Prodigal Princess

Memories

"Was it about Lucas?" Malcolm Bright asked me as I laid on the couch in my library with my head resting in his lap.
"No." I mused quietly.
He ran his fingers through my hair as the memory swept through me.
The New York Ghost terrorized the entirety of New York State from March of 2009 until his death in September of 2011, despite the authorities only linking the now thirty murders after the tenth victim.
I left my home around eight thirty the night of the eighteenth of September for my nightly run. I normally left closer to seven but happened to be running late.
I ran along the treeline next to Mountview Road in the high end suburb of Mount Pleasant in Staten Island coming to a stop halfway around the forest to catch my breath before beginning the final stretch back home.
Something felt wrong. I tried to brush it off and resumed running but the feeling nagged at the pit in my stomach. I stopped again and looked around.
Suddenly, a pair of long arms wrapped around me; one hand over my mouth muffling my screams. I struggled as they dragged me deep into the woods before forcing me to my knees and beginning to strangle me with what felt like a shoelace. My vision blurred and eventually darkened until I lost consciousness.
I regained consciousness lying naked on a dirty old mattress. My wrists bound with rope tied to the metal bed frame above my head. I forced myself to look around the small room. Roughly half a metre away from me on the right, a wooden chair fitted with leather straps on the arms sat forebodinly. No windows adorned the small dungeon like room; only a small door in the ceiling atop a small staircase two metres directly in front of the bed.
Before I could formulate an escape plan the door opened and a tall white man with lanky arms walked down the stairs into the dungeon room.
"Ah. You're awake, finally." He mused walking over to me.
His honeyed voice rough and grating; his black hair down to his shoulders and wavy looked tangled; and his cold russet brown eyes raked over my body.
"What do you want with me?" I asked.
"We're going to spend a lot of quality time together." He smirked at me.
He sat down next to me and reached out to touch my face. I flinched away from him and he punched me before grabbing my chin forcing me to look at him.
"If you behave I won't kill you." He told me.
I knew it was a lie. I'd watched enough true crime shows and serial killer documentaries to know that but I also knew if I could earn his favour I might be able to get myself out of this.
I froze when he lowered his face to rub his bearded face against mine and nuzzling my neck.
"No." I whimpered as he gripped one of my breasts.
"Shhh..." He muttered before running his tongue along my jawline.
I swallowed hard as he continued to touch me.
Suddenly, he jumped off the bed, incoherently mumbling to himself before repeatedly hitting himself in the head with an open hand.
He ripped a knife off his belt and rushed back over to me. I flinched away causing him to barely miss me with the knife in his hand. He ripped the knife out of the mattress and threw it away from us before beginning to beat me violently with his fists.
He left me badly injured but still conscious and ran back out of the door slamming it behind him.
I wasn't sure how long he left me alone in that room.
When he returned he was naked and had a different knife in his hand. Without a word he slammed the knife into my right bicep. I bucked up kicking him in the face causing him to drop the knife between the mattress and metal bars near my head.
He grabbed me roughly by my throat and climbed up on top of me continuing to choke me while he raped me for the first time.
Once he was finished he leaped off me again looking at me almost disgusted and running from the room again.
Tears continued to stream down my face as I lay alone bleeding. I finally forced myself to twist my arms in such a way as to retrieve the knife he'd dropped when I kicked him.
I heard the door open again and barely managed to drive the knife into the mattress just beneath my hands before he came back downstairs.
His eyes were unreadable as he walked back over to me.
He knelt on the bed, forced my legs open by pushing on my knees and raped me again.
What I believed to be the next two days of my captivity filled with near constant rapes and beatings passed slowly and painfully.
Finally, he passed out next to me and I carefully started working the knife I'd stuck into the mattress against the ropes that bound me.
I worked slowly as to not wake him and incite his fury again. It took what felt like an eternity to finally release my hands from the ropes.
I moved slower still to pull myself away from him and off the bed.
I raced silently to the stairs and opened the door as quietly as I could slipping from the room and out into the midnight air.
I ran faster than I'd ever ran before through the woods.
It took roughly forty five minutes to run out of the forest. I shot into the street in front of an oncoming car.
"J? J.J.? Are you okay?" Malcolm's voice cut into the memory.
I forced myself to refocus on his eyes looking down at me. Malcolm's hand still in my hair, his eyes concerned as he watched me.
"I'm fine. Uh... hearing his name just... uh..." I stammered moving my eyes away from his.
"I get it." He nodded and returned to playing with my hair without another word.
My relationship with Malcolm was never supposed to be this way. He'd been an FBI agent and I was a Junior at Bainbridge University studying Creative Writing before I was abducted by David Alexander Lucas, serial killer known as The New York Ghost, who killed thirty young women between March of 2009 and August of 2011. I would have been his thirty first victim.
"It was about the night my parent's died." I told him after a long pause.
Malcolm and I never talked much about our families.
As an only child orphaned at thirteen from the small county of Emersile in northern England, it wasn't my favorite subject. My adopted father, Thomas Jensen moved us to America less than a month after my parents' murders and all I had left of them was the crescent moon necklace I wore, my blue/green eyes, and a distinctly British accent.
"Do you want to talk about it?" He asked me gently.
I thought on that a long moment. Telling him about the murders, about my escape, about Liam might be too much for me; so I shook my head and turned slightly to press my forehead against his hip.
"I went to see my father in prison today." He admitted almost silently.
"Do you want to talk about it?" I repeated his line.
To my surprise, he nodded. I sat up and turned to look at him.
"When I was ten, I called the police on my father and he was arrested for twenty three murders..." He began instantly captivating me.