Addicted to the Dark

by Sophia Reed

  He had more. He had a leather paddle I hadn't felt yet, and a wooden one with holes drilled through it. He had hairbrushes the way my sisters had shoes. He had a variety of canes I trembled at the sight of.

  But so far, in my recovery, he'd only used the belt, well worn and buttery soft when it was threaded through the loops of his jeans or when he held it out to me to kiss before he ordered me off my knees and across his. Or face down on the bed. Or his desk. Or hanging on to a kitchen counter.

  He'd kept his word. So far. And I hadn't asked for anything else. He'd told me from the beginning I didn't have to sleep with him, though I'd seen the outline of his enormous erection pressed against his jeans or sweats or once, memorably, his boxers. He got off just on the beating, I thought, but there'd be no problem applying that to me.

  I hadn't asked. I was still processing Jesse's death. I was still engaged to Mark who didn't even know where I was, didn't have any way of knowing my undercover assignment right now was off the books. Having been sold by a fellow cop into the keeping of a man who meant to keep me sober by way of natural pharma and routine punishment.

  For everything. For asking for my phone. For finding my phone and liberating it from the locked cupboard where he'd been keeping it. For getting online. For not calling him sir.

  For talking back.

  For trying to run. That was early though, when despite the herbs and derivatives of vines that he was giving me I craved the fet. China white. I woke sweating from dreams of it. I cried for it in the shower while I ran my hands over my aching bottom and sometimes my thighs and once my back.

  I couldn't tell. Maybe the addiction was easing. Maybe it wasn't.

  But I was trying. So – "What the hell, sir?" I asked.

  He raised one eyebrow, looking more like Loki from the movies than ever. Instead of answering he simply held up the bottle of Advil I'd liberated from his bathroom and relocated to mine.

  It had been mostly full when I picked it up. Not that I'd counted.

  Okay. I had. Of the 250 caplets listed on the bottle, there'd been 249. Obviously Loki didn't need a lot of painkillers. Go, trickster god.

  The bad news was, I did need it.

  The worst news was there were probably about 20 left.

  And I'd been in residence how many days? Even I knew that was bad news.

  I was invested in coming clean. There was no way I was weak. I went through SEAL training. I didn't go out for SEALs, just did the Bud-K training to see if I could. I was strong. I could deadlift 400 pounds. I could bench 150. I could throw a man over my hip and break his larynx before he got back up. I could take Jesse's rage sex and pounding and I could fight for my father in any way possible and I could deal with the death of a high school senior who was bright and funny and cute and hooked on the China white dealt by my deep cover boyfriend.

  I could kick the fucking addiction.

  But. It. Fucking. Hurt. Even with the rainforest pharma which, yes, it was doing wonders for me. It made me feel clear-headed even without the fet. It gave me energy and it cut down the nausea and headache and diarrhea and everything else that opiates did as they left your body.

  "I'm trying," I said. All the things that made me shoot up the first time were still happening.

  "That's not good enough." He sounded so patient. A teacher waiting for the somewhat stupid student to make a connection.

  Instead, all the usual anger bubbled to the surface. "Do you think this is easy? Have you ever had to sweat poison out of your system? Even with what you're giving me, it's like flu times ten. I'm sick, I'm scared, I'm somewhere I don't know where and my father – "

  I was starting to cry. I never cry.

  He just waited.

  "Fuck you!" I threw the bottle at his chest. The instant it left my hand, both my hands went up over my mouth. I didn't want to be punished again. I didn't. I still hurt. I slid to my knees without knowing I meant to do it.

  "I'm sorry! I'm sorry! Sir! I didn't mean to! Please don't be angry!" I risked a look at his face.

  It was as impassive as ever. His voice sounded like the voice of a million fathers worldwide though he was nothing like a father. "I'm not angry," he said. "I'm disappointed. Stand up."

  No.

  I stood. My legs shook so hard they barely supported me.

  "Do you still have the same goals? The same desires? Do you still want to kick this and go back to your job before your month’s leave ends?"

  You know I do. Don't make me beg. "Yes. Sir." I couldn't help it. The sir always got tacked on at the end.

  "Then I will help you." He pulled a hardback chair out from the desk beneath the window.

  No.

  "Come over here."

  No.

  I moved across the room on shaking legs. My teeth had started to chatter. On one stupid, entirely absurd impulse, I bent and picked up the Advil bottle, offering it to him.

  "Thank you. Put it on the desk."

  Shit.

  I put it on the desk and faced him. I didn't see where he got it, but he held one of the hardwood hairbrushes in his hand.

  "Pants and panties down to your knees."

  I'd woken in sweatpants I couldn't remember putting on. But then, I couldn't remember getting to this house. Just that there had been a flight from where we were to here. Wherever here was.

  "Annie."

  I hooked my thumbs into the waistband and pushed them down. After ten days of this, it shouldn't have bothered me, but shame blushed my face. I hated facing him naked. I hated even more facing him only partly unclothed, my sweats and underwear pushed to my knees, bare from the waist down and waiting to be punished.

  "Across my knee."

  I was shaking almost too hard to comply. He helped me, guiding me down, laying me across his lap. He wrapped one leg over mine to stop me from kicking.

  "I suggest you don't fight me on this."

  I couldn't answer. I bit back a sob.

  "Annie? Grab the chair legs. If your hand gets in my way, I'll just hit it."

  My hair was in my face, my dark curls long now, catching in the sweat and tears on my face.

  "There were 249 caplets in the bottle."

  Oh, god. Oh, please.

  "There are 29 now."

  "Sir…"

  "That's 220, Annie."

  "Sir, please." I was dizzy, the blood going to my head. Hanging on to the chair legs was almost impossible.

  "Don't make a sound," he said.

  The hairbrush came down for the first time.

  I counted to 11 before I screamed.

  Cole

  There was a little bit of blood. Not much. Just enough that I knew I'd broken the skin.

  It only made me hotter for her.

  I'd told Annie when she came here – when she was brought here, sold to me by a bad cop out of Seattle who I turned in not long after – that she didn't have to sleep with me.

  That was true. She didn't. I wanted her to, though. Wanted it bad. I wanted to make her cry for me, saying my name, screaming it. I wanted to hurt her, to bend her to my will until she begged for the pain, and then I'd withhold it.

  I wanted her to be mine.

  But standing in the shower, Annie left behind and duct taped to the bed, thinking about what she'd done, or more likely seething against me, I knew I wanted more than just for her to want me and want what I doled out to her. I wanted more than for her to crave the pain I could give if I chose and not if it suited me.

  I wanted her well.

  If that sounds altruistic, so be it.

  I went into pharmaceuticals because of my grandfather. Best man I ever knew, he raised me after my father took off. After my mother died. When there was only me. My grandmother was in the picture, a sweet woman now in her nineties living across the country in Florida as if retirement there were a law and not a choice.

  When my grandfather died, in his late eighties and sane as he ever was, he was in terrible pain that even opiates couldn't touch and by
then, to his shame, he was addicted.

  I swore to find something better. To help those people humbled and harmed by drugs.

  And when he died, my grandfather made me promise he wouldn't let anything bad ever happen to my grandmother.

  She tried to shush him but it was an easy promise to make. I'd already put myself through med school, already chosen a path that could help those people who were aching and grinding their way through terminal illnesses to do so with a modicum of grace and a lack of pain that ensured their last days with family weren't cruel.

  Cruel was what I was. That was my pleasure.

  Helping was my profession.

  The drugs Annie was taking were natural, rainforest derivatives that I'd seen more than once take down an opiate addiction and render it a memory. She was one of the test subjects, carefully chosen because she was between a rock and a hard place.

  Right now, that was my hard place. Leaning a shoulder against the smooth stone of the shower, standing in the warm wet darkness with only the light coming in from a small high window, I reached down and wrapped one fist around my cock, stroking while I thought of her white cheeks shaking under the onslaught of the hairbrush.

  She bore it poorly.

  I smiled as I ran my hand out, stroking slowly for now, prolonging the self pleasure. Annie was a take charge cop. She was in command whenever possible and ceded the position unwillingly. When her life fell apart around her and circumstances were beyond her control, she crumbled.

  I was here to un-crumble her. After that I might return her to her regularly scheduled life. And I might not.

  For this afternoon, I had something else in mind. My hand moved faster of its own accord as I thought about what I meant to do to her.

  For now, that involved letting her go. Or letting her think that I would. I was going to offer her a choice. Stay here and continue the cure, continue the remedy for the toxins ruining her life. That meant stay every bit as hidden away as she would for an undercover operation. No contact with her boyfriend. No contact with her father. I had already made inquiries. He was out of the hospital and out of the rehab center and ready to face the charges mounted against him. If she broke cover to testify, she'd ruin the operation that she so desperately wanted to finish: taking down at least one of the fet suppliers on the streets of her hometown.

  It had to be up to her.

  So her choice: If she stayed, she submitted to me. I'd put her on a daily training regime, food and vitamins and water, exercise and punishment when she needed it, correction when she needed it. Or simply when I wanted to be entertained.

  She still didn't have to have sex with me. My back arched as my cock hardened and my balls drew up, the pulsation starting before everything sprayed across the shower, washed away in the flood of hot water. I could take care of that myself.

  But she'd be collared. A silver collar, made by top of the line fetish jewelers. The kind of collar that locked on and only I would have the key. If she left, she'd have to be cut out of it.

  Wrapped around the collar - the shock collar dog owners use as "invisible fencing." I'd have the remote.

  It was that, or she could head back into the world and try to make her way free of fet for the next 20 days, until her leave was up and after that decide what she wanted to do. She'd be out on the street, free to return to Mark and her father, free to break her cover and testify or contact the police and testify in some other way. She didn't even know that Samuels had been fired. She'd have to navigate all of that on her own.

  She was crying in her room when I left the shower. That was music to my ears. She had to be beaten down before she could be built back up. That's the problem with strength. It can get in the way.

  I could tell by where the sound was coming from in her room that she'd freed herself from the duct tape. Also good. She was still fighting. She needed to fight. Me. Herself. Her addiction.

  I walked into her room still naked and wet from the shower, pulling on a robe as I entered but leaving it hanging open, framing my cock, which was getting hard again just looking at her. There were tracks of tears on her face. If I ordered her to pull off the sweats she'd put back on, I'd see the hot, angry red of her ass.

  I didn't order it.

  I ordered her to sit down on the hard-back hard-seat chair I'd used to punish her.

  She winced when she did it but she did it.

  "I have an offer to make you. Clearly there are some problems with your recovery."

  Her lips started to frame a word. Her eyes were so big and dark, the lashes wet with the remnants of her tears. She was going to say It was only Advil.

  I didn't give her a chance. "You have some options. Which you choose has everything to do with how much you want to go back to your life, your job, your father, your fiancé." I said that last deliberately, pretty sure already that she didn't want to go back to him. She just wasn't ready to admit it.

  The way I was standing, her eyes kept straying to my tumescent dick. There was a hunger there, one I had no intention of feeding yet. I had other ways of taking care of that. If she wanted my cock, she'd have to work for it, and when I gave it to her, I'd hurt her.

  I knew what she'd been through. I knew what Jesse Baylor had done to her. I knew what she'd gone back for. I knew she mourned him despite what he'd done.

  I knew she wanted her life back, that she was devastated by her own slide into the addiction she was fighting on the streets, and more so, almost definitely, by her growing need to be hurt, to be fucked hard, to be dominated, kept, punished.

  For her growing attraction to me.

  So I was going to set her free. Or as free as she would think she was. And watch her come back to me of her own accord. Ready to become a sweet submissive.

  "Here are your choices," I said, and stated it bluntly.

  Submit.

  Or go home.