Chapter Ten
“So is this all a cover?” The next morning I’m a fuck-tumbled mess, and feel I have the right to ask some questions after what he did to me. I want to know more about the man who’s finally taken my virginity. “Are you really filthy rich?”
“Oh, I absolutely am,” he says. “Everything I told you about that is true. But it’s inherited wealth, and it means little to me. I enlisted in the service over my father’s objections when I turned eighteen. I served as an Army ranger, where my side specialty was intelligence gathering. I eventually joined an elite unit that focused on human trafficking. In 2009, I was injured…” He pauses. “I thought my military career was over until I was approached by some important people who asked me if I’d like to continue my work on a contract basis. I told them I would, on one condition: that I be allowed to do it my way.”
He opens up to me then, and this is how I learn more about his past, and how it relates to the things I found in the woods.
Atticus had been an Army ranger when his unit had been sent on a secret operation to bust up a ring of human traffickers in Somalia. His best friend, Sergeant Randy Perkins, was on his team. They were tracking a band of smugglers who’d taken seven girls, and intelligence had indicated the criminals and their captives were en route to the Gulf of Aden, where the kidnappers were planning to board a boat and sail to the north.
Atticus’ unit intercepted the group. In the prevailing firefight, the traffickers, knowing they were outmanned and outgunned, shot their hostages before being taken out by the Rangers. Atticus’ best friend Randy was the first into the building. He was the first to discover the lone survivor, a thirteen-year-old girl who begged him to save her. Randy, who was of Somalian ancestry himself, was distraught as he tried to render aid to the girl. She died in his arms. Atticus described how Randy took the girl’s shoe—she’d lost the other—and bracelet. He wanted something to remember her by, he said.
The incident wrecked his friend, who had a breakdown and was discharged. A year later, Atticus received a tearful phone call from Randy’s father telling him that Randy had succumbed that day to the PTSD he’d developed. Like so many soldiers, he’d committed suicide. In his final note, he’d asked for Atticus to take his dog tags and the sad mementoes he’d taken from the girl they couldn’t save.
Atticus told me he was determined that his friend’s death would not be in vain. He and several other men with military backgrounds are now part of a contracted group devoted to stamping out the flesh trade.
I could hear the anger in his voice as he talked of the kinds of people who peddled other humans like cattle, and it made me understand his quiet condemnation of my decision. I’d treated my foray into servitude as a game, a novelty, a private fantasy, without realizing that so many people were stripped of what I was willing to just give away.
With my sexual awakening has come the knowledge that I’m a sexual submissive. Perhaps I subconsciously knew it, which was why I romanticized what I perceived as making a choice to put myself in a powerless situation. That’s where I went wrong.
“Dominance carries a responsibility,” Atticus tells me. It’s after breakfast when he takes me into the living room and undresses me. “But so does submission. You don’t hand yourself over to just anyone. You don’t hand yourself over without having all the facts.”
“Isn’t that what I’m doing with you?” I’m bent over the back of the sofa in his living room as I ask. He’s behind me, his fingers playing with my pussy. “What do I really know about you?”
“By now you should know I won’t hurt you,” he says. “You know I won’t let anyone else hurt you. I’d say in just three weeks you’ve learned more about me than you ever knew about the man you lived with.”
He presses the tip of a new plug against my ass. This one is bigger. He asked me this time if I was ready to continue the training he started back at the cabin. I am. I’m addicted to the taboo things this man is doing to me. When he broke the barrier of my virginity, he also broke the barrier of my inhibitions. I love the way he makes me feel. I love how I know he’d stop if I ask him; I love how I can’t bring myself to stop him. That, he says, is the only kind of acceptable slavery.
“So you’re my master?” I ask, remembering how I asked him that once before.
“That’s a decision you’ll have to make,” he says.
It’s an odd sort of answer, but I’m too swept up in how he’s making me feel to ask for clarification. He slides his cock into my still sore pussy, and despite the tenderness I still feel, despite the fullness of the bigger plug, I’m already close to coming. He moves in slow, easy strokes, varying the depth and force of his thrusts. I’m amazed at how he stimulates me in different ways, just by shifting his body. I’d once read that it takes some woman a long time to orgasm. But I’m already there after just a few moments, my body quaking with pleasure.
Afterwards he orders me to bend over so he can inspect my pussy. He tells me how hot it is to see his seed oozing out of my slit. He asks me if I feel like a nasty girl. I tell him I do. He asks me if I like it. I tell him yes.
He says that’s good, and holds me in his arms. It feels nice not to have to break his hold, I think, although that’s expected of me the next day. I long for nonstop sexual lessons, but the self-defense courses resume. Atticus teaches me the art of the open-handed strike, the groin kick, and how going for the eyes and throat can disable or even kill an attacker.
He teaches me how to shoot properly. I get used to the sound of a gun, to the kick. We go to a private range where targets drop down and I have to determine in an instant which represents friend and which represents foe.
My days are a haze of physical training. At night, the training turns sexual. I hardly realize how fast time is passing until Atticus tells me it’s been a month. He tells me this over dinner, and I put down my fork.
“I can’t make you stay,” he says. “But I’m a man of my word. When you came here, it was under the impression that you’d stay a month and leave a wealthy woman. As much as I’ve been hoping you’d help us, I have no right to hold you. And honor dictates that I offer you the terms you came here under. I can have a check cut for $750,000 tomorrow, Maeve. You can take it, along with everything in that room, and go.” He pauses. “But I’d rather you stay.”
“To go after Elliot,” I say. The lump in my throat makes it difficult to speak.
“Yes,” he says. “But there’s more. There’s something I’ve been holding back, something I haven’t shared with you, something I want to share. But I won’t if you choose to leave.”
I feel suddenly silly. The man across from me has given me more mixed feelings in a month than I’d ever thought possible. He’s been stern and tough, both in delivering me the awful news about Elliot and training me to prepare for the chance to help him avenge my circumstance. But he’s awakened my body in a way I never dreamed was possible. The truth is, even if I didn’t want to see Elliot come to justice, I wouldn’t want to leave. And while I know why he’s giving me a choice, something in it hurts.
“Why are you crying?” he asks. “Because I’m offering you the chance to get what you signed up for?”
“No,” I say. “I’m crying because…” I put my face in my hands. “I’m so ashamed,” I sob.
Atticus pushes his chair back and walks over to where I’m sitting. He kneels by my chair. He’s so large that even kneeling, he’s able to look me in the eye. “Talk to me, princess.”
“I keep thinking of those girls on that website. How they don’t have a choice. And here I am, crying because I have one.” I wipe my eyes with the back of my hand. “Does it make me a bad person that I not only don’t want to go, but I don’t want you to let me go?”
He takes me in his arms. “No,” he says. “It makes you damn near perfect.”
“How?”
“Because it means I get to show you the rest of who I am.”