by Kitty Thomas
“Try to stand now.”
She stood. “Wow, what the hell did you do?”
“You didn’t injure it, something shifted out of alignment and you had a compressed nerve. I guided things back where they needed to be. My friend’s a massage therapist. He talks a lot of shop.”
Gabe helped her out of the car and they walked the long distance to the doors of the mall.
“When we go inside are you going to scream or run or make a scene?” he asked, his voice low.
Julie looked up at him. “Is there a reason I should?”
“None that I can think of.”
“B-but you told me that time that you were a bad guy.”
“Well, I’m not a good guy. But I would never harm you. I need you to trust that. I was warning you away from me because you deserved something better. But now things have sharply shifted.”
A tear slid down her cheek. “Now I don’t deserve something better.”
Gabe gripped her arm and turned her to him. “No! That’s not what I meant. Not what I meant at all.”
She searched his face; there was no disgust or judgment there. There was anger, but she already knew that wasn’t directed at her.
He pressed his thumbs against her cheeks and brushed the tears away. “Your mascara is running. You can’t go in like that. They’ll think I’m beating you.”
She flinched, still worried that option was on the menu. “I-I’ll fix it.” Julie walked a few feet to a nearby car and bent so she could see the side mirror and fixed her makeup. Then they continued on.
The food court was just inside the main doors. It was only about an hour until closing and much of the crowd had thinned. Still, Julie felt beset on all sides by possible danger. Gabe moved in closer to her, his large body shielding her, at least from behind. She turned to find him scanning the area as if checking to make sure things were safe. They drew a few stares from straggling diners. They must make some pair: her dressed so casually and him in a fancy dark suit. They probably thought he was her bodyguard.
“What do you want to eat?”
She pushed a strand of hair behind her ear, suddenly self-conscious. “Anything’s fine. Whatever you want to get me.”
His hands closed around her shoulders and he leaned in close to her ear and whispered. “I paid half a million dollars for you tonight. Believe me when I tell you there is no quantity or type of food you could order that would in any way ruffle me.”
Julie felt herself stiffen at that. It was twenty times higher than her highest estimate. How could he have all that money to throw away on her? What could he make her do that could possibly pay off that much debt? But he was right—she could order everything off every menu and it wasn’t going to make her situation with him any worse.
She turned to face him. “C-can we go upstairs? To the buffet restaurant?”
A flutter of emotions spread across his face in quick succession: distress, anger, pity as if just remembering they’d been starving her. She was embarrassed asking for a buffet—some never ending supply of food as if she were afraid she might never see food again after this. She knew the full horrible truth was laid bare in her expression and the few words of her request.
“Of course we can. You can have whatever you want.”
They walked quietly together to the escalator. He stayed right behind her, his body shielding her, his arm coming around to settle on her waist right where her jeans buttoned as they rode the escalator up to the second floor. From any other man, a hand so casually resting against her pelvic bone would have sent her into a spinning internal hysteria, but somehow, when Gabe did it, she felt inexplicably protected.
She couldn’t see his face, but from the expressions of the people going down on the other side, he must look fierce.
She wasn’t sure what awfulness was coming when he got her to wherever he was taking her, but for this one moment, she felt safe. And maybe it was that sense of safety that kept her from shouting for help at the first sign of a mall cop. Somehow she knew Gabe could easily take a mall cop, and while the real cops might get called, she wasn’t confident anyone could catch him before he could mete out some sort of punishment for the crime of not trusting a criminal. Because she was sure, at the very least, Gabe was that.
At the restaurant, Julie piled her plates high with foods she hadn’t seen in months. Gabe helped her carry them back to their booth.
“I have no idea where you plan to put all this,” he said. He sat across from her and watched as she dug in.
She was too hungry to be self-conscious. But she stopped eating when the waitress arrived with her soda.
The woman gave Gabe a cool assessing glare, as if she thought he planned to try to cheat the rules of the buffet and eat off Julie’s plate.
“You aren’t eating?” she asked.
“No. I’ve eaten already.”
The waitress’s shrewd eyes took in the two of them like she knew something wasn’t right.
For a moment Julie feared something dramatically bad was about to happen, but Gabe had clearly already run through several potential back stories.
“Do you know your senator, Senator Todd?” he asked, calmly.
“No, I don’t keep up with politics.”
Gabe gestured to Julie. “This is Senator Todd’s daughter, Susan. I’m charged with watching and protecting her. She’s been on the campaign trail with her father and has been so busy all day she hasn’t eaten since breakfast. The poor thing is starving. And between you and me, I don’t think she eats enough anyway. Always on a diet, this one.”
“Oh.” The waitress shifted her focus to Julie. “I’m terribly sorry, miss. Good luck to your father. I’ll be sure to go out and vote for him.”
“Thank you,” Julie said.
The waitress turned to leave, but Gabe gripped her wrist, stopping the woman’s retreat. “It is a matter of state security that Susan not have too much attention drawn to her. I trust that you will do your civic duty and not breathe a word about this to your fellow workers.”
As if Gabe’s very presence, hard stare, and fancy suit weren’t drawing attention.
“Oh, no sir, of course not. Poor dear. I wouldn’t dream of destroying her privacy. I’m sorry to have disturbed you both. Enjoy your meal, Miss.”
Gabe watched her for a while when she went back, but it was clear she brushed off the nosy questions of any co-workers who might have noticed them. Julie went back to eating.
Besides that interruption, nobody bothered them again. The waitress came back one other time to take away some plates and to put another soda on the table.
Finally, she’d eaten all she could manage, but there was still almost a full plate of food. “I’m sorry, I can’t eat any more.”
“It’s a buffet, Julie. It makes no difference if you ate one plate or a hundred. Let’s go.”
He escorted her out and back down the escalator, through the bottom level of the mall and the food court and out to the swiftly emptying parking lot. He helped her into the car and they got back on the road.
“Do you think that waitress will say anything?”
“Doesn’t matter now,” Gabe said. “There were no cameras anywhere, I checked. People have really bad memories for details. There is no way they could ever find us.”
And Julie was back to fear.
“T-thank you for the food,” she said.
“You will never be hungry again. I don’t use food restriction as a punishment. It’s cruel. I may be demanding, but I’m not cruel.”
Did that mean he was going to punish her if she displeased him?
33
Gabe thought she’d been in the bathroom far too long. He knocked again. “Julie? Come out and talk to me. I’m not going to hurt you, whatever you’ve heard about me.” But there was no answer. He pressed his ear to the door but didn’t hear anything. “If you’re in there, you better move away from the door right now.”
Gabe kicked the door in, but the room was e
mpty. The window stood open, a gentle spring breeze blowing in. He leaned out the window, but he couldn’t see where she’d gone.
Fuck. She was going to get herself killed. She’d never get off the property with all of Dmitri’s men patrolling. Even if she did, they’d hunt her down. They were professionals. They hadn’t avoided prison this long by being drooling morons.
Gabe pulled his phone from his pocket and dialed as he strode down the hall and down the stairs.
“This is Dmitri,” the slimy little worm said on the other end. Refined my ass.
“I want to buy her,” Gabe said without preamble.
Dmitri chuckled. “Who? Julie? She’s free for the night. It’s on the house.”
“No, I mean I want to buy her and take her out of here. I want to own her.”
“I find that very hard to believe. Julie is not our best.”
“So you’ve said. And like I said, she needs a proper firm hand. She needs to be punished in ways you don’t have the imagination for. Anyway, I want her. You were retiring her anyway, why not make a little money in the parting? You know she’ll never escape me.”
It was true that if Julie was ever to come to him on her own and give herself to him, he would train her, and that would include some punishment no doubt, but everything he’d said to Dmitri since he’d stepped inside this house was designed to not show weakness.
“So you think you’ll get a cheap bargain, do you? Is this like—what do you Americans call it—a garage sale?”
Dmitri had been in the country long enough that he knew what Americans called everything. He just liked to feign confusion and play the ‘new to the country’ card.
“No. I’ll pay your price. Name it.”
“All right. I’ll call your bluff. Five-hundred thousand. Still interested?”
“Done,” Gabe said. He opened the front door and strode across the lawn, his eyes immediately finding Julie on the ground with guns trained on her. “Your guards are about to shoot my property. Let me break this up, and then I’ll wire the money to you.”
“Very well. Let me speak to one of them.”
He pulled the phone away from his ear. “Gentlemen, hold your fire.”
Gabe’s gaze shifted to Julie in the passenger seat. She’d been quiet for a long time, and he’d been too lost inside his own thoughts to push her, but now he wanted answers.
“I want to talk about what happened. I want to know how you came to be with Dmitri and I want to know what they did to you. Don’t leave anything out.”
As Julie slowly unloaded her story on him, Gabe clenched the steering wheel so hard he was afraid it would come off in his hands. But somehow he kept the car intact. What she managed to share with him with only a few tears was harrowing. All those men. All those months. The abuse from the guards. Constant threat of death. Being imprisoned like that.
And now what the fuck was he doing? He was taking her to the house. Another fucking mansion she’d be a prisoner in and never get to leave. A place where they were training women to be literal slaves. They may have agreed to the arrangement, but it wasn’t as if Julie had agreed to it. But then, he wasn’t selling her either. Or sharing her. He didn’t know exactly what he was going to do with her, but he wasn’t going to force or hurt her. Eventually she would come to him on her own. Maybe. If she wasn’t too traumatized for that. All he cared about right now was that he’d gotten her away from Dmitri. She’d never be hurt like that again.
“Gabe?”
“Yeah?”
“W-will you tell me where we’re going?”
“I’m taking you to my house. It’s a bit of a drive. We should be there in another hour.”
“Okay.”
She looked scared, but not scared enough to try to get away from him. Gabe suspected her fears were about the same kinds of things that had made her nervous about him on their date. And maybe more things now in light of her past few months of hell.
“Gabe?”
“Yes, Julie?”
“What are you going to make me do?”
There was a rest stop less than a mile up the road. Gabe took the exit and eased the car into the near-deserted parking lot at the far end. He turned off the ignition and shifted in his seat toward his anxious captive. If possible, she tensed more, as if this stopping of the car meant he was ready for her sexual services. He was glad he hadn’t eaten at the buffet. The very thought of what she no doubt imagined was about to happen made it hard to keep down the food from Dmitri’s party. But Gabe wasn’t sure he could have this conversation without letting her see his face and giving her every opportunity to try to find something she could trust there.
“Julie, listen to me. I’m not going to make you do anything. I am not a rapist. I’m not a pimp.” Well, not exactly, he thought. But better to ease her into the nuance than try to explain it outright.
“But you paid a lot of money. I can barely understand the concept of that much money. Surely you want something out of me in return. And you said I was yours now.”
He watched as she mentally seemed to calculate what she thought she could be okay with giving him, and little of it was likely on the menu of the things he would actually demand of her should she ever truly submit to him.
“You are mine. It’s the only honest way to look at it. And I do want things from you. A lot of things. But none of it has anything to do with you owing me some debt. Yes, I paid half a million dollars. But I paid a ransom. I didn’t pay for your services. Half a million was what Dmitri demanded to set you free, and that is what I paid. I would go back and pay it again. I would have paid more. But you don’t owe me a debt. I am plenty comfortable. I don’t need your indentured servitude. And I definitely don’t need it given unwillingly.”
“Okay, I don’t owe you a debt, but you want things. What things do you want?”
Gabe sighed. “If I tell you, you might get out of this car and run. Then I’ll have to chase you down and drag you back. I’m not going to force myself on you, but you can’t go back to your old life. If Dmitri or one of his men sees you out in the wild, you’re dead or right back in there again. And once you see the operation at my house, you become a liability to me as well. So yes, I’m locking you away. I know that’s a felony. I understand it’s evil. But, I’m not going to rape you or beat you or starve you or in any way bring harm upon you, and I won’t allow anyone else to, either. If it takes you time to trust that, fine.”
He didn’t add that although he was angry and horrified by what she’d been through, now he didn’t have to feel guilty about taking her because there was no free life for her out there anymore. Not after Dmitri. Being Gabe’s prisoner in a nice place where he wouldn’t let anybody hurt her and all her needs would be met was far better than someone finding her body in pieces in a dumpster somewhere a few months down the road. It was beyond fucked-up that a few months ago the kindest thing he could have done for her was leave her alone, and now the kindest thing he could do for her was take her captive.
Julie stared out the window, and Gabe wondered if she was contemplating that escape. Despite what she must be thinking, she had to know it would be suicide to run from him. Where could she go outside Dmitri’s reach? Wasn’t the devil she knew better? The devil who had already done the decent thing once?
“Tell me,” she finally whispered. “Tell me what you want. I have to know.”
If that wasn’t masochism, it would be hard to find a better example.
“I’ll tell you what I want, but understand that me wanting it doesn’t mean I expect you to give it. Especially after what you’ve been through. But I may as well tell you because you’ll find out when we get to the house anyway. There won’t be any way to hide it from you.”
Gabe took a long, deep breath and then plunged in. “To say I am kinky would be an understatement—like saying a monsoon is wet. The house we’re going to isn’t just where I live. It’s also my business. I own it with some friends. I train women—willing women—to beco
me the slaves of wealthy men who are into the same kinds of things I am. I enjoy a woman on her knees in front of me... not just to blow me, but on her knees in my presence in general. I like when a woman calls me ‘sir’, which they all do at the house. But what I really want is someone who will call me ‘master’. And I want that someone to be you. I want that, though I know you aren’t like I am as well as everything you’ve been through. I won’t force it on you, but understand this: if you ever call me master, it means exactly what you think it means. There is no going back from that moment. At that point you are mine far beyond the exchange of money. So never ever say it casually or to test the waters. There is no testing with that word. That word makes you mine in ways you can’t imagine yet.”
She let out a tremulous sigh and wrapped her arms around herself. Julie wasn’t sure if she could ever willingly give herself to him that way. It seemed far too final and dangerous.
“Can you handle more, or is that enough to satisfy your curiosity?”
“There’s more?”
“Oh much more. I like to whip women, cane them, flog them, put them in cages. I like the traditional bare-assed spanking. I like blindfolds and toys that vibrate and toys that don’t. I like ropes and chains and shackles. I like things too weirdly creative to make you understand without acting them out with you first. I like a woman who begs and cries and trembles at my feet. But what I don’t like is a woman who doesn’t like and want those same things. So we’re in a pickle, here.”
“A-and you think I will come to you voluntarily and let you do all that to me?”
“I hope so. Some day.”
“What if I never do?”
That was the million-dollar question wasn’t it? He might not be a monster, but how much goodness did he have? Gabe was convinced he could woo her, and that some combination of making her fall in love with him and her own gratitude for everything he had done and would do for her would bring her around. But maybe that was a fantasy that could never be real. Fantasy Julie and real Julie weren’t the same person after all.