FrankenDom

by Rotham, Robin L.

  Julian swallowed but didn’t answer.

  “Just get it over with and tell her,” Colin said flatly.

  “Colin, what the hell?” I protested. “Leave him alone.”

  They both ignored me as Colin’s expression grew cruel. “Are you going to make me beat it out of you, Julian?”

  I gasped. “Colin!”

  Julian closed his eyes as a sigh shuddered through him. “Please do.”

  “Very well.” Colin put a hard kiss on his lips. “Be waiting for me in the punishment room in one hour. You know how it works.”

  Julian shuddered again. “Yes, Sir.”

  * * * * *

  An hour later, my stomach was rolling with anxiety when Colin and I entered the dungeons through the door directly across from my room. I’d begged him to tell me what was going on, what he thought he was doing, but as usual, he said it was something Julian would have to tell me himself.

  When Colin flipped an externally wired wall switch, half a dozen clear incandescent bulbs hanging from the ceiling flared to life, starkly illuminating the more traditional-looking dungeon. There were crosses, stocks, cages of different sizes and styles, a variety of padded saw horses and benches, and an entire long wall hung with instruments of torture. And everywhere above us, chains dripped from the ceiling like streamers at a kinky prom.

  My heart stopped when I saw Julian kneeling naked on the stone floor, his head down, his hands behind his back.

  “I hate this, Julian,” Colin said shortly.

  “I know,” Julian whispered. “I’m sorry.”

  “We’ll see, won’t we? As you’re so fond of telling me, real repentance is expressed through actions rather than words.”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  My tummy twisted with fear. Was this just another mind fuck, an intense role-playing scene, or had Julian truly done something wrong?

  Had he cut some legal corners to make his brother’s surgery happen? It had crossed my mind more than once that donating his body to the experiment was an awfully altruistic gesture for a serial killer, whatever concessions he might have been granted. If Julian had hadn’t obtained permission from the “donor”, it would be the modern-day equivalent of body-snatching.

  I shuddered. God, please don’t let that be it.

  Colin nudged Julian’s thigh with the toe of his shoe. “Up.”

  Julian climbed awkwardly to his feet and stood there with his head down, his hands still behind his back. His long, pale body and heavy, flaccid cock looked unreasonably vulnerable.

  “Come with me.” Colin led him to a heavy wooden stock in the corner with a leather-padded neck and wrist holes and a similarly padded low platform. While Julian stood there, Colin lowered both neck boards until the openings were at knee height and then raised the upper one. “In.”

  Once Julian had knelt on the platform and placed his neck and wrists into the openings, Colin slid the top board down and latched it so that Julian was locked in place with his head only a foot from the wall. Then he picked up some kind of mini-stock with just two holes and kicked Julian’s ankles further apart. Crouching, he opened up the stock and locked it around Julian’s ankles and then hooked the ends to the side rails.

  Julian jerked a little in his bonds. “I’m sorry, Colin.”

  “Quiet. Unless you’re ready to tell Rachel what you did?” When Julian didn’t reply, Colin said, “I didn’t think so. The next time you speak without permission, it had better be to tell her the truth or you’ll wish you were standing.”

  Julian quieted at once but his feet twisted restlessly.

  Colin went to a cabinet and pulled out a rolled-up mat. “Rachel, you sit on the floor by his head and keep an eye on him. No touching, please, no matter how badly you want to. He has to do this by himself.”

  I took it with a nod and unrolled it on the floor right by the wall. God, I hated seeing him like this. It was so wrong, I felt like I should avert my eyes.

  My stomach clenched when Colin went to the wall of torture implements and came back with two different canes, one white with a black handle, and a thinner one of wood, curved at the end like a walking cane.

  “I’m not going to give you much of a warm-up, Julian, and you have no safe word. You know what you have to do to make it stop.”

  I was shocked to see a tremor run through Julian. Suddenly I was very afraid. I didn’t want to be here.

  “Please don’t do this,” I said unsteadily.

  “Rachel, Julian needs you beside him, but if you can’t be quiet I’ll have to gag you and put you in restraints.”

  Stomach churning, I wrapped my arms around my drawn-up knees and bit my lips.

  Colin set the white cane on a nearby bench. Then he took his place behind Julian and rolled his neck and shoulders before blowing out a breath.

  “I love you, Julian,” he said.

  Julian took a deep breath and then gasped when the first strike landed on his butt. It didn’t look like Colin was hitting him very hard, but Julian flinched and gasped with every blow, the long muscles in his legs twitching like a racehorse’s. After about twenty, spaced less than five seconds apart, his gasps turned to grunts.

  At forty, Colin stopped and leaned down to rub his hand roughly over Julian’s butt cheeks and thighs, and Julian groaned, keeping his eyes tightly closed.

  Colin sighed. “All right, let’s get down to it.”

  My eyes widened in horror. That was the warm-up?

  He drew back his arm and laid the cane across Julian’s thighs, drawing a yelp from him. He did it again and again, and when Julian arched his back, drawing his knees closer together, Colin hit him harder.

  After the echo of Julian’s shout died, Colin ordered, “Get that back down. Don’t try to protect your nuts or I’ll go after them.”

  Julian reluctantly straightened his back and spread his knees, breathing harshly.

  Colin hit him hard across both thighs again, and this time Julian screamed.

  I burst into tears, shaking all over. “Colin, please stop.”

  “No,” Julian said through clenched teeth. “It’s okay, Rachel. I need this.”

  Colin leaned down to tap the bottoms of Julian’s feet repeatedly and Julian howled like an animal, bucking and writhing in the stock. I sobbed silently into my jeans-clad knees.

  “I told you not to speak until you’re ready to spill, Julian. Don’t do it again or you won’t be able to walk tomorrow.”

  Julian blew out a couple of hard breaths, as if bracing himself, and I wished desperately to hold his clenched hands, stroke his sweat-beaded face. Part of me wanted badly to run away, to do anything but watch him take this punishment, but I couldn’t leave him to face it alone.

  Colin hit him a dozen more times, and though Julian yelped after several of them, he seemed to be in better control of himself.

  “That’s fifty,” Colin said, rubbing Julian’s butt and legs again. “You have five minutes to come clean and then I’m switching to the Delrin.”

  Then he looked at me. “I’ll be right back. You can talk to him, but don’t touch him. When I get back, I’ll ask if either of you violated my orders and he’ll tell me the truth.”

  He set the cane down by the other one and walked out, leaving me alone with Julian.

  “Please tell me,” I whispered, wiping my runny nose with the sleeve of my sweater. “I can’t take this anymore.”

  He shook his head.

  “I love you, Julian, and I will love you forever, no matter what. Please tell me.”

  Julian shook his head.

  Gathering my nerve, I asked, “Did you lie about having permission?” When his eyes widened, I gasped. “Oh God, that’s it, isn’t it? You stole the body.”

  He hesitated for a moment, looking torn, and then shook his head again.

  I slumped against my knees in relief. “Oh, thank God. I don’t know if I could have lived with that.”

  Julian swallowed and closed his eyes, his expression one of
such undiluted dread, I decided against pushing him further.

  When Colin returned, his face was pale, his eyes red-rimmed, and I felt like I’d been kicked in the chest. Oh God, how selfish could I be? Inflicting so much pain on the man he loved had to be ten times worse than watching it.

  “Any infractions, Julian?” he asked with unbelievable calm.

  “No, Sir.”

  “Good. Thank you both.” He picked up the white cane and whipped it around in the air, looking as sick as I felt. “Julian, I want you to think about this while you’re being stoic—every stroke I give you punishes Rachel and me as much as it does you, and even if you deserve it, we don’t.”

  Julian’s face crumbled and he sobbed once but didn’t say anything.

  “Have it your way.”

  It took thirty-two strokes of the mean white cane to break him.

  “He said no!” Julian finally screamed.

  Colin dropped the cane immediately. “Thank God.”

  Horror gripped me. “You did steal the body?”

  “No,” he gasped. “My brother. He said no. I didn’t have Jordan’s permission for the transplant. He said he’d rather die than live as my monster, but I just…couldn’t let it take him, too.”

  I covered my mouth with my shaking hands. “Oh my God.”

  And I’d thought body-snatching was the worst possible scenario. At least that, the donor wouldn’t have had to live with—he was dead either way. But Jordan might have fifty or sixty years to live with the results of Julian’s highly unethical action.

  “He’s only twenty-eight,” Julian ground out. “He hasn’t begun to live yet. He’s never even been in love. How could I just let him give up without a fight when I could offer him the chance to live a full and happy life?”

  Numb with shock, I watched as Colin released the boards one by one and pulled Julian’s limp, naked body into his arms, cradling him against his chest.

  “It’s all right, Julian. ” He kissed Julian’s stubbly jaw, his wet eyelashes, his sweat-soaked hair. “You did what you had to. If it were you, I’d have done the same thing.”

  “So Pohlson did consent to the donation,” I said dully.

  “Yes,” Colin told me. “All the terms of their agreement have been fulfilled. Within minutes of the execution, an escrow deposit in the amount of ten million US dollars that Julian had made under the guise of an anonymous abolitionist was released to his family.”

  I sagged against the stock, relieved that that much, at least, had been true.

  Then Colin clutched Julian tighter and whispered against his ear, “Tell her the rest.”

  “Oh shit, there’s more?”

  Julian turned his face into Colin’s neck. “I can’t.”

  “You have to. She deserves to know everything.”

  Julian swallowed hard and took a deep, shaky breath before opening his swollen, red eyes. He didn’t look directly at me, a fact that chilled me.

  “Pohlson wanted to fuck,” he said harshly, “preferably teenage boys. He wouldn’t even discuss any other terms until we’d reached an agreement on that one.”

  I covered my mouth. “Julian, you didn’t…”

  “No, Rachel, I didn’t,” Julian hissed, finally focusing on me with tempered steel in his eyes. “I would never have allowed anyone else submit to that monster.”

  The rest of the world ceased to exist as the implications of that statement crashed down on me.

  I don’t bottom. Ever.

  “Oh, Julian, no,” I said faintly.

  “Oh yes. I spent thirty minutes a week locked in that godforsaken cell with Augustine Pohlson after the agreement was finalized four months ago. Yesterday afternoon was the last time, a full hour, and he made the most of it. He toyed with me, telling me he’d changed his mind, making me beg, making me…” His voice broke, and he closed his eyes, shuddering. “I’m sure that sick fuck died smiling, replete with the knowledge of how completely he’d degraded the great Dr. Julian Xavier Kilmartin.”

  I sat there shaking, my mind a wasteland, my breastbone aching with the force of emotions too complex to sort out and too volatile to risk venting when Julian was in such a fragile state.

  Colin looked at me, defiance and hope and dread mingling on his face. Don’t hurt him, his eyes pleaded.

  “That’s it?” I demanded. “That’s the whole truth?”

  Colin nodded. “Everything else about the operation was completely above-board.”

  Making use of my hard-won ability to compartmentalize, I stuffed everything I’d just learned into a mental drawer, slammed it shut and locked it before standing up stiffly. “We need to take care of his wounds.”

  Colin’s eyes fell to Julian’s flanks, which streaked with too many livid welts to count, several of them welling with blood. He nodded, swallowing visibly. Between us, we got Julian up to his feet and half-carried him to my room, since it was closest. He grunted with every step.

  “Dammit, why did you talk?” Colin said as we laid Julian facedown across the bed. “I didn’t want to hit your feet.”

  “Better my feet than my nuts,” Julian mumbled into the spread.

  Colin snorted. “You don’t walk on your nuts.”

  “No, but I might,” I said under my breath. I’d seen enough cock and ball torture in my online explorations to know how to administer a little discipline of my own.

  Apparently I hadn’t compartmentalized the anger quite as effectively as I thought.

  Colin looked at me sharply but didn’t say anything. He left and returned with a bottle of water, a handful of capsules, and a jar of salve. He made Julian take the capsules, and then together we applied the salve liberally to Julian’s poor blistered butt and thighs. Julian flinched and moaned the whole time, but the moment we were finished, he seemed to fall into a deep sleep.

  Colin crawled on the bed far enough to gently kiss his cheek and then wrapped the top and bottom ends of the quilt over him.

  “He’ll probably be out until tomorrow, but someone should check on him,” he said, closing the door behind us. He pulled out is phone and called Dirk, quickly letting him know the situation and asking him to check on Julian periodically.

  Then he took my hand, and though I wanted to be alone, needed to be alone, I let him pull me down the hall into another bedroom. It must be his—though it was very clean and everything was neatly put away, the closet door was open and I could see his clothes on the bar and shoes on the floor.

  He started stripping off his clothes as fast as he could.

  “I need you,” he said with a shiver.

  Noting his lack of erection with relief, I stripped off too and climbed under the covers with him. He was ice-cold and shaking when I pulled his head against my breasts.

  “Please, God, let me never have to do that again,” he said, clutching me tightly.

  “Have you done it before?”

  “Every week for the last fourteen weeks. After he returned from the prison, he’d disappear into his bathroom for an hour, scrubbing himself raw inside and out, and then make me beat him until he was able to scream out whatever that sick bastard made him feel. This time was the worst.”

  A shudder rattled through him, and then another. “I don’t think I can do it again,” he choked out before a sob was torn from deep in his chest, and then another.

  I held him for quite a while, keeping my eyes wide open and my mind blank so the lid didn’t fly off the pressurized compartment where I’d stuffed everything.

  When I was sure he was asleep, I carefully extracted myself from his arms and dressed. I stumbled down the hall, opening doors until I found a vacant bedroom, and then cried until I vomited.

  Chapter Fourteen

  November 6

  My bags had been packed and waiting by the door for the last three days while I floundered in a morass of dread and yearning. For once, my inner good girl and bad girl were completely silent, as if both of them were as conflicted as I was.

  Th
e day after Julian’s shocking revelations, I’d told him I needed some time off to think—and the key to my room so that I could lock it from the inside. He’d granted both without hesitation. That afternoon, Colin knocked on my door and handed me a flash drive.

  “This is the only remaining copy of the footage Vince took during your first scene in the dungeon.”

  “Footage?” I gaped at him, prickling all over with a now familiar blend of dread and secret arousal. “You mean Vince made a movie of me? Naked?”

  “You agreed to it,” he said shortly. “Look at section twelve in your personal conduct agreement.”

  Gasping with outrage, I slammed the door in his face. At least that explained where my employee ID photo had come from. God, how high had I been flying not to have noticed a man aiming a video camera at my nude body?

  I almost threw the drive into the fire, but something stopped me. Who’d already watched it? Did I want to know? Did I really even care at this point?

  Deciding I might one day need it, I dropped it into my computer bag, not the least bit interested in seeing myself so completely vulnerable and losing all control.

  The next day it had warmed up enough for me to go outside without a winter coat, and I tromped down the slushy driveway in just a red hoodie, breathing the crisp, clean air and soaking up the bright sunshine. For a little while, I didn’t even try to think, but just opened myself to the world around me. I walked down the narrow paved road for quite a while, and when a couple of compact cars gave friendly honks as they zoomed past, I waved and smiled, glad to finally be grounded in reality again, if only in a small way.

  It was at that point I realized how very disconnected I’d become in the last two weeks. When I got back to my room, I turned on my cell phone for the first time since the night I arrived and called Bree. She laid a ten-minute guilt trip on me and then immediately asked if Colin was as good as ever in bed.

  “Better,” I told her honestly. The bold pronouncement distracted her enough that she didn’t even mention Julian or ask about the project. She did ask about Bangenschloss, and I took the opportunity to distract her further with a vivid description—leaving out, of course, any mention of the dungeons. Horribly homesick now, I asked her about Mom and Dad, and she filled me in on the little routine things I’d missed. By the time she finished, I was nearly in tears, I wanted to go home so badly.