ALICE

 

 

I made a mistake. It was a mistake that cost me. It wasn’t a lack of communication. It wasn’t him not telling me something. It was entirely down to me misunderstanding what he did tell me.

Last night, when we were tucked up together in his enormous bed, we were talking. He told me he wanted to try new things with me, push me to the limits, find out what those limits were. I didn’t even know how far I wanted to go.

When he mentioned snatching me off the street or making me walk around with no underwear on, my initial thought was shock. Good girls didn’t do that sort of thing.

But underneath that protection of my modesty was a darker undercurrent. I wanted to do it. I wanted to try things I’d never done before. I wanted to obey his commands, no matter how shameful they might be for me.

I’d already walked naked through his house. Just thinking about it gave me a thrill. Anyone might have seen me, one of his myriad of staff coming to ask him something might have seen me. It was humiliating and so exciting at the same time, it was hard to understand my own feelings.

I was still trying to understand who I was. The person I thought I was had changed. It was difficult to get my head round who I really was. He had already had such an impact on me and we’d been together such a short space of time.

That morning, he had looked worried after his phone call, the first time I had seen him worried since he’d rescued me from Jason Fry in the club car park. He had gone off to work and then I was alone in his house.

I didn’t know what to do with myself at first. I was in bed when he left but I couldn’t get back to sleep. After about ten minutes, I thought I might as well get up.

It felt strange showering without him nearby. Even stranger was fetching my own breakfast. I found his cook in the kitchen. He offered to make me something but it felt weird to ask so I asked if he wouldn’t mind me making my own.

It took forever. There were so many cupboards and fridges and nothing was where I expected. In the end, the cook found me a box of cereal and some milk and I took it through to the dining room, looking out at the grounds as I ate.

After I was done, I took the dishes back through. “Do you mind I do a bit of exploring?” I asked the cook.

“That’s for Mr Powers to decide, Miss, not me.”

“Do you think he’d mind?”

“I really couldn’t say.”

I took that as a yes and decided to find out just how big his house was. It was roughly square, I discovered from walking out the back of the kitchen around the outside of the building.

There was a set of steps up to the double front doors which were surprisingly difficult to open, the wood heavier than I expected.

Back inside, I was in the main entrance hall. To my left was an open door into a reading room, the shelves filled with books. To the right was an archway and on the other side, by the staircase, a huge piano sat, presumably to entertain guests when they arrived. I wondered if he played. I hit a couple of keys, my off tune chopsticks echoing along the corridor.

Hallways headed left and right from the far end of the entrance hall. On the right, by the piano, was a wide staircase ascending to the first floor and to our bedrooms. To the left the hall led to more rooms and a narrower staircase, perhaps either the private family one or the original servant stairs.

I found the current servant staircase hidden behind a nondescript door. It was a set of thin spiral stairs that went both up to the first and second floor and down to the basement. Back out, I passed by the kitchen and dining room again. There was the conservatory with his gym equipment, the room beside it where we first…

I blushed at the thought, the memory of that initial encounter, how nervous I had felt, how good he had made me feel. I had to fan my face as I walked on, feeling my body heating up at the thought of his hands running all over my naked body.

Back to the right, I went to the end of the corridor. There was the room with the cupboard in, the place where he’d begun to properly induct me into his world. That bar that had made my shoulders ache, the plug that had widened and tormented my ass, the clamps for my nipples, the hundred and one toys we were yet to try out together.

Upstairs were several bedrooms. There was a study, another reading room. One room served as art gallery. It was the size of two or three bedrooms knocked through at some point in the past. Six tall windows faced the back of the house, letting in the light to illuminate the paintings that covered the walls.

Up on the second floor, I found the servant accommodation, the rooms smaller but still palatial compared to what I was used to at home. The carpets were as thick and the few people I met nodded greetings but were busy doing their own things, working, reading, busy on laptop computers.

The hallways on each floor were filled with ornaments, statues, antiques. I found Roman headstones, ancient Greek statues, Oriental vases. I would have to ask him what some of these were, where they had come from. Stopping in front of a marble piece on a wooden plinth, I examined it closely.

She reminded me a little of myself. Whoever had completed the carving had been incredibly talented. It was a woman, young, late teens or early twenties, her hair curling around her head, almost real even though to the touch it was as cold as the rest of the marble. On her face was a look of fear and the reason why was easily apparent. Behind her was a carved wolf chasing, jaws open, eyes fixed on her.

That was how I felt when I first arrived here, that he was coming after me, that there was no escape from something so strong, so dangerous, so determined. But compared to the statue, I had no expression of fear on my face when his hands descended onto me. I thought I had nothing to fear from my situation.

The doorbell rang at that exact moment. I thought one of the staff would answer it but when it rang again and there was no sound of anyone heading towards it, I descended to the ground floor and pulled it open myself.

When I saw a man in a police uniform standing on the doorstep, for a moment I felt afraid. Then I became suspicious. I got the sneaking feeling he had done this, that this was part of the elaborate roleplay that was our life together. I was to be taken somewhere and he would be waiting there, no doubt to remove my handcuffs if I pleased him enough.

“Alice Lawson?” the officer asked.

“Yes,” I replied, already putting my hands out ready. I had to give him credit, it was a realistic uniform.

“I’m afraid Mr Powers has been in an accident.”

“An accident? What kind of accident?” Fear rose up in me once again. If this was part of his roleplay, it was a weird way to go about it.

“I don’t know. I was just asked to come and collect you and bring you to him.”

Of course you were, I thought, fear turning to irritation. I’d have to have words with him. It was one thing to create a scenario to play around with, it was another to scare me into thinking he was genuinely hurt. Or was I supposed to play nurse?

“Where is he?”

“In hospital. Are you ready to go?”

“Yes, of course. Let’s go.”

I didn’t know what to think. It was an ordinary car I climbed into but the uniform he was wearing, his manner, they suggested this was no roleplay. “Look,” I said, leaning forwards as he started the engine. “This isn’t real, is it?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” he replied, setting off down the drive.

“Who sent you?”

“My superiors sent me. Told me to be quick, said it was serious.”

I sat back, becoming worried once again. Was it real? Wasn’t it? I went to dig my phone out only to realise I’d left it charging in my bedroom. “Have you got a phone on you?” I asked.

“Afraid not but we’ll only be a couple of minutes.”

“Is he okay?”

“I don’t know but I know they think it’s serious.”

“Which hospital are we going to.”

“St Jude’s.”

“But St Jude’s is the other way.”

That’s when I realised. It was a roleplay. It had to be. The officer suddenly looked guilty, his mask slipping as he realised he’d been caught out. I didn’t want to upset him, it wasn’t his fault I knew where we were, or that he’d picked the hospital my father had been taken to all those years ago.

That made me think about my father. I hadn’t been there when he died. Mum had come home in tears and told me. I’d listened as she said they did everything they could for him and in the end, she’d watched him go.

I cried too, more because she was upset. I was too young to know what death meant.

“Don’t lie to your mother,” was the last thing he said to me before I was taken home, leaving the two of them alone together. At that age, I didn’t get it. I thought he’d come back sometime, when he was finished being dead. It was many years before I grasped the reality of it. We were alone in the world.

I thought about saying the safe word, Wonderland, pull the plug on this. But I didn’t for two reasons. One, Ethan had clearly gone to a lot of trouble to set this up and I didn’t want to disappoint him before anything had even happened. Two, I got a feeling the driver might not have been told the safe word and then I’d have to break character and tell him I knew what was happening, that I wanted to have a word with his employer.

I would have to speak to Ethan afterwards, tell him I had found one of my limits. I didn’t want to think of him getting hurt. I didn’t want to think it might be true that he was injured. The thought was enough to cause me physical pain, my stomach in knots as we drove. It might only be an elaborate set up but it was confusing, not sexy. I didn’t like it.

To have been arrested and taken to him for an interrogation, that would have been hot. But not this, not to think he was lying dying in the same place my father had gone.

“Where are we going?” I asked as the car turned a corner.

“Almost there,” he replied, pulling into a space on the side of the road.

“Where are we?”

The door opened before he could say anything else. The next thing I knew there was a bag over my head and I couldn’t see anything at all. I gasped, the fabric sucking into my mouth with each breath as I was yanked out of the car and shoved into something. Was it another vehicle?

I fought to free myself as a door slammed shut. There was a clicking noise. What was that? Someone grabbed my wrists and then I knew. It was a ziptie, binding my wrists. Another was attached to my ankles and then I was trussed up and unable to move, rolling around the floor of what I presumed was a van.

The engine started and as I began to scream into the bag over my face, I was driven out of the city and into my own personal hell.