“Why?”

“She was planning something.  They’d taken her off her detail.  She wasn’t supposed to be watching you anymore, but she was, and she was acting erratic, clearly upset.  To be honest, I don’t know what she was going to do, but it seemed likely she might try to hurt you.  So I took care of her.  I killed her for you.”

It wasn’t lost on me, the horrible irony of this man who was going to hurt me, had done worse already by hurting my son, killing someone because they might harm me.

I didn’t have much time to wonder over it.  I thought he was moving to gag me, but instead he covered my nose and mouth again with a cloth that reeked with that same acrid stench.

I lost consciousness.

I don’t know if he’d dosed me harder or what, but I must have been out a lot longer that time, because when I came to it was light out, and I was already ensconced in another house, in another room with Raf, who was conscious now, his eyes steady on me.

I took in every bruise and cut I could see, his blackened eyes, his split lip, feeling every bit of it.

I had no clue why, but Dr. Earl the psychopath had gone to the trouble to make us both comfortable, sitting us up, tied, but in recliners placed about six feet apart, facing each other.

And so began our strange captivity.

For the most part, it was tedious.  A lot of awful waiting and anxious worrying.

Raf was bound up tight and treated like someone dangerous.  The psycho even fed him by hand, not trusting him with so much as a fork and spoon.

He knew that Rafael was a testosterone fueled young man who was extremely overprotective of his mother, just waiting for a chance to break free.

Me, Earl treated drastically different, though it took me some time to catch it.  He kept me tied, but he had no caution with me, no thought that I’d try to attack him.  He treated me only as a risk for flight.

Because he’d been watching me, stalking me for God only knew how long, and he knew some things about me.

He knew I wasn’t violent.

He knew this from watching me and felt confident in his assessment.

He hadn’t done enough research.

He might have been a perfect killer, but in this instance, he was an utter fool.

Because I was not violent.  In general, no, I did not have the urge to hurt inside of me.  For the most part, I did have a pacifist’s soul.

To a point.  We all have that breaking point.  Everyone probably has a few of them, but hands down, my children were the quickest way to snap mine.

How dare this sicko drag Raf into this?

I’d kill him with my bare hands.  I was just waiting for my chance.

Earl did keep his word about not hurting Raf anymore, as long as I cooperated, and I did, but the same could not be said for me.

It could have been worse.  That was an absolute fact.  There were a dozen things just off the top of my head that would have been less tolerable to me.

Still, there was some pain to be had.  Some torment to be suffered.

Some burdens to be borne that could not be taken back.

I’d carry them forever.

It began, around noon on the first day in that second house and stuck to a rigid pattern.

He started by gagging Raf, then turned to me.

He untied me and took me, without a word, into another room.

I didn’t fight him.  I knew that this was what he’d meant about me cooperating.

That didn’t make it easy.

Raf could be heard screaming helplessly into his gag from the second we left until he saw me again.

When I said that Earl hadn’t hurt my son again, I was only referring to physical pain.

The other room was a bedroom, and that first day was the worst with what I thought and feared he’d do when he sat me on that bed.

But he didn’t rape me.  Thank God at least for that.

“I don’t have what you’d call ‘normal wiring,’” he explained to me at one point.  “I don’t get off on sex.”

I didn’t ask.  I sincerely did not want to know, but he seemed to feel, as he often did, that he owed me an explanation.

“I’d show you how I do, but I can’t, not while you’re pregnant.  It’s not safe.  I wouldn’t want you to lose the baby.  After, though, we’ll have some fun, I promise.”

I didn’t ask him what he planned to do with the baby.  I didn’t want to draw his attention to it.  He was too strange when it came to my baby.  Obsessed.  Like it was his.

He stripped me, pushed me down, and tied my arms above my head.

I stayed meek as a lamb, knowing that any fight I put up on my part would cause some type of harm to Raf.

It was hard to stay quiet when he took out a blade.  It was a small thing, but I didn’t let that fool me.  Little knives could cut just as surely as big ones, if they were sharp enough.  And this one was honed with precision.

I lay there, shaking, while I waited for him to start on me.

I had no notion what he planned, but I knew it wouldn’t be pleasant.

“I’d like you to gain some weight,” he told me, as he bent down to touch high up on my leg.  “And lose some muscle tone.  You’ll be more fun to play with when you aren’t so firm.  I like soft flesh.”

I shut my eyes and shuddered.

He brushed his free hand over my inner thigh.  “Your skin is like velvet, though.  I do like that.”

And he started to cut, carving at my skin with determined skill.