“Fine. I just need to be sure you understand all your options. While you're here, you'll do as you're told. There are certain exercises you will be expected to undergo. You won't always understand the purpose of those exercises. You're not supposed to. You're supposed to learn to obey without question. To learn to trust.”
“Fuck that double. You know what my motto is, Mr. Prosecutor?”
A couple of tiny black caviar eggs had dropped from my bagel. I picked them up with my fork and let them melt over my taste buds. Salty. A faint hint of the ancient sea.
I took my time. All the time in the world. All the better to make the point of how much I was enjoying breakfast and he wasn't.
Finally, I said, “I doubt I care about a thief's personal motto, although I'm sure it's highly admirable that you bothered to formulate one.”
He glared back at me. “You won't fake me out. You want to know.”
“I think you give yourself too much credit. We'll be working on that in the course of this program.”
“Always question authority. Always.” He lifted his chin and pretended he wasn't staring at the last tiny triangle of bagel left on my plate. There was a single tiny black egg on top of it.
I pushed away the plate, sat back, made a steeple of my hands. “So. We've already identified one of your problems. See, I am authority, and I don't have time for society's backseat drivers. We can't have a peaceful community if we're always in a state of challenge.”
“I am not a backseat driver.”
My laugh wasn't quite feigned and wasn't quite real. An expression of superiority. “A thief can hardly consider himself a leader, now can he? You're the very definition of the second-guessing backseat driving loser.”
“Fuck you.”
“Your philosophy is the philosophy of anarchism. If you want to operate in a free society, if you want to fit in, you have to trust authority. Respect it.”
A lot of doms actually believe the discount store Marquis de Sade bullshit. Me, I was just repeating the words. If I'm honest with myself, I had no idea what I really believed. As a lawyer, I was trained to see both sides. A good lawyer can see every point of view from all the angles. A bad one only sees what he wants to see.
But it did seem true to me that an authority always in question was an authority in the process of being undermined. You couldn't have a stable society when nobody respected the guys in charge.
On the other hand, it seemed equally true to me that authority couldn't go unchallenged.
Well, in my head, I might be the most wishy-washy dom of all time, but I couldn't come across that way in public. So I said the words I was expected to say like an actor in a play. Did it matter if I believed them? Hell, no. It only mattered if the things I said and did changed Thorne's head the way I wanted it changed.
Thorne, sulky, knew he was in a weak place, and he knew he'd put himself there. So he had to talk a lot. Some doms would have gagged him sooner, but I wanted him to hear the weakness in his own voice.
“Trust is earned,” he said, and we both knew he was repeating a cliché. “Respect is earned.”
“Sure, it's earned. The thing is when it's earned, you're obligated to give it. And you haven't been keeping up your side of the social contract.”
“How the hell have you earned my respect?”
“I'm an officer of the law voted into public office by the will of the people,” I said. “That should be enough.”
“You're a dirty prosecutor in a dirty parish in a dirty state famous worldwide for its dirty politicians and dirty police. Give me a fucking break.”
“If that's your attitude, we've really got our work cut out for us. Would you like something to eat?”
His eyes were bright. “I'm not hungry.”
“Yes, you are.” I tilted the plate toward him.
“I'm not eating your scraps.”
I pulled the plate back. He couldn't stop staring at that triangle of bagel. That little pea of caviar.
“Now you're going to have to say please.”
“Fuck you.”
“All right, I think I've humored you long enough.” My football days weren't so far behind me that I'd forgotten how to move. Over the desk and on top of Thorne and then pulling him into a standing position and then shoving him against the wall. His cock had been flickering on and off for a few minutes, but there was no kidding himself that this was mere morning wood when I pushed him back hard and his cock stood up proud against his belly.
He liked being manhandled like that. Part of him did anyway.
“What's your safeword?”
Defiance in the eyes. “You won't trick me into saying it. I know you'd love nothing better than to see me stuck in prison.”
“Are you going to fight me every step of the way, Thorne?”
“Fuck, yes,” he said.
“Good,” I said. “That's the way I want it.”
He swallowed. I pushed my butt back a little, so my bulge was no longer pressing into his naked body. My hard-on wasn't the point of this exercise.
“You're hungry. Ask for food politely, or do without. You have ten seconds.”
“Fuck off.”
The gag from last night was still sitting on my desk. Time to shove it back into his impudent mouth so he could taste his dried spit on it.
His eyes went wide, and he made all these little anguished noises. Oh, I knew exactly what he was trying to say.
What the fuck happened to the ten seconds?
I pushed at his hips and shoulders to spin him around, and he lifted his fists. My heart skipped a beat. For a moment, I feared he was going to give the hand signal.
But that wasn't it. It was Thorne kidding himself he could fight back. He tried to throw a punch, and I easily caught his wrists and locked them together at the small of his back with puncture-proof plastic cuffs.
Try picking the lock on those, Mr. Master Thief.
“A starving man is no match for a bigger man on a high protein diet,” I said. “Like it or not, Thorne, you will learn respect. You prefer to learn the hard way, and that's completely acceptable to me. The hard way is better anyway. Lessons learned with pain stick longer.”
His eyes flashed heat and anger over the ball gag.
“The next time I say you have ten seconds, you will understand that you will comply immediately or else. For now, you go hungry.”
Chapter Ten
THORNE
“Patience will be your first lesson. It will likely be your most important lesson.”
Fuck patience. Fuck you.
“Patience is the foundation of every accomplishment. People become criminals because they're looking for a shortcut. Until you learn patience, nothing changes for you.”
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Lane was marching me down the hall, his big hand sunk deep into my upper arm. The Spanish courtyard looked more Spanish by daylight. Red tile. A round goldfish pond. Citrus trees in terracotta pots.
A mockingbird swearing somewhere. They have a way of spitting at their rivals. I always wondered about that lady we read in high school who thought mockingbirds only sang sweet songs. Had she never been outdoors?
I was in the mood for some spit-swearing myself. Fuck this fucking drool running down my fucking chin.
The pervy prosecutor of Angelina Parish sure felt chatty this morning. He kept talking as he walked me across to the brick-lined dungeon room. Easy for him to be in a good mood. Who brought in that fucking caviar? There were a lot of people in on this shit. More than I would have imagined. How did you keep an operation this size a secret? Public corruption was the only way. A lot of powerful people had to be involved.
My fucking father. He knew, maybe not the details, but he knew.
I needed to keep my eyes open. It would be helpful to figure out how many people were on the staff and what they did and where they were stationed. All of them couldn't be pervs, could they?
Or could they?
The default a
ssumption is that kink is a, well, a kink in the normal way of things. But maybe the struggle for dominance is the natural way of things, and the so-called vanilla lifestyle is the real kink. Maybe, given the chance, everybody gets off on power or submitting to power.
Or being forced to submit to power.
No. No. Don't let him get to you. He's the perv, not you. He's playing on his position of power and the physical attraction to get into your head.
“You have a lot of skills, Thorne. I want you to think about what you did to put yourself here. There's absolutely no excuse for somebody with your level of skill to have this many arrests on your record. Eleven... no, twelve now. Twelve arrests before the age of twenty-three.”
Talk, talk, talk. I swallowed around the gag to keep from drooling. There was a lot I'd like to say, but it wasn't going to happen right now.
Sure, I had a few arrests. Nine of them were before age seventeen. I'd made mistakes. Sure, I had. How else do you develop your skill except by trying things out to see what works and what doesn't? Anyway, juvenile records were sealed. In theory, no one knew about them. Of course, in reality, Beauville was a small place. Everybody knew.
“What drives you, Thorne?” Lane asked. “What's going on in that head of yours? Sometimes I wonder. And sometimes...”
He didn't complete the sentence. We'd reached the door, and he cupped his hand over the electronic keypad to punch in a twelve-character string of numerals. The mockingbird, tired of talky humans loitering in his courtyard, had flown to the ground and started flashing white wing patches, a ridiculous threat from a bird who didn't know his own size. I pretended I was looking at him, but really I was getting a pretty good idea of the key code.
Lane Lacompte better pack his lunch if he thought he was going to keep me in this cage forever.
The door came open, and he pushed me inside. A windowless room. Walled in red brick. The spotlight was already turned on, or perhaps it had been left burning all night, but the shackles on the wall were empty.
I wouldn't let him hang me there. No fucking way.
Not gonna happen.
“Yeah,” Lane was saying. “Sometimes I wonder what's going on in your head, and sometimes I don't give a fuck. I'm going to put new stuff in that pretty little head of yours.”
He pushed me forward, and I stumbled and then regained my balance. My cuffed wrists jerked, pulling my shoulders, reminding me I was in no position to defend myself at the moment.
Fine. Soon. Just you wait, Lane Lacompte. I'll humor you for now, but just you wait.
My stomach made a little growly sound. Lane must have heard it because his lips flickered up at the corners.
Fuck my stomach. Fuck him.
If he thought I was going to break down and safeword over a couple of missing meals, he had no idea of who he was dealing with. Thorne Raynaud was nobody's princess. There was no fucking way I'd break that easy.
Drool ran from my gagged-open mouth. Fuck that too.
I refused to think about what was happening further south. Willpower was stronger than biology.
There was a padded bench I hadn't noticed the night before. Maybe it hadn't been there. Maybe somebody had come in earlier and set it up expressly for me to be punished. There were factories that made these things. Stores that sold them. It seemed all very premeditated somehow. People knew about these fantasies.
No, not fantasies. These realities.
My stomach fluttered harder, and this time it wasn't hunger.
Lane shoved me toward the bench in question, and I sat down hard.
“On your belly,” he said.
Was it worth resisting? I hesitated.
He sighed a melodramatic sigh and picked up something from the wooden bench that glinted silver.
Oh, shit.
I rolled over and hoped it was fast enough. The bench was too short to accommodate the length of my body. If I wanted to support my neck and head, I had to let my legs hang off, which meant I ended up kneeling and bent over to present my backside. The leather padding gave under my weight, but I was still crushing an embarrassingly large erection. Lane grasped one of my ankles and locked it into a fur-lined leather cuff chained to the bench's stout leg.
I could have kicked about it, but what was the point?
I let him lock in the other leg. Somebody had put knee-pads where my knees hit the concrete floor.
They'd planned for this. Known I'd be chained like this.
My blood itched hot in my veins. This couldn't be exciting. Could it?
“You know what I think?” Lane asked. A rhetorical question. Fuck him for sounding so calm and neutral and unperturbed. “I think you got impatient. You wanted to prove yourself to your father overnight, and there was absolutely no reason for it. You're already rich, you have every advantage.”
I'm not rich just because my dad's rich. I couldn't live my life sitting in an office hammering out real estate deals.
Fuck. I have blood in my veins.
I flexed my ankles against the cuffs. Testing them. I could work with this, I thought.
Lane laughed. A snick-snack of a pair of police-issue scissors, and the handties were gone. My wrists tingled, and I knew there were red marks where he'd pulled them tight. My reactions were slowed. Before I could make my move, he'd yanked my right arm down and buckled it into its manacle. Then the left arm.
Because of the low height of the leather bench, I was effectively shackled on hands and knees with the leather bench supporting me from upper thigh to chin.
It seemed low for a whipping bench, but I imagined it would serve the purpose.
Son of a bitch.
“A smart guy like you should be graduating college this year.” Lane was still chirping away. “Instead, you're not even a high school graduate.”
Was I really here to listen to another lecture about my lack of education? I had things to do. Places to go. I didn't have time to sit around listening to some teacher yap at me. Anyway, teachers couldn't tell me the things I needed to know.
I tried to say something, but all that came out was the drool and a few low groans.
“See, that's what I'm talking about,” Lane said. “That kind of attitude. That kind of impatience.”
The son of a bitch sounded happy about it.
“Yes, patience will be your first lesson. Without patience, you have nothing. You can't sit still to learn, you can't be open to what's going on around you. All you're hearing is the noise in your head.”
All I'm hearing is bargain basement bullshit.
I didn't let myself think about that glint of silver. I didn't let myself think about the... situation. About how hard I was.
Lane was standing too far away. He was considering how I looked from a distance.
I forced myself to hold very still. No twitching that muscle in my ass. No rotating my pelvis in a slow, secretive grind...
“You can't hide anything from me in here,” he said. “You'll have to learn that. Everything is open to me.”
He was close again, squatting low. His hand darted between my thighs.
No. No.
I flexed my hands in the manacles. Made a fist of my left hand. It would be so easy to give the signal.
No.
Remembering the prisoner from the night before, I feared he would put the silver clothespin on my balls. If he did, if I broke in less than twenty-four hours...
At the last possible moment, he bent even lower. A pinch on my big toe. Agony, and then numbness. I shuddered all over in a vain effort to shake it off. The pain was a distraction, effective at softening my hard-on, at least for the moment.
It wouldn't be effective forever.
“Patience,” he said. “The key virtue. Without patience, nothing is accomplished. With patience, everything is possible.”
Fuck you. Fuck you double.
And then he did the worst thing he could do. The one thing I'd never imagined he could do.
He walked out.
&nbs
p; Chapter Eleven
LANE
Jeanretta Hebert was talking to the officer on duty at the front desk when I arrived at the criminal justice complex. Oops. I really should have gotten back with her after that golf course meeting, but I suppose I assumed Raynaud would take care of that. “I have a bone to pick with you, Lane Lacompte.”
“Nice morning to you too.” I was in an unreasonably good mood for a man who'd barely slept. I shouldn't have enjoyed Thorne's submission quite so much, but I did. He wasn't as tough as he thought he was, and the waiting would soften him even more.
This wasn't about me. It was about him.
Still, there wasn't necessarily anything wrong with enjoying my work. If it was good work. If it was going to change his future.
There was an app on my phone that streamed from a camera in the brick-lined dungeon. I could check on him at any time. Of course, I was an hour away, but an unseen staffer was always watching. If something happened, if he gave the signal, hell, if the building caught on fire... anything... there was someone who would instantly and silently appear to make sure he was OK. Thorne's safety was my first priority.
My only priority, I told myself. All of this, the whole purpose of this, was to make a better life for Thorne.
It wasn't about me, my responses, or the curve of his shapely ass. I was in control. Not just in control of him but in control of myself.
I ushered Jeanretta into my office and closed the door. The coffee urn was set up, and there was a small tray of lemon cookies. A thoughtful touch on the part of my staff, who couldn't know I'd already breakfasted on caviar and salmon.
“Fucking lemon cookies, Lane?”
“You're welcome.”
“You know why I'm here.”
“Why don't you tell me?”
“Where's my fucking client? He's disappeared from the system.”
I shrugged. “The charges have been dropped, and he's free to go. The rest is up to him.” Thorne had a way of making his eyes all large and innocent when he lied. I tried to emulate the tactic, but it wasn't as easy as he made it look.
It took a surprising amount of effort to relax my shoulders. To relax my hands. My fingers twitched to pick up my phone and check the stream again.
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