by Jason Luke
Edge put his arm around Clarissa’s waist and walked with her back to the car. She was still trembling, but gradually the shock was fading and the new hope of her reality was beginning to burn through the mist.
She would have her life back at last.
The desk lamp was on, casting Edge’s stern face in a ghostly glow of highlights and shadows. Clarissa watched him from the other side of the office’s vast desk. He was turning Jansing’s phone over in his hand. It was almost midnight. Already sketchy reports were beginning to appear on social media about a U.S. Congressman being caught up in a salacious sex scandal. By morning the news would be all over the net and in every major newspaper right across the country.
“You do it,” Edge handed Clarissa the phone.
She powered up the Congressman’s personal phone and went straight to the menu to find the file of photographs that were stored in the memory.
As soon as she saw the first image of herself lying on the penthouse bed, Clarissa had a nauseous moment of sickening flashback. She remembered the night so clearly; the menacing presence of the Congressman and the odious malevolence of his scheme. She deleted the image with a hateful snarl of satisfaction.
She went through the photos one at a time, deleting each one and in the process, trying desperately to erase the memory of that night. Her hands were shaking; her face was tight and strained. Edge watched her in silence.
Then Clarissa’s expression altered. Her eyes widened and a frown of incomprehension rumpled her brow. Her lips parted and she gave a quiet gasp. Her gaze flickered, and then she blinked. The color washed away from her cheeks and her whole face became tight – as if the flesh across her bones was being stretched.
“Edge…?” she whispered and looked up, bewildered.
Nick Edge knew instantly that something was horribly wrong. He pounced out of his chair and leaned across the desk. Clarissa was staring at the phone, shaking her head with slow incomprehension.
“There are photos of me on here… at a place I’ve never been…”
Clarissa turned the phone and held the photo up so Edge could see. It showed a stark image of Clarissa on her hands and knees. She was posed on a narrow bed in a small messy room. The sheets beneath her were rumpled. Clarissa had her head turned to look back at the camera. Edge stared hard at the girl’s eyes… and felt his stomach lurch.
“Jesus!” he gasped. The ground beneath him seemed to give way so that he had to snatch at the desk to hold him. “That’s a photo of Anna. It’s Anna Wilkinson!”
He tore the phone from Clarissa’s trembling fingers and scrolled through the rest of the photos on the Congressman’s phone. There was over a hundred more photographs of the same girl – all of them showing her sexually posed in the same cramped little space. Edge went white and cold, and then red and raging. He smashed his fist down on the desk, his features straining into a mask of ugly violence.
“Jansing knows where Anna is.”
It took the F.B.I. team just forty-five minutes to find Congressman Wilton Jansing’s secret door beneath the staircase.
They found Anna Wilkinson lying naked on the bed, with her legs apart and one hand flung across her breasts. She was breathing in short shallow rasps of air. Her eyes were sunken, the flesh around her cheeks dull and smudged with soft bruises. Her hair was a knotted mess, but she was alive. Paramedics were on standby.
Chapter 17:
“You’ve been watching the news?”
“Yes,” Nick Edge said with no trace of triumph or even satisfaction in his voice. “It’s all over the television and papers.”
Clarissa and Edge were sitting quietly at the kitchen table of his big house. It was a clear sunny day outside the vast bay window that filled the length of one wall.
It had been a week since the fateful night in the alley off Eighth Street. In the time since, Clarissa hadn’t gone back to her volunteer work at the city politician’s office, and Edge had begun dismantling his sex-trafficking investigation team. For both of them, the events leading up to the arrest of Congressman Jansing had indelibly changed them.
Clarissa had become jaded and disillusioned with politics. She had witnessed the unseemly underside of the beast and it had abhorred her. Before meeting with Edge, she had resigned.
She didn’t know what she might do with her life now. A career in politics was all she had ever dreamed about.
Edge too had been changed, though less profoundly. His determination to break apart the Washington sex-trafficking ring had always been personally motivated by his resolve to one day find and rescue Anna Wilkinson. Now that goal had been achieved, the fire that had flamed his tenacity had lost its spark.
“How is Anna?” Clarissa asked softly. She stared down into the cup of coffee in her hands and sipped. “Will she be okay?”
Edge nodded. He leaned back in his chair and gazed for a moment at the trees through the window. “She will be fine – eventually,” he said. “She’s gone to California. She has family there; an aunt and an uncle. They’re good people. They will look after her. It’s going to take a long time, but she’ll be okay.”
“And you?”
Edge shrugged. The house felt strangely empty. “The guys in the team are all standing down,” he said. “They’ve got plenty of opportunities to go on to other projects. And as for me personally?” he shook his head. “Well, I just don’t know, yet. What about you?”
Clarissa smiled wanly. “I’m lost,” she admitted into the stilted silence. “I resigned this morning from the politician’s office…”
Edge looked surprised. “No more political aspirations?”
She shook her head. “Not after what I’ve seen and experienced.”
There was another long spell of uncomfortable silence before Edge finally set a small box on the table between them. It was the parcel he had promised her as a gift on the same afternoon they had trapped Jansing.
Clarissa remembered it. She also remembered the five men she had pleasured in the pool room to earn this mysterious reward.
“Can I open it?”
Edge nodded.
Clarissa tore at the paper wrapping to reveal a black leather submissive’s collar with a silver ring attached. She knew what it was, and exactly what it implied.
“Does this mean what I think it does?” she asked to be sure, and to force the words from Edge.
“I want you to live here with me as my submissive,” Edge said softly, with genuine feeling.
Clarissa held the collar in her hand like it was precious. “Why? So you can just fuck me and use me as your sex toy whenever you want?”
“Yes.”
“And so you can pass me around to strangers who might want me? Groups of men who just want to fuck me for their own pleasure?”
“Yes,” Edge said again. “But only when you’re a very good girl.”
Clarissa smiled with glee. “That sounds perfect,” she said, and then modestly lowered her eyes, “my Master.”
