed over her sternum. Her heart
thumped against her fingers as she curled them around the handle obediently.
His hand squeezed over hers to grasp the knife tighter as he pulled away, her
eyes opening to watch the glint of his sharp teeth as he softly repeated the
haunting words he’d said to her that horrible morning, “You were given a gift
and it compels you to use it. Embrace it or let it consume you.”
“What…” she started to ask, but the words evaporated from her mind in the shock
of what was behind him as he shifted away from her embrace.
On the cutting board, Mr. Marceau’s severed head laid on its side, the skin of
his jaw peeled back to reveal the musculature and map of veins along his
mandible in a clean anatomical display. Her hand twisted around the knife
handle, the wood crawling and flexing against her palm. Leif’s hand gently
gripped the back of her neck, making her recoil and shoot her terrified stare
up at him, but it was Bjørn who stood behind her. His watch ticked loudly in
her ears, vibrating her teeth.
Those mad silver eyes, the same shade as hers and Leif’s, burned into her as he
whispered in her father’s voice, “Once you’ve taken down your first quarry…”
A jerky, mechanical movement flicked in the corner of her vision and a
sickening dread turned her slowly back to the head on the counter. Bjørn bent
to place his face level next to hers, his long and jagged teeth peeking out in
a grin at her peripheral as she stared in frozen terror as that flayed jaw
quivered. Her eyes shut in a flinch when the head coughed out a spray of blood
that splattered wetly against her, making her stumble backward into Bjørn’s
boney body.
She gasped, sitting up in the living room sofa, a cold sweat covering her
shaking body as she looked about wildly. The investigator rifling through the
books was coughing noisily into his elbow, earning a disapproving look from
Agent Gladwell as he stood speaking to the forensic psychologist. Simone’s eyes
followed the investigator as he scurried out of the room, confusion and panic
pounding along with her rapid heartbeat in her head. It was just a dream. Her
father was still gone. She let her body fall back into the sofa, her head
leaning backward to stare at the ornate brass light fixture on the ceiling as
she tried to calm her breathing and the aching hollow in her heart. Sweat
dripped down her jaw, a wet reminder of blood, and she wiped it away with her
numb and tingling hand. The fever had worsened. Her breaths were hot as they
rattled out of her panting chest.
“Well, I have some bad news and some good news,” Gladwell announced, his voice
reverberating painfully in her skull. She rolled her head to look at him,
squinting to focus her blurring vision. He grinned down at her unkindly.
“Despite your rather… colorful array of deficiencies and deviations, you’re
officially sane.”
Simone lifted her head, the motion sliding a strange taste in her mouth as she
mulled his words over in her scattered mind. Her voice was raspy and weak as
she asked, “You’re telling me… that I’m not crazy?”
“Legally, you made the cut to sanity,” he specified. “You have a functioning
capacity for reasoning and judgement. That doesn’t mean you’re not without
mental illness. Personally, I think you’re about as crazy as a bag of cats, but
the shrink said you’re fit to function in society.”
“Huh…” she murmured. It felt strange to be called sane. She couldn’t trust the
diagnosis even in its limited scope, but it stirred an odd anger in her that
she had to push aside for now. “So, what’s the bad news?”
“The bad news is we don’t have a case against you,” Gladwell answered, shoving
his gloved hands in his pockets as he stepped toward the fireplace. “All the
bodies we’re finding out there on the property are over two decades old. The
fresh stiffs, Leif Valstad did alone. Your mother can testify that you never
accompanied your father on his sprees and the statements your uncles gave us
all checked out. Congratulations, Simone Valstad, you’re the third surviving
victim of the I-80 Killer, the Concrete Killer, the Washington Carver, and the
Great Lakes Gutter.”
She tapped her forehead, trying to feel for her temperature, but her fingers
were completely numb. His words swirled in her burning brain, sticking to stray
thoughts and wonders as she worked to make sense of them all. From the jumble
of her mind, several questions fought for priority, but the trained habit of
picking her questions sparingly quickly narrowed it down to the most
auspicious.
“Why was I brought here instead of being interviewed by Agent Maier?” she
asked.
Gladwell’s head turned from the view out the window, an almost jumpy edge to
the motion and a frown tugging at his mouth as he worked to formulate a careful
answer. That sign of caution told her more than his tepid, “Change of plans.”
“He doesn’t know I’m here, does he?” she mused aloud, a strangely vicious glee
bubbling up from beneath her dread and feverish haze. When Gladwell furrowed
his brow at her in an irritated suspicion, she spat out an abrupt laugh. He
didn’t trust his partner with her. She wondered if he knew and, looking at his
deepening frown as he turned back to the window in dismissive aggravation,
supposed he might know more than he believed.
“You’re here to provide context,” he said pithily, not looking at her. “There
are answers in you that might help us find him.”
The glee dissipated from her like smoke in the wind, leaving a chill that made
her shiver more violently and curl her arms protectively around her body. “I
already told you everything I could remember.”
He turned to her then, a merciless gravity in his tone as he said, “Maybe you
did, but I need you to remember everything. You’re going to describe to me
every single thing that happened to you in this house and show me where it
happened. That should jog your sloppy memory.”
***** Chapter 38 *****
The little bedroom in the back had an entirely different quality to it from the
rest of the house. In this country manor that had been reworked and refinished
according to the tastes of the architects who lived in it, everything had been
designed with open space and sumptuous aesthetic in mind. However, this room
could have been mistaken for a large closet, if not by size then by the lack of
attention it had gathered. The musty carpet bequeathed an everlasting
stuffiness within the four yellowed walls and only a simple wooden dresser
occupied the small space aside from the narrow bed. Simone picked up the
strange little plastic robot figure from the dresser, turning it in her hands
as she tried to envision what life for her father had been like, taken from his
mother and brothers in Norway and stuffed in this neglected little space until
he had grown enough to fit more appropriately in the imposingly elegant house.
The shy smile and uncomfortable gawkiness of the boy she recalled in the photo
album had seemed like an entirely different species than the honed predator he
would become beneath his mask of normalcy. She didn’t need to see the photo
album to recall the hints of his transformation over time in those pictures.
Whatever had happened to him, it had happened in this house.
“What happened here?”
Simone ignored Gladwell’s looming presence in the doorway, shutting out the
world to focus on the image of the boy from the photos and placing the toy in
his hands. His skin was tanner then. He’d spent his time outside when he could.
Einar was always fair-skinned even for a white man, but Bjørn’s gaunt face was
as weathered as a sailor’s. There they were, one boy displaced from his home
and one man displaced in his existence, finding common ground in the woods. She
felt the fondness Leif had radiated as he’d spoken of his reclusive uncle and
touched the reverence of the emotions inside that glowing sphere marked as
Bjørn within him. This forgotten space did not hold enough of her father for
her to find him here.
“Nothing important,” she answered Gladwell, rising from her kneeling position
on the old carpet.
She shut the door behind her as she stepped back into the cavernous hallway,
her numbed feet dragging toward the nearby archway of the dining room. Little
yellow folded signs with black numbers on them marked several places along the
floor where she remembered blood had spilled from her, Anders, and even Leif on
the night of that dreadful dinner. A deep, sinister anger had steeped into the
high walls of this majestic room, but not from that night. The heaviness in the
air had been pressing down for decades. She’d seen that gravity weigh on her
father whenever they’d sit and eat in there. Even in his most convincing
performances, his false cheer had a glaze of tension, like an old injury had
started aching again. This was the room where his father had most obviously
reigned and he was not always a kind man to those in his domain.
“Why are we in here?” Gladwell asked.
“Just a moment, please,” she whispered, walking toward the chair at the head of
the table and sinking into the ghost that occupied it.
She knew the unspoken signs of abuse like a distinct perfume that marked its
wearers and had scented that pain in Leif whenever he’d been forced to think on
his father. She’d never allowed herself to trespass into that so private piece
of him, having felt a disquieting awkwardness at stumbling upon that guarded
secret, but now she reached into those moments and rooted around in them. Her
recently acquired firsthand perspective on being physically abused by a parent
muddled her insight and she wondered in a horrified moment if Leif had perhaps
been hurt the same way he hurt her, but he did not harbor the signs for that
breed of pain. His violence had been inspired by the violence done to him, but
the sex was his own infected wickedness. The distraction of her fiercely
conflicting feelings on their incestuous lust for each other tugged at her
concentration, but this room was only a stage on which her father had tried to
rewrite his own painful memories in a resentful fantasy of control.
“Papa drugged my uncles the night before the funeral in here,” she offered to
Gladwell by means of appeasing him. “It was the wine. Take the glasses into the
lab and you might find the residue on them to prove it. The blood is from the
fight. Most of it is mine. This,” she pointed to the thin line of stitches at
her throat, “was an accident. Paring knife by Papa. I’d tried to get between
him and Anders.”
“Anything else happen in here?” he asked.
“No.”
“TEDESCO!” Gladwell hollered into the hallway, his roar quickly summoning a
portly older man in a hooded white coverall with safety goggles over his thick
eyeglasses. “Gather up all the glasses, cups, any drinking receptacle and tox
‘em.”
The white-sheathed man nodded blankly before disappearing back down the hall.
Simone pushed herself up on the arms of the chair, her head swimming even from
the deliberate slowness of the motion, but her search had only just begun. She
shuffled out into the hallway and watched as another figure in a protective
white onesie emerged from the closet that hid the broken-down door to the
darkroom. A deep shudder erupted from her core at the memory of that figure
sitting up under the sheet, rattling its breath from the hazy part of her mind
usually reserved for forgotten nightmares. Not yet. She couldn’t handle that
yet.
“Alright, let’s keep this haunted house tour moving,” Gladwell griped from
behind her.
 
 
“You seem a little peakish, Mr. Valstad,” the agent said after shaking his
hand. “Are you sure there’s nothing we can get you to make your recovery a
little more comfortable?”
Anders returned his polite smile and shook his head. “I am good, Mr. Maier.
Please, welcome.”
He stepped to the side, allowing the plain little man to enter the suite. The
remnants of breakfast still laid spread out on the small table in front of the
window and Anders moved quickly to clear the tray for the agent to place his
notes. He was surprised by the visit, though not unpleasantly. There was only
so much bad American daytime television he could occupy his time with while he
awaited his Simone’s return.
“I was reading through the transcripts of your interview last night,” Maier
said, his American accent heavy but his Norsk was unexpected. Anders glanced at
him, unable to keep the surprise from his expression, but the man politely kept
his attention to the arrangement of notes and pens as he laid them out on the
table in methodical order from his briefcase. “And I must commend you and your
brothers for your openness. We understand how difficult it is to have to relive
some of what had happened to you. There’s bound to be some inconsistencies. I’d
like to go over a few things just to clarify them for the record, if you don’t
mind.”
Anders swallowed the nervous lump in his throat, but took a seat across from
him and gave a short nod in reply. Maier’s smile was flat and fleeting, his
lightless eyes without feeling in a way that would normally make Anders weary,
but in this circumstance he was relieved for the detachment. The late morning
sunlight filtered in through the thick glass of the window, dragging shadows
across the smooth features of this agent and giving dimension to his otherwise
plain face. There was nothing noteworthy about this man, but those dead eyes
were hard to look at. Anders kept his gaze focused on the view outside.
“When you came upon Leif Valstad digging that grave on the property, did you
know at the time that he had Bud Renfro’s corpse in the flatbed of the truck?”
Maier asked, his professional monotone conflicting with the horror of the
content.
“Who?”
“Bud Renfro was an associate of your father’s. His corpse was among those in
the vehicle Leif Valstad had left burning at the morgue, but his was the only
one with soil particles on him matching the composition found on the Valstad
estate. That, and the estimated time of death, places him in that hole Leif
Valstad had dug. I just thought you should know that the grave wasn’t intended
for you.”
A weighty uneasiness wriggled in Anders’ mind at this revelation, making him
begin chewing on his knuckle as he once more considered the depth of his
brother’s evil. He found no comfort in this news at all. A part of him had
suspected it after he had ended up not being buried. Another part of him was
too aware that there was still a hole waiting to be dug for him elsewhere.
“Do you still believe his motivation to murder you was due to his daughter’s
affections toward you?” Maier asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t know what motivates a man to do such things. Maybe he
needed no motivation at all to do the things he did, but I do know that it
bothered him. Significantly.”
Maier’s tepid smile took on a reptilian coldness as he said, “Because he is in
love with her. You managed to affect a man who believes himself above human
weakness by threatening his position with her. It’s possibly the worst thing
you could do to him.”
Anders didn’t know how to respond to that. The familiarity this man spoke of
Leif with was unsettling, if not for the knowledgeability of his insight, then
for the eagerness he seemed to have to speak it.
“How long have you been investigating him?” Anders asked.
“The FBI has been pursuing Leif Valstad as a suspect since an anonymous tip was
submitted shortly after the funeral,” Maier answered. Without any detectable
change in his mood or tone, he continued, “But I’ve been studying Leif Valstad
for quite a bit longer than that. A purebred hunter. They don’t make them like
that anymore. It would be a terrible shame to stop the tradition now.”
That uneasiness in Anders spiked into apprehension of this agent. The policeman
was down the hall, sitting in the chair facing the elevator doors, and he
wondered if his shouts for help would be heard. But Maier displayed no
expectation of reaction despite the shocking things he’d said. Anders choked
down his fear and nodded.
“He was a very… dangerous killer, it seems,” he offered neutrally. Perhaps
something was merely lost in translation. He clung to that idea, but danger
screamed at him from beneath his resolve. “Um, what else did you want to ask me
about my statement?”
“He is more than proficient; Leif Valstad is simply the best in the field. He
would have never been caught if they didn’t give him up. It was such a myopic,
short-sighted decision, but we’re working to resolve that,” Maier said, his
reptilian smile spreading into a grin. “Now that we have him, though, well…
Things are going to change. A coup has occurred and there is chaos in the
ranks; all of us aware that now is the time to secure the power that’s been
scattered. Lots of assets to acquire and maintain. That’s where you come in,
Anders Valstad.”
Anders did not want Maier to tell him any of this. As little sense as any of it
made to him, this was knowledge that poisoned him as readily as any viper’s
bite, marking him as a necessary casualty to protect a secret so deadly. His
pulse flowed ice through his veins as he tried to keep his face from showing
any of the fear and alarm that raged in him. He had to construct a narrative
that could protect him from this knowledge.
“Oh, so the FBI has him? That’s a relief,” he said, careful to keep his voice
from sounding too desperately breathless or nervously loud.
Maier ignored his response, slid a plain manila folder to him across the short
barrier of the table and explained, “You have two choices. You can leave Simone
entirely in our care and forget we ever had this conversation. Move on, leave
behind Leif and Simone and everything that’s happened here, have a normal life.
Or, you can retain her as your ward and relinquish her to us periodically to
serve her purpose. Your role will be minimal outside of that. You can… enjoy
her to your liking, so long as you obey us. Open the folder, Anders Valstad.”
He obeyed, his hands moving slowly to turn the thin paper cover as he prayed
for his fingers not to shake. This man did not come to him as an FBI agent.
Whatever Maier was beneath that title and those dead eyes was scarcely even
what he would call human. He leafed through the contents of the folder, finding
Simone’s passport, birth certificate, state identification, school transcripts,
immigration applications, medical statements, and his own passport. Everything
he needed to take Simone home with him was provided in this folder.
“It’s already been taken care of,” Maier said. “You’ll have everything you
want, so long as we have your discretion and your cooperation.”
“When you said… ‘her purpose’, what did you mean by that? What do you need with
Simone?” Anders asked. His voice quivered. It didn’t matter if he hid his fear
or not, the consequences of this conversation were now beyond avoidance. A
black, heavy hatred for this man poured over that fear like tar for giving him
this illusion of choice when there was none. He was once more a pawn in a
madman’s game, but this time he was aware of it.
Maier’s unwavering stare didn’t flinch as he answered, “We’re going to use her
to maintain control over Leif Valstad whenever and however necessary. Men like
him aren’t easily swayed by conventional means. But don’t worry; we are not
barbaric. No significant harm will come to her during those processes.”
“And my role?” Anders asked. He was wary of pushing this subject, but they’d
already gone through all this trouble to let him have her. He had to know. “I’m
not involved in any of… this. Why did you choose me?”
“Have you yet to see her interact with anyone not of the Valstad bloodline?”
Maier countered. Anders could only furrow his brow in further bewilderment.
“She might be submissive to you, but only because she perceives you as a
surrogate to her master. He’s conditioned her to be that way. As for anyone
else, well… He’s conditioned her in many ways.” He leaned in closer, his tie
dragging over the table as the first spark of emotion revealed itself in the
gleeful gleam over his dead eyes. “She nearly tore into my neck when I
presented her with the opportunity. I recommend you keep her on a tight leash
around others. Maybe invest in a good muzzle.”
Anders visualized his Simone sinking her teeth into the flesh of this man’s
throat and found himself pleased by the brief fantasy before he could remember
to be repulsed. He blinked the daydream away, recalling the fear he was
supposed to be feeling, but could find only an agitated anticipation and
hatred. Leif might have somehow survived, but Maier was not Leif. He did not
have reason to fear him, for all the power he held over his and Simone’s lives.
He did, however, have a growing reason to hate him and it filled him with a
sweet, hot energy.
“So, you get Leif, I get Simone, and everybody wins, is that it?” Anders asked.
“You take away his daughter and his freedom and you expect that he’ll help you
win whatever game it is you’re playing. If he’s as good as you say he is, he’ll
just kill you.”
“That’s possible,” Maier admitted. “But unlikely in my case. Handling Leif
Valstad himself is above my pay scale. Obtaining his little monster and
orchestrating this case are my main objectives and I have succeeded. Your
involvement can end here, as well. Up to you.”
Anders leaned back in his chair, the weight of the mad world pressing down on
him as he tried to digest just how unaware he had been of these hidden
machinations everywhere around him. The agendas he’d been written into just by
being Leif’s target nagged at his own sense of incompetence, but he did not
have to succumb to it in despair. He’d already entered into a deal with a
devil, one more didn’t matter at this point. He picked up Simone’s passport
book, flipping open the blue pages to look at her photo. She looked so young,
so brimming with life and potential. His chest ached with the longing to touch
her just to feel that she was safe. There was nothing to reconsider.
“When do I get to take her home?”
 
 
To find her father, she had to understand him. Standing before the wallpapered
wood of the darkroom door, the gasping darkness whispering to her from between
the jagged gaps from the ax, Simone reminded herself that if she was to have
any hope in finding him, she needed to understand him first. She needed to do
this. There was nothing real down there to fear. Not anymore.
“You need someone to hold your hand?” Gladwell asked, thick with sarcasm.
Fucking pig, she did not say. Her mouth was too busy salivating with the
impulse to vomit. She swallowed the excess moisture repeatedly, focusing on the
chore of not puking as she pushed that door open, the remnants of fingerprint
powder from the edges sticking to the nitrile gloves they’d insisted she’d
wear. Her center of gravity seemed to twirl as she cautiously descended the
concrete steps, but the inky blackness she’d expected was at least drowned out
by the bright white lights of the lamps they’d placed down there. The sour
smell lingering thinly through the stale air brought Bjørn to mind, a man who
had died before she was born but she felt as though she had known his company
well. Hermetic, bedraggled Bjørn, with his avoidant stare and malfunctioning
mind, haunted her dreams both awake and asleep. This was his domain. The room
seemed smaller than she recalled, the colors different than she’d imagined.
Little yellow signs marked where items had been taken. One on the shelf in the
center of a circular absence of dust caught her attention briefly. The chair
was still bolted down to the floor in the little alcove away from the work
area, its simplicity denying its sinister purpose. Something wasn’t right.
“Turn off the lights,” she said.
Gladwell hissed an exasperated sigh through his teeth, but one by one, those
bright lights shut off around her until that inky blackness closed in as though
it had been waiting to pounce. There it was. Her feverish mind had already put
her in an unpleasantly dreamlike state, but this darkness cut her off from the
solidity of her surroundings and she floated in the chemical scents and dense
pressure of the underground. All it ever took was a little push for her mind to
slip. She remembered the asthmatic wheezing of the figure in the chair, the
madness in Bjørn’s eyes, the coarse hairs of his beard, the flash of the
camera. The whirring of the film winding. The flash, flash, flash. She blinked
against that strong flash, the room illuminating in the microsecond of white
brightness. The tripod lights and the little yellow signs were gone. Someone
was in the chair. No, something. A flickering static in the shape of a human
sat strapped to the chair and Bjørn stood in concentrated poise as he took its
picture again and again. These weren’t people to him anymore. The whistling
breaths that rattled from it were slow, faint, far apart. The slower it
breathed, the faster that flash occurred.
Simone rifled through the reasoning behind this vision even as she stood
horrified from it. How much of this was once real and how much of it was the
creation of a nightmare laid only in the reasoning. Kyun’s teasing Bjørn would
have loved to photograph you. An old-fashioned film camera. A mechanical watch.
The sanctity of nature. She knew very little of Bjørn, but she could suppose
much. A superstitious man, distrusting of people and of modern society,
attached to strange concepts his creative mind obsessed over. She could relate.
Her fingers often itched inconveniently for a paintbrush when she found a
moment she wanted to capture on canvas. He had wanted to capture something
specific and he would try again and again, never satisfied until he got that
perfect shot.
In the corner, that boy from the photo album stood watching and waiting. They
were both waiting for Bjørn to catch something so elusive. The quarry Bjørn
hunted was not in the panic of the woods or the subjugation of slaughter, but
in something more esoteric. His father had taught him violence and control, his
uncle had taught him art and meaning. Art and the conductivity of human
connection, human suffering, human life. Bjørn knew people as she did. The
overwhelming sensitivity to human contact. A final rattling breath, a flurry of
flashes, then darkness. Minutes later, the scent of newly born death
intermingled in the chemical staleness of the air. She knew that scent, knew
that she didn’t let her father get to that stage. Autolysis. Self-digestion.
The enzymes and bacteria necessary in the living quickly ate away at the dead.
She’d kept oxygen flowing through his cells, refusing to let them decay. He was
alive. She had to find him.
Leif’s whisper, his voice higher and so unsure at that young age, blew over her
ear from the darkness, “There’s a lot of similarities between you and him, you
know.”
She yelped in shock when a tripod light turned on, blinding her in the flood of
brightness. Gladwell’s irritated tone was loud in the confined space as he
asked, “What happened in here?”
“P-Pictures,” she sputtered, grasping her chest to calm her racing heart. It
was just a daydream. She was out of the dark, away from the flash, away from
the madness. It wasn’t real.
“No shit, Sherlock, it’s a darkroom,” he grumbled. “Why did you come down
here?”
She panted to catch her breath. “I found it on accident when I was hiding from
Papa. From Leif. After he drugged Anders for the first time and… punished him.
The door, the ax marks, from when Anders tried to find me. I think he wanted us
to escape.” “Upstairs. The smaller guestroom. Tied to the… I was tied to the
bed. Papa, he… he fucked me… and when he was done, Anders… It wasn’t his fault,
he was too drugged to know he was hurting me... The blood on the mattress is
mine. The semen is Leif’s… and Anders’.”
A minute crawled by in slow silence, her panting breaths the only sound until
Gladwell finally said, “You didn’t tell us about that.”
“Must have blocked it out,” she lied. “Did he say anything about it in his
report?”
“I haven’t read their reports yet,” he answered absently. “Do you, um… Do you
want us to put you in a separate hotel from him?”
The softer edge in his usually brash voice drew her attention and she glanced
at him to see the hard frown of sorrowful frustration and regret deepening the
lines of his face. She grit her teeth in a hot wave of anger and hissed, “Fuck
your pity, Special Agent Gladwell! Get your god-damned head in the game; you’ve
seen worse than a half-breed slut getting passed between her daddy and his
brother. There’s a murderer on the loose, remember?”
“Christ almighty…” he murmured, turning away from her and pressing his hand
into his receding hairline. “He really messed you up, kid.”
“No shit, Sherlock. You wanted context, you’re getting it,” she seethed.
“I’m not your enemy,” he insisted, his tone still far too soft.
She could feel his emotions bouncing off that shield of hatred she’d built
around herself. People were so messy with their feelings and expectations
sloshing over the edges of them, spilling them on her when they didn’t even
know what she was. If she looked at him now, she would see through to him,
clear as glass. She would know him. She could see and smell the exhaustion of
his liver from hard drinking, know that the hard drinking was from a hard life
in the effort he took to obscure his emotions with irritability, feel the
frustration of being in a body slowly failing him among the many failures in
his life. Frustration hung about him like a vapor and sullied everything he
touched. She could even relate to him, but she did not want to. He didn’t smell
right, didn’t smell like Leif at all. She wanted to only know him as flickering
static instead of this barrage of information and humanity. His pattern was
simple enough for her to counter with the approach he could most identify with:
open disdain.
She didn’t have the energy to do more than speak in a firm whisper, “You aren’t
anything to me. Nothing but shapes and noise and stink suspended in air. We
happen to have a common goal, but don’t you ever, ever humanize me. I’m not a
person. I’m evidence. Gather the evidence, find your killer. Do your job and
keep your feelings out of it.”
The abrasiveness of his resentment scraped against her from the sigh he
breathed out, but thankfully, his heavy outpouring stemmed from there to a
level she could disregard even in her raw condition. This was new territory for
her and she begrudged him the complication of his presence. It was hard enough
to leave herself so open to her madness with its interpretations and intuitions
without this man trespassing into her mind.
“Is there anything else I should know about that happened in here?” he asked, a
guarded dispassion cloaking his ire.
Her mind was filled with too many horrors to process and nightmares awaited the
corners of her consciousness. The roots of her father’s madness dug deeper than
she could have imagined and she felt a powerful need to find a safe place to
hide and organize her crowding thoughts. She straightened, unwrapping her
shaking arms from her body, and said, “Not recently. Send me back to the hotel.
I can’t do anymore today.”
“Take an aspirin and suck it up, Valstad,” he frowned.
“You suck it, Gladwell, I don’t work for you,” she shot back, her glare turning
to him briefly before returning to the safety of the void. “One more room.
That’s it.”
“Fine. You shared a bedroom with him, correct?” he asked.
Her stomach twisted. For all the personal details she could collect just by
observing, she lacked much skill in manipulating people even when armed with
that analysis. She wished she had a little more Einar and a little less Bjørn
in her in that regard, a thought that made her mouth twist into a wry smirk and
then falter. There really were a lot of similarities between her and Bjørn. The
kinship she felt with him brought a freezing shiver up her spine.
“You want to see where my dad fucked me?” she jeered, trying to dissuade him,
but it was a crude and ineffective attempt even to her ears.
“Get walking,” he commanded tersely.
***** Chapter 39 *****
Simone focused on the little yellow sign that marked where the dribble of blood
and sex fluids had dried on the floor, bringing back the twinge of pain from
the abrasion still healing inside her vagina and the ache of her arms
restrained behind her. It was hard to interpret anything else she might have
observed inside the room with that memory burning so bright at the forefront of
her thoughts, her imagination drawn again and again to the conflicting ecstasy
and agony of being so brutally forced.
Gladwell didn’t look up from the little notebook he wrote in as he asked, “This
was the fourth time he’d raped you with his brothers in the house?”
His question startled her back to the present, her confusion derailing her
comprehension at what he was asking her. “Sorry, the fourth time he…?”
“Raped you,” he repeated. She could hear the hard edge of discomfort he forced
the word out with and see his reluctance in the way he refused to remove
himself from his writing task to even face her. “With your uncles present in
the house.”
She looked at the desk, the area she had worked at daily to hide the bruises
Leif had bestowed on her, and tried to swallow her hesitance at allowing
Gladwell to continue calling it rape. She wouldn’t be flushed hot with the
desire to be pressed into the floor under him again if it was rape. That heavy
fear that coupled with her arousal felt different than it had at the beginning,
somehow more unclear now. There was a longing in her to feel that helplessness
and terror tied to his sex, but that was too painful for her to place any faith
in being a real desire. Another symptom of her madness. Or lack thereof.
Legally sane, but crazy as a bag of cats. She rubbed the back of her sweaty
neck, the fever and the arousal burning her up and making her shiver in chills
as she tried to figure out the unnatural effect his sadism had on her body. She
shoved that line of thought aside along with the crisis that lied at the other
end of that looming revelation. There would be plenty of time later to shiver
and scream alone in a small dark space about what he had done to her mind. She
wasn’t there to learn about herself anyway.
“Yes,” she answered, still unsure if she was lying or not. Maybe she wasn’t. It
didn’t matter.
While he wrote, she approached the bookcase along the wall next to the closet.
Nothing but academic textbooks and nonfiction centering around architecture and
design. His presence could be felt in the caution he took to hide who he was
behind what he had wanted to be seen as, magnified by how early that habit had
formed in his life. The framed photos of what she could only suppose were meant
to be his friends in youth never had the same people twice and never once
included him, giving what was meant to appear as a large social pool the
obvious lie that these classmates even knew him at all. He was still green
enough to make that mistake back then. She wondered when he had started to have
fake friends instead of faking friendships, but it was clear that he hadn’t yet
learned that skill while living here. She shivered again, the chill winning
over the heat in a frigid draft that ached into her bones, and she rubbed her
arms to attempt warmth.
“Take a jacket.”
“What?”
“Take a jacket from the closet,” Gladwell repeated grumpily. “Your shivering is
distracting.”
She didn’t want to risk questioning the unexpected offer or rebuke the pity
that burned at the end of that thinly veiled kindness. She pulled out the
fitted plum pea coat and hurriedly slipped it over her hoodie. Her mother had
gifted it to her for her birthday just two months ago, making it relatively
bare of memories and attachments. Her mom had complimented her on how the color
made her eyes “pop”, the wording making Simone laugh with the violence of the
imagery it invoked. Oedipus had stabbed his eyes when he had finally seen the
evil his hubris had blinded him to. She had committed such similar wickedness
with her eyes wide open.
“Can I take some clothes with me?” she asked.
“I can’t let you carry anything out of here,” he responded.
“Can I wear some clothes out of here?” she pressed.
He turned to a previous page in his notebook, taking a moment to read before
stiffly saying, “I can’t say yes to that.”
She grabbed a pair of moss green corduroy pants, her only pants left that
weren’t in the hamper that had been taken as evidence, and slipped out to the
bathroom to put them on while he pretended not to notice. Putting them on over
the ill-fitting track pants, it wouldn’t have been indecent to do that in front
of him, but it seemed too intimate for her to do comfortably. Out of the corner
of her eye, she could see the long crack she’d made in the mirror days ago
while arguing with the enemy in her head. Now that she wasn’t insane, she could
more easily accept that the voice was never real, but since she was still
crazy, she could keep feeling angry at it. It left a slimy feeling in her to
see that she had left a mark on this house, like anyone who looked at that
crack in the glass could see her inside it the same way she could see Bjørn in
the darkroom or Einar at the head of the dining table. Except no one else saw
those things like she did. Their dreams were kept politely caged in their
subconscious while hers sloshed all over the waking world. The fever wasn’t
helping. She had to step out of the bathroom quickly when her reflection began
to shift into something inhuman.
As she turned to walk back to the bedroom and convince Gladwell to send her to
the hotel, she noticed that the door next to the bathroom that had always been
locked was left slightly ajar.
 
 
Anders twirled the orange prescription vial between his fingers as he sat on
the bed, the television on and his eyes pointed towards it but his attention
was entirely inward. The little blue dissolvable tablets rattled inside the
vial; a precautionary measure, Maier had called them. He felt guilty for
accepting them, guiltier for considering all the ways he might need to use
them. His Simone was sweet, but she was not always herself. He pushed down the
rage that came with that reminder of how deeply his brother had broken her,
focusing instead on how he would help her heal. He would provide her the care,
love and stability Leif had denied her. He would be a good father to her and
then, after some time and some talking, she could make him a father again. He
smiled at the thought of her baring his child. Logically, he knew he shouldn’t,
but logic rarely applied to love anyway. That’s what made his feelings for her
so pure; it was all so hopelessly out of his own control, right from the start.
He slipped the vial into his shirt pocket and laid back on the bed, inhaling
deeply through his nose to take in the scents that still clung to the
bedsheets. He could smell her fever and fear interwoven in her sweat, these
signs of her distress making his muscles tense in anxiousness to seek her out.
Objectively, it was disarming how instinctual and impulsive his behavior was
regarding her, but in the moment, none of it seemed odd at all. It was all so
pure and natural, it was easy to ignore the unpleasant details of their
relation and the questionable scope of her ability to consent. He turned his
face, burying his nose into the sheets to seek out her scent; the unique
quality of it stirring something thrilling and ancient in him. His Simone
simply smelled correct in ways he couldn’t articulate.
A knock at the door broke him out of his pining and he moved to the door
perhaps too quickly by how his thigh wound complained, but he was hopeful it
was his Simone returned from her interview. Instead, he flung the door open to
find Vidar’s tall and lanky form casting a long shadow over him. He felt all at
once embarrassed, as though his brother had somehow known he was doing
something weird in there, something like huffing the bedsheets like some
lunatic pervert. He knew he couldn’t have known, but he couldn’t keep the
mortification off his face enough to avoid Vidar’s sharp eye.
“Invite me in,” he ordered flatly.
“What are you, a vampire?” Anders quipped in annoyance.
Vidar responded by shoving past him, bullying his way into the darkened suite
in that familiar rudeness brothers subsisted on. He fixed his near-permanent
scowl at the television, the only light source in the shadowed room, the
shifting pictures casting a pale light on the already pale man. Anders limped
back to the bed, unnerved as his brother’s intense quiet and weary of his
frequent antagonism. Past experience had taught Anders to wait for him to speak
first and recent experience had taught him to prepare to rebuke the inevitable
accusations of sexual predation on their niece.
“We’re going home tomorrow,” Vidar finally said, his face still turned away
toward the screen.
When he didn’t continue, Anders tentatively asked, “How do you know they won’t
keep you?”
“Agent Maier stopped by and told us as much,” he answered. “He also
congratulated us on the new addition to our family.”
The clipped tone tipped Anders off to the purpose of this visit more than the
polite content. He tried not to sound defensive. “I did tell you that I
intended to take her home with me.”
“Well, you lie a lot, so I was somewhat surprised.”
“When have I lied?”
Vidar turned to him with a razor-thin smirk. “So, since you’re thinking so
clearly and have decided to make her your daughter, that means she’s single,
right?”
Anders stared in shock at his older brother, feeling a dark haze of something
dangerous choke his thoughts as he tried to comprehend his words. Vidar made a
noise that wasn’t quite a hum but less than a chuckle, that sharp smirk pulling
wider.
“What’s wrong with that? It won’t be anything she’s not used to,” Vidar
grinned. “Unless you’re going to be the kind of father she’s used to. You’re
off to a good start with that parenting style.”
“That isn’t funny, Vid,” Anders warned.
“I hope it isn’t funny because I’m not joking. If you’re not fucking her, then
there’s no reason I can’t. She’s the kind of girl who needs a hard fuck pretty
often, right? I’d bet she’d let me do whatever I want to her.”
Revulsion and a corrosive bitterness churned in Anders, but he knew his brother
wasn’t serious. He couldn’t be serious about something so sick. “Go back to
your room if you’re just here to irritate me.”
Anders suppressed an aggravated growl as Vidar sat next to him on the bed, his
brother’s demeanor all false friendliness and cheer. “Why would it irritate
you? I’m being polite by asking you before I ask her. Hey, since you’re her
father now, would she call you ‘daddy’ when you’re giving it to her good or
would she… oh, what’s that American phrase… ‘cry uncle’?”
Anders shot up and walked away, the pain from rising so suddenly drowned out by
the din of his anger. He had to move away before he did something he might
regret. Socking his brother in the jaw didn’t seem like something he’d regret
at the moment, but he clung to that bit of sense in him that warned him not to
do it.
“Hell, I’m not greedy. If you ever have second thoughts about giving up incest,
I’m open to sharing her. I don’t know if she could handle both of us at once,
but half the fun is in trying,” Vidar continued, stretching out on the bed
languidly. “I’ve got dibs on that sweet ass of hers if we’re doing a threesome,
though. Did you get a chance to fuck her up the ass before you started
repenting?”
“What the hell is wrong with you?!” Anders snapped.
“Okay, no threesome, I guess,” Vidar shrugged. “Too bad. I think she’d really
enjoy getting spit-roasted.”
“Stop it! Just stop!”
“Fine, then maybe we won’t talk about it. I’m going to need to borrow her for a
couple hours today, but don’t worry, I’ll go easy on her this time and bring
her back in good shape when I’m done.”
 
 
Simone didn’t start crying until she was in the car, safely away from that
house of nightmarish visions, but when she began, her sobs forced their way out
of her in vocal gasps. She couldn’t care about Deputy Jacoby’s discomfort at
her restrained moaning or her own bruised body aching at the violence of her
shuddering. Doubled over in her seat, her arms tucked between her body and her
lap and her wet face buried in her hands, she rocked slightly back and forth in
a self-soothing motion as those sobs tore out of her. The jagged hole where her
doubt had been bled and throbbed inside her, torn out of her by the undeniable
proof that still flickered behind her eyes. Certainty had never felt so wicked.
Dreams were only meant to represent the truth we may or may not be consciously
aware of. They were not supposed to be literal. She could bare the nightmarish
visions knowing they were only interpretations built on her observations and
fantasies built on her fears, but for them to have been real, for them to have
been the unadorned truth without the tact of symbolism or the softening of
obscurity, had shattered her faith that at least reality had a solid foundation
of logic and reason.
“Hey, I know it feels bad now, but you’re gonna be okay one day, kiddo…” Jacoby
offered softly, giving a reassuring rub between her shoulder blades. This
stranger’s touch seared the edges of her mind, hot as a branding iron through
her wool coat, but the hatred in her bent under the need for comfort. “We’re
going to make sure he never hurts you again.”
A terrible laugh shuddered out of her, indiscernible from her sobs. She’d let
her father tear the living skin from her screaming body just to hear him
denounce that it was all true. The knees of her pants were still smeared with
the dust of the office room floor, the odors of ink and decaying paper carried
on the tiny grains. Exhausted and nearly delirious from fever, she shouldn’t
have noticed the fingerprints that had scraped away the dust on the floor,
shouldn’t have seen the slight shadow of a gap between the floorboards,
shouldn’t have tested them to find that they were loose. There was no little
yellow sign that had marked it as evidence. She should have gotten Gladwell,
but she reached into that space beneath that floor. When she opened the photo
album, the world stopped making sense.
Gladwell had mentioned that the pictures would make it easier to identify the
victims they’d found. That she’d done a good thing by finding the albums. That
their families could finally have closure because of what she’d found. She
didn’t hear him at the time, his words only making sense to her now that she
was away. Dozens and dozens of people. They reached into her from those photos
like one hundred dusty fingers brushing her mind and smearing it with their
panic and sorrow and rage. A young Einar and Bjørn in the revelry of the hunt,
an impossibly young Leif joining them later. Posed amidst a tableau vivant of
bodies, the men glowing with pride and the boy haunted by the death within and
around him. Her father never had a god damned chance.
“Do you want to pick up something to eat? Anything you want,” Jacoby said, his
hand still rubbing her back while his other hand was on the wheel. “You gotta
be starving by now. There’s a McD’s up the road.”
People like Maier were out there, getting more organized and winning, while she
was getting sicker and weaker. People like Marceau had tried to strip the art
and meaning of what Leif did and he had killed him for it. Maier had Leif
trapped because if he hadn’t, then he and his friends were as dead as Marceau.
All those sons of bitches were good as dead with her father free and the world
would be better for their absence. She had to find him.
“Would you let Special Agent Maier know that I’d like to speak with him
please?” she asked.
She had to find him no matter the cost.
 
 
Anders couldn’t hear any more of it. The wretched anger it churned in his gut
was enough to chase away any thought in his actions as he hauled his brother up
off the bed with one fist twisted in his shirt collar and growled, “I’ll rip
your tongue out if you say one more god-damned word about her!”
A flash of agony burst behind his eyes and he was already on the ground when he
realized Vidar had punched his thigh wound. Before he could even gasp to
recover, Vidar had his arms locked behind him and kept him on the floor as he
seethed, “What’s wrong, Anders? Don’t like to think about your brother fucking
your niece, or are you getting jealous? Better pick your answer carefully,
fuckhead, because I know when you’re lying.”
“Get the hell off me!”
Vidar pulled painfully at his arms, making him groan and bow lower. “Is that
what she said when you were ‘too doped up to know’ you were raping her?”
Guilt pierced through his turmoil of agony and rage at hearing his brother
stating his horrible mistake so plainly. “I didn’t mean to hurt her!”
“You kept hurting her, you sick bastard!” Vidar snapped, making Anders stifle a
pained gasp as he shoved him away. The younger man turned onto his back and
clutched his chest wound, the stretching of his arms behind him having pulled
agonizingly at the stitches. “When are you going to get it?! It’s so fucking
obvious! You saw what he had going on with her way before anyone else and you
wanted it! He practically taught you how he twisted her into his little fuck
slave! You’re acting like you’re doing her this big favor, but you’re just
replacing him!”
It wasn’t true. He was only ever trying to help her. He could have kept his
attraction to her secret, she would have never known how he’d really felt, but
she was the one who had put her hand on his dick and begged him for sex. They
couldn’t go back after that. He’d tried, really tried, and Leif had forced him
on her when he’d thought they might be able to be a normal uncle and niece
again. There could never be anything normal between them, but that didn’t make
him like Leif.
“I’m not her surrogate master!” he insisted, still huffing between gritted
teeth through the pain. “I love her, you fucking prick!”
“So does he, and look where it got her,” Vidar said, his manner devoid of
either hostility or false cheer. “He couldn’t stand the thought of her growing
up and leaving him, so what did he do? He crippled her so she couldn’t and made
himself the only one who could take care of her. Sexy little thing like her,
completely dependent on one man to fill every role in her life and just so
grateful to him for it; I wasn’t surprised when I saw you watching them. You
don’t have to lie to me, Anders. I’m not Henrik. I have accepted what you are.”
Anders cautiously rose to stand, pausing in bewilderment when his brother
offered his hand. He hesitated, waiting for that hand to strike him, and
accepted the help when it didn’t. His blood pumped wild and heavy through his
aching body, the whooshing loud in his ears as he struggled to deny what Vidar
had said. He’d thought it was touching how Leif had cared for her at first.
Their dynamic was intriguing, but only because of its unconventionality.
“I didn’t know he was molesting her,” he said. He didn’t know what other excuse
he could give.
“But you imagined that you would fuck her if you were in his place, didn’t
you?” Vidar asked.
His non-accusatory tone somehow frustrated Anders further. “That’s disgusting.”
“Was it disgusting last night?” Vidar smirked. Anders glared at him, his glare
withering when Vidar tapped his own nose. The dread of having been caught in
his lie made his stomach feel as though it had dropped out of him. “It doesn’t
smell disgusting; far from it, in fact. Smells like you had a lot of fun in her
on those sheets. You can’t fool me, littlest brother, so why not be honest? I
just want us to be a family again. Got it? I’ll take care of Henrik.”
Anders couldn’t bring himself to respond, his confusion seizing his thoughts.
Vidar huffed out a brief chuckle and patted his shoulder encouragingly before
turning and walking out of the room, leaving Anders alone in his bewilderment.
He couldn’t tell what Vidar had thought of any of it at all. His clever older
brother was still sharp as a knife but now jagged and bent, his thoughts
seeming to spill out of him from too many directions at once. It would almost
be preferable if he’d just condemned it like Henrik had. Anders sunk back down
on the edge of the bed, his unfocused eyes pointed at the television once more
as he tried to calm down. He wasn’t sure what he thought of it himself anymore.
Everything was supposed to be simple, but now nothing made sense.
 
 
Simone slowly sipped the Gatorade Jacoby had forced in her shaking hands,
trying to tiptoe around the detection of substance in her belly before it
roused to expel it back up her throat. Sitting on the floor of her hotel room,
her clothing discarded in a heap around her as the fever shifted back to a
boil, she waited for Maier to call. She had nothing to offer him, no cards in
her hand beyond the role he had wanted her to play in his game. Sweat dripped
down the bruised skin of her back and she hurriedly gathered her mess of hair
into a bun, securing it with a pen. She felt reckless in her clarity, eager to
see clearly what there was to be done and impatient to do it. She had fumbled
around in the dark too long and had no time to waste being blinded by the light
of awareness, no matter how her brain writhed like a snake in her skull. The
sweat made her cuts itch and she scratched the long one on her arm open by
accident, only aware of the blood coating her arm when she smeared red on her
bare thigh.
She pressed a bloody finger to the off-white wall, the brilliant scarlet almost
glittering to her fever-rattled mind, and repeated the motion, layering
fingerprint on fingerprint to create gradients of red. It had been too long
since she had painted and her hands shook too violently to hold a pencil to
sketch. She pressed hard to form the shadows cast by his cheekbones and deep-
set browbone, smudged in feathery touches to get the lightness of his eyes
right. She’d painted his portrait enough to know how to do it in any medium and
material. It didn’t take her long at all before her father’s face stared back
at her from the wall, drawn in the blood they shared. She stared at it, sitting
nude in the lotus position for a length of time that slipped by her unnoticed.
Her hands were steady. Her breathing evened. She reached up behind her, took
the pen out of her hair, and brought it down into the center of his forehead.
“Miss Valstad?”
The pen was stuck in the wall, angled up. She pressed the tip of her finger
gingerly to the end of it and watched as a thin stream of blood ran down the
pen and dribbled down the wall, oozing around that hole she’d stabbed in his
face.
“You wanted to speak with me?”
She dragged her bloody fingers down from the center of her forehead, smearing
red from her brow to her chin in four wet stripes. Four brothers. Four of them
but only one of them chosen. Her great grandfather had chosen both of his sons.
Her father didn’t choose her, though. He had created her to be that choice.
I’ve made you and I will continue making you. She smelled Maier, felt his heat
to her right, and looked up at his plain and unassuming face.
“I want to see him,” she said.
“You will,” he smiled. His eyes gleamed with that fascinated curiosity,
interested more in the blood on her skin than her nudity.
“I want to see him now.”
That curiosity shifted, no longer so detached, and she could feel his gaze
burning on her bite wound. “That would be difficult. They’ve relocated him to
the Western Europe branch.”
Resentment flooded up under the calm waters of her mind, but she detected some
regret in his voice. “Did you see him before they took him away?”
“Briefly,” he said. A glimmer of excitement sparked in the minute quiver of his
smile. “He bit a man’s thumb off.”
She watched the pulse point at his neck quicken, his pupils widen, and his
white skin flush. His arousal was barely carnal, existing almost entirely on a
mental level, though it did create a physical reaction. There were base urges
in every man, but his responded to a rarer stimulus. The supply of that rare
stimulus was perhaps what had led him to his career, but seldom did it place
him in the active spaces of it. His pleasure was reaped in the aftermath and
spectatorship. She could bring him closer.
“Did my father spit it back at him?” she asked, shifting to kneel, her eyes
never leaving his.
A queer laugh bubbled out of him, high in pitch and excited. “It bounced right
off his face as he screamed.”
She smiled up at him and his grin twitched. He was growing uncomfortable, bad
memories of others being unable to understand him resurfacing under her
attention. She had to reassure him. “Magnificent. His ruthlessness is
unparalleled, isn’t it?”
He didn’t tense or flinch away when she took his hand gently in hers. “Yes,” he
answered, his stiff tone revealing his nervousness at her touch. Nervous, but
interested.
She let her gaze fall to his hand, turning his palm over and running her finger
up his thumb as she asked, “Where is my father? Are they treating him well?”
“I’m not at liberty to discuss that,” he said. There was a slight quiver in his
breath.
She could feel that quiver extend into his muscles as she moved her face
closer, her lip brushing over his thumb as she asked, “Are you at liberty to
show me how much of that man’s thumb he bit off?”
She could see his throat bob in a thick nervous swallow when she started to
slip the appendage into her mouth, her teeth scraping heavily along his skin as
she slowly fed him in. His normally meek and composed features were a mess of
alarm and astonishment, his breath nearly panting out of him as she slid his
thumb in further. When his breath hitched in grunt and he nodded quickly, she
bit down gently. Too gently. He looked like he wanted to scream in frustration
and she resisted the urge to grin.
She hummed questioningly at him and he stammered, “Th-there. Right there.”
“Mm-hmm?” she pressed and he hissed out a tense sigh.
“Leif Valstad is in France, on the Marceau estate,” he admitted in a huff.
She bit down hard, crushing the muscles over his metacarpal until she could
detect the hardness of bone underneath. The choked groan he made was
distractingly disturbing, even more than having this awful man’s thumb entirely
in her mouth, but she was succeeding. Marceau’s people had him. He was not safe
in the vengeful den of his slain enemy. She let Maier feel the crushing force
of her teeth for a moment longer before releasing him, refraining from pulling
away as quickly as she’d rather and careful to keep her disgust from her face.
There were red indentations of her teeth deep in his skin, sure to leave
bruises he would feel for quite a while afterward, but she had not broken it.
The thought of his blood in her mouth was repulsive.
“It feels good to do the things he does, like I’m becoming him,” she whispered
up at him, confiding a secret only they could understand. He bought it
completely, his mouth parted in awe as he gazed down at her in unabashed
amazement. It wasn’t necessarily a lie. She wanted very much to kill him, like
she knew her father would want. It was a vicious, transitory thought that she
batted away fiercely as she rose to her feet.
“I know other things,” he blurted out eagerly.
“Tell me.”
His eyes darted to her bite wound, his tongue peeking out to wet his pursed
lips in anticipation. Her gut twisted at the desire she read in him, clear as
though written on his face.
“I could tell you how to free him,” he said breathily.
***** Chapter 40 *****
Simone was right. His blood was repulsive in her mouth, but it was easier than
she had thought. Not in the level of force she had to put into the bite just to
break his skin between his neck and shoulder, but in getting close enough to
him to do it. If she imagined she was on the subway during peak hours, pressed
between the swaying and sweating bodies of the general New York public, it was
barely anything at all. If she could ignore the kindred response to the
conjoined twins of agony and ecstasy in his trembling gasps, it might have even
been simple. The faulty mechanism that mistranslated brutality into pleasure in
him was dreadfully familiar and she had shuddered in the raw exposure she felt
as that dark piece of her related to him. That commonality between them shook
her and made her reach inside him to where she did not want to feel and look to
where she did not want to see. Without meaning to, she understood Maier and, in
understanding and relating, became infected with him.
She spat into the sink, a burst of red blooming abruptly in the white porcelain
and then swirling away in the running water. She glanced at her reflection on
accident, recoiling at the nightmarish image of the blood-splattered and fever-
damp girl. It seemed more like something she would have hallucinated, but
lately, her hallucinations were becoming reality. She forced herself to look,
to see what she was and what she would have to be to bring an end to all of it.
A creature stared back at her through the glass.
“Do you hate him?”
Maier pressed a hand towel to his prized wound, the splotches of bright red on
the clean white of both the terrycloth and his shirt like oriental poppies
embellishing the materials. She looked away from both the thing in the mirror
and the man in the doorway, uncomfortable with cleaning herself in front of
this unfamiliar audience.
“I hate the world that created him,” she answered, her own voice distant from
how far she felt from herself. She was stripped down too raw to lie anymore.
Photographs flipped rapidly behind her eyes. “I want to… destroy it for what it
allows… for what it does. I want to cut away the rot and burn it.”
“That’s too ambitious,” he said, a bitter delight ringing clearly through that
terrible piece of him he infected her with.
She forced herself to look back into the mirror. Her father’s gray eyes
glittered in the light. “Not for him.”
“You might be killed,” he smiled. “You might not like it, but you would be safe
within the network. They’ll offer you plenty more than safety for your
service.”
“I’d rather be dead than their carrot to dangle in front of him,” she sneered.
He walked into the bathroom, the steps of his fine polished shoes echoing off
the stone and porcelain until he stood behind her. She watched him in the
mirror, meeting his stare, and had the strong impression that if he didn’t
abhor human contact, he would place his hand on her in reassurance. His
admiration was more condemning than any accusation she could expose herself to.
It occurred to her then, in a winding twist of horror and amusement, that she
had made a friend.
“If you free him…” he started to request, but faltered on the edge of hope. She
followed that thread easily.
“He will slaughter you without mercy,” she assured him. “I’ll ask him to do it
barehanded.”
Maier’s polite little smile twitched into something frenzied and she could feel
an ecstatic response swell within him. Love had as many faces as horror and,
after touching Maier’s love toward Leif, she was able to accept that the two
emotions often wore the same masks. Fear and love sung in a tumultuous harmony
in her heart, fueling her devotion to vengeance both for and against her
father. She swiped up some of the blood from her chin and pressed it to the
center of her forehead, letting it gather enough to dribble down the bridge of
her nose. With her eyes unfocused, she could see a hole stabbed through her
head. Maier’s high, trilling laughter bounced off the tiles.
 
 
Anders woke with a start, the images of his nightmare dissipating like steam in
the open air, and looked at the time. 8:45. He’d napped for four solid hours,
drowsy on painkillers and avoidant of his troubled thoughts. He wrenched the
sweat-soaked shirt off him with clumsy hands as he tried to get out of bed,
rising on uncoordinated legs at the second attempt. Residual panic from his
dream fed into an aimless urgency within him, dragging him still bleary-eyed
into the hallway, the cane swinging to supplement the leg that refused to
cooperate fast enough. He stopped in front of the police officer, his hand
raised and mouth open as he struggled to recall enough English to pose his
request. The officer looked up from his phone expectantly. Anders let his hand
fall and hurriedly continued walking.
“Fucking Norwegians…” he heard the officer mumble behind him.
Henrik opened the door quickly after he knocked, the scent of vodka wafting
strongly from the room, and greeted him with a slurred, “Well, look who it is!
Papa Anders come to visit!”
“Henrik, I need-”
“Are you going to shut the fucking door?!” Vidar yelled from within the room.
“Vid, can I borrow your English for a minute?” Anders yelled back.
“Piss off, I’m not getting up!”
Anders bit his knuckle in a flurry of frustration and thought. It didn’t take
him more than two seconds to make his reckless decision. “Fine! I’ll be right
back!”
He could feel Henrik watching him as he knocked loudly on the door to Simone’s
room. He tapped his nails on the heavy wood while he waited impatiently for a
response and, after a few seconds of not hearing any noise stir from inside,
knocked again.
“I think she’s taking a shower,” Henrik suggested.
“She’s been in the shower for two hours!” Vidar yelled.
Anders froze, his shock barely holding his anger at bay as he stiffly turned to
Henrik and asked, “And neither of you thought that was strange? Why didn’t you
check on her?”
Henrik offered a loose shrug, his body swaying with the motion. “I dunno.
Everything about her is strange.”
Anders shot him a heated glare before limping back to the officer.
“Open Simone’s room, please,” he said, carefully mimicking the American accent.
The officer reached into his shirt pocket and handed a key card to him without
breaking his attention from his phone. Anders pursed his lips, on the verge of
questioning this cop’s apparent unconcern for their safety to just hand out
their room keys without a second look, but he was reluctant to find fault in
this benefit to him while he was in a hurry. He’d have a few probably misused
English words with the officer afterward, he decided.
Henrik still swayed in his doorway, a befuddled frown on his face as Anders
staggered back toward her room. “What- What are you gonna do in there?”
“Help her,” Anders answered, slipping the keycard in the slot and trying the
handle. It jammed, still locked, and he sighed in aggravation.
“Why don’t you just let her do what she wants?”
“Because she doesn’t always know what’s right or wrong.”
He tried slipping the key in and out slower and waiting a split second longer
for the lock to disengage. The knob turned smoothly and he pushed it open into
the darkened room, the sound of the shower running within. Henrik caught the
door before it shut after Anders stepped through it and he tried not to growl
at his older brother.
“And does that mean you do?” Henrik challenged.
Anders felt around in the dark for the knob to the bathroom door, pushing the
wooden surface to find it ajar as he spoke past a heavy guilt, “I’m trying my
best.”
His searching fingers flicked the light switch and both men gasped audibly at
the painting on the mirror of a large serpent circling to take its tail in its
mouth. The individual scales were smudges of a white paste, each with a center
of red that spread outward into a pink swipe and textured to give the
heightened illusion of dimension. Anders stepped toward it, his feet moving on
their own as he stared awestruck at the level of detail in the serpent. The eye
was a brilliant pool of red that dripped like teardrops around its wide and
frightening mouth, the slit of its pupil rolled upward into its socket as
though in agony.
“Jesus Christ…” Henrik breathed beside him. “That’s awesome.”
It was terrifying. Snapping out of his daze, Anders turned and rushed to the
shower, yanking the curtain back to find nothing but the stream of water.
“Hey, Vid! You gotta come check out what Simone did!”
He ran past his yelling brother, panic pumping hot acid through his veins as he
flicked on the main light in the room to find it empty, the bed still made, a
pile of clothes and a towel on the floor. He snatched up the towel, finding it
wet. The brown rust color of drying blood stained it here and there, making his
heart clench in a vice of dread.
“Holyyy shit,” he heard Vidar drawl from the bathroom.
Anders dropped to his knees, his thigh throbbing in protest as he checked under
the bed. The nothing he found there hurt more than his wound. As he pushed
himself up, he stumbled backward in shock when he saw Leif’s face glaring at
him accusingly. A scream jammed in his throat, erupting from him in a gasping
sputter as he scooted away from him along the floor until his back hit a wall,
but it was just a painting. A horrifically realistic painting, drawn in the
same rusted sepia of dried blood. He panted in gulping huffs, unable to tear
away from that sinister glare.
“What is that? Toothpaste? She made this with fucking Colgate?!” Vidar
exclaimed.
Finally, he staggered to his feet and limped to the closet, throwing it open to
find it barren. He leaned heavily against the wall, the dread and the panic
overwhelming him as he threaded his tense hands into the roots of his hair.
“It’s an ouroboros, like a snake god or something,” he heard Vidar explain. “It
represents the cyclical nature of everything, or some shit.”
“It’s a snake eating itself,” Henrik corrected him knowingly.
“You know what? I’m going to leave you at the airport. Go sell ass to cow
farmers and buy your own way back home.”
“Why are you mad?! I’m right!”
Anders found himself at the doorway of the bathroom, baffled and enraged at how
they continued to ignore the distressing absence of their niece. She was gone.
She was bleeding and gone, the shower left running to give the appearance of
occupancy. Kidnapped, wounded, all while he had slept like a lazy, stupid
coward. He slammed his fist into the doorframe, the loud bang of his already
split knuckles hitting the solid wood silencing their bickering and drawing
their stunned stares.
“What the fuck is wrong with you people?!” he shouted. “There’s blood all over
this fucking room and all you can do is bitch at each other about nothing!
About bullshit! Fuck! If your heads weren’t so far up your asses, maybe you
could have seen something was wrong before Leif went full fucking psycho! Can’t
you fucking see that she’s gone?! Why don’t you ever look around you?!”
He had to stop himself before he kept yelling, panting from the effort and the
anger, his hard glare focused on their drunk-slack and wide-eyed stares as they
stood there completely stunned like a couple of dullards. He despised them in
that moment almost as much as he despised himself.
“What are you doing just standing there staring?! Let’s get moving!” he
snapped.
“Uh…” Vidar started, but Anders turned away from him in disgust.
In his rush to go alert the policeman, he collided with the person standing
directly behind him, his arms reflexively wrapping around them to keep them
from falling as he righted himself. His hands registered the soft texture of
Simone’s skin before he looked down at the girl, her silver eyes wide and plush
mouth parted in surprise as she looked up at him. She was safe. She was there.
She was completely naked.
“Jesus!” he hissed, enclosing her in his embrace more protectively against the
stares of his lecherous brothers.
“Yes, thank you, Jesus!” Vidar jeered.
“I’m waaay too drunk for this,” Henrik groaned.
Anders tightened his hold on her and lifted her slightly, carrying her light
frame closer to the bed and yanking a sheet from under the aggravatingly tucked
blanket. She wriggled in his hold, but he had to cover her nudity from his
idiot brothers. He wrapped the sheet around them before he loosened his too-
tight embrace, letting her feet reach the floor once more and feeling the
electric thrill of their bare torsos sliding against each other. His ears
burned at the slight feminine grunt she made at that sensation, but this was
neither the time nor place for that. His panic still thrummed through him
despite his immense relief at finding her and he brought the hand that wasn’t
gripping the sheet to her cheek, tipping her face back up at him. She was still
hot with fever, her hair still damp from the shower, and her eyes still glassy
with illness, but she was whole and safe in his arms.
“You are okay?” he asked. He needed to hear it.
“Yes… Papa,” she whispered. “Please, don’t yell like that. I’m sorry if I upset
you... I was only hiding.”
That frisson of pleasure and excitement shivered down his body to coil in his
pelvis at hearing her call him that again. The rapid chaos of his mind slowed
to a blank calm as her arms wrapped around his middle under the sheet and she
rose on her tiptoes. Without thinking, he bent to meet her kiss, that insistent
coil in his pelvis drawing tighter when she slid her tongue along his lower
lip. He parted for her begging tongue and she eagerly sought his out, turning
her head to deepen the kiss and moaning quietly against his mouth. That
intoxicating, heady brand of lust she brought out in him flooded his body and
mind at the taste and feel of her warm tongue sliding against his. With one
hand keeping the sheet wrapped firmly around them, he let the other slide down
to grab a handful of her ass and squeeze that soft and springy flesh, drawing a
more carnal moan out of her. Her nails ghosted down the length of his spine to
dovetail to his sides and hook into the elastic of his shorts, her tug like a
suggestion. Not yet, he imparted with a slow grind of his hips, his erection
sliding against her smooth belly and making her shudder. He loved how impatient
she was, loved even more to torment her with it.
His fervor was derailed when a low whistle drew him out of that fog of lust. He
startled away from her kiss, confusion and alarm restarting his mind with a
shock as he whipped his head to find Vidar watching them. He leaned against the
corner of the wall that led into the short hallway to the bathroom and the
door, a sly grin on his face and a looseness to his posture that Anders didn’t
expect.
“Henrik, why don’t you go back to the room?” the leering man called out to
their older brother, nothing in his tone to suggest anything was amiss. “I’ll
keep an eye on these two for a bit.”
“Fiiine,” Henrik groaned, his drunken steps lumbering and heavy as he walked
out.
At the click of the door softly shutting, the two remaining men stood rooted in
the stillness of the room, the girl’s deep breaths the only sound. She nipped
tenderly at his chest, her little tongue darting out to lap at the salt of his
dried sweat, making his cock throb even as he glared at his brother. He
squeezed her ass roughly, trying to convey the message for her to stop, but
that only made her whimper and sigh. Her need was ruthless and infectious.
“Oh, don’t mind me,” Vidar grinned, his voice slightly slurred from drinking.
“I’m just here to keep an eye on you both. Please, continue.”
Anders realized, with a lurch of his stomach, that those sick things his
brother had said earlier to get a rise out of him weren’t just for teasing.
Except that didn’t make sense. For all his lewdness, Vidar didn’t mean any of
it. He’d said it was all just him and Henrik joking around, that they could
joke because there was no actual tension there. Thinking back, his stomach sunk
with the realization that only Henrik had said that.
“Vid…” Anders started, his voice quivering in his reluctance to hear the
answer. “Did you… Did you do anything to her?”
Vidar huffed out a chuckle that was more of an exasperated sigh, his head
tilting back in mild annoyance. “Give me a break, littlest brother, I have more
manners than to stick my hand in another man’s pickle jar without asking first.
She’s your girlfriend… daughter-niece… sex slave thing.”
His relief was equal to his irritation and neither strong enough to distract
from the sick feeling at finding out that his brother had harbored lust towards
their niece. “She’s not a sex slave.”
Vidar’s eyebrows shot up in mocking disbelief. “Really? What is it that you’re
planning for her future in Norway? Are you going to help her get a job,
acclimate to the culture, get her on the track to finding her own place and
moving on and away? No, you’re going to keep her chained to your bed where
she’s ‘safe’.”
A cold pit formed in Anders that he rapidly tried to cover with denial. It
wouldn’t be like that. He only wanted to help her heal and, if that meant
keeping her protected from the world, then of course he would keep her where
she’s safest. She squirmed a bit in his arms, making him realize he had
squeezed her to him too tight.
“I’m not like him,” Anders hissed.
“No, you’re not like him. This is all you,” Vidar said, his voice heavy in
solemnity, then a sharp grin split his face. “Hey, I’m not judging you for it,
so don’t give me that look. That’s not to say other people won’t judge you.
God, mom would just die of shame if she found out what her sweet little golden
boy has been doing to her granddaughter.”
“Are you blackmailing me?!”
“I’m just stating the facts. You’re going to want my help in making everyone
believe she’s not your slave. You can both have a happy life together, free of
judgment, free of the legal attention these matters attract. I can do that if
you ask me to.”
That cold pit in Anders filled with a burning hostility towards him. The threat
was clearly meant under the honeyed offers of help: if Vidar didn’t get what he
wanted, he would make certain that everyone would know the worst possible
versions of the truth and the police would take her away as his victim. She
nuzzled against his chest, her forehead hot to the touch and her panting more
from shortness of breath than the demand of passion, and she leaned against him
heavily for support. She was so delicate. He had no idea what the sick fucks
Maier worked for would do with her if he lost her, but he was certain it would
be a lot worse than what he would have to put her through to keep her
protected. This was the only way, even if it made him sick with hatred.
“What the fuck do you want, Vid?”
“We can start by having you drop that sheet.”
His fist clenched with fury and reluctance, shaking as he forced himself to
relax. The sheet slipped from his hand and fell to the floor in a whisper.
Simone brought her glassy eyes back up to look at him questioningly, her
delirious stare seeming less than even half-aware of what was happening around
her. For once, he was thankful for her detachment from reality, as much as her
fever worried him.
“Get on the bed with her.”
“Vid, you can’t-”
“What we can and can’t do to each other stopped mattering when you stuck your
dick in Leif’s dirty business and got us all drugged for it,” Vidar interrupted
flatly. He pulled the chair from the desk in the corner and rolled it to face
the foot of the bed, his intentions horrifically clear as he sat down and said,
“Come on. Show me what was so worth unearthing all this hell for.”
“Please, Vid, she’s been through so much…” Anders pleaded.
“She looks like she could go for a little more,” he smirked.
“I can’t… I can’t do this to her.”
“Do you want me to fuck her by myself, then? I’m not a gentle lover, Anders.”
An unexpected fear struck through Anders’ sickening dread. He wanted to go back
to being angry, to want to beat his brother for this awful thing he was putting
them through, but that fear for his Simone’s safety drowned out any such
violence in him. He couldn’t think of any good that intimidating Vidar would
bring, either. He couldn’t keep that sly and clever man under his thumb. He
wasn’t Leif. She reached up and touched his face then, drawing his attention to
her as she looked up at him through a haze of delirium and such heart-wrenching
love. She stood on her tiptoes once more, her arms coming up to wrap behind his
neck as she kissed his cheek sweetly.
“I feel so hot, Papa…” she whispered, her voice small and high, almost
childlike. “Can we go home? I think… I think I have a fever.”
He nearly crushed her to him in a desperate hug, his guilt burgeoning over any
hatred or fear as he buried his face in the soft cascade of her hair and
breathed in her scent. He shut his eyes, the softness of her body pressing
against his erection bringing a throb of arousal even in these terrible
circumstances, and kissed her neck as he whispered to her.
“You are okay. It’s okay. Papa will… take care, yes? You lay down. Papa will
take care.”
He eased her pliant form diagonally across the bed, her half-shut eyes watching
him with an utterly undeserved trust that made him feel like the worst scum on
the planet. Her skin glowed in a thin sheen of sweat despite the chill of the
air-conditioned room and her eyes rolled each time she slowly blinked,
increasing his worry at just how much of a fever she had. This would be quick
and gentle, he assured himself. It didn’t seem like she even knew what was
happening and, with any luck, she never would. Her legs dangled limply over the
edge of the bed and he spread them open wider as he took his cock out of his
shorts, the greedy organ red and wet at the tip with want for her.
“Papa…?” he heard her cracked whisper as he leaned over her. Something in his
chest ached at the uncertainty in her small voice and he looked up from his
attention to aligning his tip to her opening, immediately regretting it when he
saw the fear in her face. “What are you doing?”
“Uh… I, uh… We’re…” he stuttered, his confusion at her reaction smashing
against an unsettling suspicion. Something wasn’t right with her, even less
right than normal, but he couldn’t bear the thought of what he suspected.
“Papa’s going to make you feel better, sweetheart,” Vidar answered, grinning
from his chair. Anders tried to ignore his mocking, “I guess I should have
expected that she’d be into the whole ‘daddy’ thing this deep. Well, go on and
‘take care’ of your little girl, papa.”
Simone turned her head to look at Vidar as though noticing him there for the
first time and Anders pressed his hand to her cheek to turn her back to him.
“Look to me,dear, do not look to him.”
Her eyes wide in fear, she nodded her head and stared up at him. She was just
confused. Feverish, delirious, and confused. He leaned down, pressing his lips
to hers in another deep kiss, his tongue seeking access to her mouth in an
attempt to clear that confusion. She let out a trembling breath through her
nose and her body tensed, but she parted her mouth for him. The shaking whimper
she made as he coaxed her shy tongue into returning his caresses made his cock
flex against her, the heat of her crotch almost burning against him. She jerked
and grunted away from his kiss when he began to press into her, her soft slit
still too dry to yield to him.
“Sorry, sorry!” he whispered, panicked, knowing he’d made her hurt. He backed
away from her when he saw the tears leaking out of her scrunched-shut eyes and
her face turned into the bedding as a sob gasped out of her. “Oh God, oh fuck,
I can’t do this! She’s not well!”
“You can’t just shove it in like a fucking animal, dipshit,” Vidar sighed in
exasperation.
Anders rubbed his face, her distress bringing an anxiety that clashed with the
terrible demand of his arousal. Her distress did not add to his arousal. He
wouldn’t let it. “No, no, she’s dreaming or something, I can’t do this when
she’s- Jesus, she can’t even consent in this condition, it’s not right!”
“Well, she’s going to cry. She’s been fucked by her own father for God knows
how long, you have to force her to like it.”
Anders’ panicked thoughts crashed to a halt, his shock at his brother’s
disturbing nonchalance at delivering those even more disturbing words making
him look at him for the first time since laying Simone down. Force her to like
it. Force her. His stare drifted back to his girl, taking in her light brown
skin and long dark hair, her talented fingers digging her nails into the hill
of her shoulder, her shapely body trembling in fear and fever. He thought about
what kind of men her vulnerability and submissiveness would attract. Men like
Leif. Like Vidar. Like him. But he didn’t want to hurt her. Not like that. A
strange comfort eased his tension as he realized that he wanted to hurt her
only when she wanted the pain. Her submissiveness drew a dominance out of him
that he was unaccustomed to, but it was with the care and authority of a
father, not the cruelty or forcefulness of a master. He wanted to be worthy of
that position. Standing in a hotel room with his brother blackmailing him into
raping her, he was not worthy. If he had to do this to keep her, he would do it
his way.
“Ssh, ssh, dearest, it’s okay…” he whispered to her, sitting on the edge of the
bed and gently brushing her hair away from her face. “You are okay, yes? Not
hurt?”
She flinched at his touch, but nodded her head in response. He scooted closer
to her and, when she didn’t flinch again, he pulled her into his lap as he sat
with his back leaned against the headboard. She curled around him, eager for
comfort even though he was the cause of her distress. His hands caressed her
sides in long, soothing strokes, easing the fear from her until she sighed into
the crook of his neck, and then he maneuvered her to straddle his lap, mindful
of the injury at the side of his thigh. She lifted her face from his shoulder,
that uncertain expression so adorable on her face again, and he smiled at her
reassuringly.
“Kiss?” he requested, tilting her face closer to hers. She obliged, giving him
a brief chaste kiss on his mouth. He chuckled at that and pulled her closer
against him, his cock nestled under her along her crotch. She wriggled against
it curiously. “Kiss?”
This time, when she leaned in, he tangled his hand in her hair at the back of
her head and held her still as he moved his lips sensually over hers. She made
a small noise of surprise that was muffled by his mouth, her muscles stiffening
but not trying to move away with his tight grasp on her hair. He encouraged her
with a sound of his own, a low moan that had her melting against him as he
coaxed her mouth open once more. With his free hand, he caressed the supple
length of her thigh up to the inward slope of her waist and brushed over the
swell of her ass as he moved back down again, earning him a whimpering moan
from her. Even with her mind caught in some childhood nightmare state, her body
responded to him so readily. He pressed his pelvis up into her, focusing the
grind against her clitoris, and she rolled her hips almost instinctively into
the motion with another moan. The haze of arousal returned, stronger and more
abruptly, bringing his hands to grasp her hips and rock her against him
roughly.
She broke their kiss with a gasp, that childlike pitch gone from her sweet
voice as she asked, “Please, let me taste your dick, Daddy?”
“Yes, dear,” he grinned, loosening his grip on her hips.
Watching her slide down his body, scooting back to get on her knees, he let his
mind sink into that thick arousal that altered everything into pleasure and
impulse. Surrounded by her scent with the sight of her on her kowtowed between
his outstretched legs with her ass raised high, his only worry was coming too
soon. Her mouth was as hot as her fever around him, making him tilt his head
back and sigh at the first wave of pleasure from her wet tongue sliding over
him. He had to twist his fists into the bedding to keep them from grabbing her
head and forcing her when she slowly, carefully took him all the way into her
throat.
“God damn…” he growled, the sight of her so dedicatedly sucking his dick far
more erotic than he had so often fantasized. From the edge of his vision, he
could see the motion of his brother stroking himself slowly behind her, but he
found that he did not mind. Let him enjoy her. He knew who she belonged to and,
as her moan vibrated around him, he knew she did too. A strange sense of power
tickled his mind at the notion and, before he thought twice about it, he asked
his brother, “Are you just going to stare at it all night, or are you going to
eat it?”
The shock he caught on Vidar’s face brought a smug grin to his. It was rare
that he got to stun the perceptive man, but he tucked that victory away for
another time. This moment was far too interesting and his attention was far too
narrow to juggle much thought outside of sex. When he saw his brother lean down
behind her, Anders carded his fingers into her hair and held her still on his
cock as she jerked in surprise at the mouth suddenly pressed to her ass. Her
cries of shock and protest soon lengthened into moans of pleasure, each sound
feeling heavenly on him. Her trust in him was, while undeserved, a thing that
served to feed his assured dominance of her. It felt odd but overwhelmingly
good to embrace that role, the focus on dominance never having much occurred to
him in previous relationships. He looked down at her beautiful face taking his
length and felt an overpouring of love for her strong enough to make him groan.
“Can I fuck her?” Vidar asked in a husky whisper, pumping two fingers slowly
into her asshole. “I’ll be gentle.”
“I’ll tell you when I want you to fuck her,” Anders answered, surprised at his
own words as they drawled out of him. A glimmer of discomfort at this side of
him stirred in his mind before a long moan from Simone obliterated all thought
from him, leaving only the drive for pleasure and power. His balls were heavy
and tense with the need to ejaculate soon and he pulled her off him by her
hair, the sight of the long thread of saliva connecting his tip to her darkened
and swollen lips driving up that need. Her bleary gaze was still full of the
delirium of fever and madness, clouded over with the heavy fog of arousal.
“Please, Papa…” she panted.
“You want to fuck?” he asked. She nodded eagerly, tugging her hair with the
motion and barely seeming to notice the slight pain. “Where?”
“Anywhere,” she answered.
“You want Vidar to fuck?” he asked.
Confusion furrowed her brow endearingly, making him chuckle as he pulled her
onto his lap. He barely had time to line up his cock before she sunk down onto
it, her strained moan loud and gorgeous as she took him too enthusiastically.
She was molten hot around him, her cunt sucking him in snugly. It wouldn’t be
long before he spilled in her. He held her down to keep her from moving, making
her squirm and groan in frustration as he beckoned his brother over. Vidar
moved behind her quickly, a madness and disbelief to his expression that Anders
could sympathize with. What they were doing was breaking too many taboos for
him to consider, but the forbidden fruit was sweet and ripe between them.
Anders tightened his fist in her hair to keep her from looking at the man who
slid up her copious fluid from around her cunt and swirled it at her asshole.
He appreciated the care his brother took to wet his dick with spit before
pressing it to her.
“Gently,” he warned.
Vidar nodded, his mad stare fixed to where he began to slowly fuck into her.
Anders kissed her fiercely, eating her questioning and high-pitched cries as
her body rocked with his brother’s careful motions. She was snug around him
before, but as Vidar pushed past her ring of muscle and fed into her bit by
bit, she was tightening on him like a vice.
“Try to relax, sweetheart,” Vidar whispered softly, stroking her thighs in a
soothing caress. “Let it in. There we go… Breathe, baby, breathe for us…Oh,
Christ, Anders, what the fuck are we doing? Easy, sweetheart, you’re doing so
good… This is fucked up, too fucked up, why are you letting me do this?”
Anders glanced at him, practically reading his moral crisis on his face even as
he kept fucking her ass, and had to refrain from laughing into the kiss. The
calming whispers and caresses were working on her, easing that crushing
pressure off his cock into something comfortable. Cautiously, he broke the
kiss, resting his forehead against hers as he started to move inside her. She
was shaking like a leaf between them, her cries animalistic in response to this
overstimulation. He watched her frenzied disbelief waver on the threshold of
hysteria, riveted by her struggle.
“It’s too much, Papa!” she cried in a broken gasp between her moans. “What’s…
What’s happening to me? Oh, fuck, you’re tearing me apart! I’m gonna… I’m
gonna…!”
“Fuck-fuck-fuck this is it!” Vidar panted rapidly.
Anders could feel her whole body tensing and shaking, her back arching like a
bow as her cries climbed in time with the deep pulsing in her cunt. He watched,
astonished, as she came with a long and almost mournful wail. He fucked her
harder through her orgasm, drawing it out, her teeth bared almost in agony and
her entire being too beautiful in that moment. This was it. This was the woman
he wanted to spend the rest of his life with. He came in her then, her sweat
almost sweet as he bit down on the side of her neck. Each flex and throb from
the base of his groin as he filled her with semen brought a flash of white
behind his eyes and drove a breathy grunt out of him. When at last he was
spent, he opened his eyes and saw that she had passed out, her small body
slumped against him as Vidar slowly pulled out of her with a heavy sigh.
“God… fuck… I’m sorry,” he heard his brother pant as he stumbled off the bed.
“I don’t… I was drinking and I’m sorry. Just… yeah.”
Anders watched as Vidar zipped himself up and shuffled out of the room, holding
his head in a perfect image of regret. He suspected he would join him in that
emotion eventually, but for now, he was numbed by the euphoria of hormones.
Adjusting his Simone to lie down more comfortably, he pulled the blanket over
them and held her to him as she slept. The hell he would catch for the night’s
debauchery would be there waiting for them soon enough.
***** Chapter 41 *****
Simone shot out and jerked the receiver of the phone in the middle of the first
ring, the reflex waking her more than the noise. Her hand gripped it limply,
her body halfway twisted out of the blankets and only halfway out of sleep as
she blinked blearily at the phone. Her mind ascended to consciousness with the
slowness of a diver avoiding the bends, making her squint at the strange device
as she struggled to remember what she was supposed to do with it.
“… Hello?... Miss Valstad?” a voice came through the small speaker, reminding
her how to hold it to her ear.
She hesitantly brought it to the side of her head, her voice cracking past her
sore throat as she rasped, “Yes?”
A warm body turned toward her, the softness of skin sliding against her bare
side as a white man’s arm snaked around her middle. She glanced over at the
man, seeing only his blond head of hair and a well-muscled shoulder, then
looked around the unfamiliar room nervously. She was in a hotel, a nice one
this time. She never stayed the night with these men. Her brow furrowed in
confusion, trying to recall how this happened, but memories smeared together
with nightmares in a blurred frenzy of fear and pain and ecstasy.
“… Are you still there?” the man’s voice came through flat in the limited range
of the speaker.
“Yeah… I, uh… Who is this?” she mumbled. The man pressed slow and sleepy kisses
to her lower back, his hand languidly stroking her belly with a tenderness she
was unaccustomed to in these scenarios. She usually avoided the lovey-dovey
types. Too messy, too awkward.
“Special Agent Maier,” the voice answered. “I’m sorry to wake you, but I have
your mother on the other line. Would you like me to patch her through?”
She looked at the clock and winced. 7:48. Her parents must have freaked out and
called every police station in the boroughs. “Yes, please, go ahead.”
She rubbed her tender throat, resisting the urge to sigh in anticipation of her
mother’s wrath as the line clicked into a brief silence before the low static
of air came back through the line. Her sluggish mind ached to recall anything
at all, but the many aches in her body gave her enough hints. Whatever this guy
did to her last night, he did it rough and in places she typically didn’t let
men go. She had either been very drunk or in the midst of another breakdown for
any of this to make sense. A slinking strangeness crawled around in her mind,
interrupted by the sound of Lisa’s voice cracked and strained with tears.
“Simmy? Simmy-baby, please… I… oh…”
Her mother never cried. Simone sat up, alarm bestowing a renewed energy to her.
“I’m so sorry, Mom! I know I messed up, I should have called, but I-I don’t
know what happened. Don’t cry, Mama, please.”
The mattress dipped behind her with the man’s shifting, his hands now rubbing
her shoulders in a touch that was meant to impart comfort, but she could barely
pay any mind to him now. Her mother was going to kill her.
“Ohh, my baby, my babyyy…” Lisa’s tearful groan pulled painfully at her heart.
She could feel tears stinging her own eyes in the deep agony of her mother’s
grief. “It’s not your fault, none of it’s your fault, Simmy, don’t you ever,
ever believe that! That- that monster, he hurt you, didn’t he? They won’t tell
me anything, they won’t tell me where you are, but I know, I know he hurt my
baby, didn’t he? That fucking white haole son of a bitch!”
“No, Mom, I’m fine! I promise, I’m okay!”
“I-I don’t know why I didn’t see it, I just… I wanted to leave him years ago
and take you to Puna’s, none of this woulda happened, but I listened to him
like a damn fool and I believed him!” Lisa’s ragged voice was interrupted by
her wet sniffing. Simone clutched the phone tight in her fist, her sore throat
thick with the want to cry too. There was something deeply disturbing blooming
in her mind, those long nightmares coalescing into something vivid and
overwhelming. “I believed him for so long. I failed you, my only baby child.
I’m never gonna forgive myself. Oh, sweet Jesus, the things they’re telling me
he did… You gotta stay with them, Simmy, they tell me… you can’t come home.
They won’t let me see you, won’t let me see my own child and maybe I… Maybe I
don’t deserve to, but I love you, Simmy-baby. I’m just… sorry.”
“I love you too, Mom…” Simone breathed, that aching in her pounding head
splitting her mind open. Memory poured into her all at once, making the brief
absence of it seem like a pleasant dream she’d just woken from. The terrible
context of this phone call finally broke her down into tears. She wiped them
away in resentment. She didn’t need to give her mother any more reason to cry.
“None of this is your fault either. Be careful, understand? Leave, go far away,
go stay with Puna! Don’t answer the door to strangers, don’t trust anyone. Papa
isn’t the only-”
Simone grimaced with frustration when the line silenced abruptly, clicking into
a brief static before Maier’s professional monotone came through. “Please
refrain from divulging any details regarding the ongoing case, Miss Valstad.”
The line cut to a dial tone and she let the receiver drop as she buried her
face in her hands, though the weeping refused to come. The sound of her
mother’s voice tore open a wound in her she hadn’t expected, a wound existing
only on the person she once was. That bright, ambitious girl had been long ago
twisted into an unrecognizable monster of madness and sin by a mad and sinful
man. It wasn’t her mother’s fault. They were all fooled. The harm he did to her
was abhorrent, but the harm it had brought to her mother was unforgivable.
Anders hugged her gently from behind, his bare chest hot against her back and
his scent all at once comfortingly familiar and familiarly terrifying. Both
sensations evoked that sick need in her that she could not bear to encounter
amid this guilt.
“Please, don’t…” she said quietly, not lifting her face from her hands.  
There weren’t many photographs in their home. Frequent long distant moves from
city to city, then state to state made it hard to hang onto anything for long
and keeping pictures in cell phones and cloud storage was simpler than having
to frame and place them. However, there were a few photos that Lisa had always
set out, either on a side table in the living room or on a fireplace mantle.
The photo that came to Simone’s mind most prominently as she mourned the loss
of her family as a unit was the one of Lisa and Leif on their wedding day, her
father wearing his charming smile she now knew was entirely false and her
mother in an empire waist gown to hide that she had begun to show in her
pregnancy. For him to have taken so many years of her mother’s life and used
them as a piece of his performance of normalcy struck her only now with the
full weight of such abomination. Lisa was 22 when she had met Leif, still 22
when she had wed him and bared him a child. Only two years older than Simone
was now.
She tried to imagine having a child in two years, tried to calculate what
starting a family of her own in that short time would require, but it was
impossible when all she could see in her future was blood. She lifted her face
enough to look down at the hands in her lap, the palms whiter than the rest of
her light brown skin. She could not imagine doing something as reckless as
holding a child with these wicked hands, certain that there was some toxic
residue that murder had soaked into her skin. No, she could not be anything
other than what she had to become. Normalcy was as denied to her now as it had
been denied to the boy who would become her father.
The electric frisson of pleasure that Anders’ tongue sparked along her shoulder
snapped her out of her thoughts and she recoiled in a twisting jerk, her grief
igniting into a flare of anger as she snapped, “What are you doing?!”
His shock cooled her temper with guilt, but not enough to douse it completely.
“You are needing help,” he answered.
“There’s nothing you can do to help,” she said, trying to quicken the anger
back into sorrow.
His saddened expression deepened her regret at having snapped at him, that
guilt causing her to allow him to pull her to lie down with him again. There
was no reason to be mad at him; he didn’t do anything to hurt her. She didn’t
want his comfort, though. She needed to think and the heat of his skin against
hers dragged her away from herself. Anders’ mouth resumed tasting her, this
time in short licks along her chest she had to bite her lip in concentration to
ignore. When his licks dipped lower, taking her nipple into his mouth, she
yelped in the shock of arousal and pushed away from him to scurry off the bed.
“Stop it!” she gasped, her arms wrapping protectively around her traitorous
body. The confusion and shame etched in his expression were intolerable,
causing her to turn away before she gave into the urge to surrender, to soothe,
to submit. “I can’t… I need to grieve. Let me grieve. Please.”
“I can help you feel good!” he argued.
Frustration at his well-meaning nature boiled up that anger in her again. “I
don’t want to need this- this sickness! I can’t fuck my life back together,
Anders!”
There was a desperation to his bewilderment that alarmed her, a disbelief and
denial she couldn’t guess the origin of but knew made him reach out and pull
her by her wrist. Her feet skid along the carpet, the reactive resistance
doubling in worry that his desperation was going to force them both into a
situation neither of them could want, but he was far, far stronger than she
was. She yelped when he yanked her onto the bed, his large body pinning her
down beneath him in a whirl of motion that left her dizzy. Panic sizzled at the
edges of her mind and she squeezed her eyes shut in fear when he wedged his
hand between her firmly closed thighs. There was nothing more she could think
to say to deter him. There was nothing she could do against his will with her
meager strength. It never mattered what she didn’t want; all she could do was
try to passively resist until her sick need broke her. His scouring fingers
finally pushed through to her vagina and the high-pitched whimper she stifled
behind her clenched teeth was a pained animal noise of distress.
His abrupt stillness made her open her eyes to see him staring in horrified
astonishment at her. No, she realized, at himself. The presence of any intense
emotion in men had taught her that there was often a violent reaction soon
following and she laid as still as a fawn in the grass as he moved stiffly away
from her. It wasn’t until she heard the door softly shut that she let her body
relax from its defensive tension, but disbelief reigned in the silence that
followed. Unable to recover from the shock of what had happened and what may
have almost happened, she stumbled into the bathroom for a brief cold shower.
 
 
Henrik had to drink himself into unconsciousness. The hangover he woke up with
wasn’t as agonizing as lying awake in the dark, listening to the frightened and
desperate cries of Simone through the thin hotel wall as his brothers did…
something in there. Something to her, he could tell that much. He could tell a
lot more than that, but he refused to. Vidar was in there with them; he could
hear the taunting lilt and grumbling surliness he spoke with, even if he
couldn’t make out what was said. Vidar wouldn’t let anything happen while he
was in there with them. Besides, he’d told him that Anders wasn’t like that
anymore, after all. Temporary insanity, he’d called it. Just a stress response,
crossed wires, trauma doing funny things to the mind, but Anders was better
now. They were all better now. No one wanted to hurt her that way anymore. He
turned onto his side, looking across to his brother in the other bed, seeing
him staring at the ceiling with a haunted expression. He wondered if Vidar had
slept at all last night after staggering back and taking a shower hot enough to
make the whole room humid.
“You wanna go get breakfast?” Henrik asked. “I need something to soak this
alcohol up.”
Vidar only shook his head, his tense stare not breaking from the ceiling.
Henrik braced himself for the headache and rolled out of bed, wavering on his
feet until the floor stopped swaying. He was getting too old to drink that
much. He stumbled into the jeans that barely fit over his muscular thighs and
sagged at the waist and shrugged into a t-shirt that stretched thin over his
chest and shoulders before stepping out into the hallway, surprised to see
Anders leaving Simone’s room at the same time. There was that same haunted look
in his face that Vidar wore.
Both men regarded each other in tense silence before Henrik broke it. “She, uh…
She needs someone there for the nightmares, right?” Anders glanced away,
pursing his lips briefly before nodding. Henrik opted to temporarily forget his
baby brother’s obvious tells when he lied. “You want to go down for the
breakfast buffet? We still have half an hour.”
“No, thanks,” Anders quietly answered, seeming very interested in the pattern
on the carpet.
“Oh, okay,” Henrik tried not to sound disappointed or worried. He watched their
littlest brother start to walk away, a heaviness to his mood that slumped his
bare shoulders and kept his head low. He knew it looked like shame, but he
decided it was a low-grade depression from everything they’d been through.
Eager to cheer him up, he called after him, “Hey! We go home today, remember?”
Anders looked over his shoulder and offered a wan smile and another shallow nod
without breaking his limping stride. Henrik’s fake grin withered as he passed
the cop dozing in his chair. Sitting alone in the dining area with only two
other small families still eating breakfast at tables each far apart from the
other, the dry toast and orange juice charged to whatever tab they had running
at this hotel, he noticed the news van parked across the street. Looking out
the wide windows behind him, he spotted another one with passing interest. His
attention was diverted to the unexpected sight of his young niece carrying a
tray of food, her hair still wet from a shower and a loose sweater dwarfing her
already small frame.
“Good morning!” he called to her, waving her over with a wide grin and ignoring
the pounding in his head from his own booming voice. She smiled back at him and
approached. It was nice to finally find someone happy to see him that morning.
“Hey, Uncle Henrik!” she smiled, setting her tray down next to his. She sat
down very gingerly, wincing as she settled into the chair.
He glanced at the array of fruit on her plate and joked, “You are, uh, diet?”
“Just avoiding rich foods because, you know…” she said, mimicking a gagging
noise to illustrate her point before picking up a slice of apple with her
fingers. “What goes down must come up, right?”
He laughed at that, surprised that she was joking at all, let alone with him.
It was a fantastic sign. If she could overcome the gloom and doom that seemed
to affect his brothers so deeply, then they had absolutely no excuse to wallow
much longer. He watched her, trying not to seem too obvious as he observed her,
knowing he was doing a rather poor job by her frequent returned glances. There
was a fork next to her plate that she didn’t touch and, seeing how her fingers
shook as she brought the pieces of fruit to her mouth, he didn’t blame her for
the lack of table manners. Withdrawal symptoms were unpredictable in duration
and effect.
“How are you?” he asked, wishing he had the English to phrase the question
better.
“Peachy,” she answered, then frowned down at her plate critically. “Wait, no
peaches.”
He didn’t understand the joke, but that there was a joke at all was enough to
make him chuckle. She took a sip of her hot tea, closing her eyes in
appreciation of the warm beverage as she swallowed before flashing a charming
smile at him. She seemed like a completely different girl from the wide-eyed
waif he’d met, someone bustling with life and playfulness instead of fear and
madness. He could actually picture her being Anders’ daughter this way. When a
dribble of tea dripped over the edge of the mug from her tremor, she set it
down quickly and tucked her hands in her lap. He pretended not to have noticed.
“So, you must be happy about going home today,” she smiled. “I know they always
say this for funeral trips but I really, really hope we could get together
under better circumstances next time.”
“Ah… We, uh, get together soon,” he assured her. “I ask Anders when is good.”
“Oh… I don’t think they’re gonna let me out of the country anytime soon,” she
said, tilting her head surreptitiously to the police cars parked outside. “And
I won’t take it personally if you never come back to America after this.”
Henrik wrinkled his heavy brow in confusion, working out her words to try to
find anything that he might have not caught in translation. “Agent Maier say
you… uh… live with Anders. Today, you come.”
She mirrored his confused expression. “Maier said that? That I’m going to live
with Anders?”
He nodded. “Yes. Um, yes. Today. You are come with us, yes?”
She stared at him blankly, then exhaled in a long sigh as she sat back heavily
in her seat. “No, I think maybe you misunderstood. I’m not going anywhere for a
minute.”
“He say in Norsk,” Henrik insisted.
“Well, then, he misspoke,” she said, frowning. She bit her knuckle, her lip
curled in disbelief as she muttered, seemingly to herself, “Live with Anders?!
That’s… I can’t do that. I… I can’t.”
It was his turn to be astonished when he realized that she really had no idea.
He didn’t know how to phrase his question of if anyone had even asked her about
it, but he suspected not. Watching her struggle with this news that she was to
move to another continent in a matter of hours, he pitied her all over again.
It was hard to remember that she was too insane to have control of her life
when she had good moments like this one.
“When did he tell you this?” she asked, a sharp focus chasing away any sign of
that playful girl.
“Agent Maier yesterday say to me and Vidar,” Henrik answered.
Her eyebrow raised in interest. “Where is Vidar now?”
“Bed.”
“Thank you, Uncle Henrik,” she said, rising from her seat abruptly. She
hesitated, then said to him with a sincerity that unsettled him, “Thank you for
talking with me… and for showing me that photo album. You’re a good person. I
hope I get to know you better someday.”
Henrik felt the heat of a blush redden his cheeks, the knowledge that he was
blushing only making him blush harder, but thankfully she was back to avoiding
looking directly at him. He watched, concerned at her sudden changes in
behavior, as she walked away with her fists clenched. It couldn’t be helped,
but he hated that this was the way she’d found out. He pulled her half-finished
plate of fruit toward him and took a sip of her tea, spitting it back into the
mug when he found it to be a warm cup of honey and something bitter spiced to
an almost unbearable hotness.
“Fucking full of surprises, that child,” he muttered, reaching for his toast to
sop up that spice.
 
 
She hated knocking on doors. Even after everything she’s had to do, she hated
initiating social interaction, but she needed to know more about what Maier was
throwing her into. She could just go ask Anders, but she wanted to put off
thinking about whatever was happening between them as far as she could. One
thing at a time. Vidar had better English, anyway. Pushing past her social
anxiety, she set her jaw and rapped her knuckles on the door. After all that,
no response came from within the room. A twinge of frustration helped bolster
her courage.
“Uncle Vidar!” she called as loudly as she could through her sore throat,
knocking on the door again.
This time, the door flew open and she yelped as a flustered Vidar quickly
yanked her into the room, hissing out a harshly whispered, “Fy faen, do you
want him to hear you?!”
Her senses sharpened all at once at her uncle’s alarm, her eyes scanning
quickly for the threat that had him warning her with such urgency. She jerked
her arm out of his hold when she saw none, meaning the threat had yet to come
to them. There was no time to waste on regret at having drawn attention to
them. She grabbed him by his shirt and shoved him into the closet, snatching up
the empty liquor bottle from the floor on her way. It wasn’t the best weapon,
but she could stun a man by breaking it over his head and hoped for a nice
sharp edge to sever an artery with. She crowded in after him into the closet,
silently pulling the door to leave it open a thin inch.
“Simone, what are-”
“Ssh!” she interrupted, her hand shooting out to cover his mouth as he stooped
low to avoid the closet bar. She waited a moment, listening for any signs of
approach or any movement out there at all, before whispering, “How many?”
He pulled her hand away and she glanced back at him to see his brow furrowed in
bewilderment as he whispered, “What?”
She stepped closer to him, needing to speak as quietly as possible as she
brought her mouth to his ear and slowly asked, “Is it just one man out there?
Did he have a weapon?”
“You are sick again?” he asked incredulously, then smirked, “Or this is game,
fristerinne?”
She stared at him, squinting in thought as she tried to connect his sudden
change in attitude to his previous warning and could not. “This isn’t a game,
Vidar! Is there someone out there or not?”
“He is not in here,” he answered in a low, husky whisper, his breath hot on her
neck as he stepped closer. “But we must be quiet or he hear us.”
She turned back to peer through the gap, clutching the neck of the bottle tight
in her shaking hand. That wasn’t good. Her fever had finally backed off, but
she was still in no shape to fight from starving herself so long. The little
bit of food she’d managed to eat sat like lead in her adrenaline-cramped
stomach. Vidar’s hands sliding over her hips distracted her, but she tried to
be patient. He was probably as frightened as she was, after all. She placed her
free hand reassuringly over one of his as he rubbed her body, his overly
tactile approach a thing she had come to expect from these European relatives.
He pressed close to her back, probably trying to see through the gap, but when
she moved to give him room, he pulled her against him.
“Don’t do that,” she whispered, wriggling against his strong grasp. “I have to
be able to move.”
“Oh, we will move,” he said assuredly, pressing her tighter against him.
She struggled harder, trying not to jostle the door or thump into a wall but
needing to break loose. It was difficult to keep quiet under the pressure.
“Uncle, let me go!”
She flinched when he pressed his hand over her face in a twitchy reflexive
movement, his voice strained in horror as he hissed, “Do not say… do not call
me that, not when we…” He let out a broken, breathy chuckle close to her neck,
making her skin crawl and tingle as he whispered against that sensitive skin,
“I think you are too sore to do it there again, yes? You are… not so much doing
that, I know. Too tight, too fragile. I think maybe you want… there?”
The bottle slipped out of her fingers when she felt him slide his hand under
the front of her cloth pants, the donated clothing fitting loose enough on her
for him to do this too easily. The fear she had of the external threat shifted
inward, warring with the confusion she needed to deny that this was done on
purpose. His mouth was wet and warm as he opened it over her skin, dissolving
that denial and allowing the fear to overtake her.
“Don’t…” she started to whimper, interrupted by his rougher touch stealing the
breath from her words.
“I was not understanding… but now I know,” he whispered between sucking kisses
along her neck. Her pulse pounded, beating out a steady insistence to run, run,
run but she was frozen, as frozen as she always was when her father would touch
her where he shouldn’t, kiss her where he shouldn’t, fuck her where he
shouldn’t. That sick, traitorous need flickered at the similarity. “You did
want this. You did want me to do this.”
He shushed her, having to shush her again as she whimpered louder at his
fingers rubbing her dry and aching genitals. She didn’t want this. He couldn’t
do this to her. This couldn’t be happening again. Something in her collapsed in
a deep hopelessness, echoing a lamentation that wailed through her mind.
“You are the family whore, yes? It is why Leif made you, for you loving his
cock inside you. Now you are loving us,” he whispered cruelly, his fingers
rubbing hard, hurting her on purpose.
 That wasn’t why Leif made her.
“So sweet and soft, so loving. You are made for sex.”
That’s not what she was made for.
“Say you are the family whore,” he hissed. He moved his hand down to her chin,
wrenching her head back and forcing a fearful gasp from her. “Say it,
sweetheart.”
That same splitting headache from earlier that morning hit her like a dull
hatchet cracking through the front of her skull, splattering memories that bled
and ran together with nightmares. The previous night’s forgotten fever dreams
became real in a blur of repulsion and depravity as Vidar’s whispered Try to
relax, sweetheart attached to the impossible memory of Anders holding her down
against him to let his brother fuck into her asshole. The thin denial that
Anders loved her enough not to violate her in such a debauched way crumbled
under the certainty of sweetheart.
She slammed him through the closet door, the thin wood panel hitting the wall
in a loud clamor as he fell to the floor in a flurry of long limbs. She lunged
onto his prone body before he could scramble to his feet and pushed him down,
one hand gripping his chin to shove his head back and expose his throat in the
same way he had her. Her narrowed eyes fixed on that fragile column, at the
white skin she knew how to rip open to drag the life out of any man. He was
grunting and pushing against her, those long thin hands of his not strong
enough to reach past her need to kill, to hunt.
“Do you see what I am now?!” she snarled, hot tears streaming down her face.
Her muscles trembled with a feral energy that hummed loudly in a hundred
chanting voices.
“Hva i helvete?! Jeg trodde du var en masochist!” he grunted, pressing against
her body. “Kristus, du er sterk!”
Her instincts clashed violently, urging her to bury her teeth into the jugular
that danced so temptingly while she was caught in the inability to kill what
her nose recognized as one of her own family. Above those base mechanisms of
instinct, that mournful wail shattered in her ears at this definitive proof
that she was a monster, undeserving of family and love without the price of her
flesh. There was no love without condition. There was no tenderness without
cost. There was no shelter in this world that allowed the horror and torment of
her father’s becoming. It was all just rot, down to the root, needing to be
burned away.
His hands shifted from trying to push her away to pulling her closer, spreading
wide over her ass and drawing her stare up to see his complete lack of fear.
That thick, hot anger was smothered under the weight of acceptance. She could
not determine the rules or set the price, she never could, not with her father,
not with Anders, not with any of them. She was always going to have to pay what
they asked, or she could be alone. Her hand slid down his neck, allowing him to
lower his chin as she gently pressed her fingers to his jugular. The thundering
pulse writhed eagerly against her fingertips, hot with life, completely
ignorant to how close she had been to letting it all out. Shame mingled
seamlessly with her sense of hopelessness.
“Where are you going?” he asked when she abruptly got off him.
She let the door answer his question with the quiet click as it shut behind
her. She could either pay or be alone and she was so very tired of paying.
***** Chapter 42 *****
There wasn’t anything that was his in the hotel room. The clothes Anders had
left at the seedy little motel the morning he went to confront Leif into saving
Simone from her symptoms were taken as evidence. They’d taken the clothes he
was wearing at the time, the stupid yellow souvenir t-shirt and sweatpants, but
he wouldn’t want to ever see those again even if they weren’t ruined with
blood. Everything else that had been left at Einar’s house was confiscated with
no word on if, when, or how he would go about getting them back. Sitting alone
on the bed in the hotel bathrobe, his skin scrubbed pink with the citrusy hotel
soap, the last clean outfit from the box of donated clothing laid out next to
him, he couldn’t shake the idea that he had lost himself along the way as well.
It was a strange, silly notion. He knew where he was and what he had done, but
there was a distinct lack of sense or meaning to any of it. It was as if he was
seeing someone else’s memories and hearing their thin excuses for each horrible
act with a detached disdain. He looked down at his hands, imagined them
becoming transparent until he faded away, and kept staring in an impossible
hope of that daydream becoming real.
“What’s happening to me?” he asked.
A knock at the door answered. He limped over and opened it to find Maier
standing there with a bundle of plastic garment bags slung over his arm, one
held up in his other hand toward him.
“Good morning, Anders Valstad,” Maier said in Norsk with his sterile smile and
soulless eyes directed up at him. Anders didn’t even feel the expected
repulsion at what slithered behind that professional façade. “Mind if I come
in?”
He responded by stepping aside to give the man room to enter and followed him
as he walked briskly to the bed before laying the garment bag over the donated
clothes. Anders recognized them as the clothes he had worn to the funeral,
cleaned and pressed.
Maier had an almost manic energy to him, stretching that polite smile into a
crooked grin that was hard to look at as he gestured to the suit and said, “A
bit somber, but perhaps that is the appropriate image to project. Hm. What do
you think? Do you feel at all suited to shock and mourning or is it more
sustainable for you to keep projecting outrage?”
Anders wondered if he had missed a sizable chunk of conversation in his
trancelike daze. “What are you talking about?”
Maier turned that crooked grin at him. “Your image. There are about twenty
reporters outside and we couldn’t have you making your media debut in rags.
Leif Valstad is a very sophisticated killer; it would disgrace him if his
family were portrayed in an unsophisticated light.”
A dry understanding settled over him. “Am I going to have to talk to them?”
“Under no circumstances should you even so much as look at them,” Maier
answered firmly. “Nor should you regard the reporters in Norway. If I’m not
mistaken, you’ve already been coached about the limitations on what you may or
may not discuss regarding the ongoing investigation. Anything beyond that is
determined by your level of tact, which is why I recommend silence from you.”
“In Norway?”
“Oh, yes!” Maier’s grin returned. “There’s quite a story already developing
over there. The violence and corruption of the US influencing a Norwegian
expatriate to such unspeakable crimes until at last discovered by his visiting
Norwegian relatives. Very nationalistic spin. You’re all being hailed as
unfortunate heroes! Here, however, there are a lot of murdered Americans and no
murderer to execute. They’re going to begin calling for blood, likely yours,
and that is what brings your suit here.”
Anders’ head buzzed with this information, bringing him on the verge of feeling
something before it teetered back. He sat on the bed, suddenly exhausted. “You
want me to look good for the camera, basically.”
Maier pointed at him excitedly with both index fingers. “Exactly!
Unfortunately, you are a very attractive family, so you can expect a lot of
rather invasive media attention. I suggest keeping your curtains tightly drawn,
especially considering you’ll be housing Leif Valstad’s daughter… and what
you’ll be doing to her indoors.”
Anders should have felt affronted at the comment, but he could only acknowledge
the necessity for privacy and wondered if she would even ever allow him near
her again after what he’d done that morning and last night. That brief wonder
floating through his thoughts stuck to the forefront of his mind. He should
have been thinking about the inevitable inconvenience and intrusiveness of
media attention derailing his normal life, but he was caught on the question of
what she might do in response to what had happened. The first feeling that
finally broke through in him was worry. He stood up quickly, bracing himself on
his good leg that was now sore from overuse, and snatched up the cane as he
headed towards the door.
Maier followed him with an eerie lack of surprise at this sudden change, his
words equally as unaffected, “You’ll need to be very careful with what you say
to everyone, not just reporters. They’ll be approaching your friends,
coworkers, ex-classmates, dry cleaner, anyone who might have insight into your
personal life.” The small man raced ahead of him and inserted the keycard into
the slot to Simone’s room, apparently having anticipated their destination. He
continued speaking as they entered despite Anders immediately becoming
distracted by searching the empty room. “I’ve scrubbed your social media
accounts, but I’m not your public relations manager. This is ultimately your
problem to handle with the caution and discretion it requires.”
She wasn’t under the bed, in the closet, or in the bathroom. That worry began
to edge into panic. “Simone, please come!”
“I am going to debrief Miss Valstad privately,” Maier said as he laid out
something white and lacey on the bed. “So, I’m afraid you must leave.”
Anders circled the small room again, pausing when he accidentally locked eyes
with the painting of Leif, that accusing glare seeming so aware of what he’d
done. The guilt loomed over him, casting a dark shadow as he could feel the
tremendous pressure of it beginning to bear down.
“I know it was wrong,” he muttered aloud, his thoughts too loud to be contained
in his mind. “I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want to hurt her. I did what I
could to make her feel good, I didn’t hurt her.”
“Far be it from me to inquire, but a guilty conscience needs no accusers,”
Maier said airily, stepping into his line of vision to block that awful glare.
“You have my curiosity, if not my interest. What exactly didn’t you hurt Miss
Valstad with?”
Anders’ mouth hung open, the weight of what had happened on the precipice of
his mind, but not quite within reach. “She’s not here. I don’t know where she
is. I don’t know where she is.”
“Did you look where you left her?” Maier smirked, mimicking the deliberate
slowness to Anders’ words before turning towards the window and saying in
English, “Miss Valstad, I can hear you breathing. You’d better work on that.”
Her bare foot stepped out on the windowsill before the rest of her emerged from
behind the curtain. Anders swallowed his surprise; the curtain didn’t even
appear to have bulged where she had hidden among its folds. She stepped down
from her hiding spot, her face impassive as she kept it focused somewhere
around Maier’s chest until she brought it slowly to the agent’s face. Anders
noticed with a hollow feeling that she didn’t acknowledge his presence at all.
“I didn’t know you were so fluent in Norwegian,” she remarked pointedly.
“Henrik told me that you said something very interesting to him yesterday.”
Maier’s mouth twitched once more into its polite smile, but there was something
else in his face as he leaned towards her that made Anders’ neck tense. “Did
I?”
“How long were you going to wait to tell me that I’m their carry-on to Norway?
Until we were on the way to the airport?”
He turned to Anders, mild amusement etched everywhere on his placid face but
the dead space of his eyes. “I had assumed that the good news would be this
young man’s privilege to relay to you, but I see now where assuming gets us.”
Anders jumped at the sudden movement of Simone grabbing Maier’s face and
shoulder and she threw him onto the bed, the edge of the plastic garment bag
crinkling under their weight as she held him down and growled, “I don’t need
you fucking with me, Maier, I’ve evidently got my uncles for that!”
Anders’ ears burned at her harsh words as he reached to pull her off the man,
but Maier stopped him with a raised hand and gleeful laughter, the disturbing
high-pitched noise a startling departure from his usual monotone.
“Be careful with mee-heehee, Miss Valstad, I’m a-ahAHA- wounded man, remember?”
Maier said mockingly, his speech high and stilted through his laughter.
She responded by grabbing the curve between his neck and shoulder, squeezing
hard while his back arched off the bed and his mouth fell open in a howl of
pain. Anders flinched to yank her away, but for some unfounded reason, Maier
still held up his hand in a now twitching signal to hold off. Anders couldn’t
look away from this grotesque display, watching the man’s grimace twist into a
grin while his laughter gasped and panted out of him under her grasp. Seeing
her anger and hatred pour into Maier’s pain echoed something in him drawn to
the agony this man was receiving. It should have been him beneath her,
subjected to whatever punishment she needed to enact on him to alleviate the
pain he’d caused her. He wasn’t sure how to seek a forgiveness he didn’t feel
he’d deserved on any level, but he had to give her something, some sort of
justice or retribution.
“Simone…” he started, the name coming out raspy through the thick filter of his
guilt.
“Anders Valstad,” Maier’s clinical tone was uncanny and abrupt through that
crooked grin, “I’m afraid I must ask you to leave.”
“I need to talk with her!”
“You’ll have a nine-hour flight to talk all you want,” Maier responded, his
tone flattening as his patience thinned. “What you need is to prepare for a
ten-second walk that will likely determine the public’s perception of you and
your family.”
“Why not keep me locked up and under surveillance? Whose idea was this? Yours?”
Simone demanded, leaning more heavily on the agent. Her lip curled back
menacingly from her teeth as she said in a low, warning murmur that chilled
Anders’ spine, “I’ve paid your price, Maier, now you pay mine.”
“You’re not very good at bargaining, are you, Miss Valstad? The objective is to
make me ask for less, not want to get more. Do you often find that people want
to get more and more out of you?”
Her hand shot upward and wrapped around Maier’s throat, a feral growl building
in hers to a frustrated cry as she shook with effort, seemingly just from
trying to resist strangling him. Anders had to keep his feet firmly rooted to
the floor to refrain from pulling her away from that psychopath, but his will
to obey Maier’s signal to hold back was disintegrating. At the very least, she
was assaulting a federal agent, if not a murderous associate of Leif’s. That
she didn’t even seem to be aware of the dangerous impact of her actions said
much to him of her shattered mental state.
A sick, heavy weight added to his guilt as he suspected that he may have only
set back her healing, perhaps irrevocably after last night and his bumbled
attempts to soothe her mere hours ago. Seeing her in this nearly savage state,
the weak hope that she had not been aware enough to form memory of it fizzled
down to a grim acceptance that he very well may have lost her forever. That he
had even hoped for such a selfish thing confirmed to him that he never did
deserve her, regardless if it was equally wished to spare her the anguish of
defilement. Defilement. He couldn’t doubt that it was anything other than that
now. Those reedy and sophomoric ideas that it was anything less because she’d
climaxed or had consented to him in her fevered daze were only pathetic excuses
to assuage his own shame. None of that had spilled over into allowing the
defilement he’d welcomed into their love.
Maier’s voice broke through the loud wailing of his thoughts, his professional
tone incongruent to the vulnerable position he lied in beneath the savage
girl’s rage. “As you can see, this is a private conversation. I’m not going to
tell you again. Go put on that suit and practice your best traumatized glaze
for the camera.”
“Listen, I only-”
“What is it that you want, Anders?” Simone interrupted, though she kept her
glare fixed on Maier’s neck. Anders froze, his shame choking the sound from his
voice. He wanted too much to say. Impossible forgiveness, utter condemnation,
undeserved mercy, ruthless punishment. “Do you want to ‘help me feel good’
again?”
The venom in those words stung. He needed more. He needed her to flay the flesh
from his bones. He needed to scream, but all that came was a whisper. “Speak to
me.What… What can I do to help? Anything…”
He could see Maier’s amusement at Simone’s silence, those black hole eyes
darting between her hard stare and his undoubtedly tortured face with the zeal
of an entertained spectator. Anders waited for her wrath to turn on him, to
press him down beneath her and inflict pain on him as she had Maier, but
seconds dripped by slowly only in her silence.
At last, she answered with a softly spoken, “Leave.”
 
 
It felt eerie to wear this suit again and prepare once more to get into a
stranger’s vehicle to ride to the airport. Henrik combed his beard, wetting it
down to a more tailored edge. Less mountain man, more sophisticated, as the FBI
agent had insisted. There was nothing sophisticated about the brutality of such
violence. Henrik could never understand the romanticizing of something so ugly,
as though murder was more fascinating than horrifying. Yet there he was,
playing along in single-minded desperation to get out of this hell hole,
dressing himself in finery like a beast decorated in flowers and jewels before
the ritual sacrifice. He wondered if that was how Leif had seen people, as
candidates for sacrifice to whatever drove him to kill, but he recoiled from
the prospect of wondering how Leif thought on anything at all. He did not want
to understand that murderer’s mind. An irrational fear cried out in him that if
he could understand any part of it, he might find that the same cogs of madness
that turned his brother’s mind would begin turning in him.
“Are you done making up your pretty face, princess?” Vidar asked from the
bathroom doorway.
“Are you done being a complete and total asshole?” Henrik quipped back. “I
don’t know what you’re in such a hurry for. The plane won’t take off any sooner
if we’re early.”
“And I want to be sure that we’re on that plane when it does.”
Henrik couldn’t fault him for his impatience. It was hard not to feel like the
rug was going to be pulled out from under them at any moment before they make
it out of this Hell. There were many corners a murderous maniac could be hiding
behind before they arrive back in Norway. An uneasiness bestowed in him a need
to hear his brother’s voice even if it was nothing but irritated surliness and
sarcastic jabs.
“It’s pretty weird that Anders is going to be the first one of us to have a
kid, right?” he asked, grasping for conversation. When silence stretched on in
response from the room, he nervously babbled on, “It feels like he just
graduated upper secondary school a few years ago and here he is, taking a kid
into his home. They’re not going to look like father-daughter, though. More
like brother-sister. Er, brother-half-sister. She really took after her mother,
thank God. Oh, hey, you know who is going to be super happy about this? Mom!
She always wanted a daughter, I mean, she tried four times and got none, but
now there’s going to be a girl around for her to do girly stuff with! Guess
we’ll have to get used to having a baby sister around to break up the boy’s
club, eh? You know, this is going to be really good for-”
“Will you shut the FUCK up?!” Vidar shouted from the room. Henrik did, his
mouth snapping shut in surprise at the acrid growl in his brother’s voice.
“She’s not a kid, she’s not Anders’ daughter, and she’s not our god-damned
sister. She’s nothing! She’s not even our niece because that maniac isn’t our
brother, remember? Stop saying that bullshit like any of this is normal!”
Henrik stepped out of the sanctuary of the bathroom, his heavy brow looming low
in a disapproving frown at the insensitivity of his brother. “Hey, asshole,
what the hell is your problem?! Like it or not, Simone’s family! It’s not her
fault she’s his daughter, but that doesn’t make her any less related to us!”
Vidar sneered at him in disgust. “You’re an idiot if you believe that. She
doesn’t even know what family is. Her version of family is a hard cock and a
hard bitch of a mother pretending not to notice.”
Henrik was nearly staggered by this crude cruelty. This wasn’t the brash
wisecracker he knew. “What the fuck, Vid?! What the actual fuck?!”
Vidar stood up from his leaned perch against the small writing desk and began
pacing the short width of the room, a rigid tension to his posture that was
sharp and angry as he grinned mirthlessly and said, “Don’t misunderstand me, I
don’t like what happened to her. It’s sick. It should never happen to any
child. But it did, and it made her what she is. No amount of pretending or
playing house is going to change what she is.”
“Okay, Vid, I’ll bite,” Henrik relented, folding his thick arms over his wide
chest, the jacket of his suit stretching at the seams. “What do you think she
is?”
Vidar’s entire demeanor shifted at the question. Where there was anger now
became nervousness, sweat shining along his temples as he seemed unable to stop
fidgeting with tugging at his sleeves and his widened glare darting around at
nothing. He sighed agitatedly through his nose and dragged his hand over his
face before he started to say, “She’s, uh…” He paused, huffed out a short
nervous laugh. “Simone is what she was made to be. It’s not complicated, right?
I just think it’s useless to try to make her into something she’s not. It’s…
irresponsible to even try. You and Anders have just been confusing her; it’s
like… it’s like trying to feed a wolf only bread and saying it’s not a
predator. When it’s all she’s known, it’s actually cruel to deny her of it,
right? She needs, um… that kind of dynamic to feel loved. It’s hardwired into
her psyche at this point. Really, I just want to give her what she needs. It’s
good for her, you see?”
Henrik’s gut tightened in revulsion as he listened, his brother’s words making
less and less sense until he couldn’t guess what he was talking about. It was
obvious to him that Vidar was only agitated and fatigued. In fact, he was too.
He no longer paid any mind to what had just been discussed between them,
writing them off as meaningless bickering. That’s what they did, after all.
They always bickered and it seldom ever actually mattered. He tuned out the
pointless jabbering as he bent to put his shoes on, the fine leather having
been cleaned and polished of the mud from the field. He wondered why they would
return the clothes that had been splattered with the mud from that crime scene,
but maybe they didn’t make that connection. It was funny. Special Agent Maier
was the one who had personally taken the clothing as evidence and he was the
one who had personally delivered them back cleaned and devoid of even a stain.
They might not have been the best detectives, but they ran a good laundry
service. Henrik chuckled to himself at the thought, finally bringing Vidar’s
blathering to a pause.
“… Are you even paying attention?” he groused.
Henrik cleared his throat before his chuckle could grow into a laugh. “Oh, no,
sorry, I spaced out for a minute there. Heheheh! Ohh, wow… What were we even
arguing about?”
Vidar stared at him as though he had grown two heads. “We were discussing
Simone’s role.”
“Oh! Right!” he exclaimed, embarrassed at his absentmindedness. Vidar really
hit the nail on the head when he’d said trauma did funny things to the mind.
He’d have to be careful not to make this into a recurring habit. “It’s pretty
weird that Anders is going to be the first one of us to have a kid, right?”
 
 
Simone touched the soft curls she had tamed her neglected mane into, her
reflection showing the lie she was to maintain to the public. The makeup and
the ivory lace dress brightened her sickly complexion closer to its usual
golden undertone and the plum pea coat encouraged a more composed posture than
the defensive hunch she wanted to curl into. It was a clever, disgusting lie.
She would have to get used to being a lie, though. This was easier to maintain
if she just considered it training. Her lips pulled at the corners, revealing
her teeth, all straightened from braces and whitened from a diligence to
hygiene her mother had drilled bone-deep into her from a very early age. She
practiced smiling for a moment, trying to find the divide between grinning and
baring her teeth. Both a smile and a bite could be weapons. She tried to
maintain her smile when she heard the door open.
“Well, well, well,” Maier said from the doorway, his clinical voice somehow
more sarcastic than if he’d been able to achieve any other tone, “I think
Heaven is missing an angel.”
“It won’t take much to make me vomit, Maier, so please don’t press me,” Simone
responded, sincerely and without ire.
“Just don’t do it in front of the cameras,” he said, approaching her from
behind as he watched her watching him in the mirror. She tried not to visibly
tense. “You won’t see or hear from me after today. Not in any traceable way.
Any contact I have with you will be secondhand at closest.”
“Is this our tearful farewell?” she asked, insincerely and with ire now.
“This is a warning,” he answered. “And an apology in advance. Should you see me
in person, I will not come to you as a friend. I will be a member of the
network in the employ of the Marceaus.”
“Hmm, an apology…” she nodded, pursing her painted lips. “And whatever you do
to me will be nothing personal, right? I don’t see any difference, if that’s
the case.”
“Au contraire, mon frère. All of our dealings have been quite personal to me.
I’m hanging my greatest hopes on you; I wish you luck in carrying out both of
our desires. That said, I hope to live long enough to be reckoned by Leif
Valstad, so please forgive me should that will to live drive me toward any
undesirable actions against you.”
Simone stared at his face through the mirror, the degree of separation
emboldening her to look long enough to see him. It was none of her business to
know him and she had no desire to understand him, but she could know him the
way he preferred to be known. He had earned at least that base respect from
her.
“Thank you,” she said. “For your honesty. Not with just me, but with yourself.
I’m finding that to be more valuable the more I notice its absence in those
around me and within myself.”
Maier’s face didn’t change, but she had stopped expecting it to. “You sound
like him sometimes. Increasingly so, in fact. It’s really quite charming, but
you should resolve your own identity before they come for you. There’s a
psychiatrist in Trondheim who is interested in helping you, if you don’t mind
that he’s part of the network and probably only interested in studying you.”
The carefully cultivated focus and peace she had constructed within her
collapsed under his observation, causing her breath to pause as her chest
constricted in alarm. It wouldn’t have been so disconcerting if she didn’t feel
her father’s presence so powerfully in herself that it sometimes felt like he
was eclipsing her. Sometimes, she wished he would. She could robotically
dedicate her will to a greater cause, but she would always have to deal with
her thoughts, her feelings, and her terrible needs. Suicide was not an option
available to her but to carry on without the burden of being herself was an
idea that brought a powerful peace. Complete lack of identity was an
impractical dream, though. She needed to have a functioning mind if not a
healthy one, at least.
“I… uh… I would appreciate the help,” she forced herself not to mumble or
scream. “Is it time to leave yet?”
“One more thing,” he answered, reaching into his pocket.
Her tightened chest could breathe again when he produced Bjørn’s watch and she
drew in a deep breath of relief as she touched the worn leather straps, the
texture familiar and comforting after so long of feeling alienated and adrift.
She might have thanked him, but she was unaware as she wound it without setting
the time first. It didn’t matter that the time would be off. Her hands were
shaking again, making the winding process clumsy and slow, but the insect
movements of the tiny cogs were soon enough squirming to life once more. She
held it to her ear and listened to the soft ticking, the feel of the leather
and the sound of it working reminding her of the turmoil in the moment she
admitted the confusion of feelings she held to her own father. Her feelings had
only grown more intense and less clear since then; the lust and love both at
odds and blending with the fear and hatred. She missed him. It was a dirty
trick played by a mind he had methodically broken, but she missed him.
The reporters were crowded outside the entrance door, flocking around the
windows and peering inside for any sign of their approach. Simone joined her
uncles outside the elevators, each emitting a jumble of emotions that boiled
down to a heavy gravity on them. Her knees shook and heart pounded achingly as
she stepped up to Anders, schooling her features not to break down crying when
he slowly brought his downturned gaze up to her. No, she couldn’t face him yet.
Stepping to his side, she swiftly clutched his hand as they had been instructed
to do and kept her stare forward. His fingers curled around her hand to engulf
it, his palms sweaty and his scent heavy with alcohol recently imbibed, but
otherwise his touch was thankfully as mechanical as hers.
Maier looked them over appraisingly, his FBI persona veiled over the kindred
creature she knew peered out from behind those stale dead eyes, as he
instructed, “Ikke se på dem, ikke snakk med dem, ikke bli provosert av dem.
Fortsett fram til kjøretøyet, Simone kommer først, Henrik beveger seg til
passasjersetet, Anders følger Simone, Vidar følger Anders. Forstått?”
A muttered response in affirmation chorused from the men and then they were
walking, their nice shoes clicking along the stone tiled floor of the lobby and
hitching Simone’s anxiety up with each step. Her modest heels nearly cemented
to the floor when she balked at the flocking cameramen on the other side of the
glass, their united flurry of motion as they pointed their lenses seemingly
directly at her immediately engaging her flight response. She couldn’t go out
there. She thought she knew what to expect, but faced with them now, she
couldn’t move. Anders’ hand tugged her arm when he kept walking as she stood
frozen, causing him to turn to her and she knew he saw her fear, but she
couldn’t control herself.
“Come, kjære,” he softly commanded, his arm wrapping around her waist and
pulling her against his side. “They are not to hurt you.”
Her heart raced like a hummingbird crashing around in her chest as he nearly
dragged her along, her arms wrapping around him automatically for comfort. If
she could think, she would know what this closeness would look like and in the
back of her mind, she laughed at this image of her clinging to this tall and
handsome blond-haired-blue-eyed savior like some corny fantasy paperback cover.
At the front of her mind, however, the chaos of panic reigned over her as he
pushed and pulled her toward what her brain could only interpret as fatal
danger. The clamor of voices hurled at them the moment the doors opened was
overwhelming.
Making their way through the swarm, police officers shoved them back as Simone
caught only snippets of questions, “How many victims did-” “- Valstad keep any
murder trophies from-” “Simone, where were you when-” “Did you know-” “- deny
any rumors that the I-80 Killer-” “- any history of abuse-” “Miss Valstad, did
you know that your father-”
Microphones and lenses reached out to them like swords eager for blood and she
couldn’t stop herself from looking around wildly, the camera flashes startling
her senses in a pulsing strobe of light. Henrik’s hulking mass stepped up to
flank her exposed side and she looked up at him gratefully when he petted her
head. This was new. Usually their size and strength threatened her, but now she
found protection in their intimidating masculinity. She could feel humiliated
at this pathetic idea later. For now, she had to keep moving. Henrik broke off
when they finally made it to the large unmarked black SUV and Anders’ arm slid
away from her waist, turning her to help her into the backseat with his hand on
her lower back. Before she could stop herself, she stood on her tiptoes and
wrapped her arms around his shoulders, pulling him into a hug he returned with
a swiftness that ached her heart. The furious flashing of cameras and the
betrayal he had wounded her with didn’t matter in this moment. She had needed
him and he was there for her. Tears slithered down the sides of her face as she
clung to him and she could hear him apologizing again and again into the
burning bite at the crook of her neck, but too soon they were pulled away from
each other. Maier gripped Anders’ shoulder and Simone retreated into the cover
of the vehicle before her shaking knees collapsed. Vidar pulled her into the
middle seat, his long arm reaching behind her shoulders to yank her against him
as he smiled at her reassuringly.
“You are ready to go home, sweetheart?” he grinned, a dark possessiveness so
sorely familiar in how he looked at her.
She couldn’t think to answer or pull away, locked frozen under his sharp eyes
as the panic from the reporters shifted into panic at his touch. Anders climbed
in after her and she once more found herself snugly tucked between these two
men with her mind too far gone with fear to resist. A rush of warmth bloomed
low in her abdomen and high in her cheeks at the tactile memory, issuing a
blackened slither of deep self-loathing along with it. She clenched her thighs
together and hated herself.
***** Chapter 43 *****
Anders should not have ordered so many gin and tonics at the hotel bar, but by
the time they had arrived at Chicago for the layover to the flight to
Copenhagen, he had begun to sober up dangerously.
“Vidar,” he sneered down at his brother lounging in the waiting area by their
gate. “Let’s go find something to drink.”
“Go by yourself,” Vidar sneered back.
“No! We gotta talk,” he tried not to slur, sober enough to know he was failing
in that task. “And I gotta drink. Right now. Come on.”
“Ohhh no. No, no, no way are we going to talk in public when you’re drunk. Fuck
all the way off with that idea,” Vidar said firmly, slinking down further into
his chair. “Take Simone with you if you want to talk.”
“She’s not old enough.”
“Fuck, don’t you start on that bullshit too,” Vidar grumbled as he pressed his
fingers to his forehead in aggravation. “She’s not a child, for Christ’s sake!”
Anders teetered on his feet, confusion hurting his head. “What? No, she’s not
a… I mean she’s not legally old enough to drink in this country. Wait… you
don’t think he was lying about that, do you? Shit... Shit, she looks younger
than twenty, doesn’t she?!”
“Remember the whole talking thing I’m not doing with you?” Vidar frowned. “Fuck
off.”
Anders glowered at him before pivoting on his heels and walking out into the
busy terminal. His brother was usually right, but he was always a tremendous
jerk about it. Except for last night. There was nothing right about that. He
needed a drink before he started thinking again.
“Gin,” he said as soon as he caught the bartender’s eye. He decidedly hated
airport bars. They were too sterile and controlled, the atmosphere already too
oppressive from the heavy police presence and constant urgency of flight times.
He suspected they watered down their booze and made up his mind to drink twice
as much based on that assumption.
“Gin and tonic? Coke? Soda?” the young bartender asked.
“Gin.”
Two hours was plenty of time to work up a decent drunk and twenty hours was
plenty of time to sober up. He leaned against the bar counter as he drank the
first gin and something, the taste ghosting over his tongue unnoticed as he
tried to become interested in the baseball game playing next to the screens
running cable news stations. It was dreary work.
“Is this seat taken?”
Anders blinked out of his daze when he realized the question was directed at
him. He glanced at the woman, then at the several other unoccupied chairs at
the bar. He wondered briefly if she was either rude or an idiot before it
occurred to him that he was about to be hit on.
“Oh…” he frowned. “My English… not so good. Sorry.”
“I don’t mind,” the woman smiled, wriggling onto the stool next to him. “Wow,
you get into a fight or something? You’re all banged up, buddy.”
“Yes,” he answered stiffly. He waved to the bartender, calling out, “Gin!”
“Make that two!” she added.
Anders glanced at her again. She was attractive, maybe just a little older than
him or his age, friendly and forward. There was no reason for him not to be
flattered at the attention, at the very least. He was used to these types.
Easy, hearty women who knew what they wanted. Uncomplicated, predictable, fun,
comfortable if only for an evening. Two hours was plenty of time to waste
getting acquainted with the American breed of this type.
“My name’s Chloe Cole,” she smiled, all porcelain and perfect between red lips.
“What’s your name, hun?”
“Anders,” he answered, leaving out his last name. “You are from here, Chloe?”
“Colorado.”
“Ah. Chloe Cole from Colorado, it is nice to meet you,” he smiled.
She giggled. He wasn’t sure at what, but that’s how these things went. He
drained the dregs of his glass before swapping to the fresh one the bartender
placed in front of him. A strange exasperation irritated him since she’d sat
next to him. Maybe he wasn’t drunk enough to relax yet. Or maybe he was too
drunk to know this was supposed to be fun and easy, something he’s done a
couple dozen times before. He frowned as the bitter taste lingered too long in
his mouth.
“And it’s nice to meet you, Anders from…?”
“Norway.”
Her nose wrinkled and she gave a frown that was too tailored for maintaining
attractiveness to be sincere. “Wow. You’ve seen the big news about that crazy
killer from Norway that got away from the cops the other day? What a
clusterfuck! I wish they didn’t tell us anything about it until they catch the
nut again.”
Anders looked back up at the baseball game almost reflexively and shrugged out
of his suit jacket, feeling suddenly too warm to the point of sweating. “No, I
do not know.”
“You kidding? It’s all they wanna talk about on tv!” she lamented, turning her
face up to the television screens. “See? They’re even talking about it now!
Like there isn’t anything else going on in the whole wide world.”
He didn’t want to, but his eyes shifted to the other screen. Indeed, there was
Leif’s impassive face, neither smiling nor frowning, the professional shot even
one he’d recognized from the architecture firm’s website except with the words
“SERIAL KILLER AT LARGE” in red across it. The liquor sat heavy and frozen in
Anders’ gut as the photo minimized next to a newswoman speaking, the closed
captioning moving too fast for him to translate before it cut to moving
footage. Chloe was saying something, but all he could hear was his own thoughts
mentioning that he knew that hotel shown on the screen. That was their hotel.
How odd. And there were the reporters, the cameraman struggling through the
flock to get a shot of the people exiting the hotel. And then there they were.
He no longer heard anything, not Chloe, not the airport noise, not the raging
din of his own racing thoughts as Special Agent Maier came out, followed by an
irritated Vidar looking stonily forward, then Henrik and Simone and himself. He
was distantly aware that the woman next to him abruptly left. As the camera
shakily zoomed in on Simone’s tearful face gazing up at him with her body
pressed close as she stood on her toes, she looked like she might kiss him
before leaning forward in a hug. He finally broke his stare away from the
screen.
“Gin!” he called out.
 
 
“Gross,” Simone murmured, watching as the television screen showed a still of
her clutching onto Anders, a slight breeze floating her long hair away from her
made-up face.
There it was, the damsel in distress swooning against her knight in shining
armor. She popped up the collar on her coat and hid her face behind it in pure
mortification. It looked more like a model photoshoot than a bombardment of
reporters descending on a traumatized family. They looked tragic and intimately
close, the shot far too flattering to be appropriate for the seriousness of
their circumstances. She’d shot a man between his eyes to save them, dragged
her father’s murderous attention away from them at great harm to herself,
directed them to safety and was almost too ready to kill for them again at any
moment, but there she was, looking like a fragile pretty thing begging to be
protected. More than anything, she regretted reinforcing these regressive
stereotypes, but that was exactly what Maier had wanted to encourage. It made
her sick with resentment. When the headline for this segment read on the screen
“Beauty from the Beast?”, she couldn’t stop the audible groan erupting from her
throat. It would almost be preferable if they’d pegged her as crazy and a
possible killer to follow in her father’s footsteps like Agent Gladwell had
believed. That would be troublesome and dangerous, but this was far more
humiliating than she could have predicted.
“It is… good picture, yes?” Henrik asked, his voice soft and encouraging.
“It’s demeaning,” she responded, muffled from beneath her coat collar. “This
entire culture is demeaning. There’s no reason to include us in this bullshit
circus.”
“I did look good,” he noted proudly.
She couldn’t appreciate his attempts to lighten her mood, but she couldn’t be
cold to him either. Henrik was the only one willing to be seen with her,
anyway. “You always look good, Uncle Henrik. You’re the ‘Beauty from the
Beast’.”
“We are the beauty,” he determined confidently.
She peeked out from her collar, her smile still hidden under the scratchy wool
coat. “That’s very inclusive and positive of you.”
His good-natured grin faltered just slightly in the way his face would become
blank when he didn’t understand something, but he gave her a thumbs-up despite
his confusion and said, “Awesome!”
She did manage to laugh then, even if she didn’t completely feel it. It didn’t
have to matter what the world thought, after all. It’s not like she could ever
be a part of it anymore.
“Ah… I go… to Anders, okay?” he said as he stood up.
She almost moved to follow him, but the discomfort at the idea of being around
Anders again so soon won out over her discomfort at leaving Henrik alone out
there. It was bad enough when just one of them was out of her sight; adapting
to not being able to hear or see that they were alright throughout the day was
already shaping up to be rough on her. Airports were perhaps the most secure
places for them, though. She assured herself that she didn’t have to worry so
much here, or anywhere. If this “network” Maier referred to was efficient
enough to have infiltrated the FBI all the way from their supposed base of
operations in Europe, there was little difference she could make in trying to
protect them. Still, taming back those instincts proved easier said than done.
She glanced up at the television, revulsion roiling her gut at finding pictures
she recognized from her mother’s social media accounts plastered across the
screen. A beautiful, successful family with a dark, deadly secret. Too ripe for
the media to resist and no reason for them to do so. She walked over to the
wide window instead, looking out at the tarmac and the green beyond it. In
about an hour now, she would be leaving her home country to enter a completely
new life. She had no idea what that new life would be like and with the clues
she currently had, especially after recovering her memory that morning, she
didn’t dare speculate. Living with a man she couldn’t bear to look at without
bursting into tears, in a country she didn’t speak the language of, with
nothing to her name but what she had on her, she didn’t dare speculate. It
didn’t have to matter. Her new life wouldn’t really begin until the network
brought her before her father. Until then, she needed to become stronger. Her
focus shifted to her reflection in the glass and she inhaled sharply in shock
at seeing Vidar’s image directly behind her.
“You are okay, sweetheart?” he asked, placing his hands on her shoulders to
steady her.
“Uh… uh-huh…” she nodded dumbly, her heart not ceasing in its racing gallop at
his nearness or how silently he’d sneaked up on her. She tried to step away,
but he only stepped forward to her side, slinging his arm around her shoulders
and pulling her toward him easily. That specific note of family in his scent
mingled with the stale vodka that still clung to him, transporting her thoughts
instantly back to last night. Her breath hitched at the pulse of arousal and
anger flaring in her and she wriggled to try to disengage this unwanted
contact.
He smiled out at the view as he held her still and said, “You are happy, yes?
You live with your new master. You serve. But you are not with him. Why?”
His hand slowly rubbed up and down her arm in a caress so similar to how he had
soothed her last night as he had pushed his cock into her ass. Intentionally
similar. She shuddered at the memory of the confusion and terror mixing and
heightening with the fever as he invaded her body, his gentleness at the time
almost worse than if he had been uncaringly rough. It was the threat of
roughness, the sense that he could decide how he wanted to handle her that
terrified her the most. He was trying to evoke that same helplessness in her
and it was working despite her knowledge of his manipulative trick. She was
abruptly short of breath and sweating in response to these purposeful
reminders, reducing her ability to think or control her reactions. This man was
clearly every bit her father’s brother, but he was still not her father.
“I don’t have a master,” she said, taking a small victory in how her voice did
not waver.
“You don’t?” he mused. “You don’t belong to Anders?”
“I belong to no one.”
“You are lying,” he said, turning that sharp smile down to her. “But I forgive
you. You belong to no one, you are belonging to everyone. That is what you
want?”
The hand stroking her arm slid up to her hair, tangling in the strands to card
his long fingers into the roots. How often her father had led her around by the
roots of her thick hair ran through her mind until the tactile memories led up
to how Anders had done it last night, holding her still to let this man, her
uncle who she had trusted as much as she had come to trust Anders, invade her.
That stab of betrayal still bled within her heart, but she was far enough away
from it to revisit it without being blinded by the agony. With Vidar so
craftily forcing her to revisit it now, she could analyze it differently. Where
the desire for survival and the desire for sex should have divided to determine
what was a willing act and what was forced had been melded together by what her
father had so often done to her. Every line blurred. Pain, pleasure, love,
fear, lust, survival, rage, passion, it all blended together until the meaning
of each was lost. Or perhaps it was only her that was lost.
“Belonging…” she whispered, tasting the concept like foreign fruit on her
tongue.
She looked up at Vidar’s face. Try all she might, her perception had always
been blunted when she tried to see either her father or his brothers. It was
like looking at a painting too closely to tell what it was supposed to be of.
All similar brushstrokes and materials, but she couldn’t step back far enough
to see the bigger picture. However, she had been watching her father long
enough to recognize the pieces of him in these men.
“When did you see a space for you in me?” she asked.
His sharp smile softened into something less guarded as melancholy shifted that
focus inward. There it was. Confusion and shame. Regret, perhaps, but it was
far too late for that.
“The Golden Key Motel,” he began. “You did want to lie, to protect Leif. He
hurt you, so long, so much, but you love him. You are a masochist, a
submissive. I…” His hand tightened in her hair, the familiar sting making her
draw in a sharp breath that cleared any of that confusion and shame from his
expression. “… I can suit such tastes in you.”
Her mouth fell open into a nearly silent, “Oh…”
A masochist, a submissive. If only it had been that simple. She wasn’t
completely ignorant to those sexual games and roles people played, but outside
of recent experience, such things simply didn’t occur to her. Sex had been a
means to its own end, something messy enough to not need further complication,
and she had never had a partner she trusted enough to explore those options
with. It made sense now that he’d said it in such simple terms that she was a
masochist and submissive without even realizing it, but it left out so much
that still couldn’t be explained. She felt so young and green now faced with
the evidence of such knowledge and experience Vidar evidently had of these
matters, and really, she was young and green. There was so much in life she
didn’t know; this reminder of that fact made her mourn for the life she would
very likely not live to experience. It frightened her, but that was the risk of
what she had to do. Time was precious; there was not enough of it to waste on
anger or regret.
“I don’t know much about that,” she admitted.
“You don’t?” he chuckled, his laughter dying off as his disbelief deteriorated.
His stroking fingers in her hair stopped when a grave discomfort overtook him.
“You… don’t. Faen i helvete, what did you think we were doing? Anders, he grab
your hair and he… You did want it.”
She wasn’t sure if she should respond. There was a desperation in him to hear
the answers he wanted to hear. Needed to hear. An impulse to deny him that
response had her ask instead, “Does it really matter what I want?”
He froze, startled at the question, and she caught a glimpse of him in that
moment. He needed to believe that he hadn’t done the wrong thing. A suspicion
chased through her mind and she followed it on a hunch.
“Earlier, you asked me not to call you uncle. Does incest make you so
uncomfortable?” she asked.
“Of course,” he answered, disgust gnarling his expression.
“But you fucked your niece.”
“You-”
“You fucked your niece,” she cut him off. His hand fell from her hair and he
stepped away from her, his confident and sly composure collapsing under what
she could recognize as the emotional distress of an internal crisis. She was
very familiar with that experience, but instead of that empathy encouraging her
to sympathize and soothe, she moved closer to him and continued, “You’re able
to ignore the fact that we’re related, so I must ask, what else can you ignore
to get what you want?”
That strange presence of her father was strong in her then, her words narrated
to her in his voice before coming out of her mouth as though he were whispering
what to say into her ear. It felt like he was actually near her.
“You think you know what matters to you,” she said, stalking slowly around to
his front, keeping her face carefully towards the window instead of directly to
him. “You’re not a savage. Just because you forced me into sex I couldn’t – and
wouldn’t – consent to, that doesn’t mean you’re a rapist. Getting my consent
just didn’t matter as much as getting your dick in me. Besides, you had Anders’
consent. That’s worth far more than mine. Why should what I want matter so much
to you now?”
When Vidar twisted away from her, gripping his forehead in the stress her words
put on him, she could feel Leif’s cruel amusement beside her. The watch wrapped
around her wrist felt warm and alive as she recalled something he had said to
her shortly after gifting her that watch. She grabbed his forearm, her reach
drawing her sleeve back to reveal that timepiece, the gold and glass catching
the light as she held him still and stepped close to him.
“When you strip away everything society has told you,” she recited, Leif’s
voice meshing with her own, “everything you believe what we should be, what is
it that you really feel?”
It was suddenly easy to look directly into his startled dark blue eyes to
search out his fear of being honest with himself. She envied the simplicity he
had available to him in achieving that honesty after one linear set of self-
made obstacles. Her own honesty was a goal that shifted away from her as
fluidly as her sense of identity. Her lips pulled away from her teeth in a
grin, or perhaps it was just a baring of fangs.
 
 
“Did you know I can still juggle?”
Henrik looked incredulously at his very, very drunk youngest brother. “I’ve
never seen you juggle once in your entire life.”
Anders’ grin widened as he took three of the empty glasses from the collection
in front of him and swiveled off the bar stool, wavering as he found his
footing. “Well, you’re going to see me juggle now.”
Before Henrik could reach out and stop him from trying, Anders tossed all three
glasses in the air and passively watched as they fell and shattered on the
floor. Everyone within hearing range turned and stared at the loud crash while
Henrik was caught between hiding in mortification and dragging him through the
airport by his shirt collar.
“What the fuck.”
Anders burst into laughter, clutching his sides as he managed to choke out,
“HaHAAa! I never said… pfffahaha! I never said I was any good at it! HAH!”
Henrik had never seen prompter service than the bartender closing out the tab
and asking him, with an impressive politeness despite also threatening to call
security, to leave. Henrik then opted to drag him by his shirt collar, but his
brother spoiled the humiliation by simply being wasted enough to find the whole
thing hilarious.
“That was not funny,” Henrik frowned.
“It was very funny!” Anders insisted, struggling to keep up with his heated
pace. “I was famous for that joke in university!”
“Well, you’re not a student anymore, asshole, so act your age!”
“I’m still only in my twenties!”
“For another two weeks! Shit, I am on the edge of just leaving you here!”
Anders stumbled over his own feet, his shoes clapping loudly on the floor as he
struggled to avoid falling. Henrik yanked him up harshly, not pausing in his
aggravated march through the crowds that had begun to gawk. Between having to
tiptoe around Vidar’s temper tantrums and now literally having to pull Anders’
away from his own idiocy before he got kicked out or arrested, he felt like the
mother to two massively overgrown toddlers. As he complained, he was very aware
that he sounded eerily like their mother.
“You’re a damned fool, is what you are! Are you aware that people are going to
recognize you now? It’s not just your own dumb ass that you’re embarrassing
anymore, shit-basket, you’re making all of us look like assholes with that
behavior!” he nearly yelled, yanking his brother to walk faster.
“Since when did you care about what they think?” Anders slurred.
“Oh, probably when the whole fucking world started watching us!” Henrik fully
yelled then, his booming voice drawing stares from all directions. He winced,
glad none of them probably spoke Norsk, and clenched his jaw shut as they
marched on.
“So, you’ve seen us on the news, then,” Anders said conversationally as though
he had no idea that Henrik was a centimeter away from screaming at him. Perhaps
he was drunk enough to be that unaware. “That was fast. Did you know that they
found the remains of 78 people buried at father’s property? 78! Just imagine
that many people – dead! And we were going to make it 81!”
“Shut up,” Henrik grumbled. His gut clenched at hearing this. He could have
avoided knowing that and been able to sleep a little more comfortably for it,
but now that knowledge would squirm in his brain for the rest of his life.
Everything he was finding out about Leif, the brother he’d known his entire
life but had been at such a literal and figurative distance since being taken
to America, seemed like a new and shocking horror on a list of horrors. It made
his initial theory that Leif had Münchausen syndrome by proxy with his daughter
seem so trivial when a few days ago it was enough to make him weep. A serial
killer. Their family would never escape that shame.
“Could we stop for a second? I think my leg is bleeding.”
Henrik came to an abrupt halt, causing his brother to stumble into his back but
he was solid enough not to even budge from the impact. “Oh, shit, I forgot
about your leg…”
“Itssokay,” Anders slurred heavily, plopping down on the floor right there in
the hall. He poked around where the stab wound was with clumsy hands, searching
for the moisture of blood through his dark slacks. “I can’t really feel it
right now. Or anything. I took a few more of those painkillers before you
showed up.”
“You compounded oxycodone with alcohol?!” Henrik shouted, drawing stares once
more. He barely noticed. “People go into comas from that, you bumbling prick!”
“That doesn’t sound too bad.”
Henrik’s concern shifted into alarm. He knelt next to him, keeping their faces
level as he chose his words cautiously. He wasn’t good at this sensitive stuff,
though, and he was never more aware of that than when he said, “Hey, don’t talk
like that. Don’t even think like that. We’re all going to deal with this shit
and get through it; there’s no dropping out. If you commit suicide, I’m going
to kill you.”
“That’s the sweetest threat I’ve ever gotten,” Anders giggled at him, chuckling
to himself softly before throwing his head back in full laughter. Henrik felt
mildly offended. It took him several gulping breaths to calm down enough to
speak again, but when he did, that mirth left him abruptly and he seemed almost
on the verge of tears. “I just… I’ve done something bad and I don’t know how to
fix it.”
“Well, what did you do? Maybe I can help.”
Anders hunched forward and hid his face behind his hand. “What I did to her, I…
She won’t even look at me anymore.”
“Who? Simone? She clung to you like a baby monkey earlier,” Henrik grinned
reassuringly. He felt conflicted encouraging his brother on this subject,
knowing what he’d done with her, but Anders wasn’t doing that anymore and
Simone never seemed so well-adjusted as she had today. He didn’t like that
Anders was sleeping in her bed, but he didn’t doubt that she needed help with
the night terrors after the life she’d lived. “You’re a good father figure to
her. She just needs you to show her that there’s nothing to fear from you. Of
course she’s going to get a little spooked of anyone now and then, just don’t
let her go on believing those fears. You got to be solid and consistent.”
Anders peeked out at him, looking so much like the littlest brother he knew
from their childhood. “So… I just have to force her to see that there’s nothing
to be scared of?”
“Yeah!” Henrik grinned. Maybe he wasn’t so bad at this sensitivity stuff after
all. “Be firm! Like pushing someone out of a burning plane to parachute to
safety! Okay, not the best example before we fly, but you know what I mean.”
Anders smiled back at him, his eyes brightening with hope and understanding.
“Be firm and push her to make her see… I think I know how to manage this now.
Thank you, Henrik. You’re a good person.”
Henrik beamed at having received that compliment for the second time that day.
He really must be better at this than he’d thought.
 
 
Simone awoke on the plane, confused and bewildered but at least knowing enough
to assure herself she was supposed to be there. There was no Leif to coax her
back to functional consciousness; she would have to do this herself. Her mind
felt oddly split. Half of her was a savage, chaotic mess and the other half was
a rational observer to that jumble of disorganized thought. She looked around,
seeing the other passengers either asleep or fitfully near it, the windows
revealing the pitch dark of night outside. The last thing she could recall, it
was the afternoon and the sun was shining bright outside the airport window.
Her brow furrowed as she dredged up more information. The airport was in
Chicago and they were headed to Europe. It had been a while since she’d lost
time. She reached into her pockets and found her plane ticket, taking it out to
find a pack of gum wrapped in it. Blearily, she chewed a piece of the
mysteriously acquired gum, the strong mint flavor waking her up a bit and
driving that dryness from her mouth. She tried again to find her last known
memory only to find a headache waiting for her each time she attempted it.
“Fine…” she muttered bitterly, accepting that she would have to be patient with
her broken brain.
In the meantime, she cautiously stood up and looked down the aisle, her eyes
fully adjusted to the dim lighting to see Henrik’s head towering above the
other passengers, his bearded face turned upward as he reclined in sleep. At
least she was on the right plane. In the jagged way her thoughts bounced around
in this stage of recovery, she realized she had to pee. Badly. The light inside
the lavatory was blindingly bright after awakening in the darkness, but she was
able to narrowly avoid wetting herself and making this million-hour flight any
more miserable. The roar of the apparently jet-powered flushing mechanism was
deafening, startling her into slamming against a wall. As she washed her
trembling hands, she realized that at some point she had swallowed her gum.
“You’re doing great, champ,” she smiled sarcastically at her savage half.
She pushed open the door to exit the claustrophobic space, but a large body
crowded her back inside and clapped a hand over her mouth before she could cry
out in surprise.
***** Chapter 44 *****
The unreality of Simone’s life made any mood-altering experience more potent in
its dissociating effects. The high stress of violence, the hormonal flood of
sex, the physical shift of drug use, even an interrupted sleep pattern could
unmoor her further from reality and herself. It had taken her this moment, her
front pressed against the plastic wall of the tiny airplane lavatory while a
man hiked up her skirt from behind and kept his hand mashed firmly to her
mouth, to determine that the psychological effects of what she had been through
were directly influencing her judgment. She should have been throwing her elbow
back into his ribcage until he folded and then screamed for help, but there was
no urgency to fight. Not yet, at least. Though her heart raced and time seemed
to slow, there was no panic or rage where her mental state had driven her to
protect herself from this attack. In objective awareness of the myriad of ways
this could go, the multitude of injuries she risked by resisting simply
outstripped the possibility that she could successfully defend herself in her
current condition against a man of his height and strength. When his hand
hesitantly moved off her mouth and she did not scream, he rewarded her by
moving her hair away from her neck and sucking on her sweat-dampened skin. She
could smell him now: alcohol and family, the combination draining the strength
from her muscles until she was shaking just to remain standing. Sexual
submission to her male relatives was no longer a conscious choice for survival;
it was a defense mechanism she could not control this time, and this effect
alarmed her more than being bullied against a restroom wall.
She whimpered as he yanked her panties down to her knees and kicked her feet
apart, the wordless pleas in her fearful mewling quieting when he fondled her
hip and ass like one would stroke the flank of a spooked horse. That he was
soothing her was a hopeful sign that he would be gentle, but she still flinched
at the hot, smooth tip of him pressing against her vagina, smearing a bit of
the wetness she was bewildered to feel had gathered at her opening. The body
was capable of many extraordinary feats to mitigate physical damage and she
marveled at the infuriating evidence of how adapted the female form was to the
violence of men. His panting was heavy against her cheek as he crouched
slightly to align them, his breath hot and moist from how his mouth watered in
anticipation of sex. Her body responded to his desire, warmth pooling in the
cradle of her pelvis to signal the onset of arousal, but it was far from enough
to ready her for his entry. The discomfort of being stretched so unprepared and
uncaringly began to slick her cunt for him rapidly, enabling him to advance
into her with an urgency that had her mouth fall open in a stuttering gasp to
manage the pain.
A cold sweat broke out all over her when she felt the wound inside her vagina
stretch dangerously and she shut her eyes and evened her breathing to relax
enough to allow him into her body more easily. He responded to her surrender
with a deep groan, his hands caressing up her sides under the ivory lace dress
as he kissed her neck and pumped into her further. The unwelcome intrusion of
his cock sliding out and then sinking back in deeper was alien in the absence
of the consuming, savage arousal her father would infect her with when he
forced sex on her. This was an animal act, a mechanical performance of sex
devoid of emotion and motivated on necessity. What pleasure sparked along with
the pain was only a physical stimulation of nerves wired to derive pleasure for
this purpose, but it was enough. This was likened more to the sex she was used
to in her adolescence; the meaningless hotel hookups to somewhat alleviate a
need she didn’t even know was there until she’d found it in her father’s bed.
She could pretend he was Leif, the Leif she had fallen into such a strange and
overwhelming romance with before his murderous nature had turned on their
family. The scent was correct, the drive to dominate was similar, the forceful
taking was right, but he was not her father.
“Please, uncle… stop this,” she whimpered.
His driving hips slowed at her request and he let out a shuddering sigh, but he
did not stop. It would have been more saddening if she’d actually expected him
to cease. She had to bite her lip to keep from yelping when he bottomed out,
his tip mashing too painfully at her limit, and he pressed her against the wall
more firmly to keep her still when she twitched and squirmed in the pain.
Small, high-pitched grunts escaped her throat with each jerk of his hips as he
began fucking her in earnest and his stifled groans were loud this close to her
ear, their sounds a conflicted chorus of pain and pleasure above the steady
drone of the airplane engines. Beyond the physical pain, the rudimentary sexual
stimulation, and the repulsion of violation, this was all so oddly easy to
accept. Earlier that same day, she had nearly killed when this was attempted on
her, but that murderous rage eluded her now. Perhaps it was because she had
been primed to attack earlier or perhaps she was simply caught too unaware this
time. Or perhaps she needed this.
His kisses became bites along her neck that made her sigh in pleasure and the
thrill of teeth so close to such vital arteries and veins, prompting him to
bite harder and make her moan. Finding enjoyment in this act no longer shocked
her as much. The lines had already been blurred and boundaries meant so little
anymore. The longer he fucked her, the more her body responded to him, and she
was warmed to a steady arousal at this point. It didn’t have to matter that
this was forced. The things that used to matter didn’t really as much anymore.
Sex was sex, whether it was wanted or not, whether she loved him or not,
whether she was fully conscious or not.
“Ha-ahn…Oh, that’s… ah…” she breathed, tipping her hips back to offer him an
easier angle and earning her a strong suck at her pulse point that made her
eyes flutter shut and toes curl. “Hnn, please, uncle, I’ll be good, just…”
His hands felt nice as they fondled and caressed her body. Touch was a thing
she had always craved and seldom received throughout her life, making this
recent trend of frequent intimacy all the easier to accept. He leaned off her
enough to slip his hands over her breasts, squeezing them in his palms in a
rough way that had her moaning for him again, and she bucked into his motions
despite the punishment it put on her. The pain was good now. The erogenous
connection between the pain in her cunt and the pleasure he kneaded into her
breasts sparked her ascent to climax. He seemed to sense this, either in the
clenching of her pelvic muscles or the heightened pitch of her moans, and drove
into her faster, an almost feverish excitement to his thrusts. Her nails
scraped the plastic wall and her head bowed low in shame as she met those
thrusts.
“Oh, God-!” she gasped, his harsh pace from behind rubbing the thick ridge of
his tip against a heavenly spot toward the front of her cunt. Each thrust
pushed her higher and higher to climax, making her beg in panting breaths,
“Don’t stop, don’t stop, don’t- ah!”
When his cock twitched in her at the first sign of his orgasm, she came apart
on him, gasping through the pulsing pleasure that rose in jagged spasms deep in
her cunt. Her back arched as much as it could against his pressing body while
she broke that crest of ecstasy. Shame and self-loathing crashed down on her
even as she still came, smothering the satisfaction into a purely physical
response that was stemmed by a sickened revulsion to her weakness. She was an
animal, a subhuman beast trained to entertain these men’s base desires, the
family whore. He pulled out abruptly and she sagged against the wall, her knees
quivering like jelly as she fought to remain standing while she listened to him
stroke himself rapidly. He let out a low, guttural moan and she felt the hot
slick of his semen shoot onto her bared ass. Her pain, humiliation, and
subjugation were all part of his pleasure, something he had in common with
Leif. Although she could now turn and see who it was who had violated her this
time, she stood frozen in reluctance to look. None of her options were at all
comforting.
The option to go on not knowing was taken from her when she heard Vidar say
through his panting breaths, “Gud, Simone, se på deg… du er perfekt… Ah… I,
ah…”
Her arms slid down along the wall to her sides, the watch dangling loosely on
her thin wrist. She opened her eyes and looked down at it, observing the motion
of the gears inside it squirming. It only operated on the power she gave it.
Wind it up, watch it go. When she had stripped away everything society had
taught him to believe, this was what was waiting to be released, but she did
not manage to tear his shroud of denial or rip the truth out for him to see.
Nonetheless, she was curious to know what would happen and now she knew. Her
father would have been satisfied with the results, but she wasn’t. If she
somehow lived to be as old as Leif, she might be able to show people what lied
in the depths of their own darkness as well as have them see it.
Slowly, achingly, she straightened, holding her skirt gathered above the mess
on her ass as she wiped the tears from her face with the hem of it. Her voice
cracked as she asked, “Is this what you really wanted?”
His silence answered for him. His sadism was something he had in common with
Leif, but the guilt, shame, and self-loathing were what he had in common with
her. There was no need for her to answer or berate him; this was all a
punishment on them both. Punishment on her for tempting, punishment on him for
giving into temptation. Neither of them were in control.
 
 
“It’s a very pretty open-face sandwich.”
Anders looked up from the herring smørrebrød he was already halfway through to
see Simone sketching her beef tartare one with the pencil and blank diary she’d
somehow pilfered along the way. She looked so focused when she sketched; the
serious expression exclusive to the task, her hands and eyes moving quickly as
the rest of her was stock still, a slight furrow in her smooth brow. He could
watch her for hours, but he looked away before she caught him staring.
“It taste pretty,” Henrik informed her before guffawing at his own joke.
Anders was surprised to hear her laugh and even respond back with, “Hey, I
don’t have a phone anymore, so I have to take annoying food selfies the snooty
still life way.”
Henrik laughed at that despite Anders knowing damn well neither of them had any
idea what she’d just said. He glanced between his older brother and Simone,
wondering when they got so chummy as to sit across from each other and joke
casually. She leaned across the table and put her onions on Henrik’s fourth
herring smørrebrød, stacking them to mimic the impractical but aesthetically
pleasing way they arranged their toppings. Henrik grabbed her little sketchbook
while she was distracted and she nearly launched across the table trying to
snatch it back, both of them grinning like misbehaving children as he made a
show of keeping it just out of her reach and while he looked inside. She wasn’t
acting like a traumatized victim. If he didn’t know the terrible things she’d
been put through, both at Leif’s hands and his own, he wouldn’t have thought
she’d had a care in the world. It was unsettling to see her acting so normal
when nothing about her was normal.
“Whoa! Look at this, littlest brother!” Henrik grinned, showing a page to him.
“Wait! That’s- Don’t do that!” she protested, straining for the book, all
pretense of play gone in her demand.
Anders couldn’t help but look, seeing a very detailed and shockingly
recognizable drawing of him and his brothers as they were when they were
children. She even got Vidar’s nerdy glasses down to the comical thickness of
the lenses. He took it from Henrik, now fully out of her grabbing reach, and
looked at it more closely. This wasn’t just a guess at how they looked as kids,
this was an exact recreation in pencil and paper.
“How did you… How you… did this?” he asked, glancing up from the sketch to see
how she reacted to him addressing her directly.
Her face was not turned to him nor did she look at him, but she responded in a
shy mutter, “It’s just a drawing.”
He kept watching her as she brought the knuckle of her index finger between her
teeth and bit down on it nervously. He knew he was making her uncomfortable,
but if he was going to start being firm and consistent, he had to start
somewhere.
“It is perfect. You did have… photo?” he asked.
He could see her jaw tense as she bit down harder. Indentations of her teeth
were pressed into her skin when she pulled her knuckle away and pursed her lips
before answering, “Um. Henrik showed me a photograph.”
Henrik’s attention was briefly turned away from his food at hearing his name.
“What did she say I did?”
“Nothing,” Anders answered dismissively, not wanting to lose this very slight
conversation he was having with her. His brother frowned at the obvious lie,
but resumed his breakfast. Anders turned his body toward her now and leaned on
the table as he continued scrounging up his English. “You did this from photo
showed one time?”
She wrapped her arms around her torso, hugging herself defensively as she
answered with a silent nod. That wouldn’t do. He had to keep her talking.
“You have a, ahh… photo memory, yes?”
“I have dreams that keep memories fresh,” she murmured.
She picked up her food and took a sizable bite of the raw meat mixture on
bread, fixing her gaze to something in the distance. This conversation was
over, signaled loud and clear. He sighed through his nose and sat back heavily
in his chair, trying not to feel so disappointed. It was progress, just not as
much as he’d wanted. He would be firmer in a little while.
 
 
The layover in Copenhagen was a few hours that stretched on to eternity as
Vidar tried to find anything to distract him. As usual, his brain multitasked
on several things at once and as he sat in the annoying airport sports bar
eavesdropping on conversations, watching a replay of a rugby match, speeding
through sudokus and solitaire on their game tablets, and trying to achieve
intoxication on overpriced beer, there was still an unfortunate amount of his
attention available to torment him with the thing he had done. There was no
point in ruminating or regretting. He’d done it and then he’d done it again. He
had no right to regret it after the second time, but the way her voice broke
when she asked him that plaguing question derailed all of his thoughts in a
cringe of utter remorse each time it replayed unbidden in his mind.
“Is there anything else you’d like to order?”the waitress asked in accented
German.
“Another pint,” he answered.
“Would you like any food or appetizers?”
“Certainly not from here.”
He didn’t look up from the puzzle he poked at on the touchscreen as she
hovered, apparently waiting for something that he couldn’t care less about
providing. Eventually, though, she seemed to get the hint and left. People who
couldn’t take no for an answer were beyond aggravating. Clearly, he didn’t need
anyone to lead him to what he really wanted. He knew himself. He was aware of
what he was doing and what he wanted and what he didn’t. Self-discovery was a
journey he’d ended in university like any other reasonably intelligent human.
He had over 35 years of practice at figuring out what he was and he was
comfortable with what that had turned out to be. Some insane girl who had just
barely exited puberty and didn’t know him at all couldn’t make him second guess
himself on these facts. He absolutely didn’t want to actually abuse her. The
crack of a belt striking across her bare skin was beautiful, but not the way
Leif had done it, not the way it had left her skin split and mottled blue in
bruises. He knew himself, there was just something like a sickness making him
think there was something in him he didn’t recognize. Incest was a sick,
repulsive wickedness and the taboo of it was one of the few sexual restrictions
of society that made sense. Leif had broken her so irreparably with it, molded
her into a perfect little slave to serve and depend on her master. If he
ignored the means, the result suited all his darkest fantasies.
“But that…” he muttered. The condensation on the mug dripped over his knuckles
and he watched the droplets crawl and trail moisture across his skin, the water
taking the shapes of snails slowly eating into his flesh. It wasn’t real. He
knew they weren’t real even though they tickled and itched as they chewed.
Is this what you really wanted?
“No!” he exclaimed, gripping his head to expel that horrible sound of her voice
cracking with sorrow.
The conversation at the next table paused at his abrupt shout and he could feel
that he’d drawn stares from those around them, but they could all piss off. Let
them gawk. Let them see the guilt written so clearly on his face and judge him
for it. None of them mattered any more than the dull-eyed cows they all
resembled. He’d fucked his niece - his blood-related, undeniable niece - and it
was good. It was better than good. He wanted to fuck her again and again, have
her every way he had imagined, have her screaming and sweating for him. Her
accidental admission that she had that kind of relationship with Leif was like
a cancer in his brain that had slowly eaten away at him. Her scent clung to
him, her sweet and clean sweat mingling with the deeper and thicker scent of
her arousal slathered on his crotch, transmitting animal sentiments of lust and
control to his brain. He wasn’t turned on by knowing, feeling, smelling that
they shared the same tainted blood. There was no further meaning to his desire
than fucking an exotic and beautiful sub. And she was so submissive when she
wasn’t mouthing off, whispering such poison into his thoughts, dredging up
urges and feelings that weren’t any realer than nightmares. There were better
uses for that sweet mouth of hers.
Is this what you really wanted?
He leaned forward and rested his elbows on the table and his forehead in his
hands. There was something wrong with him. This sickness kept twisting his
repulsion into further debauchery when all he wanted to do, needed to do, was
think. His brain was still scrambled by the acid - or whatever - Leif had dosed
him with. He never really felt like he’d woken up from that night, unable to
shake the suspicion that he was still hallucinating all of this. It was more
insane to believe that they’d been on the run from a serial killer than to
believe it to be a delusion, anyway. Leif still watched him from behind her
eyes, those same horrible storm gray eyes that flitted away from him in
nervousness and now shame. Forcing her and hurting her felt good in a way rough
play had never felt with any other partner. It was more than just play.
Punishing her, debasing her, dominating her gave him something back that Leif
had taken. No, not taken. Distorted. He was different in places and ways he
couldn’t name and it was frightening to encounter these changes, but when he
was with her, it all clicked together. The brutality of it all had a purpose.
She needed to be trained and he wanted to train her.
Is this what you really wanted?
No. It’s what Leif had wanted. Vidar pushed himself back in the chair, the
world around him blurring as his fractured thoughts merged into sharp focus.
 
 
Simone watched the news on the many televisions hanging at their gate, glad
that there was no mention yet of them or Leif, less glad that there was a
monstrous mud slide Bangladesh to soak up the media attention instead. There
never seemed to be any news unless it was bad news, but the bad seemed to be
what shaped people more. She couldn’t say that she really knew herself as well
as she did after these terrible and terrifying times. At the same time, it was
getting harder to believe she knew herself at all, especially now. It would be
so much better if she simply were nothing at all, her person an empty vessel
through which her goals can be achieved instead of this writhing mass of
confusion. If she were clear and empty of desire, thought, and emotion, life
wouldn’t have to feel so bad. Without feeling or desire, she could be free even
in the servitude of her circumstance and task. She shut her eyes and envisioned
glass fishing buoys rocking on the waves, knotted in frayed rope macramé, clear
and empty, holding a net hidden beneath the murky saltwater to trap the fish
that wandered through. Clear and empty, floating above the mayhem of the life
it collects below. The great white shark she traps might drag her down with it
into the depths, but she is watertight, empty except for the air that suspends
her. Down and down they sink into peaceful oblivion until they are nothing.
“Kjære.”
Her eyes blinked open to find Anders sitting closely beside her, his body
turned toward her and his hand holding hers atop where their knees touched. The
ocean was still clear in her mind, the waves lapping up her smooth sides.
Sensation tainted that peaceful nothingness inside her, just a glimmer of hurt
that ached where they touched and echoed a pain in her heart. She tried to
slide her hand out of his, but he tightened his grip.
“Kjære,” he repeated. His body heat and scent made her stomach twist into knots
and she leaned away, prompting him to only lean closer. “You… We are to speak.
Now. Please.”
She wasn’t ready for that. The betrayal was all too fresh. She needed more time
and distance to bury it deeper to where even he couldn’t exhume it. She
couldn’t even bring herself to look at any part of him, her face and body
twisting away from him in shame.
“I need you,” he whispered, the raw emotion in his voice tearing that thin
layer of protection she had managed to cage in her feelings with. She couldn’t
move, couldn’t even dare to breathe without the risk of coming apart. The
softness and sincerity he spoke with trampled her heart. “I do not want to hurt
you. Jeg har begått uutslettelige forbrytelser som har forårsaket deg skade. I
did… bad to you. I’m sorry. I am not good. I love you, kjære, do you
understand? I’m sorry. Tell me… Speak to me.”
It was so tempting to let him keep fooling her. She was never happier these
days than when she was with him. Even with the proof that he was lying still
aching in her violated body, an astoundingly large part of her wanted to just
forget what had happened and go back to believing that he could love something
as wretched and wicked as her. She couldn’t be mad at him for playing such a
nasty trick. She should have known better. That soft and warm love wasn’t meant
for monsters like her. He wasn’t budging from this vulnerability he performed
to her despite his act having been so clearly revealed. She might as well play
her role in this cruel game.
“I understand,” she whispered. Perhaps if she spoke quietly enough, he wouldn’t
hear her dishonesty. “It’s okay. I know you didn’t mean to hurt me.”
“It is not okay,” he insisted, his fingers interweaving in the spaces between
hers as he leaned closer. She bit her lip and kept her face hidden as she
fought to control the heartache he wrought when she felt him nuzzle his cheek
against her head. His stubble dragged her hair, making her scalp tingle as he
softly continued, “I want to help. Help… fix. Help you. I did bad to you, it is
not okay. Tell me to help. Anything, kjære, understand? Anything. I love you.”
It was quite a beautiful lie. He didn’t even have to do any of this, really. He
already had her trapped in a position where she had to depend on him so wholly.
There was nowhere and no one else for her to go to.
“I love you too, papa.”
***** Chapter 45 *****
“Keep your eyes closed, Simone.”
The room was already dark, leaving her in complete blackness when her eyelids
firmly shut. An echo of fear drifted up from her gut at the unknowns
approaching out of the darkness, but there was no need to be afraid. She was
also unknown, hiding among the hidden, but unlike those real and imagined
things, she knew there was reason to fear her.
“Exhale.”
Her breath rushed out of her lungs, warm and heavy like smoke, and she held
that ache in her chest at leaving them emptied. As she waited, she heard the
squeak of a glass container opening and felt the air shift as Leif held
something near her face.
“Inhale through your nostrils. Slowly.”
The air carried many particles that caught in her nose, burgeoning with scents
she did not notice before. Beneath the target she was to identify, she could
smell the detergent that clung to the cotton fibers of his shirt, the fragrant
oils in his shaving lotion and deodorant lifted on the rapid evaporation of his
sweat, the wood polish and ink that was smeared in trace amounts on his hands
and forearms from working at his desk all day, and a scent that was uniquely
and always simply him. Working past that familiar bouquet, she focused on the
target. Earth. Mineral. Wet.
“Clay,” she answered.
“Good.”
She waited among the dark as she listened for his next instruction, hearing the
snap of the lid on the airtight container and the slight clinking of hollow
glass as he brought out the next target. This could go for dozens of rounds
until she was lightheaded from holding her breath so many turns and her muscles
grew restless with the need to move, but she kept as quiet and still as he
liked her to be. However, it wasn’t enough that she be obedient; she also had
to be correct.
“Exhale. Hold… Inhale.”
Woody. Fruity, but stale and base. Plant cellulose, fresh. A sharp note.
Floral? No. “Fruit rind… pomegranate?”
“Good.”
She huffed out a relieved sigh. It was a lucky guess, but luck was as important
as skill. Valstads had both on their side. They went through several more
rounds. Black tea, beeswax, lard, burnt gunpowder, aloe vera cuttings, goat
hair, hydrogen peroxide, egg shells, salvia divinorum, thujone, camphor. She
was sweating halfway through, her nervousness mounting with each correct
answer, dreading the one that would topple her winning streak. Cedar wood,
juniper berries, deer musk, sauvignon blanc, wood varnish, neroli oil. Each
correct answer was met with the same response; his brief and calm “Good” that
thawed the chill of dread in her with the warmth of his approval. She was
shocked when she found out that she’d gotten them all correct. That almost
never happened.
“You’ve earned your treat today, Simone. Keep your eyes closed. Can you tell me
everything that is in your treat by scent alone?”
She cleared her lungs, paused long enough to reset her olfactory sense, and
inhaled with a laborious slowness when he held her treat out to her. This was
always the most fun challenge, mostly because she still got the treat either
way, but she wanted to get it right this time.
“It’s an oatmeal raisin cookie!” she smiled.
“Yes. But can you tell me what it’s made of?”
She concentrated, separating the individual scents from the overall
amalgamation that she could immediately recognize as the cookie. There was
always a trick to this preventing her from just referencing what she knew
commonly went into the confectionaries he rewarded her with.
“Wheat flour, raisin, brown sugar, oat, umm… butter, salt, egg, sodium
bicarbonate, vanilla, Saigon cinnamon…” she rattled off, mentally discarding
those components from her attention as she sniffed for that secret ingredient.
There was definitely something there, something familiar but odd. She leaned
forward, her brow wrinkling in concentration as she scoured her mind for that
scent. It almost smelled like him, but there was an intriguing difference
there, something that was both him and not.
“No peeking, darling girl.”
She flinched when she felt his hand cup the side of her face but thankfully she
did not give into the reflex to open her eyes, not even when he tilted her head
back and pressed his parted lips to hers. This was never part of the game, but
her bewilderment rapidly fell away to the heat of this contact. Their kiss sent
waves of tingling pleasure through her entire being, coiling outward from the
fire growing deep in her belly and fueling her need for more even as the
sensual slide of his tongue threatened to overwhelm her. He was being sweet and
gentle with her, almost hesitant in a way her increasing eagerness couldn’t
abide. She brought her hands to his shoulders and leaned up to deepen the kiss,
earning her a quiet moan from him that vibrated into her mouth.
“Hmm… ah, kjære…” he whispered between their soft and open kisses. “We should
not… not here… mmm…”
He sounded even stranger than he smelled, but these feelings he incited in her
were right. She squirmed in her seat, that restless need quickly making her
almost desperate for his sex. This felt like that first night, caught in a drug
delirium that made this sin so irresistible and simple. She briefly wondered
when the seat under her had become cushioned and when he had taken to sitting
beside her instead of across from her, but those details fizzled out of
importance when he pulled her flush against him. Despite that difference in his
scent and taste, he was just as potent and addictive. She licked into his
mouth, chasing more of that flavor and sensation as the rush of hormones
dumping into her system left her dizzy in arousal. The animalistic drive to
fuck burned in her muscles, urging her to mount and move on him, but she
couldn’t bring herself to be so aggressive with this aggressive male. A
thrilling quiver of fear tempted her to do it just to goad his wrath. He was
being too reserved, too patient, too kind with her. Her hand slid down his body
and he pulled away from her kiss, gasping when she cupped her palm against his
hardened length through his pants.
“Min Gud, kjære, du må ikke gjøre dette offentlig!” he whispered, tight in
alarm.
She opened her eyes in surprise — he only reverted to Norwegian when he was
either especially agitated or especially drunk— and froze when she was met with
a very flushed and flustered Anders. Her hands drifted away from him to press
against her head as she slid heavily back into her seat. Her seat on an
airplane. With Anders. Going to Norway. That’s right. Leif hadn’t played the
scenting game with her since she was eight or nine. She had completely
forgotten it had ever happened, but the memories were as clear now as that
vision she’d been in. It seemed so real because so much of it had been real at
some point. How she could forget something like that unsettled her more than
realizing that she’d been unknowingly making out with Anders. Her deceitful
body still throbbed with need, but the disturbing rediscovery of memories so
precious to her left her shaken to her core. She shouldn’t have forgotten. That
was why she still had a habit of smelling everything and probably why she was
so good at it; she would have connected the habit with the memory to keep it
fresh. There was no reason to forget, no cause for it to have been so
thoroughly blocked out of her mind.
“Why… Why…” she muttered under her breath, raking her nails over her scalp to
alleviate the pressure rising in her. “What could be the reason…”
Anders laid a comforting hand on her thigh, his roughened thumb dragging over
the lace as he squeezed and rubbed her reassuringly. She could feel his
sympathetic gaze on her while her eyes darted around unseeingly, focused
entirely inward, but his pity never grated her like it did from others. Why he
would pity her now was beyond her, but she didn’t have the attention to spare
on that quandary. She searched these memories for any sort of trauma or any
reason at all for them to have been repressed, but there was nothing worse than
nervousness and discomfort there. There was no panic, no terror, no violence,
no sex or molestation of any sort, only fond memories of bonding with her
father through this special game they’d played. The more she exhumed of these
memories, the more evidence she found that only told her she had every reason
to revisit and cherish them. It was their secret thing, an innocent and
interesting tradition between only them. All the times she’d felt unloved by
him, she would have clung to those memories for comfort. There was no reason
for her to repress them. There might have been reason for Leif to repress them
in her, though.
“Oh, Jesus…” she sighed, folding over her legs to curl tightly and tuck her
face into her hands as the weight of that thought nearly crushed her.
Anders’ hand shifted to rubbing her back, his touch light over the tender
bruises and cuts hidden beneath her coat and dress and stoking that flame of
desire in her. She burrowed deeper into herself, trying to maintain focus. No
one could take away someone’s memories without them knowing, but there were so
many holes in her past, jarring her like potholes in the road whenever she
tried to follow through her history. Entire places, people, life events would
go missing only to resurface at some benign reminder, sometimes only making her
realize they were ever gone once they’d returned. She’d thought it was because
of her madness and maybe it was, maybe it would always be, but Leif had played
his part in deliberately never bringing up that they’d ever had those moments
together. Surely, he would have mentioned or referenced them at some point. It
could only mean he’d wanted her to forget, to continue believing that there was
nothing to secure her emotionally to him so she would always clamber after any
opportunity to form some kind of bond. It was all so obvious in hindsight and
yet she still couldn’t see why. There was never any need to manipulate her so
thoroughly. She’d always loved him, obeyed him, idolized him. She could never
see his full pattern, never know the total intricacies of his design, and she
couldn’t bear the thought of how close she’d come to never being able to even
have the opportunity to find out.
“He’s alive,” she whispered. She didn’t know when she had begun rocking
slightly back and forth, the need for comfort running bone deep at the thought
of having killed him. The bluish tint to the edges of his features chilled her
into cringing. “He’s alive… he’s alive…”
This time, there was no fear accompanying that statement, only an alien sort of
relief. The watch at her wrist ticked loudly, pressed so close to her ear as
she cradled her downturned face. She didn’t know when or how or what would
happen, but she would see him again, that was the only certainty she had. In a
world where everything she knew was taken from her and everything she had was
gone, she clung to any certainty available. Until the time came that she would
finally take her answers from him, she would prepare, even if the only thing
she prepared for would be her death.
 
 
It was safety by the time they were all piled in Anders’ compact SUV, but it
wasn’t home until they were well within the city. None of them seemed to feel
all that talkative, an exhausted melancholy descending on their mood that was
sporadically broken by attempts to verbally acknowledge that they had somehow
made it home. What none of them wanted to vocalize was the anticipation of what
would come next. Anders turned down the winding roads in Henrik’s neighborhood,
the engine of his car growling almost in protest as he sped up into the turns,
but the vehicle handled well enough not to jar or sway the occupants. He was
sure Vidar would have had some nagging quip on his speeding if he wasn’t just
as eager to get to his house.
“I’ll call mother,” Henrik said as he unlatched his seatbelt, the vehicle
idling in front of his duplex. “I’ll calm her down before she freaks out on you
guys. Um… We should probably go see her, either way. Soon.”
“Right,” Anders responded.
Neither of them were sure how to leave off on that note, so Henrik lumbered out
of the backseat with an awkward, “Well… uh, so I guess I’ll see you guys later.
Drive safe.”
Vidar watched him as they waited for him to find his spare housekey hidden in
the little garden area leading up the walkway, a habit they all had fortunately
replicated from their forgetful mother having locked them all outside of the
house enough times. His head was still turned away from Anders as they drove
off once Henrik had made it inside the front door and hadn’t come running out
with a homicidal maniac chasing after him.
At the stoplight, waiting to turn back onto the main road, with only the gentle
hum of the engine and the rhythmic clacking of the signal, Vidar’s voice was
calm and clear through the quiet. “So, any plans for tonight?”
Anders rubbed his aching face in nervousness at thinking even that far into the
future and muttered, “Um… no, no just going to catch up on rest. And start
getting Simone set up in the guest room. That’s all for today.”
“Separate rooms, hm?” Vidar mused dryly. Anders frowned, feeling his blood
pressure already rise at the sarcastic remark he knew was coming. “You really
know how to make a girl feel wanted, littlest brother.”
“As if you’re the authority on what she wants…” he seethed in return. “My home
is her home too; she should have a space in it to consider her own.”
“You’re going to need a very long leash if you let her roam around that far
from your bed.”
Anders sneered in disgust and his voice rose without his intention, nearly
growling out, “Will you just stop saying that shit? She’s not a pet or a slave
or… whatever it is you keep thinking! We’re not like that, so cut it out!”
“It’s only been a few days and you’re already moving into ‘we’ territory with
her? That’s adorable.”
“You’re insufferable,” Anders spat. There was no point in talking when Vidar
got like this. The man was a seasoned expert in goading people to react and,
although Anders had a lifetime of practice trying to avoid it, it was still
easy to fall into his games. Eventually he’ll get bored. It was easier just to
let him run his mouth, as aggravating as that could become.
“I was only saying that I think it’s sweet,” Vidar said. Anders could hear him
grinning and he gripped the wheel tighter, steeling himself for the teasing and
testing that would undoubtedly continue. “And so classically you. You tip your
dick into a girl and you think you own her. And they say that I’m the brother
with controlling tendencies. Tch.”
“I don’t own anyone,” Anders muttered. He shouldn’t react, he knew that, but
these things he said stung worse to let them go uncontested.
“No, I suppose not,” Vidar slowly relented. “That would imply that you take
some sort of responsibility for what you own. Better that you both remain free
from any expectations with each other, right? No need to muck up whatever it is
you two have going on with things like labels or obligations.”
Anders adjusted the rearview mirror to look at Simone, finding her curled up in
the backseat, hugging her knees to her chest as her wide eyes watched and
examined everything of her new life out the window. Vidar was wrong. There were
already too many labels between them, too many angles through which his care
and concern for her could flow. Glancing between the road ahead and her image
in the mirror, seeing her chewing on her knuckle and her smooth brow furrowed
in some internal calamity of thought, that familiar pang of guilt stabbed
through him. He couldn’t help but feel responsible for the fear and nervousness
written so clearly in her expression because he was the reason she was there,
so far away from the home she’d known. That her home was a godless place of
terror and pain and he would provide her a better life did little to assuage
his guilt when he considered the price he had paid to have her, a price written
on her body no less. None of this had gone the way it was supposed to.
“Do you even know how to take care of a thing like her?” Vidar asked. “She’s
not your common stray, Anders. She’s more like a feral, exotic pet. You can’t
just keep her kenneled and kibbled with your dogs and expect that to be well
enough. She might be cute and cuddly now while she’s good and scared, but if
you don’t train her properly, that’ll change.”
“She’s not a pet,” Anders repeated in a grumble. She wasn’t his slave or pet,
but he had been able to take her on the basis that he was to be her “surrogate
master”. Hearing his brother address this subject in the context of ownership
without his even knowing that rolled around in his brain unpleasantly.
“All I’m asking is that you consider the kind of training she was receiving
from her previous master,” Vidar said, his tone strangely sincere and level, no
longer the languid air of nonchalance he preferred to tease with. Anders
glanced at him, but he still had his face turned toward the passenger window.
“The kind of dynamic she was responding to. You know firsthand that a well-
trained animal is happier than an untrained one. She could thrive under the
right guidance, or she could be allowed to suffer in the chaos of her madness.
It would be so very rewarding for all of us if you just allow her to be
trained.”
“What the hell are you even talking about?”
“You have to train her to fill her role properly. She needs at least one firm
handler to satisfy her will to serve and submit. Papa Leif did that through
force and pain and she’s seeking that from you now, isn’t she? Has she asked
you to be a little too rough, perhaps even directly asked you to punish her?”
Anders opened his mouth to refute these disgusting assumptions on their
relationship, but the memory of her pleading yelps and moans when he
experimentally drove into her too hard stopped his words in his throat. She’d
practically begged for him to keep hurting her that night after he’d scolded
her for mouthing off to that cop. Her pursuit of pain disturbed him. What he
almost did to her left him sick with guilt.
“She was abused,” he said instead. “I’m not going to feed into that cycle. Leif
fucked her up in a lot of ways, but that’s not her life anymore. She doesn’t
have to submit or serve to earn anything from me. She’s… lost and confused,
just reverting to what’s familiar to her to find any sort of footing.”
Vidar turned to him then and he could see his sharp smirk and raised eyebrow in
his peripheral. “Well! Look at you, psychoanalyzing the little psycho!”
“Jesus, shut up…” Anders groaned.
Vidar did not shut up. “I think maybe we’re both correct, which is all the more
reason we need to discuss this so immediately. If she is lost and confused
without the dominant-submissive dynamic, there’s no reason not to provide that
comfort. If submitting herself to the pain and control she craves from her
sexual partners brings her fulfillment, there’s every reason to provide it.
What experience do you have in BDSM?”
“None,” Anders answered flatly. “And none of your business.”
“Oh. That’s too bad. You had a firm grasp on her the other night, but without a
firm grasp on the concept, she won’t be getting everything she needs from you.”
Anders bit his tongue to keep from yelling, “That was a mistake. We should have
never… I should have never listened to you.”
“It could have been handled better, but for a first pass, it went well,” Vidar
shrugged. “We all had a good time, anyway. My God, did you feel how hard she
came? It felt like my dick was going to-”
“Is that really all you can think about?” Anders interrupted, abrupt in his
irritation. “I’m not talking to you about this… whatever this is anymore.
Simone is my responsibility and I’ll handle her the way I believe is best.
Chaining her to my bed and whipping her isn’t what I believe is best, so keep
that weird shit to yourself and away from my… from her.”
“I never said anything about whips,” his brother responded casually. “Although,
I could bring over a few.”
“Stop it,” Anders warned.
Vidar’s smirk widened into a full Cheshire’s grin, showing teeth as he twisted
in his seat to turn to Simone. Anders watched, caution dampening his alarm as
his brother asked, “Sweetheart, you are so quiet. Are you alright? Is there
anything we can do for you?”
Anders had to resist turning to see how she reacted, risking glances away from
the late afternoon traffic to check her in the rearview mirror as her wide-eyed
stare fixed to Vidar. There was something in the way she tensed her jaw as she
swallowed, something in the way she uncurled herself to sit properly. Vidar’s
eyes followed the slow movement of her legs as they crossed, baring just a bit
of her smooth thigh as she bunched the hem of her skirt in a tightening fist.
Something passed between them then, all of them, a weight in the air that gave
focus to every miniscule movement and reaction. The deepened rise and fall of
her chest as she breathed, the slight tilt of his brother’s brow as his grin
took on a more interested slant, the quickening of his own pulse as Anders
detected that strange wavelength of something almost dangerous, almost
antagonistic. It was her excitement, a thing straddling the lines between
fearful anticipation and needful desire, that drew their attention. He could
tell his brother was reacting the same way he was: like dogs with a cornered
rabbit, their prey frozen in fear as they waited for her to leap just so they
could catch her in their jaws.
“Jesus Christ!” Anders blurted out, needing this to stop before something, he
wasn’t sure what, grew out of this unbearable tension.
He couldn’t acknowledge what it was, the shame of it too excruciating to
consider. He caught the way Simone flinched at his sudden noise, seeing her
turn to look out the window once more, though with a much more troubled pinch
to her expression as she looked through the glass without really seeing. Vidar
only chuckled as he turned back in his seat, the corner of his wolfish grin
still visible in Ander’s peripheral as he gazed cheerfully out the passenger
window. None of them were looking in the same direction, each avoiding the
other as they rode to the same destination.
 
 
Simone could hear the dogs excitedly barking in the house up the long grassy
walkway to the boxy red house. The light on the covered porch turned on when
the door opened and a dark-haired boy came out with a charging wave of dogs.
Anders was immediately overrun by the pack as they jumped and yipped joyously
at his outstretched hands while he began trudging through the overgrown lawn.
Simone moved to follow, eager to meet the swarming dogs, but was stopped by
Vidar’s hand grasping her shoulder to pull her into a sudden hug. Her shoes
skid on the dirt as she struggled not to trip, causing her to lean into this
unwanted embrace.
“I do not think he did invite me in, so now I am to leave,” he spoke into her
hair, holding her forcibly to him. She shivered at the context of how she came
to be familiar with the feel of his body pressed against her, that same
disgusting tug of desire from earlier echoing as he spoke lowly, “I will come
visit very soon, sweetheart. I am a short walk away, you know.”
“Oh…” she whimpered, wincing at how pathetic her wavering voice sounded. She
shouldn’t let them see how they terrified her, especially not him. She forced
her arms to wrap around his chest, returning his hug without shaking as she
cleared her tightening throat and said, “That’s good to know. It’s nice that I
get to live so close to my family.”
She stretched out the last word, emphasizing the aspect she knew he reviled in
what he had subtly threatened her with. It both horrified and uplifted her when
she felt his fingers curl in her hair at the back of her head after she’d said
it. Her horror won out as his displeasure at her minor show of obstinance
became evident in how he tugged her head back and glared down at her. It was
all she could do to maintain a blank expression.
“Very soon, sweetheart,” he whispered, his face close enough to fill her field
of vision. Close enough to kiss. Close enough to bite.
The heat of a blush swept up from her chest to her scalp as her insides tingled
at what her muscles trembled to run from. This was so close to how her father
might react. The way he could twist fear into arousal was almost enough to
crush the surge of hostility that rushed up from that thick pit of darkness in
her. If she could not have love, then she would have hatred.
“Call before you come next time,” she whispered up into those narrowed blue
eyes. She could see his surprise shift into intrigue and amusement in the
slight twitch of his brow and curl of his crooked smirk.
His response was drowned out by Anders pulling them apart, his kind eyes
blazing with a wrath she’d only ever seen him direct to her father as he
snarled, “Ikke rør henne, drittsekk!”
She darted out from Anders’ arm hooked around her middle, nearly tripping over
the beagle that ran up along with the other dogs to join their owner in
barking. Her heart hammered and her haunches hummed with the need to keep
moving as she wrapped her arms around her body and paced compulsively at the
symphony of aggression from Anders and his pack. She watched, eager for
something she couldn’t name as he advanced on his brother, his normally relaxed
and easy manner completely transformed into a broad display of hostility and
threat. The patchwork pack of mutts swirled around them, baying and yipping,
some assuming the aggression of their master and some engaging in play to
disperse that aggression. Vidar backed away slowly, his hands held up palms-
forward and posture loose and passive in blatant surrender as he grinned and
said something she couldn’t hear over the barking and undoubtedly wouldn’t
understand anyway. Simone’s body reacted viscerally, but her mind was oddly
clearer than it had been all day. Or possibly two days. Time bent in strange
ways between cross-continental and mental traveling. Whatever he’d said was
apparently enough to stop Anders’ hostile encroachment, but the younger man’s
threat did not accept the peace offered in his brother’s retreat. She balked at
the sly wink Vidar threw her as he turned and began walking down the street as
though the confrontation had never occurred. However, it was still occurring
within Anders. His shoulders were still squared, his muscles bulged in the
restless demand of a fight response, and his hard expression was a far
departure from the calm warmth and kindness it typically exuded as he
approached her. She’d never noticed how large his hands were before as he
clenched and unclenched them, the knuckles distended and thick and his
calloused skin folding like leather. Fighter’s hands on a softhearted man. He
stepped through the long grass as she stood stuck under his heavy glare, his
anger rolling off him in waves.
She felt urge to placate and soothe before that anger latched onto her in the
absence of his target, an urge helped along by the exhilarating gratitude she
felt for him then. Not for saving her from Vidar’s uncomfortable
propositioning, but for showing her this switch in him. She could follow his
emotional pathways like a bloodhound on the trail of a scent and she found that
switch in him that turned him from rational, cooperative and passive to openly
and eagerly hostile. This call to violence was cooked out of polite society and
the profound breed of it her father possessed was as impossible for her to
follow as the rest of his inner workings, so she rarely had the opportunity to
study it. Here, in the clarity that was now coming to her more often and more
potently than it had in years, she could see through Anders and find the beast
that he kept bound inside him. In seeing him, she felt closer to seeing
herself, the self she’d thought she’d lost but she was coming to realize she
just never knew. What she didn’t have in common with normal people, she had in
common with the Valstad brothers: a unique psychological blueprint that went
deeper than their individual personalities and preferences. Inside the
landscape of her mind, she could reach her arms into that thick black pit where
murder was hidden and feel the shape of its jaws. The mantle of madness wore
her for so long, now it was time for her to start wearing it.
 
***** Chapter 46 *****
The sound of the spider crawling along the wrought iron of the barred
windowsill produced very little noise, but its many shuffling legs still made a
slight sound in the echoing silence. Its choppy, stop-motion movement was
interrupted by frequent pauses to examine its surroundings, its two largest
forward-facing eyes on its square head like a pair of circular sunglasses. The
small appendages at its front stroked over its fangs like an old man would
stroke his mustache in nervous thought, but in comically increased frequency
and speed. It made its jagged, meandering way around to the web tucked into the
corner of the windowsill and, curiously, plucked on the strands. The occupant,
a common house spider, eventually crawled over in eager anticipation of a meal
caught in its web. The visitor leapt onto it with a powerful speed and
precision, its fangs penetrating the thick carapace of the larger house spider
and injecting its venom to kill it quickly. The jumping spider had lured its
prey to it by making the house spider believe it to be prey. Fascinating.
“Your daughter has arrived in Norway,” a woman’s voice spoke in a deep,
palatalized French through the iron lattice in the window on the heavy wooden
door. Her words echoed off the stone masonry that made up the cavernous room.
“Thank you, Mrs. Marceau,” Leif responded.
The little visitor sat in the web, taking its time to suck the host dry.
 
 
Pretending to be calm was not doing much to alleviate that savage wrath within
Anders, aggression billowing like smoke from the roaring flame of rage within
him as he maintained a more-or-less friendly tone with Fredrik as he answered
the teenager’s awkward but polite questions.
“How long do you have to use the cane?” Fredrik asked.
“Until my leg stops hurting,” Anders replied, trying and failing not to sound
so stiff. He cleared his throat to cover for it and attempted to participate
more actively in the conversation his young neighbor seemed so eager to engage
him in. “Did the gang give you any trouble?”
“No, not really. They’re all good dogs. Bolle keeps trying to eat the corner of
your sofa, though.”
“Ahh, Bolle…” Anders sighed in mock aggravation. The white spitz mix perked up
at hearing her name, her tongue lolling out and eyes brightening up at him
innocently. The dogs still crowded around him, watching dotingly as though he
was the resurrection of Christ, but to a dog, he supposed he might as well have
been the dead come back to life after having gone missing for over a week.
There was no resurrection after the death that had almost caught him, though.
Not everyone was as lucky as Leif or Jesus.
“Um… Did you hurt it fighting that guy?” the boy asked.
Anders’s mouth twisted in a grimace of a frown, pushing down the reflexive
defensiveness with some effort before forcing himself to say, “I’d rather not
talk about it.”
“Sorry,” Fredrik responded, quiet now in awkward embarrassment.
“Here, let me pay you so you can go enjoy your evening,” Anders said, moving
towards the study for his checkbook.
The boy was as on his heels as his dogs, his shyness vanished in an instant as
he began speaking with renewed excitement, “You don’t have to pay me, Mr.
Valstad, it was fun! What was it like in that house? That girl’s his daughter,
right? She’s shorter than I expected. Like, tiny. Does that mean it’s true that
she’s going to live here, with you? So, you really saved her from that guy?
You’re all bruised up. Did he do that? Oh, damn! Did you get into a fistfight
with the killer!? That’s so cool!”
Anders pursed his lips and pulled his checkbook out of his desk, ignoring all
his questions in an effort not to lash out. “Of course, I’m going to pay you,
Fred. You worked, you get paid.”
He wrote out a fair compensation for the boy and handed him the check, not
meaning to glare at him as he did it but figuring his exasperated expression
was the only thing preventing the kid from refusing further. Fredrik took the
check, staring openly at the bruise that spanned from his cheekbone into his
eye from the haymaker Leif had thrown on him. Anders twitched away from that
stare, his bruises aching under that scrutiny.
Out of nowhere, the boy announced, “There were reporters hanging around
earlier, waiting for you to come home.”
A spike of uneasiness brought him to face Fredrik again in surprise. “What?”
“Yeah. I told the vultures you weren’t coming back until tomorrow and they flew
off,” Fredrik bragged proudly.
Anders tried to wrap his mind around the reality of reporters coming to his
home, invading his life with questions that would make him think and remember
the Hell he had escaped from. Every answer and every move he made would be
broadcast for the world to know. Anxiety poured into the corrosive mix of his
anger and frustration and he pressed the heel of his palm against his head as
he tried to push it all down.
“Fred, could you do me one more favor before you go?” he asked.
“Yeah, absolutely, anything you need, Mr. Valstad,” the boy brightened
cheerfully.
“Could you help me close all the curtains and lower the blinds?”
 
Getting Fredrik to leave was an aggravating process, but Anders had managed to
accomplish it without shouting or shoving, a promising testament to the
recovery of his shattered emotional control. He leaned against the door after
shutting it behind the boy, sighing heavily. He was exhausted, that’s all this
lingering anger was. But he was home and his bed awaited him. There were just a
few things he had to attend to before he could rest.
“Simone?” he called out into the house.
He kept his forehead pressed against the door, trying to calm that storm
churning inside of him. The dogs circling around him camouflaged the sound of
her bare feet on the hardwood, surprising him when he felt her arms wrap around
him from behind. He smiled and turned to her, that maelstrom of rage and
anxiousness in him abating as she leaned up against his front and pressed a
small kiss to his neck when he hugged her. She had been so affectionate since
they’d arrived home, only hiding away shyly when Fredrik had come out to talk.
He let himself bask in the relief of her forgiveness for having violated her
trust, indulging in the proof of it in how she nuzzled him and kissed her way
up to his cheek. Maybe this really was going to work out well despite all the
obstacles thrown in his way.
“Come, we are to go, ah, your bedroom,” he said, disentangling their embrace.
They made it five steps down the hallway before she hugged him again, pressing
herself flush to him and nuzzling the uninjured side of his chest. He gripped
her shoulders, almost prepared to ease her away so they could get on with the
necessary chores of the evening, but the feel of her body molded to him had him
slide his hands down to her ass and pull her closer. He craned his head down
and she rose on tiptoe to meet his mouth eagerly, her plump and shapely lips so
pillowy and welcoming; yet another attribute he was glad she had inherited from
her mother’s exotic heritage. It didn’t take more than a few seconds of this
delicious contact before his cock stiffened uncomfortably in the confinement of
his pants. That aggravating beast seemed to stir at any provocation from this
tempting creature in his arms.
His lungs seized when he felt her step closer, his certainty that she had felt
his eagerness brush against her flat belly confirmed when her lips parted from
his with her soft, “Oh…”
“Ah… It is…” he muttered, trying to find the English, his exhausted and
flustered mind leading him to none that would help. “Ah… Sorry…”
He didn’t want to pressure her, especially after what had happened, but he
didn’t know how to convey that. He shifted, embarrassed at his lack of control
when all she wanted was some reassuring affection, and leaned down to resume
their kiss. His heart sank when her arms slid out of their embrace and her
hands came down to hook onto the edges of his belt.
“Sorry, I’m sorry…” he repeated. He was a brute. It had been less than two days
since he’d broken her trust and he was already overstepping her boundaries like
some sex-addicted sociopath. He shouldn’t have grabbed her ass; he wasn’t
thinking, but that was always the problem. He couldn’t think around her. His
entire mind felt foggy and lost in her presence since she had admitted to
returning his love, but now he couldn’t even think enough to protect that love
from his foolishness. “I’m sorry, dear.”
She wasn’t moving away, just standing so close, her eyes cast down to where her
fingers had hooked onto his belt at his sides. Then, those fingers slowly slid
around to meet at the center, sliding the leather out of the buckle. He
hesitated to move or make a sound as he watched her undo his pants, the metal
buckle jangling as she opened his fly and attracting the dogs to come see what
was happening. His hesitance broke when her bare touch along his shaft sent a
heated shock of pleasure tingling up from his groin as she maneuvered him out
of his underwear.
“Wait… Wait, you…” he started to say, his vocabulary completely dissolving as
she stroked him.
She didn’t have to do this. She didn’t have to service him whenever he
displayed desire for her. He didn’t bring her there to just use her as he
pleased. He wanted to say all of these things and more, but as she bent at her
waist and swirled her tongue around the head of his cock, all that came out of
him was a strained sigh. Her deft tongue massaged the underside of his cock as
her mouth enveloped him, those plush lips stretching and sliding slowly down
his shaft a breathtaking sight. His back leaned heavily against the wall,
suddenly needing the support as she cautiously took him all the way into her
throat. The squeeze of her unyielding throat and the rub of his tip along the
back of it was almost too exquisite and, knowing how rare it was that someone
could deepthroat a man of his size, he couldn’t bring himself to say no to this
even if he’d retained the ability to speak in much of anything other than
expletives. Not that he had ever been able to say no to her on any other
account.
“Oh, hell, dearest, that’s so goddamned sweet…” he groaned between near-panting
breaths, gently carding his fingers through her hair.
That nagging shame burned in the back of his mind even as he moaned when she
slid him out of her throat only to slowly ease him back in, her tongue
massaging him in her warm and wet mouth and her lips sealed tight around him
the entire time. He didn’t want to wonder if it was Leif who had taught her to
suck dick so expertly, but his mind inevitably constructed that query, tagging
along the question of how young she was when he’d begun training her throat. He
hated these intrusive thoughts. He hated that he was so often reaping the
benefits of her abused past. He didn’t hate how dutifully she kept to a
consistent and slow rhythm, building up a blissful pressure in him while
keeping him just on the verge of being unable to resist orgasming. That feeling
that he was teetering on the precipice had his cock drooling precum copiously
into her mouth. He nearly fell off that edge when she backed off enough just to
swipe her tongue over his tip, tasting and swallowing down the excess moisture
while she slipped her tongue under his foreskin. His hips jerked in a spasm at
this, too much stimulation making him grip her hair and push past that curious
tongue in a reflexive movement. She gagged at the abrupt intrusion and he
released her immediately.
“Sorry! S-sorry…” he gasped.
He was too far gone to feel embarrassed at that impolite gaffe, his entire body
feeling tight and tingly and his sac heavy with the need to come. The warmth of
love that rushed up in him for her as she brushed it off like it had never
happened and took him back into her throat made him gaze down at her in near
drunken adoration. She was so beautiful, so sweet, so talented, and now she was
his. Somehow. He knew how. He didn’t want to think about it.
The dogs weaved around them, curious at what she had been doing to their
master, the movement of her mouth taking his cock probably reminding them of
eating as they seemed to be looking for scraps. Anders was just present enough
to know he would find this hilarious later, but watching them position
themselves around her as she serviced him so diligently, her small form bowed
to his dick, a very different impression came to him. He’d adopted another
stray, a rare and exotic animal that had been trained to perform. It was a
cruel visual joke and he hated that he was reminded of it, but there she was,
among his dogs, subjugating herself to perform this trained trick that must
have earned her a nice treat from her previous master. All she needed was a
collar around her pretty little neck. His cock twitched with the now
unstoppable inevitability of his climax triggering at the combination of her
wet mouth, the beautiful sight of her bowed and taking his dick so lovingly,
and the sickening depravity of that line of thought.
“Oh, fuck, fuck, dear, you’re gonna make me, ah, ah fuck…” he moaned, gasping
as she gripped the base of his shaft and worked his foreskin up as her mouth
slid down.
The opposing directions of her hand and mouth and her tongue massaging up his
shaft to swirl around his tip threw him abruptly over the edge and his fingers
tangled in her hair to hold her still as he began to pulse in orgasm. She
looked up at him, her silvery eyes expectant, knowing, wanting. He let out a
low and ragged groan with each deep throb that pumped his semen into her
waiting mouth, shuddering at the feel of her throat constricting to swallow as
he shot against the back of it. Her sensual hum in response to him spilling in
her vibrated against the tight seal of her lips around him, transmitting a
powerful shiver up his spine that trailed sparks through his body. When at last
that almost distressing high descended into a wave of overwhelming relief, it
drew the breath out of him in a long and shaking sigh.
She slid him out of her mouth carefully, adorably mindful of how oversensitive
a spent cock could be, and he melted at this small sign that conveyed so much
of what a caring girl she was. He was a bastard for letting her do this, but he
couldn’t bring himself to feel bad about that. There was no part of him that
seemed capable of feeling any negativity or pain at that moment. He gently
pulled her up by his fingers still tangled in the soft waves of her hair and
kissed her swollen lips, tasting traces of himself on that beautiful mouth and
smiling into the kiss with the knowledge that she’d swallowed every last drop
of his come. It brought a different but almost as heady surge of satisfaction
as having her cunt slathered with his seed did.
“You’re so perfect, my sweet little dear,” he whispered, closing his eyes and
leaning down further to press their foreheads together. “Very good girl. I love
you, Simone.”
She lunged at him, her arms wrapping around his middle in a fierce hug that
took him too by surprise for him to return before she just as suddenly bounded
away. Rolf followed after her, his claws scraping the floor as he chased her
silent feet, the yellow lab mutt no doubt certain that she stole away with
whatever she’d been sucking at for so long.  Anders’ back slid down the wall
until he sat among the remainder of his pack, too exhausted to join the chase.
He might never fully understand her. With his mind still softly reeling in a
pleasant cloud of euphoria, he propped himself back up on the cane, feeling at
once light as a feather and rickety as an arthritic old man. The steps to the
attic room had never looked so daunting.
 
 
Odette never slept in the same room as her partners, possessing a natural
revulsion to emotional intimacy and trust that Vidar preferred in what passed
as a relationship to both of them. Lying awake in his sweat-dampened bedsheets,
his bedroom still reeking of sex and smoke, Vidar weighed the idea of inviting
her out of the guest room just for the comfort of another’s breathing in the
dreadful silence. But that was not the kind of comfort she could offer, so he
lit another cigarette and waited for either the oblivion of sleep or the
oblivion of death to come. He suspected with alternating reassurance and
discontent that neither would come this night. The demons that crawled behind
his eyelids would not let him shut them long enough to obtain rest. At least he
could keep blaming these hallucinations on stress and lack of sleep. He could
blame a lot more on those factors, but he knew with a sickening certainty that
it would be a bullshit excuse.
The sex he’d had with Odette was as good as it had ever been. The literal
trappings of their play littered in the empty space next to him on the
mattress: belts and harnesses, ropes and straps, spreaders and shackles. Odette
would let him tie her up and use her any way that pleased him, but this was the
first night she’d used her safe word with him. He took a long drag off the
cigarette as he wished he’d felt guilty about hurting her like that, but he
didn’t. He’d gone beyond his own established foundation of ethics and he didn’t
even care. He’d changed without his awareness or permission. It was Leif’s
fault for chemically altering his mind. It was Simone’s fault for planting the
poisonous weeds of desire in him with her pain and her love. It was his
father’s fault for dying and dragging them all to Hell with him.
“Bullshit,” he muttered, the slight bobbing of the cigarette dusting ash on his
chest.
He didn’t have to act on these disturbing whims. He simply wanted to act on
them. It was the distressing absence of his once iron self-control that allowed
him to do it. He should tell his therapist. He should be calling her right
then, at two in the morning, panicking over this crisis of morals or identity
or trauma that had allowed him to shove his way into his own niece’s snug
little cunt in a snug little airplane restroom. Instead, he shut his eyes,
letting the demons replay her damning question over and over.
Is this what you really wanted?
God help him, it was.
He wanted to do so much worse and there was nothing inside him to stop him from
doing it. He’d tried to quench that want in him with Odette and he’d ended up
hurting her before he could even achieve some tawdry level of satisfaction.
There was no substitute he could employ to fulfill these desires; it had to be
Simone. Their slave, their pet, their plaything. Their niece. He cringed, the
cigarette tumbling out of his lips as he sat up and clenched his forehead in
the span of his hands. There it was. The last bastion of his humanity. Whatever
disease had infected Leif and Anders to fetishize something so against basic
natural order as incest had not infected him. He hurriedly snatched up the
burning cigarette and stamped it out on the dark cherry wood of his nightstand.
To Hell with the furniture. To Hell with everything. Nothing made sense anymore
anyway. He owed no decency to a world that had allowed such wickedness in it.
His brother was a monster; it was not unexpected that they all shared that same
evil gene.
He looked at the leather and steel items piled next to him, taking hold of the
wrist cuffs and examining them. The length of nylon rope holding them together
was drastically shortened in an alpine butterfly knot and he stared at that
loop as his mind walked through Anders’ house. The dogs were familiar enough
with him not to be a problem and he still had the spare key his little brother
had entrusted him with, so entry was not an issue. His mind formulated new uses
for the slatted stairs to the attic and the sturdy coffee table in the living
room as he thumbed the thick leather cuff. He might need to punch another hole
in the leather to make sure she can’t wriggle her tiny wrists out of them. A
smirk grew out from his scowl as he thought on how he would make her wriggle.
Wriggle and scream. God help them both.
 
 
Simone tossed and turned in the narrow bed Anders had directed her to sleep in,
a fearful restlessness denying her that task. It was impossible for her to
sleep with how alone she was. The thick insulation of this house prevented any
noise from reaching her, a factor somehow worse than if she’d heard every snore
and shift of the other occupants. She couldn’t hear if anyone was coming until
they would set foot on the creaky wood slats of the ladder. By then, they would
have already killed Anders and the dogs, a thought that echoed in this dreadful
silence until she’d begun to believe it might have happened. She pulled the
collar of Anders’ t-shirt over the bottom half of her face, breathing in the
masculine pine scents of his body wash and deodorant she’d used. A strange idea
that she could harbor his life by wearing his scents and his clothes stirred in
the broken parts of her mind.
Recognizing the signs of her madness spiraling out of control, she shot out of
bed, draping the comforter around her as she opened the door and leaned down
the ladder. She couldn’t be alone with her thoughts. Without anything familiar
or someone else there to anchor herself to, her mind drifted into unreality.
Even if it was dangerous for her to seek him out, she couldn’t lose sight of
what was real, but she hesitated at his door. If she went in there, into his
bed, surrendered to the comfort of the touch she’d once found such safety and
love in, she would have sex with him. She’d almost succumbed to that sick need
in her as he’d, in his limited and broken English, expressed a strong desire to
return the favor she’d done him in the hallway. She shouldn’t have done that
either, but he was hard and she was weak. He could trick her into trusting him
again if she wasn’t careful. She pressed her ear to the door and listened for
signs of life. Hearing the slight sound of his breathing within, she continued
down the hall to the living room. The sight of seven dogs, all strewn out on
massive square dog beds in the center of the room, eased away her anxiety with
delight.
“Room for one more, gang?” Simone whispered as she squatted next to the yellow
lab who seemed to like her.
His tail awoke before the rest of him, batting the sherpa with a thump thump
thump that a few of the others returned in response before they drifted back to
sleep. He stood up when she crawled onto the bed, his excitement and curiosity
waking him further as she curled up next to him. She hid her face under her
blanket when he moved to lick her chin, the smell of canine morning breath not
something she found enjoyable, and stroked his shoulders soothingly. After
giving her a lengthy inspection with his snuffling snout, he seemed content
with her intrusion enough to turn himself clockwise three times before settling
down against her.
The weight of his back pressed to the cradle her torso formed as she lied in
the fetal position was unexpectedly comforting. Dogs were easy in ways people
could not be. There were no hidden or secondary motives, no lies either polite
or poisonous, no complicated muck of emotions to stain her mind with. They were
open with their wants and affections. Their emotions were simple and
reactionary. They would never ask her to give them any more validation than a
scratch behind the ears. They would never hurt her with cruel deception or
pressure her to fill uncomfortable and unnatural roles. She stroked his side,
his short coat smooth and soft under her sliding hand, soothing them both in
the release of oxytocin from the friendly touch of a living thing. She’d always
loved animals, but pets weren’t anything her parents were ever interested in
letting her have. As she quickly drifted off into the comfort of being among
the pack, their breathing and snoring a beautiful symphony of companionship,
she wondered if this was why her father had always refused her requests for a
puppy.
When she next opened her eyes from a blissfully dreamless sleep, it was to the
sight of Anders staring at her with an expression of worry and horror. Her
bedmate lifted his head and they both looked up at their owner in bleary
regard.
“God morgen,” she said, her voice cracking from disuse. He only continued
staring, the disturbed frown on his face piercing through her fog of sleep. She
tilted her head to the side in curiosity. “Is there something wrong?”
“You sleep here?” he asked. There was a guarded hesitancy to the question that
roused her further.
The labrador got up and stretched languidly beside her as she answered, “Yes…
Is that… Did I do something wrong?”
He shook his head absently. “How… Why you did this?”
She shrugged. It was far too early to get into that subject. He still had that
deeply disturbed expression as he limped to her and pulled her up off the dog
bed. The blanket slipped from her shoulders and the cold early morning air
plastered itself to her skin immediately, making her step close and hug him for
warmth without thinking. He wrapped his arms around her before she could move
away, hugging her oddly tight to him.
“Du er ikke min hund,” he muttered, stroking her back. She tried to look up at
him, but he squeezed her to him almost harshly. “You are my… Do not sleep here.
Come, to me. Understand?”
She did, with a deflating heart. She’d wanted to sleep among the dogs again,
maybe always, but if that was his rule, she had to obey. “Yes, papa.”
He tugged her along with him down the hall and her chest tightened as she
realized he was leading her into his bedroom.
***** Chapter 47 *****
Sunlight glinted brightly on the quivering water in the large marble fountain.
Koi meandered through the shadows of waterlilies, their shimmering scales
catching and reflecting the light to show off their brilliant oranges, metallic
whites, and obsidian blacks. The songbirds in the courtyard whistled and
trilled in seeming celebration of the sun, occasionally drowned out by the
wails of the peacocks that strutted the grounds. Leif watched as a visiting
crow pecked at the ruined corpse of one of those elegant koi, a victim of some
trespassing predator that had made good use of this wealth of defenseless prey
in the night. The sound of footsteps echoing from the bricks of the surrounding
loggia caused the crow to take flight, a thing that these songbirds could not
do with their clipped wings in their steel cages. He wondered if they still
longed to fly and he imagined that they did. To have an instinct and not be
able to engage it was one of the cruelest denials a life could endure. It was a
thing that, if bore long enough, could clog the mind with madness.
“Mr. Valstad,” the young man spoke, standing at a safe three meters from him,
“you are requested in the conservatory.”
One of the trapped and crippled songbirds beat its useless wings against the
bars of its cage and trilled out an angry cry, but its selectively bred voice
still sounded sweet even through its agony. The bird rattled and screamed for
the freedom of flight that it might have never experienced, but knew by its own
shape to be its birthright.
“Sir?... Mr. Valstad?”
Leif dipped his hand in the fountain and a large dark fish swam over to
tentatively mouth at his fingertips, searching for treats. This unguarded
behavior was undoubtedly what had made these decorative fish so easy to catch
and so endearing to feed. The survival instinct to flee from threats had been
conditioned out of it by the benefit of appealing to visitors for food. The
koi’s long black fins swayed in a flourish as it turned away from his empty
hand, reminding him of how his daughter’s hair had swirled around her in the
bathwater. That night he and his darling girl had bathed together in that
psilocybin dream world was not long ago, though for him, it had been a lifetime
since. He could even still taste the spice of her blood on his lips and he
yearned to wet his tongue on the life he’d created once more. A grin twitched
into place on his placid face as he turned it toward the sun. His appetites
were returning.
“Mr. Valstad, the-”
Leif grabbed the majestic black fish, its slippery body wriggling uselessly in
his clawed grip as he threw it at the young man’s face. The messenger boy
didn’t recover quickly enough from the unexpected distraction to unholster his
sidearm before Leif lunged upon him. He had only roughly eight seconds before
the guards that were positioned to monitor him would react and come with their
tasers, but he didn’t need more than two to latch his mouth over the
messenger’s cry of pain and suck his tongue into his mouth. The spongey, slick
flesh snapped and tore easily under Leif’s sharp teeth and he spat it onto the
grass next to the thrashing fish.
“I’m not someone to be sent for like a scullery maid,” he patiently let the
screaming man know.
 
 
The cell phone store in the shopping mall was as similar and as different as
any Simone had encountered in her smattering of experiences across the United
States, meaning that her interest in these new environments waned quickly and
she struggled to find things to distract her mind from the reoccurring fever
that agitated her crazy. She’d hate to be a bad guest- or whatever she was- to
Anders by having an anxiety attack in the middle of his deliberation between an
iPhone and a Samsung. However, she also considered that it might be wise to
establish realistic expectations early on. She just had to attract as little
attention to herself as possible while maintaining her attention away from the
nauseating tremor in her entire body and the paranoia the fever cooked in her
bad brain.
After all, it wasn’t real. Nothing was happening. There weren’t any clocks
anywhere, but it hadn’t been as long as she thought. Her watch was ticking away
in the attic room. It was early on a weekday, there weren’t even that many
strangers around. No reason to panic.
“No reason to panic,” she whispered aloud.
“God morgen! Trenger du hjelp?”
Simone jumped back from the salesman, the roar of blood in her stuffed head
drowning out whatever she’d muttered as she dodged away from him. It might not
have been words. Too late, didn’t matter, she was outside, walking, walking,
buzzing, shaking, stopping, puking. She clutched the bark of a sidewalk tree as
she retched at its roots, thankful that she’d opted to skip the dairy and have
dry muesli and tea for breakfast.
“Ugh, glad for dry oats and bird food, that’s real fuckin’ optimism…” she
mumbled.
A hard knot cramped in her churning gut when it occurred to her, brutally out
of the blue, that her birth control might have failed. She still had another
month before her next shot, but as her mother had often harped on, nothing was
one hundred percent effective. She did not need this thought spinning around in
her brain while her paranoia and anxiety were set on high.
“No, no, that can’t be right, don’t be stupid,” she mumbled, wiping her
sweating forehead on the sleeve of her coat.
Her body was drenched in sweat but she wore nothing beneath it except a bra and
a pair of Anders’ jeans she’d had to roll up a ridiculous amount to fit, so she
unbuttoned the coat low on her chest. A woman pushing a baby stroller stared as
Simone hawked up the sour bile from the back of her throat and spat it into the
mess she’d made on the tree, the proximity of an infant in this moment putting
her on edge. She wouldn’t be feeling these symptoms so soon even if she’d
conceived on the first night. That was just a week ago.
“Or two weeks…?” she mused. She wasn’t sure anymore. “It’s just a flu.”
She’d snag a pregnancy test from somewhere to shut her brain up, as though that
logical proof would be enough to quell that barbed bur of a worry. More than
halfway out of her mind, broke in a foreign country, and possibly pregnant with
either her father’s or her uncle’s baby was not where she had thought she would
be at 20. The reminder of how far she was from home made her shiver and tense,
so she pushed it down until she could breathe again.
“You’ve got better problems to hide from than being in a fucking mall,” she
grumbled.
Her head swam as she straightened, but her stomach felt comparably stable
enough to remain fully upright as she popped a stick of gum in her bitter mouth
and turned to trudge back to the shop before Anders noticed she was gone. She
made it just in time to see him burst out of the door with a wild panic written
in his entire demeanor, making her freeze in the cold shock of having that wide
and intense stare of his light eyes fix on her. When he rushed over and grabbed
her by her shoulders, however, she saw the bag slung over his arm and perked up
at knowing this errand was finished.
 “Hva faen, kjære,do not do this!” he said worriedly, shaking her slightly with
his command. “Be together, understand?”
She shrunk again under his scolding tone, but there was no anger in him, only
fear. Inexplicably, she wondered how her father would have reacted in his
shoes. Leif had always seemed to know exactly where to find her, though the one
time he didn’t, the one time she’d hidden from him and stumbled into the
darkroom through the hidden door in the closet, she had ended up getting
whipped like an Antebellum era slave. The racial aspect linked to that thought
turned her mind to an uncomfortable space. Looking at Anders’ blue eyes, his
lank blond hair slightly disheveled to fall over his fair face, his thin lips
drawn tight in worry, and his narrow and sharp features pinched in fear, it
seemed impossible that she shared half of her genetic makeup with him. With her
mother’s snide remarks on Leif’s “European influences” as though they were
trespasses and his disinterest in engaging her on any part of the culture he’d
come from, she had only ever seen the white half of her primarily as a dilution
that kept her locked out of being able to identify fully as anything. Her
father’s family and heritage were always on the other side of the world and,
though she straddled that border inside of her, it was so glaringly obvious to
anyone that she was not Norwegian. She could never really hope to fit in
anywhere, but she was never more aware of how unattainable that comfort of
belonging was than she was here.
But none of that mattered. She had to stop thinking of herself as though she
were still a person.
 “Can we go home?” she asked.
He looked off to the side as he often did when obviously working to translate
before speaking, “No. You have need for clothes.”
She knew what she was, it was just so tempting to pretend that she wasn’t.
Creatures like her, like Leif, like Kyun, like Maier shouldn’t even exist, let
alone belong anywhere in the world. She had to figure out how to destroy the
spaces where they did belong. It wouldn’t be enough just to hunt the wolves all
down; she had to eliminate their niche in the ecosystem or another host of
predators would simply fill it. She knew almost nothing of this network that
had captured her father, but she had to prepare herself to destroy it. She had
to stop pretending her life could be anything more.
“Can we go home and fuck instead?”
 
 
Henrik called Anders’ house phone six times before calling Vidar back to ask
him to check on their brother and niece, but the man had been as aggravatingly
unhelpful as usual. However, their mother wanted to have them all over for
supper that night and he’d promised they would make it, so that was how he
ended up driving through lunch hour traffic to Anders’ house. By the time he
turned onto his block, he decided to go to Vidar’s house afterward and slap the
son of a whore upside his head for being so obstinate.
“Heyyy, gang!” Henrik grinned at the dogs as they jumped and barked joyously at
him from the other side of the gate.
Usually Anders would be sitting on the porch watching over them or playing with
them while they were outside, but there was no sign of him out there. Maybe he
was cooking or something and just sent them out to get them out of the way.
Maybe they had just gotten home from somewhere and that’s why he hadn’t been
able to reach them all day. Maybe they were both murdered and lying in a pool
of blood inside the house. He slipped through the gate, squeezing by to prevent
any of the dogs from escaping, and held out his hands to ward them off from
jumping on him as they swarmed gleefully. As he stepped up to the door, ready
to pound on it and confirm that nothing was wrong, he heard a high feminine cry
come muffled from within the house. The sound hit him like a shock of cold
water, a thousand worries screaming at once in a jumble that pushed him to
panic. That was Simone’s voice. Something terrible was happening to her in
there. He jolted, starting to run back to the car, then remembered that his
cell phone was long gone in the US and jolted back, taking the spare key to
Anders’ house he had brought. He knew something had been wrong. His gut had
been twisting with that awful feeling after his third call had rung unanswered.
This time, he wouldn’t hesitate to act. Twisting the key in the lock silently,
he reminded himself that he would do whatever it took to protect his family
this time, even if it meant getting violent. The door opened, blessedly quiet,
and he could hear her panting and moaning clearly as he stepped inside and shut
it behind him carefully. She must have been in agony to make such noise. He
grabbed up the ax Anders kept next to the door and crept silently down the hall
toward her high, quivering moaning.
“Aahh, God, papaaa… Papa, it’s too much, I can’t take it!”
He froze, a chill spilling down his entire body as he processed what her words
meant. Leif was in there, he’d followed them all the way back, he had probably
already killed Anders and now he was doing something in his bedroom to hurt his
own daughter. The ax shook in Henrik’s fists as he willed himself to continue
on. Leif wouldn’t be expecting him. With any luck, he could bury the blade in
his back and end this nightmare for good. The thought made him want to vomit,
but he had to do this. He had no choice. The door to Anders’ bedroom was wide
open and he pressed himself to the wall next to it, taking deep breaths to try
to steel himself just to risk a peek. His muscles trembled and cramped as he
slowly leaned toward the doorframe and he bit his lip to keep from screaming.
He expected, with mounting dread, blood and gore strewn everywhere and his baby
brother’s mutilated corpse displayed in some gruesome manner. He was not
prepared to see his baby brother kneeling between their niece’s spread legs,
his hands forcefully holding her bare thighs apart as he sucked and licked at
her while she writhed and moaned beneath him.
“Mmm… You taste so good…” Anders groaned in unabashed enjoyment. “Are you going
to come again, dearest? You will come for papa, yes?”
“Yes, papa-ah!” Simone gasped sharply, her hands clutching the mussed bedding
as her back arched.
Henrik’s mind went quiet as he watched her come apart under Anders’ eager
feasting. Her long hair was sprawled in dark filigree on the white sheets
beneath her, the cloth twisting in her fists as her arched back pushed her
breasts high and prominent, the gentle sway of that especially supple flesh
catching his eye. He could smell her arousal and sweat, both thick with
pheromones, making his own mouth water in response to what his brother’s mouth
was doing to her. As silently as he had entered, he left, leaving the ax where
he’d found it and locking the front door behind him. He didn’t pay any mind to
the joyous dogs leaping at him or the reporters approaching him from their
parked van when they saw him exit the gate. He got into his car and drove.
He decided that they just weren’t home. That’s right. There was a lot to do
after coming back, after all. Many errands to run. Anders was the type to want
to get all of that out of the way as soon as possible. They weren’t home, he
was worried over nothing, he would call later and then see them at mother’s. It
would be so nice to have a family dinner. There was a lot to celebrate even
amidst these tragedies. They had all survived and there was a new addition to
the family in Norway. Anders was going to be a great father to Simone. She was
already calling him papa. No. Henrik didn’t know that yet. He plucked it from
his mind and stuffed it into the box of other things he didn’t know.
 
 
All the photographs containing Leif were taken down, a thing that Vidar was
relieved to find that Astrid had done before he got to the farm. He considered
asking her what her exact reason for doing that was, but even he had some
respect for social boundaries. Also, she would likely pinch him for not minding
his manners.
Instead, he asked her, “Mother, what have you been doing lately?”
Astrid didn’t look up from mixing the raw meat and egg with her hands as she
sighed, “Oh, I suppose I’m not really doing much outside of work these days.
Give me a hand and pour in a splash of milk, yes?”
He tried not to roll his eyes in exasperation at his mother’s typical avoidance
of unpleasant topics as he did as he was asked. He was still wracking his brain
for any other safe questions to dance around the issues she wasn’t ready to
tackle when he heard the front door shut and Anders call out a greeting from
the entryway. Finally, his entertainment for the evening had arrived. Astrid
muttered excitedly as she quickly washed her hands and he followed languidly
after her to the front room, opting to lean against the doorway and watch
Simone stand awkwardly to the side while his mother scooped her youngest son in
a crushing hug. Vidar smirked when Simone caught him staring at her and, to his
delight, she looked away nervously and closed her body language by wrapping her
arms around her torso. After her little show of bravery the previous evening,
he was wondering if he’d have to teach her to respect him, but Leif had trained
her well. It was only mildly disappointing that this step was denied to him.
Checking to make sure their mother was still going through her fretting process
over Anders, he approached the girl.
“Nice dress, sweetheart,” he remarked, tugging on the overhanging sleeve of
Anders’ sweater that engulfed her small frame. “You are wearing his underwear
also?”
She looked away too quickly and bit her lip, confirming to him that she indeed
was wearing his brother’s underwear and she was embarrassed of it. He chuckled
in genuine amusement at how she still had the capacity for shame after the
debased life of sexual servitude she’d lived-- and he planned on continuing to
have her live.
Simone cleared her throat and whispered without looking up from her fixed glare
on his tie, “Your mother- does she speak English?”
He tilted her chin up to face him, but she kept her eyes low and to the side,
avoiding his gaze with an ease and immediacy that hinted at well-practiced
habit. His smirk twitched in interest at this behavior he had witnessed in her
before. She was trying so hard not to seem afraid, but she was practically
spilling fear everywhere. It was thrilling to be feared by a thing as dangerous
as her. It made him want to push her to see what might be hiding on the other
side of that fear and he felt giddy in knowing that he would soon get to push.
“She does not speak well,” he answered.
Her brow furrowed, frustration marring that delicate sheen of fear in her
pretty features, and when she spoke, it was as though a different creature said
from behind her veil, “Then I need your help to talk with her. I need to know
everything she knows about who Einar, Bjørn and Leif were. Where they would go,
the people they knew, what they were like. I need everything.”
“Well,” he smiled. “Lucky that I am practicing of English. Not lucky that you
try to get information from her. She does not speak of her ex-husband or his
brother for many years and, perhaps, now does not speak of your dear papa for
many years also. She is… difficult that way.”
“Why?”
“I can tell you many things…” Her skin was almost glowing in the gleam of sweat
that covered her and his eyes followed the trail of his thumb slowly dragging
up her neck. She resisted recoiling at the contact rather admirably. “… but not
for free.”
He could almost feel her resentment in the flash of hatred in her eyes when he
said that. Good. She should hate him. What she and Leif had twisted him into
was a monstrously awful thing that deserved to be hated. But it was too
fleeting, too temporary, just a flash and then the dull embers of a bitter
acceptance.
“What do you want?” she muttered.
He cupped the back of her neck, the clear but subtle suggestion of dominance
joyously not lost on this young submissive as her breathing and blush deepened.
An eagerness to earn her full and undivided hatred thrummed excitedly through
him in seeing how she responded to this signal, but he had to be patient. She
was Anders’ toy to break, not his. Not yet. He kept his smile friendly and his
voice quiet in awareness of his family members so near as he answered, “You
will keep what we do a secret.”
Her throat bobbed in a nervous swallow, her dread nearly palpable in her
whispered, “And what is it that we will be doing?”
“Ah! Baby Simone!” Astrid interrupted in a plaintive cry, scooping the girl up
into her turn to be hugged and fussed over. He watched in smug amusement as she
crushed Simone to her bosom, the small girl shocked by his mother’s personal
brand of overbearing affection as she struggled to politely disengage from an
embrace that would only end when Astrid was satisfied. “Oh, this poor child,
she’s too thin! Anders, I thought you said you were taking care of her! Hmph.
Leave it to a man to let a little girl go hungry.”
“I’ve had her for only a couple days, mother,” Anders piped up defensively. It
went unheard, as did most counterpoints posed to the matriarch.
“You poor dear, what have these boys been doing to you?” Astrid cooed
sympathetically, stroking Simone’s hair dotingly.
Vidar had to fake a cough to cover his bark of a laugh at that. What they’d
been doing to the poor dear was far worse than whatever neglect their mother
could accuse them of. Through the shower-fresh fragrances of soap and shampoo,
he could smell the slow trickle of semen leaking into Simone’s borrowed shorts.
He threw a sly smirk at his youngest brother, seeing how miserably he reacted
to Astrid’s question. If he didn’t already know Anders had fucked Simone and
then tried to wash the evidence away right before coming there, he might have
suspected something just by how obviously guilt-stricken the man was. Anders
had a head start on using her for sex; it was pathetic how far behind he was in
fully embracing his role in that dynamic. There was nothing else they could
realistically have been expected to do with such a temptation on their hands
except to give into it. Leif had left them with many lingering curses, but she
was a gift. It would be imprudent of them not to use her the way Leif had made
her to be used and Vidar felt as though he might be the only one who understood
that, no matter how he tried to influence their littlest brother. He felt sorry
for him; Anders seemed to have no idea how beyond redemption they already were.
It would be so much easier once he accepted that there was no amount of guilt
or repentance that could stop or slow the trajectory of where this all was
headed.
 
 
Home. Every cross stitch, heirloom vase, creak in the floor, and stain in the
rugs was saturated in that type of familiarity that was so fixed that it felt
as though nothing could ever alter it. This was where Anders had grown up,
where his father had grown up, and where his father’s father had grown up. It
was expected that one of the brothers would continue that trend with a family
of their own, but when Leif had made his intentions to stay in the States clear
and the rest of them had passed year after year without any plans or means to
procreate, that pressure of that expectation had steadily waned. Looking across
the table at his Simone as she pushed around the meatballs in her soup, her
weary stare fixed to the bowl, he could see himself fulfilling that expectation
with her. He wanted to. He could bring the dogs and her here where he could be
the father she would need through the healing that was ahead of her. No
bombardment of reporters waiting mere yards from the house to shout those
horrible questions at them whenever they went out and no nosey neighbors to
gawk at their bruises this far into the property. He could teach her how to
shear their sheep and fish for salmon in the river that ran through nearby. She
could thrive here, not just survive.
“Henrik, how’s that woman, what’s her name? Ann? Aud?” Astrid asked.
“Camilla,” Henrik corrected her, then solemnly added, “We broke up a few months
ago, remember?”
“Oh, that’s right, Camilla! I liked her. You know, you should really try to
settle down with the next one. None of you are young bucks anymore and soon all
that’s going to be left are divorcees and floozies looking for easy money.”
They would have to wait for Astrid to die first, though, and she wasn’t going
to pass on anytime soon. Maybe their grandchildren would carry on the tradition
for them by the time her ample health failed.
“Vidar, ask baby Simone how old she is,” she said, gesturing to the quiet girl
with her spoon.
“She just turned twenty, mother,” Vidar responded.
“I want you to ask her for me. Translate. I want to have a conversation with
her,” she clarified in a clipped tone.
Whenever Anders resented his father for walking out on them to go live in the
US, he could always count on his mother to remind him the reason why he felt he
had to go so far away.
Vidar grinned tersely at Simone and asked in an overly cheerful tone that
mocked their mother’s speech, “Baby Simone, how old are you?”
Simone stirred her soup as she considered the question, then shyly muttered,
“I’m, um… I’m twenty-years-old. I think.”
Vidar turned his rigid grin back to Astrid and announced, “She said she’s
twenty, mother.”
Astrid reacted as though she hadn’t already heard that information earlier,
bringing her hand to her mouth in delightful surprise as she exclaimed, “Well!
I wouldn’t have guessed that! Doesn’t she not look a day over fourteen? It’s
hard to tell how old they are, isn’t it?”
“‘They’?” Anders chimed in curiously.
“You know, brown people,” she explained dismissively. Anders wondered why he
expected a better explanation from her than that. “Doesn’t she have the
loveliest skin? I’d turn red as the devil if I tried to get a tan anywhere
close to that color and she’s lucky enough to be born with it! Doesn’t she look
just like Beyoncé?”
“She doesn’t look anything like Beyoncé,” Anders responded exasperatedly.
“Vidar, do not tell her mother said that.”
“I’ll tell her she said Rihanna instead,” Vidar smirked mischievously.
Astrid gasped. “You’re right! She’s Rihanna!”
“No, she doesn’t look like either of them! Stop naming mixed celebrities!”
Anders frowned.
Henrik, barely glancing up from sulking at his soup, sighed heavily from the
end of the small table before raising his deep baritone to forcefully change
the subject. “So! When are you guys going back to work?”
“I still have about three more weeks before I even have to check in with the
office,” Vidar bragged.
“This happened at a bad time for my job, so I’m going to go in and catch up on
some work tomorrow,” Anders answered. They were only in the developing stages
of their most recent project when he found out about his father’s passing and
he almost wasn’t going to take the time off to go to the United States, but his
supervisor had insisted. If only his supervisor hadn’t insisted. He rubbed at
the tension in his neck that stiffened whenever he thought about the horror
they had encountered in that country, then noticed Simone looking at him with a
gentle concern in her slight frown. Not everything that came out of that trip
was bad. He smiled at her, reassuring her that he was fine. And he really was
fine. She was with him now.
“Are you going to be gone long?” Vidar asked, looking at him over the rim of
his wineglass.
“A few hours, at least. Why?”
“Oh, just wondering if you wanted me to come by and mind your pets.”
“Simone will be home to do that.”
Vidar swirled the wine in his glass disinterestedly as he muttered, “I see.”
Anders felt a little awkward talking with Vidar after losing his temper on him
last night. He had intended to address it and apologize earlier, but that just
didn’t happen, and now it seemed as though it was better to forget it had
happened. He watched Vidar turn and smile down at Simone, giving her shoulder a
friendly squeeze that she looked confusedly at him in response. His brother
wasn’t a bad guy; people just did strange and sometimes bad things after
strange and bad things happened to them. Simone had forgiven him for the
bizarre threesome they’d forced on her. Perhaps she had forgiven Vidar as well.
He had to stop letting his protectiveness over her get in the way of having a
normal relationship with her other uncles. Sitting around the table like this,
getting on each other’s nerves through a family supper together, they could
have been any family in Norway. What they were behind closed doors didn’t have
to interfere with their familial dynamics; it was possible to have both. He was
Simone’s uncle, her father, her lover, anything she needed him to be and it was
working. He would be there to watch over her whenever Vidar was around, anyway.
They would all work out everything between them with time and the right
boundaries would establish themselves along the way. They were family, after
all.
***** Chapter 48 *****
“They’ve been accusing him of moving towards a dictatorship for months and
there are those in his own cabinet calling for his resignation,” Mrs. Marceau’s
strong, smoky voice and echoed off the sleek marble walls of the dining room as
she paced the length of the table.
The high-ranking members turned in their seats to follow her as she paced. She
looked toward none of them, orating almost to herself. Leif watched out the
window, having to turn his neck far to see the trees swaying in the storm
outside as his torso and legs were bound to his chair.
“They are not aware of our agents acting within the resistance or within
parliament. They suspect that the US is funding the opposition to fuel dissent,
which is fortuitously correct and therefore all the more convenient as a
smokescreen. They’ll be looking for involvement from other political entities
and that is why they will never find us.”
He could almost hear the leaves rustling in the wind, just as they did as he
lied under the canopy of ancient maples with his darling girl sprawled halfway
atop him. He could kill everyone in this room with the wineglass in front of
him. Lock the doors, let them run screaming as he tore through them one by one,
make an example of those who put up a fight. He could remind them they were all
made of the same soft, delicate stuff. Slice them open, let their bowels tumble
out in a splatter on the marble floor, let them slip in each other’s blood as
they tried to outrun their deaths. Well, he could do that if he weren’t tied to
the chair. The distant marching of many feet heralded the imminence of supper,
anyway.
“As we enter stage eighteen, we will disclose to the media the court’s
intentions to nullify any movement made by parliament, shifting the
dictatorship rhetoric to the court. According to the projections, we should
have their government secured in less than a year after stage eighteen has been
implemented. You will find a fully detailed timeline in the dossiers. Refer to
it before posing your questions.”
Mrs. Marceau sat down at the head of the table just as the servants arrived in
uniform fashion to deposit the steaming silver plates on the table before each
guest. Leif didn’t have to look at the display of thinly sliced meat fanned out
beneath the dark drizzle of a tomato and wine reduction to know what it was. He
was already laughing when the scent of braised cow tongue had entered the room
with the servants.
 
 
Simone scrolled through the settings menu on the cell phone Anders had given
her before he left for work, still utterly astonished that he had gifted her
something that held so much power and meaning to her as though it were simply
expected that she has it. He had no idea what this meant to her. He had no idea
what being disconnected from the world had done to her, how lonely and isolated
she had been, how lost and ignorant she was. She didn’t realize how much she
had taken for granted in being able to find the information she needed with
just a few keywords until she found herself floundering in frustration at not
knowing and having no one able or willing to explain. Every curiosity she’d
had, each question that had haunted her, every time she had struggled to
understand, missing some vital piece of information, clogged back into her mind
all at once. Her thumbs hovered over the touchscreen as the cursor in the
search bar blinked, paralyzed in indecision of what she needed to know first.
She typed a few words only to delete them before hitting Search.“International
serial killer network”. “Marceau serial killer murderer”. “Symptoms vomiting
fever paranoia shaking”. “Sexual attraction father daughter causes”. Her hands
gripped the sides of the phone tightly, her palms sweating and fogging the
edges of the screen. She typed the next line without trying to think, just to
get through this ridiculous anxiety that prevented her from committing to any
of her queries, and hit Search before she could delete this one. The results
for “Leif Valstad” popped up with top stories from major news networks and, for
some reason, TMZ, as well as his own Wikipedia page. She scrolled up and down
the first page of results repeatedly, just reading the headlines and the
snippets, her eyes snagging on pictures of him and of the house in Vermont.
The world now seemed as frightened and fascinated by her father as she was and
the headlines were just as conflicted. Leif Valstad is a prolific serial killer
still at large that terrorized multiple states with murders that had gone
unsolved for years until now, a true psychopath whose victims are still being
tallied in the dozens. Leif Valstad is a loving, compassionate family man who
donated to charities and did pro bono architectural work for several
nonprofits, a charismatic and handsome man who was liked everywhere he went.
Her thumb hovered over “leif valstad daughter” in the related searches section,
below “leif valstad missing” and “leif valstad how many victims”. She shouldn’t
select it. She should do anything but select it. She was never good at impulse
control.
“God damn it…” she muttered, seeing her image pop up in headlines that ran in
disgusting tabloids. “‘Leif Valstad’s Daughter Will Shock You’, ‘Fatal
Attraction: If Looks Could Kill’, ‘Leif Valstad Daughter Bikini Photos’… What
the fuckis wrong with the world…”
If this was the media control that Maier had planned, she would have worn a
Catholic nun’s habit to the airport. She looked down at the ratty oversized
university sweater she’d borrowed from Anders to wear around the house, then
out the large circular attic window to where she knew those awful so-called
reporters were stalking about outside the gate. She could show them what the
world should be looking at. The bruises, the stitches, the bite, the violence
and ugliness that marked far deeper than these flesh wounds went. This was
nothing to sexualize or objectify. Her life was disfigured, as well as the
lives of the families and friends of the many people her father had murdered.
She didn’t want to line the media’s pockets with her grief, though.
She stood up from the narrow bed and yanked off the sweater, standing in the
attic room in nothing but a pair of Anders’ boxer briefs that hung low on her
hips. Facing the dust-covered mirror leaning against a tower of storage bins,
she looked for the more vibrant injuries still on her body and used her new
phone to snap pictures of them. She chewed at her lip as she tried to approach
this task with the detached eye of an artist seeing only color and hue, but
each bruise and scrape had a memory attached to it. She hesitated, then stepped
into the light, taking a shot of the barely there but still present ghosts of
finger marks along her neck. The hickies from her uncles were brightly
prominent among those stripes. By the time she had taken the last painful photo
of the bite mark that marred the crook of her shoulder and neck, a mark that
would undoubtedly fade into a permanent scar, she felt drained and disgusting.
Her body was a map of both the unspeakable trauma she had endured and the
depraved sins she had enjoyed; in too many instances they were both at once.
She needed a distraction. Sitting down heavily on the little bed, she tried to
log into Tumblr, only to find that her password wasn’t working and then that
her email wasn’t even registered with the site. That was also the case with her
Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, every social media site she used, even the
Bandcamp page of her brief foray into post-punk-synthpop-retrowave. There was
no simone.valstad@gmail.com registered anywhere. Simone Valstad was everywhere
on the internet, but she was nowhere. Her online presence had been deleted and
replaced with an ugly, sexist tabloid spread, her appearance now a matter of
public property. She set the phone down next to her and rubbed her aching
forehead. She still had artwork at home in New York, if she lived long enough
to make it back there. She could replace her portfolio with new photographs of
what she hadn’t sold and get to work on new projects, but so many hours of
labor and materials were gone without proof she had done any of it beyond her
signature on the physical pieces. Simone Valstad, the up-and-coming artist
thrown out of art school, the socially awkward paint punk, the mentally
unstable pursuer of psychedelic inspiration, no longer existed.
“Fuck this planet,” she frowned.
That Simone Valstad had stopped existing that first night in Vermont, dissolved
under the corrosive change wrought through that first kiss she had initiated
with her father. That was the cataclysm that had set off a chain reaction into
all this chaos. She wondered if, in a different world, one where she did not
open that door of incestual lust, Leif would not have tried to kill Anders. Her
father and her would both still be in that house in Vermont and her uncles
would have gone home to Norway, as unscathed and unknowing of these terrors as
she would be. Leif would have continued fulfilling his lust on her unconscious
body and his bloodlust on the world in secret while she would be bored and
resentful at being trapped in the middle of nowhere, believing it all to be
some tedious attempt at healing her mind. It was her fault that any of this was
happening. It was her sin that had spread to her father, then to Anders, and
then to Vidar. She was poisonous. She was a curse. She needed a break.
She opened the door to the attic room and called down the ladder, “Rolf! Bolle!
Here, pupparonis!”
No scuffle of blunt claws came charging up the hallway. That was odd. Anders
didn’t mention that he’d put them outside and it seemed unlikely that he would
leave without at least reminding her to let them back in.
“Come on, let’s play!” she called, leaping down the steps, eager for the
comfort of their friendly faces.
Her feet hit the floor with a powerful thump, her knees and hips bending to
absorb some of the impact. It was not the most graceful landing, but not bad
for someone who hadn’t been to gymnastics class in nearly half a decade. As she
straightened, rolling her back and shoulders to work out some of the stiffness
from another restless night alone in the attic, her muscles locked up in shock
at the very unexpected sight of Vidar standing just a few feet away. Every hair
on her raised in a wave of gooseflesh at the instinctive response that told her
he brought danger with him. Danger in the slight smile he greeted her with, in
the darkness shadowing his eyes, in his slow and steady approach, in the heavy
black bag he held in his hand.
“Okay, sweetheart,” he grinned. “Let’s play.”
 
 
She ran, scrambling in a sudden bolt up the ladder toward the attic, exactly as
he had expected her to. As he had wanted her to. He let her jump up a few steps
before grabbing her around her middle and yanking her back down, the feel of
her soft skin under his hands exciting him as much as her immediate thrashing.
He had her boxed in against the steep ladder, trapped between his much larger
body and the wood edges of the steps, narrowing her options of resistance down
to trying to push him away. The length of chain jangled in his hand as he
grabbed her wrists and pushed them up against one of the steps above her. Her
torso heaved and twisted as he worked quickly to tie them together and began
wrapping the chain taut around the wooden step. That ridiculous men’s watch she
wore poked out between the loops of the chain.
“Nn-no, no, NO don’t do that, don’t, please don’t!” she stammered amid her
panicked gasps as he kept his body mashed up against hers to limit her
squirming. He anchored the chain to itself with the hook at the end, securing
her hands high above her to keep her feet off the floor and her body angled
slightly backward. Everything was tantalizingly offered to him in her position.
“I won’t- I’ll be good, just don’t- don’t tie me up, please don’t tie me up!”
He was used to his women being more docile for this part. The restraints,
pinning, and intimidation were all to safely simulate a fantasy. His blood
pumped fast and hot with an excitement that bordered on both terror and elation
at how real this was. There was no acting or exaggeration in how her movements
were jerky and uncoordinated; that was raw fear. Her begging for him to stop
was purely sincere. She resisted him with the authentic intention to at least
hinder him if she couldn’t stop him. This was no simulation. The reality of
what he was doing to her carried a weight that his fantasies had lacked. It was
an exhilarating and terrible feeling.
“Please, take this off, take off this chain, I’ll give you anything,
everything, just please, not like this!” 
She was trembling. He was making her tremble and he hadn’t even truly begun.
The first time he’d had her, she was too far gone in delirium to truly
appreciate what was happening, and the other time, he was too limited by
proximity to a plane full of witnesses to reveal it was him instead of her
beloved Anders until afterward. This time, he had her fully awake, fully aware,
and fully unwilling. This time, there was no denying what this was. He fit his
hand around her neck over the fading outline of Leif’s fingers, the pad of his
thumb pressing at the side of her larynx just below her stitches. It stopped
her begging and thrashing with a telling immediacy; the only sound from her now
was her fearful panting. So, this was part of how Leif had trained her. She
responded to it beautifully. He looked up from where he gently held her neck,
flitting over her lovely features until settling on her wide gray eyes. She
wasn’t avoiding his gaze now. His cock throbbed impatiently in his pants, but
this was far too interesting to rush; they had hours yet to play.
“He did tie you up when he fucked, yes?” he asked.
Her pupils dilated in answer to his question before her small voice could
whisper, “Don’t do this, uncle.”
Vidar cringed at that title, the disgusting reminder of what they were to each
other tipping his excitement into shame. He’d hoped to hold off on using this,
having wanted to hear her screams ring out unimpeded, but he pulled the ball
gag out from his pocket and her look of fearful confusion upon seeing it
cleared out his disgust with astonishment. She really didn’t know what it was.
He was going to be the first master to ball gag her.
“Open your mouth,” he said, applying more pressure to his hold on her neck to
warn her against any more of that pathetic pleading. Her jugular drummed hard
under his fingers as she obeyed, a startled whimper escaping her as she
flinched when he pressed the ball past her teeth, but she forced herself to
stay still as he fastened the buckle behind her head. “Good girl.”
She made a pretty picture with her big sad eyes glistening with unshed tears
and her full lips stretched around the black rubber sphere stuffed in her
mouth. Too pretty. That was half the trouble with this girl. The other half was
more difficult to define, a force too elusive to see or resist, making him
grasp at straws to know what it was that drove him to want her this way. He
hated that he was no closer to knowing than he was before, only finding that
the more he took from her, the more he wanted. With her bound and gagged, alone
in a house with no one expected for hours, he could take as much as he hungered
for. His head swam with the power of that thought, again finding the reality of
this fantasy becoming actualized something far more pungent than he was
prepared to expect.
There was no return from this. Everything before this moment, he could explain
to himself as simply overeager opportunism to satisfy his libido using an
attractive and at least somewhat willing woman, but this was premeditated. No,
premeditated implied that he had some level of control over the intrusive
fantasies and desires that had come charging into his scrambled mind. It struck
him, with a horrid clarity of wonder, that perhaps this was how it began with
the criminally insane. Impulses so crude and cruel that there was no reason or
excuse to follow through with them, but being haunted by them all the same
until one day, one particularly bad day, the plausibility of denial that they
could ever allow them to be real was torn away. Vidar had had his one
particularly bad day and his mind had been careening into that pit of madness
since. Leif had found that pit in each of them and, like any big brother would,
he had assumed responsibility to influence them to fulfill their potential. For
all he had accused Anders of being like Leif, he now couldn’t deny that it had
all been a pathetic projection of what he was afraid of. Vidar was the one most
like their violent, controlling, sadistic rapist brother.
He grabbed her chin, his long fingers hooking around her jaw to squeeze a bit
of pain into her as he lifted her face and hissed, “You will be a good whore
for me, yes? You will take it and you will not fight. Understand?”
Those full lips of hers pulled back to bare her teeth pressing into the ball
and her nose and brow wrinkled in a snarl as she jerked to bring her knee up in
the defense that every girl had been taught to ward off a rapist. He dodged the
blow reflexively and, just as reflexively, returned it with his own. Her face
snapped to the side and his palm stung with the force of his slap, the clap of
his hand connecting solidly against her cheek loud in the hallway.
“Shit,” he spat. He hadn’t meant to hit her that hard. He hadn’t meant to hit
her at all, not yet. The imprint of his hand was already darkening on her
cheek, likely to bruise. This loss of self-control was as aggravating as it was
genuinely troubling and he turned that aggravation to the cause of it all,
grabbing her hair by the roots at the front of her head and pulling her up to
face him again. “Look what you made me do! Bad girl!There’s only one way to
train a naughty bitch who growls and snaps at her master. Stay.”
He gave her hair a brief yank for good measure as he moved off her, assured by
her cowering that she wouldn’t take this opportunity to kick at him without his
body pinning her still. She was wise enough not to now. He tried to calm down
as he knelt and rooted through his bag, his delight at already seeing the
results of his training in her swelling his impatience to fuck her hard. She
wasn’t broken yet. When he pulled out the thick leather cuffs, the short
lengths of chain clinking from the pair, her fearful whimper came high and
muffled around the ball gag. God, he loved that sound from her. He grabbed her
legs by her calves and pulled them apart as wide as the step allowed, buckling
the leather around each ankle before looping the chain tight around the side
rails. The ladder was working out even better than he had envisioned; they
would definitely be using it again in the future. There was all manner of
interesting ways he could tie her to it and knowing she would have to climb it
to get to the little room Anders had set her up in made him smile. She would
think of him every night when she made her way to her bed and every morning
when she came down for breakfast. Except for the nights she would spend in
Anders’ bed, but that was fine. He was sure they would make some lasting
memories there too, preferably with his brother’s participation. Anders had
done so well, his gentle way of dominating her not quite what Vidar would have
gone for, but it suited his little brother’s sick love for Simone. He turned
his attention away from that line of thought before it got any closer to the
aspect of all this he needed to ignore.
“Alright, little bitch,” he said, dragging the soft fur of the foxtail up her
body as he rose. He grinned at her uncertainty as he caressed the gleaming
chrome end of it on her face. “Do you understand what this is?”
She glanced at him skittishly, dancing between the fur tail, the smooth steel
it was attached to, and his smirk as she struggled to figure it out. Fresh
tears welled in her wet eyes and fell down her face as she shut them tightly
and shook her head, but he was not going to punish her for her ignorance. Not
directly. That she didn’t even know what a butt plug was amused him.
“This is your tail,” he answered for her. “Your fluffy bitch tail. Do you
understand where your fluffy bitch tail belongs?”
Her eyes widened as he dragged the rounded steel side of the plug down her
torso and he could see the exact moment it clicked in her mind. Her protests
were muffled to completely unintelligible groans through the gag while he
pulled her shorts down, the elastic making a tearing noise when he yanked them
to her spread knees. She was bare beneath them, her cunt already glistening
with a bit of moisture at the delicate fold of her labia.
“Such a sweet submissive…” he muttered to himself, dragging the tip of the plug
teasingly along her slit. Her breath came in fast and hard through her nose,
her panic clear in each slight whine and whimper blunted by the gag. “He
trained your body to react even to this kind of treatment. What a miserable
life you have had.”
He took out the small bottle of lube from his pocket and thumbed the cap open
before drizzling a generous amount on the tip. Her leg muscles were straining
to shut against the ankle cuffs that kept her spread for him and she tried to
twist away from him as he knelt down and pressed the tip to the underside of
her ass. The slimy, cold steel made her flinch and yelp like a real dog might.
“Relax, little bitch, or this will make injury,” he chided, pressing through
her clenched cleft.
He loved watching this part, the sight of the plug sinking into flesh until it
was nestled firmly inside making his cock weep precum in anticipation of doing
the same. She grunted as it worked past the soft gates of her round, gorgeous
cheeks and pressed against her hole. It didn’t take much teasing to convince
her to just relax and accept it, the pain of resistance not worth the
fruitlessness of the effort. He rewarded her with a kiss to her clit when her
muscles relaxed and she forcefully evened her breathing, the condescending
token of his approval sparking a glare from her that he caught before wiping it
off her face with a push of the toy. Those calming, even breaths began to shake
as he fucked the plug into her, interspersed with uncomfortable grunts that
made him throb with want.
“There we go…” he breathed, awed at the sight of the shiny steel being
swallowed up by her tight hole until only the fur poked out.
She was panting and sweating by the time her sphincter closed over the neck. He
gave it a tug, making her groan in discomfort as the bulb pressed against the
ring of muscle that held it in snug and secure, and watched in fascination as
she shuddered when he wriggled it inside her. She was so pleasingly responsive
to every touch and sensation. He reached back into his bag, feeling for the
long slender stem of the riding crop and rose to tower above her again.
“Now you are looking like a dog, it is time to begin obedience training,” he
announced, testing the leather tongue of the crop against his palm.
Fear and helplessness really were appealing on her, especially with how the
pink of her flush rose up under the light golden brown of her skin as he
pressed the tip of the crop to her cunt. The whistle of the shaft rushing
through the air ended in a satisfying snap against her inner thigh and her
shout muffled into the gag in a high keen. Her tail swayed with how she writhed
as much as she could manage in her restraints to contain the sharp pain, the
red imprint of the impact marking her pretty skin.
“You should not have fought me, little bitch,” he said.
She cringed, turning her head away from him and tensing when he drew the crop
back, whining and cowering just like a beaten dog. He tried not to chuckle as
he brought the crop down on her again, marking the inside of her other thigh to
match. Now terrorized with the knowledge of how badly it hurt, she cried out
louder, a stream of saliva running down her chin from around the ball.
“You need this. You need pain. That is the only way an animal like you learns.”
The crop sang through the air and slapped higher on her thigh, the supple flesh
rippling with the impact and making her wail. This was not how he would treat
his subs unless they were adamantly communicative that this was what they
desired. But she wasn’t his sub. She was different. This was different. This
wasn’t what he was, not anywhere but with her. Watching her tremble out of her
cringing tension, preparing herself for the next strike without even needing to
be ordered, he could see where Leif had taught her. He could almost feel his
presence in her learned obedience.
“You should not have hid all he did to you.”
He struck her across her breasts and her back arched as she howled in the
stinging agony lighting up the nerves of that sensitive flesh. This time, as
she shook off her immediate reaction to the pain, her body trembling in the
fear and endorphins flooding her system, she looked up at him. Her irises were
a thin ring of silver around the wide obsidian depths of her blown pupils and
her placid expression was one of patient expectation. There she was. There was
her madness. It was the same quiet intensity as when she leveled the barrel of
the gun between Edward Kyun’s eyes and pulled the trigger without hesitation.
When he brought the crop down across her breasts again, she threw her head back
and moaned.
“Fuck…” he breathed.
He couldn’t wait any longer. The crop clattered to the floor as he quickly
undid his fly, his cock an angry red at the head from how engorged it was with
want to fuck her this long. He grabbed her neck and pushed her brutally against
the ladder as he stepped between her spread legs and thrust into her sopping
cunt. She grunted in those high, excited animal noises against the gag as he
forced his way into her, jerking her body with his motions.
“Fucking whore,” he sneered down at her, baring his teeth from how heavenly
soft and snug she enveloped him. “You love this, yes? Being forced, used, that
is what you are good for. Mmf! To be a good little bitch for your masters.
Fucking and killing, that is what you know. Animal!”
She was rolling her hips for him, her cunt sucking him deeper as she moaned and
sweated, her scent driving him to fuck her harder until he was slamming into
her. All the while, she watched him, that predatory leer gleaming with madness
and lust. He had beaten back her humanity until this primal core of her was
exposed, but there wasn’t hatred waiting there for him as he had expected. This
was something deeper, more ancient and powerful than anything as superfluous as
hatred. This was the thing that had called to his savageness until it had
surfaced in him. A resonant force within them both that hummed in the same
pitch when struck. They were a matching madness. They were kin and kindred,
tied by the same poisonous blood.
He barked out a short laugh at where his addled mind had gone. Her pussy was
good enough to throw him into such delirium. He was overexcited, that was all.
Just aftereffects of the drug Leif had poisoned his mind with, agitated by this
intense event. She wanted to kill him for what he was doing to her and he was
getting off on it.
“Do you see what you did to me?” he asked, ragged and husky, unable to speak in
anything but his native tongue. She was dripping wet and taking his punishing
thrusts with a feverish need, moaning and drooling mindlessly around the gag.
“What you make us want?”
She lunged at him, heedless of the hand at her throat that held her down,
pushing against it and leading with her jaw. He jerked back reflexively,
sensing that if she wasn’t chained down and gagged, she would have bitten him
viciously. She strained for his neck, her cunt clenching tight around him, her
narrowed eyes blazing. He groaned at how exquisitely her pelvic muscles milked
him, his thrusts rapid and deep as she came with a high, quivering cry. That
did it. He shouldn’t ejaculate in her, he had no idea if she was even on the
pill, but he couldn’t think of doing anything else when that wave of
overwhelming pleasure rushed over him. He sunk his throbbing length into her as
deep as she could take it and spilled surge after surge of his semen inside of
her, growling out ragged sighs with each release. He had no self-control and no
want for it either in this moment of perfect bliss. The tension melted out of
both of them as they came down from the high of that savage fucking, sobriety
leaking into his clouded mind as he panted to recover.
There was no return from this. There was no amount of guilt or repentance that
could undo what he had now done. Lifting his head from where it had rested on a
rung of the ladder above her, near her chained wrists, he knew he didn’t want
there to be any going back despite the crushing guilt that waited for him. He
wanted so much more.
***** Chapter 49 *****
Anders should have texted Simone’s phone to test it before he left for work,
but he didn’t think to do that until hours after she hadn’t replied. If he’d
known that she wasn’t receiving his texts, he could have brought the faulty
phone back to the mall with him and saved himself the trip later. But, as
usual, he didn’t think things through and that was how he ended up at the
clothing boutique with three different sizes of each outfit the clerk had to
select for him based on the embarrassingly approximate height and weight he
could guess of his Simone. Words like “tiny” and “like a grown woman but
smaller” only made the clerk look at him with pity. Of course, that also may
have been because the entire staff seemed to recognize him from the news. At
least they were subtle enough to keep their recognition of him down to just
staring and whispering amongst themselves.
He had been not so subtly pulled into his supervisor’s office and asked to
leave just a few hours into working because his appearance was such a
distraction. Actually, the term his boss had used was “distressing”. His
bruises were distressing his coworkers because they knew where he had gotten
them. He had pressed Anders to take the time off, to go spend the grieving time
legally allowed to him, but Anders had managed to argue him down to working
short shifts should he feel able - so long as he kept to his office. Couldn’t
have his famous bruises disrupting the project any more than it had. Anders had
walked out of the office angry. Now he walked out of the clothing boutique
bewildered and frustrated. This was just not his day.
“Anders?”
He froze mid-step, pivoting on his good leg before he could think better of it,
and confirmed it was who he had been afraid it was. “Elin! What a coincidence!
How are you?”
He glanced down at her belly after looking at her face. He couldn’t help it. It
was an automatic action, one that she evidently saw in the stiffening of her
already nervous smile. It seemed neither of them were prepared for this, which
was at least somewhat reassuring, if a little bitter.
“I’m good. We’re good,” she answered, sliding her hand over her rounded belly.
His eyes followed the shape it traced, that bitter feeling expanding. “How’s
your husband?”
“Louis is part of that ‘we’,” she answered, not facetiously, her silver tongue
merely always ahead of the conversation. He glanced away, ashamed at his
behavior, at all of it. “I’d ask how you are, but…”
“I’m fine,” he said, then tapped his cane on the asphalt of the parking lot.
“Well, I’m approaching fine.”
She smiled politely. An awkward silence carried on the breeze between them
until she broke it with an equally awkward, “Do you want to go grab a coffee,
since we’re both here?”
A few weeks ago, he would have been daydreaming about this scenario, praying
for any opportunity to convince her to let him back into her life. It was
startling how quickly things could completely change. He’d never given any real
consideration to becoming a father, having taken it for granted that he’d
settle down with some decent girl once he got comfortably in his thirties and
it would just sort of happen. Then Elin got pregnant, but she did not want to
be that girl for him. She was already that girl for her husband. She’d made it
clear there was no room for Anders in her neat little life and that had
devastated him in a way he hadn’t expected. Now faced with this invitation that
was more than just coffee, he realized that there was no longer any room for
Elin in his messy little life.
“I have to get back to my… to Simone, my, um…” he trailed off.
“Your niece,” she finished for him, then looked away embarrassedly. “It’s hard
to avoid reading about it.”
“You don’t have to avoid it.”
“I tried calling you while you were there,” she said, trying to change the
subject and only bulldozing her way into a less pleasant one. “I just had a bad
feeling.”
He bit his lip, not sure what he was supposed to do with this. He had an
annoying sense that he would have known how to handle this before, but his
social graces had been eaten away in the acid of all that had happened. So much
of him had been changed. He’d hoped that, once he got back home and resumed his
life, he could go back to the way he was. It was just a hope. His life now had
a sharp divide: before and after. Elin, the fetus that was decidedly entirely
hers and in no way his, all his desperation to plead his way into involvement
in their lives – that was all before. He stood on the other side now, able to
see but not able to feel anything beyond that divide.
“I didn’t get your call,” he said. He considered whether to voice his next
thought. Perhaps he shouldn’t, but it came anyway. “He had my phone. He knows
that I got a woman pregnant and that I cared about her. What I’m saying is… I
would recommend looking into better home security.”
Elin paled alarmingly and, for a moment, Anders was ready to run and catch her
in concern that she was going to faint. She blinked and nodded absently, her
voice distant and thin as she said, “I will.”
He wondered if he should attempt to comfort her. He was sure that, before, he
would not have even wondered if he should. He would have barged in to placate
and soothe her worry, trying to help in any way he could, overstepping the
boundaries of her personal responsibility for her own reactions because he knew
he could save her from them. Now, in the after, he knew how much his help could
hurt. His deliberation was brief.
“Good luck, Elin,” he said, attempting a smile before turning away.
 
 
“He’s dead.”
Mrs. Marceau’s voice betrayed nothing of what she thought or felt of that
statement of fact. Nothing she said ever did. Whether she was remarking on the
weather conditions, divulging plans to usurp the government of a developing
country, or announcing the passing of her husband, she always spoke with the
same severe, exact tone.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Leif responded politely, falling short of sincerity.
“You killed him.”
“Belatedly,” he added.
He was not surprised when she slapped him. It was the first time she made
physical contact with him and he was pleased that she made it a good one. Full
palm, solid connection, plenty of weight into it without disrupting her center
of gravity. She knew how to fight but she was still a lady about it. The two
men standing in his peripheral, each holding a taser gun aimed at him and
standing just out of reach, both tensed as he brought his hand up and smoothed
his hair back into place.
“It’s a terrible thing,” he continued, unaffected, “to be separated from the
one you love.”
Her hazel eyes narrowed and her lip curled in disgust. “I would suggest against
negotiating your terms at this precise moment, Mr. Valstad.”
“It’s never been a negotiation. You will bring me my daughter and I will do as
I please. I would suggest composing conditions in a way to make it more likely
that what I would please to do might also please you.”
“You have been doing as you’ve pleased since you’ve arrived as a guest to the
estate,” she all but seethed. “The conditions will not change until
participation is met.”
Leif turned his face toward the window and smirked at the dark sky beyond the
bars. He had nothing but the time he had stolen back from death while she had a
rapidly crumbling empire rife with dissent. They both knew it and he basked in
her hatred for him as that fact rang in the silence between them. It was
another beautiful night to be alive.
 
 
Simone flexed and stretched her aching jaw, rubbing at her masseter muscle with
her fingertips and stretching her lateral pterygoid by moving her mandible side
to side. Every muscle and bone was where and how it was supposed to be, no harm
sustained that was worse than taking a hazing at gymnastics camp. She was yet
again the new kid in town, noteworthy enough to attract the curiosity of those
who wanted to test her mettle and threatening enough to attract the malice of
those who wanted to crush it. Every few years, a new town, a new city, a new
state, a new set of peers. What she didn’t learn in permanence and stability,
she excelled in adaptability.
Her relief at being able to finally close her mouth after having it jammed open
for so long was equal to the soreness it brought to do so, but she compulsively
pushed through the pain. She rolled her shoulders and rotator cuffs as the
bathtub filled with cold water, swinging her arms to try and loosen the
tightness that had built up in them. At age eight, she had gotten past her
mental block that had prevented her from doing the full splits by two girls,
both improbably named Tiffany, forcing her legs apart in the gymnasium
restroom. This was the same pain, meaning the sharp ache of her hip adductors
from straining to close her thighs was a mild injury at worst. Looking at the
leopard spot pattern of bruises around her wrists from struggling against the
chain, she recalled what her father had told her when she’d complained about
what the Tiffanies had done.
“‘Pain is the most poignant reminder that you are still alive’,” she whispered,
her mouth still too clumsy to form the words as easily as she should. She
wouldn’t learn what poignant meant until a fifth grade vocabulary lesson and
she had only recently learned the full meaning of his advice. What eight-year-
old Simone did learn that day was that her father often gave aggravating
advice.
There seemed countless aches and pains all over her body, both from what Vidar
had wrought and from her own resistance. Too many areas to apply ice to
directly, so she cracked the ice trays into the cold bath water before sinking
into it with a wincing, flinching slowness. Adaptability was a function that
required exposure. When she had taken her first ice bath after overextending
herself to impress a new class, her mother had drawn it and had held her,
kicking and screaming, against her own body in the burning cold. When she had
taken her second ice bath, she had squealed with laughter and wrestled with her
mother in the burning cold. Sometimes, she adapted easily, shifting pieces of
herself in ways that best suited an optimal outcome with almost a seamless
effort. Other times, she railed against change with the immutable force of a
cliffside resisting the crashing ocean waves. Whether it was adaptation or
something less external, she couldn’t determine, but she had been changing over
time in the jagged progress of human behavior to this point.
After only a moment in the startling cold, she couldn’t feel anything on her
skin. Her eyes followed where her stiff hands ineptly touched her body,
receiving no feedback from either flesh, as though she were watching someone
else. When she had moaned and fucked for Vidar, she wished she could say it was
like watching someone else. Her fingers felt like icicles as she scraped his
semen out of her vagina. She wanted to take that entire memory and hold it
under the frigid water until it grew lifelessly numb; a thing only able to be
seen and not felt.
The shock that crawled along her scalp fizzled through the rest of her body as
she shut her eyes and submerged her head, the sound of the ice cubes plinking
against the porcelain sides of the tub loud under the water. To exist without
the burden of identity was an appealing fantasy, but this muddled interim of
only being aware enough to know she was changing without knowing in what manner
or to what end was a slowly building nightmare. There was a sense of something
rapidly forming within the chrysalis of her mind, but it wasn’t strong enough
on its own to smash out of its cocoon. Her skull throbbed in the threat this
cold posed to her delicate brain and she sunk further to lay her head on the
bottom of the tub in rebellion to that ache.
She was completely numb, the barrier of sensation between herself and the water
no longer detectable. She could believe herself to be the water, as malleable
and unfeeling as she had to be. The stray thought to sink back down and welcome
the heavy rush of cold into her lungs coalesced into an urge that grew in its
appeal. To leave so quietly, to drift into the water until return was
impossible, was an option open to her now. She had no control of her life, not
even her body or mind, but she could control her death. All she had to do was
sink.
“Kjære?”
Sound carried differently under the water, making the sounds of the dogs’ claws
clicking on the floor and Anders’ voice seem closer. She didn’t remember
dunking under again, shocking her when she opened her eyes to the blurry
ceiling beyond the surface of the water. Simone gasped as she breached from the
icy water, coughing and sputtering for the air her lungs ached for as the
whoosh of blood roaring through her veins to circulate that renewed oxygen was
deafening in her ears.
“Simone?” Anders called, now just beyond the door. “You are okay?”
“Hyeah…” she wheezed between coughs, her teeth chattering and body shaking in a
belated reaction to the chill.
“Come soon, here is food!” he announced cheerfully. “And here is… Ah…Klære...
Clothes.”
The door cracked open and he slipped a shopping bag into the room. Why he was
speaking to her through the door bewildered her until she realized he was
respecting her privacy, a bizarre concept to her since he’d spent hours fucking
and tasting her completely nude body just yesterday afternoon. Rolf held no
such incongruous convictions of propriety as he pushed his way through the
cracked door and beelined for the tub. The lab propped his forepaws up on the
edge and leaned over the water to lick her unfeeling face, his candid glee at
simply seeing her bringing her far from where her mind had gone.
“Nice to see you too, Rolf,” she said, grimacing as she allowed him to get his
fill of licking her face before he turned his tongue to lapping up the bath
water.
She splashed his slobber off her, promptly smacking herself in her unfeeling
clumsiness, and decided that she had probably achieved the maximum benefit of
the cold’s healing effects. Walking on completely numb feet was a slow and
difficult game as she stepped out of the tub and dried herself, but feeling was
already returning in the buzzing and stinging of her nerves recovering from the
shock. With a good night’s rest and a regimen of ibuprofen, it would be as
though the day’s violence had never happened. All she would be left with were
bruises that would fade and memories that wouldn’t matter.
“Oh…” she murmured, pulling out a sumptuous red cashmere sweater dress from the
bag Anders had left behind. She wished she could feel it.
 
 
For a day where no one had tried to murder, drug, or throttle Anders, it had
been a very bad one. It seemed as though he shouldn’t care about the million
odd little annoyances and grievances that had tallied up to what amounted to be
a harrowing day after having experienced some of the worst life could offer,
but there he was, just glad to finally be home again. Sitting across from
Simone, her lithe little body wrapped in red like a Christmas present he hoped
she would allow him to open later, he was quickly forgetting his bad day. She
smiled down at Rolf when he laid his head in her lap, begging with his big
brown eyes gazing sadly up at her while his tail wagged under the table
hopefully. Anders smirked at his shamelessness, feeling as though he related to
the dog too closely then.
“How was work?” she asked, glancing up from her meager plate of tikka masala.
“Work is… work,” he answered. His English was getting better the more they
talked, but she was always so quiet. They couldn’t get by on body language all
the time, as much as the idea seemed fine by him. “How are your day?”
He knew that wasn’t quite right, but she was sweet enough not to hint at it
when she answered, “I had a painful encounter on the steps to the attic.”
Once he grasped what she’d said, he nearly dropped his fork. “Hell! You are
okay?”
“I’m fine. I feel like I shouldn’t be, but I am. It would be pretty hilarious
if a tumble on a ladder killed me at this point, wouldn’t it?” she said, ending
with a wry grin.
He couldn’t find the humor in any of that. “You sleep with me tonight.”
Her smile vanished with a nervous purse of her lips. “I, uh… I don’t know if
I’d make a good bedmate. I was kind of hoping I could take the sofa.”
“I sleep on the sofa, you sleep on the bed,” he offered.
“I’m not kicking you out of your bed, Anders,” she frowned, stirring the sauce
into the rice just to distract her focus. He didn’t like how nervous she was.
Maybe she wasn’t as fine as she had insisted.
“So, you sleep with me tonight,” he repeated more insistently. “Together.”
She stared into nothing, the shadow of some sort of trouble crossing her
features before Rolf’s whine brought her back. She scratched him behind his ear
and his tail resumed his hopeful wag as he licked his chops in expectation of a
snack.
“Thank you for the clothes,” she said, breaking the silence with a shy and
quiet tone. “And the food and shelter. I really am grateful, I just hate always
being such a burden, so… I’ll sleep with you whenever you want.”
“Good,” he smiled.
He was glad that was settled so easily, given the language barrier. In truth,
he only seemed to sleep soundly when she was there with him, so this wasn’t
completely selfless of him. Not that he needed her to know that. Their
circumstance was something he was trying to be careful with, but he was new at
having someone so dependent and helpless to look after. He wondered if he was
perhaps enjoying it too much. Every stitch of clothing, every bite of food,
everything she needed would come from him and he wanted to be the only one she
relied on. No, he was definitely enjoying it too much, but with how unique
their relationship was, it was hard to gauge how harmful that really was. A
father should want to provide for his daughter. Lovers should want to share a
bed. An uncle should want to spoil his niece. He just didn’t want her to do
anything out of obligation to please him, even if wielding this much power over
her was admittedly appealing. He had to keep being careful not to fill that
potential for abuse.
Anders had to remind himself of that, over and over again, as he watched her
crawl into his bed later. The red dress had been replaced by one of his shirts
that rode high enough on her thigh to let him know she wasn’t wearing anything
underneath. She had to keep being the one to initiate. Until he’d fully earned
back her trust and they’d established healthy boundaries within this uneven
dynamic, he knew he had to resist any possibility of pressuring her into sex.
It was the right thing to do. His mouth watered to taste her and feel her come
apart under his tongue, but their situation was very, very delicate. Too
delicate for him to slip under the blankets and lick up the inside of her thigh
without at least asking permission first. Too delicate to even ask for
permission in the first place. He shouldn’t pressure her.
“Papa…” she whispered, the mattress shifting as she turned toward him. “Do you
ever want to hurt me when we’re fucking?”
This girl was going to be the death of him.
“You are wanting me to hurt you,dear?” he asked instead of answering. He’d been
anticipating this subject, but not this soon and not so bluntly. In the silence
that stretched after his question, he tried not to examine his own answer to
it.
“I… think there’s something wrong with me…” she muttered, her small voice
nearly inaudible.
“No, no,dear,you are good,” he quickly assured her. He reached out and touched
her waist before he could stop himself, breaking the first contact rule
already. “It is not wrong. Many people…”
“But I don’t want to be like this.”
She sounded so sad, he couldn’t help but pull her close. She stiffened in his
hug before relaxing in a shudder, the telltale sign of her crying causing him
to desperately want to comfort her. He wanted to reassure her that it wasn’t
abnormal, that he wanted to help her explore those desires and that he even had
been experiencing a similar confusion within himself he hadn’t expected, but he
just didn’t have the English. Instead, he pulled her flush against him and
stroked her back soothingly.
“It is okay, dearest,” he whispered.
She buried her face into his chest, her words coming out muffled against his
nightclothes as she stammered, “I don’t want to be hurt or, or forced, but I…
each time, I can’t… even if I don’t want it, it...”
“I know, I know…” he cooed.
He could show her that she didn’t have to be frightened of those urges. They
could go slowly and, with trust and clear communication, find their way out of
confusion together. But they had neither trust nor clear communication. There
were correct methods of engagement here, just none he could think of aside from
those they could not pursue. He needed advice from someone with more experience
in these matters.
“I don’t want to be who I am,” she whimpered, burrowing further into his
embrace.
“I want you to be you.”
“It hurts. I can’t do it... I don’t want to live with myself, I just… I want it
all to stop.”
Anders’ hold on her tightened before his mind had worked out what she might
have been implying, her words weighing heavily on his lungs and filling him
with a deep worry. After everything they’d managed to escape, she couldn’t
possibly have been considering suicide. It didn’t make sense. Her life was so
much better and it was only going to continue improving. She wasn’t being
beaten or raped, she’d never have to kill again, she was free to live a life
without any of those horrors Leif had wrought. Mostly. Now wasn’t the time to
consider the price they would later pay for her freedom. He knew he was
probably misunderstanding her grief, but even the mistaken possibility that she
was suicidal couldn’t go unchecked. He could protect her from Leif to an
extent, but he couldn’t even guess at how to protect her from herself.
“Dearest,” he began, not knowing how to continue. “Do not speak that way. You
are needing help, yes? Tell me.”
She let out another long, shuddering sigh, her small ribcage shaking in his
arms and remaining still as her jagged breaths evened out. The constrictive
worry wouldn’t lessen in him with her being so still and quiet.
“Dear?”
She had fallen asleep, leaving him alone in the dark with these thoughts
spinning in his mind. He couldn’t do this on his own. He knew how much his help
could hurt.
***** Chapter 50 *****
“Simone, come see me in the office.”
She looked up from unpacking to see her father’s broad back already walking
down the hall. His steps were as silent in leaving as he was in his arrival,
telling her nothing of how long he might have been watching her in that sneaky
way he often did. She tried to mimic his silence as she stood and followed, but
she was too sore to control her movements precisely enough. Her bare feet
padded down the carpeted hall, her fingers dragging along the recently painted
walls that stunk up the air with their sour chemical odors, until she stood
just beyond the threshold of her father’s home office. The sleek black shelves
that lined the walls were empty, their contents still packed in the boxes
stacked next to the wide desk he leaned against. In the middle of these bare
and gutted shelves she was so used to seeing meticulously arranged with books,
geometric sculptures, and glossy decanters of beautiful amber and clear
liquors, Leif stood as effortlessly composed as always, the solid center of
this room that would soon follow suit. She walked toward him when he beckoned
her over, her nervousness growing with each careful step under his piercing
stare.
“Lay down on the desk,” he said.
Her brow furrowed and she pursed her lips, approaching the glass desk with the
dread of climbing it equal to the dread of not being sure why he wanted her to,
but she obeyed. Considering the sharp ache of her hip flexors, she lifted
herself with her hands and slid onto it instead of lifting her knee to it as
she would have done otherwise. She knew he knew before he even laid a hand on
her, but every lie and explanation she’d had ready for this moment died on her
paralyzed tongue when he lifted her skirt and began squeezing her inner thigh.
His thumbs pressed into the pliant flesh of her relaxed muscles, kneading
rhythmically from her knee all the way up to the crook of her groin where the
pain emanated.  She bit her lip shut in case she might cry out too suddenly to
stop herself, breathing slowly to keep herself calm. He spread her legs far
apart and she winced in expectation of pain, but it wasn’t as bad as she had
thought.
Still holding her legs up and apart by her ankles, his body positioned between
them, he said, “Squeeze them shut now.”
She obeyed, this time groaning in the pain that was delivered in the effort of
resisting his hold. He lowered and then let go of her ankles, smoothing down
her skirt before stepping out from between her legs.
“You don’t need to tell me all the details,” he said, that imperceptible
calmness aggravating her paranoid guilt further. She hadn’t even lied to him
except to omit the truth, and now he was removing the opportunity to lie at
all. “However, I want you to tell me what happened.”
“Am I hurt?” she asked.
“You’ll be fine with rest by tomorrow if you ice it,” he answered, sitting at
the desk and typing something at his computer.
“Then it doesn’t matter what happened. I don’t want to go back to gymnastics.”
His typing fingers abruptly stopped. She lied very still, clenching her fists
anxiously as she kept her stare fixed to the ceiling to keep herself from
looking at his reaction. Not that she would always be able to tell what he was
thinking by his expression alone, anyway.
“Come sit on my lap, my child,” he said. “I have something I want to begin
teaching you.”
She swallowed down her uneasiness at the request and slid off the desk,
thinking only of ending this uncomfortable session sooner by being obedient as
she walked over and sat across his thighs. She was far too old to be doing this
and wondered bitterly if he was treating her like a little kid to mock her, but
the image he gestured to on his monitor knocked that suspicion from her in
shock. On the screen, there was a black and white image of a man sitting in
front of a crowd, his body engulfed in flames as people looked on. She looked
away in reflexive repulsion, but Leif turned her cheek to face it.
“That is a Buddhist monk named Thích Quảng Đức,” he explained. “He did this to
himself and while he burned, he didn’t even make a sound.”
“That’s horrible!” Simone whimpered. “Why would he do that?!”
“I’ll explain his motivations another time. What I want you to learn is how he
accomplished this. Look at him, Simone,” he said, his face close to hers,
preventing her from moving away from the ghastly image. His stubble scraped her
cheek. “Imagine the excruciating pain of being burned alive. His body becoming
charred black and shriveled, the smell of his own burning flesh thick in the
air, how did he do this and not scream and writhe in pain?”
“I don’t know!” she said, trying not to cry, rapidly failing.
She hated seeing others hurt. Their agony and sorrow touched her as though they
were her own, compelling her to help them. There would be nothing she could
have done for this burning monk and the thought of being there, watching him
suffer and having no way to help made her feel sick with shame of her own
ineptitude. Her father’s strong arms wrapped tight around her kept her from
wiping away her tears as they fell for the long-dead monk.
“Because pain is only conditional. When we are ruled by conditional means, our
lives and selves become conditional. When we overcome conditional and
circumstantial influences, then we are free. Pain is not bad or good, it simply
is. It is our perception of it that matters.”
His words were confusing her. She couldn’t understand what he was trying to
tell her, but she was too frightened to say anything. She didn’t want to hear
him, didn’t want to see this awful picture, but she couldn’t stop listening and
she couldn’t look away. Her stomach twisted into knots as he went on.
“You fear pain, Simone. You let your fear control you. Fear is your crucible,
but you don’t have to fear pain. Pain is the most poignant reminder that you
are still alive.”
“Nobody wants to hurt!” she managed to squeak.
“Incorrect, but that’s a lesson for another time,” he responded, grinning. She
couldn’t figure out why he was grinning. This was nothing to grin at. She
shifted uncomfortably on his lap, that suspicion that he was mocking her
returning beneath her terror. “You don’t have to be a Buddhist monk to overcome
your body’s perception of pain, my child. Watch.”
Her eyes widened at the glint of the knife he held in front of her, so
terrifyingly close.
“Papa?! Papa, what are you doing?!” she demanded, wriggling to try to escape
his lap, but he held her fast to him as he brought his forearm under the blade
before her face. “Are you- are you- Don’t, stop, STOP!”
“Don’t fret, darling girl. You’ll learn these tricks too one day, all in due
time,” he said, never breaking his calm as the tip of the blade sunk in and
dragged down his flesh, parting the skin in a thick red line that immediately
gushed blood. The warm trickle fell heavily into her lap, wafting up the
pungent scent of rusted iron and something almost sweet with it. He smiled down
at her as she screamed.
 
“PAPA!” Simone shrieked, her legs tangling in the white sheets she dragged
along with her frantic stumbling.
Her knees hit the rug, the skin burning from the friction as she scrambled to
stand and pant through her bewilderment at finding herself in an unfamiliar
bedroom. The sterile and stark surroundings of her father’s home office fell
back into memory as she took in the whites and light-colored woods of this
room. The sound of many paws scuffling around outside the door and the shadows
of noses peeking in the space under it brought her back to Anders’ home.
Dragging her fingers down her face, she tried to chase those fading images of
the nightmare away, but they wouldn’t dissipate into the unreality of dreams.
It stuck to her mind with the permanence of vivid memory, because that’s what
it was. A terrifying memory of the darker side of Leif’s parenting to complete
his aggravatingly vague advice she had recalled yesterday. It wasn’t vague at
all; she just hadn’t remembered the full context until reliving it now. The
image of his patient and loving smile as he cut into his flesh made her shiver,
but as her mind rapidly ascended the foggy web of memories of that smile to the
present, it took her further away from that powerfully strange sensation of
having just been eight-years-old and so very frightened.
“How did I forget so much?” she muttered aloud, hugging herself to soothe that
tangle of anxiety. “How much more is going to come back?”
Her words were met with a chorus of pleading whines and she opened the door to
be swarmed by the pack of worried dogs. Their snouts scanned her for injury,
their animal compassion to her distress melting away her dread, and she knelt
to receive their full examination. Their acceptance of her into the pack was an
unexpected wealth of comfort to her, but she supposed it scratched that
fundamental itch of wanting to belong and to be loved. Laying down on her back
to convey her submission as a new member, the first real smile she’d
experienced in a while pulled at her mouth as she ruffled their fur and
squirmed gleefully under their friendly licks and nuzzles.
As she went through her morning routine, carefully measuring the pain through
her warm-up stretches to find herself as uninjured as she’d hoped, her thoughts
led back to her father’s words and she wondered how far those lost lessons had
gone. When she felt a flutter spring deep in her core at the aching reminder of
the curated savagery Vidar had performed on her body, she felt as though she
had half the answer. So much of what she was had been forged by Leif, it was
hard to tell if there was anything that was ever really her.
In the attic room, while dressing herself in her fine new clothing, she found
the cell phone still on her bed. Eight new text messages, three missed calls,
one new voicemail. All from Anders, except one text from a private number that
came through as she held the phone. “Only in the light is your shadow
revealed”. Standing beneath the skylight, letting the bright sun warm the back
of her neck, she was distracted from her bewilderment by a shadow moving over
her. She looked up in time to see someone move away beyond the glass.
 
 
“Do you think, or do you have any reason to suspect, that these hallucinations
might be tied to or influenced by these urges?”
Vidar dug his fingers into the edge of his seat across from Dr. Fjeldstad, her
purposefully slow and even tone belaying the horror he knew she detached
herself from behind that question. She was a good psychiatrist, her
transparency and forthrightness often an uncomfortable but effective match for
his acerbic defensiveness. He couldn’t deceive her and she had never made any
qualms about letting it be known that she was aware of when he tried. That was
why her hedging the sexual aspect of his aggression towards Simone made him so
nervous. In the two years he’d been coming to her to untangle the snags of what
was once his everyday life, she’d managed to refrain from personally judging
his unorthodox actions and hobbies. He’d gotten to a point of comfort with her
where he could openly discuss his undeniably colorful sex life, but now,
sitting across from her and seeing how she cautiously steered away from what
he’d just admitted, he regretted having filled her with that knowledge.
“In as much as they are both related to a loss of control, they are tied,” he
answered. “But not beyond that.”
Dr. Fjeldstad crossed her legs and tapped her tennis shoe at the air as she
pursed her unpainted lips, her show of deep thought making him more nervous. He
shouldn’t have come, but she’d cleared her entire morning for this extended
session and had hounded him through his email and, almost immediately after
acquiring a replacement, his cell phone. He’d declined on both invitations, but
there he was, at her office at 7 AM sharp. She’d kept the time open for him
even after his refusals. She knew him too well. She probably knew he’d already
raped Simone, or at least had brought some level of actualization to those
urges, and that was why she was avoiding it. There were some things that were
not protected under doctor-patient confidentiality.
“It’s revenge,” he said, snapping her out of her thought process.
“Against Leif,” she finished, then brought her stony gaze to him. “That’s what
you believe it to be. You’re angry and you’re grasping blindly for justice for
what was done to you, but it doesn’t exist, and you won’t find it in hurting
his daughter. What happened to you was out of your control. You can take that
control back now, here, in therapy.”
He grinned, a rictus arrangement of his mouth devoid of humor or any
pleasantness. “She was his and now she’s ours. It’s not right, but it feels
right. Doing what he did to her feels right.”
He was pushing the plausible deniability to a dangerous edge if he hadn’t
already. Maybe a part of him wanted her to report him before he did it again,
but mostly, he just wanted to force her disgust to the surface. He wanted to
see how unforgiveable just having these desires was.
“You’re in full control of your actions, Vidar,” she carefully reminded him.
“You can stop yourself from pursuing those urges.”
A breathy bark of a dry laugh huffed out of him at that. “I haven’t had full
control since I went to Hell and came back with these devils swimming around in
my brain. I don’t care that it’s wrong, or misguided, or crazy. I want to put
on his cologne and break into her bedroom when she’s sleeping, just to see if
she would cry while I fucked her or beg for it. In your professional opinion,
which do you think she would do, Dr. Fjeldstad?”
“You seek condemnation to relieve you of the possibility of being forgiven. You
wish to cave in the exits of this path of destruction you’re on, so you feel no
temptation or responsibility to leave it,” she said instead. “It’s a natural
extension of your antisocial patterns. Provoke mutual antagonism to eliminate
the risk of vulnerability that is an ineluctable outcome of true human
connection. It begs the question: What is it about Simone that evokes this
response so hostilely in you?”
Vidar inwardly recoiled from the unexpected validity of her assessment, her
words resounding truths within him he wasn’t fully aware of. Outwardly, he
said, “Proximity.”
“Proximity to the trauma?”
“Proximity to Leif.” He looked at the vase of feathers behind her, avoiding
having to meet her stare. “She’s saturated in him and his influence. It’s not a
far leap to judge that I would want to take her power from her as a proxy to
taking my power back from him, is it?”
“It’s not a far leap because it’s low-hanging fruit. You are also fond of
hiding behind convenient truths.”
“So, which is it? Am I salting the earth to prevent any seeds of connection
from growing because I have a fear of intimacy, or am I preventing any sense of
responsibility to my horrid actions by framing myself as fundamentally horrid?”
“Neither are exclusionary to the other. This is a longstanding complex issue
compounded by an already traumatic event. You’re also mantling your abuser to
reclaim your control, but that doesn’t exclude the other methods you’re
utilizing to the same end. ‘Doing what he did to her feels right’, but you only
have an idea of what he did. There’s no revenge available to you so you’re
seeking to create an opportunity for revenge in her, but first you need to
dehumanize both her and yourself to further your access to these acts you know
to be deplorable. You won’t find revenge this way, Vidar. You will never find
revenge because it is a concept of fantasy. You need to refrain from any
contact with Simone until we resolve these urges. Will you do that?”
The black bag was in the trunk of his car, rife with options of further fear
and humiliation for his little bitch. Once this appointment was over, he would
drive past Anders’ house on his way home and, if his little brother wasn’t
there, he would go inside and find her. When he did, he would do only exactly
as he pleased. No need to consider why or to what end beyond the simple
hedonistic pursuit of pleasure. The only sin he would need to punish her for
was the fault of piquing his interest.
“Yes,” he lied.
 
 
Anders tapped the business card for the psychiatrist Maier had recommended to
him before they left the US. A “guaranteed discreet” psychiatrist for whoever
among them might find use of one. The implication was clear then that this Dr.
Benjamin Wallis was involved with the network, but his level of involvement
with the murderous organization responsible for holding Leif was purposefully
dodged by Maier. He should have thrown out the card on that basis alone, but
now he sat in his office actually considering trusting a potential murderer
with his Simone’s mental wellbeing. However, with the many incriminating
secrets she would need to divulge for therapy to be effective, there were no
other options. And, technically, he himself was now involved with the network.
In direct employ, to be exact. He glanced bitterly at the manila envelope that
was waiting in the passenger seat of his car, the cash and simple note still
tucked within. “Maintain her health and appearance”, it read. What level of
maintenance that much money could possibly require was beyond him to guess. A
knock at his door drove him to snatch the envelope and quickly stash it in a
desk drawer.
“Come in,” he called. Trygve the intern entered balancing a tray of steaming
coffee mugs in his hand and a stack of files in the cradle of his arm, the
young man deliberating over which mug to hand off to Anders before he let him
know, “It’s the one with the dogs on it.”
“Oh!” Trygve laughed a little too nervously, gingerly placing the dog-decorated
mug on the edge of the desk. He then gestured to the large collection of framed
pictures of all the dogs Anders had ever housed and remarked, “I should have
guessed.”
“Yeah, I’m known as the local dog hoarder,” Anders said, then muttered, “Well,
used to be known…”
“Ooh, a sheltie! I grew up with a sheltie!” the boy exclaimed in delight,
leaning over the desk to look over more photographs. “Closest thing to a
sibling I ever had, really. He even bossed me around like one, haha!”
Anders grinned at his excitable demeanor, that youthful energy a refreshing
distraction from the dark turn of his thoughts in the lull of his workload.
What he’d said snagged his interest, however.
“Trygve, how old are you?”
“20. Well, in a couple weeks.”
The same age as Simone, then, only a scant few months younger and an only child
like her. He looked at him through that lens of comparison. Anders had always
felt too young. Home owner, senior employee of a global nonprofit, member of a
dog rescue group that mostly included retirees, youngest brother by a six-year
difference and grace of an unwanted pregnancy at the end of a failing marriage,
he had always been remarked on by his youth. Watching the shocking divide
between himself and the near childishness of this intern made him feel the
difference of what a ten-year gap could mean. With Simone, it was simply
instinct to assume a fatherly role, their intrinsic differences more a matter
of a cultural divide than age. With this intern, he felt every year between
them and wondered how this reflected on his relationship with the girl. He
could use his insight.
“What a coincidence. I’m turning thirty in a couple weeks. Taurus, then?”
Anders smiled congenially, taking up his mug.
“Yup! Guess we have more than shelties in common, Mr. Valstad.”
“Call me Anders. Hey, Trygve, I have a girl your age, so if you don’t mind, can
I get your opinion on something? Whenever you have a moment.”
“I have a moment, sir. What’s up?”
Anders swallowed the bitter coffee with a purse of his lips. He should debate
whether to broach this so frankly, but he doubted his reputation would ever
recover within this company anyway. Or this country, for that matter.
“Do you ever become so frustrated with yourself, with who you are, that you
want to commit suicide?” he asked. The blank stare was enough to tell him that
perhaps he should have refrained. He smiled sheepishly, turning back to his
monitor to feign work as he muttered, “Sorry, forget I said anything.”
“Is Simone suicidal?”
Anders’ attention snapped back to the boy, his eyebrows raised in surprise. He
hadn’t mentioned her by name, not to anyone here. Trygve made his realization
of his misstep apparent without any attempt to disguise his regret in how he
clapped his free hand over his mouth and cringed. Whether this was due to the
probability of a gag order on the subject within the office or the boy’s own
research into that latest gossip was equally aggravating. If his ex-girlfriend
knew about Simone living with him, that just being common knowledge to everyone
around him should not have surprised him like that. He had to get used to these
details on his personal life being in the public domain.
“No need to be embarrassed, Trygve. It was my fault for bringing it up. But, I
would appreciate if this was kept between us, understand?” Anders said,
speaking with a softness to reinforce the emphasis on discretion.
“I’m sorry, she’s just really popular on boards and shit, and it’s, um, it’s so
weird talking to you about this, sorry,” the boy babbled, then blurted, “She
has a ton of supporters I can reach out to for her if she needs help!”
“No! No, I would prefer to keep this within my family. Please, forget I
mentioned it,” Anders hurriedly insisted. “Thank you for the coffee refill. I’m
sure they’re keeping you busy, so I’ll let you get on with your day.”
The young intern, apparently as lacking in social graces as himself, hovered
near the door, his eagerness to find any reason to continue this conversation
morbidly obvious. Unfortunately, the longer he stayed, the more Anders’
curiosity festered. His fingers typed nonsense into nothing on his computer as
he restrained himself from asking just what he’d meant by “supporters” until,
finally, Trygve left. Anders sighed in relief, knowing how much chaos his
curiosity could incite.
 
 
Simone’s bare feet beat the ground as she ran around to the other side of the
house, the kitchen knife pointed down and away from her body as it shook in her
fist. She didn’t feel the sticks and rocks that nearly cut through the thick
skin of her soles or even hear the dogs barking excitedly as they joined in the
chase, her entire focus on finding the trespasser as she kept her wide eyes
scanning the edge of the roof. She found him just as he was climbing off the
ladder that was leaned against the south end of the house. Her breath came out
of her in a rattling grunt, nearly a bark, when she saw him, drawing his
attention to her like a deer suddenly scents a wolf. Short, portly, young,
scared, frozen mid-step, this man obviously wasn’t part of whatever network had
taken hold of her family’s life. That alone was enough to ignite the fury her
adrenaline had primed to explode. This man was a non-threat with camera hanging
around his neckless chin and his bovine stare wide with fear. This man was
insignificant, unrelated, and irrelevant. She should ignore him and go on with
her day holding only the anger of having been rudely intruded upon, but that
text sent to her phone implied more than what she was seeing in him. She
clutched the knife tight enough to feel as though it were a jutting extension
of her arm as she ran at him, leaping over the fence he had barely managed to
climb.
He ran wildly, shrieking, “I’M SORRY! I’M SORRY! PLEASE, LET ME GO, I’M SORRY!”
She could catch him, and so she would catch him. She didn’t know what she would
do when she did. The knife told her to open him up where he could be made
hollow, but that was madness speaking. She just wanted to scare him and
everyone like him so no one would trespass again. Patterns could form quickly
and having Anders’ home invaded by paparazzi and overzealous crime fanboys
could not be allowed. An example had to be made. They were running through the
wooded area Anders’ house backed up into and she was catching up quickly as he
ineptly dodged through the trees.
She let the madness yell through her mouth as she panted behind him, “RUN for
your LIFE, SWINE! Get that blood PUMPING! Lets you BLEED OUT FASTER!”
The screams he let out were shrill, nearly inhuman with terror, and she
bellowed out her rage in a wordless and ragged cry as she tackled and shoved
him to the dirt. She’d taken down bigger, heavier men than him in Brooklyn when
the bars let out their worst drunkards during the dark hours of early morning.
Entitled, intrusive men who thought they could trample all over her basic
rights like this insignificant worm squirming and screaming in the dirt now.
She owed them nothing. Not her fear and not her mercy. Her friends weren’t
around her now to back her up, but no one was around to watch her either. Just
this frightened little male cowering beneath her knife as she crouched over
him, his breath moist on her hand as it heaved out of him.
“Toss the camera first, swine,” she demanded.
The low growl of her voice seemed to loose his tongue from his petrification as
he babbled, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I wasn’t doing anything- I just wanted some
pictures! Please don’t kill me! Please!”
The tip of the blade pressed into his spongy, shiny cheek, eking out a bead of
red and a shivering gasp from him as she barked, “TAKE OFF the FUCKING camera
and toss it!”
“Okay, okay!”
He scrambled to get the strap over his head and threw it in an awkward flailing
motion only a few feet away.
“Good job, swine,” she sneered. He sputtered out a whimper as she moved the tip
of his blade over his eye. The stink of his fear mingled with the urine his
bladder had released at some point, disgusting her at both the stench and his
weakness. “Now, you’re going to slowly reach into your pocket and show me your
wallet. If you take out anything but your wallet or if you do anything I might
not like, you’re going to lose this eye. Say, ‘yes, Miss Valtad’ and reach for
your wallet.”
“Y-Yes, Miss Va-alstad,” he whimpered, his shaking hand slow to reach behind
and under him. He held the canvas billfold next to his sweaty, pink face.
“Open it.”
She didn’t move her glare from him, checking in her peripheral to see that his
identification was in the wallet before snatching it. His breath wheezed out a
fearful whine when the canvas scraped out of his hand. When she and her friends
would mug the drunkards who thought them harmless enough to harass in New York,
it was never met with such fear. Annoyance, anger, disbelief, some terror, but
never pure fear. It was a nearly transactional process and never led to any
bloodshed. She wondered if it was the cultural difference or this young man’s
age, or perhaps it was her who was different from the little part time punk kid
she used to be. Well, even a part time punk could be intimidating with an 8-
inch kitchen knife.
“How did you get my cell number, swine?” she asked.
“What-”
“How did you getmy cell number, swine?”
“I don’t know your cell number! I don’t have it! I never had your number!
Please, just let me go!”
“Well then how did you send me that text, you little shit?!” she snarled,
pressing the edge of the blade along the wide curve of his cheek. He was
weeping, turning his face away from the knife. She growled in frustration.
“Somebody sent me a text right when I saw you. Was it one of your buddies? You
got people I should meet, piggy?”
He was blubbering something in what she could guess was Norwegian as he sobbed
and she scoffed, having to accept that it wasn’t this man who had texted her.
It didn’t seem like he was the type to even tempt getting caught with leaving
cryptic, poetic hints. If he didn’t have anything to do with it, then someone
who was able to get her number, see her roof, see where she was in the house,
and have the motivation to warn her of a trespasser did. That cool, righteous
hostility left her in a wave of uneasiness. Someone who could do all of that
and with such aggravating methods was an almost guaranteed threat. She should
have known that the people Maier was taking orders from would have been
watching her there.
“Don’t move,” she ordered, rising away from the prone and sniveling man. As she
walked over and picked up the camera, she continued, “I have your name. I don’t
care if you tell anyone, but if the police come asking me or my family about
this, I’ll find you and carve the bacon off your belly. You’re going to lie
there with your eyes closed and count to 100, loud so I can hear you, and then
you’re going to get the hell out of here and never come back. Start counting,
swine.”
With the sound of him yelling numbers in the background to tell her where he
was, she jogged through the underbrush back home, her bare feet aching and her
knees shaking. There was no peace or safety, not even temporarily. There was
only time between the madness her father had brought upon them.
***** Chapter 51 *****
Rolf leaned his body against her legs, their packmates stepping around her,
watching her with expectation glittering in their dark eyes and pleading in
their whines. She stood in the kitchen, the knife cleaned of the trespasser’s
filth, the blade gleaming and bright as she looked at her reflection in the
steel. The feel and weight of the knife was nothing like holding her father’s
hand, but it brought that exact same comfort. There were some things she knew
that she was never meant to find out and, in knowing, she wondered if it had
caused her to lose some things she was supposed to know. It was a foul logic,
but one that she was confident in nonetheless. Everything had a price, after
all. Knowing her father’s love had cost her nearly everything she had, and she
was still paying. The survival of herself and her uncles had cost Edward Kyun
his life, but it had also taken something from her that was harder to define.
There was a deceptive simplicity in having choice so thoroughly stripped from
her in that moment she’d aimed the gun at Kyun. There was no gray haze of moral
ambiguity to ponder or looming sense of miserable guilt that would visit her in
sleepless nights, only the black and white yes or no of kill or be killed.
“The most basic law of nature condensed into one bullet between his jaundiced
eyes,” she growled out in a whisper through clenched teeth, doing her best
impression of Leif’s far deeper voice. She smiled at how awful it was.
Leif’s eyes stared back at her in the knife, those same storm gray irises he’d
given her that shone in striking contrast to her skin instead of the ghostly
way the color blended with his paleness. She was always the conspicuous one,
always noticed and targeted while he had been able to blend in and hide himself
so easily. No one knew what he was until he wanted them to know, and they
always kept his secrets, one way or another. Now that the whole world knew what
so many dead had briefly known, there seemed little meaning in trying to appear
as anything other than what they were. That expectation of normalcy had been
relieved of both of them and she could finally stop feigning it for the sake of
other’s comfort. It finally didn’t matter. She could just be the creature she’d
always been beneath her skin, his little monster he had created with his
version of love.
Her gray eyes widened at seeing his sharp smirk reflected in the steel when she
tipped it, her chest constricting in both hope and fear as she whirled around,
but it was Vidar standing so close behind her. Her voice caught in her throat,
clogged with wonder at how he’d crept up so silently and terror at his darkened
expression, and his smooth voice cut her off before she could clear hers.
“What is the knife for, sweetheart?”
She nearly tripped over a dog as she stumbled backward, his wide step easily
clearing the distance between them and she gasped when his hand snatched her
wrist painfully. The knife clattered to the floor.
“What is the knife for?” he repeated, louder, angrier.
He was still walking, pushing her as she stumbled, and the dogs danced
excitedly at their joined movement. The words were all jammed in her throat
behind that thick wad of terror and anticipation. He was so close, his barely
contained rage rolling off him in waves, his body brushing against her to keep
her moving until her back hit the edge of the kitchen table. He boxed her in
with one hand flat on the table at either side of her, making her lean back to
try to avoid him as he loomed low and too close.
“You were wanting to stab me, little bitch?” he smirked.
“N-no!” she finally squeaked out.
“Do not lie,” he hissed, his breath hot and wet on her face, heavy with
alcohol. She winced away from the memories it stirred, too many memories and
all far too fresh to ignore. “I know you wish to kill me, yes? I did see it in
your eyes, when we… when I fucked.”
“Please, uncle Vi-”
 “Ikke-Do not call me that!” he snapped, grabbing her shoulders, his long
fingers digging into her painfully. “I am not uncle, understand?! You are
calling Anders ‘papa’, you call me ‘Sir’, yes? Speak, dog!”
“Yes, Sir!” she responded, breathless, cowering.
She hated that she was such a coward against these men that smelled and looked
so much like Leif. It wasn’t right. They hadn’t earned or crafted this fear
they so benefitted from, they only assumed her to naturally be so subservient
and submissive. Even if she’d still gripped the knife in her fist, she doubted
he would take her seriously. If only they knew what she was. If only she could
show them. But her legs were shaking from the strength this particular breed of
fear had drained from her and a cold sweat shivered down every inch of her
under his bullying. That drive to please and soothe the savagery in him warmed
the cradle of her pelvis and made her blush in shame. That’s what he was here
for, though. That’s what any of them were ever here for.
“You will be good for me this time,” he said, not a request or an order, but a
warning as his hands slid along her neckline and began undoing the buttons of
her blouse.
“Yes, Sir,” she whispered.
Simone hung her head low, but there was no hiding her deepening blush and
breaths as she watched him unbutton her blouse and then slacks. These fine,
sensible clothes fell away from her to reveal the sinful thing that hid beneath
them. His pale hands slid along her darker skin as he pushed her blouse away
from her shoulders and peeled her slacks down to her knees, baring the nothing
she wore beneath them in absence of even owning any underwear but the one bra
and panties Maier had gifted her. She resented her filthy existence as Vidar
cupped her breasts, but his rough squeezing and pinching still stoked the
pulsing heat that flared beneath his hands.
“You’re nothing but our little American whore,” he said, drawing a grunting
whine out of her as he twisted her nipples cruelly. Her knees threatened to
buckle at the exquisite pain that shot sparks of pleasure right to her cunt,
but she resisted as much as she could. This wasn’t right. He wasn’t the one who
should wield this power over her. “Get on the table, bitch.”
He didn’t give her time to comply, his hands hooking behind her thighs and
hauling her up onto the table until she was lying on her back. He yanked her
slacks the rest of the way off, leaving her naked but for the blouse that hung
open. Her nipples were already raw and sore, reddened from his torment, and he
grabbed her wrists and forced them away when she tried to cross her arms
defensively over her chest.
“Stay,” he ordered, his cold glare broaching no argument even if it had
occurred to her to verbalize her protests.
Any pleads for him to stop would only be met with further degradation, a
pattern she was familiar with from the man who had taught her to be so
submissive in the first place. So, she stared at the ceiling, just trying to
focus on maintaining deep and calming breaths and allow whatever was to happen.
Fighting would only make it worse. The rattling of metal muffled through
leather made her stomach flutter in unbearable anticipation of what pain was to
come as he shuffled through that awful bag. She could see herself panicking in
line at grocery stores while old ladies rifled through their purses, the sound
of them jostling their car keys in their leather bags taking her back to these
moments. So much of the sane world held danger for her insanity. The sound of
cloth moving over skin, of a shovel scraping through dirt, the mechanical snap
and whirring of an old film camera, so many sounds operated on the same
frequency as her fear now. At this moment, it was the sound of Vidar’s voice,
smooth over his jagged English, that fed her fear.
“You did not tell Anders about us. Why?”
She flinched when he grabbed her by her hair and pulled her to sit up, his
hands not giving her time to recover before wrapping something cold around her
neck and tightening it into a buckle. Her dreadful suspicion was confirmed when
her eyes followed the chain leash leading from her neck to his fist and then
his burning gaze as he took in the sight of her wearing the collar. Her
stitches scraped against the leather as she swallowed thickly and gathered the
will to speak. This man didn’t need any further motivation to punish her.
“I promised I wouldn’t,” she answered, her voice tight and small.
His brow furrowed and she braced herself for pain, but he only muttered
bitterly, “You are truly mad.”
Still holding the end of the leash wrapped around his fist, he pulled up a
chair and sat, just looking at her as she knelt nearly naked before him. His
eyes, as cold and cobalt as the arctic sea, examined her with a gleam that made
her tremble. She could run, leap from this table and maybe even make it out the
door, but there was nowhere she could go. No one she could run to except the
paparazzi waiting to sell her fear and shame to tabloids. She shuddered at the
punishment he would enact on her if he caught her, now that she was familiar
with the punishment he would give her without even needing a reason. No, he had
plenty of reason. She bit her lip as that ache of guilt twisted sharply in her.
She was the cause of all of this. It was only fitting that she should provide
this meager restitution with the same sin that had led to all this chaos in his
life.
“Are you crying so soon?” he asked, his grin stretching mirthlessly and only
sharpening his features.
She didn’t know she was, but her cheeks were wet with tears and her neck and
chest tensed in that tightening need to sob. She shouldn’t cry. This wasn’t
even anywhere close to what she deserved.
“Please…” she whispered through that ache in her throat. “Punish me, Sir.”
The silence that answered her made her sick with mounting anxiety until her
desperation gave her the courage to look at him directly, only to see him
staring in shock. She couldn’t have misread what this was. He was there to do
what he’d done to her yesterday, to continue taking the reparation she owed him
through her pain and flesh. He snapped out of his thoughts when she met his
wide blue eyes, his brow wrinkling in irritation as he looked away.
“You would do anything for a fuck, yes, little bitch?” he sneered, leaning over
and grabbing up the heavy bag. His sneer morphed back into that cruel smile as
he pulled out the tail, her dread gathering into that tight knot in her gut at
the sight of the animal fur. “You are a needy, shameless whore, but we will
take care of you. We will keep you fucked and used.”
“Thank you, Sir,” she forced herself to say, unable to raise her voice higher
than a whisper as she grasped the shiny steel end of it when he handed it to
her.
His grin grew colder as he said, “Good manners. Your papa did teach you well.
Now, show me how you put in your fluffy bitch tail.”
She flinched when he tossed her something, but reflexes had her catch it before
it hit her face. She wondered briefly if she was supposed to let it hit her,
but there were more pressing questions at hand.
“Um… I…” she muttered, looking at the tail and the tube of a thick clear goo in
her hands. Her skin heated in mortification from her chest to her scalp. “I’ve
never put anything… up there before. Not by myself.”
His brows shot up and his tongue swiped over his sharp teeth in delighted
interest. “Well, well, you are a smart little bitch. Figure it out.”
She bit her lip again, hard enough to hurt, and squeezed out a swirl of the
goop onto the narrowed tip of the steel. Whether it was enough or too much, she
didn’t know, and squeezed more until it was coated fully in the slime. She’d
always felt too embarrassed to watch porn on her own or even go into sex shops
with her friends, earning her a reputation as a prudish slut for her aversion
to sexuality while also preferring meaningless sex as opposed to romantic
relationships. Now, pressing the cold tip of this strange thing to her
sensitive hole, she regretted being so chicken before. It was hard to get her
hands under her from behind, but when she shifted to lay on her side, Vidar
stopped her.
“I want to watch you sit on it,” he smiled.
He was enjoying watching her struggle. His amusement at her ignorance stung,
but she held the thing vertically beneath her as she returned to kneeling. That
slimy, cold sensation of it rubbing ineffectively against her cleft was almost
as uncomfortable as his intense stare and entertained grin. After failing to
find a source of give while maintaining a sliver of dignity by leaning forward
and pressing down on it, a wave of further mortification washed over her as she
accepted that this angle wasn’t going to achieve anything but prolonging this
task. Holding back her sob, she scrunched her eyes shut and leaned back,
displaying everything to him and knowing he looked by his pleased hum. She’d
never felt so exposed in her life.
“A-ah!” she gasped as the pointed tip parted her inner muscle, the awkward
discomfort of invasion still something she doubted she could ever get used to.
“Ease onto it,” he directed her, his voice huskier than it was. She shivered at
the touch of his hands sliding up her inner thighs, the fact that it felt nice
and soothing was worse than if it had hurt. This was disgusting and
humiliating, it was only meant to degrade, she shouldn’t even be capable of
feeling pleasure. She wondered how she was even surprised anymore. “Relax,
little bitch. Part your knees wider. Let me see you stuff your hole with your
tail.”
“Yes, Sir…” she whimpered, hating how her voice cracked.
Forcing her muscles not to clench around the alien intrusion was more difficult
when she was the one controlling how slowly it slid in. Sweat beaded and
crawled down her bared skin and her controlled breaths soon huffed out of her
in labored pants and hitched groans. No matter how far she tried to put her
mind from this humiliation, she couldn’t get far from that slick spread into
her ass or the burn of his stare. Each time she was sure it had slid in all the
way, her steadying fingers at the flared base of the steel brushed up the
inches she had to go.
“Fy faen…” he chuckled. “You are simply adorable, little bitch. Papa did not
fuck your asshole enough to teach you, no?”
“I don’t know…” she whispered.
She had no idea what Leif had done with her body all those years, just that it
had started when she was fourteen and he had waited until she was seventeen
before engaging in full penetrative sex with her. Six years of being her own
father’s unknowing rape victim, only to become his occasionally willing lover.
She was truly vile. A broken grunt escaped her when she bared down on the toy,
sliding it all the way in with a surprisingly painless but disturbing
quickness. She opened her eyes, her head tilted back as she panted through this
strange fullness. It wasn’t unpleasant, just so very odd, though she didn’t
doubt that Vidar would make it unpleasant on her shortly. She hoped he would.
The low hum of arousal that had steadily gained volume in her body was
frightening to her.
“Look at me, bitch,” he ordered. That never-ending blush renewed with vigor as
she forced herself to comply, tilting her head forward until she briefly met
his burning gaze before shifting it lower to see him slowly palming his cock
through his slacks and holding the riding crop across his lap. She settled for
fixing her stare on his neck. “Show me how you touch yourself.”
“What?” she rasped, not wanting to understand the command.
“I want to watch you masturbate,” he clarified in a clipped tone. “Now, little
bitch.”
“Yessir,” she hurriedly mumbled, the sight of that riding crop injecting an
urgency into her.
She reached a shaking hand between her legs, pursing her lips as they traced
the outside of her opening to find it wet. Strange. She didn’t think she’d
gotten any of the goop up there. Her fingertips dipped into her heat, her
curiosity giving way to further confusion and then horror at finding her cunt
dripping wet.
“Oh, God…” she breathed, her lungs squeezing the whisper out of her in shock.
She’d gotten wet from this. Not just a little bit, but achingly drenched with
such a volume that it ran down to join the mess she’d made with the goop at her
ass. He knew. He’d literally had a front row seat to this depravity and he had
watched her drip from it. Just the light brush of her fingertips had made her
throb and ache for more contact even as she was sick with disgust at herself.
“Look at me, bitch, do not just look at my shirt,” he ordered.
With a shudder, she pulled her bleary eyes to his hungry expression. Not too
long ago, she would have never expected this man to look at her with such
dangerous lust written all over him. It was also not too long ago that she’d
never thought she would participate in incest. The scent of his arousal was
obvious to her sensitive nose even above the scent of her own, blending that
similar quality she had come to identify among the brothers and within herself.
The singular defining genetic pattern that determined them to be Valstads,
carrying the same blood as those demented murderers who had transformed her
father into one of them. Maybe it was hereditary that they should traumatize
their following generation into becoming monsters. Vidar seemed to have a
design for what shape of monster he would mold her to become, just as Leif had
for her, just as Einar had for him.
His heavy gaze impatiently flicking to her face drew her back to this horrible
moment. Dragging up some of that copious slick to circle her throbbing clit,
that strange fullness in her ass suddenly transformed into something
thrillingly pleasurable as she rubbed herself. In the blinding savagery of
their frantic rutting yesterday, her mind was too far gone to perceive exactly
what was happening to her, but now she was aware of everything. The gasp she
made was embarrassingly loud, uncontrollable from the sudden shock of pleasure
the two sensations brought. She didn’t want this. She was sure she didn’t want
this, but she was already so close to coming, a heady pressure building in both
her ass and her cunt as her legs parted wider and her fingers rubbed in tight
circles at her clit. Another gasp, then a moan, an undeniable moan, and her
pelvic muscles were tightening. This was happening too fast. Too much, too
fast, but she was already past the point of needing it now.
“Stop.”
Before she could hold it back, she growled in aggravation, the sound halting
halfway out of her but too late to stop it as she dragged her hand away. His
disapproving scowl made her wish she could suck that sound out of the air and
hide it away. The unexpected crack and fiery sting of the crop erupting a flash
of pure pain from the top of her left thigh made her gasp to keep from
screaming. She gripped the long line of agony and hunched over it as though to
smother the pain, huffing in the effort to contain it. Before she could begin
to recover, the collar yanked at her stitches as he pulled her up by the leash
and she followed his lead to lessen that choking pressure as he spoke.
“You cannot help yourself, yes? Pathetic little dog. Fucking yourself in front
of your master. I should have you fixed.”
He dragged her, leading her by the leash until she was laying on her front
halfway off the table, bent over the side at her hips. Panic gripped her when
he slid her wrists into leather cuffs, but he struck the crop hard across her
bared and raised buttocks in three quick successions, cancelling any attempts
to struggle as she yelped and shriveled in pain. Each blow of that deceptively
thin and simple strip brought a lightening strike behind her eyes that blinded
her with agony, reducing her actions to just trying to manage through it. She
barely noticed he’d tightened the cuffs and had tied them to the table by their
long leather straps until it was already done.
“So needy for cock…” he chided as he knelt behind her. She turned her head, but
she couldn’t turn far enough to see what he was doing with her arms tied so
tightly to the table. She didn’t give into the impulse to kick when she felt
him buckle the cuffs at her ankles and spread them wider apart to tie them to
the table legs. Just the thought of resisting made those throbbing lashes
across her backside burn anew. “Your papa did not need to try hard, no?...
Answer, bitch.”
“No, Sir,” she responded automatically. Sorrow curled in her chest at that. It
was never hard for Leif to fuck her, one way or another. Nothing had deterred
him. Not their relation, not her age, not her degree of willingness, nothing.
Vidar had that quality in common with him, too. She was beginning to suspect
Anders to be unique in his reluctance to hurt or force her. Reluctance, but not
refusal. She had to remember that Anders was not so different when it came down
to it.
Without warning, Vidar pushed the dangling tail aside and pushed his cock
against her, the thick head slipping into her sopping cunt with more readiness
than she was mentally prepared for. She strained against her bonds, the thick
leather more pliant than steel chains but no less giving when she tried to
twist out of them. She’d thought she was resigned to this fate, that her guilt
would make accepting this rape something she could bare with some level of
grace, but that instinct to flee from this brutal male was more powerful than
her guilt or her knowledge of the riding crop.
“Wait, wait, please stop! I don’t want to- Ah!” she stammered, yelping as that
crop cut across her already whipped back, igniting the raw welts and cuts her
father had sliced into her with his belt.
As she gasped in gulping, shuddering sobs, she felt Vidar push into her,
stretching her tensed cunt around his cock as he jeered, “It feels good, yes?
Enjoy what you can, little bitch. You are for my pleasure.”
 
 
Anders had been working for three hours and had only just gotten through his
emails and outlining. He really should be pulling full shifts, probably with
overtime to catch up to the project, but the compassion of his coworkers was an
unstoppable obstacle. A fruit basket complete with a sympathy card was on his
desk that morning, the card simply letting him know they were all sorry for his
difficult time. He supposed there wasn’t really a market for “sorry your
brother turned out to be a murderer and tried to kill you” cards. He peeled a
banana from the arrangement, feeling guilty that he considered their concern an
inconvenience but holding that opinion regardless. He should have been touched
at the gesture and gracious at accepting their sappy platitudes, their pitying
glances, their inane flaunting of how much they cared, but he just wanted to
forget about it for a while and work. Another knock on his door nearly had him
yell at whoever it was to stop interrupting his work before his supervisor came
in.
“Jon, everything alright?” Anders asked, rising from his seat when he saw his
vexed expression.
“Go home, Anders,” Jon ordered flatly.
“I’m telling you, I’m fine,” he insisted, easing back down into the chair.
Getting up was always easier than going back down with his injury, especially
after repacking the wound that morning.
“You can either go home or let me take you to lunch,” Jon threatened good-
naturedly, his grin peeking out beneath his gray beard. “And the intern is
already coming along. You and that niece of yours is about all he wants to talk
about. I don’t know why you opened up to the kid, but I’m glad you’re finally
talking about it to someone.”
“Oh, uh, I just really have a lot to do, so, I’ll have to skip out on lunch
this time,” Anders winced.
“Okay. Go home, spend time with your folks, then. Call Stefan if you don’t want
to come in tomorrow.”
“But I-”
“Drive safely,” Jon interrupted, a stern glint behind his grin. He pointed at
Anders before he left, leaving the door open behind him.
Anders leaned over his desk and sighed out a groan. He could do the majority of
this work at home, but when he was home, he was too distracted by his Simone to
want to work. When he was at work, work didn’t want him to work. Packing up his
briefcase, he contemplated just quitting and moving him and Simone to where his
personal life wasn’t a national sensation.
***** Chapter 52 *****
“Dr. Wallis’ office, how may I help you?”
“Hello, I was wondering if I could schedule an appointment for someone?” Anders
asked, the phone tucked between his cheek and shoulder as he carried the two
large bags of dog food down the street. All the load was bared under one arm
while the other wrangled the cane to lessen the burden on his bad leg, a risky
endeavor to begin with and steadily proving to lack the sustainability he’d
hoped for.
“When was the patient last seen?”
“Never. We were recommended to Dr. Wallis by a, uh, a friend.”
“I’m sorry, but Dr. Wallis is not accepting any new patients at this time.”
“Fuck!” he grunted, one of the bags slipping out of his hold. “Sorry- not you!
Um… look, we were told to contact him by a man named Maier. He works for the
United States Federal Bureau of Investigation.”
“I apologize, but again, we are not accepting new patients. If this is an
emergency, call 113 or contact your GP.”
Anders registered the flat tone of disbelief in the question and nearly growled
in frustration as he bent and picked up the heavy bag of kibble. “Would you
just take my number down and tell him this is for Simone Valstad? You know, the
daughter of that killer?”
“Your GP will refer you to services that can help you, sir. Goodbye.”
The line cut with a sharp click and this time Anders let out that growl,
cursing heavily under his breath as he set the bags down next to his car.
Henrik had set up an appointment for both him and Simone with an apparently
discreet and sympathetic doctor tomorrow, but she couldn’t be referred to just
any therapist with her issues. She needed someone who would both believe the
things she’s gone through and not turn her- and certainly also him- over to the
police for it. He leaned against the side of his car to take the pressure off
his sore wounds and breathe an aggravated sigh as he pushed down all the
stress. He had gotten what he wanted: his sweet Simone under his care and away
from the madness of Leif, though he didn’t know that he would be so lost in how
to care for her. Every move felt like a mistake.
As he drove toward home, he couldn’t stop that guilty line of thought. Anything
was better than the life she’d had, but he wanted her life to be good, not just
better. He wanted to be good for her. She wasn’t thriving; if anything, she
seemed to only be retreating further into herself, reluctant to even seek
comfort in him and skittish when she did. That brief moment she’d opened up to
him last night had only shown him a glimpse of how dangerous her damage was.
Anders had once reasoned to Vidar that she was only seeking the familiar, but
really, he was the one who was lost and sticking to what was familiar instead
of thinking about what was necessary. He had to accept that nothing he was
familiar with could apply to her or their relationship.
 
 
The way Simone moaned when he pulled and wriggled her tail made Vidar change
his mind on pulling it out to replace it with his cock quite yet, but her cunt
felt a little too good to last as long as he needed. Not that her ass was any
less accommodating to his pleasure. He tugged harder on her tail, smirking at
the way she clenched and nearly wailed in distress at the pressure against that
ring of muscle keeping it locked in. He shouldn’t have started fucking her yet.
It hadn’t even been a full day since their last session and he was still so
impatient to fuck her; it was unlike him to have so little self-discipline.  At
least, it used to be unlike him, before Leif poured acid onto his brain and
changed him. He needed a distraction from the delightful pressure building in
his groin, anything to prolong this special moment of bonding with their slave.
“Tell me how it did start with your father,” he said, pushing and holding his
throbbing cock deep inside her. She was a bit too small to take all of him and
made these delightful little panicked whimpers when he mashed against her
limit. “How young were you?”
Simone cringed and shivered beneath him at the question, leaving him to assume
the worst when she answered in a strained whisper, “I don’t… remember, Sir, I
was… hngh… drugged a lot, I... Please, Sir, I don’t like being tied up, can
you-”
“I don’t give a shit,” he sneered, stopping her complaint with a yank on her
leash.
She made a yelp that was strangled by the collar as her back arched into his
pull, that cut at her neck no doubt hurting a good amount, but her shackled
wrists prevented her from bowing backward very far. Her muscles were tensed in
pain, sweat glistening and causing her wavy mane to stick to her back in
sprawling tendrils, doing well enough to cover up some of those cuts and
mottled bruises. Although an elegant sight, he couldn’t ignore that it seemed
his irresponsible little brother didn’t even think to apply an ointment to
those open cuts. If their pet was left with any more permanent marks not of
their own making, there was going to be hell to pay. This distraction worked to
stave off the risk of ending this session too soon and he eased slack into the
leash, letting her recover her breath in shaking gasps as he bent to press her
down against the table and fuck into her in short, sharp jerks of his pelvis.
“You whine that you don’t like this but-ah!-your little snatch is more and more
wet,” he whispered into her ear, then bit the shell of it hard enough to mark.
She flinched and hissed through the bite, her snug cunt cinching even tighter
as she tensed until he had to release her ear with a groan. “Fuck… Your body
does not lie to me.Mmm… This skin, this sweat, this little cunt… How can I
decline? You do this to us, bitch. You make us do this to you and you want it.
Tell me you want it, little bitch!”
“I don’t want to want this!” she moaned miserably.
He laughed at that, punishing her cheeky response with harder thrusts, knocking
the end of the table against the wall and forcing pained grunts from her. Her
resistance was still so endearing, he almost regretted needing to train it out
of her, but she was adapting quickly to her new masters. Soon enough, he would
have her to where she would respond to him with complete obedience. He would
break her down to that most core part of her, the part that was made to serve
them, and brush away the ruin of all that extra waste she had accumulated. No
more of this coy denial of what she was, no more believing herself to be
anything more than their pet. She would become perfect. The tension in his
pelvis fed into a throb that travelled from his sac to his tip, making his
rhythm stutter before that pleasure soared too high. With her bent and bound
beneath him, brought low in humiliation and fear, trying not to cry and
frequently failing whenever he would ram into her or tease the crop along her
skin, it was all too lovely.
“Your father did not train you enough,” he said, kneading the soft flesh of her
pronounced hips. “But you will learn.”
“Please, I don’t want to… I don’t want to…” she blubbered pathetically through
her crying.
Every piece of her was soft, nothing but powdered silk over pliant feminine
curves and taut slender plains. Her appearance had tempted touch even before
he’d acknowledged the depth of his sexual attraction, when she was still his
cute young niece instead of this lustful subhuman slave. He was no longer
confused or conflicted by his desire, he would teach her to do the same. It was
his responsibility as one of her masters to do so. He slid the tip of the
riding crop along her flank, chuckling as her panting took on a more terrified
edge, and pressed his thumb to her plush lips until she took it in. The feel of
her slick tongue under his thumb and the moist suck of her mouth brought him to
the edge of his plateau in the space of a gasp. He needed to decide where to
fuck her next before he let it spill into her cunt, that looming ordeal of
having to gamble an abortion with her so soon not something he wanted to deal
with. However, the dogs suddenly barking excitedly and their blunt claws
tapping loudly as they galloped towards the front of the house pulled him away
from that edge with the immediate realization that his brother had come home
early.
 
 
Anders leaned the cane against the wall as he thumbed for his house key on the
ring, grumbling when the cane slid and fell with a clatter. The gang was
barking with increasing excitement, eager for their bowls to be filled despite
knowing full well it was hours yet until feeding time, but there was a higher
pitch to their yipping and yapping. Last time they’d made this type of ruckus,
they’d wanted to show him a monstrously huge rat they had cornered under the
wood burning stove. Before he could fit his key into the lock, a different
species of intruder opened the door for him.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” Anders asked loudly above the barking.
Vidar grabbed the bag of kibble from him and answered with a rigidly calm,
“Keeping our girl company while you’re away.”
Anders followed, his surprise at seeing him falling away into anger as he
frowned, “I don’t recall giving you permission to enter my damned house
whenever you please.”
“I didn’t need your permission. I’m here as Simone’s guest,” Vidar answered
breezily, opening the dog supply closet and setting the heavy bag down behind
the opened one as though he knew the entire routine. The dogs’ barking
redirected from the closet to Anders, their whining bays trying to get his
attention down the hall. In the handful of times Anders had invited his brother
over and he’d actually come, he shouldn’t have gathered that much on the inner
workings of his home. Anders’ glare hardened in suspicion at just how much time
his brother had been spending here without his knowledge.
“Where is she?” he asked, his annoyance rising to cover that creeping anxiety
sliding into his thoughts. He wanted to trust his brother. Seeing how Vidar and
Simone had interacted almost normally during the dinner at the farm, having a
full conversation between them even, had given him hope that they could be a
real family at least sometimes. Alone and behind closed doors were not
conditions he could trust his brother to behave like a real family with their
niece, however.
Vidar shut the closet before the dogs could crowd inside, turning slowly to
regard him with an odd smirk that made Anders tense. “She was feeling a bit
unsure of where her life is right now, understandably, so I was helping her
learn her place.”
“That didn’t answer my question,” Anders tried not to sneer.
“Could you send the dogs out? It’s hard to hear you.”
Anders pursed his lips in aggravation, but pivoted on his good leg and trudged
back to the door. Why his brother had frequently refused to give him a direct
answer to anything asked of him was an old annoyance, one that still rankled
him no matter how many years went by with the same irritating patterns. If
Vidar had any idea that Simone was possibly suicidal, perhaps he wouldn’t be so
flippant when asked about her.
“Go on! Out!” he ordered the gang as he pulled open the front door.
They rushed out, needing no further prompting except for Rolf. The yellow lab
only whined at him when Anders whistled for him to go, his head and tail low as
he trotted down the hallway instead of following the pack outside. Anders
watched in bewilderment, worried that maybe he was hurt, then saw that Vidar
had vanished.
“Vid?” he called as he followed the dog.
No answer came. He wasn’t surprised, only further irritated at his older
brother’s puerile little power games. He was going to have a talk with him; it
was far past time they gave up these sibling annoyances and started treating
each other like polite adults. It was funny sometimes, but not right now, not
when things had become so strange. Rolf turned into the kitchen and Anders
rolled his eyes at the dog’s incessant ploys for human food. Rounding the
corner, his uneven stride stopped in the doorway, at first confused at what he
saw, and then worried. Strewn on the floor were some of Simone’s new clothes,
some lengths of chain, and his largest kitchen knife. Rolf sniffed at the
clothes and looked at him with a distressed whine and a half-yip.
“What has that strange girl been up to…” he mumbled, then called into the
house, “Vid! Simone?”
Only a heavy thump from the other side of the house responded. With another
aggravated sigh, he headed towards it, soon hearing the muted sounds of quiet
conversation coming from his bedroom. Or, not so much a conversation as just
Vidar’s muted murmurs with Simone’s breathy little grunts of acknowledgement.
Anders hesitated in the hall, that anxiety welling inside him. He was going to
have to see and deal with whatever was behind that teasingly ajar door. His
hand rested on the knob, his stomach twisting into knots as he tried to prepare
himself for what he might see. He wanted to trust his brother, but he knew him
too well. He gripped the cane at its center of gravity, readying himself for
the possibility of committing violence against Vidar, and pushed the door open.
With a deep breath to press down the brief impulse to yell, he looked into the
dimly lit bedroom to see Vidar holding Simone tucked into a hug against his
side as they sat at the foot of the bed.
Vidar stroked her hair and gently whispered, “Your papa is here. Will you not
say hello?”
She shook her head and mumbled something Anders couldn’t hear, her voice small
and quivering as it got when she cried, a fact confirmed to him when he saw her
shiver in a quiet sob from under the bundle of flannel she had wrapped around
her. That heart-wrenching need to soothe her drained the terror and violence
from him, making him walk toward them to sit on the other side of her and brush
her hair away from her face. She felt feverish again, damp with sweat, and she
shivered at his touch.
“Is it the withdrawal?” he asked, that nightmarish memory of her seizing on the
motel floor coating his brain in worry. “We’re going to see a doctor tomorrow,
but should I take her in tonight?”
“That’s not the kind of attention she needs right now,” Vidar said, speaking
with an uncharacteristic softness. Anders watched as his brother’s long fingers
tipped her chin up to show them her tear-stained face. With her reddened
eyelids screwed shut, her wet cheeks flushed, thick eyelashes matted and
glistening, and lips swollen and raw from biting to keep from sobbing, the old
shame at finding all this so morbidly appealing shocked through him. He knew if
he kissed her now, he would find her rosy lips hot and plump with the blood
she’d teased near the skin’s surface. Apparently, his brother thought something
of the same as he pressed the pad of his thumb to the plush pout of her lower
lip, whispering, “She needs relief and comfort, Anders. We can provide her what
she needs.”
Anders watched, confused but mesmerized as her eyes opened into glittering
slivers, the tears welling in them feeding into the trails of the others when
she parted her soft lips to take in that probing thumb. Her expression was so
sad and pleading, nearly in agony. Relief and comfort; he could give her that
much, at least. Vidar’s fingers hooked to grasp her jaw as he pushed his thumb
deeper into her mouth, her eyes closing with a slight moan of protest stifled
behind the round seal of her lips. Anders tensed, snapping out of that brief
stupor at the small sound of her distress.
“Stop this,” he said to both his brother and that terrible thrill building in
himself.
Vidar did not, instead leaning down to whisper to her as he slowly pumped his
thumb deep in her mouth, “Tell us what you need, sweetheart, say it as we did
talk about.”
Anders couldn’t look away even if he wanted to as that thumb slid out of her
mouth, wet with her saliva and pushing against her lips to show off how pillowy
soft they were, leaving the darkened skin glistening like ripe fruit. That
unstoppable pressure in his groin signaled the truth of his desire as his cock
began to fatten, that sight reminding him of just how skillfully that mouth and
throat could work him.
“I n-need…” she stammered, so quavering and quiet that he found himself leaning
lower to hear her, drawn to the motion of those tempting lips. “I need my m-
masters to… take… their pleasure.”
“Good girl,” Vidar grinned, his long fingers trailing down her neck and pulling
aside the blanket to reveal the thick black collar.
The glinting metal ring dangling from the center of that leather and chain
leading from it caught Anders’ eye and he could feel the physical sweep of
blood draining from his face in a heated flash. He knew what his brother had
been doing here while he was gone and as much as he didn’t want to believe it,
all the proof was there in the leather and metal around her neck. The proof was
also in her flushed cheeks and, as Vidar continued to slowly pull the blanket
from her, her heaving chest. The scents of both her fear and arousal hit him
then, that heady combination turning the horror of his realization sideways and
making his mouth water with want to taste their presence in the salt of her
sweat and the slick of her cunt. He swallowed thickly, tearing his eyes away
from the widening part in the blanket that revealed only more and more of her
bare skin, and focused on what was more important than his greedy lust. His
glare latched onto that wolfish grin of his brother’s, his sharp teeth far too
close to the fragile girl between them. The urge to see those teeth drag up her
inner thigh as they held her squirming limbs down and splayed on the bed played
in his mind before he could dispel it.
“I told you to keep this shit away from her,” he nearly growled.
“I couldn’t let your state of denial deny her of what she needs,” Vidar
responded coolly. “You’d let her destroy herself in confusion and repression
for your puritan peace of mind. This needs to happen for both of your sake.”
Anders’ hand lashed out and snatched his brother’s wrist, but not before he
could pull the blanket off her shoulders entirely. She winced, turning her face
downward again to hide her shame as her breasts were exposed, her nipples
hardening in the cool air with a shiver. Vidar twisted out of his grip, his
surprisingly quick movements turning to grasp Anders’ wrist instead and force
his hand to her chest. The gasp she made as her sensitive breast filled his
palm short-circuited his attempt to pull away, neither retreating nor indulging
in the impulse to squeeze that softness.
“We can’t do this,” he said. He wasn’t sure if he was speaking more to his
brother or himself. “We can’t… I can’t do this to her again. She could barely
even look at me after last time.”
“This is different from last time,” Vidar assured him, pressing Anders’ hand
more firmly against her breast. The hard little pebble of her nipple scraped
the toughened skin of his palm and drew a breathy whimper from her that melted
Anders’ resolve alarmingly. His brother’s words sunk into his mind like a sweet
poison. “She wants to give it another try. We can show her how well we will
take care of her, that there’s nothing to be so afraid or ashamed of in what
she wants. She’s so afraid of herself, Anders. She needs our guidance and
direction to help her accept these urges as natural.”
“Stop this,” Anders growled.
His head was pounding in rhythm to her heart beating under his hand, fast and
strong. She was so small; they could tear her apart without even meaning to,
force her to do whatever they wanted, and he couldn’t deny that there were
strange parts inside them both that would be fulfilled in doing exactly that.
His hand slid away from her heart and grabbed her chain leash, pulling it until
she stood off the bed, the blanket falling to reveal her complete nudity but
for a few striking accessories. He should have been enraged at the violation
his brother had committed, or at least disgusted at the depravity of it, but
wanting to feel those things was not enough to produce them. The collar, the
leash, the tail, the staggering vulnerability of her arms being bound behind
her were all so morosely appealing. His mind seemed suspended in that thick
arousal, unable to think past all the flitting images of fucking her into the
mattress with her unable to even attempt fighting him.
“She wants this,” Vidar whispered, his hand stroking of the side of her thigh
to trace the shape of her hip, his nails dragging to leave faint lines on her
skin. She let out a shaking sigh that made Anders ache, his cock straining
against his slacks already. “Tell your papa how much you are wanting us to use
you, sweetheart.”
She didn’t turn to face him, her head still bowed low and trying to hide her
face behind her hair as she said in a thin whisper, “I want you to use me…
however you want to. Please, just… just do it… papa.”
Her words barely translated through the thick barrier of his thoughts. I want
you toand please dripped through his ears and tingled down his spine as his
eyes trailed down the leash to see it still gripped in his hand. This wasn’t
how this was supposed to happen, but things never did go as they were supposed
to with this strange girl. None of this was supposed to have happened. She was
his niece, his lover, his daughter, and now she was something he didn’t want to
acknowledge. Maybe, like those other roles, it would be alright if she was this
one only in these moments. Nothing outside of this room had to change. This
could lead to healthier things; they could get all these strange urges out
here, in a safely contained space, so they would stop bleeding into those other
roles.
“You are needing this,dearest?” he asked as he pulled at her leash and she
followed automatically, facing him and stepping between his knees.
“Yes, papa,” she whispered, her breath hitching at the edge of a sob before she
added in a mumble, “I need you to dissolve these barriers I’ve built to protect
myself, Papa.”
He could see that her cunt and the tops of her inner thighs were glistening
wet, her cute little labia raw pink and swollen with need, and he gave into the
desire to touch without any further thought beyond his own want to feel it. She
flinched and whimpered at the slide of his fingertips grazing along her slit
and pressing against her labia and he stared at her face as she tried to
contain her reaction. Just this slight touch seemed nearly unbearable to her in
the way she bit her lip and squeezed her eyes shut, her breasts quivering from
her shaking chest as she restrained her cries when he sunk two fingers into her
soaked heat.
“She’s going to cry if you keep teasing her, littlest brother,” Vidar smirked
in a low, husky drawl as he slid his hand around to her ass and she whined in
the back of her throat as he tugged her tail, her cunt sucking on Anders’
fingers in response. “She’s so pretty when she cries.”
Anders nodded absently, his focus almost entirely on the white of her teeth
sunk into her lower lip. She’d bit his neck the first time he’d made love to
her and left him with a bruise that had sparked his memory of that drunken
mistake the following morning. He’d felt so much worse at that moment than any
guilt he’d felt recently, but that night seemed so innocent in comparison to
everything they’d done since. He’d promised her then, in the definitive
sincerity of the very drunk, to take her home with him. He’d promised he would
make her happy. So far, he’d upheld half of his promise. She bent easily when
he pulled her leash, the tail sliding out of Vidar’s hand as she knelt, and he
leaned forward to keep his fingers hooked inside her and finally kiss her
mouth. She parted for him obediently, allowing him to slide his tongue inside
and devour her moan as he started to pump his fingers. Vidar moved silently to
stand behind her, the slight sounds of him undressing seeming to make her tense
and breathe quicker. Anders smiled and chuckled against their kiss at her
rising excitement. He pumped his fingers into her faster and she broke away
from the kiss in a gasp, her cunt grinding against his motions desperately.
“You like this?” he asked, gripping her hair and forcing her to look at him.
She panted through that pain and gazed at him pleadingly through half-lidded
eyes, shame and arousal written into her every feature. His cock throbbed to
replace his fingers. “Say it,dear.”
“I like it, papa,” she whispered, voice high and breaking. She blinked the
tears out of her eyes, the crystalline drops crawling down the paths of the
many others only to be immediately replaced by fresh ones.
His hand moved from her hair to wrap around her neck above the collar, the fear
widening her watery eyes beckoning his darker desires as he repeated lower,
“Say it,dear.”
“I… I like it, pap-”
He cut her words off manually with a firm squeeze, his breath easing out of him
in a slow sigh as he watched in fascination at how she grimaced in pain and
panic and jerked in his hands. The thin amount of air she managed to wheeze
past his hold squeaked in what he knew was meant to be a scream and her arms
strained against the binds holding them behind her back. Her cunt was squeezing
his fingers as she twitched and bucked spasmodically. The first time he’d
choked her, he had no idea what he was doing or what it’d meant. She was trying
to tell him, in the only way she could back then, that her father had been
abusing her, but she’d also wanted it. That paradoxical repulsion and desire
boiled in his own mind, building to this moment where he finally had her
elegant neck in his grasp and he watched her struggle for the breath he denied
her. The power was even more intoxicating than he’d imagined in his guilt-
ridden fantasies, though there was more than this he’d yearned to do to her
from that shadowed corner of his desire. Vidar’s hands snaked around her front
to squeeze her breasts, his nails digging into the pillowy flesh and leaving
red lines in their wake, but she didn’t seem to actively be aware of much aside
from her increasing desperation to breathe. When her knees began to buckle,
Anders let go of her neck and pussy to toss her by her shoulders onto the bed,
yanking her away from Vidar’s cruel touch.
Anders watched her cough and gasp to recover her oxygen as he undressed,
fingers yanking buttons loose and stretching fabric in his breathless
anticipation of fulfillment. As he laid down next to her, he was struck by just
how quickly this had all happened. Not even a week into having her, and they
were already indulging in these awful fantasies. She startled out of her
coughing fit when he grabbed her by the back of her collar and dragged her over
his naked lap, her gasps now rapid more from fear than from need. The inability
to take the future for granted anymore had stolen much patience and reason for
him to deny himself of any opportunity that was presented. Now or never had a
very different sentiment since never had become such a real possibility. She
struggled, making panicked little grunts as she tried to resist his hands
prying her legs open, but without the use of her arms and with his brother
coming up behind her, she was so deliciously helpless.
“Wait, wait, I can’t do this- Please, don’t make me do this again, Sir!” she
whimpered as Vidar grabbed her up and pulled her to him.
Anders watched in thrilling astonishment at how she froze when Vidar tapped the
tip of a riding crop to her bare cunt and curled his hand around her abused
neck as he commanded into her ear, “Be a good girl and fuck your papa’s cock,
little bitch.”
“Christ, Vid…” he breathed, his eyes darting between the crop and her terrified
expression, his uncertainty warring in him. She was truly frightened, the
pretense of this just being rough play gone when he saw how she trembled in
Vidar’s arms. They were pushing her too far. He hated how it excited him.
“It’s just the adrenaline making her flighty,” Vidar said dismissively. He
angled her head back, fingers gripping her jaw, and smiled down at her face as
he sawed the long stem of the crop against her pussy and gently cooed, “You
still love your papa, right, sweetheart?”
She shuddered, but gave a short nod in response, as much as his gripping
fingers allowed. Still holding her head back, he pushed her forward as he
walked on his knees toward Anders, and this time, she straddled his lap
automatically as he pulled her hips over him. Vidar whispered something into
her ear as he dragged the crop up her middle and Anders watched, freezing this
moment in his mind to remember every detail. His sweet Simone poised over his
cock as he laid beneath her, the sheen of sweat glowing golden on her skin in
the shaded sunlight filtered through the blinds, her head submissively tilted
back to expose the bruises that he had made along her throat, her back arched
and arms bound; he wanted to be able to recall everything, even his shame.
Gripping his cock and her hip, he eased her onto it before he let himself
examine that shame. This was what she’d admitted to wanting. This was what they
were there for.
“Ah! Papa!” she gasped, her voice high and tight as though in pain as his tip
sank into her.
“Good girl…” he breathed. She was still too tight even after working her with
his fingers, her every muscle seeming to be rigid in tension, and she whimpered
pathetically as he fucked into her. He knew he should slow down, that this was
painful for her, but she was more than wet enough and he knew she loved the
pain. She had to. She’d said she did, even if she didn’t want to admit it even
to herself. Vidar released her chin and pushed her to bend forward, the motion
forcing her to take his cock suddenly to the hilt and she cried out in a jagged
yelp that was pure pain, the sound and the pleasure of being enveloped in her
heavenly cunt drawing a deep groan from Anders. He held her down on him in a
firm embrace, that sweet friction driving him to grind into her deeply, forcing
breathy little moans from her that were thick with sobs.
“Papa… papa… please, it hurts…” she moaned against his neck.
“I know,” was all he could think to say.
That seemed to drain the will to resist out of her, her body going limp on him
and making it easier for him to move inside her. She laid crying on top of him
as he started fucking her harder and he held her tightly, stroking her hair and
shushing her as she sobbed and gasped with each thrust. He reminded himself
that this wasn’t rape, that this was all just a game no matter how
enthrallingly convincing. He had to get out all those urges to force and to
hurt her here and now. He felt her flinch and shudder and looked to see Vidar
pulling the tail out, the metal plug hitting the floor with a thump. He paused
his thrusts as Vidar gripped her hips and pushed his cock into her ass, his
glare focused intensely on where he sunk into her. Watching her take his
brother’s dick into her ass, the tight little pucker stretching taut around the
shaft as he rocked it deeper and deeper inside, was a captivating image.
“Ah… ahh, ple-ease stop…” she sobbed against him.
“Bear it, little bitch,” Vidar sneered, making her cry out when he snapped his
hips into her harshly.
“Hell…” Anders grunted, feeling the movement of the other cock rubbing against
the flesh between her vagina and rectum. That it was his brother’s penis
probably should have bothered him more, but the hypocrisy of the circumstance
and the haze of arousal made it more acceptable than it should have been. It
was hard to care about much of anything past how her clenching cunt made him
moan and buck into her. The added weight of Vidar pressing down on her as he
leaned over them made it more difficult to fuck into her, but his brother’s
harder thrusts and rapid pace moved her on him well enough to build the
throbbing pressure of an imminent and powerful orgasm. She was moaning high and
loud with each slap of Vidar’s hips against her ass and thighs, her wordless
cries of distress rising above the concerned whining and scratching of Rolf on
the other side of the shut door. He laid his head back, his eyes screwing shut
as he focused on the overwhelming stimulation and sighed, “Fuck,dearest, I love
you …”
She buried her face into the crook of his neck and he caressed her sides and
back soothingly, enjoying the feel of her skin on his hands and against his
body as she moaned and mumbled through her sobs, “I’m sorry… I’m so sorry… ah,
AH! Oh, god… I deserve this… I’m so sorry…”
“Yes, you deserve this, little bitch,” Vidar grinned, huffing out the words as
he fucked into her harder.
Anders hissed when this made her wail and constrict around his cock, his nails
digging into her delicate and sensitive skin to push down that need to spill
into her. She was shaking on him to endure the cock slamming into her ass, each
thrust knocking a quavering grunt out of her and rubbing against him. He rocked
into the brutal pace Vidar set, feeling her body tense and writhe uselessly
between them as her moaning shifted higher. She was going to come. The
realization made him dizzy, but this feeling of her beginning to bare down and
the contraction of her deeper muscles was an unmistakable signal. Vidar pressed
down hard into her with a low, drawn out groan and he could feel him twitching
and throbbing deep in her ass, undoubtedly filling her hole with semen. Anders
fucked up into her harder without Vidar’s added thrusting.
“OH, ohh… papa… papaa…!” she moaned, her hips bucking erratically, her wetness
dribbling down his tensing sac. His thrusts were driving him rapidly towards
his limit, but he could last just a bit longer.
“Come for me,dearest,” he whispered.
She obeyed, her cunt pulsing around him as she cried out, allowing him to let
go of his control and fall off that edge with her. He crushed her to him as he
mashed his flexing cock deep, spilling against that thin barrier to her womb as
she milked his seed from him. The ragged sighs wracked from his heaving growled
out of him in the euphoric ecstasy of release in his sweet girl until those
waves of pleasure rolled back, leaving him panting and holding her sobbing
little body in the calm of the afterglow.
***** Chapter 53 *****
The deeply pungent smoke was harsh in Leif’s lungs, thick and heavy as he held
it, nearly giving the sensation of it weighing down on his chest. With
practiced control, he eased it up to billow in twin streams out of his
nostrils, but the notion of ash remained heavy in his lungs. Almost in tandem
with his exhalation, the hashish and tobacco stirred a familiar high that he
leaned into as he passed the jade chillum to his right. Gnarled fingers
gingerly plucked the ancient pipe from his unsteady grip. The sour chemical
scent of the darkroom hung as heavy as the sense of his uncle’s presence.
“Feel better, Leif?”
He opened his eyes to the early afternoon sunlight casting down its warm rays
on his face, but when he turned to look at the man sitting against the fence
with him, he was alone. The pipe dangled from his outstretched fingers, waiting
for the ghost to take his turn at the blend. He could wait forever. In a way,
he had always been waiting for the vengeful spirits of the lives he had ended
to come for him or the love he felt for his fallen comrades to beckon them back
to him, but even after crossing over and back, the only ghosts that followed
him were memories and debts. He lined up the pipe, cupping his hand around the
base and pulling the flame of the lighter into it with a long, slow drag. The
sun’s warmth was pleasant on his face, the breeze tickling through the start of
his beard. He couldn’t blame them for denying him a razor; they knew what he
would do with it once he’d finished shaving. He ran a hand through the rapidly
growing hairs along his sharp jawline, considering the staggering amount of
gray with a chuckle. Soon enough, if this trend of waking up alive every day
continued, all his hair would be as silver as his daughter’s eyes.
“Good afternoon, Valstad,” a man greeted him, the familiar whispery voice
taking him more by surprise than the boldness of this guest addressing him
directly.
Of memories and debts, the voice from the phone call that had warned him
shortly before the network had collected his fresh corpse was a debt with no
memory. They’re coming for you. They’re all coming for you now. Move.
“Good afternoon, sir,” he responded, the smoke puffing along with his words as
he squinted up at the old man. He held the pipe up to him in offering and, also
to his surprise, the old man accepted it. When he offered the lighter, he waved
him off, producing a magnifying glass from under his dusty suit jacket. Leif
watched in mild amusement as the man held the small circle of glass up to the
sun, angling the collection of rays into the pipe until, after just a moment,
smoke puffed out from the seal between his mouth and fist at the base of the
chillum. Taking the pipe back, he asked, “Are you here for the funeral?”
“Ultimately, yes,” the man answered, smoke crawling out from beneath his
dreadlocked beard and between his yellowed teeth. Leif tried to place where he
knew him, but the memory was just teasingly out of reach. It occurred to him
that this was probably how his daughter must have felt much of the time. “But
presently, also yes. Terrible way to go for that Marceau. They took him out of
the oven too soon.”
Each word this man spoke grated some deeply buried part of his memories with an
almost physical sensation of sparks flying along long-inactive synapses. He
knew him, he no longer doubted that, but there was nothing he could recall
beyond that basic fact. Considering that they were both here, with Leif held
captive and this man having warned him in attempt to prevent that, he could
gather that this meeting was not by arbitrary chance. It would be a simple task
to stand up and snap this gentleman’s arthritic neck, as easy as twisting an
apple from a branch. In fact, he wondered why the guards had allowed this man
to get this close to him.
“He never could be satisfied with what he got,” Leif said, then turned his eyes
once more to the weathered umber face of his mysterious benefactor. His eyes
had the milky film of cataracts, making him wonder if this man was blind even
as he peered directly down at him from those ghostly whites nestled deep in
their gaunt sockets.
“We all get the same prize at the end of this game no matter how we play it,”
he said, then rasped out a creaking wheeze that must have been a laugh. “Except
for you. Your petit monstre dangled you like a fish on a hook and reeled you up
before the Devil could bite. Men don’t come back from the dead often, but a
Valstad? That’s easy to believe.”
“As regretful as I am to refute the faith of my forefathers, a lifetime of
crafting death did not impart any influence over my own,” Leif said as he
repacked the pipe with a pinch more of a crumbly hashish, then smiled fondly.
“All credit for both my death and resurrection goes to my petit monstreand
medical science.”
“And how does the proud papa intend to repay his darling girl for her feat?”
His wording seized any further patience for Leif to continue this polite
pretense. He stood, the wrathful energy coursing through him giving a fluidity
to his movements that his seasoned joints were normally unmotivated to present.
The opportunity to indulge in a bit of bloodsport tantalized the beast in him.
“Tell me, how long were you listening through the cell phones the organization
issued?”
“Oh, long enough to know enough. And not just listening, Mr. Valstad,” the old
man grinned, removing his worn and faded bowler hat as he gave a deep bow. His
head was shaved bald, displaying the intricate mandala tattooed in black on the
crown of his scalp, the unmistakable ouroboros coiling in the design. “Dr.
Francis Aguiyi, at your service.”
“And what service might that be, doctor?”
Francis flipped his hat back onto his head in a flourishing twirl and rose with
a grace that belied his own age as well, grinning wide enough to disfigure his
features in innumerable lines and wrinkles as he answered, “Service toward a
common goal. You disagreed with the Marceaus and they have punished you for it,
so agree to a deal with me and I will help you bury their influence along with
them.”
Leif tucked the pipe into his breast pocket and began unbuttoning his cuffs as
he shook his head and said, “The Marceaus’ influence does not concern me as I
am no longer a part of the network and the madame has treated me well since my
arrival at her estate; why should I want to bury any more than I already have?”
“Because vengefulness is in your nature,” Francis answered easily. Leif glanced
at him from his task of rolling up his sleeves as he went on. “Ruthlessness is
a pleasure you were born to where most men must adapt to it against their
humanity. The network has facilitated that nature for your family for
generations, lifted your people from savagery and into prestige, and your
bloodlust has served the network well through those centuries. You are a
Valstad. You will never be exiled from the network because you are a fixture of
it.”
Leif flexed his hands, examining the sinewy muscles as they bulged at his
wrists and forearms while he spoke, “In other words, I will be no freer out
there than as I am imprisoned in this fortress, so why not serve the warden
that serves me better?”
“So why not?” the doctor echoed, still grinning. He folded his hands behind him
and rocked on his heels. “Mrs. Marceau needs the appearance of your support to
prevent mutiny among the ranks. She has prepared a eulogy for you to deliver to
provide that appearance, but you will not read it.”
“I won’t?” Leif mused.
“You won’t,” Francis nodded, his matter of fact answers amusing Leif. “She’ll
tempt you with the paltry privilege of bringing your petit monster here to
dangle in front of you like a carrot on a string, but you won’t do it. You’d
rather risk death than indignity; that’s just who you are. You’ll provide the
declaration of support Mrs. Marceau needs from you, just not the way she wants
it.”
Leif stepped closer to this not-quite-stranger, close enough to catch the
scents of the open sea woven into the storm cloud of his coarse beard. Francis,
to his credit and to Leif’s curiosity, did not give any reaction to the danger
of this proximity beyond a friendly crinkle to the edges of his milky eyes.
Leif returned that fond expression as he clapped his hands upon his shoulders,
the dust puffing out from the worn fabric giving him the fanciful impression
that the old man had exhumed this suit from a grave.
“I’m retired from these games, Dr. Aguiyi,” Leif said softly. “I see no reason
to embroil myself in them further.”
“You’re a good liar. Better than Bjørn ever was, at least. He never had the
skill for deception as your father did, but he possessed his own set of unique
talents.”
Those sparking synapses dredged up a single faded memory from the colorless
depths of Leif’s childhood, before his father and uncle had transformed him
into a true Valstad. All the way back to a time before America, still at the
family farm in Norway, a place he had once come to believe he’d only dreamed up
as an escape from the hell that had become of his life during that transitory
period. A very long-distance phone call came through and, after young Leif
agreed to the charges, a distinctly raspy and whispery voice asked to speak to
Bjørn. That night, Bjørn left for Liberia and Leif didn’t see him again until
they met once more in the US, three years later. Leif hid the disorientation of
stitching a moment across decades to the present behind a blink. The call to
violence became suspended under Leif’s ready hands, held at bay by this
revelation.
“What prize are you aiming to win from this game?” he asked.
Francis looked past him, his cloudy gaze drifting up to the open blue sky as he
answered, “I only seek to repay a debt to the demon in your blood, Valstad.”
 
 
Vidar slid his softening cock out of their slave, her tight little tail hole
treating his oversensitive organ to a last constricting spasm from the
aftershocks of her climax before he rolled onto his back. He was panting and
damp with sweat from the considerable effort he had put into each thrust, his
body and mind both pleasantly exhausted and delightfully fulfilled. Floating in
the euphoria of that thrilling fuck, he longed for a cigarette but couldn’t
will himself to move just yet, settling for turning onto his side and watching
his younger brother try to coax their inconsolable slave to cease her cowering
and trembling.
“… sshh, ssshhh, dearest, look to me,” Anders cooed softly in whispers in
sighs, carding his fingers through her hair gently and tipping her chin up with
his other hand.
She whimpered, but her reluctance didn’t deter Anders from forcing her to turn
her face up to him, and he smiled at her with such warmth and adoration that
Vidar fought the urge to look away in discomfort at witnessing something so
personal and twisted. Anders’ delusions toward what they did were convenient
and simple to manipulate, but seeing him handle her with such raw emotion and
tenderness after they’d fucked her together for the second time struck him as
somehow more depraved than the act itself. Vidar held no such illusions. This
had been rape from the beginning and, watching the way she twitched and
struggled to turn away from Anders’ doting grasp, he doubted it would ever be
anything but rape with her. But she was adapting, learning to obey and please
them regardless of what she wanted or didn’t want, and soon she would learn
that her wants were insignificant. There was no place for tenderness between
him and Simone, there never had been, not since that night in the motel when
he’d witnessed her devotion to her master and had to face the monster inside
him that had coveted it. Their dynamic was one of control and power, where he
held all of it and both punished and rewarded her allowing him to take it.
Anders nuzzled her wet cheek, a gesture that held such a bounty of affection
that it nearly seemed motherly if not for his spent cock still nestled in her
cunt. “You did so good,dear,so good… You are okay, yes? Hm? Oh… I love you,my
darling…”
Vidar stared as his brother kissed her mouth, the pink of his tongue sliding
over the abused and inflamed flesh before he pressed his lips to hers, and was
momentarily shocked at how she leaned up into the contact. A trace of jealousy
irritated him. Anders had no true appreciation for the power he held over her
through her appetite for emotional connection, handling it with the
irresponsibility and artlessness of a man in love. And it was love, or at least
a mad perversion of it, that shined in his eyes for her each time Vidar had
caught him gazing at the girl. It made him as disgusted to see it now as it did
in that short period when she was their niece, but he was impressed by how
easily and completely love swayed her. Love had only ever brought her ruin and
pain, but she still sought it even from her tormenter. She was a pathetic, sad
little creature.
Love was never anything he’d sought or accepted for himself after coming to
recognize its greedy and capricious nature, but seeing how she responded to it
made him curious. He’d been careful to prevent emotional intimacy and
attachment with those he fucked, maintaining strict boundaries on that front to
the point of having to sever quite a few many ties with otherwise compatible
people, possessing no desire to hurt another person in that manner. But Simone
wasn’t exactly a person anymore. If she loved him as she loved Anders, he could
have her devote herself as their slave with the unthinking acceptance of the
genuinely pious. The cruelty of such a tactic enthralled him, but he wanted
more than what he had planned to obtain from her. Her life in servitude to them
wasn’t enough anymore.
As Anders turned to slide her into the space between them, Vidar hooked his arm
firmly across her waist and pulled her to him to prevent her from running away.
He watched for that feral glint in her eye as she startled at his touch, the
savage heat that he’d glimpsed in the tight and fleeting cracks of her
patchwork sanity flashed before retreating behind recognition. That switch in
her mind that flicked off her murderous hatred and replaced it with docile fear
was one place she carried Leif within her. Whatever he’d done to design that in
her worked delightfully to suit Vidar’s tastes, but there were other, much less
delightful spaces she carried her father within her. He wanted to find wherever
Leif lived in her and carve him out of her. Taking her away from Leif
physically was not enough. The fire of righteousness in that revenge against
the maniac warmed Vidar’s blood.
“Are you not happy, sweetheart?” he smiled, fondling her breast gently as his
brother caressed her hip. She remained stiffly still but for her trembling in
rabbit fear, tucked snugly between their bodies as she endured their
affections. “You belong to us.”
 
 
“Pain is conditional. Overcome conditional influences and be free,” Simone
whispered to the mirror, the blurred splotches of browns and blacks forming a
Monet portrait of herself in the fogged glass as she combed the snarls out of
her wet hair. It was much easier to look at a mirror when she couldn’t see her
reflection clearly. Knowing that, she dragged her hand across the condensation
until she could see the girl, her face still flushed from the scalding shower
and eyes red from weeping. She might have wept in the shower. She didn’t
remember waking up that morning, but she remembered her uncle Anders’ hands
caressing her sleepily as she rose from his bed. She didn’t remember taking a
shower, but she was scrubbed clean, her skin tingling and smelling of soap. She
forced herself to look at the girl, watching the lips move as she said to her,
“Stop running, don’t hide. This is real, this is reality. Bare it, little
bitch. Overcome the fear. Pain simply is. It’s the perception that matters.”
He did this to himself and while he burned…
“He didn’t even make a sound,” she hissed between clenched teeth, dragging her
nails across the stitches at her throat. The sting and burn was pleasantly
distant beyond the haze of her anger, but not nearly muted enough. A sob
sputtered out of her mouth before she could stop it, a spasmodic contraction
she couldn’t control, and she dug her nails in harder in aggravation with
herself. “God damn it, get your shit together!”
She stared at the blood that began to bead along the lines she’d dug into her
skin and raked her nails across them again, focusing on the pain,
deconstructing it. The monk calmly burned to death in the street in her mind,
the flames licking up his body, eating away at his clothes to blacken the flesh
underneath. Pain and fear didn’t shackle him as it did her and it was that
attainability of freedom that drove her to press harder into her flesh. She
swallowed the groan building in her throat and pushed through the instinct to
stop her fingers from tearing away the sutures. Deep, calm breaths were all
that she allowed to pass through her lips. It was only flesh. She would live
and flesh would heal. Hesitation, inability to act, uncontrolled and
thoughtless reaction were the things she might not survive in what little she
knew of her father’s world. Still, she screamed in her mind and tears blurred
her vision. Frustration coupled to the anger roared inside her, sweeping
despair and bitterness up in their rising current. No matter how hard she tried
to change her perception of pain, she couldn’t capture that disregard of it
that had occasionally blessed her in her most desperate moments. She couldn’t
understand how to overcome the pain, the fear, or anything of her circumstances
that trapped her in suffering. Her father knew. He was supposed to teach her
how to find freedom from conditional suffering, all in due time, but that time
had been stolen from them. They had been stolen from each other.
“Hva i helvete,Simone! What… What did you do?!”
Rough hands turned her from the mirror and Anders’ distress pulled her from the
river coursing through her fury, the din of its rage calming in the worry and
alarm widening his eyes as they took in her self-inflicted injury. That was how
he would see this; the mad work of a mad woman. She tried to explain herself
anyway.
“Don’t… Don’t freak out, okay? I have to do this. I need to figure this out, so
I need to feel it,” she said, hysterically stilted, unable to even fake calm.
Something wet dripped on her foot and she glanced down reflexively at the thin
streams of blood oozing down her chest from the flesh she’d torn out of the
stitches, the red creeping down her sternum to her navel. Her stare lifted to
stop at the scar over his heart, unable to bear all that his eyes might tell
her as he pressed a towel to her neck and muttered Norwegian in harsh and
cutting tones. Terror, disgust, disappointment, bewilderment, desperation,
anger; she couldn’t fault him for not understanding. It was futile to try to
explain this to him when she could only halfway explain it to herself. She had
little idea of what she was doing, but she understood that she had to do
something. She had to prepare for what was ahead any way she could. Pressing
her bloodied hand to the towel, she tried to turn away from Anders, only for
him to pull her forcibly to him.
“You can’t do this!” he snapped, hugging her tightly, ignoring her blood
smearing on his skin. “You can’t, understand?! No!”
The shape of his body pressed against her spiked panic into her heart where it
had once provided shelter, that invasive terror worsening the frantic urgency
of her need to control it. She shut her eyes and wrapped her arms around him,
leaning into the fear that quickened her pulse. Her fear was the root so much
suffering, but not just for her. Guilt swallowed up the last of her manic
desperation, weighing that acidic energy down as she sighed in defeat and
stroked his back. She had brought so much suffering to her family with her
cowardice and lack of self-control.
“I won’t, then,” she said, the lie laying flat and bitter on her tongue. “I’m
sorry… papa.”
“Hvorfor… Why you did…” he muttered. “Why you did do this?”
His arms constricted around her too tight, crushing her to his torso, her blood
and his sweat filling her senses. Beyond the fear and the pain, that
treacherous pulse of arousal thrummed low in her, altering those feelings into
further fuel for her shameful perversion. Her debauchery disgusted her and she
winced in the effort it took to ignore the warmth growing in response to his
possessive hold, but a shocking realization stopped her breath. She was going
about this all wrong. The focus was never meant to be on the pain itself, but
beyond it. The monk did not immolate himself to demonstrate his willpower; pain
was an obstacle and distraction, not a goal. Survival, protection, love, guilt,
there were many motivations that had driven her to act regardless of the pain
or fear, but lust was always the most consistent. This perversion these men
wrought within her with their forceful and painful brand of lust was a powerful
alchemy that transmuted her entire perception. If she could isolate that
effect, distill it into a resource she could use at will, then maybe it was not
so hopeless. The ability to surpass suffering had been in her the entire time.
“Papa…” she whispered.
Her throat was dry and her palms were sweating, her movements unsteady as she
rose on tiptoe. Every muscle hummed with the want to flee even as every nerve
seemed attuned to welcome both pleasure and pain to feed her sexual response.
It was a thrillingly precarious balance, one that might never make sense to
her, but her body always seemed to know what it wanted even if she wanted
anything else. Anders bent to devour her mouth in a violent kiss before she
could work past her reluctance to ask for it, but there it was. The rapid burn
of arousal, the flames licking up both fear and reason alike, eating away at
her pain to blacken it into something darker. The monk, self-immolating in the
street, not destroying himself but transforming himself. Anders’ teeth scraped
her tongue as she sought his, the pain of his sharp incisor nearly piercing her
sensitive flesh making her burn for him. He was rougher than he’s been, even
rougher than the previous night when they made her hurt and scream for them. He
was angry at her. Good. She needed this to hurt.
“Fuck me,” she forced herself to say, the words coming out in a ragged breath
through her hesitance.
“Not now.”
She jerked in shock at the unexpected sound of Vidar, Anders’ strong hold on
her naked and bloody body not allowing her to skid away. Her chest constricted
in the terror that now accompanied the older man’s presence and evaporated that
hope for control over her fear as it commanded her to freeze if she couldn’t
flee. The sting of failure was harsh.
Vidar’s air of cool composure faltered when his stare latched onto the smear of
blood and the red-splotched towel at her throat. There was something dangerous
in his tone as he asked, “Who did this?”
“I did,” she answered quickly.
He pursed his lips in a frown before turning to Anders and tersely asking, “Du
tillot dette?”
Sensing Anders’ anger shifting towards his brother, Simone cut off whatever
response he was about to make, risking both of their irritation to focus on her
as she asked, “What are you doing here?”
“I am here to make sure you don’t say anything stupid at the hospital,” Vidar
answered. “Speaking of… get dressed. We are to be late at this rate.”
 
 
Once again, the reek of life interrupted the halls of the dead to induct
another reveler. Leif reclined in a shadowed niche where some future Marceau’s
corpse was to be detained among the several others that lined the winding
catacombs beneath the estate, watching from this raised and hidden space as
Mrs. Marceau provided eulogy over the sarcophagus containing the late Mr.
Marceau. Her words echoed through the stone passageways, bouncing off the
living that resounded with a similar dispassion and indifference as the twisted
and desiccated corpses they stood among. To attempt profound meaning into a
singular death among these merchants of death was to try to sell ice cubes to
an Eskimo. Only he seemed to find the entire event laughable, but that didn’t
stop him from chuckling. A man he recognized as a high ranking general from the
zenith of civil unrest in Liberia glanced at him sidelong, only the white of
his sclera obvious in the shadow. That white around the pinpoint black of his
iris widened when the general noticed him, Leif’s sharp and pointed teeth
glinting through his rumbling laughter from his pale and predatory face. The
general looked away hurriedly, shaken by his presence, fearful of his
attention. Leif would remember him by his fear.
Silence stiffened the heavy air of the underground at the draw of the widow’s
eulogy, cut by an uneasiness in the murmuring that rippled through the crowds
as Leif descended from the shadows within the shadowed hall. He made no sound
as he stepped through the throng that parted for him and, though his posture
was relaxed and his expression merry, those nearest as he passed drew back from
him as though he might reach out and draw their lives with a touch. He
contemplated doing just that with a select few of them, but he still had
patience.
Ruminating on that point, he ascended the pulpit and faced the crowds, casting
a hush over their whispers. Looking over them, these wealthy men of influence
and power, seeking not to pull the strings behind the curtain but to create
them, he understood. This wasn’t a funeral, this was a business conference,
where men of their trade waited to be done with the ceremonials and
presentations to network and assert themselves among competitors. There was no
passion in their ambition, no art in the effect they imposed on the world, no
animal in their humanity. These merchants had made his father’s house a house
of trade, a den of thieves. The statement of surrender Mrs. Marceau had
prepared for him remained in his pocket, folded into an origami crane. As
ambivalent as he had ever remained to the order, Dr. Aguiyi was correct in that
he could not simply hand over its remains to these vultures. He owed it to them
to poison it first.
“Mr. Marceau is my dearest friend,” he began, smiling fondly down at the
grotesque corpse in the stone casket.
There were large chunks cut out of him, exposing the red meat and yellowed fat
that was beneath the charred skin, likely to relieve the pressure that his
stiffened skin pulled at him in one of those grisly last-ditch lifesaving
efforts. He looked like the luau pig his ex-wife’s family had served at their
last family reunion and Leif briefly regretted not being able to experience
another one of those charming events. He caught how Mrs. Marceau visible
stiffened at his deviation as he turned his mask back to the audience.
“Mr. Marceau possessed an enthralling ambition to bear the immortal duty and
carry on the everlasting life imbued in his role. And so, he did, and he’s
served the title well. Obviously. Such… conspicuous acquisition. This order has
never been more influential in the world than it is today, thanks to his
leadership. For over 400 years, we have met in these catacombs, again and again
to pass on the title, and for 400 years, we have operated in the shadows. Now
we operate in opium fields, textile sweatshops, board rooms, and governments.
These catacombs were not known to anyone who had not been indicted into the
brotherhood, but now you stand among us, united through the network. You who
stand here, where blood has been shed to maintain the shadow, have infiltrated
beyond the veil. And we also stand among you! In your opium fields, in your
textile sweatshops, in your board rooms, in your governments, we also stand
among you! United, as one! Welcome!”
His smile sharpened at their collective tension, allowing the implication of
threat to bloom and breathe, but he kept his eyes locked with Francis Aguiyi
standing among his sect. The doctor, his clouded eyes now crinkled at the edges
and glimmering mirthfully, grinned up at him. The young men flanking him
glanced to his smile, then turned their bleary stares to Leif as though they
now saw something truly horrifying where he stood.
“Marceau is my friend because he is able to stay a step ahead of me. I’d died
believing I had killed him, only to be revived and find him clinging to life
just long enough to outlive me. Dead man walking; I, literally, he,
figuratively. Even now, he is still stepping ahead and I, as his loyal friend,
will continue to follow.”
Leif turned to Mrs. Marceau, seeing her face wooden with barely concealed rage
and mortal terror as she stood among those who sought to betray her at the
slightest provocation. With the correct implications, he could have her sealed
in the sarcophagus with her late husband, dismantle all the couple had built to
achieve, allow the network to be torn apart by the vultures. With a simple
gesture, she could have his brains splattered over the stones right where he
stood, and end the coup she could see teetering on the edge of his words. He
beckoned her forward and she hesitated before taking five stiff paces toward
the pulpit.
He grinned widely to the crowd, throwing his arms wide with his palms raised to
the vaulted ceilings as he announced, “Friends, brothers! Marceau is dead! Long
live Marceau!”
Francis stood, the bells of his cuffs jangling as he clapped and let out a
whooping laugh, immediately joined by a clamor of bells and applause from the
followers of his blood cult scattered throughout the passageways. The polite
applause of those unaware of the full meaning to this changeover followed. Mrs.
Marceau startled out of her wide-eyed astonishment when Leif grasped her hand
and shook it; their second physical contact, one meant with just as much malice
as the first.
He had to commend her nerve not to flinch away as he leaned in and spoke into
her ear to be heard above the din, “Congratulations, Mrs. Marceau. You have
inherited a great legacy.”
***** Chapter 54 *****
“You are so pathetic,” Vidar smiled as he smoothed the paper tape over the
gauze covering Simone’s reopened wound. She wilted in that endearing way she
did when verbally degraded, her eyes casting low and to the side as her
shoulders sagged with an expression that made him want to degrade her further
by kissing those downturned lips. Or maybe it was just a stray curiosity to see
how their mouths might fit together. Neither were motivation enough to break
that taboo of intimacy, no matter how tempting it was to feel her whimper
against his teeth. Such tender gestures as kissing was to remain strictly off-
limits.
“Be nice to her!” Anders snapped from the shower.
“Shove it up your dick, Anders,” Vidar quipped back. “You don’t even know what
‘pathetic’ means.”
“I know when you’re being an asshole,” his younger brother growled.
Vidar shrugged, not doubting that, and returned his attention to their nervous
pet sitting on the edge of the countertop in nothing but a towel. His stare
immediately latched back onto those full, soft, shapely lips. It really was too
bad he didn’t kiss, but there were plenty of other things for that lovely mouth
to do.
“Come, sweetheart, let’s go upstairs to get dressed,” he said, smiling kindly
at her as he gathered her up in his arms.
She weighed nothing as he pulled her off the counter, tempting him to just
carry her up to the attic and ravage her on her bed, but it was always more
satisfying to have her follow commands. Setting her on her feet, he tugged the
towel loose and chuckled at how quickly she reacted to grab and hold it tight
to her body. She needed more practice in subservience.
“You want to wear a towel all day?” he asked, thumbing the hem of the stained
terrycloth. “Don’t be a child.”
The metallic odor of blood clung to the material and mingled organically with
her scent in a way the perfumed soap and shampoo didn’t, reminding him of how
their scents all blended in a bouquet of sweat and sex both on and inside her.
There was a deeply carnal satisfaction in having her bear their scents; an
animalistic ownership that went deeper than his humanity. He was finding that
their pet frequently connected him to those ancient, primal pieces of himself
in surprising and bewildering ways. It was as unsettling as it was
exhilarating, but he was aware enough to know that he shouldn’t enjoy it as
much as he did – another effect he found she inspired in him. It would have
been more difficult to accept if all of this wasn’t already so outside his
scope of normal, enabling him to ignore the disagreeable aspects of this lack
of self-control or awareness in favor of embracing these thrilling impulses.
Presently, his impulses told him to yank the towel out of her hold and shove
her into the hallway naked, so he did. She didn’t stumble as he’d hoped,
adjusting to the sudden and awkward trajectory with a grace that reminded him
that she was once a promising gymnast before she’d lost her mind. Apparently,
she’d never quite given up the hobby.
“So much… ambition and… ah, potential you had,” he said mockingly as he walked
closely behind her. She wasn’t even trying to hide how uncomfortable and
nervous she was and he grinned as she kept glancing back at him. “Now look at
you. Not even a person.”
She didn’t glance back at him after that, instead keeping her arms wrapped
tightly around her bare torso as she ascended the slatted steps with the grim
resolve of a prisoner walking death row. He sat on her bed and, in the guise of
leering as she began to wind her wristwatch before digging around in the
shopping bags on the floor, he examined her body for how fresh her newer
bruises would seem to the hospital staff. The marks of the riding crop were
light and tame compared to the deep bruises both Leif and Edward Kyun had left
her with, but the friction burns where her collar and cuffs had dug into her
skin were raw and damningly new. His gaze traveled down, catching the suck
bruises on her inner thighs as she quickly stepped into leggings. Anders was an
idiot to take her in for a check-up now, but Vidar was confident he could
explain these things away if anyone asked her about them.
“Do I have time to eat?” she asked, her twitchy fingers fumbling with the
buttons on her shirt.
He beckoned her to him and she clutched the shirt closed as she stepped
obediently before him. As he began buttoning her shirt, he explained, “No food
for you. They are to do blood tests to check organs and know what you are
withdrawing from.”
“I don’t do those kinds of drugs,” she muttered, shaking her head.
He heard the depth of sincerity in that denial and felt a stray dash of pity
for her that almost, but not quite, prevented him from saying, “It is not so
much what you did. It is what was done to you.”
Her fidgeting with the overhanging sleeves of her blouse stilled and he glanced
up from his task at her buttons to her widened eyes, the devastation there
snagging his attention. He hated looking at their slave and seeing the same
shattered silver eyes as that murderous psychopath, but the terrible
realizations stampeding through her mind were reflected so fascinatingly clear
in them. That clarity of emotion constantly spilling from her was so refreshing
in this dishonest and callous world. He could see why Anders had been so
bewitched into protectiveness of the girl. To Vidar, however, seeing something
so delicate and vulnerable made him itch with the compulsion to torment it for
those same reasons.
“What?” he smirked, huffing out a brief and incredulous laugh. She grimaced
slightly as though the sound stung. He was sure it did, and rewarded her pain
with a soothing caress of his fingers cupping the sides of her face. That raw
vulnerability in this fragile state was so enticing. “Did you never question
what your father did give you?”
“He told me medicine wouldn’t work with my… It was just a sedative, not that
often, just when I… when he wanted to… to…” she stammered, mostly to herself.
Her desperate attempts to rationalize what he was telling her were adorable.
“It isn’t withdrawals, I have a lingering flu. It’s stress. I- I don’t do those
kinds of drugs.”
He pulled her closer, his fingers anchored in the roots of her damp hair,
bringing her face within centimeters of his as he whispered, “He did poison
your brain, little bitch, the same way he did poison mine. Don’t hide from the
truth. He did this to you, understand?”
Her eyes shut and she shuddered as her tears finally crawled down her cheeks,
those crystal droplets sparkling in the late morning sun from the skylight. She
was trying so hard to overcome the horror in the horrible thing that had been
done to her; he wanted to witness every part of her suffering.
“The ashes of… my mind,” she muttered under her breath, sniffing.
“What was that, sweetheart?”
She opened her wet eyes as she said in a breathless and anxious whisper, “He
was transforming my mind, and, uh… I don’t know how far he got. I don’t know
how much further I need to go to get there.”
Vidar smiled again at her madness and closed the distance between them to lick
away her salty tears, saying as she tried weakly to turn away under his grasp,
“You are so cute when you say crazy shit.”
“Why are you- agh!” she started to sneer, but he cut off her words by shoving
his thumb into her mouth.
“Be careful, sweetheart, it was sounding like you might question me,” he
grinned, gripping that slippery, spongy flesh between his thumb and forefinger.
The immediate acquiescence of this sad little creature as he pulled her down by
her tongue to kneel between his spread knees was so gratifying, filling those
screaming holes in his mind with a silencing warmth. “Did he not teach you to
respect your master? You’re too smart to be so stupid, so you are wanting to be
taught a lesson again, yes?”
“Aheen hah-ee,” she tried to speak, her tongue flexing uselessly under his
hold, and he shut her mumbling up with a jab of his thumbnail into that
squirming muscle.
“Do not misunderstand, little bitch,” he said, her pained and cowering wince
under his nail making his cock fatten up uncomfortably against his slacks
despite knowing they had no time to relieve that need. That greedy drive to
dominate her even at his inconvenience wasn’t entirely without its own
beneficial affect beyond the thrill of it, however. “I am not Anders. When you
misbehave, I will not show you mercy. You are not a person, remember? You are a
thing to use and to fuck. Remember your place, little bitch, or I will remind
you. Now, what do you say to your master?”
He released her tongue with a final tug and she tucked it back into her mouth
to swallow the excess saliva that had pooled under it before saying, “Thank
you, Sir.”
Her glittering, terrifying eyes looked up with an unwelcome ease in meeting his
stare, as instinctively alarming as a hint of fur moving behind shadows of
branches. Dehumanizing her was a necessary step in the process, one that he was
enjoying thoroughly, but he was becoming more aware of the dire purpose to all
of it beyond his own fulfillment. The creature he had glimpsed between the
breathing cracks of her sanity was an inhuman thing for certain, but the exact
nature of it was something he did not entirely know. Whatever it was that gave
her that impenetrable core of savagery was nothing like the sweet, sad girl who
leaned so pathetically into his touch even as he hurt and humiliated her. There
was a notion that all that she outwardly was had been crafted to conceal
something necessary to hide from the world, a notion too similar to how Leif
had operated towards the end with his layers of disguise falling away to show
the monster beneath. Vidar related to that aspect of them with a resonance that
still shook him, but the nature of his beast had been released and he relished
in unleashing it upon their slave. He was coming to know what he now was, but
he still didn’t have a way of identifying what she might be. Whatever Simone
was becoming, he would tame it and own it so that when her control failed, he
could control her. He wouldn’t let her become like her father.
 
 
Leif felt the satisfying pop and give of the young man’s arm dislocating from
his shoulder joint as he bent it slowly backwards, his knee anchored in the
center of his back to keep him from squirming away. Sweat dripped from the
ridge of his brow, his bared back shiny and bronzed from the sun of the
courtyard, indulgent in this primitive pursuit of life through the death of
another. The ground was smudged in places with blood that shown black on the
dark gray stones; black, except where red could cling to the bits of flesh and
here and there. Teeth were common litter in these events, but Leif had always
tried to contribute more rarified debris to decorate the ring. Seeing an
eyeball half-crushed and smeared like a stray grape put more fear into the
opponents, made for a more impassioned performance even before the first
tussle.
Leif waited for the young man to stop screaming, his shrill cries withering
into moaning, before he jerked the arm back into its socket and shouted over
the din of the crowd for him to get back up. The border of the circle was a
wall of brown fists tightened in anticipation and mouths gaping pink flesh and
white teeth to bellow until the air was alive with sound and fury. Francis
observed the match, a still spectator in the shivering fence of bodies, his
deeply wrinkled bloodhound face focused in concentration where the others
writhed in excitement and anticipation. Leif caught his clouded eye and the
doctor’s wooly beard separated to show his yellow-toothed grin and shrugged as
though this pathetic situation simply could not be helped. Leif could not
accept victory so easily, especially for his final match. The young man laid
sprawled on the flat stone bricks, prone and gasping like a fish exhausted from
thrashing under the heavy press of gravity outside of water. He shouted again
for the young man to get up, even providing him an encouraging kick to his
ribs, but he only curled in agony.
“Listen to what the pain tells you,” Leif shouted, the way his father had
recited it to him from his father, and from his father’s father on through each
notch in his genetic memory. The hollow ache in his heart wished it was his
Simone lying broken and open to this lesson instead of this defeated man. He
stalked around him in a circle within the circle of men, wishing to fill that
ache by imagining it was her he spoke to. “What is your pain saying?”
The young man didn’t answer. His Simone would have had some insightful
response, some innermost truth to offer once he’d broken her through her fear
and pain, but this young man was not his daughter. He was too lacking in
compassion and savagery, utterly deficient in conviction and imagination, just
a diluted husk of a man searching for meaning and holding none of his own. The
wall of bodies swayed tighter, but Leif still paced around him, warding them
back. He wasn’t done yet.
“Is it telling you to die?” he asked, squatting next to him. “Are you so easily
convinced?”
Dirt was glued by the coagulating blood onto the pulverized face of the young
man, his breath puffing out of the swollen hole of his mouth through the gaps
where his teeth once were. The skin of Leif’s knuckles was mostly worn away,
left raw and wetly oozing, and there was a split at the bridge of his nose from
someone’s elbow being faster than his grapple, but he could keep going for
hours. This was his favorite part of the ceremonies following the funeral. Mr.
Marceau had been prideful of his rank and this was a more magnificent event for
it, though Leif did not care for the splendid displays of ritual or the
ostentatious feastings as he once did in his youth. Age and his own brief death
had brought focus to matters of more meaning than the implied values of
tradition and he now found a powerful freedom in just how few things truly
mattered anymore. He gathered the young man’s red hair in his fist. He couldn’t
recall if his opponent was a redhead or if this was blood streaking through the
sweat along his scalp, but it wouldn’t matter shortly. Everything this young
man was or would be would soon cease; the narrative of his life leading up to
this point and not extending beyond it.
“Are you certain you’ve heard it correctly?” Leif asked into the misshapen
cauliflower of his ear. He gripped the underside of his chin he bent the young
man further backwards, feeling his sputtering breath against his wrist. A
wordless gurgle spat out of him, but that was the only response he provided.
Leif wanted to punish him for not being Simone. He considered his options,
favoring the idea of driving his heel into the bend of the neck, giving this
young man a quick blow to the brainstem, but he’d taken him this far along the
path of brutality. It would be in poor taste to depart from the path at this
point. He drove his chest into the stones, confident the force would snap his
clavicle, and began writing the story of his ending with the ink of pain.
Afterward, as Leif rinsed the blood and bits of skull and brain from between
his fingers in the koi fountain, he let the savage thrum leave his body in a
heavy sigh. His hands throbbed, unable to entirely unfold from the curl of
fists, and he looked forward to filling a bathtub with ice. Just like he’d told
his wife to do for his daughter during those first years he had begun Simone’s
confirmation into the religion of pain. He watched the beautiful fish approach
the scents of gore and weave their elegant bodies around his still feet in the
water, their maws gaping wide in search of the food. That young man’s agonized
death was delicious to these decorative fish. The roar of the crowd on the
other side of the courtyard swelled in response to the violence within the
circle as another two participants brawled. A delicate fin, as thin and
ethereal as a dancer’s veil, brushed his ankle as a great mottled koi hurried
away.
“That was magnificent, Valstad.”
“Thank you, doctor. Shame about that last one,” Leif said, stepping out of the
water to accept the cup Francis handed him.
The old man sat along the edge of the fountain in that slow way a bad back
demanded to be eased into the motion as he groaned out, “What- your grand
finale? You made a Jackson Pollock painting out of that ring!”
Leif sat down next to him, a wistful smile stretching his wide mouth. “My
daughter would like you.”
“Not too much, I hope,” Francis grinned, wagging his gnarled and thick finger
knowingly. Leif hid his chuckle behind his cup, drinking the cold palm wine in
thick gulps to avoid the cloying flavor. His new old friend gestured with a
tilt of his chin toward the tall wall of the mansion, leading Leif’s eyes to
find Mrs. Marceau watching from a balcony among the rest of the fully-dressed
and clean businesspeople. “What do you think they thought of it, up there in
the vulture’s nest?”
“I try my best not to consider the thoughts of the complacent,” Leif said, his
lip curling in mild disgust. “Whatever infects such apathy and avarice into the
hearts of men is a contagion too volatile to handle with something as
vulnerable as thought. I only seek to understand enough of the mechanical
workings of their tinman hearts to know where to throw the wrench into them.”
Francis looked at him as he tipped the copper cup into the pocket of his beard
where his mouth was hidden, his brown skin a slice of starless night with the
sun shining behind him, and said in his whispery rasp, “We should probably kill
them while they’re all here.”
“No. This is systemic, not something you can isolate to a roomful of
individuals. Attacking them directly would only divide your cause from the
order as it currently stands. Killing the other players won’t assure you a
victory by default.”
“Then what do you suppose we should do?”
Leif moved his hard glare from the balcony of thieves to the writhing mob of
revelers as their cheers once more swelled to announce another champion. “If
you don’t like how the game is played, then change the rules.”
 
 
“Simone, I need you to relax, okay?” Dr. Brun repeated, his even smile well-
practiced and obviously fake. “You’re safe. No one here is going to hurt you.”
The touch through the nitrile glove on her arm made Simone flinch away and she
managed to murmur, “For the last time, doc. Don’t. Touch. Me.”
The room was too small, the walls seeming to inch in closer when she wasn’t
looking, and she was far too naked for Vidar to be standing this close. He
couldn’t do anything with the doctor there. She was safe for the moment, but
they were going to hurt her when they knew for certain they could get away with
it. Each second she was alone with them, the likelihood of her polite
pretending at normalcy felt closer to crumbling. She didn’t know this doctor,
but she didn’t need to. The awful thinness of the hospital gown, which was
really more of an apron, and her nudity beneath it eradicated any benefit of
doubt she might have been able to retain for this stranger. Vulnerability made
everyone a potential threat.
“When did these symptoms start?” Dr. Brun asked again.
“Um… uh…”
She cringed when Vidar gently brushed her hair behind her shoulder, the thick
locks sliding over her bare skin in a slither that his fingertips trailed with
a wave of goosebumps. Whatever he’d said to convince both Henrik and the doctor
to allow him to sit in on the examination had shifted their awkward uncertainty
to understanding and even gratitude with a shockingly brief conversation. Or
perhaps it was not so shocking as it was just distressingly expected. Her
mental status had long since stripped her of autonomy and privacy in these
clinical settings with her father taking the reigns in every appointment and
evaluation; it should not be surprising that Vidar would easily slip into that
preestablished routine.
“Sweetheart,” Vidar said. The quality of his voice held a warmth and affection
that was blatantly false to her ears, but seemed to charm the doctor into
believing he held the right amount of familial love that assured him his
presence here was proper and right. “Do you remember when these symptoms
started?”
His lingering fingers on her upper back burned against the bruises. She pursed
her lips, gathering her resolve before saying, “It’s not a concussion. I’ll be
fine. You have my blood samples. Can I go back to the waiting room now?”
“Well, we need to be sure. I want you to follow my finger with your eyes,” Dr.
Brun said.
Anger flashed hot up the back of her neck as she bristled from being so
blatantly ignored, snapping before she could stop herself, “It’s not a fucking
concussion, shit stack! Fuck off already!”
“Simone! Mind your manners!” Vidar scolded.
His hand was still pressed to her back, hidden under her hair, the pinpoints of
his nails resting in a threat over an open welt her father had sliced into her
skin.
She clenched her jaw and willed herself to calm, the presence of his touch
enough to ground her in consequence if she didn’t, and sighed, “Sorry… I don’t…
Can Henrik to do this? I’d feel more comfortable if it’s someone I trust.”
“Well, you don’t mince words, do you?” Dr. Brun chuckled tightly. “Let’s just
get back to the examination. There are a lot of other patients who wantto see
me today.”
She could feel how offended her outburst had made him, his resentment of her
now free to be open. It crackled along the edges, abrasive and annoying, like a
shirt tag that begs to be cut off. Henrik had to excuse himself from the room
once the gown had left her back exposed, his voice gone thick and froggy, and
she wasn’t upset with him for trading patients with Dr. Brun to attend Anders
instead. She didn’t want to deal with her problems either. However, she knew,
from the moment this doctor had sat down on his little stool and opened by
asking her which recreational drugs she’d used, that this was going to happen.
One look at her and he’d decided to skip the ifand go straight for the which,
because being young and brown had answered that first question for him, because
being a victim of abuse had roped her into that likely statistic, because he
was simply unforgivably rude. He did not need rudeness to tip her into
hostility when his mere presence was enough to warrant that within her.
It took all her willpower not to wrap her hands around his pencil neck as she
leaned forward and said, “If you don’t move your pus-oozing inferiority complex
out of my sight, you’re going to find out what I domince.”
Dr. Brun’s face was shrink-wrapped in pale appall and rage, his bug eyes
bulging and thin lips vanished into the small line of his mouth, and she could
have lunged at him to knock him off his stool and slam that face into the hard
edge of the little sink behind him. The idea of having to touch him to
accomplish that was what kept her seated on the end of the exam table, the
paper sticking on the bottom of her thighs and ass to crinkle and tear with any
slight movement. She hated him and his entire existence with a vehemence that
had her breathing hard through her nostrils as she imagined what his awful
little pointed head would look like without that soured buttermilk skin.
Seconds fell like hot wax dripping down her neck before she heard Vidar say
something in their mutual Norwegian behind her that made Dr. Brun nod in
agreement as he quietly left the room, eyes downcast, brow knit, shoulders
slumped. Her haunches tensed to bound after him and her nailbeds and teeth
itched to rip into him when the door politely clicked shut, but all that
hostility in her scattered like flies into the air when her uncle stepped
around the exam table to stand in front of her. She couldn’t move her eyes up
from where it had glared at the doorknob, now fixed to the weave pattern of
Vidar’s shirt.
“What was that?” he asked. Calm, composed, collected, direct. He didn’t give
her anything to tailor her answer to, so very much like her father. She tried
not to let how that twisted her guts show.
“What was what?” she asked, slow and low with how heavy her tongue now seemed.
His arm extended beyond her peripheral and she felt his hand crawl under her
hair to cup the base of her skull- not pulling or tugging, just cupping. It was
what he could choose to do to her that terrified her the most. His touch spread
vines through her nerves, stretching like immaterial tendrils and bursting
spore pods of tingling fear as they grew down her spine. She shivered, tried
not to pant, and squeezed her thighs together unconsciously before she caught
that she wasn’t doing it out of nervousness. Shame more than sexual desire
bloomed warmth from her breastbone to her brow, though the emotions seemed a
package deal these days. Fear, shame, and self-loathing were the staple spices
of her sex life after leaving Brooklyn. After leaving the US, sex had become
her life. There was no escaping these emotions. His breath was a ghost brushing
over her forehead as he leaned close, his scent now strong over the antiseptic
stench of the room. There was another emotion that wove it all together in her,
something she couldn’t trust to be real in how ridiculously mismatched it
seemed from everything else.
“You never did act this way before,” he said, the air undulating against her
face. She was very still. “What has gotten into you?”
Confusion creased her brow. “I’m… I don’t like talking to strangers. I hate
them. I just wanted him to leave me alone.”
His thumb massaged the dip where her skull met her vertebrae, the gentle
pressure seeming to squeeze out a poison that loosened her tensed muscles
involuntarily. His voice was a silk shroud wrapping her mind as he softly
asked, “Why do you hate them?”
His other hand descended gently on her knee and her breath shook out of her as
it slowly slid up, bunching the thin cloth along its path. She couldn’t speak
above a whisper as she answered, “I’m jealous of them. They can shape
themselves to fit into a world that doesn’t want me to exist, no matter how
much I’ve tried to… to change my shape.”
“You think you do not belong in the world?”
“I’m scared that I might never belong,” she whispered, her throat closing
around the admission. “So many people, they don’t even try, they are just so…
so arrogantly complacent to accept that things are the way they should be, but
nothing really works. There’s so much wrong with the way things are and these
people that don’t care are just making it worse.”
“You want to change the world?” he asked. She could hear his smirk. “Such noble
ideal.”
That photograph of her father, so young and so scared among the hunted, stained
the walls of her thoughts. Acid tears stung her eyes and she squeezed them shut
as she admitted, “No, no, I’m worse than any of them! I want to kill them all!
I want to burn the world just to destroy them with it. I want to make myself a
monster so that I can never, ever even try to be the kind of human that lets
this happen. That’s what I want! That’s how fucking spiteful and hateful I am.
I’m inhuman in a human world and I hate them for it.”
The long span of his thumb slid along the underside of her jawline and tipped
her head back, but she kept her eyes screwed shut. She couldn’t stand to be
looked at in this moment. Her thoughts had been dragged out into the light and
they hung in the air to bare the worst of her. She hated herself with a burning
passion that she wanted to immolate her body like a monk in the street.
“Then don’t be.”
His soft tone cut through her thrumming hatred. Bewilderment opened her eyes to
see him, her father’s wide mouth and sharp features painted by a different
artist, nearly close enough to blur his face into any of the brothers.
“Don’t be human,” he said. His words caressed her aching mind as he spoke in
such dulcet, soothing tones. “I feel the same. You and I, there is nowhere we
fit. I can tell you, this never is better. Never. You will always be locked
outside, never part of them. You will always be alone. But here…” Her breath
caught in a hitch at the spread of his hand over her racing heart, the touch
spreading those living tendrils down through her chest cavity and curling
around each organ until she was full of him. The blue of his irises was
darkened to cobalt under his half-shut lids as they drifted lower on her face.
“… You don’t have to be alone with us. You don’t have to be anything but what
you really are. That is our gift for you.”
Before she could react to the insurmountable terror that crashed over her like
a towering wave in the deep ocean blue from his gaze, his lips descended upon
hers. The press of his cruel mouth and the slide of his sharp tongue opened her
to his taste, the familiar element so dreadfully present among each of these
brothers immediately striking her but carrying a piece of something between
them that shocked her. She didn’t want to know him this way, not ever, but the
instinctive response was undeniable. They opened to each other like a secret
never meant to be overheard, something unable to unlearn once known no matter
how terrible it was to think of. Beyond her self-loathing, fear, and desire,
that emotion that wove between it all wrapped painfully along the invisible
threads of connection between them. He recoiled from the kiss still staring
down at her, his eyes caught in the wide stillness of recognizing a mistake too
late to correct.
She could see he knew, and that caved in the exit of deniability for her that
this could possibly exist between them. They were trapped in this knowledge now
with no way back. The kiss had plucked that strand of kinship between them and
it sang clear above the lies they needed to protect themselves from that truth.
Despite the cruelties and obstacles they’d both erected between them, that
connection was rooted in something more savage and ancient, something permanent
in an otherwise impermanent world. Whatever sweet platitudes he’d meant with
what he’d said were more correct than he could have known or wanted. They were
family, and they belonged together in a way they didn’t belong to anyone or
anything else. They always would, and the truth of this terrified them both.
***** Chapter 55 *****
Vidar had a long and clear memory. He remembered every summer he’d spent in the
US, from the excitement and fulfillment of the first long flight when he was
seven until the last flight back home when he was sixteen. The stuffy suppers
with their strict and rigid father had since blurred together in their
monotony, but there were many moments that he could reconstruct in near perfect
clarity. His first time hunting rabbit with their uncle Bjørn, that powerful
and strange feeling when he looked into its glassy eye and saw what he had
taken from it. The warm static of his first kiss in the cool dark under the
patio, the thrill of discovery and magic of a girl’s touch. There were also a
myriad of small vibrant memories that seemed to have no importance or impact
attached to them at all. Waking up before dawn and watching his father
meticulously clean his guns in the yellow lamplight at the parlor coffee table.
The slow gathering and crawl of condensation down the side of a green beer
bottle while Leif talked with the grocer about the high school basketball team
he played power forward on. Memories with no purpose or meaning but the mind
latched onto and etched in permanence on its own.
One such meaningless memory bubbled to the surface as he looked down at Simone.
She was petting the side of a nanny goat at the farm, her eyes wide with wonder
and reverence for the creature, and when she reached for a temptingly long ear
with her chubby little hand, he warned her to be gentle. The feather touch she
used to stroke the goat’s ear must have been barely even felt by the animal,
but little toddler Simone turned her head to look to him – a twenty-year-old
boy of a man she’d barely known- for reassurance, her eyes shining like silver
mirrors and brow wrinkled in uncertainty. He recalled the awkward discomfort of
so suddenly being this little person’s source of guidance and protection, but
beyond that, there was no meaning to this pocket of time that had been
preserved in him. Fifteen years or so later, as he tasted the strange heat of
her mouth still lingering on his tongue and his heart raced with the terrible
sentiments his lizard brain communicated to his irrational mind, she wore that
exact same helpless expression. He hadn’t been able to reconcile that this
young woman, this barely human thing he’d begun training into her function as
their sex slave, was the same child he remembered as his niece. Now, he
couldn’t stop the convergence of those two beings no matter how he railed
against it.
“No,” he breathed. His hands were numb as he gripped the sides of her face. The
same face, the same little girl looking to him for reassurance, the same blood
that pushed and pulled through their pounding hearts. “No, no, no, you’re not…”
He knew, logically, that wanting something was not enough to make it true. He
was intellectually aware that no matter how twisted and abnormal her life had
made her, it could never justify what they’d been doing. She was technically
human, technically his niece, technically innocent of the crimes her father had
committed. Technically, as in the sense that it was true, but a truth so
irrelevant that it was to be regarded as false. Breathing in her scent and her
taste, he could no longer base those denials on technicalities. Facts attached
themselves to opinions, tearing apart the walls of denial and illogical
reasoning he had carefully constructed around them and transforming them into
terrible truths, and he could not change them back any more than he could erase
the sins he had committed under their influence. As his hands lowered to
tremble around her torn and elegant neck, the thought that poured over the riot
of his mind like boiling oil was that, despite all of this, he was still going
to do it.
“It’s okay,” she said, her voice vibrating under his hands. She gently touched
his wrists. Anders had trimmed her nails down to the pink lines of their beds,
leaving her unable to injure herself further through scratching, and Vidar
swallowed against the urge to vomit at the gratitude he felt for him having
stripped her of that defense. “You don’t have to pretend anymore. You can just
be what you are.”
“Don’t…” he shuddered, his grip tightening until he could feel her the rapid
drum of her pulse against his palms. “You do not understand.”
Her throat strained under that bit of pressure his panic supplied to her neck
as she rasped and whispered, “No, I don’t… I don’t understand anything. I don’t
get it at all. I thought I knew what I was, but I had no idea. For the longest
time, I thought I would get better, or at least get used to it. I had a few
friends. I had my paintings; I was selling in galleries. I was even going to
apply for some community college courses, maybe get back on the university
track after that. I had hobbies and routines and… and then we went to Vermont…”
He cut off her words with a firm squeeze, the warm gush under his hands
spilling blood from her reopened cut as he hissed, “I don’t want to know this!”
“I ran from it,” she choked out. Her grip at his wrists was still gentle, not
struggling to push him away or clawing uselessly at him as he thought she
would. As he wished she would. “I’m tired of… ah-h… run-ning…”
The sound of her wheezing to squeeze enough breath through her narrowed throat
was a slow metronome to his thoughts. He had thought he had known himself too.
He was once so sure of his nature, comfortable with what that had been, for
better or for worse. With his hands tightening around his niece’s slender neck,
her wheezing became faint and stuttering and his cock hardened eagerly within
the tight confines of his pants. All those times he had halfheartedly sought
condemnation for his desires, he was just seeking anyone or anything else to
blame this sickness on for not stopping him. He had blamed her father for
changing him; poisoning him to insanity and altering his nature until he could
no longer control what he had become. He had blamed her for tempting him; a
fruit too ripe not to bite with the fangs Leif had given him. He had blamed
Anders for opening that option to him; his love for Simone seemingly made to be
corrupted and manipulated. He had blamed his own hedonistic pursuit of pleasure
in another’s pain and submission, his own weakness to ignore his better
judgement, his own deluded cowardice to rationalize these wicked acts. It had
taken an impulsive taste of her kiss and all the terrible confirmation that
came with it for his condemnation to finally arrive. She was a human being that
had been taken advantage of in the worst ways and a member of his family he was
instinctively drawn to protect. He couldn’t deny any of that now, having tasted
their connection both physically and emotionally, and that made it all the more
devastating that he couldn’t stop this. He had never thought he would be so
aware of his own insanity.
“I will ruin you,” he whispered low and sharp, squeezing until her wheezes
stopped altogether and she grimaced in pain, “until you are perfect.”
Her mouth gaped to draw in the breath he had locked out of her lungs, her
desperation growing in little involuntary twitches and tugs, but her dedication
to let him continue to choke her was heartwarming. He bent down and kissed her
open mouth, that mysterious sensation of something in her taste conveying such
disturbing sentiments of family and emotion, making him shiver. He had never
considered himself a good man by anyone’s measure, thinking such ideals as good
or evil far too subjective and flawed in their logic to be taken seriously, but
he recognized evil in him now as clearly as he had seen it in Leif. It was an
uncomfortable realization among many. When her hands slid down from their
gentle hold and her body began to sag, he loosened his grip and allowed her to
briefly gasp for breath before shutting her airway again abruptly. The
startled, cutoff yelp she sputtered made his cock throb and his distress swell.
“You fucking bitch,” he sneered. He kissed her harder, grinding his lips
against hers as he twisted his tongue into her mouth, greedy for that strange
jolt. Her stilted, weak attempts to return his kiss would have made him laugh
if it wasn’t so pitiful with loneliness and desperation. He leaned in closer to
her as he whispered between rough, jagged kisses, “You like this, yes? You like
me to do as I please with you… mmm… Sweet little bitch… I can hurt you… fuck
you… kill you… That is what you want? You want me to kill you?”
His chest constricted in mounting panic at how easily he could end her life.
Even as empty as the threat was, it was real, and she still didn’t try to fight
him. If anything, she relaxed under his hold, though that was almost
undoubtedly her skirting unconsciousness again. It had to be. She couldn’t
leave them, not so soon, not ever, not when she was partially responsible for
turning him into this demon. She had to pay with her life, not her death. Anger
tightened his grip until his fingers trembled and her head lolled back, the
lack of both blood and oxygen to her brain taking her swiftly. Just by keeping
this grip for a few more seconds, he could see to it that she never wakes up.
The power to end her life and her suffering made him dizzy. He wondered if it
would cure him of this madness or if he would be forever haunted with
dissatisfaction, unable to enact these compulsions upon his beloved slave. His
mouth was dry and his palms were slick with his sweat and her blood, the bright
cherry red of it smeared everywhere on her neck and oozing down her chest.
Beloved. This wasn’t anything that could make a place for that tenderness, but
there it was, the greedy thread of connection wrapped painfully around his
heart. She was his niece and he loved her as such. She was his slave and he
loved her sexual servitude. Who he once was and who he had come to be warred
within him as she slipped further down into death with each breath untaken. If
his humanity had any remaining effective bearing over him, he would end their
misery there before these desires and impulses tore them apart. Hold her blood
from her brain until she died and then find his way up to the roof of this
building and jump. It would save them so much suffering. But he wasn’t human
enough for that mercy; the demon in him finally had what he wanted.
A small click of the door closing was the only warning he had before he was
hauled backward, a heavy arm crushed around his neck. He dragged Simone down
with him, her limp body falling to the floor and out of his grip in an awful
tumble, and his panic at her not hacking and coughing to catch her breath
overrode the panic at his own being attacked. His shoes skid and his knees
buckled as the blood choke quickly worked to make his head swim, that arm like
a steel beam bent to pinch those arteries. He jabbed his elbow into the solid
torso behind him but whoever it was didn’t even flinch or grunt, their thickly
muscled body taking the blows like a brick wall. The realization that he could
not get out of this was quickly followed by an insistent acceptance that
perhaps this was for the best. Glancing down through the blurring edges of his
darkening vision to see Simone crumpled, unmoving, the hospital sheet twisted
under her, he wished he could have been someone who had wanted to save her. In
the end, it just wasn’t in his nature. The world was shut off to him behind a
veil of darkness, the roar of pressure building in his skull the only thing
left to his awareness before that too was snuffed out.
 
 
“What was he like in his death?” Leif asked, his stare fixed to the fire
casting shadows that danced to the rhythm of the flame.
Francis tapped the thick nail of his index finger against his copper cup as he
weighed his thoughts. He always took his time to think about what to say when
he could, a habit that Leif found he appreciated after a lifetime of
conversations where people only waited to have their turn to speak or
calculated their pauses for effect. Members of the doctor’s entourage, a motley
crew of mercenaries, talented derelicts, and outgrown child soldiers from all
reaches of the living nightmare smears in the world, crowded around the prison
that was the guest quarters Leif had been restricted to. None of them spoke or
barely even made a sound, their presence that of stalwart stone sentries more
than human men, their bleary stares the exhausted gratitude of a still and
peaceful moment. There was an itchiness to them, though, a slow simmer of
waiting that would eventually boil into restlessness. They could not sustain
themselves on peace and that was why they followed the doctor. Leif knew these
men like he knew that same part of himself and he could meet their empty eyes
with equal understanding and appreciation of the ghosts they carried. They had
transcended humanity in their own ways to become warriors and they could not
live without the violence that both tormented and sustained them. It operated
similarly to what Leif was and, though they knew him to be a different species
of predator, they had accepted him readily after seeing his savagery in the
ring. Camaraderie was an aching absence within him, but he would not find it
within their fold. Half of his heart beat in his daughter and he could not be
complete without her returned to his side.
“Bjørn Valstad died with his eyes open, searching for something that I believe
he may have found in his final moment,” Francis answered. He drank deeply from
his cup, the fire glinting off the hammered copper brightly, and sighed. “I
think you and I are the last still alive who knew him. When we go, that will
truly be the end of Bjørn.”
“Not entirely,” Leif muttered into his cup, the bitter tea spilling over his
tongue swiftly as he drank. He grimaced as he swallowed, but the brew was doing
nice things to his perception. The flames in the gilded fireplace licked up the
sides of the logs in the shapes of frantically grabbing hands, their nails
scraping the blackened bark. “When we are done here, will you go back to
Liberia?”
Francis chuckled, a dry, raspy sound that rattled through the smoke-damaged
strings of his vocal chords. “You’re confident that there will be an end to
this.”
“There will be for me. I have to get back to my family. They need me, now that
they have been awakened.”
“The organization needs you,” the doctor corrected him with a point of his
gnarled finger. “We need you. Centuries of tradition and legacy needs you.”
“I renounced my duties when I cooked a Marceau.”
“Killing him was the beginning of your greatest service to the order. You have
to keep being the hero they will look to.”
“I will not remain to be the leader they will follow once it’s done,” Leif said
firmly. “That is not my legacy.”
Francis slumped back in his chair with a shake of his head, a yellow grin
splitting his beard as he said, “You Valstads are all as stubborn as you are
crazy.”
Leif grinned back and shrugged. “Some genetic consistencies are undeniable. We
are no more able to resist them than a wolf can resist a limping lamb.”
“Even the domesticated Valstads?” Francis joked.
Leif stared into the swirl of his tea as he stirred more sugar into it, the
motion kicking up colors he knew weren’t present anywhere outside of his mind
as he responded, “A collie who has never seen a sheep still dreams of herding.
A collie who has worked its whole life herding and protecting sheep still
dreams of hunting them.”
 
 
The throbbing, burning pain in Anders’ stab wounds seemed worse now than they’d
been since Leif had sunken the knives into him, but the staff here was not
quite so generous with prescribing narcotics as they had been in the US. He
limped back to the waiting room from the hospital pharmacy with a higher
strength anti-inflammatory that was guaranteed to tear up his gut and not do
too much else. Henrik had called him lucky that he had somehow avoided
infection despite his seemingly best efforts to neglect cleaning his wounds
properly. Lucky that he could recover with physical therapy. Lucky that the
knife hadn’t sliced an artery. He would have thought he was the luckiest guy on
Earth by how often medical staff had pointed out his talent for getting stabbed
in ways that avoided these many, many worse scenarios. When he sat down to wait
for Simone and Vidar in the barely comfortable laminate benches that lined the
neutral taupe walls, he nearly groaned when the receptionist behind the glass
divider beckoned him over. He leaned heavily on the cane to prop himself back
on his good foot.
He had to lean in close to hear her say in a low and private tone, “Mr.
Valstad, your brother has been taken to the Accident and Emergency Department.”
“What?! What the hell happened?!” Anders exclaimed. “Where’s Simone?!”
“Henrik’s with him,” she said instead. “He wants to be the one to tell you
everything, but don’t worry. The police are on their way.”
“The police?!” he yelled. He didn’t care that everyone was staring now. His
pain, his aggravation, everything else was forgotten in the face of this fresh
fear.
“Please, sir, the A&E is located on the western end of the complex. Henrik can
explain more than I can.”
He pivoted and limped quickly back the way he came, realizing halfway through
the sprawling halls that he had left his prescription bag at the desk and not
even coming close to giving a damn. His mind paraded a hundred possible
scenarios, each one worse than the last, but the worst was simply not knowing.
There was nothing he could do but swing his bad leg faster, his lurching gallop
earning him stares and offers for help that he disregarded as he tried his best
to run. By the time he had found the department, he was panting through the
agony throbbing and cramping his entire thigh and sweating from the effort.
“I’m here to see Henrik Valstad,” he said to the nurse behind the counter, the
words tumbling out quickly between breaths. “He’s a nurse, works here with Dr.
Brun, third floor. He’s with our brother-”
“I know. Let me get you in,” the nurse interrupted him as she rose from her
seat.
He rushed through the door immediately upon her propping it open for him and
followed her hurried steps through the sharp turns of the crowded corridors
until he saw the two uniformed police officers looming in an open doorway.
Henrik stood inside the small room speaking with them, stopping when he caught
his eye.
“Anders! Jesus, it’s about time!” he grumbled, pulling him by his arm between
the policemen. “Thanks for escorting him, Bev.”
Nurse Bev left with a curt nod, walking back in as much of a hurry as she’d
come, and Anders stumbled into the room to see Vidar laid out on a bed with the
heel of his hand pressed to his forehead.
“What the hell is going on?!” Anders growled, shaking his biggest brother’s
hand off his arm. “Where the fuck is Simone?!”
“That’s what we’re trying to figure out,” the shorter, mustachioed officer
interjected. “I’m Officer Bergesen and this is Officer Reistad. When was the
last time you saw Simone Valstad?”
His stomach felt as though it dropped out of him. “Is this about her? Did
something happen to Simone?”
“We don’t know,” Reistad answered. “Can you answer the question?”
“Can you?!” Anders snapped before he could stop himself. “Last I saw, she went
in to get examined by Dr. Brun and this asshole-” He shoved a finger in Vidar’s
direction, who glared at him with a sneer. “- insisted on being in there with
her! Now, can anyone tell me what the hell happened?!”
“Whoa, littlest bro, you gotta calm the fuck down,” Henrik cautioned him,
glancing nervously at the cops.
“And quit fucking shouting so goddamn loud,” Vidar added.
“I’ll calm the fuck down when I know she’s okay!” Anders shouted at them both.
“You can either calm down here or we could calm you down at the station, sir,”
Reistad frowned, squaring his shoulders and placing his hands at the sides of
his belt.
Anders pushed down the urge to deck him, surprised at the sudden and intense
impulse, and forced himself to quietly and calmly say, “I’m sorry, I just need
to know where she is.”
“Again, so do we,” Bergesen said.
“Can I just tell him?” Henrik sighed. “He’s going to be like this until he
knows what’s going on.”
Bergesen glanced at his partner, sharing a skeptical shrug with him before
nodding to Henrik.
He pulled Anders further into the room, gesturing for him to sit in the
singular plastic chair in the corner before saying, “First, I’m going to need
you to not freak out, alright?”
“Go fuck yourself,” Anders responded. His panic had only risen, those worse
scenarios gaining traction in convincing him as each second passed. “What’s
happening?”
“Simone’s missing.”
“Missing? What do you mean ‘missing’?”
“I mean, she wasn’t where she was supposed to be and no one knows where she is
now,” Henrik clarified. He pursed his lips, a terrible sign that always gave
away when he had to break bad news, and Anders could feel his throat and chest
tightening in anxiety. “Someone attacked Vidar in the room. Got him in a
chokehold from behind and Vid went under quick. He couldn’t see who it was,
doesn’t know what happened after that, nothing. Vid’s fine, but we think,
maybe, whoever knocked him out might have… taken Simone.”
A wave of nausea made Anders bend forward and hold his face in his hands. The
sweat that had beaded on his skin chilled to an uncomfortable cold. This
couldn’t be happening. Everything was falling apart so quickly but this was
absurd. He knew he wasn’t doing a good job with her, but he was going to do
better. She was going to start getting the medicine she needed instead of just
remaining sick from the drugs she’d been poisoned with. They were going to heal
together, figure all this out together, learn to be better together. Now that
chance had been taken from him. From them.
He lifted his head, frustration calcifying over his distress and panic as he
growled to Vidar, “You let her get kidnapped?!”
“Well, I was a little distracted at the time, but yes, that’s essentially
correct,” Vidar answered flatly.
Anders shot up from the chair, his rage forgetting his injury and making him
stumble towards the bed. Henrik’s strong hands held him back from advancing on
the prone man as he cursed and writhed against him. This wasn’t supposed to
happen. They were in a hospital, there were people, witnesses, everywhere.
There was no word or warning, no clue that something like this could happen. It
wasn’t fair. His knees buckled as the weight of his grief pressed down on him
and he sank to the floor, lowered slowly by Henrik’s hands.
“It’s one of those murdering freaks, isn’t it?” Anders asked, his voice tight
as hot tears streaked down his face. He didn’t try to hide his crying; the
sharp edges of his shattered pride cutting deep. He had failed her so
thoroughly and now he would likely never be able to make it up to her. “She’s
gone. She’s gone!”
 
 
Henrik slipped on his jacket over his scrubs and slung the strap of his bag
over his shoulder, sighing as his shift had finally come to a close. His niece
might have been kidnapped and his brother might have been attacked in his own
office, but patients still had appointments and paperwork still needed to be
filled out. At least everyone had been sympathetic and even Dr. Brun had
displayed an appropriate level of shame and humiliation for losing a patient in
possibly the least expected way any doctor could. Once it had been established
that this had been an isolated incident, the day had resumed almost as it
normally could, though with the added police intrusions in and out of room
four. There was nothing in room four for them to find. A few drops and smears
of Simone’s blood, but that was all the signs of foul play they could gather
outside of what had happened to Vidar. It was as though she had simply
vanished. Henrik checked with the front desk to make sure that her blood and
urine samples had been sent to the lab regardless of her disappearance and
figured he’d go ahead and get Dr. Brun to prescribe her whatever she needed for
her withdrawals tomorrow. The grouchy doctor would likely do just about
anything for him now, including writing his possibly dead niece prescriptions.
“I’m heading out, Martha,” he waved to the receptionist.
Martha rose from her chair, her brow wrinkled and eyes glittering with true
concern as she said, “We’re all so sorry, Henrik. We’ll be praying that the
police find her soon and safe.”
“You be careful, alright? Have security walk you to your car,” he said firmly.
“We can’t take any risks with the freak who did this still out there.”
“Will do,” she nodded. “Goodnight, Henrik.”
He took the staff exit to the stairs, his steps echoing in the stairwell, his
footfalls the only sound all the way down to the garage. No one took this
stairwell outside of fire drills on account of needing a key to access it and
its general creepiness with the lighting in the garage around it flickering on
only half the time. He was the only one who had even seemed to recall its
existence, none of the staff pointing it out as a possible route the kidnapper
could have taken. He hadn’t mentioned it to the police either. A simple
oversight, one they might catch later, but the security cameras had long been
nonfunctional and no one would have seen anything anyway.
He set his bag on the lid of his car’s trunk, relying on the thin ambient light
from the working halogen bulbs on the other side of the garage to measure the
proper dose into the syringe. Better too little than too much was his general
rule in most cases with sedatives, but in this situation, he leaned toward
perhaps a pinch too much just in case. Setting his bag on the concrete floor,
he held the syringe ready and popped open the trunk. When the lid didn’t come
flying up and nothing came out from the trunk but the sliver of illumination
from the light within it, he eased it open. A smile grew on his face at the
sight of his adorable niece, curled on her side, looking absolutely angelic and
at peace in a deeply drugged sleep. He’d worried all day that she might choke
on her gag or come out of unconsciousness in a panic over being trapped in this
tight little space, but she was perfect. He brushed a stray curl away from her
face, his thumb lingering on her smooth cheek as he touched her with more
boldness than he had ever dared while she was awake. Before he risked this
dallying any further, he sank the needle into her battered neck and fed more
sedative into her bloodstream. He wished there was a better way, but this was
the best way he could think to keep them all safe. Her especially, but his
brothers too. His smile faded as he pulled the needle out, those bruises around
her blood-smeared neck having darkened significantly since he’d picked her up
off the floor of room four. No one would hurt her like that again; he would
always be able to keep her safe now.
***** Chapter 56 *****
Leif could feel Mrs. Marceau glaring at him as he addressed the soft old men in
their dated tailored suits, which made him only speak on for longer just to
bask in the irritation of her gaze. Discussing projected timelines, potential
contingency implementations, aggregate planning, process modeling, critical
chain project management, and event chain diagrams with a room full of dusty
representatives worth billions of dollars between them was as dull and droll in
organizing architecture projects as it was in the unofficial buying and selling
of underdeveloped countries. Whatever China wanted to do with the resources in
the Congo was not his business, but apparently it had been the main business of
the organization for quite some time, including his own uncle’s involvement in
their ongoing political sabotage nearly thirty years ago. Leif was unsurprised
at the monetary interest in keeping these impoverished countries vulnerable for
the picking of interested buyers, but he was amused that the old cult his
family had been so pious toward had taken up competition with such
organizations as the CIA. Although, in certain perspectives, he supposed the
order had created a sort of primordial business model for some of the more
taciturn tactics those entities employed.
As the meeting suspended for a brief repose and the representatives took to the
halls to update their parties over rapidly-spoken phone calls and furiously
typed emails, Leif sat on the edge of the long lacquered wood table and looked
out the wide windows to the line of trees blocking the view of the street. The
temptation to break through the glass and lose his pursuers in the streets was
present only in how attainable it was, but they knew as well as he did that his
imprisonment was not enforced by physical means. It was the same means that
enabled Mrs. Marceau to step toward him with a relative reassurance that he
would not rip out her throat despite that same attainability and temptation.
“Your participation has not gone without notice,” she said, with all the same
cold clinical regard in her deep voice that betrayed nothing of her sincerity
or intention, “nor without gratitude. I am open to discuss the terms of your
punishment with the council in light of your cooperation.”
“The terms of my punishment clearly call for my execution,” he notified her
unhelpfully. He turned to her then, showing his long eyeteeth in a wide grin.
“I took the oath and broke it when I tied and roasted your husband like a
Christmas ham, remember? It’s the ax for dissenters like me.”
He was glad he didn’t miss the disgusted curl of her lip as she said, “I assure
you, I am doing everything in my power to prevent that outcome.”
“So long as I remain cooperative toward your goals, you mean,” Leif grinned. He
tilted his head, giving a little show of thought before continuing. “I hate to
say it, madame, but I am simply unsatisfied with what you’re offering me.”
Her hazel glare hardened under her furrowing brow as she nearly exclaimed,
“What I am offering you is your life!”
“I wouldn’t mind dying again as much as I mind what it is you’re trying to
accomplish here,” he shrugged. “Frankly, I require more motivation. Make me a
better offer and I might consider furthering your agenda instead of destroying
it.”
“What are you asking, Valstad?” she asked.
He hummed, pleased at her directness and lack of tact to try to even question
his ability to destroy her plan. It saved them both so much time by avoiding
these little games of polite abstraction and coy diversion her late husband had
so aggravatingly favored. Mrs. Marceau was proving to be no pale imitation of
Mr. Marceau, but a businesswoman of her own fashion and method. Leif would
almost admire her steel if he didn’t so easily see where she could be made to
bend.
“The trick to making a lackluster offer have value is to make your buyer see
the value in it, whether it is there or not,” he said, sliding off the edge of
the conference table and walking toward that view out the window as he spoke.
“You offer my survival, but I do not value my survival. What is it that do I
value, Mrs. Marceau?”
“I can bring your daughter here,” she answered. “You may see her, unsupervised
and unmonitored to do as you please with her, for one 24-hour period per
month.”
“You must think me an easy man to please with such crass measures.”
“Are you not?”
He laughed at that, genuinely amused by her brash rudeness wrapped in a
passionless package. “Madame, you think you are tempting a starving man with a
morsel, and though I do hunger for my darling girl, I can’t accept anything but
the full meal.”
“Then you will have her,” Mrs. Marceau responded, in as much of a huff as her
sterile manner allowed. “Confined to your quarters, full time, no
restrictions.”
He licked his teeth, the thrill of such a consideration exciting the beast in
him, but he was playing a longer game than that now and with more players than
just the two of them. “You’re still not appealing to what I truly value. Think,
madame. What is it about my daughter that I most value?”
“According to the rumors?”
“Don’t be simple,” he scolded. The long pause afterward drew him to glance at
her, seeing nothing revealed in her stony expression. He could smell her
increased perspiration even at this distance, see the slight fidgeting in her
usually controlled stillness. He knew if she didn’t need him, she would have
gladly gunned him down where he stood. “Are you so surprised to find that the
rumors are true?”
“I’m thinking,” she said stiffly.
“Then I’ll leave you to think,” he said as he turned, the heels of his shoes
clicking on the marble floor as he walked toward the door. “Tell your merchants
whatever you wish to excuse my withdrawal from their schemes.”
“Wait!”
He paused, hiding his satisfied smirk by not turning to her as she spoke.
“It’s your family’s legacy. That’s what you value more than anything, isn’t it?
You need to do whatever it is you were doing to ensure that legacy continues,
right? You could do that here with her. Train her, develop her skills, whatever
you need, I can facilitate.”
He sighed, long and exasperatedly, running his hand over his short beard. “You
still don’t get it. I’m feeling generous, though. Bring my girl to me and I
will entertain your little plot briefly to give you time to get the offer
right.”
 
 
The slow crawl of a tear falling away from the wetness that had pooled behind
her eyelids was what woke Simone with the ache of a nightmare still pressing on
her chest. Echoes of saltwater filling her lungs weighed heavily in her body,
but it was just her weight sunk into the soft mattress beneath her and the
heavy comforters and quilts stacked above her. She shivered from the cold that
chilled her bone-deep despite the thick blankets and, when she tried to curl
her body to collect the warmth this supine position eked out, dread splashed
over her at the familiar sluggishness to her motions. Years of experience had
told her she’d been medically sedated and recent experience told her this was
cause enough to panic. She sat up too quickly, her shadowy surroundings
splotching with holes of pure blackness before she sank back down, her head and
heart pounding as the drug threatened to pull her under again. She clung to
consciousness like a man caught in a river clings to anything to keep him from
drowning, her eyes squeezed shut in concentration and fear until she forced
them to stare out into the darkness when she began to slip into the sweeping
current her half-dream conjured. She had to keep awake, keep herself out of
those inky rapids. Unable trust her body to move, she moved her mind to stave
off the forceful persuasion of sleep.
She dredged into her most recent memories, pulling up sterile soothing off-
whites and fluorescent lights reflected off waxed linoleum. The acrid stench of
antiseptics and anxiety that had soaked into the walls. The hospital. She
touched a clumsy hand up her stiff arm and felt the tape and tube at her inner
elbow, the presence of an IV calming that panic. Maybe Dr. Brun had found
something they needed to knock her out to fix and the anesthesia had taken her
memory of it. Her mind walked her into the small room, onto the crinkle of
paper covering the vinyl cushion of the exam table, through the wave of anger
and then despair that had led to Vidar overtaking it all. His scent, his
piercing stare, his coaxing and condescending lilt, and then his taste and the
consequences that had begun to fall in line after it. She could not detect him
in the dryness of her mouth now. She didn’t know how much time had passed since
that kiss, or the ones he had devoured from her mouth after it, but the only
presence of him that still lingered was the ache wrapped around her throat and
his scent rubbed into her hair. That clean, woodsy aroma with a spice somewhere
between juniper and oakmoss was the base that each Valstad’s scent grew from; a
scent she had thought unique to her and her father until meeting her uncles.
What Vidar had tried to deny in her scent, he could not deny in the chemistry
of her taste.
She turned her face into the spread of her hair beside her head, seeking out
the odd comfort in their shared scent. It shouldn’t soothe her. Everything that
had come with that scent had brought her so much misery and pain, but the
instinctive stirrings of love and attachment settled over her like a pleasant
drug coating her synapses. But she was alone. The hollow ache of lonesomeness
expanded in her chest and, like she had done in her childhood before
embarrassment of the habit had trained it out of her, she hugged and sang to
herself to ease that ache.
“ʻO kou aloha nō … Aia i ka lani…” she sang in a thin whisper, a song she
didn’t even know the meaning of now her only link to that half of her family.
She tried to listen for her mother’s voice in the words as she nuzzled the
scent of the last man who had touched her. It didn’t have to matter that he had
hurt her. Her throat was sore and the bruised muscles of her neck protested to
her turning to bury her nose further into the cascade of her hair, but the
loneliness that had marked her life now spiked to an overbearing pitch. She
tried to imagine her grandmother’s backyard in Aiea. The deep and lush greens,
the salt of the ocean carried in the gentle breeze, everything had seemed
sweeter where her mother Lisa had been raised. Since that last phone call with
Lisa had lamenting not having divorced her father years prior, a fantasy had
been growing in Simone of an alternate reality where her mother had taken her
to live with Puna in their island home. In the quiet moments when the isolation
in Anders’ house could not be fulfilled with the dogs’ companionship, she had
often wondered what that alternate version of herself would be doing. Listening
to her mother badger her to slather on sunblock and stay out of the sun,
probably. The thought made her smile despite the fresh tears that stung at the
corners of her eyes.
“A ʻo Kou ʻoia ʻiʻo… He hemolele hoʻi…”
Leif would not have gotten the chance to poison her. She wouldn’t have become
infected with his lust, wouldn’t have been confronted with the evil that had
germinated in her genes, wouldn’t have been stuck halfway through this
transformation, too human to withstand the pain and shame of what she was and
too inhuman to stop any of it. It hurt too much to imagine all the things that
would not have happened. She turned back to the cold waters of the Pacific
Ocean feeding into Aiea Bay lapping up her calves, the wavering voice of Puna
calling her to shore. Puna would call out for her, call and call while the
water rose up Simone’s body until she couldn’t hear her beneath the ocean’s
roar, just like in her nightmare. She wondered if it was still considered a
nightmare if part of her yearned for her lungs to grow heavy with brine until
it washed out her life.
“Ko`u noho mih-”
She froze mid-verse at the sound of the door slowly creaking open, a wedge of
light spilling into the room too bright for her dark-adjusted vision. Her
previous panic scratched just beneath the surface of her control as that light
spread and the silhouette of a very, very large and muscular man stood in the
doorway. His size, coupled with his stillness, made the hairs on the back of
her neck raise.
“Sorry- was I too loud?” she whispered, trying to stall for time as though an
extra few seconds would mean anything to the drugs that had crippled her
movement.
A thick arm parted from the massive bulk of shadow and light flooded the room
from above, prompting Simone to wince and shut her eyes against the aching
glare. She couldn’t move, she couldn’t see, and she doubted her sore throat
would allow her to scream beyond a rasping bray. Panic began to claw through
the cracks of her resolve.
“Jeg håper du liker iskrem.”
Relief washed away that mounting terror, the relaxing of her tensed muscles
dragging a sigh out of her smiling mouth as she whispered, “Jesus, Uncle
Henrik, you scared me!”
Shielding her eyes with her hand, she peeked through her fingers to see him
carrying a small bowl. He wasn’t in his scrubs. He wasn’t even fully dressed. A
ratty pair of sweatpants hung low on his hips and a sleeveless shirt worn to
near translucency displayed an uncomfortable amount of him as he approached.
She glanced away from the overbearing masculinity of his build, the heat of a
flush rushing up from her chest to her scalp at being caught so off guard. How
the male form could still trigger this ingrained modesty in her was beyond her
to know when she considered all the very personal experience she’d had lately.
But that wasn’t with Henrik; the gentle giant was still so mysterious beyond
his general good will to her, she felt as though seeing this much of him was an
intrusion. In glancing away, her flustered thoughts became distracted by her
surroundings. Or, rather, lack of surroundings. The full-sized bed and the IV
pole beside it that held the bag of clear fluid feeding into the tube in her
arm were the items in the small white-walled room. She noticed then that there
was no stench of antiseptics there either, the lingering sharp and sour tang of
that medical odor clinging only to where the IV pierced her. Instead, all she
could smell was the stale air of a room shut up for too long. Her oldest uncle
walking around in his pajamas, the barren room, the IV drip, it was all so
strange.
“This isn’t the hospital, is it?” she asked, bewilderment clogging her
thoughts. The soft bed dipped almost comically where Henrik sat at the end of
it and placed the bowl next to her. She shifted onto her back and slowly sat
up, her head swimming with the effort, to see that he had brought her ice
cream. “Where… am I? What happened?”
“Ah…” Henrik started, drawing her wandering gaze to his bearded chin. Old
habits dictated that she couldn’t look him in the eye yet and she didn’t dare
look any lower, knowing she lacked the self-restraint not to blatantly examine
the black of his tattoos bleeding through his thin shirt. “Dette er...my
house.”
“Your house…” she muttered. The walls slowly closed in around them as she tried
to recall anything that might have led her here. She couldn’t remember what had
happened after Vidar had choked her. “Why am I here and not with Anders?”
Henrik’s mouth thinned in a frown. “Eat.”
“I’m too cold for ice cream,” she said, shaking her head absently. “Can you
tell me what happened? Why am I here?”
“Eat… før det smelter,” he said, poking the bowl with his thick finger and
jostling the spoon to clink around inside it. “Eat now. Make strength.”
She pulled the bowl into her lap, the two scoops of white ice cream in the
white bowl in the white nest of blankets seeming too surreal for her drugged
mind to quite believe as real. She offered up a muttered excuse, “My throat is
too sore to eat right now. Please, can you tell me what happened at the
hospital?”
“It is good this way,” he insisted, pointing to his throat, letting her know he
understood her words even if he could not communicate them back to her. “Eat
now. Come.”
Frustration and a nagging fear clenched her teeth and soured her already
nauseous gut. “I don’t care about the ice cream, Uncle Henrik. Can you please
just tell me what happened? Is Anders going to come get me soon?”
His silence in response verified some unspoken and unknown fear in her,
cracking her already shaky composure even though she couldn’t identify to
herself why it distressed her so. This had to be some sort of strange
nightmare. Nothing was happening, there shouldn’t be any reason for her to
start crying, but the tears came hot and fast from that unknown terror in her.
Something was horribly wrong, she just couldn’t tell what it was. The room, it
was the room, every windowless wall and bare inch of it was wrong. This man
wasn’t the same jovial Henrik who had shuffled her off to show her old photo
albums and laugh about times he had thought were innocent. But it was just a
room and it was just Henrik. She was the one who wasn’t making any sense.
“I’m sor-ry,” she murmured, her words hitching as she tried to reign in her
sobs. She rubbed her wet face with the sleeve of the shirt she was wearing, the
billowing fabric hanging so loose on her that it must have belonged to him.
“I’m sorry, I-I don’t know why I’m crying, I… I’m just confused. Why am I here?
Where’s Anders? How long have I been asleep? Why… why won’t you say anything?
Please, please, just say anything…”
The clink and drag of the spoon in the bowl brought her to open her eyes, the
flow of tears quickly blurring her vision as she saw him holding a spoonful of
the ice cream to her mouth.
“Eat,” he commanded.
“Why won’t you-” she started to ask, her pleading cut off by him forcing the
spoon to her lips.
Reflexively, she jerked back, but he grabbed her chin and squeezed her cheeks
to encourage her to open her mouth. The cold cream smeared on her lips and chin
as she tried to resist him, but when darkness once more encroached at the edges
of her vision and the vertigo threatened to tip the world completely, she
parted for him. The sweet vanilla was thick on her tongue, cloying and
unwelcome, making her swallow immediately and the cold burned as it passed her
sore throat. The slide of the metal spoon leaving her mouth was a relief until
she heard it scrape the bowl again.
“Please, stop,” she said, calmly, trying not to antagonize this very large,
very strong, very willful man. She couldn’t bring herself to open her eyes, too
afraid to see what he might think of what he was doing to her. She couldn’t
bear the thought that he might enjoy forcing and humiliating her like his
brothers had. Before she could plead again, the cold spoon pressed against her
lips and she obediently parted for it again.
“It’s good, yes?” he said. When she didn’t respond, only swallowing the
freezing cold morsel down with a wince, he asked, “You do not like?”
“I’m c-cold…” she answered, a stray sob shaking her small voice.
He released his hold on her chin and she risked looking at him, finding no real
relief in seeing his clinical detachment to his actions and her distress. She
knew with certainty that she was not the first patient he had force fed, both
by the practiced ease with which he’d handled her and his unaffected attitude
toward it. Compartmentalizing was a necessary skill in much of the medical
field, something that she was once able to do, but for years now her thoughts
and emotions ran and bled together in the unruly chaos of her mad mind. He was
not her uncle in this moment; he was her caretaker, and he would do whatever
was necessary to take care of her. She shivered under the iron in his stare.
“Eat,” he commanded, holding the spoon out to her again.
Licking some of the mess from around her mouth, she leaned forward and took the
spoonful of ice cream into her mouth, leaving the metal clean when she pulled
away. There was no use fighting him. There was no use fighting any of them.
 
 
Having worked in healthcare fields since he was eighteen, from wrangling the
committed insane in mental health facilities to easing the descent into death
in hospice care, Henrik could accurately assess a patient’s health within the
first five seconds of meeting them. He knew what to look for in the various
lusters and textures of skin and hair, he could read nail beds and vein
distention like a palm reader, and whatever he couldn’t see, he could smell.
When he’d first entered room four, fully primed to use these gifts of
perception, he’d failed to protect himself from the emotional effect of what he
perceived of his only niece. Her skin had the look of sustained dehydration
that he would have attributed to her drug withdrawal if not for the myriad of
other things he immediately noticed. He could see in the hollowness around her
eyes and pick up in a peculiar pungency in her breath that she had been
severely underfed beyond the required fasting for blood tests. There was
bleeding somewhere in her body other than at the injury she supposedly had
reopened at her neck; judging by how tenderly she sat and her posture, he
intuited rectally by trauma. There were friction burns and the unmistakable
pattern of chains bruised into her wrists and ankles and neck. The reddened
bruise of capillaries burst close to the surface on the side of her face told
him she’d been slapped, the deeper discoloration beneath it told him it had
been done with a brutal force.
He’d seen this kind of abuse in bits and pieces in vulnerable patients before,
sad cases of sexual assault victims and one or two severe instances of child
neglect and endangerment, but not clustered together like this. He couldn’t
logic it. She was in the care of Anders, his littlest brother, who worked for a
nonprofit trying to get clean water to communities in third world countries and
rescued stray dogs as a hobby, and he couldn’t have done this. But there she
sat, battered and broken, starved and raped, enough evidence on her body to
finally break that perception he had of his littlest brother. Trauma did funny
things to the mind and they had all gotten quite funny.
Watching how she responded to just a little physical force, how obedient and
submissive she became under a firm hand, he hated how well it worked. She
needed the calories, though. This was more merciful than the funnel and tube he
had begun to worry he’d have to fetch, so he tried not to hate having to bully
her. Mercy was seldom ever pleasant.
“Uncle Henrik…” she whimpered after swallowing another bite. He tensed,
dreading that she would start that awful pleading and sobbing again, worried
that he did not possess the resolve to resist it. “I have to go to the
bathroom.”
It took him a moment to reconstruct what she’d said, recognizing the word for
bathroom and reworking the odd grammatical structure before it to understand
her meaning. He sighed, grabbed up the bowl from her lap and placed it on the
floor before pulling the blankets from her. It had been a while since he’d
worked with inpatient care, but reaching to grab her by her narrow ribcage and
pull her up came automatically. The flinch and defensive fold of her arms over
her chest drew him out of his professional mentality and he paused. She was not
a patient. Even if she was, he wouldn’t have treated her this forcefully. His
heavy brow furrowed in confusion at his behavior. Perhaps it was the language
barrier preventing him from delivering the common courtesies of communication,
or maybe it was the stress of the day wearing down his manners, but he
recognized now that he had been unnecessarily brutish toward her. Seeing how
fear shined in her red-rimmed eyes, regret broke through that barrier of duty
towards his task and he withdrew his hands from her.
“Come,” he said, rising from the bed and rolling the IV pole to her side.
She leaned heavily on it for support as she slid out of the bed, disregarding
his offered arm for help as she limped forward. The rejection stung as clearly
as her new fear of him, but both were well-deserved. Leading her into the small
bathroom across the hall, he tried not to watch how she struggled just to move.
She’d been conscious for less than twenty minutes and he had messed this up so
badly already. Or maybe he hadn’t. She was bound to go through a period of fear
until she understood this was for her own good, after all. Listening to the
sound of the faucet running behind the bathroom door, he ran his hand over his
beard and tried to fully recommit to this plan. He had to be stronger than his
selfish desire for her to be happy with him. Even if she hated and feared him
forever, she would at least be safe this way.
“Oh, God, don’t let me fuck this up,” he muttered into his hand, leaning his
head back against the wood of the door.
His siblings would forget her in time. She would never have to worry about them
hurting her again and he would never have to think of what they’d done once her
bruises healed. He had left room four weeping for them all and when he went
back and had walked in on Vidar strangling her as he said those filthy, awful
things, he couldn’t let that madness continue. He had to protect them from it,
even if it meant going a little mad himself. That’s what this plan was: mostly
madness and barely a plan at all. There was no sane way to handle this
insanity, though. He lifted his head from the door, the length of time the
faucet had been running striking him as strange. When no response came after
knocking, he opened it, worried that she had lost consciousness inside.
“Simone?” he called through the small gap of the open door. “You are okay,
baby?”
Still no response. He pushed the door open all the way, shocked to find the
bathroom empty. The window was open to the cold night air, the screen missing
from it and gaping out into the pure darkness. His heart skipped a beat when he
registered that Simone had escaped after less than half a day in his care.
***** Chapter 57 *****
“He was right.”
Vidar kept looking out the passenger window, deciding whether or not to
acknowledge what Anders had said after refusing to speak since reacting to news
of Simone’s kidnapping. He’d seen his brothers and himself break in more
miserable and unfathomable ways than he had ever bothered to imagine, but it
still unsettled him to see the cracks that had splintered from those jagged
pieces of them. When Anders had crawled into himself, he didn’t press or coax
him to respond. He knew the dark space inside him he had to withdraw to for
this to pass and now it seemed time to hear what he’d brought with him from
that place. It was that firsthand experience that made him both able to
sympathize with him and dread what was to come now. Ultimately, though, it was
his own curiosity that decided for him.
“What are you mumbling about, Anders?”
“Leif.”
That name still made Vidar clench his jaw against the fear it shot off in his
mind. He watched the trees blur into a long cloud of green as they sped past
them. Everything had become so muddled since he’d stopped sleeping. Clarity and
lucidity had dwindled where he had never known it to be in such limited supply
and dreams had begun to seep into these endless waking hours. He wasn’t
entirely sure if this nightmare was real, providing a buffer of disbelief that
had helped him from cracking under the distress it should have warranted.
Insomnia wasn’t entirely without its uses in that way.
“He was right,” Anders continued. “I’m a fraud and a liar.”
“Maybe I should walk,” Vidar said. “It’s a nice day for it. Pull over and let
me out.”
“I fucked her before I even found out about any of it,” his younger brother
went on, his voice too loud and clear for Vidar to pretend to not have heard
him. “None of this shit had happened yet. I got drunk and fucked her while
everyone was asleep. Do you know why I fucked my mentally disturbed niece?”
The sour pit in Vidar’s stomach did not want to know. He didn’t want to know
any of it, but it was either this or jumping out of the moving car.
“The way she would look at him, that… that connection between them,” Anders
said, the words drawing out of him slowly, almost wistfully. Road rash and a
few broken bones weren’t such a terrible alternative to Vidar now as he pressed
his head against the side window. “I wanted that. I thought I was just curious,
you know, what it would be like to have a child of my own who loved me that
much… but really, I was jealous of him for getting to be a father when I was
denied. I hated him for being a good dad, for giving up everything to take care
of a daughter who loved him so much. I wanted to take it away from him. When I
was fucking his kid, I believed I was giving her something he couldn’t, but
wow, was I wrong about that!”
“Why are you telling me this?” Vidar asked past the sourness crawling up his
throat. “No, no, don’t answer that, just stop. Wherever you’re going with this,
stop. You’re almost home, do you think you can hold in your emotional breakdown
for another five minutes?”
“I need to take responsibility for once in my selfish life and face that I’m
not the person I thought I was.”
Vidar pressed his hand to his pounding forehead and was surprised at how much
anger bled into his tone as he snapped, “If you want to regret what you did to
her, that’s your choice, but don’t talk to me about your fucked up fallen
father figure bullshit!”
The car lurched to a stop at the light before the turn into their neighborhood
and Anders put it in park, took his hands off the wheel and turned toward him.
He smiled at him, a hollow expression that didn’t touch his empty eyes as he
said, “This isn’t regret. I’m not even human enough to regret any of it.
There’s no redemption for either of us, but I don’t feel damned. I feel free.”
The turning in Vidar’s mind was offset by the car turning down the street, that
shifting and sliding of thought dizzying as he watched the familiar roads twist
before him. He wasn’t sure which was more disturbing: the sense that his
younger brother was officially going off the deep end or how deeply his words
rang true in him. The world had been mad for much longer than they had, though.
He looked at Anders’ hands on the steering wheel and recalled how gently he had
caressed their slave’s body after ravaging it, then at his own, remembering how
he had strangled her for making him feel the truth in their connection. It had
been troubling enough to realize she and him were kindred in feeling inhuman in
a human world and similarly hateful for it. He had kissed her, a stupid mistake
from being caught up in the moment, and tasted the undeniability in just how
deeply they went beyond kindred to kin. It was still too fresh to even think
clearly about yet and already that profound connection had been severed,
leaving a raw and painfully unresolved loss. It didn’t make sense that he
should feel bereavement for the loss of a bond he had never wanted and had only
just become aware of, but that was another mad trick in the mad world.
“We are free to be what we really are,” Vidar muttered. “We don’t have a
choice, anyway.”
The vehicle shuddered to a stop up the gravel driveway into Anders’ garage, the
noise of the door shutting them into darkness leaving a gaping quiet in the car
when it settled. Neither man moved to exit, both reluctant to enter the
emptiness of the house where their girl was not. Vidar could feel the distress
welling in his brother, that tremendous grief an unfathomable and powerful
thing that emanated from him even in his silence, and he pitied him. This was
one of the many high prices of love and part of why Vidar had banished it from
his heart, but it still swam in his blood for his family. Some attachments were
inevitable. He loved his brothers. He loved his niece. He resented it all.
“Let’s get the dogs fed and go to my place for tonight,” Vidar gently insisted.
 
 
Looking out into that dark, hollow space, Simone could feel herself tip and
spill into the night, sloshing out of her mind and over the end of the world as
far as she knew it. The running faucet facilitated this spilling sensation, one
she knew existed only in this space between drugs and dreaming but there was no
other reality for her to perceive but the one filtered through her madness.
Between drugs and dreaming, between a door and a window, she tried to keep hold
of herself as much as her consciousness. The problem, she found, was that there
was simply not much of herself left to hold onto, so she held onto the monster
a little to find balance. The screen lifted out of its notches easily and
tumbled down into the darkness. White flashed behind her eyes and everything
jarred at once, knocking the wind out of her and leaving her choking on her
paralyzed diaphragm. She couldn’t remember the fall, just the screen fading out
of the field of light from the window and then she was on her back, her mouth
gaping in panic to draw in the breath her body refused. The window, as it had
turned out, was on the second floor of the house.
Every second mattered. Simone had to get up and move as soon as her lungs
remembered how to breathe. Gravity pinned her down like a blanket of iron laid
over her and her body moved slowly as though in water, but she pushed herself
onto her knees, panting and shaking with the effort. The gravel was deafening
and sharp as she scrambled awkwardly to her feet, vertigo making it difficult
enough to tell which way was up even without the dark of night hiding it from
her. She pushed into the ground until she began to stumble, not caring which
direction so long as it simply took her away. Away from all the wrong in that
small room, away from the man who was not acting like her uncle Henrik, away
from the stain she cast on the lives she touched. If she could not stop it,
then she could escape it. Her labored, wheezing breaths and galloping pulse
drowned out any sound that might have reached her ringing ears, but she knew he
would come hunting for her any moment if he wasn’t already there in the dark
with her. He didn’t know what she was becoming or what she would do to him if
she stayed, but ignorance didn’t deserve such a harsh consequence. She could
spare him where she hadn’t spared the others. She told herself that she could,
over and over, with each shaking step.
Drugged, disoriented, weak, and injured in many small ways including the new
aches from freefalling out the second story window, that animal instinct to run
fueled her tilted steps more than the paltry belief she had in her mantra. This
was the only way she could protect him. There was no time to consider where she
might be going or what she would do afterward, only the singular objective to
flee. There was no moon in the sky and the stars were a thousand tiny pinpoints
of useless light that only made her trip and scrape her knees when she looked
into the distant glimmering sea of them, so she clawed her way back to her feet
and kept her head down in the shadows she raced through. Porchlights marked
where the widely spaced houses were along the block, the punched-out black
squares of windows telling Simone it was either very late or very early, and a
solitary streetlight painted an island of yellow onto the curb some twenty
yards away.
“Come here!”
Henrik’s brash baritone became a bestial growl that shook her bones in how
startlingly close it was. Footfalls closing in behind her matched the rapid
pounding of her heart in a stampede of percussion her own uneven pace could not
keep time with. He was going to catch her. Her feet slapped concrete and the
open space of the street screamed danger, so she careened into someone’s
garden. Branches of trees or bushes scraped her arms and her feet felt sliced
to ribbons by the underbrush as she stumbled through it, but there was safety
in the cover of plants. Further, further, until her foot slammed down into
nothing and she tipped forward, her hands clawing at the air until the ground
broke beneath her in a splash. Chlorinated water enveloped her, sucking what
little warmth she didn’t know she had from her instantly, and the world slowed
to a crawl as she sank deeper and deeper.
Above the roar of the water filling her ears, she heard her father say, “The
water is cool and calm. You’re relaxed. There’s someone in the water with you.”
And there was. She looked down at him, the stale water of the pond up to her
knees and the mud squishing between her toes, and saw that the man was bleeding
from a bite in his neck. She tasted blood in her mouth. His eyes were wide with
panic and he held his hands up at the gun trained on his face. She followed the
arm that held that gun up to the wielder’s face.
“Papa?” she whispered, the words coming sluggish and clumsy.
Leif did not seem to have heard her, his focus entirely on the sniveling man
laying prone at the edge of the pond, but the man looked at her and stammered,
“Please, please, I’m sorry, I- I wasn’t going to hurt you, I promise! Tell him
I wasn’t going to hurt you, Julie!”
“Her name isn’t Julie,” Leif said. The man gasped out a whimpering sob at his
voice, making her father chuckle. “And she’s not eighteen. My daughter’s name
is Simone, she is fifteen-years-old, and she is going to end your life, Mr.
Bradshaw.”
“N-no! No, please, I didn’t know- AH!”
Mr. Bradshaw’s pleas devolved into guttural cries when Leif shot him in the
right side of his chest, the blood frothing from his mouth telling Simone that
he had punctured his lung. She watched him writhe in the water as his screams
came out in a gurgled, strangled sound. She should have been horrified, but she
felt nothing.
“Let the water make him still,” Leif said to her, even and slow as though
cajoling a pet to do a trick. “Let the water make him quiet.”
Without deliberating or questioning it, she stepped up to the man, forced him
onto his front and pushed him down until his head was submerged under four
inches of murky pond water. She didn’t think about it. She didn’t think at all.
Mr. Bradshaw pushed and kicked against her and she pushed him in deeper, into
the soft bottom of the pond, and waited. After only a minute, his struggles
became spasmodic and weak, then slowly waned until he was still and quiet. He
bobbed limply in the water under her hands, his dark blond hair spread and
floating around his still head, her fingers gripping the short locks tight. She
could not discern color with only the moonlight illuminating the pond, but she
knew he was blond. They were always blond, the ones she chose. Her father
gently pulled her away and she ran her fingers through the man’s hair one last
time; a farewell caress to a stranger who had served the evening’s purpose.
“My darling girl,” Leif whispered, low and gravelly, husky with desire. “My
sweet, darling hunter.”
His arms wrapped around her in an unmistakable lover’s embrace, tight enough
that she felt the full effect of his desire pressed against her in the long
bulge rubbing her middle. Need sprouted and grew rapidly to fill the emptiness
inside her, that sudden heat of sexual yearning demanding too much too fast,
and she clung to his embrace with a ragged gasp.
“Please,” she sighed, breathing hard through the almost painful need filling
her. She slid down his body as she lowered herself to kneel, pulling a strained
sigh from him as she dragged herself over his hardness. She nuzzled his cock
through his pants, her mouth watering at the scent of his arousal so pronounced
this close to her face, and stroked the long line of that bulge pleadingly. His
body jerked in surprise.
“No, baby!” he whispered frantically. “Ikkegjør det, Simone!”
She groaned in protest when he pushed her away, his wide hands gentle but firm
on her shoulders, and she looked up to beg her father. Henrik’s wide, startled
blue eyes met her instead, the dream disintegrating rapidly around her as
reality clicked back together piece by piece. Her hair and the oversized shirt
she wore were wet with heavily chlorinated pool water, both clinging to her
chilled skin as she kneeled in the bathroom she had escaped from. She leaned
back on her haunches and tried to understand what was happening. The pond, the
murder, her father, that suddenly wasn’t real, but it clung to her mind in a
film of certainty that only made her question how real anything could be.
“Henrik…” she rasped, her sore throat dry and aching. “What happened? What have
I done?”
Henrik didn’t answer her. He pressed his hands against his face and sighed
deeply, his powerful shoulders hunching as he walked around her in awkward
steps toward the shower tucked in the corner of the small bathroom. She blinked
in confusion at his reaction, then blushed hard when she realized what she had
been doing on her knees in front of him. Her own hands came up to her face and
covered her mouth as she held in her scream of shame and frustration. She had
failed disastrously. She had fallen into a strange hallucination and had fallen
even further behind than where she had begun. Too exhausted to cry again, with
the fatigue and drug fugue numbing as much of the anguish as it could and
pulling insistently at her already loose hold on consciousness, she remained
kneeling in the puddle of pool water that had formed under her as her head
hummed in a dull ache. She had given everything she had in running from this,
but it wasn’t nearly enough.
“Simone,” Henrik said stiffly. “Come.”
She hadn’t noticed the shower running until she heard him call for her. Looking
back over her shoulder, realization slowly filtered through her mired awareness
that he was holding the glass door of the shower open for her to walk through
it.
“I can’t…” she started to say, not sure how she should finish that statement.
She couldn’t shower in front of him, but he couldn’t leave her alone, not
anymore. He would be cautious now; any advantage she might have had to slip
away had been dashed under the vigilance she put in him with this failed
escape.
“Come,” he repeated, begging softer in his awkwardness.
Simone pushed herself to stand, her muscles rubbery and weak, and took a moment
to steady herself and steel her will before peeling the sopping shirt from her
body. Despite the chill that desensitized her, the chlorine stung in the dozens
of thin, shallow red lines that marred her forearms and legs. He was probably
used to seeing people in all of stages of undress and injury, but knowing that
did little to ease the humiliation of the task. She thought instead of the
nightmare, how similar it had felt to the one she’d had of biting through that
old man’s neck. She had dissociated during that vision, as well. She could
remember it so clearly; the dark blood gushing and pooling in the pink muscle
and yellow fat from his severed artery, the spread of that liquid turning the
musty green carpet under him black. It was all so vivid, but she had felt
nothing in killing him. She knew what it felt like to take a life; that
horrible black pit inside her, always there, always steaming with guilt and
anger and emptiness. For all the horror those nightmares invoked, they did not
stir from that dark place, and so there was a cold comfort in knowing those
dreams couldn’t have been memories for that reason alone.
All she had felt through those gory visions was the warmth of her father’s
pride. It was the same approval and loving affection that Leif had shined down
upon her when he had last made love to her under that pulsing ocean sky and she
grasped onto that feeling greedily, pushing down the horror at her own
callousness for doing so in her desperation for it. That old ache was just as
present now as it had ever been. She knew it would always be there, even if he
was not.
 
 
“We could mobilize as early as tonight and neutralize the risk by daybreak,”
Leif offered airily to the grim and severe representative for a potential
investor. He didn’t remember if he was from a government or private institution
or even what country he was situated in, but it didn’t matter. All that
mattered was getting the right people in the right places and this businessman
would help him get them there.
“I need more!” he argued emphatically, gesturing with an impassioned chopping
motion that Leif followed with a smirk.
“Then your people are not managing these dissenters correctly. If you can’t
strategize a proper response to these very basic issues, we will be sending our
men into a situation that does not produce results,” Leif said. He shook his
head and turned his focus back to the pâté en croûteand spiced Cumberland sauce
he’d been neglecting to eat in favor of manipulating the board. There was a
certain dryness that sucked the passion from this slow vengeance he was doing
his part to construct, something so utilitarian in the meticulous arrangement
of pieces on the board, but there was also gratification in each success of
placing them. “We have a reputation and agreeing to provide our services to a
failing endeavor endangers that reputation. We can’t guarantee success if we
are limited to operating within your proposed parameters. I don’t know how I
could possibly reiterate this point any further. You have twenty minutes to
give me a better proposal or I’m closing the deal with Cambodia instead.”
Never mind that he had already shaken hands with the businessmen paying to
maintain Cambodia’s sabotaged attempts at democracy and had a few of Francis’
men on their way to enmesh themselves in Mrs. Marceau’s plans there. The
representative left in a huff, already pulling out his cell phone as he stepped
into the hall to make the appropriate calls. Leif took a bite of the rich
pâtéand washed down the cold fatty morsel with a deep draw of an equally rich
Bordeaux, for once missing his ex-wife’s mundane and simple cooking. One could
gain a certain appreciation for broiled chicken breasts and a side of
microwaved vegetables after long enough.
He ate lightly of these indulgent hors d’oeuvres, eager for the real feasting
to be done in the open courtyard among the real members of the order later.
More funerary rituals awaited his brethren since he had evoked the full breadth
of traditional ceremony in killing his final sparring partner. Cannibalism
wasn’t among his preferred vices, but Francis had insisted on its benefits and
had been marinating the corpse since stealing it from the incinerator pile.
More than the spiritual benefits, the emotional appeal that eating his enemy’s
flesh would provide to their cause had led him to accept the honor. A very
fitting honor for the demon-blooded Leif Valstad, it seemed. He sighed and
leaned back in his seat, the sumptuous armchair merciful on his aching joints
from the sheer physicality of brawling after only just having recovered from
his death.
“I don’t mind that you are eavesdropping,” he spoke in his passable French,
loud enough for the woman feigning conversation behind him to hear. “In fact, I
find it a shrewd practice, given my alliances. So, tell me, where is my prize
for remaining allied to your vision?”
Mrs. Marceau stepped into his field of vision, her steely expression firmly
fixed as she said, “Surely, you can wait for us to procure your prize after the
guests have departed. There is much to be done and not much time to complete it
in.”
“You’ll have much more to do without my assistance, then,” he sighed, setting
the small plate and wineglass on the lamp table next to him before moving to
stand.
“If you leave now, you’ll get nothing,” she warned.
“I already have nothing and I don’t need more of it, thank you.”
“Wait,” she said, her finely manicured hand reaching out as he turned away.
She froze halfway in realizing her error, alarm crossing her stoic face in a
fleeting moment he would have missed if his attention hadn’t snapped to that
hand invading his space. There it was. Fear. She had retreated behind her iron
shield as quickly as she had slipped from it, but he had seen the shape of it.
Of all things which Leif had gained expertise throughout his years, fear was a
field he had mastered. He was both craftsman and connoisseur of all shapes and
shades of fear and knew the patterns it stitched along the psyche of the
afflicted. His eyes sharpened at what he saw in her then.
“What did you do?” he asked, soft and quiet, dropping the French for the more
familiar and abrupt English.
“Bear with us one more evening,” she said, matching his calm with that
impenetrable cool. “You’ll have her tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow? Why not tonight? There’s going to be a feast, I was hoping to invite
her,” he spoke more rapidly. She glanced to the side, stirring tight motion
from a cluster of men nearby. Guards. It wouldn’t matter if he could pluck just
one of those hard, cold eyeballs from its socket in less than a fraction of a
second. His long, sharp teeth showed in a dry grin. “Where did you put my
daughter, madame?”
“You know damn well where we put her. Don’t forget who you are speaking to,
sir,” she seethed. Defensive. Hostile. His intuition was confirmed in a
flourish of fury expanding within him. She turned away from him with a clipped,
“Complete your given task tonight and you may be rewarded the privilege of
visitation.”
He watched as she made a swift retreat into the crowd, his hands itching to
grab her head and snap her neck in a way he had not been tempted since arriving
at this gilded prison. That gratification was denied to him for now under the
assurance that a greater revenge would soon enough be satisfied, one that such
premature recklessness would defeat. He once enjoyed these long games he would
play against the late Mr. Marceau, but since they had begun involving his
family, a primal territorialism had overtaken his usual patience and had made
him sloppy and shortsighted. Mr. Marceau had paid for that transgression and
now Leif was paying for his, but he was never fond of playing by anyone else’s
rules.
“Mr. Valstad, we are willing to negotiate on allowing your unit access within
the capital, but not-”
Leif interrupted the returned businessman by grabbing his shoulder, the
withered musculature mapping clearly in his mind’s eye as he gave it a firm
squeeze and grinned, “That will be fine. I have a few men I would like to
personally select for these purposes, but I need it to remain discreet. It’s
hard to tell who you can trust here, isn’t it?”
 
 
“Martha, I’m going out for lunch today,” Henrik announced to the receptionist
as he walked through the waiting room toward the main elevators.
“Oh! Labs came back with Simone’s work!” Martha blurted out hurriedly.
“Thanks! I’ll ask Brun to check them when I get back!” he replied as he rushed
out the door.
He had, in fact, already checked them under Dr. Brun’s login information to the
hospital’s system. He didn’t need anyone knowing that, though, and after
reading her results, he wished he had just waited for the doctor to see them
first. As much sway as the kidnapping had afforded Henrik with Dr. Brun,
everyone in their office was busy playing catchup after yesterday’s delays and
he would have to wait for the young doctor to have a free moment before
pursuing those prescriptions Simone needed. As he sped down the motorway, he
tried to focus on the varieties of medications that might help his niece
recover instead of the stinging, sucking rage that threatened just beneath his
calm all day since finding out some of what Leif had put into her system. He’d
need a cerebral spinal fluid analysis to more correctly assess the likelihood
of certain cancerous tumors that could explain the level of human chorionic
gonadotropin in her blood, but there was a much simpler and terribly likely
explanation for that, one that matched her elevated progesterone. Whether it
was Leif or either of his other brothers who had put that in her, he couldn’t
be sure, but that it was any of them was sickening enough.
He had to decide on a course of action as soon as possible, which was half the
reason he rushed to his condo. The other half was the uncertainty in how
effective his efforts to Simone-proof his house had been. He locked the front
door behind him as he bounded into his home, the sight of the heavy dresser
still barricading the hallway door giving him some reassurance. He decided to
stop by the hardware store at the end of his shift for a more permanent
solution. Straightening his back and squaring his shoulders, he picked up the
dresser and moved it as quietly as he could before pulling the door open to the
darkened hallway. There was no sound or movement within, all doors as shut as
he had left them, most locked to prevent her from finding another window to
jump out of. He didn’t have much time to waste on courtesy, giving the small
room he’d used for storage two knocks before pushing that door open.
“Simone, we need to-” he started to say, the words dying on his tongue when he
caught the fleeting glimpse of smooth, light honeyed brown skin before the
white sheet moved to cover it in a flurry of motion.
Simone twisted to sit up in alarm, her bare arms crossed over the thin blanket
she had snatched up to cover herself in a hurry, and stared at him with wide
eyes and flushed cheeks. His hastened mind had ground to an abrupt halt at what
he had just barely seen even though he had seen everything before, but that had
not been anywhere near this context. Checking her wounds and redressing her
while she was still sedated was nothing beyond what he had normally done for
patients hundreds of times before and monitoring her while she showered was
only uncomfortable after she had deliriously snuggled up on him in the bathroom
last night. This, however, was nothing he had thought to prepare himself for.
He had barged into a deeply private and personal moment and there was no
professional or impersonal space he could approach this from. So, as he was
prone to do in panic, he pretended not to know.
“Uh, hm…” he stammered, then cleared his throat and started over. “We are, ah,
need talk. Wait.”
He ignored the way she stiffened and scooted away from him as he approached the
bed and took out his cell phone. He also ignored the shiver that crawled across
his scalp and down his spine when he tasted that familiar and enticing scent
hanging in the air. Memories of catching traces of that scent when she’d walk
by or sit down near him flickered to his attention as he distracted himself
with typing in his phone. His hands were suddenly clumsy, making him have to
retype and delete several times as he tried to focus on this one small task and
not feel the warmth coiling low in his belly or the racing of his heart.
His thumbs trembling over the keys, he swallowed the excess saliva pooling in
his mouth and muttered, “Sorry. One moment…”
She shifted on the bed, drawing the blankets tighter around her, stirring the
scents of her sweat and arousal soaked into the sheets and making his thumbs
twitch uselessly when he could taste her in the air. The buried memory of
something he was never meant to see, something that was never meant to be,
surfaced to clog all thinking in his addled brain and he looked up from his
phone to where her bare body sat curled under the miasma of bedding. He
remembered, in a way he had not wanted to ever remember, how Anders had eagerly
lapped and sucked at her as she had moaned through her orgasm. Henrik swallowed
thickly and let his gaze drift to her flushed, waiting face. Time seemed to
slow as he watched the tip of her pink tongue swipe at the moisture glistening
on her rosy, bitten lips. A startling pressure announced its presence in a
growing heaviness low in his pelvis and he looked around desperately for
anywhere to sit before he recalled that he’d cleared everything out of this
room.
“Um…” he murmured absently, the forgotten phone slowly drifting down as his
hands lowered to his sides. “I… uh… Sorry. Sorry.”
He walked hurriedly out of the small room, shutting the door firmly behind him,
and scooted the bookcase away from his bedroom door to lock himself inside. He
tried not to think about why he needed to do this as he yanked down his scrubs
and gripped the rapidly thickening base of his cock in his hand, tried not to
think about who that mouthwatering scent belonged to as he chased its memory
into the warm bedding back in that little room, only focusing on the individual
pieces instead of the shameful whole.
“Fuck…” he growled, clenching his teeth at the rough pull of his fist.
His body yearned for softer, wetter things than the brutality of his coarse
hand and that yearning reminded him she was right there, needing it as much as
he did. He shoved those invasive thoughts out before they could repeat more
insistently. That was his niece. He stroked himself faster, groaning through
the almost painful resistance of his hand as he chased a rudimentary relief.
Anything to stop these deplorable, disgusting desires frothing from the sick
animal part of his brain. That was his niece. The pressure started to bear down
harder and pull within him. He reached down with his other hand and caressed
the rising tension in his sac, eager for this torment to be over with. Try as
he might, those invasive thoughts slipped past his guard and his frenzied mind
pursued them like so many little monsters scurrying to tunnel before he could
crush them. That was his niece, and she was soft and wet and needy for the sex
he was equipped to give her.
“Fucking shut up!” he hissed to himself.
He just needed to come. He would come, he would be disgusted with himself, but
this would stop. He let his mind play out the fantasies that flashed swiftly
behind his shut eyelids and remembered every detail of the sweet little cunt he
had tried so hard not to look at last night. He pulled a grunting, shaking,
barely satisfying climax from his cock almost immediately, catching the hot
spurts of his seed in his fingers cupped over his sensitive tip as he came.
Shame washed over him with each throb and he hated himself for this, but his
mind still focused on both constructed images and real memories of his young
niece even through his guilt. Frowning, miserable with grief, the demon of his
arousal only half-sated by this crude method, he pulled his pants back up and
held the mess in his hand to wash off in the bathroom. With a deep sigh, he
unlocked and opened his door to trudge out into the hallway and nearly stumbled
backward in shock at finding Simone standing right there, a white sheet
clutched around her shoulders and her eyes gleaming strangely up at him.
“Eh, ah, what-” he stammered loudly in his surprise.
She stopped his attempts at speech when she snatched the hand he held carefully
cupped in front of him. Before his frenzied brain could command his hand to
pull away, she pulled it toward her and he watched, horrified and mesmerized,
as she brought it to her mouth. The silky slide of her tongue against his palm
and fingers and through the mess of his semen shot a thrill of excited pleasure
straight to his core, short-circuiting the rush of panic and rendering him
completely dumbfounded. This wasn’t supposed to happen. In any possible
reality, this wasn’t something that could possibly occur. The sheet that was
wrapped around her fluttered to the floor in a whisper, baring so much of that
tantalizingly creamy skin and scent to him all at once. He made a strangled
grunt as he tried to say something, anything, like stop or don’t, but only a
shaking sigh managed past the block in his throat. His eyes tore away from the
astonishing pink of her tongue lapping up his come with all the pleasure of a
cat lapping at cream and his stare drifted down the body he had already seen,
but hadn’t really looked at before. Immediately, his gaze latched onto the top
of her cunt, the little folds glistening with her arousal and invitingly puffy,
and his mouth watered in anticipation of feeling those soft petals with his
tongue.
He yanked his hand out of her grasp and almost ran down the hall, slamming the
hallway door shut and dragging the dresser back in front of it hastily. He
didn’t look back at her. He couldn’t. He couldn’t do this. His hand still
sticky with the residue of his come and her saliva, he peeled out of his
driveway and drove, his mind racing in a blur and his chest heaving as he
panted through his panic. His mouth was saying something over and over before
he realized he was finally saying “stop”, the English phrase that was on the
tip of his tongue now repeating until it lost meaning. He didn’t remember the
drive back to work, only that suddenly he was parked in the garage with the car
still running and his hands gripped tightly on the steering wheel. He leaned
his forehead on the wheel, shuddered once, and wept.
***** Chapter 58 *****
The first thing Vidar became aware of was pain. White hot, piercing pain
crackling up his neck and wrapping around his skull. He groaned and sat up, his
blurred vision clearing to reveal that he was lying in the middle of his living
room, but everything seemed so oddly off. He pressed a hand to the raw point of
pain throbbing in the back of his head and felt his hair matted with something
crusted and sticky. His palm came away with a rusty smear of drying blood. A
thin and muted alarm woke him up a little further.
The coffee table was broken, the black wood splintered and split right down the
center. He stared at it blearily, trying to figure out what had happened, but
his memory was blocked by a thick fog. There was something lurking in that fog
he wasn’t sure he wanted to see. A clatter from the kitchen stole his limited
focus and he cautiously pushed himself to his feet, his head throbbing almost
unbearably from the effort. It was dark outside the windows. That didn’t seem
correct. It was just the middle of the afternoon a moment ago, or maybe it
wasn’t. His face hurt too much to frown in confusion as he tried to think about
it, so he turned from the windows and stepped carefully toward the kitchen.
Light spilled into the short hall and sounds of someone shuffling through
drawers bounced off the walls and painfully through his skull. With one hand
gripping his head and the other braced against the wall, he shuffled into the
turn. Those bright overhead lights pierced his eyes and it took him a moment to
blink past it to register what he was seeing. Red was splattered on the clean
white laminate of the counters and the smooth white floors, the color standing
out brilliantly in the stark pale kitchen. A man he had never seen before was
lying on the island countertop, more of that brilliant scarlet pooled under him
and stained on his clothes. Another was slumped over on the floor, his legs
folded awkwardly and red smeared in a thick streak down the wall behind him.
The smell of iron hung heavy in the air. Iron, and sausage.
“Good morning, Vidar Valstad,” the man cooking at the stove said without
turning to look at him.
Vidar stared at him, that calm and clinical tone ringing familiarity in the
slow drip of his thoughts until it produced a name. “Agent Maier?”
“In the flesh,” Maier said, turning to flash him the impression of a smile
without actually smiling and then resuming with whatever he poked at in the
sizzling skillet. “Breakfast will be served shortly. I do apologize for the
mess.”
Vidar nodded absently, his blank stare drifting back to the man lying on his
kitchen island. He realized, with an abrupt and blunt certainty, that the
stranger was very dead. The horror he should have felt with that recognition
was just on the other side of that fog in his mind, though, and his stare
drifted back to the American.
“What are you doing here?” his words slurred out of his numb mouth.
“Cooking,” Maier answered. “Go wake up your brother now. I put him in your
guest room.”
Vidar looked again at the corpse sitting on the floor, now noticing his chefs
knife sticking out of its neck. It was so strange that he didn’t see it sooner.
It was all so very strange. He walked back out through the living room, now
identifying why it had looked so odd. The lamp had been knocked to the floor,
the different angle of light casting strange shadows over the room. It was
rather impressive how different a room could look just by changing the
lighting. A sharp pang stabbed down from the top of his head to the base of his
neck, making him flinch and stagger, his feet automatically stumbling toward
the guest room until he came through the other side of his pain looking at
Anders. His little brother laid atop the bedding, his clothes and shoes still
on as he slept. Vidar shuffled up to him, looking him over for something he
couldn’t think to identify. He wasn’t sure why he hesitated at the side of the
bed, just watching him, but the steady rise and fall of his chest was
important. A bag of frozen peas was tied to the side of his head with a strip
of gauze and he poked it to find it still cold, but thawed. A deep burgundy
gash decorated his cheek, framed by an eggplant of a bruise that spanned the
curve of his cheekbone and pooled along the rim of his eye socket.
“Hey, wake up,” Vidar tried to say loud enough, but the volume of his voice
vibrated in his skull agonizingly.
Anders didn’t stir. He gently shook his shoulder, then not so gently. He stared
down at his bruised and battered brother, trying to feel and think the right
things, but nothing came out of that thick fog. He shuffled back to the
kitchen, each shallow step heavy and slow, his mind dragging half of a second
behind. The bright lights of the kitchen were oppressive and cheerless.
“Still out cold, is he?” Maier asked without turning to see that Vidar was
alone. “We’ll save him a plate.”
“Why are there dead people in my house?”
“There are dead people in your house because they died in your house.”
Vidar supposed that made sense. Maier set three places at the table before
bringing the hot skillet over and dispensing the omelette evenly between them.
Vidar drifted past the corpses and sat at the table when he beckoned him over,
the smell of freshly cooked food waking up his senses a little more.
“I didn’t think I had sausage in my fridge,” he slurred as he sat down. The
food seemed to slowly crawl around on the plate and he watched it, mesmerized.
“You didn’t. I made a trip to the store after those boys settled down,” Maier
explained as he sat directly next to him.
“Who murdered them?”
“What makes you think they were murdered? Did you murder them?”
Vidar checked to make sure his kitchen was still covered in blood. “I don’t
think I would make this much mess in my own house.”
“I don’t think you would either.”
Vidar caught a squirming sausage under his fork and bit into it gingerly,
careful to chew in a way that didn’t jostle his aching head. He tried to
swallow, but something metallic and watery came up from his stomach and he
leaned off to the side to vomit. A puddle of runny blood and bile dribbled and
coughed up from him onto the floor.
“Keep trying to eat. You need something in your belly other than blood or that
will just keep happening,” Maier said.
“Is this my blood?” Vidar mumbled, his voice thick and froggy.
“Most likely. They were already done questioning you by the time I had arrived,
though, so I can’t say for sure what you were up to before that.”
“They?”
“These guys.” Maier gestured vaguely to the two corpses with the eggs and
sausage speared on his fork before biting them off. His even, professional
voice was muffled through his full mouth. “Things got a little out of hand.
They weren’t expecting me.”
“Ah… well… Neither was I,” Vidar nodded.
He forced another bite of sausage down and this time it stayed in his stomach.
Each minute food stayed down, he felt slightly less scattered, but the whole he
was becoming was not any more clear. He wanted to know what brand of sausage
this was, but each time he tried to ask, his hand mechanically moved food into
his mouth. It wasn’t terribly important, anyway. Nothing was terribly
important. They ate in silence for the rest of the meal, Maier waiting
patiently for Vidar to slowly finish before taking their plates to wash them in
the sink. Vidar rose and helped to dry and put away the plates and utensils
handed to him, the chore drilled into him from a young age and coming
automatically. When the mess of the meal was tidied up, he bid the American
goodnight and shuffled off to his bedroom. He had a sense that he had slept for
a long while, but he was still so very tired.
He lied in bed on his side, mindful of the oozing wound in the back of his
head, and fixed his unfocused stare to the open doorway. Sleep evaded him again
as it had since his mind had been poisoned, the hours passing in warped
succession as consciousness and unconsciousness bled into each other without
fully being either until time became a solid and quantifiable notion once more.
Each sleepless night had weakened the barriers of what he once was so sure
being awake used to be. These walking nightmares no longer surprised him. His
kitchen having been turned into a bloody murder scene with an FBI agent cooking
him breakfast in the midst of all the gore was simply too ludicrous to possibly
be real. The world was mad, but there had to be some boundaries to that
madness. Even if those things were true, he needed to doubt them, or he was
truly more insane than he thought he was.
So, when time became less jagged and illusory and the sun brightened his
bedroom, he wasn’t surprised to find his kitchen clean and empty of corpses.
The absence of his coffee table in the living room and the presence of a cold
plate of eggs and sausages on the counter were acceptable points of madness.
They didn’t need to be explained. He didn’t want them to be explained. Anders,
however, was still solidly asleep in his guest room. He envied him, even with
his bruised and cut face and soggy bag of peas strapped to his head. He looked
so peaceful.
“Hey, motherfucker,” he said, shaking Anders’ shoulder. “Quit showing off and
wake up already. It’s closing in on noon, you bum.”
Anders didn’t even twitch, his head only rolling limply to the side from being
jostled. The bag of peas slid down with the motion and Vidar jerked away from
what he saw beneath.
 
 
“I’m not prescribing her that without testing for epilepsy,” Dr. Brun said
flatly, removing his glasses to rub at the indents on the bridge of his nose as
he often did when exasperated.
“The seizure was a symptom of withdrawal, which is part of why I’m requesting
trazodone,” Henrik argued.
“Well, according to her blood work, she was on anticonvulsants. Why would she
have been taking them on such a long term basis if she didn’t have frequent
seizures?”
“None of the medications in her system were prescribed. None of it was
monitored or overseen by any medical personnel of any title,” Henrik explained,
trying to maintain the impression of patience where there was none. “Given what
I saw and… what he was doing to her, it’s likely that Leif was either provoking
seizures or attempting to counteract the effects of an inconsistent and erratic
drug therapy.”
Dr. Brun kept clicking through the lab reports, his stare carefully fixed on
the monitor as he asked with a measured nonchalance, “What was it that led you
to the opinion that he would actively encourage seizures in her?”
Henrik pursed his lips and tried not to seem defensive. “He might have used
them as a smokescreen to justify the variety of medications he gave her. I
don’t know. I stopped asking why he did the things he did; the man was
completely insane.”
“So… The misoprostol and mifepristone you want, was that part of what he did to
her?” Dr. Brun asked.
This constant curiosity of what had happened in the US had irritated Henrik,
but most people had the tact and better sense than to ask about it so directly.
Those who did not had been swiftly told to mind their own business, but this
doctor had thus far been slow on the uptake. He clenched his fist behind him
and tried not to think about punching his glasses into his smug face.
“That’s her private matter to discuss if she chooses. I can’t speak for her on
that,” Henrik responded tersely.
“I agree. She should speak for herself on it,” Dr. Brun said. “I’m not going to
sign off on prescribing her abortifacients without discussing it with her
directly. This is unethical enough as it is, and I...”
The ringing in Henrik’s ears drowned out the droning doctor. He sighed through
his clenched teeth, shut his eyes, counted slowly to ten in the screaming
pressure of his mind, and tried to find a place beyond the anger enlivening
each tensed muscle in his powerful body. He couldn’t trust his control and that
feeling was both deeply disturbing and distressingly liberating. The desire to
hurt this aggravating little man conjured fantasies of blood and bone breaking
out of pallid flesh. A soothing static of rage coursed through his body and he
felt lighter, almost euphoric when he simply allowed it to move through him.
“… Henrik, you’re asking me to write prescriptions for… for psychotropics
without further testing. It’s not just unethical; this could land me in legal
trouble if anyone takes a second look. If she’s found in time, I’ll be glad to
see her and also refer her to someone who can begin the process to...”
Henrik looked at Dr. Brun, seeing him not as a man, but as the collection of
fragile pieces that made up an existence so thoroughly meaningless to him. The
frailty of such an insignificant thing denying him what his family member
needed was outlandish in a way he logically knew was not. This was unethical
and risky for both of their careers, but at the same time, it would hardly take
any time or effort at all to crack his skull open like a coconut against the
floor.
“… Henrik? Are you feeling alright? Henrik?”
He blinked, confused at the doctor’s look of mild irritation and concern until
he realized that he hadn’t heard a word of what had been said, and then
nauseated at where he had retreated in his mind. He ran a hand through his hair
and tried to collect himself, but there was no calm response to the unspeakable
violence he had been considering. Those were no intrusive thoughts or
absentminded daydreams. He brought his other hand up through his hair, gripping
the back of his head as he tried to process and reason why his mind would go
where he would never have commanded it to.
“It’s stress,” he muttered to himself. “It’s just stress. I’m alright.”
The door opened, startling both men as Martha poked her head through and
addressed Henrik with a worried look as she said, “Your brothers have just been
taken into emergency again. Henrik, I think you better go check on them. It
sounds like they were attacked.”
 
 
The single bare bulb in the ceiling cast a dingy yellow light over the bathroom
and no daylight was able to sneak through the flat slab of plywood nailed over
the window, making everything difficult to discern in the dimness. Simone’s
watch told her it was six, but there was no way for her to tell if it was six
AM or six PM. She found pale light in the spaces under the locked doors and,
though the gaps were too narrow for her to discern if it was day or night, she
lied down in a cocoon of blankets on the hard floor of the narrow hallway to
stare through them. That sickly, jaundiced light that spilled from the bathroom
behind her was only marginally less awful than the pitch dark without it. There
were no sounds but the ticking of her watch and the shiver in her breathing, no
company but the ghosts of memories that played unbidden in her mind, no
distractions from the fevered madness that blurred what little boundaries were
left between reality and surreality. She was alone with nothing to tether
herself to, so she lied down and tried to not do anything but believe in the
daylight beyond the doors. Maybe when Henrik came home, he would let her out of
the three small spaces he had left accessible. Maybe he would talk with her and
touch her in a friendly way to make her feel real again. Or maybe she had
ruined that, too.
Her fingertips dug into her shoulders, the raw and exposed nail beds from
Anders forcibly trimming them too deeply hurting more than if she had pressed
her nails into her skin. There was no mistaking Henrik’s behavior earlier; both
hope and doubt that he would be different had died in her when he had caught
her masturbating and had stepped closer instead of away. Anger rose heat to her
skin rather than shame at how suddenly and easily lust had stained what was so
pure and simple between them. Whatever it was that was so wrong within her that
it had spread this sickness to them wasn’t their fault, but she needed it as
much as they did in the end. Morality was an irrelevant and lavish concept that
their circumstance did not afford; this was simply what they were. She dragged
her hands down to cup her breasts, sighing at the tender mark Vidar had made
with his riding crop, and kneaded some comfort from that pain. It would have
been easier, maybe even less damaging, if Henrik had just allowed himself to
give in instead of running from it.
Some people were simply born into circumstances that denied them the ability to
choose or change the lives set before them. Leif had to become a hunter and she
had to become a slave, both of them cast into these roles without the chance to
escape them. That didn’t absolve her of the responsibility for what she had
done, but she also couldn’t stop it. The raw sores on her wrists from
struggling against her bonds burned and itched, making her clench her jaw with
want to bite them since her nails were cut. So much misery had been caused just
by her existence. The misery she’d invited into her uncles’ lives had amounted
a debt too deep for her to repay, a debt that denied her anger at the suffering
they had subjected her to. Love welled up through the cracks in her mind
instead, thick and sweet as syrup, coating the bitterness of her thoughts until
her declawed fingers stopped clutching at pain. There was no amount of
suffering that had made the price of affection or belonging too steep. Even if
her place among them was a painful and sinful space to fill, she still belonged
among them. Even if Henrik had locked her away from the world, he had not cast
her out alone into it. The love that radiated from their will to keep her with
them, no matter how twisted and tainted, filled her with a warmth she had
hungered for all her life. She had killed to protect them and this precious
feeling. Her freedom, her agency, and a little more loneliness were acceptable
prices to pay for love and belonging.
The sound of something heavy dragged just outside the hallway door shocked her
out of her spiraling thoughts and she froze, waiting in her cocoon as the door
opened and light steps approached. That was not the sound of Henrik’s swift,
heavy footfalls. Her body wouldn’t listen to her commands to move even if she
wanted to. There was nowhere for her to hide, nothing for her to defend herself
with. She stayed curled in a tight ball within the blankets, her eyes shut in
prayer to whatever god or demon was listening that whoever it was would dismiss
her as a pile of laundry in the hallway. The hard nudge of a shoe jabbing into
her back dissolved any such hopes and it was all she could do to cover her
mouth to keep from screaming. As the blanket was torn out of her hands and that
filthy yellow light reached behind her shut eyes, she prayed for Henrik to come
home.
 
 
Anders recovered consciousness while they were still in the process of
reattaching his ear, but the local anesthetic and severe grogginess prevented
him from panicking and made administration of general anesthesia a thankfully
quick process. After recovering consciousness a second time after surgery, he
listened to Henrik tell him these details with some skepticism and confusion.
He didn’t remember waking up on the surgery table. He didn’t remember the blunt
force trauma that had caused his basilar skull fracture and the tearing that
had nearly separated his ear from his head. He did remember the kicks that had
fractured three of his ribs and bruised his kidney and the haymaker that
cracked one of his molars. The broken ribs and likely the skull injury were
from the intruders waiting for them at Vidar’s house and the cracked tooth was
courtesy of Vidar’s fist when he had found out why they were asking Anders for
Simone. That was not the way Anders had wanted him to find out about the deal
he had accepted with the organization. He hadn’t yet figured out the best way
to broach that subject, but that definitely wasn’t it.
“Do you think this had something to do with Simone?” Henrik asked, shifting
nervously in the chair beside the hospital bed. “It’s too much of a coincidence
that this happened so soon after…”
“Yeah,” Anders responded flatly, his voice muffled through the swelling in his
cheek. The drugs made everything muted and distant. Or maybe it was the
concussion. He blinked blearily and tried to remember what his brother had
said, but it didn’t matter. “Vid’s still here?”
“He got off easy. Mild concussion and a few stitches. Cops took him home hours
ago. Nice guys, by the way, much better than the assholes we got yesterday. Do
you remember what happened last night?”
“Not a thing,” Anders lied. Lying no longer occurred to him as difficult as it
once had, the deception coming to him as easily and automatically as the truth
now. “It’s all scattered and weird. What did Vidar say to the cops?”
“Well, I don’t know what he told them, but he told me that he woke up in his
living room and Agent Maier cooked him breakfast,” Henrik answered, chuckling
nervously. “Ridiculous shit, right?”
Uneasiness pierced that delicate film of detachment in Anders, but he tried not
to let it show. With how stiff his face felt, he was confident it did not. Up
to that point, he’d gained certainty that he’d hallucinated Maier’s presence
and the savage violence he’d reigned down upon the men who had tortured him and
his brother. But he’d also been certain that the organization had Simone until
those men had begun interrogating him. Now he was certain of nothing.
“Ridiculous shit,” he agreed.
Maybe it was the anesthesia and painkillers, but he couldn’t make sense out of
anything. None of this was adding up. Such gaping ignorance produced a very
different and deeper ache than the guilt of selling Simone to a club of serial
killers to use as leverage in persuading his psychotic brother. It was ironic
to him even now, in the midst of the haze after being halfway beaten to death
for losing her, that he was more comfortable knowing she was among murderers
than the nebulous nothing he now knew of her whereabouts or condition.
“Well, uh… I won’t be back until Monday, but you’re in good hands here and I’m
just a call away,” Henrik said, his expression and manner exuding an urgent
discomfort as he pushed himself up out of the chair. “Let me know if they
release you sooner.”
“Sure.”
His older brother scratched his beard and pretended to pay attention to the
numbers displayed on the vital sign monitor as he asked, “You really don’t
remember anything that might relate to why they were there?”
Anders tried to shake his head in reply, but the motion pulled oddly at the
stitches trailing around his ear and down the side of his face in a way that
might have been painful if half his head wasn’t completely numb. The edges of
his vision jerked and blurred oddly when he moved. He wouldn’t be trying that
again for a while, then. It was annoying how many times that question had been
rephrased to him, as though the answer could change within the three minutes
since it was last asked. Maybe it was one of those aggravating cognitive tests
that the nurses had put him through to check how damaged his brain was. He
wasn’t sure if being consistently unable to recall new information or abruptly
being able to recall new information was the correct response to get Henrik off
his back.
“Look… neither of us wants to be here and your shift ended a half hour ago,”
Anders said as clearly as his numbed mouth allowed. “Go home.”
 
 
Between the hectic pace of the workday and the hassle that came with his
brothers, the only prescription Henrik had managed to persuade out of Dr. Brun
was a low dose beta blocker to treat the hypertension brought on by withdrawal.
The paranoid doctor wouldn’t even submit it to the hospital pharmacy, forcing
Henrik to make a stop at a drugstore on the way home when he was already late.
Anticonvulsants and antipsychotics were out of the question which, despite
knowing the potential dangers of taking many of those drugs poorly prepared and
unmonitored, still pissed him off. It seemed as though this parade of Hell and
chaos that trudged through their lives was unending. With all the violence
surrounding him, he should have been less shocked at the violent impulses that
had begun to creep into his mind with increasing intensity. It was textbook
post traumatic stress, but knowing that didn’t make it any easier to accept how
disturbingly right it felt to want to hurt another person. It occurred to him,
not for the first time, that considering holding someone captive in his condo
as the best option available was perhaps more symptomatic of irrational thought
than of the desperation of their situation. However, he knew he needed to look
no further for proof of his insanity than the temptation he found present in
his own niece. Hovering near the pharmacy counter, he stared at the selection
of condoms as he tried to think of which ex-girlfriend or ex-girlfriend’s
friend would be most likely to text him back.
“It’s going to get out eventually.”
He blinked out of his daze when he realized someone had spoken to him and
turned to the unfamiliar voice to see an unfamiliar face. A young man, perhaps
still a boy, stood facing him with a friendly smile that didn’t match his
words. There was an eagerness to his friendliness that seemed aggressive,
almost hostile.
Henrik straightened to his full height, towering over the boy, and asked, “Do I
know you?”
“No,” he grinned. There was something in his manner that set Henrik on edge,
something in the gleam of his eyes so focused unflinchingly on him that made
him want to step away. “The world is going to find out about you and your
family.”
“What.”
“Sir? Sir, your prescription is ready.”
Henrik turned to the pharmacist calling to him and when he turned back to the
strange boy, he was gone.
***** Chapter 59 *****
“I just don’t understand,” Vidar said, half-mumbling to lessen the impact of
his own voice bouncing around in his throbbing head. He slouched halfway out of
his seat to press against the cool glass of the café window, the clothes he’d
been wearing for two days reeking of sour sweat and blood and torn a bit at the
seams from a struggle he was only just beginning to vaguely remember. He shoved
his long fingers through his greasy hair and gave the aching back of his head a
wide berth. The last time he was this disheveled, it was after an accidental
acid bender at a music festival in Barcelona. Although the result felt and
looked similar, he was significantly more upset at the current cause.
“What don’t you understand?” Odette asked.
He could hear the irritation that flattened her tone and made the leg crossed
over her knee fidget in tight, impatient swings of her pointed shoe. Not that
he cared about her discomfort; half of their non-relationship had been
maintained by a mutual disinterest in each other’s personal wellbeing, but he
had broken that unspoken clause when he had called her to pick him up from the
nightmares of his empty house. He’d made his wellbeing her business by being
made so sufficiently dependent in his condition and now she had a social
obligation to make herself dependable. Both resented it, but it couldn’t be
helped. He couldn’t be alone and Odette was his only friend who had picked up
her phone.
“How anyone could be that obstinately ignorant,” he answered, grimacing as he
slid his hand down to rub his face. “That son of a whore brought those fuckers
right into my god damned house. I should have punched him harder.”
“Yes, I’m sure more violence would have been very helpful,” she sneered.
“Fucking primates…”
He glared at her, at her rocking foot, at the frown she fixed on her latte, and
asked, “What the hell are you so pissed about?”
“You.”
“Then leave.”
“Or we can discuss what’s been going on with you like adults.”
“Or you can leave.”
She drank out of her mug, her lips touching the same brick red lipstick smudge
that marked where she brought the rim to her mouth with unfailing precision,
and flitted her amber eyes over his bruised and unshaven face before saying, “I
called your psychiatrist while you were in the restroom.”
A hot rush of anger pulled him away from his slump against the window and he
leaned over the small table between them. “You did what?”
“I told her that you and your brother were attacked in your house last night,
that your niece has mysteriously vanished, and that you were spending a lot of
time with them shortly before both of those things happened,” she explained in
a terse whisper, her brow set in a hard and accusatory furrow.
“How do you-”
“Because it’s national fucking news, asshole,” she interrupted him. “You
thought those weirdo ‘reporters’ standing outside your brother’s house got
bored and left? Hell no! They know your fucked-up family is a goldmine for
tabloids. They had you clocked in and out of his place carrying your black bag
on the homepage of every trash news site in Norway. You’re lucky I didn’t tell
anyone what you carry in that thing. Shit, you’re lucky I didn’t tell the
cops.”
A cold spill of dread doused some of the anger within him and he glanced around
to make sure no one was eavesdropping as he hissed, “I don’t know what you’re
implying, but you have no right to interfere in my life.”
“I’m not implying shit,” she said, rolling her eyes in irritation. “I don’t
care if you fuck other people but going full on Story of O with your brother
and niece smacks of a psychotic breakdown. You’ve been out of control since
you’ve come back, even you have to be aware of that.”
He held his aching forehead in his palms, his elbows planted firmly on the
table, and tried to say something to deny the truth Odette had laid out so
plainly. It shouldn’t have been so obvious. A few photographs of him at his
brother’s house with his bag wasn’t obvious, in fact. That was no basis for
anyone to have speculated anything on such thin evidence, but he couldn’t
conjure the words needed to dispel what she had uncovered. He pressed his face
into his hands and cursed ever getting involved with a woman who had more than
half a brain and apparently no qualms with using it.
“Why would you want to help me?” he muttered into his palms.
“I’m not doing this for you,” she scoffed. “I’m doing this so I can sleep at
night. I didn’t do anything to stop you from fucking that doe-eyed little girl
and now she’s ‘missing’.”
“I had nothing to do with that!”
“You can explain that and everything else you ‘had nothing to do with’ to Dr.
Fjeldstad. Whatever she decides to do with you is on her. After this, I’m
done.”
The condemnation he had been seeking for the wickedness he had enacted had
finally begun to appear, but it had come too late. He’d succeeded in
establishing himself beyond rescue from his diseased mind and had completed
what Leif had set out to achieve in Simone. He had truly broken her. If she
hadn’t been taken from them, he knew he wouldn’t have allowed this guilt to
spoil that victory. Even after the distasteful revelation of how deeply the
double-edged sword of their connection had cut, he would not have allowed shame
to taint the splendor of ownership. However, she was taken from them, perhaps
irrevocably, and her absence had implanted a desperation that had rendered him
emotionally unstable. Guilt melted through the widening and splintering cracks
in his control. Guilt, and hope that perhaps his condition was reversible
without access to the object of his ruination.
“Fine,” he sighed, resigned to this unpleasant ordeal. “When does she want me
to see her?”
“She’s on her way back to her office now.”
 
 
Henrik checked his phone again, surprised to see that Camilla had texted him
back. With a heavy sigh of relief, he lingered at the stop sign before his
house to read it, further relieved to find her responding to his inquiry of her
weekend plans with a graciously open end. The hardware store trip to fully
guard his condo against opportunity for further escape would have to be put off
for tomorrow and then there was the time required to install those measures,
but after that, he hoped Camilla could provide guard against opportunity for
further weakness in him. Typically, he would not resort to reaching out to an
ex for sex, but this was not a typical circumstance. Unconsciously, he stroked
his fingers against his palm as his thoughts once more brushed over that
morning’s incident. Perhaps Camilla would even be open to a late dinner that
evening. At her place, he added to the text. He hit send before he could think
to be more tactful with his intentions and tilted his head back with another
sigh.
His brow wrinkled when he noticed the car parked in front of his residence, the
trunk of it open with a man standing, waiting, as he watched his home.
Something in Henrik’s gut told him that this was about his niece, that
intuition sprouting a million little seeds of fury as he turned the corner and
parked his car out of view of that stranger. He pulled the hood of his jacket
low over his forehead and jogged silently up to the man, slowing when he got
near. This could be nothing. This could just be a guy going through his trunk
after his car had stalled on his block. Pure coincidence. Henrik came right
behind him, his sensible sneakers doing well not to scuffle against the
concrete of the street in the slightest, and peered in to see the trunk
completely empty but for a roll of duct tape. It could have been pure
coincidence, but unfortunately for this stranger, that was how these things
happened sometimes. Wrong place, wrong time. Henrik stared at the scruff of
dark hair at the base of the stranger’s neck as he brought his arms up. This
might be a mistake. He could potentially injure an innocent man. He was
surprised at how easy it was to accept that possibility as he dragged him down
in a chokehold that had this stranger struggling violently and, curiously,
skillfully against him. Henrik held in his pained grunts as the man tried to
sidestep out of the hold and elbow what he probably hoped was his groin area,
but within seconds of having his blood cut off from his brain, the stranger was
out.
Henrik maneuvered him into the trunk and shut the lid as quietly as he could
manage before hurrying up the steps to his door. Most trunks had an interior
release, meaning this stranger would be free to escape from his trunk once he
recovered, but if this trunk was designed in mind to hold a person captive as
Henrik had suspected, then that was just as well. The fury that had sprouted in
him blossomed into full rage when those suspicions were confirmed at the sight
of his front door ajar. Every hair on his body bristled and every muscle
thrummed with that rage as he charged through the door, this visceral response
doubling at the sight of a man wrestling to subdue his niece in a restraining
hold in his living room.
He felt the strands of this intruder’s hair and the curve of his head under his
palm before he realized he was smashing his skull against the corner of his
kitchen counter. That rage, so full and thrilling, soared higher and higher
with each pound against that granite edge. Every hit was loud and fulfilling, a
drum beating to the rhythm of his rage. The give of flesh stopped at the
collision of rock and bone until they both began to crack with each strike.
This was exactly what he’d wanted to do to Dr. Brun. This feeling was exactly
what he had been craving for much longer than that. This sweet, hot, consuming
rage was so right. His chest was heaving, a feral growl scraping out of his
throat with each thrust of this squirming, screaming worm against the counter
until the squirming and screaming stopped, but Henrik did not stop until he
felt that unyielding bone collapse with overwhelmingly satisfying crunch.
He let the limp man under his hand fall to the floor and saw the blood and
jagged bits of flesh that clung to the jagged dents in the counter. Splatters
of red radiated from that point, expanding in a burst of color on the mottled
white granite. Panting through the elation that continued to flow up from that
dark part of him he had denied for his entire life, he gazed down at the
carnage he had created and laughter erupted from him. Blood pooled thick and
wide beneath that misshapen and grotesque head, dead beyond any doubt, one
eyeball distended from its socket and its limbs arranged in the awkward splay
of a ragdoll. Henrik had murdered this man. This man had earned murder from
him.
“H-Henrik…”
That small, timid whisper somehow reached past the roaring frenzy in his head
and the laughter pouring from his throat. All at once, the purity of this
feeling decayed with thought. He had murdered this man. The laughter and the
fury cut abruptly, leaving only cold sweat and terror. His hands and face were
wet with the blood that had splattered from the sheer physical brutality of
what he had done.
“Henrik… It’s okay… You’re okay…”
He turned automatically toward the voice, seeing his niece kneeling naked on
his living room rug. The terror in her wide eyes mirrored his own. He could see
his insane, murderous older brother in the shattered silver of her stare. He
could feel him in the insane, murderous pit of himself. It should have felt
like an unexpected and foreign thing to murder someone, but beyond the horror
and panic held suspended in this knowledge, it felt comfortingly familiar. His
hands were shaking. Hand tremors were a common symptom of benzodiazepine
withdrawal. Tremors, and increased blood pressure.
“Your medicine…” he muttered, turning stiffly to the door. “I left your
medicine in the car.”
His bones seemed to vibrate each time his foot struck the ground as he jogged
past the strange car, the sound of the stranger beating the lid from the inside
of the trunk echoing down the block. Henrik didn’t remember leaving his home.
He didn’t remember if he even shut the door. Simone might escape. He once had a
girlfriend who had indoor cats and all hell would break loose if he let one of
those bastards slip outside. An odd chuckle choked past his panting breaths as
he recalled the pandemonium of coaxing spooked cats out from under cars and
bushes. That relationship didn’t last long. It occurred to him that it had been
a few minutes since he’d checked to see if Camilla had texted him back and he
dug his phone out of his pocket, smearing red all over it as he walked briskly
to his car and read her reply. His excitement deflated slightly at reading that
she was busy that night, but dinner tomorrow was open. That was okay. No, that
was perfect. He was busy tonight anyway. He stared at the screen long after it
went dark and showed only his reflection under the blood smear. He didn’t know
he was crying until he saw the tears tracing lines through the blood on his
face, but once he did, the deep ache in his chest dragged him to his knees and
a strange keen howled out of his throat.
 
 
Dr. Fjeldstad’s office was even quieter without the murmuring chatter of the
secretaries the other doctors shared at the front desk, giving an uncomfortable
stillness to the air as Vidar and his decidedly ex-not-quite-girlfriend entered
the floor. Odette crossed ahead of him and sat down to regard the contents of
her purse, her impatience and irritation rolling off her with each wide step of
her long legs. He didn’t know legs could be so expressive before this night. He
tried to translate his anxiety into anxiousness to get this over with and
receive the sentencing he would earn from each damning admission in this half-
baked attempt at a redemption he knew he could never achieve, but he was just
too worn down to shift his emotions anymore. He had no more will or reason to
keep up his thin veil of control anymore. If his crimes were not uncovered
during the investigation into Simone’s kidnapping, then they would be
eventually uncovered when she is found, dead or alive. Secrets, no matter how
well concealed or protected, tended to find a way of revealing themselves given
enough time and he was not a patient man. This was the better way. He stepped
past Odette’s resentful disregard of his presence to Dr. Fjeldstad’s door and
knocked before he could rethink this.
It could have been any regular bi-weekly appointment by the way Dr. Fjeldstad
opened the door with a silent nod in greeting and stepped aside to let him
through, waiting until the door was firmly shut before saying, “Good evening,
Vidar.”
“Good evening, doctor,” he replied. He did not sit. She did not offer him to
sit.
She adjusted the clear plastic frames of her reading glasses, the show of
nervousness and the pinch in her features precluding her carefully phrased, “I
understand you have some unpleasant matters to discuss with me. I’m afraid I
have some bad news to bear first.”
“Seems to be the theme of things lately,” he said passively, hands in his
pockets, attempting to make himself seem as nonthreatening as possible given
the atrocities he would soon be admitting to.
However, it did not seem it was him who was making the doctor nervous. She
seemed rattled, distracted even, as she leaned against her desk and said, “I
was given some… information that has brought my attention to certain factors of
our doctor-patient relationship and, in light of those factors… I have
concluded that it is necessary to end our doctor-patient relationship.”
This was not the discussion he was dreading, though it brought a different and
unexpected dread as he attempted to process his shock. He couldn’t hide his
disbelief in asking, “Are you terminating my therapy with you?”
“I apologize if this seems abrupt,” she said stiffly, “because it is abrupt.
Ideally, we would not be initiating termination until the final phase of
therapy has been resolved, and I do regret that I am unable to proceed with you
to that point. I also regret that I do not have a referral to provide to you. I
can only wish you luck and bid you farewell from here.”
“I don’t understand. Is this because of what I did? I’m aware that they are
heinous claims, but aren’t you at all obligated to at least assess my statement
of those actions? Are you just going to turn me over to the police?”
Dr. Fjeldstad folded her hands in front of her and offered him only a solid
wall of professional impartiality as she answered, “No. I am simply terminating
therapy with you. Goodbye, Mr. Valstad.”
The insistence for him to leave was clear, but his bewilderment prevented him
from believing it.
“So, that’s it?” he asked. “Some random woman tells you my dirty secrets out of
the blue and you call me over here just to drop me?”
She didn’t react, not even to blink, as she waited for him to exit. He scoffed,
opting for annoyance to fill the gap of reaction he did not yet know to respond
to this development with. His annoyance did not lead him any further out of his
bewilderment. This just didn’t make sense.
“Two years,” he seethed. “I’ve been coming to you for two years and you never
once gave me the impression of a quitter. You won’t even tell me why. What am I
supposed to do?”
“Leave,” she answered.
He blinked at her, stunned, then slowly nodded. He really was this beyond
redemption. God only knew what she thought of him then to have driven her to
this point, but he supposed that he had crafted a very vivid idea of what he
was capable of in their previous visit. He was a rapist and, according to
Odette’s assessment, for all appearances also responsible for his victim’s
disappearance. He didn’t kidnap or kill her, though he might as well have. He’d
taken a cracked woman and purposely, methodically, brutally broke her the rest
of the way, effectively reducing her chances of surviving to zero in the
condition he’d tormented her down to. Simone was never meant to be apart from
them, though; they were going to take care of her. He wanted to explain that to
Dr. Fjeldstad, to make her understand that what he did was only necessary for
his niece’s happiness in the long run. Simone was never going to be able to
make it on her own anyway. He was helping her accept and embrace the role she
had been designed to fill in life instead of letting her continue to flounder
in the false hope she could be anything else. That had to be worth something.
The world was never meant for them, but they could make a space for themselves
in each other. They were meant to be together. They were family.
The last string of his self-control snapped at that revelation, something in
himself breaking with a sharp pain that nearly had him cry out. All the denial,
all the blocks and obstacles he had erected to protect himself from truly
acknowledging it had been chipped and chiseled away until he now stood in that
truth. Deeper than any genetic ties or titles of uncle or niece, there was that
instinctual magnetism that drew them together, all of them. He stumbled out of
the cozy little office with its comfortable, sleek furnishings and unyielding
professionalism into the empty waiting room, barely able to acknowledge that
Odette had left and completely unable to care. That yawning ache that had
haunted him since Simone’s kidnapping opened wide enough to swallow him hole as
he struggled to contain it with the control he no longer had. He’d lost their
Simone but he couldn’t lose this need for her that sang in his bones and roared
in his blood. They were family in a way that, by all rules of human society and
culture, shouldn’t be. He knew this, knew it was madness, but they were mad
enough for it. Leif had cracked them all open and smeared them together under
that magical madness. Vidar leaned against the front door, his hand pressed
over his grimacing face as he tried to hold himself in. This was what their
oldest brother had cursed them with: each other.
The door opened abruptly and he nearly tripped through it, gripping the
doorsill to keep from falling and being torn halfway out of his miserable mind
by a familiar dull voice saying, “Good evening, Mr. Valstad. It seems as though
you require assistance.”
He peered through the tight cage of his fingers, horror stiffening his spine as
he saw Maier regarding him with his dead shark eyes and doll-like smile.
 
 
If she hadn’t had struggled, this man would not have died. Simone watched the
man on the kitchen floor, certain by his crumpled and cracked head and
protruding glassy eye that he was dead but not so certain that he wouldn’t rise
and lunge for her again. If she had not delayed him those few precious seconds,
he would not have had his skull caved in. Henrik would not have come to know
murder. She would have been dragged from this prison and into another, likely
worse, fate, but this man would not have had to die and her uncle would not
have crossed that threshold. She did this to both of them. The pool of blood
spanned wide on the linoleum, leaving only a small margin to step around and
search the cupboards on the other side of it. Dragging down a loaf of bread she
found to rest her shaking knees on the floor, she tore open the plastic and
shoved a couple slices in her mouth. She was too hungry to chew, nearly choking
several times as she swallowed the thick dry chunks of this dense bread. She
let herself get weak and life saw fit to remind her harshly of this mistake.
There was nothing she could do to correct it but to remain vigilant in the
future. Don’t be sorry, be careful. Be stronger. Be faster. Be smarter. Don’t,
and people could die. Slowing down after the first few jagged swallows, she
tore off a large mouthful and crawled over to the corpse.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered through her food as she reached over and gingerly
pressed the eyeball back into the socket with her forefinger and thumb, “but
you shouldn’t have come here.”
She resumed watching the corpse as she perched on the balls of her feet and
finished the crushed-up chunks of bread, waiting for him to stir at any moment.
She knew the dead could come back to life. There was no guaranteed safety from
life. Memories lived on, actions rippled through time, there was no escape.
Nothing is ever really destroyed, just transformed, so she waited. Waiting was
all she could do for now, anyway.
***** Chapter 60 *****
Leif ran his hands over the sumptuous material, a high-grade silk and wool
blend woven in a herringbone pattern so subtle and precise that it first passed
as a simple diffusion of the stately navy color, and breathed in the scents his
touch stirred from the fabric. Vicuña wool, he knew by the especially fine
feel, was confirmed by its gentle gamey smell that lacked the lanolin of sheep
wool. He’d once had the fortune of being in Peru during the annual shearing of
the wild vicuña by villagers in the Andes and had been so charmed by the
colorful ceremony and the tawny creatures that he’d harbored a fondness for
their precious wool ever since, much to the benefit of his wardrobe and the
strain of his budget. That the summation of his fondness was to acquire and own
was a tendency that had not eluded him. He contemplated his possessiveness as
he tested the highly valued fabric between his thumb and forefinger, finding
the grain to be exquisite enough to snag his greed.
When he found something to be of sufficient value, it was never enough that he
simply admired it in its element. He was not of the same virtue as those Andean
natives who herded and sheared the vicuñas only to release them back to the
mountains. He saw the high regard their culture held for this untamed animal to
remain free and, in recognizing that value, was instantly driven to acquire the
object of their worth for himself. He never could be satisfied until he had
plucked the flower bloomed so ostentatiously at the zenith of its beauty,
poured the finest 19th century Madeira to breathe in that first plume of
fragrance upon uncorking, or harvested the forbidden fruit of his own loins
once captivated by her lust and sacred biology. As deeply ingrained as the sin
of greed was within him, there was its close cousin, frivolousness, which he
abhorred with a powerful distaste. Although greedy, he did not acquire
capriciously; the value of what he had desired was only ever increased by being
in his possession. He missed his carefully curated collection of suits and
apparel, finding himself eager to begin reacquiring the essence of what had
been lost. And so, it was the vicuña, and only the vicuña, he would consider
once found among the swaths presented to him.
“Would you have this in windowpane check?” he asked, addressing the tailor in
their mutual French instead of relying on his corroded Italian.
“I could have it be made so, if that is what the sir requires,” the old man
replied with a thoughtful furrow of his overgrown brows.
“Have it be made so, then,” Leif answered with a smile he had not worn since
before his death; the polite mask he turned onto the unsuspecting world. It had
calmed the tailor, who had entered and became nervous upon realizing that the
guards crowding this dungeon-like room was not for Leif’s protection, but for
the tailor’s own self. There was no use to be had of a tailor that was nervous
to touch a client. Leif examined the chalked and stitched prototype suit the
tailor had fitted to him, eyeing the bold length of the cuffs with some
indecisiveness. “This three-piece– I think a solid gray vest would do nicely,
yes? A more elaborate pocket square is in fashion, I believe, something that
highlights by contrasted color and intricate fold. I’ll leave that up to your
taste. When do you expect to have it ready?”
“The suit, it is done in four, maybe three weeks,” the tailor offered,
unclasping his hands to weigh the air with his palms as though weighing his
answer before acquiescing with a resigned, “but for the sir, it is done in two
weeks.”
Leif shifted his polite smile into one of fixed gratitude.
There were many things he had lost when he had died, but things could be
replaced, refreshed, and renewed, as was often otherwise necessary in the
impermanence of everything. He had not died as the pharaohs died to maintain
claim of what went with them in their tombs, nor had he died as the atheist
died to vanish all that he was into eternal oblivion. He held no strong
convictions on whether this was or was not Hell; a destination that, if any
such existed despite his doubts, he was certainly qualified. Hell or not, he
was here and had found that his desires, his appetites, and his sins continued
on with him. He intended to replace the things that could be and, soon enough
if not today, reclaim the most precious object of his greed that could not be
replaced.
Once the tailor had left and Leif was escorted to the last appointed meeting of
the day, his now constant companion filed in seamlessly at his side. More than
half the guards were at least somewhat aware that the great Dr. Aguiyi and the
dead arisen Valstad harbored motivations separate from propelling the Marceau
takeover and none of them seemed to disagree with it, allowing the doctor the
free reign of most of the grounds that was officially any member’s right, but
unofficially regarded as restricted during this tumultuous time. The
festivities had come to a close with last night’s feasting, leaving these halls
deserted of the revelers, spreading them out into the world to tell those who
could know about all that had transpired here.
Members of Francis’ ragtag group lingered, over thirty war-hungry and
bloodthirsty men littering the hall in pairs and trios, appearing at ease but,
by the nature of their lives and the necessity of this moment, constantly
primed for violence. Francis was never far from his pack of dogs, and therefore
neither was Leif. He knew them each by how they were meant to be known, by both
the names they gave and their proclivities, and had found them all to be
exceptionally monstrous. While Leif had greed to fulfill his exquisite tastes,
Dr. Francis Aguiyi had greed to amass and command an army, one that he saw a
great and powerful opportunity in acquiring through Leif’s rising status as a
reluctant leader of the order. The spectacle of Leif Valstad, the living dead
embodiment of the mysticism that the order had been founded on in centuries
past, had been fully exaggerated to the success of securing himself as a
respected symbol of what the Marceau regime was fatally lacking.
Francis drew his clouded eyes to him, the thick cracked leather of his mouth
pulling into a smile beneath his ashen beard. They had all but won, but Leif
had gained nothing, and he suspected that he would gain nothing still. He
looked back to their path, to the long Turkish rug that ran like a cluttered
river up to the large ornate doors of Mrs. Marceau’s office, and swallowed the
venom rising in his throat.
 
 
Vidar sat across from Maier at his kitchen table in a bizarre replay of his
waking nightmare, the hallucination now seeming to him as a premonition of this
moment as the agent rifled through the hard leather of his courier bag. In the
corners of his vision, he thought he could see the thick splatters of blood
coating the counters and walls behind him, but everything was as clean as he
had left it when the paramedics had arrived early that morning. He tried not to
notice how Maier seemed to know the layout of his flat when he headed
immediately into the kitchen upon escorting him through the door, but he
couldn’t shut off his squirming mind to spare him the uneasiness that
observation brought. Even under the bright lights of the kitchen, Maier’s eyes
did not reflect any shine or color, the flat and lifeless quality in them
driving Vidar to focus his stare on his cheek or chin as he had so often
noticed Simone chose to look at people. The stray thought of her pulled at the
wild mess of emotions he carried just below what stilted composure he could
craft around the agent. The instinct to not let this man see him be vulnerable
was irrationally present. Injured, insane and exhausted, there was no hiding
how obviously vulnerable he was, but the instinct to conceal it was nearly
involuntary. He sat up a little straighter when Maier slid a thick manila
folder to him.
“I’m sure you’re wondering why I’m here in Norway,” Maier said, folding his
hands on the table and smiling his empty smile, “and I’m sure you’ve guessed
that it is in relation to Ms. Valstad’s disappearance. Before you open that
folder, I should tell you this: nothing we discuss here leaves this room. That
includes my own discretion on these topics, but that discretion is limited to
how far you are willing to cooperate. Please keep that in mind throughout this
interview.”
Vidar’s fingers were numb but thankfully steady as he opened the file, finding
the top page of the documents to be a photograph of him entering Anders’ house,
his black bag in his hand and his back to the camera. The next photo was a
grainy but undeniable shot of him walking down the hall, the high angle and
quality like a still from security footage. That steadiness in his fingers
vanished and a wave of dread crashed over him at this realization, his dread
growing into horror that beaded sweat along his brow at the next picture.
Anders’ bedroom, both him and his brother seated on the bed at either side of
Simone, that same angle from above and quality of a video still. He flipped
through the next photo, then the next and the next, seeing and remembering how
they had molested and assaulted the bound girl between them. Anders with one
hand at her throat and the other tucked between her legs, his own hands
torturing her breasts. The recognizable stem of the riding crop in his hand as
he steadied her to straddle over Anders’ lap, her head tilted back and mouth
open in a cry of pain. Simone’s body, bent and bare but for the cuffs and
chains that tied her arms behind her, seemed so small between them.
There was no excuse, no denial, no explanation he could give to any of what was
so clearly displayed in each of those grainy photographs. Caught between the
file and Maier’s patient stare, his hands still folded so politely in the
peripheral of his vision, Vidar was far too full of the grief of the past to
make room for the grief awaiting him in the agent’s intent. His mind could not
carry both this proof of what he had done and what it meant to have it bared to
him by a man of the law, so he continued looking at the photos. The sight of
their slave being used by her masters as she was intended to be used produced a
savage pleasure that ran parallel to his shame, riding above it like a banner
marking the monster he had become. Even faced with imprisonment and
ostracization, he wouldn’t take any of it back if he could. There was no
remorse in what he had so thoroughly enjoyed and yearned to enjoy again. His
fingertips traced the fuzzy image of her laid out between them after they had
used her, his pale arm slung around her to keep her from trying to escape, and
he felt a strong possessiveness rise to swallow his guilt. A little room to
consider the man sitting across from him was made in the wake of this
possessiveness.
“What is this?” he asked, sharp under the indignation from this violation of
his privacy. “An arrest? Blackmail? What do you want from me?”
“This is an interview,” Maier answered as blithely as his flat tone allowed,
“and what I want from you is full cooperation for what little I will ask of
you. You recall Anders Valstad confessing the conditions that brought Ms.
Valstad home with him?”
Vidar didn’t answer. He didn’t know much other than the brief explanation that
reserving her in servitude to the maniacs who held Leif captive was what it
took to have Simone pulled out of the US so quickly and easily. He knew enough
to know that he should absolutely not answer that question, especially not to
the FBI.
Maier ignored his unresponsiveness and continued, “That knowledge already
involves you in the deal, but instead of neutralizing the threat your knowledge
poses to my plans, I would instead like to extend an amendment to that deal by
involving you further. Anders Valstad’s failure of discretion can also go
without penalty, pending your agreement.”
The nervousness and dread that Vidar felt in the presence of an FBI agent that
held incriminating evidence on him was nothing compared to the hateful revile
of being in the presence of one of them. There was no mistaking the wording as
a mistake of a non-native speaker. There was also no mistaking the threat woven
into this charade of an offer; if he refused, it would almost definitely result
in not only his death, but that of his younger brother’s as well. He tried not
to let his hostility show as he closed the file and slid it back towards Maier.
“Alright,” he said. “I’m listening.”
“It’s such a refreshing change of pace to employ discussion towards resolution
of such volatile matters,” Maier said, that reptilian smile spreading into a
hollow grin. He took the file back into his bag, replacing it with an identical
one and sliding it forward, keeping his hand atop it as he said, “As a primer
to the exact nature and details of the amendment, I feel it is necessary to
reveal the bigger picture. Examine these photos at your pace and I will attempt
to provide an adequate summary of their history and relevance.”
Maier pulled his hand away to resume his polite posture and Vidar, with no
small amount of apprehension, opened the file. A copy of an old film photo of
his father, uncle and oldest brother laid atop the small stack, all of them
much younger and surrounded by a dozen limp and lethargic people lounging and
posed in odd ways. It took him a moment to realize that Einar, Bjørn, and Leif
were the only people alive in the photo.
“Oh, good! You’re shocked!” Maier interrupted the confusion clogging the horror
erupting from this realization. “That simplifies things. As you may have
perhaps inferred, the late Mr. Valstads also partook in the hunt. They were, in
fact, responsible for training and passing on the tradition to the young Leif
Valstad, a tradition that spans back several generations in your bloodline and
one that Mr. Valstad intends to continue. Fun fact: Ms. Valstad was the one who
just recently uncovered that photograph and brought the FBI’s attention to the
past crimes of your family. They will eventually be investigating your family’s
farm through the legal attaché in Norway and they will find evidence of murders
dating back several decades before your father and uncle were even born.”
Vidar’s mind lurched through the mire of everything this implied, stress
causing the pounding in his head to deepen and compelling him to bring the
photo closer. It didn’t seem doctored. He didn’t suspect it was but hoped for
it and swallowed his despair when he found no indication of it. There was a
horrible sense to all this that shattered his image of his father, a man he had
harbored no special affection toward by his physical and emotional distance
from his sons. The ancient envy he held against Leif for being chosen to live
with Einar transformed into a brief pity for him before devolving into an
admittedly petty sense of vengeance. Leif was chosen but being chosen was not
the privilege he and his brothers had always been resentful of. He looked at
young Leif’s haunted, terrified gray eyes and couldn’t imagine seeing even a
glimmer of that same fear in them now. The past was only as relevant as how it
affected the present. There was nothing that was done to this boy that could
excuse the heinous crimes he would come to commit. That his hatred toward his
brother was prioritized above the disturbing reconstruction of his own father
as a murderer was perhaps a sign of his own declining mental health, but he
already knew he was no longer quite sane.
His mind lobbed a memory linked to the fun fact Maier so glibly supplied,
reminding him of Simone’s strangely emphatic request that he tell her about his
father and uncle. He’d dismissed it as a silly curiosity that her insanity had
blown to outstanding proportions, but in light of this new information, he
reconsidered his perception of the girl. He wondered what kind of person would
pursue such dreadful knowledge instead of repelling from it. He wondered again,
as he had since watching her level the handgun between Edward Kyun’s eyes, if
it was perhaps not insanity that accounted for much of the mystery in her
motivations. A new guilt sprouted out of this, a guilt of squandered chances.
If he had bothered to see their slave as something more than a broken, insane
invalid, so much could have gone differently. He would have seen the abuse Leif
had enacted on her instead of letting him pull the wool over their eyes, at the
very least. Of course, if she had reached out to him instead of falling under
Anders’ unwitting manipulation, he would have probably just fucked her too. He
never was a good person. He put the photograph down and laid his forehead in
his hand, willing the pounding to lessen.
“So, what am I supposed to do with this?” he asked, quiet in the presence of
his headache. “Am I supposed to apologize for being born from this madness? Am
I guilty by relation? What is the point to this?”
Maier’s blank eyes twitched to focus on him now, the dense vacuum of his
emotionless stare reminding him of how dangerous this was as the agent
responded, “The point is that you learn so that you can more effectively
discourage the development of deviant behaviors in her. Anders performed well
enough in retaining her, but he was promoting traits that would be deemed
unfavorable by Leif Valstad. You did well to disrupt his efforts and revert her
to a state that is conducive to her role. I want you to be her handler once
she’s been recovered.”
“You’re mistaken— I’m not…” Vidar paused, needing to say this aloud but having
to work past his reluctance to admit it to this outsider. After a moment, he
whispered, “I wasn’t training her for any purpose but to better serve my
brothers and myself.”
“Precisely,” Maier responded. “She’s been conditioned to respond to her father
with devout piety and submission. Whether intentional or not, that conditioning
extended to all of you as well, so you were correct in your assessment and
treatment of her as a sexual subordinate. You are all equally as hereditarily
predisposed to these sexual dynamics with your female descendant, therefore I
agree that you all have the equal right to bond with her as mates.”
“Wait. You think I was fucking her because I’m ‘hereditarily predisposed’?”
Vidar asked. “That’s got to be-”
“I do confess that I may be conflating correlation with causation,” Maier
interrupted. “However, given your family history, the evidence toward that
conclusion is rather uncanny. The Valstad line very rarely produced female
offspring, but when it did occur… Let’s just say, the family tree did not
branch out far in those generations. You are certainly not displaying a
necessarily deviant behavior in your desire to copulate with your brother’s
female offspring. I had figured incest was a cultural trait and maybe it is,
given how pervasive familial culture can be psychologically integrated within
an individual, but there’s a certain romance to it being hereditary, don’t you
think?”
The temptation to anguish over being the product of incest nearly distracted
him from defensively stammering out, “I’m not like that! I don’t… That’s
disgusting!”
Maier’s thin lips stretched once more into that reptilian grin. “What was it
that you accused Anders Valstad of before pressuring him into sexual
intercourse with you and Ms. Valstad? ‘Repression for your puritan peace of
mind’? Come now, let’s not be obtuse. This is, was, and will be a family
matter.”
“What do you want me to do, exactly?” Vidar nearly snapped, desperate to change
the subject before the nausea in his twisting gut wrung too tightly. “If you
want me to train her into subservience, I’ll fuck her until her only will is
the will to serve, but don’t, don’t try to tell me I’m anything like him.”
“Well, so long as that is what you are willing to do, then I will refrain from
further criticizing your motivations toward doing it,” Maier conceded. He rose
from his chair and pulled the file away, placing it in is bag and rifling
through it as he continued, “Thank you for your time, Vidar Valstad. I am aware
that you are as eager as I am to recover your niece, so please rest assured
that I am doing everything possible to find her. I am also aware that you are
quite fatigued, so it would perhaps be prudent to consider adjourning this
topic for today. This will not be our last meeting.”
 
 
Henrik had to do something about the corpse in his kitchen and the man in the
trunk. Regardless of the peril of his mind or the panic of what he had done, he
had to do something. The warmth and soothing touch of his niece holding him on
the sofa was a balm on the calamity of this crisis, but he would have to leave
the calm she shushed and stroked into him so compassionately. His face buried
in the uninjured crook of her neck, her meager weight across his lap, it was
almost surprising how well they could fit together, how natural touch came to
them when he hadn’t the mind to fear its consequences. Huddled together as
animals would seek reassurance from their pack, the distance that their
language barrier maintained was closed in this nonverbal communication. From
the firm insistence she had used to drag him into the bathroom and wipe the
blood from him to the timid coaxing she had led him into her arms, the racing
madness had slowed its spinning until he could breathe again. What foreign
words she spoke were not with the expectation to be understood, but only the
intention to soothe with gentle tones.
The tactile sweetness of her soft body and smooth skin seemed limitless once he
had begun to return her caresses. That his hands, the same hands that had so
brutally crushed a man to death, could still be able to touch something so
fragile as her without so much as bruising her was a solace that broke him down
to tears. Stroking the length of her side, his hands following the dip of her
waist and the flare of her hip, he savored the feel of her chest slowly
depressing against him as the warm stream of her sigh brushed past his ear. His
scalp tingled as she ran her fingers through his hair and his muscles melted
under the slow rub of her hand along his neck.
As he absently kneaded the crest of her hip and traced his thumb along the
ridge of her pelvic bone, she whispered and sighed, “Ah, that- that’s nice… oh-
h…”
His mind had calmed to the point that he did not fear each thought that floated
into it, slowly returning reason to him until he could allow himself to think.
Not about what he’d done, not yet, maybe not ever. But this slow exchange of
comfort had seemed safe to think on until the delicate waver in her voice
snagged and dragged up an awareness that had eluded him until now. He shoved it
down, needing this for just a while longer. He didn’t want to think about what
they were doing or the position they were in. He didn’t want her lack of
clothes to bare anything more than simply unrestricted touch; this could still
be purely for comfort if he didn’t acknowledge what else it could be. He
nuzzled deeper against her neck, inhaling her scent and enjoying the pleasant
warmth he found it stirred in him.
He could recognize this sensation as the release of oxytocin and dopamine, a
natural hormonal response to welcomed intimate touch, but one that flooded him
into a deeper calm with the accompaniment of her scent. What feature of
evolutionary biology made the scent of this girl elicit activation in his
reward-related cerebral functions was beyond him to suppose, but the reaction
was palpable. As she returned his nuzzle with a kiss atop his head, her mouth
lingering there to breathe against his scalp in a way that made him relax into
a boneless heap, he suspected that this scent reaction was mutual. Through the
pleasant fog it produced in his mind, he found it easy to accept that they were
still animals despite the pretensions of their humanity. Whatever the cause or
function, he hugged her tighter and let the touch and scent of her fill him
with that intoxicating warmth.
“This doesn’t have to change who you are,” she murmured, her softly spoken
words puffing out more warm little breaths against his scalp. He slid his hand
back up the smooth expanse of her thigh, listening to the sound of her voice
and not the content of her speech. They could talk later. “It’s not your fault.
You didn’t have a choice, right? It’s nobody’s fault if it had to be done.
We’re alive and we’re… we’re gonna be okay… one day. Right? We’re going to be
just fine. You did what you had to do and now you have to live with it, but
you’re alive… I’m sorry, Henrik. I wish this was easier. I’m sorry this
happened. I’m going to try harder to make sure you never have to go through
this again. I promise. I promise, I promise, I promise.”
 
 
“You promised,” Leif said, tutting Mrs. Marceau with a disappointed shake of
his head. He spoke in the English he was most comfortable with, having grown
weary of the demand French had stretched his vocabulary and no longer feeling
so polite as to use it. Rudeness was something he abhorred almost as much as
frivolous acquisition, but his patience with her had been worn down low enough
to begin scraping away at his well-mannered poise. “What good is your word if
you can’t keep it?”
“I had merely entertained the idea of extending you the privilege of visitation
with your daughter,” she replied coolly, that stony visage hardening further to
contain the fear that trembled beneath it. “You have been afforded many
privileges here. I recommend you do not continue to test them by making
demands.”
“Doubling down on a bad bluff is a bold move for someone with so much to lose,”
he said. He smirked at the guns held ready in the guards’ hands; no mere
neuromuscular incapacitation by taser darts for him tonight. The stakes had
been raised to lethal standards and not by him for once.
Her hazel eyes, nearly as dark as swamp water in the low light of the single
lamp that enshrouded anything beyond the desk in shadow, narrowed almost
imperceptibly as she said, “I had you rescued from a trial that would have
undoubtedly put you on death row. I had your execution revoked with the
council. I have given you freedom to the entirety of these grounds, audience
with our chief clients, participation in laying the groundwork for the success
that will be the future of the order, and you have given me grief and demands.
I pray your perception may change before I provide you perspective on what I
could deny you.”
“Ah. Here is a prime example of why you have built your own failure,” Leif
grinned, leaning forward in the plush leather chair he’d been restricted to for
this meeting. “You think that by creating a shortage, you can create a demand
for you to supply and your potential buyers will pay your inflated price. You
think that by creating need or debt in me, I will pay you with my loyalty and
obedience. You think I am unreasonable to not be grateful to you, but I can’t
be grateful to a thief who has robbed me of my freedom, my family, my time and
tried to sell it back to me in pieces. The truth that we both know is that you
need me more than I need you, if not because your ‘leadership’ would not exist
without the illusion of my support then by the simple math that I have no need
of you at all. Not only am I unmotivated to pay your price, but now you have
lost the one thing I was interested in buying back from what you have stolen.”
Mrs. Marceau glowered within her shell. The hard set of her jaw was the most
emotion Leif had seen her display since she had slapped him and he hoped she
would try again. It would be the last thing her hand would ever do if she were
impulsive enough to try.
Unfortunately, impulsivity was not among the many shortcomings the woman
possessed as she mustered all the fake calm she could in her words. “You are in
no position to speak so brazenly to me. I hold over half our numbers under my
command and my need of you is not so great as to tolerate such insubordination
any further. You will cooperate to earn your privileges, or you will no longer
receive them.”
“You really believe that? Any of it?” he asked. “I’m afraid the only person who
has succumbed to your attempted manipulation is you, madame. You thought you
needed my loyalty to obtain theirs, but all this charade has proven is that
they are fully willing to follow me, even if it is toward something as foolish
as following you. The irony here is that it was entirely your own doing!”
“You will be restricted to your quarters once more, stripped down to a true
prisoner’s rights,” she warned.
“This regime you believe you have won was doomed to failure by the very
framework with which it was designed,” he continued, heedless of her threats.
“You sought to run this cult as a business, but they aren’t motivated by profit
margins and bloodless board room successes. You can’t acquire their loyalty as
a resource and that is why you have failed. You’re not a leader, Mrs. Marceau.
You’re just a capitalist.”
She addressed the guards with a flippant gesture as she ordered, “Lock him up.
Take everything but the mattress. Clothes, books, bedding, everything.”
Leif’s smirk sharpened at the stillness that remained in the room. Mrs. Marceau
waited for her guards to respond to her command and, as the seconds ticked by
in silence, that hardened shell of her composure began to crack and crumble. He
rose slowly, smoothing down the jacket of the dark business suit she’d had him
wear to appear more human before the stakeholders earlier that day, and she
stared up at him with panic and hatred rising under her thinning control.
He smiled at her a moment longer, gloating in the meaning of this moment they
both understood, before nodding to one of the guards and cheerfully saying to
him, “Rupert, would you be so kind as to escort me back to my quarters? I
believe I’m done here.”
 
 
Henrik’s jacket, heavy with blood, engulfed Simone’s much smaller frame
ridiculously, but its dark and muted color did well to hide her among the
shadows of the bush she ducked in. She was glad her instinct to not let him
venture out alone again proved to be correct as she watched him deliberate and
dread with his large hands spread over the trunk of the car parked on the
street. The periodic banging from within that trunk could only be either
another victim of the attempted kidnapper or the kidnapper’s partner. Seeing
how her uncle’s powerful shoulders bunched and tensed in shuddering panic as he
hesitated for several minutes at the car, she confirmed it to be the latter.
The knife gripped tightly in her hand, its gleam hidden under the heavy jacket,
reassured her that what she had to do was right.
At last, Henrik retreated up the steps into his home, having failed to muster
the will to the task as she had hoped, and she crept quickly from hiding. When
he would come to realize her absence, there would not be much time to do what
must be done and she did not want to risk him coming back outside before she
was finished. The knocking resumed as she stepped up behind the long black car.
Bang, bang, bang. Her fingers shook, as they always did these days, while she
searched for a button or latch. Bang, bang, bang. A sharp pang of fear seemed
to stop her heart when her fingers caught on the latch.
“Make him quiet,” she whispered to herself as she willed her hand to squeeze
that latch. “Make him still.”
The lid flew open as soon as the latch pulled at the release, the sudden motion
being met with one of her own as her hand shot out from the fold of the jacket.
Every muscle in her body was alive and acted without thought, obeying a will
not entirely her own as she pushed forward before even seeing the wide
expression of surprise on the huddled man’s face. The white of his eyes
startled her back into the moment and she looked down to the knife handle
pressed against him, just below his solar plexus.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, breathless. Her heart thundered in the wild chaos
of terror, so loud and strong that she felt as though the air around her
bounced in time with her racing pulse. He was as frozen in panic as she was,
but she was able to move first. The grunt he made when she jerked the kitchen
knife out of him was guttural and frightened, a sound that she knew would haunt
her for the rest of her life, however short that would likely be. Blood flooded
out from the deep slit she had to stab into him in order to reach and sever his
aorta, the high arterial pressure sending out an astonishing amount of blood
that would usher him into unconsciousness in a few seconds and certain death in
a few minutes.
“I’m sorry you have to die.”
***** Chapter 61 *****
Anders downed the painkillers with a swig straight from the mostly emptied
bottle of scotch, not really needing them, but needing a stronger form of
intoxication than alcohol could provide. The dogs scattered in a cacophony of
claws tapping and scraping on the floor as he stumbled when he tried to walk
and a laugh coughed out of him as he grabbed the wall. Maybe his body didn’t
need the extra kick of narcotics, but his mind certainly did. He wiped the
wetness of sweat and tears from his numb face and chuckled between his sobs as
he slid along the wall into his living room. Truth be told, his skull fracture
had fully healed by the six-week mark and all the ways he had been sliced and
diced had closed into fresh pink grooves of flesh that would harden into the
white lines of scar tissue he’d carry for the rest of his life. Physical pain
had left him, leaving only the invisible wounds that might never heal on his
heart and mind. This day marked two months since Simone had gone from his life.
The first week had been a smear of anguish and self-loathing, but he had held
such bright hope that she would come back. His thirtieth birthday had come and
gone as a desperate blip along the blur of that second week; a bitter day where
his hope burned searing hot until he drowned his senses in drink. Then it had
been a full month and he began to truly hate the hope that niggled him like a
burr stuck in his sock, its presence made known only by the pain it created.
Worse than the hope were the moments and full nights where he lied awake
without it.
He knew what everyone else had thought. Pretty girl like that, in the spotlight
of murder fanatics and perverted sickos, there were a thousand ways she was
raped and killed and locked up in some dingy basement in an unsuspecting suburb
somewhere. He’d cussed out every trash reporter and tabloid slimeball who
wanted to interview him, not being shy or subtle about how they were the ones
who had put her in that spotlight. It felt good to blame someone other than
himself, even if he didn’t really believe his own screaming accusations. Simone
was already declared dead in the eyes of everyone else. Everyone but him and
sometimes Vidar, when he would come over and make sure he was still breathing.
Like right now, as the dogs heralded his brother’s arrival in a chorus of happy
yipping and yapping that came blessedly muffled to Anders’ ears. Or rather,
ear, with the scarred one not hearing as well as it used to.
“Suicide watch!” Vidar announced, carrying the aroma of meat with him. “Anyone
call for a professional noose-fitter around here?”
“How much do you charge?” Anders responded, sitting up from his splayed
position on the couch.
“Depends. How much you got left in that bottle?” he asked. Anders held up the
meager slosh of scotch, earning him a chiding tut from the older man. “Sorry,
sonny, looks like you’ll have to kill yourself with an unfitted noose today.”
Anders managed a laugh that didn’t tug the invisible wound inside him. He
watched as his brother stepped over the back of the couch, sat down next to
him, and placed a pizza box on the coffee table.
“It isn’t even noon yet. Aren’t you supposed to be at work?” he asked as Vidar
shoved a slice of sausage pizza at him.
“I’m playing hooky,” he answered, turning on the television. “I figured you’d
call in sick today too, so here we are.” He gestured to the television with his
slice and said through a mouthful of pizza, “Have you been keeping up with the
shit happening in the Democratic Republic of the Congo? Those crazy Ouroboros
sons of bitches are claiming takeover of the country and demanding it be called
Zaïre again. And now China of all places wants to start sending in troops to
smoke them out! Maybe I should mind my own business, but isn’t China pretty far
away from Africa?”
Anders tried to focus his blurring vision on the television, able to discern
the hauntingly familiar symbol the Ouroboros terrorist group had adapted as
both moniker and flag. He avoided the news just to avoid seeing that serpent
circling into itself to devour its own tail, each time only reminded of that
same beast Simone had painted on the hotel mirror in Vermont. That was so long
ago now. Everything was becoming so long ago. The image on the screen blurred
further as tears welled in his eyes and began to spill down his unfeeling face.
“Reality has gotten unreal in the world lately,” Vidar continued as he handed
Anders a wad of napkins to dry his eyes. He never remarked or paid any notice
to the crying now. “It’s like our childhood cartoons are becoming real. Like
G.I. Joe, right? Ouroboros is like Cobra, but there’s no Joes to fight em so
they’re just taking over the world. Remember watching G.I. Joe at Pappa’s when
we were kids?”
“I think that show was before my time,” Anders slurred. “I’m not a dried up old
hag like you.”
“Yeah, eat shit,” Vidar sneered. “You hit thirty. It’s all graying pubes and
heartburn from here, littlest brother.”
“My pubes aren’t gray,” he muttered defensively.
“Enjoy that while it lasts.”
Anders frowned at his brother, his indignant glare lingering as he considered
him. Things had changed between them and within themselves, all of them. He’d
expected change to occur after everything they’d been through of course, but it
hadn’t headed in a way he could have expected. Two months ago, he would have
never thought Vidar would be sitting next to him on his couch, bringing pizza
on a whim and joking around about utter nonsense to keep him from drinking to
death alone. He also wouldn’t have predicted that Henrik would have become so
distant, almost resentful toward them. Vidar derailed his sluggish thoughts by
stealing the bottle out of his hand while he was so dazed and draining what was
left in three chugging gulps. That was fine. There was plenty more in the
cupboards.
 
 
“Have a good lunch, Henrik,” Martha smiled as he made his way across the
waiting room.
Henrik smiled back and waved at the receptionist, his good mood stretching his
grin wide and adding a bounce to his step. It seemed hard to be in a bad mood
these days. The sun was shining longer, summer was finally in full swing, and
his life had never felt so full and meaningful. Even grumpy little Dr. Brun
seemed less difficult these days; he was, in fact, rather glad he didn’t kill
him. Stepping out into a balmy late morning, grinning to find not a single
cloud in the sky, he jogged to his car. He didn’t want to waste a single
minute. His new apartment was close enough for him to walk to work, but driving
was still faster and he wanted to get the most out of every moment of these
lunch breaks. He ran to catch the elevator, crowding in next to a young woman
with a stroller, and hit the button for the sixth floor just as the doors shut.
“Beautiful weather today, right?” he grinned at the young mother.
She smiled and nodded politely, not seeming too open to elevator small talk. He
loomed over the stroller to look at the baby and caught the infant’s deep blue
eyes. A tiny pink-skinned newborn, its melanin still not yet developed enough
in its irises to reveal what color they would stay. He waggled his eyebrows at
the baby and chuckled at its blank stare before he caught himself. It seemed as
though every infant he’d come across lately drew his attention, so much so that
he’d heard more than a few comments on how his biological clock must be
ticking. He cleared his throat and straightened, embarrassed at this compulsive
baby-seeking behavior when he’d never even considered having children before.
Before what? he wondered. Before he had been so thoroughly confronted with the
limitations and inevitability of his own mortality, he supposed. Or perhaps it
was a biochemical response to being in such close and consistent proximity to a
pregnant girl. His good mood dampened a bit at the reminder. There was much he
had been selfishly avoiding and ignoring in regard to his niece, but that
particular problem was very soon going to become unavoidable. He was running
out of tomorrows to pass that uncomfortable talk onto and she was running out
of time for a medical abortion to remain an effective and safe option. Tonight,
he decided firmly. His eyes drew once more to the precious bundle in the
stroller before he could remind himself not to gawk.
He turned the deadbolt he had installed to lock from the outside before turning
his key in the hole below it, a feature he’d had a hard time explaining to the
landlord without outright saying he needed to keep someone locked inside. Once
inside, he relocked the reverse deadbolt with the key he always kept tied
around his neck before kicking off his shoes in the entry. Every day, the same
ritual, never failing to lock the reverse deadbolt.
“Simone?” he called out.
No response. He’d stopped expecting one by now. His socks muffled his steps on
the light wood flooring as he crept through the apartment, looking over the
sparse furniture of the living room and into the open kitchen as he made his
way to the hall. Her sketchbook and charcoal pencils were on the new sheepskin
rug in the living room, exactly where he’d forbade her to use them. A short
sigh huffed out through his nose in mild irritation at how obstinate the girl
could sometimes be. He checked the storage closets, the cupboard below the
bathroom sink, then went and checked the cupboards in the kitchen just in case
before venturing into their shared bedroom. The small twin mattress he had
bought for her was propped up against the wall, completely unused but for the
one night he’d managed to keep her out of his bed.
He really should just get rid of it, but the idea of getting rid of the option
for her to sleep on her own left him with a bad feeling. Even if its function
was entirely symbolic, he needed that symbol to remain. Their dynamic was full
of symbolic gestures, barriers, items and ideas to help them maintain some form
of normalcy and sanity to their abnormal and insane circumstance. The unused
bed, the pillow tucked between them at night, the thin barrier of cloth to
cover where hands could never roam. All so functionally useless but entirely
necessary, at least for his peace of mind. He stared down at the mess of their
bedding –their bedding, the automatic thought happening upon him with a
nauseating twist in his gut— and touched the smooth ivory satin of her short
nightgown folded on her side of the bed. He didn’t hear her step out from
behind the door wedged against the wall, nor detect her silent movements until
she leapt onto his back.
“FUCK!” he shouted, her sneak attack knocking him face-down onto the bed. He
grunted as she wrenched his arm behind him and dug her knee into the center of
his spine. “Simone, stop now! Bad girl!”
“Say uncle, uncle!” she demanded.
The laughter ringing in her voice reassured him that this was only play and not
one of her fearsome flashbacks, but that reassurance only went so far as he
still bore the bite marks on his forearm from her last episode. Using the raw
force of his ample strength, he pulled himself up to his knees, causing her to
wrap her legs around his middle and grab onto his shoulders to stay on his
back.
“Get off me, you little monkey!” he grinned, trying to put some growl in his
words to threaten her, but she only clung tighter.
“If you can’t say it in English, you can’t blame me for not obeying!” she
teased.
Her bare heels dug into his abdomen as he tried to shake her off gently, but
she only relented when he scraped enough English together to say, “Simone, let
go now!”
She slid off him bonelessly and rolled onto the bed, the infectious sound of
her laughter cracking his attempt to frown disapprovingly at her until he
scooped her up in a bear hug and laughed along with her. It seemed he wasn’t
the only one in a good mood that day.
 
 
Leif could register the sting of the soap rubbing into the split skin over her
throbbing knuckles enough to be aware of the pain, but he didn’t mind pain. He
did, however, mind the splatter of blood decorating his new dress shirt. With a
heavy sigh, he took off the shirt and stood only in his pants and shoes as he
ran the stain under cold water.
“Old Scratch,” one of Francis’ men, Veracruz, an ex-mercenary aptly named thus
due to his originally being from Veracruz, greeted him by the nickname they’d
taken to calling him. “That guy you was beating on died. You find out about
your little girl?”
“We’ll see. This one actually had some information that might lead us
somewhere,” Leif answered. He rubbed at the stubborn stain with the pad of his
thumb, careful not to fray the weave of the fibers. “Which means his friends
were withholding information after all. Gather them into the courtyard. I would
like to peel them and toss their faces to the fish.”
“Yes, sir. But… the fish is all gone.”
Leif’s scrubbing stopped. He lifted his gaze to Veracruz’s intricately branded
face, the pierce of his steel glare freezing the ex-merc in the reflexive
terror at being the target of his full attention.
“How do you mean?” Leif asked, unable to control how his voice dipped low and
scraped over his vocal chords like gravel. He had grown out of practice at
maintaining his false voice to the point that now he reverted to his natural
dark pitch at the slightest distraction.
He could see the man’s throat bob as he swallowed nervously and repeated, “The
fish is all gone. They dead. Ah… You know, the servants, they not around no
more. So… the fish dead now.”
That did, unfortunately, make sense. The purging of any outsiders from the
estate had thrown domestic upkeep of the vast grounds into brief disarray. In
Francis’ eagerness to rid the new organization of anyone not fully sworn and
aligned to them, they had yet to account for the fact that the most loyal
hunters were not often the best housekeepers. Apparently, there was also not an
adequate aquarist among the assassins, guerilla soldiers, blood cultists,
triggermen, and murderous zealots that had fit Dr. Aguiyi’s standards in the
unification of the crumbled organization under the new Ouroboros regime. Leif
freed Veracruz from the pin of his stare and shook out the soaked garment,
leaving it draped over the edge of the sink as he walked past the fright-
stiffened ex-merc. He stepped briskly through the kitchen, the large stainless
steel and laminate room slowly returning to the immaculate order it had been
when he’d first decided on maintaining it as his preferred interrogation arena,
and continued through the vast Venetian hallways and corridors that comprised
the main Marceau manor. The sharp clack of his shoes echoed off the marble
where the bloodstained rugs had been removed and bounced off the gunshot-marred
walls. Not much killing had been necessitated, but Francis’ men had been
chomping at the bit to taste violence for weeks at that point and, frankly, so
had Leif. The smell of cigar smoke led him to Francis poring over a marked map
and dozens of photographs spread out on a wide coffee table in the drawing
room.
The two men next to the doctor, men Leif recognized as the chief tacticians in
the Zaïre effort, stood immediately upon his entry, their eyes not hiding the
terror they felt in Leif’s presence while Francis didn’t raise his concentrated
stare from the map to ask, “How’d it go this time, my friend?”
“Better,” Leif answered. He wiped his bleeding knuckles on his bare chest
before they could dribble onto the rug, smearing bright crimson across his pale
skin and fair body hair. “I apologize- I was not aware you were currently
strategizing. I’ll find you later, doctor.”
Francis rubbed his leathery hand over the ouroboros mandala tattoo covering his
scalp and sighed, “If you hope to catch me when I’m not strategizing, then you
will catch me when I am dead. Please, let us discuss what is on your mind.”
“Very well,” Leif replied, then approached the men, nodding to the tacticians
in greeting as he sat across from Francis. The tacticians nodded back, lower,
nearly a formal bow in their anxiousness not to incur his displeasure. He
disregarded the minor distaste of such sycophancy to address his companion in a
grave regard, “I have just received news that we have neglected the koi to
obliteration.”
Francis lifted his head, the deep cracks of his weathered face expanding and
twisting in bewilderment until his clouded eyes widened in realization. “Oh,
drat and damnation, you’re talking about the pond! By God, I’d completely
forgotten about them! Well, this is terrible!”
“I know,” Leif nodded somberly. He wrung his hands, spreading blood over them
as he allowed Francis a moment to process the grief of their oversight. The
tacticians glanced back and forth between them in confusion and alarm at the
sight of these powerful and fearsome men become so abruptly affected. When the
doctor seemed to recover with a frustrated slam of his fist on the coffee
table, he diverted, “It seems the media broke on Zaïre. Economists followed the
hole right through mining shareholders’ pockets and blew the lid off the entire
coup, now both the UK and China are scrambling for international arbitration.”
“They’re going to want to set up a provisional government for that to be at all
effective,” Francis grinned slyly, tapping ash from his cigar onto the DRC
president’s picture, right at the crux of the X marked over his face. “Stick a
pig in his bottom line and he’ll squeal every time.”
“Ouroboros is everywhere and everyone at the moment. The entire western coast
is lighting up with militants claiming credit and carving snakes into their
skins,” Leif smiled, preening his comrade’s pride. It worked briefly, soothing
the doctor’s consternation, but then his heavy brow and the shadowed cut of his
mouth fell in morose regret. Leif deliberated his next thought for only a
moment. “Frank… I’d like to propose a revival of the fish fountain. We may
employ an aquarist to train a few fledgling initiates how to go about the
process, if you would agree to it.”
“I don’t know. We’d likely need to have the aquarist at least inspect the
fountain if not oversee the process, and we mustn’t permit outsiders access to
this sanctum… But they were such lovely fish,” Francis frowned, shaking his
head. He leaned back against the tufted leather couch with a deep sigh, regret
weighing heavily on him. The tacticians, upon realizing that the meeting over
the fate of their home country had indeed been interrupted to mourn a fish
pond, glanced to each other to confirm the ridiculousness of this suspicion.
Neither Leif nor Francis paid any mind to them, focusing the entirety of their
attention to the task at hand. “Very well. I cannot endure this failure. Self-
sufficiency is a winding path of million small steps and Ouroboros did not
spring forth fully formed from the forehead of Zeus. Some outside assistance is
inevitable.”
“I will procure the resources and ensure that our secrecy is not compromised,”
Leif assured him.
“No, no, no,” the doctor grumbled, gesturing emphatically. “Delegate it to
Skinner. You’re already busy enough.”
“Skinner is presently rigging the election in Venezuela. Perhaps Face-Eater?
He’s adept at adhering to normative social standards when interacting with the
general public.”
“Face is a good choice,” Francis nodded. “Oh, you mentioned the inquiry went
well. Did you get something useful from that batch of dissenters?”
“Indeed. Two of their men failed to report back when they were sent to
interrogate my brother Henrik regarding Simone’s location,” Leif answered.
“Considering the amount of time that has passed since we’ve raised her bounty,
it can be reasonably assumed that they did not obtain her to collect the reward
for themselves.”
“So, the mystery is reduced to why they disappeared.”
“I have no doubt that they were killed. Their faction was one comprised of
loyalty. No deserters, no traitors. I’m very interested to find the person who
thought it best they fail that particular assignment,” Leif said. “Would you
pass this on to your man on the ground there?”
Francis smiled at Leif, the older man obviously impressed at that deductive
reasoning. “Of course. I’ll call it in immediately. Excuse me a moment,
gentlemen.”
The doctor pushed himself up from the plush couch, his tacticians left standing
befuddled and alone in the room with a shirtless and blood-smeared Leif
Valstad. In the absence of his comrade, he rapidly grew irritated with them.
“Would it kill you two to relax?” he sneered. “None of us have arrived here
without surviving the hardships endemic to this cause, but by god, don’t allow
that rigid sense of purpose and duty to trivialize the value of anything beyond
its practical use! You can’t quantify meaning in the same manner you can’t
quantify chaos. Sit down and start appreciating the moment. It’s all you’re
ever going to really have.”
The tacticians sat down immediately, their terror and stiffness irritating him
further. Exasperated, he got up and walked back to the kitchen, ignoring how
they both flinched at his sudden movement. Over the past couple months, his
patience had worn thin and his temper had found reason to flare where he knew
none existed in reality, but the ache of being apart from his beloved daughter
had unfortunately run deeper than he could have predicted. He had long dreaded
the thought of what his life would look like without her and the world was
indeed losing color and meaning. He had no fish to feed and admire, but he
still had faces to carve off. This was all the meaning he could muster until
she returned to his world, so he would carve and interrogate and murder while
he waited and hoped each new clue would lead him to her. When the time would
come that she returned to him, and it would come, he was going to ensure that
she never slipped away from him again.
 
 
“Have a good night, Henrik,” Martha smiled as he made his way through the
waiting room.
Henrik grinned and waved goodbye to the receptionist, eager to get home as soon
as possible. They had cleared their patient queue 45 minutes later than their
posted hours despite his best efforts to rush them through and he had done a
shoddy job setting up for the next day, but he was still somehow only at 15
minutes overtime. He’d gotten good at being less thorough at his job, something
he had promised he would never do once stepping out of hospital nursing and
into the much less hectic realm of clinic work. That stalwart ethic and
perfectionist drive seemed so naïve and myopic now that he had something
important in his life outside of work. Nonetheless, he reassured his pride that
not many nurses could do better than what he did with half the effort and in
half the time. The drive home was over before he knew it, no longer having to
wade through traffic to reach his twisting and turning block, and he caught the
elevator just before the doors shut, this time crowding in beside an elderly
couple.
“Beautiful weather today, right?” he smiled to them.
They smiled and nodded to him, the old woman piping up with her tiny voice,
“It’s a beautiful day for us because we’re visiting our first great
grandchild!”
“Congratulations! That’s wonderful!” Henrik grinned, his brassy baritone
filling the small space and prompting beaming grins from the proud great
grandparents.
He leaned back against the wall, trying not to appear obvious as he re-examined
them. They were elderly, but he didn’t think elderly enough to be great
grandparents. Then again, he didn’t exactly have a concept fully developed in
his mind for that role. None of the men in his paternal line had lived much
past 65 and his grandparents had met unfortunate ends when he was too young to
remember them. It occurred to him then that at his present age of 38, even if
he went out and got a woman pregnant that night, there was a good chance he
might not live to see his grandchildren, let alone great grandchildren. The
thought chilled him in a way he didn’t expect, throwing him into a troubling
mediation of regret on his life choices that he snapped out of when he nearly
walked all the way into his kitchen without relocking the deadbolt. As he
tucked the key back under his shirt collar, he felt the overwhelming need for a
drink. A constrictive slide around his middle startled him into flinching, the
fearful tension that electrified his frazzled mind relaxing when he heard
Simone’s giggle and looked down to see her brown arms hugging him from behind.
She was getting too good at being stealthy.
“Come, come, come eat!” she insisted impatiently, pulling him backward.
He stepped into her smaller stride, trying not to stumble as they made their
way to the small dining table where one of her culinary creations awaited them.
She sat perched on her the balls of her feet on her chair, her privilege to sit
any strange way she pleased being the only condition they could agree upon to
get her to sit at the table with him for meals, and bit into what appeared to
be chicken bones. The meat was separated and left on the platter between them.
At least it looked normal enough. He tried not to stare as she broke apart the
bones with her teeth and licked at the soft marrow within.
“Simone,” he began, ready to test out his English once more even if he was not
quite ready to broach the topic that had weighed so heavily on his mind these
past couple months. “We have need to talk.”
Her silver eyes shot up to him from her stack of bones and she asked eagerly,
“Can you take me outside this weekend? I want to feel sunlight. Grass would
feel nice, too. I won’t run this time, I promise!”
His mouth twisted into a frown as guilt sat heavily on this already weighty
task. “Maybe… We will talk later. Simone, I need for… Ah… Listen, yes? You are,
ah… pregnant.”
“I am… gravy’d?” she asked, her smooth brow furrowing in confusion. “I didn’t
make gravy. Are you not going to take me outside because I didn’t make gravy?”
“No, no, ah… one moment…” he grumbled as he pulled his phone out of his pocket
to search for the English word for pregnant. Upon seeing the dozen or so unread
texts from Camilla, however, he groaned and got up from the table. “Sorry,
excuse me.”
He felt Simone’s stare burning into his back as he left the dining nook to shut
himself in their bedroom and deal with his now ex-ex-girlfriend’s demands. He
knew he should have just delayed making the call, that he was being a coward in
hiding from this moment behind some superfluous excuse once more. One more day
wouldn’t hurt. Maybe he would wait until that weekend, until she was happy and
relaxed from a few hours out in some secluded wilderness where she could feel
the sun and the grass. Or maybe he just wanted to wait until it was too late
for her to choose what to do with the baby growing inside her.
***** Chapter 62 *****
Anders stood in the stifling silence of the attic room. He knew he shouldn’t be
up there, that he was only torturing himself by being in this space that was
supposed to be Simone’s own, but he had a reason beyond immolating himself in
the misery that it stoked. She wasn’t coming back. He had to accept that, and
part of accepting it was to stop holding a space open for her that she wouldn’t
want to fit into again even if she did turn up alive. He’d proven it to himself
and to her, time and time again, that he could not change the monstrosity of
his own nature any more than he could change the monstrosity of the world.
He sat on her bed, the one she had all too seldom used in the short time he’d
had her, and folded the clothes he had bought her before placing them in a
storage box. He started with the ones she hadn’t gotten the chance to wear,
knowing this would only get harder when he began to handle the ones that still
carried traces of her scent. He didn’t know it would be as hard as it was when
he found himself unable to move with the red dress gripped tight in his
clenching fists. She was so beautiful in it. He was trying his best to be good
to her back then, only to fail so thoroughly and so soon. He’d never deserved
to have her. He had to let her go. 
With her clothing put away, he moved onto the scarce few personal items she’d
had. Her hairbrush still had some of her long, wavy hairs clinging to the
bristles and he put it in the box before he did something useless and strange
with them. Anyone would think him mad had they seen the impulses he’d indulged
under grief’s influence, but he supposed he was a little mad now. He knew his
sanity and normalcy had become largely performative. As he picked up and
inhaled the scent on her pillow, he wondered if perhaps all sanity was a
learned performance. He peeled the case off the pillow and placed it in the
box. 
Standing from the bed to check the dresser drawers, he noticed the edge of a
strap sticking out from under it. He crouched down, a maneuver he still met
with an anticipation of pain that had since stopped accompanying it, and pulled
out a very expensive-looking camera, a wallet, and her sketchbook. A wave of
relief and wonder filled him as he opened her sketchbook; he’d thought it
completely lost. His heart raced with emotion and anticipation as he flipped
through the pages, delighting at the skillful and realistic depictions. The
drawing of him and his brothers exactly as they were as children, the
smørrebrød sandwich in Copenhagen, him and all his dogs crowding the hallway,
Rolf’s grinning face exactly as he looked when he expected a treat.
The drawings grew progressively stranger as they went on. A man’s head carved
open on his father’s kitchen counter, Bjørn photographing a body made of static
strapped to a chair, a very young Leif staring straight at the viewer as a
thick garden of poppies flourished from his opened and hollowed-out torso. He
nearly dropped the book at the haunting stare of his oldest brother and the
drops of rust that filled the petals of each poppy, not doubting that the
pigment was Simone’s own once-scarlet blood. With quick fingers, he flipped
through the pages to the last drawing she made: the ouroboros coiled within the
face of the watch she constantly wore, the arm wearing the watch still only the
geometric shapes and curved lines she began her figures with.
She never finished her last drawing. The weight of this fell heavy on him,
almost dragging him away from a memory dredged up at the sight of that watch
and the mythical symbol of the serpent. The last terrible day at his father’s
house, just before the FBI agents had knocked on the front door only to be
immediately gunned down, he’d taken the watch off her unconscious body to wind
it and popped the back of it off. He realized now that the symbol drawn there
was the ouroboros. The snapshot image of that symbol and the three sets of
numbers were as clear in the photo album of his memory as they were when he’d
held that little gold disc between his thumb and forefinger. In the relative
clarity of his mind outside of that chaotic moment, he was now also able to see
that the numbers were perhaps latitude, longitude, and what he immediately
recognized as the year their odd uncle Bjørn had died. He typed the numbers
into his phone while the memory was still freshly exhumed, his curiosity
further piqued when the map pulled up a territory in France.
It might have been all the head injuries he’d sustained these past few months,
but he couldn’t stop thinking these were all somehow connected. The drawings,
the ouroboros, Bjørn, Leif, Simone, and whatever was in Neuilly-sur-Seine,
France. He flipped through the sketchbook again, stopping at the drawing of the
man’s head on the kitchen counter. He knew that face. That was one of Leif’s
last known victims, the one who survived a few days in a coma after being
horribly burnt. Compelled by the hunch, he searched for that victim’s name,
pulling up a Hector Marceau of Neuilly-sur-Seine, France.
Anders sat back down heavily on the bed, overwhelmed by the sickening
confirmation that these connections were not just the delusions of a battered
brain. He’d rather just be insane, for now he had a responsibility to do
something with this information and he knew, with mounting dread, that this
rabbit hole would not lead him anywhere good.
 
 
The warmth of Henrik’s body heat that pressed to Simone’s back melted the ache
of loneliness and the magic of touch hummed and sparkled under his fingers to
dispel the fearsome calamity of anxiety from her mind. This was what she waited
for every day, what made the pain of being so alone bearable enough to wade
through, just to rest on the shore of this sweet comfort. Tonight, as they did
most nights, they started out spooning on the sofa as he watched television and
she pretended to watch it with him, the only difference being that the gin he
was well into drinking had made him a little bolder and clumsy. He stroked her
belly under her shirt in a caress that almost tickled and every so often the
bristle of his beard swept along the curve of her neck in a nuzzle, making her
stretch to offer more of her sensitive neck and purr out an appreciative hum.
The way he touched was always gentle and sweet, taking delight in the ways it
pleased her as much as the feel of her pleased him, an exchange she shared
equal part in as she caressed him in return. This was the contact she’d
constantly craved and rarely received without cost. There was no pain to pay
for this pleasure, no sex to torment her conscience. They were just two people
who enjoyed the comfort of each other’s touch.
“Denne jævla telefonen…” he slurred as he pulled his hand away from her to fish
out the phone that buzzed in his sweatpants pocket.
She turned and snuggled into his front as he typed a response to the text. It
was likely that woman who always texted him. Camilla, she had gathered, from
the pleading way he said it whenever the woman would call him and those
conversations would invariably end up in an argument. Henrik’s strong arms
hugged her to his bare chest and she nuzzled against the soft down of his body
hair as he texted. It was good that he had a life outside this apartment. He
deserved it. He could handle it. Just because she couldn’t didn’t mean he had
to limit himself. This was for her own good and his needs were different from
hers. He needed a woman and, no matter what her body demanded with the burning
heat of the sin that sizzled under his innocent touch, she couldn’t be that for
him.
You don’t believe any of that.
She ignored the voice and listened to his heartbeat speed up as she playfully
nipped the well-developed swell of his pectoral muscle, taking a bit of petty
vengeance in the way he giggled and squirmed. The scent of juniper from the gin
on his breath and sweat mingled well with the pine fragrances of his masculine
hygiene products, products that somehow smelled very different on her than they
did on him.
She wished she could fit more seamlessly into his space, but he seemed to want
to highlight their differences. The excessively girly skirts and dresses,
frills and bows and Peter Pan collars, floral prints in pretty pastels, all so
firmly feminine and innocent that she felt more like a doll than a woman when
she looked in the mirror. But that was what he wanted her to be. It irritated
her when she would allow herself to think on it. He would always be so much
bigger and stronger, his very maleness providing such an unfair advantage as he
built his muscles to these proportions she could never hope to achieve in her
thin little female body in this little apartment that held nothing to train
against but her own weight. She could sneak, she could surprise, she could even
subdue if she was lucky, but she could never win a fair fight against any of
them. When it came to raw strength, and it always had as they held her down and
did as they pleased with her, they would beat her every time. And he, this bear
of a man, so audacious with his unfair body, dressed her like a little girl and
did as he pleased.
Or does he dress you up like a little girl because he doesn’t want to think
about doing what would please him the most?
She bit down hard on Henrik’s chest in annoyance and he yelped as he jerked
away from her.
“Simone!” he scolded, his deep voice thundering with anger that struck fear
into her core like a cold knife stabbing through her middle. “Hva i
helvete?!Bad girl! Go to bed!”
Naughty, naughty child.
That reflexive fear was eaten by the savage feeling that constantly simmered
within her, a feeling she could only express through whatever boiled over her
shortening barrier of thought into impulse. Reaching up, she watched as his
eyes widened in surprise and felt the coarse hairs of his beard between her
fingers as she gripped the sides of his face. Frustration and confusion drove
her to lunge onto him, but she didn’t quite know what she was being driven to
do until she tasted the sharp bite of juniper berries. Sneak, surprise, subdue.
He grunted and tensed beneath her at first, then as she licked against his
slackened mouth, he melted softly under her kiss. She poured the poison of her
curse into him with a moan that drew his tongue to return her slow caress.
Despite all his strength, surrendering to her poisonous touch and a little gin
left him pliant and quivering. Tainting the last of her uncles didn’t hurt as
much as she’d imagined; he’d done most of it himself night after night, never
quite exceeding the boundaries he pushed, frustrating them both to this point.
“Simone… baby, do not… faen…” his strained pleads came in a jumble of
incoherence as she sucked at his neck. A streak of sweet, hot, powerful hatred
carried her to slide the crux of her need over his, the thin material of his
ratty sweatpants leaving little of his desire to mystery against the yet
thinner barrier of her panties. He gasped and winced beneath her as though in
pain, a pain she knew was entirely within the conflict of his body and mind as
he bowed his pelvis to meet her sway. “Don’t… don’t, baby… ah-h…”
“Were you expecting a medal for keeping me locked in here for so long without
using me?” she asked, her voice ragged with want and anger. He didn’t respond,
either unable to discern her English or too caught up in the way she rolled her
hips as she whispered the words into his neck, but she didn’t say it for him
anyway. “At least your brothers were honest. You’ve been making me live your
lie, but I don’t care about saving your conscience anymore. You punish me for
what you deny about yourself and I am done being everyone’s worst part of
themselves. I won’t be your dirty little secret. I am not going to live in the
shadow of anyone’s cowardice.”
His hands gripped her hips, his strong fingers digging into her sensitive flesh
as he tried to still her motions, but she was too flexible and undaunted by
discomfort. The heat of her need, so long ignored and repressed, flared at the
raw pain and dragged a whimper from her he mistook for one of agony. His cock
throbbed against her at the high, breathy sound even as he eased his stifling
grip.
“Baby… vi må stoppe før…” he slurred between panting breaths. “I can’t…”
She stopped his babbling with another kiss, sucking that familiar taste from
his tongue and reveling in the intoxicating fog that clouded and soothed them
both. The hands that were trying to still her reached under her skirt to knead
and grope the flesh of her ass and hips. He throbbed and moved under her, the
thrust of his thickness rucking her dampened panties inward until his worn
sweatpants were mostly sliding over smooth skin. Two months without sex when
she had come to crave it daily was a torture she had begun to think had cured
her of that sick need, but it had never gone away. Desperation to satisfy that
greedy sickness ate all reason until she was clawing at his waistband like an
animal.
“Simone, stop!” he exclaimed, grabbing her wrists and wrenching them away
before she could yank his sweatpants down.
“You fucking coward!” she hissed. His grip was strong enough to gnash the tiny
bones of her wrists together as she slid against his cock, pressing him hard
against her aching cleft. That consuming hatred loomed up from that primal
place in her, but not for him. No matter how much she knew she should, she
could never get that hatred to stick to any of them, so it floated aimlessly
until it could attach itself to things she was allowed to hate. Things like
herself. “Don’t you get it?! You can’t lock it away, you can’t cover it up, you
can’t ignore it because this is what I am for!”
Her eyes screwed shut and she yelped as he shoved her, the room spinning until
she blinked away the dizziness to find him looming above her. The unhinged
gleam in his glare as he bared his teeth so close to her face made her freeze,
but the harsh scrape of his nails at her thighs as he held them spread wide
apart kept that savage fury and need burning above her fear. He looked as
though he would tear her apart at the slightest incitement, a silent threat she
had no doubt was true from how his muscles tensed and bulged to lunge upon her.
She met his heated stare unflinchingly, riding on the crest of her savageness,
drawing from the seemingly bottomless well of strength it offered. As his
fingernails dragged slowly and painfully toward her center, she recognized that
same savageness in him. This was what they were, after all: monsters. A cruel
satisfaction startled her at the thought.
He must have seen something pass over her expression then, some shadow of guilt
or uncertainty, because as suddenly as he had toppled her, he stood from the
couch and left. She became aware of how her heart thundered all the way up into
her throat when the solitude closed in on her, but she had no time to lie there
trembling in shock at what had come so close to happening. Listening to ensure
he had locked himself in the other side of the apartment, she reached between
the couch cushions and pulled out the thin chain she had unlatched from his
neck, the key catching the light as it dangled from it.
His body becoming charred black and shriveled, the smell of his own burning
flesh thick in the air, how did he do this and not scream and writhe in pain?
“He chose not to,” she answered, gripping the key in her fist until the jagged
teeth of it bit into her palm.
It had been weeks since she’d last been outside and not having walls around her
or a ceiling above her made Simone dizzy and overwhelmed at how open it was.
She couldn’t look at the sky without feeling like she would fall into it,
making her cling to the sides of buildings and dash across street corners.
There were so many people out, so many eyes and lives reaching into her
thoughts all at once. She didn’t know where she was going, although it didn’t
entirely matter; she knew where she had to end up. Freedom was beautiful and
more tempting than it had ever been, but it was not for her. It was never for
her, never was and never going to be.
“Hey, you speak English?” she asked, getting the barista’s attention at the
café she’d ducked into. The young man looked up at her with shrewd eyes that
answered the question before he could employ whatever grasp he had on the
language to respond. “You have a phone I could use?”
“Ah…” he muttered, his squint shifting into something different, something more
focused. She wrapped her arms protectively around herself and shriveled under
his scrutiny. There was too much in his eyes that she didn’t ask for. In a
burst of recognition that startled her, he suddenly exclaimed, “Oh! You’re that
girl! Simone!”
“‘That girl’?” she parroted back. Alarm stirred her anxiety into a frenzy.
“Wha-what-what the f- What are you- No! No, I need to make a phone call!
Please! May I please use your phone?”
A couple sitting behind her spoke to each other, her name peppering their rapid
conversation, and a man to her left was already holding his phone up to take a
picture. Confusion blunted her mind, letting anger easily take the reigns of
reaction as her adrenaline shifted her flight response into fight. When her
heel connected with the photographer’s gut in a high side kick, she was
reminded of the times she had felt most free. Hitting the city nights with her
friends in search of anything to stave off the frustration and fear that
haunted their days, they’d only ever found trouble. Fun, whimsical, violent
trouble that they could create and enact on those who, in their broken minds,
deserved it more than they did.
But you deserved what happened to you.
These people might or might not deserve it, but that wasn’t on her mind as she
turned from the hunched and gasping photographer to upend the chatting couple’s
table, sending both them and their coffee mugs scattering. The barista fled
among them, leaving this man alone to suffer her wrath. What burned in her to
inflict this havoc was knowing that the mental illness that had connected her
to that band of derelicts and delinquents was a product manufactured by the one
man she was supposed to – and unfortunately did – trust above all others. Even
the bit of identity and connection she’d managed to weld together by embracing
her mental illness in that group was taken from her. As she stomped the downed
photographer over and over upon his rib cage, the vileness of her life occurred
to her as it often had when she allowed those thoughts to storm her. She could
never be free because there was no place in the world for the monster that was
emerging in her.
“Ms. Valstad.”
Simone looked up from the bloodied and shaking ball of the man she had been
tormenting into submission for several minutes now to see a figure in a plain
suit with a plastic clown mask covering his face, but she recognized that
professional tone immediately. The dreams and nightmares she’d had of this
moment could not have predicted the calm that washed over her now.
“Mr. Maier,” she returned his form of greeting as she stared into the shadowed
holes of that cheerful mask, knowing the eyes beneath them were just as empty.
The man under her groaned, gurgling something that might have been words as she
rose from sitting atop his curled back.
“I’ve been looking for you,” he said, then turned to the group of gawkers
watching through the café windows. “Many have, in fact. Would you care to
accompany me somewhere more private?”
 
 
The night was settling over the bright summer sky as Vidar drove far outside
the city until there was only a thick wall of trees on one side of the road and
the green expanse of farmlands opening the other. Too nervous and still too
drunk, he passed the dirt road he was supposed to turn onto and had to double
back. This was the first time that madman had ever called him out to meet him
anywhere but the privacy of his home and Vidar was almost sick with anxiety of
what it could be he wanted to show him all the way out in the heavily-wooded
middle of nowhere. Whatever it was that was out here, he was sure it wouldn’t
be good. He knew too much to be ignorant of the danger his circumstance
afforded him. Far, far too much, more than he had ever wanted to know or think
about. Seeing the unmarked post he was told to watch for, he pulled off onto a
driveway that was little more than a narrow clearing of trees, having to drive
painstakingly slow over the bumpy trail until his headlights found a
dilapidated cabin.
“Good fucking god…” he mumbled, his knuckles white on the steering wheel. “I’m
going to die in a horror movie cliché.”
The woods were alive with the wind rustling through the pines and a million
chirping insects and night birds when he stepped out onto the soft undisturbed
loam. The quiet hum of a power generator rumbling below the cacophony of nature
was the only sign that this place was at all occupied, let alone occupied
anytime in the last century. He walked around the windowless cabin until he
came upon a door and took a moment to loosen the fear gripping his spine before
knocking. Moments dripped by sluggishly, building the hope that no one was
there, a hope that was useless since he wouldn’t dare leave even if he had to
wait all night. Finally, the clatter of locks being undone came muffled behind
the rotted and mossy wood until the door opened to a shockingly solid concrete
interior. He had to glance back at the fragile wood to be certain he hadn’t
blacked out and wandered elsewhere before stepping into what could have been a
bunker fit to survive any apocalypse. He nearly jumped out of his skin when
Maier shut the door behind him.
“I appreciate that you accepted my invitation despite such short notice, Vidar
Valstad,” the ex-agent said as he latched a series of locks. “Your diligence is
valuable.”
Considering the choice was either to accept the invitation or accept death,
Vidar had a little difficulty replying, “No problem. So, now that I’m here… Um,
why am I here?”
Movement caught the corner of his vision and he reflexively turned to it,
unsure what he was seeing was real even as he met her wide silver eyes. The
breath was stolen out of his lungs in the tightening constriction of his chest
until it felt as though his heart had stopped, only to jump and lurch back to
life as Simone took a staggering step backward.
“What is he doing here?” she asked, the question directed towards Maier but her
wide eyes not moving from his.
“Your uncle is here to help you remember where you’ve been these last two
months,” he heard Maier answer. The words were lost in the distance.
Vidar dashed to her, his hands sinking into the blissfully familiar waves of
her hair before curling into fists before she could jerk away. Her scent
stirred all that same savageness in him, reigniting neural pathways that had
lain dormant in his brain since her trail had gone cold. Any illusions he may
have had that the madness she’d inflicted on him would fade in her absence was
smashed against the ravenous drive to reclaim their slave by means and impulses
that pulled him in a hundred different directions at once. His palms itched to
slap and squeeze bruises into this wealth of unmarked and tender flesh as much
as they ached to soothe and protect her from whatever danger had taken her from
them. He wanted to hear her scream as much as he needed to hear her reassure
him that she was well. From this tangle of desire, one frayed impulse flared
into action and he gripped the sides of her startled face as he leaned down.
The taste of her mouth, of their terrible connection, slammed the reality of
this moment hard over his disbelief. She was alive. She was whole. She was
here.
She batted him with an open hand against his side as she grunted and tried to
twist away from him, but there was no real force to her resistance. He wrenched
her head further back by her hair and she relented her efforts with a pained
whimper, allowing him to deepen the kiss as she opened to him with that fearful
obedience he’d missed so much. The warmth and softness of her mouth accepting
his tongue brought yet more desires to mind and to the pressure rushing to his
groin. However, a scent so similar and so separate from her own wafted up from
her skin, a scent he had known all his life and startled him to find on her
now. He parted from her mouth, content to bite his way to the side of her neck
where that scent was strongest. The sour antiseptic reek of hospitals, the
sharp odor of sweat and stale gin, the sweetness of pine and bergamot, all of
them closely associated to the base note that only belonged to Henrik. He
pulled away from her neck to examine her with this suspicion heavy on his mind.
“If you don’t mind, I’d like for you to begin the interrogation,” Maier’s
polite interruption widened Vidar’s awareness to the world around him.
Embarrassment at having a witness to his raw reactions was enough to loosen his
grip on Simone’s hair, but not enough to disengage his hold on her. Maier
didn’t bring them together to merely reunite them; the maniac had a specific
use for him. A specific, terrible use.
***** Chapter 63 *****
Chapter Notes
See the end of the chapter for notes
“Isn’t it enough that we have her now?” Vidar asked as he watched Maier pull a
metal cart to the center of the sparse room. He tried to keep his tone neutral
and disinterested, as though he simply didn’t see the need for such hassle, but
he knew he was hedging too closely to the gut-wrenching horror at what might
happen to Henrik if Maier finds out.
Maier examined the rope that hung from a pulley at the ceiling, giving it a
hard tug and testing the fibers as he explained, “If retaining Ms. Valstad was
the only objective, I would agree with you. However, it has been deemed
necessary to obtain the party responsible for this extended delay in our plans.
Unfortunately, for reasons I also intend to extract from Ms. Valstad, she has
been uncooperative in divulging any information whatsoever to complete that
task.”
“Maybe she doesn’t know anything,” Vidar suggested hopefully. “I mean, it’s not
uncommon for kidnappers to wear masks or blindfold their victims, right?”
Maier placed his duffel bag on the rolling cart before turning to him. The
impassive silence in response to his suggestions made Vidar’s jaw tense in
regret at having said them, certain that this maniac could see right through
him with those dead shark eyes. Then, those eyes twitched mechanically to
Simone. She stiffened noticeably in his arms and he pressed her closer to him
in a rush of unexpected protectiveness, but he was too distracted by his
simmering panic to deeply consider that peculiarity in him as he cupped the
base of her head and began to rub soothing circles against her scalp.
“Ms. Valstad, tell me anything you may recall regarding your recent captivity,
please,” Maier said with the distinct clarity of a repeatedly recited request.
“Fuck off, Maier,” she spat, her hostility transforming the fear that had
stiffened her muscles into anger.
Vidar gaped in shock and dismay at her bold obstinance, seeing exactly how she
had sealed her fate in this interrogation. His fingers twitched to yank her
hair back and punish her for her artlessness, but he knew a greater punishment
soon awaited her and to act on this frustration prematurely would reveal the
root of it. That stubborn streak in her had obviously not relented under
whatever care Henrik had provided; if anything, her backbone seemed to have
only been fortified. As much as he dreaded the outcome, he did not so much
dread the methods with which Maier seemed intent on utilizing. She did indeed
need to be brought to heel.
Maier turned his empty stare back to Vidar, a slight smirk painted on his
placid face as he said, “She knows.”
As Maier turned back to his task of meticulously emptying the contents of his
bag onto the cart, Vidar took this opportunity to lean down and, under the
guise of intimately embracing his missed pet, whispered into her ear, “I can
smell Henrik on you. Did he let you go, or did you wriggle away when he wasn’t
paying attention?”
She flinched, her whisper nearly inaudible as she asked, “They’re going to kill
him, aren’t they?”
“Don’t say a fucking word,” he warned, his fingers curling into claws at her
waist.
He noticed, with a curiosity his constantly multitasking mind could support
even now, that her middle seemed just slightly more fortified in the literal
sense along with her spine in the figurative. At least Henrik had the decency
to amend some of that waifish malnourishment in her while he had her. Satisfied
that he’d effectively communicated his stance on maintaining her secrecy, he
slid his hands lower to indulge in the delightfully pronounced curve of her
ass, pleased further to find that she had filled out even more there.
“Mr. Valstad,” Maier said, dragging his attention back to the center of the
room. “Bring Ms. Valstad here, if you would be so kind, and restrain her if
necessary.”
“Gladly,” he responded, meaning it as he pressed her forward with a tight grip
on her hip.
She did not fight him, but as they approached, her steps became halting and
disjointed. He glanced at the stiff resolve veiling her terror before following
her glare to the cart. The astoundingly long needle on the syringe caught his
eye first, as he was sure it did hers, before taking stock of the vials,
gloves, cuffs, spreader bars, blindfold, rods, chains, harnesses, and all
manner of implements to restrain or cause pain. The psychological effect this
ghastly array had on her was immediate and he tensed at the likelihood that she
could not withstand what Maier seemed to consider interrogation. As he eyed the
various hooks, blades, and needles, he wondered if he could maintain his own
compliance and participation. As vast as he knew his perversions and sadistic
enjoyments ran, that was outside of his realm.
“You can stop this at any time, Simone Valstad,” Maier helpfully reminded her
as he pulled on a pair of nitrile gloves. The snap of the thin rubber made her
flinch back against Vidar, reminding him of the role he was supposed to be
playing in all this, and he gripped both her arms to keep her still. “Just tell
me what you know, and we will cease directly.”
At first, Vidar wondered if she had even heard what was said to her through the
shock that had affixed her attention firmly on the syringe. Then, with just a
slight and stiff movement, she nodded, a shaky sigh leaking from her slackened
mouth.
“Very well,” Maier responded, then turned his blank face to Vidar. “Might I
recommend you begin by binding her arms? Whichever manner you prefer, unless
you want her free to attempt to defend herself. Either way, I must insist that
she wear the face harness. The mouth strap will make it much less likely that
she break any teeth in clenching from pain. Oh, wait. You didn’t happen to
bring any personal lubricant, did you?”
“I… No, no I was not expecting to…” he trailed off nervously. That wasn’t good.
He needed to relax, focus on the thrill of this task instead of the high
probability of damning his brother to death, or he might end up on the
receiving end of these same methods. He began again, “It’s not entirely
necessary. I can get this little slut wet like you wouldn’t believe.”
“I see…” Maier nodded pensively. “Yes, that should do. I’ll need to palpate
deeply to determine the position of her uterus, so let me know when her vagina
is sufficiently lubricated to facilitate digital penetration.”
“You want me to get her wet now? Right now?” Vidar asked incredulously. His
frustration flared at this sociopath’s inconvenient ignorance of the very
basics of human emotions and their physiological effects. “You should have
mentioned that before laying out your torture kit in front of her!”
“If you are not confident in your ability to sexually arouse Ms. Valstad, I can
utilize saliva as a rudimentary lubricant, though a more viscous and sanitary
fluid would be preferable.”
Vidar stood momentarily stunned before hissing out, “Did you just insult my
competence and imply that you would spit on my bitch’s snatch to finger her
uterus?”
“I apologize if I came across as insulting; that was not my intent. I’m not
doubting your prowess, nor would I offer my saliva when her own is both readily
available and less likely to transfer harmful pathogens. Also, unless her
cervix is considerably dilated, direct contact with her uterus would be
physically impossible without causing catastrophic damage to her reproductive
organs and I was firmly instructed to leave her unmutilated.”
Vidar willed his irritation to calm with a long, drawn-out sigh through his
nose. It was difficult to keep in mind that Maier was a dangerous murderer he
should not respond to in anger when he was also a huge pain in the ass know-it-
all. Rather than risk verbally replying to his grating remarks, Vidar turned
his girl around to face him instead of the torment she was soon to endure.
Perhaps if he eased her into it, got her to where she approached this as sex
play instead of pure torture, she could endure it long enough to convince Maier
that she wouldn’t talk. Tipping her face up with his thumbs hooked along her
jawline, he knew it was a naïve thought. He had no idea how far Maier was
willing to go and he wanted to avoid considering it, but his curious mind
squirmed with the need to know, to plan, to outsmart this hopeless scenario.
“Vidar…?” Simone whispered shakily.
He stared into his slave’s fearful gaze and saw his niece, her eyes shining
like silver mirrors and brow wrinkled in uncertainty as she looked to him for a
reassurance he could not offer with any honesty. That protectiveness rose
again, an inept and useless thing that could only make what he had to do
harder, but the temptation was too strong to push down for the sake of
necessity. He let himself fear for her and, within that fear, once more found
that savage root that connected them. More than their slave, more than their
niece, she was theirs, and he kissed her with the certainty of that fact. Her
soft mouth was slow to react, mortal terror blunting any other emotion or
thought, but he could go slow to coax that heat he knew burned in her. He let
his hands wander as they pleased, drawing shuddering whimpers from her as one
remained to grope her breast while the other slid further down to slip under
the waistband of her skirt. He chuckled when his fingertips brushed over the
wet heat on her panties, his touch drawing a gasp from her that parted their
kiss.
“I knew you missed me, sweetheart,” he jeered, his voice husky with want. He
rubbed a tight circle over the tiny bump of her cloth-covered clit and nipped
her full lower lip as she drew in another, louder gasp. “Did he fuck you like I
do?”
“No, Sir,” she answered shakily.
The steadily building pressure of his erection throbbed at her obedience, even
now, even after this long, to address him properly. He pulled her hand and
pressed it to the crotch of his jeans, grinning at the gentle squeeze she
applied when she gripped his shaft through the thick material as her gaze
lowered and she wilted in shame.
“I missed you too, little bitch,” he smiled, then twisted her nipple through
her blouse as he rubbed brutally hard on her clit.
Her eyes squeezed shut and she bared her teeth in a pained grimace, a small
squeak of a cry escaping her when he didn’t let up on this assault. His smile
sharpened into a smirk as she bent and tried to pull away from him, stopping
her efforts with a harsher twist on her nipple that had her gripping his arm
plaintively while she gasped through the pain. She was so lovely when she bent
to the pain he could give her. She leaned against him for support as her legs
began to tremble, her face pressed to his chest adorably. He was about to pull
away, to switch back to being gentler to keep her off-balanced and confused,
but she leaned into his harsh touch. His eyes widened in surprise as she rocked
against the hand tormenting her labia, her jagged gasps gaining a rapid rhythm
and growing into a noise that sounded like moaning until it was, without a
doubt, moaning.
“Ah-! Ah, I can’t-! Please, Sir, I need-!” she nearly cried, her nails digging
into the material of his jacket until he could feel the pricks of her crushing
grip on his forearm.
The stuttering sway of her hips stopped with a hard jerk and he could feel her
little cunt pulsing under his fingers as she came with a broken wail of a sob.
He watched her struggle through her orgasm in astonishment, not having expected
her to come so easily or quickly, let alone at all under these circumstances.
The warm spill of her release drenching his fingers past the ineffective
barrier of her panties brought a shiver of some ancient and primal response in
him, making his clothes suddenly unbearably uncomfortable.
“Is she-”
“Shut the fuck up,” Vidar interrupted whatever Maier had begun to ask as he
scrambled out of his jacket while trying to hold Simone’s now struggling and
sobbing form against him.
That was probably the wrong thing to say, but he couldn’t think beyond his need
to get inside this soft and wriggling female. Her body was weakened and
sluggish as she tried to push away from him, allowing him to wrench his pants
off without letting her get away.
“You’re not going anywhere, little bitch,” he growled out as he yanked her to
him.
“I’m sorry! I’m sorry I did that, I just- I couldn’t stop!” she stammered,
shaking in his grasp as he yanked at the ribbon tied around the collar of her
blouse until it tore loose in a barrage of buttons popping open.
The sight of her breasts, bare as he’d suspected beneath that blouse, only
taunted him to expose more of her and she cringed defensively as he tore the
waistband of her skirt in his eagerness to remove it. She grabbed onto his
wrist when his fingers hooked onto her panties, the flimsy sensible cotton and
elastic ripping from her with just one hard yank. Her attempts to deter him
were laughable, but that she was back to resisting him after the training he’d
put into her was no laughing matter. He grabbed her by the roots of her hair
and yanked her down, making her crumble to her knees easily, and didn’t give
her time to recover before pulling her face against him.
“Open up and make it good, whore,” he ordered, pressing her tear-streaked cheek
to his cock impatiently.
She did as she was told, turning her open mouth onto him and trailing up to his
tip with her tongue to seal the sensitive head between her lips, all with such
fear. If she thought this was the beginning of her torture, he could run with
that. Feeling her whimper as she slid him cautiously deeper to crowd into her
throat, he could definitely run with that. Tangling his fingers more securely
in their hold, he pushed his way into her throat until her nose pressed into
his pubic hair and she spasmed around his intruding length. Ever since Anders
had drunkenly lauded her talent for fellatio, he’d been cursed with regret that
he’d not gotten the chance to experience it himself. As he watched her struggle
to control the gag reflex he purposely triggered with short, quick thrusts deep
in her throat, he thanked whatever god or devil saw fit to fulfill that regret
in reuniting them here. He tangled his other hand in her hair to hold her down
on him when she began to twitch and attempt to dislodge that thick obstruction
in her airway.
“Do you deserve to breathe?” he asked. “Do you think you’ve earned that, little
bitch?”
The dismay written in the furrow of her brow and the borderline panic in her
wet eyes as she looked up at him with the begging she was unable to verbalize
was a stunning sight. Anders was right; she was beautiful, but with a mouth
full of cock, she was gorgeous. It made him want to punish her further for
being so enticing.
“You don’t deserve anything but what I give you,” he spat.
He held her down for a few more seconds, seconds he knew stretched to their
fullest extent in her panic as she pushed her hands against his thighs and
tried in vain to pull out of his grasp, just to let his point sink in and savor
her desperation before releasing her. She jerked away immediately and gulped in
air between heaving coughs, her hands braced on the cold concrete while she
tried to recover. The startled mewl that shook her hunched form when he placed
his foot between her shoulder blades was amusing enough to make him smirk.
“Have you remembered how to behave yourself yet?” he asked. Still catching her
breath, she answered with a nod and he pushed her down further with his foot.
“Face down, ass up, sweetheart. There’s a good bitch.”
He considered the instruments on the cart as he admired her kowtowed position,
reaching over and selecting a simple pair of handcuffs. As he knelt behind her
and tightened the cuffs around her slender wrists, he saw her shudder and heard
her breathy whine at the metallic rattling of the ratchet. His cock ached at
the fear she still received from bondage. She couldn’t have been more perfect
to fulfill this savage lust he burned with to dominate and subjugate. Two
months of safe and sane play with women who would balk at what he would ask of
them to supplement this need had only left him hungrier for his slave’s sweet
submission. He held onto the short chain of the handcuffs with one hand as the
other reached between them to press the thick head of his cock, throbbing with
the hot blood that engorged it to a painful hardness, to her slit. He teased
her slippery entrance, rubbing along the whole of her cunt up into the cleft of
her ass, chuckling at her little grunts and gasps as he took his time deciding
where to fuck her. The stray thought of what awaited her after this, of Maier’s
fingers searching her vagina, decided it for him in a thrum of territorial
zeal.
“Ah-AHH! Oh god oh g-AH!” Simone’s high and tight voice cried out as he pushed
into her drooling cunt, the soft and heavenly feel of her stretching to
accommodate his sudden intrusion prompting him to ram harder into her until he
bottomed out in just three excruciatingly pleasurable thrusts.
“There’s no God for you here, little bitch,” he smirked, the words straining
out of him as he bucked into her almost involuntarily. “Mm… Oh, yes, I’ve
missed this…”
He fondled her hips and ass as he set into a strong rhythm, the supple curves
emphasized by her bent position. Her golden skin was completely healed of
bruises, leaving only the pink lines of scar tissue on her arm, throat, and
faintly here and there on her back. Each mark she would bare from this moment
on would be from those she truly belonged to. At the glee this knowledge
brought, he dug his nails into her hip and relished how she moaned loudly and
clenched down on him as he dragged four long rows of scratch marks into her.
“Oh Hell,Simone…” he groaned, her soft cunt and the adorable sounds he fucked
out of her quickly becoming much too delightful.
She pulsed around him and bucked back into his more rapid pace as he wriggled
his thumb into her asshole. Pumping the thick digit past that tight muscle, he
considered pulling out and fucking her open there, but the drive to mark his
territory won over any other temptation or reason. He should not ejaculate
inside her vagina. He reminded himself that he should absolutely avoid coming
in that hot, velvety, snug little cunt.
“Please… Please, fill me up, Sir… oh, fuck, I need it inside me so bad…” she
begged between sharp, desperate gasps.
Shit.
His release crashed down hard on him, pressing a deep groan that grated out of
him as his entire pelvis throbbed with the pressure of his climax. That
overwhelming tension and release had him spill deep in her and he couldn’t care
about anything but the satisfaction of claiming her in that most primal way.
His slave, his dear, delicate, darling slave sighed and shuddered so sweetly as
he filled her with the culmination of his pleasure. While ecstasy fizzled out
into euphoria, he leaned over her bent body and turned her by her chin to fit
his mouth over hers. She received his kiss passively, the detection of her
humiliation and regret making him huff out a laugh.
“You little vixen,” he chuckled. He slid out of her, leaving her huddled in
shame on the floor as he stood to loom over her. “You’re so pathetic. Maybe I
should let Mr. Maier fuck your secrets out of you, yes? Do you think he would
be gentler than me? Does your American cunt miss getting stuffed with American
dick?”
“I’m not at liberty to perform genital-to-genital penetrative intercourse with
Simone Valstad,” Maier piped up from where he still stood patiently observing
them.
Vidar glowered at him, snapping, “Christ, I’m trying to scare her! Isn’t that
what you want?!”
Maier glanced down at the girl cowering on the floor, then nodded. “My mistake.
Perhaps, then, now would be an appropriate time for me to examine her.”
“I’m far from being done with her.”
“It won’t take long. It’s also necessary to determine her condition before we
begin the interrogation in order to set a guideline of how much stress we may
safely apply to her.”
“You need to finger her to make sure she’s healthy enough to torture?”
“Digital examination of her vagina is a necessary part of the process, yes.”
Vidar frowned, his possessiveness warring with the knowledge that these polite
and passive requests were nothing less than orders from this dangerous maniac,
but it would be entertaining to expose her to the impression that he’d let
Maier rape her for his amusement. “Make it quick.”
Vidar stood by and watched, shocked as Simone shot up to kick at Maier the
moment he stepped within range, but the maniac seemed to be incapable of
feeling pain as she bloodied his nose with her swift heel and winded him with
direct blows to his middle. Or, rather, he seemed to almost enjoy the abuse, a
crooked grin splitting his face as he endured her impressively high and
lightning fast kicks. Her frustration and desperation mounted until she lunged
at him, a growl tearing from her bared teeth as she made to bite his neck like
the predatory creature she resembled more than the broken girl Vidar knew her
as just moments before. Maier seemed to have been anticipating this move and
used her own trajectory to slam her front to the wall. With a practiced
quickness, he kicked her legs out from under her to press her to the floor. The
efficiency and strangeness in the brutality Maier executed his task was a
chilling reminder of what this man was capable of.
“Mr. Valstad, would you mind attaching the spreader bar to her ankles?” Maier
asked, his voice froggy and nasal now from the abuse to his nose and face. He
moved to straddle her ass, but this seemed more to restrain her from
effectively kicking or moving her lower body than to instill any sexual threat.
Vidar couldn’t trust himself to speak past the tightness he abruptly found in
his throat, so he grabbed the bar and strapped her squirming ankles into the
cuffs. There was no reason he could find for his discomfort. Nothing had
happened to her that was any worse than what he or Anders had done and the
thought of her suffering between them brought him pleasure, so he was
bewildered at the bitterness he found in watching Maier so much as touch her.
“I am going to turn her onto her back. I’m going to need you to bring me the
syringe and then restrain and immobilize her torso to the best of your ability,
understand?”
“Understood…” Vidar rasped.
He tried not to imagine what Maier was going to do with the syringe during this
“examination”. He tried not to imagine anything that might happen that night.
They just had to make it through this, then Maier would give up on trying to
find out about Henrik and he would have his slave back. Until they needed her.
He swallowed that bitterness down again as he walked back with the ridiculously
long needle, handing it off to Maier, who then tucked the syringe between his
teeth as he flipped her over. Her ferocity was not at all subdued by her
reduced ability to act upon it, launching her into a fit that had her rearing
up and snapping her teeth at Maier. She would have bitten his face if Vidar
hadn’t caught her shoulders and slammed her back down to the floor.
“Let me GO! I’ll kill him! I’ll tear his fucking throat out!” she snarled,
writhing under the men’s combined hold.
“Perhapsh anotter time,” Maier responded glibly around the plastic syringe
tucked in his mouth.
Without wasting any time, he pushed his gloved fingers inside her sloppy cunt
and pressed along her lower abdomen in search of her uterus, dragging out an
enraged cry from her that chilled Vidar’s spine. He’d never expected this raw,
volatile fury from her, having only caught slight glimpses of it despite all
the terror and pain he’d put her through. But that was him. Maier was not
related to her. Seeing this evidence of Leif’s conditioning in her, how deep it
ran, was startling. Maier had explained it to him in those awful “lessons” but
seeing it in action was more alarming than hearing about neural pathways or a
particular drug’s effect on reshaping memory during recall. She wasn’t a
masochistic, docile little submissive. She was merely, in every literal sense
of the term, made for them.
“Steady now…” Maier said, the needle grazing her skin between her navel and
vagina.
“What are you doing?” Vidar asked before he could stop himself.
“I will extract a small amount of amniotic fluid to test the fetus for
chromosomal abnormalities or genetic disorders that may have resulted from
inbreeding,” Maier explained. Simone groaned as the needle pierced her skin and
he pushed it in slowly, centimeter by centimeter.
Vidar’s blood ran cold. “She’s pregnant?”
Maier pulled the plunger back with painstaking care, drawing up a clear yellow
fluid into the barrel as he responded, “Of course. You didn’t think time was of
such emphasis just to get her back to you, did you? A female with Ms. Valstad’s
unique genetic attributes must not be wasted. And don’t worry—I’ve dissected
enough pregnant female subjects to know how to safely perform this procedure.”
Vidar felt a strange buzzing in the back of his numb mind. “Why do you care?”
“I, personally, do not. If the fetus is healthy, I will bring it to the person
who does care quite a lot.”
“And if it isn’t healthy?”
Maier pulled the needle out, bringing a pained whimper from Simone as he
answered, “We will terminate and you will impregnate her if Leif Valstad is
unavailable to sire another infant.”
Vidar could identify what he was feeling as wooziness but could not determine
much aside from that. He didn’t want to know, he was sure of that even as he
asked, “It’s Leif’s?”
“Most likely. There’s the possibility that Anders Valstad could be the father,
or even you.”
It was impossible for Vidar to decipher what was more disturbing: that Leif
might have knocked up his daughter, that he might have knocked up his niece, or
that she was to be treated as breeding stock for the exclusive purpose of
either.
“That should do it,” Maier announced as he pushed himself to his feet, holding
the filled syringe gingerly between his fingers. “While you were reinforcing
your sexual dominance over Ms. Valstad, I was inspired by the racial gap
between you. Based on that racial aspect she has no doubt considered of her
‘slave’ status, I am confident that she would benefit most from a traditional
American approach on that theme. Have you used a bullwhip before?”
Chapter End Notes
     Happy Valentine's Day
***** Chapter 64 *****
“The UN has approved the Europe-based mining conglomerate’s request for
international arbitration and they are seeking legal action against the DRC,”
Dr. Aguiyi said around the half-smoked cigar tucked into his mouth. He lit the
cigar, taking a drag off its mysterious and pungent blend in pensive slowness,
then let the smoke billow out onto the cloud of his wooly beard as he remarked,
“I don’t know who the hell they’re seeking legal action against since we
slaughtered the entire cabinet, but it’s cute that they think their laws will
still extend to Zaïre when the dust settles.”
“Mm-hmm…” Leif mumbled, his attention fixed more to the drawing he was
attempting in the margins of the novel he’d been slowly reading.
As interesting as he was sure the book was to some, he had never developed a
taste for fiction and had found this distraction insufficient. He had also
never developed a talent for recreating living creatures in pencil as his
daughter had, abandoning the shoddy depiction of a rabbit that more resembled a
long-eared pup to return to his strength in assembling complex geometric
perspectives. In his opinion, The Brothers Karamazov was improved with his
added illustrations of nineteenth century Russian monasteries, but that wasn’t
saying much. He only drew to hear the familiar and comforting sound of graphite
scraping against paper; the daily background noise of what used to be his small
and private life. If he listened to it long enough, he could feel as though his
Simone was sitting in the same room, sketching away in the mutual enjoyment of
each other’s company.
“Hey, you okay, Old Scratch?” Francis asked, tapping his stack of reports
across his desk to where Leif sat engrossed in shading the onion-shaped domes.
“Peachy,” he muttered, mimicking his daughter’s stock sarcasm to that inane
question.
“You want to drop acid and watch the boys brawl in the yard?” the doctor
offered.
“Not tonight, Frank.”
Silence stretched on, but Leif could not recapture that elusive illusion with
how Francis watched him, the imposition of his gaze too loud above the scape of
the pencil. Zaïre, Venezuela, Cameroon, Haiti, he was far too uninterested to
be stretched so far over the world when all that he wanted could fit so
perfectly in his arms.
“We’re going to find her,” Francis assured him.
“Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
His pencil stopped its rapid scraping, letting the silence descend over them in
the thick tension that followed before he explained, “Do not extend my daughter
on some magical idea of confidence and theory. I cannot sustain myself on the
idea of her alone; I must have her in reality, in this life that I am living
right now, but I don’t have her, do I? She is not here, so I must confront the
concept of being without her as a question of how. How am I going to live this
life where she is not? I don’t have an answer to that, Frank, and I don’t
appreciate you trying to answer that for me. You want me to continue passing my
time here accomplishing your goals, then tell me to work, but don’t tell me to
wait and hope. Don’t try to comfort me with words; I have no use for them.”
Francis removed his dusty bowler and ran his thick hand over the mandala
tattoo, sighing in that weary way the elderly could summarize their
exasperation with life itself. “What do you want me to do, Leif? If the men see
you this depressed, they’re going to lose morale and you know this entire thing
is held together by the confidence they have in you. Not to mention that I hate
seeing you so god-damned sad. Shit. I promised Bjørn I’d look out for you. So,
what the hell can I do?”
“You’re already doing what you can,” Leif answered, the hard edge gone from his
tone as he continued shading. “You’re not a fairy godmother and I’m only asking
that you don’t try to be one.”
As graphite gave dimension to the monastery Leif designed above the beginning
of chapter three, he weighed whether or not to tell his friend about his plans
to have himself smuggled into Norway and decided once more against including
him in that knowledge. Francis might have had his best interests at heart, but
he was still a shrewd leader that had placed Leif at the center of his complex
plans. It was better to betray him in silence and allow both of them to
remember only the best of each other.
 
 
Interrogation was a word to which Simone did not understand how little she had
associated with until being introduced to it as the concept Maier was versed
in. Interrogation, to her, conjured images of a small, badly lit, plain room
with a table between her and her interrogators. Interrogation, to him, was
still in a small, badly lit, plain room, but there was no table between her and
her interrogators. In fact, there was nothing between them. She hung by her
wrists, the rope burning her skin as her hands went into a fuzzy numbness each
time her legs faltered to maintain the precarious tiptoe balance to reach the
concrete floor, stripped down to the watch on her wrist and the straps buckled
around her head to fix the leather in her mouth. What strength and stamina she
had built in those long lonely days of physical exercise in the apartment
prison was not enough to prepare her for such an extended period of being
stretched en pointe, but the threat of her shoulders dislocating or acquiring
nerve damage in her hands was enough to keep her toes pushing against the
floor.
At the first thunderclap of white hot pain searing through the nerves of her
exposed back from the loud crack of the bullwhip in Vidar’s able hands, she
shrieked in agony and anger at the ineffectiveness of words. Words could not
convey that interrogation was the sweat that beaded on her bare skin, the tears
and saliva that streamed down her chin, and the screams that hit the leather
strap clenched between her teeth. Words only obscured reality and muddled the
meaning their ineptitude could not transfer, but words could still achieve such
devastating damage.
She could end this torture with a few meager words, which was why whenever
Maier slid the strap out of her mouth and asked her who’d had her, she could
only let two tear loose from her ragged throat, “Fuck off.”
So much hinged on so little. This was the power and failure of words contained
in the burning lashes across her back. She would not break to Maier for the
pittance of relief, but that did not stop him from sliding the strap back into
her mouth and stepping away from her.
She tried not to shudder too obviously when he calmly commanded, “Again.”
The whistle of the whip cutting the air behind her made her legs stiffen, but
that explosion of agony as the leather snapped across her back brought a hard
yank on her wrists as her feet skid out from under her in that compulsion to
writhe. She could not choose her automatic response to pain as the burning monk
or her father had been able to, but she could choose not to give into it. She’d
made a promise to Henrik. Where words could fail so often, she could at least
give her own word meaning and value.
“Again.”
The crack of the whip, the burst of pain lighting up behind her eyes, the block
of the leather muffling her cries. There were no other constants this world had
offered than rejection, humiliation, isolation, and agony. There was no
inherent altruism in men. Every light cast a shadow, every kindness had a cost.
She wondered how it had taken her this much to see what her father had tried to
teach her.
“Again.”
The crack, the pain, the betrayal of her body bending to the torture. There was
nothing he could do to her that hadn’t already been done. There were no more
disappointments or disillusionments left to discover. She’d had her freedom,
her home, her family, her country, her body, her mind, her memory taken from
her at the will of men. Not monsters, not demons, just men, as human as
herself, made of the same fragile flesh, precious blood, and brittle bone. They
were all just as breakable. She had to be more than human to break them.
“Again.”
Her knees buckled to the pain, but the rope denied her the relief of giving her
weight to the floor. This was the world that had taken the life of a frightened
boy and broken him into the shape of a monster. This was the world that
deserved the horror he repaid it. This was the world he had tried to prepare
her to survive while sheltering her from it for so long. She understood that
now. She understood her father’s love.
“Has this refreshed your memory yet, Ms. Valstad?”
It had.
The room came into blurry focus in a dreary and dimensionless smear of gray as
she surfaced halfway from her delirium. The skin of her back burned and
throbbed, sizzling along the nerves, and the leather held her tongue down
against the powerful need to spit. Her ankles ached from pushing her toes down
to lessen the pull of the rope until she wasn’t sure if that was any better
than the ache it put into her joints to dangle. These things were all so
fleeting and fickle, so empty beyond such simple pain and discomfort. There was
nothing to this man, this rope, or even this whip. It was all so banal. There
was nothing to fear.
Maier’s white wrist slid into her peripheral as he unbuckled the leather strap.
Her jaw flexed when he removed it once more, that incessant ache something that
would be there hours or maybe even days after the strap had been gone, but it
would fade. This all would fade. One, two rotations of her mandible, then
working the smaller muscles to spit out the froth that had pooled from her
mouth. Clumsy, the spittle mostly joining the dribble down her chin, but
everything was still in working order. He leaned forward, standing at her side,
his face a pale beige smear in the corner of her vision as she kept her stare
downward.
“Tell me anything you may recall regarding your recent captivity, please,” he
politely requested again.
Her head hung weakly, a thread of drool dangling from her slackened lips as
they twitched when she tried to form the words, but all that came out was a dry
scrape across her vocal chords. He stepped closer, his body heat brushing
against her cold sweat putting a bit of groan to her sounds in revulsion.
“How many men were there?” he asked. His voice buzzed in her teeth, but she
could not let herself flinch away. “Or perhaps there was just one?”
“Ss-… jusst…” she rasped, the rest of her dry whispers too quiet to be heard.
Maier leaned forward, his movement wafting over her. He was so close, too
close, nearly touching her bared skin as he filled the entire left hemisphere
of her vision. Every hair stood on end in a wave of revulsion when the material
of his shirt grazed her chest.
“Just one. Describe him, please. Did he have any markings, scars, tattoos?”
“Ah… I… r’memberr…” she mumbled at the tail of a thin breath. She could map his
position by the pressure of the air around him and his heat, almost hearing the
bulk of him blocking the openness beyond where he stood. Too close, but not
close enough. “Tch… ffn… ah…”
A shift in the air, the turn of his head, leading his ear close enough to her
whispering mouth. The artificial fragrances of aftershave and soap were
overpowering, but beneath that, she could smell the reek of his humanity. Skin
and sweat, flesh and bone, temporary and tenuous. She caught his flesh between
her teeth with a jerk of her hanging head, his reaction time too slow to avoid
her jaw clamping down on a mound of cheek next to his mouth. His immediate
response to pull away tugged her sharp teeth further into his skin and he
leaned in instead, hissing in a gasp and grabbing onto her bare torso.
“AHH-AH! Ms. Valstad, please!” he grunted, his words warped by the harsh pull
at the corner of his mouth.
The pressure she exerted into the bite crushed both the skin and subcutaneous
tissue, breaking capillaries that would display bruises vibrantly on his
whiteness. She considered bloodborne pathogens when that metallic bitterness
made contact with the vulnerable mucous membranes of her mouth, but the
probability of contracting disease did nothing to deter her from twisting her
head to rip him wider. She could break his humanity to pieces and use his pain
as her tool, as he had sought to do to her. She could feel that same
indifference in reducing him this way, but she would not let her own violence
reduce her in turn. This violence had meaning, emotion, and life. This was
punishment for his deception in bringing her here instead of to her final fate
and she would relish it passionately. He buckled and choked out a guttural
shriek as she wrenched away from him with her prize of flesh stretching
precariously between them. When the skin tore on his face, he stumbled away to
brace himself in a huddle on the floor with his hand pressed against the
bleeding wound. The snap of his flesh splitting loosed a great wave of relief
that swept the tension from her body and cleansed her mind of the noise that
rage had filled it with.
As she watched him pant through the pain she had given him, she could taste the
sweetness that was vengeance among the raw blood and tissue that clung to her
teeth. Perhaps her father had found something similar in the act of killing.
She wondered, without the accompaniment of revulsion she’d expected with this
thought, if perhaps she could now feel what Leif felt in killing. While there
was no excitement in the likelihood that she would have to take another life,
there was also no dread. A calm, neutral curiosity at the prospect had paved
over that black pit of horror inside her at some point. A blur of motion rushed
past her and she watched, surprised at how quickly her uncle descended upon
him. She watched, her delirium clearing in shock as Vidar bludgeoned Maier with
a heavy kick to his head that transitioned into stomping when the man crumpled
onto his side.
“Stop-s-STOP! STOP!” she yelled as soon as she could get her throat to
cooperate. “Don’t kill him!”
Vidar’s raised knee froze before it pushed his foot down into the unmoving man,
his wild scowl turning to her as he snapped, “I don’t have a choice!”
“Yes, you do! You can still choose! Please, just stop!” she cried.
“Why?!” he snarled, turning from Maier and coming upon her in five wide steps
to grip her neck and growl out, “You want him alive to enslave us both?!”
His touch imparted the terror that had been so curiously absent under Maier’s
much more brutal torture, but she couldn’t let him know what it was to kill.
She’d seen it change Henrik, haunt him in the murder she knew tempted him the
same way her father was so tempted. Perhaps the same way she was now tempted,
as well. She couldn’t let him know what it was to kill, although there was
another much less dire but no less important reason to prevent this murder. She
needed Maier alive to be the one to deliver her to her father. She needed him
to be the living proof of the truth that could free her father from his bondage
to those that held him. She couldn’t explain that to Vidar, though, or he would
surely kill him just to prevent that.
“You want them to send someone worse?” she snarled back, but her voice wavered
under that instinctive drive to appease his hostility rather than draw its
focus. She couldn’t bend to it now, no matter how the spark of his touch sapped
the energy her violence had imbued in her, so she swallowed that impulse and
maintained contact with those burning blue eyes. “If you kill him, they’ll kill
you.”
“I’m not going to sit and wait for them to come,” he sneered, his hands sliding
up to cup her jaw and disable her only point of movement. “They are going to…
you will be forced to… We can run. We don’t have to be their pawns and we don’t
have to die if they don’t find us.”
She caught the fear glimmering behind the hatred in his eyes and in the
desperate curl of his fingers, her strong façade crumbling under the weight of
her guilt as she asked, “What about Anders? And Henrik? They’ll go after them.”
“It’s only you that they want,” he argued.
“Then let them have me,” she said. The guilt constricted her chest and throat,
making her voice tight and eyes burn with tears as she pleaded, “Let them have
me! If you kill him, they’ll chase you, they’ll find you, and they’ll gut you!
Please. Leave me here. Run. Run!”
His fingers slid into her sweat-dampened hair and the rage burning in his glare
dimmed to a smoldering resolve that terrified her more than the violence of his
wrath. This grim, firm resolve was so much more dangerous than anger. Anger at
least imparted an unpredictability, but his will was fixed and focused. Her
weakened legs trembled as he leaned down and kissed her wet lips possessively,
smearing the blood of the man he believed to be their enemy on his mouth.
Instead of pulling away after kissing her, he lingered, nuzzling his cheek
against hers. The presence of such blatant affection from this cold and cruel
man bewildered her into shock.
“You belong to us,” he reminded her firmly, evoking the horror and comfort that
those words meant to her.
When he leaned in again, she returned his kiss until he pulled away and walked
behind her, toward where she knew those horrible instruments were arranged. Her
panicked breaths stirred her arrested mind back into active thought.
“Vidar? Vidar, what are you doing?” she asked, trying to turn but her legs
could barely even cooperate enough to keep her up. The scrape of metal on metal
scratched her brain. “Please, don’t do this. You don’t have to do this.”
The knife he held in his hand as he walked past her to Maier’s crumpled body
was a small, cruelly curled blade.
“No…” she rasped, panic squeezing her lungs as he knelt next to the man.
“Nothing is going to change if you kill him! You don’t have to do this! Please,
don’t!”
He leaned over him, his back turned to her so she couldn’t see what he was
doing, but a movement along the floor caught her eye. He didn’t respond to the
warning she yelled before Maier’s arm shot out and Vidar collapsed under the
paralyzing effect of the stun gun she saw him jab into his side. The burning
agony in her left shoulder distracted her enough to tell her that she had
nearly dislocated it in her wild thrashing against the rope, but she couldn’t
stop herself from pulling futilely as Maier crawled atop her uncle and uncapped
a syringe from his pocket. She had to get to him, had to save him from that
murderous maniac, but she’d let them tie her down to this spot. The enraged cry
that tore from her as he injected something into Vidar’s neck made Maier look
up at her.
The sight of his mouth elongated into a one-sided Glasgow smile from where
she’d ripped him was made all the more gruesome as it opened wider to show his
molars while he spoke, “Patience, Ms. Valstad. I’ll come for you in just a
moment.”
 
 
Though the grounds of the Marceau estate were extensive, there was no
substituting freedom, even if that freedom was squeezed into a narrow tunnel
Leif had to duck through to fit. The catacombs of the dead fed into a sprawling
ossuary that extended far beyond and below the property, known only to those
who had acquired such knowledge as it had been passed down to them from those
who knew firsthand. Bjørn was among the few who knew of the tunnels that lied
beyond, and so Leif was among the yet fewer who still knew. As Bjørn had been a
true believer in the old ways, Leif was reminded of what he had to trade for
that knowledge while he navigated the dim memories of that day to find his way
among the stones. While he reminisced about the trials, Rupert dragged the body
of the man who had followed them down to these narrow tunnels. All Rupert had
needed to acquire this knowledge was loyalty, but willpower and pain were not
nearly as valuable as that rare quality.
“We’re directly below the Seine river,” Leif said, his deep timbre echoing into
the unending darkness beyond their lantern light. “This tunnel has held since
its construction in preparation for German occupation in World War II. We might
be the first men to walk this far into it in decades.”
“Well, that’s just right comfy,” Rupert muttered. “So, what ya mean is: it’s
gone without inspection for decades. Suppose this thing might collapse on us
any minute?”
“Suppose it might, but what could you do about it?” Leif smiled as he stepped
over a large jutting of grout that had pushed through the curved concrete wall.
He set the lantern down and reached over the obstacle with open hands. “Pass
him here, I’ll drag him for a bit.”
Rupert lifted the corpse by the shoulders, grunting with the effort, and
frowned when Leif carried it over the jut with ease. As he picked up the
lantern when he climbed over after the corpse, he groused, “Can’t see why we
don’t just leave him down here, Old Scratch.”
“Rats.”
“What’s wrong?”
“No. Rats. Ossuaries are like pantries to rats as it is.” Leif readjusted his
hold on the sagging corpse, dragging it by its ankles through the silt and
gravel instead of its shirtsleeves. “No need to invite them in through the
backdoor by leaving fresh meat about. Several of my own ancestors rest there,
after all.”
“Who’da thought a demon-blooded Valstad would be so sentimental?” Rupert
smirked.
Leif chuckled in amusement at what a ridiculous joke that was, then blinked in
surprise at realizing that it wasn’t a joke at all. His actions and thoughts
had not been those of the rational and practical man he had thought himself
still to be. That rational and practical man would be poring over plans and
crafting contingencies in the effort to acquire power for Ouroboros, not
ducking through subterranean tunnels on his way to search out his daughter.
There was no reason for him to do any of this aside from his own unquestioned
want. In fact, it was all very unreasonable and completely lacking in
practicality. Had his uncle or father known what he was walking away from, they
would throttle him for his foolishness. If he were at all logical, he would
simply begin the breeding process again and start anew on carrying on their
legacy, but he couldn’t bring himself to even consider it. He didn’t even need
to consider it before; he simply knew it to be his duty and had conceived and
raised Simone by that duty.
Unbeknownst to him, however, he had changed. All that he had done to groom
devotion and attachment in his daughter had also called forth a response in
him, creating something he hadn’t ever truly had before. Something beyond logic
and reason, beyond duty and obligation. As he continued to advance into the
unending shadow ahead of him and leave more and more shadow in his wake, he
came to understand exactly what that something was. In the love that had so
unexpectedly sprouted from the seed of curiosity she had planted in him when
she had met his lustful stare six years ago, the fruit it had borne into his
life was purpose.
 
 
The sound of water falling in heavy, splattering drops woke Vidar from his
dreamless sleep, but the soft sound of a female voice opened his eyes to the
dim yellow light pouring through his bedroom door from the hallway. He drifted
on the edge of consciousness for what might have been several seconds or
several minutes, just listening to that voice and the patter of water. While he
tipped over that edge, he dreamt briefly of those whispers drawing nearer, of
breath brushing over his bare skin and fingers ghosting gently through his
hair. In this dream of such caring tenderness, he opened his eyes again and saw
his niece leaning over him, but he was not in his bedroom. Beyond the pale gray
of her irises was the wide expanse of a pale gray sky.
“Good morning, Sir,” she said, her voice as warm and soft as her smile. She
brushed his hair away from his temple, her gentle touch bringing the smell of
blood. “Are you waking up now?”
His brow furrowed as his foggy mind worked to translate her words and form an
appropriate response. These weeks of rigorous study of the English language had
not yet brought him to the point where he could effortlessly conjure full
sentences without first translating them in his head. In working his mind, it
sharpened, clearing some of that fog until his effort to answer her question
was suspended in a strange suspicion. He blinked, turning his gaze from her
lovely mouth to the trees that encroached at the edges of his vision, then
followed them to their wooded surroundings. Despite the fantastical setting and
the impossibility of this forest nymph that had taken Simone’s form, he had the
oddest suspicion that he was not dreaming.
“Simone?” he rasped. His throat was so dry. “What are… Where am I?”
“We’re still here,” she answered, enigmatically as a dream should, “but don’t
worry. We’re safe. Whenever you’re ready, we can leave this place.”
He could feel the scratchy texture of the woven blanket from his car trunk
rolled around him, the unyielding and cold ground beneath him, and her warmth
tucked next to him. It was all so vivid. He looked down the torn neckline of
her blouse, the girlish ribbon dangling ruined and lopsided to bare her where
the shirt would not close, all the way down. The simple desire to feel the
softness of that exposed skin drew his hand up and her smile faded as he
touched her chest. That wasn’t how she usually responded in his dreams. She
placed her hand over his wandering fingers to stop him and he looked down to
see the rusted brown of dried blood caked under her short nails.
“I’m sorry, I… Just, please, not here…” she muttered.
The blood under her nails. Blood. The blood seeping from the long stripes he’d
cut into her back with the whip. The blood gushing from Maier’s Glasgow grin,
the most expressive smile the man had ever worn. He’d held the knife to his
throat, ready to cut themselves free of him for good, but the blood had not
come. He didn’t kill Maier. This wasn’t a dream. This was a nightmare.
Vidar grabbed onto her bruised and cut up wrist, squeezing pain into her until
she winced as he demanded, “Where is he?”
“He’s gone,” she answered, breathless and cowering. “He’s not going to hurt you
anymore.”
“Where?”
He squeezed harder, earning a whimpering yelp from her as she grabbed onto his
arm with her free hand pleadingly. Then, panting through the pain, she brought
her glare up to him and he nearly startled at what he saw in that burning
silver. Who he saw.
With the same firm coldness to her inflection as Leif, she answered, “Somewhere
you don’t have to worry about.”
***** Chapter 65 *****
Vidar wasn’t used to not knowing what to do. Even if his decision was to do
nothing, he was always confident in the thought process that led him there.
What knowledge he lacked could be supplemented by inference gathered by context
or relevant experience, or at least assurance that more information would soon
be acquired to build on. He had no context or relevant experience with this,
and the outlook of acquiring any information seemed grim. What he had was
insufficient data and an insane creature of a girl sitting at the edge of his
bed, telling him not to do anything in response to the sudden end of the
sociopathic maniac who had held control of his life for the past two months. He
knew just enough to know that he knew nothing. That was why he was packing his
suitcases with his bolt action hunting rifle loaded and ready within reach.
“Where will you go?” she asked, fiddling with the broken ribbon of her blouse
like a guilty child.
“Weare going anywhere they won’t find us,” he answered. “Stop that.”
Her hands fell to fold politely in her lap without hesitation or even a
scornful look. Whatever hellion she may have been when she had answered Maier’s
questioning with vitriol and violence was nothing like the meek little thing
before him now, but he couldn’t trust that this was really her either. He
didn’t know what to think of her anymore.
“I can’t leave,” she said. “And I can’t stay with you.”
Vidar wrinkled his nose in irritation and revulsion at the reminder of their
dreadful use of her, sneering, “You are just going to let them have you after
what happened last night?”
“If I don’t, they will punish you for my disobedience. Besides…” she paused,
and he could see how tight her hands nervously squeezed together. “What they
want is not any different than what you’ve done. It’s not a problem for me
anymore. You’ve done a good job at being my handler.”
He froze in the middle of folding a shirt into a suitcase, his widened eyes
drifting to her in shock. She wouldn’t look at him, her carefully blank stare
fixed to the floor and her posture tense and rigid. Anger seeped in past the
dissolving wall of shock in him and he slid the suitcases off the bed and onto
the floor, the heavy thumps of them hitting the hardwood making her breaths
come quicker and her hands clench tighter.
“Let me make some things clear,” he said as he stepped closer. She didn’t
resist him when he pushed her by her shoulders to lie face-down on the bed,
didn’t fight him as he moved to straddle her thighs. “I am not your ‘handler’.
I did not do a ‘good job’ to train you for their use. What he wants is nothing
like what I’ve done.”
She didn’t resist him sliding her skirt up or lifting her ass with a yank on
her hips, but her hands curled into fists at the sound of him unzipping his
fly.
“I am your master. I am training you to better serve me. What I want is what I
take from you, because you are mine to take from.”
He reached over and pulled the tube of lube and a short length of nylon rope
from his nightstand drawer. The skin of her wrists was rubbed raw and bruised,
but she still did nothing to resist him as he tied them together behind her
back. The trembling in her hands extended to the shiver he could hear in her
deepening breaths, this evidence of her fear thrilling him as much as the long
thin welts from the whip striping her beautiful ass. He was already impatiently
hard by the time he knotted the rope.
“If you ever speak like one of them again…”
A whimper shook out of her when he slicked the pretty little hole tucked in the
cleft of her backside with a generous glob of cold lube.
“… you will be punished. I am choosing to be lenient this time. Keep that in
mind, little bitch,” he finished as he freed his erection from its constricted
confines.
“I’m sorry,” she shuddered when he pressed the tip of his cock to her asshole.
“Show me how sorry you are and fuck yourself on this dick, sweetheart,” he
smirked.
He gripped the base of his cock to steady it against her first fumbling
attempts to push back against it, smearing the clear goop up her cleft when she
completely missed. All his dread and uncertainty melted away as he watched and
felt her grind ineffectively on him. She was really trying her best and he had
to bite his lip to keep from laughing at how adorable it was. This inept little
lamb was nothing like the ferocious she-wolf that bit and tore at a man only
hours earlier. This was his sweet slave as he remembered her; helplessly lost
and hopelessly naïve, so very malleable to his desires. The softness of her
flesh sliding against him made the expectation of sex unbearably anticipated,
so he gave her a bit of guidance by pressing the tip of his dick firmly at the
yielding center of her pucker. She pushed against it and that tight ring slowly
opened over him, making her gasp out a startled grunt at the intrusion. Without
any warmup to open her, she was impossibly tight, that muscle throbbing and
twitching to accommodate his girth into where it was so blatantly unnatural to
receive it.
“Does it hurt, little bitch?” he smirked.
“Y-yessir… a little…” she whimpered into the bedding.
“Good. Keep going.”
She struggled just to keep her muscles relaxed as she pushed again, a high
whine building in her throat as she stretched around his tip further until the
ridge of his head popped through that band. The warmth inside was notably hot,
as though her fever hadn’t left her in all this time, making him sigh in
pleasure as it enveloped him. His impatience to ram the rest of the way into
her and fuck her asshole to a less uncomfortable level of tightness was
mollified by the titillating show of her struggling to fit him inside. The
short, huffing breaths, the sweat beginning to shine on her golden skin, the
agonizingly slow push to take him in mere millimeters at a time; it was all so
enthralling.
Her dainty approach to taking a cock up her ass wasn’t what he’d sold his soul
to Maier for, however. Whatever she’d done with that sociopathic maniac wasn’t
enough to make up for all that. The horrors he’d learned, the madness that had
fractured his mind, the violence that had befallen him and his brothers for
having merely brushed the truth that had been concealed from them; there was
nothing that could possibly make any of this ruination and terror worth it, but
she was a start. He pressed into her, too eager to keep up this slow pace, and
relished her astonished gasp with a swell of his cock and his ego as he slid
into her a few more centimeters. He held back from bucking into her too
quickly, wanting full use of her ass for later. This luxurious friction was
something he wanted readily available to him at any given time.
“Oh, holy mother of fuck…” he muttered, straining to suppress a groan that
leaked out of him in a long sigh at the tight heat he sunk into.
To her credit, she took the slide of his cock considerably well, forcing
herself to relax and breathe as he rocked into her. The affection that expanded
with an ache of joy in his chest wasn’t a feeling he expected, but it pulled
his smile into a grin as he watched the mesmerizing sight of that tiny hole
stretching around his shaft.
When he finally hilted in her, he stroked her haunches in a fond caress and
leaned closely over her to whisper, “You understand now, yes? Wherever we go,
this cock is where you belong. Welcome home, sweetheart.”
He could feel her wince at his words, then shudder through the tension that
constricted her muscles in her already tight ass, making him dig his nails into
her hips and hiss through this overstimulation. It wasn’t until her second
shudder made her cringe and huff out a quavering whine that he realized she was
crying. A cruel thrill worked its way up alongside his strange pride in her and
he slowly rocked against the nearly uncomfortable grip deep in her ass. She was
so easy to read. That need for love, belonging and acceptance was so simple to
manipulate. All he needed to do was teach her that this was the only way she
could earn love and her desperation for it was all that was needed to blind her
to deception. Though his skin itched to tear off their clothing and feel her
bare softness slide under him, he was aware enough of the damage he’d wreaked
on her back to refrain from exposing her just yet. He shook off that feeling
that dangled too close to guilt at how much further Maier had made him hurt her
than even he had ever preferred to go.
“You did so well taking the whip,” he cooed into her neck, rocking in her with
just slightly more force. “All that time alone with Henrik, you must love him
to protect him so devotedly. Do you think he would do the same for you?”
For a long while, only the creaking of the bed and her ragged panting answered
amid the rhythm of their flesh, then she muttered thickly, “He should never
have to.”
“Oh, my, you really do love him, don’t you?” he chuckled. “Don’t worry—I’m not
jealous. You were made to love us, after all.”
She flinched and shuddered when he slid a hand beneath her, but as much as she
tried to staunch her reactions, he could feel her body respond to his
fingertips grazing her clit. The wetness that had slicked her there revealed
the depravity he knew she couldn’t help but succumb to and he rewarded her
lustfulness by stroking that inflamed bud in a rhythm matching his thrusts. The
response this pulled from her was almost instant, making her gasp and push back
against him, that uncomfortable tension waning just enough for him to start
fucking her with the force he needed to build towards release. It would take
considerable training to get her to the point they could do this without
extensive stretching beforehand. He chuckled with the glee that prospect of
training brought and nuzzled her neck in a whim of affection.
“You love this,” he whispered tauntingly into her ear. “Don’t try to deny it.
Heh… Well, maybe not this specifically, but you love serving your purpose to
us. No more pretending, no more searching for where you belong in the world...
Does it not feel good to finally let yourself be what you really are?”
“Yes, Sir…” she whimpered, her voice small and thin. Defeated.
“Good girl.”
He kissed up her neck to the side of her face, the taste of her salt on her
smooth skin reaching his awareness before he realized what he was doing. He
didn’t care to restrain himself anymore. The pressure of his arousal throbbing
through his pounding pulse ticked up bit by bit with each rolling thrust into
her until his pace reached a ruthlessness that more matched his mounting need.
The sweet sounds of the panting grunts he knocked out of her, his increasingly
ragged breaths, the creak of the bed, and the wet slide and collision of their
flesh filled his ears in a beautiful symphony of sex. The scent of her sweat,
her arousal, her blood and the spice that was simply Simone filled his
discerning nose in a heady bouquet that he inhaled greedily.
He gripped her hair and turned her to face him as much as her flexible joints
allowed, taking a moment to admire her lovely, pained face before leaning in to
taste her kiss. A spark ignited a tingle that fizzled and buzzed through him at
the press of their lips, a spark she apparently shared as she moaned at the
slide of his tongue. He groaned into their kiss at her taste, that mysterious
and alluring something literally and figuratively at the tip of his tongue, as
she flexed and pulsed around him in her orgasm. That she would come, he had no
doubt, knowing himself more than proficient in the ministrations of his fingers
at her clitoris, but that she would happen to come when he kissed her made him
feel a rush of triumph. His slave was adorably pathetic in her need for
emotional connection and affection. As she gasped against his mouth and arched
her back, he extended her climax by rubbing in tighter, harder circles against
her throbbing clit to encourage her need and delight in the feel of her
tightening rhythmically on him.
That delight tipped easily into the overwhelming imminence of his own release
as she still pulsed from hers, that deep grip inside her rubbing his sensitive
glans with each thrust until he couldn’t hold back. As that tension in his sac
snapped in a surge of profound ecstasy, he pushed hard against that grip and
growled out his pleasure. Spilling in her brought a fervent gratification along
with the thrill of claiming her in this most primal method and he threw himself
into that sensation without thought. This was good. This was right. Ejaculating
in his niece was suddenly the most natural and expected thing in the world.
Euphoria descended over all else, drowning his brain and his body in a potent
hormonal cocktail, and he smirked blearily at biology’s dirtiest trick to get
him to bond with this perfect mate. Pushing aside the greedy tendrils of that
illusion, he slid out of her and rolled onto his back, exhausted by his orgasm
and the sheer physical fatigue of all that had happened.
The rare and blessed promise of sleep weighed heavily on his eyelids before
being interrupted by Simone’s timidly half-muttered, “Sir… could you please
untie me now?”
His brow wrinkled in brief confusion until he remembered that she’d only been
so cooperative because he’d bound her. He’d forgotten this was rape. His hands
were clumsy as he undid the quick knot, then shaky when he saw the fresh blood
that smeared the abused skin of her wrists beneath the rope. The fog of
hormones and fatigue did well to stave the burgeoning calamity of thought just
below his consciousness as he pulled her close, instinctively seeking her
softness and warmth. He was asleep the moment her body molded so perfectly to
his, his mouth tucked against the scarred crook of her neck.
 
 
The sea stretched on in all directions, only stopping where it met the infinite
sky in the straight horizon. Seated atop of one of the rows of the shipping
containers, Leif focused on his breathing and let his discomfort with this
wide-open space work through him. Months of being sequestered in a mansion had
made his mild agoraphobia worsen to the point that his first look out onto the
ocean had made him dizzy, so he forced himself to ruthlessly pursue the notion
that he would fall endlessly into that open sky to prove just how impractical
it was. Fear did not heed practicality, however, and though he knew this, he
held onto the belief that at least exposure might lessen the anxiety that
churned and clenched his gut. Whereas the wide horizons of Vermont had trees
and hills to disrupt that gaping openness, out here, there was nothing. Open
below into those dark depths, open above into that endless sky. Nowhere to
hide, nothing to grasp onto.
He turned his mind away from the small comfort of the solid metal beneath him
and forced his guard down until there was nothing that separated him from his
fear, then began to meditate on that distortion inside of him. If he could not
control his fear, then he could not control his mind, then he could not control
his existence. He immersed himself in the open, allowed it into him as what it
was rather than what fear attached to it, and then moved towards the fear
instead of away from it. This was the process he worked through each time he
awoke to find himself still alive to get through another day, only to refresh
the process upon somehow awakening yet again. If fear itself was his daughter’s
crucible, then living was his. At the undisciplined wandering of his mind to
the now constantly nearby thoughts of his daughter, he broke from his
meditation in a sigh. He was clearly no Buddhist monk.
“Four hours ‘til Kiel, Old Scratch!” Rupert yelled from below.
“Thank you, Rupert!” he called down over the edge of the freight container to
where his ally stood along the railing. “Would you be open to joining me for
supper once we hit port? I know of an acceptable Italian restaurant nearby!”
“No thanks! He who sups with the Devil should have a long spoon!”
“To keep your distance, or to steal from his plate?”
“Neither! I’ve got a mark in Kiel, so I’ll see you back on this ship for Oslo!”
“You’re still taking contracts?”
“Murder is a good alibi in our line of work! Enjoy your supper, Old Scratch!”
Leif watched as his fellow hunter, a man who called him old when he bore deeper
wrinkles in his pallid English brow, walked along the rail to leave him to his
fear once more. He leaned back on the metal and kept his eyes open to the
menacing sky the pulled at the ripple in his pulse, but he could not stop his
mind from wandering to his daughter. He wondered if she was afraid right then,
and if she was, what was pulling at the ripple in her pulse. A different will
sopped up that bit of fear in him as he chased that stray thought, growing
weeds of emotions from the fertile soil of his anger. For too long, he had been
kept from his girl, first by the plotting of the Marceaus and then by the
necessary circumstance as fugitive and figurehead. It was by his own impatience
and the instinctive call to seek her out that had driven him to this cargo ship
routed to his long-forgotten homeland. He was still unaccustomed to such
spontaneity of emotion and thought, but the matter of his child had long since
rent control from his grasp and placed it in a will beyond his own. The idea
that anything could be terrorizing her that wasn’t his own purposeful doing
brought a protectiveness in him that was more savage and demanding than his
deepest bloodlust. In her presence, these wild, unruly whims could hold their
own logic and sense. In her absence, they could tear him apart in how they
clawed away at the careful order of what he once was supposed to be. He’d never
felt diminished by it, though. The monster her effect had crafted was sharper
and stronger than the machine he had been conditioned to be.
So, he would be returning to his homeland not as the boy who had been taken
from it nor as the man he had disguised himself as for so long, but as the
monster that love had made of him. He stared up at the boundless sky and bared
his fangs in a smile.
 
 
With a painstaking slowness, Simone slid from her uncle’s embrace, listening to
the evenness of his breaths to guide her movement. It was difficult to be
careful when so much of her was limited by pain. Her shoulders and arms
trembled to support her pushing away from him even just inch by inch and her
legs would not listen to her command to stand when she finally slunk to the
floor. She crawled on her knees and knuckles to the doorframe, climbing up the
wood until she stood slumped against it. The shift in gravity leaked his semen
down her bare legs, joining the crusted trails of his come from earlier. She
grabbed the rifle and pulled it up by the muzzle as she leaned against the
wall, the cold steel in her hands heavier than she’d imagined as she’d watched
Vidar load three long brassy bullets into the top of it.
It was especially front-heavy, she was surprised to learn, as she held it with
the butt cradled against the front of her shoulder and peered down the long
barrel. She’d always thought rifles would be more evenly-weighted, or just
heavier in the back by the way she’d seen it held like so. She’d seen enough to
know how to shoot it and now, thanks to Vidar’s unwitting demonstration, how to
load it. The safety was already off and there was a bullet ready in the
chamber. Knowing that had made her hyperaware of the rifle with a nervous
flutter in her pulse, even throughout the fear that had already been keeping
her blood fast and thick. Lining up the rear and front sights to see through
the singular narrow eye of the muzzle, that nervous flutter expanded to pulse
in her chest like a moth beating and burning itself against the light of a hot
glass bulb.
Anyone she looked at through this snug little space down the long path of the
barrel could be killed with a simple squeeze of her finger. Vidar’s face, so
much less frightening in sleep, fit perfectly in the frame of the sights. She
hooked her index finger on the trigger, applying just the lightest feather
touch to the smooth little mechanism. The moth in her chest beat furiously
against the searing light, the powder scales of its wings smudging the glass.
She worried that he would hear it and wake. There was no time to delay,
however. She slung the strap across her back, holding the rifle across her
torso to prevent it from moving as she bent and gingerly picked up the box of
rounds from his open suitcase, then grabbed his jacket, wallet and car keys as
she limped out of the house.
Like the rifle, her experience with operating a motor vehicle was limited to
observation. With her mental status, the prospect of learning to drive was
never even broached and being a non-driver in a borough like Brooklyn was not
out of the ordinary, but she’d always wanted to at least try it. Even just the
ability to one day be drive out of that congested, chaotic city to glide along
the freeways to places she’d never been before, to go where she wanted
according to her own schedule, was a distant dream she’d kept alive. The rumble
of the engine igniting, the lurch of backing over the curb, and then the
scramble for the seatbelt she’d forgotten to buckle were all enough to fill her
with giddiness as she borrowed Vidar’s car and somewhat fulfilled that longtime
dream.
“Ten and two, ten and two, ten and two…” she muttered excitedly to herself as
she gripped the steering wheel tightly and put just a little more pressure on
the gas pedal. The car picked up speed and she slammed on the brakes in a
fearful reflex, her heart pounding and her lungs panting. She swallowed,
steeled herself, and eased her bare foot slowly onto the gas pedal again. “You
got this, Simmy. You’re a natural. Maybe not a natural driver, but you’re a
natural something. Car thief? Yes. The speed limit is probably more than
fifteen miles an hour, grandma. Do they have speed limits here? Do they have
traffic cops? Shit. Fuck it. Fuck. Shut up.”
The car staggered and crawled to a more respectable 25 miles per hour that she
monitored with frequent glances between the speedometer and the road until she
screeched to a halt at the stop before the first turn she knew she had to make.
She waited for the car that was coming from a far distance away to pass, then
the next, then she was idling for five minutes as this pattern continued until
she finally worked up the courage to turn. There was no time to delay. Her
spine rigid and aching muscles tense, she forced her foot off the brake and
very slowly took the turn, only accelerating when she had straightened onto the
road. Whether she liked it or not, this was going to be a learning experience.
As cars sped past to get around her cowardly pace, she was utterly unnerved,
but also thankful for the thorough distraction. If she had the opportunity to
focus on her thoughts at all, this would have been much more unpleasant.
Between learning how to drive and reconstructing the way in reverse through
memory, she had no room to consider anything else. For once, the anxiety that
quickened her pulse and filled her belly with lead had a very identifiable and
solid source. There was no mingling of conflicting desires and horrors, no
confusion, no betrayal. She managed to park in the lot of a convenience store
without hitting anything, though she took up the space of two spots and the car
was only two-thirds in.
After stuffing Vidar’s coat pockets with snacks, a travel size sewing kit,
several tubes of what she hoped was antibiotic ointment, and a bar of soap, she
grabbed as many liter jugs of water as she could carry and walked out without
paying. When the clerk ran out after her yelling something she couldn’t and
didn’t care to understand, she put the jugs down carefully on the concrete and
took hold of the rifle slung over her back. The clerk tripped as he ran back
into the store. She didn’t feel good or bad about it, only minorly
inconvenienced as she had to bend her aching back to pick up the jugs and
continue limping to the car. There was no time to delay.
When she finally turned onto the dirt road that was nothing more than a brief
pause in the thick line of trees and brush, that giddy and focused anxiety left
her to the dread and anger of returning to the cabin. The car jerked and
shivered over the unpaved road until she turned off into the driveway she knew
she would miss if she didn’t know what she was looking for. There was nothing
on the outside of that awful little building that gave away anything amiss, but
she held the rifle ready as she turned Maier’s key in that deceptively simple
lock.
Things were seldom what they seemed. So much of her life had been based on
tricks and deceptions. Even beneath the lies, the truth was rarely true. She
hated that she had to deceive and trick to get anywhere in this world. So much
was illusory, vague, and nebulous where she had expected it to be solid and
final. Not this time. This time, she would squeeze the truth out from the lies,
purify it, distill it until it was real.
With the rifle aimed to where she could hear the scrape and rattle of chains
along the smooth concrete floor, she removed her hand from the gun just long
enough to flick on the dim lights. There was no time to delay. She had to begin
interrogating Maier while he was still lucid and alive.
***** Chapter 66 *****
It had been the comforting warmth and relief of finally having his beloved
slave in his possession, safe and close, that had pulled Vidar into the sleep
that had so often evaded him and rarely heeded even the prescription sedatives
on the worst nights. It was the cold settling over where she’d lain that woke
him now. His long, flat hand smoothed over the bedsheets as his brain, dazed
from the abrupt reintroduction to natural sleep, slowly and patiently collected
thought. The idea of her absence occurred to him as a sensation of loss he
could not place, as though he’d just woken from a lonesome dream he could no
longer recall anything of but sorrow. With the drag of his hand, his shoulder
and arm ached a bit from handling the wide sudden motion of the bullwhip, that
ache bleeding memory into his thoughts that brought something sharper than what
he had allowed himself to feel before. Guilt pierced through that ache,
magnifying it, spreading it like a chemical burn upon his mind. Anger washed
over him to drown that guilt, to cover it in a balm of blame toward anything
and anyone other than himself that had put the whip in his hand and tore
muffled screams from her when he could not soften the impact of the cowhide
cutting her flesh. He could apply anger to anywhere, but guilt only went inward
to where he could not bring himself to look. Consciousness roared up from that
balm of anger and all at once, his mind was a bustling, hot, overcrowded
calamity of thought that converged to one sharp point: Simone was gone.
Vidar stumbled out of the empty, cold bed that was still damp with their sweat
and sex, her scent stirring up from the sheets with his abrupt movements. The
freshness of her sweat clinging to him and mingling with his own riled him
further. He’d miscalculated, misjudged her obedience to be the same as what had
kept her in Anders’ house even throughout all that they’d done to her there,
but she’d escaped from here at the first opportunity. That she would remain so
complacent with the circumstances set for her by him was an assumption he had
made from some silly idea of loyalty she had toward him. She’d kept what he’d
done, no matter how vile, a secret, but secrets were not solely kept out of
loyalty.
He tore through his house and only found what was missing: his coat, his
wallet, his keys, his car, and more alarmingly, his rifle and ammunition. A
chill froze each notch of his spine in a rapid flash as he considered how the
girl he had freshly whipped and raped had taken a loaded rifle in her small
hands while he had napped, completely unaware. While she had not murdered him
the way his brain automatically completed that envisioned scene, he hated that
she had wounded him by leaving. That she could wound him. There was never a
place for tenderness between them, but he’d allowed the beginnings of such
delusions to take root under a mindless pursuit of unmonitored desire and
rampant emotion. Her submission, surrender, secrecy, and servitude were not
devotion no matter how effective Leif’s conditioning was, just like his
misguided affection towards her was not love. It had never been love and it
could never be love. Scorched earth permitted nothing to grow; not the deeply
buried seeds of guilt, not the invasive spores of delusion. No, there was
nothing there to wound but his pride. There was nothing else that could be.
He sat hunched over his knees in his unlit living room, breathing hard from his
frustrated and fruitless search while he tried to move his thoughts away from
the aggravating depth of disturbance her leaving had inflicted and instead
focused on what to do. Maier was dead, and with him, Vidar was either free or
in more dire circumstance with the people that maniac had been working for.
Either case had led him to the same conclusion that disappearing was the most
rational choice, but now that she was gone, he found himself stuck. The plan
was still rational, yet he was not. Even though she had betrayed him and would
likely betray him again, he could not vanish without her. He had to find her.
From all that Maier had told him, the police could not be trusted. As easy as
reporting his car stolen would make this, he could not have the cops finding
Simone only to have her delivered to Leif’s captors for the hefty bounty they’d
placed on capturing her alive. How Maier had gotten to her first when she’d
made such a public spectacle of herself was pure luck of him being in the area
and alerted to the live feed of her thrashing that man in a café on social
media. Vidar could only hope she wouldn’t do something so garishly ostentatious
again. No, he would have to do this with as little exposure as possible. He’d
need to do this himself.
He leaned back into the couch, his aching shoulders sinking into the leather
cushions as he speculated. As far as he knew, Simone had no knowledge of
Norway, its language or customs, its geography or towns. She had not associated
with anyone outside of their family here. She was hostile towards men, shy
around women, and mistrustful of strangers in general. If she’d gone anywhere,
it would either be to seclusion or to the familiar. Henrik had offered her
both. Vidar had no knowledge of the particulars of their arrangement, but her
skin had lightened considerably in the time she’d been in his older brother’s
care, unquestionably from a lack of sunlight that should have been plentiful as
summer lengthened the days. She’d been kept indoors, safe, tucked away
somewhere that had slathered her in Henrik’s scents. He didn’t see any chafe
marks that implied she’d been tethered, though. A stray bitterness cut across
his analysis when he considered that perhaps she’d favored Henrik to have
stayed with him willingly, but she had ended up leaving in the end, barefoot
and unprepared to handle the outside world. Having left only to find torture,
it was not unthinkable that she would run back to Henrik.
His brother’s selfishness to keep her all to himself while he had become
enslaved to Maier and Anders had wasted away in emotional turmoil gnawed at
him, no matter the hypocrisy in his intending to vanish with her immediately.
He wouldn’t have kept it secret or refused either of his brothers if they
wanted to join, though. She belonged to all of them, after all, and he was
merely doing what was necessary to facilitate their possession of her. The
fantasies he harbored of being in a place where their relation was not public
knowledge, where they could exist as they were instead of as they should, were
only additional motivations. Being able to kiss her mouth or hold her close
without worry of what anyone might think was only a minor extra. Seeing her
unborn child into the world was an unexpected addition to that fantasy, one
that sobered him from his distraction.
He quickly stood, unnerved by that intrusive thought, and walked rapidly to
fetch his cell phone before walking outside. That wasn’t something he wanted,
not at all. He’d never wanted to be a father, let alone to an inbred
abomination that could belong to any of them. That was Anders’ bizarre fantasy,
one that repulsed him from the moment he’d confessed it during one of his bad
spells. He was just agitated and still in shock over the dreadful news of her
pregnancy, letting his mind get ahead of him in digesting that idea. He shoved
those thoughts down, burying them to join his guilt as he focused on more
urgent matters like how he was supposed to go confront Henrik without a car.
Going to Anders while Simone was out there still saturated in his scents would
be too troublesome to explain without revealing more of the truth than he had
ever intended. That, and he would likely try to kill Henrik if he found out
that particular truth. No, it was not worth tormenting Anders with her return
only to destroy him once more with her disappearance. He scrolled through his
contacts, coming again to the same one that had announced she was through with
him after each time she’d broken that vow when in need of a good fuck. He’d
have to shower before calling Odette over, though.
 
 
“Eat,” Simone insisted, shoving a chunk of some sort of semi-sweet bun with
raisins in it near Maier’s mangled mouth. He was naked but for the metal she’d
left him in, his arms bound together in front of him in chains, his wrists held
in the very same handcuffs he’d undone to better suspend her from the rope in
the ceiling. His legs were similarly hobbled and tied to the iron collar from
his ankles with a chain that kept him bent, making lying curled on his side the
most sustainable position. This was how she’d left him, the only difference now
being that he was conscious enough to hold his privates in a show of modesty
she thought so odd. There wasn’t much else he could reach with his hands,
though, and she knew the body’s want to do anything when so much had been
limited to it. She knew that too well.
“No, thank you,” he responded, his words slightly mumbled by how still he kept
his mouth as he spoke. Whether that was due to the tremendous swelling of the
extension she’d made to one side of his mouth or to the pain of it, she
couldn’t tell. This man did not react to pain as she was accustomed to
witnessing in others. His dead eyes, the whites of them red and the skin around
them pink and puffy, flicked to her before he offered, “Perhaps after you’re
done with me, should you still be so generous and I still be alive, I would
like to eat. Whatever I may consume now would likely be vomited in the meantime
and this wound needs no further encouragement towards infection.”
She grunted her acknowledgment and took the morsel into her own mouth. Living
with Henrik had brought her out of practice in starvation and she’d since found
herself growing hungrier in even shorter times than before Vermont, so she ate
the bun quickly as she watched Maier’s vacant expression interrupt with the
occasional blink.
“You’re not as talkative as you once were,” he mentioned, then just as airily
continued, “It’s not an uncommon trait in victims of sexual abuse. Does your
resentment of your uncles’ entitlement to your body cause you significant
emotional distress when they address you as ‘slave’ and rape you?”
Ash filled her mouth and soured her belly. She placed the remainder of the bun
in its plastic wrapper as she calmly threatened, “I can show you how it feels.”
To her revulsion, an intrigued glimmer shined in the flat space of his eyes as
he asked, “Is that why you’ve chained me and left me nude? I didn’t know you
felt that way for me, Ms. Valstad, and I must say I’m surprised. I’m not even
related to you.”
Disgust and aggravation simmered over her reluctance to what she had to do to
break this man. She let it fuel her will to open the box containing the soap
bar and lather her hands with a bit of bottled water before reaching her sudsy
fingers to his face. He flinched, more at her touch than the pain it caused,
then gagged at the fingers she shoved into his mouth.
“If you keep saying that shit, I’ll have to keep washing it from your mouth,”
she warned as he jerked and groaned.
In truth, she knew that his wound did indeed need no further encouragement
towards infection, and though it was almost certainly infected, she’d already
gone through the trouble of stealing soap. The tissue in his mouth was soft and
slick in a way she didn’t expect from this inhuman man, disturbing her that any
part of him could be so yielding to her intrusion. And yield he did, opening
his mouth to her even as he shuddered and groaned against the agony of burning
fingers rubbing stinging soap into that elongated grin. Her stomach turned at
his debauched submission to her hateful touch, curling her lip in a sneer of
disgust at what she had to do.
There was no need to feign the loathing in her tone as she said, “I wish you
didn’t deceive me, Maier. It really hurt my feelings, what you did to me here.
But I’m a forgiving person and I don’t hate you for it, so I’m going to give
you the opportunity to buy your life back. All I want is your honesty. Do you
think that’s a fair price?”
She slid her hand out of his mouth and the suds still clinging to her skin were
stained pink. A shaky sigh crawled out of his gaping, wet mouth and he nodded.
“Thank you,” she muttered as she opened one of the water jugs.
He flinched and choked when she poured it into and over his mouth, rinsing off
her hand over his face before rising from her knelt position. The cart was
still stocked with its gruesome array of tools and instruments, but she was
only there for the box of nitrile gloves. She glanced at the syringe, its
astonishingly long needle more menacing since watching it sink deep in her
abdomen, and she wondered again at what Maier had extracted from her. The
little vial was nestled in a liquid nitrogen cryogenic container on the floor,
a thing that looked more like a large thermos if she didn’t know better from
the advanced biology class of her brief high school experience. She decided to
ask him about it if she got what she needed from him and he was still conscious
enough to answer. As she opened the sewing kit and fortified the end of the
thread by dragging it between her sucking lips, she hoped she maintained this
clarity enough to remember to ask. She could feel his eyes on her as she
threaded the needle, his taunting amusement and delirium rolling off him like
heat radiates from an open oven.
“You are putting a lot of effort into fixing something you are just going to
break,” he rasped through a throat thick with pain and laughter.
She bent the needle into a curved hook, her limited focus on bending it into
the proper shape distracting her enough to speak her mind without filter as she
muttered, “I put a lot of effort into making that mark. It’s mine. I will take
care of what’s mine if I want to. I will take care of what’s mine and I don’t
need your cracker-ass opinion on it, haole.”
She forgot to feel unsettled by the surfacing of her silent inner narrative,
only blinking in mild confusion at the unmonitored words leaking freely from
her mind. Her control was already slipping. Maybe it had to slip for her to get
through this.
“Don’t fidget,” she scolded, her mother’s voice coming from a place and time
far away from here as she pulled his head into her lap.
His wet hair clung over his eyes, but she could see his discomfort and
nervousness from this intimate contact between the cracks. He did not fidget
and barely winced as she put her gloved fingers in his mouth to guide the
needle she sank into his cheek. The hook curved easily to meet the flesh on the
other side of the jagged and swollen divide, but it was slow work from the
strangeness of this scenario. She couldn’t put any stock in her judgment on
strangeness, however. Things that had seemed strange did not appear to bother
others and things that seemed perfectly natural or rational had made others
balk. What was happening was all necessary and all necessary things contained
their own merit for being. Maier, ever polite even when rude, remained
obediently silent and still as she steadied the side of her hand against his
face and sewed shut what she had opened. It was not a pretty suture, nor would
it heal prettily if he got the chance to heal at all, but it was hers and she
hummed a song into it as she worked. Like the crack in the mirror in Vermont,
like her teeth marks still engraved at the base of his neck, this was her
creation and it held something of her in it. The gaping gash held a moment of
her vengeful wrath and the jagged line she now sewed together held her song.
Knotting the thread at the edge of his natural mouth, she trimmed off the
excess with the tiny scissors from the kit and inspected her mark.
“Your face has some character now,” she smiled. He blinked from under his veil
of hair in response. There was something eerily familiar about a silent head
cradled against her. Something eerie and unfinished. “You can talk. There’s a
lot you need to tell me. Will you need any encouragement, or can I count on you
to answer with the honesty your life depends on?”
“What would you like to know?” he asked.
She frowned at his avoiding her question, her heart and stomach sinking under
the heavy weight of her task. She held his head still as she bent and let her
lips brush his ear when she whispered, “The truth. All of it.”
 
 
“You’re all going to rot in Hell.”
Vidar sighed, pressing two fingers to his throbbing temple as he leaned against
the car window and bit his tongue from saying anything that might get him
ejected from the vehicle.
Odette glared at the road, but her vitriol was aimed solely at him as she spat,
“You’re a god-damned stack of shit and you deserve to get murdered in your
sleep for what you’ve done. All of you.”
“Good thing I don’t sleep too often, then,” he muttered.
“The fuck you just say?”
“Thank you for driving me out here,” he answered instead.
“God, fuck off,” she sneered. “If you think Henrik has her, you should just let
the police handle it.”
“I don’t know that for certain. His new apartment is just in the area she was
seen at yesterday and I want to follow up on a hunch. Besides, I don’t want the
cops booking her for assaulting that guy.”
“So… that was really her?”
Vidar shrugged. He hadn’t watched any of the videos the gawkers had taken nor
had he read the tabloids that swarmed to it like flies. There was a hesitance
in Odette’s question that betrayed the same depth of guilt that he had used to
manipulate her into helping him. Her sense of personal failure to a girl she’d
never even met was ridiculous but convenient and the opportunity to improve his
image in her eyes was not lost on him either.
“She needs help, not condemnation from the law,” he said, measuring out the
right amount of sentimental value to his words. “I can’t change what I did when
I was needing more mental help than I was getting, but I can at least help her
get what she needs to heal. We just have to find her.”
Odette was silent at the wheel, but he was patient to let his lies work their
way into her guilt. He had to rub his mouth in a feigned itch to keep from
smiling when she finally said, “I hope we find her soon.”
Success relaxed him. For all that had gone so wrong, there was much that had
gone unexpectedly right. The receptionist at Henrik’s job was surprisingly
forthcoming about providing his new address, right down to the apartment
number, and Odette was prepared to sacrifice her entire weekend just to give
him rides while she believed his car was being repaired. He couldn’t push his
luck with her too far, though. She had an annoying habit of using her
impressive intellect and perception. The area around Henrik’s building was
commercial and crowded, making Vidar’s suggestion that she just drop him off to
go in and handle this alone more reasonable than he was sure it otherwise would
have seemed to her. Seeing a young woman struggle to handle the door with her
large stroller in tow, he rushed over and held it open, following in after her
without needing to be buzzed in through the electric lock. Unnerved at the idea
of being stuck in an elevator with a young mother and baby and not wanting to
confront the source of that discomfort, he climbed the stairs up to the sixth
floor. It was difficult to not get his hopes up. If Simone wasn’t there, he
truly had no idea where she could be. He blamed his hammering heart on the
stairs when he finally stood in front of Henrik’s door. When he raised his hand
to knock, he noticed the extra lock on the door, the latch of it facing the
outside. It didn’t take more than a second for this oddity to click in his
mind.
“So that’s how you kept her, you rat bastard…” he mumbled, a crooked grin
pulling at his mouth.
He didn’t want to acknowledge it, but there was a strong relief in knowing she
was kept there by force rather than by choice. Chalking it up to pettiness, he
pounded on the door three times and waited, listening for any movement within.
“Henrik?” he called, knocking again.
Satisfied that his brother was not home and not particularly caring if he was,
Vidar picked the lock with two bobby-pins and a screwdriver from his pocket. A
lifelong interest in restraining his sexual partners had taught him the value
of lock-picking in a pinch and this one was not so different from the locks
he’d used to affix chains and collars. The apartment was silent within, his
steps reverberating off the walls in how sparse the furniture was in the open
space. Not a lot of places for their cunning little slave to hide. The living
room had a new-looking sheepskin rug spread out before the solitary couch, a
sketchbook open on the white wool displaying Simone’s artistic talents in
smudged charcoal. He glanced at it to quickly become disturbed at the
unfinished yet distinctly recognizable image of his uncle Bjørn’s disembodied
head cradled in the arms of a terrifying demonic creature. Terrifying, but
mesmerizing in its intricacy and extravagant detail, like a baroque torture
device. He shuddered at wondering what went on in the maddened mind of his
beloved slave that she would find crafting such grotesque works to be soothing,
then brushed it off to search the rest of the apartment. The hopes that he had
tried to fend off fell at finding only evidence of her recent presence, but not
recent enough. The clothes in the hamper only contained one outfit of Henrik’s
that reeked of the same gin he’d smelled on Simone last night and her
toothbrush next to the bathroom sink was bone dry. He milled about after
confirming his failure, rifling through the drawer of embarrassingly girlish
clothes that made him uncomfortably concerned for his brother’s preferences,
before giving up. No Simone to drag back to him, no sign of where she might
have gone, not even Henrik there to yell at until he felt a little better, this
was all so dissatisfying. Vidar was about to leave with only a heart heavy in
worry for his runaway slave when he heard the slam of the front door and
Henrik’s heavy steps.
 
 
Rust and meat and bittersweet filled Simone’s nose as she bent close to Maier’s
face and wiped the blood with a dampened edge of the undershirt she’d torn off
him last night. The bob of his throat swallowing nervously and his rapid
blinking as he avoided her gaze drew the attention of something predatory
behind her mind. What runs away must be prey and, by running, begins the chase.
She followed the trail of his fear, tracking it through the noise and
distraction of her own.
“Have you already had your fill of causing me pain?” he scoffed in the subtle
change of his tone, still not meeting her steadfast stare. His breath hitched
and shuddered as she dragged her bare fingertips through the veil of his hair,
pushing it out of his face and running her nails gently over his damp scalp.
“Causing physical pain is easy… and nothing worth having comes easy,” she said,
speaking softly just above a whisper as she smoothed his hair back. It was
greasy, limp, the same grayed day-old black coffee color and quality of his
eyes, and she focused on the effect her touch had on him rather than the
revulsion it caused in her. “Aversion to touch and physical affection is not an
uncommon trait in victims of sexual abuse. This hurts you far more than the
smile I carved into your face, doesn’t it?” His white skin turned gray and
pallid, providing the answer that he did not voice, and she forced herself to
grin and chuckle past the sting of it echoing in her. “I guess we have more
than a high tolerance for pain in common. Well? Mommy or daddy? Who did it to
you?”
Another bob of his throat, then his even, clinical tone returned, “I hardly see
how that applies to your plans, Ms. Valstad.”
“I no longer have plans,” she frowned. Though she wanted to drag her nails down
his forehead and burrow them into his eyes until the plump balls popped under
her thumbs, she kept her touch gentle and settled for the queasiness so clear
in his features. “All my plans were based on what you told me, but apparently,
I can’t trust anything you’ve said. It’s hard to trust anything, isn’t it?”
“I did not lie to you,” he said.
“It’s been months, and nothing has happened. I don’t even know if my father is
alive or if that was a lie too.”
“I did not lie to you.”
“Don’t tellme that when your lies are what got me collared and fucked!” she
snarled, an unexpected and hot flash of rage bubbling up past what control she
had gathered. “You said you had Vidar working for you, that he knew the truth,
but he doesn’t, he can’t know the truth and still want what he wants! You never
told me what Papa did, what he gave me and changed me! I’ve remembered so much
and I…”
Her other hand came up to sink into his hair, those slick strands so unlike her
thick unruly waves, that white skin turning chameleon colors, that thin mouth
with a tail curling up his swollen cheek, and she slipped a little further into
herself just for the distance. When she spoke, it wasn’t to him, but she
couldn’t stop the words that flooded up from these months of misery and
confusion.
“It’s like… It feels like my life is a shipwreck and I’ve been waiting on a
beach, watching the tide bring in the wreckage,” she said, weary and ragged.
Her fingers slid down to wrap around his neck, feeling the rapid tempo of his
pulse, but there was no intention in her hands. She couldn’t feel him or see
him anymore as her silence broke and her voice birthed the hurt that had been
gestating for so long. “It’s too much. The world is too much. But men… men
don’t know when to stop. Even when they’ve taken everything from you, they
reach in and grab and grab... They told me he’s evil, but they never told me
why. Maybe because if they did, they might have to look around and see that
their rules are just lies they tell themselves to feel safe. When I stripped
away everything society told me to believe, I saw what we were under the masks
and I can’t go back to wearing mine again. Nothing worth having comes easy and
truth is the hardest thing to come to. I still love it. I still love Papa for
showing me the truth and I still love my uncles for splitting me open to
receive it… even if it hurts. It hurts, oh… oh god, does it hurt… but… I’m
supposed to do something with it. Right? I need to find out what that is, I
need to find him, I need to find him again... and then I’ll know what to do.”
She slowly came back to the concrete room and the chained man under her hands.
He watched her behind those flat eyes and she remembered what she needed from
him.
“Where is he?” she asked. “Why didn’t you take me to him like you said you
would?”
Maier hesitated, his pale lips drawing in a breath and holding it before
saying, “Leif Valstad is still a captive of the Marceau estate. I did not take
you to him simply because I could not find you when the time came, but in the
weeks that you were made unavailable, the circumstances of his captivity have…
evolved. It is no longer in my interest to see him freed. I realize this is a
sensitive issue for you and I don’t mean to upset you, but I’m afraid I cannot
expose him to you in your current mindset.”
She leaned back on her haunches, her hands limply sliding away from his neck as
she tried to identify this feeling his words stirred in her. She’d felt this
before, this strange calm where she expected frustration, rage, and despair at
her helplessness against these unseen forces that moved her and her family like
pieces on a chessboard. Her feet carried her to the cart and she examined the
stainless steel set of blades, knowing what she wanted only when the scalpel
was in her hand. Maier’s knowledge was not enough. It would not help her to be
told that she was now alone in wanting her father’s freedom, and therefore her
own freedom.
“If I’m not to be with him, where am I to be? What do you want from me?” she
asked as she tested the sharpness against her palm. The blade was honed. The
cuts would be exact.
“You are to remain in the captivity of his brothers. If I can be certain of
your compliance, you may be granted visitation with him.”
“Generous,” she seethed.
His bound hands were still clasped over his genitals and it occurred to her
that it wasn’t out of modesty, but preservation. She smirked at that, amused at
how sex-driven her thoughts had become, and lowered herself to straddle his
thighs. Her bareness beneath her sagging skirt was made apparent to him in a
direct method that repulsed them both, but these mild discomforts were
necessary for her task. His skin wasn’t lovely, nor unblemished and unscarred,
but it was an open canvas nonetheless and she leaned over it to survey where to
begin.
“I thought you were different,” she said, dragging the flat edge of the blade
along the width of his chest. “I thought that just maybe because you wanted
something that wasn’t sex and wasn’t a lie from me, I could trust you not to
use me for deceit and in deceitful ways. I should have known better. You’re
just a man, made of the same selfish flesh. Deceit is as much a part of you as
your skin. I wonder if I made you mine like I made that smile in your cheek,
you would be something more than just a man. I could change you, Maier.”
“I am satisfied with my selfish flesh as it is, thank you,” he said, and she
could hear his nervous anticipation. She let it stretch until he broke, asking,
“What were you thinking of doing to me, if you don’t mind me asking?”
She swallowed her uncertainty and answered, “Art is a response that can be felt
even through centuries by the conductivity of human connection. I’m going to
make you my conduit.”
It was a longshot, but if Maier was ever in Leif’s presence to be seen, her
father would be the only person in the world to understand the meaning of the
art she would carve into this man. As she held his head down and dragged the
thin blade through the side of his face, she let herself miss her father. He
would understand. He was the only one who ever did, even when she didn’t
understand herself.
***** Chapter 67 *****
Henrik’s feet dragged and his thoughts ran together in a bleary hum too big for
the stuffy confines of his skull. Whatever trail Simone had left in her
ferocious wake had cooled after the clown-masked man had escorted her swiftly
from the café, leaving only puzzlement for the police, fascinated intrigue for
the public, and dreaded knowing in Henrik. In the dozens of times he’d scoured
the videos on the tabloid sites, he tried to search for any clue he could
gather that might lead him away from the suspicion he did not want to confirm
into fact, but there was no doubting that the clown was a man of Leif’s and
Kyun’s ilk. If not by the use of a mask when any normal man would not have need
to hide his identity, then by the chilled recognition that fell over her
aggressive behavior when she took notice of him. Henrik had seen that tense
stillness in her only a few times before: in the moments he could now identify
when Leif’s intent turned deadly and in Edward Kyun’s car shortly before the
chaotic wrestle for the gun. She’d regarded him with that distinct stillness
once before, too. He shook his head, his brain sloshing around painfully with
the motion as he chased that memory back into the depths.
He dragged his coat from his stiff shoulders and shuffled out of his shoes,
leaving a trail as he discarded them from the entryway to the living room
before collapsing onto the couch where this disaster had begun. In his
desperation to avoid making a mistake, he’d made a worse one and let her slip
away. It hadn’t been until several minutes after, as he sat on his bedroom
floor with his back against the door with the physical manifestation of his
need still wet in his hand and his breath panting out of him hot and ragged,
that he’d noticed the key’s absence from his neck. Since that terrible
realization, he’d been out on the streets, searching and calling for her until
his throat felt stripped and his legs began to shake. When he saw the videos on
social media, all hope in him withered, but he wandered aimlessly to avoid the
dread of returning to this empty apartment. He unbuckled his belt and leaned
his head back into the couch cushions with a deep sigh.
“Welcome home, asshole.”
He jerked up in a sudden flinch at the shock of the voice even as he knew who
that sardonic drawl belonged to at once.
“What the fuck are you doing in here?!” he snarled, on his feet in an instant.
Vidar leaned against the wall leading down the darkened hallway, his posture
relaxed in the detached way he became when deeply angered, and Henrik realized
then that he knew everything even before his brother spoke with a false
nonchalance, “Oh, just thought I’d drop in and see where you’ve been hiding the
little bitch. Nice place, by the way.”
Henrik swallowed the sour ash heavy on his tongue and squared his powerful
shoulders as he ground out, “You need to leave. Now.”
His younger brother’s smirk was as sharp as his glare and at odds with his
casually asked, “Does Camilla know what’s been waiting for you at home at the
end of your dates? I always did think it was sort of odd that she never posted
any of those stupid cutesy couple pics from your place. I bet it wasn’t for a
lack of trying on her part, though. How many excuses did you give your
girlfriend before she stopped asking to see your new apartment?”
“Vid,” Henrik growled warningly, ignoring how his fists trembled. This couldn’t
be happening. Of all times and all people, it had to be now and him. There
would be no end to the punishment with this sly, spiteful man holding this
horrid knowledge.
“Or was she in on it?” Vidar grinned. The sleaziness oozing from that smile
made Henrik’s stomach twist in anger. “She never struck me as anything but the
conventionally annoying clingy type, but maybe she liked having a girl in the
bedroom. I have no doubt that Simone eats pussy as good as she sucks dick. For
someone who speaks so little, she has a deft tongue, doesn’t she?”
Henrik’s skin flashed hot at the abrupt memory of Simone lapping at his come
popped up at the front of his mind, tearing out from where he’d locked it far
away from his thoughts, and he was certain beyond reason that Vidar could see
every depraved detail of that pink tongue dragging slick and soft along his
palm. He shoved that hand in his pocket, his other tugging through his hair
nervously as his glare darted away from his brother.
“I never touched her. I was keeping her safe. I was keeping you all safe from
that… sin,” he muttered, wincing at how the lie fell flat no matter how true he
tried to convince himself it was. He’d touched her countless times; chaste,
innocent embraces and caresses that imparted only a mutual comfort and
affection. She was the one who tempted, her want so constant and calling to him
like a silent siren’s song. One mistake, just one drunken moment of weakness
after so many nights of temptation was all it took to shatter everything. It
wasn’t fair.
Vidar’s snort and chuckle tightened his fist in his hair with frustration as
his younger brother scoffed, “You expect me to buy that load of bullshit?
Henrik, you’re not an idiot. You had everyone—the whole fucking world—convinced
she was chopped up in some lunatic’s freezer, or shackled in someone’s
basement, or anywhere but sleeping in your bed every night. You weren’t keeping
her safe. You were keeping her to yourself!”
“I don’t care if you don’t believe me. I never touched…” Henrik started, then
corrected himself loudly, “I never fucked her! She’s sick, remember? She’s had
a fucked-up life and it’s made her think she wants or-or deserves things that
hurt her. But you… There’s nothing that excuses your behavior, but there’s
something wrong with you and Anders. This was the best solution for everyone; I
had no other choice!”
“So, that’s it? You choked me out, let me believe I’d allowed my niece to get
dragged off and murdered, let Anders drink himself to fucking oblivion, all for
the sake of what, exactly? Keeping us safe from sin? Did it keep you safe from
yours?”
“I never fucked her!”
Vidar’s smirk twitched into a snarl and he slid into a slow step towards him as
he spoke with an anger that simmered quietly, “It doesn’t matter. Do you think
that makes you any better? You held an innocent girl prisoner against her will.
You were sleeping together. Don’t deny that; I’ve smelled her on your
bedsheets.”
He stopped in front of him, close enough that their toes nearly touched, and
Henrik swallowed that thickness weighing down his tongue before repeating, “I
never fucked her. I did what I had to do to stop what was happening.”
Vidar’s cold eyes narrowed in disdain as he said, “You didn’t fuck her because
you didn’t let yourself, not because you didn’t want to. If you wanted to keep
her safe, you would have reported what we were doing to the police, but you
didn’t do that. You kept her close, all to yourself, all alone in secret,
waiting for an excuse good enough to justify giving in because you know, even
if you’re too much of a coward to admit it, that she was made for us to take.
All those times you didn’t fuck her were just buying your conscience some
comfort for when you finally do it so you can tell yourself that you tried.”
Henrik felt a hollowness well inside him like a drum, digging out a hunger for
something he wasn’t sure of until the sour truth of his brother’s words hit it
with a nearly audible sound. The want for fulfillment only blood could satisfy
reached up from the bottom of that hollowness, begging for the sweet, hot,
consuming rage that only lived in the taking of life. He’d gotten a taste just
that once and ever since, there was that hollowness in him, opening wide at
every anger and every hate. Meeting the knife-sharp glare of his brother’s
eyes, those cruel eyes that could seemingly cut through any man to the core of
his truth, he wondered if he could see it now. The slight tick at the corner of
his thin mouth was the only clue that he might, but still, Vidar did not back
away.
“And you? What was your excuse for beating, choking, and raping our niece? Did
you think you could get away with it forever?” Henrik asked, that nervousness
now gone from his anger. The hunger purified him, brought strength and
certainty where before there was fear and regret.
“Forever isn’t something I worry about. Forever could end at any time,” Vidar
answered, then that sly smile slid back over his weary features. “And I’ve
never needed an excuse to take what rightfully belongs to me. Neither do you,
brother. When we find her— and we will— I can help you to accept her purpose to
us.”
Henrik let his eyes close and inhaled slowly through his nose, letting his
breath leak out even slower as he counted in his head. 1, 2, 3. This was his
brother, younger than him by a mere two years, the person he’d been closest to
throughout his childhood and remained close with through adulthood. They knew
more about each other than anyone else ever had and might ever will. 4, 5, 6.
This was the man who had given his niece bruises so deep they took nearly a
month to heal, but worse were the scars on her mind that had made her tense up
and tremble every time he’d hold her too close from behind or touch her neck
with a reaching hand. There was no remorse in this man, not even the
anticipation of remorse. 7, 8, 9. That sweet heat thrummed through his
bloodstream, enlivening every sore and tired muscle with an electric energy and
he felt aware of everything within and around him. The slow sailing of dust
motes catching the morning sunlight, the faint ticking of his late father’s
watch on his wrist, and the slight widening of his brother’s eyes as
realization took root were all present within his range of awareness before it
was all enveloped in black. 10.
An irritating burn bloomed in the left side of his chest and something wet
spilled down his torso, clearing that black from his vision to see his large
hands wrapped around his brother’s neck like iron bands tightening through the
resistant muscle and ligaments. Vidar’s face was as wide with surprise and
pinched with pain as his own, that mirrored expression causing his hands to fly
away from their deadly grip as he stumbled backward. That burning sensation
flared abruptly as he stepped away and he looked down between them to see the
screwdriver in his brother’s hand, its shaft wet with blood. His blood, he
realized when he saw the wide stain on his shirt still spreading at an alarming
rate.
“Oh…” Henrik murmured, pressing his chest, trying to feel where the blood was
coming from.
Vidar helpfully moved Henrik’s hand to the wet rip in his shirt and both men
were quiet as he pressed against that curious lack of pain. He knew it was
shock that prevented him from feeling it, but it was hard to comprehend that
he’d been stabbed even with this knowledge. It was hard to comprehend much of
anything in that moment.
“Sorry…” Vidar croaked, breaking the tense quiet that had fallen over them. “I
should call an ambulance, right?”
Henrik frowned, bewilderment briefly overtaking his muffled thoughts as he
tried to figure out why an ambulance was necessary, then saw the blood pooling
around his shoe. That was an awful lot of blood and it didn’t seem to want to
stop.
“No, no… I’ll call,” Henrik said. “You should go.”
“Are you sure? I can at least wait with you for the ambulance,” his brother
offered, his voice raspy and quiet from being choked.
Henrik shook his head slowly. He felt tired, far more tired than when he’d
first dragged his feet through the door, but he didn’t want to dirty the new
sheepskin rug to sit back down on the couch. He shuffled over to the small
dining area and sat in his chair, the dishes from last night’s dinner still
littering the table. It had been his turn to cook, which had meant it was
Simone’s turn to clean. She’d left him instead. He took out his phone and his
hand shook as he dialed.
“You’re losing a lot of blood…”
Henrik looked up to see his brother still standing there, his pale skin somehow
impossibly paler as he stared at the red puddle on the floor. “I told you to
leave, Vid.”
“Sorry…” Vidar murmured, then hesitantly walked out, muttering, “Sorry… sorry…”
Henrik hit the call button and explained to the emergency operator, in the
briefest terms, that he’d accidentally stabbed himself, then clarified that it
was a rather nasty stab. The operator wanted him to stay on the line and talk
to him until the ambulance arrived, but Henrik was uninterested in holding a
conversation with a stranger. It was easier to watch the dust motes sailing
through the golden sunlight, their aimless drift carried on air currents too
subtle for him to detect. The weather was beautiful that weekend. He should
have taken Simone out to the countryside like she’d wanted, far away from
anyone else so that his would be the only set of eyes to watch her stretch out
on the grass and let her golden skin eagerly brown in the sunshine. That
strange girl was always begging for sunshine and she seemed to hold it inside
her for days afterward, making her smiles brighter and her touch warmer. He
hoped her baby had her smile. He reached up to grab a speck of dust that he’d
watched, but it danced away in the air he stirred with his hand and he lost
track of it. He should have done so many things differently.
A powerful thirst nagged at him, but his body was far too heavy to move,
drawing him to slump against the table until he laid his head next to the dirty
dishes. He was just so tired; a little rest would help. A blackness far calmer
than the one earlier enveloped him before he could recall how to tell Simone to
wash the dishes in English.
 
 
Rupert never made it back to the ship. Leif had waited in their storage
container, away from the port workers’ inspections, until the ship lurched back
to sea and the captain had cleared him to come out, but the old Englishman
hadn’t been heard nor seen since departing on his errand. There was a stern
lack of concern on the subject from the captain, imparting an unwillingness to
know or speculate on anything regarding the smuggled passengers he carried
aboard his vessel. That authentic adherence to ignorance was what had kept Leif
from killing the crew and commandeering the ship, as any excuse or interest in
providing one would have inferred some nervousness or personal investment on
the subject. It had seemed the captain truly had no stake in the matters of
either him or Rupert, leaving the possibility for sabotage to await Leif on his
long-ago home shore since it appeared none would occur at sea. He should have
offered to accompany him on his errand to see if he refused, then he would at
least be able to more assuredly confirm that a trap was in Rupert’s plans.
Either way, Leif had drifted lightly along the edge of sleep under the
overwhelming vastness of the stars on that moonless night, his nest atop the
highest container now feathered with a sleeping bag. The barking conversations
of the crew was lost to the waves, along with the screams of his nightmares as
he dreamed in the ocean’s roar. It was in the depths of a nightmare that he was
carried to his daughter’s lifeless corpse at the end of this journey and the
only screams the ocean drowned were his own.
“Coming up port!”
The crewman’s call slipped Simone’s limp and meager weight from Leif’s grasp
like sand through his clutching fingers and the nightmare faded back among the
rumbling worries that murmured constantly at the bottom of his thoughts. Bleary
half-sleep clung heavily to his motions as he lifted himself and saw the
mountaintops of his homeland cut a dark divide between the glittering starlight
and the glittering city lights. He was sure he’d seen this view before as a
boy, but he could not pull the memory up from two lifetimes ago. He wondered
what he’d thought of it then, what sentiments this view of his homeland had
brought him. Had he learned to value its veneer of safety, simplicity, and
familiarity, or was that something that could only be cherished once lost? He
could not remember and it didn’t occur now. Looking out at the small seaside
city, he only felt what had been in his heart for the past twenty years with
increasing awareness: yearning for his daughter’s safety in his company.
Whether Rupert had been guiding him into a trap or whether he had met an
inconvenient end in the deadly work they did, Leif did not care to find out. He
dove over the railing into the black and foamy brine, the shock of cold
expelling the sluggishness from his body in shudders as he pushed through the
waves. The city lights drew closer in imperceptible increments, as
imperceptible as the pace at which his daughter had turned his continued
existence into life and his mechanical heart into red flesh. Soon, in hours or
days or weeks or months, he would find her and his return from death would
become life again, even if he had to stain these waters red with the blood of
all of Norway. When he finally dragged himself from the lapping waves and onto
the stable firmness of land, the sky was just beginning to lighten in pre-dawn.
It was going to be a sunny summer day, but in the early morning chill with the
saltwater having sucked the warmth from his body, it was freezing.
His first victim was by necessity and pure good luck. The yellow squares of
light amid the dim gray dawn drew him to a large house that had been divided
into apartments; a common arrangement even for larger families, but only a
single young man seemed to occupy that little section of the building. As the
capricious nature of luck had so often favored him amid the dreadful events of
his life, he noticed that this young man, alone and unsuspecting in his single-
serving apartment, was also roughly his size. Leif scratched on the window next
to the door; arrhythmic, animal scratches that drew the young man’s curiosity
to crack the door open and see what the noise was about. Leif had always
preferred to hunt single men, especially young men who did not yet acknowledge
their vulnerability to the horrors of the world, because they were arrogant and
far less likely to call the police even when a threat was known. He could taunt
and draw out the hunt before they were ever aware of being hunted, coaxing fear
past their ignorance but allowing their disbelief to contain it until he chose
to shatter that delicate bubble. However, this was no time for fun and games.
Leif forced his way through the door, grabbed the young man’s face before he
could think to cry out, and held him against a wall as he strangled him. It was
a perfunctory, simple, clean kill that ushered in a swift and silent death, not
typically Leif’s preference, but he wasn’t here for sport. He was here for a
hot shower and a change of clothes.
The distressed jeans were a little tight and the black t-shirt that clung
revealingly at his torso displayed the garish iconography of a band his
daughter might have known, both items far from his typical fashion and exactly
what he needed to disguise himself. He finger-combed his overgrown hair into a
small knot high at the back of his head, the stringy strands that escaped it
giving him a calculated dishevelment that he tipped more into the impression of
calculated after trimming his beard into a refined shape. Completing his
disguise with a cheap pair of sunglasses to hide his distinct eyes, he examined
himself as though through the perspective of a stranger. Gone was the cultured,
sophisticated professional killer the public knew to look out for and gone was
the savage bronzed king of a blood cult Francis had tailored for him. The man
in the mirror was simply, as his daughter might put it, a reluctantly aging
douchebag trying to prey on a much younger dating pool. Not that it had stopped
her from using and then discarding exactly this type of man in the past, so it
must not have been as repugnant as she had claimed. Nevertheless, he was
unrecognizable from the image the public held of him, so he folded a few
outfits into a bag to take and doubled his socks to guard against the damp of
his shoes.
After rolling his young benefactor in a thick duvet and stuffing him under the
bed, he walked out to find which car responded to the remote key he’d taken
along with the wallet from his pockets. Fortune continued to smile upon him
when the click of the remote prompted a chirp and blink of lights from a Lexus
SUV that had the back windows conveniently blacked out. This would serve his
purposes quite nicely. Sliding into the plush leather interior, he considered
the logistics of his journey and decided the best route to begin his search
would be from his own beginning. It had been quite some time since he’d visited
his mother, after all, and Astrid might be able to fill him in on what had
happened to their family since his brothers had absconded with his darling
girl.
 
 
His brother’s blood smeared on Vidar’s hand when he remembered to shove the
screwdriver back into his pocket. He wiped it unthinkingly on his pants where
the dark material disguised the nature of the stain, but the tacky fluid stuck
in every crack and wrinkle, mapping his skin in thin lines of bright red.
Standing outside the apartment building under the too-bright sun, he rubbed his
hand on his thigh over and over, the rough weave of his pants scraping away the
red until finally all that clung to his skin was the pungent odor. Sweat seemed
to bead out of every pore on his body, collecting in the folds and creases at
his joints and soaking his hair before forming fat drops that slithered down
his skin under his clothes. He couldn’t think. He didn’t want to think.
Somewhere beneath the deafening sound of his own labored breathing, a noise not
quite heard drew his wide stare to Odette calling him from her car.
She was asking something, or berating him, he could not decipher the sounds
coming from her frowning mouth, but whatever it was, he could only stammer out
his imperative need to go home. Her noise continued with questions that could
not penetrate the locked fortress of his mind, but the car was moving. He was
moving, and he would keep moving through distance and time. Henrik, however,
had stopped. Vidar could not unknow what he had done as much as he could undo
it, so he did what he could do and moved away from it. His sweating body
trembled and tensed, his breaths stuttering out of him as he tried to contain
the overwhelming need for distance and time away from that knowing.
The minutes stretched and warped until at last the car idled in front of his
house and, with a little convincing of his muscles to unlock, he staggered out
and waved dismissively to Odette until she stopped trying to follow him. Or at
least he figured she’d stopped. Either way, he shut and locked the door behind
him, leaning against the solidity of the wood before shoving himself off it and
walking toward the kitchen. He had to wash his hands, had to get rid of that
reek, had to quench the thirst that scraped his bruised throat, had to keep
expanding that distance until what he’d done was a speck on the horizon of his
life. Memories of red splattered on white crowded the corners of his narrowed
vision as he washed the stench from his hands until his skin stung pink and
clean from the dish soap and hot water, but he was already further away when
all he could smell was the lemony soap wafting up from the steam. No, it was
still there. He scrambled to tear out of his pants, sending the screwdriver
clattering on the kitchen tiles, and he shoved both into the trash bin before
turning to walk out of the kitchen. The figure standing and watching from the
doorway froze him in place. The initial shock at finding himself not alone as
he’d thought burst into a frenzy of feeling when recognition made its way past
the wall.
“Where… Where…” he stammered weakly, then in a flare of rage, he found himself
quickly advancing on Simone. She shrunk under his hands grabbing her by her
shoulders, her fear of him displayed so openly in her cowering expression, but
she did not move away from him even as he shouted, “Where the fuck did you
go?!”
“I’m sorry!” she pleaded. “I’m sorry, I… I can’t…”
His panting breath was hot as he glared down at her, his teeth bared in the
anger that ate away at his panic while his mind expanded beyond the walls it
had erected to protect him from seeing and knowing what was around him. Her
hair was pulled back in a thick braid, still damp from the shower that had
washed away the sweat and grime of their horrid night, and she wore one of his
t-shirts, the hem reaching low enough to be a short dress on her much smaller
frame. She’d been here while he’d been there, searching for her and finding
only his brother’s end. The outrage of it nearly made him laugh, and then he
did, his grip crushing her shoulders as a strange chuckle bubbled up from the
din of his rage.
“Vidar, what-” she started to ask, her voice tight in pain until he cut her off
with a backhanded slap across her face.
“You LEFT!” he yelled, grabbing her chin and jerking her up to face him as he
snarled, “You are not supposed to leave! You are not supposed to do anything
unless I tell you to do it! Do you understand? Do you?!”
Her tears crawled down his fingers as she nodded and he calmed at seeing her
endure suffering to be good for him. That rage fizzled out as abruptly as it
had come, leaving that treacherous tenderness to grow in its wake. He allowed
it. Anything to build a wider gap between his mind and what he had done. The
fearful hesitance to open her eyes as he loosened his grip into a caress that
brushed away her tears amused him, but when she looked up at him with confusion
glimmering in her wet gaze, something in him that had been wound so tight for
so long finally snapped. He wanted her. Not just his slave, not just his pet,
not just his niece. He wanted her. His breath held suspended in his aching
throat at the very idea, the impossibility of it, yet it reached for her and he
reached with it, cradling the base of her head in his hands and leaning down to
kiss her before stopping himself.
“Simone…” he whispered, needing to know and dreading to hear it. She watched
him, fear still swimming in her glittering tears, as she waited with the clear
anticipation of expecting an order to fulfill. There was no chance she would
tell him the truth, but he was always able to see a lie when spoken. “Why did
you come back?”
Her teeth briefly nipped at the plump, tempting flesh of her bottom lip before
she gathered the nerve to answer, “This is where I am expected to be.”
It was not a lie. It was also not the truth he had expected her to hold. His
brow furrowed as he deciphered what her response could imply, only taking a
moment to come to the awful conclusion. It couldn’t be, though. Even ignoring
everything that had already happened, she couldn’t want that.
“Where Leif’s captors expect you to be?” he asked, his frown hardening when she
responded with a silence that confirmed the most obvious fact of it all.
Irritation growled into his tone. “Do you not know what they will do to you?
Why they want you here with me?”
Her mouth opened, her reluctance to answer closing it before she tried again
and meekly whispered, “You… You’re training me to, uh…”
His frown twitched into a humorless smirk at just how clueless this clever girl
could be when blinded by her devotion to that sick freak who conditioned her so
well. It was revolting, how much she still loved him. Vidar was no longer too
perturbed to admit to himself how much of his hatred for Leif was mere
jealousy, though his hatred ran deep enough to suffice itself even without it.
“I’m training you for myself,” he corrected her, then added, “They only want
what you can create for them. What we can create, or you and your father.” Her
expression of utter bewilderment and worry gave her such an innocent look, he
allowed it to build just to watch it shatter when he finally said, “They’re
going to take your baby, Simone, and they’re going to want more.”
Her mouth twisted in disgust, yet her bewilderment did not lessen. “But… I was
on the shot… I’m not even sure I can get pregnant, not for at least a few
months. There’s still time to… to do something.”
“Oh, sweetheart…” he said, his false sympathy making her tense under his touch
as he rubbed at her neck and slid his other hand down over the barely
perceptible curve of her belly. He watched closely as her wavering stare
widened in disbelief when he told her, “You’re more than two months pregnant
right now.”
“No… n-no, that’s not poss- possible, I-I-I can’t… I can’t…” she stuttered, her
eyes darting around to chase the thoughts spinning through her mind before the
color drained from her face to a sickly gray-yellow.
Vidar only had a second to realize what her reaction to this news would be once
the denial passed and he hurriedly stepped away right before she lurched
forward and vomited on the floor. The display of her emotional turmoil being
processed so physically brought him an odd comfort to the turmoil of his own,
and through this strange secondhand vengefulness, he understood how to better
increase his distance. Despite his skill in tormenting her, there was someone
much more suitable for this particular circumstance, someone who could relish
in it with a fervor he could not bring himself to supply.
As he picked up his phone from the countertop, he ordered her, “Clean that and
then clean yourself, sweetheart. Your dear uncle Anders is going to come over
soon.”
***** Chapter 68 *****
The accumulation of three generations’ worth of clutter had amassed detritus to
clog and gorge every surface in the farmhouse. Paraphernalia, curios, books,
and baubles of all sorts were retained by the ever-saving grace of not yet
having broken and by the value of constantly looming preparedness, although
Leif could not construct any feasible situation that would require the owner’s
manual for a 1986 Dodge Daytona or a dubiously functional watercooler that ran
on Freon. His familial home was an archeological site that told the story of
the many who had lived there through only the most peripheral of perspectives.
Vague memory of his grandmother’s nervous hands haunted the cross stitch
hanging on the wall, but he only remembered the thousands of tissues she’d
compulsively and ritualistically torn apart towards the end of her shorter and
shorter days. The chipped wood of a croquet mallet stirred recollection of a
particularly active summer with neighbors he could no longer recall anything of
save for the sound of their honking voices muffled through the walls. There
were no meaningful memories for him here, only recollections.
The house held the physical remnants of the everyday lives of many, except for
his own. The places where the photos containing him were once hung were marked
by squares of discoloration from the wooden frames having preserved the
patterned wallpaper behind them. The award ribbons and trophies of his
prepubescent youth were nowhere in sight. It was as though he had been erased
from the history of the house, which he knew his mother would have herself
believe, but he did not fault her for it. That dedicated denial of hers had
been a useful tool to his family for decades, but like the Freon-running water
cooler, its usefulness had become obsolete. His secret was out and, soon enough
if not already, her husband’s and brother-in-law’s would be dragged out along
with it. Einar and Bjørn had the advantage of being dead for this
inevitability, though Astrid had no such benefit. To bury that past, she would
have to bury herself with it.
He had excavated the drawers of a large hutch in the receiving room to find a
machete Bjørn had brought back from Honduras when he heard the squeal of the
front door swinging open on its antique hinges. The simple sound of the regular
comings and goings through the heavy door invoked a nostalgia that the decaying
viscera of past decades had not. All at once, part of him was pulled back to
that other life and he could detect the assured level of safety and comfort
within the world that had permeated his childhood. It was a faint brush along
the outskirts of his mind, something he couldn’t know again but knew of as one
is reminded of the sun in a dark winter night when next to a fire, and he rose
to his feet to greet the one as responsible for bringing him into that charmed
life as she was for expelling him so readily from it. The shock freezing her at
the threshold widened her narrow pale blue eyes was one of seeing a person
where she’d not expected, then recognition drained what little color was left
in her skin.
“Hello, Astrid,” Leif said, the deep timbre of his true voice striking an old
fear in her. He knew who he sounded like beneath the light, friendly inflection
he’d worn to disguise it. He’d taken after his father in many ways, but she’d
seen Einar in him far before he had ever known what that fear in her drawn face
had meant. As with the machete in his hand, the horrid truth was always there
underneath all the distraction and denial she’d heaped upon it.
“Wh-wh-wh-why…” she stammered, her mouth twitching as she tried and failed to
form the words.
“‘Why are you here’?” he finished for her, then smirked, “My brothers took
something precious of mine. I’m only here to take her back.”
Those widened eyes shrunk back into the folds of her aging face in a deepening
despair and she sputtered out a sound that was somewhere between a wheeze and a
cough before rasping, “I see. Well. They don’t have her, so you can just… just
stay away.”
“Once I have become certain that she is no longer in their company, I will be
on my way,” he acquiesced, then lifted the machete, testing its weight and
balance as he spoke, “You’re looking rather wan, Astrid. You must be more
careful not to overexert yourself at your age. Might I suggest you have a seat
while I pour us some tea?”
She wavered, almost literally, leaning back and forth in an indecisive rocking
motion before shuffling to sit on the worn sofa, her back bent and gait
shortened by the weight of grief. He watched her, seeing the way this life had
aged her beyond her years, and felt a brief and passing sympathy that he
dismissed as he stepped into the kitchen. These were the lives that they had
been thrown into; him by birth and her by negotiation. If things had progressed
differently, he could have felt sorry for her, perhaps even forged a bond of
fellow victimhood, but that had not been the case. Their animosity towards each
other had been mutual and neither of them could claim victimhood after how
complicit in their own suffering they had quickly become. As such, neither
could blame the other for the consequences that complicity had wrought. While
he spooned the sticky sweetened condensed milk into the bottoms of two
mismatched glasses, he came to the same conclusion he had when he first came to
know what their respective roles were meant to be in this life: survival was
the only true morality and what was done under that cause was always justified,
even if it required terrible sacrifice. In sacrificing his innocence and her
freedom, she had ensured the survival of herself and his three brothers. It was
not wicked, immoral, or destitute; it was simple math. Three lives had been
spared at the loss of two. The hot tea ate away the ice in the glasses as he
stirred the heavy milk to a color that reminded him of his daughter’s creamy
skin, a reminder that needlessly and insistently deepened the ache and
anxiousness in his heart. In coming to know himself as a father, he better
understood the weight of the price Astrid had paid to save her other sons.
Sacrifice wasn’t at all so difficult when he knew the value of what he had to
sacrifice for.
“Sweet iced tea was among the best of things one could encounter during a hot
summer in New York,” he mentioned conversationally as he handed a glass to
Astrid, who accepted it without looking toward him. He sat in one of the two
threadbare armchairs across from her, purposefully taking what was once his
father’s favored seat, and wore his business smile. It tugged oddly on his face
from lack of practice. “We— that is, myself and Simone— lived around the corner
from a Thai restaurant that, despite its unpretentious appearance, served some
of the best iced tea I had encountered outside of Southeast Asia. They were
open late enough that I would often purchase one to take through the humid
evenings I’d follow my little girl on her mischievous jaunts through the city
nightlife. Teenagers can manufacture all types of trouble, can’t they? Not that
I’d known what to expect, considering my own adolescence. Tell me, were my
brothers very difficult to raise, or did the remote country life not provide
many avenues for promiscuity and destructiveness?”
The condensation forming on the glass gathered until it slithered down her bony
fingers, the fat droplets clinging to the edges of her knuckles and quivering
with her tremor. He tipped the cold beverage to his mouth, letting the sweet
liquid touch his pursed lips without passing them as she mechanically mirrored
his motions. He watched her swallow the brew before lowering his glass.
With the tea having cleared her throat of the alarm that had clogged it, she
cautiously said, “No one has seen her in months. I would tell you if one of
them had hidden her somewhere, but they’ve been worried out of their minds
about wherever she’s been. They aren’t involved in your kinds of schemes, Leif.
I beg of you to just let them be.”
He glanced to the side, seemingly considering her case, and asked, “In what
manner do you mean ‘worry’? How have they been conducting themselves?”
“Oh, it’s… you know…” she muttered nervously, taking another sip of the brew
before starting over, “They’re common people, Leif. Their niece was kidnapped,
so they’re worried like common people would normally worry. It was your kind,
wasn’t it? That took her? Why don’t you ask them where she is?”
Leif’s business smile hardened into a cruel smirk. He could tell her just how
uncommon her sons really were, especially her most cherished youngest, but it
amused him to see a genuine ignorance in her for once instead of a forced one.
“Would I have come here if I hadn’t already exhausted that possibility?” he
asked instead. She was wise enough not to answer and knowledgeable enough not
to press her request further. Her experienced subservience brought him no
satisfaction, no hint of pleasure where he would typically find it in such
fearful manageability. Her caution was orderly, conformed, fortified by the
decades under her husband’s rule, and though Leif had never addressed her from
his role, she had regarded him with compliant servility and quiet disdain since
his apprenticeship. It irritated him. His smirk withered and he looked down at
the creamy fawn color of the iced tea, dropping these unnecessary pretenses
with a sigh. “I’m not here to do anything but retrieve her. I have come to you
first to avoid alerting your sons to my presence, for I would rather avoid them
entirely if I can, though I have no alternative should I find your information
inadequate. There are many who would harm my daughter, but many more who would
harm those around her just to deliver her to me. If you know anything, you
might prevent that harm from occurring by telling me now.”
Her wheezing stretched on for several turns, inflating his hopes until she
rasped, “I don’t-”
The house phone ringing in the kitchen startled her into spilling a bit of her
tea on her lap as she fumbled at setting it down on the coffee table in her
hurry to rise. With eyes widening again at realizing her misstep, she looked to
him for permission and he waved her off dismissively. It would be inconvenient
to have any concerned neighbors come seeing why the aging Mrs. Valstad was not
answering her phone that morning. Leif rubbed at his aching forehead as failure
crept unpleasantly over his mood, his certainty that there would be no secrets
to rend from this woman all but confirmed. The hyoscine he’d put into the tea
and the time he’d taken to get here were to go to waste, but those losses only
seemed more significant by how tauntingly close he felt to finding Simone. In
his self-admitted impatience, he turned in his seat to rise and take leave of
this waste, but the sight of Astrid wielding a kitchen knife in one hand while
the other was held tight to her shoulder across her chest gave him pause. He
squinted at her, trying to decipher what exactly she was doing with her face
twisted in pale rage and wheezing like a dog with a collapsed lung as she
stumbled in short steps toward him.
“You… you killed him…” she croaked. The blade flashed in her trembling fist. “…
You killed my Henrik…”
“Oh!” he exclaimed, eyebrows raised in sudden understanding. He was sure he did
not kill Henrik, not by any direct or purposeful means, but it was a very
curious coincidence. As he thought on this, she hobbled closer and he could see
the sweat that shined on her pallid face. With a lighthearted interest, he
asked, “Are you going to avenge your dead son, Astrid?”
Her grimace grew slack, or at least half of it did, her face sagging on one
side before she collapsed. He leaned over the edge of his father’s chair,
waiting for his father’s widow to move, though the crumpled pile that was
Astrid Valstad did not so much as breathe. A stroke, perhaps. A heart attack,
just as likely. A bad batch of hyoscine, a considerable possibility. He tucked
the machete into his belt as he finally stood and proceeded to the tool shed.
The jug of gasoline was old enough to have crusted under the screwcap and
emitted a foul stench as he poured it over the paraphernalia, curios, books,
and baubles of all sorts, leaving a wet trail as he exited through the heavy
antique front door. It was time to let outdated memories and traditions die
with the last generation who had use for them. As flame raced up the path he’d
left, he looked through the threshold to the body that had once been his mother
and accepted his grief. If things had progressed differently, he would still be
shackled to the obligations of his bloodline, training his child to wear those
shackles herself and continue the cycle. How close he had come to repeating the
atrocities of his parents was the source of his grief, and in knowing that, he
released it into the fire and forgave them. He had broken the cycle, and now he
needed to free his daughter from it.
 
 
In the habit of hope, Anders had come to confront heartache with a regularity
that bred familiarity. Heartache had provided a neat house for the inevitable
fallout of every hope inflating only to burst in a splatter of anguish.
Standing outside the café, he wondered when the thin and delicate expectation
of hope had stopped coming entirely, finding only the deep dull ache of
disappointment already settled in its place as he sat in the room where Simone
was last seen. Hope had skipped him. He’d come to confirm what he already knew:
she was out there, alive, and staying away from him. As she should. Still, he
couldn’t even respect her wishes enough to resist the ghost of her presence,
but that was who he was. There was no use in fighting it; he never could, never
will, and though he loathed himself for that especially, he was no longer
deceived into thinking he was capable. At least he was an honest man now.
Staring into the dark reflection of the haggard man in his coffee, he was only
what he was: an honest, self-aware beast.
The people walking past the café looked through the windows, eyes scanning the
interior that had been broadcasted in the videos of Simone thrashing that man.
Hugo Jakobsson, a Swedish tourist who had no prior involvement or relation to
the case of the missing-person-turned-fugitive Simone Valstad, was now enjoying
his fifteen minutes of fame in the tabloid spotlight since his release from the
hospital. That Anders could envy the two broken ribs, dislocated shoulder, and
bloodied face she’d given Jakobsson was a point so low that he couldn’t help
but laugh at his own desperation. The punishment should have been his.
“Mr. Valstad?”
Anders looked up from his hollow-eyed reflection before he could think not to,
his regret doubling at the sight of the young intern smiling at him amicably.
He managed to keep the distaste out of his tone as he forced himself to return
the smile and say, “Hello, Trygve. Strange seeing you out of the office.”
“Yeah, I almost didn’t, um, recognize you,” Trygve chuckled nervously, his
awkwardness reminding Anders that he was wearing a grimy hoodie from his
university days and jeans that were half as old as the intern himself instead
of the business casual fare their workplace mandated. He wasn’t embarrassed so
much as annoyed at the boy’s expectation of his embarrassment. There was always
so much expectation regarding his emotional state, he was both used to it by
now and oversensitive to it. “Uh… You, um, you come here? I mean, regularly?”
Anders felt the control over his expression slip from friendly to guarded, his
annoyance at the intrusion of human interaction shifting into suspicion. “I
think we both know why I’m here. The better question is, what reason do you
have to be here?”
The boy’s fascination with his niece was not unknown to him, nor was it even
especially remarkable by how many others shared an interest in the tragedy
surrounding the daughter of the famed killer. It was fame rather than infamy
due to the media’s swift realization that the story of a handsome family man
with a dark compulsion sold much better than simply reporting on an
irredeemably coldblooded killer; that family focus encompassing the rest of the
Valstads by proximity and implication, although Simone’s public image had borne
the brunt of it. Still, he either exuded enough surliness on the topic or
Trygve had possessed enough tact not to bring it up as much as he’d very
obviously wanted. Encountering him here in the café the day after the event was
catching him in the act of fascination and, by the way the boy’s brow raised
halfway up his smooth forehead and his cheeks reddened, there was no hiding it
now. Still, he tried.
“Oh! Um! Well, I was, uh, I’m meeting a friend,” Trygve answered lamely,
shoving his hands in his pockets and making a show of looking about the café.
“I don’t think he’s here, though, so I should, um. I should go?”
“What’s your friend look like? Maybe I’ve seen him pass by,” Anders offered,
his smile now genuine at the suffering of this polite underling. It was mean
and unnecessary, but it felt good to watch him squirm. It felt good to punish
him for looking at his niece like so many of the sick and depraved gawkers who
helped themselves to their personal lives like they were meant for public
consumption.
Trygve was already backing away as he stammered, “You know, I, um, I think I’m
at the wrong café. Heh! Okay, Mr. Valstad, I’ll see you at the office! Bye!”
Anders glared at the back of the retreating boy, the taste of such short-lived
cruelty having only whetted his appetite for a vengeance that could not be
fulfilled and ignited his hatred into an anger that burned and consumed. It
didn’t matter that Trygve wasn’t the cause or even the target of his hatred but
hating himself wasn’t enough anymore. He needed to see his pain manifested upon
those guilty of finding pleasure in it, just as Simone had manifested her pain
onto Hugo Jakobsson. He wanted to take back the pain he’d caused her most of
all, devour it, feel it tear him apart from the inside like he deserved.
“Filthy rapist…” he muttered under his breath, rubbing his scowl from his face.
He drank his coffee to give himself something to do with the hateful energy
that yearned for action, grimacing at finding the bitter drink had gone tepid
from how long he’d sat there waiting for a girl who would never return here or
to him. His dour contemplation of the cold coffee was interrupted by his phone
buzzing in his pocket and, seeing it was one of the few people he would bother
responding to, he answered it.
“Hey, Vid.”
“You home right now?”
It was a question Anders imagined was only asked to be polite, but for once, he
wasn’t at home. “No, I’m, um… I’m at the café Simone was…”
He’d stopped being embarrassed at how pathetic he could be in front of Vidar
after baring his soul in wretched drunkenness so many times now, but the brief
pause on the other end reminded him that he should perhaps be a bit ashamed for
his brother’s sake if anything.
“You should come to my place,” Vidar’s voice came through slightly distant and
muffled, as though he was doing something that required him to balance the
phone between his cheek and shoulder. His chuckle brushing air over the
receiver blew static through the line. “I have something to show you. Come
quick.”
“Sure,” Anders answered. He was about to ask what it was when he heard a
distinctly female gasp in the background of the call before it abruptly ended.
It was fleeting and distant, but the sound struck him with a wave of goosebumps
as though that sharp breath was taken right next to his ear. The high, girlish
pitch, the fear so present, the strained resistance of it was hauntingly
familiar in a way that stirred the worst parts of him. He shoved the phone back
into his pocket as he stood, shaking the encroaching arousal off his mind
before it became a problem. It wasn’t outside of his brother’s range to call
him while he was watching the creepy porn he was into.
The drive back to their neighborhood wasn’t a route he enjoyed taking, being
the same route from the hospital Simone was taken. If she was taken. Since
seeing the video, he wasn’t sure if she was kidnapped or if she had simply
found an opportunity to escape them. The possibility that she had pursued
escape should have felt better than the idea of her being captured, but no
matter how much he tried to convince himself that she was far better off
running away from him, it didn’t feel better.
“Sick, filthy rapist whoreson…” he muttered at himself as he slowed to a stop
in front of his brother’s house. He sat in the thick quiet that filled the car
after shutting off the engine, collecting the wide scatter of his thoughts and
emotions to make himself more of a human again until he could unravel in the
privacy of his own home. These moments of collection were getting longer
instead of shorter, disproving the dreadful lie that time can heal all wounds.
Perhaps that adage was true in the longer run, but there was not enough time in
mortality to heal wickedness. Before he could wallow any further down that line
of thought, he trudged up the grassy incline to Vidar’s flat and knocked on the
door.
“About goddamn time,” Vidar greeted him in his typical acerbic regard, though
there was an excited tilt to the words. He retreated from the light pouring
through the threshold, vanishing in the darkened interior as he ordered, “Get
in here already. And lock the door!”
Anders, no longer one to have his hackles easily raised by his surly brother’s
attitude, did as he was told and followed after him. He blinked in the
darkness, waiting for his eyes to adjust and depending on his knowledge of the
layout and the sound of Vidar’s voice to guide him.
“I would have told you over the phone, but I didn’t want you to go batshit in
public. Fuck knows our family’s done enough of that.”
“Told me what, Vid?”
“You know, it’s best you find out this way. Not that I’d hide it from you. I
wouldn’t want to do that. I don’t want to hide things from you, Anders, you
have to know that, remember that I don’t want to. We can’t always have what we
want, right? No, I’m just glad you’re here, physically here to find out.”
Vidar was acting strangely. They were all acting strangely since everything had
happened, but this was strange even for him. Anders had adjusted well to the
more relaxed, patient, thoughtful version of his brother and seeing this nearly
manic oddness in him was uncomfortable. Vidar’s speaking was rapid, his
excitement almost desperate, but he wasn’t really saying anything.
“Find out what, Vid?”
Vidar stopped and pivoted in the middle of the hallway, a mad gleam in his eye
catching the low light as he glanced nervously to his bedroom door and
whispered, “I took some of those little blue tablets. The ones Maier gave you
in Vermont. I mean, I didn’t take them, except for one to see how effective
they were and… a few just to sleep when nothing else worked. It’s what Leif
would do to calm her down, keep her docile as a little lamb or make her sleep
so he could… It’s not really my thing, but it’s closer, closer to what you
like. I gave her less than half a tablet, a quarter really, just enough to make
her easy. You like her sweet and easy.”
Anders’ lungs constricted tightly as something in his middle seemed to twist
with the uneasiness his brother’s words and behavior wrung in him. While
nothing he said made any sense, there was a vibrant wrongness it all painted as
he went on and the suggestion that there was a woman involved in that wrongness
welled a sour misery within him. He knew about Vidar’s proclivities with his
women all too well, both from his boastful recounting and experience through
their shameful affair with their niece, and he’d long dreaded the day he’d go
too far.
“Vid,” he said, grabbing his brother’s arm, feeling the stiff tension of the
muscle beneath his shirtsleeve. The older man did not like to be touched
without his permission and communicated that in a glare, but he didn’t jerk
away and cuss as he would have in the past. Anders forcefully disregarded his
dread of the answer to ask, “Should I call your lawyer?”
Vidar’s glare widened in a shock that told him a different story than his
incredulous smirk. “What!? No! No, no. Why would you say that? I didn’t… No one
knows what I did and they’re never going to know. Not about that, not about…
Ha! You mean her. You wouldn’t tell anyone about what we have going on with
Simone. Would you?”
He should. He should be rotting in prison for his hand in what he did to her
and what he made her think she wanted.
“What did you call me out here to see?” Anders asked gravely, to which his
older brother brightened in stark contrast.
“Right! Right. Well, let me show you,” Vidar answered, that gleam in his eye
unnerving above his rictus grin.
The door opened to a deeper darkness, what little light peeking around the
edges of the blackout curtains revealing the bedroom in gradients of shadow. He
could make out a petite female figure on the bed, the dull shine of the metal
chain tied around a bedpost and leading to where she lay curled in passive
defensiveness causing a cold pit to form in Anders’ gut.
“Vidar… What have you done?” he whispered, his breath wavering in fear. He
didn’t want to wake the woman, if she could wake at all.
“I brought her back here. For us and no one else,” Vidar answered, stepping
around him as he stood frozen in the doorway. His older brother sat on the edge
of the bed, and though his face was hidden in the darkness as he looked down at
the woman, his voice was softened with a warmth that rarely touched it. “She
belongs to us. Come here and take what’s ours, littlest brother.”
Anders didn’t want to enter that room, didn’t want to find out what his brother
had done to that person on the bed, but he had to confirm it. His shoes felt
weighed down as he stepped across the hardwood, his soles muffled when they
came into contact with the rug under the large bed until he stopped to bend
over it. With one hand splayed on the bedding, he reached through the dark with
the other to gently land on her shoulder. The bare skin under his hand was
warm, soft as a young rabbit, and springy with supple and touchable flesh,
stirring that animal part of his brain with abrupt and unexpected interest. He
followed the curve of her shoulder up to her neck, that softness sliding under
his palm sparkling along his nerves delightfully despite his horror, and slid
his touch over the leather collar wrapped around it to press his fingertips to
her pulse. She was alive, her heart rate strong and steady, not racing in
terror or weakly near death. He exhaled a deep breath of relief he didn’t know
he was holding, the worst of his fears expelled along with it. A gentle brush
against his wrist startled him, cutting off that brief relief as Vidar pushed
his hand up, and he humored his older brother by touching her face just to buy
time in which to think. He had to assess the exact nature of what had led to
Vidar wanting to share an apparently unconscious woman with him so suddenly.
There was no hint of this having been premeditated and his behavior was
alarmingly erratic. Even if this was a consensual sex game between her and
Vidar, there was no way of knowing she’d agreed to accepting a stranger into
it. He should just ask. It wasn’t as if this was entirely uncharted territory
for them.
“Vid, did you-”
“Hnn…?”
The quiet groan from the woman nearly made him leap away from her as he
snatched his hand back. She wasn’t entirely unconscious, but that sound wasn’t
entirely awake either. Adding to his horror, he couldn’t ignore just how young
she sounded.
“Shit!” Anders muttered under his breath, shaking off the shock and trying to
circumvent where his agitated thoughts were headed. “Shit. Shit. Fuck! Vidar,
what’s going on here? Who is this?”
“Hmm… ah-what… what’s happening…?”
The soft, quiet voice stole the breath from his lungs as that constant
tightness he’d felt since following Vidar down the dark hall crushed inward and
squeezed his heart to a brief stop. That was Simone’s sleepy, confused voice.
Anders’ hands lashed out at the girl, groping at her face, mapping those
familiar features by touch but not yet daring to believe that these were the
same thick eyelashes, sharp jawline tapering to a narrow chin, or plush lips.
Her movements to twist away from his desperately wandering touch were
lethargically slow, her slight grunts growing in confusion and alarm, but he
needed to be sure. This couldn’t be another false hope. He couldn’t take it. It
was her scent that gave his hope purchase to grasp him in its torturous
clutches.
He managed to speak past the pounding heart lodged in his throat, uttering a
prayer in the form of a plaintive, “Dear?”
“Hmm…? Anders…?” she mumbled, voice thick and slurred with sleep.
A cacophony of emotion burst open, overfilling him as he got in the bed and
gathered her limp, warm, living, breathing body against him. This couldn’t be
real. This was another dream or trick of his rotted brain and he’ll wake up
alone and hungover. He ran his hands all over the endless softness of her bare
body, too greedy to let this brief illusion pass without taking as much as he
could get, and kissed her wherever his mouth paused its desperate begging for
this to be real. She squirmed in his hold, grunting in protest as he held her
too tightly, touched her too roughly, but he couldn’t stop or lessen his
assault. It was the hand grabbing his and pushing it down to hold still over
her navel that broke his frenzy and he looked through the darkness to his
brother’s shadow.
“How? How is she here?” Anders rasped, his throat still tight in joy and shock.
“How is this possible?”
“We can talk about that afterward,” Vidar said. His hand moved to press over
his, pushing his palm harder against her belly as he added, “She brought
someone with her, littlest brother. Your wish for a child is coming true.”
A hot flush spread from Anders’ chest to tingle at the edges of his body as he
comprehended these mere words that meant something so much larger to him. A
shaky breath escaped his smiling mouth, the huff growing into a laugh of pure
and bright joy.
“We’re going to be a family?” he asked, the question alone making him giddy to
speak aloud.
“Yes, we are,” Vidar answered.
His response startled Anders. He hadn’t meant to include his brother in that
question. However, now that he was there in the dream Anders had envisioned
countless times before, Vidar fit into it so naturally. It was a mad, strange,
controversial idea, but that was them. His older brother had been so caring and
supportive, bringing him back from the brink of despair more times than he
could recall, and now he had brought Simone back to him. To them. Vidar’s
fingers fit in the spaces between his own over where their child was growing in
their beloved, and it felt right. They were family, but now they were afamily.
Anders felt his eyes sting with tears of gratitude, joy, and relief as he
leaned down and held Simone’s chin to still her drugged struggling as he kissed
her panting mouth. His tears fell to mingle with her own on her cheeks as Vidar
pushed their joined hands lower, down into the softest and warmest parts of
their dearest love.
 
 
Simone tried to call out for her father in the delirium of the drug and panic,
but her weakness wouldn’t allow her to scream and her pathetic cries for Papa
only seemed to excite the fingers eagerly intruding in and on her vagina. The
callouses on Anders’ hand pushed her out of that delusion of home that kept
pulling her under, the illusion of her bedroom in Brooklyn shifting and melding
with her bedroom in Los Angeles as she tried to cling to whatever reality this
dark world was. The lips at her mouth travelled down to suck at her neck and
she called out for this to stop, just please stop, but another set of lips
sealed her words with a fiercer, hungrier kiss. This wasn’t supposed to happen
again. She was stronger, faster, less paralyzed by her fear, but that little
shard of blue Vidar had forced under her tongue took all of that away. The
darkness was spinning around her, the touch and sounds of her uncles all that
tethered her to this reality, and it wasn’t enough as time and space bent and
bled into another moment. A bright room, the slatted shadows of window blinds
cutting across her father’s powerful back as he thrust against her mercilessly
but kissed her with so much love. The lewd squelching sounds of her wetness
straddled both realities, tying them together by the lust that fogged her mind
and transmuted her pain into fuel for that burning drive to submit, to please,
to pleasure. This wasn’t supposed to happen again.
Those hands and mouths pulled away from her and she turned onto her side,
squeezing her legs shut and curling into herself as the sounds of clothes
moving over skin and dropping to the floor echoed across countless memories to
this moment. She couldn’t tell who pried her thighs apart and licked into her
cunt and who grasped the sides of her face and licked into her mouth.
The soft, sweet tenderness of the kiss had her believe it was Anders, but his
husky whisper of “Fuck, kjære! Jeg har savnet deg!” from between her legs
corrected her.
Confusion boiled up along with her panic as she tried to reconcile Vidar’s
cruelty with how he was kissing her now. The gentle, slow slide of his tongue
persuading her to respond instead of overpowering and taking pleasure in
forcing her was too confusing for her to understand. Frightened of displeasing
him in her helpless condition, she returned his kiss shyly, her insides
clenching in terror when he purred out a small sound of pleasure and moved his
hands down her neck. She breathed in as much as she could through her nose,
preparing for him to choke her, but his hands kept sliding down past her neck,
even past her breasts that she was sure he would crush and twist to mottle with
bruises, stopping only to gently fondle her belly. The reminder of her
pregnancy hit her harsher than any physical pain he could have dealt her,
refreshing the flow of tears down her face and ripping a sob out of her that
she felt him smile at. His cruelty hadn’t eased, it had only evolved.
“Can you feel our child growing inside you, sweetheart?” he whispered against
her swollen lips before pressing another heartbreakingly sweet kiss to them.
She could only shudder in response.
Anders’ tongue laved over her clit in a long, slow lick that arched her back
and expelled a quavering moan against Vidar’s mouth. He repeated the move,
extending the slowness and pressing harder against that little bundle of nerves
to bring her so close to the edge of orgasm already. Her shame and fear were
washed out in the blinding glare of that promise of release, but he pulled
back, left her desperate on the edge as he teased her with small, light licks.
The dull ache of denial throbbed at the end of each eager pulse of her cunt
begging for relief until it began to physically hurt in a way his teasing
hadn’t before. She needed to come and that need steadily encroached over all
thought and feeling, overwhelming even her sorrow at how easily they could
debase her to this point.
She only became aware of the high-pitched whines she was making when Vidar
pulled away from her pleading kiss to laugh and whisper, “The little bitch
wants a bone, doesn’t she?”
His mocking tone reignited her frustration and she tried to twist away from
him, but he grabbed her by the leather collar around her neck and yanked her
back into a crushing kiss that was more like the cruelty she’d dreaded. There
was no point in fighting. Her head swam with both the drug and their tongues
working in tandem to drain the will to resist out of her, proving what she
already knew: her body did not belong to her. If they wanted, they would fuck
her. If they wanted, she would beg. It didn’t matter what she really wanted;
that was already decided for her. It had always been decided, far before she
was ever aware of it, far before she was even born. This was the cycle they
were all born into, after all.
***** Chapter 69 *****
Soft, shivering flesh writhed languidly beneath Vidar as he kneeled over his
slave’s prone body and slid his cock in the cleft of her ass. The sounds of his
shaft rutting between her cheeks were sloppy with the wet slick he’d dragged up
from her cunt, but the sounds of her sucking Anders’ cock were outright lewd.
His eyes now fully adjusted to the darkness, he watched as the younger man
helped her drugged weakness along with his fingers deeply tangled in her hair,
much of those wavy locks now loose from the thick braid since they’d begun
handling her with increasing roughness. It calmed the chaos of Vidar’s mind to
see his little brother so happy at last with their darling slave nestled so
lovingly between them, like nothing else in the world mattered. Nothing else
had to matter, not anymore.
“Oh, God, dearest…” Anders muttered breathlessly, his hips driving up into her
faster to fuck her throat with an increasing urgency. She grunted and flinched
as she fought her gag reflex with endearing dedication, but he seemed too far
gone to notice her struggle. “So good… shit, you’re such a good girl… Good
girl…”
“Don’t come yet, dipshit,” Vidar warned him scoldingly. “Where are your goddamn
manners? We haven’t even fucked her yet.”
To his dismay, Anders held her mouth sealed around the base of his cock,
forcing her to swallow his come as he groaned out his climax above her.
Simone’s body tensed under Vidar’s hands as she tried not to choke on the warm
semen gushing down the back of her throat while he glared at him, annoyed at
his little brother’s impatience. It was easy to forget that Anders had little
experience in this type of play. Perhaps it would have been prudent to speak on
the unspoken rules of their engagement beforehand, but the younger man had
bristled in the past at each mention of their joined trysts with Simone. There
was much to discuss, later. Every wandering of Vidar’s thoughts to anything
outside of this room and this moment threatened to shatter what fevered peace
he held together within him, so everything else had to be later, or even better
yet, never. Some things were better left outside of the mind.
“S-sorry, dearest…” Anders mumbled between panting breaths as he lifted her
mouth off his cock. Lost in his own drunk affection for their girl, he seemed
to have not heard Vidar’s reproach as he bent and nuzzled her lovingly before
kissing her wet lips. The honest and easy love the younger man could wield for
her stirred a familiar and strange frustration in Vidar that he counted on the
darkness to hide from his scowl. “You are too good at this… Hmm… don’t worry,
we will take care of you too. You want to come, yes,dearest?”
The soft and warm way Anders whispered to her between lingering kisses both
irritated and enticed something in Vidar, prompting him to lean forward and
whisper close behind her ear, “We’re going to keep you fucked and used, just
like I promised. You’re going to love your new life, sweetheart.”
“P-please, I can’t- I can’t do this, just please let me… let me wait in peace.”
Her shivering and whimpering response wasn’t quite what he’d hoped to hear. Not
that her fear or her sorrow weren’t what he wanted, but for whatever reason, he
wanted her to desire this as much as her body very obviously told him she did.
He was sick, his mind was poisoned, and his self-identity was mutilated beyond
his recognition, but he wasn’t deluded. He knew it was unforgivable to even
want another living, breathing human being this way and if he had any
conscience at all, he would have eaten a bullet before ever touching his niece.
But she wasn’t quite his niece and she wasn’t quite a living, breathing human
being.
“Don’t be so shy,” he jeered, rubbing the ridge of his cockhead against her
tender pucker. Her shiver grew into a tremble and she gasped sharply as he
pressed harder, feeling that tight muscle bend and flex as she instinctively
clenched to protect that delicate hole. Still sore, no doubt.
“We will make it good,” Anders assured her, his words muffled against her
panting mouth as he held up her chin. “Please,dearest?”
She whimpered like a nervous puppy as he kissed her again, but those deep, wet
kisses relaxed her almost unconsciously. It was fascinating how easily she bent
to a little love and affection, no matter what it was that was asked of her in
exchange. Vidar had observed this phenomenon several times before, though this
was the first time it had struck him as something so transactional and shallow.
Whatever love the girl may have had for Anders before was now reduced to what
comfort he could offer her, and in seeing it acted out now, Vidar recognized
the same pattern had formed between himself and Simone. The true devotion and
unconditional love he knew she still held for her bastard father was as far
from his grasp as it had been when she’d confronted his desire with that
damning question.
Is this what you really wanted?
He wasn’t so sure anymore. He wasn’t sure about anything. He had what he had
set out to obtain; she was his slave, in his possession, serving his pleasure.
That’s what this was and that’s all this could be. There was no room to want
for tenderness in the vice of his heart, so there was no point in envying the
place Leif had crafted in the heart of his creation. But what was the point in
having a slave if he could not do exactly as he pleased with her? She was his
to love if he wanted, so he was entitled to enjoy her love in return if he
wanted it, just the same as he’d enjoyed her fear and her suffering. The normal
rules didn’t apply here, and maybe they’d never applied anywhere. So little
mattered or made sense anymore.
“Ah-HAH! W-Wait! Stop!” she cried as he gripped his cock and pushed against her
asshole with clear intent.
“Shut the fuck up and take it,” he growled out.
He began to squeeze into the soft heat beyond that band of tight muscle, the
friction adding an uncomfortable warmth as he pushed past it. The lube was
right there in the nightstand, but he wanted her raw and aching from this and,
from the sound of her strained gasps and the trembling in her haunches, he
grinned and licked his teeth in the thrill of his success. When he reared back,
he spat a glob of saliva onto the base of her tailbone and watched as it
slithered down the valley of her cleft to where he stretched her hole wide
around his half-sunken shaft. With a few short pumps, he had her just barely
lubricated enough with spit to drive forward and shove a startled cry from her
as he pushed until he’d hilted. He lingered in this moment, savoring how she
hugged every part of his cock in that snug heat, her muscles throbbing to
adjust to the unwelcome intrusion while she panted to fight the impulse to
resist.
“Does she… enjoy this?” Anders asked in a hesitant whisper.
Vidar broke from the marvelous sight of his tiny slave’s body fully impaled on
his cock and smiled at his brother. His only brother. It was just them from now
on, but that was a topic for later, or maybe never. It didn’t matter. He
reached over to where his brother sat on the other side of their girl and
squeezed his shoulder in friendly reassurance, noting with an odd pride how the
younger man did not tense or react negatively to his touch as other men in such
circumstances might. Save for the manipulation it had taken to break Anders’
moral conflict, this arrangement had come together seamlessly, almost
naturally. Maybe it was natural. Vidar could no longer state with any certainty
that he knew their true nature under the compulsory morality and conditioned
thought that society had cluttered it with. Chasing that thought, he moved his
hand up to cup his brother’s cheek, watching for his reaction. Confused and a
little startled, Anders wrinkled his brow, but he didn’t pull away. Vidar
grinned, delighted at the wealth of trust his brother had placed in him, and
filed it away as something to investigate further. For now, he had a better
idea of how far he could stretch the boundaries of propriety with him.
Grabbing Simone around the front of her waist and shoulder, he hauled her up
into his lap as he knelt back onto his heels. Even with the dead weight of her
drugged state, maneuvering her limp body to straddle him with her back pressed
to his chest was effortless just by how much smaller she was compared to him.
With one arm snaked around her front to hold her chin up in the wide span of
his palm and the other wrapped around her waist to keep her steady against him,
he nuzzled her sweat-damp hair and pressed a kiss to the top of her head before
testing this position with a roll of his hips. She choked on her sharp intake
of breath, stuttering some wordless rasp of pain as he sunk deeper into her
tight hole, and he hummed in gratified approval at finding that snug narrowing
at the end of her rectum. It was a good thing he’d come twice already within
the last twelve hours or that sweet spot in her would milk him far too quickly.
The look on Anders’ face to see his sweet little “daughter”so lasciviously
displayed was worth all the effort of drugging her.
“Touch her,” Vidar whispered, and he needn’t say it twice.
Anders was upon her in an instant, his hunger for their darling slave not
abated in the slightest by having climaxed. His mouth ate the whimpering grunts
Vidar rocked out of her with each upward saw of his cock into that resistant
hole, her muscles pulsing and body shaking in seemingly equal response to the
fearsome affection of the younger man. It wasn’t long at all before Vidar could
feel her wetness dripping down his sac from his little brother’s fingers
searching her cunt for ways to make those shy little grunts become the wanton
moans of the whore they knew she was.
“Come on, dearest, doesn’t it feel good? Don’t you want to come for papa?”
Anders whispered, one hand busy at her cunt as the other kneaded her breast and
pulled at her nipple.
Even when he spoke in the Norwegian she didn’t understand, her body reacted to
the husky murmurs as much as his digital manipulations. Her pelvic muscles
began to bare down in exquisite tension and she started to groan deliriously,
both the drug and the stimulation between two men overcoming her emotional
misery. In all Vidar’s experience simulating rape fantasies, nothing could
compare to the reality of forcing his slave’s pleasure against her will. He
slid his hand down from its hold on her chin and grinned through his panting at
how she’d seemed to find the strength to hold her head up on her own to meet
the kisses Anders licked from her mouth. The heady combination of her
lustfulness and her constant want for love could apparently work miracles to
overcome sedation. Vidar buried his nose into her hair and kissed her scalp
again, his own affection for this delightful creature flourishing at how
sweetly she submitted to their sex. This was perfect. They didn’t need anyone
else but each other; they could leave their old lives with no regrets and find
a future just for their little family. He slid his freed hand down the length
of her body and felt how his brother was touching her, roving his fingertips
along the hand that pumped two thick fingers into her pussy and curiously
avoided her clit. He chuckled at realizing the intention of that.
“You’re still edging her,” he smirked, unable to disguise his amusement.
“You’re going to drive her insane.”
“Mm-hmm…” Anders hummed in sly confirmation of both assessments.
Something he did in her cunt just then made her yelp and then shudder, her
inner muscles jerking and throbbing with it, still not enough to have come but
enough to pull a groan from Vidar. Only twenty minutes in, and he was already
sweating to control the urge to hammer her ass to completion. He’d missed her
so much.
“Lie back. I want to join in,” Anders murmured hurriedly.
Vidar paused his rhythm to unfold his legs from under him and mutter, “About
time, you quickdraw adolescent fuck.”
“God, shut up,” his little brother groused back as he kept Simone’s shaking
thighs pried open while Vidar leaned them both to lie on their backs.
The position made it a little difficult to fuck up into her, but that soon
wouldn’t matter as Anders slid over them and pumped his recovering cock with
his fist as he positioned it to her unused hole. Her trembling gave way to a
terrified stiffness as he shoved his way into her vagina, the crowding in both
holes benefiting the tightness of each to a once again uncomfortable extent and
causing both men to wait for her to relax before moving. The resistance her
body put up each time was endearing, if at times a bit challenging.
“Childbirth isn’t going to be easy on her,” Anders chuckled.
“You’re thinking about that now?”
Through the darkness, he could see Anders shrug and smile a bit sheepishly,
making it difficult to be annoyed with how happy the news of her pregnancy had
made him. Not that Vidar had much time to be annoyed because the younger man
was already thrusting, his motions moving her on both their cocks and pulling a
pain-choked moan from her with each rocking slide of them stretching her open.
The fluttering shiver of her throbbing inner flesh heralded an ascent to the
climax she’d been so systematically denied, quickly working to transform that
pain into eagerly-sought pleasure. The switch from resistant reluctance to
reluctant participation was subtle, though Vidar knew it wouldn’t be long until
the only thing she’d be fighting was the sedative in her pursuit of orgasm.
Leaning his head back and shutting his eyes, he reveled in the snug slide of
her ass being worked up and down his length, pushing up into that sweet spot
deep inside each time Anders’ rolling pace pulled her in.
“Hahh… ah… Ah! No, no, please, stop! Stop! I can’t take this, I’m… It’s…”
Simone cried out, struggling weakly between them.
Anders immediately grabbed her wrists, not even faltering in his rhythm as he
hushed her with a soothing, “Sshh-ssh… You are okay, dearest… Easy, easy…”
Vidar’s grip on her hips tightened warningly and she calmed, her brief panic
descending back into that precarious balance between passive delirium and
cooperative fear. It wouldn’t do to have her think she could stand a chance at
fighting either of them off, sedated or not. After seeing what she was capable
of doing to Maier with her arms bound and fatigue sweating out of every pore,
he didn’t want to play around with her aggression too much without her securely
restrained. Kissing that same sweet mouth that had savagely torn a man’s face
just last night gave him both pause and a dangerous thrill. Seeing how fiercely
Anders assaulted her mouth with a passionate tongue, he wondered if he perhaps
should have warned him, but he was still undecided on whether or not to reveal
how he’d come into that knowledge. The slap of his little brother’s pelvis
ramming harder and faster into her flesh tore such distracting thoughts from
his mind in a consuming wave of pleasure as her climax began to build with each
sucking throb around him. The crescendo of her breathy moans rose pleadingly
with each throb until she was almost sobbing in her wordless begging, but that
was apparently not enough for his little brother.
“Say it, dear,” Anders hissed. The wet squelch of each push and pull into her
sopping cunt was accented with the slap of sweat-slicked flesh and creak of the
bedsprings beneath them, her wavering high-pitched cries ringing above it all.
“Say your need. Say it!”
“Beg for your papa to let you come,” Vidar helpfully supplied, his own release
rapidly becoming imminent at this increased pace.
“Beg.”
She obeyed, those breathless moans forming, “Please, please, fuck me, let me
come, let me…! Ah! Ah! Yes, papa, I need it! Oh, please, oh, oh, oh!”
With a startled cry, she bared down hard and shook through her orgasm. That
sweet spot rubbed insistently on Vidar’s glans, her throbbing asshole pulling
him deeper with her back arching as much as she could manage between them, and
he pressed up into her harshly as it triggered his own climax. The pleasure was
intense, bringing an ache along with each shuddering pull of his seed spilling
into her and coating everything in a deeply intoxicating relief. Every pulsing
tense and release had him choking on his gasp as she milked him into an
extended high, his greed for this darling creature gripping him with a fierce
need as he bent and opened his mouth to her neck. A primitive need to claim
what he could of her body in compromise to what he could not claim of her heart
filled him. The mottled texture of her bite wound, healed into pale and
permanent scar tissue, fit under his teeth as he sucked her sweat-salted skin
to mark her where her father had left his brand. She would be his one day,
sometime into the life ahead of them, but for now, he could be content with her
flesh and her submission.
With his climax leaving his cock oversensitive and his mind even foggier than
before, he slid out from under her and left her to Anders’ passionate sex.
Vidar lied on his side, watching his brother tuck Simone’s shaking and weak
little body more snugly under his measured thrusts, and let his clouded
thoughts drift through the afterglow. Life was a horrific, brief fumbling in a
chaos that people spent their entire existence attempting to tame into sense
and order. Some achieved that illusion, never knowing how close to losing that
idea of success or security they really were, but it was all just luck. This
pocket of peace Vidar had found within Anders and Simone was wrought of chaos,
something that should have never come to be and existed despite all the
fundamental rules and beliefs of a society that should have prevented it. It
shouldn’t be, but he had killed to protect it. He had killed. It was no
accident.
He had murdered his brother without a second thought.
Nausea descended over him in a feverish wave and he stood from the bed on
shaking legs, gripping his head to lessen the spinning sensation within it as
he stumbled out of the room. The memory of Henrik standing in a growing puddle
of his own deep red blood stained his mind as he leaned against the wall for
guidance on his way to the bathroom. It wasn’t an accident. The light in the
bathroom was blinding and he blinked through the ache in his eyes as they
adjusted, staring at his pallid reflection until red drew his gaze downward. A
sharp panic pulled him stumbling backward at the sight of the blood coating his
crotch, his heart thrashing wildly in alarm. Fresh, bright red painted him in
murder and he turned on both taps in the shower to full blast in the urgent
need to wash it off. When that spray of icy water hit him, he panted through
the memory of that expanding puddle on the pale hardwood under Henrik’s feet,
that memory twisting and replaying until he was drowning, drowning in the blood
he had loosed from his own brother’s heart. He didn’t know how long he stood
under the tepid shower unable to remove his hands from his pounding head to
scrub that red off himself, but by the time he had worked up the will to look
down, the water ran clear and his skin was white. Uncertainty wormed its way
into the tangled wreck of his thoughts, making him wonder if the blood had ever
even been there. The hallucinations were never so vivid, but he could recognize
his own instability with a clarity that made him wish for the delusion of
madness. He could see the wickedness that had infected him and know the
sickness he had spread around him because of it but seeing and knowing weren’t
enough to stop him. With the blood of his older brother still pooling in his
writhing mind, he knew, with the terrible certainty of experience, that nothing
would ever stop him.
A loud bang tore him from his thoughts and he startled, his panic sinking back
down when he saw it was just Anders that had burst into the room.
“Why didn’t you tell me she was hurt?!” the younger man demanded.
Vidar, too rattled to care and too exhausted to draw this out, turned off the
taps and said, “We… I will tell you, but I want you to do something first.”
Anders glowered at him, a snarl twisting his lip back from his sharp incisor as
he spat, “What?”
“Go home, get your passport, pack for a long trip, call someone to mind the
dogs. I’ll tell you when we’re on the road.”
 
 
No matter where Leif was in the world, from Seattle to Macau, convenience
stores somehow sold the same burnt, weak, mediocre coffee. He stirred in a
copious amount of creamer to mask the unpleasant taste with the cloying
sweetness of artificial vanilla before taking it and a slightly green banana up
to the cashier, wanting to get on his way to where he remembered Anders was
living before lunch hour traffic hit Oslo. Glancing up from taking the cash out
of the wallet he had taken from his victim, he looked for the cigarette display
before remembering they don’t make it quite so obvious in this country and was
about to ask for a pack of Prince menthols when a black and white printed photo
taped to the wall behind the register caught his eye. It was grainy and printed
on plain copier paper, but the image of Simone was undeniable in that security
feed still of her, rifle slung over her shoulder and Hell carried in her eye,
walking through the door not even four yards away from where he stood now.
Written in bold marker above the picture was a warning to phone the police if
this individual was sighted. That was his girl, all right.
“Excuse me, when was she last here?” he asked, pointing to the picture.
The cashier looked to where he was pointing, then looked back at him with a
wary frown. “You mean Simone Valstad?”
Leif put on a smile. That this man knew her name was promising, but apparently
so did half of Norway considering the tabloids his family been featured in.
“Does she come here often?”
“Not sure,” the cashier responded tersely, giving him a hard stare before
deciding to answer. “She came in yesterday, stole merchandise, threatened one
of my employees with a hunting rifle, and drove off like a maniac. Before that,
she beat some poor Swedish son of a whore down in a coffee shop. Can you
believe a bitch that short could cause all that trouble?”
“Hard to believe,” Leif agreed.
The chime that announced the door opening drew his attention, a distracting
reflex he’d lost control of after spending months trapped where the coming and
going of people would always demand something of him, but the disheveled man
limping through grabbed his focus instantly. In the swollen, deep red gouges
carved into the mutilated side of the man’s paled and haggard face, he
recognized the work of the artist he was most familiar with. The swooping,
curving lines framed the thinner scratches of contoured hatching that gave the
ridged texture of the ram’s horn the illusion of dimension, its curled tip
nearly touching the grisly corner of the crudely sewn Glasgow smile. His
darling girl had marked this man as one of her sheep.
“Sir! Don’t forget your coffee!” the cashier called after him as Leif grabbed
the man by his torn shirtsleeve and pulled him outside before he had the chance
to react.
The scarred stranger didn’t put up too much of a fight, too busy stumbling to
remain upright as he was dragged backward, but as they drew closer to Leif’s
borrowed SUV, he spoke with a clearly American accent, “Pardon me, sir, but I
believe you must have me mistaken for someone else.”
Leif threw him against the passenger side of the car, the man recovering from
the bodily impact with a curiously detached and weary sigh before looking up at
him. The widening of the one eye that wasn’t swollen shut was all Leif needed
to confirm that this man recognized him past his flimsy disguise, but the
reactions after that were intriguing. That mangled mouth hung open in shock,
then twisted into a crooked grin.
“How about we go for a ride?” Leif suggested, glad to be able to switch back to
the English he was much more comfortable with for the upcoming torture and
interrogation.
“Of course, Mr. Valstad,” the wounded man spoke with a monotone calmness that
didn’t match the manic grin pulling at the unmarred side of his face. “Might I
suggest a destination?”
Amused at this man’s odd nature, Leif smiled, “Please.”
“There should be something waiting for you at Vidar Valstad’s residence.”
Leif’s brow quirked at the suggestion that Vidar of all people had come into
the possession of Simone, then furrowed at the implication that Francis had to
have known all along where she was if that were true. This was clearly one of
Francis’ men; anyone else having this knowledge would have either tried to kill
him or themselves upon being discovered. There were too many unknowns to jump
to such conjecture yet, however. He reached under his captive’s suit jacket and
removed the handgun from his side holster, tucking it under the waistband of
his borrowed jeans at his back before patting him down to find a scalpel hidden
in his pocket as well. Keeping the man’s sleeve in his grasp, he opened the
passenger door and leaned in to grab the machete sitting on the center console
before pushing him into the car. His captive didn’t need much direction, calmly
situating himself into the seat and giving no hint to running off. Assured by
the man’s cooperative attitude and the loaded gun now in his possession, Leif
walked around to the driver’s seat and started the vehicle. This was all coming
together almost too conveniently, even for his level of good luck, but he
didn’t sense a trap.
“What do I call you?” he asked, tucking the machete between the seat and the
door as they turned onto the road.
“Maier.”
The name was familiar, as was the better half of his face. Leif looked at the
man again, studying the plain, white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant features, the
glassy dead eye, the utter mundanity of the unremarkable face beneath those
remarkable wounds, and remembered.
“Special Agent Dick Maier,” Leif said. “You were on the case, gathering
evidence to be used against me. Is this where you went missing when you
vanished?”
“Indeed, Mr. Valstad.”
Leif smiled. “They, that is, the FBI, seems to hold the impression that some
fatal vengeance was done to you in my honor. Funny how that relates to your
current predicament. So, what brought you to Norway? Was it the FBI, the
Marceaus, or the good Dr. Aguiyi?”
“Yes,” Maier answered.
“Yes?”
“Yes to all three.”
“Sounds complicated, answering to three masters.”
“I have but one master, Mr. Valstad.”
“And who would that be?”
Maier turned his steadfast stare from the road and Leif met it in a brief
glance, feeling comforted by the presence of another hunter and excited in
anticipation of killing him. He’d grown spoiled on the challenge of wrenching
life from those who were accustomed to taking it to the point where he felt no
bloodlust toward the general population any longer. This man, with his empty
eyes and steady hands, was almost undoubtedly a true killer.
“I serve only in the interests of the demon king himself. You are the only
master I can accept, Mr. Valstad.”
Leif resisted the urge to sigh in exasperation at being attended to by another
religious fanatic, outwardly opting to say instead, “I hope your loyalty proves
fruitful, Dick. Tell me about those scars.”
“Ms. Valstad carved me just this morning and she gave me this smile last night,
sir,” Maier explained.
His flat tone betrayed nothing of his thoughts; no emotion, no pretense, no
indication of lying. Leif felt a passing discomfort at having to rely on
information from this unreadable man, but at least in this case, Maier had
offered up the truth, as cursory as it was.
“You were with her all night?” Leif asked, unable to keep suspicion from
darkening his tone. “Have her tastes changed so drastically as to have become a
sadist with a preference for brunettes?”
“I am not familiar with any changes to her preferences. However, I am afraid I
had done well to earn my scars from Ms. Valstad,” Maier answered. “In the
interests of obtaining information on her extended absence, I’d had her whipped
by Vidar Valstad as part of an interrogation. The interrogation did not yield a
preferable outcome despite the enhanced techniques used, although that is
perhaps mostly due to my failure in maintaining control of the situation. As a
result of my failure, both she and Vidar Valstad have defected, and I have
sufficient reason to assume they may attempt or have already attempted to
flee.”
Leif pushed down the urge to pull over and hack Maier down into a quivering
lump of gore with the machete as he gripped the steering wheel and sorted his
violent emotions from observation of the words. There was a necessity for
interrogation, implying that this man didn’t have information about where
Simone had been hiding these past two months. Vidar took a whip to his
daughter. The use of the word “flee” indicated that she’d been monitored while
in Norway, a concept that had occurred to Leif as something Mrs. Marceau had
arranged to keep him cooperative. Vidar hadwhipped his Simone. More
importantly, despite the urgent demand that Simone be brought to him, Maier
chose to interrogate her first. There was no point in the delay for such
tertiary reasons— unless the need to bring her forward was not his primary
objective, or among his objectives at all. Vidar had whipped his darling girl
and now she was with him.
Swallowing the demand to know how many lashes Simone had taken from the whip,
Leif asked, “Who have you been taking orders from?”
Maier silently contemplated his response as Leif ground his teeth in the rising
desire to grab his neck and smash his broken face against the dashboard before
he answered, “I am under the direct command of Dr. Francis Aguiyi, sir.”
“Then why didn’t you bring Simone to me?”
Another hesitation, then, “That was not among the orders sent to me from Dr.
Aguiyi.”
Leif felt a heavy weight fill him at that, his friend’s betrayal clear to him
but not the motive behind it. There was no gain to be had in keeping Simone
from him. It didn’t make sense. “What were the orders?”
“I cannot answer that question, sir.”
“You will.” Leif kept his hard glare on the road, driving faster towards where
he both hoped to find Simone and dreaded to. For now, he could only keep moving
forward.
***** Chapter 70 *****
Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and
cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their
inhumanity and fear.
The words of James Baldwin floated up from the depths of distant memory in the
bold and throaty voice of Miss Peckham. It had been five years since Simone had
attended the youth church in Queens, but there in her mind was Miss Peckham
speaking of how the light of hope shines brightest in the dark and how
sometimes God will put forth that darkness to bring the light out of you.
Simone was not brought up in a religious household, she did not nod along with
the proverbs, she only went to appease the friend who had invited her, but
sitting in the back of the church with her mind steadily falling apart and her
future shrinking to fit into her parent’s apartment for the rest of her life,
she heard the words of Baldwin and listened. When she was expelled from school,
she understood it was because of her broken mind. When the policeman slammed
her head into the concrete until her hair was matted and dripping with blood,
she understood it was because of her ethnicity. When her best friend’s parents
told her they didn’t want her to talk to their son anymore, she understood it
was because of her emerging womanhood. There was nothing she could do, it was
just the way things were. She tried to understand the inhumanity of a world
that so often told her she was inferior for all these reasons, but she
couldn’t, so she heard Baldwin’s words from Miss Peckham’s mouth and let them
carry her above the fear the world offered.
Lying in the darkness, on bedsheets soaked in the sweat of the sex that was
forced on her, wearing a collar that kept her chained there in case the drug
wasn’t enough to disable her, she heard the words again, but they didn’t carry
her. They weren’t for her anymore. Her personhood had been whittled away until
it was almost easy to shed entirely. She was an inferior thing not worthy of
humanity, so it didn’t matter that this had happened again, that she’d been
drugged again, that she’d succumbed to that need to fuck again. It hurt this
bad because she deserved to hurt for the ruin she’d brought into their lives,
because she was disgusting, because she was a monster. If that weren’t true,
they would not do this to her, and more tellingly, the sex wouldn’t feel so
terribly, disgustingly good.
“It doesn’t… matter…” she murmured to the dark.
The sound of the shower running had started up again and Anders had left after
the yelling had stopped, so perhaps she had time. She touched the collar around
her neck, pulling at the leather and chain, but she didn’t have the key to the
padlock on it. The drug made the air seem thick and heavy, making any movement
laborious and difficult even to breathe. It took minutes to muster the strength
and coordination to pull herself up to the headboard, her fingers clumsily
gripping the wooden bars until she found the bedpost the chain was wrapped
around and secured with another padlock.
She breathed the thick air, just focusing on the weight of it filling her lungs
until the screaming in her mind quieted. She shut her eyes and thought of the
outside, of the breeze stirring the curls at the tips of her hair and the
sunlight warm on her face. The screaming was now distant murmuring, growing
distinct until the rolling rumble of them formed the voices of her uncles
speaking in solemn Norwegian. The warmth on her face and the wind moving her
hair was so vivid and the drug crawled through her veins pleasantly now,
dizzying her enough to feel as though she was drifting along a tide instead of
being pulled into a whirlpool. A droning hum blended it all in a smear of
drowsiness that tugged her towards sleep, but she couldn’t fall asleep on this
drug or she’d be out for hours, completely vulnerable. She couldn’t let it pull
her under, she had to stay awake, stay right where she was, waiting for them to
come for her where they knew to find her. If they would only come find her and
take her to him, she could do something, anything to stop it all. There had to
be a way; they just had to find her, and then she could find it.
Simone forced her eyelids to open, blinking away the brightness that blinded
her until she found herself looking at the gray interior of Anders’ car. Late
afternoon sunlight poured through the open window above her, the wind blowing
through it stirring the locks of her hair that had escaped her ruined braid.
Dread filtered through the thick fog of her mind to twist in her belly. She was
not where she was to be found. Her sluggish heart lurched to flutter around in
her chest like a trapped bird when she tugged at the ropes binding her wrists
to her ankles, keeping her curled tightly inward on her side. She tried to
unbend her legs and the rapid beginning of a panic attack choked her when she
found that her knees were tied to the collar still around her neck. Noise and
light crushed in, the world blurring in jagged motion and roaring in fury,
filling her, stretching her, tearing her apart. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t
breathe. She couldn’t breathe.
A cold sweat crawled across her skin as she tried to force her lungs to work,
struggling against the ropes in a frenzy, screaming without being able to push
the air past her vocal chords until at last she forced out a sound she couldn’t
hear. The spinning world swayed harshly and there were hands prying her jaw
open, but she couldn’t see and she couldn’t think to wonder what was happening
when she felt fingers crowd into her mouth. The bitter bump they left under her
tongue foamed in her saliva. More hands, grabbing, rubbing, soothing voices
floated under the crashing din that filled her ears, but she couldn’t feel, she
couldn’t hear, she couldn’t see. Then she began to sink, deeper and deeper, the
pressure crushing her until she was immobile, the depths darkening until she
was blind, the distance silencing the clamor until all was quiet. The
nothingness pulled her into its bleak and immutable peace as her life floated
up out of her, but she wasn’t alone in the death that waited with patient
certainty. Another life was with her. It was too late for her, too late for the
frightened boy in the photograph, but it couldn’t already be too late for the
life that hadn’t even yet lived. Before the darkness swallowed the last bit of
her, she heard a tiny heart beating beneath hers and she endured the dark.
 
 
There was a recently-built fence outlining the property, the five-foot planks
still pale and splintered at the edges, requiring Leif to cover the spiked tips
with his borrowed shirt to avoid any nasty splinters as he vaulted over it
rather than risk being seen entering through the front gate. He shook the grime
off the garment as he looked for any windows that weren’t covered, becoming
quickly annoyed with Vidar’s rightfully justified paranoia upon seeing that
there was to be no simple way of observing the interior happenings of the house
from the exterior. Usually, Leif preferred to observe the habits of his victims
in their habitats for a while if the kill called for a home invasion setting,
coming to understand their routines with a familiarity that lent itself to more
easily predict the direction and behavior of the chase once he allowed them to
realize their homes had become his hunting ground. He would be going in blind
with this task and, yet worse, the targets already had Simone as potential
leverage. Vidar, though quick-witted, lacked experience to effectively utilize
her as a hostage, making the situation even less favorable in that she might be
harmed in the ensuing panic. This was a sloppy, shoddy endeavor and Leif did
not like the lack of method he was applying to it, but he could not wait on
method to mature this brash tactic. Simone was in the charge of the man who had
whipped her. Leif unsheathed the machete and left the shirt folded over the
back of a lawn chair at the thought, looking forward to the sensation of his
brother’s blood splattering his bare skin.
The front door had an unfortunately sturdy security screen, but the backdoor
was of a standard wood variety and the metal lock broke through the frame with
one solid kick. With his presence now loudly announced, he entered immediately,
his senses attuned to any sign of movement in the darkened house. He’d done
this dozens of times before. Rarely was anyone ever prepared to defend their
home from invasion even if they possessed the means of defense, especially
among those unacquainted with violence, although his two remaining brothers had
recently acquired an acquaintance with this very concept. Leif had no choice
but to move quickly with a near recklessness that sung through the wide blade
in his grip as though the conductive property of the metal could carry the
current of his rage. Room after room revealed only stillness, the halls yawning
with silence and the walls cold with absence.
The machete sighed back into its sheath. The news of Henrik’s unfortunately-
timed demise had no doubt spooked his brothers to take flight. The sleek little
sedan parked haphazardly in the driveway hinted that they had taken Anders’
car, a fact reinforced by the evidence of both Anders’ vehicle and the pack of
mutts missing from the youngest brother’s residence when Leif had passed by
that property on his way here. His brain sizzled with frustrated unfulfillment
as he resigned himself to yet another delay in finding his girl.
Moving at a more leisurely pace for one last sweep of the residence, his steps
halted abruptly at the master bedroom doorway when he caught the scents
lingering from within. He moved through the darkness, deeper into the recent
scents of Simone, Vidar, Anders, fear, blood, sweat and… sex. A scraping
sensation clawed against the walls of his skull with the confirmation this
evidence brought: his brothers had taken his child and used her for sex. His
nails dug into his tightening fists until the sting told him he’d broken skin,
but he couldn’t let the beast of his wrath overtake him. Not yet. He leaned
over the bed, noting how the mattress had been stripped bare and certain he
would find the sheets in the garbage bin outside if he looked.
He did not have Simone’s perceptive and overwhelming imagination, and as he ran
his palms over the rough-hewn fabric of the mattress and then brought them to
his nostrils, he felt a fleeting fit of gratitude that the limits of reality
did not bend to show him what had transpired here. Mere hours earlier, she had
bled and fucked and cried without him there to piece her back together. It was
not wholly unsurprising to Leif that the same darkness that lived in him had
also tempted his brothers, but that lack of shock did not alleviate the effect
of this realization. It had been nearly three months since Mrs. Marceau had all
but gifted Simone to Anders. Three months, within which the repressed young man
had unfolded these wretched desires from the false morality he’d constructed to
contain them. Three months of his daughter being fucked not only by the uncle
she’d allowed herself to be tricked into loving and trusting, but also the
uncle who had taken a whip to her without question or complaint.
“I will find you,” he said, trying to contain the destructive heat that was
steadily burning away his self-control, “and you will never be lost to me
again.”
His objectivity waning, the black tendrils of rage curled around his mind, and
another scent yanked his attention. He’d caught it before, a few days after
that first fateful fuck in Vermont, but it had been so faint he’d disregarded
it out of hand as a common hormonal irregularity. There was no denying what
this scent now confirmed of that passing suspicion; Simone carried the
culmination of his seed in her womb.  
He pressed his hands to his face as if to hold himself together. For all the
recklessness he accused of his brothers, it was his own barbaric carelessness
that had allowed his seed to germinate in his own child. This wasn’t meant to
happen, not for five or ten years at least, and certainly not with his own
genetic code folding into redundancy with her own, risking congenital disorders
among the myriad of other difficulties such close and repeated inbreeding
entailed. The hardships his sibling-related grandparents had endured just to
produce a meager two suitable offspring after nearly a dozen unviable lives
hadn’t survived their first year had put him off the idea of repeating that
mistake. Yet he had done exactly that. He wanted it to seem as unfortunate and
foolish as he knew it to be, wanted that wrathful flame to engulf him in the
full consequence of this egregious error, but the scent and knowledge that she
was impregnated by him incited a primal gratification he could not staunch.
This misalignment between his thoughts, his emotions, and his self was the root
of the rift that had brought him into his daughter’s bed in the first place; he
could not allow it to negate his stance on this subject, yet that paternal
yearning struck him with surprising voracity. It also dissolved his will to
remain lucid in this nightmare that kept denying his daughter to him.
His nails, thick and hardened by the restless work he’d put into strengthening
his grip, tore into the fabric of the mattress as his fingers curled. A high
tinny sound pierced his skull and he did not hear the sound of his fist
cracking the solid wood of the headboard in one impulsive strike. He looked at
the splintered slab and breathed out a heavy sigh, relinquishing the concept of
concealing any evidence of his presence. In fact, stealth was decidedly no
longer part of his method. Let the whole country quiver in fear of his fury,
for all he cared of such a polite and discreet method to benefit the comfort of
sheep. There was a monster in their midst and they would soon know it. Still,
he could acknowledge his bloodlust required he kill someone before he did
something rash. As though on cue, a distant knock filtered through the high
piercing whine and the hot breath scraping out of him hitched in anticipation
at the sight of two police officers waiting at the front door. Two unsuspecting
pigs, fattened on their illusions of authority, were welcome to the venom
thickening his blood as he opened the door.
“Vidar Valstad?” one of the policeman asked, squinting to see the tall figure
amidst the shadows. “We understand this is a difficult time, but we have some
questions-”
Leif interrupted him with an upward swing of the machete, slicing through the
officer’s abdominal wall and loosing his innards in a splatter before thrusting
the blade across his partner’s eyes. There was a level of force that the thick
steel of a machete required of its wielder to enact fatal violence onto his
victim, its use as a tool to clear vegetation not lending itself well to
cleaving flesh and bone, and it was exactly these difficult qualities that
provided Leif with the satisfaction of having to throw himself into the kill.
He wanted this messy, inefficient, and gruesome. The hacking of the dull edge
into the blinded one’s neck and head was nearly more of a bludgeoning than a
slicing, though it quickly produced an arterial spray that showered Leif in its
gratifying warmth. There was something uniquely pleasing in chopping away at
something until it lost all resemblance to what it once was.
“With all due respect, officer,” Leif said above the squealing peals of the
disemboweled as he pulled him into the darkened entryway, “I don’t think you
understand how much of a difficult time I’m having right now.”
After he was done with them, he smoothed his hair into his calculatedly
disheveled bun and slid the t-shirt over his torso, piecing the disguise back
together before leaving. The obvious appearance of blood had been toweled off
his skin and the dark material of the jeans hid the nature of the stains,
leaving only its pungent reek to cling to him. It would have been a futile
effort to wash it off since he intended to spill more shortly. Maier watched
him approach the car with his one good eye in expressionless anticipation,
nothing about his calm and clinical manner saying anything about the bicycle
lock Leif had used to secure his ankle to the seat or the fact that he had seen
two policemen enter the property and only the assassin exit.
Rather than go immediately to the driver’s side, Leif opened the passenger door
and leaned down to level his glare with his happy prisoner’s adoring gaze as he
said, “Tell me where they took her.”
“I cannot tell you that information until I have first acquired it, sir,” Maier
responded. “But there is a way I may be able to acquire it.”
Leif gripped the edge of the door, his knuckles turning white and every muscle
growing taut as he refrained from the delight of punching this man’s throat in
to watch him choke, instead calmly stating, “Continue.”
Maier nearly perked up at being given permission to do so, taking a small
breath before explaining, “Very early on in my assignment, I had installed
software on Anders Valstad’s cellular phone that enabled me to access the
microphone, camera, and GPS applications even when the device appears to be
turned off. I had also installed the same software on the cellular phone he had
given Ms. Valstad, although her use and proximity to the device was too
infrequent to be considered useful. So long as power is supplied to the device
through the battery, I have been gathering and recording the information
through those feeds onto my personal computer at my base of operations. There
is a chance that I may be able to determine their location or destination,
pending the device’s proximity to them currently or during any integral
planning.”
Leif’s lip twitched in the want to curl back into a snarl. It was to be
expected that Dr. Aguiyi’s top lackey had utilized the same methods of spying
on his family as the doctor himself had spied on Leif through the cell phones
he had supplied in his prior role as the order’s communications manager. He’d
had no impressions of assured privacy so long as he was regarded as a prominent
figure in the order, but how casually these methods were applied to something
that should have been as harmless as monitoring his milquetoast littlest
brother seemed gratuitous. Or perhaps his own anger was clouding his judgment.
Apparently, they should have been watching Anders far closer than they were.
The thought stirred his relentless need to possess and protect what was left of
his daughter’s mangled psyche, even if it meant utilizing the help this odd
little man offered.
 
 
“Is she okay? Is she going to be okay?” Anders asked, his fingers pulling
harshly at the roots of his hair as he dragged his hands through it nervously.
He couldn’t watch as Vidar had held her down and forced the sedative into her
mouth, but he couldn’t just stand there either, so he paced through the grass
on the side of the road and tried to just wait it out. Vidar was right to
restrain her; God knows what would have happened if she hadn’t been tied up
during that attack.
“Of course. This is what the pills are for,” Vidar assured him.
He was still leaning over her, though, not moving from her even as he insisted
everything was fine. Anders rubbed the sweat from the back of his neck and
tried to force himself to look, but his feet carried him away as his nerve
failed before he could peer over his brother’s shoulder and he looked at the
skid marks his sudden stop had made on the road instead.
“What the hell are we doing?” he murmured, his fingers sliding through his hair
as his arms drifted numbly to his sides.
“Surviving,” Vidar responded.
Anders grit his teeth at the quick and casual answer, as though it were so
clear what was happening when, in fact, nothing had made sense lately. He also
didn’t mean for that to have been heard; losing half the hearing in his marred
ear had reduced his ability to judge what was appropriate volume. In either
case, he huffed out his frustration and checked his phone nervously. The signal
was spotty this far from civilization, but that didn’t prevent him from
fidgeting mindlessly through his photos and calendar.
Anything was better than thinking. If he let himself think, he would start to
consider how gleefully he’d done the very thing that had tormented him to
drinking. With a mind unfortunately cleared of the lust that had so quickly
seduced him into forgetting his basic humanity, it was startling to see such
stark and obvious evidence of his own madness. He had followed into the dark
terrified of what his brother might have done to a woman, but upon finding that
woman to be Simone, his terror had turned into enthusiasm for the very horrors
he had just moments before condemned. He wanted to look back and find a
hesitance within that moment, somewhere in that elation and relief where he
could honestly say there was reluctance or even just consideration towards what
they were about to do with her, but there was none. The shift was seamless,
natural, and instantaneous. It wasn’t until he’d pulled back the curtain and
saw her fear, her shame, and her wounds that it had occurred to him exactly
what he had done again and done with such joy, yet even then, it was a hollow
observation rather than the guilt-stricken epiphany he knew it should have
been. He had two months to realize his sickness and accept his guilt and all
that contemplation had gone to waste the instant he touched her. It was one
thing to know he was beyond redemption, but it was an entirely other thing to
experience it so viscerally.
He didn’t hear his brother come up behind him until he jumped at the hand on
his shoulder.
“Shit!” he snapped, jerking away from his brother’s touch, his shoes scraping
over the dirt in his reactive scramble to escape him. “Don’t scare me like
that, asshole!”
Instead of soothing his overreaction with humor or polite disregard, Vidar just
blinked, his sharp features drawn by fatigue and haunted with a grief that
dulled his eyes. Anders almost wished for the biting sarcasm his older brother
used to belittle him so constantly with rather than this wan man that seemed
only halfway there. The thin smile Vidar offered was nothing more than a
manipulation of his facial muscles.
“She’s asleep again. The cabin is still about two hours out. I’ll drive the
rest of the way,” Vidar offered.
Anders eyed his older brother, skeptical of his warmed-over corpse appearance,
but he knew better than to argue with him even if he did look one stiff breeze
away from collapsing. He dropped his keys in Vidar’s extended hand and slunk
into the passenger seat, waiting until the car was in motion again before
swallowing his cowardice and turning to look at her. With a blanket tucked over
the ropes binding her battered body, she looked as though she was merely
napping for the long car ride. There was the initial jolt of jubilation at the
sight of her, an almost queasy excitement that hit him hard after so much hope
and misery, then there was the static warmth of fulfilled possessiveness and a
joyfully demanding affection. It was the absence of any sense of his
wrongdoing, the blank hole where the shape of his guilt should have been, that
distressed him. This was wrong. What they were doing and what they had done was
wrong. He desperately wanted that to matter to him.
“Vid…”
“Hm?”
Anders bit the edge of his knuckle, unsure of how to give voice to something
that was so vague and strange to him. He wanted to know what was wrong with
them.
Instead, he asked, “You were going to explain what happened, right? Where did
you find her? Why is she… what happened to her back? Where was she this whole
time?”
Vidar didn’t appear to have heard him, his glassy eyes distant as they watched
the road, but then he spoke in a voice so subdued that Anders had to lean in to
hear, “Actually… Would you mind if we didn’t talk about that quite yet? I’ll
explain… everything, but just for now… I’d rather not think about any of it.”
As much as he wanted to know, Anders was too worried for his brother to be
irritated. The man seemed faded, only half there while the other half was
beyond reach, almost hiding. Something had happened, that much was obvious.
Something terrible.
“Are we in danger?” Anders asked. His gut tightened unconsciously at Vidar’s
silent nod in response. He’d guessed that much from his abrupt and frantic
demand that they go on this trip up north to his friend’s vacation home, though
to have it confirmed filled him with a different dread. “Shouldn’t we have
taken Henrik? I know he’s not really involved in this, but if they can’t have
us… We should warn him, at least.”
Vidar’s jaw tensed as if considering what to say, but nothing came. He rubbed
at that tension, some sort of anguish leaking into his darting eyes and for a
moment, Anders thought that he might vomit. Slowly, that impression passed, and
his brother only stammered something unintelligible before coughing and
resuming his wary silence. With the subject apparently closed to him, Anders
glanced back at their sleeping girl before committing himself to relax for the
drive. She was still deeply unconscious, no more of that upsetting twitching
and sputtering, and he allowed himself to believe that she wasn’t as distressed
as she’d seemed. Certainly not by them, at least. Whoever had her had abused
her, whipped her until the skin had split in several places across her back and
choked her until her neck had bruised. He wouldn’t let that happen to her
again, and neither would Vidar. He took a deep breath, letting it out slowly as
he slid his mind away from the evidence of her horrors. It was odd, sitting in
the passenger seat for once. He’d been alone for so long, he couldn’t recall
anyone having driven him in this car and, even if it was a small and silly
concept, it hit him then that he wasn’t alone anymore. It was going to be the
three of them from now on, and soon, that number was going to increase. Perhaps
he was incapable of experiencing guilt regarding all of this because it wasn’t
so wicked as it read on the surface. Nothing that resulted in something so
beautiful could be wicked; they had just taken a different path than most.
At the peace this perspective brought to his mind, the tension in Anders’ body
bled out of him and he shut his eyes, relaxing in the reassuring scents of his
family so nearby. All those worrying little details about consent and morality
would iron themselves out over time in the happy future they would have
together. He finally had what he had wanted for so long, it was just difficult
to trust that it was this easy after all the suffering and pain they’d each
been through.
 
 
As Simone woke from drugged unconsciousness, she was immediately and immensely
aware that she was not where she needed to be. Reality dripped into the thick
and viscous nothingness, dissolving it with an acidic hiss that slowly became
the sound of rainfall. Hands molded her body back together as they caressed and
fondled her nakedness, but she was not afraid or embarrassed; these hands
touched her with a familiar bid for sweetness and comfort that she
automatically leaned into. Reality dipped back as this touch took her back to
her mother’s cool palm checking her forehead for fever in the night, those
work-hewn fingers gently brushing her wild mane from her face before lips
replaced her hands to soothe the needy lonesomeness that sickness brought.
“Mom…?” she whispered, too weak to speak, too frightened to open her eyes.
“Ssshhh…” someone hushed her, the sound distinctively different from Lisa’s
pitch.
Simone shut her eyes tighter against the tears her need pressed out of her. The
soothing touch tucked between her thighs and belly to gently squeeze at the
slight roundness her curled position had pronounced, right above where her baby
was growing. She shuddered at the immediate thought; it was just a tiny cluster
of cells rapidly dividing within a protective balloon in her body, but it was
already her baby. She wanted her mother even more, wanted her there to stroke
the hair she’d chided for being so offensively textured, to kiss her fever and
tell her everything was going to be alright, even when it could never be
alright again. Arms that were too thick with muscle and too long to belong to
Lisa cradled her against a body too flat and the edge of a cup tipped water too
insistently against her lips until it spilled down her chin and she sputtered
to swallow it. So often, especially when she was alone during those long days
when Henrik was working, she conjured her mother by closing her eyes and
caressing her own face, replaying memories of a familial affection that held no
underlying desire or expectation of sex. She occasionally wondered, with a
sinking shame, if she was capable of returning that kind of affection anymore
or if all familial touch had forever been tainted to fall into the binary of
threat or sex. The hand that wiped her chin held both.
“You are okay, kjære?” Anders’ voice, smooth as snake scales sliding down her
spine, whispered into her ear.
The sense that she was in the wrong place returned with a severity that opened
her eyes. The wooden room with its low, sloping ceiling was illuminated by the
fire from the cast iron stove in the corner. She didn’t know this room, but she
was too afraid to ask. Wherever she was, she wasn’t where she was supposed to
be.
“Take me back,” she rasped, pushing ineffectively against him.
She was unbound and his hold was gentle, but the drug made her weak enough for
none of that to be needed to keep her seated on his lap. Somewhere in her mind,
she realized that she had been bathed and the reminder of just how much they
could do to her unconscious body without her ever knowing made her shudder in
horror. It was a stale horror at this point. He hushed her again, cradling her
closer and pressing her head to his chest as he nuzzled his cheek against the
top of her hair, and she had no choice but to allow this attempt to soothe her.
There was no use in fighting them, especially when drugged. She pushed down the
urge to cry in frustration and forced herself to accept this.
“Please,” she whispered plaintively, “please, please take me back. I don’t care
what you do to me, just… I need to stay there.”
He murmured something in Norwegian against the top of her head, the small
breaths that carried the foreign words warm on her scalp, but she couldn’t
understand any of it and he wasn’t moving them from their seat in front of the
fire. His hands began to caress and fondle her once more as he kept speaking,
his touch becoming more rough and insistent as his words became more
impassioned, almost frantic. Her fear accompanied his steady escalation, but
there wasn’t anything she could do. If he wanted to dig his nails into her
skin, he would. If he wanted to crush her against him until her ribcage bent,
he would. There was nothing she could do to stop any of them.
“I don’t understand you,” she said.
He appeared not to have heard her, his stream of words continuing
uninterrupted. An admission, a plea, a confession, a demand, she couldn’t tell
what he was on about, and really, it had never mattered what he told her
anyway. Every promise that he would help her, every claim that he loved her,
every apology after he’d hurt her had never mattered. Despite his sincerity and
intent, it had all led up to this. It was just the way things were.
Wincing from the pain of his nails dragging along the curve of her hip, she
rasped, “I could never understand you…”
Finally, he stopped talking and they sat with only the sounds of the rain
falling outside and the fire crackling inside for a moment, then he shifted her
on his lap to straddle him. She swallowed the sick heat that rose in her chest
as he reached between them and undid his pants to pull his erection out. His
fingers dug into her hips as he pulled her closer, pressing her cunt to his
cock, but not penetrating her yet. The warm, silky skin over the blood-engorged
hardness was tantalizing against her sore labia even without the buildup of
arousal, although arousal was quickly pouring its syrupy presence over
everything in her perception.
“You are wanting this, yes?” he asked, breathless with lust, hands twitching to
pull her in. “Say it… Please, kjære, say you are wanting.”
She couldn’t remember how many times she had been used by them, she couldn’t
even remember how many times she’d been used since the previous night, but it
was never going to be enough to break this sick need she responded with every
time. She shut her eyes and thought of her mother. Threat or sex, or threat and
sex. There was nothing left. She leaned forward, weakly wrapped her arms around
his shoulders, and felt him shiver when she opened her mouth on the side of his
neck. Then, she bit down.
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