CHAPTER SIX
ANTHONY
"I've never seen you so mussed, Anthony." Laughter was hidden behind Aiden's words, his body leaning against a counter in the kitchen.
"I'm surprised you're still awake." Taking the mug of coffee that he offered me, I sipped the warm liquid, awaiting his response.
"She put up a fight, apparently." He chuckled while studying the state of my clothes. "They always do."
After sipping from his own mug, he explained, "I gave Theresa the week off. I highly doubt she'll be able to stand the battle your new pet will undoubtedly wage. Given what I saw in the hallway, I'm not sure that Rebecca will be able to handle it. She's not one of the prim and polished little bitches we normally pluck from the world. That one carries the scars of a woman who's not been handed an easy life."
"Beneath the dirt, I believe a beautiful woman exists. And despite her past, she can be trained just like the rest."
"And what do you know of her past? How will you choose what course to take with her? I have to admit that I'm intrigued. I've never attempted to train a woman with claws."
"Rebecca has claws.” I answered. “Hers are just better manicured."
Aiden grinned, his messy hair out of place on his head. Normally groomed to the point of being polished, it was rare to see the animal that existed beneath the smooth exterior.
"That she does. But she's fallen asleep during your late night interruption. I wanted to make sure you were tucked away before I joined her."
"I have my bags in the car and I'll use my normal guest room. Not that any of it is necessary. I'm too worked up to sleep. I want to check on Carla in an hour to make sure that she hasn't found a way to hurt herself."
He chuckled softly and shrugged. “Carla? Interesting name.”
Placing his cup on the counter, he pushed away from the ledge to cross the room. "As long as she's secured, she'll be fine. Rebecca spent several weeks in that room before I trusted her enough to bring her into the main house. She survived it."
"Rebecca didn't already have a death wish."
He stopped moving to look back at me, pity blazing in his light green eyes. "You've made your choice, Anthony. Let's hope that the only thing it costs you are a few sleepless nights. Good luck with Carla." Speaking her name with an amused tone, he was gone after that last word, disappearing down the hall in search of his courtesan.
Taking the seat he'd previously occupied at the table, I sipped my coffee and glanced about the kitchen. Appearing normal and inconspicuous, most people wouldn't notice the tools in this room that were intended for training. Every piece of furniture, every utensil was selected for a dual purpose. Eventually my gaze locked to the table, the newspaper folded in such a way that opening it would take you to a particular page. I flipped the page and saw a familiar picture, Aiden's flowing handwriting scrawled beneath the missing persons report.
“Thought you might like to know the identity of your new toy. The press is one step ahead of you, old friend. Let's hope nobody saw you on that cliff. On a good note, you now have a bit of her past to use in your training. We need to talk about this woman in the morning when we’re both thinking clearly. I recognize her.”
I smiled and glanced at the atrocious black and white mugshot of Seraphina Hailey Ashland. Years ago, she disappeared when she was sixteen years old and had lived inside the city. Recently found passed out along a dirt road, she was last seen at Jefferson Memorial Hospital and was now listed as an escaped psych patient. I found it interesting that she’d given me the name Carla instead of her actual name. I should have found it interesting that Aiden had laughed when he heard the name she’d given me.
Seraphina. What an absolutely beautiful sound on the lips.
No wonder Aiden was taking such pleasure in this mistake. By the time I'd returned from the room where I'd left Seraphina, he had known more about the girl than me.
My body felt stiff on my journey between the house and the waiting car. After collecting my things and telling my driver he could go home for the night, I found myself once again sitting at the kitchen table, coffee in hand and a laptop in front of me.
Aiden had been right about one thing: Seraphina did have scars. Deep, festering, ugly marks that were a chain effect of unfortunate circumstances through her entire life.
Through public records and legal documents, I was able to track her life story back to when she was three years old. But nothing could be found explaining what had occurred during the years she’d been missing before being found along the road, her body beaten, bloody and bruised. She was taken to the hospital and admitted onto the psych floor after waking up, apparently in an absolute rage.
Numerous police reports and newspaper articles detailed a mother that was in and out of jail, a father that died when Seraphina was young, and a string of stepfathers that, alone, had been professionals in every white crime common in the city. I found it surprising that she’d come from money – even if I knew how dirty that money actually was. Her family name rang a few bells, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on why. They weren’t members of the Society, and for as much as I could remember, they hadn’t been clients either.
As a result of Seraphina’s reckless behavior in her youth, it was easy to imagine that she’d been moved quite often between a family home and psychiatric supervision as she grew, but even that wasn't enough to account for the anger I witnessed in that beautiful girl.
When she’d almost reached adulthood, it appeared she'd followed in her family’s footsteps, although her crimes were much more seedy and apparent. Every couple of months she was charged with a new crime: prostitution, drugs, theft and assault...the list continued on and read more like a career criminal than that of a broken sixteen year old girl.
My eyes grew tired just looking through the records, and I leaned back in my chair to close them against the glare of the laptop monitor.
What had I gotten myself into? For all intents and purposes, Seraphina was everything we avoided in the Society. Women who were hard, those that had been slapped down by life repeatedly and had developed exteriors of steel, weren't proper as courtesans. They were too difficult to train - too much of a loose cannon to accept the role and relinquish themselves to a lifestyle of being owned. We couldn't threaten them with pain because they'd already experienced it enough to accept it without fear. We couldn't seduce them to love because their heart had been shattered too many times to be mended.
I lost track of time while pondering the different techniques and avenues I could use to deal with my new prize, the silence in the house lulling me into a half sleep - something between true rest and the wakefulness that wouldn't quite release me from its grip. When a scream tore through the house, I believed I'd imagined it at first. The small sound grew with the passing minutes, eventually becoming so terrifying and so shrill that my eyes widened with recognition.
Seraphina.
Instantly on my feet, I raced the halls towards her room, pulling the key to her door from my pocket as the screams became more urgent and frequent during my approach. Slowly opening the door, I used the light of the hallway to watch her, noticing immediately that her eyes were clenched shut and her body arched off the bed. She was asleep as far as I could tell, and even the violence of her screams weren’t enough to wake her.
Closing the door behind me, I slipped into the darkness, listening to the torment in her voice. The springs in her mattress screamed, the normal chill in the room made warmer somehow by the energy it took for her to fight. Minutes passed, but the screams eventually settled back into her throat, becoming a choked sob that shook the mattress and frame of the bed.
My eyes adjusted to the pitch black, her body nothing more than a shadow when she startled and woke. She thrashed over the mattress before remembering where she was and looking up to catch me standing above her.
"What hasn't been done to you?"
There was pity in my voice, a quiet sadness that radiated through every bone inside me. This poor, lost girl. Alone. Scared. And I’d been the asshole to leave her in the dark. I didn’t want to secure her with chains on the bed – didn’t want to force her even further behind the wall she built to house her fears. For her own safety, I hadn’t been given a choice.
On alert and searching the room for any person behind me, she stilled over the mattress.
Her voice was rough and gritty with sleep. "Have long have you been in here?"
"Long enough to know that you have demons."
"Don't we all?"
So unusual, this girl. It wasn’t surprising given her past, but the fact that she could talk calmly to a man who had her locked in a dark room painted a picture of pain and grief much greater than anything I'd done to her yet.
"What haven't your monsters done to you?"
She laughed without humor, disbelief ingrained in her voice. "Don't you mean what have they done to me?"
I smiled. "I'd run the risk of appearing dim-witted and dense if I asked that question. Your screams alone tell me the list would go on forever. I feel it's an easier question to ask what has not been done."
"Do me a favor, Anthony..."
"Master. From here on out that is how you'll refer to me."
Another bark of humorless laughter.
"Of course. So is that what this is? Am I back here again? You're selling me into sexual slavery? Soon you'll have me locked in some window in a foreign country, selling my virtue to any sick tourist who happens to walk by?"
"Not quite." I answered softly. She was strong, that much was apparent by the ease with which she'd reacted to what I'd said.
"Good luck, Master," she spit out the word because she couldn't stand the bitter taste it left on her tongue. "Do me a favor and just kill me quickly, okay? I'm never going to be your whore."
"I disagree, Seraphina."
Shock wrenched her body and disturbed the springs of her mattress. Her real name rolling from my lips was unexpected.
"How do you know who I am?"
Stepping back, I wanted to turn on the overhead light just so I could read her expression more easily. Choosing to remain in the safety of shadow instead, I moved to lean against a wall giving her space while giving myself the time to determine the best answer I would tell her.
“You have an interesting back story.”
She shook her head, her hand reaching up to run through her tangled hair. It didn’t make it far through the dirty tresses and she snatched it back to lay it in her lap.
“Is that what he told you?”
Confusion wrinkled my brow. “He? To whom are you referring?”
Her head snapped up, and if the room hadn’t been so dark, I had no doubt she would have pinned me in her stare.
“Aiden. You are part of the Society, aren’t you?”
Shock rolled through me, my body straightening from its casual position as I stepped closer to her once again. Before I could utter a word, she laughed dejectedly.
“I guess you haven’t heard about me yet. So let me inform you. Aiden was my first Master.”