by Cerys du Lys
§
She walked past him, out into the bedroom again. There was a towel on the bed but she ignored it. Her skin was drying almost instantly in the heat.
She didn’t look at Rob. She didn’t need to in order to know that his eyes were following her every move.
She’d seen the hunger there, seen how much he was torn between desire and... what? Duty? Fear?
She went to stand on the balcony. It was enclosed by a waist-high frosted-glass wall, the garden some distance below. She couldn’t see any neighboring houses, which confirmed that this was one of the large villas you could see from the beach, each isolated from any neighbors by some distance.
She reached up and pulled clawed fingers through her hair, teasing it out as it dried in the sun.
The sun on her skin felt like that damp north London morning when she had stepped out of prison. A sudden liberation, the luxury of a freedom she had not had in... how long had she been here?
Like that morning, though, that sense of liberation was an illusion. She had never been free, never really been released from the Hell her life had become. That she was captive now somehow seemed no different. Locked up in prison, or in this luxury villa; trapped in the cage of her own anger.
Freedom was an illusion.
§
Rob had stayed in the room, giving her a little distance.
She couldn’t work him out. Early on, he’d told her he’d just kind of drifted into the life he had here. He’d come to owe people favors, and he’d found ways to pay them back.
She didn’t know what he did, though, what kind of double life he had. All those periods when he was away from the bar. Was he up here at the villa, or was he elsewhere, doing whatever it was that he had become involved with?
She knew all about double lives, though. She’d lived one for so long without even knowing. And Jeremy...
She turned, resting the small of her back against the rail that ran along the top of the balcony’s enclosing wall.
Eye contact was all it took.
He came to her, slowly, like a fish being reeled in, the eye contact never breaking.
She stretched up and kissed him, their bodies still a short distance apart. His lips pressed against hers, hesitant, holding back. Stubble scraped her face.
His hand moved to her waist, and came to rest on the spread of her hips.
She put a hand to his face, finding the roughness of that stubble.
Such an intense moment.
She hadn’t expected that: the way such a hesitant, minimal contact could send sensations ripping through her body like this.
None of this was what she’d intended.
She pushed away from the railing, standing, finally pressing her naked body against his. Feeling the rough denim of his shorts against her belly, his thighs against hers, her breasts squashing against his ribs through the thin cotton of his shirt.
She hadn’t expected to suddenly need this so much. Not now. Not like this.
She couldn’t allow herself to be so weak.
She just couldn’t...
She swung her foot, hooking his instep and swinging his leg away so that suddenly he was teetering on only one foot. It was a move she’d learned in prison. One that worked on even the biggest assailant: take them off balance, then use their weight and momentum against them.
As he flailed for control, she drove her shoulder against his chest, knocking him further off balance, and suddenly he was leaning over the railing, starting to fold over, his arms spreading as he tried to catch himself.
She ducked down to grab hold of that swinging leg by the ankle and yanked it up with all her strength. Now he was at the pivot point, his weight equally distributed either side of the balcony’s retaining rail.
She heaved harder, felt him start to go, and she knew she had him, he was going to fall over the edge, crash to the ground below.
He caught the railing and somehow managed to stop himself. She felt that balance point shift, start to come back, and then he hauled himself back, beating the momentum that had been taking him over the edge.
Suddenly that leg was swinging back down, her grip on the ankle slipping.
She fell away, crashing into the glass balcony door, pain jarring through her body. There was a ringing blackness as her head struck something hard, a sudden dizzying rush, and when she was able to focus again he was facing her, his back to the drop, standing with his legs and arms spread, poised like a wrestler about to engage an opponent.
“What the fuck?”
He stepped towards her, reached out, and his grip on her wrist was like a vise.
He hauled her up, and for a moment they stood in a crude mockery of how they had been before: bodies pressing, her breasts squashed against his ribs, the hard roughness of denim against her belly.
His mouth almost touching hers, he hissed, “Just what the fuck did you think you were going to do next?”
She didn’t know. Hadn’t thought beyond the moment, the opportunity. Hadn’t thought how she might escape this place, this country, this life.
Nothing beyond...
She crumpled against him, hating herself for the tears that started to spill. She buried her face against his chest, tried desperately not to sob, not to let him feel the heaving of her chest as she fought this sudden eruption.
He released her wrists and wrapped his arms around her, his grip on her just as secure as the one he’d held before.
Slowly, her sobbing eased, and she just stood there, leaning into his embrace, feeling his strength against her, all around her.
Now... she was very aware of his touch, of the hand resting on the small of her back, the other higher up, between her shoulder blades. Of the rise and fall of his chest against her face. Of the pressure of that denim against her belly and... lower down. Her smoothness pressing against a denim-clad thigh, not moving, just... there.
She tipped her head up, and his eyes locked on hers, a hungry look, a breathtakingly urgent look.
His mouth, so close to hers. Closer, and their lips brushed. Such a delicate touch it might not have happened at all. The brush of a butterfly’s wing, the lightest breath of air.
He pulled away, stepped back, releasing her.
He was shaking his head, and now his eyes wouldn’t meet hers.
She stood there, her heart pounding. The physical memory of his touch still such a powerful thing, even now that it was gone.
He reached for her, took her arm roughly, making her gasp with pain.
When he pulled her into the room she thought for a moment that he was going to throw her onto the bed, but no, that moment was gone.
He dragged her so roughly she had to scamper to keep up and not fall and be dragged.
Seconds later, she was standing there, her back to the wall, her wrists secured before her in the cuffs again, held by a short loop of chain to the ring set into the wall.
Rob backed away from her then, turned and headed for the door. Pausing, he looked back. “You can’t do that,” he said, his voice tight. “You can’t fool me like that.”
§
That moment when she’d just folded into him...
Had she been trying to trick him? Had she just been angling for another chance to break free, as she had on the balcony?
Had she only imagined that there had been anything more to it than that?
Her mind playing games with her.
Confusing her.
The drugs, screwing with her senses. Distorting everything.
4
Those moments.
The ones where you’re pulled up short, when you realize that everything you had believed has been built on a foundation of lies and misperceptions.
The ones where everything you had believed, the things that guided and shaped the person you were... all of them: snatched away.
Those moments.
Eleanor Dryton had known far too many of those moments.
§
They came for h
er that evening. Danny and a man she’d never seen before. Tall, dark hair slicked back, eyes all over her nakedness. For a moment she thought this must be him, the man. The one who had taken it upon himself to decide when Jeremy had been more valuable to him dead than alive.
But no.
“Uncuff her,” snapped Danny, and the new guy stooped, and yanked at her chain to pull her cuffs up so he could unlock them.
El winced at the pain in her wrists when he pulled the chain, but bit down on it. He’d deliberately tried to hurt her, and she didn’t want to give him the satisfaction.
Danny nodded his head, indicating the door.
“Time for you to meet the man,” he said, a cruel smile on his face.
§
La Casa Blanca lived up to its name. Everything was white, and the place had been built cleverly so that sunlight angled in through windows, and high, domed skylights, flooding the interior with light to emphasize that whiteness. Decoration was minimal, making the few big, abstract canvases on the walls all the more dramatic.
Danny led her through the building and down wide stairs to ground level, and then down another level to a basement. Unlike the upper floors, this level was dark, lit only by a few spotlights around the walls of a wide room.
There were more chains here, attached to the walls, and in the middle of the room there was a wooden bench that made her think of an operating table.
She stood where Danny had indicated, a sudden cold nausea deep in the pit of her belly.
Was this where Keira had been mutilated? She remembered her dreams, the images of Keira further mutilated.
Was this where the awful reality of her pitiful quest for revenge would reach its conclusion?
How had she been so stupid? How had she put herself in this position?
At another nod from Danny, the other guy stepped behind her and slipped a band of fabric across her eyes, knotting it tightly at the back of her head.
Now she was in complete darkness, and this made her feel so much more vulnerable, standing there naked, waiting.
Just standing there.
§
She wanted to sit, she’d been standing so long, but she didn’t dare. The last words she’d heard were from Danny, before she’d been blindfolded.
Stand there, bitch, and don’t move.
She was alone. She was pretty sure of that. She’d sensed movement, sensed them leaving.
She could sit. Just lean back against the wall, slide down it.
Her hands were free. She could reach up and remove this blindfold. She didn’t have to just stand here, senses cut off like this. She was a strong, independent woman. She could do what she wanted.
She stood, blindfolded and naked.
And waited.
§
He came to her.
The man.
The one responsible for everything.
The one she had come here to find.
The one she had come here to kill.
She’d never allowed herself to think of it like that before. Never used that word, not even in her thoughts. But it was true: she had come here to kill him for all he had done.
She heard a noise, from over where the steps led down from ground level.
Then she sensed him approaching: the sound of his feet on the hard floor.
Closer: she could hear him breathing, she was sure. Hear the pounding of his heart, louder than her own.
She could just reach up now, and remove her blindfold so she could look him in the eye, but she didn’t. She stood where she had been told, and waited.
A finger on her breastbone, dragging slowly down. The touch was so light it was almost imperceptible, passing between her breasts, and down the flat of her belly.
She thought it would keep going, but it paused just below her belly button and then withdrew.
She’d been holding her breath, and now she let it go in a soft sigh. It was a sexual sound, the gasp initiated by a lover’s touch, and it surprised her.
Since when had vulnerability and fear ever been such a turn-on for her?
She was entirely at this man’s mercy, and here she was... gasping at his touch.
Something brushed against her hair now. His hand, the knuckles coming to run down her jawbone.
There was something about senses being shut off, and others compensating: unable to see, unable to move from the spot, everything combined to magnify that touch, and her response to that touch.
His mouth pressed against hers, then – a sudden and unexpected thing. His lips were hard, his tongue darting, withdrawing, pressing again. His skin smooth, only a faint, almost velvet, fuzz of stubble.
She pulled away, a wild storm in her head, and in her chest and belly.
She staggered back a step, put a hand back to catch herself against the wall, put the other hand up to her face, to the blindfold, and–
“No.” A sharp, powerful command she just had to obey.
She let her hand drop, and stood upright again, away from the wall.
The kiss.
The voice.
The touch... that finger running down between her breasts again, down her belly, and this time going further, brushing softly against the smoothness of her sex before pulling away.
Those moments.
The ones where you’re pulled up short, when everything you ever believed you knew is turned on its head. The ones where everything you had believed, the things that guided and shaped the person you were... all of them: snatched away.
Those moments when all it takes is a kiss, a voice, a touch, and you no longer even know who you are or how to stop your world spinning madly out of control.
The ones where you manage to catch yourself, swallow, find your voice and say, “Jeremy?”
5
He took her. Hard.
His hand closed on her face, cupping her chin, fingers up one side, thumb the other. His grip on her hurt, was meant to hurt.
There was no hesitancy in his kiss now. He closed his mouth on hers, guiding her head with that vise-grip on her chin. His tongue drove deep, stabbing into her mouth, forcing her open.
His other hand reached down, palm flat against her smooth mound, fingers sliding underneath, forcing her legs apart. One finger slid through the wet folds of her sex, bent and pushed upwards, the sudden penetration making her cry out, a cry that tailed off into a long groan.
She staggered backwards, two small steps and then her back was against the wall. His mouth mashed against hers as the wall broke her momentum, his teeth against her gums, and there was the metal taste of blood.
Her arms went up – to fight him off? She didn’t know. Didn’t know what she was trying to do.
Her hands came to rest against his chest. Smooth silk stretched across that familiar, tight ribcage, not an ounce of spare fat on his body.
He manipulated her like a puppet, that one hand clamping her jaw and the other cupping her so hard that with each upward thrust as he drove his finger into her he pushed her up against the wall, raising her to her toes.
She started to doubt. A small part of her brain, a thought process detached from the immediate rush of responses to what was happening.
It couldn’t be him.
Jeremy was dead.
The police had told her he was dead.
She’d organized his damned funeral!
This man... he was like an animal, a beast. Jeremy had always been so polite and restrained, never a man to let himself go, emotionally unable to lose himself to the moment.
This man... when he lifted her to her toes it was as if every sensation focused on the pressure of his hand and that finger driving deep inside her. And then as she sank to her heels again there was a roll of his wrist, grinding the heel of his hand against the softness of her mound, sliding that protective hood across her clit, turning that pressure into sudden stabs of sensation darting up into her belly and through her body.
She started to pull at his shirt, tugging it free of his
waistband, fumbling with the buttons.
His hand came away from her jaw so that now there were just those two points of contact: his mouth on hers, and that one hand, cradling her, penetrating her.
His trousers came free, slid down around his thighs, the soft fabric brushing against her and then... Oh my God! The finger withdrew, the hand shifted and now there was a new presence down there as he guided his manhood against her. The bulbous head slid through the folds of her sex. The hardness of his shaft ground against her.
He cupped himself between her wet heat and the palm of his hand, steering himself into position, and then he pushed up and she felt that delicious parting, opening her up and filling her, as he slid home.
Slowly, he pushed, as if savoring every moment, every sensation.
She clung to him now, all confusion lost.
She knew that feeling. She knew the way he did that, the control it took to enter her so deliciously slowly, always moving, but so damned slowly!
She felt it building at that first parting, as the swollen head of his dick slid into her. Felt that tightness in her belly, that weakening in her legs, that sudden raggedness to her breathing.
So slow that everything was magnified, every slight pulse and twitch the trigger for another tightening.
His balls came to press against her thighs, and then she felt that rough rasp of hair against her as – finally! – he filled her completely. That roughness against her shaved smoothness was a new sensation for her, another thing that intensified everything.
He pressed, filling her, and then he reached up and took a fistful of her hair and yanked her head back.
That was what pushed her over the edge: the sudden pain, the abrupt sense of him taking possession again, of him taking complete control.
He pulled back a fraction and then thrust hard, and it was like nothing she’d ever felt. Again and she groaned. Again and it was a scream this time and now her belly tightened and the muscles of her sex clamped hard around him, pulsing again and again in climax.
He wasn’t done.
He pulled out, turned her so she stood with her face up against the wall.
Now he guided himself into her again, taking her from behind with long hard thrusts, the head of his manhood pounding repeatedly against that sensitive spot on the front wall of her vagina.
