Boy (The Training House #2) (8 page)

“I am.”

“My Master Graham threw his back out fucking me,” she says, a hint of amusement in her voice.

“Your Master Graham wasn’t me.”

There’s a long pause, then, “No. He certainly wasn’t.”

I look down at her and she’s biting her lip, those pretty white teeth coming down on the plush pink of her mouth, making me want to bite her, too.

“Christopher? I don’t want you to be him. I don’t even want you to be the Master—Master Damon. I want you to be whoever you want when you’re with me. Master or slave, or this heady combination of both that makes me… I don’t know, exactly. But it makes me drunk with the possibilities. Sub-drunk. Is that even a word?”

“It can be. It can be your word. Our word.”

She smiles. “Will you tell me something?”

“Tell you what, pretty?”

“Anything. Something about yourself. About what you went through before becoming a slave, when you were young.”

“Why do you want to hear about that?”

“Because that’s when you reveal yourself to me. Is that…is that okay to ask of you?”

I roll onto my back, pulling her with me, and press her cheek down on my chest. She curls in like the kitten she is. And suddenly I have an image of her lying on her back, fluffy white ears on her head, purring at me as I dangle a toy above her.

Fucking hot.

But what was she asking? Oh yeah. My sad past.

“What do you want to know?”

“Um… What about your addiction? I mean, if you’re okay telling me.”

“I’ll tell you anything—I don’t care. Fuck. That’s bullshit. I do care. I don’t tell just anyone this stuff. I’ve kept it to myself most of my life. I don’t particularly enjoy feeling like I’m burdening anyone with my crap.”

“It’s no burden. It’s important, don’t you think? To who you were, who you’ve become?”

“I don’t know that getting hooked on smack was as important to who I am now as getting off the stuff.”

“Of course,” she agrees. “Because that’s your strength.”

“It didn’t fucking feel like it at the time. Or…maybe it did.”

It comes back to me, then. The fear and the thrill. The dark and the flesh. The absolute goddamn powerlessness, and me taking my fucking power back, in grand form. I exhale, long and slow.

“You know what got me to stop using heroine? One night when I was sixteen—I’d been using about a year—I was hustling at Balboa Park. This trick comes up to me, we negotiate my price to blow him, then I have him follow me to my favorite bush, and three other guys show up and fucking gang rape me. But you know what? The problem wasn’t being gang-banged against my will. The problem was that I
liked
it. And I knew I had to get my shit under control to figure that out, that I had to get off the drugs—out from behind the mask—to feel that again. That’s what really living is, you know? The shit with the fucking sparkle. You can’t have one without the other—not anyone I ever knew. Those people who think life is one or the other? They’re the ones who are missing out. Not us poor kinky fuckers. We have it
all
.”

She curls hard into my side, her hands grasping at my chest, then hanging onto my shoulder, and I feel her hot tears on my skin.

“Don’t, Aimée. Don’t you fucking feel sorry for me,” I growl, unable to keep the fury from creeping into my voice.

“I’m not. I don’t. It’s not pity. But it’s still terrible, a terrible, hard way to grow up. And perhaps selfishly, it makes me think of my own childhood. We were both lost children, weren’t we? Even if it was in very different ways. When you’re a kid, it all amounts to the same thing—not having anyone to protect or care for you, not having that safety net. I suppose that’s part of my need to be a slave, too—having someone care for me. Or, taking care of me, even if all they want is for me to serve their needs. But I’ve been lucky, for the most part. It sounds like we both have, as far as our kink lives are concerned. Well, maybe me more than you. But don’t you find you get that out of it, at least at this point? No? Please don’t scowl at me—I didn’t mean to make any assumptions. I’m sorry.” She stops, sniffling, then another tear drops onto my skin, hot and melting its way into my chest. Into my heart, whether I like to admit it or not. “But Christopher,” she goes on, her voice so soft I can barely hear it, “I can still feel sad for what you’ve had to go through, can’t I?”

“I don’t know. No one else ever has.”

She lets out a breathy sigh, her fingers smoothing tentatively over my skin. “No wonder you’re so angry,” she says, still quiet.

But I’m fucking pissed. Pissed at my past. Pissed that I feel like a goddamn victim having to talk about it, or maybe because someone is actually sympathetic to my fucking pathetic lot in life. I don’t like to feel pathetic. Anything but that.

“Yeah. Fuck it. Whatever. It doesn’t matter.”

She sits up suddenly, looking down at me, her green eyes gleaming softly in the twilight bathing our little stall. “Don’t,” she pleads. “It matters. It does. It matters to me.”

“Why?” I still don’t have the rage under control. It’s not her. It’s simply
there
, an ancient part of me, like the rings on a tree, except those rings may as well be steel cables wrapped around my body, holding the deeply fermented ire in place.

She’s watching me again, her brows furrowed, her lovely face all soft, elegant lines. “I don’t really understand it—why you make me feel the strange things I do. Things that are so new to me, so different, I don’t even know how to process it. All I know is, this feels important, meeting you, being with you. I have to ask myself, is this what I’ve been missing with my Masters, with my Mistress? With the men I’ve tried to have relationships with outside of kink? There’s always been this awful, glaring hole, and I’m constantly trying to fill it. I feel as if I’ve come close a few times—close, but never quite enough. Never quite right. And then you come along and…you feel right. Forgive me, but I can’t
not
tell you. You rip me too wide open, and I can’t allow that to happen and still have anything left to fight it with. No, that’s not right. I couldn’t fight it to begin with. Not with you. I have no desire to do anything but give myself to you, no matter what it does to me. It scares me to tell you, but I have to. I
have
to.”

I don’t know what to say, my tongue frozen in my mouth. Emotion builds, knotting my chest, my gut, threating to burst in some spectacular explosion. And when it does, that shattering sensation tearing into my skin, all I can do is fist my hand in her soft hair, push her down into the hay and kiss her and kiss her, as if my life depended on it. Maybe it does.

Her body is so damn soft, her mouth even softer, and the way this woman yields to me is powerful. Intense. She makes me want to
own
her—something I’ve never done before, never wanted. Sure as fuck never needed, the way I do right now, with her.

I pull back. It almost hurts to do it. “Aimée, I need to take you out of here,” I tell her in a rush, and maybe I’m not even certain of what I’m saying.

“Take me out of here?”

“Yeah.” I nod, the plan formulating as I talk to her. “I can get to some clothes, and I have cash stashed here. We’re going away together. I don’t know where we’re going, not yet, but I’ll figure it out by the time I have you dressed.”

She’s staring up at me, her eyes wide.

Laying my palm on her cheek, which is burning with a hot, lovely blush, I tell her, “I need your consent. You know that’s the only way I can do this. Fuck, I shouldn’t be doing this at all, violating your contract, as well as mine. I do it all the time, but I know this isn’t something you’d do without my bad influence. Still…” I have to pause, chewing the inside of my lip, trying to ground myself. It’s not working. All I know is a sharp-edged desperation that’s going to make my guts spill all over the damn floor if I can’t do this. “I need you to come with me. I can’t stay here anymore, and I’m not leaving without you. But if you can’t do it, I get it. I do. Just fucking tell me…”

She raises her hand and strokes my face, her gaze locked on mine, her pale little brows drawn. So serious, and so damn pretty, I can’t stand it.

“Christopher. Please promise me you won’t leave without me. Please. I’ll go anywhere with you. I have to.”

I nod, turn to kiss her sweet palm. “Wait here. I’ll be back within an hour.”

She nods, smiles. Her eyes are shining, brilliant.

Getting to my feet, I flex my fingers, then ball them up into fists. And there I am, naked and unchained, when I hear the stall door swing wide behind me, and the high-pitched chuckle of fucking Jonathon as the handlers grab me and throw me to the floor.

“God fucking shitting damn it!”

There are four of them on me—big, beefy guys—and they overpower me too easily, pissing me off. I kick one of them, manage to bite a hand, but there are too many of them. In seconds they have me bound in rope and gagged with the damn stuff—the spiky jute I usually love and hate simultaneously, but which I only hate right now. Not as much as I hate Jonathon.

My vision is blurred with red—the unadulterated color of raw anger—and through it I see my beautiful Aimée, hands over her eyes, tears streaming down her cheeks. And fuck, I will hate myself if she’s punished on my account. I will hate
them
. I will burn the goddamn place to the fucking ground!

But they hustle me out so damn fast, I hardly have time to think, to tell Aimée I will get out of this and come back for her. I’m still struggling as they drag me down the center aisle of the slave barn, but my arms are laced tightly behind my back, my ankles shackled with rope, and I can’t even fucking walk by myself. I don’t mind the humiliation so much—at almost any other time, I’d love it—but I don’t know where they’ll put me, or how long it’ll take me to escape. And fucking shit—what will they do to her? What if they send her away somewhere? Someplace where I can’t find her?

But I will. I’ll do whatever I have to in order to track her down. I have my connections in the kink world, and in the underbelly of the kink world—and yes, even our world, which is an underbelly of sorts in itself, has its own anarchists. I know them, of course. I’m one of them, aren’t I? And I can find out anything I need to.

All of this is spinning through my head at a thousand miles an hour, and I barely noticed that the goons have hoisted me onto their shoulders. But suddenly, we’re out in the cool evening air. Even now I notice the scents of rolling fog on green leaves, see the color of the sky overhead: a deep, deep blue, starless as the sun makes its final, glimmering descent over the horizon.

They’re carrying me on my back, so I can’t see where they’re taking me. But even before I’m tossed face-down onto the boards in the back of a wagon, I hear the jangle of harnessing, then the crack of a whip as the driver starts the human ponies moving down the road. Eventually, we stop, and the goons are back, grabbing me by the shoulders and pulling me out of the cart, only two of them this time, but I need to get my bearings if I’m going to make a break for it.

Am I? They’d come right after me, set off the alarm, and the property would be crawling with handlers and obedient slaves, like a pack of hounds scenting a fox. Fuck. When they tilt me upright and set me on my feet, I can finally see where I am. My blood runs cold.

In front of me is the Victorian house the owners of this place live in, and in which they house some of their more important guests. I only know it because the Master has brought me here with him—in my life as a Master, which I think of as my “outside life”, I’ve been put up in one of the dozen or so guest bungalows. I have no idea what it could possibly mean that I’ve been brought
here
. Am I being dismissed from my contract? Have I fucked up that badly this time? I’ve done all sorts of rotten shit, but I’ve never involved another slave before. Bad Christopher. If my stupid behavior hadn’t put Aimée at risk, I would laugh at the absurdity of my predicament—
me
, of all people, of all slaves, being despondent at the idea of being sent away. Ha!

Except there’s not a damn thing to laugh about right now. The goon squad hustles me up the front steps, through the double doors that are being held wide by a pair of latex-clad ponies, which I only catch in a dark and shining peripheral blur. They’re dragging me along so damn fast, down a hall and into a large room, which, I see with a quick glance, is a parlor, of sorts. Except that there’s all kinds of kink gear and furniture in here—spanking benches and examination tables are punctuated by delicately-built period furniture. At the far end of the room is a huge fireplace, but instead of a fire, a bound and gagged and blindfolded male slave is turning on a spit above a row of burning pillar candles. Of course, he’s sporting a raging erection. Very nice. The sadist in me can’t help but grin gleefully beneath my rope gag. And then I remember that I could damn well be next.

Fuck. Fuck this place. Fuck my damn contract.

The fury is building, and it’s that crazed beast, scratching and slobbering, clawing to get out. The more I think of Aimée left alone, chained up in the barn, the more it feels like my brain will explode. I turn and growl at the handler on my left. He shakes his head at me. When I growl again he backhands me across the face, and I lunge at him—as ridiculous as that is, given that I’m bound and hobbled. He takes a step back, and I go down hard, hitting the floor with a thud that momentarily knocks the wind from my lungs, my sight dimming for a split second.

One of them toes me in the ribs, and I’d cuss the fucker out if I weren’t gagged—except I still don’t have enough air in my lungs to even growl at him. But a low chuckle makes me blink up, and my gaze meets Master Damon’s.

Fuck.

He clucks his tongue, says in his precise tone, “Foolish even for you, Christopher, don’t you think?”

I don’t say anything, grinding my jaw while he turns his head and signals to the others to leave the room. It’s only the Master and myself in here now. The slave “roasting” on the spit hardly counts. Master Damon waits until the parlor doors close, then he straddles my body, pulls a knife from his back pocket, and leans down, slicing the rope binding my ankles. I have a moment to glance at the blade, which is a straight razor, before he flips me over onto my stomach and drags me across the floor, pulling me along by the rope binding my arms until we reach an ottoman. He bends me over it, shoving my knees apart. I’m fucking furious and hard as a rock. Alas, my never-ending story. I know what to expect, but still, the object he shoves into my ass without preamble makes me suck a breath in between my teeth.