Wake to Dream(80)

The woman opened her mouth to scream, and Max struck out with his hand, clipping the girl upside the head before lunging forward to buckle her hands into the shackles above the bed.

“Open your eyes, Alice. You need to see this.”

Max’ voice was soft when he called out the fact that she’d clenched her eyes shut against the secret her husband had been hiding.

Barely dressed, the woman had no defense against Max’s strength. Her mouth opened on another silent scream, Max hurting her in ways that left Alice crying angry tears. He forced himself on the woman, violating every part of her despite the blood that dripped down her legs, despite the shade of red her face had turned because he was choking off her airway with his hand.

“Turn it off,” Alice begged, her words barely discernable.

“You should watch it, Alice.”

Screaming at him with a strength that came from some place deep inside of her, she demanded, “I said turn it off!”

The picture went black.

Max stared at her with cold calculation in his dead eyes.

“Do you understand now?”





12:40 p.m.



“I can’t do this, Doc.” Her eyes clenched shut, the rims burning from the salt in her hot tears. Alice trembled where she sat, her body thrumming with the terror that crept along her bones, slithered up her spine and trapped her within the crushing weight of memory.

“I can’t,” she whispered, her voice pleading for some relief from the horrifying truth of her life from the man who studied her.

It spoke to the professionalism of the doctor that, even in the face of such a traumatic and gut-wrenching confession, he was able to preserve a gentle expression, sympathy and bits of horror obvious behind his eyes. His voice remained studious, his body relaxed in order to provide a safe place for his patient to come to terms with the nightmares that haunted her.

“I wish I could give you the permission you’re seeking to stop the story here, Alice. But to do so would be a mistake. I’d handicap you emotionally and mentally if I told you that you didn’t have to see this through to the end.”

Shaking her head, Alice couldn’t dispel the racing thoughts and memories, the horrifying truth of the decisions she’d made when she discovered the secrets her husband had been hiding.

A tap of a pen against a notebook, and the doctor’s tender voice filled the silence between them.

“I can imagine how hard it would be to learn how vicious and cruel Max truly was. Judging by the violence committed against you, however, I’m not surprised.”

“It wasn’t his fault,” Alice interrupted, a harsh bite to her tone that took the doctor by surprise. She glanced up at him, her eyes bruised and practically swollen shut from the amount of tears she’d shed. “He was sick, Doc. Sick. I don’t know another way to describe it. There was something inside him that needed release and the only way he could find that release was to do those things. But it wasn’t his fault. If anything, it was the fault of that son of a bitch who raised him. The father that beat him and told him he would never be good enough. The mother that turned a blind eye to the abuse.”

A thought occurred to the doctor. Toying the pen between his fingers, he cleared his throat and ensured his voice remained kind and calm. “Did you ever discover what happened to his parents? How they came to be buried on the property without a marker to designate where they were interred?”

Giving him a sharp nod of her head, Alice answered, “He eventually told me the truth. After everything came out in the open, there wasn’t a point to him hiding the rest of the story. His parents were the first people he…he killed.”

A sob broke free of her lungs, her entire body visibly shaking with the sound.

“He had no choice. The things they did to him.” She barked out a humorless laugh. “God, and I thought my father was bad. He was a walk in the park compared to what Max went through.”

“It drew you more closely together,” the doctor surmised. “Cemented the bond – the love – you two felt for each other.”

Nodding her head again, Alice sniffled loudly, but didn’t voice a response to the doctor’s statement. Pulling a tissue from the box on the table beside him, Dr. Chance leaned forward to hand it to the woman who was falling apart before his very eyes.

She accepted the tissue, blowing her nose before calming down enough to continue speaking.

“I loved him deeply,” she admitted. “And for a long time after his secrets came out, I considered the love I had for him. Studied it, pulled it apart and analyzed it, because, logically, it didn’t make sense.”

“Emotions rarely do,” the doctor noted.

She grinned, the expression sorrowful, regretful. “You know, during all that time, I kept coming back to the same question: How could two people who lived similar childhoods, who experienced abuse and torment in their formative years, turn out in such opposition to each other?”

Glancing up at the doctor, Alice connected with him by the way she locked her stare to his. “My father made me the perfect victim. I was scared, alone, and reclusive to the extent that it made me the perfect target for a person who wanted to make me disappear. Max, on the other hand, became a monster, a predator, a person so twisted by the abuse he suffered at the hands of his parents that a part of him snapped and took control of the man he would have become if he’d been raised in a loving home.”