Dark Desires (Dark Romance Boxed Set)

by Cerys du Lys

  “Are you kidnapping me?”

  He rose to his feet, swooped down, and dragged me to my feet. “Don’t even think about trying to escape. I’ll be tying you to my bed when we get back to the boat. No way I’m ever letting you go.”

  Well, hey. That sounded good to me.

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  Linda’s Bio

  Linda Barlow is the bestselling author of 20 novels, with more on the way. She lives in New England with her mysterious spouse (who sleeps during the day, which has often made her wonder if he’s a vampire) and their equally enigmatic and nocturnal cat.

  Her novel Leaves of Fortune won the Rita Award, and Fires of Destiny was a finalist for the same award. She loves reading, writing, computer games, and dark chocolate.

  Master Over You

  By

  Cerys du Lys and Ethan Winters

  This novel contains dark themes that may not be unsettling to some people. It includes explicit descriptions of violence and sexual situations. If you are sensitive to such situations, you may not find this story to your tastes.

  Please note that this is a love story, though. There’s just no sugarcoating. It is raw and real and deals with a varied spectrum of emotions, including pain, hate, regret, anger, denial, along with love, longing, happiness, hope, and more. It is BOTH sides of the story, and not just the good. If you’re accepting of that, we think you’ll enjoy the story. If it sounds like something you’re unsure about, then it might be better if you skip it.

  Author Note: Cerys du Lys wrote the scenes labeled “Angeline” and Ethan Winters wrote the scenes labeled “Noah.” We both collaborated on the “Chastity” scenes. Cerys edited the entire thing for continuity to combine her and Ethan’s writing styles into a single story. We really hope you enjoy reading this dark romance, with a male and female author’s perspective into not only why two people can survive and fall in love through some of their darkest experiences, but also how they can continue living despite the fact that sometimes life is extremely difficult for all of us.

  ***

  Name: Chastity White

  Age: 20

  Birthday: September 22nd

  Height: 5’ 3” / 160cm

  Weight: 129 lbs / 58.5kg

  *** Chastity White

  Tomorrow is my birthday. I have classes in the morning, but I get out early, and then the rest of my day is free. This is exciting!

  I was sitting in my US History class, doodling in my notebook. The instructor was talking about the Revolutionary War. I barely heard anything she said, because all I could think about was my birthday.

  My birthdays weren’t usually too exciting compared to any other day, but this one was different. I was technically already an adult, but I was becoming more of an adult. Twenty-one is a big year. I could finally drink. My friends and I had gone to dance clubs sometimes, but none of us could actually drink. There was this game we played where we tried to see if we could get guys to buy us drinks, but it almost never worked. If you weren’t wearing one of those bracelets that let the bartenders know you were old enough to buy alcohol, most people weren’t willing to buy for you, either.

  That was fine, though. I had a lot of fun, anyways. Dancing! Swinging back and forth, hands in the air, hands on my hips, hands somewhere. Hands on someone else’s hips, just dancing. Swaying. The music thumped, heavy, pounding into me and through me and the rhythm and the sound became a part of me.

  Sometimes I... well, I grinded with guys. They’d come up behind me, push against me, and I’d just go with it. What was the worst that could happen? We were in the middle of the club on the dance floor and all my friends were there. We had secret codes we used now to let each other know if the guy that came up behind us was attractive or not. Not all the guys came from behind, either, but that was the easiest way for them to start dancing. Some girls hated it, but I didn’t mind. It wasn’t like I was going to bring them home with me, or go home with them. It was just dancing. It was kind of sexual, yeah, and sometimes really intense, but it was still just dancing.

  What was the worst that could happen?

  Tomorrow I could finally drink, too. My friends were coming with me. Some of them were old enough to buy alcohol, too, but most weren’t. We were young, in the prime of our lives. This was exciting! I did well in college and this was my reward, right? I might get drunk. Haha! The thought made me giddy. Maybe being drunk wasn’t that exciting, but I’d never know until I tried it. Right? My friends would be there to make sure I didn’t do anything too bad. We would just dance, swing back and forth, hands in the air or on our hips or each other’s hips, someone’s hips. Their body. Bodies pressed together, music pounding into us, dancing.

  It was just for tomorrow. Tomorrow I was going to let loose and go wild. I wasn’t a party girl or anything, I just liked to have fun sometimes. Tomorrow was my twenty-first birthday, so I was at least allowed that. I’d study for all the rest of the weekend to make up for it. I wanted to visit the aquarium, too, and my dad and I had plans for lunch on Saturday. My mom couldn’t make it, but she said she’d try to come up next week if she could and we’d go shopping.

  Everything was going to be a lot of fun.

  *** Noah

  My name is Noah.

  I kidnap women, I hold them against their wills, I break them down, I hurt them mentally and physically. Occasionally, I hurt them emotionally, too. I cause them pain. I give them a reason to hate me, but I force them to love me.

  Their love isn’t real; I know that. How do you even fucking define love in the first place? Check a dictionary and see how useless that shit is. A profoundly tender, passionate affection for another person? A feeling of warm personal attachment? It’s all bullshit. It’s all pointless bullshit, because you don’t know and you can never know.

  I can pretend to love someone, sure. I can act like I want to be with them for the rest of my life. They can act the same. Maybe they really feel that way. I don’t know. Regardless, it’s worthless.

  Tell me this? If I pretend to love someone and they start feeling profoundly tender towards me, passionately affectionate, but I don’t really love them, what is their love worth? Nothing, because it’s fake. It’s not real. Sometimes it’s fun to build someone’s love up, act like you care, wait until they’re really in deep, and then hit them with the news.

  Sorry, love, but you don’t mean a thing to me.

  I have an addiction to calling women “love.” I can’t stop. I’ve never loved any of them, and I never will, but I just can’t stop. It’s like a joke, an insult, a little bit of hope wrapped up in one insignificant, meaningless word. It’s hope for them, at least. I don’t hope for anything; I get shit done. Hope and prayers are for the weak.

  I should add that I don’t kidnap women and break them because I like it. Yes, they might get hurt, they might feel pain, but I don’t like that, either. I don’t hate it, but I don’t like it. It just doesn’t bother me. There are more important things in the world to worry about.

  It’s nothing personal, love. It’s just a job.

  Call me what you want. I don’t care. Master, Dominant, Dom, Sir, Slave trader, whatever. Some people in the BDSM scene use Daddy and I think that’s kind of fucked up, but whatever. Call me that if you want, too. I’m not into BDSM, though. What I do isn’t safe. There’s no consensual bargains here. We don’t sign a fucking contract and discuss limits and boundaries.

  I kidnap women, I hold them against their wills, I break them down, I hurt them, I bring them pain. I make them hate me and love me at the same time. Then I sell them to the men and women that come to me to procure my services. You don’t want to know what happens after that.

  There’s a difference between hating women and just not caring about them. I do this for my own reasons, not that anyone would understand that. It’s not hard to do the things
I do. Any ignorant fool who takes two seconds to plan it out can kidnap someone, and it only takes a few weeks of confinement to alter someone’s state of mind so deeply that they’ll do anything you say.

  It’s not hard to do what I do. It’s hard not to get caught. You need to be perfect. You need to plan out everything. You need to know exactly what to do exactly when you’re going to do it, and never leave any traces behind so someone can track what you’ve done. It doesn’t just happen when you take the girl, but when you ship them off to the buyer, too. There’s a lot of shit that goes on. It’s ruthless and unforgiving. I go the distance. I treat this like it’s fucking art. If I don’t do this, the influx of inspiration seething inside me would eat me alive and I’d die of starvation like some depraved artist drowning in a puddle of his own muddy tears in a back alley somewhere.

  You don’t have to know why I do what I do. You just have to know I do a good job.

  They call me Noah because I herd girls for a living. I find them, whatever the specifications, and I bring them home, I dominate them until they’re a perfect mold of what I want them to be, and then I sell them to the highest bidder.

  Most of the time nowadays I take special orders instead of dealing with auctions. Auctions are risky. I don’t like that scene. The stagnation building in the pits and the broken girls paraded onto the stage make me want to vomit out of futile depression. It’s fucking sickening to watch. I don’t know how anyone could enjoy that. I did it when I had to, when I was just starting to make a name for myself. It was a necessity, but it almost destroyed me.

  Now, no one knows my real name. I might have forgotten it, too. I’m just really fucking good, so they started calling me Noah. For forty days and forty nights these women weather my storm and then I deliver them to a new world.

  I like that. It’s real fucking cute. Definitely ironic.

  *** Noah

  This guy is a fucking idiot. No joke, I don’t understand how someone can be like this. I will never understand it. He was directed to me by an acquaintance or some shit, and I’m doing them both a favor, but he’s got some really fucked up ideas about what kind of business I run.

  I read over his email again, probably for the hundredth time.

  Noah, he starts, and that’s the only sane word he says in the entire thing.

  He wants a girl, so we have that part straight. I only work with women. Nothing against men, they just don’t interest me that much.

  Anyways, this guy wants me to find him a girl. Younger is better. He says he doesn’t care how old she is, but I’m not into that creepy underage shit. I get that he’d probably like that, but I’ve got morals and limitations here, as fucked up as that sounds.

  It’s not just that, though. Young, alright. I can find someone that’s college-aged easily enough. Those are usually the easiest girls to deal with, too. Not enough experience to know any better, so they’re easy to capture, and then they fall in love so fucking easily it’s sickening. It’s like you just chain them to a wall for a week and after that they’ll do anything you say, they’ll just get on their knees as soon as you come in, slobber on your cock until you get off, and even thank you for cumming all over their face.

  There’s more, though. Young, yes. College-aged, sure. On the shorter side, which I had to ask him for clarification about and he replied with anything under 5’ 5”. Got it, I can work with that. Not overweight, either. Sure thing, boss. What’s overweight? He comes back with some arbitrary number that doesn’t mean anything. Under one-hundred-forty pounds. Weight doesn’t mean anything because I can do something about their weight, but it’s good to have guidelines like that. It’s easier, too. If they have restrictions on looks, then you want to know what they’ll look like before you go through with the whole process.

  Overweight girls are usually really fucking attractive once they’ve lost even just twenty pounds. It’s kind of fun, too. When I kidnap one of them and get them in shape, I feel like I’m really making a difference in the world. Self-esteem, right? They’re easy to control, too. Show them how fucking hot you’ve made them and they practically melt at your feet, even after all the other terrible shit you’ve done to them. It’s real sweet. Makes me want to pretend I’ve fallen in love before I send them to their buyer.

  I can deal with this guy’s requests about age, height, weight. I asked him about looks and he got back to me that he wanted someone cute. Cute, sure, what the fuck does that mean? Give me an example here? He shows me a picture of some celebrity who somehow hasn’t posed nude in a men’s magazine yet. I didn’t even know it was possible to find a girl like that. She’s got that sort of heart-shaped face, with a bubbly personality and the cheeks to match. When she smiles, it makes you want to pinch her cheeks and then fuck her hard. The innocent type of girl. A little shy. Not dumb, but naive. She might have a lot of book smarts, but she doesn’t know anything about reality. I get it. I understand the sort of girl he wants, and it shouldn’t be too hard to find her, because that’s basically every girl in the history of the world.

  And her name has to be Chastity White, he says.

  What the fuck? We’ve gone back and forth about this, and I just do not understand. I asked him if it has to be White? Can it be Chastity Wight? Same pronunciation. No, he says. What about LeBlanc? Same idea, right? No, he says. Does it have to be Chastity? I can do this a lot easier if I’ve got a few more options for a first name. I give him suggestions, too.

  Purity? Grace? Faith? No, no, no. Motherfucker.

  Look, we can just rename this bitch. I will give her a new name. She doesn’t need a name. Her name is literally the least important detail about her.

  This guy is absurd. He’s built up some romanticized version in his head about what I do. He wants some pure, innocent girl who’s going to cater to his every whim. Sure, I get that, but why the specific name? I started to tell him it’d be double what I usually charge, but then I upped it to triple. I raised the price because I checked some directories online, and guess how many Chastity Whites there are?

  Thirty-four in the United States. There’s probably more in Europe, but I don’t travel outside the country. It’s too hard to bring girls back and train them, so I would need to do it overseas, and without my standard set up it wouldn’t be worth it. I’m not going to build a new house every time I get a job in fucking France or England or somewhere. It’s just not worth it.

  So, there’s thirty-four Chastity Whites in the United States. Guess how many are within this guy’s age range? A couple. Less than five. He wants me to kidnap one of maybe three girls, train her for him, then sell her to him.

  Sure. Twelve million dollars. I want to fucking choke on my laugh as I hit send on the email.

  He replies almost instantly. Done. Well, there we go.

  I confirm with him that I’ll have everything in order, too. He’ll get identification so he knows he has a real, authentic Chastity White on his hands. I briefly contemplate printing out some certificate of authenticity for him, numbered 1 out of 34. Maybe I’ll make her sign it, too. Not that she can get out of this by not signing it, but it might be fun. Limited fucking collector’s edition slave trafficking. You saw it here first, folks. Trademarked. Don’t even try to copy my idea.

  Well, I better get to work. Twelve million dollars isn’t just going to show up on my doorstep. Half of it will be delivered in cash to my door by tomorrow actually, but I won’t get the other half until I give him the girl.

  Maybe I’ll buy a new TV.

  *** Chastity

  My birthday was a buzz. Or abuzz. I was buzzed. I was dancing!

  My birthday was wonderful and really exciting. It started like any other day, but it took a turn for the amazing later on. I went out to dinner with my friends at this fancy restaurant I couldn’t remember the name of. It was Chinese, I think. We drank a lot. I drank a lot. They had scorpion bowls or something? I didn’t know what they were or what was in them but they tasted good. The cup or bowl they came in had
flaming liquor in a center spot and I blew it out and lifted up the bowl and swallowed, swallowed, more and more.

  It tasted good. I didn’t remember how many I drank. I ate a little bit, too. Noodles and teriyaki and a fortune cookie. I remembered my fortune and I had the snip of paper tucked into my pocket.

  Today is a day of many changes.

  I was dancing now and I laughed spontaneously, remembering the fortune. What did that mean? I didn’t know. Was today the day that I’d find my true self? Yes! That was it. I was excited.

  My friends kept dancing with me, too. Some of them moved to other parts of the club, but I had Mandy and Ellen with me. A pair of guys came up and started dancing with them, twirling them around, grinding and pushing, bodies pressing tight together. I wasn’t dancing with any one person in particular, but that was fine. I was dancing with everyone. Everyone in the entire club was my partner, and our bodies moved and mixed as if we were one.

  I could barely hear the music over the rush of blood pumping through me, pounding into my ears. Lights flashed on and off, going from too dark to too bright in the span of a fraction of a second. My body felt light but my head felt heavy and I kept staring at the ground, watching. Watching my feet, watching the floor, watching other people and their feet.

  Someone came up behind me. He steadied me just as I thought I was about to fall. What a nice person, I thought. He put his arms around me and pulled me close to him and I smiled and danced. Vaguely, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Mandy and Ellen dancing with men, too, but they didn’t seem to notice me. I wanted to know if the guy who had come to dance with me was cute or not.

  Without signals from my friends to figure it out, I decided to do the next best thing. I twirled like a ballerina, twisting around to face my dance partner. That’s what I wanted to do, at least, but I moved a lot less gracefully than I planned. I nearly fell over, but he heaved me back up and held me in his arms.