Tamara, Taken (The Blue-eyed Monsters Book 1)

by Ginger Talbot

  “I’ve got a different kind of cane here, and I’m going to go to work on your feet. This type of punishment is called bastinado. The soles of the feet are very sensitive. You know how much it hurts when you step on a sharp rock, barefoot? Well, that’s nothing on this. Think about having that soft skin slashed with a red-hot blade. And then multiply that times a thousand.”

  She chokes on a sob. “You piece of…piece of shit, miserable head case…” She sucks in air, her whole body trembling. “Everybody hates you.”

  That’s my girl.

  I smile as I bring the cane down on her foot, smacking it against the sensitive flesh in the middle of her sole. She rewards me with an agonized shriek. I work my way up and down the bottom of her feet, and she jerks her legs madly against the straps. I’ve heard victims of bastinado describe the feeling as being like having their feet dunked in gasoline and then lit on fire. It’s not long before she’s begging. “No, please, no! Master, no, please, I’m sorry!”

  It’s as if God designed human bodies just for me—with their delicate nerve endings and lightning-quick panic-messages to the brain. At times like this, the entire world seems to shrink beneath me. Human beings are tiny, doll-sized creatures that I can scoop up in one hand and manipulate as I wish. I can bend them and break them with sickening ease.

  I ignore her pleas, snapping the cane with small, precise flicks of my wrist.

  “Master, please, oh God, I can’t take it anymore!”

  Oh yes she can. Nobody knows better than me exactly how much agony a person can endure before they succumb, and she has a long, long way to go.

  “Oh, now I’m your master again?” I smack the soft, tender flesh of the middle of her foot again, and she screams to the heavens.

  “You’re my master! I’m sorry, sorry, sorry!”

  “You haven’t begun to understand the meaning of the word sorry.” I move back to the other foot and lay down a flurry of sharp, snapping blows.

  “You’ll cripple me! Please! I’m sorry, Master, I’ll never— Ahhhhhh!” Her body is convulsing, her eyes huge and desperate. Her muscles are strung taut, twitching with each new slap.

  After a few minutes of this, the soles of her feet are bright red from top to bottom. They’ll be bruised and swollen tomorrow.

  When I’m satisfied that her feet are in flaming agony, I unstrap her and scoop her up in my arms. I carry her shuddering body over to the electrified floor plate. She’s shaking her head and desperately trying to rasp out pleas for mercy. She should know me better by now.

  I hang her from the overhead chains. The musical sound of sobbing caresses my ears. I walk very slowly over to the switch on the wall, my eyes half closed, listening and enjoying. She’s not begging anymore; she’s just sagging there, whimpering and hopeless.

  My hand rests on the switch, and I stare at her, fascinated. Her body is quivering and she’s hanging off the chains, trying to keep the weight off her horribly bruised soles.

  I’m growing harder and harder. I unbutton my fly, grasp my cock, and stroke myself until I explode, sending my cum flying through the air.

  Finally, I can’t make myself wait anymore. I flip the switch and watch her dance on her tortured feet.

  Her screams pour into the raw center of me, stroking it obscenely. Even though I came mere minutes ago, I’m hard again and I can barely hold myself back from dragging her over to a bed to fuck her violently. She hasn’t earned it yet, though. I will never, never take a woman who isn’t begging for it.

  All too soon, her eyes roll back in her head and she passes out.

  Then I unchain her, drag her over to a bench, and dump a bucket of ice water on her head. She wakes up with a strangled scream, flailing wildly.

  I look down at her. Her face is white and drawn with exhaustion and terror. The look in her eyes…it’s the look of wounded prey when it’s cringing away from the killing blow and has no fight left.

  “Your name is no longer Tamara. You know why? Because you’re fucking nobody. I own you. You’re my toy. So your name is Toy. When I call you by your name, you acknowledge it instantly.”

  That breathes some life back into her. She convulses, struggling to sit upright, but she’s so weak that she just falls off the bench and lands on the floor with a thud. I leave her there.

  “Oh no!” she wails. “No! I’ll call you Master! I’ll never think that you’re not my master again, never! Just let me keep my name! It’s the last thing I have from my mother. Please let me keep my name!”

  Then I see the look of horror and realization on her face. She swore she’d never beg to call me Master. And now she’s pleading for the privilege.

  I haul her back over to the chains on the wall, and she cries all the way there, weak little mewling noises. She sags on the chain, her legs quivering.

  “What’s your name?”

  Her head is lolling and her eyes aren’t focused. “My name is Tamara Bennett!” I remember those words well, because they are the last defiant words she says to me before she breaks.

  I can’t believe she’s lasted this long. She’s a wonder. She puts the men I hunt to shame.

  Almost done now.

  I fetch a riding crop and slash across her stomach with all my strength. Her screams are weakening, her eyes wide and hopeless, as I move up and down her torso, splashing agony across her tender skin. I have to give her credit—she lasts a lot longer than I expected.

  I keep whipping her. She loses control of her bladder again.

  She passes out again.

  When I bring her to with another drenching bucket of water, it’s a different woman whose dazed eyes are staring at me. Her mouth is slack, her muscles limp. She’s a hollowed-out shell, waiting for me to fill her with whatever I see fit.

  “Ready to dance on the plate for me again?”

  “Noooo…” Drool leaks from her mouth.

  “What’s your name?” I hold the whip up, and she just gapes at me stupidly and rasps something. “I can’t hear you.”

  There’s no fight at all in her as she mumbles, “My name is Toy, Master.”

  The fierce triumph that roars through me almost makes me come on the spot. “What’s your name?” I yell again.

  “My name is Toy, Master!”

  I slash her breasts with the whip. “Louder!”

  “My name is Toy, Master!”

  I keep whipping her until the front of her body from tits to crotch is livid red. I make her rasp out her submission again and again, until her voice is hoarse and it’s agony for her, and then I make her scream it some more.

  Then I do the cruelest thing I’ve ever done. Far crueler than the whipping.

  I break my rule and I lie to her. It’s necessary. She needs this is as much as I do; she just can’t appreciate it. She can’t hold on to hope anymore. That hope, it’s harming her. It’s making her do foolish things.

  Things that might make me kill her.

  And I don’t want to have to kill her.

  So I whisper in her ear. “Nobody is looking for you, Toy. You haven’t even been reported missing yet. I don’t think you ever will be, because nobody out there cares whether you live or die. Why are you even fighting? There’s nothing out there for you.” And the hopeless dry-heaving sobs that rack her body tell me that my arrow has struck its mark.

  Then I sling her limp body like a sack of flour over my shoulder and carry her back to her cell. I rub medicated cream on her wounds, but I’m rough and impatient. I force her to take antibiotics and drink water, but I don’t give her any painkillers. She doesn’t deserve it. She tried to leave me.

  I send Elizabeth down the next day to take her breakfast and dinner of plain gruel, along with more antibiotics. No more lunch. I don’t bring her upstairs to exercise. It’s fine. Let her get weak.

  Toy is in so much pain that she can barely move for days. I hear her cry out in agony as she crawls to the bathroom grate and voids.

  I leave her down there in the dark for days. A
week. No bath, nothing but a deliberately bland meal served to her twice a day.

  One day she starts refusing her food. I send Elizabeth down with a note. “If you refuse to eat, I will shove a feeding tube down your throat and put a hood on your head. You’ll be blindfolded and chained hand and foot twenty-four hours a day.”

  So she eats.

  And once her feet heal, she stands up and stumbles back and forth every day, walking the short length that the chain will allow.

  She’s starting to crack for real now.

  Not that shit she was faking earlier, where she was willing to endure some punishment in order to trick me into thinking I was slowly breaking her.

  Yeah, she thought she’d fooled me.

  This is the real thing.

  I sit in my office, watching the last pieces of her fall away. She cries out to the camera, begging me. Her face is twisted with sorrow and desperation. “My name is Toy, Master! Please, Master, I’m sorry! I won’t try to escape again. Please, Master, my name is Toy. I’ll be good! I’ll do anything you want, Master. Toy will do anything you want.”

  I believe her when she says she won’t try to escape again. That girl, the one with a will of her own, is dead now.

  I sip my bitter black coffee and turn down the volume on the screen to dull the sound of her screams, and go back to work.

  I’m feeling itchy and unsatisfied because I don’t get to see my little Toy in the flesh anymore. I miss tasting her delicious pussy. I miss teasing her until she sobs with need and frustration. I miss thrusting down her throat and seeing that look of panic in her eyes as she struggles to take me in—and then her surrender, the way her nostrils flare to suck in oxygen as she swallows my cum.

  Depriving her of my presence is part of the punishment, but it’s also hard on me. I wish I could make her appreciate that. What I’m doing to her is for her own good, and I am willing to make the necessary sacrifices, but the dull ache inside me, the need for her, grows with each passing day.

  I finally decide to take a day off to kidnap the child rapist. I might as well take him out before he gets custody of his children, not after. Does it really matter? Not to me. I could always tell Toy about it someday.

  No! I draw myself up short. That would be weak and foolish of me. Since when do I need to trot my good deeds over to her, for her approval? She exists to please me, not the other way around.

  Bagging Stewart Hamilton is pathetically easy. I shoot him with a tranquilizer and bring him back to my estate in the soundproofed trunk of my car.

  I am pleased to see that I haven’t lost the urge to hunt. I watch him go through the various stages of outrage and threatening, then on to pleading and bribing and begging.

  The running, that’s the fun part.

  When I catch him and force him to face off against me, he tries to rise to the challenge. He really does. He feints and jabs, he puts up a halfway decent fight. He even gets one shot in, slamming his fist into my solar plexus, and I grunt in pain and happiness at the sensation rocketing through my body.

  The knives, oh, they’re glorious. The peeling away of the skin, exposing the red meat underneath. The shrill, girlish screams, the bubbling agony of his final breaths.

  I dispose of him quickly, shed my coveralls, and take them back to my house to burn them.

  By the time I get there, though, the elation is starting to fade, and thoughts of Toy are crowding into my head again. That’s much too soon. I think it would help if she was upstairs with me, if I could play with her, spank her, make her beg for my cock. But if there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s maintaining self-discipline. She’s not ready to come back upstairs yet, so I will suffer without her until it’s time.

  A couple of days later, I’m in my office reading the paper online when I’m hit with a bombshell. The Morton Media Group has been purchased.

  Shock ices my veins as I read the details. The purchaser, a real estate development group, offered them less money than I would have, but is allowing them to continue to operate their newspapers.

  The purchaser is paying to move the media group’s operations to smaller buildings on less valuable pieces of property. Apparently, Mr. Morton cared more about keeping his newspapers and radio stations running than he did about money. A man with principles? How fucking disgusting.

  All the deals I planned to make based on this one have now fallen to pieces. It doesn’t affect my vast holdings, my wealth, in any significant way, but it does affect me personally. I’m not used to failure.

  I do not yet know how all these different threads are woven together, but when I find out who did this to me, I will end them in horrible ways. In the meantime, I have to put all future hunts on hold. Frustration coils tightly inside me. Whoever’s doing this to me, when I find them, I’ll stage a special little hunt and I’ll make it last for days.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Joshua

  I feel an unusual nervousness as I glide into the parking spot in my building. I haven’t been to the office ever since I took Toy.

  With the threat of the phantom texter hanging over my head, and all the weirdness that’s been happening to me lately, I don’t like leaving Toy alone in the house with Elizabeth. Oh, she’s chained up and safe in her cell, but with someone still out there who delights in fucking with me, and who apparently has a way to hack into my system and set off the perimeter alarms, leaving the house like this is a huge risk.

  There’s one option I have if anyone attempts to breach the perimeter of my house. The nuclear option. Since I bring my hunting prey to the house, there would be too much risk of police finding DNA if anything were to lead them there. So I’ve wired my house in such a way that I can, just by calling in a certain code, cause it to explode completely, obliterating any trace of its existence—along with anything and anyone inside it.

  No more Toy. Ever.

  The thought creates a strange hollowness in me, but of course, if it ever became necessary, I could do it without blinking an eye.

  Couldn’t I?

  I force myself to try to picture my life without her, and my brain rebels. I clench my fists in frustration, opening and closing them. On some level, our roles have reversed. I’m keeping her body prisoner, but she’s taken my mind hostage.

  I can’t understand Toy’s effect on me. What is it about her, specifically, that has called up something new and un-nameable inside me?

  Plato believed humans were split apart before they were sent to Earth, and spent their entire lives searching for their missing half. He said that love tries to make one out of two and heal the wound of human nature.

  But that can’t be the answer for me. I’d never be drawn to someone like myself; I’m a perfect monster.

  And Toy is nothing like me. Oh, I know she’s a survivor—she crawled away from the wreckage of her past and rose to her feet and found her place in the world. But the similarity stops there. She is the exact opposite of me in her dealings with people, the yin to my yang. I want to open wounds; she wants to heal them.

  I mutter curses under my breath as I slide out of my car and head for my office. I really, really don’t want to be here today.

  Unfortunately, I didn’t have a choice.

  A police detective contacted my office and asked to see me but refused to say why. He wanted me to come down to the station to meet him. As if. I can handle myself with perfect calm and control anywhere, but why hand him any advantages?

  So I called my lawyer and arranged for him to meet me and the detective in the conference room of my building. My lawyer’s advice was to make the police wait until they were willing to say why they wanted to talk to me, but I think I’d better get ahead of all this.

  The police detective, Sergeant Ruiz, is a Hispanic man in his forties, has a gut lapping over his belt, and gray in his black gelled hair.

  Like most people, he’s not good at hiding his true emotions. He means to show me a poker face, but I can see his disdain in the subconscious curl of
his lip, the lines strung tight across his forehead. I don’t think it’s the typical envy and distrust that the working class have for men like me; I’m pretty sure it goes deeper than that.

  My lawyer, Algernon Brooks, who looks every bit as preppy and haughty as his name, sinks down into a seat next to me. After we get the introductions out of the way, the detective places a manila folder on the table. He opens it and takes out a picture that he slides across the table for me to look at. A driver’s license picture. Tamara Bennett, who is now my Toy.

  “Tamara something,” I say to him. “She worked for us as an office clerk for a little while over the summer. How can I help you, Sergeant Ruiz?”

  To amuse myself, I manufacture an image of what she’s doing right now. Crying out to the camera, bruises half-healed, beautiful tears streaming down her cheeks, her voice hoarse with sorrow as she begs to serve me. And there’s not a damn thing that Sergeant Ruiz can do to save her.

  “She’s been missing for almost a month now,” he informs me.

  I frown in manufactured dismay. “Yes, I know—my human resources director informed me that she’d been contacted by your department a little while back. I was sorry to hear it, but I’m not sure how I can help you. She was a summer intern, and she left our firm, I think to start school.”

  He ignores the question. “She didn’t just leave, though, did she? You fired her. Why?” he asks me.

  Who the hell told him that? Now I’m starting to get genuinely pissed off.

  I favor him with a pleasant, uninterested smile. “She acted inappropriately at a party. However, I hardly see how that’s relevant.”

  “In what way did she act inappropriately?”

  I lift my shoulders in a minimal, dismissive shrug. “She’d been drinking too much. Tried to flirt with some of the married guests.”

  “Why did you claim that she’d left to start school when you’d actually fired her?”

  “Because she would have finished with us either way, and her firing wasn’t a big deal. It was a temp job. She was nearing the end of her contract.” It’s a non-answer, but there’s not much Ruiz can do with it unless he wants to call me a liar to my face.