Beg Me

by Lisa Lawrence

  Oliver had warned me, Simon had warned me, hell, even Carl in London had warned me, that the people in this cult must use psychological manipulation. As Simon said, what could be a bigger bogeyman than the villain who had robbed you of a parent? Imagine that this bastard could come looming out of the past.

  But: How did they even know about Oliver’s past? He must have mentioned it to one of them. It was possible, even logical, for them to try to complete a thorough portrait on everyone they decided to take into their confidence.

  And: Why add this extra dimension of Bishop to his secret girlfriend’s murder? Wasn’t it horrible enough that Oliver came back to the hotel room to find her bludgeoned to death?

  They had sent photographs of Kelly Rawlins just like they sent photos of a bound Anna to her brother, Jeff Lee. Why the extra thrown-in scare over Bishop? Just to throw off Oliver’s suspicion of the cult?

  There was also the problem of Craig. He had a bishop drawn on his arm.

  But a quick check with my good ol’ Inspector friend back in London confirmed for me that Craig Padmore’s parents were both alive and well, and his ethnic background had absolutely nothing to do with Nigeria’s civil war.

  So who was the message for in his case?

  For Oliver? How would he possibly know, being on the other side of the Atlantic?

  The book. The book in French on the Vietnam War. Padmore had bought it from Oliver’s bookshop and had told Oliver it helped him. He was determined to bring the whole “group of psychos” crashing down.

  Cults are paranoid by nature and necessity. Okay. If the devotees killed Padmore over what he learned, and Padmore got his book from Oliver…the cult might have reasonably concluded the two of them were working together. And had a third ally. Maybe this was who the bishop symbol was intended for—just in case there was somebody else, a third party. Or if Oliver somehow learned directly the details of Craig’s death.

  It was guesswork, and I had all these loose threads. The bad guys had dredged up a ghost of the Nigerian civil war. And Craig Padmore had gone digging around into the Vietnam War. He’d been confident that something out of this chapter of history could bring down the leader of the cult, Isaac Jackson.

  The two wars had nothing to do with each other. Except that, at one point, they were going on at the same time.

  If there was another connection, I couldn’t see it.

  Bishop. True, there was Bishop. After the Nigerian civil war ended, he had gone to Vietnam as a “consultant” for the southern forces and the Americans.

  I pulled out my own copy of the French book—the same one Craig Padmore had bought from Oliver to try to confirm the purported heroism of Isaac’s father.

  Helena—beautiful, reliable Helena—had got one of her staff to hunt down the French edition through Bibliofind and other antiquarian book sites, and, get this, she actually dispatched one of her escorts to bring the copy to Heathrow. To catch me before I flew out on my connecting flight to NYC. And a gorgeous courier he was too. Pity there wasn’t enough time to get to know him better.

  Okay, the book. My French was rusty, but I muddled through. There were a couple of references to Bishop as one of the less than stellar advisers for South Vietnam. But then I remembered: Craig Padmore had not been interested in Bishop, had no reason to hunt through the text for him at all. No, he had found something else in here.

  What had excited Craig Padmore so much?

  I thought I knew the Vietnam conflict reasonably well, had to write a paper on it for school once, and I had relied heavily on Stanley Karnow’s big brick tome, Vietnam: A History, from my father’s impressive library in our house. The French book seemed to retrace the same ground as Karnow’s work, and I scanned through it, flipping through chapters on the rising drug use of U.S. soldiers, the overlooked marginal contribution of Australian and other foreign volunteers, how the American GIs took Vietnamese girls as common-law wives, the fall of Saigon and the aftermath, the economic boycott, and the struggle of the country to develop. On and on. There were a few lovely photos of buildings from the French colonial period that had survived the war.

  I don’t get it, I thought. What was the key for Padmore in these pages?

  I wrote down, Book: What’s the big deal?

  Then I flipped a page in my notebook and scribbled down Oliver. I had another puzzle.

  If Oliver was the perceived threat, why not kill him in that hotel room instead of Kelly Rawlins? Or both? Dead certain is better than simply scaring the hell out of him and making him think he could be implicated in Kelly’s murder. They took a big chance he wouldn’t go to the police and admit to being in the hotel room. Dig around in either Oliver’s past or the girl’s and it might lead the cops back to the cult.

  Come to think of it, since Oliver owned a bookshop, they could have dreamed up some crazed-addict holdup job to gun him down right in Bindings. It might seem implausible, but the cops might have settled for it, with their heavy case-loads. Why the girl, then?

  As I mulled over all these notions, I glanced down at the page. Without realizing it, I had drawn the outline of a chessboard bishop.

  Back in Bindings. Back amid the dusty bookshelves and wooden pews after closing time. I told Oliver all about Harry Bishop, about the last moments of his father—how an “associate” I’d accidentally met in Lagos and I were looking for the old mercenary’s final hideout. Oliver took the news pretty well. He reflected somberly for a long moment on his poor father’s grim end, and then he thanked me with quiet dignity for uncovering the truth.

  Time to press him over the Sarcophacan Temple of Nubian Princes.

  “Not yet,” he insisted. “You can’t go to them yet. I haven’t finished your training, remember? I told you you’re only at the halfway mark.”

  “Damn it, Oliver! How long is this process going to take?”

  “We made a bargain, Teresa—”

  I grrrred frustration and snapped, “Right! Then give me something else. Make yourself useful another way.”

  I dug into my handbag, remembering something I had forgotten to take up with him before Nigeria. Well, I actually hadn’t forgotten. I hadn’t wanted to then. He had been so fixated on his father’s killer, and I suspected he might unconsciously skew anything else he told me to keep me on that plane to Lagos. Now it was time.

  “Have you ever seen this guy with your old friends?”

  He gently took my cell and inspected the phone camera shot stored in memory. A dead face that belonged to a tall white man with dark brown hair and a dimpled chin, eyes that once glowered.

  Mr. Bad Suit in Bangkok.

  “Son of a bitch!” said Oliver, his mouth open in shock. “That’s Andy. He looks dead.”

  “He is dead. Andy who?”

  “Andrew Schacter. What happened to him?”

  “In a second,” I said. “First, who is he and how do you know him? For a prince, he doesn’t look very Nubian to me.”

  “That’s ’cause he never was a prince,” replied Oliver. “But I think he went way back with Isaac and Danielle somehow. He couldn’t fit into their ranking system—it would have made Isaac’s philosophy of superior Nubian males ridiculous. So he gave Andy an honorary rank of ‘squire.’ He was the group’s only male sub.”

  I felt myself do a double take. “How did that work?”

  “You’d be surprised! Andy was a kind of bodyguard sometimes for Danielle and Isaac, plus I think he handled anybody who gave ’em trouble in town. Kept a low profile, and all I could ever get were scraps of stories. But I know he was one mean SOB. Any prince who felt like putting Andy down or dissing him in public either got a private tongue-lashing from Isaac, or Andy taught them in a more physical way not to mess with him.”

  “Charming,” I said.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” said Oliver. “If Andy kicks some fool’s ass, that undermines the system too, causes tension. But you see, he knew his place. He always paid respect to the princes—never spoke to them
as equals. It actually reinforced everything Isaac told them about the outside world. How they were better than white men, how they were better than most black men! Here was this mean, nasty cracker taking orders from a black dude, you know what I’m saying? He was a servant. And he only ever fought if somebody mistreated the servant.”

  “And the sub stuff?” I asked.

  “We all knew some of the princesses liked to switch, and since they couldn’t do that with the brothers, Andy came in nice and handy to be dominated. He was their outlet.”

  Sounded right. There was a reasonable interior logic to all this. Here was this leader Isaac pumping up these guys to think they were superior Nubian princes, able to command and dominate women—how do you send a guy like that to Thailand to kill Ah Jo Lee? Besides sticking out of place, like I did, a Nubian prince might have the self-esteem and enough independent thinking to morally question killing someone.

  But Andy Schacter, who craved being told what to do, who lived for cracking heads on his master’s say-so, had been a submissive, not a dominant, in terms of sadomasochistic relationships. And he was a fanatic. Obviously one with a shady past, which was how he knew where and how to recruit his Thai accomplice.

  Andrew Schacter. I had a name I could pass on to Carl in London and to Ah Jo Lee in Bangkok. Hopefully it would bring more leads.

  But I was still restless.

  “Look, Oliver, as much as I understand the whole kinky ‘wax-on, wax-off’ training to prepare me in their mystical ways—and not that I don’t appreciate the orgasms, I do!—it’s high time I faced off with this Isaac character!”

  “No,” he said, in that tone I’d come to recognize. “What I’m going to teach you next might help you survive Isaac.”

  I sighed. I began to undress.

  He smiled, clearly enjoying the obedience that had become almost second nature to me. “No, you don’t understand. I taught you how to submit for them. Now I’m going to teach you how to dominate.”

  But I wasn’t going to learn to dominate him. Instead, he found me an appropriate partner. Victim?

  He had a room fitted out in the basement of his home, just like the dungeon in the shop.

  Funny. I could recite a list of everything that was in that dungeon room but barely anything about his personal living space. It had books, I know that much. A few Impressionist prints.

  I could remember the smell of the dungeon. I could draw you a map with the dimensions.

  I would never know my partner’s name. And as far as I know, Oliver never gave him mine. He had me wear a black domino mask of soft cotton that not only covered my nose but pretty much the top half of my face. I thought it was pretty clichéd at first, and then I discovered the power of anonymity in it.

  Even now, months after the case is done, I sometimes have fantasies about that boy. I can see him in my mind’s eye, and I feel cursed. He looked like he was about twenty, his hair cut short, his face so smooth, a thin, toned build like Oliver’s—and his insistent hard erection the minute I stepped into that basement.

  I was nude.

  So was he.

  My fingertips ran over his abs and pecs, caressed him, turned his head this way and that as if I were inspecting a horse.

  As a matter of fact, I was armed with a riding crop.

  And so help me, I gave in to exploiting the power Oliver had handed me.

  “Come to me,” I ordered.

  He took a step.

  “Get down on your knees.”

  And he did.

  “You want this?” I whispered. “You want to lick my pussy?”

  “Y-yes.”

  “Say it.”

  “I want to lick your pussy.”

  “Beg me,” I ordered.

  “Please?” he pleaded. “Please let me…”

  I parted my legs and rested my foot on him—just as if I were a conquering heroine stepping onto a rock. My dusty bare foot plopped down on his shoulder, and this humiliating contact made his cock stiffen even more. Jeez, it was incredible. He shuffled on his knees closer to me, which must have hurt on the cold cement of the basement, and then he burrowed his head between my legs. I felt his tongue licking me like a dog.

  At one point his left hand gripped my leg lightly to steady himself, and remembering what Oliver had taught me, I flicked the crop down on the rise of his buttocks. Zing. Lightly. Just enough. There was an accuracy and precision to giving blows that I must learn, Oliver said. If I learned how a dom thinks, how a dom performs, I’d gain insight into how best to please him—and maybe how best to keep myself safe. Maybe I’d know when they were about to go too far or take liberties that they shouldn’t.

  “How dare you touch me?”

  “I’m—I’m sorry!”

  His cock was so red it looked like he was about to burst.

  “I should make you bleed for that,” I heard myself say, and it didn’t sound real, the words from a stranger.

  “Y-yes.”

  “Are you going to do a better job?”

  “Please…”

  He brought his mouth back, and I felt his tongue flicking away, working me with feverish, desperate energy. My knees began to buckle. I grabbed his neck and squeezed as much of the skin in my fist as I could, and that excited him further, the soft strokes on my clit driving me mad and the lightness in my thighs overpowering me, making me stagger. I swooned, my weight on his head and shoulder. And then I felt his hot, rapid breath on my pubic mound, and I let out a tortured moan. When I pushed his face back and he sat on his calves, I saw him in torment, his cock a bulbous crimson, the boy holding on to his control by a thread.

  “Don’t you dare come!” I ordered. “Don’t you dare!”

  I whipped the riding crop down on his thigh. It made an angry red bar on his brown skin.

  “You don’t come ’til I say!” I barked.

  “I won’t! I won’t!”

  Denial. Arousing him until he couldn’t stand it anymore, increasing the intensity of his climax.

  I slammed down the crop on his opposite thigh. He stifled a groan of pain, and now he had two matching red welts. I got up to fetch another prop from a foldout metal table.

  “You will fuck me and come when I give you permission,” I said, “and if you come one second before, I will cut your balls off, so help me.”

  “Y-yes.”

  “Now go lie down on that rug.”

  He did. I mounted him backward, facing away from him. I felt the involuntary stiffening of his rod, and I was having my own struggle with control. An impulse seized me, and I brought the crop down on his calf. He started and yelped with pain, and it made him push into me a little more, but still he didn’t climax. I hit the other calf. He bucked inside me again. I started a selfish rhythm for my own pleasure, and I heard him mewl like a child under me, no masculinity in it at all, and I heard myself laughing, actually laughing at him. It was the cruelest thing I’d ever done in bed to anyone.

  And yet this was what he wanted, I could tell. It was one thing to get your ego satisfied by stimulating your partner, but this…! Not just power, but to use your imagination in flexing that power, bringing all your creativity to bear.

  There was an incredible intimacy to it, knowing he was in my hands.

  I played with my clit to help my orgasm and rode his pole slowly, still fearing he might break. When I slid off him, panting and my head swimming, he was still hard, a bead of semen glistening on the head of his dick.

  I don’t know what drove me to it. At once I resented this miracle of restraint, even though I knew it wasn’t defiance, that he was doing what I’d ordered him to do, and his obedience actually made me want to push the boundaries even more. How far would he trust me? That was it, wasn’t it? The intimacy of the bond could be even more intense, just like the actual sex.

  I picked up the straight razor.

  “Lift your knees up,” I said.

  He swallowed hard. His cock twitched again. He was looking forward to it, to
whatever I had in mind.

  Complete trust.

  There’s this theory that the submissive is actually in control because he or she might say stop, and if he stops being aroused, that’s it. Oliver had told me things weren’t as clear cut as that. After all, that idea is predicated on the notion that you discuss a scene first and negotiate all the limits. But the princes of the sarcophacan temple didn’t talk through their “scenes,” and they didn’t have safety words. They believed that once the sub gives blanket consent, the dom runs the show.

  This was my show, my game. I loved it.

  I caressed the razor edge ever so slightly above the sac of his balls, and I enjoyed his shivers. He couldn’t bring himself to tell me to stop, never mind any safe words.

  There were no safe words.

  “What are you looking at?” I asked, letting the blade hover.

  “Your tits,” he answered. I believed him. Naked in front of him except for the domino mask, my fingertips touching him inside his thigh.

  “When you feel it, you can let go,” I said.

  And then my fingertips caressed his balls tenderly, and he shivered again, his knees up like a girl, panting hard, his face glowing with sweat.

  I brought the blade down with savage speed just below his ball sac and cut him. Not deep. A razor-thin line, no worse than a paper cut but in the most vulnerable skin, and he let out an anguished roar. “Aaaahggghhhhhh!” I watched bullets of spunk fly past his head and then a stream of white cum fly out over his chest. He shut his eyes tight as if he were holding back a sob. Another stream. I experienced my own small orgasm, so powerfully turned on by the vision of him like this, and as he passed the crest, I staggered up and found the K-Y.

  I put aside the razor. I squeezed a couple of drops of the jelly onto my fingers, and I jerked him until he was hard again, another finger tapping the fresh cut, making it burn. As my fist flashed up and down his slick penis, he let out a feminine keen, and I knew the tantalizing pain and burn of my finger under his balls, pressing on the cut. This time I made him come all over my breasts.

  When the boy had cleaned up and had gone, I stood pensively in the upstairs shower, letting the water wash over me, thinking again about Simon’s warnings. As I stepped out, dripping and reaching for a towel, Oliver walked in casually, as if we were a married couple or something, and leaned against the tile of the bathroom wall.