Chapter 7
“Michael?”
“Fancy seeing you here,” he says, in a tone that makes it very clear I am exactly who he expected to see here.
“What are you doing here?” My mind is spinning. I haven’t failed to complete the job—yet. And he wasn’t being quiet, so he is obviously expected. What kind of setup was this?
“I’m afraid that although your price was exorbitant, Mr. Jaydee was able to meet it.” My price?
“I’m not a canvas. I’m not for sale.”
“Of course not. Of course not.” He pauses. “Of course, I know everywhere you’ve been. I know everything you’ve done. I can dress you up exactly the way you looked each time you stole and present you to the people you took things from. How well do you think men like that will take coming face to face with the woman who took their toys away? What do you suppose they’d do to you then? Jail would be the kindest option, really. So it seems to me that you are for sale. Either I am the arbitrator of your freedom, or he is.”
“But… why?” I’ve been perfect. Professional. I’ve made him so much money.
“There’s nowhere left for you to go in this town where you haven’t burned a bridge.”
“I only do a few jobs a year. There are plenty of doors still open to me. I’m good at this job. It’s maybe the only thing I’m good at.”
“Just think of this as a changing of the guard, of sorts. Isn’t it time?”
“Fuck you. My time belongs to me.”
“Actually, my little thief, I believe that belongs to me as well.” I hadn’t heard him walk up behind me, but now Hank’s hand slips around my wrist as immovable as the cuffs he’d used earlier.
This time I won’t submit. This time I will kill that motherfucker Michael.
I am a contract employee. I am not an object. I am not a slave.
I am also powerless, as my wild kicks and punches connect with nothing before I’m pinned against a wall with Hank’s hand at my throat. I could kick him in the balls and take my chances with Michael. I could spit in his face and try to make him mad enough to lose control.
But I don’t. Like he knew I wouldn’t. Because he can read my body, and it makes my choices more readily than my brain. At the insistent pressure at the base of my neck, I freeze, still panting.
And then he winks.
It’s fine. I’ll stab him later. He deserves it. Then I can do… oh, I can do all sorts of things to Michael. From the outside, I imagine I look quite docile, but its only because I’m allowing my imagination free reign to do the most painful things possible to my former boss.
I’m so glad my ex introduced me to Game of Thrones.
Even if I am a submissive at heart, I am certain I will derive all kinds of pleasure from inflicting pain on the man who just sold me like a fucking Renoir.
“I assume my payment has cleared your accounts?” Hank asks Michael, who’s still grinning cheerily over my failed outburst. He nods. “Then its been a pleasure.” The dismissal is evident.
I’m so pissed off. Before I thought I understood what frustration felt like— when a client dragged his feet on a payment, or a mark thought they might rather remain faithful to their wife. That was nothing compared to this impotence.
Hot tears spring into my eyes, which makes me even more mad. I don’t want to cry. I want to scream, I want to hurt people, I want to burn this whole city to the ground where it belongs.
“So what are you going to do with me now? I’m all yours.” I lace my voice with enough sarcasm to chasten a lesser man.
He doesn’t answer, and it pisses me off even more.
“Go ahead. Hurt me. I don’t care. I can take it.” Maybe if he hurts me badly enough, I can forget that I am now a prisoner. I can forget who I am altogether. I can go numb.
“It isn’t about pain,” he says finally.
“Sure it is. You keep on inflicting it. It must get you off.”
“No.” Said so simply and assuredly, I can almost believe him. Yet I’m still pinned to the wall, his hand wrapped around my trachea, which kind of defeats his argument.
“Then why do it? You’re just a regular sadist, not a sexual one?”
“It’s for you.”
“Yeah, yeah, you can read my body. I know. But you own me now. Who buys a person? Which, by the way, does not include my assets. I worked really hard to restore my building and you can’t have it for some fucking bondage art thing, or whatever it is that you people do. You might be able to have my body whenever you want, you might even be able to make it respond to you, but know this—it’s mechanical. It’s no reflection of what’s happening inside me. I will never, ever enjoy belonging to you.”
At last, he registers that I’m daring him. He’s pulling me from the wall and tossing me over his shoulder before I even realize the pressure’s off my neck.
Back on his bed where he deposits me, I kneel and wait while he rummages around.
“So do you believe that life should be enjoyed?” he asks me, opening and closing another drawer in the bureau.
“No.” I don’t even have to think about it. “It’s to be endured. But there’s enough pain to go around without romanticizing it in kink.”
He finds what he’s looking for, a length of rope, and I don’t even bother to hide my eye-roll. After all, he can’t really punish me for it now that he’s made the claim that this isn’t about hurting me.
“Have you ever known anyone who self-harms?” He kisses the bracelet of black and blue hematoma on my wrist tenderly before wrapping and knotting the rope around it. It throbs, but not as badly as I would have expected.
“My college roommate used to pull her own hair out. It freaked me out to watch, but I couldn’t stop. When she was really stressing hard, she’d even get down to her eyelashes. This rope isn’t scratchy at all.”
“It’s more like webbing than rope. I want the pressure, not the discomfort. Why did she do that?” He holds me carefully as he leans me all the way back, so that my lower legs are still beneath me but my back is now on the bed as well, then he begins to knot my wrist to my ankle.
“Some kind of OCD mixed with a desire to externalize her stress?” There’s very little as tiresome as someone trying to rationalize themselves through psychology, but I can play.
“Imagine all of the things you’ve experienced with me in that light.”
“My stress belongs more to the fact that you are currently knotting your way up my leg as though trussing a turkey and immobilizing me. To free me from my stress, perhaps you’d like to stop doing that?”
He chuckles, and keeps twisting, knotting, twisting. Beside the fact that it is gradually restricting my movement like a python, it doesn’t feel bad.
“Do you work best under pressure?” He changes tack.
“No. Don’t most people hate it?”
“Not everyone. But you really dislike the rush of having your neck on the line.”
“Yes.” The rope, having reached my stomach, is beginning to cross up to my breasts, then down again.
“You don’t want your neck on the block. The feeling of the boot on your neck. Of having your boss breathing down your—”
“You know a lot of idioms, what’s the—oh.” The choking. He lets me sit with that one for a moment. Lie with that one might be more accurate, as he knots down my other leg and finishes off by tying that wrist in.
I say I don’t like pressure, but I actually got off on it, literally, when Hank put it on me.
“Sometimes kink is about externalizing the things you fear, and discovering you desired them all along.”
A second rope is knotted between my breasts and looped through a ring I hadn’t noticed on his ceiling. A few tugs leaves me nearly suspended, back curved, face to God.
And then he leaves, closing the door behind him.