Chapter 12 — The Monster We Created

The midday sun reflected off the windshields in the parking lot, creating a suffocating heat inside the car. I waited in the passenger seat, my mother had gone inside to buy “just a few things”—and it had already been twenty minutes.

My phone vibrated once more. Dorian. The sixteenth unanswered call of the day.

I let a cruel smile escape my lips. One week. A whole week without answering him, without responding, letting him wither in his own obsession. “Let him feel what it’s like,” I thought, “let the arrogant professor know what it means to need.”

The passenger window suddenly shattered.

Before I could scream, a strong hand covered my mouth, pulling me out of the car with brutal force. I struggled. Not because I wanted to escape, but because it was what was expected of me.

My arms were quickly pinned behind my back.

“Shhh, my little devil,” Dorian’s voice whispered in my ear, chilling and familiar. “I think you forgot who’s in charge here.”

He dragged me toward a black van parked a few meters away. I could see, over his shoulder, my own mother emerging from the supermarket, carrying bags, completely oblivious to what was happening just fifty meters away.

“Pathetic, she never really saw me.”

Inside the van, he threw me on the cold metal floor, gagging me with a cloth that smelled sweet. My eyes found his in the rearview mirror, dark, possessive, completely lost.

Perfect.

“Did you think you could avoid me?” he growled, tearing my dress with a knife. “Did you think I would simply accept it?”

I tried to scream, but the cloth muffled my sound. My mind raced, not with fear, but with perverse excitement.

“He finally broke.”

The van stopped in front of the abandoned house that I myself had shown him weeks ago, in a moment of intimate confession. Now, ironically, it would become my prison.

He carried me inside, throwing me on the iron bed in the main bedroom. Cold metal handcuffs clicked shut around my wrists with a final sound.

“How sweet the sound of surrender is.”

“Now,” he said, unzipping his pants, “you’re going to learn what happens when you ignore me.”

But then something changed in his face. Anger gave way to an expression almost of care. His fingers, which moments before had been brutal, now traced gently the contour of my face.

“No, don’t retreat now.”

“Why did you make me do this?” His voice was broken, almost a whisper. “Why did you force me to become this?”

I spat out the cloth, my smile a knife cut.

“I didn’t force you to anything, professor. You always were this. You just needed an excuse to let it out.”

He recoiled as if he had been slapped. His eyes swept over my body, handcuffed to the bed, and then looked at his own hands as if seeing them for the first time.

“I… I kidnapped you,” he said, as if only now realizing the gravity of his actions.

“Yes,” I agreed, arching my back against the handcuffs. “And now what are you going to do with me?”

The question hung in the air between us, laden with perverse possibilities. Dorian looked at me, then at the handcuffs, then at the closed door.

“Choose me, choose us.”

He didn’t answer. Instead, he undid the handcuffs with trembling hands.

“Leave,” he whispered, turning his back to me. “Before I do something worse.”

I rubbed my wrists, watching his tense back. Instead of fleeing, I approached him from behind, wrapping my arms around him.

“Too late to back out now, professor,” I whispered in a passionate voice. “You’ve already crossed the line.”

I turned him to face me, guiding his hand to my neck.

“Do you want me? Then take me. But not as a kidnapper. As a man who has finally accepted what he is.”

Dorian looked at me, his eyes a war between desire and horror. And then, with a moan that sounded like surrender, his lips found mine.

It was different from all the other times. There was no violence, only desperation. There was no anger, only need.

“Finally, finally you see me.”

When he took me to the bed, it was with a solemn urgency, as if each touch were a confession, each kiss an admission.

“I hate you,” he murmured against my skin.

“I know,” I answered, wrapping my legs around him. “That’s why we’re perfect for each other.”

That night, in the abandoned house that would become our shared prison, Dorian didn’t kidnap me.

He kidnapped himself, and finally, finally surrendered to the monster that we both had created. And I, lying beneath him as he possessed me with a mixture of love and hate, knew that I had finally won.

We, two wounded soldiers, had found each other on the battlefield we created.