Yield (27 page)

He didn’t say a word. I only heard his harsh breathing then he climbed to his feet and walked away.

My first jerk to free my limbs told me he’d hogtied me, linked my wrists and ankles together.

Damn.

He strode back, hands full of ropes and a bag of something I had no doubt was diabolical.

“Fuck you.” With my face to the side, I spat at him.

Without speaking, he turned me over, slapped me across the face until I stuttered to a halt and stopped swearing, then he wriggled a metal gag into my bleeding mouth. I glared as if my eyes were fire and tasted the sweetness of blood. The straps clicked together at the back. At one spot, my lips had been caught and jammed between the metal and my teeth, but he didn’t seem to care. After my ankles were unclipped, I was hauled to my feet and marched from the room and along the hallways to the big viewing room.

What I’d done had thrown him into incandescent anger.

I didn’t know he was capable of being this angry. He’d always met my efforts to rile him with calmness then measured punishments. Regrets arrived, late and useless. My mistake had been catastrophic and worse than before. I had no possible defense. I hadn’t meant to wound. I’d aimed to kill.

“You stupid, stupid girl.”

I wavered on my feet then swallowed, strangely relieved to hear speech. If he took off the gag, maybe I could talk my way out of this...somehow.

I
was
stupid if I believed that.

I could see the monster in his eyes.

We’d reached his so-called pit of despair. The drop over the railings was a full story onto tiles. He wouldn’t, would he?

I shook my head, making weird guttural noises, and drool spun away then dripped from my chin to the floor.

Slowly, while staring, his breathing slowed. I could still see his teeth past his taut lips but some of the wildness had gone. Locks of his ragged black hair had flopped over the mask. The scruffy look was always carefully maintained – a persona of rawness. Now, it was pure fucking scary menace.

“When I first planned to take you, I meant to use these on you.”

From the bag, he pulled a handful of five-inch-long hooks.

The blood drained from my face and hands, leaving me shivering. He wouldn’t.

I imagined them, the points popping into my skin, then sliding into me, and my nausea from earlier kicked back in, snakelike, coiling in my stomach, making bile rise to my mouth.

“These are suspension hooks. People do this for kicks. The hooks are sunk into them, in their backs or chests, then they’re pulled into the air by cords attached to the hooks. You’ve earned a session.”

“Uh-uh!” Legs trembling, I took a step away, only to be halted as he grabbed my neck and pulled me back in, despite the dragging of my heels.

“No, girl. You’re not going anywhere. Not for some time. I was a kind master until now. I hope you’re very sorry, because this is the punishment I’d decided was too much for you. I haven’t decided yet how long I will leave you strung up. It could be a long time.” He touched his throat. “A very long time.”

The room fuzzed in and out as I struggled with the concept of staying upright and not fainting. I wouldn’t give him the damn satisfaction.

Moghul

The points of the hooks called to me from where they dug into my palm, but I only clenched my hand tighter.

The worst part of me was snarling that I should hurt her badly. I’d made a rule, years ago, to never let that
me
out of its cage. Nevertheless, she needed punishing.

I turned her, face first, over the railing so she bent at the stomach and had to stare down into the pit. Her little squeaked
no
was clear despite the gag.

As I knelt and clipped each ankle to the railing so she had her legs spread a few feet apart, I asked her leading questions. “What’s wrong? Worried I’ll tip you over?” I ran the point of a hook up the back of her thigh as I rose, stopping it at a fleshy part of her lower back, to the left of the
M
of the brand. “Here? For starters?”

“Mmm! Uh-uh!” She shook her head, violently, looking at me from her upside down position, the gag making her mouth a neat
O
, rendering her even more accessible, more objectlike.

I swabbed her back with alcohol in the places that seemed best, reaching over the rail to get her upper back.

With my finger and thumb pinching the skin into a fold, so I could insert the point of the hook, I paused to think, I could suspend her by the hooks then fuck her mouth, a good way to underline her mistake.

I could...

But should I? I knew her tolerances by now.

She’d tried to cut my throat. An inch deeper and I’d be struggling to breathe through a hole in my windpipe, with blood filling my lungs. She’d have finished me off soon after.

Volatile little bitch.

I looked down at where my fingers waited for instructions. The hook gleamed with light all along its length. This spoke to the sadist in me like nothing else.

I knew her tolerances, if not her deepest wishes and thoughts. There was terror in her eyes. Far more than from anything I’d ever done to her, even the half-drowning in the pool.

I glanced through the rails. She hung with her hair swishing lightly from her movements. Drool spooled in a thin string from her mouth. Red-faced, she retched once then stared at me, then away, blinking crazily.

Violent, volatile, unconquered bitch. I
had
her at times. I could make her into the sweetest submissive, then she flipped and became what she’d been a few minutes ago in the room. Would I ever get her past this? I might. With the hooks.

This little biting metal thing in my palm had the potential for change.

Stringing her up might kill who she is.

It might change her for the better.

Or would it make me into a monster so that I could never reach her? What I’d done so far hadn’t worked.

I closed my eyes, closed my fist on the hook until the point bit me.

I needed distance. I should think about this some more and let my anger lessen.

Being her monster had never been my aim. Well, not lately, not really since that first time I saw her in the boot of the car.

Her wanting to kill me was a result of how I’d acquired her and kept her.

I released the ankle ties and pulled her upright, then I clipped on her leash and led her to the bedroom and put her into the cage beneath the bed. There was no point in speaking at this stage so I said nothing, only removing the gag and shutting the door before I went back to the viewing room.

On the balcony, the wind rocked me. Maybe, if I stared out to sea for long enough, the answer would come to me.

The sting at my throat reminded me of what might have been. The endless roll of the waves reminded me of the world outside of my microcosm of perversion.

I crouched and put my palms to the glass, looking through the faint smear of salt that drifted in on the air when the wind was high. Then I leaned my forehead on the hard surface.

Like all my decisions, there was only me to confer with and this one had me in a vice.

Pretty Wren. I thought I had the key to your soul when all I had was a hammer. You’re too sweet for me to ever think of destroying and I’m too selfish to want to destroy myself.

There wasn’t much of a choice after all.

Wren

Looking out through the cage door was an exercise in terror and meditation. I tried hard to stop my mind from running around screaming but being at his mercy, trapped in here with my hands at my back and nothing to do except wait for his decision, was making my imagination go berserk.

I knew what he’d intended to do. Why had he stopped?

To arrange something worse?

To control himself? I figured that could be it; though he hadn’t said anything, he’d looked calmer when I dared to examine his face.

I shifted to lie on my back and study the underside of the bed, pretending this was somewhere I wanted to be, somewhere nice, like a cubby house where I’d hidden as a child, until my arms and shoulders went numb. I told myself to breathe slower and think of daisies growing on a green hill on top of a deserted island. The visual helped. I could smell the sea after a while, and the flowers. I could feel the breeze.

Then some distant noise would trip me back into the present.

What would he do? He was planning some punishment. He always did.

If he used the hooks on me, I’d withstand it. I wasn’t some wilting daisy.

Except...the thought of them going inside me, then out again, and him hanging me up in the air. I shuddered.

I’d tried to cut his throat. Another man would’ve killed me for that.

I kept recalling my reaction after I’d cut him. As well as triumph, I’d been sad and had an absurd need to say
I’m sorry
.

I guess...I liked him a little, pitied him even, because I wondered if loneliness had made him kidnap me. And I feared him. Hardest of all to admit, I was in awe of how he could make me
feel
.

But most of all, I think I hated him.

Even now, I was unsure of that.

Foolish me.

When I heard the bedroom door open and his footsteps approach, I tried to keep my breathing steady. This was why I’d lost my taste for horror movies. Something was coming and none of the possibilities were good ones. When he squatted in front of the bars and looked in, he shadowed me. I was low. He was high. I was tied up and he was free. All that time he was away, he’d been thinking up how to punish me. Couldn’t be much more ominous than this.

I looked out at him, seeing the parallel lines of his fingers, the size of his legs, the hairs on his arms, and the stretch of his shirt over his chest. Mercy wasn’t in his makeup.

I trembled and felt my nipples peak.

My own private nemesis was out there.

This was no time for defiance. I swallowed down my reawakened pride and croaked out, “Sir?”

He opened the door, and reached in. With the utmost gentleness, he placed his finger in the center of my forehead, then traced a line down my nose to the tip, bumped over my lips, slowly, then trailed back to where they met. When he ran his finger along the seam, I opened my mouth, but all he did was shift his aim to draw a slow line over my eyebrow, from the middle to the outside, before doing the same on the other side.

Then he grabbed my collar and dragged me from the cage.

That he didn’t speak scared me. I was taken to the shower and made to clean up, my hair thoroughly washed and combed out with conditioner in it, then rinsed again. Using gestures and handling my body, he showed me what he wanted. New underwear waited for me on a table. He let me dry myself then had me dress. The underwear was straight from a package but with the shop labels removed.

Things seemed to be turning out better than I’d expected. Had he forgiven me? So unlikely, and still he didn’t talk.

At his hand signal, I reluctantly kneeled.

Alarms went off in my head a half second before he grabbed my hair and pulled me forward onto my stomach. While he pinned me there, he cuffed my hands again and settled a ball gag in my mouth. Then he put a canvas bag over my head and cinched it closed at the neck with a drawstring.

Where before, I might have protested, now, I stayed quiet and submissive.

I was in the dark, and gagged, though the ball of the gag seemed to have a large hole through the middle. Holes in the canvas let in pinpoints of light and some air.

I could breathe, sure, but he’d never done this to me before. New things scared me, on this day more than ever.

He walked me somewhere, through places in the house that sounded and smelled different, into a huge echoing space. A car door was opened then what sounded like a trunk. When my legs hit the bumper of a car, I panicked and tried to run, even though I was blind, and made all of one step before he had a hand on my arm.

I was forced to my knees, the concrete abrading my skin as I tried to wriggle away. He was taking me away from the house. Not good. The pounding of my heart and the rasp of my breathing, the scuffle of my feet and his shoes, my curses, the click of the ankle link – all these happened and none of them altered his course of action. Nothing I did made him speak, or swear, or acknowledge that anything I did mattered to him.

A moment later, he scooped me off the concrete and rolled me into the trunk, then slammed it shut.

Quiet, no noises past my desperate gasps. I counted seconds.

He walked around, entered the car, and started it.

I was fucked. So fucked. I coughed out my anger as tears and sweat ran down my face. The trunk was lined with something soft that took my head butts without noise. After a while I stopped trying to yell through the gag because it made it difficult for me to suck in enough air.

I cried silently off and on as the car drove along roads, waited for ages, somewhere, with the engine off, then drove some more. Scared was an underestimation of the power of this situation. I despaired endlessly.

The car stopped again and I heard the door open then he came for me.

First, he unlocked the collar and took it off. My neck seemed too bare, wrong, without the encircling weight. That was enough to send me reeling. If he didn’t want me anymore...

I blinked in the darkness, striving to not go there. I didn’t want to follow that thought through, to the end. I took a big, extra-shaky breath and the bag sucked onto my face.

Stay calm. It’s the only way to survive this.

There was hope, always...wasn’t there?

Though he didn’t remove the bag, he searched for my mouth with his hand, feeling over the hollows and bumps of my face. Through the canvas, I felt the press of his mouth over mine, and then he whispered, “Goodbye.”

No. Oh no.
My heartbeat stuttered. Gargled words left my mouth. If he heard them or understood them, I received no reply.

I could’ve translated, if he’d asked, if he’d wanted to know.

What are you doing? You’re not leaving me? Please. Please don’t leave me here.

Begging? I would’ve gone down on hands and knees and licked his feet, kissed them, prostituted myself out for his ten imaginary friends, if he would’ve kept me.