“I’ll finish after we deal with her. We have to tie her up. We have to protect ourselves.”
“Please…don’t stop.” He was still reeling from her interrupting his impending orgasm. “Please…” he repeated.
“As soon as we figure out what to do with this little mess.” She was torn between keeping Nicky sexually engaged-knowing that was the key to keeping him on her side instead of the side of reality-and at the same time she needed to figure out how to stop me. The scissors in her right hand shook from her trembling. “Nicky, we have to strap her down on the gurney. You have to get up. You have to help me.”
Nicky turned. His eyes were glazed with lust and need but some of it dissipated as he looked at me.
I knew that the only shot I had was to convince him that his wife needed help and he was the only one who could ensure that she would get it. If he really loved her, whether it was a healthy love or not, I was going to have to bet on the fact that he would want to save her more than he wanted to hurt me. But would he? Or more to the point, could he? I didn’t know enough about their relationship yet to know if he was subservient to her only sexually or in other ways.
“Nicky, we can help Daphne.”
“Shhh…” She leaned closer to him and kissed him behind his ear. “Nicky…” She took his hand, put it up to her mouth and sucked in his thumb, going down on it and then pulling up slowly.
“We have secrets to keep now, Nicky. Your secrets with the society. My secrets here. We have to bury them. Both sets of secrets.” She went down on his thumb again.
What was she planning to do to keep her secrets? What could I do to stop her? There was no way to protect myself. All I had-all I ever had-was my voice. But how could I compete with her? He was a man addicted to giving up power, who found it sexually arousing. His wife knew that.
“I’m sorry,” she said to me. “I don’t know what else to do. You’re just too big a part of the secret now. You have to get up on that table.”
I didn’t argue. At least I could act as if I were going to obey. The longer I could stall her, the greater chance I had to talk Nicky into helping me.
“I can help you figure out what to do, Daphne. I can help with the police so you don’t have to go to jail.”
“I don’t think so.” She laughed and I cringed. It was a deranged laugh. A power-sick cackle that went through my body like a shot of pain. “I know how to help myself. I’m going to bury the secrets. I’ve known that I could do that all along. This bunker is twenty feet under the house. No one knows it’s here. My grandfather had it built as a bomb shelter. It’s not in any of the plans. Once Nicky and I walk out of here and shut the door behind us, no one will ever be able to find any of you. It wasn’t my plan, but I always knew it was a backup.”
Nicky seemed surprised by what she was saying. I could see that in the narrowing of his eyes, in the way he put his lips together in a tight line.
“Nicky.” I made my voice as authoritative as I could. I had learned from my session with Paul Lessor what I had done wrong. I was not going to waste the one shot I had left.
He didn’t turn.
“Nicky!” I shouted at him with as much venom as I could put into the two syllables.
He reacted and turned to me.
“You must listen to me, Nicky.” I kept my voice dictatorial. “Daphne loves you. She loves you enough to kill five people if she has to. You have to take away the power of her love. If you don’t, you’ll allow her to destroy both of you. You’ll wind up keeping her secret for her. You understand what I’m saying, don’t you? Yes. Of course you do. I know you do. You’ve had a secret for years. The Scarlet Society has been your dirty secret. And you know how that secret controlled you. You know that, Nicky, don’t you?”
He was listening. Her fingers on his crotch were not distracting him from the tyrannical tone of my voice, or from the meaning of my words. I was ordering him to listen with every single syllable I uttered.
For one moment, Daphne had forgotten the most important thing.
Her husband was not addicted to sex.
Nicky was addicted to a woman overpowering him. To a woman demanding something from him. She was being too soft. Her need for his help was blinding her. She was seeing him as her savior and that was not the role he craved. He wanted to be a slave. If only she had stopped asking him to help her for just one minute and made him obey her, she would have won. But she didn’t do it.
“Listen to me, Nicky,” I commanded. “You bastard. You have to listen to me. Daphne needs you so much. She wants you. That’s all she wants. She doesn’t control you. I do. She is weak. Like you. I am the one with the power.”
He was completely focused on what I was saying now. “You don’t want to be the big brave man and give Daphne what she needs, what she needs, Nicky. You want to give me what I demand.”
Daphne’s hand was urgently racing up and down his erection. “Nicky…help me.”
“No!” I screamed at him, hoping that Daphne was too far gone to understand what I was doing, that she wouldn’t try to figure out why he was responding to me.
He was completely focused on me now, what she was doing to him might have merged with my voice, but it was my voice more than her actions that absorbed him.
“Nicky, I am ordering you to take the scissors out of Daphne’s hand. NOW!”
He turned to his estranged wife. The fact that she still had her fingers wrapped around his penis didn’t seem to be registering with him anymore. He slapped her hand away as if it were an annoying fly and reached for the scissors.
She was faster than he was. Pushing past him, she ran at me, her hand raised, the scissors pointed at my chest.
“Nicky, stop her!” I yelled. He went flying after her.
I ran in the other direction. Stopped seeing, just blindly moving, racing to find a corner of the room where she couldn’t get at me. All I could think of was Dulcie. That I had to protect myself for Dulcie. I had to get home to my daughter.
Daphne followed me, enraged, ready to do battle with the other woman, with all the other women whom Nicky responded to when he no longer responded to her.
“Nicky, stop her!” I yelled.
She was a blur rushing me and then she was gone. Nicky had pulled her back. The two of them lay on the floor in a heap.
I heard weeping. Daphne’s sobs. Nicky lay on top of her. He was finally flaccid. “Daphne, Dr. Snow is right. You know she is. We have to get you help. We can’t make this worse than it already is.”
She stared at him. There was an expression of disgust on her face: her lips were twisted into a grimace, her nostrils flared. With a huge burst of energy, she got her arm loose. She still had the damn scissors clutched in her fingers. She raised them over her head.
They came down. An arc of silver light gleamed in the gloomy basement.
The sound was that of a small animal caught in the night.
I cringed.
Daphne stopped moving. The blood leached out, turning her light pink shirt deep red.
Nicky shouted something I couldn’t make out and knelt down to her.
“No. Don’t touch her, Nicky. Go upstairs and call the police. Depending on how the scissors are lodged in her chest, you could hurt her more if you try to pull them out. Just go. Now!”
He stared at me. “I can’t leave her,” he whimpered.
“If you don’t, she’s going to die for sure. Go. Now.”
Seventy-One
Nicky didn’t have to leave Daphne’s side after all.
The police-including Jordain and Perez-had found the house and were already inside and on their way down the stairs when they heard the scream.
Ambulances had followed them to the house, expecting to find the other men there-hoping to find them.