by Sophia Reed
I told them my own story, aware that so far I was the only "bad girl" with a record. They asked about my boyfriend and I told them a little about Cole, leaving out his last name and who he was – CEO of an international pharmaceuticals company – and what he was – a billionaire who would come looking for me.
There was always the chance that he wouldn't be able to find me. Despite my confidence in the trackers embedded in me, I wasn't going to raise any hopes in these women. That would be unfair.
I told them about my family, the altered version, and let them assume I wanted to go back to them. The boyfriend was enough. The mistake – mistake – with the Corvette. The bad cops. The drive east and then west. I was accepted as part of them.
None of us were sleepy. Bevington tended to prowl the house at night, they said, often coming up with his security escort to take a girl. No one slept easily at night. He'd fall asleep just as the sky started to lighten to that dark pre-dawn green and the harem would too, sleeping until noon when the rose and worked out because he didn't like any extra flab on them.
That sounded like a long-term observation but none of them had been his prisoner for more than two months.
So that was concerning.
I wanted information. They wanted to talk about the things he did. How he had a hard hand. How fucking hard he could spank and that he routinely then followed that up with some unforgiving implement.
When I said I knew, Lettie said we could talk with me lying down as well as sitting up. I thought about arguing but whatever she wanted to do to help me, the others looked like this was normal.
I don't like being touched much. But I needed to be accepted. I wanted to be part of the group, not the latest girl brought in who might disappear again before her two months.
I had a feeling I wasn't leaving here alone.
Lettie had arnica lotion and while it was weird, it wasn't the most inappropriate touch of my life. Not even of my last 24 hour period.
We went on talking as I lay face down on the bed, my head supported on my arms. Lettie raised my skirt and sucked in a breath. Next thing she did was undo the knot Bevington had put in my panties. I'd gotten used to the pain of them digging into my soft flesh. There'd been too much else to worry about to fix them. But having that pressure off helped.
"Who did the caning?" she asked.
Which let me know they'd seen cane strikes before and knew the ones on my ass weren't new.
"The people who sent me here. None of you were channeled through Raven in Arizona?" I tried to make it a Really? I thought that was normal! Question but there was a short pause after I asked it, so I let it go.
Her hands smoothing the lotion into my fevered skin felt wonderful. She massaged delicately, which didn't feel as wonderful, but broke up some of the muscle tension that sets in after a severe beating.
Meanwhile the three of them told me about Bevington's innovations. He used an electric play toy, a dildo wired to produce shocks about like a static electric shock from touching a doorknob or a light switch, but turned so fucking high. He chose his orifices at random, inserting the toy and turning it on for longer and longer bursts. Once he'd used a cattle prod on a girl, but she'd seizured and he hadn't done that again. He used tasers to disable girls, then left them hanging from restraints. Nikki had her shoulder dislocated by that treatment.
"Did he bring in a medic?" I asked. I got the impression he was paying a lot for the pretty fragile things he wanted to destroy and that kind of casual destruction seemed wanton.
"His goons are ex-Army. They know how to fix things." Her voice was laced with loathing. Apparently I'd gotten lucky with the choice of goons walking me up to the room.
The rest of it seemed old hat, which amazed me, but Cole had punished me so many times during the years I'd been with him, I didn't react as strongly as I could have.
I was exhausted. Not too tired to understand that someone who will shove an electric prod inside a girl is more than capable of killing her. What the fuck, he'd told me he wanted to destroy things. And there were a limited number of girls. Of course he killed them.
But there was time.
That idea brought me upright, out from under Lettie's soothing hands which were starting to feel a little too familiar. "You said he goes to bed at dawn?" It was damn close now.
Nikki looked out the window. "About another twenty minutes. Sleeps like the dead. He's hard of hearing, though he won't admit it. So speak clearly and a little more loudly than usual because he gets really mad and he will hurt you for making it seem like he's old."
I allowed myself to smile.
Nikki looked at me considering, then smiled back. Lettie and Mia joined in. And then we were all laughing, too hard to stop, at the idea of the mummified Mr. B becoming annoyed at anyone suggesting he was older than mountains. Older than God! Older than the Universe! So. Fucking. Old!
When we calmed down, the sky had gone green. I wanted more than anything to sneak out of the room with its simple lock. "Don't you think information might help? Information is power," I said, meeting eyes that still watered from the laughter.
"I'm with you," Lettie said and the other two nodded. "But don't get your hopes up. Shelf life here is about three months, from what I know. Because the girls here before me?" She gestured around the room, then made a poof! Gesture with her hands.
Two months.
And gone.
And suddenly that didn't seem like much time at all.
"So can't we work to change that?" I asked. I couldn't share who I was. A couple hours, a couple pieces of chocolate, and a semi-inappropriate ass massage didn't make us best friends. Any one of them might turn me in for better treatment. From the sound of it I'd probably be willing to betray a confidence or two to avoid having an electrified dildo shoved inside me.
Tomorrow night, I thought, finding myself damned near asleep anyway.
That's when Nikki said, "If you really want to go find information, I'm with you. Tomorrow night. But I'm with you."
Which made me both think they were relatively assured there were no bugs in the harem and that since she brought it up first, maybe I was partially protected from being ratted out.
"Me, too," Lettie said. "The outside doors and windows are all alarmed."
"Of course they are," I said absently.
"But inside isn't," Mia said. She sounded pale and scared and she hadn't yet said she was with us. But then she surprised me. "I can get us to the kitchen no problem."
My brows shot up.
Nikki laughed. "Mia forages for us."
"I've never gone anywhere else, but I can do that." She seemed to be psyching herself up.
"Okay, then," I said, not wanting to add the pressure of my gratitude just yet. "Maybe we should all get some sleep."
That didn't seem likely. But it was exactly what we did.
24
Cole
She was in Los Angeles. Or the trackers were.
Decker was working outside official capacity but she wasn't leaving us just yet. April and her team were closing in on the signal, trying to pinpoint it. It was Charles who said, "You know? Maybe it's in the canyons."
Everyone turned to look at him and he turned cherry red.
"Cell service is amazing anymore but there are still places the terrain makes it difficult."
April and Scott looked at each other and instantly went back to their maps.
She was in Los Angeles. The mercs were on their way to rendezvous with us. We'd be mobilizing in the morning, flying to Southern California.
If she was all right, I wouldn't approach. I'd leave her to do the thing she'd set out to do and to complete her assignment.
If she was harmed, I'd figure out where to go from there. I didn't care if the trafficking ring fell because they were all in custody, or because they were all dead.
If she was dead, no one would survive it.
25
Annie
Morning brought breakfast. Mor
ning brought a hot day and guards taking us as one to the in-house gym and leaving us there for two hours. They sat along the exits, automatic weapons over their laps because of course four girls looked threatening. One of them spotted me on a heavy squat. Another spotted Nikki on a higher bench than I could have done. At the end of the session they led us into the locker room, which had no lockers and no curtains in front of the carrel of shower heads.
I caught my breath and looked at Lettie. She shrugged, mouthed Sorry, and stripped off her jog bra and shorts.
The guards watched, the crotches of their military-issue fatigues tented.
"I'll shower upstairs," I said, sitting down on a bench.
One of them rose, grabbed my hair, and walked me to the shower. "Strip. Bend over."
"You can't do that to me!" I'm Mr. Bevington's property wasn't what I wanted to say next but it's what I thought.
"Can. He wants you girls clean. And safe. I'm checking on safe."
I opened my mouth and Mia said so softly I barely heard her, "Erin. Please."
Furious, humiliated, my face flaming, I took off my gym clothes, folded them onto the bench, met the guard's sadistic gleeful face, turned and bent over.
"Separate your cheeks for me, nice and wide. I wanna see everything."
I reached back, separated my cheeks, and heard the guard snap on a glove. Rough fingers reached inside me, feeling into both orifices, taking his time. My tears splashed down on the already wet tile of the bathroom. Finally he pulled his fingers out of me, slowly and caressingly so I felt every touch.
"Get clean, cunt."
I was just straightening. I mouthed Fuck you where he couldn't see it and determined that when I bought this down – and I would – I'd kill the son of a bitch. As I stepped into the shower I committed his clean cut but five o'clock shadowed Mediterranean face to memory.
I could wait. I didn't look to see if he was still watching. I knew he was.
The hot water didn't feel good when it hit my flesh.
Guards came to the door midafternoon. From talking while we ate fruit and listened to music, everyone went completely still. I raised my brows in question.
"This is the time of day," Mia whispered. She didn't add anything else because she didn't have to.
Lettie got up and went to the door. The guards, the same two who had seen me upstairs the night before, not the one I wanted to kill, had only knocked and opened. They hadn't come in. There were weird protocols in the house, between privacy and allowing for modesty, and the hateful behavior of the guard in the shower room. I hoped I'd be long free of the place and its "master" on his way to prison before I figured it all out.
Lettie came back to us practically skipping. I saw smiles starting on Mia and Nikki's faces. "Is it?" Mia asked.
"Good news!" Lettie was nodding. "Migraine!"
There were high fives. They included me, but I wanted details. "What were you expecting when the guards showed up?"
Nikki's hair had been up in an elaborate style, all curls and sexy boudoir tendrils. She was dropping combs and pins and running her fingers through it as she spoke. "He picks someone different most afternoons."
Lettie was changing, pulling off a silky top and stripping off the lacy bra underneath. She had small, tight, perky boobs with big nipples and apparently no compunction about showing them to us. She pulled a tank top over her head and flopped back down onto the bed beside me. "He sends the guards and you never know. Sometimes it's just sex. Sometimes it's rape."
I didn't ask how sometimes it could be one or the other, especially after he'd already had the same girl once. I totally understood the difference.
"Sometimes it's his toys and there's nothing fun about them," Mia said and paused. "The one thing he's never done with me is see if I'm having a good time." Then she laughed and the other two joined her.
I didn't. "Every afternoon?" I asked. "No," Mia said and the other two looked curiously at her, then at me, alarmed.
"Don't even think it," Lettie said. "Middle of the night, after he's taken out his hearing aide and taken whatever the hell it is he takes so he can sleep like a baby after everything he's done." She shook her finger at me like she was my mother or something.
"Okay, okay, jeez Louise," I said. "Just trying to make sure we all get our beauty sleep."
The rest of the day was spent in classes from five to seven, mandatory. They were streamed by some dude who used a cane as a pointer as he taught math, English, French of all things, and science. As the conference call started Nikki leaned close.
"Mistakes are punished. Don't answer unless you're sure and if you're called on, try to get it right."
"And if I don't know?" I asked.
Her eyes were wide and frightened. I thought maybe classes weren't regular but kind of a horror story thrown in from time to time if it seemed like maybe there hadn't been enough abuse passed around.
I was starting to hate Bevington more every second.
At the end of classes, dinner was brought in. I was becoming more confused. It was like Bevington didn't know whether to be a cartoon villain or something horrible and real or a chatty old man. The last hadn't seemed complexly like a false front. Some of it seemed like something he actually believed. The only thing I knew for sure was he was dangerous.
Dinner was unremarkable. Meat, protein, vegetable, whole grain bread, fruit. There was water to drink and coffee for after. It had all the thought behind the meal as a cafeteria lunch.
During dinner I asked if they thought Bevington would be up later as a result of having been in his bed all day with the migraine.
"If anything, he'll go to bed earlier," Lettie told me. "But we wait until the small hours like we were going to."
That sounded smart to me, too, even if it wasn't what I wanted to hear. We talked about the day, about my run in with the guard in the locker room. They'd all seen, which was even more embarrassing, and though they said at some point or another all of them had been fingered by Evan, I didn't feel better.
But I tucked Evan's name away to use later.
"What were you thinking, anyway?" Nikki asked. She wore a pink baby doll nighty I couldn't imagine pulling off or for that matter, wanting to wear. With the idea of some dangerous old pervert wandering around, I slept in shorts and a t-shirt and a bra. I wanted to be able to defend myself.
Right. Because that had worked so well so far.
I sighed. "I don't know. Sometimes it feels like the whole world is nothing but people fucking with you, you know?"
They definitely did.
"After a while it feels like you're crazy. Anybody here read I Am Legend"
No, but they'd all seen the Will Smith movie.
"Not the same," I said. "The movie was about vampires. The book was about being the last of something, the loneliness when what you've known is gone and the fear that now that it is gone and it's possible you're the only one left, are you still the way things are supposed to be? Or is the new world order of vampires hunting for one last snack the way it should be and your time has come and gone."
"Sounds like contemplation of old age," Nikki said.
Mia shook her head. "I don't know about the book, but I think Erin means with so many men in the world who see us for what's between our legs and who see us as controllable, are we making the right choice in rebelling? Or should we – "
"Never," Lettie said, as if that were settled. She turned and looked at me. "We've made a pact when one of us does something really stupid – " she gave me a look – "Like you did in the gym today, we take matters into our own hands."
I felt a sexual thrill I hadn't expected. I didn't even know what she was talking about yet.
"You don't have to, but if you want to be part of what we've put together," she said, and almost stopped.
The half confused look on my face must have gotten through to her.
She moved and sat on the edge of the bed. "We're trying to keep each other safe by reminding each other of th
e things we need to keep in mind." She patted her lap.
My eyes moved around the tiny group. Mia nodded. Nikki nodded. I looked back at Lettie. She wasn't moving. She was waiting.
"Shorts on or off?" I asked, standing.
"Off."
"She's been caned," Nikki said.
"I know that," Lettie said. She'd been the one with the lotion. She looked at me. "It's more the submission. To a group will."
I wasn't sure I liked that idea, but my blood was running fast, my pulse up, and suddenly my mouth was flooding with saliva.
I wanted this.
I stood, pulled my shorts off, and stretched over Lettie's lap. My hands just brushed the floor, but Nikki moved in and took them, holding them.
Lettie started slow, spanking me and pausing, then rubbing her hands over the marks, then repeating it. A rosy glow started, filling me, sinking between my legs, coiling from there through my body, making me warmer, more needy.
Her hand continued, soft pats, nothing to hurt what was already there, but with her soft touch, I wanted more of that. I wanted it to hurt. I wanted somebody to take me in hand and take me to task for the stupid decisions I'd made.
I whispered, "Harder. Please."
I heard her laugh under her breath, and then the spanking started in earnest. I didn't count. I didn't try to say present. I let the pain build and the longing for Cole fill me, the need to do what I'd come to do and do it right. To get everybody here out but even more important, no matter what I might think of these women, to stop Bevington, his security, Raven and Evie, Chad and Theo.
Exactly what I'd set out to do before I knew about the harem, or knew who it was I was fighting.
And then, only then, I could go back to Cole.
When Lettie finally finished, when she released me, I climbed shakily off her lap, my long t-shirt falling to cover me. No one touched me outside of the spanking and I was grateful for that. I was as wet as Cole had ever made me. I could feel my own slickness on my inner thighs and I didn't know what would happen if one of them made any kind of move.