Page 15 of Ricochet

The large phallus pushes deeper, burning at my entrance while he jostles the dildo around inside of me, as I hang from the hook to which I’d been tied. “You love this, don’t you? How about you pretend its Achilleus fucking you, huh? I’m sure he’s hung like a horse.”

I flinched at the memory. After hours of torment, he’d finally abandoned his play, forcing me to damn near crawl back to my room without dropping a single bit of blood, lest he’d take a renewed interest in my pain.

“You okay, Mrs. Culling?” Carmen approached the bed, eyes wide. “Ay dios mio! Is that blood?”

“I’m okay, Carmen. Please, I’ll be fine.” Though enough splotches marred the sheets to rule out a paper cut, the worst of it was probably inside of me. He’d done it before, much more violently than the night before, so I knew I’d recover within a couple of hours. “Please, I’m okay. I … just started my menstrual cycle.” A lie, and as Carmen cleaned my personal bathroom, I was certain she had a pretty good memory that only less than a week ago, I’d finished my usual cycle.

“Should I call the hospital? Tell them you can’t come in?”

“No!” I didn’t mean for the word to come out quite as forcefully as it did, but I refused to miss the opportunity to leave the shithole for a few hours. The only thing that kept me sane happened to be hanging out with a bunch of broken and battered students—my reward. “No, I’ll be okay. I just … had some residual bleeding.”

“That’s a lot of blood for residual.” Her Hispanic accent almost made the comment laughable, if not for the air of concern behind it, but her gaze remained glued to the patch of blood on the sheet where my ass sat. “I’ll start you a bath … or, I mean a warm shower, how’s that?”

I’d once told Carmen I didn’t particularly care for baths. In truth, I was downright terrified of them.

“And I’ll get these sheets cleaned up for you, quickly.”

“That sounds wonderful, Carmen. Thank you.”

She headed toward the bathroom but paused, midstride. “Miss. You know, I have a friend who was in a really bad situation once.” She’d lowered her tone, putting my oh, shit sensors on high alert, and didn’t bother to turn and look at me. “She hired this guy …”

“Carmen—” I interrupted her for her own safety. “I said, I’m fine.”

She nodded and continued on toward the bathroom.

I once took a psych class in college and struggled with the difference between psychopath and sociopath. To me, any ‘path’ was a path that I avoided in life, but truly, I should’ve paid more attention.

While the rush of water echoed from the bathroom, I glanced up at the camera in the corner of the room.

***

Renata, a cousin of Carmen’s, who worked for the same family-owned cleaning agency, fixed the back of my dress, looking over my shoulder as we both stared in the mirror. A single strap of black satin crossed over my breasts to my right shoulder, and clung to my curves in a long, elegant gown, with a band of beads that clipped my small waist. A long slit exposed my thigh, and the strappy heels beneath added a delicate touch. While black gloves hid the scar on my wrist, a cluster of layered pearls at my neck concealed the mark where Michael had gotten carried away with his belt at my throat.

In truth, I hated the fancy dresses and expensive jewelry he made me wear, like his own personal Barbie doll. Having grown up with nothing, it went against my blood to flaunt something so flashy.

“Such a beauty!” Renata turned to a much smaller, meeker woman, who gathered the clothes I’d discarded for the dress. She never spoke. Couldn’t. She had no tongue. “Isn’t she pretty, Elise?” At her question, the woman gave a slight smile and nodded, but quickly returned to gathering up whatever mess she could scrounge in my otherwise meticulous bedroom. Renata smoothed her fingertips over my long, brunette locks that’d been curled at the ends. “What are you, Mrs. Culling? You got some European in your blood, yeah?”

“My father was French, and his mother was also Sicilian.”

“And your mother?”

Instinctively, I rubbed the scar on my forearm and looked down at the tattoo of black cursive over my wrist. A quote by Charlotte Bronte:

There’s little joy in life for me,

And little terror in the grave;

I’ve lived the parting hour to see

Of one I would have died to save.

God, the thought of her still stabbed me in the heart. I’d lost her at a time in my life when I probably needed her most. A time when my father had become so stricken with sadness, the mere mention of her name had him hiding away in his garage, his sanctuary, for hours. It’d only been later, in the letter he wrote to me the day I eloped with Michael, that I realized how much pain her death had brought him.

I’d never known anyone like my mother, so full on life, vibrant and free-spirited, it felt warm and right just to be near her. We could hardly survive on my father’s meager income, and yet, I had everything I needed while she was alive.

“Beautiful,” I said. “My mother was beautiful.”

“Well, then, that’s why you’re so gorgeous. Mr. Culling’s jaw is going to drop, when he sees you. Just hope he returns in time!”