by Sophia Reed
I had loved people and I had lost them. Causing pain filled the void because I enjoyed it. It made me hard and it made me happy.
It kept me from getting hurt.
Annie was still on her knees when I went back into her cell.
If Annie ran, it would hurt me. I didn't want to care about her. I wanted it even less with the new rage coiling through me.
"Get up."
She stood instantly, not looking at my face.
"Take your clothes off."
She complied instantly, folding them and putting them on the floor beside her.
"Walk ahead of me."
Her feet made slapping sounds on the tile. Her ass moved before me, her hips swaying.
"Stop."
She stopped. There was a tremor working its way through her, anticipation or fear, or both.
"Hands behind your head, fingers laced. Present."
Which meant she stuck out her chest, her ass, spread her feet, gazed at a spot in the distance. She did everything I ordered. Just – there was some protest there. Something sensed rather than seen.
"I'm going to punish you."
"Yes, sir."
That just angered me. I was wearing a long sleeved button-up and I rolled the sleeves to my elbows as I paced. "Do you know why I'm going to punish you?"
I looked up at the end of the question and saw her face contort briefly with what looked like annoyance.
"Because I wanted to keep you safe."
The answer made the anger rage. That I understood. I let her down when Vincent took her. It was my job to keep her safe. Not hers to keep me anything.
"That's not your job!"
She flared then, met my eyes. "It is exactly my job. Do you think I've forgotten I'm a cop?"
"You're not a cop here." I held her gaze.
"Yes, I am."
Furious, scared for her, scared for her because of what she'd done with Kie, and because of how off I felt, I went across the room and chose the biggest, thickest crop, a combination of biting, fiery sting and hard thud. I saw Annie shudder.
"You have no right to try and keep me safe."
No answer.
I closed my eyes for an instant, opened them and smacked the crop against the palm of my hand. "Do you submit to your punishment?"
No answer.
"Annie. Do you submit?"
No answer. She didn't break position. She just didn't answer.
I raised the crop. I stood in front of her. The blow would go across her beautiful pink tipped breasts. Or across her flat belly. Or across her shaved mons.
"Submit."
Silence. She wasn't looking at me.
"Annie."
She breathed in.
I had let the crop dangle. Now I pulled it up again and brought it slashing down toward her breasts.
She caught it before it could make contact. Caught it in one fist, held it still.
Met my eyes.
Had I said I wanted her to fight back? How much I loved breaking her when I had to break past this Annie.
Only this Annie wasn't going to break.
23
Cole
Even after everything that happened with Emily, I'd had normal relationships. Boyfriend and girlfriend. Going out to dinner. Talking in the sunshine. Looking up at the night stars.
Some of the girlfriends were with me because they wanted to be with me. We enjoyed each other's company, fell in love or didn't, climbed rocks or read books in bed.
Others expected a billionaire would start every date with a trinket of some sort, maybe diamond earrings, and others were appalled when I suggested charting a plane to fly across the country to catch The Eagles in concert or something like that. Of those who were appalled, some were upset because they objected to flying because of global warming. I heartily applauded that kind of thinking even if it was never the first thing on my mind.
Of the girlfriends who expected diamonds on a regular date, a couple of them were heartily applauded on their bottoms. While I'd never force someone who wasn't mine bought and sold, wasn't mine contractually, or wasn't kidding herself that she "Didn't like that kind of thing", I would certainly teach a lesson to a brat.
So maybe not all my "normal" was normal.
Some of those girlfriends from the so-called normal world had deviant proclivities and some found oral sex abominable.
What set off a contractual relationship clearly in my mind was not having to take feelings into account. It was up to me if I wanted to take a woman to dinner or turn her over my knee. If I wanted to give her a back rub or beat her ass. If I wanted to shout, I could. Berate, belittle, beat. It was about control as much as it was about sex, because watching a woman's ass turn bright, cherry red made me harder than any other kind of porn. Watching her walk across a room toward me, knowing I would be punishing her when she reached me. Watching a woman kneel at my feet. Forcing her to strip.
The other component was that once I owned her, once I'd bought her or she'd signed a contract, disobedience made me angry in proportion to what it was.
Play disobedience upped the stakes. It meant she wanted whatever she was going to get.
Actual disobedience that was rooted in fear – lagging steps, grudging submission – was punished because it had to be, but in a way that said; Look, you can get through this.
Whether or not she'd get through the next session was up in the air.
Annie's disobedience was unacceptable. But truth was, although in our contractual agreement I could shout if I wanted to, could berate, belittle and beat, none of that was going to do any good with Annie. She was impervious to it.
Right now she was mad. Almost as mad as I was.
"Sit down," I said and she glared at me, pacing fast across the pain room. She'd already tried both exits, the one leading back to her room and the one leading outside, despite being naked. I'd had the foresight to lock them. The doors were keyed electronically, could be controlled by the guards and could be overridden by remotes. In case anyone got into a room without a key or a remote and the guards locked the room down and didn't unlock it – with the break-ins and attacks lately, this didn't seem far-fetched – there was an override switch in the corner of the room under one of the coat racks now doing service as a handy place to hang whips out of the way when using some other implement.
It's hard to look big and Dom-ly when tripping over one's own weapons of pain.
" I don't want to sit down," Annie snarled. She looked at me, paused in her furious pacing and looked down at the crop in her hands. With a look of fury, she lobbed it across the room where it fell harmlessly and lay on the hard, shiny tile floor.
I crossed the floor in three steps and caught her by the shoulders, shouting into her face. "See, this is where you don't quite get what you signed. I don't care if you don't want to sit down. I didn't ask if you wanted to. I told you to do it. Do it."
Surprisingly, she did. Instead of kneeling, she sat on the bed, next to where I had been sitting. When I looked at her incredulously, she moved around, pulled the top blanket off the bed, and wrapped it around herself.
"Are you finished?" I asked. "Can I get you anything? A glass of ice water? A tea and croissant?"
I had never been this angry at her and for half a second, maybe a shorter amount of time, whatever that would be, I couldn't remember why I was punishing her.
The next breath I remembered. That we'd signed the contract and then she'd done one thing after another to show she thought nothing of having done so.
"Look..." she said.
I interrupted. "No, you look. You signed a contract. I don't care if you thought you could just honor the parts that pleased you. I know you're a police officer. I know you're bright. But I didn't want you at that meeting. I didn't want your input at that meeting. And you had no business at all getting mad and walking away from it."
Her expression was as mutinous as a sixteen year old's. It was almost laughable except I didn't feel like laughin
g.
"Kie is my business. Did you forget what she did to me?" She was standing again, as if she just couldn't do what she was told.
What I wanted to do was knock her feet out from under her, cuff her with flexicuffs, gag her, drop her onto the bed and then make her listen.
What I did was nod. Quietly. "Yes, Kie hurt you. No, extracting revenge is not your business."
"What the fuck," she said wonderingly and I stored that one away for later.
"What the fuck, as you so eloquently put it, is that punishing Kie is my business."
"You're setting up a relationship for her that she'll love!"
The only thing that kept me from backhanding her for that was under the protest were tears. They were cascading down her face, dripping off her chin into the weave of the blanket.
I studied her, her wet chin in my hand, turning her face to look at her. The reasons she'd given me and the surface reasons I'd extrapolated were that she was a cop, she was an undercover narc, she knew about dangerous people and she was worried.
But under that?
"You don't think I'm doing enough to get your honor back," I said. It was a question.
Her eyes went big and round, as if of all the other things she'd already done, that one she couldn't dare to.
"And you don't think I'm doing enough to protect myself." That one came out a second later, out of nowhere, just knowledge blooming in my brain with a sense of wonder. My eyes searched hers and I said, "You care what happens to me?"
Annie made a face, as if she was trying very hard not to say, Well, duh or even Well, duh, Sir and she reached out, very gingerly because it was without permission, and touched the side of my neck. When her fingers stung there against the flesh, I realized that Kie had actually cut me, sliced into the vulnerable skin when she'd stood behind me with the knife in her hand.
Annie's eyes searched mine. "Of course..." she started and stopped and tried again. But there was a pause just long enough that she changed what she was going to say. Maybe it would have been; of course I care about you.
Did I want it to be that?
But what she said instead was, "You saved my life, Sir. I care about what happens and I would obviously do the same and save yours."
The end of that sentence hung so heavily in the air and so loudly between us I said it; "If only I'd use some common sense and let you do so?"
"With all due respect, sir..." she started.
I snorted.
"...You don't make it easy," she finished.
24
Cole
We talked about why she'd done what she'd done. And about the fact that she didn't have the right to do it.
We talked about what the contract meant, that I took it seriously and that she had signed it and needed to. That was a threat and I saw her eyes glaze over as she refused to consider it as that. She simply pushed it away.
I didn't know what Annie thought about her addiction. Did she understand she was clean now and that though she'd always be at risk of backsliding – because she'd been an addict, because she had the need and would again to hide from the world – barring any stressors like she'd gone through a year ago, I didn't think her first choice would be to use.
I was the one who had been in charge of getting her off fentanyl. Most likely she would be waiting for me to tell her when it was safe for her to go back into the world.
Did she want that? She already felt strong enough to make her own decisions despite knowing my views on that while she was in recovery. Did she want to stay? She'd come back of her own free will and signed the contract.
Which she wasn't adhering to. It kept coming back to that.
Because it wasn't a game for me. And because she'd put me in a place where now she was my conquest. Because I had her here and didn't have her.
I couldn't just walk away and leave her in the punishment room. Not without punishment after having defied me during punishment. That almost made me laugh. She'd be a challenge to any Dom who took her on.
So when the talk ran down and we'd covered every point, I stood and looked down at her. "You can choose to comply with what I require of you now, or you can wait here – because you have no way out – until I send for Jason and another of the guards. They'll physically force you to comply and watch as your punishments are carried out."
A fast burn ran across her face. It wasn't just anger, though. There was at least a little remorse and a lot of fear. To answer the question of the prostitute who’d asked in essence, how BDSM stays fresh when mostly doing things the other person hates - that’s what exposure therapy is all about, it stays fresh. Offered a choice to not be stripped and punished in front of Jason, she was going to submit.
"Now, Annie." My voice was harsh. Not play-acting. The anger was still burning coupled with the need to put her in the place she'd accepted.
She released the blanket, letting it slip off her shoulders, and stood, about to kneel.
"Don't bother." I took her wrist and forced her over to the St. Andrew’s cross. She didn't fight me and she didn't assist. Like a ragdoll, she allowed me to strap her wrists and ankles in place. Her backside was bruised despite the arnica and aloe, so I faced her outward. A small grimace crossed her face at that. Annie hated all breast play. She specifically hated having them punished.
Good.
I fetched the crop from where she'd thrown it, forced her to kiss it, then commanded her to request her punishment.
Fifty blows, the crop snapping down on her most vulnerable bits until her screams became one long wail. Not of pain – I could have hurt her so much more effectively; this was mere foreplay for a masochist and submissive – but frustration, confusion, longing, remorse and hatred for the things she wanted.
And couldn't face in herself.
When I finished I ordered her to kiss the handle, then forced that up inside her, making her meet my eyes as I did so. What I saw there wasn't hatred. I'd have released her if it had been, then and there. I'd have had her flown to Vegas in the helicopter and admitted into the hospital before being taken home to Seattle where she would both find the money she needed to live on during the time she got her degree and her college paid for, and could make up her own mind what she wanted to do about her private life.
I didn't see hatred. I saw all the confusion that had gone into her crying.
"Keep hold of that," I said, tapping the crop hanging obscenely from between her legs. "I expect to find it there when I come back or we start over."
I turned my back and walked away before she could answer.
I couldn't leave her on the cross without someone checking on her. Because she'd done what I said, I wouldn't saddle her with Jason or the others.
Instead I kept the door between her cell and the pain room open. I spent the afternoon working in my office, a timer bringing me out of whatever I was doing to check on her every ten minutes.
By the end of the afternoon, Hennings had agreed – happily, cheerfully, and with a sizeable donation to the anti-trafficking fund – to take Kie.
And as my anger continued to boil uncontained, by the end of the same afternoon, Claude and Chloe had agreed to take Annie.
Just for now.
One by one, I was placing all my ferals.
25
Annie
The first time I met Claude and Chloe was at one of St. Martin's dinner parties, though now I couldn't say which one. While I'd been with him, enduring morning cleansings and afternoon beatings, running in the desert and getting past my addiction, there had been multiple get togethers, some of which he insisted I attend, and others which I was excluded from, allowed some treat in my cell, like a teenager bribed with staying in her room with extra online and her own pizza.
The first of the events had been the group of billionaires with more money than sense who raised funds for fighting human trafficking by fucking and beating each other's wives and girlfriends. During that one, at the auction Vincent Geddes had bid $5.5 million f
or me and won. But Cole St. Martin wouldn't let him take me because I was too new and Vincent too crazy.
That had ended well.
The second one that stood out in memory was the one in which Kie assaulted me with a broken open jalapeno pepper, leading to everything else that Vincent "winning" me hadn't already been leading to.
During those and other dinners I met Claude and Chloe. She was ethereal and blond, delicate and funny and bright. She had a degree in art history or museums or something to do with art that I couldn't keep straight but was impressed by. She had two children, which made me wonder how she had a BDSM lifestyle until I realized they were grown. Chloe was older than she looked, and had started younger.
After the horrible scene with Kie at the dinner party and after she'd been punished in response, I'd spent the night with Claude and Chloe under St. Martin's roof. It was weird, not my scene. In my real life I'd been apt to use sex when I wanted or needed it. I'd had sex when undercover, something Mark had never acknowledged but must have suspected. It's nearly impossible to get close to someone when you're pretending to be a person you're not and despite all the other things you say you do – use and sell drugs, ride with an outlaw gang – you won't have sex with the guy you're supposedly with.
If Mark suspected, he kept the suspicion to himself. Or possibly from himself.
And though in many instances I found I was having a really good time as long as I could remember my cover, unfortunately most of those experiences had taught me that Mark was tame. Or, I guess, boring.
And when I'd sometimes ask Mark to spice it up, he'd tie me up or use my cuffs, only to be furious with me or sickened or something afterwards.
I'm not sure what it meant that when I went home with someone from a martial arts tournament or a bartender from the after-hours drink, I never wanted anything kinky. Just unusual and new was enough. Or rough. Rough was good.