by Sophia Reed
"I don't care," I told her.
"You will."
The threat was the first thing to rouse me from a near stupor. Even as I struggled to sit up, it was already too late.
She was on me faster than I anticipated, her hands on mine, the plastic zip ties already set for my wrists. She'd tied my hands more than once already. Vincent liked to threaten me by giving her limited authority over me and she liked to use whatever she had. She knew the right size space to leave to force my hands through.
Cuffs. And then the leash she'd brought, to attach them to the leg of the couch, leaving me bent back over the arm of the sofa, weirdly like the position Vincent had dragged me into after he'd slugged the air out of me.
She was fast. She got one of my legs and tied it to one of the rings. The other leg she just avoided, letting it thud uselessly against her shoulder as she knelt between my legs.
"What are you doing?" I shouted at her. Fear had started to crawl up inside me, honest emotion and horrifying.
"Making you care," she snapped and there were scissors in her hand, cutting through the running shorts I'd pulled on again at some point.
"Kie, don't!" Scared now, my breath coming too short. This was the woman who had hurt me so badly that Cole wouldn't even let me be taken by her master. "Kie, please."
She just looked at me and held up the pepper, letting me see it as she used the scissors to score down the sides of it. I could smell it then, jalapeno or ghost pepper or whatever the fuck it was, it didn't matter, if she – she couldn't – I hated her, she hated me, but I thought – under the same roof with the same madman and she had access to scissors and if we worked together –
And besides, she'd done it once, all the horror that was trying to drive me back into my own head. She'd done it and been horrified at the results, and been beaten senseless for doing it.
She was doing it anyway. There was a short stretch of time when it felt like neither of us was moving, when what was between my legs felt cool.
Then I screamed. I screamed and writhed and my back arched farther. My eyes poured tears and useless saliva pooled in my mouth, as if I might vomit from the pain.
She spun the pepper inside me, then looked up at my face.
I heard her swear. It was the same sort of sound Vincent made when a whip landed the wrong way. As if something had happened she hadn't anticipated, but she'd done this before - She had to know.
I felt her hand on my face and snapped at it, trying to bite, then screaming again.
Kie ran. I heard her shout, a frantic, Get the fuck out of my way and assumed it was at security.
And assumed she was doomed to whatever Vincent would do because clearly she was on her way out of here. Too late for me, she was finally running.
All the while, I couldn't stop the keening.
Then she was back. Tears poured down her ruined cheeks, probably hurting to some similar degree as my screaming my head off.
She had milk. She had a towel. The speed with which she retrieved them meant she'd at least planned that far ahead. There was no way she could have made it to the kitchen and back with the milk, bowl and towel. I could hear the panicked labor of her breath.
She had the presence of mind to soak the towel and squeeze it up against me and into me, letting whatever it is in milk do whatever magic it does against the unholy capsaicin of pepper.
It took several long minutes. It took more endurance than I thought I had.
Then I was sliding down the far side of pain, the milk-soaked towel nestled against me, something cold and horrible, like a memory that's inescapable.
I was sweating everywhere from the pepper. I could smell the reek of it, mixed with the milk.
Mixed with Kie's rank fear sweat.
My screaming turned to sobbing. Through the sound of it, I could just hear her.
"I wish I was dead. I wish he'd just let me go. Leave me some way to die. I wish I was dead. Oh, god. Oh, fuck. I wish I were dead."
At that moment? Me, too. For me. Not just for her.
It didn't end just like that. Kie didn't get to die and despite the pain, neither did I.
Vincent came with security to answer the screams, covered me expertly and rounded on Kie, who shrank back, a look of terror and triumph mixed on her face.
There was no way she was getting away that easily. Because the look on Vincent's face spelled out her death and no. Not while my pulse still banged away between my legs, every too-fast heartbeat driving fresh blood to make the hurt that much more intense.
"Sir!" Me calling him that was enough to jolt him out of his contemplation of her, but I'd only have a minute. "You told her to get me out of the room by any means possible."
His fury was instant, and directed at me. "Are you blaming me for this incident?"
Oh, hell, yes. "I'm saying she didn't have a lot of options." My eyes were squeezed tight shut. I could hear security calling for a medic and assumed it would be the same man who had come the last time. Someone Vincent had bought off. Some poor medical student like Mark had been not all that long ago, in over his head and maybe trying to pay off student loans.
At least he was good, and gentle.
In the hall, security was saying yes and emergency and burned and two of them.
There were? If I had to, I'd fight Vincent before I let him do the same thing to Kie. Stupid, because my fighting him was stupid. Stupid, because my fighting anyone for the sake of Kie was stupid. But I couldn't face it.
Vincent was still staring at me like I was some new species of bug.
"I'm not being altruistic," I snapped, then added, "Sir," because I needed him to not be angry at me when I could barely move.
Maybe it was the sir that did it, because he relented. "She'll be punished," he said as if daring me to argue.
I didn't. I was fine with that. I just wasn't all right with this happening to anyone else.
Except maybe to him. I wondered vaguely if anyone had ever died from the shock caused by the pain of one of the peppers. Mark had told me about people getting what was almost a chemical burn from eating the hot peppers, and that it was becoming like the cinnamon challenge and ice water challenge and other incredibly stupid challenges from recent years. People were eating ghost peppers and other stupidly bred-to-deadly heat level peppers on challenges, saying they liked to do it and then vomiting from the pain.
Sometimes I though that, as a race, all humans were very stupid.
I'd started to drift into my thoughts when Vincent covered me with a blanket.
I shivered into myself.
"Miss?"
The medic. Last thing I wanted to deal with. But he'd ordered everyone out, and he was thorough and fast and reassuring that the blistering and pain would end no matter what it felt like. For all of her attempts, Kie had gotten very little of anything inside me. It was surface and it was fixable.
It would just hurt. And hurt, and hurt.
Burn creams would help, but at the beginning he suggested coconut oil and olive oil, carrier oils that would pull the oil of the pepper out.
"Or sour cream," he said without warning, as if hoping to get some reaction out of me.
He did. I stared at him. "I'm not an appetizer."
"Good," he said, as much to himself as to me. "Sour cream is thick and sticks and there's something in the milk that neutralizes the fire of the pepper's heat. That's one of the reasons it's served with nachos."
I blinked again. "Um," I said. It was as much as I could manage and caused him to pat me as if he needed to reassure himself by touching me.
After that I struggled out of myself long enough to understand what to do for it and what would stem the ache and fiery burn with commercial remedies.
And to ask. "She wasn't – this didn't? No one did this to her, did they?"
Even the medic gave me a startled look, then he said, "No. She burned her fingers. More important than that, we needed to get gloves on her before she accidently touched one of her
eyes, or her mouth."
I shuddered at the thought. He leaned over then to make sure my mouth and eyes were untouched, that my fingers bore no trace of the heat carrying capsaicin. I didn't think I'd touched it, only been touched by it, but I was more than happy to comply.
He never answered the question I finally worked up the nerve to ask. "How did you end up with this particular job?" He wasn't mean about it.
He just didn't answer.
I followed the instructions. I used the burn creams. And for the hours that followed Kie's attack, I did my best to act as depressed as I had been when the little bitch came down to take me for a run. And when she came back, to finish what she'd started at the dinner party.
It occurred to me that maybe she'd done it on purpose. Not what she'd done to me – it was possible that was beside the point for her. Instead, I thought maybe her fear reaction to my calling Vincent "Vincent" even not within his hearing was nothing more than the lies she told herself. Maybe she did what she did to me because she wanted the punishment.
There was no way for me to know. I wasn't given to introspection past learning how to stay alive in the various strange situations my job routinely took me to. If Kie wanted to kill herself, I wished she'd hurry up and do it and not take me with her. If she was that big a pain slut she wanted whatever Vincent did to her that made her scream like that, fine. Again: Leave me out of it.
But I had heard her at the end, when she'd shocked herself so badly she was trying to undo what she'd done. I heard her mumbled words as she tried to use the milk to stop the pain and the coldness of the milk had been a shock on my fevered, burning skin. It had turned hot within an instant. If someone measured the temperature of my skin, I was sure there'd be a major difference between my normal flesh between my legs and the places where Kie had burned me.
But past that. I had heard her, a litany of her own suffering, a suffering so intense that even though she was imposing her own brand of it on someone else, she wanted nothing more than to cease to exist. She wanted to be dead.
At that moment I could cheerfully have taken care of that for her. I did not want Vincent to. She had never hurt him.
She wasn't anywhere around in the afternoon and I remained cowed. Vincent, with very little prompting, brought me lightweight and very loose clothes, and left me to see to the care of my wounds myself. While wearing gloves, because the capsaicin was that strong and stuck that well that even so much later after applications of sour cream that didn't amuse me all that much, there was the fear that the oils could rub off. Spread. Touch my face.
I thought I'd be muttering the same things Kie had been, if that happened.
When Vincent came in, I moved to kneel and when he told me I didn't have to, for fear of pulling the clothing tight against me, I stood with hands folded and gaze down, and he was arrogant enough even then to believe it.
I snapped at him twice during the times he was in the room with me. Both times it was intentional. He liked a sub that fought back. I had to fight back, even against nothing, just enough to keep him interested.
I was a liability now. Whatever he chose to do with me, he had to know the ending would be a blood feud between him and Cole. He talked as if he thought Cole was weak, possibly only because Cole was nowhere near as brutal as he was, but I thought that Cole, of the two of them, was more likely to kill.
Vincent would kill for petty reasons, for spite, for hatred, for feeling insignificant compared to someone else.
Cole would kill to protect those he cared about.
Whatever, the hatred between the two of them was strong. It couldn't end well, Vincent taking me and now this. If he was playing this game, the only reason to keep me alive was to be certain he had something to trade with Cole if it came to that.
He had to think I was still fighting. That wasn't hard. I was. Even with him there I was weighing choices. Whatever I chose, it had to be soon.
He had to think I was cowed, too. Docile. Waiting for the next session. That was harder. Because I wasn't. I wasn't anywhere near resigned.
When he came in the third time, ostentatiously to check on me, he mentioned that he'd sent videos of "everything" to Cole. The dinner party event. The knife play. The stuff he'd done to me in the limo. The breath play he'd done with me.
And what Kie had done with the pepper. I wasn't able to pretend to be cowed or uninterested at that.
I was instantly furious. My head snapped up and my gaze locked on his.
So I didn't miss the nasty little smile he gave me. "She didn't have permission to do what she did." He said that as if somehow it made him look better. In my eyes? What did he care what I thought of him? Not to mention there was no way I'd ever see him as anything but a predator and a psychopath. "But I'd be a fool not to use it." He leaned over from his seat across from me and brushed some of my hair out of my face.
I tried not to react, but the very tightening of my features undoubtedly gave me away.
"For Cole to know you're out of his reach. That he can't even stop the thing he stopped at the dinner party. That she went ahead and – " He leaned in close, as if this were confidential, as if I hadn't most definitely been there – "Fucked you with that thing."
There was a silence that stretched between us and then he said, "You should have heard yourself scream." Pause. "Maybe I'll play it for you some time."
When I was a girl growing up with three sisters I not only didn't see eye to eye with but didn't seem to be the same species as, sometimes I'd fight back inadvisably when the three of them wouldn't stop picking at me. Trying to make me be something I wasn't. When it became physical – because I could always beat them there – my mother would step in, separating us and speaking with us in turn. I tried not to notice that my sister's lectures were always much shorter than my own.
When it came to my turn, my mother would spend a good twenty minutes lecturing me. It was like she had a clock in her head, the way she could set the time and keep going with no problem.
Her lectures were all about the same shit. When I was your age. Appreciate the opportunities you have in life. Understand you love your father but you're going to grow up to be a young lady, not…
I learned the timing too. When it was obvious she was launching into a lecture that was going to stretch the whole amount of time and be about my failings as a daughter, I would automatically reroute my thoughts. I was able to look right at her and pretend to be home behind my eyes while at the same time, I would imagine my wedding. Not because I was romance obsessed, but because the first time I ever tried the tactic I'd come up with weddings and it stuck. It was fast, it was easy to imagine (take my latest crush, add some years, pop the question and voila! Instant food for thought).
Over the years and the bad behaviors I got married naked on a rock beside a lake, fully clothed while standing on a raft in that same lake, while horseback riding, while skydiving, while on a cruise, while off a cruise, while – everything. I got married in white lace and promises rituals, in historic churches and in the office of the Justice of the Peace. I had dresses that spanned the gamut of wedding dresses real and imagined. I married every movie star that caught my attention, from Scarlett Johansson to Chris Pratt to Jason Momoa to many of the Jonas Brothers.
With Vincent, I needed the same distraction. He was here to gloat. Which amazed me and scared me, because it meant he was every bit as big a psychopath as I thought.
But I really didn't want to think about weddings.
So I thought about the different ways I could kill him. While he told me about Cole receiving the videos and not responding, I thought about cutting him over and over, tiny cuts with his own horrible straight razor. Until he bled out.
While he told me about what he'd do to Cole when Cole finally came here – at the same time pointing out that Cole hadn't come here to get me, certainly not yet! – I imagined walking into one of the consultations Vincent Geddes might have with a new plastic surgery patient and taking my clothes off b
efore he could stop me, showing her the scars on my back and boobs, and then sending her fleeing while I shot Vincent Geddes in the head.
And so on. And so forth.
He died in every scenario.
"Are you listening to me?" he asked finally.
"No."
That should have earned me a beating but he only snorted and stood. "You can't really block it out. You heard me. Every word." He turned and strode from the room, anger radiating in every line of his not-good-enough body.
I took a deep breath and started to slowly stretch. If the clothing clung to the places the oil had burned me, I'd take it off. Maybe I was becoming acclimated to abuse. Maybe I was in the middle of deciding on changes for my life that had nothing to do with Vincent Geddes or Cole St. Martin.
Maybe when I got out of here – under my own steam – I'd kill everyone in the house and go off and test for the DEA with no explanation for where I'd been. Mistress or toy or pain slut to a very famous politician, I'd tell them, leaving them way too many candidates to wade through. It'd be easier to look at my record and just hire me, or send me off to whatever schooling I actually had to have.
It was a weird feeling. Sitting there on the mat on the floor, breathing through pain when it flared, stretching and taking the time at it that I never did in my real life because I begrudged it too much – right there in the lair of the psychopath and his bitch behind a locked door I felt more free than I had in years.
I didn't have Mark longing for a kind of normalcy that I would never have, or even seek.
I didn't have my own desire to live up to standards my father had never placed on me but I had.
There was no listening for Cole's step in the hallway because it wasn't going to be there. I wondered if he had a new sub. I wondered if she liked being beaten and fucked and run through the desert for hours.
There was no fear of Kie and no fear of Vincent and if there should have been, if either came near me, I'd kill them.
Life had just become so much more simple.
It was simple because it was mine. All I had to do was get free of this prison. I'd turned my life around before and not for the better. Now I'd turn it around for good.
