Love & Exorcisms | 18+ | COMPLETE |

- Chapter 1 -

Storyville, New Orleans, Louisiana, 1900

He was terrified of me, and yet he always returned. Like an addict, desperate for his fix even though he knew the path to pleasure was paved with pain. The road was worth it, I could see it on his face. With every lash that bit across his back I made of him a bleeding, sacrificial Christ upon my cross. His body, his blood, all mine.

He was elite, the well-bred heir to a sugar crop empire, who spent his days lavishing in his father's plantation house. I was the daughter of a pig farmer from upstate New York, a simple girl who had hardly been taught to read. Madame Jeffries once told me that my looks were deceiving, when she first found me on that country road, wandering alone in bloody clothes. I looked like a trap, she told me. Like sweet honey to which flies would swarm, catch their legs, wriggle and die.

This man told me I was merciless. He wailed it, hissed it, and moaned it. Merciless was what he wanted; he had paid enough for it. Merciless, luckily, was all I felt capable of being.

Whip him until he dies. Push him past his pathetic limits. Further, further, further. Take the club, break his bones. Don't be weak, silly girl, whip him harder.

It was in these moments, and these moments alone, that I felt in control. The voices - the ones that whispered behind my thoughts, always watching, wheedling, lying - could not sway me, although they tried. I was merciless, but they were ravenous, insatiable. Never satisfied with the mere spilling of blood, they wanted death. They wanted exquisite suffering.

I did not know who they were, I did not know where they had come from, or even if they were real. I knew only how they had found me. I knew only that my life was now a dedication to silencing them.

Kill him, kill him, kill him! You know you want to do it again. It was fun the last time, so fun, so beautiful. Do it, do it, do it.

I paused in the flagellation to push my loose strands of blonde hair out of my face. My room had become overly warm between my client's panting and my exertion, even with my windows cracked to the ample upstairs gallery. I could have gotten a better breeze if I did not refuse to remove the heavy black curtains that covered those windows or open them more than an inch, but I would rather suffer the heat than see what lurked outside. Sweat was beading on my forehead and beneath the numerous layers of my maroon dress. Sometimes I missed the days when my most elaborate garment was the plain black dress Papa made me wear to church on Sundays, with not a corset in sight.

I often felt the desire to chop off my pale locks, which had never seen a pair of sheers since I was a little girl. New Orlean's thick, muggy air seemed to wrap sticky fingers in my hair on the hottest days, tangling it until it felt like a heavy damp mop on my head. But Madame Jeffries insisted I keep my hair long. It was all part of the allure, she said: the sweet, innocent little whore with doll-like eyes and angel's hair could not possibly be the one to beat the shit out of men on a nightly basis, could she?

Oh, but she most certainly could.

"I hope you've learned your lesson, young man," I said, my voice soft but stern. It was an empty statement: there was never any lesson to learn. Even more absurd that he was at least five years my senior, and I was only nineteen. But it was all for the fantasy of it. A man like him would never have a woman as his authority. He could go home to his servants and order them about the house and nothing would change. These moments were safe and escapable, a temporary thrill for him and nothing more. For me . . . . for me they were everything.

"Yes, Mistress," he replied, his voice hoarse. These moments were my saving grace. They quieted the voices, tamed them even as they satiated them. They staved off the ache to do something truly, irreversibly horrible. This humble room, with my cross of dark wood and walls papered in soft dreamy filligree, was my haven. It was my fresh start. There, I was no longer Samara Garfield, pig farmer's daughter, shame of her family, stupid, foolish, contrary girl. I was just Samara, the whore, with no past, present, or future that anyone cared about.