No.
No, no, no, this was not her anymore. This was everything she’d run away from, everything she’d left behind. If she did this, she could never look at herself again. The men in the room would laugh at her. They’d know that nothing had changed. She was still the girl on the street. The whore.
It didn’t matter how evil the man in front of her was. She couldn’t do it.
“I... I... think,” Cat began.
It was hard to form words. She tried to grab the words and put them on her tongue, but they skittered away from her. Why was it so hard? Just say it. I need to go. I can’t stay here. I can’t let you do this to me, you son of a bitch.
“Relax, Cat. Drink the wine.”
“I... I... can’t. I need—”
“What do you need, Cat?” he asked her in a voice that lilted up and down like the notes on the piano. “Tell me what you need.”
“To go.”
“Oh, you don’t want to do that,” he told her. “The party’s just starting.”
“Feel strange,” Cat murmured.
She labored through quicksand, unable to understand what was happening to her. She hadn’t tasted the wine. She was still free. All she had to do was get up and leave. Push him away. Run.
Why couldn’t she run?
The glass swayed like a tree in the wind, still full, still untouched. Some of the wine spilled over the rim onto her fingers. She couldn’t hold the stem upright anymore. It was going to topple and spill. He reached over and took the wineglass from her hand. She squinted at him and watched him put the glass to his mouth.
He drank it. He finished the whole glass.
Oh, no.
Somewhere in the fog, Cat understood. She knew what he’d done to her. She knew it was too late to go back now, too late to stop, too late to escape. She felt herself falling off a cliff into air, going down and down and down.
He hadn’t put the drug in the wine.
He’d put it in the water. The empty bottle of water on the floor. It was already in her blood.
Stride drove north through the snow that streamed across the scenic highway. He drove faster than he should. His truck led the way, and Maggie’s Avalanche followed. There were two more police cars after that, like a caravan on the North Shore road.
“Did you try calling her again?” he asked Serena.
“I did. She must have her phone on mute.”
He kept his eyes on the road. His headlights were the only light around him, and otherwise the night was black. “It’ll be okay. There’s probably a hundred people at the party. We’ll get Cat out of there.”
“I know.”
But they had miles to go, and the resort seemed far away. Stride kept the radio off. The truck was silent except for the patter of snow. Then, strangely, he heard the toot-toot of an old-fashioned car horn.
Serena grabbed her phone from the seat.
“That’s Cat’s text tone,” she said with relief. “Thank God.”
“What does it say?”
He glanced over and saw Serena’s face cloud with confusion. “I don’t get it. It says, ‘Check Facebook.’”
“What does that mean?”
Serena pushed a few more buttons on her phone. Stride’s eyes shifted back and forth from the road to his wife’s face. Her expression was calm and curious. He watched her scroll to Cat’s profile, and then, out of nowhere, she slapped a hand over her mouth. A cry broke out of her throat. She choked; she gagged. She threw the phone down as if it were on fire. She was instantly sobbing, disintegrating into panic next to him.
“Jonny, drive, drive, speed up; we have to get up there right now!”
“What’s going on?”
“Cat’s with Dean Casperson. It’s just him and her alone. He’s going to rape her, Jonny, and she’s streaming it live for the whole world to see.”
41
It felt like a dream.
A gauzy curtain draped over Cat’s mind. Shapes in the fire-lit room grew larger and smaller as if she were seeing them in a fun house mirror. Her limbs were leaden. She willed her arms and legs to move, but they only stared sullenly back at her. She had trouble keeping her head up; it kept lolling onto the sofa cushion. She was vaguely aware of Casperson slipping off his tuxedo coat, undoing his tie, and unbuttoning a couple of buttons on his shirt. His face had the intense, curious look of a scientist studying the reactions of a new specimen.
“It’s a little different every time,” he told her. “Most women would be unconscious by now, but you’re still awake. That’s interesting. I like it better that way.”
He sat down next to her. Their legs were touching. He put an index finger on her cheek and slowly slid it down her face, along the line of her chin, and into the hollow of her neck. She wanted to slap his hand away, but she didn’t know how. She was watching his face as if through a kaleidoscope, broken into pieces and moving in circles.
“I wasn’t lying about how beautiful you are. That wasn’t just a line. You really are unique.”
He stroked her chestnut hair. He pulled his fingers through it and let the strands fall in a messy pile across her eyes. He traced the outline of her full lips, but his touch made it feel like he was caressing the marble of a statue. She was trapped inside, and she couldn’t feel what he was doing. She was a girl in a box, unable to escape or resist. She was a thing to him. A robot. A doll. Something over which he exerted complete control.
Her mouth formed a word, but her tongue felt thick. She wasn’t even sure if she’d said it aloud. Stop.
“Stop? I wish I could. Truly. I don’t like this part of myself. In the early years, I tried to resist, but the strange thing is, my acting suffered when I didn’t have an outlet. I finally realized that I had to accept myself as a whole package. The good and the bad. I’m not proud of it, but every life requires a balancing of the scales.”
She tried to curse. Two short words. It made him laugh.
“You’re brave. I like that about you. The fact is, you won’t remember anything about tonight. Or if you do, you’ll never really be sure exactly what happened. No one will believe you if you tell anyone, because you’re nobody and I’m me. That’s just the way it is, Cat.”
She wanted to scream. Inside her head, she screamed at him. The effort made her dizzy. She could feel unconsciousness closing over her like an eclipse, blocking out her thoughts like the moon did to the light of the sun, but she fought back. She wouldn’t give in. She wouldn’t forget.
Yet she was helpless.
“It’s the unwrapping I love,” he said. “Seeing the secrets each woman hides.”
He placed his fingers lightly on the bare skin where her breasts began to swell and gave her the slightest nudge. She found herself toppling backward, slowly, sinking as the room spun. She lay sprawled on the sofa. She blinked as she stared at the ceiling, and each blink took forever. Her arms lay next to her, useless appendages covered in black lace.
She knew what it would be like.
She’d been on this ride before.
The other men from her past were still here with her. She could see them. Every man she’d been with in the bad days leered at her in the hot room. She saw their faces, smelled their breath, heard their panting, felt them between her legs, winced at the pain. She wanted to close her eyes so that she couldn’t see, wanted it to be over, wanted to wake up from a nightmare and be home and safe. But this was real.
His fingers touched her everywhere, and she couldn’t stop him.
His hand followed the skin of her leg until it was under her dress, and she couldn’t stop him.
Her eyes were glazed little slits on her face. In her head, she beat her fists against the bars of her cage, but she was powerless. She wondered if anyone was watching this happen. She wanted to know if people could see her and what they were saying and whether the secret was passing from one person to another. It didn’t matter. Wherever the voyeurs were, they weren’t here, and they didn’t know where she was. For now, she was absolutely alone.