by Sykes, Julia
I swallowed hard, trying my best not to shift uncomfortably in her embrace.
No. I didn’t know how much she had missed me. Because I hadn’t missed her. I hadn’t even thought of her in months. I had forgotten her, just like I had forgotten everyone else. Just like I had forgotten myself. Missing them had been too painful to face.
Shame flooded me. I had surrendered them to him. I had given the people I loved to that Bastard on the day that I broke.
I stepped away from Becs, no longer able to resist the urge.
“I’ll see you tomorrow, B,” I said, trying to make the words come out evenly.
Tucker ushered her to the door, laying a reassuring hand on her arm. His touch drew her gaze to his, and I could see that her eyes were shining, the lines around them betraying anguish.
Her pained expression reassured me of my decision not to allow her to stay. I had managed to deeply upset her after exchanging only a few sentences. She would have been unfathomably more distraught by the sound of my despairing sobs in the night.
Once the door had locked behind her, I turned to retreat to my bedroom. I was more than ready to put this day behind me.
“Wait,” Tuck called me back. “Will you sit with me?”
I didn’t want to sit with Tuck. I wanted to crawl into my bed and huddle under the covers like a child hiding from the monsters in her closet.
The gold band weighed heavy on my finger, reminding me of the choice I had made. Tucker was my husband. And our marriage would never work if I shut him out completely.
My feet dragged as though the soles of my shoes were made of concrete, but I managed to walk to the couch. Tucker settled down beside me, his expression troubled. I knew whatever he had to say to me wouldn’t be pleasant. I stared at him expectantly, waiting.
“Agent Scott came by to ask me some questions this afternoon,” he said carefully.
“Agent Scott?” I didn’t recognize the name.
“He’s Agent Byrd’s partner,” he explained. “He wanted to know how I felt about… About where you were when you were abducted.”
I sucked in a breath.
No. I didn’t want him to know about that. Kate’s suspicions about Tucker seemed to have been eased during the course of my debriefing. Why did they have to tell Tuck my dark secret? Even Becs didn’t know about what I had been up to in those last months before I was taken.
Just when I had decided to work things out with Tucker, the FBI had gone and complicated things further for me. He would never understand this. He never had.
“I’m not upset, baby,” Tucker said quickly. “But why… Why would you go to a place like that? Is that why things fell apart between us? If I had just given you that -”
I shook my head sharply, and he stopped speaking instantly.
“I don’t want to talk about it, Tuck,” I said firmly. “I don’t want that. Not anymore.”
Not with anyone but Master.
Master had given me that part of myself back. He had returned an essential part of my soul to me through helping me reclaim my lusts from that Bastard.
I shoved him from my mind almost angrily. I was going to be with Tucker, and Tucker didn’t want that kind of sexual relationship. I would learn not to want it, either.
“I want to make things work between us, Tuck,” I said softly, forcing the words to form on my tongue. “I married you, for better or worse. Things couldn’t be much worse. The problems that we had before… They were nothing in comparison. Even after everything, I… I still love you, Tuck.”
It was true. I loved Tucker fiercely. I just wasn’t in love with him.
But maybe that didn’t matter anymore. Maybe I wasn’t capable of loving anyone like that anymore.
You loved Master.
No. No, that wasn’t love. That was slavish devotion. Obsession.
Tucker’s hand tenderly cupped my cheek. I had to fight the urge to flinch away.
“I love you, too, Lydia. I always have. I always will.”
I studied his face. Although there were fresh lines at the corners of his soft blue eyes, he was just as handsome as he had been on the day I first saw him. His cheekbones were sharply defined, his mouth full and sensitive. I remembered staring at him in wonder as he strummed his guitar in my bedroom, singing the first song he had ever written for me. We had been so young then, so naïve.
My heart swelled at the memory, aching to recall that time of perfect innocence, our love just blossoming, untainted by years of pain and resentment at all that we had lost when we had committed to eternity together.
Tuck and I were supposed to go to college together. I was going to be an artist, and he was going to be a singer-songwriter. We weren’t supposed to have spent our early twenties working jobs we hated just to scrape by. And all for a family that had never come to fruition.
I glanced down at Tucker’s crisp blue button-down shirt and khakis. He looked like he had stepped out of a J. Crew catalogue now; all signs of his youthful, carefree style were gone. It had been stamped out of him by years of struggling in the corporate machine so that he could support us. He hadn’t even picked up his guitar in years.
Tucker had sacrificed the life he should have had for me. He had sacrificed himself for me. I would do everything I could to give him as much of myself as possible in return. He deserved nothing less.
Still, I couldn’t stop myself from shrinking away from him when he leaned in to kiss me.
His hand dropped from my face, turmoil flickering across his features.
“I’m sorry, Tuck. I’m just… I’m not ready for that yet. Can we take it slow?”
“Of course,” he said softly. His voice was so earnest and understanding that it made my heart twinge. “Of course we can.”
I took a deep breath. Would I ever be able to accept his intimate touch? Would I be able to allow his lips to caress mine without stiffening beneath him? Would I be able to accept him into my body again without wanting to cry?
I came to the disturbing realization that it wouldn’t be memories of that Bastard that caused my tears to flow. It would be because the man moving inside me wasn’t Master.
The possession which I had once so desperately craved, which I had demanded from him, had proven to be my destruction as well as my salvation. He had shown me the pleasure that I had always dreamed of – no, my dreams hadn’t even been capable of conjuring up such a perfect fantasy – and in doing so, he had ruined me for anyone else.
“Do you know how long I’ve ached to explore your body, girl? I’m not going to stop until I’ve devoured every inch of you. I am claiming you. Your body is mine. And I get to toy with it and play with it as long as I like.”
Even though I would never see him again, he would own my body, my pleasure, for the rest of my life. And although the comprehension of that fact pained me like a knife twisting in my gut, I couldn’t regret our coupling.
My time as Lydia, Master’s slave, was something I would never bury, would never forget. I would tuck it away, but I would pull it out from time to time, savoring it.
That night, I replayed the memories of my time with Master in my mind in lurid detail, burning all of them deep into my psyche so they could never be erased.
Those memories would help me preserve my sanity when I wanted to fall apart. Master was the bridge between my time as that Bastard’s plaything and who I truly was: Lydia Chase. He had gently coaxed my soul out of hiding without me even realizing what he was doing.
I idly stroked the tourmaline gem at my throat until I finally fell into sleep.
Chapter 19
The following morning, my stomach was doing somersaults as I settled down on the couch in Dr. Rachael Stanger’s office. Her sharp features were framed by straight black hair, styled in a bob with bangs. She would have seemed almost severe if it weren’t for the soft set of her mouth and the gentleness of her eyes, which somehow conveyed kind understanding and incisive acuity at the same time.
“I’ve read the file that
the FBI has compiled regarding what happened to you, Lydia,” Dr. Stanger began after the general introductions were out of the way. Her voice was a touch deeper than it had been at first. The sound was richer, warmer. Although I knew she was about to lead me through something that would be extremely upsetting, her voice eased some of the tension from my muscles.
“You don’t have to tell me anything in detail. We’ll be dealing with your trauma through EMDR – Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. Right now, all of the memories of what you went through are stored away in your mind. I’m sure you’ve actively tried to put them away in order to avoid them.”
I nodded. The accuracy with which she already understood how my mind operated in relation to my trauma helped to further calm my anxiety. Dr. Stanger knew what she was doing. She was going to be able to help me.
“Even though you’re free now, you’re susceptible to the pain of those memories if they’re triggered by some stimuli surrounding you. EMDR allows us to access those memories one by one and deal with each of them. We’ll do this style of intensive therapy for several weeks until your memories are no longer debilitating. Then we’ll begin more introspective therapies to help you stabilize and rebuild your life. EMDR is meant to lessen the most extreme effects of PTSD, but this is only the beginning of the healing process.”
I nodded my understanding. I hadn’t expected a quick cure, but I was determined to take my life back.
“Facing your memories in detail will be very difficult, Lydia,” Dr. Stanger continued, “but afterward you’ll be able to put them away again. Only then, they’ll be organized in a way that you control, and they won’t be able to cause you further trauma if they do surface. We’ll begin by establishing a positive memory for you to focus on if you become distressed during the course of the exercises. It should be something you associate with being safe and calm. Take however much time you need to select your positive memory. When you’re ready, I’d like for you to share it with me.”
My mind instantly flashed to Master’s face.
His steady silver eyes stared down at me from where he loomed above me. He touched the top of my head affectionately as I knelt at his feet. Master was in control, and I didn’t have to worry about anything. He would take care of me.
Safe. Calm.
But now that memory held its own edge of distress. I couldn’t be his mindless slave any longer, couldn’t live my life in the pursuit of pleasing him.
It was wrong that I ever had been his possession.
My mind turned to a different memory, but it was still about him. Only, it didn’t hold the same imbalance of power as my first thought.
Master held me in his arms as my body slowly stilled its blissful quivering. Nothing separated our naked flesh, not even air. I was his, but he was finally mine as well. We were irrevocably bound, and his claiming of me granted me my own sort of claim over him.
I had demanded that Master join with me in that way. I had come to him from a position of supplication, but I hadn’t relented when he tried to deny me. Even while he dominated my body, I felt empowered as I never had before. Not only was I taking my lusts back from that Bastard, but I had also asserted myself with Master. I hadn’t begged him to use my body because I wanted to please him; I had begged him to touch me because it was what I wanted.
I couldn’t recall another memory that came close to that perfection, not even from my life before I had been taken.
But I might get Master into trouble if I told Dr. Stanger what had happened between him and me.
“Do you work for the FBI?” I asked her warily.
“Yes,” she said evenly. “But nothing you share with me will leave this room.”
I wavered for a moment, unsure if I should believe her.
“You can trust me, Lydia,” she reassured me. “This is solely about helping you heal. That’s all that I’m concerned with.”
I decided to take the leap. I needed advice on how to deal with what had happened with Master almost as badly as I needed help dealing with what that Bastard had done to me.
“If you’ve read my file, then you know that three weeks passed between when the FBI found me and when I was reunited with my family. Did it… Did it say where I was during that time?”
Dr. Stanger nodded. “After you were attacked at St. Paul’s, you were taken to an FBI safe house at an undisclosed location.”
A small sigh of relief escaped me. What Master had done wasn’t part of the official record. Clayton must have kept his secret.
Even though I was discomfited by how I had behaved while I was with him, I didn’t want Master to suffer any consequences. He had only ever tried to help me. And he had tried so hard to do the right thing, the decent thing. I was the one who finally broke him down and convinced him to touch me sexually.
And I didn’t regret that, either.
“I wasn’t at a safe house. I stayed at Ma- at Agent Smith James’ apartment.”
The sound of his real name issuing from my lips was strange; it was the first time I had ever voiced it aloud.
“And how did you end up there?”
“He was the one who found me at Decadence,” I explained. “He was very disturbed by what had happened to me, and he stayed with me every day while I was at St. Paul’s. He became invested in my recovery, and… And he understood a kind of treatment I needed that the doctors didn’t.”
I watched Dr. Stanger carefully as I made my next admission.
“He’s a Dominant in the BDSM lifestyle, and he recognized that I needed very specific rules and structure in order to function in the state I was in. It wasn’t his intention, but I immediately identified him as my new Master.”
Dr. Stanger’s expression didn’t change one iota, but still I plowed on quickly, rushing to defend his actions.
“He wouldn’t allow me to call him that, but I never stopped thinking it. It was only after that Bastard came back for me and I almost slipped back into the place where I had been when he found me that Ma- that Smith told me to call him ‘Master.’ He insisted on personally ensuring my safety after that, and he took me to his apartment.”
A note of pleading entered my voice as I pressed on. Dr. Stanger had to understand that Master had done nothing wrong.
“All he wanted was to help me. He allowed the power dynamic because I wouldn’t have been able to function on my own. A few times, he tried to tell me that he wasn’t really my Master, but I couldn’t handle his rejection. Everything just sort of… happened.”
Dr. Stanger allowed me a moment of silence before she asked the question I had been dreading.
“Did your Master/slave relationship become sexual?”
“Yes,” I admitted, but I shook my head at the same time. “But it wasn’t like that. In the beginning, he just held me, comforted me. I was the one who tried to seduce him. I could tell he wanted me too, but he never allowed me to touch him like that.”
“Why did that change?”
“Because I begged him to.” It was a quiet utterance, and I forced my voice to be clearer. I might have been disturbed by my shocking level of dependence on him, but I wasn’t ashamed of the fact that I had stood up for myself and reclaimed my sexual identity. “During my time with him, he slowly helped me remember who I was, who I had been before I was taken. I remembered that I had wanted a BDSM relationship, but the way that Bastard tortured me destroyed that. I asked – I insisted – that Master help me reclaim that part of myself. And he did.”
I looked at Dr. Stanger steadily, significantly.
“He did help me. I wasn’t even a person when he took me in. He helped me find myself again. And I… I loved him for that.”
“So that’s your safe memory, then? Being with him?”
“Yes,” I said, my tone colored with uncertainty. “But that’s wrong, isn’t it? I thought of myself as his slave. Those memories… They shouldn’t comfort me.”
“You just referred to Agent James as ‘Master.’ Do you sti
ll think of yourself as his slave?”
I rolled the question around in my mind. Did I still think of myself as his slave? I certainly still thought of him as “Master.”
My mind raced through my memories of my time with him, of how he had treated me.
“You’re mine now.”
His.
But not his slave. He had only called me “slave” once, when he had been desperate to snap me out of my catatonic state. Even that had been about helping me rather than degrading me. The whole time I had been with him, he encouraged me to make my own choices, to speak my own mind.
He hadn’t been training a slave; he had been teaching me how to be myself again.
But he had been my Master. He had guided me and cared for me as a Dominant would care for his submissive.
“No,” I said finally. “He never wanted me to think of myself as his slave. I understand that now.”
“But you still think of him as ‘Master’?”
“I’ve never know him as anything else.”
No. That wasn’t true. I called him “Master” because that was his title, his name. But I hadn’t spent every minute mindlessly serving him. While I always had his pleasure in mind, there was more to our relationship than that. He wasn’t simply some remote entity that I worshipped; he was a man. A wonderful, achingly beautiful man, but a man nonetheless.
He cussed worse than a sailor, he couldn’t cook to save his life, and he had an almost unhealthy knowledge of every single action-comedy movie that had ever been filmed.
His body reacted like a man’s, even when he didn’t want it to.
He had made a mistake years ago, a mistake so terrible that he had permanently marked his body as a reminder not to do it again, to choose to be better.
He was fallible, flawed.
He was real.
That man was Smith James, I just hadn’t known him by that name.
“That’s not right,” I corrected myself. “I think of ‘Master’ as his name, but I know him better than that. I… I miss him. And I’ll never see him again.”
My heart twisted agonizingly as I whispered the last words.
