The Golden Locket (Unbreakable Trilogy, Book 2) (30 page)

I shrug, aware of how adolescent that looks. ‘Maybe just watching the video will do the trick?’

Without another word he puts his glass down beside mine and marches out of the room. I perch on the edge of the seat, shivering with tension.

The darkness smothers the trees and lakes down in the park as I wait, leaving a backdrop of sparkling lights over on the East Side. And then Gustav is beside me again, sitting down on the sofa. He has the disc in his hands. And also the little whip.

‘You sure about this, Serena?’ He pulls my face towards him and kisses me very briefly on the lips, but enough to get my senses prickling up on red alert. ‘You want to watch the film of me whipping you? Making red stripes on you?’

‘I’d rather you showed it to me than it fell into someone else’s hands. After that I want you to destroy it.’ My voice is very quiet in return. ‘And then we can go to bed and I can show you how much I love you.’

‘My girl the voyeur. Now she wants to watch herself.’ A flicker crosses his face. I tense up with fresh anxiety, but I see that he’s biting back a slight smile. ‘I certainly don’t like it that Pierre and Polly’s troubles are getting you all worked up like this. But I’ll have to go along with what you demand and spank the worries out of you instead.’

He slots another disc into the machine. The screen flickers into life.

Gustav’s voice on the screen murmurs, ‘Are you ready?’

I’m the girl in the film, spread-eagled on the huge sofa in his drawing room in London. The girl lying there looks so young, what little I can see of her. Her dress is wrinkled up over her hips, laying her bare. It’s a relief when Gustav drapes a white cloth over her face. I don’t want to see her eyes. I knew nothing then. I barely knew him. All I had was my naivety, a dose of determination and my talent.

On the screen Gustav takes some pretty little glass and ceramic bottles and pops the corks from them. I remember how that felt, how every touch of those creams set me on fire. My stomach coils with sudden, unbidden fury. Are the ointments Gustav is using in the film the same as Margot used on him once upon a time? Gustav on the screen is smoothing cream over my thighs, into my bottom, up between my legs into all the hidden crevices. Cream that Margot may have swiped her fingers through to smear his body when he was her husband.

I wriggle on the seat as I watch. I have to get that image out of my head. Margot went with Pierre, remember. Margot and Gustav hate each other.

The remembered heat from the creams and the whips is already seeping through my skin, deep into my muscles, getting hotter the deeper it seeps. Gustav sits very close to me on the sofa. The only part of him touching me is the tip of his finger, running up and down my neck under my tangle of hair, hooking into the little chain holding my golden locket.

I have to get that image, Margot’s fingers in the cream, on his body, out of my head.

‘Can you remember how green you were that night? Yet you had already shown me, the world, that behind that cute freckled face was a hard-eyed voyeur. All you needed was to enact what you’d seen other people do. You loved it, you low-down little slut.’

I moan and press myself against him. The sounds on the screen are muted. No words. A whisper of music in the background. The flicker of candlelight. The clink of the ointment bottles.

The Gustav beside me pushes me down onto my stomach. ‘Lie down, Serena. You’re like a cat on tacks. You need calming down. These ointments will do the trick.’

With a low laugh he dangles the silver chain in front of me, then clicks it onto my bracelet, winds it several times round both wrists. He is here with me now, and he’s taking charge. Relieved excitement twists inside me as he attaches the chain to the end of the sofa. I allow my gaze to linger on his long legs. The hard bulge behind his zipper.

As on the screen, which I can just see if I twist my head, there’s the pop of a bottle stopper here in the room, and Gustav’s hands in the film are pushing my dress up, and in real life they are peeling away the kimono, and massaging sweet smelling oils into my legs. He’s being gentle, but his hands move sensuously, his fingers lingering and probing, exploring and stroking, far more intimately and deeply than he did that first time. The lotion is setting me on fire. I can almost hear it sizzle, piercing the tender skin, but although I clench my bottom in pretend protest I keep quiet while the girl on the screen screeches out crossly, something about chilli.

‘My beautiful girl. You really want me to slap you? Or shall I find some props to do it with? A slipper, perhaps? Or one of my ties?’

I try to twist round to see if he’s serious.

‘That’s not in the script.’

‘There is no script. Just what I tell you to do.’ He pushes my face down into the cushions. Now I can only glimpse a corner of the screen. A pair of white legs. A young, plump bottom waiting to be striped with punishment.

Gustav pushes my legs open and goes on massaging the cream right in, up and in. Every sense is magnified. As well as the heat and scent of the creams soaking into my skin, there’s the strong, almost sickly perfume filling the air. At last, thoughts of everyone else, his brother, his ex-wife, my cousin, they all fade and pop, like a trio of burst flash guns.

On the screen I’ve gone very still. I try to look at that girl dispassionately. But how can I, when the sight of her is turning on the voyeur in me? So much has happened to that other Serena since then but, I think with another wriggle of excitement, so much still is happening.

I try to focus on the film. I demanded he take it out of its hiding place, but a new and disturbing thought insinuates itself: if he showed this film to anyone else, or if someone discovered it, Pierre for instance, it could be dynamite. Serena Folkes as an installation. Whether that’s a good thing, maybe for future publicity, remains to be seen. For now I want it just for me. This is my therapy. It worked before, when I wanted him to thrash memories of my miserable childhood out of me. Now it’s thrashing away unwelcome thoughts of his brother.

But what exactly does
he
think he’s teaching me?

As his long fingers swipe and wipe the cream until the whole area is alive and throbbing, I try to find the answer to that one. As before I’m feeling stoned and woozy, the heady scent of the cream curling up my nostrils into my brain, filling it with fog. The rest of my body feels floppy and weak. There’s only one part of me aching and burning.

I wonder if I’ve dropped asleep, because nothing is happening. On screen there is vague movement. He’s turned the sound right down now. My eyes are closing and Gustav seems to have wandered off.

But just as the arm on the screen rises silently so there’s a rush of air in the here and now as Gustav’s arm goes up. Here it comes, that delicious wasp sting as he slaps me hard on the butt, thrusting me forwards over the suede sofa with the force of it, making me squeal and squirm. He slaps me harder on the same spot and stinging heat from the blow sends a shaft of twisted pleasure through me.

That sharp whisk of air, then a handprint of fire on my buttock as it lands. The stinging goes deeper this time, radiates away from the original soreness, burns inside me, makes me twitch. I can feel myself closing up tightly. The tentacles of pain touch me everywhere. I twitch and groan, unable to control my own reflexes now.

‘I’ve got your little nun’s whip right here, Serena. Ready to do this all over again?’

‘Yes! Give it to me!’ I struggle at the chain round my wrists, but that just makes it tighter, the silver chain biting into my wrists. ‘I deserve it all!’

I hear him testing the whip on the palm of his hand for a moment. Then it comes down on my other buttock and the pain daggers straight up me.

He chuckles softly, whips me again, that quick, vicious whip lashing down. I am smarting with the lashes. I know I’ll be striped with thin red welts. I strain at the silver chain binding my wrists, welcoming the nasty thrill releasing me, the hot darts of pleasure shooting through.

As I struggle, the golden locket gets caught in my hair so that, every time I move, my hair draws it tighter around my throat. I try to speak but the volume on the screen suddenly turns up to full, the voices and the gasping, the whipping and the background music all drowning out my gasping attempts to breathe.

I don’t care any more. This is a different kind of stress. How complicated my life has become since October. Now I have genuine guilt and anxiety to add to the mix. Everything I’ve done and said with and without Gustav. Stepping way out of line talking so intimately to his brother. Letting Pierre think he can lean in and kiss me.

The spanking feels so good. I feel released. Confident in the man doling this out to me. Confident that I can ride any small storm I may have caused. Confident that maybe, just maybe, I am beginning to get this lovely man where I want him.

Another slap, stinging and hot on my rump, sizzling through me. I was waiting for it, I knew what was coming, the shock of the slap itself, the blood rushing to that one burning place, and the lovely afterglow. There will be the brand of five red fingers on me, and thin red lines from my little nun’s whip smacking the naughtiness out of me.

Just as in the video Gustav is silent amidst the furore, he’s behind me, above me. He smacks the other cheek hard until the heat prods and probes everywhere, fingers of fire and pleasure inside and out.

Just as in the film I lift my sore, tender bottom up in the air, and hear a low grunt of laughter.

‘Such a naughty girl. This is for all you’ve done since we came to Manhattan. The Weinmeyers, the Robinsons, the Club Crème. Worst of all, going for intimate drinks in glamorous cocktail bars with other men. With my brother, just to rub salt into the wound.’

Every inch of my bottom is sore and tender. There are spasms inside me now, deep between my legs, hungry spasms of pleasure and wanting.

He doesn’t know. Oh, Gustav doesn’t know and I need to tell him. But now he’s pushing my head into the cushion, snagging the golden locket even tighter around my throat, a glittering ligature, forcing me to take short gasps, loving the free, natural high from the lack of oxygen. I feel the dip of the cushions as he kneels on the sofa behind me and the lack of air is making me hallucinate now, reminding me of my drunken fantasies after my session at Club Crème and my dreams while Gustav was away, the two brothers coming to my bed, pressing on the mattress until it reaches the floor, pulling the duvet off me, unable to tell the difference, which one will it be, which one is going to take me in front of the other?

I squeal as someone, one of the brothers, lifts my bottom towards him, spreads open my legs. Through the noise and the music I hear the rip of his zip. His breath rasps hot, burning hot, on my neck. Who is it? Who is it? My pulse beats frantically as if hammering to get out. One of the brothers slides his mouth down under my ear, his lips dry at first, then getting wet as they linger over the spot. The tip of his tongue runs under the chain of the locket, touches my pulse, echoing the push of him between my legs, hitching my hips so that I bang up against him.

His fingers play over me, into all the slippery creamed soreness, feeling inside to open me, feeling the wetness, and then he’s in there, which one is it, which brother is it, he’s long and strong and hot and hard and pushing, pushing my face deep into the cushions, the golden locket a sharp little nub pressing against my throat, the silver chain snaking from my wrists across my back towards him, our mutual crescendo matching perfectly as he hammers the nonsense out of me and I cry out his name.

We lie there, panting crazily, my face still pressed into the cushions until he rolls me in a tangle of limbs to face him. Gustav hangs over me, unhooking strands of my hair from the golden locket. The metallic hidden object slides from side to side as he shakes it.

‘What is in there, Gustav? I walk around with that little sound knocking against my clavicle all day. Why won’t you tell me?’

‘I will open it for you when the time is right. I like the thought that in the meantime it’s driving you mad!’

He strokes my hair off my face. I lean up to kiss him, breathe him into me.

‘Why not now?’

‘You still have to earn the right to see what’s inside.’ His eyes crinkle slightly at the corners, his face shadowed in the candlelight as he opens his mouth to say something.

And then the door buzzer goes.

‘Ignore it!’ I screech, trying to sit up. Gustav frowns impatiently and releases my hair, but not my wrists. He holds me down for a moment longer. The buzzer goes again and he stands up reluctantly and lazily zips himself up, leaving me sprawled in my half-open kimono, the golden locket half-strangling me, the silver chain still fastened.

There’s a quiet murmur of voices and I give a silent sob of relief that it’s not Pierre but one of the doormen, handing Gustav my camera cases and iPad. Gustav thanks the guy and turns to me, the door still open behind him, his eyebrows raised questioningly.

‘He says your equipment was just delivered to reception. They didn’t leave a name.’ He hands me the iPad. ‘But they said to be particularly careful with this. You lost your stuff? What is the matter with you?’

‘I didn’t lose it. I was going back to collect it.’ I run my fingers round my sore wrists and take the iPad off him. ‘But everything was delayed by that girlie video, and then the drink with Pierre. They locked up the theatre over the weekend with my things inside.’

The iPad must have been switched on all this time. The battery is dead. I carry it into the bedroom and plug it into the charger.

As I come back out into the salon the peace is shattered by a manic flapping in the doorway as if a bird has been trapped in the building. ‘Where is she! Where’s my beloved cousin?’

Polly’s voice is high and reedy with anger as she pushes through the door that Gustav has not yet closed. She lurches through the hallway and into the sitting room. I pull my slippery kimono over my damp nakedness and take a faltering step towards her.

She looks even thinner and paler than before, not helped by the fact that instead of her usual neon colours she is dressed from top to toe in funereal, baggy black. She stops dead in the middle of the floor and is staring past me at the TV screen. Gustav has paused the film so that all there is in the centre of the wide screen is my white bottom, striped with red, the fuzzy outline of a whip shivering down onto it.