Beatrix woke up in a small metal cage.
A persistent dripping sound her only company.
Lost in the darkness.
Reeling to remember.
Two meals and a lesson. Three graces a day.
She had been leaving work to celebrate her promotion, a promotion that was the culmination of her entire ruthless, driven career, a promotion that would cement her status with her marketing firm enough for her to take her relationship with her girlfriend out of the lesbian closet.
Beatrix had finally made it. And then she was here, disoriented and petrified in a black she could not define.
βFear and panic are just words. They in no way capture how I felt in those first hours in my cage. I could say them, scream them, carve them in my β¦ arm a million times, and never fully express how the terror absolutely radiated from my bones.β
Yet the reality of her Master may be even more terrifying than the crushing darkness and enveloping isolation. He appears as an ominous shadow in the doorway of her cell, and he never speaks to her. Instead, he teaches her the language of pain and torture, of submission and obedience, of domination and possession.
βI didnβt have to understand to obey. All I had to do was read the commands and follow. Submit.β
With each passing day, the fight and hope in Beatrix begins to shrivel and wane. With each savage beating, her survivalist instincts rise up to overwhelm the person she was. With each dehumanizing condition, she begins to forget who she was and the life from which she was ripped.
βYou were breaking me down. More brilliantly than I could realize, lost in my strife. You were leaving me alone to turn on myself, break myself down to something more pliable for You. I wish I could have appreciated the beauty of it in my misery.β Can Beatrix ward off the psychological breakdown of her Master?
Can she resist the temptation to survive and thrive through submission? Either Beatrix will succeed at surviving and escaping the torments of her Master or her Master will succeed at breaking her completely and reforming her into his design for a human possession.
**About LGBT Horror Author Christina Bergling
** Colorado-bred writer, Christina Bergling, sold her soul early into the writing game. By fourth grade, she knew she wanted to be an author, and in college, she actively pursued it and stared publishing small scale. However, with the realities of eating and paying bills, the survivalist in her hocked her passion for horror to profession and worked as a technical writer and document manager, even traveling to Iraq as a contractor. Bergling is a mother of two young children and lives with her family in Colorado Springs.