by Jaden Wilkes
“I said do not take it off, do you understand me?” he barked and jerked the ends together, effectively tightening the blindfold against her face. He followed this with a backhand across her cheek, the sharp smack of skin on skin resonated in the small room. She fell back; she would have landed on the floor but caught herself on the bathroom counter.
“Yes,” she cried out and cowered away from him, hunching over and trying to shove something under her shirt.
“Give me the fucking phone,” he demanded.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said and turned away from him.
“Do not try my patience, little dove. You will find it short lived,” he said, pulling her around and hitting her face on the last two words for emphasis. Her head jerked away under both the strikes, but she was frozen in place, trembling.
“I don’t have anything,” she said again and hunched her shoulders against anticipated blows.
He reached for her and grabbed her arms, stretched them wide and locked his hand around her wrist. He twisted as she grunted in pain, but she dropped the phone with a clatter on the countertop. He let her go and took it, slipping it into his pocket for later.
“You may proceed to clean up, but I am going to check you for a weapon,” he said and shifted to accommodate his growing cock. The thought of running his hand along her firm body was almost too much to contain. He wanted to take her here, bent over the counter so he could see her anguished ecstasy in the mirror as he fucked her from behind.
He exhaled hard, put one hand on her shoulder and started at her waist. The elastic of her pants cut into her flesh, his slipped his finger underneath and dragged it slowly from one side to the next. Her skin felt hot under his, she winced as he traveled along her lower back. This acted to thrust her ass out and it glanced against his hard cock. She felt him and pulled away, frightened or disgusted, he couldn’t tell without looking her in the eyes.
He slid his hand on the outside of her clothing, patting her down for any potential weapons. She was trembling harder now, her breath coming in light panting gasps. He finished by running a hand down each of her legs, coming back up along her inner thighs. She instinctively widened her stance to allow his search as though she’d been through this before. He ended at the top of her V, her wet heat penetrated the fabric of her pants and he felt it on his lingering hand. He pulled back and heard her gasp and exhale, then visibly relax.
“I want you to strip,” he said as he stood up.
“Why-” she began to protest, then flinched and stopped in mid sentence.
“I want to see if you have anything hidden on your body. In places I can’t see through fabric,” he told her. “You can take your clothes off, or I can cut them off. It’s up to you.”
He admired the stubborn set of her jaw as she weighed her options. She swallowed, tilted her head and said, “You’re getting off on this, aren’t you? You fucking perv!” The moment the words left her mouth she dropped back into a cowering crouch, expecting blows.
Dimitri looked at her there, cringing from his touch, and laughed. “Yes, I suppose I am,” he told her. “That’s only because it’s been so long since I had a woman. And even longer since I didn’t have to pay.”
She stood carefully once she realized he wasn’t going to hit her. That was one of the small tricks Sergei had taught him when interrogating prisoners. Keep them on their toes, intersperse physical violence with good humour or amusing stories. Mind fuck them, as his mentor had once said.
“Why would you have to pay,” she asked, forgetting his earlier lesson of saying only yes or no. He would let this slip; give her some confidence before knocking her down again.
“Many reasons, too many to trouble you with,” he told her. “Now let’s get you out of those clothes.”
She complied this time. She kicked off her boots, unzipped her hoodie and pulled it open. She was wearing a simple tee shirt underneath, black with a graphic of the planet that read, “Earth First.”
“We’ll fuck up the rest of the planets later, eh?” Dimitri said with a grin.
“What?” she asked as she shrugged off the hoodie and lifted up her shirt to expose the milky white skin underneath.
“Just an old joke, your shirt,” he said, and noticed the scars. Across her beautiful flat abdomen were slashes of healed cuts, small dashes of puckered pink flesh in perfect criss cross patterns. He reached out and touched one, saw her flinch away, and pulled his hand back. “Who did this to you?” he demanded. His chest contracted at the thought of somebody attacking her smooth skin.
She hung her head and felt in front of her for the counter, then dropped her clothes on the surface. She slipped her fingers in the waistband and started to slide her pants over her hips when he noticed the same thing on her arms. He grabbed one and dragged it towards him. Holding it there, extending, he could see deeper gashes along the inner arm. A precise execution of torture. He wanted to tear the blindfold from her eyes and learn the origin of these defilements. “I said who did this?” he demanded again.
She moved her face away from him and continued to slide her pants down her long legs. She bent over to slip them off her feet and he was momentarily distracted by the wiggling of her round ass in front of him. She was wearing plain white cotton panties with small pink flowers on them. She had on a small white bra, both were startlingly bright and stood out against the lines of pink scars all over her body. He saw them on her thighs, her calves, her sides. It struck him as odd that there were none on her back. Most cases of torture he’d overseen started with whipping the back. Her body’s story confused him.
“I have to know who did this to you,” he said, his voice ragged with his need.
She stood up and placed her pants on the counter on top of her other clothes. She took a great shuddering breath and simply said, “I did,” as she crossed her arms in front of her defiantly, as if waiting for his response.
He reached for her again. His burned skin with his Bratva tattoos no longer looking so foreign against hers. He pulled her around to face him, although he could not see her eyes, he could read so much in the rest of her. Her mouth was set in a determined grimace of self-loathing. He recognized that look; he had seen it in the mirror so many times since Sergei’s attack.
He held her shoulders and looked down at her. She was still beautiful to him, her imperfections only enhancing the absolute perfection of her face, her hair, her form. In a strange twist, her scars elevated her beauty to Dimitri. Burdened with his own physical testaments to pain, he saw her patterned slashes as a manifestation to her strength. She wore her inner beauty on her flesh, and it matched her outward perfection.
He stroked her arm, ran his fingers down and felt the bumps like Braille, as if trying to read the story of her life on her ruined skin. He stopped when his hand reached the fold of her arm at the crook of her elbow and settled there. He looked at her face, tears leaking from under the blindfold, and said, “Little dove, what are we going to do with you now?”
Chapter Ten – Columbia
The moment her captor had closed the door, she reached for her phone. She slipped the blindfold up and tried to lock the door. Realizing it had no door lock; she knew she’d have to be fast. She couldn’t remember any numbers. She scrolled through Marco’s phone and none of them seemed familiar. She cursed herself for never remembering any of them; once they were in her phone she didn’t need to know them. Marco said Stuart’s number was in here, but she suddenly blanked on his last name, her brain freezing under the stress of her capture.
Reluctantly she called home. They’d had the same number since she was small, before the days of cell phones. She remembered practicing it and memorizing it for her third grade class on safety. How could her kind teacher have known that it wasn’t the outside world she needed to be kept safe from, the danger in her life came from inside her house.
She punched the numbers in and waited with bated breath as it rang. On the fifth ring her father pi
cked up.
“Hello?”
“Dad?” she whispered.
“Columbia, where the fuck are you girl? I waited for you…”
“I know, I’m sorry Dad but I’m in trouble.”
“Out slutting around? That’s the kind of trouble you brought on yourself.”
“I need help. Can you call my friend Stuart and tell him I’ve been caught?”
“Call him yourself, you little whore. I waited for you…” he replied and hung up.
She held the phone for a second to make sure he wasn’t going to pick it up again, startled when the call ended at last. Her captor called to her and she replied, hoping to stall him. She was going to call back but she heard the door handle wiggled. She tried to hide the phone but he found her struggling to tuck it back under her bra.
He caught her and she ended up hit, but it was nothing worse than she’d taken at home a million times over the years.
She caught a glimpse of his face though, in the mirror before she had her blindfold back down. She saw beautiful blue eyes and a handsome man, just half of his face reflected to her. She had been startled by his looks, almost expecting him to be hideous because of his treatment of her. She supposed not all criminals looked like they lived a life of crime, and not all monsters wore their evil on the outside. Some people wore their ugly deep inside where nobody could see it. Those were the most dangerous monsters of all.
He demanded she strip and she froze. She had managed to avoid being naked in front of anyone for the last decade, always getting out of PE with a doctors note and never going swimming even on the hottest days during the summer.
She was humiliated that he was going to see her secret shame. She was a cutter. Only saying she was a cutter might be an understatement. She was a destroyer of beautiful things. Only her father’s warning to hide her terrible obsession from those outside the family had prevented her from doing it to her face.
She wanted to hurt herself, when she was feeling stress or self-hatred or anxiety building, it felt so good to release it through the surface of her skin. She never talked about it with anyone, but a quick Google search brought up thousands of cutting websites. At this point she didn’t think she could be helped, all the rage and sense of helplessness she’d felt over the years was directed towards herself. It had almost become an artistic expression of anger and hatred.
She heard him make a joke about her shirt, but it hadn’t registered. What she had been waiting for was the inevitable, his voiced filled with disgust as he questioned her. He initially thought she had been attacked; even this sociopathic criminal couldn’t comprehend the depths of her depravity, her madness.
What she hadn’t expected was his voice filled with kindness and compassion. She wished she could see his face when he spoke to her. She wanted to see his brilliant blue eyes when he talked about her body, she heard warmth there that didn’t match up with the man she assumed him to be.
When he took her from the bathroom and tied her again, she sensed how his touch had changed. He was much more tender with her, more careful, as though she were a delicate beauty instead of a ruined, self-mutilating outcast. Stuart had recoiled in horror when he felt her arm, she couldn’t imagine how he would have reacted had he seen the rest of her body. Her father was disgusted and bewildered by her self-harming even though he was essentially the root cause of it all. This man, however, seemed fascinated by her.
The first time she had tried it had been in the fifth grade. She was ten and starting to develop the first buds of her breasts ahead of the other girls. The attention from the boys in the class had caused the girls to turn on her, calling her names and taunting her mercilessly. She didn’t have anyone to talk to at home, Eden was a toddler and her mother had already checked out of their lives by then.
She had been in the bathroom, after an evening bath. Her father had hammered on the door while she was drying off, screaming because she was never to deny him entrance to any room in his goddamned house. He had backed off when she didn't respond, but she knew he would be all her over the moment she opened it.
Her mother’s razor blade was lying on the edge of the bathtub; she had picked it up and thought about cutting her wrists rather than face him. The thought of him finding her dead in a tub full of pink water brought her great satisfaction. Only her sister’s life had kept her hanging on, that house had been no place for a little girl and Columbia couldn’t abandon her.
Instead she had cracked the plastic casing and pulled the razor out. She had stared at the perfect, flawless white flesh on her inner arm for what seemed like an eternity. She felt as though she was hovering in between worlds, between childhood and something else. Not quite adulthood...purgatory perhaps, a forever after of waiting for something better to save her from the life she was trapped in.
The first cut had been painful, a shock of sensation for a girl who had learned to dull her senses against that which was happening to her in the moment. It was addicting, as was the beauty of the welling blood on her flesh, and the patterns it made as it dripped into the white porcelain sink. The entire experience had an otherworldly feel and for the first time in months she felt in control of her environment. She couldn’t keep her body from changing, and she couldn’t lock her doors at night, but she could carve herself into something beautiful.
After that it became her go-to for pent up emotions. As easy as drinking coffee for a buzz or taking a Tylenol when battling a headache, cutting herself offered relief for everything that ailed her. By high school she had learned to hide her body and knew what to say to their decrepit family doctor to get those notes out of PE. Her father had stopped commenting and her mother didn’t notice. Eden made a few cruel comments about them from time to time, but eventually lost interest.
Nobody else had ever seen the beauty in it though, nobody except this man who had captured her. His voice betrayed his feelings and she knew he understood the why of her body modifications. His brilliant, gorgeous blue eyes had scanned her naked body and found her worthy.
Something completely unexpected in a place like this.
She was still terrified of him and feared he would kill her, but perhaps it was better to be killed by somebody who saw her as beautiful than to be kept barely living by somebody who only saw the damage. He could be the one to finish the thing she had been working on all these years, her departure from this world. Suddenly the idea of death was no longer so frightening, Eden could take care of herself now and nobody else would blink an eye at her passing. It was time to let go and end her own suffering through the hands of a man who thought she was beautiful.
He had bound her to a chair this time, and left the room. She sat in the quiet and tried to accept the idea that she was ready to die. Death would be more a relief from her life.
As she contemplated these things, the spark of defiance that had kept her alive all these years started to flicker. By the time she imagined her death at his hands for the hundredth time, the flame was growing and gaining energy. And by the time she heard him coming back for her, she was ready to fight again. Whether he found beauty in her scarred patterns of cuts, she was ready to fight for her life. She wanted to leave this place in one piece and she wasn’t quite resigned to giving in any time soon.
Chapter Eleven – Dimitri
Dimitri gave himself an out, time away from the girl. She confused him, and he needed to settle his thoughts. Since the big revelation that it was she destroying her own body, he had backed off a bit and let her have some time in the bathroom. He then tied her to the chair and left her alone. She hadn’t moved when he’d returned, which is exactly where he wanted her...anxious, exhausted, emotionally drained, and ready to tell him everything.
He’d texted the concierge but was unable to tell him about her. They'd gone over small details of the next day's events, the menu and an expected delivery, but that was it. He didn’t know what he would say about her, and he was certain by now the concierge would suggest he kill her and give hi
m the number of somebody to dispose of the body. Dimitri wasn’t convinced that was the best thing to do...he didn’t know if he could stand the thought of her limp body being dragged out of here by some base criminal.
When he returned to the room, he pulled a chair over to where she sat, bound to her own chair. He positioned his in front of her and took a seat. She was still blindfolded and slumped against her bonds. Her white skin, even with the scars, almost glowed in the soft light of the room. Her head sagged and she looked defeated. Dimitri still hadn’t spoken to her, giving her time to worry.
He’d gone through the phone when he was out of the room, but had come up empty handed with any clues to her name. It apparently belonged to somebody else, a young man with a predilection for tall blondes, booze, and blowjobs...all caught on the phone’s camera.
He considered the fact that she might have stolen it, but that didn’t sit right with him. He wanted to call the last number she had dialed when she was in the bathroom, but the sick part of him didn’t want to make this easy. The dark part of his brain wanted to toy with her and draw the information out the old fashioned way, through mind fucking and torture. Perhaps he justified it by still classifying her as a possible threat, but once again, if he were being completely honest with himself, he would admit that he simply wanted to see her on her knees, begging him for her life and his cock, each having equal value in her world.
He cracked his knuckles and let his eyes move up the length of her body to settle on the valley between her full breasts. There were beads of sweat forming there; salty drops as a testament to her fear making her run hot.
