The Cruelty

Years after they break up, Camile's first boyfriend, the obsessive one she broke up with, might be back in her life and she doesn't even know it... After a failed suicide attempt, Camile wakes up in a strange place. Drugged and disorientated by her near-death experience, she is cared for by a solicitous stranger. Camile becomes Rafael's doll, his plaything. For a long time, Camile, drugged and ruined by her past life experiences, is unaware of the game. Finding out sinister circumstances of his ex-wife's death, Camile wonders: What are the chances two women connected to him would attempt suicide? Did he really just 'find' her after she tried to commit suicide or did he orchestrate everything? Living with a man whom she suspects has murdered neighbors and possibly his first wife and son, how can she and her child get free when she doesn't even remember who she is? Who will survive her escape? Who will keep hunting her down until she's dead? Even when she thinks it's safe, it isn't. It really isn't. This has been a long game and she's out of time... This novel focuses on the legacy of abuse. What learned behaviors from extreme abuse and mental illness can set individuals up to be controlled and manipulated to unimaginable levels. The book highlights connections between sexual abuse, sadism, extreme pornography and domestic violence. This fictional story posits the question: What if you lost everything and someone controlled your entire existence, how would you survive? People will often say things like; "If she knew she was in danger, why didn't she just leave right then and there?" We might scream at TV characters in exasperation for staying, yelling out; "take the damn child and run!" But should our own lives be televised, we may come to understand, staying and leaving are not simple doors a person walks through. They are life-altering decisions, ones not lightly made when the person in question has no memory, no money, nobody to turn to and no understanding of what they are ultimately capable of ... But in those cases? Those desperate times where we run with the clothes on our backs and our children in our arms, there is without exception, a sane reason we choose to leave, and such instinct should never be second-guessed ... The only option was for him to think she wasn't going anywhere because she no longer existed ... Camile had escaped by being more than a victim, more than a survivor. She had to be an avenger.