Choice of Cages

by Parker Avrile

  Thorne's shackled isolation was a more advanced form of making him sit alone and bored in the interrogation room all day. The more time he spent looking inside, the sooner he saw how quickly he became bored, the sooner he'd realize what it meant. He was bored so easily because he had nothing inside. He was hollow.

  Before you can fill the hollow man, he has to recognize he's empty.

  There shouldn't be anything all that fascinating in observing that process from the outside. A hooded man shackled to a bench. A clamp on his toe. It wasn't exactly an action movie.

  Jeanretta stared at me, trying to read something in my face I probably didn't want her to read. Good thing she didn't play poker. “Don't shit a shitter, sugar. Yesterday, Ray Shelvin is saying he's the victim of assault on a police officer during the commission of a felony, and now he's saying he might have mumble, mumble made a mistake. The hell is that?”

  “You're a good lawyer.” There was lemon icing on the lemon cookies. No reason for her side-eye.

  “Nobody's that good a lawyer. Look, this is me, Lane. How long have you and I been working with each other? I need you to be straight with me. If Thornhill paid somebody off, if my client was enticed into the commission of a felony...”

  She was worried somebody had asked for a bribe and Thorne's father had paid it. It wasn't an unreasonable worry. Hell, bribery used to be a standard way of doing business in this parish. But one decade's SOP had become this decade's risky business. The time for the giving and taking of actual cash money bribes was done. Fuck, the whole reason I was district attorney at such a young age was because the previous guy was currently residing in a federal facility in Texas.

  “Raynaud didn't pay anybody off. Relax. There was no felony pay-off this week. Not to the sheriff's department. Maybe to the real estate licensing commission but we've got nothing to do with that.”

  “Ha fucking ha.”

  We looked at each other.

  “The hell is this, Lane? You know more than you're saying.”

  “Does Raynaud know you're here?”

  “Fuck, no. He told me to drop it. Told me to invoice him for five hundred dollars an hour and to round up when I calculated my time. I'm being paid off, and I don't fucking appreciate it.”

  “It's good money. Take it. You did your job.”

  “Suge, I ain't done my job until I know that kid is safe.”

  “He's safe, Jeanretta.”

  “I think I need to hear it from him.”

  “You heard it from his father, and now you're hearing it from me.”

  “There's more to this. I heard a rumor Jimmy Victoire came out of a conference with Judge Comptan with a pissed-off look on his face.”

  “I wasn't there, Jeanretta.”

  “You know something, though.”

  “I'm under the impression the judge wasn't impressed with Shelvin's handling of the arrest. He had something to say about the level of evidence he'd expect if the case appeared in his courtroom.”

  Jeanretta finally cracked a smile. “I've been telling you from the beginning. Shelvin's body cam was non-operational at the time of the arrest. That whole assault didn't even happen. He fell on his fat ass and wanted to blame my client to keep from looking like the idiot he is.”

  I wouldn't tell her, but I may have assisted the judge in locating some evidence Shelvin's body cam was non-operational more often than not. Prosecutors are supposed to be on the side of police, but Shelvin was the kind of police who made us all look bad. In my ideal world, he'd find another job.

  “Yeah, he's a sloppy officer. Judges don't like sloppy.”

  “I don't know what you're up to, Lane, and maybe I don't want to know, but I need to be confident that boy's all right.”

  “He's fine. As you've obviously surmised, a lot of people are working to make sure he's fine. He's in a...” I considered the word. “A sort of rehab at the moment. A private community. He can't communicate with the outside world. But I've checked on him personally and I promise you he's fine. He's going to be just fine.”

  “Suge, it isn't that I don't trust you and all, but I don't feel right leaving it like this. Something's fucked up here.”

  “I swear to you, he's fine.”

  “Do I have your word on that?”

  “You have my word.”

  After she left, I pounced on my phone to get caught up on Thorne's struggle. He was still and slumped and, for a moment, I wondered if I'd missed the big moment. Then he began to wriggle first his foot—the one with the clamp on the toe—and then his ass.

  Contradictory impulses. He wanted to grind off into the leather, but the pain shooting up from the toe prevented him from going over the edge. He'd been there almost ninety minutes, so the only reason the pain was still fresh was because someone had come in and done some adjustments.

  I checked the time.

  Soon.

  I pressed a button on the handset to call the receptionist. “What's on for this morning, Sheila?”

  “You have an appointment with the mayor in twenty.”

  “OK. Buzz me in fifteen. And we'll probably be needing more of those lemon cookies.”

  I went back to the stream on my personal phone.

  Now.

  A man entered the brick-lined room wearing a leather domino mask, shoulder-length gloves, and a hard-on. He was too well-disciplined to touch himself or even to touch Thorne anywhere he wasn't supposed to, but still... I didn't enjoy watching the scene as much as I expected to.

  That hard-on disturbed me. Thorne was sexy, bound and bent over like that. Anybody would be hard. It was one hundred percent natural.

  I knew that. I knew everything about this training technique. Distance and denial were a critical element in rewiring his psychology. Thorne had to understand he hadn't earned my undivided attention. The masked man wasn't doing anything wrong. The problem was me. I hadn't been prepared to feel such mixed emotions at watching another man with Thorne.

  Didn't matter. My pleasure wasn't what it was all about.

  The man hovered a minute, all the better to create a sense of drama. Thorne redoubled his efforts at kicking and twitching within his shackles. He probably expected to have wormed his way out of them by now. The intruder who kept entering the cell to make little adjustments was screwing up his plans.

  Gloved hands unclamped the clothespin. Thorne's foot kicked out, its range restricted by the yank of the short manacle chain.

  The masked man checked each of the restraints. Something had been loosened on the left wrist, but the gloved fingers fixed it.

  Satisfied, he clamped the clothespin on the big toe of the other foot.

  Thorne twitched and kicked again.

  The masked man walked away without a glance.

  Good. Perfect. I shifted in my seat.

  The live stream showed Thorne bucking, wriggling, and thrashing. Grinding, really. His cock dug energetically into the leather bench, evidence he'd lost all self-control.

  He was fighting himself as much as he was fighting the shackles. The lightning jolt of pain from his toe wasn't going to hold him back much longer.

  I tapped an icon. Spoke a single word.

  “Come.”

  I knew how the word could echo, magnified, in the brick-lined room. Knew how the hidden speakers made it sound as if my voice was thundering godlike from every direction at once.

  Thorne froze stiff for a half a heartbeat and then bucked hard into the bench. Drool ran down his chin. Tears ran from the corners of his eyes.

  His surrender shamed him. He knew he was utterly under my control at that moment.

  His cock was spewing all over his belly and all over the leather bench.

  My own cock... but I wouldn't think about my own cock.

  Not about me. It's about him. Only him.

  Chapter Twelve

  THORNE

  Three days of torture. How could I take a year of this? And yet I wasn't going to give Lane Lacompte the satisfaction of seein
g me cry like a little girl.

  Fucking safeword. I wouldn't use the fucking safeword. I wouldn't even think it in the privacy of my own head. I'd leave this place at my own time on my own terms. Not because I'd safeworded. Not because I'd broken.

  When I left this place, it would be because I waltzed out the door of my own free will.

  Sure, I had to break down and beg for food. I wasn't even going to give him that much, but then I decided I'd just be playing into his hands if I refused to eat.

  Bad enough that when he came home...

  Home? Wait, what? Where did that word come from?

  Bad enough that when he came back to the dungeon that evening, he found me shackled in my own spunk. Some lackey had come from time to time to move the clothespin around on my toes and to check my shackles. Every time I thought I'd made some progress in getting loose, he'd sashay in to adjust the buckles and to shift the pinch of the clamp.

  Lane was a busy man. Too busy to see to my so-called retraining. It wasn't quite what I'd expected. I thought I was a central player in his mental life. Apparently, I was an afterthought. He didn't even have the time to torture me himself. Instead, he sent in the fucking lackey.

  Fine. Fucking fine. If he thought I was going to tolerate much more of this, Lane Lacompte was in for the surprise of his life.

  I do have a skill set, and it was high time I employed it. In the dark of the third night, I made some adjustments to the video feed. He probably thought the thing in my cell was just a camera lens, but it had a way to communicate with the internet, which means I had a way to communicate with the internet. True, it was on a primitive level, but it was enough to set up a repeating scene of me going into the shower, steaming the place up, the faint pump of a hand moving up and down... the implication being I was taking a nice long shower to take care of business.

  Which I'd actually done the morning before when the original footage was being recorded.

  Water isn't slippery in the way lube is. After grinding myself into the bench the day before, I had to hold myself with a certain care. Had to resist the temptation to pump hard and fast. Instead, I barely closed my fist around my throbbing hard-on. Applied the minimum possible amount of pressure. Stroked myself from base to head to base. Eventually, I began to focus on the crown, cupping the palm of my hand over it to feel the slit gaping open to spit out a steady stream of slickness.

  So tempting to move faster, harder, but I forced myself to take my time. The longer it took and the wider variety of strokes I used, the more the steam from the hot shower swirled around me. More steam meant more mystery, and more mystery meant the ultimate video would be that much more effective.

  It's possible he was watching me on the live stream. Possible but I didn't know if he actually was. Perhaps he'd outsourced the voyeurism to lackeys too. Still, I liked to imagine him leaning forward into a screen, his pants around his ankle, his hand around his own shaft.

  I didn't like to think of him busy on another case, not a thought in his head for one 22-year-old fuckup. He was a high testosterone guy, a hard-driven guy. A prosecutor. Maybe caging me had satisfied whatever he was looking for from me. Now he'd passed me on to the staff while he chased somebody else. Somebody more challenging. Somebody tougher. At the very least, somebody new.

  Fuck Lane Lacompte. He wasn't worth the angst.

  My hand worked faster. I'd forgotten all about wanting to pace myself. My balls were on fire, and the hot water pounding on my back wasn't enough to put it out. My knees bent and swung out, and my cock jerked forward. I came hard and high, the spunk gushing all the way to the underside of my chin. Fortunately, it was an easy clean-up in the steamy shower.

  Then, towel around my hips, the bath and main cell still steamy, I hurriedly went to the camera to make some adjustments.

  Now, the same loop was playing. Steamy glimpses of pink skin through mist. A hand cupped over a plump shaft. If Lane was watching—if anybody was watching—I liked to think they'd lean forward and lose track of time as they tried to get a better view of the naked guy playing with himself in the shower.

  There would be cameras in the corridor. Hell, there'd be cameras everywhere. I didn't really expect to get away with it for long. I was more making a statement. The only reason I was still in this prison was because I'd agreed to be here. I could choose to remove myself at any time.

  So, barefoot and naked except for the towel knotted around my waist, I moved silently down the hall. From time to time, I stopped cold and stood frozen in position. Patience? I'd show him fucking patience. I was acutely aware I was operating on limited time. In fact, I suspected somebody was already watching me.

  Observing to see what I'd do. How good I was. What I thought I could get away with.

  Many of my skills weren't entirely unknown to Lane. He knew I was a master thief. At my level, I have to have high-level skills at entering and altering computer monitoring systems. The day when a steady hand and a set of burglar's tools were enough to make a career was long over. I wasn't exposing anything he didn't already know by showing off my gift at hacking security systems.

  I heard a soft sound, maybe a sigh, from one of the cells. Another unfortunate soul on lockdown. I knocked softly on the door, then louder.

  “Hello?” A puzzled voice. Young. My age or a year or so younger. I hadn't realized my fellow prisoner was so young.

  “May I enter?”

  “Could I stop you?”

  I'd figured out a few things about the electronic key code, and now I punched in six digits. The box made a beep, and then the door swung open.

  I'd expected nakey, but this guy must have been around long enough to earn some privileges. He wore an expensive pair of silk pajamas, and he sat at a desk with a scatter of hardbound books on it. An uncapped yellow highlighter suggested he was in the process of marking up one of those books. Fuck, I hate that, people who deface a book. It really cuts into the resale value. In two strides, I was there, right up close, jamming the cap down hard on the highlighter.

  “The hell you doing?” He looked me up and down. My lack of clothes revealed my status more clearly than any prison jumpsuit, but he almost certainly already knew who I was. “Well, well, well. The new fish knows how to crack some codes.”

  “Well, don't you sound tough? The new fish is soooo impressed.”

  “Look, I'm here to learn something. I don't know what you're here for, but I'd appreciate it if you'd leave.”

  “We should both leave. This is bullshit.”

  “Bullshit for you, maybe. A good deal for me.” He took the highlighter out of my hand and returned to his book.

  “Be honest,” I said. “Is that the life you imagined for yourself? Books?” He didn't get here because he spent too much time in the special collections section of the library.

  “I like books. I could never have them around when I was growing up. There was never any extra money for something like that. When I get out, I'm going to have my master's degree.”

  “I'm soooo impressed.”

  “Yeah, you already said.” He squinted at the book in front of him, then made a point of uncapping the pen and highlighting something else.

  I leaned over and read.

  “What is the cause of historical events? Power. What is power? Power is the sum total of wills transferred to one person. On what condition are the wills of the masses transferred to one person? On condition that the person express the will of the whole people. That is, power is power. That is, power is a word the meaning of which we do not understand.”

  “What the hell is that? The Marquis de Sade?”

  “Tolstoy,” he said. “War and Peace. See, you might know that if you ever read a book.”

  Give me a break. Nobody knows that.

  “I want out,” I said, testing the words.

  “Why are you telling me? There's a safeword you can use, isn't there? Nobody's here who doesn't want to be.”

  I didn't say anything.

  “I
think you want drama. That's what you want. Well, you're not getting it from me.”

  I pushed up the sleeve on the silk pajama top to expose a full sleeve tattoo. Among the thorny roses dripping blood was a skeleton in a top hat with a cigar in its teeth and a knife in its claw. I hadn't seen this exact design before, but I'd recognize it if I saw it again.

  He shrugged. “So now you think you know who I am. Happy now? And I already know who you are.” He touched my ink-free arm. He meant I was a loner without affiliations. Since it was true, I don't know why I felt a little butt hurt at the expression on his face.

  “I have a right to know who I'm dealing with.”

  “So what do you think you know?” His voice dripped more scorn than his tacky roses dripped blood.

  “You're Baron Kriminel. The real motorcycle clubs think you're a bunch of art students.”

  “Everybody's a critic.”

  There were the same cameras in his cell as there were in mine. I was a little surprised they'd let us chitchat this long. Still, it was a shock when two masked men appeared in the tiny room. They each took me by an arm.

  There was no point in getting into a debate about it. We all knew I'd broken the rules.

  “Have fun,” said my fellow prisoner.

  Jerk.

  The masked men were big enough not to need handcuffs to control me. They walked me fast and, if I tried to drag behind, they yanked my arms hard enough to lift me off the floor. An incentive to keep up. All the time, I looked around me, eager to memorize everything I could see. I didn't really want to escape, not yet, but I could foresee a time when it might become a necessity. I didn't intend to cool my heels in illegal detention indefinitely.

  Through the courtyard. Into the dungeon room. Empty at this hour. Probably empty most hours. From what I could tell, Silk Pajamas and I were the only two prisoners in the place.

  “You're making a big mistake,” I said.

  They didn't dignify the comment with a reply.

  “I don't belong here. It's all a big mistake. I want to go home.”

  They bent me over the whipping bench. In moments, I was shackled face-down. The towel had dropped away somewhere.