by Nic Saint
As Kelley lay there waiting, she fell into a feverish sleep, strange dreams tugging at her consciousness. In her dreams, Will was there beside her, sitting next to her bed, cloaked in darkness, and he was whispering softly in her ear.
“Kelley,” he was saying, “you’ve got to get out of here before something bad happens.”
“Something bad?” she cried out in her wordless state.
“Something very bad,” he hissed. “Something very bad indeed…”
“Will,” she moaned as his shadowy self seemed to evaporate. “Don’t go. Stay with me. Don’t leave me… Will!”
Her eyes flashed open, the words trembling on her lips, and when she felt movement beside her, she was startled to see a figure crouching down, his head low and his mouth close to her ear.
She jerked back when the words hissed out, stirring the tiny hairs on her neck. “You betrayed me, Miss Casey. Now it’s time I returned the favor.”
“Who-who are you?” she managed to utter.
Suddenly, the room was bathed in light, and she blinked, momentarily blinded. As she regained the sense of sight, she saw that a fat man was seated on her bed, his toad-like face topped with a shock of white hair. Harlan de Montesquieu, she suddenly knew. And only now did she notice she was naked, her cover sheet ripped away. In a reflex action, she pushed her legs together but found that she couldn’t, her ankles tied to the bedposts.
“Do you recognize me, Kelley?” he said in honeyed tones as his hand softly trailed along her arm.
“Let me go!” she yelped, the cry stuck in her throat as his hand dipped toward her breasts, and he fondled and kneaded her flesh with obvious relish. His eyes were like a snake’s, she decided. A slithering, creepy serpent.
“You disappointed me, Kelley. I thought you were smarter than to turn your back on me.” He grinned a set of yellowed teeth, the tobacco stains obvious. “And I think you will find it doesn’t do to rat me out to the competition. What did Roland offer you?”
“He offered me nothing,” she bit back, squirming under his palms as his fingers dipped and stretched, squeezed and tested.
“Oh, I find that very hard to believe. A talented hacker like you? I don’t think you’re in this for charity.”
“I—I’m not working for Roland. He—he forced me. I never agreed, but he locked me up and said he’d throw away the key.”
Harlan nodded. “That sounds more like the Roland I know. Nevertheless—“ His fat hand was now trailing along her belly and finally reached the gentle slope of her mound and rested there, patting it gently. “—you should have told Turtu what you were up to.”
“But I did,” she said, her eyes wide and—so she hoped—projecting innocence. “I told him everything and he said I should use my skills to break into the Thornton Tower mainframe and steal whatever secrets I could find.”
Harland’s hand had stopped, and his eyes scrutinized her. She found them cold and dead. “And did you?”
“They never gave me the chance. Will—William kept me under constant surveillance. He said I should spy on you instead—hack into the HdM computers and collect as much data as I could.”
“For a skilled hacker such as yourself, a piece of cake, right?”
She shook her head violently “But I didn’t. I never did what they asked.”
“And neither did you do what Turtu asked,” he murmured as his eyes returned to her body. “You remind me a lot of my first wife,” he said absently, his hand now disappearing between her legs, cupping her pussy. “She was quite… quirky. And surprisingly pretty.” The sensation of his claw on her most intimate spot was sickening, and her chest heaved and fell rapidly now, sweat forming on her brow.
“Please, Mr. de Montesquieu,” she implored. “I never betrayed your trust.”
“She had a very pretty pussy,” he continued dreamily, as if she hadn’t spoken. He rose and walked to the end of the table she was strapped to. “Not as pretty as yours, but the same… shape.” He reached out and opened her labia, prodding and examining her like a gynecologist. “Pink and juicy, with firm, tiny lips, perfectly shaped.” He looked up. “When you masturbate, do you get extremely wet?”
“Please, sir,” she whimpered as he continued his perverted examination.
“No? Pity. I like a woman who comes extensively.”
“I’ll do anything you tell me to. Anything at all. I will hack into Thornton Tower.”
He sighed, as if her words saddened him somehow. “You know? This would all go over a lot better if you hadn’t slept with Will Thornton. Oh, yes,” he smirked at her look of shock and surprise, “we know all about that. Roland watches his own, and we watch Roland. There’s nothing about the Thorntons that stays a secret from me for too long.” He smelled the fingers he’d just jabbed into her cunt, and seemingly relished in the scent. “How did you find young William? Charming yet volatile? He does have a tendency to be emotionally all over the place doesn’t he? Daddy issues, I gather.”
He’d dipped his index finger into his mouth and was now sucking it with smacking sounds. It sickened Kelley to the core. “How do you know all this?” she gasped.
“Oh, I’ve studied the Thornton brood extensively these past few decades. Know thy enemy, Miss Casey, is still very sound advice.” He slowly and very demonstratively started to roll up his sleeves. “Now, this plan of yours to hack the Thornton mainframe, did you devise that before or after you allowed Will to have his way with you?”
“Please,” she begged. “Just let me go.”
Harlan had picked up a tube of lube that stood on a small side table and squirted an ample amount on his hands and arms. He gave her a devilish grin. “I’m so going to enjoy this. Did you know that I always wanted to be a gynecologist, Kelley? No?” He picked up a gleaming metal speculum and weighed it appreciatively in his hand. “The thing is—I don’t often get the chance to practice my art, what with business getting in the way and all.”
She squirmed. “No, don’t do this!”
His face suddenly lost its smile, and he growled, “Then you shouldn’t have turned on me, Kelley. Traitorous bitches get their just reward.” And with those words, he eased the cold hard steel inside with practiced ease, and blithely ignored her screams of agony as he did so.
Chapter 24
Will jerked and raged as he heard Kelley’s screams in the next room. Before commencing on his treatment of the girl, Harlan had announced his intentions to a struggling Will. Bumps and bruises covered his body, and he couldn’t move his right leg, fearing it might be broken. The truck that had run into them had belonged to Drake, and it had hit the diver’s side with a violent crash. Kelley, Harlan had assured him, had survived with only minor injuries, and was now ‘ripe for the taking’ as he had called it.
He knew that his time was up when Drake had entered the room after Harlan’s departure, a sickening grin on his broad face, the muscles of his brawny arms working beneath the swarthy skin. The brute was dressed in a halter top only, revealing a body that only hours upon hours of lifting weights in the gym could have produced.
The punch to the gut he received had him fighting for breath. “That’s for killing my friend,” the goon had growled.
“I had nothing to do with that,” Will croaked when some breath had returned to his lungs.
Drake shrugged. “Maybe not, but who cares? You’re a Thornton, right?” And with those words, he had landed another hard punch to his ribs, once again sending him struggling for breath.
At this rate, he wouldn’t last very long, he knew, the thought of Kelley being molested by Harlan in the next room forcing him to focus.
“Look, Drake. I really feel we got off on the wrong foot. Maybe we can start over?”
“Sure,” said Drake easily, and punched him in the face.
He was going to die in this room, Will knew, if he didn’t find a way out. The sounds of Kelley struggling and screaming for help galvanized his will, and with a supreme effort, he regained his poise.
“Come here a minute, will you?” he whispered. “I’ve got something very important to tell you about Ty.”
Drake’s small eyes widened slightly under their hooded lids, and he bowed down to listen to Will’s confession. “Tell me.”
With a grunt, Will moved back his head, then delivered a knockout head-butt that landed right on the other man’s cheekbone. As a shooting pain held him in its grip, he watched as Drake’s eyes rolled up in his skull, and he fell to the floor like a felled tree. “Three—two—one,” he muttered, and then started fighting against the restraints with renewed vigor.
Kelley thought she’d never endured a more humiliating treatment. The man clearly was some sexual deviant. For the past ten minutes, all he’d done was prod and poke around in her pussy, seemingly unable to get enough of the sight of her insides. It was getting a bit too much, she decided, and she yelled out, “Hey, haven’t you seen enough yet, you piece of shit?”
At these words Harlan jerked his head up, as if waking from a trance. The childlike expression that had been plastered across his face throughout the ‘examination’ was wiped away as if with a squeegee, and he growled, “I’ll decide when I’ve had enough.”
He flung the speculum across the room, and it clattered to the floor, then started unbuckling his pants with wild jerks, his eyes hard and face flushed.
God, no, Kelley thought. Me with my big mouth. As long as he’d only been playing doctor, it hadn’t been so bad. But now things were really going from bad to worse.
“I think you will find, Miss Casey,” he said as he dropped his pants and revealed a tangle of wiry gray hair that disgusted her, “that it behooves you to be on my good side. If not? I can assure you that you will be screaming for mercy very, very soon now.”
Soon? Why not now, reflected Kelley, and opened her lungs for a scream so loud she thought it reverberated all the way to Times Square and back. All to no avail, of course, for Harlan now started pulling at his flaccid pecker, trying to stir the horrid thing to life.
For some reason, she thought the man was more to be pitied than censured. All the stories she’d heard about him had described him as a force to be reckoned with, but all she saw now was a sad old man who couldn’t even get it up.
She decided one more time to appeal to his better side, if he had any. “You don’t have to do this, Harlan.”
“Of course I don’t,” he snapped. “But I want to.”
She watched as he jerked and tugged and yanked some more in absolute silence, his face turning more and more the color of a ripe tomato. Then, to both him and her surprise, the door was thrust open, and a familiar figure stormed in.
“Will!” she exclaimed.
With a loud cry, he directed what looked like a part of a bed at Harlan and struck the older man across the face with it. Without a word, Harlan went down, blood spouting from his nose, and as Will stood heaving and panting over the man, he turned to Kelley. “Hey, honey. Everything all right?”
In spite of her predicament, Kelley had to laugh. Apparently, Will hadn’t been able to remove his appendages and had elected to break the headboard in two pieces, using one of them to knock out Harlan. Her eyes traveling down to his legs, she saw that they, too, were festooned with the cracked remnants of the bed he’d been tied to.
Then she saw the blood and the bruises and the gash in his leg, and her heart bled. “Oh, honey. You’re hurt!”
He touched his hand to his face, where blood was seeping from a gash in his forehead. “Yeah, I hit something hard and solid.”
“The car crash.”
“That, too.”
He turned to her and started untying the straps. His eyes dipping to her naked form, he growled, “What did that monster do to you?”
She shook her head, the situation seeming so surreal she had a hard time coming to grips with it. “He—he played doctor with me.” She rubbed her wrist as it was released from the restraints. “The guy is nuts, Will. I don’t know if he’s always been this way or if this is something recent, but he’s clearly a complete fruitcake.”
“The death of his son must have hit him harder than we all thought.” He pressed her in his arms, holding her tight, and she thought she’d never felt so relieved to be held by him.
“I’m so sorry, Will,” she murmured as she pressed kisses on his bruised and damaged face, ignoring his hisses and winces.
“Sorry? About what, honey?”
“That I was so hard on you before.” A sob welled up from somewhere deep inside. “I-I do care about you. I really do.”
She could hear the smile in his voice as he spoke the next words. “I’m the one who should be sorry, honey. Sorry to have put you in harm’s way. And sorry to have treated you the way I did.” He held her face in his hands, an expression of such tenderness in his eyes that it melted her heart. “Can you forgive me, Kelley?”
“I can do more than that,” she whispered back, and pressed her lips to his. I can love you, she thought, and never doubt you again.
Chapter 25
Will stared down at the man who had done so much harm to his family. Harlan de Montesquieu lay on his belly, his mouth open and blood covering part of his face. He offered a pitiful sight, he found to his surprise. The man he’d grown to fear and loathe looked neither scary nor dangerous.
Then his eye fell on the speculum, and rage once again bubbled in his bosom. The man might be sliding toward lunacy, but he was still a monster. Who would do such a thing? And judging from his state of undress, he’d had much fouler intentions with the woman of his dreams as well.
If he’d been Roland, he might have taken revenge to the next level by plunging a dagger—or in his case the jagged edge of the bed board still dangling from his arm—into the man’s heart. He knew he was incapable of murder, however, no matter how much of a vile beast his opponent was.
He felt Kelley tugging at his arm. “Come,” she said softly. “Let’s get out of here, Will. I don’t think he will harm us anymore.”
He granted Harlan one last glance, and knew that the emperor had no clothes—literally, in this case. That the giant had toppled from his throne. Then he got a novel idea, and he quickly started removing the straps from his wrists and ankles and moved over to the sideboard. Opening one of the drawers, he found to his relief that Kelley’s shoulder bag rested inside, badges of honor all present and accounted for.
He grabbed it and reached inside, searching for her smartphone. He handed her both bag and phone. “Here. Better take some pictures of this piece of human scum. Otherwise, no one will ever believe this actually happened.”
A smile lit up her face as she took the phone and bag. “Good idea. I’ll plaster this all over the internet. That will show the bastard.” Her smile faltered as another idea hit her. “Though if we really want to show the people what happened here tonight, we should…”
Her eyes crossed to the table she’d been strapped to, and he followed it, understanding dawning. The moment their eyes met, he saw the resolve reflected therein, and he shook his head. “No, Kelley. That’s madness. I won’t allow it.”
“We have to, Will. It’s the only way to put a stop to this.”
And without waiting for his response, she quickly stripped down and crawled back onto the table, placing her hands and feet just so.
“We don’t have time for this,” he insisted. “Any moment now a horde of Harlan’s flunkies will come charging in here.”
“Then do it quickly,” she offered, holding up her wrists.
Shaking his head at so much stubbornness, he quickly covered her wrists and ankles with the straps, making sure she wasn’t actually tied to the table this time but merely staging the scene for the picture.
His heart bled as he watched how she’d suffered on this table, and as fast as possible, not to have to prolong her suffering, he snapped pictures of her from all angles, then took a dozen snapshots of Harlan bleeding on the floor. And then a few more of the scene as it had unfolded—people woul
d just have to use their imagination to know what had actually transpired in this torture chamber.
“Great,” declared Kelley, and started putting on her clothes. He studied her as she quickly dressed. A flush mantled her cheeks, and her eyes shone with excitement. This was how she probably looked when she went out on one of her marches or demonstrations, he thought, or when she raided the office of some multi-million dollar corporation.
He grinned as he wondered what the hell he was doing consorting with a known anarchist. He, a scion of one of America’s richest families, in love with the opposition. A member of the one percent engaging with one vehemently defending the rights of the ninety-nine percent.
Though he’d had his recurrent doubts about her loyalties these past few days, he now realized that deep in his heart, he’d never doubted his feelings for her. He’d known she was the one for him from the moment she’d pointed that gun at him back at the store. Looking into those startling eyes, earnest and brooking no nonsense, he’d been a goner from the start.
Even though he’d played things tough, and had been rough on her, questioning her motives, throughout it all he hadn’t been able to deny his basic attraction to her. He now knew, as he watched her surf on the waves of excitement fueled by danger, that he loved her. Her presence in his life was electrifying, and she lit up his world just by being in it. Just by being herself.
He found she was staring at him, her eyes misty with worry all of a sudden, and he frowned. “What’s the matter?”
“You look like shit,” she said simply, then took his hand and dragged him along through the door, out of this chamber of horrors. As he fell into step beside her, he felt a bit woozy. Being in a car crash and then being punched to a pulp by some freakishly muscular goon will do that to a man.
As Kelley picked her way along the corridor, she threw anxious glances at Will. He looked as if he’d been thrown into a cement mixer and had only barely survived. His trademark good looks were buried under a welter of cuts and bruises and drowned in blood, and he was limping, a gash in his leg clearly showing through the frayed jeans. His foot, too, seemed mangled, and she felt a tight squeeze in her heart at the thought of what he’d endured.
