His name is Marc, he tells me. He doesn’t offer a last name and I don’t ask. I tell him my name is Rachel. A lie, of course. My real name is not to be revealed. I’m on a mission and my cover is critical.
There is passion dancing between Marc and me. I feel something for him that I’ve never felt before for a man. Lust. Arousal. Flushed pleasure when his fingers caress mine, a certain blushing acquiescence when he insists on buying me a drink.
His hands cup my jaw as the night goes on. “Come home with me?” he asks directly.
Lucien’s angry words are still on my mind. “Fix this. You are useless to me this way.” And though I am angry with him, I understand the truth of his words. I have always known that I might have to play the seductress, if the situation warrants it. I’d do anything to get Dylan McAllister. Yet I am terrified of sex and I recoil from a man’s touch, knowing from hard experience how close lust is to cruel violence.
But I want Marc and this makes him a means to an end. I have never felt lust before. I should embrace this feeling and go home with this man. I will use this tight, pleasurable feeling in my lower belly, the heat in my cheeks and the painful ache in my erect nipples. I will fix my inability to enjoy sex. I will free myself of the fear in my heart when a man desires me.
***
The time I spend with him is the most incredible night in my life. It is a night in which I feel genuine pleasure from the act of sex for the first time.
I stay with him all night. In the morning, he drives me back to an apartment complex in Clichy sous Bois. He looks unhappy when he sees the badly maintained building, but he doesn’t harp on about it. Instead, his eyes rest on mine. “Can I see you again?” he asks.
My heart breaks. My life doesn’t have room for relationships. Not as long as Dylan McAlister is still alive.
But by this time, after four years of Lucien’s training, I’m skilled at lying. “I’d really like that,” I say. That part isn’t a lie. What follows is. “Let me give you my phone number?” I reel off a number to him, and he punches it into his cell phone and dials. The phone in my pocket rings, and I smile at him.
“Now you have my number too,” he says in explanation.
He kisses me goodbye. I let him. I stand and watch him drive off and then, I pull out the cheap burner phone, remove the SIM card and toss it in the trash. A swift twist of my hands, and the flip phone breaks into two. I toss each part of the phone in two different trash cans on my way back to Lucien.
I’ll never see Marc last-name-unknown again. I tell myself it is for the best.
***
“Are you listening to me, Jenny?” Madame Lorraine gave me a strange look and I realized I was zoning out on her again. I shook myself internally. I had to keep my head in the game. Truth be told, though I put a bold face on it for Lucien, I was petrified at the idea of this auction. I’d sworn I was done being someone’s sex slave. Yet this was the only way to get to Dylan.
This auction is for consensual sexual submissives, I reminded myself in an effort to keep my fear at bay. This will be nothing like what Dylan McAllister did to you. But that wasn’t entirely true, was it? I couldn’t know. After all, Alexander Hamilton was an associate of Dylan’s. Perhaps he too got his thrills from kidnapping and raping women.
“I’m sorry,” I said. I pasted a thoroughly fake, yet convincingly worried smile on my face. “I was just thinking about my sister.” Again, this excuse worked on Madame Lorraine, as I knew it would. After all, this entire elaborate auction she ran was her way of dealing with what had been done to her own sister so many years ago.
She was far more idealistic than I was. I wondered if she really believed that if there were enough consensual slave auctions, men wouldn’t need to kidnap young girls from their homes and torture and rape them. Me, I was more cynical. I’d seen the dark side up close and it wasn’t something you forgot.
I’d zoned out again. I took the address she gave me and I promised to be there at ten in the morning.
***
In keeping with my cover story of someone who was watching every penny, I was staying at a cheap hostel on Khao San Road. Lucien, always cautious that someone might be watching our every move, was staying at a different hostel a few doors away from mine. I called him from a burner phone when I reached my room.
“Well?” he asked me.
“What?”
“Are you all set? Are you ready?”
For a few seconds, I wondered if Lucien actually cared. If I told him how afraid I was that I was about to be trapped again, would he tell me not to worry? Would he hold me and promise to find another way to get to Dylan? Would he assure me that everything would be okay?
But I wasn’t naïve and I had no ability to delude myself.
We all had ghosts in our pasts. Like Madame Lorraine, Lucien had a sister to avenge. Claire. She’d been taken the same way I’d been taken, abducted from a crowded parking lot by Dylan McAllister’s henchmen. She had been sixteen though, too young for what had happened to her. In keeping with the pattern, two years after her abduction, Dylan lost interest in her and sold her to a brothel in Saudi Arabia.
She had killed herself the first chance she got and Lucien was forever haunted by her memory and his abject failure to save her.
Lucien would never rest as long as Dylan was alive. He would never give up. This was why we’d made common cause, why he’d taken me and trained me so that I would be able to kill with the same fluid ease as he did. Because his thirst for revenge was matched only by mine. I burned with a need to make sure that Dylan McAllister suffered for what he put me through. A flaming compulsion to kill him drove everything I did. All I ever wanted was to stand over him and hold a gun in my hands and to watch him plead and cry, like I had the first day.
Then I would offer him the same mercy he’d offered me. None. I would pull the trigger and he would be dead.
My shoulders straightened and my voice filled with resolve. What did my fears of a slave auction matter in the light of what I had to do? Dylan needed to die and that was the only thing that was important. “I’m ready.”
***
While Ellie Samuelson had travelled many times to Bangkok, Jenny Fullerton had never visited the city. Jenny Fullerton had never left the USA until she nervously boarded a plane to Bangkok to sell herself to the highest bidder in a consensual slave auction.
You are Jenny Fullerton, I told myself sternly, looking in the small bathroom mirror, but the face of a stranger stared back at me. My hair was now the brunette hues that Alexander Hamilton was supposed to prefer, not the reddish-rust colour I’d been born with. It had also been straightened till it hung flat down my back. My eyes were still green, thank heavens. Changing their colour was out of the question – the surgery existed to do it, but it was risky and blindness wasn’t part of the Kill-Dylan-McAllister plan. And of course, coloured contact lenses were too easily detectable.
No gun, not in Thailand. Too complicated and risky. No knives. It hurt me to leave the Bowie knife taped to the underside of the toilet tank cover, but there was nowhere I could hide it on my person, not with the undoubtedly scanty clothing I’d be wearing at the auction. All I had was my body and it would have to be enough. I’d been taught to fight in the underground fighting halls around the world where men who aspired to rise to the MMA ranks trained. The many thousands of hours I’d spent learning kickboxing, Muay Thai and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, these would all have to suffice.
I tried to forget that the plan involved Alexander Hamilton buying me for sex. My body wasn’t a combat machine for the next three months. It was only meant to be an object of desire.
Once again, I looked in the mirror. I was dithering, avoiding the moment when I’d have to step out of the door, into the teeming crowds of Khao San and hail a cab to the more cosmopolitan district of Silom, where I’d be bathed, made up and auctioned like a piece of property.
The phone rang shrilly. It was Lucien. “Are you on your way?” His voice wa
s tense. This was the moment of truth for both of us. If Alexander Hamilton didn’t buy me at today’s auction, we’d have no way of accessing Dylan McAllister’s Vietnamese fortress compound.
“Just leaving,” I told him, closing the door behind me. I ignored my shaking hands and thought instead of the knife I was leaving behind, taped to the toilet, where it wouldn’t be discovered until after I was gone. I would miss that knife.
Chapter 4
Ellie / Jenny:
My one small suitcase in hand, I caught a cab to the address I’d made my way to three days earlier. Today, I paid attention to my surroundings. I was about to walk into battle. I could not zone out. My survival would depend on my ability to stay mindful, to remain entirely in the moment. Today, I couldn’t lose myself in daydreams of Marc.
The building itself was about as unobtrusive as you could get in Silom. A three-storey brick building with greying white paint, it looked like every other apartment building in the ritzy neighborhood. But I had done my research and knew better. This was Bangkok’s most private BDSM club and today, it was the scene of Madame Lorraine’s twice-a-year consensual slave auctions.
A shy Thai girl greeted me at the door in response to my knocking. “You are Jenny Fullerton, yes?” she asked me in slightly accented English. I nodded silently, my stomach a churning ball of nerves. And while I would normally try to conceal all emotion, today, I let them show. It would be expected. I was a young woman who had never been outside the USA and I was about to participate in a slave auction. Calmness would be far more suspicious.
“Come with me,” she said, leading the way down a narrow corridor to the back of the main floor. “My name is Sarit,” she added over her shoulder as she walked.
In the room that she led me to, three women were bustling around three massage tables. “We need to remove all body hair,” Sarit explained and I nodded again. I couldn’t speak. I was busy swallowing down the bile that rose in my throat, triggered by the memory of many forced Brazilian waxings. Mrs. Olusola’s voice echoed in my head, the memory painfully fresh. “Master doesn’t like hair,” she had whispered before heating the wax and spreading it on my mound. “Master wants girls to look like girls, not women.”
Master had his thugs kidnap an eighteen year old to be a sex slave, I had wanted to scream. But by that point, I had known better. Master didn’t like screaming or tears. He wanted quiet, docile obedience.
I got naked for the women around me and lay on the vinyl-covered table. “Do you need something for the pain?” Sarit asked me. She smiled impishly. “I have pain killers if you’d like or maybe a drink?”
Would Madam Lorraine approve of the drinking, I wondered, but I shook my head. I needed all my wits about me this evening and the alcohol would just interfere with my abilities. As would the pain killers. I settled for the truth or a close resemblance to it. “My former Master insisted I do this without pain killers,” I responded. “He liked that I endure the pain for him.”
Sarit smiled sweetly. “And you honour his memory by following his wishes?” I could picture the girlish romance she was creating in her head, of a Master who had loved and cherished and trained his submissive. But her fantasy couldn’t have been further from the truth. “I bow to your courage,” she added.
Oh you silly thing, I wanted to say. Oh, you silly, silly thing.
***
The hair on my pussy had already been weakened by the dye I’d used on it. After all, I was a brunette now. Red hair on my mound would have been a total giveaway.
I endured the waxing and the girls clucked around me, patting my hand and telling me how brave I was. If only they knew. The real act of bravery would be later this evening when I would voluntarily put myself on the auction block to be sold.
I’d been a slave once against my will. It would take every bit of courage in my body to be a slave again.
Hot wax was spread on my arms and my underarms. Strips of cloth were laid on top and smoothed down. Upon first contact with Madame Lorraine, I’d received a list of grooming instructions for the next six weeks, until her investigators had time to complete the extremely thorough background check every single potential slave was subject to. “We find that Masters and Mistresses prefer their slaves without stubble,” it had said. So I’d had to dye all my pubic hair instead for this waxing.
Now with swift tugs, the strips of cloth were pulled off and my body hair with it. I bit my lip and endured the thousands of pinpricks of pain that covered my skin. Finally I was shown into a bathroom and told to wash off all the sticky residue. “We will style your hair next,” Sarit told me brightly.
Lovely. I bit back the sarcastic response. I just nodded quietly instead.
***
When I walked out, clad in the thin black silk robe Sarit had handed me, two other women were in the room. Two fellow submissives, designated for the auction block. We studied each other with open interest.
“Hi, I’m Elena,” one of them said to me. She had flaming red hair, the kind I used to have, before my need to be bought by Alexander Hamilton had necessitated the change in colour.
“Hello,” I replied. “I’m Jenny.” With a pang, I realized it had been years since I’d had a conversation with a woman that was any more meaningful than ordering a coffee or a drink. I thought of Lisa and Amber. The three of us had lived in the same shabby East Cleveland neighborhood and we’d all worked in ritzy Beechwood Mall for extra cash. We would carpool as often as we could since money for gas was always tight.
So many things were lost to me as a result of the revenge I sought so that my soul would once again be whole. Marc. My friendship with Lisa and Amber. I had no time for meaningful relationships. I didn’t have a home or any kind of stability. Everything I owned fit inside one suitcase. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d done something as simple as watch a movie while eating popcorn.
The third woman spoke. “First time?” she asked me. Her voice was friendly.
I nodded. “Is it that obvious?” I asked ruefully.
She laughed. “You look really nervous,” she told me. “Relax. You’ll have a great time. This is my third go-around.”
“Really?” My curiosity must have been obvious because she grinned at me.
“I’ll tell you my story if you tell me yours,” she promised with a wicked gleam in her eyes. “My name is Susan.”
Sarit came over at that point and hurried us to three chairs. “Sit, sit, sit,” she chided. “We have your hair to do.”
Susan laughed. “Sarit, you know it doesn’t matter. They are just going to undo anything you do so they can run their hands through our hair.”
“I still have my job to do, Susan,” Sarit said firmly. “I don’t want to get punished by Madame Lorraine.”
“Liar,” Susan retorted, and they both giggled. “I know you love getting punished by Madame Lorraine.”
I listened to their back-and-forth banter enviously until Susan turned to the redhead, who had stayed quiet and nervous as well. Behind me, a silent Thai girl moved to my hair, rubbing some kind of sweet smelling gel into the strands and massaging it into my scalp. “You look nervous too,” Susan remarked. “Don’t be. It’s really fun. Why did you decide to do this?”
“I wanted to serve,” the redhead replied softly. “I’ve played in clubs but it doesn’t feel real to me. I’ve tried to find a Dom but that’s more complicated. I had one for a while but when he wasn’t dominating me, he just sat on the couch and watched TV, and didn’t do anything for himself. That’s fine for fantasy but it’s hard to sustain a real relationship that way.”
I nodded. I had been a virgin when I was taken, more interested in the imaginary worlds that I entered when I was reading than in the real world in front of me. But Lisa had had a boyfriend and he was very much like the guy the redheaded woman was describing.
“So I thought I’d try the actual fantasy,” she continued. “Three months. I don’t have to worry about how this will work long-term, becaus
e it isn’t long-term. But it’s still long enough to be real. Now though, I’m worried that I’ll end up with a jerk.”
Susan shook her head. “Don’t be,” she said. “Madame Lorraine’s auction house is the best in the business. Every single person has been carefully vetted. This is my third time and I’ve never heard of anyone having a bad experience. It’s safe-word friendly, consensual slavery.” She had a soft, faraway look in her eyes. “It’s amazing.”
Behind her, Sarit was nodding her head. “Very safe,” she echoed, as she tended to the redhead’s hair, expertly bundling it in some kind of chignon with strands of hair curling around her face. I watched her work, her hands quick and sure, as she transformed the way the girl in front of her looked. Elena was already beautiful, with her red hair and her pale skin and her sea-blue eyes, but when Sarit was done with her hair, she looked even more spectacular.
“What’s your story?” I asked Susan. “Third time, you said? What keeps you coming back?”
“I like sex,” Susan replied frankly. “And I like to serve. I like to surrender to my Master’s will.” She sighed. “But apart from that? There’s one guy who comes to these things that I’m hoping will bid on me.”
“Who?” Elena asked curiously. She’d leaned forward in her chair.
Susan sighed again for dramatic effect. “His name is Alexander,” she said. “He’s dreamy. I’ve seen him both times I’ve been here, but I guess I’m not his type.” She looked ruefully at her blonde hair which hung in lustrous, touchable waves down her back. “He seems to go for the frail brunettes. Like Jenny.”
That’s precisely why I’m a brunette, I thought. That’s why I’ve been starving myself for twelve weeks. To try and look more waif-like, so that Alexander would bid on me.
Susan continued talking. She didn’t mention Alexander again and I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to arouse any suspicion. I tried to ask her what the auction itself was like but she refused to tell me. “It should be a surprise,” she grinned. “I will tell you you’ll get a chance to talk to every Master or Mistress who wishes to bid on you and you can reject anyone you don’t get a good sense from.”
Bought (Assassin's Revenge Book 2) Page 4