by Sophia Reed
I returned to the party, hovering in the doorway, still dressed in his jacket. I did not kill Kie. I stood and made ready to continue the party. Insane as the situation was, I at least expected that Chloe and Claude would act the same if Chloe were hurt, and likely Andrew and Cecile.
I figured Kie would claw out the eyes of anyone trying to hurt or help her and I didn't give a fuck what Vincent would do.
If he ever tried to collect me for that 5.5 million auction payment, I would kill him.
But there was another problem I hadn't foreseen. Everybody brought their own security to these events apparently. There were hired thugs for each couple and it required only for them to be wearing the livery of their house for the entire situation to be straight out of some D&D game. Or an epic fantasy novel, the kind that took Mark six months to read because he was always working and always tired.
Among the security for House St. Martin was the guard who had watched and laughed at my strip search and at me being returned from trying to run and at other humiliations and degradations. In the heat of the moment, or the horrible burning heat and pain of the pepper, I hadn't paid any attention to him. In truth, after all this time, I had no idea what the asshole's name was. I'd complained about him but Cole treated him like another facet of my slave status, which he was. There was nothing exciting about being punished or humiliated around the jackoff. Just – it was another facet.
I'd already sworn I'd kill him. I had no idea if I someday would. Sometimes the idea of being freed at the end of the year and a day contract seemed like a fantasy. Other times it was something to live for. Most of the time a year was just so far away I couldn't even imagine it, or who I would be by the time it rolled around. In a way, I'd never stopped being deep cover.
Killing the security thug would likely fade into insignificance the minute I was free. That seemed likely. I figured within a week of leaving Cole, the desert and the compound behind, the whole thing would feel like a nightmare, one long fever dream.
But Cole had noticed the security guy. He'd seen him react when Kie jammed the pepper inside me. He hadn't stepped forward to help.
He had laughed. To himself. But he had laughed.
"Before we go any farther," Cole said, eyeing the others. Vincent wasn't going to argue with him about much of anything (maybe that killing Kie thing) and the others were still a little shocked I think. Amazing that a room full of sadists could be shocked out of their unnatural glee. Go Kie?
Not even as a joke could I make myself think that.
Next second I was properly distracted because Cole had turned on his heel and barked an order at someone named Jason. Confused, I turned to see where he was looking and got the first inkling of trouble.
He was shouting at the guard.
I wanted to protest but in a way I'd already disrupted the night's proceedings. Not that I valued their fun and games, but the people in the room did and I didn't want to draw any more attention to myself. Ever. Even to go and smack Kie in her hateful face.
Jason instantly went into bristling alert as if he was being called to protect one of us or something.
One of them. I was definitely not part of an us.
When he understood he was being called, the man looked mutinous. He crossed the floor and stood before Cole, though he looked ready to point out he was hired muscle and not part of this Sunday Night Swingers Club (or whatever he thought of it as).
He didn't. In the next instant I had the pleasure of seeing him blanch with dread as Cole said in a deadly voice, "I saw what you did. And I saw what you didn't do. Take your shirt off."
Jason, big and blocky like a chunk of granite carved into a man, the gray kind of stone that doesn't sparkle but is enormously strong, shook his head. "I'm not a part of all this," he said.
He was huge, but Cole was taller and Cole was far, far angrier.
"I didn't ask if you thought you were a part of this group. Clearly you are not. Everyone here has far more money than you will ever see in your lifetime."
Jason swallowed what looked like fury and looked over Cole's head at the opposite wall.
Cole dropped his voice to a menacing whisper. "You want to take off your shirt now because your reaction to what happened was unacceptable. Because you protect the people in this house before you protect the people from outside who have brought their own security. When something happens to someone in this house who belongs in this house, you wade into it before you ask whether or not it's your business."
Jason looked sullen. "It's not my business." He gave Cole an unbelievably stupid glare.
Cole said in an ever quieter and more deadly voice, "You're absolutely right about that yet you chose to express an opinion on it and come down on the wrong side. Take your shirt off or I'll have them strip it off." He gestured to the other security guys.
They were pressing in close around the rapidly gathering problem.
I longed to say, Cole, leave it, it's not worth it, let's – what? Go home and have tea? Call it a night and throw out our guests and go home and go to bed together?
Where did I fit? I was being defended by Cole for being laughed at in a moment of extreme pain and panic when Cole himself had allowed that moment to occur and had allowed Jason to exist even after my protests.
It should have been too little too late. But I was looking forward to seeing what Cole was going to do. For a minute it looked like Jason would win. He was big enough to refuse to remove his shirt and to simply leave.
But he wasn't big enough when, responding on their own or to some signal I didn't see, the other, more serious but blank and unfriendly guard appeared at Jason's elbow, accompanied by all the muscle in the room.
Jason looked at each of them with a sick sense of panic.
In the end he opted to take off his own shirt rather than be stripped of it by the other goons. His upper body was impressive, if colorless, with an eight-pack and slabs of pectoral muscles, heaping shoulder caps, bulging bi's and tri's.
He walked to the St. Andrews cross of his own volition and held his hands up to have them buckled into the restraints there.
"Pick a number between 20 and 40," Cole told me.
Oh, fuck, no, don't make me more a part of this. But he had and there seemed to be zero way to win. So I chose 30 as being halfway between – he was definitely going to get 20 and while there was no point in assigning him 40, there was also no reward for requiring only 20.
I stood back and watched as the single-tail whip struck.
He made it to twenty-two before he started to scream.
I'm aware there are different ways to whip someone. There are tutorials online, there are classes in places like the dungeons in San Francisco where I went when I was searching for a way back to Cole. Whipping can be soft and sensual, even with a bull whip, if the person doing the beating knows what they're doing. Or it can flay flesh from bone. I have no doubt but that it's possible to kill with it.
Cole handled the whip like a true sociopath. He was emotionless, cold and directed, and I doubted very much that he'd have whipped Jason himself if he hadn't been. His intention was to beat, to punish and to humiliate. Not to kill.
But blood started up after number twenty-five, and twenty-six through thirty all left cuts behind. Apparently anticipated, because Cole threw the whip into a bucket of disinfectant the instant he finished.
Jason collapsed with the last blow, his legs going boneless. He hung from his wrists, his back bleeding freely, and I wasn't certain he was completely conscious. The other house guard, the one who had never laughed at me but only watched, sometimes interested and sometimes, I thought, disgusted, stepped forward along with the hired muscle.
"Not yet," Cole snapped at them. "You can take him in ten minutes."
I thought the other guards were going to object. Probably it was their job to stop things like this, not stand by idly. But they stood down, hands behind their backs, eyes straight ahead. Cole looked over at me, his face impassive but h
is eyes asked a question I answered with a nod.
I was all right. The milk had done what it was meant to do. All that was left was the nauseating scent of pepper, and I thought that was probably imagination as much as anything else.
Kie huddled across the room. It wasn't an elegant kneel now, but a bundle of punished, hurting girl. I couldn't summon up any sympathy. I didn't know her story. Maybe she'd been betrayed and bought. Maybe she was underage or maybe she had been. I couldn't tell how old she was by looking at her.
Being a police officer I'm supposed to be just a little more – moral? -han other people. I'm supposed to have the ability to see that everyone is treated to justice, if nothing else.
Fuck that. I wanted to go over and kick her where she held her arms around herself in pain. The only thing stopping me was that I'd be punished if I did.
I'd had enough for now.
At ten minutes Cole released Jason to his comrades. I was watching as they cut him down. There was an ambulance waiting outside, and I wondered if I'd ever have to see him again and if I didn't, whether I would search for him when released from my contract. Then I thought that Jason, with his temper and his obvious delight at the pain of others, very likely was under contract himself. Because how many people out there would take a job like this? They had to at least tolerate, if not enjoy, the sort of sadistic fun and games that went on under St. Martin's roof. They had to be trustworthy, someone who would remain loyal and not report Cole or sell out for money or turn him over to the police. Not that the police could do anything right away.
Or maybe at all. Strangely, there'd been no classes I'd ever taken that taught what to do if consenting adults appeared to be consenting to something so weird as being whipped for sexual pleasure. Or pain.
The attendants didn't come in. I heard the rattle of the stretcher as they came to the door, but the door wasn't opened to them. Instead, Jason was taken down and dragged across the room. His head wasn't lolling, though. His eyes were bright and aware. He was clearly in extreme pain and as they passed me, his eyes locked on mine.
He had done nothing to help me since I'd been brought to the compound the first time. I had no reason to believe he ever would have. Jason clearly had a mix of masochist and sadist, and he'd enjoyed seeing me stripped naked, beaten, examined, strip searched and, for all I knew, he'd seen Cole the few times he fucked me.
But where he'd been an asshole, unrelentingly so, he was now a downright enemy.
The attendants took him from the other guards. They were stony-faced, not giving away a single emotion. They strapped Jason face down on the stretcher and gingerly laid a sheet over his back, probably to keep the wounds as sterile as possible.
I had an idea they would report a call had come in and the man had been found somewhere outside or in some abandoned structure, out of his mind and unable to communicate who had done this to him.
That Jason wouldn't talk I had no doubt.
That the EMTs were paid off was also a given.
Money makes the world go round.
When the ambulance moved off, lights reflecting through the still weirdly formal living room, the guests were already talking again. Chloe and Cecile were having some kind of conversation, their eyes flicking to me from time to time. I didn't want to see pity there, but I was surprised that, not only did they seem to have compassion, they also had a kind of respect. For what, I couldn't guess. Though I'd enjoyed my conversations with them, at this point I was pretty much consigning them to the lunatic category.
Nobody should respect me for anything I'd done tonight.
Cole came over to where I was standing, arms still wrapped around my own shoulders, his coat hanging on me enough to keep me decent.
"You are completely excused from the rest of the evening," he said to me, tilting my chin up so I looked him in the eye. "What happened to you was inexcusable, and your response was justified and acceptable."
I thought my response had been to scream and not much else, but if that was acceptable, well, fuck. Good thing. There wasn't anything else I could have done.
But I found myself saying, "Yes, sir." And making no move to leave.
"You may return to your room," he said. "I'll have someone escort you. If you choose to stay, it will be as if none of that happened. You'll be in the same place you were earlier tonight."
I expected to see a challenge in his eyes. Cole liked humiliating me, liked to hurt me and see what I'd do, and I thought he wasn't finished with his own games tonight. There was still Vincent to think about as well.
I was being given the option of keeping his clothing on my body and sitting out the rest of this.
There was a problem with that, though. I'd never been one to sit out. In Taekwon-Do I fought even when I was nauseated from heat and fatigue, I tried never to tap out. In weight lifting I went to failure and tried for one more rep.
This, this insanity I'd found myself in for no reason other than wanting a clean slate and a fresh start in my career, this wasn't anything I needed to prove anything to myself about.
Except? There was. Because when I'd watched Jason being beaten, I'd felt a twisting joy at the sight. And when he started to scream, I'd felt real regret that I hadn't chosen 40 rather than 30. I had been a part of what was going on, above and beyond what had been done to me. I felt a sick and wholly unhealthy need to make amends for that.
Not to Kie. If I had the chance, I'd hurt her.
Not to Jason, really. If I ran into him on the outside, I thought I'd still kill him if I could.
To me. I needed to know I hadn't run from what everyone else had to go through.
Stupid. Sick.
True.
"I'll stay, sir. If that's all right."
His eyes searched mine. There was no approval or disapproval. He simply nodded once. "Give me my coat," he said.
34
Cole
Her idea to stay was a bad one. I could easily have ordered her to go back to her suite. I could have had any of the guards or guests escort her there. By staying, she even put herself at risk of Vincent, though I thought he'd be stupid to try and lay a hand on her tonight, eventually he would collect on what he'd paid for, his weeks with her.
If she thought that I would be proud of her for this act, she was wrong. It was close to defiance. When someone offers you something and that someone is a sadist who owns your ass, take it and say Thank you, sir. Anything else is stupid.
There was something in her eyes though, when she said she would stay. Probably it was the same stupid thing that rose every time she said she was ready to go back to her "real life" of being an undercover narcotics agent working daily around the very thing she'd nearly lost her life and possibly her career to. That didn't make her healthy. It made her masochistic in the worst sense of the word.
And if she thought whatever she endured between now and the party's end would save her from the count we were at – truly, I didn't remember the number, and would probably accept whatever she told me – she was wrong there, too. She'd be punished and soundly.
But I was grateful when she dropped the coat and went to kneel by Chloe talking quietly with Claude, both of them with their eyes on Annie. Before she could even drop to her knees, they were there before her, hands out, inviting her. Commanding, but Claude is strange and sweet and kinky but not hurtful. If he spanked her, that might be the whole of it and he might not even do that. She didn't know that she'd just stumbled into the next best thing to doing what I said and going into her room and staying there.
I watched them walk away together and then I went to get Cecile, raising my brows for Andrew's complicit smile. He was stroking his erection, watching Kie as she knelt, tears still falling on the hardwood under her. He simply nodded when I took Cecile by the hand and led her across the room.
Watching Andrew, watching Kie and wishing there were more I could do to her, I arranged Cecile over my lap. No one had undressed her, so I pulled the skirt of her dress up over her ba
ck and sat with her stretched there, rubbing her ass in ever harder circles but not yet doing anything more.
Vincent had gone off into the library, sulking perhaps, or planning revenge, or simply looking for somewhere to fume in private that his little game had ended so poorly. That he'd been part of it I didn't really doubt.
I am not good at appeasing people. Vincent would have no interest in having his 5.5 million dollars returned. It wasn't the money he missed. He was still angry that he hadn't been allowed to have Annie.
On my lap, Cecile gave a low moan. Well, then. I should rejoin my own party. I raised my hand to head level and brought it sweeping down, pounding down, the connection hard and flat and loud. Cecile's cheeks wobbled and instantly began to redden. I considered what I'd done, pinching hard along the junction of her thighs and ass and making her moan again. Then I rained down three or four dozen swats on her ass, hard, stinging blows that made her cry out and then bite her lip, trying to be silent.
"Do you want more?" I asked.
"Yes, sir." She was breathless already, squirming. I ran my fingers between her legs and they came away soaked. Little slut. I repeated the beating on her red ass, making her cry out several times, then pushed her onto her knees and shredded the top of her dress, using both hands to slap her breasts back and forth until she was both crying out and actually crying. Then I unzipped my pants and stood, thrusting my cock into her mouth and fucking it as hard as she sucked. Her head bobbed back and forth and tears ran down her cheeks from the exertion and the speed and the lack of air, but she never stopped and when her hands came round to hold my cock, to fondle my balls, I let her, and afterwards rewarded her with another session on both her breasts and her ass.
I stood up and redressed and walked away, looking for Chloe and Claude and Annie, watching through the unclosed door as both of them alternately fucked her and hurt her.