I smiled. “Let me at that fry pan. But…” Go for it, like he says. “Can you tell me everything, please? Like, what and where am I going to the police?” I shut my eyes a second. “All that.”
“I can. Sure.” He leaned against the kitchen counter and crossed his ankles.
And he did, while I made a light stir-fry of vegetable to go with the bugs. It was simple. I only had to stay with him a while, then I’d be gone. Like he’d shown me, the doors were open. But to walk out now would betray him. I needed only to wait.
I checked him out, whistling as he set the table. I was such a dork. Not everyone was Jack the Ripper.
The bugs turned out wonderful. As we ate at the dining table, me sitting on a chair at a proper table for the first time in almost a month, I felt a split in reality. The floor beckoned me.
I shivered, remembering being at
His
feet, under his body, Jodie holding me while
he
did things to me. Lust. Sex. Pain. I breathed in some oxygen only to find Chris looking at me strangely. Shit. I was going to need a shrink after this.
For some reason the expression on Chris’s face reminded me of how he’d looked at me in the room—like I was something special, as if letting myself be trapped in a room had bestowed me with some unique quality. He’d said he was in awe of Klaus. If he was in awe of the man who’d abducted me, what did that make him?
I checked him out as I took another forkful of my meal. He was as normal as ever here. In the room had been surreal. I couldn’t count that against him, could I?
Yes. Yes, I could. Trust had become a precious commodity to me.
In the dark, later, I reassessed what he’d told me. Two days with him, then he’d let me go near the house Klaus owned so I could make my way to the police station and say I’d escaped. All I had to do was pretend I’d never met Chris before. I’d checked his front door and it was unlocked. That had been so amazing I’d smiled. A few days more, that was all. Easy.
I stared at the ceiling.
So alone.
No one else warm and solid to hold me.
No one to tell me what to
do
. I was free. For a second I panicked. Get a fucking grip. It’s just Stockholm or lost puppy syndrome or some such crap.
When I awoke with the sun in my eyes and slanting across the wall, I found myself curled at the bottom of the bed where I used to sleep when I was with them.
Damn.
The next day passed, slowly and agonizingly, as I angsted over how things would play out when I walked into that police station. After harassing myself for ages, I discussed it with Chris.
His reply buoyed me. “You can only do your best. I don’t expect miracles but if you do your best, I’m happy. But, just to help you. We’ll practice.” Then he pretended to be a police officer interrogating me.
If it wasn’t so serious, I would have laughed. He was right, though, rehearsing my story over and over gave me confidence. We varied the precise words too. Real stories rarely used the same words while made-up ones tended to be learned by rote.
It helped, until the night brought back to me the past few weeks. I woke up frantic, sobbing, and had to sit clutching my pillow to get my breathing back to normal. I stared at the shadows of trees washing across the walls. For an adult, I was pitiful.
Shrink, remember. Afterward, after I spilled everything to the cops, I’d get a shrink and fix this problem.
At five in the morning I gave up on sleep, and sat cross-legged in the middle of the bed, with my head stuck in my pillow. I wept silently as the dawn light crept in.
I hoped Chris didn’t notice the soggy patch in the middle of his pillow.
What distressed me the most wasn’t the crying, or the sleeplessness, but that when I had awoken it was often in the middle of them making love to me. Awake, I recalled the pain he had made me take. Asleep, I recalled the love. Then I was stuck in the middle of nowhere, longing for something I could never have. I wanted to be able to hold and kiss Jodie again. I even, in some damn weird way, flip-flopped between wanting him and hating him. Was there some psychological clue there? I had no idea. I just wanted someone to tell me where the hell to go from here.
On the third day, early in the morning, Chris drove me up to the house and let me out. I looked up at the swaying trees and the fine blue sky. This here had been my prison. I’d never seen the front of the house. It appeared so serene, so normal: a garage, a gravel driveway, trees, and a pretty garden. Butterflies floated about from one flower blossom to another.
After he went in and made the room door stick open with a small bit of scuffed tape that he’d showed me, as if it had fallen from somewhere and been kicked along the floor, Chris came back outside. He shook my hand.
“Good luck, Steph.” He bent and kissed my forehead. “You’ll be okay. Just remember the story. Stick to that, please. For my sake.”
I nodded. “I will. Thank you for all you’ve done.”
“No worries.” His gentle grin and thumbs-up lifted my heart. “Take care out there. There’re some crazies on the road.”
His car passed me as I set off down the winding road.
My legs felt odd taking these long strides and I had to check myself a few times when I almost skidded on the loose gravel. Somewhere, deeper in the trees, a kookaburra laughed in its lunatic bird voice, as if mocking my lack of hill descending skills.
I’d been inside for a long time and even on Rat Island the world was small. Here, under the shade of the trees, I was truly free. I smiled. I could do this. Fuck all that had happened. It wasn’t my fault that things had gone down the gurgler for these last weeks. I’d do as Chris asked and tell my white lies. I’d even try to show Klaus and Jodie in a good light if I somehow could.
Walking as exercise had never been my favorite. I had to walk all the way to the cops? All the way down this hill? It was hot and already sweat was rolling down my back. Maybe I could get a lift? Or maybe not. Hitchhiking after all that had happened to me? Not wise, girl. Not at all.
A small rock that ended up in my Croc shoes made me hop about and grimace and rethink that vow. Who invented damn rocks anyway? If only I had gym shoes, but there hadn’t been much use for those in the room.
I continued but the farther I went, the more something pulled on me, and the more I slowed. I stopped and looked up at the sky with my eyes shut. Yes, that was it. I was between two worlds. Behind me was the strange fantasy world of Klaus and Jodie where I was their sexual toy to be cherished, and made to perform and, at times, to scream. I shuddered at the thought of the latter. Even Jodie had relished that. My cruel girlfriend who even now made me ache. My girlfriend who’d gone somewhere far away without me. I wrapped my arms around myself imagining she was here with me and grieving that she wasn’t mine anymore…and that I wasn’t hers.
Ahead of me, down this road, was the normal world where I would have to explain where I’d been for these past weeks. How I’d gotten myself into the situation in the first place. Damn, that was going to be difficult. Then, once that was done, I had to go back to work. To the gray world. Money, clients, rent, filling out papers, driving cars, arguing, forever and ever.
I opened my eyes and stared down the slope of the black asphalt. But also movies, parties, talking to friends, achieving things and, best of all, being me, for myself and with no one to order
me
about, except for my bosses at work. The pluses were definitely on that side of the scale.
Then why was I miserable?
Because, I told myself. Just because. I’d come out of the maelstrom back there, unscathed, sane, and with the most amazing sexual memories ever.
Be happy, girl.
I kept going.
My chest tightened as I went past a house—the first one since Klaus’s. The silver-gray SUV in the driveway looked safe. Yet again, I hesitated as I wondered if someone in there could give me a lift. What exactly were the odds of encountering a serial killer in the average posh car? A thousand to one…surely? I sighed and continued.
But when I heard the engine approaching from behind me, I stuck out my thumb. Bugger walking. I turned. It was the silver-gray vehicle. I glimpsed a man with a baseball cap as it rolled past. A man. The vehicle slowed and stopped in front of me and I walked toward the SUV as the passenger door opened.
A lady would be safe, not a man. My stupid instincts nagged at me.
Do not get in.
I swallowed and stepped up, ready to brush him off with a lame-ass explanation.
Klaus. Lunging at me. Halfway across the seat, with his hand already reaching. My mouth gaped, I started to backpedal.
His fingers clawed onto me.
“No!” I squeaked, as he hauled me in by the front of my shirt and my armpit. My knees banged on metal, and a split second later, my mouth had his hand across it. I bit down.
“Shit.” He slapped me and shoved my face into the seat. “Behave.”
The fight left me. Three weeks before I would have screamed more, struggled more, but not now. I knew him and what he might do. Ashamed at myself, I realised I’d also snapped back into that submissive mode he’d trained in me.
His arm flattened on my back, squashing me. I felt him wrap some new leather about my elbows then came the distinctive sound of a belt being cinched in and fastened. He clipped together the wrist cuffs. Last of all, he leaned over me and did up the ankle cuffs, and pulled my legs in so he could shut the door. After working a gag between my teeth and buckling it, he turned me over.
Tears ran down my cheek. Whether from the pain of the slap or from shock, I couldn’t tell. Fear had mastered me, as had the unknown. Why was he doing this?
“Welcome back.” The rasp in his voice betrayed his passion. I trembled, confused, and overwhelmed. With his fingers, he roughly combed my loosened fringe away from my eyes. “Welcome back, toy. I decided we should keep you after all.”
Then he frowned—that tiny corrugation of his forehead I knew so well. He brushed away my tears with the back of one finger. “Hey.
Shh
. It’s okay. I was just getting you to be still. Stay there while I drive back up to the house. Lucky for me the Dysons are away on holiday.”
The quiet patter of his words in his steady voice helped me to calm down. He was doing this deliberately. He knew the effect it had on me. My breathing slowed and I looked up into his eyes, searching for something in the gray-green depths.
He stared at me for a while longer, as if memorizing my face before he started the engine and drove the SUV back up the hill.
My head was in his lap. When the vehicle went over bumps, the hard denim of the crotch of his jeans rubbed my face. I could smell him. Familiar. A man who’d had his hands on me, in me, many times. Now I was at his mercy again.
Oh god, I’m sick.
This was arousing me.
I’d crossed the line here and I knew it deep in my guts. As I hauled her out of the car and kicked shut the door, I knew it. As I walked down the stairs with her over my arms, I did more than
know
, I exhilarated.
I could have taken her here at the house before she set off down the road, except Jodie had a thing for car abductions and her eyes had glittered at the possibility of Steph being picked up this way. It had certainly added to the excitement and the risk. But, some risk seemed fair considering what I was doing and planning—my last bit of fair play to Steph. Now, the gloves were off.
Methodically, despite her wrists and ankles being linked, I ripped off, or cut off, or unbuttoned, her shirt and tiny black shorts and underwear. When I strapped her against the wall, using the wall anchor points, I figured an observer would notice my eyes burning bright.
Jodie had known that this was crossing the line, but she’d begged me to do it, then she’d hugged me with tears streaming down her face as I left her for the plane flight back. We both knew we were being bad, but we also both had a craving to make this woman ours for good.
As a result, I was so jet lagged my brain was possibly in another state or time dimension, but I still comprehended there was no way I would qualify as Dom anymore due to the small misdemeanor of abducting Steph. Consent was nowhere in sight. If Moghul found out, he’d be the first to condemn me.
I surveyed my gorgeous nude woman pinned to the wall. I wasn’t Luke Skywalker with right on my side. I’d turned to the dark side. Apparently, they didn’t have cookies like someone had once told me, but they did have hot women.
“Let me guess, you have some questions for me?” I undid the ball gag from her mouth and tossed the thing aside so it bounced across the floor.
With her hands fastened to the O-ring above her, with one thick leather strap beneath her beautiful breasts and another above, as well as various other straps designed to keep her in place while I did my work—she was exquisite. Her glossy, night-black hair hung in delicious tendrils about her shoulders, with one strand long enough to curl across her nipple.
“Let me get that,” I said, roughly, and I tucked the offending strand of hair behind her shoulder. I pressed a kiss on her luscious mouth, and another on that nipple then I played with it with one fingertip until it popped upward.
I noticed her reactions in detail—the huff of breath after I kissed her, then the licking of her lips and the flutter of eyelids, even the slightest tremble of her body.
With my arm laid on the wall above her head, I leaned in to admire her. “You must have questions, my toy.”
She blinked and pushed against the leather before answering, making her breasts bulge out even more. “Why have you done this? I was…I was free.” The last word trailed away.
I caressed her cheek, feeling wetness. “More tears? You need to accept what you need. For the last few days I’ve had reports about you from Chris. I flew out of the country with Jodie but I left him with instructions to report to me. When he told me how you were crying at night and calling for us, and for Jodie especially, that made me wonder. I wondered if I should do what I’ve been wanting to since I first saw you. And I listened to Jodie. She wants you back. She’s been begging me. It’s hard to say no to the woman you love.”