Total pages in book: 57
Estimated words: 54836 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 274(@200wpm)___ 219(@250wpm)___ 183(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 54836 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 274(@200wpm)___ 219(@250wpm)___ 183(@300wpm)
Surely, that was what he got off on.
The power that fear and pain gave him.
I had to do everything in my power not to give it to him.
No matter what he did before I could hurt him back.
That deep breath coughed out of me, though, as I looked at the opening between the bars of the cage, and saw not a ski mask, or a stocking-smushed mess, but the real face of my attacker.
Somehow, it was even more chilling to see his features, even as the little true crime podcasts were playing on a loop in the back of my mind about how they only showed you their face if they wanted to murder you.
Of course he wanted to murder me.
He’d murdered those two other poor women.
And he was just so… painfully average.
Regardless of knowing better, some part of us always want the bad guys to appear bad.
That just simply wasn’t the case.
This guy wasn’t exactly ugly, but he wasn’t attractive either. He had the kind of face that you saw in a crowd and immediately forgot about. Oval face, average nose, lips, and cheeks. His eyes were a little wide-set, but not glaringly so, and again, just an average brown shade.
Utterly forgettable.
Yet… there was this little niggling feeling of familiarity.
It spread until it was this rock in my stomach, this solid certainty that I knew him from somewhere, that I’d seen him often enough to remember his unmemorable face.
That made sense, of course.
Wells had insinuated as such when he’d asked for a list of all the places I frequented.
Men like this, they obsessed. That fit the profile. They watched, longed for, planned, bided their time, and then acted.
I’d seen him somewhere. Over and over.
It was driving me a little crazy that I couldn’t place him.
Which, I guess, was good. Because it kept me from being focused on my fear.
Glancing down at me, locked in his little cage, a sneer spread across his features, twisting them uglier with each passing second.
I was sure as I looked up at him, refusing to break eye contact, that there was nothing quite as chilling as a smile spread as wide as his currently was that didn’t reach his cold eyes.
Fear, it turned out, made me a little, well, snippy.
Because before I could think better of it, my mouth was opening, and words were spilling out.
“Damn. I kind of hoped I’d killed you.”
It was, as you can imagine, the exact wrong thing to say.
That chilling smile fell, and his hands shot outward toward the cage, fiddling with something I couldn’t see, and then the cage top was loosening.
Maybe it wasn’t the wrong thing, though. Because, in his anger at either what I said, what I’d done to him, or possibly at the fact that I was ruining his fantasy by not being visibly scared, his hands were clumsy. He seemed frustrated with himself.
We were always told not to poke apex predators.
And, sure, men were women’s only true predator.
But, all at once, I could see him for exactly who and what he was.
The kind of guy who was afraid of women, who couldn’t talk to us, charm us, and get us into bed. The kind of man who sat in Incel chatrooms, bemoaning all of womankind for not seeing his great many virtues.
Out of curiosity once, I’d gone into an Incel group.
The juxtaposition of whining and bitching while also claiming they are practically God’s gift to the world was so incredibly off-putting that I could barely stomach it. Once I got to all the posts slut-shaming, rage was simmering through me. When I reached the posts where the Incels described their perfect woman—which, invariably included virgins who lived only to cook and clean and cater to their every need—I decided I needed to get the hell out of there before I lost all faith in mankind.
That was all this guy was.
A guy who had spent years behind a computer screen. Who, over time, became emboldened to act on his sickest fantasies by other men who shared their revenge porn stories freely without shame or disgust in themselves.
I mean, we’d seen it several times in the true crime world, hadn’t we?
Incels who went on killing sprees.
By my estimation, this asshole, though, really did seem like the most sadistic I’d come across. At least in modern history.
I wouldn’t pretend to know everything about psychology, but I wondered if maybe doing everything ‘wrong’ would be my best bet. If I kept screwing up his fantasy. If I kept flustering and frustrating him.
The more upset he got, the more likely he was to make a mistake. Yes, logic also told me that he was more likely to be even more horrific to me.
But my gut was telling me it was worth the chance.
He was going to do unspeakable things to me regardless of how I acted. I might as well try to stack the odds in my favor by screwing with him, right?