Master's Flame (Cirque Masters)

by Joseph, Annabel

  She got to her feet and set off quietly through his echoing, empty house. If he was watching on his cameras he would know, but she didn’t care anymore. She went into his kitchen and opened the drawer where he kept things like scissors and screwdrivers and duct tape. She pulled out his thick black marker and returned to the white room. She stood just beneath the camera in the corner, and uncapped the marker and put it to the wall. She let her passion guide her, let loose the roiling emotions that wouldn’t be still. Her intuition, her feelings, she let it all guide the sweeping movements of her hand.

  She drew in reckless strokes that left great black swaths on the wall. She drew the Mr. Lemaitre she knew, who was stern, cruel, conflicted, complex, and not completely finished. She made his eyes pierce, she made his lips frown. She made his hair a great tornado of blackness on his head, the way it looked when he ran his fingers through it and set it on end. She made the Master she knew and the Master who was unknowable, and when she finished the spare likeness, it looked so bleak she started to weep.

  She pressed her hand over her mouth. She didn’t want him to hear her. He might not be watching but he could hear when she made sounds. She went to the closet where Mr. Lemaitre kept her clothes and threw on a black top and pants. She packed a couple bags of things and left the rest. She left the painting of Sara and Jason for Mr. Lemaitre to gift or destroy as he wished. She didn’t care about anything anymore except getting away from the picture she’d drawn on the wall. Part of her wanted to scribble it away, but he would still be there beneath the obfuscation, glaring out from the wall.

  Instead she took the pen over to the contract wall where it said I belong to Le Maître and crossed out belong to. She replaced the words with hate in big block letters. She stood back and looked at it through tears.

  I hate Le Maître.

  But that was a lie. She might hate the things he’d done to her. She might hate the picture of him on the wall. She certainly hated that he was not a complete person, but she couldn’t hate him. He was her perfect other half and always would be, no matter how much that hurt.

  So she crossed out the word hate and wrote love.

  I love Le Maître.

  Something about seeing it there after everything they’d been through... It seemed like something worth repeating, so she wrote it again, and again, and again, bigger and bigger until the words took up whole walls. Until the words overpowered the sad drawing of him. She was going to leave him alone the way he wanted, but she’d still love him forever and she wanted him to know.

  Then she took her couple of bags and left through the back door, disarming the security system the way she’d seen him do a hundred times. If he was watching her, he didn’t try to stop her. She was pretty sure, by this point, that he wasn’t watching, or he just didn’t care. Either way it didn’t matter. It was past time for her to go.

  Chapter Eighteen: Sad

  Michel hadn’t used drugs or alcohol to inebriation for many years, but he fell into bed like a man passing out, and woke up with something very much like a hangover hurting his brain.

  But not clouding his memory, no. He wasn’t that fortunate. The events of the previous evening unwound in his head with perfect clarity before he was awake enough to block them out. Yelling, fighting, hurting, killing. Not actual murder, but the killing of a relationship with such complete violence that it couldn’t be revived. He had done all those things the night before, subconsciously perhaps, but he’d done it. It was, after all, the way he’d been raised.

  But it was for the best. It was time to return to safety and sanity. He would have to issue apologies and retreat from the Citadel for a while, and apologize to Valentina. He would send her a note and some flowers, not to excuse what he’d done, but to reassure her none of it was her fault.

  As for him, he had finally gotten a work of art based on him. In the style of Valentina, it was direct, true, and illuminating. No buttons, candy, leaves, hardware, or cellophane, no. She had used harsh, monotone lines on his harsh, monotone wall, and captured every ounce of harsh, monotone pain in his soul.

  But she hadn’t stopped there. Over all four walls, she had written, over and over, I love you, because she knew exactly how to hurt him as much as he hurt her. She hurt him by being Valentina, who coated the world in love and emotion, not even caring who it stuck to. He couldn’t even go in the room to repaint it, and he couldn’t bear to let anyone else see it. So her graffiti remained, a nightmare he saw every time he closed his eyes. The energy of her words, the walls themselves, seemed to throb through every night. It kept him awake in his harsh, monotone bedroom where he slept alone.

  Still, he went to work. He continued to live. He watched Valentina when she didn’t know it, to be sure she was okay. She was Valentina, so of course she was okay. She was still fire, La Vampa, all-powerful. She continued to smile and laugh and embrace the world around her, and did beautiful work with her hand-to-hand act. He had all her things delivered back to her apartment, except the painting of Jason and Sara, which he planned to present to them at the time of their wedding.

  Safety and sanity. He longed for it, and in her absence from his life, he found some part of it. Then Jason returned to town.

  “Is it true?” he asked, storming into his office. He was red-faced, livid. “Is it true you ran a train on Valentina in your fucking back room last week?”

  Michel didn’t look up from his laptop. “Do you have an appointment?”

  “I’m going to make an appointment on your fucking face in a couple of seconds. Answer my question, motherfucker. Did you let twenty guys gangbang Valentina last weekend?”

  He couldn’t help arching a brow. “Twenty? Is that the rumor? There weren’t more than fourteen. And I’ve warned you several times not to call me a motherfucker.”

  “You are such a motherfucking asshole. You are such an unbelievable asshole to her.”

  Michel shut his computer with a sigh. “If you’re not going to leave—”

  “I’m not going to leave until you explain how this is appropriate courtship behavior. Are you taking relationship advice from the Marquis de Sade? Have you started smoking crack? Should I be concerned about your mental health? Has she broken your motherfucking brain?”

  He gritted his teeth. “Valentina and I are no longer together.”

  Jason clutched his chest in feigned shock. “Oh no. You’re kidding? You let fourteen other guys fuck her like a piece of meat in your back room, and she broke up with you?”

  His theatrics weren’t doing anything for the headache punishing Michel’s temples. If he could get just one night of decent sleep... “She didn’t break up with me,” he said. “I broke up with her. I mean, I released her. We weren’t dating, as you know. She was only my slave.”

  “Only your slave. Oh, okay, I see.”

  “It amused me to watch other men fuck her. There’s no more to it than that.”

  “Except that you’re in love with her.”

  Michel opened his laptop again. “I’m busy.”

  “Everyone knows you’re in love with her, Michel, everyone but you. How can someone so intelligent be so clueless?” Jason made the universal sign for his head exploding, along with the requisite sound effects.

  Michel rolled his eyes. “Are you finished?”

  “No, I’m not finished.” Jason planted himself in the seat across from Michel’s desk. “I want to tell you something else. There were almost a hundred people in your back room that night—”

  “There weren’t more than fifty.”

  “A hundred fucking people disagree with you, and a hundred fucking people are out there gossiping about this to anyone who will listen. You know how gossip is in the circus. They’re talking about it in Vegas, in Toronto, in Sydney, in Buenos Aires, fucking everywhere about how you’ve freaking lost your brain over a woman and what you did to her that night. And a lot of the people hearing this—they work for you. They respect you. You’re their boss and they’re scared that you
’re not really worthy of that respect anymore.” He crossed his arms over his chest, a muscle ticking in his jaw. “And I’m kind of scared too. If you don’t love her, what’s going on? What’s making you act this way? Is it the wedding? Is it letting go of Sara?”

  Michel waved a hand. He didn’t want Sara in this conversation. “This has nothing to do with my daughter, nothing to do with anything but me and Valentina being a really bad match. I messed up.” He gave Jason a rueful look. “You told me. You warned me at the beginning that I was making a huge mistake and I didn’t listen. I regret that. You have no idea how much.”

  “I have some idea how much, seeing as how I came into practice today and heard that you had fourteen guys shove their dicks into the woman you love.”

  “Enough with the love,” Michel snapped. “You and Sara are about to drive me mad with all this love nonsense. You’re as bad as Valentina. Love, love, love, rainbows and unicorns and hearts made of glitter. None of it is real, you realize.”

  “I’m about to marry your daughter. I think you’d better take those words back.”

  Michel studied the younger man, rubbing a finger over his lower lip. Valentina’s artwork came into his brain, Jason’s key and Sara’s lock. “Maybe love works for some people,” he admitted. “But not for me.”

  Jason blew out his breath and pushed Michel’s laptop shut before he could return to his task. “Jesus Christ, I can’t believe it. It’s your thing with Sara all over again. ‘I don’t know how to love. I don’t have feelings. Wah wah wah, I’m a big forty-five year old uber-Master who can’t process basic human emotions like caring and affection.’”

  His mocking, sing-song voice had Michel’s headache throbbing into a migraine. “Enough,” he roared.

  “No, it’s not enough,” Jason said, talking over him. “I stood by and watched you rip your daughter’s heart out. That’s on me, letting that go on as long as it did. I won’t let you do it to Valentina. And to yourself, you fucking lunatic. You love her.”

  “I think I get to decide who I love. That is, if I wanted to love anyone romantically, which I don’t. Do we have anything else to discuss?” Michel was sure his strident tones could be heard throughout the entire floor. At this point, he didn’t care. “Do you have anything else to say to me before you fucking get out of my office, you fucking prick?”

  Jason stood, scowling at him with an expression that would have lesser men ducking back. “I do have one last thing to say to you. Someday you’re going to be sorry you sat by and watched fourteen guys gangbang the woman you love. You’re gonna really fucking hate yourself for it, and you’re going to deserve every fucking iota of angst you feel.” He went to the door, then turned back, poking a finger into the air. “You won’t ever forget these things you’re doing to her, Michel. And you know what? Neither will she.”

  *** *** ***

  The evenings were the hardest time for Valentina. Even with the noise and bustle of the dormitories all around her, she felt lonely. She read books, she worked on her art, and practiced French a little bit, not because Mr. Lemaitre spoke it, but because she lived in France now and it would be a good language to know. She had lots of friends to help her practice the language, people who had been so nice to her ever since...

  Well, she didn’t want to think about that, but with all the gossip, it was hard to get away from it. People looked at her differently. Nicely, but differently. They were sorry for her. It sucked.

  She ate ice cream when she felt really sad. She watched movies late into the night curled under a blanket on her couch, and sometimes she slept there because she felt too lazy—or lonely—to sleep in her bed.

  She was having just such an evening when someone knocked at her door. She pulled the blanket up a little. She was already in her fuzzy pajamas, settled in for the night.

  “Valentina?”

  Another knock, sharper. Jason Beck. She considered not answering but he could probably hear the television and he’d just keep knocking. She switched the maudlin movie to a cartoon channel, then shuffled over in her slippers and opened her door. She kept it locked now that Mr. Lemaitre had had the deadbolt replaced, and her key.

  “Were you sleeping?” he asked.

  “No. Not yet.” She stood back to let him in.

  He looked around at the mess that comprised her life, the mess that had only grown in scope during the past few days as she tried to forget about her broken heart.

  “Wow,” he said quietly. The last time he’d been here, she’d had everything packed up so she could run away from the circus. So many things had happened since then. He walked over to her bird made of matchsticks and lightly touched one of the wings. He turned around and bumped into a bust made of plaster and colored tiles. He grabbed for it, barely rescuing it from a crash to the floor.

  “I’m sorry.” He placed it back on its wobbly pedestal, a laptop table Valentina had scavenged from someone’s trash heap. “I hope I didn’t mess it up.”

  She shrugged. “If you did, I’ll fix it. There’s more room over on the couch.”

  Jason moved across her living room and sat, still looking wide-eyed around her apartment. Why did her life and her work always elicit that reaction in people? Because you’re a freak. Obviously.

  She tried to think what normal people did when guests came over. “Can I get you something?” she asked, heading for the kitchen. “Some coffee? A glass of water?”

  “Will you come sit with me? I want to talk to you about something.”

  She stopped en route and turned back around. “I know what you want to talk about, and I don’t really want to talk about it.”

  “I do. Come and sit down.”

  Jason wasn’t her Master. He didn’t have the right to issue her orders, but he was her development director and she usually listened when he used that tone of voice. She came back to the couch and collapsed beside him with a sigh. She didn’t want to look at him, so she looked at the TV where a cartoon cat and mouse were embroiled in an endless chase. In her peripheral vision, she could see Jason’s hands tighten on his knees.

  “So, I guess the first thing I want to know is, are you okay?”

  “Of course I’m okay. I’ve been working, haven’t I?”

  His gaze swept her apartment again, all the scraps and odds and ends, and stuff hanging from the ceiling. She was glad she’d left her painting of Jason and Sara at Mr. Lemaitre’s house. There was nowhere to hide it here and it would have ruined the surprise.

  “You can work and still not be okay,” he persisted. “I heard about the Citadel incident second hand, but what I heard was enough to worry me.”

  Valentina forced a brittle smile. “Now I’ve been involved in two Citadel incidents. I think it’s best if I stay away from that place.”

  “What he did to you was wrong.”

  The certainty in his voice ruffled her a little. “Who are you to judge our kink, Jason? How do you know I didn’t enjoy it?”

  He gazed back at her, saying nothing. She felt angry, confused. Defensive. She didn’t like being depicted as a victim. She didn’t like that she probably was the victim in Friday night’s scenario.

  “I liked it at first,” she said, lifting her chin. “I like when he makes me do vile, perverted stuff. I like being humiliated by him, and feeling used by him. That is my kink and I don’t want to be judged for it.”

  Still, nothing from Jason, just that steady gaze. She looked down at her hands, then started tracing the panda faces on her pants. The rest of the words spilled out like a dirty confession.

  “I did it because he asked me to, and with the first couple of guys, I enjoyed it. I’m not ashamed.” The fact that she was saying she wasn’t ashamed kind of gave away the fact that she was struggling with shame, but her coach didn’t call her out on it. “It turned me on, him watching me while other guys fucked me. The fact that he could make me do anything—even that. That he had that much control over me. It felt kind of hot.”

  “I c
an see that side of it,” Jason said.

  “But then...then it started to feel bad and I didn’t know how to stop it.” This was where the shame really ate at her. She had reached a point in the scene where she didn’t know what to do, where it had progressed past eroticism to something ugly, and she had felt powerless to make it beautiful again. “Everyone was watching and really...I didn’t...I didn’t want to mess up the scene. I didn’t want to challenge him in front of everyone. I wanted it to be exciting for everyone, and hot and sexy.” Her voice trailed off as Jason leaned forward, burying his face in his hands.

  He looked up at her a moment later. “I want to fucking kill someone right now.”

  “It was just...just a scene that went bad. It’s not this big disaster everyone is making it out to be. I could have stopped it, but I didn’t because...”

  “Because you’re such a good slave,” he said in a derisive tone.

  “No. Because I thought he’d be able to save the scene. Up until the end, I thought he’d figure out some way to make it better, and hotter, because he’s Le Maître and he’s really good at this stuff.”

  “He usually is,” said Jason grudgingly. “But in this case he fucked up.”

  Valentina hugged herself, feeling the same unsettled angst she felt every time she hashed over the events of that night. “Up until the end, I thought he’d do some magic to make it all mean something, to bring us closer together. To make it about some connection between us. But afterward, I realized there was no connection between us, that I’d been making it up in my head because that’s what I wanted. And that’s when I really felt devastated. That’s when I really felt embarrassed and ashamed.”

  “A relationship with Michel Lemaitre is not for the faint of heart.” Jason reached over and stroked the back of her hand. She wondered if he could feel it trembling. “I told you once, at the very start of all this, that it was a game. That it was supposed to be fun. Do you remember?”