Never Have I Ever (45 page)

I’m sorry, Noah,
I thought over and over.
I’m so sorry
.

I sank against the wall, unable to maintain my weight through the anger and fear, and slid to the concrete floor.

“Stand up,” Ethan said after he tossed the collar across the room. I only glared at him. “Stand the fuck up.” I tried to tell him to fuck right off, but the words came out as no more than an indignant muffle. The point was received, though. He came at me and yanked me to my feet by my hair again. “When I tell you to do something, you do it, or you will receive far, far worse. Nod if we’re clear on the rules.”

He was holding my hair too tight to give much of a nod, but it was there. No other choice presented itself.

“Breaking you is going to be too easy.”

He shoved off me and spun me around so I faced the pale spackled wall. My arms were raised up, the chain between my wrists fastened on a hook high above my head. It forced me to stand on the balls of my feet. There was no way to reach any higher to unhook the chain. Even if I managed to unhook myself, the tether at my feet prevented me from going anywhere.

“Seeing as you didn’t respond to my requests, my warnings, my threats—or anything, really—it’s abundantly clear there is only one way to get through to you. You’re a smart girl; do you know why the whip cracks?”

I did. When handled right, a whip cracks because it moves faster than sound. The snap of the tip is the sonic boom as it splits the air. That wasn’t something I learned from Noah; it was a nugget of information I held onto from high school. But Noah never used a whip on me. I wasn’t sure if he even owned one.

There would be no build-up to Ethan’s cruelty. His intention was to hurt me as much and as fast as he was able. I’d been weighed and measured, and I was found wanting by this man; my judge, jury, and probable executioner. I only understood that when my body reacted before my mind could catch up. I twisted wildly against the hook above me; contorting my body in ways I didn’t know I was capable to loosen it somehow. Mentally, I tried to disconnect and enter a state of numbness to my surroundings. I tried to block out his words as he said my own thoughts back to me, confirming what I already knew, to block out whatever horrors were to follow. It was far more difficult when every instinct chose then to kick in and escape.

The more I tried to block out the world, the more the world crashed into me. My mind was a blank slate swiftly being filled with hopeless feelings of abandonment.

“This is your punishment, you fucking bitch,” Ethan declared. The whip whistled through the air and smacked violently across my back. It shredded the fabric of my blouse effortlessly to tear open the skin there.

I screamed, a flood of tears racing from my eyes so fast they burned as much as the whip did.

“This is what you deserve for interfering in the lives of people you shouldn’t!” He threw all his weight behind the strokes. The next one bit down hard between my shoulder blades. “This is what happens when you try to save a soul that should be damned!”

Angry red welts began oozing hot blood along my spine. All the muscles in my body tensed in expectation of further agony. There was nothing dignified about the way I took this particular torture; the first of several tortures the man had in store. I wish I could say I held out, that I bit back the primal urge to scream and curse and cry and hate him; that I was able to rise above it and forgive him for his own hatred and misdirection. I wish I could have been a stoic statue of a martyr and not give an inch to Ethan, or what he longed so passionately to see from me.

Those are things I cannot say. I was anything but that person. I felt nothing save sheer loathing for Ethan from the very first stroke of pliable woven leather. For every one following the first, I silently swore my wishes for plague on him and everyone who aided him in my capture.

Stifled pleas to reign in his rage with an appeal for humanity were drowned in a torrid wash of red and white-hot despair. Never before had I experienced pain quite like I did in these endless minutes.

Though I successfully muted Ethan’s voice, I counted the lashes raining down on me for some reason: first five, then ten, soon twenty five and thirty of them. They didn’t come in a flurry of blows, but rather in unassuming beats of two and three, followed by a reprieve of a minute or two, sometimes more, that gave me a false sense of hope before they rained down on me again. They varied in strength and depth. Some cut my skin so deep I knew if I ever got out alive they wouldn’t only require stitches, but leave deep scars.

I stopped counting at thirty three. Silence overcame me until all I heard was my own hitching breath between cries. It was within those minutes that I screamed myself hoarse. My shoulders were tired from the strain. Not a single muscle failed to shudder. I dropped my head, trying to catch my breath while tears smeared across my cheeks. Grooves cut deep into the rubber of the ball gag between my teeth from biting down. My knees buckled, making me hang loose against the hook above my head until the metal shackles dug too deep into my wrists to bear any longer and I forced myself back to my toes.

If ever Ethan was a Dom the way Noah would have me believe, all remnants of the qualities a Dom should possess had long since vanished. He was nothing more than a psychopath; a sadist to the core soaked in hubris. It was a brand of insanity even Anya probably never saw firsthand; cold and calculating, biding his time to put pieces into place in just the right way to maximize his payoff.

The payoff hurt. It hurt so, so much.

“Color me impressed,” said Ethan as he peered around to look at me. “I thought for sure you would pass out there for a minute.”

All I could do was glare at him.

“Oh, the fire is still there. Good for you.” He unhooked my wrists and spun me around to face him. The cuffs were then reseated onto the hook. I winced with further discomfort. “That’s better. Now you know just how serious I am, don’t you?”

I looked down. Blood—my blood—splattered beneath my feet, making it that much more difficult to stand the way I was made to without slipping. I felt it streaming down the small of my back and my pants. My blouse was in tatters, barely recognizable as clothing after the barrage of whip strikes.

“Nothing to say?
No clever retorts or wise words for me
?…
No, I didn’t think so.” Ethan walked to the table to retrieve his phone, casually dialed a number, and put it to his ear. “I’m ready for you now.”

He hung up and let the phone tumble back onto the workbench from a leisurely grip. Moments later, the door behind him opened to a dim hallway and a pair of men of roughly similar height in matching bland blue jeans and T-shirts. Their faces were covered by black ski masks like they stole them out of some shitty television show.

After instructing them to close the door, Ethan tossed a set of keys to one of the men. “She’s all yours, boys. Though, you might want to clean her up first.”

My eyes grew wide. I wanted to fight them. Ethan made sure every inch of my body was wracked with pain so I couldn’t. Any movement at all resulted in renewed agony. I hung limp against the chains as they approached me, unable to stand on the balls of my feet any longer without my legs quaking.

The men paid no mind to my whimpers and cries, my subtle movements to back away from them despite having nowhere to go. Off to the side, Ethan pulled one of the chairs forward and sat close by so he had a good view of the show. I expected Ethan to force himself on me for sure; I expected that from the moment I noticed the chains. I even tried to prepare for it by warning myself; more or less coming to terms with it. I certainly didn’t expect he would sit back and watch as others defiled me.

What sort of people, I wondered, were so fucked in the head they got off on defiling an already beaten, bloody woman?

These men, obviously.

I wouldn’t have put it past Ethan to pay them for the fun they were going to have at the expense of my suffering.

Their eyes stuck with me most of all. They struck me with such vivid clarity. A pair of deep brown and a pair of ice blue eyes. Both knew exactly what they were doing. They disregarded any scrap of humanity within them to raise Hell into such a small room.

If you’re going through Hell, keep going.

That was the quote, right? There was no other choice in my case. No other options presented themselves. Forward, through Hell, as a one way street.

Ethan, for his part, drank my despair as if it flowed from the Holy Grail. I averted my eyes from all of them, yet I still felt their eyes on me.

Scoring me.

Objectifying me.

Dehumanizing me.

The men took their time to soak in my fear. A pair of emergency medical scissors was retrieved from the table to cut away the tattered remnants of my blouse. Strips of cloth were embedded in the gashes on my back. I barely managed anything above a whimper as the cloth was pulled from the sticky wetness of blood beginning to dry. It didn’t seem to bother the men, which only made me want to vomit all the more. They made a show of slowly unbuttoning my pants, and then yanked them down to cut the fabric free at my knees.

Before they began their assault, Ethan offered up one more direction to them. “Make her remember every second.”

From that moment on he never moved much. He never spoke, either. Hazel eyes, too reminiscent of Noah’s for comfort, merely gazed on as if watching a thought-provoking stage production.

Time went nebulous, as it is want to do in such situations. What was probably minutes, at best, on the clock stretched into hours in my
head.
Over and over, it stretched into actual hours. Speculation on time was all I had, and it didn’t get me very far. How long, I wondered, would it be until Ethan grew tired of the freak show playing out for his amusement?

To my mortification, I did remember every horrendous second. I remembered their calloused hands, the variances in their weight and muscle mass. I also remember I cried until my head split with a migraine the size of a small planet and I became too exhausted and too dehydrated to produce any further tears whatsoever. I struggled until my veins propelled plasma through my heart. And then I struggled some more.

Neither of them
were
gentle; I was a puppet to get their rocks off with, nothing more. At some point the men removed my gag to make use of my mouth. They never had cause to worry about screaming, and for that matter didn’t appear to. My voice was all but gone, my jaw too sore to manage much beyond catatonically holding it open or closed. The taste of iron, saline, bitter semen, and uninviting musk permeated my very being. Any time they thought I might be a little too comfortable for their liking they would change up their routine. One of them dug his nails into my ass so hard when he fucked me I felt it bruise in an instant and break the skin.

The names they called me ran the gamut of uninventive insults to the point I almost became insulted they couldn’t think of anything more creative outside of “slut” and “whore”. Still, their choice of limited vocabulary served the purpose of making me loathe the words whereas before, when they came from Noah’s lips, I relished them. Now I never wanted to hear them spoken by anybody ever again.

Predictably, I grew numb. There came a point wherein the throbbing pain overwhelming me dulled into nothingness as my mind disconnected. I saw the events unfold as if through a paned glass window or a film. I stopped feeling altogether. The sensations of alien hands and alien bodies forcing themselves onto me, into me, and around me merged half past the point of oblivion. Fatigue won out eventually, though I highly doubted my passing out deterred them from continuing in the slightest.

I
am not certain just how long I was out, what with time having gone
biggledy
on me and all. When I woke, one of the last people I expected to see in the world was sitting Indian style on the floor in front of me. At first I thought I was dreaming. The twinges of pain, the soreness of muscles trying to twitch to life, and the wasteland in my mouth convinced me otherwise.

I was on my stomach with my left arm acting as a poor substitute for a pillow. My right wrist remained chained to the left. The cuffs on my feet had been removed, the chain tethering them to the wall moved to my wrists instead. My eyes were still heavy. I barely tilted my head to glance at the woman with dark hair and a pleasant smile. I barely blinked despite my shock at Selene sitting mere feet from my ravaged body. The irony amused me more than anything given my state. I began to wonder exactly how long I really had been out.

For a while she just sat there, watching me in silence. The litany of words to scream at her rolled endlessly through my mind. Too bad I didn’t have energy enough to speak most of them.

“No—” I coughed to clear my throat—“Noah went looking for you.”

“I know. I was gone by the time his plane landed.”

“Figures,” I croaked.

“You got what you wanted, Piper. I’m here with Ethan now. He brought me home with open arms of forgiveness. I should be thanking you.”

I picked a dot on the wall behind her to stare at. “Pardon me if I don’t jump up and down with elation.”

“He will be happy after all, together with me. But, you won’t be. You can’t be. He won’t allow it. There’s something to be said about listening. You really should have listened.”