by Sophia Reed
I believed he'd do it.
That meant I was his. With the contract I'd signed, and Samuels selling me to Cole St. Martin in the first place, all that had led to a place where I was so far out of the loop, the changes had occurred that put two men in positions of power they needed to be removed from.
By agreeing to what Cole proposed, I not only sealed their fate.
But my own.
He left me to my own devices. The cell I was held in was the size of a small house. It held the room he punished me in and a room in which he sometimes fucked other people. Both were soundproofed. I only sometimes saw him coming in a back door I never approached because the alarm sounding would bring the guards I wanted to avoid. He had taken me there once or twice. Our sexual encounters were few. He had other interests with me, and that was fine with me. My own slavery, my unconscionable contract, my unspeakable circumstances, and my most recent decision were enough to keep me functioning at a weird level of sexual excitement mixed with the decision not to be touched by the man who had "bought" me and the man who had auctioned me off to the highest bidder while I was tied naked to a post.
Being with Cole St. Martin, depending on him for anything, was very similar to being with Jesse.
I should have been questioning my very life, the tides that had washed me to this place, but instead I was moving fast, working out, thinking fast, panicking even more than I had been in the days after my arrangement with Cole.
I wanted it over. I wanted to know I no longer had any chance at all of rescinding my decision. That I wouldn't put my own moral comfort ahead of other lives.
And I wanted it never to happen.
My suite of rooms became much too small and confining and Cole must have given the order that I could come and go within reason without being stopped. I began running several times a day, short runs of a mile or two, but pushing myself to run faster than was comfortable. Punishments of a sort. Definite distractions.
When he came for me on the second day, I was neither surprised nor unhappy about it.
He didn't speak. When he came into my bedroom, so much more cavernous and not private than such a word sounds, I didn't have time to sink to my knees before he grabbed me by the wrist and dragged me to the chamber up the hall, the mostly soundproofed room where he took the others.
Not the room where he punished me or played with me.
The bed was huge. A four poster and probably a California king size if not something custom made. The posts were reinforced despite their aesthetic beauty, and sticky where duct tape had been wrapped around them and cut free. They were marked where handcuffs and chains and ropes and leather restraints had all rubbed on the wood while a captive squirmed and cried out under Cole's ministrations.
He wasn't speaking. His eyes were dark, so dark blue they were nearly black. His breathing was rough and he was nearly white, a shocking pallor. In case I thought he felt no moral qualms about what he had sworn to do, here was proof he was, perhaps, even more human than I was in his horror at what he'd set out to do.
He dragged me to the bed and I thought I wouldn't fight him. This felt right, somehow. But when he started to tape my wrists, thick gauntlets of tape and pulled it tight to the headboard posts, throwing me face down and pulling the tape so tight my upper body rose from the bed, I began to thrash, wordless or at least senseless shouting. It was completely automatic, this very human need to protect myself and live.
He swore and lashed out at me but the blow didn't land. Cole didn't strike in anger like that. Everything he did was controlled, no matter how frenzied it looked. The blow went wide and struck the pillows and he launched himself off the bed and returned with the black leather mask I'd seen.
I went wild then, screaming and thrashing, my legs churning the bedclothes, upper body threatening to wrench my shoulders from their sockets. Cole fought above me, grimly determined, and pulled the hood over my face, opening the zippers at the nose but sealing my screaming mouth behind the thick black leather. My eyes were behind padded folds of leather, completely blind, and my ears stopped up until I could only just hear him.
"If you can hear me, nod one time."
There was an eternal heartbeat during which I considered not answering. Because the terror driving me insisted he remove the hood.
Then I slackened just enough to nod one time.
"Can you breathe through your nose?"
Whatever was coming, it was going to be ugly, but he wasn't going to kill me. Had I ever thought he was going to? The fear was primal but it wasn't that he was going to kill me.
Only that I couldn't take whatever he was going to do.
I nodded one time.
He told me what to do for a safe word. I thought of all the people lost in the insanity that had led to this and gritted my teeth and determined I would not use that word.
Cole taped my ankles to the baseboard posts, so hard and tight that my body was mostly suspended above the bed, a stress position of sorts and the most vulnerable I could imagine feeling.
I waited for the cane. Or the cock. I didn't know if he would take me as brutally as any assault or cane me until I was the vile bruised red of the worst and hopefully faked porn movies.
What I never expected was the gentle touch that began at the nape of my neck and continued in soft, fingertip touches, small circles, delicate caresses, from neck to tailbone. The feathery brushes of touch, that gradually grew more intense, dragging pleasure out of me. I began to writhe under him, long before the touch grew more intimate, his fingers curling around to brush under my breasts, to run inside the curve of my hips along the edges of my belly. He reached down under me to touch between my legs, to stroke there as I arched in my bondage, my head moving, my thoughts all inward, all safe behind the anonymous mask, my expressions hidden, my responses secret.
I felt him swing one leg over my hips, straddling me but keeping his weight from my nearly floating body. It had to take muscle control to not put weight on me that way and I experienced a moment of almost panic at the laugh that had no space to bubble out: His almost dull adherence to yoga no doubt allowed him this control.
Then he slid into me, filling me the way he did, his size and rock hardness always just this side of too much. He moved slow, stroking in and out of me until a rolling, unstoppable orgasm swept through me, leaving my muscles shaking and my skin sweating inside the hood.
Only then, after he'd felt my pleasure pulsing through and around his length did he begin anything close to what I had anticipated. It began nearly as slowly but built, the intensity insane, the pain beginning to grow with it because he was fucking me so hard my body jounced and fought on its own against the tape holding me, the strain on my joints, the force with which he plunged into me. He felt huge and so hard if I hadn't known he'd never come, never pulled out, I'd have thought he was using some implement, some monstrous dildo, something too big.
But it was him, and he pounded into me, speed and power and no finesse, pulling and pounding me against my bonds, thrusting into me as hard as he could, over and over and over until the pain and need and fury and want rose up in me and I screamed into the hood, wordless and full of emotions I had no words for anyway.
I came so hard I screamed, feeling the sound rip out of my throat, and distantly, past the hood, I heard Cole's answering roar.
It might have been half an hour or half a day later that he came back to cut the tape loose and tell me to count to two hundred before removing the hood.
Even then I had no doubt I hadn't been alone for even a second in the room. Not with that hood over my head. Not while taped to a bed, defenseless. Not without someone who could hear my labored breath and make sure the next breath came.
And the next breath, and the next breath, and the next breath.
But when I finally stopped trembling enough to unzip the mask and peel my hair from the zipper and the hood from my head, I was alone in the room.
21
Annie
; I remained alone. He was busy. He was working the leads from the Rio trip. He was doing whatever other things the pharmaceuticals company required of its CEO. He was very hands on. It was his company. He'd built it up. Keeping it what it was required the interest of the owner.
He told me he'd be gone on and off for most of January. He told me he was pleased with my progress. I waited for him to tell me I'd be returned to oral doses of the cure while he was gone. When he didn't, my stomach twisted with nerves. Memories of him saying something some time ago about a minder came back to me. I almost asked half a dozen times but the look on his face when I looked up at him each time stopped me.
I'd been coasting on the quiet. In the morning at dawn, despite the cold, I'd wake and dress and run. I was averaging a seven mile run every day now and usually finishing within an hour. I'd come back and do weights, skip yoga and meditation and luxuriate in a shower that never ran out of hot water.
If he wasn't there to force me into yoga or meditation, I wasn't going to do it. At breakfast he would order me across his lap, my sweatpants and panties shoved down to my knees. It never became less humiliating. There were guards in the room and they changed from time to time, new men watching and pretending not to in some cases, and blatantly staring in others. He'd give me a hard enough spanking to make sitting on the hard wood chairs he had at the table an uncomfortable trial, but before I got there, he'd give me my medicine, making certain to push each into me with exquisite slowness, tucking them safe far up inside me before he pulled my thong back up to snug it into place.
I'd slide from his lap and kneel at his feet, thanking him for taking care of me, and eventually he'd allow me to get up, pull my sweatpants back up and sit down to my breakfast. More often than not, that was now a small slice of fish, accompanied by oatmeal or whole wheat toast, eggs, bacon and juice, and coffee.
I think even Cole St. Martin wasn't arrogant enough to think that he could take me off coffee without suddenly finding he was treating a rabid wolverine.
My first clue that he had gone on one of the trips was the nurse who had done the strip search months ago walked into the room, waking me before even my dawn run alarm went off.
"Mr. St. Martin is out of town on business," she said, apparently unaware there was no town that we were in. "You are in my charge until he returns. You will call me Miss, and respond to my commands with Yes, Miss. I will be reporting everything back to Mr. St. Martin when he returns, but I have the total authority to punish you should you require it. Get up."
I stared at her. After what she'd done to me my first morning back in the cell, I had determined that this woman was on the unofficial list I was keeping in my head. The one where I was determined to get even with the people who had most humiliated me.
I had choices. I could beat the hell out of this woman because she had come in without guards, supremely overconfident that I'm Mr. St. Martin's proxy was enough to keep me in line.
Or I could study her and figure out who she was. Because I wouldn't always be Cole's captive.
I got up. One look around the room was enough to prove we were alone together. I got up and faced her and waited.
"Raise the back of the t-shirt, turn around and kneel over the bed."
I had ordered the death of two men. I had no guilt over the act, because even if I was wrong, which I didn't believe, they were bringing misery to the world. They were not just the bearers of bad news and bad events. They were active evil in the world.
I didn't believe in evil with a capital E, the kind that possesses or exists in free floating form, from some other dimension or part of the Earth.
But I absolutely believed in evil on the part of humans.
So there was no guilt from ordering the death of the two gangbangers that Cole had put out the contract on. There was no guilt over how I'd left things with my family or with Mark. If Mark chose to wait for me this time, that was on him. I loved him but I wouldn't ask him to wait for a year and a day on the off chance he would have time with me somewhere along the line.
Cole St. Martin, sadist and philanthropist and architect of my addiction-free new life, owned me. He’d asked if I wanted him to have those men killed. I said yes. Until the contract between him and me ran out, I would –
Fight him tooth and nail for every thing he did to me and every time he beat me for his pleasure or humiliated me or punished me. I'd fight his morning routine and I'd probably eventually look for a way out again.
But until I couldn't bear it, I'd remain in place. I'd take my marching orders from him with a modicum of grace and a soupçon of snark.
But not this bitch. This woman who had run her fingers into my body and opened me up without explanation and humiliated me before the guards that very first morning.
Not a chance.
"Fuck you," I said.
I anticipated the guards at that moment. I thought she'd call for help and I'd be overpowered and Cole's morning routine would go through along with whatever correction she was allowed to perpetrate.
When she simply made a note on her phone and turned and walked out of the room, I anticipated more childishly punitive retaliatory measures. No breakfast. No coffee. No workouts.
But the only thing that happened was she turned and walked away.
Why was it that made me even more nervous?
22
Cole
I returned home from meetings with investors and interested parties. The new directions St. Martin Pharma had determined to go were in the process of being set up. I'd been across the country but not out of it. My head of security would have my head if I tried something that stupid.
Nina met me before Annie ever knew I was back. She's a professional dominatrix who actually loves her work. A true sadist though with masochistic tendencies.
"She refused to let me touch her," she said, sitting down across from me in my office in the main compound. Outside January rain was slashing down onto the desert floor. January and February Southern Nevada forgets that it's a desert.
I nodded at her to continue. She didn't need to know I'd anticipated Annie's refusal to be taken in hand by Nina especially in her nurse persona. More than once since she became mine she'd brought up the strip search when angry about something.
Annie wasn't the sort to forgive and forget.
Nina was shifting in her chair. Her job over, she wore a short tight miniskirt of the Basic Instinct variety.
My eyes didn't stray. That was part of the game. I drew out the interview, getting all the details from her about Annie's misdeeds and letting her explain a few of the punishments she'd like to have inflicted if I hadn't left her only the right to threaten, not the right to touch.
Nina's restlessness became more pronounced the slower I went, asking questions and taking opinions. In truth I had no intention of punishing Annie. I'd hoped she'd fight. After what had happened with the hit being put out rather than me opening the door and saying, "By all means, go back to Seattle and clean things up, then hurry right back here!" she'd become quiet.
I wanted to know that the fighter was still in there.
And it didn't hurt Nina any to be refused.
Now I was back, she wanted to be paid. When I'd kept her waiting for more than forty-five minutes, I gave in and brought out her payment – in twenties and smaller denomination bills, more than five thousand dollars for the week.
And then I got down to the business of paying her.
Nina, stretched out on an iced metal medical exam table, wrists and ankles secured. Nina, receiving the enemas she'd like to have given Annie, filling her high, hot and a helluva lot as the expression went.
Nina, stretched out, a butt plug in place, her mouth stopped with a ball gag because it's the largest plug she's ever had and covered with casein oil.
Nina, slashes across her ass from a handful of switches.
Nina, face up, being given a cropping on her exposed pussy.
Nina, rethinking everything she wanted to do to
my slave. The secret to most masochists is that in the middle of it all? It still hurts.
Nina wasn't an exhibitionist. She hated being seen naked almost as much as Annie did.
I threw her clothes out the door after her, and asked the guards to help her pick them up.
I figured it would take her about an hour to drive back to her house in Henderson.
An hour and a half later, I received her thank you text.
23
Cole
Valentine's Day was coming up fast. Annie asked for permission to call Mark that day, prettily phrased and kneeling with her gaze down, her hands laced behind her back. I considered making her work for it, but the work in the lab was going well and I had other things on my mind. I allowed her the phone call, gave her a generous hour, and was interested in the somewhat sterile phone call and the fact that it ended before the hour was up.
She didn't seem upset by this. Maybe such communications between them were normal. Or maybe he was on shift at the hospital. Apparently Annie's fiancé was as tied to his job as she was to hers.
Among the things on my mind was the annual Valentine's Day party a handful of us threw in the valley. Generally held at the home of Dr. Andrew and his wife Cecile, two of the richest in the valley. Their master/slave relationship was more than a decade old and Cecile was lovely, in her late twenties now. He'd bought her the day she turned eighteen, a runaway on the street in danger of overdosing or being strangled by some john who wanted more than a hand job in the backseat. Dr. Andrew, on the other hand, was a huge, rangy man with a homely face, and fifty if he was a year. I'd never had a girl with him, never heard all the details of what he liked to do, but there were rumors.
The other three couples were million- and billionaires, a club of us, and our slaves or significant others. All male Masters. All female slaves. Very traditional. There were two things I was uncomfortable about this year. I had no problem with Annie being resistant. Most slaves are at the beginning and in the terms of such relationships, we were still very new. She hadn't come to this from the lifestyle, as Claude V's wife, Chloe had.