Maelstrőm

by Michelle Love

  Steele had been sent to him. Not only to love him, but to help him be strong in the face of those who had hurt him so badly they nearly broke the man.

  If Arsen had fallen victim to Beth’s charms again then Steele would help him see why Beth was not good for him. It wasn’t as if that was a lie. The girl had watched her father beat him and yelled at him to get up and fight a man twice his age and size.

  Beth wasn’t good for him, no matter how much she may have changed, and Steele was, at the very least, going to fight for the man she loved more than life itself.

  After putting her hair in a braid to be sure her hair couldn’t become a target if Beth was going to fight back, she marched out to find Paul and Fontaine exchanging phone numbers as they sat so close to each other their legs were touching.

  “If you don’t mind my interrupting your little date, I’d like to go to this woman’s house. I’m going to fight for my man. I will not go down without a fight,” Steele informed them.

  “I can’t let you go and assault anyone, Steele,” Fontaine said with an exaggerated eye roll.

  “I’m going one way or another. I memorized the address, Fontaine.” Steele headed towards the elevator and Fontaine got up as Paul took her hand and pulled her up with him.

  “I have to take her. I told Arsen I wouldn’t let her out of my sight.” He pulled her along. “You can come with us if you want. I’ll let you ride up front with me. It’s a bench seat, so you can sit right next to me.”

  Steele looked back to see Fontaine grinning like a school girl.

  “I have to take my own car. I’m still on duty. I’ll lead the way and I’ll go talk to whoever it is that’s home there. Think you can keep her locked in the car until I get things figured out?”

  Paul smiled and kissed the tip of her nose.

  “Not a problem. I have the master control up front. I got your back, partner.”

  “Dear, Lord!” Steele said as they all stepped into the elevator. “This is going to be excruciating!”

  Paul laughed as the doors shut.

  “Now, now, princess. Others like to go to the ball too, you know.” He slipped his arm around the detective and pulled her in close to his side.

  “Whatever that means,” Steele said. “I just want to get to Arsen as quickly as I can. The wait is killing me.”

  The trip down the elevator from the penthouse to the ground floor seemed to be taking forever. Everything was taking forever in Steele’s mind. She couldn’t get to Arsen fast enough.

  She knew the chances of him being at that address were slim to none, but Beth’s husband might be and that was one step closer to her finding Arsen.

  If Arsen thought Anne was harsh, he’s going to have to come up with a new word for me!

  GWEN

  Inch by painful inch, she’d crawled through the tall grass until she finally came to the edge of the road. The sun was up and had been for a while. Morning dew was still covering the grass, and she was soaked from it.

  Her body shivered with the wet cold. She knew she had little time. Exposure, exhaustion, starvation, and dehydration were all combining to take her life away.

  She just kept praying and focusing on breathing each breath. The idea of saving Steele and Arsen kept her going. If she never did another thing in her life, she would’ve accomplished saving a couple of people from terrible fates.

  The sound of wheels smashing the gravel along the road made her look up, and she saw the headlights of a car coming towards her through the foggy morning. The person pulled to a stop and got out.

  She saw a tall, slender woman with blonde hair. She didn’t say a word as she was too weak and the woman didn’t speak either. She just picked her up and placed her in the back seat of her large sedan.

  Gwen was saved. She would make it. She could complete what had taken her nearly two days to work at. The swim, the shark, the long crawl.

  It had all come together and had worked for her. She would be able to save Arsen and Gwen now. She closed her eyes and just took in one breath after another and thanked the Lord above for the woman who had stopped and picked her up off the side of the road.

  Soon, she’d be hooked up to an I.V. of fluid which would fill her veins and bring her back to life. Food would be in her empty stomach and fresh clothes, be it a hospital gown which would surely be gaping in the back, letting her ass show, but it would be clean and dry covering her tender flesh.

  It was all about to be over. The pain, the agony, the near defeat. Allen White would be behind bars in hours. Anne Sinclair and her boy toy as well. All would be over and Gwen would be in a nice, safe, dry hospital bed, sipping on some refreshing beverage.

  The radio came on and played some old rock. A little old time rock-and-roll, Gwen thought to herself. Yeah, some good old rock and some food and water and fresh clothes. That was just what the doctor would order.

  And when Steele saw her and found out she had the words to bring her complete happiness, then she’d be a hero. She knew Arsen would insist on rewarding her, so life was about to get real fucking easy.

  And she’d let him do it too. She’d let him give her a reward, and she’d take some time off school and work and just lounge around for at least a month. Do nothing but sit by the pool and sip Champagne cocktails and eat fancy things she’d never eaten before.

  French foods she’d heard of but had never seen. Escargot, Vichyssoise, and other foods she’d never tasted. It occurred to her in all her twenty-one years of life she’d never had one bite of spinach.

  She was going to try every food on the planet. Every drink in the world. She was going to live, damn it!

  No more living like every day is a given. Gwen would live every day as if it were her last. Try everything. Find a good-looking guy and kiss the mother fucker on the mouth before he even got a chance to speak.

  Dance in the rain, watch an old movie where all the actors have died already and fall in love with the leading man. Crazy shit like that is what Gwen was going to do when she got well and got out of the hospital.

  Her eyes felt heavy and her body was beyond tired. Though she knew it was over, she was growing kind of worried. The woman wasn’t speaking at all. The car didn’t feel as if it were speeding to the nearest hospital.

  It seemed to be going slow, as a matter of fact. It took everything she had in her to pull her eyelids open. Her vision was blurry and that concerned her. She didn’t need to wear glasses so what was happening to her?

  Suddenly she realized she wasn’t taking breaths. She pulled in some air and her chest hurt really bad when she did.

  After all she’d made it through, was this it? Was she supposed to kick the old bucket now? Throw in the towel?

  The numbness was moving over her body in slow increments. Her toes, then up her calves, over her thighs and now her stomach which had been in a constant state of pain was growing numb.

  Was her body completely shutting down now she was so close to being saved and saving her friend?

  If she died before telling anyone what she knew, she’d have done it all in vain. She took in slow breaths and closed her eyes. She was so tired, and it had seemed like it had gone on so long.

  The ride was taking forever. If the fucking broad could speed the fuck up she might fucking live.

  She wanted to scream at the woman to hurry the fuck up. She didn’t have much longer and people’s fucking lives depended on what she had to say.

  Her words came out quiet and scratchy. “Hurry, please.”

  She doubted the woman could even hear her over the radio she had so fucking loud for some damn reason.

  Who the fuck picks up a nearly dead person off the side of the road in a desolate area and places them in their car and turns fucking eighties rock up so loud? Who does that kind of thing?

  An idiot? A sadistic person? A narcissist who wants to hear what she wants to hear and fuck all the others, especially the dying chick in the back seat?

  This woman was a piece of wo
rk. The car stopped and the sound of buttons being pushed Gwen heard as the key pad made little clicking sounds. Then there was the sound of scraping of what she thought was a metal gate opening.

  Where the hell is this woman taking me?

  The car lurched forward, bumping over the rails which held the gate in place. Then she heard it close with a resounding bang. The car moved ahead slowly. One curve it went around then the car went in another direction around another curve.

  It was taking a while to get where they were going and Gwen knew it wasn’t any hospital. There were no gates keeping anyone from an emergency room parking lot. Not one.

  Something else was happening to her. Something awful. Something which would end not only her life but Steele’s and Arsen would go to prison.

  Why can’t things just work out? Why can’t things go right for just one minute? One break? One little break in the chain of crap she’d had to deal with since Allen White took her from her apartment?

  Gwen laid perfectly still as the car pulled to a stop. She crossed her fingers that she’d been wrong. The woman turned the radio down then shut the car off.

  Gwen felt the cool, wet wind as the woman opened then closed the driver’s side door. Her shoes crunched against the gravel of the parking lot or whatever it was she’d stopped in.

  It took a long time it seemed to Gwen for anyone to come back to the car to get her. Maybe the woman had forgotten about the too weak to speak woman in her back seat.

  Maybe she was picked up by a senile woman who shouldn’t be driving in the first place. She placed Gwen on her back and that made it harder for her to move than when she was on her belly.

  She tried to pick her head up but she couldn’t. She couldn’t even get her eyes to open. Then the sound of two sets of feet crunching the gravel she heard faintly. They got closer and closer.

  They stopped right by the car.

  “Yeah, it’s her,” a man’s voice said. “Where’d you find her?”

  A woman’s voice filled her ears.

  “On the road, you fucking idiot. Get her out of there and then we have to clean the car so there’s no evidence of her in my car.”

  Gwen knew the voices. She knew it was not her fate to save her friend and her friend’s new boyfriend. It must be her fate to end up back in Allen White’s hands.

  Her fate to end her life at a mere twenty-one years old at the hands of Allen White and his partner Anne Sinclair.

  Gwen felt the air swoosh past her head as the back door opened. Her limp body was picked up by Allen, no doubt. The sound of gravel crunching under shoes she heard again.

  She wanted to cry, but her body had no water to make tears. She wanted to scream, but her body had no strength to do that. She wanted to live, and that was a thing her body seemed to not want either.

  All was against her. All was over. All was lost.

  He placed her on the bed with broken springs. The one he’d chained her to a few days before. He didn’t bother to put the chains on her that time. He and Anne knew she didn’t have the strength to go anywhere.

  “Get the bleach and I’ll get the vacuum cleaner and we’ll get busy on the car. My daughter called me and she’s waiting for me at my house. She was excited and said she had a surprise for me. I hope it’s a nice purse of a pair of expensive shoes. Her husband makes a lot of money and every once in a while she surprises me with some expensive gift. She’s thoughtful that way. I raised a good girl,” Anne said as they left Gwen near death on the bed.

  Concentrating on taking in slow breaths, Gwen tried not to fall asleep. She had to hold on. Had to try not to die.

  Hope should be long gone, but she found she couldn’t give it up.

  I have got to hold on!

  For Fortune Arsen’s Rules Part 12

  By Michelle Love

  ARSEN

  The hours had passed at a snail’s pace as Arsen and Beth waited for her mother to arrive at her home where they were waiting for Anne Sinclair. They sat on the sofa, leaving space between each other.

  “When I found the tapes, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” Beth told him.

  Arsen ran a hand over his face.

  “It’s hard to believe after all this time the woman still has those. I thought I’d destroyed them all.”

  “Seems three made it without you finding them. It seems my mother was adept at hiding things.” Beth stood up and went to look out the front window. “Where is this woman?”

  “She made my life hell for a number of years, Beth. She changed me. Well, your father and you did too, but Anne really changed me,” he said as he looked at his watch. “It’s been hours. Where do you think she is?”

  “No telling. I can’t say I know the woman anymore. I had no idea who she was and what she was capable of doing until I found those tapes and then when I found the files she kept on the women in your life that really freaked me out.” She went back to her place on the sofa.

  Arsen barely saw the former Beth under the years of cigarette smoking and obvious alcohol abuse. The glass of vodka in her hand was a constant thing since they got into her mother’s house at six that morning.

  She sipped at it, but it seemed she needed to hold the glass more so than drink the alcohol it held. Her blonde hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail, the dark roots showing.

  Arsen was surprised to find he had absolutely no residual feelings for the girl who was his first love. It seemed the way things ended had really cauterized the wound she left in his heart all those years ago.

  “I’m really glad you told me about this, Beth. You have no idea how much this shit was going to cost me. Your mother has a knack for fucking up my life. This time would’ve been beyond devastating.”

  She ran a finger around the rim of her short glass.

  “How did you leave her if she had so much control over you?”

  “It wasn’t easy and I have the scars to prove it.” He looked away at the memories he tried hard not to think about.

  “Tell me, Arsen.” Beth pulled her feet under her and looked at him with a sadness to her eyes he didn’t remember ever seeing in them before.

  “One day just before my graduation day, I came home to the apartment she’d rented us. I had a few of my final grades and brought home the papers with them on it. It struck me when she commented how well she’d taught me. And how great it was going to be when I became a lawyer and could support her, finally.” He stood and walked to the window.

  “So she was planning to leave my father then and marry you?” Beth asked.

  He shook his head.

  “No. She told me she would never divorce your father. He was the person she stood behind to show the world she was a normal woman with a normal family. Not the freak show she hid from most people.”

  “Then why did she think you were going to support her, Arsen?” Beth re-situated herself on the sofa and took a tiny sip of the vodka.

  “No idea. She used the shit out of me. In all ways. I mean all of them. I suppose she thought because she rented the apartment, that was taking care of me. The fact was, I didn’t need her to do that. I had a job at all times. I could’ve taken care of myself with no problem.”

  “Then how did she justify that?” Beth asked with confusion riddling her face.

  “I don’t know. How does anyone know what goes on in the mind of an insane person?” Arsen went back to sit down.

  “Sure you don’t want something to drink, Arsen?”

  He shook his head, making his dark, silky hair which had grown to his shoulders, bounce off them.

  “No, thank you. So getting back to how I left. She was away for the week. You know back home with you guys. I had overheard her talking on the phone to one of her friends how she’d built me into the man I was becoming and what a great investment she’d made in me. Like I was a damn animal she had trained.”

  “That’s when you decided you wanted no more of life with her?” Beth asked.

  He nodded.


  “Yes. So I left. I rented an efficiency apartment and went to a different BDSM club. I found a young woman there who later became my first sub. I have to admit I was hard with her. I had learned from the hardest and that’s how I treated her.”

  “Oh, Arsen.” The disapproval in Beth’s voice made him flinch.

  “Anne came to my apartment once she was able to track me down and she found the poles I had purchased. She put them to good use on my back as she tried to beat me back into submission. I wouldn’t go back to that though. No matter how many times she hit me, I wouldn’t go back. She eventually gave up. Or so I thought anyway. I had no idea she would go this far to punish me for leaving her.”

  Beth got up and left the room. Arsen could hear her getting sick in the nearby bathroom. It made his stomach knot. He paced around the room and wondered why he’d said so much to her.

  She didn’t have to know all of it. But somewhere deep inside him he was glad she knew her mother now. It was Anne’s time to be found out. Just as she had made sure his private life had been made public.

  Beth came back in with her face shining from the water she’d splashed on it. “Sorry.” She sat down. “I just couldn’t stomach it any longer. She is my mother after all.”

  He nodded.

  “I suppose I shouldn’t say any more about her.”

  “Probably best.” She laughed a little. “All this time we thought she was so into church. Were we fools?”

  Arsen sat back down.

  “I finally met the one for me and Anne is threatening that relationship as well.”

  “The one for you? A new submissive?” she asked as she took another drink of the vodka.

  “No. Not a sub. A real woman. An equal to me in all ways. And in some areas, she’s far superior to me. My body, mind, and soul love and need her. She will be the mother of my children someday. If I can get this legal crap off me then I plan on making that woman my wife.” Arsen’s eyes drooped a bit at the corners. “If she’ll have me, of course.”