Where the fuck was all this coming from so suddenly? I couldn’t figure out how someone as intelligent as Ethan could hate his brother with such an obsession, or how the rationale behind actions beyond his own was lost on him, or how he continued to work alongside Noah and keep a business afloat if he harbored so much resentment. The only explanation which made any sense was that Ethan had officially lost his mind.
I was about to tell him as much, but then he plowed straight through, “I am going to make you hurt, you fucking cunt. I will make you bleed. I will break you in every way imaginable until I am satisfied with the results. Do we have an understanding?”
“Promises, promises.” The words were out of my mouth before I could bite them back. Ethan slapped me across the face so hard I saw stars and crumpled in a heap to the floor. It only served to piss me off. I wiped the taste of iron from my bottom lip and yelled, “It was Selene’s fault for not telling Noah she was pregnant! Noah couldn’t have known! I may be a narcissistic cunt for thinking we could help you but at least I’m not blind to reality you lunatic!”
“Go on, rail against me! I want to see that spirit in you, Piper! I want you to show me the light in your eyes as you fight and curse and lash out in your snide, mocking way. I want you to show me all of the fire you have inside—” He yanked me up awkwardly to my knees by my hair, looming over me like a pitch black shadow from one of Noah’s terrors. “Because all of that spirit chained in this room makes my dick hard. I imagine I’ll be able to cut diamonds with it by the time your mewling and screaming comes to a stop…” He clenched his fist tighter against my scalp. His voice lowered into a strained, rattled sigh, “and I watch that light die out.”
The mask of strength I tried to wear rigidly disintegrated, paving the way for trembling fear of my life in his words. Ethan’s stare stung in my eyes. Not only was he crazy, but he was more dangerous than I originally gave him credit for. I didn’t at all like my odds.
“Do you think you can just disappear me?” I said in a shaking voice. “I’m not like Selene; I have a family and friends and a career. I have essays and papers published in national journals. If I vanish for any reason people will take notice. Stop this now and I won’t press charges. Noah never has to know.”
“The whole point, Miss Minogue, is for Noah to know.”
“Please, don—”
The melody of a default ringtone I recognized as one of my own chimed from Ethan’s pocket. “And here he comes barging in on my enjoyment of a woman once more.” He retrieved my phone and glanced at the screen just long enough to confirm the Caller ID before returning his attention to me. “Tell him you’re fine. Make the conversation brief. It should go without saying that if you even hint to him where you are I will kill you. He won’t have the pleasure of knowing about this little session until much later.”
I believed him. I summoned the courage somewhere in my soul to find a way to deliver the message to Noah without Ethan catching on, but I had to think fast. Ethan fell silent as he answered the phone and held it to my ear. I locked eyes with him and didn’t falter my scowl as I spoke in a surprisingly even tone despite my heart having leapt into my throat.
“Hello, Sir.”
“Piper. Where the hell have you been? I’ve been trying to reach you for hours. Declan and Anya are worried sick since you stood them up this morning. What’s going on?”
With my absolute faith Ethan would kill me no matter what I said; this was my one and only chance to communicate the need for help in some way before he managed to get that far. What Noah could possibly do about it a world away was another problem entirely. It became a real prospect I was completely on my own.
“Piper?”
“I’m sorry, Sir. I haven’t been avoiding your calls. My brother’s in town. He grabbed me for a day out. Also, thank you for helping me with Cocoa. She was in pretty bad shape.”
There was a pause.
Come on, Noah, catch the hint.
He almost asked what I was talking about. Except that Noah, like me, was just brilliant enough to connect the dots. Ethan didn’t know I was an only child. He also didn’t know my safe word. Placing the two strategically within the vicinity of one another caught the blaze in Noah.
“I understand,” he assured me darkly. There was no way of knowing whether or not he was on speakerphone, so I thanked my stars he was even smarter to play it safe simply by asking, “How bad?”
“The prognosis is good. It’s a game of Hurry Up and Wait at this point.” Of course, the prognosis wasn’t good, though the less Noah worried the better. It was a necessary lie to calm whatever ire would soon overtake him, if he wasn’t well on his way to full-fledged fury already.
“Everything will be all right, sweetness. Hold out some hope she’ll pull through.” His voice was eager and distracted now, as if he was trying to piece a plan together.
Ethan began making a small circular motion with his free hand as indication to wrap up the call. I grudgingly complied. “Glass is always half full for me. I have to go, Sir, my phone’s about to die. Good luck finding Selene.”
“I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
Before I could get the words “I love you,” into the air, Ethan ended the call and pried the backing off my phone to pull the battery from it. He then discarded the pieces onto the floor. My ephemeral moment of hope now lay in shambles across the room. All at once his hand was at my throat.
“What the fuck was that?” he spat.
“A lie,” I rasped. “My cat’s about as far off topic as you get.”
The vice of his fingers gripped too tight as he lifted me completely to my feet and shoved me to the wall. Ethan’s angry eyes didn’t hesitate for an instant. He pressed himself against me. With an unnerving and unwavering sense of accomplishment, he bent down to me and whispered, “I am so much stronger than you.”
Was that what he wanted to prove?
“You don’t really want to do this.”
“There you go again assuming you know better. Yes, I do want this. Your fear and pain will be my pleasure, Miss Minogue. Every last drop of it.”
Terror sent gooseflesh across my body. His lips crashed into mine, forcing his tongue into my unwilling mouth. I cringed and closed my eyes tight, praying that when I opened them again the whole thing really would be a nightmare. I fought back the urge to hurl with his kiss. He was right; I was too weak to overpower him on my best day let alone half-drugged and chained. I tore my mouth away from his, trying in futility to shove him off of me so I could at least draw breath. My struggle barely made any headway; all Ethan had to do was shift his feet a few inches to correct his stance.
“What’s wrong? I thought you liked aggressive men, Piper,” he taunted. He threaded his fingers between the buttons of my blouse and sent most of them flying when he ripped it open in one jerk of his arms.
“Think about what you’re about to do,” I stammered. “Think about the repercussions, the least of which being legal and the most of which being Noah’s wrath.”
“I have.” He traced his fingers an inch or so above the slash the whip left on my stomach, and then looked back up at me. “Quite simply… I. Don’t. Care.”
“What happened to you?”
The abruptness of my question took him by surprise. He all but snorted, “What?”
“What happened to make you hate him so much? I don’t believe it’s something as simple as Selene.”
“Simple?” Ethan choked. “You think that was simple?”
“I think there’s more to it. What happened to you, Ethan?”
Ethan was just as tired of playing the diversion game as I was. For some reason, he answered me the way a human being should. “Everything Noah has ever desired in his life he has gotten. He’s never wanted for anything. Our mother doted on him, bent to his every request just because he was the youngest. Meanwhile, back in the real world, I scraped and clawed for a fraction of the praise he received! I was the responsible one. I was the
disappointment when I slipped even just a little. Well, not anymore. This is for me. For all the little ways he destroyed my life! And I’m sorry, Piper. I’m really very sorry that it has to be you. But I have to do this. It really isn’t anything personal.”
Ethan believed. Somewhere along the way, he convinced himself that everything was indeed Noah’s fault. He believed his own bullshit so fervently and with so much empowerment that he lost all capability to reason. There was little anybody could do to deter a Believer from their rhetoric. That epiphany scared the fuck out of me.
I struggled to control the shaking in my voice as I asked, “You’re going to kill me, aren’t you?”
Ethan put two fingers on my lips to shush me, “It’s time for you to be quiet now.”
For what little it was worth I was almost glad he side-stepped the question because I wasn’t sure I wanted the answer. His face didn’t betray his words. He gave me nothing to work with in that department. Why was I even trying to read his expression? Why did I want to know if he was going to take my life after he did whatever it was he was planning on doing to me? No, he wouldn’t do that. Ethan seemed very capable of many cruel things in his life; murder was not one of them. Or, maybe he was extremely capable of murder and I only thought the contrary for my own benefit.
While I wracked my brain for a way, any way, to talk myself out of the situation I found myself in, Ethan exchanged the whip for a wad of white cloth and a ball gag. He slipped a pair of scissors, or what looked like a small pair of scissors, into his pocket. I began to plead against the impending gagging. Instead, he hooked his fingers into my mouth to force it open and shoved the cloth against my tongue. A ball gag did little on its own to silence anybody. Its original intent was to debase someone, forcing them to drool more than shut them up. The cloth worked far better at muffling screams. The ball gag was used in this instance more to secure the cloth in place and keep me silent.
Of course it was futile to struggle, but struggle I did. Though my hands were tied, they were in front of me, and I scraped and clawed and shoved as much as humanly possible to buy some additional time. For what, I didn’t know, but something told me the sooner I gave in the worse off I’d be. If I gave Ethan the fight he so craved then perhaps it would entertain him enough to keep me alive. Living far outweighed the thought of torture. Even if I wanted to die by the end of it, living meant the chance of rescue. I’d survive deep physical and emotional injuries, I was sure of it. Nobody could survive death.
The gag was pulled too tight against the back of my head. I never got the chance to even reach for it to tug it off. Ethan snatched the chain between my wrists and held it steady. Without a word, the small pair of scissors was in his hand. I now saw they were reminiscent of a tool used to cut away jewelry. He gripped my right hand. The mouth of the shears dipped into the lock on my wrist cuff. To my surprise, the hand-held shears bit into the platinum. I didn’t think anything but a table-top machine could manage such a thing. I shrieked behind the gag. He’d take Noah’s cuffs from me when he pried them from my cold, dead hands. In reflex, I jerked back just as he threw as much pressure into the effort as possible. The action aided in the cut rather than prevent it. I heard a snap as the metal of the tool sliced through the lock. My eyes filled with tears at the satisfied smile Ethan carried. Once he yanked the cuff from my wrist, he moved to the other.
Again, I tried to fight him. My nails dug deep into his arm while I did, drawing blood. He barely flinched as he wrestled me against the wall and found the right angle to cut the second one from me. Both cuffs were thrown with vehement disgust in the general direction of the remnants of my cell phone. I tried not to choke on the cloth in my mouth as I held back a sob. Silent tears rolled from my eyes.
Ethan pressed the shears into my hand, threaded my fingers to grip the handle and held my hand up to the collar on my neck. Instead of the lock, however, he looped a link of chain into position.
“Cut it,” he demanded. “You won’t require it anymore. No master in the world will want you after we’re finished here.”
My hands began to shake. I was sobbing openly now. It became difficult to breathe through my nose alone. I whipped my head back and forth in the most expressive way of saying no I could manage. He wouldn’t make me cut my own collar from me. Fuck him!
He squeezed my hand in his, which closed the shears around the thin link of platinum chain. God, this wasn’t happening. This was not happening.
Snap!
The first link broke.
Slowly, the others followed. Each snap felt like a dagger stabbing at my rib cage. Snap! Another link fell away. Snap! Another. I lost count after a while. The sounds became white noise in the background like a distant thunderclap from a storm that would never hit me. As intricate as the pattern was, it took what seemed a full ten minutes to work through the whole weave. By the time the final link was cut away by my own hand, with the aid of his, small pieces of chain lay strewn at my feet and hung precariously from the attached loops. My neck felt cold and naked when he snaked it off. I struggled to breathe, choked on the combined wet gag in my mouth and my saliva.
I’m sorry, Noah, I thought over and over. I’m so sorry.
I sank against the wall, unable to maintain my weight through the anger and fear, and slid to the concrete floor.
“Stand up,” Ethan said after he tossed the collar across the room. I only glared at him. “Stand the fuck up.” I tried to tell him to fuck right off, but the words came out as no more than an indignant muffle. The point was received, though. He came at me and yanked me to my feet by my hair again. “When I tell you to do something, you do it, or you will receive far, far worse. Nod if we’re clear on the rules.”
He was holding my hair too tight to give much of a nod, but it was there. No other choice presented itself.
“Breaking you is going to be too easy.”
He shoved off me and spun me around so I faced the pale spackled wall. My arms were raised up, the chain between my wrists fastened on a hook high above my head. It forced me to stand on the balls of my feet. There was no way to reach any higher to unhook the chain. Even if I managed to unhook myself, the tether at my feet prevented me from going anywhere.
“Seeing as you didn’t respond to my requests, my warnings, my threats—or anything, really—it’s abundantly clear there is only one way to get through to you. You’re a smart girl; do you know why the whip cracks?”
I did. When handled right, a whip cracks because it moves faster than sound. The snap of the tip is the sonic boom as it splits the air. That wasn’t something I learned from Noah; it was a nugget of information I held onto from high school. But Noah never used a whip on me. I wasn’t sure if he even owned one.
There would be no build-up to Ethan’s cruelty. His intention was to hurt me as much and as fast as he was able. I’d been weighed and measured, and I was found wanting by this man; my judge, jury, and probable executioner. I only understood that when my body reacted before my mind could catch up. I twisted wildly against the hook above me; contorting my body in ways I didn’t know I was capable to loosen it somehow. Mentally, I tried to disconnect and enter a state of numbness to my surroundings. I tried to block out his words as he said my own thoughts back to me, confirming what I already knew, to block out whatever horrors were to follow. It was far more difficult when every instinct chose then to kick in and escape.
The more I tried to block out the world, the more the world crashed into me. My mind was a blank slate swiftly being filled with hopeless feelings of abandonment.
“This is your punishment, you fucking bitch,” Ethan declared. The whip whistled through the air and smacked violently across my back. It shredded the fabric of my blouse effortlessly to tear open the skin there.
I screamed, a flood of tears racing from my eyes so fast they burned as much as the whip did.
“This is what you deserve for interfering in the lives of people you shouldn’t!” He threw all his weight behin
d the strokes. The next one bit down hard between my shoulder blades. “This is what happens when you try to save a soul that should be damned!”
Angry red welts began oozing hot blood along my spine. All the muscles in my body tensed in expectation of further agony. There was nothing dignified about the way I took this particular torture; the first of several tortures the man had in store. I wish I could say I held out, that I bit back the primal urge to scream and curse and cry and hate him; that I was able to rise above it and forgive him for his own hatred and misdirection. I wish I could have been a stoic statue of a martyr and not give an inch to Ethan, or what he longed so passionately to see from me.
Those are things I cannot say. I was anything but that person. I felt nothing save sheer loathing for Ethan from the very first stroke of pliable woven leather. For every one following the first, I silently swore my wishes for plague on him and everyone who aided him in my capture.
Stifled pleas to reign in his rage with an appeal for humanity were drowned in a torrid wash of red and white-hot despair. Never before had I experienced pain quite like I did in these endless minutes.
Though I successfully muted Ethan’s voice, I counted the lashes raining down on me for some reason: first five, then ten, soon twenty five and thirty of them. They didn’t come in a flurry of blows, but rather in unassuming beats of two and three, followed by a reprieve of a minute or two, sometimes more, that gave me a false sense of hope before they rained down on me again. They varied in strength and depth. Some cut my skin so deep I knew if I ever got out alive they wouldn’t only require stitches, but leave deep scars.
I stopped counting at thirty three. Silence overcame me until all I heard was my own hitching breath between cries. It was within those minutes that I screamed myself hoarse. My shoulders were tired from the strain. Not a single muscle failed to shudder. I dropped my head, trying to catch my breath while tears smeared across my cheeks. Grooves cut deep into the rubber of the ball gag between my teeth from biting down. My knees buckled, making me hang loose against the hook above my head until the metal shackles dug too deep into my wrists to bear any longer and I forced myself back to my toes.
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