My Sadist King

The chain that bound us had been unlocked and abandoned in the kitchen. Our bowls were still sitting on the dining table, their insides nearly empty and coated in leftover soup. My king’s comment about killing me in perfection had led to a long, drawn out silence. After that, he pulled that set of keys out of his pocket and unlocked the shackles around our wrists.

“Please don’t put me back down there,” I said as my king dragged me back to the basement door. “Give me a little longer.”

“You’re not fooling me,” he said, tugging me harder by my wrist.

I used my free hand to pull him towards me. “Your Grace, please…”

“You should know by now that I have a lack of empathy, Kelly,” he said, glaring down at me. “So do us both a favor and don’t try to beg.” He looked down at the blood stains spread along my left side of my clothes. “But I must admit, you smell like shit...” he added. He paused for a minute and then grabbed my arm. “Well, come on, then.”

I was shoved towards the only door to the left of the basement--the slightly ajar door that had frightened me earlier with the pitch darkness lingering inside. I stopped with my nose barely touching the wooden door and my eyes widened at the darkness peering at me from within.

“Get in,” my king demanded as he pushed the door open. He reached inside of the doorway and flipped on a switch. “Now.”

The shiny tiles of the bathroom floor reflected a blinding ray of light into my eyes. The entire room and almost everything in it was the same color--pure white. It almost looked like the inside of a cloud with how everything blended together. Like the other parts of the house I’d seen, it was the exact opposite of what I had expected.

The floor almost looked slippery from the radiating luster of every white tile. I tensed up as he pushed me forward and came to an immediate stop when I bumped into the edge of the spacious bathtub with four claw feet. It had only taken four or five steps to reach it. From the inside, the bathroom looked diminutive.

My king reached past me and turned the knob marked with an “H.” The spout began to spew out gushing water, flooding the first couple of inches of the spotless, white abyss of the tub. His hands were soon on my shirt, pulling it off of me.

I was completely defenseless, standing there without a shirt on. His eyes glanced down at my breasts and said, “The blood soaked through your shirt.” I looked down at the left cup of my bra, seeing that he was telling the truth. A crooked smear of crimson clutched onto the gray fabric, slowly drying into a musty, dark brown.

I jumped back when my king began to wrap his arms around me to unlatch my bra. “Take it off,” he said. His tone was unusually calm. “I can’t wash it if you’re wearing it.” Eventually, he smiled at my petrified stance and shook his head. “You’ve never been naked in front of anyone before, have you?”

“I have,” I said. It was a complete lie. My fear of intimacy shot down any opportunity I had to be with a boy my age. Opportunities that never came to me in the first place.

“Then take it off or I’ll do it myself.”

I exhaled sharply, reaching behind my back and unlatching the clasps of the bra, letting it fall away from my arms and onto the tiles below. I avoided looking him in the eye and expected him to do something horrible to me, but he just stood there and pointed down at my jeans. “Take off the rest.”

Within an endless moment, I was fully nude in front of him and the bathtub was full with faintly azure water. He turned off the water, filling the room with a ringing quiet. He silently ordered me to get into the water and I followed. The water was scorching as I lowered myself into it and splashed over the edge when I was entirely within its capacity.

My king lit up another cigarette before reaching into the cabinet below the bathroom sink. He tossed a washcloth and a bar of soap into the water, causing a sloshing noise to echo throughout the room. “Clean yourself up,” he said, breathing smoke out of his lips.

He leaned against the wall, opposite to me, and watched as I rubbed the soap over my skin and foamed up the water with scented bubbles. I couldn’t find the strength to look up at him. The unknown fact of whether or not he was getting off by seeing me vulnerable was eating away at my gut. I wanted to look up and see what his face looked like--what message he was conveying with his beautiful eyes.

I brought the washcloth to my skin and began to scrub at my arm. That was when I looked up at him to see nothing--not a single emotion--on his face or in his eyes. He was only standing there, staring at me as he used up his cigarette.

“I forgot to show you something,” he said, reaching into one of his front pockets. He unfolded a wrinkled, torn piece of paper and smoothed out the creases. I wrote it off as a newspaper clipping, given that there was an advertisement for a car dealership on the back of whatever he was reading.

“Your parents are looking for you,” he said. “I found this on the back page of today’s paper.” He turned the paper around between two of his fingers, revealing a “Missing” post. My picture from the family portrait session last year was beside a list of information about who I was, what I looked like, and where I was last seen.

I turned away from the scrap of paper and continued to scrub my skin.

My king backed away and crumpled the clipping in his hand, taking another drag of his cigarette. He dropped the ball of paper onto the floor. “That’s an excellent picture of you,” he said.

“Why did you show that to me?”

“Thought you might want to see that you’re being looked for.”

“No,” I interjected. “You wanted to see me react... Maybe you even wanted to see me cry.”

My king was silent.

“I don’t care if they’re looking for me,” I said. “I’m never going to leave here.” I began to wash my other arm and applied painful pressure, seeing my skin turn red. “They aren’t even offering a fucking reward for my safe return. The only one who probably wanted to look for me was my little brother… They’re just doing it for him. He’s sensitive and cries too much about everyone’s well being.”

“To be honest,” I went on, spreading the washcloth along my collarbone. I gazed up at him. “The only person I want to be with is you.”

He took one last inhale of his cigarette and chucked it into the water, causing it to extinguish with a tiny screech. He approached the tub, snagging me by the back of my neck and pulled me to my feet. Waves crashed boisterously in the tub below. My body dripped hundreds of streams of water.

My king forced his lips to mine, slipping his tongue into my mouth. All I could taste was tobacco.