My thumb found my mouth again—the one self-soothing behavior that didn't require permission. But even that felt wrong without him there to call me his good girl, his sweet baby, his perfect little thing. The comfort turned bitter, made me cry harder, but I couldn't stop.
Couldn't stop anything. Couldn't start anything. Caught in limbo between the person I'd been and the person he'd made me, with no bridge between the two.
The sun set again. Or rose. The light changed, painting different patterns, but distinguishing day from night required caring about time. And time only mattered when it was structured. When it meant anticipating his arrival, his touch, his voice dividing existence into meaningful segments.
Now it just passed, shapeless and cruel.
My body tried to override the conditioning sometimes. Thirst became desperation, and I'd start to uncurl, start to move toward the kitchen. But then the questions would hit: What if he came back and found I'd taken things without asking? What if this was a test? What if good girls waited for permission even unto death?
The movement would abort, leaving me more twisted than before. Crying from need and inability to meet it. Perfectly trained for a life that no longer existed.
"I don't know what to do." The words became a mantra, repeated to walls that didn't care. "Don't know when to sleep. When to move. How to be without you telling me."
My beautiful conditioning had become a prison. Every trained response demanded a handler who'd vanished. Every carefully built behavior required reinforcement that never came. I was a marionette with cut strings, unable to remember how joints worked without someone pulling them.
The phone—a new one retrieved from somewhere, sometime—sat dark on the coffee table. I should call someone. Should reach out. Should try to build the new life all this money was supposed to buy.
But call whom? Say what? "Help, I've been programmed to need ownership and my owner abandoned me"? "Please, Ineed someone to tell me when I'm allowed to pee"? "I can't remember how to be human without permission"?
The therapy I'd been forced into before would have words for this. Stockholm syndrome. Trauma bonding. Dependent personality disorder. Clinical terms that reduced transcendence to pathology. That made our love sound like sickness.
But those therapists had never felt the perfect peace of surrender. Never known the bliss of choices removed, decisions delegated, existence simplified to service and obedience. They'd never been rebuilt by careful hands into something functional through dysfunction.
They'd never been abandoned after that rebuilding, left to malfunction alone.
Another sunset. Or sunrise. My mouth tasted like copper and defeat. When had I last brushed my teeth? But that required standing, walking, choosing toothpaste without guidance. The simple task loomed impossible without his voice directing each step.
"Gabriel." His real name felt foreign on my tongue. I'd called him Daddy for so long, thought of him as Owner even longer. "Gabriel, please. I'll use whatever name you want. Be whatever you need. Just please come back and tell me how to live."
The begging echoed in empty rooms, bouncing off surfaces that absorbed nothing. No hidden cameras here. No observation windows. No careful eyes cataloguing my dissolution. Just me and the weight of needs I couldn't meet without permission.
My legs cramped from staying curled so long. My back screamed from the awkward position. But changing position felt like a choice, and choices belonged to people who existed independently. I was built for dependence now. Programmed for it. Lost without it.
The crying came in waves. Sometimes silent tears that just leaked endlessly. Sometimes body-shaking sobs that left me gasping. Sometimes a keen so high and broken it didn't sound human. The grief of a pet abandoned by the only hand that had ever gentled it.
"I was good," I told the empty room between sobs. "Followed all the rules. Learned all the lessons. Did everything right. Why wasn't it enough? Why wasn't I enough?"
But I knew the answer. Had always known, maybe. I was an experiment. A project. Proof of concept that broken women could be rebuilt into functioning submissives. The fact that I'd fallen in love, that I'd believed his promises, that I'd trusted in forever—that was my failing, not his.
He'd done his job perfectly. Taken a rage-filled mess and transformed her into someone capable of total surrender. The contract was complete. The work concluded. Time to move on to the next broken thing.
"But you said—" The protests died unfinished. Said what? Words that felt like promises to someone desperate to believe them? Claims of forever from a man who'd warned me about attachment even as he fostered it?
I'd been such a fool. Let loneliness and need cloud judgment. Mistaken intensity for intimacy, possession for love, training for relationship. Believed a fairy tale because thealternative—that I was just another patient, another success story for his files—was too painful to consider.
But pain had found me anyway. Multiplied by every moment of joy I'd felt in his arms. Every second of peace at his feet. Every instant of believing I'd found home in his control.
My hand moved to my throat again, seeking collar that wasn't there. The absence ached like a missing limb. Phantom weight where salvation used to rest. I pressed harder, trying to recreate the feeling, but my own fingers were poor substitute for leather and meaning.
"Please." I wasn't even sure what I was begging for anymore. Death might be mercy. Or maybe just unconsciousness. Anything to stop the endless loop of need without fulfillment, conditioning without application, love without object.
The money still sat on the counter, visible from my couch prison. Five hundred thousand dollars. Enough to buy anything except the only thing I wanted. Enough to build any life except the one I'd been promised.
What was I supposed to do with it? How did people make decisions about money when they couldn't even decide when to drink water? The old Lilah might have known, but she was gone. Murdered by kindness. Killed with careful hands that had promised to keep what they created.
"I hate you." The words surprised me, coming out raw and broken. "Hate you for making me need you. For teaching me peace exists then taking it away. For showing me home then changing the locks."
But even the hate felt conditioned. Couldn't sustain itself without permission to feel it. Collapsed back into grief anddesperate missing. Because hating him meant he wasn't coming back, and I couldn't survive in a world where that was true.
