I tell Anna to vary our meals, to forget about roasts and baked goods and simple flavors. I feed Kate exotic dishes scented with saffron and fennel pollen and cardamom.
I lock down my wife’s access to various sites on the internet—all of Ireland one day, all US government agencies the next. I watch her build workarounds almost as fast as I can destroy them.
Every step of the way, I cover my own trail. I have no delusions that Kate will demurely abandon her former life, just because she’s mine. She’ll attack whenever she thinks she has the upper hand. It’s that fight that fuels me. Fuels both of us.
Just to stir things up more, I set up a private chat room inWinter Reckoning. I limit entrance to people with a new in-game status—Ice Knights, I call them. They’re the best of the best. The cream of the crop. The players I’m considering inviting to work for Lone Wolf.
I send an Ice Knight invitation to MaskedMarauder. To IceKiller and DarkMoney666 and to Shaddow, too. I purposely leave Kate off the list.
She’ll be furious when she learns she’s been left out. I hope she fights back—in the game or elsewhere online, rebelling against all my restrictions. I long for the opportunity to defeat her, to make her pay.
Because online, CyberGhost doesn’t have a safeword.
34
KATE
Iknow Wolf is testing me. He wants me to fail.
Clothes, food, computer access—it’s all a game to him. He wants me refusing to wear the scraps of lace Nilsson stows away in the dresser. Wolf wants me pushing away my plate, rejecting food I can’t identify. He wants me breaking through the firewalls he puts up, or better yet, storming into his office and complaining.
Every morning, I vow to accept his rules without protest. I work on NightSaber, on StarCoin, on Mask’s idiot bookie, who turns out to have a ridiculously strong firewall of his own. My concentration is shot, and my code looks like something created by a five-year-old. Nothing works, but I try and try and try again.
Every afternoon, my patience shreds to rags. Waiting for Nilsson to take me to and from the carriage house stings like lemon juice on a cut. I hate that I’m so restricted, so unable to control my life.
Every evening, I find some new way to tell Wolf he’s an arrogant shitehawk arsehole with more money than brains and I hate him.
And then he takes me to the basement.
I don’t want to break for him. I don’t want to give him the satisfaction of watching me tremble, of hearing me howl his name. I don’t want to taste my own arousal on his fingers, on his lips.
But I’m powerless. I crave the dungeon the way a daredevil craves adrenaline, the way an Olympic athlete craves gold, the way a rock star craves a screaming crowd.
I’ve never needed anyone or anything in my life. Even when the Bad Men had Breagha and me locked in a dark, stinking room, I always knewIwould find the way out.Iwould set us free. And I did.
But I need Wolf. I need him to unlace my body. I need him to feed the hungry furnace burning just beneath my skin. My sudden dependence on his cruel touch terrifies me more than anything he could ever do to my body.
Trying to escape, I phone my sister every couple of days. Breagha chatters about the new shoes Mam has loaded into the closet that used to be my room. She tells me about Da’s tantrum when the bratva lifts one of his containers from the docks. She stammers about suitors who are starting to stake their claims, coming round the Canton house for drinks, for dinner, for walks around the block.
Her life sounds like something I read about in a book long ago or maybe watched in a black-and-white film. I feel more lonely every time I end one of our calls.
I turn to Winter Reckoning, a place where I’ve always belonged. I spend long hours searching for MaskedMarauder and the others, planning campaigns, preparing to obliterate the colony of frostdemons living on the far side of the DarkWood. But my Raiders are nowhere to be found inside the game.
After almost a week, I rig an alert to tell me the instant any of them logs in. Shaddow’s the first eejit to trip the wire.
CyberGhost: Hey mofo! Where u been?
Shaddow: I
He disappears from the boards so quickly I’d think I imagined his logging in, if not for the aborted chat displayed in the corner of my screen. I search for him throughout the game, without success.
Enough of this shite.
I text MaskedMarauder outside of Winter Reckoning.
CyberGhost
WTF is going on?