Claimed (4 page)

“Hey Tom, it’s Ellie,” I said.

“Hey Ells,” he responded cheerfully. “Did your battery die again?”

I seized the offered explanation about why I wasn’t calling from a familiar number. “Stupid phone,” I griped lightly. “Tom, can I hit you up for a favour? Could you collect Midnight tomorrow morning and deposit her at the vet? I’ve arranged for her to be boarded there while I’m away.” Tom lived close by and had a key to my apartment in case of emergency. Giving him access to my home had felt like an important marker on my journey back to normalcy.

“Too much to do before you leave?” he asked easily. “Sure, no worries, doll.”

I thanked him and hung up. We’d reached a waiting car with darkly tinted windows and Jean-Luc opened the back door for me and inclining his head. I got inside and he slid next to me, the car moving forward immediately. I glanced at the raised partition between the driver and the back. Good – we could talk freely.

Jean-Luc was staring at me. “What?” I asked.

“Is he a boyfriend? Someone you will need to explain what’s going on to?”

It took a second for me to register that he meant Tom. “Not that it’s any of your business, but no,” I said. I wasn’t going to tell Jean-Luc that I wanted Alexander, not if he’d found someone else.

“Anything that concerns Alexander is my business,” he replied.

I rolled my eyes. “Oh, get over yourself,” I snapped. “Can you even hear how ridiculous you sound? Where are we even going, by the way?”

He barked a short, startled laugh. “I think I’m going to like you, Ellie. As to where we are going,” he added dryly, “I would have thought that would be obvious.”

I looked out the window for the first time and felt slightly foolish. The car was speeding in the direction of the airport and it didn’t take a genius to figure I was going to be bundled on a plane next. “Are we heading to Paris?” I asked.

He nodded confirmation. “This way, we maintain an element of surprise.”

“We don’t.” I was just realizing something. Today was the nineteenth of December. I was scheduled to fly out on the twenty-first. If Lucien was tracking my movements, he would be aware of that. “Shit,” I swore as something else just occurred to me.

I’d been living in my own, peaceful world, concerned only whether Alexander was dating someone else. But when I’d bought my ticket to Paris, I’d inadvertently telegraphed to Lucien that I was picking sides. And I had information on Lucien, information that no one else did. Information that could expose Lucien to Alexander’s attention.

Any moment now, Lucien would be coming for me.
Fuck.

I quickly filled Jean-Luc in on the situation as the car pulled into the airport. He swore as the implications became clear. “Okay,” he finally said. “We have to assume he’s in the air right now, heading towards San Francisco. We might still have a day’s start on him.”

My thoughts churned. Choices were collapsing and I’d been thrust into a kill-or-be-killed situation. We’d need plans. A safe place to hide while Lucien was located.

There were more questions than answers, but as the car drove up to a large, gleaming jet that I recognized, one thing was made clear. This was Alexander’s plane. I exhaled shakily. It seemed that I was about to fly to Paris, two days earlier than planned, where the man I still loved waited.

Ellie:

Twelve hours later, I was back in Paris, back in Alexander’s house. Jean-Luc showed me to my old bedroom. “Wait here,” he said. “Get some sleep, if you can. Alexander will be along momentarily and we can start making plans.”

I hadn’t been able to sleep on the plane. It was rare that I could doze off in a public space, but that hadn’t been all of it. I’d been dwelling on something that I’d missed while Jean-Luc had spirited me away.

Alexander could have come himself to get me in San Francisco, but he had sent someone else instead.

It seemed to me that was as clear a sign as I was going to get that he wasn’t as interested as I would have hoped. I’d been busy fighting my misery on the journey, reproaching myself for thinking that there could still be a chance between us. Too much history lay in the way. Even if Alexander was interested in me, it was all still horribly tangled. His father had kidnapped me and raped me and I’d killed him as a result, using a gun that Alexander had pressed into my hands.

My head hurt just thinking of it. It was perfectly understandable that Alexander would look for something a lot less
complicated
. Perhaps if I possessed the gift of being able to forget, I would have made the same choice.

The sky was starting to darken in Paris, but it was still early evening. I sat on the bed for a while, but jumped to my feet when my eyes started to close of their own accord. I opened the closet and wasn’t particularly surprised to see the clothing that I’d left behind eighteen months ago hanging there. Alexander had always been good at the details. Of course, I’d gained fifteen pounds in that time, so I doubted any of them would fit me. Besides, the pretty summer dresses, the skimpy cocktail outfits and the glittery evening gowns – none of these fit in any version of my life. These were the accoutrements of the plaything of a rich and powerful man.

As much as I scorned the clothing, my fingers still trailed over the dresser drawers filled with lingerie. It was hard not to remember the way Alexander’s eyes had heated up when I had worn the pieces of silk and lace. It was impossible to forget how many of them had ended up ripped or cut away by shiny scissors as our lust overwhelmed us.

The house was quiet. If Jean-Luc had posted guards, they weren’t inside. Outside, I could hear the street noises of Paris and I could imagine what the city would look like. People would be rushing to and fro in the gathering twilight, trying to do all their holiday shopping. The stores would be packed, the bars filled with weary shoppers setting their bags down and enjoying a moment of respite.

My life had been divided into segments. Pre-Dylan, my mom and I would celebrate a festive, but low-key Christmas. There was a store in Cleveland that handed out free hams around the holidays, and we’d stand in line for hours in the cold, trying to get one.

During my time with Dylan, there were no holidays and no celebration. What was there to celebrate? Captivity was grim and bleak and depressing. Lucien had never celebrated the holidays either. Once, in response to my question, he’d tersely mentioned that his sister had killed herself in December and the month would never be anything other than painful. I’d held off on the festivities out of respect for his grief.

But in San Francisco, for the first time in my life, with the help of the money that Alexander had given me, I could have the kind of holiday I wanted. The first year, the idea of celebrating had seemed surreal. Old memories of working during the rushed holiday season clashed with the markedly grey Christmases that Lucien had insisted upon. But, urged in part by Dr. Wilson, I’d gone to a neighborhood lot packed with Christmas trees for sale and I’d bought a small fir. I’d relished shopping for ornaments to decorate my tree and I’d bought many beautiful glass globes in jewel tones of green and amber and blue.

Of course, Midnight had climbed up on the tree and broken the ornaments. The next year, I’d smartened up and I’d stuck to plastic.

Jean-Luc had hustled me into the house and to this room, but in the brief glimpse I’d had, the space appeared to be bereft of decorations. Alexander had mentioned that he’d been shunted to Dylan during the holidays. I wondered if those memories still haunted him, still prevented him from fully enjoying the joys of this season.

I exhaled. We’d been through so much together. Every encounter with him was vividly etched in my soul. My heart ached for him and my body yearned for his touch. Yet I knew so little about him, about his past, about Dylan. He’d killed Sylvia but I didn’t know why. Alexander was a mystery to me.

I’d been wandering through the house absently, lost in my thoughts. When I looked up, I realized my feet had led me instinctively to Alexander’s bedroom, the setting of so many pleasant memories. I closed my eyes for a second. This was it, the moment of truth. If he was seeing someone else, there would be signs of her presence in this room. Maybe a pair of earrings on the side-table, maybe a book from the library.

I didn’t think my heart could bear that.

The door stood open, inviting me in, but I hovered at the threshold, almost paralyzed by the prospect of oncoming pain.  
You are a survivor,
I scolded myself.
The truth can’t be hidden and it can’t be avoided. Just go in and find out.

I took a tentative step in, then another one. My eyes darted to and fro, searching for signs of a girlfriend, but the rumpled, unmade bed didn’t provide any concrete answers. My feet marched of their own accord through the bedroom towards the playroom door.

The door was shut, but when I turned the handle, it swung open.

I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for. Would it be a dildo showing obvious signs of recent use? A crop set on the table, not neatly hanging from the wall? A pair of panties, crumpled and tossed aside? My eyes searched for any evidence that Alexander was with another submissive, but if he was, the room didn’t tell any tales. It just seemed very empty and though it was spotlessly clean, a testament to the competence of Alexander’s cleaning staff, it felt disused.

I stepped into the room, my fingers tracing the crops on the wall, the wooden frame of the spanking bench. My eyes rested on the chains that hung from the ceiling.

“You know,” a voice spoke. A familiar voice, one whose smooth, smoky tones made my heart beat faster. “I would have sworn you’d be in the library.”

“Alexander,” I breathed, turning towards him.

I was seeing him for the first time in eighteen months. My eyes drank him in, devoured every detail. The brilliant blue of his eyes, the sexy dimples that flashed into view when he smiled. The stubble that covered his jaw. The hair that I ached to run my fingers through, those full lips that I longed to kiss.

Yet I hesitated, refusing to close the distance between us. He’d sent me away, shattering my heart into a million tiny fragments in the process. I’d agreed to come with Jean-Luc; I’d picked Alexander’s side over Lucien’s without even thinking about it. But though I still yearned for him, I wasn’t about to make the first move. I needed him to invite me back into his arms.

However my predominant emotion was relief. After Jean-Luc’s story of the assassination attempt in Hanoi, I was just glad to see him in one piece and to hear the sound of his voice. I blinked back the sudden tears from my eyes.

“Ellie,” he said softly. “You’re okay. Thank heavens… I was so afraid.”

“Me too,” I whispered. “Tell me what’s going on.”

His lips twitched in a very familiar grin, one that put those sexy dimples of his on display. “
Cherie
,” he replied. “Surely in this room, you should remember to say
please.
”

My insides did a little flip-flop at that. Oh, I wanted him, but questions needed answering before anything could happen and I needed clarification on where we stood and what we wanted from each other.

I needed to have a better handle of what lay ahead before I could lose myself in his body. I folded my arms in front of me and I looked stubborn.

“Let’s go downstairs,” he said, taking in my expression. “I’ll pour you a drink and I’ll tell you everything I know.”

Alexander:

We settled on the couch in the living room, across from each other. Both of us held glasses of red wine in our hands. She took a sip of her drink while she waited for me to talk.

I couldn’t take my eyes off her face. For eighteen months, all I had to do was close my eyes and she was there. Her face had haunted both my dreams and my waking hours and even though she’d been all I could think about, I was still unprepared to see her again. She took my breath away. She had always done that, right from the first time I set my eyes on her.

She looked as beautiful as she had been that first day. Her body was a seductive combination of soft curves and taut muscle. Her hair was once again the blazing red tangle of curls that I remembered from that night in Saint Denis. Her eyes were a little tired, but she’d once told me she was always jetlagged after a journey. The trip to Paris had drained her and this was only the start. Until we sorted this business out, we were going to be on the run.

“Three weeks ago, I was in Hanoi,” I started. “Routine business, nothing special. Then, as Jean-Luc has already would have told you, someone tried to kill me. I wasn’t hurt but a member of my security team took a bullet for me. Luke.”

She inhaled sharply, her expression concerned. “He’s okay,” I reassured her. “No major harm done.” I closed my eyes. The bullet had missed Luke’s heart by millimeters. It had been close. Too close.

“And Lucien was responsible?” Her voice was thoughtful and her expression was resigned.

I’d been afraid she might not believe me. I’d feared she’d contradict me or deny the facts, unwilling to face the truth. But Ellie was the strongest person I knew. She didn’t shy away from difficult conversations.

“Yes,” I confirmed. “I thought you might know why.”

She shot me a sharp look. “Is that why you brought me here? For information?”

What had Jean-Luc told her?
Had he not revealed that I needed to keep her safe? I ran my hands through my hair in frustration. Her expression was unreadable and I was about to spill my heart out to her with no idea of what would follow. Love made us bold and love made us fools and at this moment, I couldn’t tell which one I was.

I’d been able to survive without her, but it had felt like a shadow of an existence. I’d been going through the motions and living on autopilot.

Now she was here and I wanted her. Not for three months; not as my submissive in a contracted arrangement similar to the one we had a year and a half ago. I wanted Ellie Samuelson in my life. Strong and vulnerable, brave and fierce and passionate. She was the brightest part of my life and when I let her go the last time, my world had dimmed and diminished.

Stay with me, bright star. It killed me once to watch you leave.

“If you were threatened,” I said laying it all out in the open, “I would be helpless. That’s all he would need to do, Ellie. He would just need to suggest that you were at risk and I would walk willingly into whatever fate awaited me.” She was staring at me, her eyes wide. “I don’t know what your relationship with Lucien is, but
bright star
,” I swallowed as I revealed my heart, “it doesn’t matter where your loyalties lie. Mine are clear. I will never allow you to be harmed on my account.”

She was silent for a long time. Finally, she spoke, her voice soft. “He was my mentor,” she revealed. “Dylan had sold me to three men who owned a brothel in Lagos. Lucien attacked them, thinking that Dylan was with them. He saved me that day, trained me to be an assassin in the years after.” Her eyes met mine. “Had it not been for him, I would have been dead by now.”

“Why me then? Why are you here?”

“Because he’s changed,” she replied. Her voice steadied as the words emerged. “Something happened after Hanoi. He was always reclusive, but he isolated himself even more.” She swallowed. “Dylan’s death was eating away at him.” She sighed sadly. “For the sake of six years of friendship, I wanted to pretend otherwise.” She bit her lip. “You must think I’m very foolish.”

“I think you are human,” I replied, moving to sit closer to her. Of course I could understand her ambivalence. Dylan had been my father. Against my hatred of what he had done to those fifteen women, there was the compulsion of blood. The memories of a young child making do with the only father figure he had had, imperfect as he had been. “Our humanity defines us, Ellie. Not our guns or our knives.”

She wrapped a coil of hair around her fingers, that red hair of hers that I ached to touch. “Why would Lucien want to kill you though?” she spoke. “You aren’t Dylan.”

“Why did he want to kill Dylan at all?” I asked. Of course, there was no shortage of people who had wanted my father dead, but I thought I had a fairly good idea of who those people were.

She bit her lip. “Lucien’s sister was one of Dylan’s sex slaves,” she replied. “When Dylan sold her to a brothel in the Middle East, she killed herself. Lucien has wanted revenge for a very long time.”

“Claire Bectell? She was his sister?”

She raised an eyebrow in surprise and I clarified. “We’ve known the names of the women Dylan took for a very long time. I’ve tried to find them and aid them, where I can.” My voice was bleak as I remembered the names of the women I’d been unable to help because it had been too late. “But some of them were already dead and the only thing we could do for them was to tell their family and friends and provide closure. But though Claire Bectell was dead, we could never locate her loved ones. We knew nothing about her.”

I linked my hand in hers. She could have pulled away, but she didn’t. She looked at our entwined fingers silently for a second before continuing. “Why is Lucien after you?” she asked aloud. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

But even as she spoke, I could see her make connections in her mind. “There was a conversation we had once,” she remembered. “While I was your submissive, I’d go into a café to check in with Lucien.” She blushed. “My mission was to kill Dylan, you knew that?”

I nodded. That much had been clear the instant Daniel Schneider had revealed who she really was.

“I’d told him you were taking me to Hanoi,” she said. “His voice had broken. He asked me if there was any way he could come with me.” She looked pensive. “I killed Dylan. It seems that Lucien has now found a different target to focus on, a different way to put his own demons to rest.”

Again, she twisted a strand of hair around her fingers. “There are some boundaries that should never be crossed. Lucien has forgotten that.” Her expression hardened. “You weren’t responsible for what happened to his sister.”  

She hadn’t been able to kill Daniel Schneider in Hanoi. She’d told Jean-Luc she had to draw the line somewhere. This was where she drew it.

“How did you know I was working with Lucien?” she asked me.

“He came up when we probed your cover story,” I responded. “You already know that Lori asked me to bid on you to keep an eye on you at the auction.” I reached up to caress her cheek and she leaned towards me, her lips parted, her entire body telegraphing need. “We figured out soon enough that your story was fake, that Jenny Fullerton’s identity had been stolen and that there was no dying sister. But when we tried to uncover who you were working with, all we could come up with was a first name.
Lucien
.” I smiled, remembering Jean-Luc’s thwarted expression. “Jean-Luc was very frustrated.”

“Poor Jean-Luc,” she said dryly. “So you knew all along that I was planning something. Did you ever wonder if you were the target?”

“The first week, I wasn’t sure who you were after, but as time went on, while I didn’t know who you were taking aim at, I knew it wasn’t me. You aren’t capable of being that deceitful and your body has never lied.”

***

Ellie:

I listened to the words he spoke, to the faith in his voice. We had so much more to say to each other. I was still not happy that he’d sent me away. I wasn’t a child; he shouldn’t have made my decision for me then.

But as I spoke, my heart was still digesting his words. He would walk into danger for me. Sacrifice himself for me. He’d brought me here to keep me from harm. I was pouting about something that had happened eighteen months ago.

I closed my eyes. I’d missed Alexander; I’d ached for him. There had been so many nights when I cried myself to sleep, mornings when I woke up to find my pillow damp with the tears I’d shed. I didn’t want any more falsehoods and half-truths to create new distance between us. I was done with that. I never wanted to lie to him again and I never wanted him to lie to me.

He’d got up at some point, detaching his hand from mine, to pace the area in front of me. Silence hung in the air for a few instants and I realized I had to put an end to this right now. I reached up and took his hand, the one that didn’t clutch at a wine glass. “Sit,” I invited. “Please? I don’t want things to be complicated.”

His expression softened. He sat next to me, this time so close that I could feel the heat emanate from his body. His strong hands lifted my legs and draped them over his thighs. I was dressed casually, jeans, a t-shirt and a sweater and at that moment, I cursed the denim. I needed to feel his warm fingers against my bare skin.

“Can we help ourselves?” His voice mocked the both of us and the secrets that we hugged tightly to our chests. “
Complicated
seems to be our default setting.”

“No more,” I said quietly. “Perhaps we’ve just forgotten the underlying truth and we’ve let it get murky. One day, almost four years ago, I walked into a bar and wanted to go home with a guy. It was that simple. Just desire.”

“I don’t think the desire has ever been the problem, Ellie.” His fingers pressed at the seam between my legs, and I almost parted them for him.

“I need to say something first.” My voice suddenly felt very loud. I gripped at the stem of my glass and took a sip for courage. “I’m not happy about the way you pushed me away after Hanoi.”

He looked troubled. “Was that not the right thing to do, Ellie?” he asked me, a thread of sadness in his voice. “Should I have asked you to stay when there was so much of your own life to discover?”

It
had
been the right thing to do, but the day he’d walked out of the door was still among the most painful days of my life. Even now, my heart ached at that memory. “No,” I replied. I looked at him steadily. “But I should have made that choice, Alexander. Not you. You can’t make my decisions for me as if I were a child. You should have asked me what I wanted to do that day.”

Emotions flashed over his face. Regret, sorrow, finally resignation. His lips curved into a wry smile, one that did not reach his eyes. “I wanted to be so different from my father,” he said. “My entire adult life, I swore to myself that I wouldn’t be like him. Yet in the end, I wasn’t that far away from him, was I?” His expression turned bleak. “He imprisoned you and took away your choices. It seems I did the same.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” I snapped. “That wasn’t what I said at all, so stop putting words in my mouth. If I thought for even a second that you were anything like Dylan, would I be here?” I glared at him. “I’m not a fool, you know.”

He chuckled at that, a warm sound that caressed my skin. “Fair enough,” he acknowledged. “There might have been some unnecessary pathos in my speech.” He gave me a straightforward look. “You are right and I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have made that decision without checking with you. But I wanted to keep you at my side so much that day that I had to let you go precisely for that reason.”

“To prove to yourself that you weren’t Dylan.” I’d suspected as much. Now, my hunch was being confirmed. “You were never Dylan.” I closed my eyes. The entire situation was ridiculous. We were playing games with each other instead of just being honest. It was time for that to end.

“Are you seeing anyone?” My heart was in my throat as I voiced that question.

He laughed in disbelief. “You have got to be kidding.”

The weight over my heart lightened. “And you know that if you try to take my choices away once more, I will knee you in the groin?”

He nodded solemnly, though he was struggling to repress his grin. I was biting my cheeks to keep my own smile from spreading across my face. His hand was stroking my thigh and with each touch, I felt a flutter of heat. It had been eighteen months. Some answers could wait for a few more hours. The time for talking had passed. I swung my legs off his lap and slid to my knees on the floor. “Sir,” I continued, my voice softer than it had been just a few instants ago, “I need you.”

His hands wound in my hair, and each prickle of pain in my scalp zapped directly to my pussy. “Do you tell me when to fuck you, Ellie?”

The games were beginning. I kept my eyes downcast on the floor. For eighteen long months, I had only memories to keep me warm at night. Now I was in Paris, in Alexander’s home and with the playroom only steps away. Anticipation surged in my blood. “No Sir.”

“That’s right, Ellie. You do not. In the playroom, the only choice you have is to use your safe word, isn’t it? It seems that you need to be punished to help you remember that.”

“Yes Sir.” Along with the anticipation came a sense of calm contentment. A protective net closed around me, holding me safe and secure.

“Upstairs with you.” Underneath his habitual amusement was tightly stretched need. He felt the same desire I did. “Shower if you need. You have twenty minutes to get ready.”