His cock still hadn’t found bottom. I wanted it there. He paused, as if poised to go either in or out.
“Want this?”
Oh yes. I wanted it harder, deeper.
Needed. Nothing in my head but need, lust. I bowed my spine, pushing toward his cock, seeking. An obeisance to this ultimate goal. To be fucked and claimed.
“Say it. Say it.”
Would he never move?
I pressed my ass back toward him.
“Say it.”
“Please, fuck me,” I murmured, hoping he wouldn’t hear and, stupidly, that he would hear.
My traitorous pussy squeezed onto his cock. Muddled, I was so muddled. Up and down were mysteries, but I knew the feel of a cock plugging me, possessing me. I needed. God, yes.
“Please!”
I wriggled at him. I smelled, tasted, absorbed him into my flesh, his sweat and masculinity, his power, his muscles. A man behind me. I needed him in me, not shallow, but at a depth where his presence tore away the make-believe. I needed real, even as I hated where I’d come to.
I trembled, waiting, caught with his cock halfway inserted.
“Fuck me,” I repeated, louder, despairing, at the end of his cock and with no other way to make him move except by begging. “Please.”
“Done.”
Then he plowed in and took me.
No quarter given, no courtesy due to our friendship. No more nice. In that moment, I wouldn’t have it any other way.
The metal frame jarred the floor and the chains and ropes tugged on my breasts. My entrance stung from micro-tears, from the force of his cock jamming into me. I didn’t care. My cries were those of joy, but I couldn’t come – I was a fraction, a terrible fraction away from nirvana.
I whimpered my frustration. A foreign hand gripped my throat. My eyes had been shut. I opened them and saw...
Einar.
It had been him, before. His hand on my ass.
Again.
The frenzy of a mesmer-made orgasm ripped through me, making me a jerking, back-arched, sobbing puppet. My eyes rolled up. Despite the condom, I could feel every pulse of Grimm’s dick as he climaxed. From around where his cock entered me, my own moisture spurted and sprayed onto my legs. He swore, shoved deeper, and filled me with the last of his cum.
“One day.” He grunted next to my ear. “I’ll fuck you without protection and make a child.”
He wanted me pregnant? The ramifications permeated into my blurred mind. I moaned as he withdrew.
The ache of emptiness.
The rattle of a belt buckle. He’d stepped away and was picking up clothes, leaving me draped over this thing. In my disarrayed and broken state, it seemed the ultimate rejection.
There was no mistaking what he’d done. He’d taken me as a mesmer would, even if he’d been unable to bring me to climax. I had no friends here. Not now. There existed only him and my other captors.
“I hate you,” I whispered, slumping with my chin on the bar. I was too tired to properly use my feet on the floor.
Those words had been too quiet for anyone to hear. For the best. The cane in Einar’s hand scared me more than a mere stick should do.
“That was a little tame. I’m sure you can improve, Grimm. We can give you some ideas. Watch the men with the other women.”
Feet padded closer.
“No. Leave her there. She’s fine. Watch.”
Though I’m sure Einar didn’t aim that comment at me, I couldn’t help seeing some of what the men did to the other women. He was right. What Grimm had done to me was tame. The smack of cane and whip on flesh, the upside down bondage, the sheer cruelty terrified me.
The women writhed in climax, but I refused to look when the screams climbed in volume.
“You’ll kill them,” Grimm said incredulously.
“Never. They’ll be fine. The men know not to leave marks that won’t fade. You and your biting, however...”
I could feel the throb from that bite. Could see his tongue licking me down there. I shuddered and I wasn’t sure if it was from the memory of the pain or the pleasure.
Damn him.
When Grimm let me down from the iron man, he held me a while. I let him. It was better than protesting and having worse happen. He was quiet, barely doing more than holding me, stroking me. I wondered if this had affected him in some way, if perhaps there was still some of the old Grimm left inside him. Asking him directly would be stupid. I wouldn’t know an honest answer if it was in my face. All I could do was judge him by his actions and by what he’d said to me while fucking me. That was enough to make me sad. I’d liked him, once. Loved him a little even, despite our platonic relationship.
When allowed to put on my clothes, I did so. I kept my back to Grimm. No words, still no words. Could he possibly be horrified by his actions? I damn well hoped so.
After their artificial orgasms, no matter how much pleasure I’d been given, regret and disgust always shadowed me.
Fuck them all. I seethed in silence.
Chapter 14
Zorie
I meekly followed the guards back to my room, pretending that none of the pains bothered me, especially not the purple-and-red bruise on my thigh from Grimm’s first bite.
While showering, I cursed them all into oblivion as I strangled the faucet. Water pouring over my head always made me feel as if I was in a separate world to whatever was outside the shower. I didn’t want to be changed by what they made me do, but it was happening. I’d never ever been so fired up in my life. Guess I’d considered the world a nice place. I’d never wanted to simply kill people so hard before. Kill, smash, obliter-fuck the hell out of them. The faucet under my hand would’ve made a fine instrument to smash in Einar’s skull.
I wished, I wished... My body hurt all over – breasts, between my legs, that bruise. I wanted to see blood – other people’s.
I ended up kneeling on the shower base, weeping, and I wasn’t sure if it was from sadness or fury.
Was this anger the side effect of the mesmer infection?
I dressed again in a fresh skirt and plain white top. Lunch arrived, brought to my room on a tray, as did dinner, hours later. They left me alone. I wondered if there was another batch of women out there, being trained. After an hour or two more passed, I assumed night had fallen. The guards were likely to be gone or very few.
I stood and stared at the wall, tensing muscles, glaring, driving my anger upward, then I let it subside, feeling cleansed. Where another might resort to a yoga pose and meditation, I liked to use rage.
I exited my room to begin another night of exploration. Ninja time.
I would do this until I found a way out. I couldn’t go directly up the first stairs? Very well, I would find a window, an unwarded stairway, a chute, a ladder. There had to be a way out.
In the second room, in the opposite direction to the stairs, my first trial of bravery began.
I took a deep breath, and I went inside. Empty. Thank god. If they caught me doing this, fuck them. Risks were unavoidable.
For the next few rooms, I thought there were women, from the noises, and because most of the doors had a small grill I could look in through. I avoided three occupied rooms. Perhaps I would chance talking to them if nothing else turned up.
In the next empty room, I searched for useful things, weapons, and what I found there made me break down and cry. I sat on the bare mattress and sobbed, noiselessly.
I opened my hand to look again at what I’d found in a small jewelry box. The heart-shaped amethyst pendant resting on my palm – it belonged to Cherie.
A victory or a jinx?
I had to stay now. I had to find her, or find out what had happened to her.
How could I escape when she might be here being tortured, raped, or worse?
If I left, they might know and move on, clean up the evidence, and make people vanish.
The hallways seemed to grow darker the further I ventured. When I came to an upward-h
eading stairway and tried it and found it possible to ascend – to put one foot ahead the other, I rejoiced. A spider on the wall, halfway up, had me snatching my hand away.
The lights seemed fewer, the walls clammier. The timber corridors of downstairs became stone above. Which was surely an odd building choice.
When I stepped off, I had a stomach-churning seizure and fell to my knees, nauseated. Had I been drugged? The floor seemed the safest place, so I clung to it. Once my head stopped spinning, I rose to one knee, and found a stairway climbing above me. Halfway up, on the join between ceiling and wall was a gray spider.
Something, someone, was fucking with me.
Had I just gone up, was I looking at this upside down? Or was it the reverse, had I been descending when I thought myself going up?
Either way, something was screwing with my perceptions. I couldn’t trust myself to know up from down.
“Fuck.” I covered my face with my hand. What was I going to do?
When I swiveled at the waist, still on my knee, and studied it, the corridor seemed new. The stone was a clue. You didn’t build stone on timber. Whatever this mind trick was, it must be their doing. Logically they wouldn’t want anyone leaving.
“I must have gone down the stairs, not up.”
As sure in my deduction as I could be, I stole along the hallway, keeping to the edges, with an eye out for unique things to recall.
String, I needed string, or a pen to mark the walls.
Or blood. I shivered. This place would haunt me. Horror movies were the pits. If a headless zombie trundled around a corner and came at me, I vowed to kick its teeth in.
More to the point, because I didn’t really think there’d be zombies, what if I didn’t make it back to my room on time, before they came for me?
Risk was unavoidable. My basic ground rule.
I went onward. My heart-rate was already topping into cardiac arrest territory. The next room, when I peeked through the grille, it still made me gasp.
I stuffed my fist into my mouth and rolled away from the grille, resting with my back to the door.
What should I do? Grimm was inside, and he was shackled to the wall, by a chain.
They didn’t trust him after all that.
They didn’t trust him.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend, but he wasn’t quite their enemy.
What should I do?
“Zorie? Is that you? Please come in.”
I bit down on my fist. I so wanted to hit him. Going in there and getting within his reach – diabolically dumb.
Even so, he might be a fount of information.
He might be anything. I didn’t know him anymore.
Chapter 15
Grimm
I looked over the top of the book I was reading. I’d know Zorie’s gray eyes anywhere, even through a grille in my door.
What was she doing loose when I was chained?
What was I going to say to her?
What might I do to her...
I twisted away from that thought.
The wrongness of what had happened was obvious, when away from that sexual cauldron. The room had distilled me into somebody I wasn’t and didn’t want to be. Except it wasn’t simply the room. Einar and Kaage could make the women do anything, and I’d wallowed in that, leeched off that power of theirs. I’d been a happy little parasite.
Their employees were just immoral men, doing what they were told to because they enjoyed fucking women, willing or unwilling, or mesmer-coerced.
I was different. I was in tune to their power.
It was me, and it was the mesmer bug. What would happen if I could no longer separate one from the other?
What I’d done might happen anywhere.
Control, I had to figure it out before I was swept away, and became what I hated.
Fuck this shit.
After placing the musty book on the quilt, alongside a poetry book, I rolled to the edge and sat up. I put my hands in my lap and tried to look non-threatening. I needed her in here, to talk.
She was still out there. I could feel her out there, though I couldn’t see her. Strange but true.
“Come in, Zorie. Please.”
Her face appeared at the grille. “Why?” she asked softly.
“Because I don’t know if they are monitoring me. The longer we do this, the bigger the chance they will notice...if they are listening.”
Nothing. She just stared.
“Because I need to say things to you.”
“I don’t trust you.”
My heart lurched. I nodded. “I know that. I understand why. Will you come in anyway?”
“Are you Grimm right now?”
“Huh. Am I myself?” I angled an eyebrow. It was a good question. “Yes.”
What else could I say? Either she believed me, or not.
“Can you even open the door, Zorie?”
The handle turned and she entered. As often happened, her figure drew me to study her. White clothes, all white, same as in the room, and she looked so pretty, but I shouldn’t say it.
“There was a key outside, hanging on a hook. I don’t think they know how to run a prison.”
She edged in a little farther.
“Yeah. Look. We need to go in there.” I nodded toward the bathroom. “And turn on the water to cover us talking. It may help.”
The lights were all on, of course. I’d been sleeping with a pillow over my head.
The twitch of her mouth said it all.
“I won’t touch you. I promise. I swear it on my brother’s grave.” I turned over my hands on my knees, palm upward. Tom would’ve found this amusing and ridiculous, that I was helping the girl he’d tried to kidnap. The woman who’d killed him.
Life was bloody hilarious.
Her nose wrinkled.
She couldn’t know how horrified I’d been after I’d fucked her. While cuddling her after, my thoughts had run in gibbering circles. I knew it had happened to her, after Reuben had screwed around with her – the denials and self-disgust. I doubted other mesmers felt this way.
Maybe they grew immune to loathing themselves. I hadn’t, yet. I prayed I never would.
“I have this.” Something long and pointed showed in her hand. A knife? A skewer. “I’ll use it if I have to.”
I grunted and stood. “You want me to tie my own hands, keep them at my back? I will. This talk, it’s for me to say sorry, and other things.”
She hissed through her teeth as if undecided. “Okay. Fuck. Look Grimm, I don’t care where you put your hands as long as they stay away from me. In.” Then she jerked her chin at the bathroom.
Giving me orders? I managed not to smile. I walked in first, turned on the shower then sat opposite, next to the sink, on the floor with my back to the cream tiles. When she entered and kneeled down to sit in the entrance, with her skirt modestly tucked around her legs, I stayed still and quiet.
“What do you want to say?” Before I could answer, she went on, “I have so many things I could say...” Zorie pulled a face, her mouth down-turned. “Mostly fuck you. Remember me saying that before?”
Yeah, I did. I could see pain in her eyes, far more than mine, perhaps, though it didn’t seem that way. In that instant, I burned with hate for myself. “I’m sorry.”
“How many times are you going to say that Grimm? Do you think it changes things?”
That little frown line between her eyes, I wished I could massage it away.
“I’d say it forever, if I thought it would eventually sink in.”
Again, she screwed up her face, staring down at her hand where the spike of metal showed projecting from her knuckles. Only a pin of some sort, I decided, not anything she could kill with. “It won’t. I think next time they ask you, you’ll do the same.”
I nestled into the wall behind me. I sighed. The allure of what had happened, I’d been swept away. I’d tried to stop myself, at first. Failed. She was right. God that hurt, to admit that.
The twitch of one corner of her mouth and then of her brows came and went. She knew I was right, but I guess there would never be enough justification.
“You’d rather I refuse, be killed, and someone else fuck you?”
“I’d rather no one. I think you’d do it even if they weren’t making you. You’re turning into a bloody mesmer.”
I searched her eyes. “Yes. I am. I need to get out of here. Away from this.” I shook my head. “I don’t want to hurt you more. Not now, not when I’m sane.”
“Pfft.” Zorie blew out her cheeks, stabbed the floor with the spike. “Easy excuse. Plead insanity.”
“You of all people should know.”
“Me? What the fuck. Me? How can you even –”
“Can you resist when it calls you? Can you stop yourself obeying, coming on command, being their fucktoy?” A low blow, I guess.
The water in the shower drummed onward. It’d be one in the morning by now.
Her answer was so quiet I could barely hear it. “No. I can’t. Not much anyway, not yet.”
So Mavros’s training hadn’t worked, even when she had the bug too. Or maybe it hadn’t taken.
“The difference is, I will get control of this.”
We exchanged glares for a while. Me, it was more a determined, don’t you dare push and tell me I can’t. Her? Plain old anger, I guess.
“Why are you a mesmer, Grimm? How exactly did that happen?”
Lying tempted me. I didn’t like looking desperate, but maybe this would help her see me as her friend again.
“Okay.” I nodded, the bump of my tied-back hair rasping against the tiled wall. “I heard what Mavros told you in Greece. I went to the kitchen that night and...I licked every cup and fork I could find that he might have put his mouth on. That’s how I got the infection.”
Her mouth fell open and the frown lines got another workout. “Why? Why! That’s it, all I can say. Why the hell would you do that?”
“You.” I cleared my throat. “I hated not being able to reach you, to make you feel what I feel.”
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