had “picture perfect” auburn hair, and Little Boy Blue still looked like a little boy, even though he was almost twelve.
“I had Snow White,” she said. “But… I don’t figure we need to talk about her. She’s gone now. I’ll be replacing her when you get settled.”
I croaked out questions, which she answered readily, telling me in her high-pitched, almost chirpy voice, how she had rescued “her” children.
“They were all unwanted. All but you. I had some trouble finding a suitable Gretel—you know, blonde, with blue eyes and a delicate, Germanic sort of face. I saw your family one day – oh I’d say a month or two ago – down at that Home Depot south of Boulder. I was buying…well, it doesn’t matter.” I turned my head toward the front of the car, not that I could see anything but the back of the third row of seating. “Did you know that I get nervous when I leave The House? If I were never to return, well…I don’t know what. My children would perish, I believe. Stuck in their rooms, the poor dearies.”
She sounded resigned to the possibility. I almost puked again.
“I did a good thing, really, when you think about it. With the other children, most of them were re-homed. That means they had been adopted, but they weren’t wanted. I helped them, welcomed them into my nice, big home. But I couldn’t find a Gretel. No Gretel near here, in Nevada, Utah, or anywhere that I could drive. When I saw you—the three of you—I knew. Your parents have three. I took only one.”
Weeks later, it’s her voice that haunts me most as I lie on the cot in my room.
How, even when I kicked and cried and screamed as she hauled me out of the car and threw me on a rug that she rolled over me, she never sounded angry.
When I kicked my way out of the rug, she put a gun to my head and asked me would I please stand up and walk very slowly.
“Oh.” She laughed, a giggle, from a pretty, fair-skinned face. “You can’t use your hands, can you, sweeting? All tied up. That’s what you are.”
The gun was how she got me to walk to my room. Through the foyer and the hallway with its creepy, flaming torches. She held the gun to my head as she showed me several huge windows along a hall with a green rug. She showed me a statue of a naked man— David , I think it’s called—and explained how, due to Ben’s death, she had a lot of money to buy things like that, and to support “her” children.
When we got onto the long, hardwood hallway with a dozen or more doors, she stabbed me with a needle. When I woke up, I found myself staring at a forest: a painted, two-dimensional forest, suspended eternally in autumn.
CHAPTER FIVE
Lucas
Present Time
The process of finding another sub is always tedious. Looking over the notecards Raymond makes for me is damn near pointless. I don’t want to know their backgrounds or their interests. Just height, weight, build, and hair and eye color.
Raymond does most of the vetting on his own, one of the many tasks that he and he alone can be entrusted with. He’s been working with me since the year after I returned to Vegas, and by now, he knows exactly how I like things done.
How many subs has he found for me, I wonder as I lean back in my massive leather office chair. I tap my fingertips against my laptop, but it’s difficult to count them when they don’t have names.
If there were robots capable of serving my needs, I’d happily invest in one of them. I’m not looking for an emotional connection. I don’t need the physical connection either, not for anything beyond the demands of my dick.
The phone on my desk rings—my secretary, Leda, putting a call through from the head of the casino’s board of directors. I agree to the date and time of our next meeting and transfer him back to Leda so she can put it on the schedule.
Then I grab the stack of flash cards off the corner of my desk and thumb through them. Raymond knows by now what height I like, so
Learning to Kill: Stories