I can tell from the swing of her hips that she’s testing me as she guides me further down the corridor. She wants to see how much I can take before I break. My love for her keeps me going. She’s fucking insane, but she seems to have experience and know what she’s doing. She has an added confidence that she doesn’t have in the mansion. She adopts a persona for the parties, always keen to perform and do what he wants, but it’s different here. Everything else is stripped away. This is her lair.
“Over here.” She beckons me to another door that’s locked with a keypad. Father’s tight-knit security measures have benefits, after all. A green flash of light, and the door clicks open. “Are you sure you’re ready for this?”
Her voice is teasing, but I refuse to show fear. Her unpredictability is terrifying but mesmerizing. How can she be capable of sending a chill down my spine and blood to my cock simultaneously?
“Show me,” I demand.
I take a deep breath as we step inside.
It’s not what I expected. After seeing her pet and the dungeon, I’d anticipated something similar, but this is different. It’s almost like a museum. The room is filled with various artifacts, and there’s too much to take in at once.
An assortment of objects hanging on the walls draws my attention first. Stuffed body parts are mounted in the same way that a hunter would display a prized kill. The walls don’t hold the only items of interest. A workbench takes up a large space in the middle of the room, equipped with many tools and a comfy-looking armchair. A stack of books and sewing equipment sits to the chair’s right. A sewing machine rests on another smaller table to the left of that.
The longer I look at the room’s contents, the more I understand. My stomach drops at the sight of a lampshade made of skin and chairs that have human feet as legs. I count the body parts and try to calculate how many pets Clemmie has kept.
What ornament would she turn me into if she had enough of me? Would my chest end up on a coffee table, or my cock be used as a handle or coat hook?
“What do you think, August?” Clemmie asks. “This is my special place.”
My palms are clammy, but I hide my shock. “How many people have you killed, Clemmie?”
“That’s not a question to ask a lady,” she replies, her green eyes sparkling.
How can she joke around?
I try to keep my cool, but her casualness annoys me. My father isn’t the only one with a twisted appetite. In some fucked up way, I can see now how they’re made for each other. But where does that leave me, and what is my place in our fucked-up family?
“Where do you find them?” I ask.
“Daddy brings them to me,” she says. “I don’t ask questions.”
“What do you do to them? Before turning them into...” I screw up my face at the sight of a cushion made from varying human hair colors. “This.”
“It depends on my mood.” She takes a seat in the armchair and curls her legs underneath her. “Some of them I like to keep longer than others.”
“When did it start?”
She bites her lip in concentration. “It started with animals first. I was young and used to play outside near our old house. Squirrels mainly, then other small creatures who tried to ruin my fairy dens. Daddy caught me with a neighbor’s cat one night, and he wanted to help. We moved out here after that. It suited both of us.”
“When did you progress to people?” I ask.
Clemmie may have a predisposition to violence, but no child is born a killer. Father encouraged her behavior. He made her this way. Even now, there’s no way she could overpower an adult man alone.
“I was twelve when I had my first proper kill,” she says, “but it’s taken years to get the technique right. Sometimes I care more about the process. Other times, it’s more about what I can do afterward. I like crafting. It helps pass the time. These are my creations. Recently, that’s what I’ve preferred more.”
“Twelve?” I gawp at her. “How do you do it?”
“Oh, that’s easy!” She jumps up and strolls to a cabinet, popping it open. It looks like a pharmacy counter on the inside. My mouth goes dry as I see the needles, not because I’m scared of them but because I’ve seen them poking out of my mom’s arms for years. “I drug them.”
“Does he...” I try to get my thoughts straight. “Does he help you do this?”
“He brings them to me sedated, then leaves the rest up to me,” she explains and gestures at the hospital trolley beds. “I move them around on these.”
I’ve always pitied Clemmie for being trapped in a prison of my father’s making. Now I’m questioning whether the reason he’s kept her locked away isn’t that he wants to keep her to himself, although I’m sure that’s part of it, but because he knows it’s too dangerous to let her loose on the outside world.
“What do you think?” she asks, snapping me out of my reverie.
Her prior confidence evaporates as she seeks my approval with her wide beautiful eyes. The eyes of a serial killer.