by Skye Jones
“What’s with the fancy dress.” I laughed.
His eyes narrowed. “Oh, you are a stupid one, aren’t you?” he asked with a sneer. “I’ve already told you how much I enjoy breaking pretty things, so go on; you carry on being a pushy little bitch. Give me an excuse.”
“As if you need one.”
Thick gloved fingers took my jaw in a punishing grip, holding my face up for him to inspect. “Well, so far, I’ve restricted myself to training you in physical pain, but I do love a bratty bottom, so keep it up and we can move on to more… sensual pursuits.”
He leaned in and licked my lips, his cool, wet tongue tracing the seam of my mouth, making me shudder.
I swallowed down a wave of nausea. I was pretty sure if I puked in his face, he’d beat me black and blue.
“I’m trying to take it easy on you. Honestly, I haven’t been that rough on you, and I’ve given you plenty of breaks. You need to toughen up. You need to be able to tolerate a certain amount of pain. You’ll have to keep your mind clear and in order to do that, you need to be able to cope with pain. Some people like pain, of course, but if you’re not naturally a pain slut, then you will have to learn how to cope.”
I laughed. “How kind of you to be helping me like this.”
His face went serious for a moment, and there was a flicker of something almost soft in his eyes before his harsh sneer snapped into place once more. “I am trying to help you. These guys are sadists, but they aren’t murderers or into physically damaging you so badly you aren’t of any use to them. They will dress like this. They might even wear face masks, some of which can be scary as fuck if you’re tied up and vulnerable.
“I’m preparing you, Milly,” he carried on. “I flogged you today; it hurt, but it hasn’t done you any lasting harm. No broken skin, I know where to avoid in order not to damage your organs. These men are the same. It’s your fear they want. Not your destruction.”
He walked around me, trailing one finger over my shoulder as he continued talking. “If you can learn to control your thoughts, you can control your fear of the pain. If you aren’t feeling real fear, but only pretending, it makes it a lot easier for you to do your job—read their minds and get out of there quicker. Better for you. Better for Sienna. Better for me.”
“What does it have to do with you?” I asked, genuinely puzzled.
“I have a reason to want a cure for the virus.”
“Do you have any suggestions of ways I can deal with the pain?” I asked him. Wanting to keep him talking as I ran through ways to get out of this mess.
“Go into your head. Retreat from the situation: have a song you recite, or a favorite story you relive, anything. Find something that works for you and go there, keep yourself grounded and you should be able to keep calm enough to do what Sienna needs… and breathe! Breathe into the pain.”
He came back around my front and watched me as he spoke. “One of the things you’ll need to be able to do is cope with clamps. This training is to prepare you for the things they might wish to do and teach you how to disassociate from the pain enough to do what Sienna needs.”
“Why the hell are you helping her?” I asked.
“Money, power, my own reasons.”
“Is she insane? What on earth makes her think I’ll do what she wants?”
He laughed. “I had thought as much myself, but she seems to think holding your family and threatening to kill and eat your dog, chop off your mother’s head, and feed your father his own dick, will be enough to ensure your compliance. Her words.” He paused and walked around me once, before ending in front of the cross. “Now, me, I’m not sure she’s right. I mean, from what Simon tells us, your mother is a grade-A bitch who treated him like shit and planned to marry you off to some arsehole for power and prestige. Your father is weak, the dog is a sad victim in all this, but if I were you, then I doubt I would do what Sienna wants to save an ungrateful bunch like your family.” He shrugged. “Not my call though, is it? I hope she’s right because if she can get the cure then things will look up for me. But you’re a wild card in all this. For now though, I’m simply here to train you; what you do out there when you are with those guys is up to you.”
I hated him so much. He wouldn’t save anyone in his own family, I’d bet, because he was a sociopath. I was livid, terrified, and helpless. Unable to even move to assuage some of the emotions swirling within.
He went over to a bag in the corner and pulled out some clothes pegs. “Now, I’m going to start gently, on your arms and legs and build up, until we get to the nipples and genitals. Of course, I’ll need to take your underwear off when we get to that part.”
I gasped, and tears welled in my eyes.
“Calm down, I might be a sick fuck but I’m not a rapist. I won’t do anything to you sexually. Not unless you want it, which I’m doubting will be in the cards. As for the training, you’ll get used to it soon enough. Okay. Here goes.”
He took a clothes-peg out of his bag on the floor and attached it to the underside of my arm. It hurt like hell and I screamed, unable to stop myself. I couldn’t stand the feeling.
That sickness surged again, and I swallowed, my throat thick and dry. I wished I could hurt him the way he hurt me.
I wanted to get into his head, see if he had any conscience at all. I focused on him, not too hard, but thinking about him, his life before everything went to shit, who he was. I emptied my mind of all else and filled it with nothing but Slim. At first, I thought it wasn’t going to work, but then the awful fracturing-of- the-earth sensation came at me, as if the whole world had been defragged, and I was in.
I expected pleasure and there was some, but it was tinged with shame. Regret. Above it all simmered a pent-up pissed off anger at the whole world and exhaustion. Such exhaustion.
He looked at me, and although his face was cold and hard, unreadable, inside, he felt more of that shame. Then sympathy, for me. He didn’t want to be doing this, not really. So why did he?
He was turned on, to a degree, but conflicted as hell.
The sick fuck enjoyed this, got off on the scenario to an extent, but he knew it was wrong and a war raged within him at his actions. Okay… not a sociopath. Not a good man, but not a monster.
He was bargaining with himself, thinking if he didn’t do it someone else would; believing he could train me, and I wouldn’t be scared of the men I’d be given to by Sienna. The fool genuinely thought he could help me face what was coming.
Then I saw something else. Slim, hurt by a person much bigger than him. A woman. Why was she so tall?
“Mummy, please don’t. I didn’t take it, I promise.”
Holy hell, he was a child. A child being beaten by his mother.
Slim had a shitload of baggage, and I sensed a deep-seated need to dominate, and he was right when he’d warned me ages ago that he liked to hurt pretty things, but he preferred it if the pretty things liked to be hurt. This scene didn’t please him because I didn’t want to be here. He thought back to a girl with dark hair and sad eyes who loved being spanked and hit with a riding crop.
He wasn’t a flat-out sadist though. He stopped before harming her, and then he soothed her. Held her, gave her water.
His thoughts flicked back to me. He was thinking those guys I would be meeting soon were depraved in the pain they liked to cause. Slim preferred the control and domination to inflicting any real hurt. He liked to play, and this was too far for him, but he was doing it anyway. Shame as he worked with a gang who sold boys and girls but refused to have any part of that. Why?
Was it because of what his mother did to him? Had it hardened him until it overrode his conscience.
Maybe I could use that pain against him? Could I make him feel some of that childhood terror all over again? Use it to my advantage?
If I could read his thoughts, couldn’t I find a way to hurt him? Even if only the way Jackson did to me when he got into my head. I tried to let Slim know I was there. I shouted hello
as loud as I could in my head, but nothing. I tried to scratch as his brain, but he didn’t show any signs of knowing I read his mind.
I was getting lost deeper in his thoughts, his psyche, and it was a murky place to be. Part of me feared never getting out if I didn’t wrench myself free, but part of me wanted badly to hurt him. I didn’t want to leave. Not before I paid him back and made him hurt.
Then I saw something else: a woman, bedraggled, emaciated, chained. She was in a room, a kind of barn or outbuilding it seemed, and Slim approached her cautiously. He placed a bowl of entrails and raw meat in front of her and backed away. The creature dropped to her knees and crawled to the bowl on all fours before starting to eat the disgusting food.
Slim watched her and he hurt for her, ached.
She wasn’t the woman who had harmed him. She wasn’t his mother, so who was she? A girlfriend? He didn’t show me. With a sigh he turned and walked out of the building. Once outside, he passed a man smoking a cigarette.
The guy gave Slim a disgusted look, and Slim turned around and punched him in the face.
The guy staggered back, holding his jaw, but he didn’t retaliate or say anything. With a surge of satisfaction that dimmed the aching in his heart, Slim walked on.
As I sank deeper and deeper into the disgusting world that was Slim’s brain, I began to lose myself. His memories, thoughts, and feelings became more real than my own.
That was when it hit me. Maybe I could hurt him by getting deep inside him and focusing on his pain. The punishment his mother doled out to him. Focus on it, amplify it, and give it back to him in spades.
I let myself sink farther still, scary as it was. Soon, I didn’t quite know where I ended and he began. Although I should hate him, I didn’t. He wasn’t dead inside like he pretended. Slim felt things deeply, and he pushed it all down and converted it to anger and hardness and hate, but deep below those things were grief and fear.
I focused on pain. Nothing but pain.
The pain he’d given me, the pain his mother gave him. I felt every lash he’d stroked upon my skin, then the lashes on his tender flesh from the whip his mother used on him as a young boy. She hadn’t been playing and her whip wasn’t a black BDSM toy made of soft suede like the one he used now, but a proper horse whip.
She used it with gusto, and didn’t only hurt him but humiliated him too. His mother claimed to be a God-fearing woman who had given birth to an abomination. She repeatedly told him how bad he was.
Dirty, evil boy. You’re filled with the stench of the Devil. I know your dark thoughts, son, and you must let me help you be free of them.
I let her words etch themselves on my soul and set them free in his mind.
Crack, crack, crack. The flogger came down harder and harder on my skin, the whip on his. My head screamed with the pain of it all, but I didn’t let up.
“Fuck.” Slim stepped back and shook his head. He dropped the clothes peg he was holding onto the floor.
I didn’t let it break my concentration. I couldn’t stop because if I did then he’d win, and I’d end up nothing more than his slave.
Slim stumbled to the side and gave a cry before dropping to his knees.
“No, Mother. Stop.” The words rang out in his mind as clear to me as if he’d said them.
A grim sense of satisfaction surged within, but I pushed it to one side, not wanting to lose focus for a second.
The pain tore through me as surely as it did him, but I wouldn’t pause.
“Agh, God, I’m sorry.” Slim bent over, touching his head to the floor.
Then he raised his face to look at me, bewildered and scared, before dropping his head back down hard, forehead slamming against the concrete floor. “Make it stop, Mother.”
I didn’t let up. My body was covered in sweat, and I shook all over from the effort and concentration needed, but I wouldn’t stop. I’d rather die and take him with me than let him conquer me.
He lifted a tear-stained face to me and spoke aloud, “It’s you.”
I grinned at him. Yeah, you sick fucker. How’s it feel when the shoe is on the other foot? I didn’t speak, couldn’t find the energy to do so while I lashed him with mental and physical pain, but my smile told him all he needed to know.
“You fucking witch, make it stop or I’ll kill you.”
He screamed and bent double, and I upped the ante. I delved deeper still, to when he was but a tiny babe in arms, and his mother had scalded him. The burning pain on my arm knocked me sick, but I let it wash over me, seep into me, and I shared it with him.
“Noooo. Aggggh.” He began to roll around on the floor, screaming and shouting.
Still, I didn’t stop or let up. His body was covered in sweat; it dripped from him onto the floor, and his heart rate was high enough I feared he might die if I didn’t stop. Not that I should have cared if he did, but I did, and I needed him to free me too.
I broke the contact suddenly, withdrawing from his mind so fast it spun me around as if on a fairground ride. A wave of sickness rushed over me, and I bent my head to the side, throwing up.
Slim shook and trembled on the floor, his body convulsing every now and again.
“You fucking bitch,” he ground out. “Do that to me again and I’ll kill you.”
“No, see, you won’t because I can do way worse than that,” I lied through my teeth. “I can make you feel pain so bad you’ll never recover. I’ll kill you, and it won’t be quick; it will be hellish. You’ll throw up, scream and beg, and piss yourself, but I won’t stop.”
“What the fuck do you want?” He pulled himself into a sitting position and stared at me, pure hate burning in his gaze.
“Nothing much, simply undo my restraints and open the door. That’s it.”
He laughed. “Oh, only that. See, if I do what you ask, I’m a dead man.”
“No, you’re not. You let me go and open the door. Then you walk out of here, out of the facility, and no one will care. Go get your guys and say you’re getting some air or having a smoke if anyone asks you. I’ll give you five minutes before I do anything, then I’ll leave. By then you can be on your way back to Raven territory. Sienna won’t come after you there.”
He stared at me. “I don’t know. Part of me wants to kill you after that fucking stunt. I don’t care if it ends me too.”
I grinned at him. “I know the feeling. And at this point, I don’t care,” I lied again. “One thing I’m certain of is that I’m not staying here to be abused by you and used by Sienna. Either we go out together in a blaze of glory, or you let me go. Your choice.”
He cocked his head to one side as he stood and regarded me. The crazy bastard did seem to be deciding whether or not to die here with me. I contemplated getting into his head to give him another dose of pain, but instead I slipped in and read his mind. He didn’t care all that much if he lived, but he cared about the bedraggled creature in the barn, whoever she was. His mind went to her and he hurt for her, but he couldn’t die because then he couldn’t save her. His face gave none of it away. A smile, a lazy shrug of one shoulder, and he came to me.
Undoing my ties, he leaned in close and whispered in my right ear, “This isn’t over between us. You’re on my shit-list now, pretty one. I will never forget this.”
“Ditto,” I snarled back.
Still in his head though, I saw he didn’t mean the words. Instead of hatred for me, he only felt fear for what this would mean for the abomination he fed and sheltered. I was almost incidental in all of this to Slim. He would let me go, and he wasn’t thinking about getting vengeance on me; his mind only focused on how else he could get the cure. He was running out of time.
When all the restraints were undone, he gave me his hand and helped me down. My legs were like straws, they had that much strength. I wobbled about like a newborn foal, while Slim gathered my clothes and threw them at me.
He went to the door, entered a code, and opened it.
Turning to me, he shot me a venom
ous look before he exited the room and took off at a fast pace down the corridor.
I pulled my clothes on as quickly as I could with my shaking limbs, and then I tried to get my breathing under control.
The thing I’d done to Slim would be an invaluable weapon if I could use it on others, but it took a hell of a lot out of me.
I waited for what felt like five minutes, as agreed, and then I hesitantly walked to the door of the room and peered out. The corridor was empty, and I crept out of the room, not looking back. I never wanted to see that space again as long as I lived.
I had no clue which way to go and wondered if I could somehow use my sixth sense to show me the way. Closing my eyes, I focused on the building, on the fresh air of the outside, and tried until my head hurt to see the way out. Nothing.
Damn, my gift was unreliable as hell. I needed to train with Jackson, but he wasn’t as strong as me in this department. Already, I probably could do way more than him, Alex too. Which meant I needed someone with similar powers to me.
Sienna had mentioned a few others, but one particular girl who had been helping Sienna to learn when people were in her head. Someone like me, she’d said, but who wouldn’t appeal to the men in London in the same way. I needed to find the mystery girl. Probably the homely one Sienna had talked about. I needed to find her and see if she would help me.
That girl could be my salvation.
Chapter Twelve
Milly: Take me Home
After long minutes walking down empty corridors, I began to think I’d end up dying anyway, of starvation, as I lingered, lost forever in this damn maze. I should have asked Slim the way out of the hellhole. I slammed my palm against my forehead in frustration.
“Stupid, stupid, stupid.”
Footsteps to my right had me spinning around.
“Can I help you?” A man in a suit with a clipboard stood to my side, watching me warily.
“I’m lost. Only my second day on the job,” I said with a smile.
He didn’t smile back, and his frown deepened.