Maya thought he’d abandoned her. He had been the instrument of her sin, but her heartstrings tugged all the way to her fingers and ached in the hollow place in her chest from being alone.
He’d said he would punish her. This was her punishment, to soak in her own darkness, to cry out in her dreams where no one would hear. A slave alone, as it should be. Yet… She shifted on the bed, but she didn’t want to move while she was still so uncomfortably open.
She silently pleaded for the darkness to just take her, stop her aching heart, her traitorous body, her wicked mind. Just let it end.
Bell turned off the light and crawled under the sheets beside her. He smelled like honeysuckle soap. He’d only washed up.
He put a glass of water on the small nightstand next to her.
“You should drink something before you sleep,” Bell said. “Ideally, you should eat something, too, but let’s save that for tomorrow.”
Maya opened her eyes and stared blearily at Bell’s shadowy form.
“You have to keep yourself healthy to tear yourself down. The longer you stay alive, the longer you can work toward redemption—or what you consider redemption,” he said. He brushed his fingers over her cheek.
She turned over, propped herself on her elbow and drank the water he had provided.
“There’s soda in the fridge if you need something to make your throat feel better tomorrow. Take care of yourself so I can take care of your punishment. That’s an order, Maya. That is my demand.”
She nodded then rested her head back on the pillow. His incense scent had suffused it. She was sleeping on his side of the bed.
“Very well. Sleep now.”
She was way ahead of him. Maya sank like a stone to the bottom of bad dreams.
Chapter Eight
Maya woke up to sausage and eggs steaming on the nightstand next to a tall glass of orange juice. Her stomach growled then protested, still queasy from the night before.
“You’ll live,” Bell said softly from the bedroom door, where he’d been staring at her while she’d been sleeping. “That’s the important part.”
“Remind me why,” Maya said. Her voice was still gravelly and probably wouldn’t get any better during the day. She took the plate when Bell handed it to her, but she drank the orange juice first, suddenly parched.
“You know what they say, Maya,” Bell said. He sat next to her, shifting the bedsprings. “Where there’s life, there’s hope.”
“Don’t be trite,” Maya said. “Platitudes don’t suit you.”
“How about this?” He tucked her tangled hair behind her ears as she started to eat. “There’s no hope for change when you’re dead.”
Maya ruminated on that one. “I think I might hate you a little bit right now,” she said, mouth full. “Quite a lot, actually.”
“I can handle it. I’m a strong man, you know,” Bell replied. He wrapped his arm around her shoulders and kissed her cheek. “Finish your breakfast, take a shower, drink a soda. When you come out, I have something for you in the tent.”
“Do I have to go?” Maya asked. Her fork seemed twice as heavy and four times harder to lift.
“Yes,” he said. “I want you at my side, and I would prefer to keep you in sight.”
“I’m not going to cross the threshold again,” Maya said.
“I’m psychic, Maya. You think I can’t see what you’re considering?” he whispered in her ear. “Be out there in time for the circus opening or else I won’t punish you.”
What a strange way to put it. She would have assumed he’d misspoken, except Bell never misspoke.
He left the bedroom.
Maya did as he’d said, eating, taking a shower in the small stall, dressing herself in the red leather dress, which Bell had draped on the foot of the bed, and grabbing a soda before leaving the trailer. She immediately began to sweat, undoing most of the work of her shower. She was from Texas. She was used to it. Condensation formed on the aluminum can.
Bell was right, though. The soda made her throat feel better.
She cradled the cool can against her chest, cursing herself for her comforts all the while. Why did she get to have them? Derrick didn’t. She had a man—well, a demon pretending to be a man—who, for some bewildering reason, had found his inner mother hen. But Maya doubted Kerry waited beside Derrick in the hospital. Kerry was probably in the mental ward anyway, pumped full of tranquilizers after what she’d witnessed. His parents lived in North Carolina, and their relationship wasn’t nearly as cordial as Maya’s with her mother. Would they come all the way to see their broken toy of a son? Maya didn’t know, and that was what weighed like stone in her heart as she shuffled to Kitty’s tent.
Maya stopped outside of it, unsure whether Kitty would want to see her face and whether Maya would want to see Kitty’s. She had warned Maya about wishing around Bell, especially in the heat of passion, and Maya had done it anyway.
Maya stood there, paralyzed with indecision and anxious about getting to Bell’s tent within the hour.
Then someone pushed through the tent flap, knocking Maya’s cheekbone with the back of their hand.
“Oh God, sorr― Oh, it’s you.” Valorie ducked under the entrance and narrowed her gaze at Maya. “Never mind.”
A few old-Maya retorts floated to the surface of her disturbed mind, but she didn’t say any of them. Valorie hadn’t hit her that hard.
Maya had been distracted last night, but in addition to being responsible for the torture Bell had wreaked upon Derrick, she understood now that she had also displaced Valorie from her own bed. Was there anything left that Maya hadn’t turned to rhinoceros shit?
Valorie didn’t linger to trade barbs, however. She stalked off to her oddity tent without another word.
“Maya,” Kitty said, peeking out. Her expression was inscrutable. “Come on in.”
Maya followed her into the shadowed tent.
Kitty’s embrace came out of nowhere. One second Maya had thought Kitty was going to berate her, the next Kitty had whirled around and wrapped her arms around Maya.
With all that hair, there was no way to avoid the feeling that she was being hugged by a thick, wooly blanket in the heat of summer, which was probably why Kitty kept an air-conditioning unit rumbling at all times.
“I’m so sorry, sweetie,” Kitty muttered.
“But you told me,” Maya said, burying her face in Kitty’s hair-covered shoulder, oppressive heat notwithstanding. “You tried to stop me, and I still did it. I might as well have killed him with a garden trowel.”
“Bell knew what he was doing,” Kitty said, stroking her back. “He showed you what he needed to show you at just the right time then pumped you for the wish. He’s been alive a thousand ages, Maya. He knows how to get a wish out of someone. If you were voluntary, I’d have recommended using up the rest of your wishes at the very beginning to avoid a slip, but you needed to save them for your own security. You still do.”
“I want to fix it,” Maya said. “I destroyed everything. Him. Me. Everything.”
“Bell wanted you to wish harm on that young man. Hell, I might have accidentally wished harm on him if I’d still had my wishes,” Kitty added darkly, pulling back. “Come on, sweetie, let’s get that hair up off your neck.”
“I wi― I’d rather you didn’t say that.” Maya allowed Kitty to corral her to the stool, however.
“You mean about the nasty things that boy did and the awful way he treated you?” Kitty said. “I don’t know the whole story between you two, but there is no excuse for what he did.”
“There’s no excuse for what I did.”
“Maybe not,” Kitty conceded. “But you got an equal and opposite reaction right after. You were horrified by what happened because of the wish—which isn’t the same thing as doing something, I’d like to point out. I can see it in the dark circles under your eyes and the paleness here…” Kitty stroked down the side of Maya’s face.
Maya stared into Kitty’
s vanity mirror. She looked like she’d put on zombie makeup four months too early.
“And after what you did, what the Ringmaster had to do to you… We’ve all been there. In all of your emotions and your reactions, you acted like a human being. I’m going to take a stab and say that reacting like a human being isn’t a carousal ride, is it? Well, maybe an Arcanium carousel. Suffice it to say, the jinn get the better end of the guilt stick, especially if they’re demon. I can promise you Bell’s feeling no pain.”
Kitty wrapped Maya’s hair up in a knot and slid two decorative chopsticks through it. She peered into Maya’s eyes through the mirror.
“You want my advice?” Kitty asked.
“Don’t know why. I wouldn’t listen to it anyway,” Maya said. She lowered her gaze to her fidgeting fingers.
Kitty stroked Maya’s hair sadly. “Try to forget about him.”
Maya jerked, her spine straightening like a switch. “What?”
“Bell won’t take it back, even if you waste another wish on it,” Kitty said. “The damage is done. It can’t be undone. There is nothing you can do for the young man, and if you hadn’t wished, you certainly wouldn’t go out of your way to do him a favor now. His life will go on without you, and yours without him. You each have your own torment to endure. You might as well be dead to each other. So forget what happened. Forget he exists.”
“How do you forget about someone you shattered into eighty pieces,” Maya said, standing, “out of nothing but spite?”
“That was Bell, Maya. Or don’t you remember?” Kitty replied quietly.
“Even if Bell manipulated me, I allowed myself to be manipulated.”
“Oh, sweetie, that’s not how it works with him.”
“I knew better, and I did it anyway,” Maya interrupted. “I’m not going to forget that any time soon, Kitty. And if you’d watched your boyfriend break every bone in his body, I bet you wouldn’t either.”
“I’ll never forget what I saw,” Kitty said, “or…heard. I’m not saying you should either. I’m saying let it go. There’s nothing left you can do for him. And there’s nothing left he can do to you. It’s finished.”
“Not for the rest of his life,” Maya said, “and if there’s any justice in this world, not for the rest of mine either. It wouldn’t be right for me to have peace when he never will.”
“He’ll die eventually, Maya,” Kitty said. “He’ll have his peace. He may even have his peace long before he dies. Broken bones and atrophied muscles heal.”
“I don’t care!” Her voice couldn’t handle the added strain and her last word cracked into a hissing whisper. “I deserve to be miserable for the rest of my life, no matter what Derrick did to me.”
Maya got up from the stool and stormed out, batting the tent flap open.
“Life is hard enough,” Kitty called after her.
* * * *
Bell lounged in his chair, staring into the lit candle he’d placed on the table next to the tapestry-woven square he sometimes used for tarot or palm readings. The crystal ball had been put almost out of sight on the sideboard behind a cluster of wooden effigies. When she ducked in, he glanced up, uncrossed his legs then stood in a single graceful motion.
“Sit,” he said, gesturing to her chair.
He acted the gentleman, but it occurred to her that almost everything he’d said to her since she’d woken up had been an order. Usually such a thing would make her bristle. But it made getting through each second easier knowing that at least some of things she had to do during the day weren’t in her hands. The gut instinct to rebel while obeying anyway, however, made each order another turn of the screw inside her. Maya welcomed both contradictory thoughts on the matter, comfortable with neither.
Bell tilted her chin up and leaned in until he was within an inch of kissing her. He inhaled her scent, parting his lips as though to taste her. As she involuntarily closed the distance, he brought a finger between them and touched her lower lip. She swallowed a sigh.
“I have something for you,” he said. He opened the bag at his waist. “Hold out your wrists.”
Maya ran the back of her hand over her mouth, hesitating before presenting him with her wrists, the blue veins ranging over the paler skin.
Bell pulled out a pair of black leather strapped cuffs from the bag at his side—they seemed too bulky to have been stored in the small leather bag, but maybe she just hadn’t been paying attention.
He fastened the first cuff snug on her left wrist. Then he bound her right.
“You may remove them only when you shower,” Bell said, taking her hands in his as though to read her palm. He stroked the vulnerable flesh under the cuffs, a surprisingly more intimate gesture with the cuffs on her wrists and what they represented. “When you wear them, you promise to do as I say, to submit to my will, to my pleasure and any pleasure—or pain—that I deem proper to give you.”
“This is what you were really anticipating, wasn’t it?” Maya said. “For me to want to be your slave.”
“You’re a slave as long as you choose to be. I won’t even require that you call me ‘Master’,” Bell replied, stepping back, his eyes like opaque glass as he returned to his seat. “I was under the impression this was what you wanted.”
Maya lowered her head and stared at the cuffs. “But you’re not refusing.”
“Why would I?”
After an hour or so in the tent with Bell reading for a few early guests—and not a single wish, thank God, because Maya didn’t know if she could have handled it—they parted ways so that she could grab lunch. She ordered a small Dr Pepper from one of the food booths. In insane faire sizes, the small was practically a large. It wouldn’t do anything to hydrate her in this heat that Bell’s fan couldn’t dispel, but it felt so good on her throat.
She could have stayed out like she sometimes did during afternoons. She could have ridden the carousel, actually walked Oddity Row for once, or hidden in the RV or the big top. But after lunch, she returned to Bell.
She didn’t trust herself alone either.
During a lull in customers, Bell set a sign outside his tent—Fortune Teller Shall Return in 15 Minutes—and tied the flap closed.
“Come here,” he said, sitting back down.
Maya eyed him warily, but she approached him and started to sit in his lap. Unease roiled in her belly. This was what had started the madness yesterday. But he stopped her, turning her slightly so that her knees hit his outer thigh. Then he put his hand on the small of her back to guide her down on his lap, stomach-first.
Maya opened her mouth to protest that there was no way she was going to do this, what did he think she was, five? However, he didn’t even have to nod at her new accessories to convince her to acquiesce.
Maya had to say something, though, as she bent herself over his thighs, her ass barely covered by the skirt this way.
“Someone might come in,” she whispered.
“They won’t,” Bell replied.
“That’s what you said last time.”
A smile colored his response. “I knew Kitty would interrupt. I was being coy.”
“Then how can I trust you now?” Maya asked.
“No one will interrupt us this time, Maya. I put up the magic sign.” He stroked the length of thigh exposed then brought his palm over her ass, pushing the skirt up over her hips.
“You knew Kitty would interrupt,” Maya said. “You saw it coming? All of it? You knew it would all happen?”
“Yes,” Bell said. He didn’t spare her his strength. His blow hit her squarely on the right buttock, a sharp smack and sting. The spanking was far from playful. He was really hitting her. She bowed her head against her clasped hands.
“If you knew what was going to happen, you could have stopped it,” Maya said. “Why didn’t you stop it before I―?”
Another two strikes in succession.
“I prophesied that yesterday would be the day you saw what your boy has been doing in your absenc
e, the day his betrayal and cruelty would be revealed to you,” Bell said.
“That’s rich, coming from you.”
Five. The smacks were astonishingly loud to her ears. At first, she worried that the people outside could hear it, but then she shrugged that off. The more people party to her rectification, the better.
“Why couldn’t you have just kept me ignorant? Then I wouldn’t be here like this, and he wouldn’t be…” Maya tightened her clenched fists. “Aside from your wanting me to hate him, why’d you still do it?”
“It wasn’t a matter of whether you would learn who your boy really is,” Bell said. “It was simply a matter of when.”
He spanked her hard over and over. He didn’t get winded—he could do this for days if he chose to. Then Bell let up, and she gasped. She shifted on his lap, her ass burning under her panties and her skin there starting to object to the idea of any additional blows.
“If I hadn’t done it then, all I would have done was postpone the inevitable. You would have eventually asked why your mother hadn’t called, why your boss unceremoniously fired you, why no one has tried to contact you—any of these things. Then I would have shown you something very similar to what you saw. The outcome was always the same. Your wish was part of your destiny before you made it.”
“I don’t believe that,” Maya said.
He’d seen the possibility and accepted it as a favorable scenario for him. It’s what he always did. She remembered the disclaimer he had given her when she’d first met him— that knowing one’s future gives a person the opportunity to change it. And he hadn’t, preferring to view it as unavoidable.
“Believe what you choose,” Bell replied.
He concluded his punishment, the final number seemingly arbitrary, following his will and nothing more.
“Now, sit,” Bell said. “No squirming, Maya. I don’t want my guests to think you’re uncomfortable.”
When she stood up, she was able to observe what she’d only peripherally noticed during the spanking. His erection formed an intimidating bulge in his pants as he smoothed her skirt back down, patting her ass in a fainter echo to what he had done. She winced.
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