Pearson sputtered. “Who the hell are you to make those demands?”
“I’m the guy who can upset all the apples in your cart. And I’m the only one who seems to care about what these women have gone through. I’ve been fighting for them since I started this, and I’ll fight for them until the last woman resumes a normal life.”
Lawter looked at him for a moment, then nodded. “Agreed.”
~ ~ ~
Dan returned late that afternoon. Josh found him in the office soon after.
“How’d it go, boss?”
“Pretty much like you’d expect if you got two crowns without anesthesia.”
“Ow. That bad?”
“I think it’ll be better now.”
“I hope so.”
Chapter 14
Laura was so tired. Her throat was even more raw now, and the pain pills had worn off enough that her feet hurt with every twitch. She just wanted to be left alone to sleep, and for a while, it seemed that she would be.
Then the door banged open. “Laura!” Dan’s voice rang across the room. Laura turned over slowly, her mind reluctant to obey anyone, even him.
“Get over here, now!”
She wanted to cry. There was no sympathy in his voice, and while she knew she shouldn’t expect any, it hurt nonetheless. She slid to the floor and crawled over to him just outside the door, then knelt quietly at his feet.
“Follow me.” He slammed the door shut, turned, and walked down the hall. She had to rush to keep up with him on knees that were growing rapidly sore. She followed him down the hall and then to her surprise, he went out the door. She hesitated at the idea of crawling on her knees across the hard-packed dirt of the yard until he turned around and his hand landed with a smack on her bare ass. She yelped and hurried out the door.
“Go! Keep going! All the way to the road.”
She gaped at him. Was this more punishment?
“Now.”
There was no room for hesitation in his voice. She put her head down and concentrated on crossing the seemingly vast distance ahead of her. It was probably only fifty yards, but her knees caught every pebble along the way.
She got to the entrance—a couple of posts and a swinging wooden gate—and waited. One of the guards leaned against a post and observed her silently, chewing on a toothpick.
“We’re going for a walk. Tomorrow it will be a run. Get up.”
She looked at him in disbelief. He looked back at her silently. She grabbed the other post and hauled herself up, whimpering with the pain of standing on her feet for the first time since his punishment earlier in the day. Had it really only been this morning?
He nodded towards the road. “Go.”
She took a few tentative steps. The pain was intense. She stopped, arms crossed over her chest. “Dan, I can’t. It hurts!”
“There is no Dan here. I am Master 1. And you will walk, now, standing straight up, or I will put a leash on your collar and drag you down the road. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir,” she whispered. She started forward, each step an individual lance of pain that shot up her legs. She bit her lip and made faces and kept up a continuous whimpering, but managed to walk to the edge of the driveway and start down the road.
Why was he doing this? What purpose did this have? She had to put all the questions out of her mind as she struggled down the dirt road, her swollen feet finding every sharp rock in the packed earth. At last, they were at the bend of the road and out of sight of the compound. Dan pulled a device out of his pocket and scanned it, then looked behind them, and let out a breath of pure relief. Without warning, he swept her off of her feet and into his arms, moving to sit on a downed tree on the side of the road.
He held her tight in his lap. The affection confused her more than his callous indifference had a few moments before.
“Master, what is going on?” she asked.
He didn’t reply right away, just looked at the ground. When he did speak, his voice was low.
“I had to get you away from any listening ears and out of any line-of-sight eavesdropping devices. There’s nowhere that is really safe to talk in that place.”
She waited silently.
“How are your feet?” he asked with concern, lifting up one and then the other foot, wincing at the sight of the red and swollen skin now studded with small stones. He picked off each one with care. “I’m sorry. I’m so, so, sorry.” He let them down gently.
Laura’s first response was to say they were okay, but she wasn’t able to shrug off the condition of her feet quite yet. They fucking hurt.
“God, this is killing me.” His voice betrayed the anguish he felt.
She was unsure of what to say.
“Laura, it’s getting worse. Much worse. DeLeo—the guy running this thing—has decided you’re a distraction to me. He wants to take you for himself.”
An arrow of fear shot through her. “When?”
“At the auction.”
She relaxed. “Well, isn’t the auction when it all ends? He won’t actually leave here with me, right?”
His hesitation told her there was more and the fear flooded back.
“Laura, he won’t leave with you, no. But he’s given very specific instructions about how we are to prepare you for him in the meantime.”
“Like what?” she whispered. The knot of fear was back in her stomach.
He gave a grim chuckle. “Well, he definitely wants you to learn how to give him a massage.”
Laura shuddered at the idea of touching the bare skin of a man like DeLeo. “Okay, I guess I can do that.”
“That’s not all. He wants you to learn to take a punishment without making any noise. Get used to stress positions and endurance, like hanging from your wrists this morning. Be aroused for hours without relief. Take punishments silently. He wants you to learn how to give a perfect blow job even if you’re being whipped at the same time. And I know him—he’ll be watching as often as he can. He’s obsessed with this place and the upcoming auction. We can’t pretend to teach you, or fake it, because I have no way of knowing when he’s watching in most of the rooms.”
He couldn’t look at her anymore. She couldn’t look at him, either, but not because of fear. A tendril of something she didn’t understand, but which wasn’t complete revulsion, was creeping up into her stomach from a place much lower down.
“You’ll be in charge of it?” she asked softly.
He nodded, his eyes still on the ground and oblivious to the change in her tone. “If I don’t do it, Marco will.”
“Okay.” She wasn’t sure why she’d said that.
His head shot up. “What?”
“I’m really scared right now. And the worst part is that I’m think I’m kind of turned on, too, and I don’t know why.”
He stared at her. “Laura, you have no idea–”
“Dan, can I trust you?”
“Of course you can. But you know some of this is out of my control.”
“I know. And I really am afraid of that. But the rest—I know you’ll do your best to help me get through it, and to not injure me—”
“There’s more.”
She paused, waiting.
“He wants your nipples pierced.”
She glanced down at her breasts, sweaty and dust-covered, and closed her eyes while she struggled with the idea. “You’ll get someone who knows what he’s doing?” she managed to ask.
“God, yes! I wouldn’t let any of these dirty slobs do it to any of the girls!”
She nodded. “And…” she prompted, knowing there was more.
“I have to rape you, to break you.”
Her heart hammered and her breaths grew quick and short. Fear and desire both shot up from between her legs in a race to see which one could possess her mind first. Fear won, but only barely.
“Dan?” she said in a small, scared voice. There was no question attached; it was merely a need to have him say something, anything, to reassur
e her.
But he still couldn’t look at her, though he did tighten his arms around her waist. She took a large shuddering breath and managed to push whatever it was she was feeling back into a corner of her mind, for now.
“I’m glad it’s going to be you, not Master 3,” she said. She forced conviction into her voice “Dan, it’s not rape if I want you to do it. I want you to take me and fuck me hard and hold me down and whatever else you have to do. I want you to. It might look like rape, but it won’t be. That’s a promise I can make to you, no matter how harsh you have to be.”
He shook his head. “You can’t just say that. Don’t you know?—no, of course you don’t. The BDSM life was never something you were interested in. Not that this has anything remotely to do with that. There’s nothing consensual about this.” He looked old and tired and it hurt that she was the reason for it. “At least someone in the lifestyle understands what a whip might feel like, or a cane, and might even have some coping techniques for getting through an intense session.”
“Like imagining I’m giving you a blowjob when I’m really being face fucked by Master 3 who won’t let me eat until I finish him off?” He missed the small grin on her face as he once more stared miserably at the ground. He missed the whole first part of the sentence, in fact.
“I’m sorry. That’s the kind of thing I have little control over if I want to keep the illusion I need to maintain. I have to limit my intervention, and Josh’s, to the really big stuff.”
“I know. What surprised me was how aroused I got imagining it was you.”
Now he stared at her. “Really?” At her affirmative nod, he smiled wistfully. “I wish it had been me, too,” he said as he pulled her close again.
She sensed more unease. “What else aren’t you telling me, Dan?”
He didn’t answer right away. “Nothing. That’s all.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
She didn’t believe him. “Okay. Dan, let me ask you something. Are you going to be able to keep it up? I’ll get to cry and scream and beg, but you’ll have to pretend not to care. Can you do that?”
“I have to. If we want to get through this, I have to put on a damn good show.”
“And I’m going to have to pretend to hate you, and ignore the scathing hatred of the other women.”
“If this were a movie, they’d give us Oscars when we were done.”
“If this were a movie, the rescue would come right before the bad guy did anything really bad. Let’s hope the good guys are following the script.” She smiled wanly.
“We need to go back.”
“I know.”
~ ~ ~
There were several things Dan had to do immediately. It was with a sense of anger that he made the first call, to arrange for a piercer— “You better send a damn good one! If you guys fuck this up, I’ll slice your balls off, understand?” He hung up. And it was with a sense of revulsion that he logged onto the computer for the second item. As he placed the order and made the arrangements, an idea hit him. He hoped to hell it wouldn’t be needed, and it wouldn’t make it right, but perhaps if the worst came to pass, it might help a little bit. He changed the order, hit ‘send’ and logged off.
Chapter 15
The women alternated between pity and horror at Laura’s connection to Dan. Though they scarcely dared to speak about him at all, they managed to convey their anger very clearly towards the man who was the face of the organization that had ripped them from their lives. Laura couldn’t blame them, and longed to tell them the truth. At the very least, she longed to give them hope where they saw none, but it was too damn risky.
Laura’s schedule immediately became different from everyone else’s. DeLeo had no interest in how well she could serve dessert, or whether she had any talents. He wanted her in top physical shape immediately, able to fuck and be fucked for hours. While her feet were healing, she started doing upper-body exercises. Once she could put weight on her feet, she resumed the squats with the other women, but now the tack mat was placed under her every morning and left there until she could hold the squat no longer, no matter how long that took. She never got used to the pain of the tacks piercing her tightly stretched ass as she fell, and she would scream in frustration.
Two days after her new schedule started, she was escorted on still-painful feet back to the cell. She’d just spent an hour on her knees, struggling to pay attention to Master 4’s cock while Master 2 flicked the crop on her skin from behind. He would move around like a wolf stalking prey and snap the crop on her left thigh, then her right hip, then her right cheek. She struggled to focus her mind on her task. Every time she lost her rhythm because of a blow, he would give her another one in the same spot, harder. He’d repeat it over and over, the pain flashing up and up, until she was back on task. She wasn’t very good at concentrating yet, which was why she was covered with dozens of red welts. Master 2 vowed they’d work on it every day until she didn’t flinch even slightly.
She was exhausted. She wanted to collapse on the floor, not having the energy to make it back to her bed.
Master 3 was with her and saw her start towards it.
“Unh uh, sweetheart. You need to shower again. You have a date!” He spit the words out with contempt.
She stared at him, not understanding at first. Then she remembered and let out a sob that was not at all pretend. He herded her to the shower and insisted on washing her, spending way too much time soaping her breasts and pulling on her nipples. He washed her cunt thoroughly as she bent over, and she cursed him silently as he stirred her arousal despite the hate that raced through her.
As soon as he was done with his humiliations, he hurried her out of the shower, dried her perfunctorily, then gripped her arm and dragged her down the hall to a small room she hadn’t been in yet. It was decorated with a number of tie-off points on the walls, and an assortment of ropes, chains, floggers, and whips. She was growing used to the sight of those by now.
He clipped her wrists together behind her back and pushed her to her knees. “He’ll never be able to fuck you like I could have fucked you,” he hissed in her ear. “Sooner or later, he’ll screw up and my uncle will see him for the idiot he really is.” He left her on the floor and slammed the door behind him.
Like hell he’ll screw up! she thought. I won’t let him. A little blinking light up in the corner informed her that she was probably being watched. I’ve got to make this good. She dropped her head and let the fear she’d been keeping at bay sweep up and over her. It didn’t take long for real tears to spill out of her eyes once more. She rocked back and forth, whispering, “Please…please…please…” over and over.
The door banged open and she uttered a shriek of surprise. Dan stood there with a look of—fury? It wasn’t what she expected and she cowered backwards. She tried to remind herself that he was acting but the look on his face sent real fear spiraling down into the pit of her stomach.
“Dan?” she asked tentatively.
He slammed the door behind himself and strode over to her where she knelt. He grabbed her hair and tipped her head back painfully to look up at him.
“Dan is gone. How long will it take you to remember that? There’s only Master in here, and I expect immediate obedience. Do you understand?”
She caught a whiff of alcohol on his breath.
“Yes,” she whispered.
He tightened his grip on her hair until she cried out. “Yes, what?”
“Yes, Master!” she almost shouted.
The grip on her hair never loosened as he unzipped his trousers and brought forth his cock. It was only partially erect, as though it were unsure which direction to go, considering the circumstances.
“Make it hard,” he growled.
This was not the way she would have chosen to welcome him into her mouth for the first time, if she’d had the choice. But she didn’t, and so she obediently opened up and sank down the length of the long member, de
termined to avoid having him force her. His hands loosened slightly and he let her take the lead. She struggled to hold it deep in her mouth, choking on the length, then pulling off for only a moment before taking it deep again. Her body screamed in protest as she made herself gag again and again, and she was running out of willpower to do it all by herself. She needed him to help her. She looked up at him with a pleading look, hoping it looked like a ‘please stop’ look to the cameras instead of ‘please help me make this look good’. He seemed to catch her message. He re-tightened his grip on her hair and forced himself deep into her mouth, ignoring her body’s now-involuntary and very real struggles. When at last he yanked her mouth off of his swollen and rigid member, she drew a heaving gasp and fell backwards onto the floor.
A Captive of Fear and Desire Page 10