Julian quieted at once but his feet twisted restlessly.
Colin went to a cabinet and pulled out a rolled-up mat. “Rachel, you sit on the floor
by his head and keep an eye on him. No touching, please, no matter how badly you want
to. He has to do this by himself.”
I took it with a nod and unrolled it on the floor right by the wall. God, I hated
seeing him like this. It was so wrong, I felt like I should avert my eyes.
My stomach clenched when Colin went to the wall of torture implements and came back
with two different canes, one white with a black handle, and a thinner one of wood,
curved at the end like a walking cane.
“I’m not going to give you much of a warm-up, Julian, and you have no safe word. You
know what you have to do to make it stop.”
I was shocked to see a tremor run through Julian. Suddenly I was very afraid. I didn’t
want to be here.
“Please don’t do this,” I said unsteadily.
“Rachel, Julian needs you beside him, but if you can’t be quiet I’ll have to gag you
and put you in restraints.”
Stomach churning, I wrapped my arms around my drawn-up knees and bit my lips.
Colin set the white cane on a nearby bench. Then he took his place behind Julian and
rolled his neck and shoulders before blowing out a breath.
“I love you, Julian,” he said.
Julian took a deep breath and then gasped when the first strike landed on his butt.
It didn’t look like Colin was hitting him very hard, but Julian flinched and gasped
with every blow, the long muscles in his legs twitching like a racehorse’s. After
about twenty, spaced less than five seconds apart, his gasps turned to grunts.
At forty, Colin stopped and leaned down to rub his hand roughly over Julian’s butt
cheeks and thighs, and Julian groaned, keeping his eyes tightly closed.
Colin sighed. “All right, let’s get down to it.”
My eyes widened in horror. That was the
warm-up
?
He drew back his arm and laid the cane across Julian’s thighs, drawing a yelp from
him. He did it again and again, and when Julian arched his back, drawing his knees
closer together, Colin hit him harder.
After the echo of Julian’s shout died, Colin ordered, “Get that back down. Don’t try
to protect your nuts or I’ll go after them.”
Julian reluctantly straightened his back and spread his knees, breathing harshly.
Colin hit him hard across both thighs again, and this time Julian screamed.
I burst into tears, shaking all over. “Colin, please stop.”
“No,” Julian said through clenched teeth. “It’s okay, Rachel. I need this.”
Colin leaned down to tap the bottoms of Julian’s feet repeatedly and Julian howled
like an animal, bucking and writhing in the stock. I sobbed silently into my jeans-clad
knees.
“I told you not to speak until you’re ready to spill, Julian. Don’t do it again or
you won’t be able to walk tomorrow.”
Julian blew out a couple of hard breaths, as if bracing himself, and I wished desperately
to hold his clenched hands, stroke his sweat-beaded face. Part of me wanted badly
to run away, to do anything but watch him take this punishment, but I couldn’t leave
him to face it alone.
Colin hit him a dozen more times, and though Julian yelped after several of them,
he seemed to be in better control of himself.
“That’s fifty,” Colin said, rubbing Julian’s butt and legs again. “You have five minutes
to come clean and then I’m switching to the Delrin.”
Then he looked at me. “I’ll be right back. You can talk to him, but don’t touch him.
When I get back, I’ll ask if either of you violated my orders and he’ll tell me the
truth.”
He set the cane down by the other one and walked out, leaving me alone with Julian.
“Please tell me,” I whispered, wiping my runny nose with the sleeve of my sweater.
“I can’t take this anymore.”
He shook his head.
“I love you, Julian, and I will love you
forever
, no matter what. Please tell me.”
Julian shook his head.
Gathering my nerve, I asked, “Did you lie about having permission?” When his eyes
widened, I gasped. “Oh God, that’s it, isn’t it? You stole the body.”
He hesitated for a moment, looking torn, and then shook his head again.
I slumped against my knees in relief. “Oh, thank God. I don’t know if I could have
lived with that.”
Julian swallowed and closed his eyes, his expression one of such undiluted dread,
I decided against pushing him further.
When Colin returned, his face was pale, his eyes red-rimmed, and I felt like I’d been
kicked in the chest. Oh God, how selfish could I be? Inflicting so much pain on the
man he loved had to be ten times worse than watching it.
“Any infractions, Julian?” he asked with unbelievable calm.
“No, Sir.”
“Good. Thank you both.” He picked up the white cane and whipped it around in the air,
looking as sick as I felt. “Julian, I want you to think about this while you’re being
stoic—every stroke I give you punishes Rachel and me as much as it does you, and even
if you deserve it, we don’t.”
Julian’s face crumbled and he sobbed once but didn’t say anything.
“Have it your way.”
It took thirty-two strokes of the mean white cane to break him.
“He said no!” Julian finally screamed.
Colin dropped the cane immediately. “Thank God.”
Horror gripped me. “You
did
steal the body?”
“No,” he gasped. “My brother. He said no. I didn’t have Jordan’s permission for the
transplant. He said he’d rather die than live as my monster, but I just…couldn’t let
it take him, too.”
I covered my mouth with my shaking hands. “Oh my God.”
And I’d thought body-snatching was the worst possible scenario. At least that, the
donor wouldn’t have had to live with—he was dead either way. But Jordan might have
fifty or sixty years to live with the results of Julian’s highly unethical action.
“He’s only twenty-eight,” Julian ground out. “He hasn’t begun to live yet. He’s never
even been in love. How could I just let him give up without a fight when I could offer
him the chance to live a full and happy life?”
Numb with shock, I watched as Colin released the boards one by one and pulled Julian’s
limp, naked body into his arms, cradling him against his chest.
“It’s all right, Julian. ” He kissed Julian’s stubbly jaw, his wet eyelashes, his
sweat-soaked hair. “You did what you had to. If it were you, I’d have done the same
thing.”
“So Pohlson did consent to the donation,” I said dully.
“Yes,” Colin told me. “All the terms of their agreement have been fulfilled. Within
minutes of the execution, an escrow deposit in the amount of ten million US dollars
that Julian had made under the guise of an anonymous abolitionist was released to
his family.”
I sagged against the stock, relieved that that much, at least, had been true.
Then Colin clutched Julian tighter and whispered against his ear, “Tell her the rest.”
“Oh shit, there’s more?”
Julian turned his face into Colin’s neck. “I can’t.”
“You have to. She deserves to know everything.”
Julian swallowed hard and took a deep, shaky breath before opening his swollen, red
eyes. He didn’t look directly at me, a fact that chilled me.
“Pohlson wanted to fuck,” he said harshly, “preferably teenage boys. He wouldn’t even
discuss any other terms until we’d reached an agreement on that one.”
I covered my mouth. “Julian, you didn’t…”
“No, Rachel, I didn’t,” Julian hissed, finally focusing on me with tempered steel
in his eyes. “I would never have allowed anyone else submit to that monster.”
The rest of the world ceased to exist as the implications of that statement crashed
down on me.
I don’t bottom. Ever.
“Oh, Julian, no,” I said faintly.
“Oh yes. I spent thirty minutes a week locked in that godforsaken cell with Augustine
Pohlson after the agreement was finalized four months ago. Yesterday afternoon was
the last time, a full hour, and he made the most of it. He toyed with me, telling
me he’d changed his mind, making me beg, making me…” His voice broke, and he closed
his eyes, shuddering. “I’m sure that sick fuck died smiling, replete with the knowledge
of how completely he’d degraded the great Dr. Julian Xavier Kilmartin.”
I sat there shaking, my mind a wasteland, my breastbone aching with the force of emotions
too complex to sort out and too volatile to risk venting when Julian was in such a
fragile state.
Colin looked at me, defiance and hope and dread mingling on his face.
Don’t hurt him
, his eyes pleaded.
“That’s it?” I demanded. “That’s the whole truth?”
Colin nodded. “Everything else about the operation was completely above-board.”
Making use of my hard-won ability to compartmentalize, I stuffed everything I’d just
learned into a mental drawer, slammed it shut and locked it before standing up stiffly.
“We need to take care of his wounds.”
Colin’s eyes fell to Julian’s flanks, which streaked with too many livid welts to
count, several of them welling with blood. He nodded, swallowing visibly. Between
us, we got Julian up to his feet and half-carried him to my room, since it was closest.
He grunted with every step.
“Dammit, why did you talk?” Colin said as we laid Julian facedown across the bed.
“I didn’t want to hit your feet.”
“Better my feet than my nuts,” Julian mumbled into the spread.
Colin snorted. “You don’t walk on your nuts.”
“No, but I might,” I said under my breath. I’d seen enough cock and ball torture in
my online explorations to know how to administer a little discipline of my own.
Apparently I hadn’t compartmentalized the anger quite as effectively as I thought.
Colin looked at me sharply but didn’t say anything. He left and returned with a bottle
of water, a handful of capsules, and a jar of salve. He made Julian take the capsules,
and then together we applied the salve liberally to Julian’s poor blistered butt and
thighs. Julian flinched and moaned the whole time, but the moment we were finished,
he seemed to fall into a deep sleep.
Colin crawled on the bed far enough to gently kiss his cheek and then wrapped the
top and bottom ends of the quilt over him.
“He’ll probably be out until tomorrow, but someone should check on him,” he said,
closing the door behind us. He pulled out is phone and called Dirk, quickly letting
him know the situation and asking him to check on Julian periodically.
Then he took my hand, and though I wanted to be alone,
needed
to be alone, I let him pull me down the hall into another bedroom. It must be his—though
it was very clean and everything was neatly put away, the closet door was open and
I could see his clothes on the bar and shoes on the floor.
He started stripping off his clothes as fast as he could.
“I need you,” he said with a shiver.
Noting his lack of erection with relief, I stripped off too and climbed under the
covers with him. He was ice-cold and shaking when I pulled his head against my breasts.
“Please, God, let me never have to do that again,” he said, clutching me tightly.
“Have you done it before?”
“Every week for the last fourteen weeks. After he returned from the prison, he’d disappear
into his bathroom for an hour, scrubbing himself raw inside and out, and then make
me beat him until he was able to scream out whatever that sick bastard made him feel.
This time was the worst.”
A shudder rattled through him, and then another. “I don’t think I can do it again,”
he choked out before a sob was torn from deep in his chest, and then another.
I held him for quite a while, keeping my eyes wide open and my mind blank so the lid
didn’t fly off the pressurized compartment where I’d stuffed everything.
When I was sure he was asleep, I carefully extracted myself from his arms and dressed.
I stumbled down the hall, opening doors until I found a vacant bedroom, and then cried
until I vomited.
November 6
My bags had been packed and waiting by the door for the last three days while I floundered
in a morass of dread and yearning. For once, my inner good girl and bad girl were
completely silent, as if both of them were as conflicted as I was.
The day after Julian’s shocking revelations, I’d told him I needed some time off to
think—and the key to my room so that I could lock it from the inside. He’d granted
both without hesitation. That afternoon, Colin knocked on my door and handed me a
flash drive.
“This is the only remaining copy of the footage Vince took during your first scene
in the dungeon.”
“Footage?” I gaped at him, prickling all over with a now familiar blend of dread and
secret arousal. “You mean Vince made a
movie
of me?
Naked?
”
“You agreed to it,” he said shortly. “Look at section twelve in your personal conduct
agreement.”
Gasping with outrage, I slammed the door in his face. At least that explained where
my employee ID photo had come from. God, how high had I been flying not to have noticed
a man aiming a video camera at my nude body?
I almost threw the drive into the fire, but something stopped me. Who’d already watched
it? Did I want to know? Did I really even care at this point?
Deciding I might one day need it, I dropped it into my computer bag, not the least
bit interested in seeing myself so completely vulnerable and losing all control.
The next day it had warmed up enough for me to go outside without a winter coat, and
I tromped down the slushy driveway in just a red hoodie, breathing the crisp, clean
air and soaking up the bright sunshine. For a little while, I didn’t even try to think,
but just opened myself to the world around me. I walked down the narrow paved road
for quite a while, and when a couple of compact cars gave friendly honks as they zoomed
past, I waved and smiled, glad to finally be grounded in reality again, if only in
a small way.