The Punishment
The sexual punishment Kat McDonough endured continued for days. Even as their lives returned to normal routines—going to work, making dinner, picking out a movie to watch—the brutality of the sex continued as a cycle of cruel thrusts, hard pinching, hitting, and throat grabbing.
The couple’s earlier conspiracies to find a minion to use and abuse were no longer wishful fantasies. Seth now told Kat that she must fulfill the terms of her second punishment, and he was unrelenting about it. She had no choice, he told her. She had to find a woman to offer up to him.
Kat continued to solicit—and to throw herself at—women on fetish websites, but no one was tempted by what she was selling. She’d already gone through her high school friends, most of them having been summarily banished from the Lair for escaping the erotic trap they had laid. Neither Wendy nor Zoey were coming back, their encounters with Seth and Kat having made them feel awkward and uncomfortable in the apartment. Even Jill, Kat’s best friend since first grade, didn’t want to come over.
The number of women in Kat’s real-life orbit was limited as well—she was no longer in school, just working part-time and doing plays. There were only a few women her age on staff at Target. The more Kat thought about it, there was really only one candidate who kept coming to mind. And she might be Kat’s only hope.
—
Lizzi Marriott—the twenty-year-old former prom queen with the huge blue eyes and sandy-blond hair—had started working at the Greenland Target about a month earlier.
Kat and Lizzi both worked the night shift a couple of times a week. They spent hours together organizing store shelves and moving clothes from boxes to hangers. Lizzi was quick to help her coworkers with whatever needed to get done. She was silly and made Kat laugh. Lizzi was effervescent even when slogging cardboard boxes through the department store. She was always friendly, even if she’d come straight from the University of New Hampshire ocean lab to her shift, wearing salt and exhaustion like a second skin. It seemed impossible to wipe the smile from Lizzi’s face, and because of that, she was impossible to ignore.
Lizzi’s curiosity had no bounds; she was driven to make friends with her coworkers and wanted to learn everything about them, and she was open with the details of her own life as well. During the night shift at Target, there was plenty of time for small talk. Kat knew that Lizzi was a transfer student to UNH and was studying marine biology. She knew Lizzi grew up in Massachusetts but was living with her aunt and uncle about twenty-five miles from campus. She also knew that Lizzi was bisexual and that she had a girlfriend who sounded pretty cool.
When she shared the details of her life, Kat was surprised by how much they seemed to have in common. Lizzi also enjoyed performing and had a great singing voice. They were both interested in nerd culture, things like science fiction and superheroes and role-playing games. Kat had just learned to play Dungeons & Dragons, and Lizzi was dying to learn too. Kat, whose mom sewed costumes, was blown away upon hearing that Lizzi had made her own prom dress.
Both young women lived with cats, although Lizzi admitted she was allergic and that her aunt and uncle’s cat wouldn’t leave her alone. Lizzi squealed when Kat shared her obsession with Harry Potter and how she’d dressed as the character Tonks for a movie premiere. Lizzi told Kat that the Harry Potter books were her favorite too. They’d been the first books she’d learned to read on her own.
Kat saw Lizzi the way everyone did: undeniably charismatic and keenly intelligent, but a little bit ditzy. It was testament to both her likability and her absentmindedness that one day, when Lizzi managed to lock her keys in her Mazda while it was running, the store’s employees fell over themselves to help her out. When with some luck and ingenuity they were finally able to open her car, what struck Kat most was Lizzi’s unflappable attitude about the incident. If Kat had locked her keys in the car, she would probably have walked into work swearing up a storm or holding back sobs. Lizzi had just shrugged and laughed at her own silliness—as if understanding just how unimportant such a mistake was in the scheme of things.
One night in the break room, as a group of workers gathered to chat, one woman said she’d been stocking the book section and couldn’t believe a mainstream retailer like Target was selling Fifty Shades of Grey. There was tittering among the group, as some explained the BDSM-themed novel’s plot and others admitted they either knew too much or not enough about what people did behind closed doors.
Kat had never shared her own alternative lifestyle with her coworkers, but when someone asked if Kat had read the book, she said no.
“That’s my life every day.”
That silenced the group, and everyone avoided eye contact with Kat when they grasped her meaning. But Kat noticed Lizzi looked at her and made some kind of funny face. Later, testifying under oath, Kat said she wondered if that was a signal that Lizzi was intrigued. She didn’t wonder whether Lizzi was just trying to be kind.
—
After days of brutal treatment at Seth’s hands, Kat told him she might have thought of a candidate who could fulfill the second part of her punishment. Seth still thought there were other fish on the line. He was holding out hope they could still land a unicorn, a real “ten,” through the BDSM personal ads.
Seth also had his eye on Kat’s friend Darla. She had a new boyfriend who was interested in bondage, and she’d told Kat they had been experimenting but neither of them really knew what they were doing. Kat hinted that “Lex” could likely be convinced to teach them a few things.
“We’ve even messed with blood/knife play,” Kat told her via text message. “He has plenty of experience in it and I’ve found it psychotically fun.”
“I’m looking at electricity stuff,” Darla responded.
Kat said that, although that seemed fun, she was into rougher stuff.
“I like chains, whips, leather, rope, and knives.”
The complication was Darla’s boyfriend, Eli.* Seth wanted a three-way not a four-way. They were hoping to get Darla to come to the Lair alone the way Wendy had, but they agreed that they would allow her to bring Eli if that were a deal breaker.
Seth agreed to vet Lizzi as well, and the next night Kat and Lizzi were scheduled to work together, he dropped by the store to casually bump into them both. Kat introduced him to Lizzi, who proceeded to go on and on to Seth about what a great girlfriend he had.
Seth found Lizzi to be everything Kat said she would be. He liked her looks and loved her personality. The fact that she was bisexual gave him hope she wouldn’t be opposed to having sex with both of them. He took out the tarot cards and did a reading on Lizzi when they got home.
“She was flirting with you,” Seth later told Kat.
Her smile, her laugh . . . that was just the way Lizzi always was, Kat thought. But as Seth insisted there was more to it than Lizzi just being friendly, Kat found herself wondering why it was that she was always so oblivious.
—
Midway through September 2012, Kat quit her job at the Target in Greenland and started working at the Michaels arts and crafts store in Newington, across the street from the Best Buy where Seth now worked. Kat and Lizzi exchanged phone numbers on Kat’s final day but didn’t make any specific plans to get together.
The punishment was now routine. At any moment Seth might turn to Kat and order her to have sex. Kat would later tell her mother that she feared for her physical safety, aware that Seth was a third-degree black belt who vastly outweighed her. Kat claimed Seth threatened to track her down if she left—the same thing he told Catherine Fish.
The rough treatment Kat described was not noted by anyone else around them. At this same time, Seth and Kat were regularly visiting his mother, Heather, and by all accounts these trips were polite and drama-free. Heather was planning some home improvements, and it was agreed that Seth and Kat would come over to do some painting. They said they’d pick up all the items needed for the job, including a new painting tarp.
Despite the disastrous experience she’d had around the summer-camp surrogate, Kat did not abandon the hope she could attract a Sub for Seth through an online BDSM personal ad. Kat thought she had a pretty appealing profile. She was a thin and pretty eighteen-year-old girl—how could she not be receiving messages or responses to her e-mails?
Most of the members on the website seemed to be in their forties or fifties, their profile pictures showing balding men with paunches or wrinkled women with fat bottoms. Everyone knew those with photos featuring only close-ups of eyes or sexy shoes or genitalia belonged to people who were obese or ugly or pretending to be someone else. But Kat’s alter ego “roguetemptress” was the real deal.
The string of virtual rejections on top of the punishing sex she’d endured for a month was wearing Kat down. On September 25, 2012, at two o’clock in the morning, Kat switched on her computer and started writing a letter to herself.
“I feel like such a fucking loner,” she began. Seth had been telling her she was this sexy woman, but her failures at attracting any partner undermined that feeling. It played into all of her other insecurities and feelings of rejection.
“I can handle being called a slut or a Slave to a Master. It’s better than no attention at all.”
Kat said “Skarlet” had been a powerful, desirable woman in her past lives and behind the Veil. If that were so, she wondered, why can’t she have the same power in this world? Cracks were finally showing in Kat’s state of mind when it came to the hard-core BDSM she was being subjected to. Seth still claimed it was Darkheart or Wild Card having his way with Skarlet or Anay, but Kat seemed to have doubts about whether the sexual experience she wanted was the same as what Seth was telling her was taking place.
She wondered how she could be so blind as not to know—as Seth had tried to convince her—that Lizzi was flirting with her.
“God somedays I just want to give up on all of it and just submit myself completely to Darkheart, but I know that I don’t really want that completely [in] this life.” She was vacillating between the life she was living and the life she was promised. Kat was having a crisis of conscience.
Kat closed her laptop and sat in the dark. Only she could say what other thoughts were running through her head that night. But she didn’t say much more, not in her journal anyway. She’d finished the entry with a resolution.
“I’ve gotta figure out what to do about this.”
—
Kat and Lizzi hadn’t really stayed in touch in the few weeks since Kat had left Target, and they’d never actually seen each other outside of the store when she did work there. But they’d become Facebook friends, and Kat could keep tabs on her there. And she did keep tabs, because Seth had decided that Lizzi was the one.
Kat dialed Lizzi’s number and asked if she wanted to come over to watch The Avengers, which had come out on DVD the previous week. She asked Lizzi if she remembered when they’d found the Avengers underwear in the boys clothing section and how they’d joked they would wear them if they came in bigger sizes. Lizzi laughed and agreed to come over, saying it would be fun to hang out.
Lizzi was still new to UNH and new to the area. She was looking to make friends and also felt she and Kat had a lot in common. It would have to be Tuesday night, she told Kat, because of her evening class schedule. They set a time of around ten P.M., and Lizzi asked for Kat’s address so she could plug it into her TomTom GPS.
Kat waited outside the entrance to the Sawyer Mill Apartments looking for Lizzi’s Mazda on the night of October 2, 2012. When she finally pulled up, Kat jumped in the front seat. The parking lots were hidden along a confusing tangle of streets and behind the mill, so Kat needed to show her where to go.
They had the apartment to themselves because Seth was at play practice, Kat said. Seth had a role in local productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Kat was in it too, but her smaller role didn’t require so many rehearsals). She apologized for the level of clutter.
In addition to the ubiquitous piles of laundry and video game paraphernalia, in the corner there were some painting supplies, which they’d bought to complete the work at Heather Mazzaglia’s place. As the movie started and they settled in to watch it on the futon, Lizzi and Kat dug into the individual bowls of microwave popcorn they’d each perched on their laps. Seth came home from play practice a few minutes before the end of the movie, said hi, and then waited until the film was over to make small talk. He told Lizzi it was great to have her visit and that she should come back again. They could watch another movie or play video games or Dungeons & Dragons, he said. Because it was nearly an hour’s ride from UNH to her aunt and uncle’s house in Chester, Seth also offered the apartment as a place to crash if Lizzi ever felt like it.
Lizzi said she was grateful and would absolutely come back to hang out. The conversation lasted about ten minutes before she said good-bye.
“She had definite potential,” Seth said after Lizzi left. “We have to get her back.”
He then told Kat that Lizzi was almost certainly someone they had met in a past life—perhaps someone Skarlet met the night she burned down Portsmouth.
Kat thought Seth would be pleased with her for bringing Lizzi to the Lair, but instead he only offered a rebuke.
“You were too friendly.”
“What do you mean?” Kat asked him.
“You should have been more flirty. Less friendly, more flirty.”
Seth told Kat she should have sat closer to Lizzi. Instead of each of them eating popcorn from separate bowls, he said, Kat should have put both microwaved bags into one large bowl. Seth said that would have been more sexual, their buttery fingers touching again and again as they reached into the bowl.
Seth also said that, if Lizzi were to come over again, Kat should suggest they all play a game of strip poker.
—
The following week, Seth and Kat got an unexpected nibble from Darla, when she said she was ready to experiment with bondage. Not the common “tie my wrists to the headboard” stuff, she told Kat. She wanted to learn more about rope play and how to tie complicated harnesses. She wasn’t 100 percent sure that her boyfriend, Eli, would be on board, however. He’d hinted at trying some kinky stuff, but Darla was afraid to freak him out.
Darla asked Kat if she and Eli could come to the Lair and have “Lex” show them a few things. Could Lex teach Eli how to be a Dom? Could he show him some ways to tie her up? Seth was all for it when he heard about the plan. He would demonstrate a few things on Kat, like a teacher imparting his wisdom on eager students.
Seth saw this as a great opportunity. If they played it smart, a sensual Dom at work on a nude Sub could get their observers aroused. When the moment was right, Seth could invite Darla to get up close to the vulnerable Kat. Or he could help Eli as he practiced on his girlfriend, but Seth would have to insist Darla be nude so that Eli could learn the proper amount of pressure to apply to the skin.
Darla set a date for Monday, October 8, but she texted Kat at the last minute asking to put the date off until the following night, Tuesday evening, October 9.
As she had promised Seth, Kat also followed up on her invitation to Lizzi, who said she’d love to come back and hang out again. Kat tried to book her for Wednesday the tenth, but Lizzi said her work and class schedule was very tight. The only night she could get together was on Tuesday the ninth. Her chemistry lab started at 6:10, but she could come over when it was done.
The irony was rich and wasn’t lost on the couple. After months of no takers, suddenly they were double booked.
Their solution was simple. Lizzi wouldn’t arrive until around nine P.M. Kat told Darla and Eli they had late play rehearsal and that the couple should come over at ten thirty. Kat told Lizzi she and Seth needed to leave just after ten o’clock to pick up a friend of Seth’s at the airport.
If things got romantic with Lizzi, they’d cancel their BDSM demonstration with Darla and Eli and pretend as if the airport pickup got cancelled. Otherwise, they’d usher Lizzi out just after ten o’clock and wait for the second shift to clock in.
—
Seth clocked in at Best Buy on Tuesday, October 9, at 10:59 A.M., looking forward to the kind of evening he’d been waiting for since before Kat left for camp. He told Kat that their personas for the evening would be Skarlet and Darkheart—two particularly sexual alter egos.
In the meantime, Kat was playing air traffic control via text message with all the principal players. In the early afternoon, she pinged Lizzi to confirm that she’d be coming over after class.
“Okeydokey.” Lizzi punctuated it with the smiley face emoticon :) “Can’t wait, darling!”
The “darling” comment made Kat wonder again if Seth was right and Lizzi had been flirting with her all this time.
After confirming with Darla, Kat messaged Seth to say that both plans were in place.
“Perfect,” he texted back, and Kat congratulated herself with the return text, “Win for Skar!”
Shortly after six P.M., Seth texted the director of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and told her he had a work conflict and couldn’t come to rehearsal that night. He said Kat was unavailable too. (Though she had her own phone, Seth was the contact person for all theater communication with Kat. It was yet another way of him exerting control and reducing Kat’s autonomy.)
He then sent a message to Roberta Gerkin, claiming that psychic activity had been “shorting out my radar” and asking her to just “let me know you’re alive.”
At 7:20, although she knew Lizzi was likely still in class, Kat sent her a text saying she was hopping in the shower, just in case she showed up early.
Lizzi didn’t respond until an hour later. “Okeydokey, just got outta class!”
At that moment, Seth got home and realized he had time to take a shower himself. While he scrubbed the day from his skin, his cellphone buzzed once. Roberta had finally returned his previous text, reporting she was okay. Her second text was more ominous.
“Keep yourself guarded for a while. Someone is looking for you and I can’t tell if they’re friend or foe.”
—
Earlier that evening, Lizzi Marriott had relaxed at the UNH student center, the Memorial Union Building in the heart of the enormous Durham campus. She grabbed a bite in the MUB’s massive dining hall and texted with her girlfriend, Brittany Atwood.
Lizzi headed to her chemistry lab, and while she was there, she received several affectionate messages from Brittany. She sent a text back, saying she was wearing the gift Brittany had given her two days earlier, a black hoodie sweatshirt bearing the logo for Avenue Q. The musical was one of Lizzi’s favorites, a Sesame Street parody featuring Muppet knockoffs singing subversive songs like, “It Sucks to Be Me” and “The Internet Is for Porn.”
When class ended and she climbed into her Mazda Tribute, Lizzi and Brittany traded more text messages. Lizzi knew she shouldn’t text while driving—the way deer and wild turkeys suddenly appeared on New Hampshire roads, she was taking her life in her hands—but she didn’t want to put Brittany on pause.
Lizzi’s TomTom GPS reminded her of the way from Durham to Dover, and she found the Sawyer Mill visitors’ parking lot without trouble. As she walked to the complex’s back door, she kept typing texts to Brittany on her iPhone.
“U should do more poetry baby,” Brittany responded to something she wrote. “Ur really good with words.”
“I can be eloquent when I want to be.”
As she so often did, Lizzi ended the message with :P, a sticking-tongue-out smiley face. Once she hit send, she switched over to text Kat.
“I’m at the outer door :D”
Lizzi and Brittany exchanged texts with <3, the combination that looks like a heart—shorthand for “I love you.”
As Kat opened the locked door for Lizzi, she sent one final text message to Brittany. “You’re so cute!”
It was 8:55 P.M.