Killing Time: The Bonus Collection (24 page)

“You won’t always feel like that. Eventually, it will become normal,” he’d assured me.

And slowly, over the past three weeks, my life with him felt normal and okay and not strange at all.

I could understand how my sister had become so enraptured with him despite our age difference and her being in her impressionable twenties. I felt like I should have known better at my age but for some reason I didn’t want to as I enjoyed everything we did together and the guilt ebbed away with each passing day.

Yet he stood there and he looked at me as if I had truly embarrassed and surprised him because I couldn’t say I was in love with him too. It didn’t feel right and perhaps one day it would but please God don’t let him ask me to say it at that moment.

Rory didn’t. He sighed out loud. “I think I need to get some air and take a walk. I’ll be back a bit later.”

“What about dinner?” I inquired.

“I’ll get some takeout. Don’t worry.” He kissed my lips quickly and though I tried to hold on to his waist, he pulled my arms apart and left as soon as we physically separated. He couldn’t get away from me fast enough.

What had I done and didn’t he realize all I needed was a little bit of time he didn’t want to give me? How was that fair to me? Why couldn’t he give me the space I needed to process all of this before he gave up on me completely?

Chapter Fourteen

MOMENTS AFTER RORY LEFT, I
walked to the spare suite and opened up the box which contained my sister’s possessions. I had organized all her journals chronologically though I hadn’t opened any of them to read any of her words.

I felt reckless and grabbed one of the notebooks out of order and allowed it to fall open to a page.

I used to put a date on these entries but what difference does it make when I am the only one to read them? I have decided to just talk about how much time we have been together and I think that is enough. It’s been a little over a year and R. keeps amazing me and frightening me. I sometimes wonder if he does what he does to drive me absolutely batty or if he is trying to help me?

We have some pretty wild and amazing times together but none of that made me fall in love with him. It’s the person he is when it’s just the two of us and he is completely vulnerable and I can see the real him. I want to worship him and lay at his feet for hours but he eschews that kind of behavior. He says it is too much like how S. treats his slaves and he doesn’t want that.

I don’t even know their names because S. says it is unimportant and R. says it doesn’t matter but it matters to me. I rather like the blonde number one. Blonde number two is his toilet slave and she freaks me out because she is such a beautiful package but she allows herself to be degraded like that.

Speaking of degradation, we have to go to Los Angeles to see S. and it gives me the creeps when we visit him. I don’t like him and I hate he purposely confuses me so I don’t know R. from him. I wish I had the smarts of my sister because they would never be able to pull that shit on A. I feel bad I don’t contact her or M. and P. but if I do then they’ll just know something is different. For starters, I’m not on drugs and then they will ask questions about what I am doing with my life, who I am dating and I don’t want to have to explain it to them. It would exhaust me.

Anyway, I have to go as R. is home and I can hear his shoes against the marble tile. He would be upset if I didn’t meet him and kiss him. We haven’t seen one another in a couple of days so I look forward tonight. I am the luckiest woman in the world.

I flipped through several entries, stopped and began to read again.

Ugh, today has been such a shit day and it was a shit day for R. too because he is a total prick. I would get twenty lashes with the cane for that but this is my special place and he would never read these so it’s cool and besides, if I don’t write this crap down, I’d believe I dreamed it all up.

He degraded me because he brought that bitch, A., home and he knows how much I hate her. She wants to possess me and make me her own but I would rather die than be with her. Anyway, he was angry at me yet I have done nothing and when I began to cry as he whipped me with the flogger, he told me, “I beat you now because you cry about not deserving a beating.”

I couldn’t win for losing. Especially when he was done, he handed the flogger to A. and she had him turn me over. She used it on my breasts, stomach and thighs. My whole body felt like it was on fire. If that wasn’t bad enough, after she finished beating me, she hiked up her skirt and shoved her asshole in my face and told me to tongue her deeply.

The thought makes me want to puke now and I only hold the bile down because I can write this shit down. Then I had to watch him fuck her and I was left there, my hands secured by handcuffs and my clit on fire with desire. He wouldn’t touch me. He didn’t even acknowledge me. After he came inside her, she made me eat all his come out of her pussy and I thought I would be sick.

I swear to fucking God I feel like I am living with Jekyl and Hyde or something. R. would usually never do that to me. Part of my brain wants to believe it wasn’t him but S. instead. First of all, I have asked R. if he ever had a sexual relationship with his cousin and he said no. He actually looked a bit taken aback as if I were the sick one for suggesting it but if that was him fucking her then why lie about it?

It’s days like this I feel like walking away but then I think about the money and the sweet side of this man and I can’t do that to him. Not now. Perhaps one day I will have the strength but I think not. I am a sub and this is what I am supposed to do and everyday isn’t going to be great but it will get better. I truly believe that. I have faith because it is the kind of person I have always been and I won’t let anyone take that from me.

A tear dropped and hit the filament paper. I closed the notebook and began to sob for my poor confused sister. She couldn’t have known but I knew that incident happened with Severin and not Rory. He would have never done that to her. He didn’t particularly get off on humiliation and that definitely was up Severin’s alley.

If Trésor had let me in, I would have been there for her and perhaps I could have given her some advice. My career was too important to me. So fucking important I had gone almost a year without speaking to my sister and didn’t think it was strange at all.

There was always the next huge story that was about to break and I would have plenty of time to catch up later. It was always not at that particular moment, tomorrow, next week, next month, next year. If I’d known how much time she had left, would I have been so blasé about getting in touch? Probably not but that was the beauty and the frightening part about life. We weren’t given exact dates when everything just stopped and our world as we knew it was no more.

The tears came again whether I wanted them to or not and I sobbed right there on the floor, my face half buried in the crux of my arm and half pushed into the Persian rug.

The sobs echoed throughout the suite and I cried until the tears stopped and my eyes rubbed raw with emotion but at least I felt better. By the end, I didn’t know whether I was crying for my sister anymore and whether the cry had taken on a “Woe is me” tone.

I sat up and covered my face in my hands. I only hoped Rory would come back soon because I missed him already and though I wouldn’t dare admit to being in love with him, I would express how much I cared about him. He bruised easily and for a man who called a community that seemed to be able to handle pain and agony quite well, he wore his heart on his sleeve for me. I’d basically thrown it on the floor and stuck a six-inch heel in a major aorta just to prove the point I so desperately wanted to make.

As soon as I had a modicum of calm, I wiped the tears angrily from my face and began to sort through other items in the box besides the journals. I hadn’t bothered beforehand because just seeing my sister’s handwriting had been painful enough.

My heart wrenched as I set the journals on the floor and began to pick up other belongings which had once belonged to Trésor. There was an iPod Classic which held a shitload of music as I turned it over to discover it was a one hundred and sixty gigabyte model. The one she’d been found with in her cage had been an eighty gigabyte model but they were both silver. Unlike the one confiscated by the police and held in evidence, this one was perfect and blemish free.

I turned it on and discovered not only was it fully powered but she had some great artists’ listed on various play lists she’d created too. I stopped on Joss Stone and pressed play. The young English singer’s sultry and soulful voice came through the earbuds and I immediately placed them in my ear as I started to focus on the heartbreak in her voice rather than my sister’s demise.

There was also an iPad in the box and I removed it and turned it on as well. I looked through her Google history and the documents she kept stored on the device which were mostly personal in nature. There were also many films uploaded, most of them recent releases along with a few classics like
Goodfellas
,
Casino
and
Cape Fear
. Trésor had been a total Scorcese film junkie and loved all his work. She also seemed to have every film Jared Leto and Leonardo DiCaprio had ever made loaded in her film library as well.

It was interesting but nothing earth shattering so I turned it off and replaced it back in the box. She also had the latest Kindle Fire and I immediately turned this on as it must have been the device she used to read books. There were also films loaded on this electronic device but mostly books and many of them were BDSM in nature.

Not only did she have the particularly cheesy
Fifty Shades Trilogy
but she also had most of the mainstream novels which had done well from the whole trend including
If I Were You
,
Bared to You
and a few others. There were also hardcore BDSM novels like
Comfort Food
by Kitty Thomas,
As She’s Told
by Anneke Jacob,
Captive in the Dark
and
Seduced in the Dark
by CJ Roberts along with all of the books Annabel Joseph had ever written. It looked like she had been in the middle of reading both
Mercy
and
Burn for You
as neither had been completed yet.

I did a search and started to see what other books she had on her Kindle but most of the novels were either sexual or violent in nature. She had a lot of books which would have been classified as mystery and thrillers or horror but most of the novels listed were found primarily in the erotica section.

It felt like such an invasion of privacy, I turned off the Fire and put it back in the box before I piled her journals on top of it with the one I’d recently read a couple of passages on top. It would definitely help if I understood what was going on before I went charging in, speaking to friends of hers about what her life was like.

I’d never approached a project blind and I didn’t plan for that to change now. She was too important and her death had already been a slip-shod operation of the police wanting to close the investigation as soon as possible and not really caring what had happened to her. She’d made her bed and as far as they were concerned, she’d laid in it too. It had cost her everything, including her life, but they had real crimes to solve and my sister’s wasn’t exactly at the top of the list.

“What are you doing?”

I turned around, startled but relieved to face Rory. His eyes looked concerned but he was much calmer now than he had been earlier. Obviously the walk had done him a great bit of good.

I stood and walked towards him before I slid my arms around his waist and buried my head in his chest. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have acted the way I did earlier and I can only hope you won’t hold it against me. This is all so new to me. Real emotions with someone I care about and I don’t want it…sullied by false promises of love and forever. I don’t know if that makes any sense but we have a real chance at making this work and…I can’t screw it up again. I won’t be able to take that kind of heartbreak.”

He tilted my head up to his and I gazed into his mesmerizing aquamarine eyes. “Is that why you have been pulling away emotionally? You might have thought I didn’t notice but there isn’t much that escapes my attention. Is that why you can’t say you love me?”

“I pulled back emotionally because we will be burying my sister soon and I need some fucking closure,” I responded as we separated and I slowly backed away until I hit the wall. “I can’t say I love you because it’s too soon and I know that sounds like utter bullshit but it’s just how I work. To be honest, I don’t think I ever told Grayson I loved him. I admitted to being very fond of him but fondness isn’t love. He didn’t need to hear it so it worked between us because he respected my boundaries.”