Obsession
Authors: Ann Mayburn
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Obsession
Copyrigh
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2016 by Ann Mayburn
Published by Honey Mountain Publishing
All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work, in whole or in part, in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means now known or hereafter invented, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher.
**DISCLAIMER: Please do not try any new sexual practice, BDSM or otherwise, without the guidance of an experienced practitioner. Ann Mayburn will not be responsible for any loss, harm, injury or death resulting from use of the information contained in this book.**
Dear Beloved Reader,
If you’ve read my work before you already know that I’m a filthy, dirty bitch in the bedroom and you’re ready for the ensuing sexy times. For my first time readers, please be aware that my sex scenes do not fade to black, and my characters are not big into missionary under the sheets with the lights off for procreation while thinking of England sex. That said, Leo is a kinky, kinky bastard and even though he’s into Daddy/princess play, in no way-shape-or form does it ever become pedophile/incest role playing.
Instead, the ‘Daddy Dom’ dynamic is one of love and trust, where the Dom enjoys caring completely for his baby girl, helping her grow into a stronger person, making her happy, while giving her the discipline she both needs and desires. This is a consensual relationship between two adults, and in my opinion, Daddy/princess play is a very loving form of BDSM that is caring and full of lots of open affection. Like everything else in life it means different things to different people so what I may find kinky you may find vanilla, and vice versa.
So, get your seatbelt on and your vibrator handy, ‘cause you’re in for a heck of a ride.
Ann
Table of Contents
A true friend is someone who lets you have total freedom to be yourself - and especially to feel. Or, not feel. Whatever you happen to be feeling at the moment is fine with them. That's what real love amounts to - letting a person be what he really is and loving him for it.
~Jim Morrison
Leo – Age Eighteen
Tucson, Arizona
There are few emotions that I experience with any intensity, and fewer still that are what ordinary people would consider “nice”, but of those occasional bouts of negative feelings I have to endure, sorrow is by far the worst. Once it sinks its poisoned claws into you, it debilitates your body, steals your will to function, drains your life, and leaves you hollowed out and blistered raw inside. The only thing I’ve found to combat the choking depression of sorrow is violence, but my grief at this point is so absolute I couldn’t fathom anything but pain.
Usually I’d be multi-tasking, touching base with the various members of the cartel I belonged to as we went about our daily business and shit like that. But with my mother dying in a room not too far from me in this barren medical wasteland, I could barely function enough to breathe.
My sweet, gentle, kind mother, who always smelled like cherries and vanilla, was pumped full of strangers’ blood in a vain attempt to keep her heart beating and replace the liters she’d lost as I’d held her in my arms, trying in vain to stop the bleeding as she clung to me with the last of her strength.
Guilt and sorrow battled for supremacy in my chest, my lungs tight with the need to cry out against the injustice of it all.
If it wasn’t for my mother’s unending patience and kindness, her generous nature, I may have grown up having no idea what it felt like to care for another person, to have any form of compassion. If that had happened, I’m sure I would have become a monstrosity in the truest sense of the word. Instead, I’ve managed to channel my taste for the high violence gives me into a profession that had, ever so briefly, given my mom the kind of life she’d always dreamed of.
Tears burned my nose, but I turned my head up to the ceiling and closed my eyes, willing them away.
My dad had died not long after I was born, and my difficulties with processing the world like everyone else would be a challenge to anyone, let alone a single mother with only a high school education. Still, she’d always been there for me, helping me understand people and their emotional motivations like an interpreter translating a foreign language. It was through her that I learned to mimic the unspoken rules of our society, how to blend in. At least as much as I could ever blend in. I’m one of those people you look at and just know something is wrong, different. Nothing overt, nothing you can put your finger on, but when people meet my gaze, some animal part of their brain screams that I’m dangerous.
And I am. I carried within me the ability to do great violence without balking. If I had any respect for authority, I might have gone into the military; they tried to recruit me, but I had other plans. In the rough neighborhood I’d grown up in, violence was a fact of life and boys aspired to work for the biggest drug cartels, not the government. It was survival of the fittest, and I was born a predator, so it didn’t take me long to move up through the ranks, even when I’d joined the Cordova cartel at the tender age of fifteen.
I’d grown up poor, but over the last few years had managed to move us into a decent house north of Tucson, the result of my working for the Cordova cartel as one of their enforcers. Turns out they had a use for a man of my talents, and while being sadistic would never serve me in the world occupied by offices and people standing in never-ending lines, it did allow me to flourish in the deep underbelly of society. The money was good, but the release of tension I felt after killing someone was even better, and because of my willingness to do gruesome work without a blink, for the first time in her life, my mom didn’t have to work two jobs to support us.
Unfortunately, my activities had blown back on me—and my mother had paid the price. Someone had done a drive-by on our house and she’d been standing directly in the line of fire, getting ready to go bowling with her girlfriends.
She’d been so excited to show off the two-carat diamond pendant I’d gotten her for her birthday, hadn’t been able to stop touching and admiring it. She had to have known my money wasn’t legal, but she allowed me to think she bought my lie about working as an errand boy for a local construction company the cartel owned. My mom was brutally practical, and I’m sure she knew better than anyone I wasn’t meant for the nine-to-five world.
A smile tugged at my lips as I remembered catching her standing in front of a mirror last night and touching the pendant with a soft, dreamy expression that took years off her lined face. At one time, Carla Brass had been a beautiful woman, but life had ground her down, aged her before her time. She deserved a break after all her hardship, and I felt a great sense of pride that I could take care of her, give her luxury and comfort. Her happiness was
my
happiness, and there was nothing I enjoyed more than the satisfaction of making her world a better place. I’d felt so full of gratitude that I could provide for her like that, ease her burden and give her the things she’d always wanted, but sacrificed when she’d decided to marry my dad after she got pregnant at eighteen.
Then the bullets had torn through the house, piercing her in the lung, stomach, and leg.
Blood…so much of it that I knew the chances of her making it were slim as I held her in my arms, screaming into the phone for the ambulance to hurry.
Now she was in critical condition and they were trying to stabilize her enough to do more surgery.
I knew, deep in my gut, she wasn’t going to make it—and the knowledge made me furious.
Acid boiled in my veins and adrenaline surged through me as I thought about the men who’d done this.
I would find them and they would pay.
A family entered the waiting room, an older man with graying black hair and his pale, sickly looking wife, along with their daughter, jerking me from my dark thoughts. They were a nondescript family, the mother’s blonde hair showing about an inch of brown and gray roots, the father’s clothing wrinkled and worn, but something about them caught my attention. They were clearly grieving as they sat in the uncomfortable chairs filling the waiting room, the woman’s loud weeping annoying me.
I almost looked away…until I noticed the girl. She was young, probably no more than ten or eleven, and she had the biggest, saddest golden-brown eyes I’d ever seen. Even rimmed with red they were beautiful, and filled with so much sorrow. I’ve never met someone with such expressive eyes, their rich amber depths revealing a wounded soul that was old beyond her years.
Something seized up in me, pierced through my grief and made me focus on her. Next to the girl, her parents clung to each other and wept, ignoring her pain in favor of their own. It made me furious that they were so selfish, that they could sit next to someone as young and innocent as that little girl and not even see her. Didn’t they realize how short life was? That she needed them? I was pretty much emotionally fucked, but even I felt a flicker of compassion for the hurting kid who looked like her world was shattering around her.
I watched them for a little while longer, waiting for either the father or mother to even acknowledge their kid, but they didn’t. She just sat there, staring down at her feet clad in a pair of red Chucks, her jean shorts loose and baggy, revealing pale, bony legs and knobby knees. As she looked up again to stare at the television, I noticed further how frail she was, her arms slender to the point I wondered if she was even eating. Dark circles shadowed her eyes and there was a look of such hopelessness on her narrow face that I couldn’t help but raise my hand and wave until I had her attention.
She sat up straighter and glanced over at her parents, who were still wrapped up in each other, then back to me before easing out of her chair and walking hesitantly across the empty room to sit next to me.
Her parents never looked up, so I ignored them and glanced over at her, hoping my tattoo and size didn’t freak her out. “What’s your name?”
When she licked her puffy, chapped lips, I noticed she had braces as she whispered in a light and melodious voice, “I’m Hannah.”
I held my hand out. “Hi. My name’s Leo.”
Looking at me from beneath her long lashes, she bit her lower lip, then tentatively took my hand in her own and said in the sweetest, softest murmur as she blushed bright red, “Nice to meet you.”
Poor kid, she was going through that fucked-up, awkward stage of adolescence where your body seems to be growing out of sync. Her nose a little too big for her heart-shaped face, her chin too pointed, mouth too wide, and her mouth was puffed out by the braces she wore, giving her fish lips.
But there was something about her that made me take a second look. The more I studied her, the more I realized in a few years, she’d grow into her features and she’d be stunning, beautiful in an unusual way that wouldn’t just draw a man’s gaze, but hold it. I’d never seen a person with skin as pale as hers before, so milky smooth that I could faintly see the blue veins beneath if I stared hard enough. You don’t see a lot of pasty people in Arizona, and I watched with fascination as her cheeks flushed a deeper red all the way to her ears.
Looking away, she muttered, “What are you staring at?”
“You’re going to break hearts someday.”
Instead of smiling, like most girls would at a compliment, she jerked back and hissed, confusing me. “You don’t have to be mean. I know how I look. I’m plain, nothing special. My sister’s the pretty one…or at least she was. She was so beautiful. Now, after battling leukemia for so long, then slipping into a coma three weeks ago, she’s…she’s like a dried-out husk. I have nightmares about her turning to ash and just floating away.”
“That’s fucked-up.”
She gave a sharp laugh, and looked over to her parents before returning her gaze to mine. “Yeah, it is,” she whispered, so softly I could barely hear it and I knew this girl wasn’t used to swearing, “totally fucked-up.”
“Is that why you’re here? Your sister?”
Nodding solemnly at me, she took in a shivery breath. “Yeah.”
I didn’t know how to comfort her, so I tried to make her understand that I knew how she felt. In a way. While she held no responsibility for her sister’s death, my mother’s blood was on my hands, even if I didn’t pull the trigger. Those bullets were meant for me and I failed to keep her safe.
“My mother’s dying in a room that smells like medicine and piss,” I blurted out. “It’s bullshit.”
She surprised me, anger burning on her innocent face as she whispered, “It is. I hate this place. My sister wanted to die at home, in her room so she could look out the window and see our tree house, but my parents made the doctors try everything to cure her, no matter what. She was in so much pain, crying all the time, trying to be brave. She wants to die, I heard her begging them to let her go to sleep and not wake up, but they won't. They say they believe in God, and pray to him all the time to cure Tiffany, but they don’t really believe in him. If they did, they’d know Tiffany is going to Heaven where it doesn’t hurt anymore. Where she can be happy. It’s…” She looked around then lowered her voice to barely a whisper again. “Everything is bullshit.”
Big tears rolled down her now blotchy cheeks, and I grabbed her some tissue from one of the boxes around the room. She gave me a watery smile then blew her nose.
When I looked over to where her parents had been sitting, the faded chairs were empty. “Where did they go?”
Her narrow shoulders rose to her ears as she shrugged, looking away when I sat next to her again. “Who knows?”
“Aren’t they worried about you being in here alone and talking to me?”
“No. I think…I think they’re mad I’m okay and Tiffany isn’t.”
“What do you mean?”
She held my gaze, something most people couldn’t do. “I don’t blame them for loving her more. I mean, I’m nobody and she’s amazing. Tiffany isn’t only my sister, she’s my best friend. Kind, sweet, and awesome. She was so funny, always pulling pranks and making our parents laugh. I know they ask themselves why God would take Tiffany and not me, I heard them talking when they thought I was in bed, and I wonder the same thing. If I could trade places with her in a heartbeat, I would.”
And people thought I was fucked-up. Anyone who could do this to their kid, mess with their head this badly, deserved nothing but contempt. She scuffed her feet on the floor and I reached out, taking her hand in mine, aware of how tiny the bones of her hand felt. Something, some unknown emotion, made me want to give her hope, needed to make her feel better.
“Do you believe in destiny?”
“What?”
“You know, fate.”
“No. Do you?”
“Absolutely. Think about it, from the moment of conception to right now, how many things had to go exactly right to bring you here? How many close calls did you survive? What were the chances that your parents would even meet? If you look at the big picture of your life, you can see the divine pattern. You’re here for a reason, a purpose, we all are, which means you’re special.” I inadvertently squeezed her fingers as the reality of what was happening down the hall hit me again. “My mom taught me that.”
Even though I must have hurt her fingers, she placed her other hand on top of my tanned one, tears spilling down her cheeks. “I’m sorry about your mother. She sounds really cool.”
“She’s the best.”
Movement through the glass windows by the door drew my attention and I stood right away, recognizing the pretty older doctor who’d been taking care of my mom.