Relief hits with metal on metal, a key in the door. The old man has come to calm me. My throat is raw and dry, but I choke, “Please, Norman. Let me out.”

The answer I get is gritty, rolling with incredulity. “Norman? No such luck.”

I’m stunned into silence, barely leaping out of the way when the door opens. A flash of low light illuminates a silhouette, the same one who stalked my bed the first night. When the door slams, we’re plummeted once again into darkness. Thinking only of escape, I lunge forward and dodge to what I hope is his side. Despite the blackness of the room, he catches my waist with surprising accuracy.

 “Run, and I’ll chase you,” he says calmly. “Believe me, you don’t want that.”

I squirm in his tightening hold, my elbow stabbing into his side repeatedly. My screamed protests are incoherent with panic; my body’s never felt more alive and more foreign, every frantic thump of my heart diffusing fear and adrenaline through me. My fist thumps against his chest, pain shooting from my wrist, but he just grunts.

“Let go of me!” He does, and I launch myself to the ground from the force of my struggling. I retreat, crawling backward to the bed, seeking refuge in what I just sought to destroy.

 “Do I not provide everything you need?” he asks. My eyes search the nothingness desperately as menacing footsteps close in on me. “Why do you insist on throwing a tantrum like a child?”

His voice is made of pure threat, so low I feel it underneath me in the floor. “Are you the M-Master of the House?”

“Get back in your bed and keep quiet,” he says. “Don’t make me come back to this room.”

My arms are trembling so hard they’re on the verge of giving out. I don’t know when I began crying, but it’s turning hysterical.

“Did you hear me?” he asks. “I said get back on the goddamn bed.”

When I don’t move, his presence abruptly surrounds me, his fingers wrapping around my bicep. I thrash more, kicking his shin, slapping his firm grip with my free hand. My teeth and nails hunt wildly for exposed skin.

He pulls me to my knees, yanking so hard my face collides with his leg, and my hands grasp his pants. For a weighty moment, there’s only his heavy breathing and my whimper. His hand leaves my arm to seize my hair, and he shifts my cheek to the side fractionally. He curses under his breath. My skin scrapes against coarse denim as he gyrates once. His fingers curl into my roots, urging me closer.

My scream is silenced with a harsh tug of my hair. “Please, don’t do this.”

“I warned you,” he says with another sinuous motion.

My mind can’t compute how we went from fighting to him humping my face. I attempt to back away, but the result is only futile struggling. The teeth of his zipper hiss, and I have to clench to keep from urinating all over myself. My hands rip at fabric as I wrestle with his legs. From this angle, Guy is no longer the golden boy I saw on my last day of freedom. He is a black shadow, towering from where I sit underneath him. I’ve never been in the presence of someone so commanding, so fear inspiring.

His hand still clutches my hair while he hastily shoves down his pants. He rubs himself against my cheek; the disparity of soft and hard makes my body shake and pulse like my heart.

His loud groan spirals through my body as he presses the tip against the corner of my mouth. “Open.”

“No,” I plead through gritted teeth.

He yanks my head back and bends at the hip. All I can see are the shadowed ends of his hair curling away from me. “Do as I say. You’ve earned this lesson in obedience.”

I jerk back, but he shoves himself in my mouth. He pushes deep, ignoring any muffled objections. I close my teeth around him but hesitate too long, and he catches my jaw. “You’d instantly regret that,” he says. “No teeth. Just leave it open for me.” Holding the back of my head in both hands, his hips urge forward once and then again, his pace increasing with each repetition. “Good girl.” I’m stretched open all the way and still can barely taste all of him. “You’ve always been such a good fucking girl, Cataline.”

He thrusts until my mouth is full and my throat constricts around him. Hot tears flood my eyes. He doesn’t relent until I begin to choke, gasping and begging for mercy by shoving his unyielding thighs.

When he pulls out, only a thread of saliva connects us. It droops and eventually breaks, swinging back onto my chin.

“Have I come?” he asks. “Don’t shut your mouth yet.”

“Fuck you, Guy,” I cry through my burning throat.

He freezes instantly. There’s an eerily deafening silence as his fingers pull so tightly on my hair that I squeal. “What did you say?” I stare at him in awe. His body seems to grow bigger as he crouches over me. “What the fuck did you say?”

I flinch, and a noticeable tremble laces my whispered response. “I know you’re Guy Fowler.”

He shoves me away so I fall onto my outstretched arms. Immediately, I ball into the fetal position, flinching with each of his heavy, retreating footsteps. My quivering is uncontrollable while my mind scrambles to catch up. When it does, the thoughts come as easily as the tears: violated, used, disgusting. I hate this place, my situation, but most of all, I hate Guy Fowler. My fingers bury in my hair.

“You’ve always been such a good fucking girl, Cataline.”

It’s true; I’ve spent my life trying to do the right thing, see the positive in people, find light in the darkness. This is where it’s led me. Now that I know I’m right to be afraid, all I want to know is how far this will go. I have to find out whether I’ll ever be free again, or if it’s my fate to die here in this breathtakingly beautiful mansion.

8

The light slam of the door rouses me. Footsteps vibrate in my ear because I’m still on the floor, curled tightly into myself. I’ve moved to the side of the bed furthest from the room’s entrance, mostly underneath it.

I’m my seven-year-old self again, hidden under a new bed in a new home. Fear manifested as silent sobbing while my small hands clung to a bedpost, hoping, impossibly, my dead parents could still come for me.

“Come out from there, Cataline,” says a man’s voice. He waits, unmoving, until I go to him. “Why are you crying?”

“I’m afraid.”

“You’re braver than that, aren’t you?”

“I miss them.”

I’m lifted by my armpits and put under the covers. The last thing I hear before I fall asleep is, “You’ll be happy here. I promise.”

Despite the obscure country night, despite the crystal-sparkle of my tears, I’d known it wasn’t my foster father. When a new, valiant hero surfaced in New Rhone years later, my scalp tingled remembering my first night at the Andersons’.

As the steps draw nearer, my mind spins a silent prayer, my ears heat with a sudden rush of blood. I cease breathing, blinking, and all other basic functions as I attempt invisibility.

“Oh, dear. Cataline?”

My relief is a loud exhale, but my throat protests as words shred from my mouth. “I’m over here.”

Norman comes around the bed and heaves a sigh. “Thank goodness. For a moment, I thought you were gone, but, of course, where would you go? Did you sleep there?”

I ease my stiff back from the floor to sit up. “I slept. That’s all that matters.”

The wrinkles that stripe his forehead deepen. “I wasn’t aware you weren’t sleeping well. I’ll bring you calming tea in the evenings going forward,” he decides. “Perhaps that will help.”

“Help? If you want to help, open the front door. That’s it.” I get to my hands and knees and crawl to Norman’s feet. “I won’t go to the police,” I say, looking up at him. “You don’t even have to tell me where I am or how to get home.” My voice cracks as I whisper, “Just open the door.”

He stares down, impervious to my groveling. “Why, Cataline? Look at all you have here. You have nothing like this at home, not even a family.” His harsh words are delivered gently, and instead of enraging me, they weigh down my already-heavy grief.

“I do,” I say emphatically, and my hands go to his legs, fisting the fine fabric of his pants. “I have a family who loves me, and I love them. They’ll miss me so much, Norman. I’m sure they’ve reported me missing. My mother will be devastated without me.”

I’m forced to release his trousers when he drops into a squat. He rubs my shoulder with papery fingers. “None of that is true.”

“Yes, it is,” I say. I continue to list the members of an imaginary family as he peers at me, his head angled while he listens. I don’t know where the lie comes from, but I tell him the names and locations of siblings, cousins, grandparents. He’s bluffing. He doesn’t know the truth about me or where I come from; he couldn’t possibly.

His response comes moments after my plea finally ends, and it sends a chill down my spine. “You have a foster family in Fenndale and a roommate called Frida. Isn’t that true?”

I blink, too dumbfounded to form an answer.

He looks at the floor. “Come. It’s time for breakfast.”

“How do you know about Frida?”

“You must be hungry.”

My back teeth grind together from his bullshit. Though I want to rail against him, I can’t seem to raise my voice above a whisper when I say, “Do you know what he did to me last night?”

The coward refuses to look at me, but at least he doesn’t pretend not to hear me. He glances at the door and subtly at the nearest corner of the room. “My advice is not to rile him. He only came to your room to stop your tantrum, not to torment you. If you behave and stay out of his way, I’ll do my best to ensure he stays out of yours.”