The most comfortable thing about her present situation was the plush pillows that had been provided for her to sit upon while chained to a brick pillar running up from the hardwood floor to the beams of the high ceiling. She was actually in chains locked to manacles on her wrists. Suzanne had never included “bondage” scenarios among the services that she provided for her clients.
She knew that some women in her profession engaged in such activities, either as the dominatrix or as the dominated, under carefully controlled conditions. Services of that sort were not for her; she found them distasteful, unnerving, and a little bit sick, and she had always turned down clients who wanted them, advising them to look elsewhere. Her present situation did nothing to change her opinion.
Ironically, as frightening as her situation was, the place in which Suzanne now found herself was one where she would have enjoyed being under any other conditions. She was someplace on the slope of a mountain that must have looked just as breathtaking when blanketed in winter snow as it did now, outside of the huge windows that took up one whole wall of the room.
The whole place was done up in beautifully stained wood with a huge stone fireplace and brick pillars. All of the expensive furniture had been cleared away, moved to one side of the space. The occupant who had rented it wanted this cavernous living room open for a very special kind of entertaining. She was now standing in front of those big windows, wearing an open-backed, sleeveless jumpsuit, looking out expectantly into the gathering night. Suzanne, having given up straining against the manacles and chains, sat watching her “hostess,” knowing full well whose company she was expecting.
Mariah turned away from the windows to face Suzanne. “It won’t be long now,” she said. “I’m sure Justin won’t waste any time getting here.”
As tired as she was frustrated, Suzanne replied, “You’ve really been planning this out for a long time, haven’t you?”
“It takes long-term planning to do a thing like this,” said Mariah. “I started as soon as I signed on for the experiments with Bio-Shapers. You have to book the Ambrosian Chalet well in advance, especially at this time of year. My first payment from Bio-Shapers took care of that.”
Suzanne shook her head. “All this time, all that money, and you spent it on hating Justin. There must have been a million other things you could have done. Didn’t anyone ever tell you living well is the best revenge?”
Mariah scowled. “No one could possibly live well enough for revenge on that man. You’ve seen how he lives. You know that.”
“I know you could have had a completely different life than this.”
“And I know exactly what kind of life I could have had! And with the perfect man! Perfect! But I shouldn’t have to tell you that! You of all people!” She stepped away from the window, coming towards the middle of the room and the pillar where she had chained Suzanne. Watching her, Suzanne was suddenly afraid of pushing Mariah’s buttons too much. If she felt too provoked, this woman might flip in an instant and become again the creature that had slashed poor Mack almost to bloody ribbons right in front of Suzanne.
It pained her to think of that moment. Poor Mack: so kind, so sweet, so handsome. He certainly had not deserved what this creature did to him. “You know what he’s like!” Mariah ranted on. “How perfect he is, every part of him, every bit of him! How he takes you to bed and goes on and on and on for hours, all night, and makes every time the best you ever had! And how he always has the best of everything in life, and what he can give you besides what he gives you in bed.
With him you could have the world! I wanted to be the best for him. I knew I could have the best with him. But he finally didn’t care. He was done with me.” She calmed down, but still fumed at Suzanne, sitting so helplessly there before her. “Just like he would have been done with you.”
Casting her eyes around the room, turning from side to side, Mariah said, “He brought me here once, for another one of their nominating conventions. He had me in every part of this chalet, every part of this room.” She pointed to the windows where she’d been standing. “He had me right there, in the window, from behind, looking out at the mountains.”
She pointed to the fireplace. “He had me on my back all night, right there; he only stopped to put on more wood.” She smirked at that, and Suzanne could only guess that Mariah was remembering where else he was putting the wood that night. She faced Suzanne again: “Did you scream when he was first inside you? His women always scream at first.”
Suzanne did not answer, but her expression answered the question. How well Suzanne remembered her own first night with Justin, and how she had indeed screamed—for joy, not pain. She had a different sort of pain now, a nagging ache in her jaw. It wasn’t the kind of pain she’d had from getting used to going down on Justin. It was the pain of how Mariah had given her the back of her paw, hard, across the face to knock her unconscious in the parking garage. That was the last thing she remembered before waking up here.
More calmly, but just as obsessed, Mariah went on. “I really thought I was everything that the perfect man could ever want. I was a model. I’ll bet you didn’t know that. One of Justin’s business contacts had invited him out to a runway fashion show; Justin was looking for someone new to take to bed. That’s where we spotted each other. I knew I had to have him as soon as I saw him looking up at me on the runway. And I could tell he wanted me. I was in his bed in his penthouse that same night.”
Unbidden, the memory flashed into Suzanne’s mind of her dinner conversation with Justin at the hillside house, where she explained to him why she never wanted to be the very kind of woman that Mariah had once been. It was hard for Suzanne to imagine Mariah that way, as one of the “walking clothes hangers,” one of the “coat racks in fancy shoes.”
There must have been some quality about her that made her stand out for Justin. Or so Suzanne imagined. She couldn’t see him taking just any model to bed, not the way most of those women were. Mariah must have been something unique. It was a shame she hadn’t valued her own uniqueness when Justin ended things. Everything now might be different. Suzanne now might not be in such a dire spot as she was.
“I was his favorite,” Mariah declared, both proudly and bitterly. “Me. I was the one he gave up all the others for. He sent all the others packing—for me. I thought that meant something. I thought what was happening between us, what he was doing to me every night, wasn’t just sex. I let myself believe that when he gave up all the others and only slept with me. It was so real.”
She shut her eyes, and for a moment Suzanne almost believed Mariah would melt into tears. “It was so real.” But her voice did not come as a sob so much as a feral snarl, the snarl of an angry, wild animal. Again, Suzanne feared that Mariah would suddenly morph and forget that Suzanne was not just her prisoner but her bargaining chip.
Mariah opened her eyes again, and Suzanne found herself gazing not into the eyes of a human woman but of the she-cat that had faced her in the city. “I thought it would be him and me forever—until he finally got tired of me,” she said. “It would have been that way with you and him too, you know. That ring you’re wearing is an original touch, but it doesn’t mean anything, not to him. He could buy a hundred of those for a hundred women.
Sooner or later the great bear would have decided he wanted someone else in his cave, and you would have been out just like I was. I’m doing you a favor, ridding you and everyone else of him. He really doesn’t want a lover, you know. He only wants someone to hump until he’s ready to change both the sheets and who’s in them with him. With all his money, he’s better off with whores. That’s all he really needs, just a whore to play with until he gets bored and wants another.”
The things Mariah had been saying up to now had unnerved Suzanne, scared her. But these last words were the first that actually stung her. Only last night, she and Justin had said words of a very different kind to each other, with a completely different meaning; the words that were supposed to be off-limits and impossible in the kind of relationship that she and Justin had.
But there, they had said them, and they had meant them. Or at least Suzanne had meant them. She had dared to let herself feel that way and dared to say it out loud, and Suzanne had felt her whole world change when he actually said them back. What if only she had truly meant them? What if, by doing the one forbidden thing in her profession, Suzanne had set herself up for the consequences of the forbidden?
Were they only words? Was it only an illusion in which she had foolishly, unwisely indulged herself? It had felt so real. And yet, what if, like Mariah, she had been Justin’s favorite only because she gave him the best sex? In spite of all her experience, she could have let herself fall into the one trap that she could not afford. Her job was to give her body, not her heart.
Her job was not to be too dazzled by his money, his looks, his cock and the way he used it. Suzanne feared that she had allowed herself to become a fool after all. The proof of what happened when a woman like her became a fool was standing right in front of her now, glaring with cat’s eyes.
Mariah’s phone rang. She took it from a pocket at the hip of her suit and answered. An evil smile curled her lips. “You’re here? You’re alone? The front door’s unlocked. Just come on up; we’re in the living room.” She ended the call and pocketed the phone again. To Suzanne she said, “He’ll be right up in a second. You can take your last look at him.”
There was the sound of a door opening and closing at the bottom of the stairs leading up to the chalet living room, and the sound of footfalls on the stairs. In another moment, he entered, stricken with a look of pain and rage at the sight of Suzanne chained to the pillar and Mariah standing with hands on her hips, greeting him.
“Justin,” Mariah said mockingly. “So good to see you again.”
He looked past Mariah to Suzanne. “Are you all right?”
In response, Suzanne could only give a gesture that was part nod and part shrug.
“What, not a word for me? Where are your manners?” taunted Mariah.
Now, pointedly to Mariah and pointing to Suzanne, he demanded, “Let her go. Now.”
“This isn’t your corporate offices or your boardroom, darling,” Mariah mocked again. “You don’t get to give orders here.”
Controlling his utter rage, his almost volcanic fury, Justin forced himself to ask, not demand, “All right. Then just let her go. Take off the chains and let her walk out of here and we’ll talk. Or do anything else you want.”
Grinning more like a Cheshire cat than like the predator she had become, Mariah teased him: “ ‘Anything’? That covers a lot of ground, you know. There was a time when I actually would do ‘anything’ with you. And let you do ‘anything’ to me. Too bad those days are behind us, aren’t they?”
“Mariah, this is wrong,” said Justin. “You hurt Mack. Hurt him badly. He morphed and recovered, yes, but you know he didn’t deserve that. And you abducted Suzanne. You took her, and she’s been terrified. This isn’t about her. This is about you and me. Just please let her go.”
“Let her go? And then what do I get?” asked Mariah, angrily. “There’s only one thing I ever wanted from you. All right, we both know that’s not true; we both wanted the sex. But the only other thing I was ever looking for was for you to feel what I felt and want what I wanted. Why didn’t you love me, Justin?”
He opened his mouth to say something, but could not find the words. He just hung and shook his head.
Mariah’s feline eyes flashed green fire at him. Her voice turned almost to a snarl and a hiss. “Answer me! Why didn’t you love me? Damn you, why couldn’t you just love me?”
Mutely, Justin looked back up at her again. “Mariah, I felt as much for you as I could. I did; you know I did. When we were together, I never screwed another woman, not even once…”
“Then I should have been enough for you!” Mariah shrieked. “Why wasn’t I enough?” She looked as much on the verge of tears as violence. “Damn you, Justin! God damn you, I might as well have been a hooker!”
A thunderstruck look hit Justin’s features at that moment. His face fell and he turned pale with utter shock to hear her say those words. His jaw slack, his eyes widened, he took a step back—and again, he looked past the furious Mariah at the helpless Suzanne, who returned an identical expression from where she sat.
And in one dreadful, awful moment, Mariah glanced, seething, back and forth between Justin and Suzanne, comparing those identical expressions. And a sick and fateful realization came upon her.
Almost laughing with a sick and evil derision, Mariah taunted again, “Is that it, Justin? Did you finally just do what you should have done all along? Did you finally break down and just get yourself a whore to spare yourself the trouble of a relationship? Is that who she really is?”
And as Justin glared angrily at her, his fists clenching and unclenching in a mounting fury, Mariah stood in front of him, threw back her head, and hurled gales of mocking, twisted, malevolent laughter up to the ceiling of the chalet. “A whore!” she laughed and bellowed, finding it so rich, so delicious. “The billionaire hired himself a whore!”
The moment was a knife twisting in Justin’s heart—a deep, piercing, twisting pain, not for himself, but for Suzanne. He watched Suzanne react to Mariah’s cruel, contemptuous call-out. He watched her turn her face away, hiding her expression, not wanting either of them to see the humiliation. Nothing that Mariah might do to him could hurt him as much as what she was doing to Suzanne.
To the laughter of his ex-lover, Justin said, “That’s enough, Mariah. Suzanne has done nothing to you. She’s done nothing to anyone. I asked you before and I’m asking you again, let her go and let’s finish this, you and me.”
“I’ll bet there are a lot of wives and girlfriends who wouldn’t agree that she ‘hasn’t done anything to anyone’,” said Mariah. “But what if I did just let her run out of here and, as you said, let us finish this between us. What would you be willing to do to finish it?”
“I can guess what you’d probably want,” Justin replied.
Mariah laughed again, a scoffing squawk of a laugh. “Don’t flatter yourself, darling! I could have you fuck my brains out right here the way you did before and it wouldn’t change a thing, would it? You wouldn’t love me any more now than you did then. You can set your precious Suzanne free yourself. All you have to do is come through me to do it. Take your clothes off and change.”
Resigned to the inevitable, finding someone else holding the cards for the first time in his life, Justin removed his jacket and tossed it aside, then began to unbutton his shirt. He kept his eyes on Suzanne, who turned her head once again to face him. He could tell that she was bravely holding back tears—one more thing for which he wanted Mariah punished.
In seconds, Justin was naked and kicking away the clothing heaped at his feet. Mariah looked him up and down, admiring his magnificence now as she did then—but wanting to do very different and much more permanent things to that body than she did the last time she saw him this way.
“You are still the hottest thing that ever lived,” she told him. “Things should have been so much different.”
Without a word, Justin took a deep breath, and the shape, mass, and contour of his body all changed. He dropped from two feet to four legs and lost his shoulders. His hands and feet turned to massive extremities with deadly claws. Black fur covered his now ursine musculature. His head morphed like the rest of him, from man to bear. He roared out the roar of his bear self at her, a wordless call to the action she had demanded of him. Come on. Let’s finish this.
Mariah chuckled evilly, pulled off her boots and tossed them aside, and swiveled her head. With a thought, she too let go her human form—but with very different results. The shape of her head flowed and transformed until her green cat’s eyes sat in a skull of a completely different shape: white and feathered, with a massive yellow-golden beak that could easily bite a man’s heart right from his chest.
The head of an enormous eagle now sat on her shoulders. Her bare arms turned to scaly, sinewy limbs with reptilian hands and a lion’s claws. Her feet transformed to the mighty paws of a lion, with claws capable of shredding a human’s chest. From her upper back extended the large and leathern wings of a dragon, and from her lower back came a long, scaly, and powerful dragon’s tail, as thick as her thigh, dropping to the floor and curling dangerously.
Suzanne turned pale and gasped at the creature now standing before Justin, spreading her wings, thrashing her tail, and giving a shrill eagle’s cry of murder. Any further reaction froze in her throat. What she was seeing was too horrifying, too impossible. Even Justin in his bear form seemed at a loss, emitting a growl of defiance in which Suzanne thought he could hear an undertone of shock.
Mariah gave forth her shrill cry of challenge yet again, calling Justin to have at her if he dared, summoning him to come forth and face her with all his bearish strength, all his ursine might, as if even a creature such as he were a match for what Mariah was now. Of what good was all his strength, all the power of his werebear body against a foe who was eagle and lion and dragon all at once, with all the fury of all three creatures in a single hellish form?
How could a mere bear ever hope to be a match for a living, raging gryphon?