VICTOR
Dawn had stopped answering her old phone. Victor knew this because, for two months following their anniversary, he read all of the increasingly frustrated messages that came in from her friends and family in reply to the email she’d supposedly sent. He’d even listened to the voicemails.
The one from Dawn’s father especially thrilled Victor. The undercover agent seemed to sense that there was something wrong, but he couldn’t confirm it. He took time away from his undercover assignment to call her.
“Sweet pea, what’s going on? I know you and Doll don’t always see eye to eye, but you got her real upset. You’re an adult now, and you can do what you want. I just need to hear you’re okay. Not into drugs or anything like that. Byron said you weren’t returning any of his calls either. We’re all worried about you. Call us. Call us back.”
Several beats went by before her father added, “Please.”
Aw, poor Darrell Kingston. What would he do if he knew that the only thing that stood between him and death was the daughter he was so worried about? No wonder Dawn couldn’t bring herself to answer him.
Victor didn’t have that problem.
After listening to that message, Victor opened up Kingston’s last email and pressed the reply icon.
“You’re only upset because you can no longer control me,” he answered on Dawn’s behalf.
Her father only received a one-sentence reply to his long list of questions, but Kingston should have considered himself lucky. That was more communication than anyone else had gotten from Dawn, including her pregnant friend from college.
He doubted that after two months of letting emails, texts, and VMs pileup, Dawn would do any investigative work if she ever picked up her old phone. But just in case, Victor made sure to delete the lone reply email from her sent message folder and to mark all the ones he’d read as new.
Not that it mattered. Her father never answered the email Victor sent. And Dawn didn’t log back into her account for the next several months.
According to Wayne’s weekly reports, a former Red Diamond in his late 50s who made Phantom look like he had A+ social skills, she’d finally fallen in line. Not only had she stopped biking to work every day, but she’d also stopped going out altogether. No more gym membership. No more music festivals that summer or entire days spent at farmers markets and food and wine events. She dutifully let Wayne drive her to work. Other than that, according to his reports, she stayed quiet and no longer tried to engage him in conversation.
Good.
These years were meant to be a punishment. And he wanted it to feel that way.
Victor was proud of himself for a season or two. He’d had Wayne plant small cameras all over the house, but he didn’t bother to check them. And eventually, he weaned himself down to reading Wayne’s reports and her emails to once a month. Knowing she was miserable became enough. Besides, he had plenty of work to keep him busy.
A dragonhead’s life was never boring, and he filled his days with work and deals much bigger than the ones from the year before. All signs pointed to this being a very, very good year. Maybe so good, he’d forget about Dawn altogether. After all, he had better things to do than constantly monitor her.
That anniversary dinner had changed everything. Now that she was fully subdued, he would no longer lack the discipline to resist her. If Dawn were an addiction, she was losing her grip on him. He was sure of it.
Seven months went by without incident. He even decided to take Han up on his invitation to travel with him to Shanghai for the Lunar New Year. And it was more fun than Victor had had in years.
“Remember how hard we partied that month before you left for Japan?” Han asked as they drank champagne at the New Year’s Eve rooftop soiree Han had arranged at the luxury hotel where they were staying. There were beautiful people all around them, models, actresses, and several C-pop stars from a record label they used to wash their money.
Yes, Victor did remember. And when one of the C-pop stars sidled up to him, claiming to be a gift from the head of the label, Victor wanted to be tempted.
He let her sit on his lap while the lights sparkled overhead, willing his cock to rise. To fill even a percentage point of the insatiable desire that had overtaken him on his last anniversary. But it never did.
“Do you want another kind of gift?” the C-Pop star asked. “I can tell the label head to send someone else over. Any of the girls or boys you want. Just write down whoever you want.”
Victor rarely wrote on his scratchpad with strangers. But he broke that rule to write down, “No, thank you. I’m tired. Please, do not take this as an insult.”
He was pleased when she went away without any hurt feelings. Sometimes he forgot that about himself. That he didn’t enjoy hurting women or treating them cruelly. Only one.
After the fireworks finished, he retired to his suite. Instead of bedding the pop star, he went to bed alone and tossed and turned to dreams of Dawn.
He woke up exhausted the next morning. And alone. It was too much. He finally gave in to the temptation he’d been resisting for seven months.
He took his phone off the nightstand’s charger and scrolled to the display app for the cameras Wayne had planted in the Rhode Island house.
Victor hesitated, wanting to be better than this, wanting to be over her. But in the end, what he wanted didn’t matter. He pressed down on the button, unable to stop himself.
He’d caught her just as she was getting home from work. It was still New Year’s Eve where she was, but America didn’t stop everything to celebrate the lunar new year, so to her, it was just any other night. She’d gained weight, he noted right away.
And that was when he discovered he did have an opinion in that regard. He preferred this version of Dawn to the thin version from their anniversary night. The soft curves he remembered were back, and his fingers unconsciously rubbed at the ball of his palm, wanting to touch.
He watched her pull a takeout container out of the refrigerator and heat it up in the microwave. No more elaborate homemade meals or hairstyles, it would seem. She wore her curls in a messy topknot and didn’t even bother to plate the food after taking it out of the microwave.
Maybe watching her wasn’t such a bad idea, after all. He had gone out of his way to break her, and it pleased him to see the results.
No trip outside to deliver a plate. He watched her sit down at the island counter with a can of LaCroix she hadn’t bothered to pour into a wine glass. Apparently, she was now a shell of the aggressively vivacious woman he’d found when he returned to Rhode Island for their anniversary.
Another thrill zipped through Victor. Watching Dawn was even better than the fireworks from the previous night.
However, his new thrill fizzled when he saw what she was doing with her other hand while she absentmindedly ate fried chicken with her left.
Was she…?
Yes, she was…she was drawing.
Victor brought out his laptop then and logged into her Amazon account. It was one of the delivery apps he still allowed her to use because he knew she wouldn’t be able to order alcohol through the Zon. Sure enough, it was filled with orders for art supplies: sketchbooks, art pencils, an electronic drawing tablet, and other miscellaneous items.
Victor went back to the kitchen camera footage, but there wasn’t anything new to see. She was still drawing. And she kept on drawing, long after her dinner was gone.
Eventually, Han came to Victor’s room to get him for lunch with some associates Kuang wanted them to meet while they were in Shanghai. Victor was forced to close the app on the sight of an unusually laser-focused Dawn pulling out her drawing tablet.
The meal took place in a basement bar that couldn’t be found on any websites or Google Maps even. No business was discussed. Mostly Kuang’s friends told them how lucky they were to have escaped to America and how tough things had been for the Shanghai mafia since the handover.
“We used to run this town. Now we can barely run our protection rackets,” one of them lamented.
Victor did his best to appear appropriately sympathetic. But there was an engine inside of him, revving to go back to the room.
He claimed he had a bad hangover and needed to return to the hotel to lay down when Han tried to invite him to drinks at some sky bar he knew afterward. He felt terrible lying to his brother. Lying to loved ones…that was the first sign that your addiction was back.
However, those guilty thoughts disappeared in a flash when he opened the app to the sound of her whimpering.
He hated her, but that old protective instinct fired up in an instant. Someone was hurting her. Where the hell was Wayne? How had he let someone get in there to—
What Victor found on the screen stopped those thoughts cold.
The security camera app favored the camera feed with the most amount of movement. So the bedroom feed now filled up the screen.
It was after midnight there, and she had gone to bed. She wasn’t hurting. At least not in the way he had thought at first. Her hand was underneath her nightshirt, working her nipple. And the other hand was curled around the handle of an instrument that was partially embedded beneath her shorts.
He couldn’t see below the waistband, but the memory of what he’d found in her nightstand came back in a flash. Victor knew exactly what he was looking at as he watched her hips undulate against the buzzing machine between her legs. Eyes glued to the screen, he unbuckled and took himself in his hand.
Her eyes were closed. Was she thinking about him as she worked the instrument up and down? Someone else?
The idea of it being someone else made him fist himself all that much harder. He hadn’t killed the guard who’d gotten too friendly with her. But Ears was on Han’s detail now, and his brother knew better than to ever use him when meeting with Victor. Maybe that had been a mistake.
He hated that Dawn did this to him. Made him consider killing one of his men simply for accepting dinner from her. Hated that just watching her touch herself made him harder than that C-pop star ever could.
He hated it, but as she worked the vibrator between her legs, he jerked his cock. And when she came, he did too, splattering his cum across the room’s fine carpet.
Even then, he couldn’t stop watching her. Not until she put the vibrator away and fell asleep.
There was no more resisting after that. After he returned to the States, he fell into a new routine, of sorts. In the mornings, he woke up and opened his iPad to go directly to the feed of her still sleeping. He only let himself watch her for a little while in the mornings—no more than thirty minutes. Getting to watch her for longer at night was his reward for making it through another successful business day.
She wasn’t nearly as disciplined as him, and her schedule varied wildly. Sometimes he found her drawing at the kitchen table when he got in around midnight. Sometimes she was sleeping. And about once or twice a week, he caught her with the large vibrator between her legs.
He preferred that, but it didn’t matter what she did. He jerked off to her just the same. Morning and night, he fucked his hand while watching her. It was a good way to release any sexual tension before going into his business day with a clear head. That was what he told himself.
Months passed in their strange little routine. But then something strange happened in late April.
Dawn had led an extremely frugal life since securing a job. Before he stopped allowing her to shop for her own groceries, she’d use her own funds to pay for whatever she decided to buy, including her bike. And even after Wayne started purchasing all of her groceries, she insisted on paying for everything else with funds from her own bank account. Her one last bastion of pride, he supposed.
Pride wasn’t something she was allowed to have. He’d take that away from her too. Perhaps for their second anniversary, he’d decree that she was no longer allowed to work at her sad little Lower South Providence daycare.
But he found something interesting as he was reading over that month’s banking statements, which include one for the account he’d had set up for her. Instead of accumulating more money in interest fees as her checking account often did, it was suddenly missing five figures.
He scrolled down until he found the source of the missing money. One payee had subtracted over $30,000. His entire body chilled over when he saw the name written in the Description section.
It was the Rhode Island Design School.