Cassie McGraw Box Set: Books 1-3

by David Archer

  The better she felt, the more she was willing to forgive and overlook the “out of hand” part. After all, as he had pointed out, she had been the one who had actually pushed him to explore the fantasy. It was her fault, more than his.

  Of course, she never told anyone, and especially never mentioned it to Abby during their frequent phone calls. Abby simply would’ve gone through the roof, would’ve started trying to warn Cassie about the dangers of abusive relationships, but Cassie knew that wasn’t the case. This was just about fantasy, just about some erotic fun. There was nothing to worry about, she knew that.

  And then it happened again, not quite two weeks later. He wasn’t quite as violent this time, and though she did end up with two black eyes, they didn’t hurt all that badly.

  On the other hand, she did manage to get in a couple of good kicks. He wanted her to fight back, right? Well, if this was something that he liked, then she figured she could handle it. She knew enough about the psychology of sex by this point to realize that she would probably even start to enjoy it, eventually.

  After the third time, Mike told her that he got such a thrill out of dominating her during their play that he wanted to experiment with some other things. When she asked him what he had in mind, he explained to her about something called domestic discipline. If she would go along with that, he said, it would mean that she agreed to letting him call the shots for the most part, and if she didn’t obey or failed to please him, he would have the right to punish her.

  “Like, how?” Cassie asked.

  That’s what led to the slapping and the rough spankings. She never knew when they were coming, because she wasn’t always sure whether the thing he told her to do was something serious, or something he was only playing about, but if she didn’t do it instantly she would suddenly find herself bent over his knee and he would whip off his belt to use on her. It hurt like hell, but whenever she tried to protest, he reminded her that she had agreed to it all, and she’d give in.

  Slapping was also at unexpected times. If she expressed an opinion or suggested an alternative to what he wanted to do, it would come so quickly that her head would be rocked and she’d be dazed. She also saw bruises appear from them, and began buying better makeup to conceal them.

  Unfortunately, there was still that one niggling little part that wondered if this was the kind of man Mike truly was. If he honestly got erotic pleasure out of hitting her, raping her, slapping her and such, then wouldn’t he eventually want to do it for real? If he came up with something even worse, Cassie wondered what she would say.

  “Oh, hell no,” she muttered aloud. That’s what she wanted to say, and she was pretty sure it was what she should say, but she knew herself well enough to know there was a good possibility that she would bite her tongue and hold it back. After all, it wasn’t like he was going to let her be seriously hurt. Mike wasn’t the kind of man who would actually inflict real harm on anybody; for God’s sake, he was a cop, not a rapist.

  Then why, she suddenly asked herself one day, am I having to tell myself that over and over and over?

  She was walking through the dining room when that thought struck her. It was the day after the third time Mike played out the rape fantasy, and she suddenly realized that she had stopped unpacking his old boxes after their first conversation about it. The psychology student inside her wondered why that was the case, because she would’ve expected it to have the opposite effect. Knowing he had such a fantasy should have made her want to find any evidence relating to it, but instead, she had simply abandoned the whole project, as if she was afraid of what she might find if she continued.

  There were still a few boxes inside the house, but Mike had carried most of them out to the garage. A guilty suspicion crossed her mind that he actually knew exactly which boxes held the “naughty surprises” that he had warned her about, and so those would undoubtedly be among the first boxes he took out. She glanced at the clock on the wall and saw that it would be at least three more hours before Mike got home.

  Surely, it couldn’t hurt to just go take a look. She knew what she would find—just some simple magazines or videos that made a little rough sex seem like fun. All she had to do was see them, and then she could put these worries to rest. Mike didn’t even ever have to know about them.

  She went to the garage, through the door that led into it from the kitchen. Her little Kia was sitting inside it, taking up most of the room, but there were some workbenches and shelves on the far side. Any of the boxes he wanted to hide would probably be over there, so she stepped down onto the concrete floor and made her way around the car.

  Yes, there were the boxes. The space under the workbench was deep enough to shove two boxes in. One of them would be against the wall, with another one in front of it, just barely sticking out under the bench. If Mike wanted to hide something, he would undoubtedly have made sure it was in the box that went against the wall.

  Carefully, she dragged out one of the boxes and took a cursory look inside. It held mostly books, and a random sampling of them showed her that they were almost certain to be his old science fiction novels. He had told her that he had spent his teens as a space cadet, reading everything from the old sci-fi of the fifties to every Star Wars book he could get his hands on. Sure enough, she found quite a few of each kind in that box.

  Shoving it aside, she reached in behind it and pulled out the box that was against the wall. This one wasn’t very heavy, and a moment later she had it out where she could open it and look inside. She found a few magazines, but none of them were anything she could consider pornographic. The closest she came to that was an old Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. She put everything back in the box and pushed it back into place, then replaced the one with the books.

  When that was done, she looked at the next boxes in the row. The first one on the outside held more books, but there were also some model cars and even a few old toys. She dragged it aside so that she could get back into the tight space and pull out the one behind it.

  As soon as she opened the box, she knew she had found what she was looking for. It was filled with videos, some of them on DVD and others on old video cassette tapes. Most of the tapes appeared to have been privately recorded, but the DVDs were labeled and the images on their cases were graphic.

  The Night Visitor, Stalking You, The Girl Who Cried Rape… Cassie’s eyes were wide as she stared at the titles, but it was the clips that were shown on the backs of the cases that sent them to their widest. She saw women who were tied and gagged, women with bruises and stripes all over them, and women who were obviously pleading for something to stop. Her stomach was turning flip-flops, because she was having trouble imagining how any man could watch such things unless he was capable of doing them himself.

  She pulled out a few of the others and looked at them, but they were simply more of the same. She dropped them back into the box and looked at the cassettes, wondering just what kind of videos might be on those. Without even thinking about what she was doing, she picked up two of them and walked back into the house. In the bedroom, Mike had an old TV set that had a built-in VCR. She sat down on the foot of the bed, turned on the television, and plugged the first tape in.

  This was obviously something homemade, because there was no music, no titles, and no credits. The image that appeared on the screen showed a woman bound spread-eagled and gagged, lying on a bed. She was naked, and there were tracks of tears on her cheeks, showing where the tears had cut through dirt and grime on her face. Her wrists and ankles were each tied to one of the corners of what looked like an old metal bed frame.

  Cassie reached for the television to turn it off, but some morbid fascination kept her from doing so. She pulled her hand back and watched, waiting to see just what kind of depravity Mike had purchased on this tape.

  The camera angle was adjusted slightly so that the woman’s entire body was on the screen. It jiggled once or twice more as someone tried to get it set precisely the way they want
ed it, and then a shoulder filled the screen. It appeared to be a man’s shoulder, and he seemed to be trying to get the camera set just how he wanted it. All she could tell was that he was wearing a gray sweatshirt.

  When he had stepped out from behind the camera, the woman began crying in earnest. Cassie mentally willed the man to get out of the way so that she could see what might be happening to the poor woman, and her telepathic instruction must have reached back through time because the man moved aside. The woman was once again filling the screen, though she was struggling with her bonds and trying her best to escape.

  “Think she’s ready?” asked a man’s voice from off camera. “She definitely looks ready.” That brought a short burst of laughter, and it sounded like two or three men. Cassie’s eyes narrowed as she stared at the screen, waiting to see what was going to happen next.

  “We’ll find out,” came another voice, and Cassie suddenly froze.

  That voice… It had sounded just like Mike, but she couldn’t believe he would actually have participated in something like this, and certainly not in front of a video camera. She leaned forward and stared at the screen, and then her worst nightmare was realized when she saw the man in the sweatshirt appear again. There was no way she could mistake those handsome features, that close-cropped brown hair.

  A second man appeared beside him, and Cassie thought he looked terribly familiar. She’d seen him somewhere before, she was certain, but she couldn’t remember when or where.

  Mike climbed onto the bed and sat on his haunches, pulling the sweatshirt off over his head. She could tell that he was a bit younger than now, so the video was probably made a couple of years earlier. Mike was only twenty-four, but the one she saw on the screen looked like he was probably two to three years younger. There was a babyish look to his features, and his muscles weren’t quite as chiseled as they were now.

  With the sweatshirt gone, he sat down and took off his jeans, kicking everything over and off the bed. Off to the side, the second man was also taking off his clothes and dropping them onto the floor behind the bed. When they were naked, both of them lay down beside the woman, one on either side and began touching her. Cassie watched in horror as Mike caressed her face with his hand before moving down to touch her in more intimate places. The more he allowed his hand contact with her, the more she cried and struggled, but it was obvious she couldn’t get loose.

  The second man grabbed the woman by her hair, lifting her up and pulling her head back hard as he ripped the gag from her mouth, and she began to beg for them to let her go. “Please, oh please,” she begged, “just let me go, I won’t say anything, I won’t ever tell anybody anything about this, I swear…”

  “You won’t say anything?” The second man was looking into her face as he spoke, his own expression one of sadistic delight. “You’re nothing but a whore, bitch. You do this kind of thing all the time. You upset because you’re not getting paid this time? Is that why you’re crying those big alligator tears?”

  Cassie’s heart began racing, and her breathing became ragged. What kind of video could this be? Surely it was all an act, it had to be. Grasping for anything that would help her to cope, she told herself that what she was seeing was Mike’s attempt to become a porn star, that he had made the mistake of doing a low-budget porn film when he was younger. That’s all it could be, right?

  The second man pressed his lips to hers, and she fought to turn her face away. He jerked back and slapped her, then looked at Mike. “Let’s get this on,” he said. “I’m gonna enjoy this slut.”

  And then the beating began. Mike and the other man began striking the woman, and Cassie clamped a hand over her mouth as she saw blood beginning to appear. Her lips, her nose, even her eyes were suddenly bloodied, and she was crying and begging for it all to end.

  It was only getting started, though. She was weakened and subdued, no longer struggling even though she still wept, and that’s when the rapes began. The poor woman was violated in every possible way, until she finally stopped crying and simply endured what was happening to her. When Mike and the other man were finished, they stepped away and two others took their places.

  It took a moment for Cassie to look at their faces, but then the shock of recognition hit her. These two and the other man were the three police officers in the photo she had found that first day, she was sure of it. She jumped up and ran to the living room, snatched the photo off the fireplace mantle and carried it back to the bedroom. She looked at the screen, then back at the photo and was certain. Whatever was going on, it was the four policemen—including Mike—from that photo who were beating and raping that poor young woman.

  Cassie was too shocked to stop the tape but let it play as she sank back onto the foot of the bed with her fist shoved into her mouth and the photo clutched in her other hand. Tears were streaming down her own cheeks as she watched, and a part of her was trying to figure out what was going to happen next while another part was screaming that she didn’t want to know.

  When the second pair of men were done with her, they stepped back and left her lying there on the bed. She was barely moving at all, but Cassie saw her eyes flick toward the camera, before looking away again.

  “Your turn to clean up the mess,” she heard a man say, and then Mike’s voice answered.

  “No problem,” he said, and he suddenly appeared in the camera’s field of view again. Cassie’s eyes clamped shut when she saw the pistol in his hand, and she made a guttural grunting noise as she waited for the sound of the shot, but it didn’t come. Instead, she heard Mike’s voice again.

  “Hey, do me a favor and kill that camera before I do this, okay?”

  It took Cassie several minutes to get up the strength to rise from the bed and eject the tape. When she finally did so, she realized that there was a second tape lying beside the TV. Yes, she had brought two of them in from the garage, hadn’t she? She trembled as she ejected the first tape and pushed in the second, but she didn’t go back to sit on the bed.

  This one began with a woman in a different pose. She was standing, but her hands were tied above her head, and she was already covered with what looked like bloody stripes. Cassie used the fast-forward button, and sure enough, Mike appeared a few seconds later. He reached up and released whatever was holding the woman’s hands over her head, then threw her over a table and raped her. When he backed away, another man took his place, and then another. The tape ended suddenly at that point, and Cassie sobbed as she ejected it.

  She knew she had to put them back, and she needed to do it before Mike got home. As horrible as the videos had been, she was so shocked that she couldn’t think of what to do. She just knew that she had to put them back before he found out she had them, so she carried them quickly back out to the garage.

  It was the work of a few minutes to put them back into the box they had come from and shove it under the workbench, back against the wall where it had been. She pushed the other box into place in front of it, the one with the model cars and books that seemed so normal, so innocuous.

  And then her strength finally failed her. She collapsed, sitting, on the concrete floor. Her back was against her car, but that left the workbench and the boxes in plain sight, and just the knowledge of their existence brought a question to her mind.

  What kind of man was she engaged to marry?

  EIGHT

  As a psychology student, Cassie was fully aware of the mind’s ability to refuse to accept or believe that which it found inconvenient or unacceptable, but that didn’t prevent her from being amazed at her own subconscious insistence that what she had seen had not been real. She offered herself every possible explanation, reminded herself that there were men and women who made their livings by doing the exact same things she had just seen on those tapes. It was an act, with each person playing a part.

  Surely, she thought, that’s all this was. I just came across some old tapes of Mike and his buddies making a porn film. For a moment, grasping on to that wis
py thought would make her feel better. For a moment, she could convince herself that none of it was real, that the woman who seemed to be begging them to stop was really enjoying the whole experience. After all, hadn’t she enjoyed it when Mike…

  No. She hadn’t. She’d been utterly terrified, and just like the girl in that video, she had begged and pleaded and tried to fight, but all to no avail. When she was forced to admit that to herself, she also had to admit that the fear she had seen in that girl’s face and heard in her voice was just as real as the terror she, herself, had felt on that awful night.

  Cassie had expected to die that night, because Mike had done an excellent job of making the experience seem real. He called to tell her he had to work late, and she had heard the frustration in his voice. When the attack came, the stocking mask he wore had so distorted his features that she couldn’t recognize him, and her panic had made him seem bigger. In her mind, it had not been Mike at all. It had been a monster, some predatory creature that she never knew existed, and it had her in its grip.

  And when the monster has you, she thought, you just know you’re going to die. Cassie had fully expected to be killed, and the same horrible, visceral fear that she had felt that night was etched across the face of the woman she had seen in the first video. That girl, whoever she was, had been absolutely certain she was going to die when those men were finished with her.

  The one in the second video had seemed resigned, beyond caring what happened to her. Cassie realized that she could imagine what it would be like to reach that point. After all, hadn’t she sort of been there already? That first time Mike raped her, hadn’t she reached the point of giving up? She had passed out, and she didn’t need her psych degree to know that it had been a subconscious effort to escape what was happening, regardless of how it might end.

  The question now, Cassie knew, was what to do about it. She was certainly not going to ask Mike about those tapes; no matter what he said, no matter how convincing he might be, there would always be a part of her that wondered, and that was the excuse she used to avoid confronting him with it.