Chloe recoiled farther into the corner.

With clenched jaw, he turned away from his prisoner and tied on his apron. There was no time for sexual fantasies. None. He had to feed her, just so she would stay alive. He had a straw, several water bottles, and a can of a protein shake that he’d seen the caretakers give his mother when she’d been living in a memory care unit in the nursing home.

A bitter woman to start with, Mother had only gotten worse as her decline into dementia had made her more nasty and critical than ever. Even when she’d no longer recognized him as her son, he had visited, watched her rot in that twin bed with its beige sheets, an afghan at her feet. Her scraggly hair had been tied away from her face in a thin ponytail and she’d squinted through thick glasses, trying to place him.

“You,” she’d finally said, nearly spitting as her roommate’s television blared from behind a striped curtain that rattled on metal hooks whenever an attendant whipped into the room and pushed the drapery aside to check on the residents. “You’re the bad one.”

“No, Mother.” He had shaken his head as he looked down at her, shriveled into half the woman he remembered. “I’m good. Your boy. Remember? I only do what’s right.”

Her eyes had narrowed suspiciously. “Are you my husband?” she’d asked.

“No, I’m not him.”

“Well, that’s what he said, too. That he did what was right. Oh, sure. Lyin’, cheatin’ son of a bitch.”

“I’m not my father. I’m your son.”

Her laugh had been a brittle, cold wind escaping in a hack from her lungs. “Son?” Her thin nostrils had flared, her pale face infusing with the color of the ribbon tying her hair. “I have no son.” With that, she’d turned away, closing her eyes and refusing to speak or look at him again. The ribbon had loosened over her wisp of graying hair, resembling a twisting rivulet of blood upon the institutional beige of her pillow.

He’d left her then. Never returned. Didn’t attend her damned funeral. For if she had no son, then he had no mother.

Now, in this basement with its bluish light, the girl looking nearly catatonic, her hands clutched together as if in prayer, he opened the can of Ensure, slid in a straw, and carried it to her. Eyes round and staring straight ahead, she shivered against the cracked cement wall, huddled close to the corner.

“Drink,” he ordered when she turned her big eyes up to him. They shined in the half-light, shimmering with tears.

She was scared shitless.

Excellent.