My Sadist King

I didn’t say anything. What he said could have meant so many different things and I was unsure. It didn’t take him long to walk away from me, out of the bedroom and into the living room. I silently chased after him, watching him pace between the coffee table and the sofa with his hands clutching at his hair. “Fuck,” I heard him whisper. His eyes were glued to the ground “God damn it.”

I gulped before I spoke my next word. “... Kieran.”

He stopped and lowered his hands. His back was to me again and I felt more fear accumulating.

“Kieran, look at me,” I went on. “Just look at me.”

He didn’t move a muscle. “I’m not looking for sympathy.”

“Yes, you are.”

“I’m not!” he roared. “You’re not supposed to know about these things! I trusted you not to…” He sighed. “I know exactly what you’re trying to do… You’re trying to get yourself a way out of my possession by using my past against me so you can soften me up and I’ll decide to let you walk away.” He turned to me with tears flooding his face. “I am not letting you leave!”

I parted my lips to speak, but he wasn’t finished just yet.

He took several footsteps towards me. His fists were clenched and his eyes were glossy with tears. “You think I don’t know what victims try to do to people like me? Every fucking girl I’ve taken has tried it. But you… I can’t have you doing it, too.” The space between us was closed and his menacing shadows engulfed me.

“Kieran, please--”

His fist whipped across my face and I flew, landing with a deafening crash. When I had been able to open my eyes again, I saw broken wood all around me. I had landed on the coffee table, which had been more than a couple of feet away from us.

The pain began to kick in while the blood gurgled out of my mouth. I whimpered as I held my puffy cheek, spitting out the excess blood that cloaked my teeth.

“I told you not to use that name… Don’t even fucking acknowledge it.”

He remained in his tense position, staring at me from the corner of his eye as if he were ready to break my neck. I almost laughed at him. Despite his desperate attempts to hide the weakness of his soul, I still felt his frailty before me, breathing it in and letting it sink into my blood.

“Every king has a name.”

He lowered himself onto one knee and grabbed the back of my hair, bringing my face right to his. His jaw was so tense that I could hear the bones trembling, ready to snap. I mirrored his gesture and placed my hand at the back of his head--caressing him instead of hurting him. It calmed him and the grip at my scalp loosened. I didn’t need to speak. He understood exactly what I was telling him: It’s okay, I’m here.

His lips began to shiver and soon enough, his tears were streaming along my shoulder as I held him. Shards of wood splintered into my entire backside, but I let the pain linger and rip into me. I had never seen a man cry in my entire life, not even my own father. My father was too afraid to cry. And as it turned out, most men appeared to be afraid of crying. They didn’t want others to see their hardened hearts crumble into dust. I had never understood why. Holding Kieran as he sobbed like a child comforted me and let me know that I was still human. Still alive.

“They were everything to me,” he cried. “Sara couldn’t handle giving birth and she just…” He took one shaky breath. “Slipped away. She just slipped away and I watched the life leave her... That was the only death I hadn’t enjoyed watching.

“Then Cassandra and I were left alone. You know how hard it is to celebrate your kid’s fucking birthday on the same day your wife died? It was just us and she couldn’t even understand anything I told her. She was just a baby. And soon enough, she was gone...”

“How?” I asked.

“A car hit us,” he said monotonously. “They were speeding, not paying attention, and hit the back half of the car… My baby girl died.”

I snatched his hand and held it. “Then you had to kill to fill the void…” I whispered.

“Exactly,” he said. “I shut out that side of myself when I met Sara, but it came right back four years later--when I was left alone again.”

He had killed before. I pieced everything together. The journal entry I had read was dated back to 1994, two years before I had been born. He was a veteran at what he did, with only a short vacation before he fell back into it.

The house simmered with heat as I rose to my feet with him. He kept his head lowered, sniffling and hiding his face in embarrassment. He began to step towards the bedroom, but I stopped him. “Don’t go in there,” I said. “I’ll clean everything up.”

“No, that stuff is mine, I need to--”

“You should sit down instead.”

His voice switched back into that low, threatening growl--his way of telling me that I had gone too far. “You think that you can tell me what to do because you’ve seen me cry and know things about me? A king doesn’t get ordered by his servant.”

I am not your servant, I wanted to say. I am your queen.

But I dropped my head, as usual, and he stomped past me. I remained there, listening to him organize the envelopes and scattered letters. Everything began to land with a thud inside of that worn down box I had discovered underneath his bed. Then the noise stopped.

The chain in the bedroom rattled once and then collided with the wooden floor.

His footsteps creeped up behind me and then came to a halt only an inch behind me. I could hear him breathing. “You’re clever,” he said. “You saw the sloppy mistake I made and took advantage of it… You’re a survivor.”

“I wasn’t going to leave here,” I said. “I just wanted to walk around.”

He scoffed under his breath. “Oh, you want to walk around? Then put some clothes on and get ready.”

I finally turned around and met his eyes. “Get ready for what?”

“To catch your first kill.”