Брайан Фриман - Alter Ego

“How about that wine now?” he asked.

“Sure. That sounds great.”

He went over to the wet bar, and she watched him carefully. The wine was already uncorked, bathing in the ice bucket. She heard the slosh of water and ice. He glanced back at her with a confident, seductive smile. He was going to do it now. Definitely. Absolutely. He was so smooth as he poured that she didn’t even see it happen. She didn’t spot his hand dipping into his pocket for the vial. No one would know he’d done it. No one who didn’t realize it was about to happen.

“So what’s it like being Dean Casperson?” she asked him.

Casperson turned around with two wineglasses in his hand.

Don’t look at the television , she thought, staring at him, holding on to his gaze with her smoky eyes.

“Honestly? It’s an amazing life.”

He came and sat down next to her and handed her a wineglass. If you knew what to look for, you could see the predatory anticipation in his face. This was more than romantic seduction. Most of the women who came here would have slept with him anyway, but it wasn’t about that. She’d been with men who needed to dominate. Who needed to win. Who needed to abuse. She’d seen that sickness, and there was no cure.

“To the most beautiful girl I’ve met in Minnesota,” he toasted her, clinking their glasses together.

This was the moment. It was now or never.

Cat stared down into the golden pool of wine and tried to will herself to drink. He watched with a hawk’s eyes and waited for her to take a sip. She didn’t know what he’d put in her glass. Xanax. Ecstasy. Rohypnol. Ketamine. She only knew she was about to be drugged. And then much, much worse.

“You’re being very sweet to me,” she said, forcing a smile and twisting the glass in her hand. Her fingers on the stem were slippery with sweat. You have to drink .

“Naturally,” he said. “That’s what you deserve.”

The fire sparkled in the wine. Cat brought the glass to her mouth, but her hand quivered.

“I don’t want to lead you on,” she said, playing for time. “It’s fun to talk and this is very flattering, but we’re not going to have sex. I don’t do that with men I’ve just met. Even if you are Dean Casperson. Are we clear about that?”

“I would never make you do something you don’t want to do,” he told her.

Cat tried to make her expression sincere. “Well, good. As long as we understand each other.”

“Try the wine,” he urged her. “I think you’ll love it.”

You have to drink .

She tilted the glass, fully intending to taste it, to let it happen. The wine splashed against her lips, but she kept her mouth closed. She couldn’t even run her tongue over her damp lips. She couldn’t do it. Everything about her past began to flash in her mind. Every man she’d been with, every man she’d hated, was there in the room with her. They knew she would drink. She’d done it before. She’d taken drugs. She’d been with men who did what Dean was going to do to her. What did it matter if she did it one more time?

This was no big deal. This was who she was.

Let it happen.

But she couldn’t. She stared at the wine, which began to float in front of her eyes like an amber lake, and she kept screaming at herself in the cavern of her head. Drink. Do it. You have to drink .

No.

No, no, no, this was not her anymore. This was everything she’d run away from, everything she’d left behind. If she did this, she could never look at herself again. The men in the room would laugh at her. They’d know that nothing had changed. She was still the girl on the street. The whore.

It didn’t matter how evil the man in front of her was. She couldn’t do it.

“I... I... think,” Cat began.

It was hard to form words. She tried to grab the words and put them on her tongue, but they skittered away from her. Why was it so hard? Just say it. I need to go. I can’t stay here. I can’t let you do this to me, you son of a bitch.

“Relax, Cat. Drink the wine.”

“I... I... can’t. I need—”

“What do you need, Cat?” he asked her in a voice that lilted up and down like the notes on the piano. “Tell me what you need.”

“To go.”

“Oh, you don’t want to do that,” he told her. “The party’s just starting.”

“Feel strange,” Cat murmured.

She labored through quicksand, unable to understand what was happening to her. She hadn’t tasted the wine. She was still free. All she had to do was get up and leave. Push him away. Run.

Why couldn’t she run?

The glass swayed like a tree in the wind, still full, still untouched. Some of the wine spilled over the rim onto her fingers. She couldn’t hold the stem upright anymore. It was going to topple and spill. He reached over and took the wineglass from her hand. She squinted at him and watched him put the glass to his mouth.

He drank it. He finished the whole glass.

Oh, no.

Somewhere in the fog, Cat understood. She knew what he’d done to her. She knew it was too late to go back now, too late to stop, too late to escape. She felt herself falling off a cliff into air, going down and down and down.

He hadn’t put the drug in the wine.

He’d put it in the water. The empty bottle of water on the floor. It was already in her blood.

Stride drove north through the snow that streamed across the scenic highway. He drove faster than he should. His truck led the way, and Maggie’s Avalanche followed. There were two more police cars after that, like a caravan on the North Shore road.

“Did you try calling her again?” he asked Serena.

“I did. She must have her phone on mute.”

He kept his eyes on the road. His headlights were the only light around him, and otherwise the night was black. “It’ll be okay. There’s probably a hundred people at the party. We’ll get Cat out of there.”

“I know.”

But they had miles to go, and the resort seemed far away. Stride kept the radio off. The truck was silent except for the patter of snow. Then, strangely, he heard the toot-toot of an old-fashioned car horn.

Serena grabbed her phone from the seat.

“That’s Cat’s text tone,” she said with relief. “Thank God.”

“What does it say?”

He glanced over and saw Serena’s face cloud with confusion. “I don’t get it. It says, ‘Check Facebook.’”

“What does that mean?”

Serena pushed a few more buttons on her phone. Stride’s eyes shifted back and forth from the road to his wife’s face. Her expression was calm and curious. He watched her scroll to Cat’s profile, and then, out of nowhere, she slapped a hand over her mouth. A cry broke out of her throat. She choked; she gagged. She threw the phone down as if it were on fire. She was instantly sobbing, disintegrating into panic next to him.

“Jonny, drive, drive, speed up; we have to get up there right now!”

“What’s going on?”

“Cat’s with Dean Casperson. It’s just him and her alone. He’s going to rape her, Jonny, and she’s streaming it live for the whole world to see .”

It felt like a dream.

A gauzy curtain draped over Cat’s mind. Shapes in the fire-lit room grew larger and smaller as if she were seeing them in a fun house mirror. Her limbs were leaden. She willed her arms and legs to move, but they only stared sullenly back at her. She had trouble keeping her head up; it kept lolling onto the sofa cushion. She was vaguely aware of Casperson slipping off his tuxedo coat, undoing his tie, and unbuttoning a couple of buttons on his shirt. His face had the intense, curious look of a scientist studying the reactions of a new specimen.