by Loki Renard
Katie still didn’t understand what he was playing at. All she really knew was that someone somewhere was lying. She was being manipulated, and that made her angry.
Jason turned as she entered and asked a one-word question.
“Hungry?”
She nodded. “Yeah.”
“Sit down.”
The table had already been set, apparently in anticipation of her awakening. It seemed like nothing she did came as any surprise to Jason. Katie sat down, noticing that he’d gone so far as to give her a steak knife. That was stupid. She could have killed him eight different ways with the fork alone.
He slid a steak onto her plate, medium rare with garlic seasoning. It smelled like heaven. She didn’t say a word, she just started eating and she didn’t stop until every last trace of the meal was gone.
Finished with her food, she stared at him. He was the enemy. She was supposed to kill him. Why, then, did this feel almost like a holiday? Why wasn’t she more angered by his undoubtedly perverted treatment of her? She had not forgotten what her time in the stirrups had entailed. There was no part of her body that did not somehow bear his brand now. She should have been furious, scathed, scarred, something. Instead she felt… oddly at peace.
While she thought, Jason sat down across from her and ate as she had, without a word. Her thoughts were scattered, but one kept returning. He was so damn handsome. It wasn’t just a matter of physical appearance either, though he was undoubtedly attractive. It was his energy, his presence, just who he was. Dangerous, ruthless, and somehow in spite of it all, kind.
“You won’t be able to think your way through this one.”
“Huh?” She frowned at him. Why did he always seem to know precisely what was going through her head?
“The process you were put through at Oversight didn’t touch your intellectual abilities. It tampered with your memories and with your emotional pathways. So you won’t be able to think your way out of this.”
His words made anger spark inside her. Couldn’t think her way out of it. Fine. She didn’t need to think. Didn’t need to torment herself with questions about what was going on. At the root of it all, she was an agent and she had a job to do.
She picked up the steak knife and glanced at him. He was inches away across the table and his throat was exposed as he lifted his glass to drink.
That was all it took. She saw that moment of opportunity and her training kicked in. She lunged, every muscle in her body intent on the task of ending his life.
“Goddamnit!” He swore as he grabbed her arm just before the blade plunged into his neck. Her momentum set them both in motion, Jason falling backwards still on his chair as she more or less somersaulted over his head, propelled away from him by a well-placed boot to her midsection.
Katie landed in a crouch in the corner of the room. He was already on his feet, standing over her with a scowl on his face and the broken shards of crockery laced with steak juices at his feet.
“That was naughty,” he chided darkly. “Very naughty.”
Katie braced herself for the punishing jolt of the collar, but he didn’t seem inclined to use it.
“Back to bed for you, I think,” he continued. “Girls who try to kill me go to bed without dessert.”
Lifting the corner of her lip in a snarl, Katie shook her head. “This ends here. You’re not going to keep me here and lie to me anymore, Doctor. You’re going to hell.”
“Nope. Not even close.” He took a step forward, reached down, and grabbed her by the front of her shirt, hauling her up to her feet in one swift motion, which demonstrated his strength in a scarily casual way. Katie had lost the knife in the scuffle, but she still had fight in her and she wasn’t ready to admit defeat yet. She swung a knee hard toward his groin. It was blocked by his thigh as he threw her over his knee, sitting on the chair she’d vacated in a hurry. Katie found herself with her face inches from broken plates and abandoned leftovers as he yanked down her panties and began to spank her bottom hard.
Each stroke landed with what she was sure was full force until another, harder one came after it. Each slap was like a ballistic explosion on her backside, his palm detonating against her tender skin. It was a clever thing for him to do, really. Agents were conditioned to absorb blows to their stomachs, shins, forearms. Intense martial arts drilling took care of that. At no point had her bottom ever been conditioned to take punishment, however, and for a reason she could not explain, it hurt like hell in a way that was more than just physical.
“There’s only one thing worse than an agent attempting a kill,” Jason said.” And that’s an agent failing spectacularly. You’ve really let your training slide, haven’t you, Katie.”
“Go to hell,” she growled. She hadn’t let her training slide one bit. She’d held back. For some reason she couldn’t explain, she hadn’t stretched the last inch. It had been the same on the first day they’d met. She wasn’t being sloppy out of ill practice; some part of her mind was preventing her from using full lethal force.
She cursed that part of her mind as well as Jason as his palm fell in a hard barrage of swats, painting her bottom with hell-fire and heat and an ache that she knew would not abate for a long time.
“I let you live, you asshole! The least you could do is go easy on me now!”
“If you wanted to let me live, all you had to do was not attack me in the first place,” he pointed out.
“I had to attack you,” she spat. “You know goddamn well I had to.”
“I know that,” he said, his tone lifting with what sounded like surprise. “I wouldn’t think you would know that.”
“My mission is to kill you,” she said through gritted teeth. “That means I’m going to try every opportunity I get. It’s in my blood.”
“Not in your blood. In your brain,” he corrected, smoothing his palm over her very sore bottom. “It’s something you don’t have a choice in at the moment, but I’m going to break you of the urge, Katie. I’m going to give you something you haven’t had in a very long time.”
“What’s that?”
“Yourself.”
Katie snorted. “Save the philosophy, old man.”
Jason smacked her bottom again, hard enough to make her let out an involuntary yowl. “Old man? If there’s one thing worse than a sloppy assassin, it’s a smart ass.” He proceeded to spank her with renewed vigor, swatting from the tops of her thighs to the crowns of her cheeks until she started to kick and squirm out of pure physical need to abate some of the heat building in her rear.
“After this, you’re going back to bed,” he informed her. “And tomorrow, we’re going to talk.”
“I have nothing to say to you!”
“Wrong again,” he said, laying a hard slap to her left cheek. “And I think you know you’re wrong too. You know something is going on here, don’t you, Katie. You know this isn’t any normal mission gone wrong. You know you’re not who you think you are.”
“Oh, fuck off,” she snarled. The pain in her backside was nothing compared to the continued undermining of her very self. She wanted to rule his nonsense out completely, but he was right. They were bullet holes she bore, and after her ordeal in the medical room she could not deny that there was a part of her mind trying to assert itself through layers of training. She tried to avoid that truth, not wanting to face it, afraid of what might be there. “You’re a liar!”
“Yell and swear all you want,” he said implacably. “It won’t change the truth.”
A sudden sob escaped her lips. She did not know where it had come from. Agents did not cry. They did not show weakness or emotion, not even under the most extreme torture, which a spanking, however hard, did not qualify as.
She tried to clamp her jaw shut so as to prevent any further outbursts of emotion, but tears were flowing down her cheeks. Some part of her was crying, a silent part that had been denied voice for a long time was breaking through.
Katie expected Jason to laugh, perhaps t
The act was more intimate and innocent than any that had preceded it and it surprised Katie to the extreme. There was tenderness in his touch, not just the desire to make her submit to his perversions.
“What are you doing to me? What have you done?” She asked the question through rivulets of tears that flowed in spite of all her normally rigid self-control.
“I’m not doing anything,” he said. “Aside from my best to stop you from killing me before you get yourself back. Then you can decide if you want to kill me or not.”
Curled up on his lap, Katie could have easily killed him. The position left him exceptionally vulnerable in the region of several key organs. She was far too miserable to take advantage of any of them, however; as much as the highly trained portions of her mind screamed for her to take her shot, she was too busy curling up on herself and wishing she understood what was going on.
Jason was putting her through it with his captivity and erotic treatments, but that couldn’t be the whole reason for the avalanche of emotion rushing through her. She felt as though her heart was being pulled out through her throat, as if her very soul was being torn to shreds.
Racked with sobs, Katie gasped for breath, trying to gain equilibrium, but losing it over and over again. She had been in control for so long, she no longer knew how to be out of control. Her own emotions were foreign and her responses to them completely terrifying. Only Jason’s arms around her anchored her to any kind of reality.
“It’s okay,” he said, soothing her. “I know this is scary, Katie. I know it’s a long time since you felt any emotion other than hate or fear. But this is good.”
“This is not good,” she wailed. She was sadder than she’d ever been, but there was a queer happiness tinging the sadness as well and no obvious reason for either reaction.
Jason held her until her tears finally began to abate and some sense of calm made its way back into her being. She took a deep breath, wiped her eyes, and tried to jam her fingers into his windpipe.
Somehow, he anticipated the motion and blocked her hand, catching her wrist and pulling it around behind her back so, along with her other arm, she was more pinned than held.
“You really can’t help yourself, can you?” He murmured the question against her ear as he slid handcuffs around her wrists. There was no judgment in his tone. He didn’t seem upset. In fact, for some bizarre reason, he was smiling.
“What are you grinning about?” She snapped the question at him.
“You,” he said. “My sweet little lazy assassin.”
“I am not lazy!”
“Oh, yes, you are. When you were first trained you were one of the best they’d ever seen. Quick, and more deadly than most any man in the unit. Impeccable form and an incredible instinct to match it.”
“How the hell would you know?”
“Because,” he said, nailing her with a look. “I was your handler, Katie. I was the one who drilled your sweet little ass fourteen hours a day. I was the one who hauled you out of bed every morning and the one who made sure you had just enough energy to get back to it at night.”
Katie screwed her face up and shook her head. “That wasn’t you.”
“It was.”
“I would remember that.”
“There’s a lot you don’t remember,” he said. “But you’ve had enough for one night.”
“No,” she said. “Tell me.”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I did.”
“I don’t care. Tell me.”
“You’re not really in any position to be giving me orders,” he reminded her. He was right. She was sitting on his lap with her pants down, her bare bottom flaming red, her hands cuffed behind her back. She wasn’t in any position for anything.
That didn’t mean she wasn’t going to demand it. She opened her mouth to tell him as much, but all that came out was a squeaked moan because Jason had slid his fingers between her bare thighs and pressed them into the tightness of her already well fucked pussy. At the same time, his mouth claimed hers, cutting off all her clever words and objections. As she squirmed, he began fingering her roughly, claiming her body with an urgency absent of his usual calculated coolness.
Katie whimpered. This was punishment, there was no doubt about it. The more his fingers plunged inside her, the more her pussy protested. She soon started squirming and whimpering, biting at his lips to try to make him stop.
Jason stilled his fingers inside her, grabbed her jaw with his other hand, and nailed her with a dominant look. “Do you want me to let your pussy recover?”
Katie nodded.
“Then get your ass to bed, girl,” he growled. “If I see you again before first light tomorrow, I’m going to fuck you. Hard.”
The promise made a jolt of excitement shoot through her body even as his fingers slid out of her sore lips. For a brief second, Katie hesitated. Jason shook his head at her and snapped his teeth lightly against her nose.
She took the warning for what it was and fled to the designated safe zone. She’d fight, and likely, fuck, another day.
Chapter Four
The next day, Katie found herself sitting on the floor and watching Jason as he cleaned his semi-automatic. He had a PKK in reach, and the control for her collar just past that, so he was in no way unarmed. Not that it mattered. He could have been completely without weaponry and she still would have been outgunned by him.
She had been with him for seventy-two hours. She was melting on the inside, slowly disintegrating. Every session with him made her question her world a little more. Could he really have trained her? She couldn’t remember him. Then again, she couldn’t remember her trainer either. Her early experiences at Oversight were something of a blur, indistinct memories of experiences that left her focused entirely on her work to the exclusion of everything else.
Closing her eyes, Katie tried to center herself. She felt as though she were being pulled in two different directions. There was Oversight on one side and Jason on the other. The truth had to be somewhere in the middle, if only she could recall it.
Her head began to throb with the beginnings of an ache. She curled up, put her head on her knees, and tried to will it away.
“Headache?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s a result of your conditioning breaking down,” Jason informed her. “The headaches go on for a couple of weeks, but they get better. They go away entirely when it’s completely broken.”
“Great,” she deadpanned.
His green eyes flicked over at her, coming to some secret conclusion of their own. “I’m going to tell you more of the truth now, Katie,” he said. “You might not be ready to hear it, but there are parts of you that need to.”
“Whatever.” She feigned disinterest, even though she was hanging on every word out of his mouth.
“First of all, I’m exactly who Oversight told you I am,” he said, ignoring her tone as he pushed a white cloth swab through the barrel of his gun. “I was Oversight’s first elite agent. The first to go through their conditioning program. I went through willingly. I thought it would make me better at my job, stop the nightmares, give me the freedom to be what I always wanted to be.”
“It didn’t?”
“For a while it did. Then the mission profiles changed, as did Oversight’s protocols. Agents were no longer briefed on the conditioning process. They were put through it without their consent and without their knowledge most of the time. If you interrupt a person’s sense of self severely enough, they don’t remember anything you don’t want them to. You went through an advanced version of the training. Oversight erased most of your memories, or rather, blocked them. The human mind isn’t like a hard drive so much as it is a series of pathways. Nothing is ever erased, it just becomes the road less traveled, or not traveled at all.”
He spoke as though it was the truth, without pausing for any kind of thought. Katie found herself almost believing him. Almost.
“Or maybe this is what you’re telling me to make me accept your sick torture,” she said. “Maybe you’re the one trying to change my mind, and mess with my memories.”
“I’ve left your mind completely untouched,” Jason replied. “There’s nothing I’ve done to you that you don’t remember. I bet you can’t recall a single moment of the training Oversight put you through.”
He was right. She didn’t reply to him, there wasn’t any point. He knew precisely what she knew, and precisely what she didn’t know as well.
“The good news,” he said, “is that conditioning can be broken.”
“So can people.”
He glanced over at her. “You’re not going to break, Katie. Don’t worry about that. I know how much you can take.”
Again she had the strangest experience, that of not only believing the enemy tormentor, but of trusting him on some odd, primitive level.
“Why are you trying to break my conditioning? Why are you bothering with all this?”
He looked at her and his eyes filled with an emotion she didn’t understand. “Because you matter, Katie.”
* * *
Why. That was the one question he wasn’t ready to answer.
“Enough talk,” he said, reassembling the weapon with quick, snapping motions. “You need some exercise. I don’t want you losing condition.”
He led her to the gym, the one room in the house she probably considered to be fairly innocuous. She couldn’t have been more wrong.
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