You keep telling yourself that, Lois.
The door opened again, and the next thing I knew another bloke was staring down at me, and the look on his face was almost gleeful.
“Well, well, well. What have we here, Chef?” His smile revealed one capped gold tooth that glinted back at me.
The chef looked very pleased with himself. "A delectable morsel for the Gov'nor, methinks. He's going to be mightily pleased when he sees what we've got here, Paulie."
“He sure is, Chef. There’s nothing Dumortier likes more than an escapee. You lucky bastard. You’re going to be drowning in women for the next couple of weeks if you play your cards right.”
He nodded with a grin that would rival a crocodile's after a five-course meal. "Good job I wasn't sleeping in this morning because those dumpsters were due to be rolled out of here in two minutes." My face fell. Seriously? I had missed my chance at freedom by a mere two minutes? How ridiculously unfair was that?
“Rosalita keeping you up again? Oh man. That one can really fuckin’ bounce.”
" Yeah, and you should see what she can do with her tongue." The fascinating conversation about what Rosalita could and couldn't do with various body parts kept the gruesome twosome entertained for the better part of ten minutes until Paulie thought it best to let Dumortier know that he'd caught me. Then everything was back to business. The two of them got me out of the dumpster, and I probably would have tried something, had the room not been filled with bystanders. All of sudden I had apparently become famous because everybody who was anybody wanted to get a good look at me. I already knew the reason why. I wasn't going to be about much longer.
Slowly my adrenaline high faded, and it was replaced with exhaustion and fear. I just wanted this over with. I didn’t fear death, if that’s what you’re thinking – just the means Geraud Dumortier might take to get me there. He wasn’t getting anything from me. If he wanted to pull out all my teeth and toenails, and then dice me up into chunks, then so be it, but all I would give him was lies. My mouth set itself in a mutinous line and I held myself up straight as I was led from the room at gunpoint. I had a feeling that today was going to be a very long day.
“I’m going to kill you.”
The Adie I saw before me, was not the same one I had been with this morning. The guy in front of me looked like someone had ripped out his soul with a pitchfork and then set fire to it.
As he bit off the words one by one, I could feel flecks of spittle splatter against my forehead. Glowering down at me, he grabbed hold of my cheeks and squeezed them painfully tightly, his fingernails digging deeply into my soft skin. My split lip protested at the treatment, dribbling another long line of blood and saliva, but this was tame when compared to what he did to some of the other girls, or so he told me.
This was the first time I’d been brought down to the wet room, and judging from what I’d seen, I had a lot to look forward to.
“But that’s not all. First I’m going to play with you, and then, when I get bored of you, I’ll leave you to rot.” He then violently pushed the chair that I was tied to, and it rocked on its legs for a moment, threatening to tip, but somehow managed to right itself. Adie was not impressed. His foot then lashed out and sent me sprawling towards the floor, breaking one of the chair legs in the process. He then went completely mad, screaming and swearing in his caustic French accent. The man was quite creative about it, too. I could see why he didn’t bring it out very often. My ears were bleeding.
“What do you do for a living, Lois Reeves?”
Finally. Here was the question James had warned me would come. Now that it had, I felt only relief. Two week’s under Alain’s roof had been a lifetime of agony, and I think it had aged me ten years. Not that it mattered. It looked like I didn’t have too long left in this world. My eyes fluttered prettily in their sockets as I twisted them to meet his. The man was a fucking paradox. How could someone who looked like an angel be such a complete and utter bastard? I wondered what had happened to drive him to such lengths. He was a cross between a serial killer and a terrifying psychopath, and that was being kind. But there was also another side to him - one that I could fall in love with, or perhaps had already fallen for. One I obviously trusted, else I wouldn’t have run this morning. Had I been set up? My instincts were usually infallible, but with Adie, hormones seemed to take over. I cursed myself for being all kinds of stupid. James had warned me about Adie. He’d implied the man was attractive, but I’d dismissed the idea without thinking. I did not find men attractive, especially those that were my mark – until now. It was going to be my downfall. Give me a sign that I’m not wrong about you. Give me a fucking sign, my inner voice pleaded. Until that happened, my eyes were trained on him like a beady little hawk.
The next thing he did was pick up my chair, carefully placing me upright, and although my balance was a bit precarious on three legs, I was steady for now. When I risked a glance up into his eyes, his expression was dark and terrifying, and my pupils immediately found a safe spot on the floor. The damage had been done, though. His face then came close to mine, and every instinct screamed back away, but that was rather difficult when you were tied to a chair.
"I have to be a monster now," he whispered lazily in my ear. The lack of emotion in his voice sent chills all the way through me. He let a fingernail trail all the way around my neck as if he was marking a path to sever later. My throat closed up, and I swallowed involuntarily.
Circling around me, he spoke in very low tones, his lips barely moving and I craned my ears to pick up the noise.
"Everything I do in here is for the cameras, Lois. It's not personal, but it's certainly going to feel like it in a minute. I'm working on getting you out of here, but that's not going to happen for at least the next twenty-four hours, and dear old dad, who is, unfortunately, very much alive, is going to want to see some nasty stuff. It'll probably leave scars, but I'll do my best to make sure you're not disfigured for life. For the first half hour, you're going to need to feel the pain I dish out so he can get a satisfactory buzz that I'm doing my job properly. He'll be watching via the camera up there," Adie used his finger to indicate a small black box in front of me. "After that, I'm going to give you some more heroin – just enough to take the edge off things, anyway. After he's bored of seeing you writhe around the floor, you'll be interrogated, and he'll probably want to do that himself. I'm sure James has told you what kind of drugs we use here, and you should be prepared for them. Whatever you do don't get him riled. If you do that, there's a good chance he'll get excited and give you too much of something – and there's no coming back from that." He pulled a black ball gag out of his pocket and fastened it around my head. I grunted in pain as my split lip was stretched open, but made no other sound. "The gag is to make sure you don't say anything you shouldn't for the time being. Geraud thinks they turn me on, so he'll accept it, although he'd much rather hear your screams. Now you need to do your best to hide away somewhere deep inside yourself. Blink if you understand."
Blinking, I watched him carefully and made some kind of non-committal noise behind my gag. There wasn't much else I could do.
"Good. Now, remember to yell really loud, as often as you can. That will keep Geraud happy for the time being. If you don't play your part, he'll be down here to do the job himself, and I don't think you'll enjoy that much."
The first half hour I spent with Adie was excruciating in the extreme. He didn’t need to ask me to scream, I did so quite frequently and entirely of my own accord. In that time he managed to pull out a toenail, split my left earlobe in two, and break my nose. All the while he was asking me questions that I couldn’t answer, but it didn’t take me long to figure out why he was doing it. He was prepping me for what was to come. I needed to figure out how I was going to answer these and quickly.
Who do you work for? Who is your handler? Why do they want Geraud dead? How much do you know? He asked all the typical questions I would expect and plenty more that I wou
ldn’t. How long have you been an agent? Tell me about some of the missions you’ve been on in the past? Can you describe some of your other operatives? I began getting all the lies straight in my head while dealing with more pain than any woman should have to handle – and this was just the warm-up by all accounts. When Adie unsheathed a pair of razor-sharp, Japanese design, fish filleting blades, I knew that my endorphin level was shortly about to rocket.
"See these beasts? They'll cut your flesh to ribbons," he roared, presumably so the microphones could pick the sound up. I didn't have to fake either my terror or sobbing. I was already well past any form of training I'd ever undertaken in the past, and a bullet wound had nothing on the kind of pain Adie could dish out. Coming to stand in front of me, the man flashed his blades and sat down across my knees. With two knives in one hand, he drew a twin trail of devastation down my right cheek, and I screamed my head off and went wild. He used the distraction to jab a needle in my left upper arm, his upper body covering what he was doing. I screamed all the louder, and as blood began dripping down my cheek, I just wished he would kill me. I already knew how talented this man was with knives. I didn't need a more intense rerun of our earlier session to remind me that I was in way over my head. Right now, I didn't want to be rescued. I wanted to slip away and leave everything behind. That was one way to escape, and the beauty of it was that I wouldn't need any therapy afterwards.
“Wake her up.”
“If I wake her up too soon, she’ll just drop again from exhaustion. She hasn’t been fed for three days.”
“Wake her up.”
I didn’t want to wake up. Alain and Geraud were arguing loudly, and I knew that as soon as my eyes opened, more pain would follow.
“Give her five more minutes. It’s no fun working with someone who’s virtually catatonic.” Alain’s voice was lazy, but I didn’t miss the edge to it.
“Wake. Her. Up.”
“Fine. Have it your way.”
A backhander across the side of my cheek sent my chair flying, and I clattered noisily to the floor – again. Opening my eyes slowly, I saw Geraud looming above me, and the man did not look happy. It's funny what a near-death experience can do to a person. Taking a swift look at the livid bruises around his neck, I marvelled that the man was alive at all. I'd probably missed my target by all of three seconds, max.
Glancing around the room, making sure my eyes did not linger upon him, I noticed a couple of guards posted near the doors. They were the only other people in the room. If I wasn't tied to a chair, I might have been able to come up with something, but wriggling out of steel restraints wasn't one of my specialities.
“Break her legs.”
That gave me reason for concern, and even my opiate-laced brain suddenly woke up and took notice. This was going to fucking hurt, and we'd barely started. The bastard could have given me a little warm up punching session before going straight for my femurs, surely?
When the two goons from the rear of the room began moving forward menacingly, I wondered for a moment if I should start praying, but I didn’t. Looking up at Alain from the corner of my eye, I couldn’t help but wonder what the hell he intended to do next. What did you do as an encore to that? Perhaps I’d be hung, drawn and quartered. I’d heard that was quite good fun.
As he advanced towards me, looking so fucking beautiful, he could almost have been angelic, and I couldn't help but wonder if our next session might cure me of my ridiculous infatuation. It would probably be hard to lust after a man who systematically began breaking every bone in your body. I reckoned there was a fifty/fifty chance. It all depended upon how much enthusiasm he put into the job.
Looking up towards him, and flinching at the stone cold expression I saw there, I decided I would begin praying. In situations like this, it really was the only thing you could do.
Kiel, I think I might shortly be coming to join you. Tell them to light the fires, and roll out the welcome mat, sweetheart.
THE END
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FLAMES
Book Three in The Sexy Special Agent BDSM Series
I’ve been left in the hands of a monster. He’s beaten me up, torn my flesh to ribbons, and tried to steal my soul – but even though I crave death, my body refuses to die.
Just when I begin to think that there is no God, an angel arrives to save me. Now it’s James Leveritt against Alain Dumortier with my life riding in the balance. I’m in love with both of them, but I’ll need to kill one if I want to survive.
The stakes have never been higher.
Please Help A Starving Author By Leaving A Review
Ok, so I lied about the starving part, but books need reviews on Amazon in order to sell. Without them, they wither and die, and so do the authors. Honest.
You don’t have to say much and you can stay anonymous – just set your Amazon reviewer name to something like ‘Amazon Reviewer 3982.’ Anyway, here are a few examples of what you could write if you were a truly wonderful person who didn’t mind doing a good deed every now and again:
This book was so awesome I forgot to feed my kids. Thankfully they reminded me, over and over again, so I haven’t managed to kill them yet. Phew.
This book sucked. It was even worse than a certain president’s infamous hairdo, and that is saying something.
James and Alain Dumortier are so hot, I want a threesome with both of them. As long as I’m allowed a safe word – because Alain is a little bit on the seriously freaky crazy side.
I would rather read War and Peace than this ridiculous smutty drivel and nonsense. Seriously – all Mandara talks about is orgasms, sex, and hot blokes. Who wants to read about that?
Ms. Mandara does not write quickly enough. I need her to release a book every month at the very least and she keeps me waiting for months, and worse – ends everything on a horrendous cliff hanger. I have a love/hate relationship with this author. She should probably be spanked.
This is not a good book to read on the train. Especially when the hot guy sitting next to me kept trying to read it over my shoulder.
Don’t ever read this book to your wife. She will demand sex for days on end and will suddenly become insatiable in bed. Seriously, I have been considering divorce…
Any of these will do (I’m more partial to the nice ones…) and it will give you extra karma points that will be returned to you in due course in the form of cookies, money, hugs, and wine. Honest.
THANK YOU!
I just need to say a big thank you to all the readers that stepped up to leave me an Amazon review for ‘Sparks’ when I desperately pleaded for some on Facebook. Nearly twenty reviews were left which was so awesome it nearly made me cry. You people know who you are – and you are AMAZING.
Another big thank you to all my wonderful beta readers who always step up to the rather tricky task of reading my books before they’ve had a good edit. Without you my books would probably be unreadable as you manage to figure out that my heroine can’t see things when she’s wearing a blindfold, and that it’s really difficult for her to talk if she’s gagged. You also help me to correct my numerous errors and give me your truthful opinions, which are more valuable than pixie dust. (The stuff that makes you fly without wings). (That is what pixie dust does, right?)
So, for everyone who’s helped me along the way, thank you, thank you, thank you! I don’t like to name names, given the dark nature of my books, but I am sending virtual hugs instead. They are valid for the next twenty-four hours only, though. So grab ‘em quick ;)
Love ‘n hugs to all xxx
Bio
Christina Mandara was born in the UK, but has spent most of her life travelling the world. She speaks three languages and has been chiefly employed in the fields of finance and travel. Her favourite city is Sydney, and her favourite holiday destination is the south of France.
She loves keeping fit and enjoys running
, cycling, and water sports. Think surfing or sailing. She's a big fan of BDSM in all of its glorious forms, and her favourite item in the toy closet (a box simply isn't big enough) is her riding crop.
In her spare time she's usually cuddled up with a good book, exploring the countryside, or baking in the kitchen. In fact, she loves her kitchen so much she's one of few woman who wouldn't mind being tied to it! Her first and foremost love is writing, however, and more often than not you'll find her on a laptop spinning tales of romance, erotica, or dark, paranormal fantasies.
Christina’s Social Media Hangouts:
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Website: http://christinamandara.com
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