I immediately seized the chain in both hands, pulling on it and trying to get it to come apart. I fumbled with the lock next, executing the same pointless tugging until i was red in the face.

"You've gada be fucking kidding me" i mumbled in disbelief, following the length of the chain with my eyes to see where it led. It lay limp across the couch and then plummeted to the floor, explaining why it felt like i was being pulled by something.

I stood, finally turning on the overhead light, and slowly walked next to it, as if i didn't want to wake a slumbering beast. To me, the chain was something sinister, one of Mac's minions that he employed to keep tabs on me when he couldn't be around. I knew it was insane, assigning personality to inanimate objects, but I couldn't help my instinct to think that the chain was evil. When I followed it around the corner and towards the front door, i felt it start to slide behind me. The weight of it wasn't too bad but the noise it made was grating. It was a dismal scrape, the unmistakeable sound of dead weight being dragged. Sighing, knowing every detail of this plan had been carefully thought out, i gathered it up into a pile and then attempted to carry it. It was burdensome though, sliding in on itself the way chains are apt to and constantly shifting in my arms.

I let the menacing length of metal lead me, snorting in disbelief when i saw what he had done. Despite how annoyed i was, i couldn't help but hang my head and chuckle, hand pressed against my forehead. The chain went through a small doggy door in the bottom corner of the front door, and I was going to have to crawl through it.

I knew his sense of humor; he must have delighted in this part. I could imagine him smiling like a little kid as he did it, snickering to himself and trying to keep quiet. When i tugged on the chain it jerked in my arms, so i knew he had attached it to something in the front yard. Sighing, i got down on all fours and opened the flap to see through it, the chain lumped in a loose pile beside me.

I could hear the crickets before i even stuck my head out. It was late, and suddenly, i was exhausted. Just beyond the porch i could see a small portion of the night sky. It was brilliant with the uninterrupted light of a thousand distant stars. I pulled my head back inside and sat back on my haunches, exhaling in defeat and rising to my feet.

I went back to the couch, unable to sleep but too tired to scheme. It was then that i noticed the tablet. I snatched it up, minimizing the word document that had been left open and instead searching for the internet browser icon. I clicked on it eagerly when i found it, as if i were actually running towards freedom, but was quickly rebuffed by the lack of signal display. Never in my life had a computer seemed so cold and mean, just another one of Mac's cruel cohorts.

"Fuck" i muttered. "Fucking Fuck"

I took a deep breath and clicked on the note i had previously dismissed. I knew it was from him, i just wished i could have made fun of him while he typed it.

Calli

Don't do anything stupid. I'll be back soon.

The road to the cabin is miles long so don't try to walk it. Watch out for rattlesnakes if you do.

Watch the movies and make me a list of food you want.

There's stuff in the fridge and pantry for when you get hungry.

The curser blinked at me from further down the page, meaning he had almost written more but then stopped. I scowled and looked at the folder of movies he'd downloaded. There were a lot, and i took that to mean he intended to keep me here for a while. I put the tablet beside me and stared at my feet. If he was warning me not to walk the long road to civilization, then there must be a way for me to get this chain off my ankle.

Testing my theory, i moved around the cabin to the various other rooms. I needed to know what i could and couldn't reach. I was expecting to not be able to get far, assuming he wanted to force me out through the doggy door, but to my surprise, he had included enough slack in the chain to allow me access to everything except the back bedroom.

'Dick' i thought to myself, staring longingly at the bed from the hall but unable to reach it.

Instead i went back to the kitchen and rummaged around for snacks. I went to the pantry after exploring the fridge and felt something under my foot. It was the weed liquid that he had spiked my drink with, and it felt like gold in my hand. I quickly checked the dosage, grumbling out loud when i realized there was only 20 milligrams left.

I didn't know what his tolerance was but i knew it couldn't be that low. I would have rather given him upwards of 100 milligrams, and i honestly didn't think 20 would even slow him down. Maybe if i mixed it with booze i could increase the potency enough to make him sleep heavier than usual but that was it. Still, the drugs could come in handy, so i hid them at the back of the bottom shelf behind old cookie tins and continued searching for something to eat.

XxXxXxXxXxXx

Mac could hear Lucy in his ear but he was focused on the way Bonnie was holding her face. It was easy to see that she didn't buy it, and even though it didn't really matter what she thought, he was still trouble shooting ways to convince her in his head.

She wasn't safe from him just because she was with Marcus. From what little Mac had seen, Marcus wasn't much for confrontation. He hadn't done anything to stop him when Mac had carried Bonnie out of their bedroom to soak her in the shower, and he never spoke assertively, not even when Lucy had 'accidentally' polished off his bottle of Stagg Jr.

Bonnie, perhaps thinking the same thing he was, looked quick from Marcus and then back to Mac. Her eyes still had that edge to them though, that goddamn defiance that made him want to hit her. She had no idea how brutal things could really get, the things a person could do if they felt like cornered. It made his hand twitch, that fucking look on her face, and he had to keep reminding himself that she wasn't his problem in order to keep his breathing steady.

It was just the four of them sitting around the table trimming into the trays in their laps. The table was cluttered with debris from their tasks and dirty plates and cups. Calli was the one who usually cleaned up the kitchen, and in her absence the pile just grew. So far, no one had stepped up to assume her responsibilities, but Mac had his money on Marcus.

Dinner was bleak. They burned the frozen pizza and had all ended up eating whatever leftovers they could find in the fridge. It was every man for himself, except of course for Mac who had Lucy to do it for him. Martin had taken a shot of the whiskey Mac had gotten on the way back but then disappeared. The last anyone had seen him he had been raking his hand through his hair and acting distracted, muttering something to himself and oblivious to the others.

Mac let him go. He knew the guy was probably wracking his brain trying to figure out what Calli could have taken. It wasn't normal for a worker to disappear without getting paid out first, and Mac was lucky that Martin hadn't accused him the way he knew Bonnie had.

"She just flipped out?" She had asked after he first told them all the story. It was clear she was skeptical. She held all of her emotions in her wrinkled brow and hard set eyes. "For no reason? And you left her on the side of the road?"

"Sure she had a reason" Mac mumbled in return. "Just don't know what the fuck it was"

"So she just snapped or something? What the hell happened?"

"I. Don't. Know."

He had gotten aggravated then, punctuating each word with lethal force and actually taking a step towards her. The girls and Marcus had collectively taken a step back, but Bonnie still hadn't been willing to let it go. It was all she talked about for the rest of the night, even if she never accused Mac directly.

"Calli had been acting so weird lately" Lucy said as they trimmed, trying to placate Bonnie in her obvious distress. "And she was super private too, maybe something came up and she had to get home"

Bonnie said nothing. She simply focused on the stem in her hands, snipping furiously at the dried leaves. Mac sighed, hoping she would just be smart enough to let it go.

He could always leave, he'd gotten what he'd come for after all, but Mac wasn't the type to go until he was good and ready. Nobody was going to chase him out either, especially not some chick. His plan was to just continue working for a while and accumulate some capital. It was good to have a source of income since he wasn't making money in Utah and Calli had put a dent in his rainy day fund. That, and even though he was fine with subjecting her to it, the thought of being trapped in that isolation made the muscles in his shoulder seize. He didn't like being confined.

Mac got up from the table, retrieving the whiskey off the counter and pulling straight from the bottle. For the hundredth time, he wondered what Calli was doing. Being separated from her again was harder than he thought it would be, even if he knew exactly where she was this time. He wanted to see her again, to have her right here in front of him, but he never questioned the choice he'd made in hiding her up there.

He had thought about just hauling her ass back to Utah, dragging her into his house and onto his bed, but had quickly decided against it. She had friends there, people that would help her if she begged them to, and Mac couldn't trust her not to disappear again. There would never be a way to keep his eyes on her 24/7, and at least this way he knew she'd stay put. The forest that cabin stood in was dense, and Calli had never had a good sense of direction. If she stuck to the road she'd get tired and turn back. If she tried to hike out she'd get lost. Either way, the chain around her ankle was going to make both options seem impossible, so he wasn't worried. The image of her disoriented in the woods did make him a little nervous though, and he hoped she wouldn't be that goddamn stupid.

To calm himself back down, he thought about her on the couch beside him earlier, the way her arousal had flooded his nose. He knew it was pheromones, something primal that couldn't be helped, but he was still impressed by the effect they had on him. Nothing, not even booze or meth, could inebriate him the way the smell of her cunt could. It was instantly distracting, the only thing he could focus on. There had been times he had stopped dead in his tracks because he could suddenly sense her, and whenever he scanned the room in search he would always find her, eyes locked on him and cheeks flushed. Once or twice it had been when he was fighting in the parking lot of the bar. More often than not though, it was when he was working on cars.

She would hang around and pretend to be reading but Mac knew she liked to watch him strain against rusted bolts and listen to him curse. She had a thing about the jumpsuit too, something he didn't understand but never questioned. Those dirty blue coveralls got him laid somehow, and he could give a fuck about the reason.

The whiskey burned in his throat, reminding him of another itch he needed to scratch. He set the bottle down, fumbling in his pocket for his pack of smokes and heading towards the door. His memories were beginning to betray him, constantly reminding him of how she'd been versus how she was. Once upon a time, everything he did had turned Calli on. These days, all she did was deny him. It was fucking infuriating.

His spun the wheel of his zippo with his thumb, hardly feeling the contact under the thick scar tissue that covered all of his fingers. Calli was only being stubborn, a spoiled brat who had forgotten what she could and could not get away with. He snapped his wrist so that the lid slammed down hard on the flame. Any other time he would have just fucked her, knowing it was what she really wanted, what she needed, but these circumstances were making him just as stubborn.

He wanted her to relent, to admit that she was his. If he forced himself on her it was just going to prove whatever point she thought she was making, and Mac had no intention of letting her win anything. She belonged to him, and this was ridiculous, this behavior from her. Sighing, reminding himself that pregnant women acted crazy, he flicked the ash from the tip of his cigarette and drew in another lungful of smoke. From behind him, the sound of the screen door swinging open broke his concentration.

"Mind if i join you?" Lucy asked

Mac tried not to stiffen. This bitch itched like a chigger under his skin, but he was going to pretend she didn't and keep fucking her. Besides the connection she had to this job he wanted to stay at, there was also the convenience of having someone to fuck whenever he wanted to. Bad things happened when he didn't have that.

The longest he had gone without sex had been the week when Walter had refused to get him out of jail. He was being held on multiple charges, but his father could have made the town cops release him with a wave of his gnarled old hand. Instead, pissed that Mac had gotten locked up again for something stupid, he had left him there to rot. Walter claimed it was strictly 'for Mac's own good' but there had been consequences for others as well. By the time he got out he was so wound up that the three women he'd paid to satisfy him had all ended up in the hospital. Walter hadn't commented on it but he had also never left Mac in a cage again. Maybe he knew that his son hadn't meant to hurt them, not really, but that he hadn't been able to stop when they told him to. Mac was usually better at keeping himself in check. That night he had been like an animal, everything experienced through a weird, pulsating filter of red. He didn't like that hectic, out of control feeling and he was grateful that it had only happened once.

He ticked his head to dismiss the thought and then nodded at Lucy. It didn't matter. He had lost ahold of himself then, but only because he had been made to wait so long. That was why he had always had to have multiple women at once, so he could rotate and never be without. Calli insisted that she could handle him, that she didn't want him finding it elsewhere, but he knew enough about himself at this point to know that no one person would ever be able to sustain him. He fucked because it was a compulsion, because he had to.

Before that it had been fighting, any kind of contact that would make him feel tired afterwards, not so ready to explode. After he had discovered sex around the age of fourteen though, it quickly became his ritual. He still enjoyed fighting, it always felt good when a punch connected, but nothing compared to the thrill of dominating another human sexually. When he was younger he used to just fuck, content in the power it gave him. Since then however, he had grown into something darker, something that wanted even more.

Soon physical control wasn't good enough. It wasn't difficult for him to hold someone down and force his dick inside them, and he got bored with it almost immediately. Despite that time with Reggie in the caves, Mac didn't consider himself a rapist. Or if he had been, it had only been a phase and he had already grown out of it. There had been other insistence's of non-consent in his checkered past but it was usually after things had already started, and by then of course there was no going back for him. If they got passed a certain point and the girl suddenly wanted him to stop, he simply ignored her. Those times didn't count as rape in his mind. They all secretly wanted it, they just didn't want to admit they had willingly fucked the guy from the wrong side of town. Mac was a born problem solver though, he could fix it so that everyone got what they needed.

Usually however, he didn't have to. There was a certain breed of women that liked to be spoken to and treated in a demeaning way, and Mac was very good at finding them. They weren't all that rare honestly, it just took a certain kind of attitude to lock them into place and to make them behave. In his experience, women liked it when he took over their lives for them, offering up all the decisions they didn't want to make and just doing whatever he said. it was easy.

It started one night at the bar, when a girl he had been trying hard to dismiss for over a week just kept coming at him. At first he thought he was going to have to kick her, the way you do a dog that wont stop following you, but something about the way she looked at him gave him pause. Eventually he realized that she liked being talked down to, that he was already giving her what she wanted, and he finally started paying attention to her. She had turned out to be lots of fun, and he had spent that whole summer seeing just how devoted to him she was willing to be, his longest relationship to date until Calli. That had been the first girl to get off on the way he degraded her, and once he realized it was an option, he never looked back.

After that he had reformed his tactics to a more verbal approach. Everything he said or did had an underlying motive, and he began to thoroughly enjoy the planning and plotting that went along with seducing someone. He could pay for sex if it was an emergency, another form of control he got off on, but he prided himself on being able to just talk women into it. It didn't matter to him if he was using his words or his body, and it was fun once he got the hang of it. In the past when women ignored him he would have gotten pissed. Now though, he saw it as a challenge, and he didn't mind if it took days or even weeks sometimes. Fucking women who had first turned their noses at him was a heady rush, especially when they let him hurt and humiliate them.

Case in point, the brunette standing beside him. If she hadn't been trapped here with no other options, Mac wondered if she would have acted the way she had towards him. In his eyes she was a spoiled brat, the type of girl that took a little more convincing, but he wasn't going to argue with convenience.

Lucy wasn't like Calli, who had been made specifically for him; she wasn't even close. She probably still had parents somewhere, parents that loved her and sent her money when she asked them nicely. Mac and Calli were different. Their parents hadn't ever seen them as something special to love and protect. Mac and Calli were outdoor dogs, the kind who slept soundly in the rain because they just didn't know any better.

If push came to shove Mac could tell this girl next to him would buckle easily. He wanted Calli, and he needed to figure out a way to sneak off for a few days to go see her. She was going to be pissed, but he was kind of looking forward to that part. She smelled so good when she got angry.

XxXxXxXx

Hey! Finalllllyyyyyyyy i got this chapter done. Sorry that took so long, i just cant rush it. Let me know what you think! It took so long to edit because i kept rearranging certain parts of it, do you think it flows well or does it seem choppy?

also, what is your favorite Mac relationship in this one? Mac and Calli, Mac and Lucy or Mac and Anne? ;)

Thank you for reading!

Magz