Finally, it’s time to go. I’m cursing him every hobbling step of the way as I make my way to the playroom. Even here, even walking to what will surely be a session of torture, I’m compulsively on time.
The fact that I have to deliver myself to be punished is an extra helping of humiliation heaped onto me.
When we come in, he removes the collar and ankle cuffs, but I don’t feel any relief whatsoever. Only fear.
“Strip,” he says coldly, and, dreading what’s coming, I slowly slide my shirt off and remove my bra.
“Too slow.” He walks over to the rack of whips, and I stifle a cry of protest and frantically shuck my pants and underwear.
He returns with a vicious little riding crop.
“Hands behind your back.”
I obey, grabbing my wrist, and stand there, bracing myself.
“This is for being too slow.”
He slashes at my breasts, crossing over the half-healed whip marks. I stifle a scream of pain. He whips me two times on each breast, and I manage to swallow my cries, whimpering instead with each vicious bite of the whip.
Then he holds the whip up to my lips, and I glare down at the floor as I kiss it. “Thank you for punishing me, Master.”
Choke and die, Joshua Smith. You’re the master of nothing.
His eyes flare wide with anger, and he grabs me by the arm and starts twisting my wrist. I scream in pain and surprise.
“What were you thinking just now?” he demands.
I start to cry. “Please, you’ll break my arm—please, Master!”
“What were you thinking?” he roars, bending my arm up, and I don’t dare lie. It’s terrifyingly clear that he already knows the answer.
“I was thinking you’re not my master,” I sob.
He releases my arm. “I know,” he says, his icy blue eyes freezing my soul. “Because I study human nature, Tamara. I study people’s expressions, their body language, the way they breathe. The tiny muscles in your face, the movements you make even when you think you’re holding perfectly still…they’re like screams, Tamara. Nasty, disrespectful screams of defiance. Every single time you’ve disobeyed me in your mind, I’ve known. And it stops now.”
The horror flooding me feels as if it will drown me. I’m sucking in panicked breaths, gulping for air. The pain in my breasts fades, washed away by an agony that sears my very soul.
He can see inside my head. There’s no escape from him. None. Ever.
He grabs my chin with his hand and squeezes so hard that tears spring to my eyes. “I’ll break you down and make you into what I want. You will acknowledge me as your master, and not just in words. You are not allowed to disagree with me in your thoughts anymore. Do you understand me?”
“Yes, M-M-Master.” My voice wavers. And I don’t dare to defy him in my head right after he says that, because he’s staring right into my eyes, and he’ll know. Some minute muscle twitch, an involuntary blink, and I’ll give myself away.
Bluebirds, sunshine, rainbows…picture a rainbow, think of anything else, because the words want to come into my mind, but I can’t let them…
He releases my chin. I gulp down sobs, shaking all over.
I’m not even safe inside my head.
He turns and walks away, heading across the room. “You said you wouldn’t kill me, Master!” I cry out. “If you break me down and make me into something else, then I won’t be me anymore! That’s the same as killing me, Master!”
He gives me a kind, gentle smile as he walks back to me.
“Semantics,” he says. “Now, how much do you think that defiant little speech is going to cost you?”
He’s heaping on punishment after punishment. My face goes white. “I don’t know, Master.”
“I think four hard smacks on the ass with a paddle should do it. What do you think?”
I can barely concentrate on his words. My mind is fracturing with panic, splintering. Mocking him in my head was the only thing that kept me sane, the only way I could still be me.
I’m going to die. Tamara is going to die, and she’ll be something else. Something weak and horrible and pathetic. A crawling, mewling beast like Elizabeth.
He’s looking at me, waiting for an answer, so I mumble, “Whatever you decide, Master.”
He spins me around. “Stand there and wait.”
He’s back in a minute, and he strikes my right butt cheek without warning. I scream and jump as the flesh of my butt cheek catches fire. The next smack burns a square of agony right above the first blow. Then he strikes the flesh of my other butt cheek twice. I dance and howl, frantically rubbing my seared flesh for a minute, until he grabs me by the hair and drags me over to a metal square in the middle of the room.
“This is for trying to escape,” he intones, and the gleam of anticipation in his eyes makes me weak with fear.
As I’m standing on the metal square, he forces me to hold my hands over my head and hooks them up to cuffs that are dangling from a beam on the ceiling. He leaves, then returns a minute later with nipple clamps, each of which has a little round weight dangling from it.
I whimper when he clamps them on my nipples, and I don’t even try to stem my tears as he walks away. I’m bracing myself for the slash of a whip…when the floor catches on fire. I shriek and jerk my legs up, dangling from the chain, and the nipple clamps jolt agonizingly.
The floor underneath me is electrified.
I swing back and forth, bending my legs, but soon my arms begin to burn and tire, and I can’t hold myself up anymore.
My feet hit the metal plate, and agony convulses me. I dance and scream. The nipple clamps with the weights pinch cruelly and as my body thrashes. I go through it again and again, until finally when my feet hit the floor, it doesn’t burn me. I hang from my chains, sobbing in relief. And then a minute later, the floor catches on fire again.
I howl and pull my feet up again. I don’t see Joshua anywhere. He must be standing behind me, watching, but I can’t twist around to look.
“I’m sorry, Master! I can’t take any more!” My voice is weak, and I’m desperate to make it louder so he can hear me. “I’ll never do it again! Please, Master, please!” I’m furious with myself for trying to escape. Why was I so stupid—why, why, why?
The minutes stretch on, and the metal zaps my feet again and again, and my arms feel as if they’ll pull from their sockets. My nipples are on fire. I’m terrified that this will never stop.
“Please, Master!” I scream. “I’m sorry, Master! Please, please, please!”
More time drags on. Seconds or minutes or hours; I can’t tell, because there is nothing in the world but pain and panic. I’m sobbing hysterically, my feet slamming onto the plate more and more frequently. Pure agony burns my arms.
I’m dizzy, on the verge of passing out, when he calls out, “All done.”
And I know that he waited until I was at the point of fainting.
My feet hit the metal, and it’s warm but not burning me. I hang there, gasping and sobbing.
“Please take the nipple clamps off, Master,” I beg as he walks over to me.
“Did I say you could speak?” he asks.
Oh God. My nipples will fall off. It hurts, it hurts, it hurts… “No, Master.” I choke on the words.
“That’s right, I didn’t.” He slaps my tortured breasts, and the little weights on them bounce, making me shriek. He smacks them again and again, and I howl and jerk on my chains.
He grabs my chin and makes me stare at him. My eyes are swollen from crying, and I’m gulping for air. My body’s shaking as if I’m suffering a seizure. “Who’s your master?” he demands.
“You are, Sir!” I wail.
“Who owns you?”
“You do, Sir!” I’m sobbing.
“Say, thank you for punishing me, Master.”
“Thank you for punishing me, Master!”
“Say, I’m sorry I spoke without permission, Master.”
Oh God, just
take them off, take them off!
“I’m sorry I spoke without permission, Master!”
He unchains my hands. I’m desperate to claw the nipple clamps off, but I know he’ll punish me again.
“Now kiss my feet.”
I bend down, frantic. If I’m too slow, he’ll punish me more. I kiss each of his shoes.
“Stand up.”
I scramble to my feet, staggering.
He removes each nipple clamp. “Thank you, Master, thank you,” I sob. Then my nipples start burning as if they’re on fire. “Oh God!” I scream, rubbing at them.
“That’s the worst part of nipple clamps,” he says gently. “The blood flow returning.”
He leads me over to a cabinet with a bowl of ice cubes sitting on top, and begins rubbing a couple of cubes over my nipples. My tortured flesh numbs, and the pain fades.
As he rubs, he growls, “Look into my eyes. Right into my eyes. I am your world, Tamara. I am your everything. Say I love you, Master.”
“I love you, Master.”
He keeps asking me. Making me say it, again and again.
He drops the ice, and now he’s just massaging my nipples with his fingers, so gently, and I don’t ever want him to stop. There’s a strange and terrible intimacy in staring straight into his eyes like that. The entire world vanishes, and only he exists.
“I love you, Master. I love you, Master. I love you, Master.” I say it until my voice is hoarse, and I don’t dare once think the thing that he forbade me to think.
He makes me say it more. Again and again. Hundreds of times, until my throat is raw.
And by the time he lets me stops saying it, I almost believe it.
Chapter Twelve
Joshua
I’m sitting in my office, grasping my cock in my hands. God, I can’t wait to plunge it into her pussy. Her mouth is sweet, but I want more. I want to bury myself in her tight, wet heat and fuck her so hard that my bed slams into the wall. I want her screams to sing a song of ecstasy and agony in equal measure.
But not yet.
I stroke myself, and dark images flash through my mind, the way they always do.
The images are terrible, and they pollute my sexual encounters, forcing me back in time. They sicken me, and I can’t help myself.
Skinny girls chained to the wall, with hollow eyes and tattered dresses. Dad wouldn’t let us touch them, but we had to jerk off to them.
Thor was beaten to death because he couldn’t come that way. Our father screamed that no son of his was going to be a pussy little faggot. So they went outside into the ring of stones where we had all our blood battles, and my mother watched her husband beat her thirteen-year-old son to death in less than sixty seconds.
Watching my father with those girls sickened me. I don’t know if that shows that there’s a glimmer of normal in me, buried down deep.
But we had to show our father that we were real men. All those times I watched him ramming himself into them, choking them with his cock, while I was forced to pleasure myself… By the time I was in my teens, I couldn’t think of sex any other way. If a woman wasn’t twisting and screaming, I couldn’t get hard.
Watching him with those girls…that was when I finally began to question him. All that bullshit talk of being the ultimate apex predator. Taking those girls wasn’t the action of a predator. It was the action of an inadequate man who feared confronting a real challenge. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I had never seen my father take on an opponent who was a match for him in size or strength. He beat his wife, he beat his children, he beat up little girls he stole from their homes. Where was the honor in defeating such a foe?
A faint uneasiness stirs inside of me when I think of Tamara. My bringing her here is different, I remind myself. Not just because she’s a woman rather than a girl. I took Tamara for her own good, so I wouldn’t have to kill her. My father, though, he took those girls because of the weakness in him.
The images of the crying girls swim behind my closed eyes as my hand moves up and down, gripping my cock. Usually, I replace the images with the picture of some random whore. Today I replace them with Tamara, imagining her bent over a bench and moaning, “Yes, Master,” and it’s surprising how good it makes me feel.
Thinking about her, I come in less than a minute.
I’m smiling as I clean myself off with tissues.
She’s a fighter, that one. She pretends to surrender, but she’s always plotting and planning. That makes the challenge even more thrilling.
I wonder how long it will take until she’s fully, completely mine. Until she truly loves me, craves me, would die without me.
Until she doesn’t have a single thought in her head other than how to please me.
As I toss the tissue in the trash, a flicker of worry creeps through me. Will I still want her when she’s nothing but a mindless puppet?
I’ve met so many weak women over the years. Women who are instinctively drawn to my brutality. Women who would chew their own tits off for me if they could. It revolts me. God help me, it reminds me of my mother, who was too weak until the very end, and then it was too little, too late.
Now my elation starts to fade.
Is it selfish of me to steal a human being and use her to self-medicate? To give myself the endorphin rush that my brain craves?
Of course it is. Who fucking cares? Where did that question even come from? I never think like that. Sometimes I think Tamara’s weakening essential parts of me. All the more reason to hurry up and reshape her into exactly what I need. That will have to break the hold she has on me, won’t it?
But what will she be if I crush her completely?
Will she still be able to please me? Isn’t this fight, this defiance, what I need from her?
And when it’s gone, when she’s a mindless, broken toy, what will I do if I get bored with her? I promised I wouldn’t kill her. Will I still desire her if she’s a shambling zombie who craves me and never questions me?
I lean back in my chair, lacing my fingers together. I’ve never experienced a situation like this. In the past, if I wanted sexual satisfaction, I hired whores I could whip, fuck, and then throw out with a handful of money clenched in their greedy little fists.
The worry won’t go away. It’s chewing at the edges of my consciousness. I can’t see any way out of this situation, though. I don’t know how to spend time with anyone without feeling the overwhelming urge to crush and conquer them. That’s one reason I picked the business I did. I buy companies and strip them of their assets, or cut them down to size and resell them when they’re profitable. I move on. No permanency, no interpersonal contact. It’s why I’ve always held every single human being in my life at arm’s length.
Except for Elizabeth, but that’s a different story.
I made promises to her a long time ago, and I will do my best to keep them.
My father used to make promises all the time, and he’d laugh and laugh as he broke them. He’d promise a girl he was going to let her go, and then when she’d run a few hundred feet, he’d start chasing her.
He’d promise my mother he was done hitting her, and then the beatings would resume.
I try very, very hard to avoid lies. And I don’t make promises I can’t keep.
Not lying makes it a little harder to manipulate people, but that’s all right. Handicapping myself isn’t a bad thing. It makes life more challenging.
My new burner phone vibrates and beeps on the table, and I look at it, narrow-eyed. Only Elizabeth has the burner phone numbers, and that’s just so she can call me in case of true, life-or-death emergency. Right now, I am watching Tamara on the monitor, so I know she’s secured, and my perimeter alarms haven’t been tripped, so nobody’s on my property—so what the hell is going on?
When I pick up the phone, ice water washes through my blood.
Have you been a bad boy? the text message says.
I sit bolt upright.
Holy f
uck.
Adrenaline pumps through me. I consider answering but decide that acknowledgment would be a bad idea.
Quickly, I log on to my computer and check the video feed that shows me a man in a large, padded cell. He’s drawing on a piece of paper with a crayon. Hmm. I wonder if that’s a good idea. Knowing him, he could find a way to make a deadly weapon out of those. Then again, he’s monitored all the time. I check the time and date scrolling across the screen at the top of the feed; it’s current.
To be extra sure, I make a phone call, using a special phone that I keep just for this purpose.
The head of the Blackthorne Psychiatric Institute answers instantly. As he fucking well better if he wants the money to keep flowing and his family to keep breathing. I have not yet ever killed a child, but if he fucks me over on this, he will leave me no choice, and he knows it.
“Is he there?” I demand of him.
“Of course.” Dr. Barnard doesn’t need to ask who I’m talking about. “You can check the feed.”
“I just did. All right, then. He’s not giving you any problems?”
“No more than usual.”
Cursing, I hang up. I almost wish he’d escaped. Almost. If he escapes, it will be my personal Hell on Earth, but at least it would make sense. I have no fucking idea who could be texting me and how much they know about me, and this is making me angry.
I use a special software program of my own design to run a trace on the phone, but I’m not surprised when it doesn’t lead me anywhere. The phone call is pinging all over the place.
For a brief moment, it occurs to me that Tamara is a complication. If somebody is starting to pry around into my business, I should get rid of her.
I push that thought aside. This house, bought by a shell company and completely untraceable, is deep, deep in the country. Nobody knows I’m here. Do they?
Does the person who’s taunting me on the burner phone know where I live? I don’t see how, but then again, I bought these burner phones with cash, at two different stores, yet somebody has very likely gotten the number twice. That phone call that went to voice mail…it can’t be a coincidence. It’s got to be the same person.
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