I’d trust him with my damn life, but with this woman? What he might do to her scared me. There was no way I was leaving him alone with her.
Chapter 3
Chris
We left town with no fuss, the tires purring over the Bruce Highway on our way north. As soon as we were past the outer suburbs, I pointed over my shoulder at the box. Andreas propped open the front. Whenever I glanced sideways, I caught him looking back as if studying her. I wasn’t sure what he made of all this, apart from that obvious disapproval and his desire to keep her safe.
In a way, I was glad he was here to watch her. It was safer for her. I just prayed this wouldn’t backfire on Andreas. And I prayed like hell I could get rid of him fast once we got there. I needed to be alone with her. To sit and figure out what I wanted to do to her.
My fingers were hurting I’d clenched the wheel so tightly. Relax. I’d waited so long, thought about this scenario, off and on, much of my adult life, but…I could wait a bit longer.
No matter how well you know someone, as soon as you break the law, everything goes into a cyclonic blender. What would come out when he’d had time to digest all of this?
I hadn’t seen him for a few months. He’d been out on the oil rig in the Bass Strait same as my brother. Soon we might be going separate ways. His wavy black hair ruffled in the breeze when he wound down the window for a while. From beneath the short ochre sleeve of his T-shirt, the scars from the shark attack ran like pale confetti down the muscles of his left forearm. Remnants of a time when he’d needed me. I liked that. My good friends defined my world.
Andreas was a solid man with a solid conscience. That might prove a problem for him.
Me? I’d stick with my decisions, no matter how wrong they might be in a moral world. But I wasn’t in a moral world, hadn’t been since I was twenty-two and uncle had introduced me to shaky accounting.
I tensed my forearms, using the steering wheel to control my frustration. Of all the people to arrive and fuck this up…to maybe, fuck this up.
But…I made a hard and cutting decision then and there. If Andreas decided to hand me to the police I’d go without protest. I wasn’t jeopardizing things with him. No matter how deep into the dark this kink of mine took me. I could be Mister Evil to her, no worries, because it got me off. Not to him.
“You can take off her gag now,” I said over the engine noise.
He nodded and did so. For a few seconds he held the gag before him like it was some creature he’d caught and he was afraid to let it go in case it bit then he wiped it with his T-shirt and placed it back in the box with her.
“I swear I can hear the thoughts running around in your head. If we get stopped or have to slow down near people, drop the flap back down. If the cops stop us for any reason and they find her, pretend you didn’t know she was there.”
He grunted.
Andreas wasn’t normally the quiet sort but he didn’t say another word until we were near the Mount Spec turn-off.
“I want to stop here. You have to free her, Chris.”
Oh shit.
My stomach was so knotted up I’d probably need a valium myself before the day was out. I could have let this go. I could’ve not told Klaus my idea to take Kat out of the equation. But I had.
I hated that Andreas was here with me. This was my messed-up self. Not his doing. If I could’ve pushed him out the moving car without hurting him, I would have.
For most of my adult years I’d had a distant, back-of-the-cupboard, dangerous yearning to go further than BDSM allowed. Kat… Fuck, her prima donna personality and her pseudo-submissive, emotionally distant behavior had triggered every snarling instinct in me to wrestle her down and impose on her a set of laws that would make her behave. Those little shorts she wore, and the curvaceous body underneath, drove me crazy. I’d been allowed to strip them off her a few times when she agreed to scenes, but that had never been enough.
Being able to mark her with red, to make her scream, to run my hands over her hips and ass and, a few times, to get her off with a vibe or my fingers, if anything that had fed my craving.
Some Doms would have nothing to do with her, but me…I only dreamed of what might be possible.
But I never had, truly, been able to make her behave, because I couldn’t. Hard limits, safe and sane, consensual kink – all those drew lines I couldn’t cross.
“I’m not stopping unless you want to get out and take this to the cops. If you’re doing that, I may as well drive us there. If we stop to chat like schoolgirls on a picnic, the drug will be wearing off. I may have to give her more and that adds to the danger.”
The long, dead-straight road unrolling ahead, for the next kilometer, allowed me to drift my thoughts into remembering how Kat had looked back there. Controlled, for once, waiting for me to decide what to do with her. Her eyes half-closed. It was a miracle I’d wanted so badly for so long.
“Fuckit.” Andreas had shut his eyes. Air hissed in through his teeth. “Fuckit. Fuckit. Fuckit. You’re going to hell, you know.”
I shrugged. “Maybe. You don’t need to be here. I promise I’ll take care of her. I can let you out somewhere and you can catch a bus back. Then you can forget this.”
“What’d you drug her with?”
Ignoring me, hey? “You’re a stubborn bastard when you want to be.” I sneaked a look at his earnest face before concentrating on the road again. “Valium. I researched it, Andreas. Doses, effects. It was the safest one and the easiest to get hold of.”
“It’s hours yet to the Daintree. When does it wear off? What if she starts screaming?”
I kept my voice level. “If I have no choice, I’ll give her more.” I hoped he wouldn’t ask how. The answer would freak him out. “It might take four to six hours to wear off. It might take less. It varies from person to person.”
“Uh-huh.”
Andreas seemed to relax at that – as if knowing I’d planned this well had reassured him. I turned the thought over. His response almost said he didn’t want her to escape. Which was curious. I inhaled and the mind-cracking tension ebbed from my muscles.
“You know this is wrong, don’t you?”
“Yes.” A semi-trailer going the other way rocked our vehicle in its wake and I adjusted my hands on the wheel.
“So you’re not going to shoot anyone if things go ass over turkey?”
“No.” I checked him out. Meditative. “You’re still wondering if you should hand me over to law enforcement?”
“No. Hell, no.”
The road thrummed under the wheels. “Yes, I know it’s wrong. Do I care if society condemns me for doing this? Only if I get caught. Will I hurt anyone over this? No, especially not you. I never thought I’d do this. If the opportunity hadn’t arrived, I’d have kept going the way I was.”
“The way you was?” he murmured. “Just BDSM with chicks who said yes, hey?”
“Yep.”
“I keep thinking I’ve fallen into the wrong wardrobe and come out in Narnia or something. Jabberwocky land. Oz, maybe.”
I pulled a contemplative face and nodded. “Oz is close.”
He bit out a laugh. “You know she’s listening? Doped out, but she is. I can see from the way she holds her head. Does that worry you?”
“Let her.” Kat mightn’t remember much of this. I wasn’t sure of the long-term effects. But if she did… If she did, she’d remember her helplessness; remember us casually talking while she was back there unable to do a thing. I liked that. It gave my balls a warm feeling. I wished I could see her expression.
Yet this wasn’t purely sexual. Even after all these years of being a kinkster, I wasn’t sure what it was that grabbed me about dominating a woman sometimes. It just was me.
Not all sexual, but a part of it. I wanted to see her lips wrapped around my cock even if she didn’t want them there. I took a deep shaky breath.
“The Daintree?” Andreas said it quietly, like it was somewhere interesting and this w
as a normal holiday chat.
“Yes.”
“I always wanted to go there.”
“Me too.” I turned up the air-con. I didn’t want Kat getting heat stroke. Despite the autumn weather, the box might become a sauna if the tropical sun heated the car.
“We’ll have to stop to get petrol along the way. And I’ll find somewhere isolated, off the road, where we can let her out to go to the toilet. But I’ll have to watch her. To make sure she doesn’t get away.” I eyed him briefly then went back to looking at the road, then back to him again for a moment.
He swallowed and kept his gaze focused ahead. “Okay. When we get there, you and me, we have to talk.”
“Sure.”
I was beginning to wonder what Andreas was thinking about all this. Like any man, he’d have his little fetishes. We all had something dirty we’d like to do, even if we suppressed the ideas. But give us half a chance and a willing…or unwilling victim…most of us would do some damn kinky things to a woman. For some that meant coming on their faces or tearing off their panties and gagging them with them. For others it was ass sex, or milder things. Few men had the guts to let loose the dark beast inside them.
Me, I had a million ideas. Most I’d done at some time, to someone.
Part of Kat’s appeal was the challenge. She’d never submitted to anyone properly. Not that I’d ever seen. Bitch Queen was her true name. She’d never even let me fuck her. I wanted to bring her low, so low she would kiss the dirt for me.
She was going to find out how hard-ass I could truly be when there was nothing stopping me.
Part of it, and just musing on this made that red scintillating need slither through me, part was I just wanted to hurt her and see her take it because she had no choice. Fucked up? Yeah. But it was a beautiful sort of fucked up. I wondered why I always imagined it as a red need? The link to blood probably. Red had a certain distinction to it.
Pain – red.
Fear – black.
Graphic novels followed that sort of color scheme.
Which made sadism a mix of both? There’d be no green though, definitely. Or blue. Screams, in a comic, should be orange. Crap. I was going a bit crazy with this.
Maybe I shouldn’t be imagining what I was planning to do while I was driving?
In those few crystal clear times between us, I was sure I’d seen in Kat a yearning, like she wanted something she couldn’t quite reach. The dominant and submissive relationship, even the malformed one we had shared, let me see things she wanted to hide from everyone. It was a matter of listening hard enough, and paying attention.
In a perverse way, I was sure she wanted someone to make her do what she didn’t want. That was common in submissives, and the Dom’s role is to show them how to let go of control. The difference was that Kat never did let go. She clung to the edge with both hands.
Well, I’d pried away those fingers, and now she was going to learn to fly.
Chapter 4
Kat
It wasn’t until I was on my feet and standing in the prickling grass that I could think. Everything swirled; my legs shook; my stomach rebelled. I opened my eyes. Nothing. And tried to open them again. Then remembered, again. Blindfold.
“You’re somewhere hidden, Kat,” Chris said, his tone managing to be both dry and thickly evil at the same time. “No one can see us.”
Oh, you bastard. I blanked out his words while I fought nausea again. Tired, so tired.
Someone took my elbow and I jerked my head up, swaying as I attempted to focus on blackness. Blindfold. Stoopid.
“Go to the toilet.” They didn’t let go of me.
“Here?” Such croaky words. I’d spoken! No gag. Surprise, surprise. When had they removed it? I imagined my questions lined up like crows on a power line in my head. My lips seemed worn out and slick from constant dribbling. I licked them.
They…or he, had me, somewhere outside. Where was the car? Birds chirped nearby. Grass stalks scratched the soles of my feet. Could I kick him? Could I run?
There wasn’t a chance in hell I could escape. Not right now. I tried to concentrate and still the slosh of thoughts and sensations filling my head. If I could just think…properly. The blackness before my eyes surged with color splotches, with random sparks of panic, of fear, of what the fuck is happening.
Focus! Think, think, think.
I leaned sideways, off balance, and everything turned to mud.
I bit back a moan.
“Kat. Last chance.” Chris again. “If you need to go, go. Counting to ten. One, two…”
I did need to go. Someone had given me sips of water earlier, in the car. But they’d be watching. My shorts and underwear were gone. My hands were free but my arms were so heavy I couldn’t lift them. Trembling, borrowing strength from the unknown hand, I lowered myself. The only thing that freed me to do this was the knowledge that watching women pee wasn’t one of Chris’s kinks. Halfway done, at the tightening of his hand on my arm, I remembered that humiliation was, sometimes.
I’d bet he was getting off on this.
When I was hefted up and loaded back into the box, the world in my head was too busy spinning to and fro for me to do more than weakly tug against their grip. Two sets of hands. The man who handled my upper torso clipped my wrists down. Metal clicked and I blindly turned my head seeking whoever was there. Fingers locked my chin within a rough hand. I gasped.
“You have no idea how much this pleases me. Seeing you at my mercy like this.”
Though I tried to summon spit even that was beyond me.
Let him think I’m cowed.
Genius. I mocked myself. Couldn’t squash a bug.
After a moment he let me be and lowered my head.
Bastard.
The engine started and the car rocked. The tires cracked over gravel, then came a jolt, then we hummed over smooth road.
I was supposed to be on holiday right now. Instead I was here, a prisoner, being taken somewhere far away from home for Chris and his friend to do god knew what to me.
Tears leaked into the blindfold.
Chapter 5
Chris
Our trip continued with little drama. Kat behaved so well I was almost dreading her misbehavior. The woman was akin to an unexploded bomb. Continuing to drug her to the eyeballs with valium wasn’t an option. What would she do when she ‘woke up?’ The anticipation might not kill me, but it was giving me a severe case of blue balls. I sincerely prayed it would be good.
Nearly five hundred kilometers after leaving Magnetic Island, we reached the Daintree River, crossed it by ferry then went on to Cow Bay. North of here, very few roads penetrated the deep tropical rainforest, and wandering too far afield might land you in trouble with crocs or shotgun-wielding entrepreneurial growers of weed. I slowed and pulled over to the side of the road at the outskirts of the tiny town.
Andreas roused. “Why are we stopping?”
“This is where I get the keys to the house I’m borrowing. A man called Scrim should be meeting us here. Keep an eye on her.” Not that I needed to tell him that. We’d lowered the flap on the box.
“Fuck. This is crazy,” he whispered.
As if anyone would hear us.
Years after my uncle had introduced me to doing the accounts for a friend of his, that had led to me helping Vetrov, a man I’d never met, with his dirty laundry. Crime paid me well. I kept my distance, though. My only contact with Vetrov was David, one of his employees, and emails. I did the money for him and never asked questions unless they involved numbers.
But some things I learned along the way, like a sponge mopping up blood. On the rare occasions we went for a drink together, David had dropped info. After a few drinking sessions, I’d wanted brain bleach. Some of his stories had made me wonder if there was something wrong with me, because they’d sent me into a sexual haze. Things I’d long imagined had been made real. A few times, in the beginning, I’d wanted to back out, to maybe even go to the cops, but
I hadn’t. I was young, my family was involved, and I was just a small player on the periphery. I let it go. But the lodge, that info I’d tucked away for a time like this.
I creaked open the door and jumped out. My boots crunched over loose rocks on the bitumen.
From beneath a huge spreading fig tree a man emerged, a duffel bag slung across his shoulders. I assessed him. Compact. Efficient. A man who’d reached his thirties and learned how to handle himself physically. All these came to mind. Already, I didn’t like him. Scrim was one of the boss’s lesser henchmen. I’d met a few over the years but they’d never seen me as more than the accountant.
Today was different. Surely he’d been told very little? I just needed to get the keys to the lodge off him and go.
Late afternoon. The heavy shadows beneath the trees were gathering coolness.
He nodded and shifted the bag off his shoulders, letting it hang from his big fist. His smile creased around his mouth but did nothing to soften the squareness of his face. The skin under the grey to black bristles on his chin and scalp showed lines – old cuts and a gouge that dug deep above his right eye then swerved down to his cheekbone.
“How’s it going? I’m Scrim. Chris, yeah?”
“Yes.”
His free hand came up and we shook.
“You’ve got the keys to the lodge? David told you I was coming?”
“Yup. I’ll show you the way. Do you want me in the front? Otherwise I can direct you from the back seat.” He gestured toward the Toyota.
I nodded, as if agreeing. He wanted to come with us? “I thought I’d just be getting keys from you.”
“No. I guess you could say I’m the caretaker. I just got off the plane at the Cow Bay airstrip. You want to use the lodge? I’m there too. It’s part of the deal.”
Fuck.
“Don’t worry. There’s two houses.” He nodded toward the vehicle. “You’ll have your privacy. There’s a Range Rover in the garage at the Lodge. I’ll keep out of your hair.” He winked. “No matter what you get up to.”
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