Without a Net (11 page)

“And sun feels great, sir—right before the drug destroys your life.”

Milan pressed against Ollie’s balls hard enough to make him hiss as pain radiated through his lower body. “You will receive lessons on addressing people politely later, but for now, limit yourself to answering questions. When did you first go to a control club?”

“What?” Ollie asked in confusion, and then the toe of Milan’s shoe was lifting his balls, and Ollie got hard despite the suddenly uncomfortable conversation and his aching arms.

Ollie wanted to escape and thrust. He wanted to hide his balls and sink his cock into something. His head was already getting turned around, and the worst part was he knew it.

Milan slapped Ollie’s ass. “Answer!” he ordered.

While Ollie should lie and protect his soul, he also knew he would pay for lies later when he was too tired and confused to keep them straight. His safest bet if he planned to survive—and God help him but he did—was to be honest. “I was sixteen, sir.”

One of the henchmen chuckled. “He lied. Why am I not surprised?”

“Be careful, Garret, or you’ll be at my feet next,” Milan warned, and Ollie felt a vicious little thrill at the idea of one of these assholes getting some of Milan’s attention.

“Yes, sir,” Garret said politely.

“Someone chose to send you because you were so nicely submissive, correct?” Milan said.

“Yes, sir.” Ollie suspected Milan already knew as much. He clearly had a mole inside the department.

“Did they make fun of you for submitting so beautifully? Call you weak?” Milan pushed the hairbrush in, and Ollie’s muscles closed around the neck of it. That was more comfortable, but now the very end was pressed up against Ollie’s prostate.

“Sometimes,” Ollie admitted.

A line of fire slashed across his ass, and Ollie screamed. “Sir!” he yelled the second he got his breath back.

Milan patted him. “Good boy. You learn so quickly. Those weak and sniveling officers who worked with you would have lost all ability to think by now. Their fear would have overcome them, but not my beautiful Sunshine. Now, did they focus more on your submissiveness or your preference for men?”

“Focus on in what way, sir?” Ollie asked, and he braced himself for more pain.

Milan spent some time manipulating the brush handle, lifting and pushing down. Ollie tried to shift slightly to ease the pressure, but one of the henchmen put a boot in the center of his back, and he went still. “They didn’t like you, did they, Sunshine?”

“No, sir,” Ollie agreed.

“Did they make fun of you because of your submissiveness or your homosexuality?”

“More because of my homosexuality, sir,” Ollie said. This was a very strange line of questioning if they planned to take him out and kill him. Actually, it was a strange line of questioning no matter what their short- and long-term plans might be.

“Did you report them?”

Ollie opened his mouth to demand what difference that made, but the boot in his back pressed down, reminding him that he had very few choices right now. Avoiding pain seemed his best alternative. “Yes, sir.”

“I sense opposition. Don’t worry, Detective Robertson, that will be trained out of you more quickly than you can imagine. Isn’t that right, Garret?”

“Yes, sir,” Garret said. Ollie expected some smart-ass remark or for the heel of Garret’s boot to grind into him, but neither happened. Ollie found that the criminals who were low on the totem pole were usually quicker to get all macho and arrogant. If Garret had been trained at Milan’s feet, Milan had beaten the attitude out of him. That was not a pleasant thought.

Milan shifted, and then he ran his fingers up Ollie’s spine. “Now you’re distracted enough to relax your muscles. That is my first lesson, beautiful. You have more control over yourself than you understand. And I will enjoy being your teacher.”

Maybe Milan had been right about Ollie relaxing a tiny bit, but now his whole body coiled tightly, fighting the bonds and cramped space.

Milan gave a theatrical sigh. “Garret, drug him, please.”

Almost immediately, Ollie felt a prick at his shoulder, and the world spun as an unnatural heat swallowed him. Voices grew distant, and he wasn’t sure how much was real and what his imagination provided.

“But we’ll get you trained up right, Ollie, and then I’m going to have a surprise for those idiots.” Milan sounded terrifyingly cheerful, just like Ollie’s father when he was three drinks into getting drunk and feeling no pain. Ollie never had trusted that particular tone.

Chapter Nine

“How is my beautiful boy doing?”

Ollie heard Milan’s voice behind him, but he was too tired to react. His arms ached, his knees were on fire, and the skin around his throat throbbed dully. He’d expected rape. Instead he’d been left mostly alone for days and days on end. The room was dark, and his only company was the commands that came through a little speaker.

The mechanical voice offered a curt “
Yellow
,” and Ollie struggled to his feet. He moved to the yellow square painted on the wood floor and carefully settled back to his knees, but no matter how carefully he settled, his bruised knees still screamed in agony.

Voices muttered behind him, and Ollie tried to shift around to ease the weight off his knees. The collar around his neck zapped him so that he cried out, and then he got a second jolt for making a noise. Ollie rode through the aftereffects of the electrical shock silently. The muscles of his neck and shoulders ached, and his skin felt stretched and sore. The panic he’d felt when he’d first woken in this hell had faded to a bone-deep weariness. Whatever his future held, he had no control over it. Right now, though, anything would be better than these endless, pointless orders and the dull pain that defined his life.

“
Triangle
,” the mechanical voice ordered, and Ollie struggled up and moved to the green triangle and settled back onto his knees. Yellow square, green triangle, blue circle, red star, purple oval. It was like a sadistic version of Twister. While he didn’t have a clock, he suspected he’d been moving from one spot on the floor to another for several hours since guards had taken him from his cage. When he finished following pointless orders, they’d take him back. His reality had been limited to a few cubic feet and some childishly bright shapes painted on a wood floor, with a cage being his only respite. The artificial voice ordered him from one spot to another, and the man standing behind him with the collar’s controls punished him when he didn’t move fast enough or gracefully enough.

Boots clicked across the wood floor, and Ollie turned to look toward the man who had captured him, only to get a longer than usual jolt from the collar. Sharp, white pain flared through his body and drove the air out of his lungs. Biting his tongue, he settled back down and stared straight ahead as Milan stopped pacing behind him and began to stroke Ollie’s head.

“
Purple
,” the voice in the ceiling ordered, and Ollie struggled up and moved to the new spot. He’d learned not to take too long to get back into position.

Milan moved in front of Ollie. As much as Ollie would like to curse the man out, he was too tired to think about anything beyond the vague hope Milan might end the random orders.

“Let us work on your mouth. You must learn to answer respectfully, even when tired or feeling disagreeable,” Milan offered with that same calm he always projected. He bent over and rested one hand on Ollie’s shoulder before reaching down. Ollie had his hands cuffed behind his back, so when Milan pulled up on the chain between Ollie’s wrists, it forced his head to the floor. His hands were curled into balls and tucked inside mitts that made them worthless, so he couldn’t scratch. He was utterly helpless and exhausted.

“What color are you kneeling on?”

Ollie blinked in surprise. He expected Milan to demand information on other officers or the department. The fact Milan had asked such a trivial question left Ollie feeling off balance and even more out of control. Milan touched the controller on his belt, and Ollie’s collar sent a jolt of electricity through him.

“Purple! Purple, sir!” Ollie rushed to offer. Instead of shocking him again, Milan let go of the chain between his wrists and stroked his cheek. But then when Ollie knelt up, Milan grabbed his chin in a harsh grip.

“Your answer is correct, but try again with a new tone,” he said in a quiet voice that gave Ollie a cold shiver. The mechanical voice interrupted with a call for him to move to yellow. Ollie rose before his brain had a chance to process the idea that Milan might not want him to obey the voice. However, Milan stepped to the side and allowed Ollie to return to the yellow square.

“I don’t repeat myself. Focus, beautiful. What did I ask you to do?” Milan followed and again stroked Ollie’s cheek with the back of his finger. Ollie fought to pull his thoughts together, but they scattered away from him. Then Milan gripped his chin again, and the right memory crowded to the front.

“To try again with a better tone, sir,” Ollie answered. He trembled as Milan caressed his cheek and then traced the curve of his jaw. “Sir, do you want me to repeat that I was on purple or tell you that I’m on yellow?”

“Tell me where you are now.”

“Yellow, sir.”

“Has your keeper been always fair in the administration of punishment, Sunshine?”

Panic gripped Ollie. He wasn’t sure what he was supposed to say, and while he knew there were verbal traps around every corner, he was too tired and he hurt too much to properly assess any of them. On the good side, he was still alive. Just as Milan’s expression turned dark, Ollie chose the answer he thought least likely to earn him more pain. “I don’t know, sir.”

“Oh?” Milan took a step back. “Explain that answer.”

Even though Ollie felt like he was trying to push through the world’s densest fog, he tried to find the right words. “I’m too tired to evaluate whether he’s been fair or not, and I wasn’t paying attention, sir.”

Milan slapped his hands together. “Excellent honesty. You have no idea how pleased I am with my acquisition of you. Those morons did not understand the quality merchandise they had right under their noses. Idiots. I dislike stupid people. However, you must learn to pay attention all the time. Your trainer had control over you, so you should have paid attention to every nuance. You will be punished for that failure later.” Milan gave Ollie an expectant look.

Ollie kept his expression neutral since making faces had earned him more punishment than any other sin so far.

“Do you have anything to say to me?”

“Sir? My knees hurt,” Ollie said, going for honesty a second time. Go with what works—that was his motto.

Milan’s narrowed eyes suggested Ollie had guessed wrong.

“I am offering to defer punishment until you are stronger as a reward for your willingness to be honest,” Milan said slowly, and now Ollie understood the rules of the game.

“Thank you, sir,” he said. It took effort to keep a respectful tone, but he was fairly sure he succeeded. He was rewarded with a smile.

“Today’s training is over. Stand.”

Ollie gratefully scrambled to his feet with as much grace as he could muster. When he’d first started this game hours ago, his trainer had shocked him for failure to show grace, but as the time passed, that rule had fallen by the wayside. Ollie moved like an old man jerked about by marionette strings. The pain was only just bearable when he stood.

“Follow,” Milan said curtly, and then he turned and headed for the exit. Without hesitation, Ollie followed, his bare feet slapping against the wood floor as he rushed to keep up.

Milan opened the door and stepped down onto a path made from old brick, and Ollie had to blink for a second in the sunlight. After being drugged in the car, he’d woken in the dim light of the training room. For some number of days he couldn’t even count, his life had been reduced to the mechanical orders and getting hosed down before being put back in a cage where he could barely stretch out and he couldn’t sit up. The light never changed. The sounds never changed. This—the paved path, the tall trees shading a sloping lawn, the distant hints of blue through the leaves, and the scattering of flowers along the edges of the yard… This all felt suddenly unreal.

A quick zap, hardly enough to do more than make Ollie’s flesh crawl, reminded him that he had an order to follow, and so he hurried after Milan. It was chilly outside. With a sweater, Ollie would be comfortable, but since he was buck naked, his skin turned to goose pimples and his muscles shivered. They headed for a small stone building with tiny windows and tall bushes.

“Master.” A tall man in a suit gave Milan a nod as they passed. The man opened the door to the cabin. Milan returned the gesture. Ollie mainly tried to avoid making any eye contact, especially since he could almost feel the man’s heavy gaze on him. Maybe the man worried that Ollie was a threat. Maybe the guy just didn’t like cops. Inside the structure, a fire was going, and more than anything, Ollie yearned go sit beside it. Instead, he followed Milan to a chair far from the fire and then waited as Milan sank down.

“Sit,” Milan ordered with a wave toward the rug in front of the chair. Ollie considered the couch and two overstuffed chairs in deep wine-colored upholstery. Not long ago, he would have plopped his ass down in a chair and glared at Milan, but Ollie had discovered the only thing worse than being terrified and in pain was being bored as he was tortured by a faceless voice in a dark room. So he lowered himself to a spot on the carpet in front of Milan’s chair. The cop part of him thought of security and escape, but he wasn’t fool enough to search for an escape so openly. He kept his head angled toward Milan and his gaze focused on his bruised knees.

Milan brought his boot up to rest on Ollie’s knee, and Ollie struggled to avoid reacting to the pain. Showing a reaction led to more punishment. That didn’t make sense to Ollie, because Milan had to know his foot was on a bruise. A deep, aching bruise that kept sending arrows of fire up his legs.

“Explain what you have endured so far, Sunshine.” Milan picked up something, and the scent of melon filled Ollie’s head. He had eaten a strange mixture of thick rye bread and weird-tasting gruel, but nothing with even a hint of sweetness. Ollie hadn’t thought much about the food until this second, but that was the point.