The Seller: A Dark Romance

by Renard, Loki

Stavros

  That saying keeps playing through my mind, even though it doesn’t apply to Siri.

  I don’t love her.

  She doesn’t love me.

  But I did set her free, or at least I tried to.

  She stayed.

  So she’s mine.

  It has been three days since she was brought to me. If she was any other girl by now I would have been dick-deep in her a dozen times. She’d be well on her way to learning how to please me perfectly. She’d suck cock like a professional, never forgetting the balls, or the ass.

  I’ve been waiting to see if law enforcement shows up, which has put a damper on things. My personal helicopter has been fueled and ready to go every hour of the day, and I have lookouts stationed across Cephalonia to tell me if trouble is coming.

  Nothing has happened.

  If someone is trying to set me up, they’re taking their time about it. And if law enforcement has sent Siri to catch me in the act, they’re leaving her in my grasp an awfully long time.

  I no longer think she’s a cop. I do think she’s a very strange, very intriguing young lady. One I should be fucking.

  So why aren’t I now?

  Something about her has made me treat her with kid gloves. I don’t know what it is. Objectively, I’ve had more vulnerable, even younger women here. I seduced them, just as I should be seducing her. I lured them into a life they would never leave. Some of them call me the devil. Others worship the ground I walk on. None behave the way she does. Maybe it’s not that I’m being nice to her. Maybe it’s that she scares me in a way no woman should be able to.

  After I got her home, I put her back down in the basement, but not before I stripped her out of the dress, tearing the seams as she stared at me with outright defiance and a look which said you’re not going to get away with this.

  “I am though,” I said, balling the dress up and throwing it, useless and torn, into the corner.

  “You are though what?”

  “I’ve done this a dozen times. I’ll do it a dozen more. You’re not going to change what happens here.”

  I pulled a short length of chain around her neck and secured it with a padlock. There are no fancy collars in my world. Maybe one day she’ll earn one. In my basement, she wears a simple chain. A heavy rope attaches her to the ring in the floor, three feet of length the outline of her entire world.

  Once I had her naked and chained, she looked like a different woman. She should have looked weaker, chain tends to humble a woman, but her arrogant bearing made her look defiant and strong, as if nothing could break her.

  Since then, I’ve had my attendant go down and feed her, take her to the toilet, give her enough water to wash her face and between her thighs - the bare minimum of what it takes to keep a girl in useable condition.

  Isolation is the most effective human punishment there is. I’ve had girls who would rather be beaten than be left alone for twenty four hours. My attendant reports that Siri does not seem to be affected that way, but I suspect she’s just as affected as anyone else - she’s just better at hiding it.

  Siri has done something no woman has done in quite some time. She’s made me think.

  Selling women is not a past time for the soft hearted. It is a filthy business, one of the worst in the world, and yet, where there is demand, there will inevitably be supply. The outside world wants to pretend that humanity has changed over the course of a few thousand years, but that’s not enough time for any species to lose its essential characteristics. Men are driven to possess women, but most get along with the scraps society allows them. Those are the good guys. The ones who sublimate their violent warrior urges into sport and boardroom takeovers. They tame the raging caveman who wants to take a woman he desires and claim her for his own and they satisfy that part of themselves with material things which never quite sate their desire for possession. If you ask me, materialism is a symptom of being unable to have the one thing one truly wants.

  Then there are those who cannot tame that part, who act out rashly and stupidly and hurt people in the process. They become vicious and brutal, are sentenced as criminals and are rightly looked down on with derision. They are put behind thick concrete walls and they see the world through narrow bars. I’m sure many people think that should be my fate, but I am a man in another category altogether.

  That is the category of the rich and very powerful. To be in this category, a man must be capable of controlling himself. He must never act rashly or without thought. He must be the master of his impulses without being slave to common law. To him, what is written in legal texts holds no intrinsic value. It may as well be written in crayon. He is a man who understands that behind the veneer of civilization, the world crawls with vice.

  I have never been part of good society. My mother was a prostitute. I can only assume that my father was a client. I was born out of a transaction, and I grew up watching every decent and indecent human thing be sold. Now I run a legitimate global import-export business, but I pay homage to my origins by turning a few select girls every year into the most priceless commodities. Siri might think this torrid and filthy, but by the time I am done with her, she will gleam like a jewel. My girls are not cheap or nasty. They are expensive and rare, perfectly trained, utterly beautiful. They are excellent companions, willing bedmates, and several of them have even become wives.

  I do not feel guilt for what I do. There are many who do worse. In this world, women are not the only ones who are commodified and sold. The flesh of the common has always been owned by those in power. Smartphones and global internet coverage don’t change the fact that when the king decides it, peasants will die. Social media hashtags, democratic elections, online polls, they’re all lies designed to make a person think they’re choosing the terms of their imprisonment, when the truth is much more simple than almost anyone dare admit. They were born to labor, be taxed, and die having spawned a new generation to take their place on the wheel.

  All the world is a cage, and I am but one of many jailers.

  Bing!

  My email alert interrupts my thoughts.

  With bad news.

  Siri

  The darkness won’t last forever, I tell myself. The light will come. This is just a game he’s playing. He wants to break me. He told me that himself. He hasn’t forgotten about me down here. The little old man who brings me food is testament to that.

  I have spent the last several days tied to a small radius, a chain looped around my neck, the weight of it worse than the cold which saps the natural heat from my skin. He has made me feel the humiliation of confinement. He has left me to sit in the dark and feel the helpless desperation which comes with the total absence of light. At times, I’ve been close to tears, but there is a reason for all of this, and I hold on to that reason.

  When the door at the top of the stairs opens, I’m expecting the old man, the one who doesn’t seem to speak English. Almost immediately, I know it’s not him. The stairs don’t creak the same way, stood upon with arthritic hips and shuffled down one step at a time. This time the steps are smooth and quick and athletic.

  Stavros is back.

  I was lying down, trying to rest, taking refuge in dreams when the door woke me. By the time I open my eyes, two long legs are in front of me.

  From this position, he is a towering man with more power and presence than anyone has the right to have. In another life, he might have lead armies. In this one, he uses women.

  “Get up.”

  His clipped tones issue an order I don’t mind following. I don’t want to be lying down when this man is around. I want to be on my feet.

  I rise, finding myself a good foot shorter than him. He’s tall. He’s handsome. He has all the genetic advantages life can provide, and look what he’s done with them.

  “Don’t look at me like that, girl.”

  My disdain can’t be hidden. He’s disgusting, no matter how attractive he might be superficially. He is motivated by two thin
gs, money, and ego.

  I bite back a sarcastic response and wait to see what he wants. There’s a new intensity to the way his dark brows draw down over his eyes, harsh lines jutting down toward his nose. His jaw is clenched and his cheeks are hard slabs of muscle. Someone has pissed him off. It can’t have been me. I’ve been sitting in the dark for days.

  “It’s time to tell me the truth.”

  “What truth?”

  “Tell me why you wanted to be here.”

  “I didn’t want to be here. Nobody wants to be here.”

  “Liar,” he growls. “My delivery guy was found a day ago. Dead.”

  “Oh no. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.”

  I feel his anger. Not because he gives a fuck about the asshole who drugged girls and dragged them off to whorehouses across the continent, but because I’m defying him again. He knows that I’m up to something, and it’s driving him absolutely crazy not knowing what that is.

  He reaches out, his fingers curling around my throat. His touch is pure danger. He’s not squeezing, yet, but the threat is there. I meet his eyes, not knowing if he is threatening my life, or making a point. It doesn’t really make any difference. He was suspicious about me from the beginning, and I know very well that the coincidences are just going to keep mounting.

  “What happened to him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “You know better than to ask me questions I’m never going to answer.”

  “He was poisoned. That’s a woman’s way of killing someone.”

  “Sexist.”

  His grip tightens, fingers constricting around my neck. “Tell me what is going on,” he repeats.

  He can say it as many times as he wants, I’m not telling him a goddamn thing.

  “Did you poison him?”

  I give a little shrug. We both know I had no way of doing that.

  He lets out a growl, and this time it rumbles through me, traveling through the grip he has on my neck.

  “I can hurt you. Make you tell me.”

  “Sure you can, and no, you can’t.”

  His eyes narrow until they are two dark slivers. In the low light of the basement, he seems almost demonic. I am sure he’s used to intimidating young women into doing what he wants them to do, telling him what he wants to know. Though he’s probably not as used to interrogations. Most of the girls he takes have nothing to tell him that matters.

  “This is a game to you, isn’t it?” He leans in, his face sliding past mine, his lips close to my ear as his stubble brushes my cheek. “It’s a dangerous game.”

  He’s not the only one who knows how to whisper menacingly.

  “Let’s play,” I whisper right back.

  Stavros

  Goddamn. I’m hard as hell. I don’t know what the fuck is going on. I don’t know who this girl is. I don’t know why she’s so cocky, or why her fear doesn’t matter to her. What I do know, is that I fucking love the way she makes me feel. I’m alive right now. There’s real resistance to my domination. None of this is going to come easy, to her, or to me.

  “You want to play? Okay little girl, we’ll play.”

  I pull a stool up out of the shadows. She’s been tied so short she doesn’t know what exists in the darkness all around her. There are so many things she’ll come to enjoy and abhor in equal measure. For now, I sit down and pull her over my thighs, naked and still chained.

  I say nothing to her as my palm meets her left cheek in a hard swat designed to get her attention and set the tone of this encounter. The satisfaction of feeling her flesh yield to my hand relieves a lot of tension immediately.

  I have not felt as in control with Siri as I like to feel around my girls. I have felt as though I am losing a game I didn’t even know I was playing. My delivery man’s death increased that feeling to intolerable levels.

  Now I have her over my lap, under my control. Now I can see every bit of her, she has nothing to hide, except her inner self. I start spanking her hard enough to hurt, hard enough to let her know that there is pain in lies. She doesn’t want to squeal, give me the satisfaction of how it sounds when she surrenders, but she can’t help it. She might be mentally conditioned, but she’s not physically hardened. Her flesh is soft and vulnerable, and it turns pink, then rose, then red beneath my palm.

  She can’t ask for mercy - or rather, she won’t, because she knows the condition of that mercy would be honesty, and that’s the one thing she refuses to give me. Instead, she’s left with gasping, wailing, and then cursing as the fire from the slaps grows hotter and she starts to fear that she can’t take my wrath.

  “It’s not my fault he’s dead!”

  “Isn’t it? You didn’t seem very surprised,” I purr, smoothing my hand over her cheeks, giving her just a little respite from the pain she so deserves. When she doesn’t immediately respond with more information, the spanking resumes. Talking is good. She will be spared if she talks. If she clams up, goes silent, tries to hide the truth from me, then her ass will burn like the sun.

  “Of course I’m not surprised when some criminal scumbag who helps sell women ends up dead!” She exclaims. “That’s what happens to men like you, Stavros. Justice catches up to them.”

  “So you are a cop.”

  “If I am, you’ve really fucked up now,” she replies, her voice coming in halting gasps between the waves of heat I unleashed on her. Just because I stopped spanking, doesn’t mean her ass stopped feeling it.

  “You’re too young to be a cop,” I say.

  She starts to talk, then shuts up again, and I start spanking. Hard. Fast. I want to get whatever it was she was about to spill then decided not to, out of her before it retreats to the vault of her mind where all her secrets are held.

  “What was that, Siri?” I goad her. “You’re not too young to be a cop?”

  I am more than twice her age. I should be able to crush her, but she won’t let me. She arches her back and she lifts her cheeks and she silently dares me to keep going, keep punishing. I can tell her ass will wear out before her iron will does.

  I could use my belt on her again. I could use my cane instead. I could make her scream and shriek. I could break her. For a moment, as I hold her over my thighs, her squirming red ass somehow managing to seem defiant, I am tempted to do just that.

  Before I go further, I get control of myself. This is not how I handle my girls. Any idiot can brute force a woman into submitting to him. There’s no honor in that, and there’s no point either. Siri might still refuse, and then I’ll have nothing but a marked up girl who hates me and who knows I can’t make her talk.

  I smooth my hand over her flaming hot bottom, rubbing some of the sting I put there away again, giving her the comfort she doesn’t deserve. I feel her hips relax, the tension flowing out of her. I am used to young, tender things. I am used to many of them coming with pre-existing damage, which usually manifests in resistance. A woman who has known pain in her past will rarely bow to it in the present. I can tell Siri has been hurt. I can tell she’s had to stand up to power, and also that she’s learned it is best to be avoidant when she does.

  When I take on a girl, I have to get to know her. As much as she might be molded to what I decide I want from her, her essential personality always comes into play.

  I no longer think Siri is a cop. Her confidence and resistance made her seem above it all at first, but now I’m understanding that her initial resistance to me was the manifestation of serious authority issues. She resists out of reflex. She’s proud and she’s independent, and that’s probably why she was on vacation by herself in Athens, ready to be picked up by my erstwhile delivery man.

  I let go of her, just to see what she’ll do. Some girls stay laying over my lap, waiting to be released, afraid of the extra punishment they’ll earn if they do something they’re not allowed. Others escape at speed, desperate to avoid more discipline. Siri gets up, but without any apparent urgency. Th
ere is a languid nature to her movement, a casual grace. Even naked and with a flaming red ass, she manages to look cool and collected.

  I find myself admiring her. I need to know what her secret is, but more than that, I want to actually get to know her, and not just so I can dominate her. It’s the strangest impulse for a man in my line of work, though I suppose it is normal and perhaps even healthy in the world outside my basement. I’m not used to having normal responses to women. When I sit at a cafe and watch people pass by, it’s hard not to mentally assign monetary values to the ladies I see. My inner world is dark, carnal, and thoroughly mercenary.

  Standing, I point to the floor. “On your knees.”

  She hesitates for a second. That’s too long. I grab her, twist her, and put my shin to the back of her knees hard enough to make her legs go out from under her. She drops down onto the floor, not as hard as she would have done if I’d just let her fall, but hard enough to shock her.

  “So this is where you really hurt me,” she says. “No more Mr Nice Guy, huh?”

  My thoughts exactly.

  My cock is rock fucking hard. Naked, she’s beautiful. She’s not perfect. Her body isn’t free from blemishes, but that’s what makes this so fucking hot. She’s real. The soft lower curve of her belly is swollen with femininity. Maybe she’ll be bred if I sell her. My cock stiffens all the more at the idea of hot load of cum being pumped inside her, one of the trillions of little pieces of life finding purchase in her fertile womb.

  Fuck. Why am I saying if, even to myself? There’s no if here. I sell women. It’s what I do. Of course I’m occasionally tempted to keep one for myself, but they always get boring in the long run, and there’s always a new innocent to corrupt. I remind myself that we’re in the honeymoon phase. She seems fascinating because she’s new. I can’t lose my edge, and I can’t forget the reason I started this.

  She’s looking up at me, waiting to see what I’m going to do with her. Her mouth is a red pout, attractive, but it would be so much more so if it were wrapped around my cock. She deserves to be used, but I’m not going to give her the satisfaction of being a victim. Everything that happens to her is something she’s going to beg for.