The Game Maker

by Kitty Thomas

I extricate myself from the hand still stroking the nape of my neck. Our captor acts as if this entire conversation were about something unimportant—not two lives hanging in the balance. But our lives are unimportant to him. I crawl the few feet to Seven and bury my face in his chest. I'm grateful the chains give enough leeway for him to put his arms around me. He strokes my back.

  “Shhhh,” he says. “I'll be fine. Don't worry about me. I need you to go. Live your life.”

  I shake my head, my tears dripping onto his chest. “No, I won't leave you. I love you.”

  I involuntarily flinch when I say this because I remember our captor is standing so close. He heard this confession of love, and he surely won't be happy about it.

  There’s a long beat of tense silence, and then Seven laughs. It’s a dark, sinister laugh, like nothing I've heard from him before.

  “What was that, Declan? Three weeks?” Seven says.

  “Impressive. I thought she'd take the money.”

  I pull away from Seven to look in his eyes, still not believing what I've just heard. This can't be real. I trusted him. I thought that he... I thought he was like me...

  “You are so adorable,” Seven says. “So sweetly trusting. I love it.”

  “No! No, no no...” I can't stop the word. It's gotten stuck on repeat. I scramble back to the corner I was in only minutes ago when Declan first stepped into the room.

  I'm still trying to put it all together. I had thought Seven was my captor that first day, but I'd become quickly convinced by the lie of his innocence which only became more convincing the more time passed. And after the way he was tossed in the cell all bloody and broken the day we were punished for speaking each other's names in the seemingly safe space of the shower... Did he let Declan beat him like that?

  It's strange having a name for my captor now... my other captor. Declan unchains Seven, and the two of them stand together, watching me, amusement on their triumphant faces. It was a game, and Seven won. Good for him.

  I seek desperately to put together a new narrative of what really happened these past weeks. Obviously, he did let Declan beat him that day, something I can't begin to comprehend. But it served its purpose. It convinced me we were in this together. That we were a team. Us against the monster. It bonded me to him more tightly than any other play they could have made.

  Did they plan and coordinate each move? Did Seven know ahead of time how every last detail would unfold? When Declan was keeping me in his bedroom and blindfolding me to take me to the dungeon... Seven had to have been walking around free outside the cell. Did he watch? Did he become the new voyeur?

  I squeeze my eyes shut, trying not to think about the fact that while I worried Declan was starving him and beating him, or had even killed him, that he was just taking a break from the game.

  Whenever Seven was dragged out of the cell, Declan wasn't moving him long distances to punish him or whatever. It was all just a show until he got out into the hallway.

  Seven knew there were no real drugs in the syringe the day of the escape attempt. He knew Declan was lying there fully conscious waiting for us to almost get free before pulling the rug out.

  Another realization slams into me like a mallet. Seven was never drugged. The food he ate was the same as mine. And every time he was injected with what I thought were drugs, it was only a saline solution. Nothing was real.

  Declan told the truth every time he said Seven wasn't my hero and everything was an act and a game. He put the truth right under my nose in plain sight. He openly stated it while I thought he was just taunting me.

  “You're going to kill me aren't you?” I say, the tears still flowing down my cheeks. I loved Seven. God help me, but I still love him.

  “No,” Seven says. “We really are letting you go. I mean there's only so long I can live in a cell with nothing else to do. So here's the deal. You will sign a non-disclosure agreement, backdated to the date that we took you. The contract states that you were here of your own free will playing a game with us. You can tell no one about anything that has happened here.”

  I wish it was Declan telling me all this because it's so hard to see this change in Seven. I thought he cared about me... I thought...

  “You will not go to the police. We own nearly every judge in this corrupt city, and we can guarantee we would get one of those judges should a trial ever occur. And we own about half the police. If you go to one of our guys, he'll just bring you right back to us, and we will be very displeased. You can't imagine the punishment.”

  “Master, please...” I can't dwell on this betrayal because starvation is still a real possibility, and I have nowhere to go, and I'm sure the money was part of their sick joke—the carrot they could take away as soon as my greedy little eyes lit upon it. “Please... I have nowhere to go,” I say quietly.

  “Yes, you do,” Seven says. “Declan has set up a bank account in your name, and we have all the paperwork and bank cards for you. The account has five million dollars in it. You also now own a penthouse apartment in the city, fully furnished. And a car, a blue Porsche 911 Carrera. You're welcome.”

  I shake my head. “It's not real. You're just fucking with me again.” I can't take any more of these lies.

  Seven steps out of the cell for a moment, the keypad accepting his thumbprint as easily as Declan's. As if I needed any more proof of his role in this. No wonder Declan made me call Seven, master.

  I cry harder now as I'm left alone in the room with Declan. The bad master. The scary one. But they are both utterly terrifying now. They were just playing good cop/bad cop with me, and I was too stupid to see it.

  “You're both psychopaths,” I whisper.

  “Oh, come now, Pretty Toy. If we were psychopaths, you'd be dead right now. We're sociopaths.”

  “What's the difference?” I never actually thought there was a difference. I've heard the terms used interchangeably so many times.

  Declan walks over to me. I cringe away from him, my back now pressed against the wall with no more room to run. He sits on the ground beside me, stroking my hair.

  “Sociopaths can form bonds with a select few people. And lucky for you, you're now one of those people.”

  I don't believe him. I can't. The amount of deceit both men have used with me these past few weeks is too great for me to believe a word out of their pathologically lying mouths.

  “Did I ever once threaten your life?” he asks.

  “No.” He did mention starving, but I know he means violent immediate murder threats. It's fucked-up that I can read between his lines and know what he means even if he isn't entirely specific.

  “No, what? You aren't free quite yet. Let's not get too casual.”

  “N-no, Master.” I can't stop crying.

  “Good girl. Did either of us ever physically harm you in any serious way? Any broken bones? Cutting? Amputations? Starvation? And I mean actual starvation, refusing you food with no way for you to rectify that situation. Were you at any point violently raped?”

  “No, Master,” I whisper.

  “That's what I thought.” He stands back up as Seven re-enters the room with some papers, a pen, and the clothes I was wearing the night I was taken. The little black dress. He takes me by the arm and guides me to the bathroom where the light is better. The latest white roses are wilting in the vase. Some of the petals have fallen onto the counter.

  It's jarring, because there were always fresh roses. They never got to this state before being replaced with more, always while I was sleeping.

  “Read, sign, and initial in the marked places,” he says.

  Seven strokes my back as I read. I hate him more than Declan right now. At least I always knew Declan was the bad guy. Seven's betrayal cuts deeper.

  I can barely read through my tears but I get the gist of it. It doesn't even matter what the fuck these papers say. I have no choice but to sign them. I'm not really agreeing to anything, just obeying one more of their whims.

  I sign and init
ial in all the appropriate places.

  “Good girl,” Seven says, passing the papers to Declan. “Now get dressed, and I'll take you to your new home.”

  My hands shake as I put on the bra, panties, dress, and heels. It feels so uncomfortably strange to have fabric resting against my skin after so much time naked.

  He pulls a black scrap of fabric out of his pocket and ties it around my eyes.

  When I panic, he says, “It's just until we get away from the house.”

  He leads me out of the cell, down a hallway, out a front door. Birds are chirping as he opens a car door and guides me inside.

  “Buckle up,” he says before shutting me into the silence of the car.

  He joins me a moment later and the engine revs to life. As we drive, I wonder how many women they've done this to.

  There’s this sick part of me that still wants to be with Seven because a part of my mind is still in shock and can't accept that he's the bad guy. I'm still not sure he's not just taking me somewhere to kill me. His level of elaborate deceit makes anything now possible.

  But I don't ask or beg because if he were planning to kill me, he wouldn't tell me the truth about it anyway. I remember what Declan said back in the cell about how sociopaths could form a few limited bonds. Maybe they know they have to kill me but don't want me to see it coming. Maybe this is their twisted way of showing mercy.

  With a blindfold, I wouldn't see it coming. Seven could just park the car somewhere, reach over and snap my neck. If he kills me, I hope he does it like that. Quick, where I don't see it coming.

  “I can't believe I believed you. I believed you cared...” I say, needing to talk to get my mind off the dark fears consuming me.

  “Shhh,” he says before I can start sobbing again. His hand strokes my knee, and I can't bring myself to pull away, and it isn't the fear. I hate myself right now for still wanting him to touch me.

  “Don't feel bad,” he says. “There are women married for decades to serial killers, with children even. They never suspect. Without a real conscience, it's easy to hide, and normal people can't even fathom what goes on inside our minds. And you never really know anyone anyway. Everything you think you know about anyone you've ever met is just the parts they've shown you. You never really know anyone,” he says again. Does he really believe this? I'm not sure. Maybe it's true though.

  We always have a skewed perspective of other people, even those closest to us. We make shorthand assumptions about their thoughts and feelings and motivations. We project ourselves onto them. We become disillusioned when we find out we were wrong about people.

  My hands are clenched together in my lap. “I felt safe with you.”

  “You were safe with me. You're still safe with me. Tell me, Kitten, if you needed surgery, would you prefer to have someone very empathetic or very sociopathic operate on you?”

  What kind of question is this? “Someone empathetic, of course.”

  He laughs. “No, you wouldn't. Very empathetic people are the type of people who break down into tears when a disaster happens on the other side of the world to random strangers they've never met. They hold candlelight vigils and pray and wring their hands. They see a starving African child on a television commercial and send money they probably could put to better use for their own family because they felt sad seeing a small sad-eyed hungry child. And they need to assuage their guilt at having a full belly. They are altruistic even to the point of neglecting their own needs or their family's needs. They have no strong loyalties because they love everyone with a shallow love that is really just their lack of emotional control.”

  I let these words fall over me. I don't know if I should believe them, but they do sound true. I've known people like this. Every news story depresses them or makes them anxious. They get emotionally over-involved in the lives of strangers.

  “It's not black or white, Kate. I guarantee you every top surgeon in the world is at least a bit sociopathic. You have to be able to shut your feelings off and just see a body in front of you so you can make clear-headed rational choices. You don't want someone who is too emotional or falls apart at every little thing or feels everybody else's emotions. Most politicians are sociopaths. Most CEOs are sociopaths. And yet the world still spins.”

  “You didn't really feel anything for me. I didn't expect Declan to, but I thought you...”

  “Obviously, I felt something, Kitten. He does, too.”

  And that's all I'm going to get from him. I know this because he seems to become a wall. He turns on the radio to a classical music station, and we drive the rest of the way in silence.

  Finally the car stops, he removes the blindfold from my eyes, and he gives me a folder with all my bank stuff, my purse, and a set of keys.

  “Your car is in the parking garage. And you live on the top floor.” He winks at me. “It's where they typically keep the penthouse. Goodbye, Kate.”

  I swallow back the tears. I'm never going to see this man again. I shouldn't want to see him again. And now that I know they were both bad, it seems stupid to deny I also felt something for Declan. Because one of them isn't the safe guilt-free choice anymore. They were both evil. And suddenly, in this moment, I’m flooded with my feelings for Declan, these soft feelings I've denied myself because it was so wrong.

  I get out of the car, and before I close the door, I say, “Can I ask you one more question?”

  “Ask,” he says.

  “How do you know Declan?”

  “My only friend since childhood. He was the one person I knew who was like me. Empty.”

  These are the last words he says to me. I shut the car door and watch him drive away. I manage to get inside the building and onto the elevator, riding up to the penthouse before I break down into sobs again. I feel so lonely and so wrong in every way one can be wrong.

  I feel... discarded. And I am. But at least I won't starve.

  I'm surprised when the elevator doors open directly into the penthouse. I had to use a key in the elevator for this floor, but I still somehow expected a hallway. There are floor-to-ceiling windows, and the view is astounding.

  I drop my purse, keys, and large bank envelope onto a chair next to the elevator. And then I freeze. Right in front of me, on a marble table, is a vase of fresh fragrant white roses. There’s a card in the flowers with my name on it.

  My hand shakes as I pull out the card.

  When you are ready to come home, call, and we will come get you.

  There’s a phone number at the bottom.

  They're still playing with me. They think I'm so addicted to what they turned me into that I will give up freedom and luxury to go back to them and live in a cell like some animal.

  Fuck them both.

  I pick up the vase of flowers and hurl it against the wall. The glass shatters into hundreds of tiny shards. I rip up the card with the number on it and throw it in the trash. I will not play their new game.

  Chapter Nine

  An entire week passes before I finally clean up the shattered glass, water, and now wilted roses. I feel inexplicably sad that the life has gone out of them. It's another week before I start to regret throwing the card away. It's long gone now and in a landfill.

  During the first few days of my freedom I went to the spa and got every treatment on the menu in a full-day pampering frenzy. It was nice, but massages and body masks and wraps and a mani-pedi cannot erase the memory of their hands on my body, their dark voices in my ear.

  I've also shopped. I bought a whole new wardrobe. Nice things. I went out to nice restaurants and contemplated how to get myself out of the self-imposed isolation I'd created, how to form some real and lasting social bonds. I need some friends, but I'm not sure how to do that. Maybe I could volunteer somewhere?

  I sit on the floor next to the window in the main open floor plan living area, thinking about my options. Part of me wants to open my own ad agency. I've got the resources now, and I could probably get a few of my old clients to com
e to me. I could even work here from my new home. There’s plenty of room to set up a business and meet clients. But I need time to wallow and ... mourn them.

  I feel so wrong and twisted for mourning, but I have so many memories of Seven being so kind. Comforting me. Being gentle. The ugly truth can't erase all the beautiful moments we shared, even if they were never real.

  Declan was kind in his own way. He never used violence to break me. He used fear and kindness. Pleasure.

  Even if I still had their number, I wouldn't call. There’s no way I would ever voluntarily place myself in their hands again no matter how much it haunts my dreams, no matter how many times I bring myself to orgasm when I wake up to find they aren't there. These men are evil. They are dangerous. And it doesn't matter if they told me they felt some bond with me or that I’m somehow safe. I know I'm not.

  And yet, I also know they know exactly where I am. They could come take me back at any time. So why haven't I used this money to flee the country? Why haven't I transferred the money to another bank, something they don't have access to, because they no doubt have access to the account they set up for me. Why don't I ditch the car and get a new one? Sell the penthouse and pocket the cash? Because I'm stupid and pathetic and some sick part of me hopes they'll come take me so that it's not my fault when this inevitably ends in my grisly death. They are still toying with me, still playing a game. I know this, but I make no move to take my game piece off the board.

  My piece is still in play. I know it, and I’m sure they know it.

  My eyes light on my handbag, the one that went with the little black dress. It's still sitting on the chair beside the elevator. I actually burned that dress and the panties and bra I was wearing, but I haven't touched the bag. It's partly because it's a sleek, sophisticated black Louis Vuitton that I bought as a splurge when I got my first major promotion at the agency. It has sentimental value even as it also has these conflicted memories now attached.

  I can't burn it or throw it out, so it just sat there. My phone is also in there. It's kind of amazing how you can get away without having a cell phone in a big city when you don't really have anyone to call anyway. The penthouse has a landline, so it isn't as though I'm totally without communication to the outside world. And I have a laptop now and the internet. I kind of really missed the internet during those weeks of unreality, playing their game.