Shattered (7 page)

And it was all done in silence.  What Nathan had witnessed earlier still burned in his mind and she was offering him no other distraction.  She wasn’t taunting him or
hurting him; he had no other outlet to expend his energy and the need to say something boiled up in him until he couldn’t contain it.

“
I could teach you how to read and write.”

Robin
stared down at him for just a second as the comment registered.  Then she stood and hurled the platter she held at the wall, and it connected with a loud clash, a shrill gong going off and echoing as it settled.  Nathan nearly choked on his food in surprise.

Grey eyes glared down at him, framed by the long black strands of her hair. 
“Do I look like I need anything at all from you?”

Candlelight reflected off her face and cast shadows under her eyes and he realized that, if she didn’t look so angry, he might think she was tired instead.  “No Robin, of course not, it’s just...”  He wanted to give her something, but he didn’t know how to word it.

“I let you sleep on my floor, in my room, and you throw it back in my face.  I should have returned you to your cage and let you scream away half the night.”

Mention of the box made him feel weak, but it wasn’t what paralyzed him now.  He couldn’t move, he was trapped by the displeasure in her stare.  Her
anger didn’t make sense to him, but he felt like he should say something, like it was his responsibility to placate her somehow.  He had to give her something, but there was so little left for him to offer her.

Without thinking further he
gave her the last thing he could.

“I’m sorry Mistress,” Nathan mumbled
.  He dropped his eyes to the floor but it didn’t feel like enough.  He couldn’t fight down the pain in his chest.  It coiled around his lungs and he thought he might choke.  He bent his head, then his waist, until his forehead was pressed up against the top of her foot.  Only then could he breathe.

Robin stepped back and Nathan clenched his eyes shut, expecting she might kick him.
  He hoped she would and break the tension here.  He could take the pain.  His heart beat faster every second she didn’t.

She
knelt in front of him and her lower thigh brushed against the top of his head.  He felt her hand slide beneath his chin, hard fingers pressed into the soft flesh beneath his jaw, and he swallowed to try to dislodge her tightening grip.  She lifted until his head came up and his face was close to her own.

“What did you say?”

“I’m sorry, I’m…”

“No, the second part. 
I want you to say it again.”

Nathan swallowed again as he raced over the words he had spoken, those fleeting words that outpaced his mind as he tried to cat
ch them.  She was asking too much of him right now.  Precious liquid filled his eyes and a few fell free, water spent and wasted on the floor.

Robin wiped them
away and cupped the side of his face.  Nathan was so weary of the turmoil of his abduction that he leaned into her hand without thought.  “Mistress,” she supplied him.  Her voice was soft, stripped of the irritation that had been there moments ago.  “You called me Mistress.  Say it again.”

“Mistress,” he whispered.

“Again.”

“Mistress.”  Nathan felt a lightness he
hadn’t experienced before.  All his soreness, the deep bruises of his abuse, the heavy, hot welts on his backside, the stinging streaks of her lash, they all became irrelevant.  He was elated by her pleasure in him and when she drew her hand away he felt a new kind of emptiness as well.

Robin stood and stepped
away, turning her back to him as she stared off towards the door.  She stood still and silent for a long time.

“
You surprise me prince,” she said at last, shaking her head at nothing and letting her long black curls dance across her back.  Her voice turned hard, controlled, and she faced him once more.  “It makes it easier to tolerate you.  But I hope, for your sake, this isn’t some ploy.”

Nathan shook his head rapidly, from side to side, but his eyes stayed locked on hers.  She pulled the back of the chair towards herself, tilting it back and away from him, freeing his hands from beneath the leg
.  In their conflict he’d forgotten how unrestrained he’d been.

“I’ve decided I’m
going to clean you myself today.  Are you going to be good for me?”

“Yes Mistress,
” he whispered, but the thought terrified him.  His handlers were gentle, or at the very least they weren’t cruel.  He couldn’t say the same for her.  Yet if she wanted to hurt him he would endure it.  Her will was his, he realized that now, for she left him with nothing else.

Robin’s
eyes narrowed ever so slightly beneath her brow and she cast her gaze over his loose bindings.  She went to the dresser and pulled something out from the bottom drawer, tossing the bundle of cloth in his direction as she spoke.  “Untie yourself and put this on.”

Nathan did as he was told, as quickly as he could, but his hands were clumsy against the knots.  He knew how to untie a knot,
how to follow a strand until it reached its end, but the procedure seemed divorced from the process right now.  He couldn’t stop his shaking.

Robin
left him there and disappeared from the room, and every second she was gone Nathan felt the threat of her return more greatly.  He feared her displeasure when she saw the rope cuffs still on and the building pressure of failure only made him more frantic.

The trembling of his hands had worked its way up his arms and down into his stomach
by the time the click of her boots started the steady countdown of her return.  She crouched in front of him but he was too scared to look up.

Robin put her hand o
ver his and stilled his shaking.  “You still don’t get it, do you prince? You don’t own your fate anymore.  If you act counter to my wishes, if you cannot perform as I ask, that failure is my burden, not yours, and I will do what I need to correct it.  But you, you’re going to hurt regardless.”

“
Now, here,” she said.  She guided his hand to the proper strand.  Somehow the task that seemed so impossible a moment ago was laid out before him in simplicity when she was here.  It didn’t take him long to strip away the rope and the cuffs both.

Nathan pulled the loose robe over his head and slipped his arms out through sleeves designed for a much
larger man.  The thin curtain of fabric moving down his back brushed against yesterday’s welts.  He grimaced.

“Up,”
Robin commanded and handed him the blindfold.

He
used the chair to help himself rise and drew in a deep breath as he submitted to the blindfold again.  It was that darkness he hated most – the uncertainty it brought and the isolation.  But it didn’t seem so bad now, knowing it was what she wanted.

Robin held on
e end of the rope and pressed the other end into his hand.  Nathan heard her move, felt the rope go taut, and he followed her out.  The rough fabric grated against his wounds on each step and he took small ones to minimize the rub.  Only when the rope pulled did he increase his stride, and soon he fell into a tolerable pace behind her.

She
whispered out directional changes or warnings often enough that Nathan avoided any direct collisions, though he did stumble a few times.  He wanted to remember the way they traveled when it became clear they weren’t simply stopping in the wash room, but the directions quickly became buried in the endless repetition of ‘right’ and ‘left’.

‘Stair’ and ‘step’ were both introduced to the list and soon they became just as
monotonous.  Nathan knew the blindfold distorted everything, that the heightening of every other sense exhausted him, but he swore they walked on for half an hour or more.

He
only noticed the lack of doors when they reached one.  It whined on its hinges as Robin forced it open.  Beyond a warm blast of wet air hit him and the sound of water, bubbling and flowing, met his ears.  The ground turned from cold to damp and the moisture in the air clawed into his clothing and weighed them down.

Robin dropped her end of the rope and Nathan stood there
alone, smothered by the humidity and the darkness of the blindfold.  He strained to follow her with his ears.  He listened as her boots came off, as she padded around the room, and finally as she came back before him. 

She took up his hand in hers an
d pushed it to the lacing at her side.  “Loosen this for me.”

Nathan
felt along the flare of her hips as he traced the crisscrossed ribbon up her side.  He barely touched her but it was enough.  It made him feel warm and connected.  On the rare occasions that his fingertips glanced her skin he smiled, mostly inwardly, sometimes not.  He lost track of his progress in his sightlessness until the tight leather dress slacked around her body.  Robin moved to accommodate him and he loosened the last cross section, just beneath her arm.  The whole thing fell to the ground.

He
had no idea why she was getting undressed but he knew better than to question it.  Robin didn’t give him much time to.  She stripped away his clothing much more quickly and the sudden friction against his skin reignited pain.  Nathan just barely managed to bite back his reaction and despite it he was hard.

Robin mov
ed around behind him and touched his backside next.  The fierce sting there blurred the line her finger traced.  “These are really going to hurt when you get in the water…,” she warned him.  “Come on.”

Tension
on the rope again and Nathan moved forward, but lost to the ambient sound of the water was its location.  Two steps was all it took before warmth flowed over his feet.  He wasn’t expecting that at all and froze, but an insistent tug from Robin got him moving again.

Water lapped at his legs and
up, just past his knees, before the first current washed over his tattered backside.  The shock caught him off guard, despite Robin’s warning and his own common sense, and his legs buckled beneath him.  Pain shot up his back and he lost his balance.

Fully submerging
was like taking the entire beating a second time, all at once, and he fell to all fours in the water as he cried out.  He grasped futilely at the smoothed stone with his hands in an attempt to banish some of that pain, but his fingers found only frustration instead.

“If you
r aim is to drown yourself you should wait until we’re deeper,” Robin said, once the echoes of his voice were again overtaken by water, and Nathan could hear the smirk behind her words.

He
couldn’t tell if he was crying or if it was just warm water soaked into the blindfold that made tracks down his face.  The loose end of the rope, the side he had lost when he fell, was laid out for him across his shoulder.  Nathan took it and stood, fighting back the second wave of pain as those welts broke the tension of the water and sat in air once more.  The muscles in his legs trembled, but he ground his teeth together and took another step.  He was determined to survive this with a strength he hadn’t felt since being brought here.

Nath
an submerged up to his waist before Robin stopped him.  Or, more appropriately, before the end of the pool she led him to stopped him.

“Hands flat against the wall prince,” she said, tapping him on the back with the
coarse sponge she held in hand.

Robin set to work cleaning him.  She started at
his shoulders first, then down across his shoulder blades in two large circles.  She wasn’t as strong as his handlers but persistence in the same spot soon had his skin tingling just the same.  That heat spread across his lower back as she worked down his body, stopping just shy of the first raised welt on his ass.

“
You’d never guess how close we are to the castle,” Robin said, almost as idle conversation as she worked.  And when he didn’t guess she went on, “It’s not even a full day’s walk from here.  I hear the King has posted a substantial reward for information regarding your disappearance, but so far it has not been paid out. They’ll never find you here.”

She paused then, giving him a chance to r
eact to her provocations, but Nathan knew better.  Not that his mind was on her words anyway.  The image of her body that his hands had traced lingered in his mind.  More prominent still was the memory of shock the warm water against his torn skin had left.

“T
here are hot spots like this all over, beneath Surnat, if you know where to look for them,” Robin continued.  “The underground rivers carved out a network of caverns and, in the places where water still flows, you end up with heated springs like these.”

She
stood directly behind him as she spoke.  Her body pressed close to his as she slid the sponge from his shoulders to his upper arms, bringing warm water up where the air was already beginning to cool his skin.  Her breasts brushed across his back and her hips even lower.  Nathan pushed harder against the wall and drew in a sharp breath as she disturbed his fragile balance with his pain.

She must have felt him tense for she pushed her body even closer to his
.  He could feel the soft mounds of her breasts as they pressed into his back.  It was too much for him to hold in, as her pelvis grinded against his ass, and he let out a moan.