Santi didn't want to stop.<br/><br/>She knew she was doing real damage.  She could see that Tim was getting more and more mangled... she could see that he was losing teeth.  For the first time ever he actually didn't look cute, and she delighted in that, and in the fact that she was the reason for it.  She didn't know --- or at the moment, even care --- whether this was some aggressiveness she herself had long suppressed, or if it was something<span style="font-style: italic">they </span>had<span style="font-style: italic">put</span>in her, but it felt good.  Too good.<br/><br/>But it quickly became like kicking a puppy.  He wasn't fighting back, or even resisting, at all.  He was<span style="font-style: italic">taking</span>it.  Just as she had told him to.  He was doing exactly what she'd ordered.  But... was it to pretend he wanted to do what she said from now on?  Was it purely to save Shari?  Or was he just enjoying the pain, the same way as Santi had enjoyed lesser pain so many times before?<br/><br/>She held her punches and stepped away from the bed a little, staring at his ruined face, trying to hang on to her dwindling rage, but trying to understand, too.<br/><br/>For all she knew, he no longer gave a damn about Shari.  For all she knew, he had adopted<span style="font-style: italic">her</span>, Santi, as his new mother figure --- his "big sister" --- and no longer needed that other woman.  Maybe he had done exactly the same thing to Shari to "prove his word" to her; they had certainly looked alike.  For all Santi knew Shari was just another pale imitation of a woman Tim had murdered, a copy of the real Shari, given the motherly dominance he sought.  How else would she have been so utterly certain that Santi was going to become part of him?  Suddenly that made an awful lot of sense!<br/><br/>Maybe Santi really<span style="font-style: italic">had</span>resisted him in a way he had never faced before.  She'd still been conscious inside him, and had come out as herself, not as an imitation.  Maybe he'd expected her mind to fade and become a fake imitation constructed by his own, like Shari and Sven.  Maybe the fact that she was the first<span style="font-style: italic">not</span>to "miraculously" love him after being inside him had impressed him... like a boy who'd just hit puberty being disciplined by a curvy teacher he had a crush on.<br/><br/>"Why... why aren't you fighting back?"  Santi demanded, the anger in her voice again.  "Are you<span style="font-style: italic">enjoying </span>this?"  She shot him with the pepper gun again... the thing was damn near empty already.  "Is it to impress me?  Is it to save Shari?  Is she worth<span style="font-style: italic">anything at all</span>to you?!"  She punched him in the face again.  "Answer me!"  She didn't care that she was screaming.  Most people wouldn't care even if they heard it in a seedy place like this.  "I don't care if you have to spit out the rest of your teeth, ANSWER ME!"