Unraveled Together (5 page)

But however much I wanted to do that, I knew I couldn't. I couldn't disappoint her. Because if I deprived her of the chance to prove herself to me, to submit to me, to rise to the most rigorous of challenges, she would have been not just disappointed but deeply disillusioned in me, as well.

Part of my pleasure in subjecting her to my tests came from my awareness that she was bright and spirited and self-willed. It seemed to me then that she had the strong will of a great submissive, the kind I'd dreamed about but never before had the good fortune to have in my hands. Or rather, at my feet. A will so strong that when she dedicated it to submitting to a Master, to obeying him, pleasing him, there was nothing she wouldn't take from him, nothing she wouldn't do for him, nothing she wouldn't endure from him, nothing she wouldn't become for him.

In Dungeon 3, she struggled valiantly to pass the tests of patience I set for her and gave me the distinct impression that she was fully prepared to employ her strong will to conquer her impatience. Not just to please me, but because she had come to realize that conquering it would be beneficial for her, as well.

After the third test, when I detailed the third part of my story to her, high up in my tower suite, she listened intently. Only when I eventually revealed to her in the eleventh hour that Pamela and Georgiana were one and the same person did her composure slip, and she erupted in a jealous rage, threatened by Georgiana's clandestine past as a professional submissive.

At the time, I found Miranda's rage, her inability to cope with what was long gone, disproportionate and puzzling. Now, though, I reproach myself for having not tried harder at the time to understand her, to probe her jealousy of Georgiana—because if I had, I would have been primed for her deception, and perhaps more prepared to deal with it, and would now better understand her failure to tell me the truth, her dishonesty in hiding it from me, everything that tarnished my love for her.

The following evening, when she presented herself to me in Dungeon 4, I had already judged that she was ready to take further pain and so I subjected her to a proper caning. Beforehand, I made the decision not to be too easy on her, as I knew that if I were, I wouldn't live up to her expectations and that would undermine her belief in me as a Master. By that time, my own belief in her as a submissive was at its height and my respect, my admiration, and my desire for her increased with every stroke of the cane I administered to her naked ass.

The morning before her very last and final test in Dungeon 5, I was on the verge of canceling it altogether. After all, she had conclusively proved her submission to me in every single way, so why subject her to the most intricate, the most devilish, the most challenging of all the tests I could ever construct for her?

As I'd explained to her, her fifth test would be the harshest, the most difficult, and the most humiliating of which I could conceive, but by now I wasn't at all sure whether it was really necessary to subject her to it at all. At the same time, I knew that if she took the fifth test and endured everything I had in store for her, she would emerge from it prouder, stronger, and more confident that she was a true submissive, the kind of submissive she needed to be on her own terms, and for herself.

Of course I had no inkling of the mortal dread she had of Tamara Hatch. Nor did I realize that Tamara still carried such a large and flaming torch for Georgiana. How could I, when I assumed that as Georgiana had now been dead for six years, Tamara must surely have started to move on?

Back in Dungeon 5, after I put Miranda in the stocks and declared, “She's all yours, Mrs. Hatch,” the shock to Miranda, pinioned naked in the stocks, with her ass protruding and on offer, her arms and head in the stocks so she couldn't turn around, must have been considerable. I wouldn't have been at all surprised if at that moment she had used her safe word and stopped the scene before it began—and I would have completely understood.

Such was her resolve, such was her determination to please me and to prove herself to me, that she didn't use it. The only sign of her distress was the deep red flush that suffused her entire naked body.

Before the test started in earnest, I had pretended to leave the dungeon, so as to increase her sense of being at Tamara's mercy. But although Miranda wasn't aware of it at the time, I remained in the dungeon to monitor the situation when Tamara started to lace into her.

At that point, I wanted to yell at Tamara and demand that she stop, but I didn't because I knew that would have dented Miranda's considerable pride, so I waited as long as I felt she could take it. And take it she did.

Much later that night, once she had recovered from her ordeal at Tamara's hands, just as she had after all the other tests, she sat close to me and listened as I detailed the full horror of my honeymoon night with Georgiana.

Soon afterward, Miranda allowed me to hypnotize her, and I was finally able to coax from her the story of the traumatic abuse she suffered as a small child. I understood then that although the abuse was nonviolent, it had clearly prevented her from fully giving herself to a man during sex because she was so afraid of losing control to him. In contrast (and for reasons so complex that probably only a psychiatrist or a psychoanalyst would ever be able to fully fathom them), her psyche allowed her to relinquish control to a man during BDSM—required it, in fact—but she always made sure to retain the last of her seven veils and not to have a strong and truly fulfilling orgasm.

After she finally confronted the truth about the wrong that was done her, she gave herself up to me wholeheartedly and allowed herself to have a full and complete orgasm at last.

After that, our existence together seemed blessed and our future happiness a foregone conclusion. Following a romantic week together in Palm Beach, which, as I had decided beforehand, was vanilla all the way so as to give her a taste of a relationship without BDSM, we returned to Hartwell Castle to celebrate her birthday.

But later that night, she sleepwalked, only to wake up in front of the closets containing Georgiana's stratospherically expensive Chanel wardrobe—laces, satins, furs—all hanging there.

Impulsively, I swept aside the clothes in one of the closets, planning to show Miranda the bricked-up wall to the secret passage within, only to discover that it had been torn down and that the secret passage leading out of the castle was now wide open.

I didn't want to spoil her pleasure at her birthday, or the romance of the evening, so I did my utmost not to let her see my dismay. I think I succeeded, because she relaxed on the bed with me, reminisced about past birthdays, and then flashed on the birthday surprise her grandfather always arranged for her: a movie he'd secretly made of her throughout the year.

It was then that she informed me her grandfather was Georgiana's astrologer and had previously been a cinematographer. And I made the instantaneous association between his being a cinematographer and the movie Georgiana arranged to have shot clandestinely on our honeymoon night, in order to blackmail me.

A movie of me pretending to strangle her, just as she had begged me to do, a movie filmed from the secret passage by someone who understood lighting and angles and was, in short, a seasoned cinematographer. My mind made a gigantic leap and I turned to Miranda and asked, “Do you have a photograph of your grandfather?”

And she did.

The image that stared up at me momentarily unhinged me, and I blurted out, “When I last saw your grandfather, he was calling himself William Masters,” then wished I could bite my tongue off. How could I have been so thoughtless as to reveal to Miranda that her grandfather clearly had a double life in which he was a genial astrologer but also a cruel dominant—William Masters—who had forced his submissive to work at Le Château, and thus inserted Georgiana into my life?

Wasn't it enough that Miranda had only recently begun to grapple with the abuse to which her depraved grandfather had subjected her when she was only seven years old?

Wasn't it enough that when I hypnotized her and she finally recalled what he did to her, all her illusions about him were shattered in the cruelest, most dreadful way? And now, by revealing his secret life as the dominant William Masters, I'd added even more fuel to the fire.

I reached out to hold Miranda in my arms, to comfort her, to try to explain, when all of a sudden there was an enormous bang, I felt a piercing pain in the back of my neck, all the lights went out, and I lost consciousness.

When I regained it, it was dark once more, and Miranda was gone.

Groggy and disoriented, I dragged myself into my own suite, hoping against hope that she would be there waiting for me.

But she wasn't.

Just as I was about to order an extensive search for her throughout the castle and the grounds, I suffered an eerie sense of déjà vu; Georgiana's disappearance all those years ago, the search, and then the discovery of her body. The hammering inside my head was suddenly so insistent that I blacked out completely.

Mary Ellen was by my bedside when I finally awoke, my head still throbbing, my mouth dry, and my mind numb with shock.

Obviously afraid of the impact the news might have on me, Mary Ellen gently broke it to me in fits and starts that Miranda had fled the castle, leaving no trace behind her. The only explanation I could summon up was that it was all down to me. I had driven her away through my thoughtlessness, my inconsideration—however unintentional—in revealing to her that her grandfather wasn't only her abuser, but was also the cruel dominant who once owned Georgiana.

Clearly, Miranda was unable to cope with what I'd so unthinkingly revealed to her, blamed me for it, and consequently decided to flee the castle and leave me without another word.

“My daughter loves you to distraction,” Clare, her mother, had later whispered to me when Miranda and I visited her in Hawaii. And, at that stage, I believed her.

Now, though, Miranda had disappeared without a trace.

And I didn't know whom or what to believe anymore.

Then the letter arrived, the evil, brilliantly constructed, lying letter, which supposedly came from Miranda and in which she declared that she didn't love me, that she had never loved me, and that she was a fake.

To my shame, when I read the letter, my first reaction was not to suspect that it had been dictated to her and that she wrote every word under duress but to believe it was real, that it came from Miranda, that she meant every single word of it.

Then I saw the signature, “Ciel,” and flashed back to Palm Beach, our last night there, when we sat by the shores of the Atlantic, hand in hand, and listened to “Hymne à L'Amour,” Edith Piaf's anthem to eternal love. I'd turned to Miranda and said, “Our song, now and for always.”

And with that, we made a pact that we'd always love each other, and that we'd be together forever, no matter what.

So when I saw that she had signed the letter “Ciel” (the first words of “Hymne à L'Amour” are
Le ciel bleu
), I knew that it was a clue, that she was signaling to me that she had been forced to write the letter, and that none of the sentiments in it were true.

But before I could discover the identity of Miranda's kidnapper, her text that she was being held a prisoner in the mausoleum came through on my phone, and within a flash I mounted a rescue operation.

And as I boarded the boat to the island, my private army in tow, and from a distance witnessed the sky turn bloodred as the mausoleum went up in flames, for the first time since I was a small child, I looked up at heaven and voiced a prayer: “Dear God, please don't let Miranda be inside the mausoleum. Please keep her safe for me, please let her live.”

My prayer, of course, was answered, when the sniper I stationed in the castle's highest turret fired the crack shots that felled Tamara and saved Miranda's life. Within minutes, Miranda was in my arms, and as I fought to keep back my tears of joy, I held her close and whispered, “You're safe, my darling. It's all over. She's dead and gone forever.”