Them

Janelle decided that the zapping collars weren’t enough to keep her houseguests as quiet as she would like. Therefore, she rummaged around the owners’ bedroom and found a couple of pairs of pantyhose, which she used as gags. In the mornings, she and the guys uncuffed their hostages so they could walk around for a few minutes, use an actual toilet, brush their teeth, and shower in the basement's tiny bathroom. Janelle made sure there were no razors or other objects in the bathroom. Just toilet paper, a bar of soap, a bottle of shampoo, two cheap toothbrushes, and toothpaste. She hadn't bothered with deodorant. They wouldn't be doing much physical activity. After showering, they were diapered up again and cuffed back on their little cots. She refused to partake in any diaper changing. When Lauren begged to at least have her sports bra, Janelle granted her that wish, assuring her it would be the only wish she was ever granted. The guys flung insults at Boris’s flabby body and little hoots at Lauren’s lean frame. Janelle made them promise never to violate Lauren beyond their eyes and words. She wasn’t sure why, but she felt that would be going way too far, despite everything else she was doing and having done to them. She just didn’t tell Lauren that, or that they planned to abandon them in the end, which they had decided to do instead of cleaning up all the evidence and risking dropping them off somewhere. She wanted them to be totally left in the dark, filled with uncertainty, because she knew that uncertainty would be an even greater torture for them. Initially, she had tried to talk herself out of returning to the U.S. to carry this deed out. She tried to convince herself that risking getting caught and then having to escape jail wasn’t worth it for these two shitsters, but they were, and she knew damn well she wouldn’t feel better until she got her revenge. She and a couple of the guys sat at the kitchen table discussing the matter, and all agreed that they would let the elderly owners return from Florida to discover Boris and Lauren and have them call the police to free them so they could get on with their now-traumatized lives. The original plan was to remove everything and drop them off somewhere, then alert the police anonymously to their whereabouts, but that would be more work and more risk. Since she was untouchable in Montenegro, and the others swore they didn’t have a record or any prints on file, no evidence left behind could be linked to anyone. The day before the owners were to return on New Year's Day, she would call an Uber and have it drop her off just a few streets away, and then she would call a Lyft from there to get her to the airport. Janelle was dumb but not entirely. As a master criminal, she had learned quite a bit over the years. She knew that if anyone witnessed her getting into an Uber, or if her accomplices got caught and told the police about it, all they would have to do was contact Uber and find out where she’d gone. Well, she didn’t want to risk them tracking her to the airport before she could fly out of it. She had never told her accomplices that she had come from another country or where she was going at the end of the month. With Boris and Lauren gagged and fully coherent, she could begin what she considered her first therapy session. That was to speak her mind directly to her antagonizers. “You’re going to listen to every single fucking word I have to say, and you’re going to do it quietly unless I specifically address you with a question, and I don’t mean just a rhetorical question. Every time you do, you will be zapped, and if that isn’t enough to control you guys, further measures will be taken. And trust me, you don’t want that. You really don’t. “You see, once upon a time, you thought you were invincible. You thought you could tell anyone anything and get away with it. So what if it fucked with their minds? All you cared about was being in control and getting your legal revenge. You never gave a damn about what anyone had gone through. You would get that revenge at any cost, no matter how it affected those you wanted so desperately to rake over the legal coals. No one’s physical well-being mattered to you. Neither did anyone’s psychological state. So what if the person you were desperate to screw had been held hostage and watched her friend be viciously murdered? So what if she ended up saving lives because she was able to sneak to a phone and call this shithead,” she said, motioning toward Boris. “Janelle, please—” Lauren began until Janelle picked up the remote and silenced her. “You still don’t get it. You don’t get to say what you want anymore, lover,” Janelle added, emphasizing the last word. “Yeah, I figured your claims to liking me were as full of shit as they actually were. I thought you might be a lesbian, but I knew you were just telling me that shit in hopes of me telling you what you wanted to hear. I don’t know—maybe you wanted me to make all kinds of nasty confessions to you or something—but I wasn’t the least bit surprised when I learned, in one of your lovely interviews slandering the shit out of me and making fun of my horrific ordeal, that you’d just begun dating another woman." Lauren stared stony-faced at nothing. She would do this at the hospital too, whenever Janelle said something she either suspected or later learned wasn't what she believed would happen, such as what she would do when she was out of the "safehouse" in a month or so. “Do you think your other half and the boy you raised together are safe, Lauren?” Janelle studied Lauren’s eyes as they became more terror-filled. “Yeah, you didn’t think about that, did you?” Janelle asked with a grin, even though she knew damn well that the wife and son were just fine. Worried shitless, but fine. They had nothing to do with what was going on. She knew that harming them would further punish Lauren, yes, but she had no desire to have a whole army of houseguests to torture. She just wanted to target the main source of her rage. In her fractured mind, she perceived Boris and Lauren to be two of her biggest antagonists. Sure, there were others involved in the bullshit "deal" she was given, but there was simply no way to deal with every single person who had been involved, no matter how deeply. That was okay, though. She really wanted to focus on these two. Next, she stepped over to Boris. “I think it’s time I give you one more reason to be obsessed with me, Boris dear, don’t you agree?”