I blinked against the glare of the lights overhead. As grateful as I was not to be in the dark, they reminded me of those cameras always flashing…
Cameras.
Abruptly, the threads entangling me in the past snapped. I was firmly, irrevocably back in the present. A single question tore through my mind: How had the hooded man known about the napkin?
He had appeared within minutes after I read the message hidden within the folds of the napkin. But by that time, I’d already put it down. How had he known to demand it?
Cameras.
I was being watched.
All my life, I had been a private person. The attention of the media, once it was unleashed on me at the age of fifteen, was painful to endure but I had managed. This was different. So personal, so intrusive, it made me feel violated in mind and body.
Even as I recoiled from the very idea, I knew with sickening certainty that it had to be true. Nausea rolled through me. I dared a quick glance toward the ceiling. Surveillance cameras had become so small that they could be hidden anywhere. How many were there?
Who was watching? The hooded man would be bad enough but were there others? Men who enjoyed seeing me so helpless and degraded?
What else would he--or they--do to me?
I hated crying but my tears wouldn’t be denied. They flowed down my cheeks as I sat huddled on the ledge, teetering on the precipice of a pit that held only fear and dread. With every breath I took, I struggled not to fall into it.
Hours passed. From time to time, I tried to tell myself that my situation could be a lot worse. I could be dead, or raped and beaten, or who knows what? Compared to that, cold, thirst, and hunger were relatively minor.
But even though I knew all that was true, the sense of helplessness and violation only got worse as the day wore on. So did the pain in my cramped body. Finally, it became so intense that I couldn’t bear it any longer; I had to act.
All too mindful that I was being watched, I stretched out one leg, then another while still trying to hide as much of myself as possible. That didn’t work very well but it was something at least.
Realistically, I knew that I couldn’t stay huddled on the ledge for however long I was in the cell. I would have to get up and move around. The more I thought about how afraid I was to do so, the more the hard kernel of anger inside me swelled and grew.
Just because I had dared to question my captor, I was being punished. I got the message--defiance wasn’t allowed. That didn’t mean I was about to submit to him. He could keep me confined and watched but he couldn’t control my mind, not for an instant. I wouldn’t let him.
Anger, I was discovering, could be healthy. I certainly preferred it to the sensation of being terrified and beaten down. It gave me strength and emboldened me.
Defiantly, I forced myself to stand up and stretch. God, that felt good! As the painful stiffness in my limbs and back began to ease, I decided that I was done cowering. It was vital to my mental state that I focus on whatever it took to get through this ordeal moment to moment, without dwelling on either the past or the future.
Spurred on by the overwhelming need to do something, I dragged the mattress onto the floor. I had no real basis for believing that the cameras would be at the front of the cell, they could be anywhere. But I decided to at least pretend that they were there.
Keeping my back turned, I sat down and stared at the blank wall opposite me while I took a few deep breaths to compose myself.
I’d never been a fan of yoga but I’d done enough classes to know the basics. The simple routine I went through made my body more limber and calmed my mind. In overcoming my fear, I felt as though I’d won a small victory.
My mood remained elevated for the next several hours. It improved even further when “Marilyn” returned. Not only did she bring a bottle of water and another bowl of oatmeal--or whatever that thick, tasteless substance was--she also had a blanket.
“Thank you,” I said as she handed all three through the bars. I would have liked to tell her that I appreciated the note but I didn’t want to risk causing her any trouble. As it was, I could only hope that she hadn’t paid too high a price for trying to comfort me.
Her only response was to gesture for the bowl she’d brought earlier. When I gave it to her, she took it but she didn’t linger. Moments later, I was alone again. Or at least as alone as someone under constant surveillance could be.
Wrapped in the blanket, I sat down on the ledge and had “dinner”. As hungry as I was, the porridge disappeared quickly. I chased it with the rest of the water, then sighed and leaned back with my head against the cement wall.
With my hunger and thirst eased, if only partly, some of the tension that had kept me taut as a bowstring eased. On a sudden impulse, I looked toward the front of the cell.
“There are spas where people pay big bucks to fast and meditate,” I said. “If you ever decide to give up kidnapping, you might consider opening one.”
I stuck a hand out of the blanket and waved it around. “Of course, you’d have to improve the ambiance a little. Put in a few tatami mats and replace the bars with those sliding paper doors that the Japanese use. Maybe even add a plant or two, preferably edible. It would be fine with me if you wanted to do that right now.”
Abruptly, I yawned. The fear and stress that had kept me going from the moment I awoke in the cell were no longer enough to stave off exhaustion. It hit me hard. I only just managed to tug the mattress back onto the ledge before curling up on it wrapped in the blanket.
Almost as soon as I did so, the lights dimmed. That couldn’t be a coincidence. I’d been right; he was there on the other side of the lens. My last thought before sleep claimed me was that in a strange sort of way, I wasn’t alone after all.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
I spent a second night in my desk chair, watching the monitors. Each of them gave me a slightly different view of Grace, curled up on the mattress, sleeping far more soundly than I had any hope of doing.
It would have been a simple matter to route the video feed to my laptop and watch her from the comfort of my own bed. But absurdly some part of me wanted to share her discomfort, if only to a small degree.
Bad enough that she was turning me into a voyeur. I’d be damned if I’d fall victim to whatever the captor version of Stockholm Syndrome was.
I told myself the problem was simple: I wanted to fuck her. But deep down inside, I knew it was more complicated than that.
Watching her go through that yoga routine--her naked body graceful and elegant, glowing with a sheen of perspiration--had almost driven me over the edge.
In no small measure because she had obviously figured out that there were cameras. She knew I was watching and yet she did it all anyway, every slow, controlled motion of her body, every display of beauty and feminine strength.
I knew that she wasn’t being deliberately provocative. She was both too intelligent and too afraid for that. She’d simply been doing what she needed to for her own sake.
Nonetheless, I couldn’t remember when merely looking at a woman had aroused me so powerfully. Her helplessness appealed to my dark nature. The things I could imagine doing to her--
How would she respond? With fear, no doubt, and resistance. I could overcome the second easily enough. As for the first, a part of me liked the idea of her fear, of forcing her to accept both it and me, compelling her to take the pleasure I would give her even against her will.
The thought of her coming for me, her lovely body bowed, the hot, slick sheathe of her cunt convulsing around me…
Sprawled in the chair, I stroked the bulge in my slacks. My hand moved more quickly until I realized what I was doing. With a low curse, I stopped abruptly.
No woman, no human being, could be allowed to undermine my self-control. A vengeful side of me wanted her to pay for every moment of frustration that I was experiencing. Yet despite myself, I couldn’t help admiring her courage and wit. That remark about opening a spa… I s
miled but my good humor was short lived.
None of that mattered. At heart, she was a pampered young woman who had never had to deal with any real challenges. She would yield soon enough and give me what I wanted.
But on the chance that she didn’t…
Settling back in the chair, I gave myself up to thoughts of all the dark, enjoyable ways to break her.
Chapter Five
The lights came on suddenly, waking me. I sat up slowly, unsure for a moment where I was or what was happening.
Memory slammed back, vivid and remorseless. I staggered to my feet.
The hooded man stood on the far side of the bars. He had entered without my being aware of him.
Despite the blanket I clutched around me, I shivered. How long had he been there? What did he want?
His voice, when it came through the distorter, made me jerk.
“Come here.”
A shudder of fear moved through me. My courage of the night before had evaporated, burned away by the reality of my circumstances. I stood on shaking legs and moved slowly toward the bars.
As soon as I came near, he held out a gloved hand. “Give me the blanket.”
Was this some further punishment or did he just intend to keep me naked during the day? As tempted as I was to ask him, I remained silent. Under no circumstances would I give him an excuse to enter the cell.
As I handed over the blanket, the contrast between the relative warmth of my skin and the cool air struck me. My shivering, compounded by hunger, increased. Wrapping my arms around myself, I started to turn away, only to stop at his order.
“Face me.”
Hesitantly, I did so. But I also straightened my shoulders and raised my chin. I was lacking in courage but at least I still had pride. I’d be damned if I’d cower before him.
“What is your name?” he asked.
The question took me by surprise. He already knew my name. Why was he asking again?
Despite my confusion, I said, “Grace Delaney.”
I could at least take some pride in the fact that I was more composed than I had been the day before. I had faced my fears and I hadn’t succumbed to them. I needed to keep on doing exactly that, moment to moment and breath to breath, until I was free again.
“What’s happened to you?”
He’d asked me that, too. What was going on?
Frowning, I said, “I’ve been kidnapped.”
“Do you know where you are?”
“No.”
“What do you want?”
What any normal person would, although I didn’t say that. “To leave, to go home.”
“Do you have a message for your family?”
That was new and it threw me. The answer was obvious: Get me out of here! Save me! But the words lodged in my throat.
I had the sudden, horrible sense of a trap closing around me, one that I hadn’t even realized existed until then.
The memory that had replayed over and over in my mind for weeks rose, brutal and remorseless in my mind. I was standing on the terrace of my parents’ beach house, the sound of the rolling surf as close as the bottom of the wide lawn. It was night, I was supposed to be asleep. No one knew I was there.
Voices drifted through the French doors to my father’s office.
“It had to be done,” he said. “The boy had become too great a risk.”
“I agree,” Uncle Brian replied. “Still, his mother is…affected.”
“You have other children. She’ll recover.”
“Perhaps. At any rate, as you say, Patrick was a liability. At the very least, he violated our trust. You were right to insist that we dispose of him.”
My throat clenched. Trembling, I pressed back into the shadows along the outer wall of the house. I couldn’t have heard them correctly. They couldn’t mean what they seemed to…
“The decision wasn’t taken lightly,” he father said. “He was given every chance. But he went too far and he wouldn’t stop. Even now, we can’t be certain that there won’t be repercussions. If he spoke to someone…”
“He’s been thoroughly discredited. We’ve seen to that.” Uncle Brian spoke calmly, as though they were discussing a stranger rather than his own son. “If anyone comes forward, they won’t be believed.”
That satisfied my father. They went on to speak of other matters. I stumbled away, reeling from what I still desperately wanted to believe couldn’t be true. The head of our family, my father, wouldn’t have arranged for my cousin Patrick’s death. Even worse, he couldn’t have done it with the complicity of Patrick’s own father.
Yet even then, a part of me knew it was true. In the weeks since, I realized that on some level, I had already known or at least suspected. Not about Patrick directly--I wasn’t capable of imagining that depth of evil--but about the lengths that Delaneys would go to for wealth and power.
All the years growing up, surrounded by more boisterous siblings and cousins, I was the quiet child whom people tended to forget. I had seen and heard more than I was capable of understanding.
But that night on the terrace, the pieces of the puzzle finally began to come together. The picture they formed was beyond horrifying. All I could think of was how to get away, to make a life for myself without ties to the family, and to somehow find a measure of justice for my cousin that didn’t put me in line to share his fate.
How could I beg them for help now, knowing what they had done? As ruthless as they were, they would see me as weak, fearful, the kind of person who could easily be manipulated. Worse yet, they would be right.
The very thought made my skin crawl. Yet there was also no escaping the fact that I was in a very dangerous situation, held by a ruthless captor who might be willing to do anything to me.
My mind raced, trying to find a way to survive and still keep faith with myself.
So far as I knew, there were only two reasons for kidnapping--ransom or sexual depravity. The harsh conditions of my captivity notwithstanding, I hadn’t been touched. That pointed to the objective being money.
Grandmother and the others would balk at parting with any fraction of the family’s wealth on my behalf, even if that just meant using the trust fund that was supposed to be mine. But “America’s Princess” had value to them, all the more since Adam Falzon had made his interest in me clear. Ultimately they would pay. I was convinced of that.
I wasn’t self-destructive, not remotely. The prospect of facing yet more hunger, thirst, and cold locked away in the cell terrified me. But I wasn’t about to betray myself, especially not when in the end, the result would be the same whatever I did or didn’t do.
“Answer the question,” my captor said. “Do you have a message for them?”
As it happened, I did, just not the one that I suspected he wanted. I had a message to my family about who I was. Myself, someone to be reckoned with. The sooner they understood that, the better.
I dug deep for the strength that I had to believe was inside me. In the quiet of the cell, my answer was soft but clear.
“No.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Bloody hell! What was wrong with her?
Nothing in the investigative reports had indicated that Grace had any sort of mental issues but for damn sure she was behaving as though she did. Why wouldn’t she ask her family for help? Why wasn’t she clamoring to do so?
I slammed into my office, ready to put a fist through the fucking monitors. In each of them, the image of her sitting on the ledge, hugging her knees mocked me. What was it going to take to get through to her? Hunger, thirst, cold, and nakedness certainly hadn’t had much of an impact. She’d endured everything I’d thrown at her--so far--and still told me “no”.
That word on her lips…
I needed to hang a punching bag in the office, at least for the duration of her stay. It would look incongruous among the old world furnishings but so what? At least I’d have some way to work off my frustrations that didn’t involve my cock.
&nbs
p; Unable to sit, I paced beside the portraits of several of my ancestors, stalwart men who had bent the world to their will. I didn’t have to wonder what they would have made of my predicament. Or what their advice would have been.
Take her. Use her. Break her in the most gratifying way possible, for me at least. As for her…
I wanted her under me, helpless to do anything but endure as I possessed her in every possible way. I wanted her moans, her screams, the sweet contractions of her cunt as it convulsed at the nexus of pain and pleasure so intense as to shatter her.
I wanted to lick her tears from the curve of her cheek, hold her as she shook from the force of what I made her feel and then, when she had calmed a little, begin all over again.
When had a woman aroused me so? The answer sprang to mind all too readily: Never. That was puzzling. It couldn’t just be her beauty; beauty in women was commonplace in my world. And it certainly wasn’t her wealth or status, neither of which meant anything to me. I could appreciate that she was intelligent and that her nature was instinctively compassionate. She was a decent person, even possibly a good one.
But none of that explained why I was so drawn to her. The sound of her voice, her scent, the grace of her movements, the brush of my fingertips over her skin…
I bit back a groan and stared out the tall windows. The sight of the sea dappled with silver shards of sunlight failed to calm me. My hands curled into fists, my body drawn bow taut. In the privacy of my own mind, I forced myself to confront the truth.
In her strength and gentleness, Grace made me believe in possibilities that I feared to acknowledge.
I didn’t react well to fear. It brought out the worst in me, translating swiftly into anger and a raging need to punish.
It was just as well that I hadn’t planned on visiting her again for another day. By then, I’d have re-established control over myself, whatever that took to accomplish. She would yield, I was certain of it. I would get what I wanted from her and then…
Chosen: Part Two (Allure) Page 3
