Dark Days (Written Pictures #2) (16 page)

There stood a strangely erotic version of Captain America, only female and fundamentally fetish. For what seemed minutes Raven looked, barely able to blink as she took in everything, occasionally moving an arm or a foot as if to test that it was still her reflection. Raven’s heart raced and she was no longer sure why. She simply stood there as an extremely fuckable caricature of a national hero with reddened breasts squeezed uncomfortably through tight blue bands.

Finally, she broke the spell that was her own image but just as she was about to push the third box aside, she spotted something else in the bottom of it, laid corner to corner. Surely it couldn’t be? Raven thrust a hand down to retrieve it.

Another item that was not all it initially seemed, the crop she now brandished was not made of the wood and leather as she would expect of the tool of her trade. This one had been similarly fashioned in rubber. It was as useless as the shield and so, having only just risen, her spirits sank back, slipping to a place lower than they started from.

Just one box left now and it was the smallest of the four. It surely couldn’t get any worse. Deep down she already knew the answer, they would no doubt have found a way. So, rubber crop still in hand, she bent down as far as her chain allowed and nudged the lid aside.

Unlikely as it was, the cradle of red silk was the biggest surprise of the four. Hesitantly, Raven retrieved one of the two small, tarnished bells that rested inside. Slowly she lifted it to her eye line by the hook from which it hung. It bore a carefully replicated crack, as did the second bell, an exact twin. As she looked at them, a door to her past opened in her mind, spinning her back to her childhood and a school trip to Philadelphia to see the Liberty Bell, symbol of American independence.

“They go on your nipple rings, Ki-Ki, yes yes,” came an unwanted explanation from Natalia, who had entered the room unnoticed and who tossed a makeup box onto the bench when she reached it.

All sense in Raven’s mind was suspended. Robotically, she raised one of the bells and threaded its hook through the white gold of a nipple ring. She should have protested, or at the very least tried to stop herself, but her mind was elsewhere. Long suppressed childhood memories flooded her focus and she remembered for the first time in years when she had been called Ki-Ki before.

CHAPTER XXXVI – Memories

Raven’s mind hurtled back through the years, accompanied by a faint tinkling of bells. It had been her happiest time, way before life had started to career out of control and set her on the path to what she’d had to become to preserve both sanity and self.

Simpler then, she had gone to school, come home, greeted her mother with a pre-teen grunt and thought nothing of the daily snatched exchanges as one headed out to the hardship of her second job, and the other to her happy place.

Raven felt a chill suddenly that froze her breathing and drew her back for a moment to the present. Natalia had misted her tummy with a spray and as Raven watched, began to polish her outfit, her hand with its short, stubby nails working a cloth. Curiosity satisfied and no immediate threat apparent, Raven allowed her mind to return to reliving that rarely resurrected memory.

A whitewashed picket fence. A gate with a homely squeak of hinges. Crunching of gravel underfoot. The smell of fresh cut grass. The memories were vivid, even after being locked away for so long, so vivid that Raven paused before allowing her mind to dig more.

She now saw the porch again with the fragrant honeysuckle creeping up just one side and the empty pot on the other where together, they had managed to kill off the jasmine that used to weave through a wooden lattice. They had fallen against it while they had happily played, snapping it at the base to a brace of worried giggles.

The door was still pillar box red with its single, large brass handle squarely in the middle and in her mind, Raven reached up for the familiar pull chain to sound the bell to ask to be allowed in. But the bells she heard was not quite as she remembered it being.

“Keep
still
, Ki-Ki!” interjected the small woman’s voice, followed by a slap to Raven’s breast which set off another peel of bells as her bare chest oscillated to the sudden blow.

== ~ ==

With a lingering look of warning up to the somewhat distant female, Natalia got back to work, spraying and buffing the tall woman made taller still by the stilt-like platform boots. She was all long legs and full tits. Natalia would have hated her for that alone, having been ultimately turned away from her childhood dream of taking a principal role with the Bolshoi, not because she lacked the requisite talent, but because of her own lack of inches and the bedroom efforts of a leggier rival.

She had been good, the best she could be. They had all said that and the best she could be was the best there was. Two women had been in the final assessment and Natalia had known she was the better of the two. They both waited in the same room, stretching out soon to be used muscles and preparing themselves for the final panel.

Natalia had been the first to dance but as she was called forward, her rival spat a sneering whisper in her expensively educated Muscovite accent, just loud enough for her to hear. “You dance like you look. Nothing but a provincial kulak.”

The dance Natalia had chosen to perform for the panel had been perfect yet it had been all she could do to hold her anger inside. She had fixed a smile and her posture and glided from the room luxuriating in the afterglow of her performance.

The look on the other girl’s face as she passed inside for her turn though was indelibly etched on Natalia’s mind. Triumph, scorn, mockery, mirth. All bore into her in that fleeting moment when the woman barged purposefully past, nose as high as her self-esteem and confidence clearly founded on more than just her insufficient ability.

When the rejection letter came, the shattering of her dreams was only beaten by the shattering of Natalia’s spirit, knowing the future that had for so long consumed her had been taken away. ‘Too short,’ it had said, ‘too intense, with a hurried manner more fitting to the tango than the sensual needs of the highest ballet.’ She knew the real reason though and pictured that sneer atop that near perfect body. She just knew it was her rival’s body that had clinched it.

It was from that point that she devoted herself totally to her adored brother. He had a future, a mission, a purpose and she would do everything she could so he didn’t have to feel the kind of hurt that she would always carry inside.

Deep down, she had known before she even went in the room. Provincial girl versus girl with a father from the political elite, but she had let herself hope and believe. The image of that moment would never leave Natalia. Legs and tits, this American was all legs and tits just like
her
. They traded in sex – they were all the same. And with her anger boiling, Natalia polished again, pressing against the lengthy latex leg with renewed vigour.

== ~ ==

Raven stumbled as the smaller woman brought a bright sheen to her latex-clad leg but quickly regained her poise and leant into the pressure as a counterbalance, arms limp, useless shield on one side, facsimile of a crop on the other.

Her mind spun back again to the door and she remembered her hazy reflection in the polished wood while she had stood there, waiting for the bell to be answered. She heard the familiar small footsteps on the other side running over what she remembered as a parquet-floored hallway, then the thud as a child’s body collided with the heavy door. She could still picture the look of excitement that was always on her face.

Slowly, the door cracked open, heaved inwards by the small girl and crouching down to her level, Raven had enveloped that bundle of delight that leapt at her with cries of “Ki-Ki, Ki-Ki!” with wide, welcoming arms.

== ~ ==

Natalia circled her cloth upwards to the top of the woman’s legs, breathing in the aromas of the polish and her sex and snarling inwardly as she worked. ‘Fucking whore with the fucking tits and the fucking legs,’ she silently cursed, chewed nails grating along the reinforced blue edge of the catsuit’s crotch.

‘Probably fucked her way to where she was, just like that Bolshoi bitch,’ she continued to herself, finding a different reason for her failure. ‘Fucking whore. Fucking
American
whore.’

== ~ ==

“Ki-Ki, Ki-Ki!” accompanied the continuing cuddle as she wrapped the small girl tight in her arms. It was how it always was and how she always wanted it to be and as Raven fondly remembered the times looking after the child from the other end of the street, she almost laughed as the girl’s attempt at her name rolled around her head.

She was only just three years old. Presented with a difficult name, she had plucked out the easier parts and doubled it up in an attempt to make it sound longer. Jacqueline had been turned into Ki-Ki and the mangled name made into a special bond as Raven visited each day in her cherished role as babysitter and playmate.

== ~ ==

Natalia worked diligently up the woman’s body. She knew she would enjoy this day but nagging fears welled within her. This woman, this American
,
had established a place in her brother’s mind and maybe somewhere else and she feared it with all that she was. Finishing off the supposed coating of polish, she fished a brush from the makeup box she had placed on the wooden bench and reaching up, set to work.

Garish blue for the eye shadow was followed by a brush of misplaced white on cheekbones and Natalia busied herself with the final touches to complete the caricature. The flame red that flourished on those full lips was the final embellishment and, stepping back, Natalia looked on with a smirk of satisfaction, feeling safer in the knowledge that today would indeed be a day of all days.

== ~ ==

Jacqueline. It was a name Raven hadn’t called herself in an age and more. She hadn’t allowed herself to, or indeed wanted to. It was a name of her past, of a time when she had been someone else, a person so vulnerable and ultimately so hurt.

Jacqueline. The name echoed in her head, focussing on it while her other memories melted away. Jacqueline. Perhaps she could be her again one day. Perhaps he could call her that. Perhaps. Perhaps. Perhaps…

CHAPTER XXXVII – Toward The Light

Red felt surprisingly invigorated. The mixture of stimulants and the first solid food in weeks were clearly working wonders. Why had they changed though and why had that brute of a guard not fucked her like he always did? Questions flared in her head as she huddled over her plate to protect the food on it from the ever present black birds that swooped around her, their thick grey beaks snapping with each pass. They never left her alone now, night or day and she wondered why they only attacked her.

There was something unusual about the injection too. It hurt the way they always did but the rush was almost nourishing, more than the sticking plaster to need. Still those damn birds though, why the fuck couldn’t they just get them out of the place? The main difference lay in her awareness and Red could feel each of her senses was as taught as a bowstring, waiting to twang on the merest input.

She flailed out an arm to discourage the latest swoop of an imagined bird and scooped overcooked vegetables up into her gaping mouth, the mange touts too wide but bending inside anyway as she pushed the heap in.

Her ankle snapped out to kick away a bird that hopped toward her on the floor and the clanking snap of the chain caused it to flap and flee, ready to try again from another angle as it cried, “Murderer.” She was sure she felt the snag of a claw in her lank dirty hair before she shook her head wildly to dislodge it. Bastards, never a second to herself.

Black birds; they were everywhere and had been with her since she had been taken. Their presence tortured her and after screaming her defiant hatred of them, Red hunched deeper over the plate and shovelled her first solid meal in quicker still, ready for yet another day’s hard training.

== ~ ==

It could only be described as odd. Like an accomplished campanologist, Raven rang out as she walked; the bells dangling from her nipples pulling and swaying no matter how much she tried to glide. Her usually elegant gait was thrown out of tune by the added inches of the towering platform boots. They caused her hips to move in exaggerated swings and her unusually unsure steps echoed along the corridor down which she was pulled by the chain to her neck.

There was light at the end and a growing murmur which wasn’t quite drowned out by the clump of her steps. Once, twice her ankle almost gave way and Raven had to shoot a hand to the wall, steadying herself, bending the rubber shield in the process. It distracted her enough to make her oblivious to the increasingly fresh air that progressively nipped at her exposed crotch with every hesitant step forward.

Her mind drifted back once again. Jacqueline. Jacqueline Corbeau. Names from a time when she was very different to the woman she had made herself into. She was vulnerable then and yet, at the same time, happy – an emotion she hadn’t permitted herself for all too long. Hard though her life had been with a mother who was always either working her fingers to the bone or whoring herself to her latest meal ticket of a male, the small girl had been a ray of sunshine. That brightness had helped her through life until the night when her world was ripped apart.

Jacqueline Corbeau. The unshackling of that memory of a name echoed in her head as Raven remembered when she had been her. She had been told that her maternal grandfather had been a Cajun and that it was his name she bore but she would never be truly sure of that as her mother had explained it to her through a bottle of tequila and the stumbling, hurried words could have just been alcohol-induced ramblings.

Not knowing for sure had always left her feeling disconnected, feeling almost rudderless with a lack of foundation on which to build. Evolving into Raven had finally taken care of that lack. Raven was her sense of purpose, her security and her protector, always looking forward, never back. And yet, here, now, somehow she felt less real, less
herself
.

Thoughts spun to the pathetic creature that used to be Red and the need for Raven soared back. Was that her destiny too? She could never let herself become that. Raven had to endure and she was sure Red was in some way intertwined within that continuing existence; it couldn’t wholly be coincidence that she was here, could it?

Raven had never needed anyone. Sure, she had coincided with people and used them when she had cause to but she had never actually needed anyone. She knew Red needed Raven though; she had always been dependent on her to some degree since she had moved into the manor with that blonde girlfriend of hers in tow.

She needed Raven now more than ever though if she was to free herself from whatever they had done to her. Deep down though, Raven knew that something had already changed. Raven now also needed Red. If nothing else than as a touch point to remind her of what they could still do to her. Alexei had changed though, softened. She needed him more than anything.

God. What was happening to her? Alexei just kept intruding on her thoughts. She could see his legs again and remembered how they had rested against her side the last time she had been hung from the pier. Such a comfort to feel that strength. She needed that.

With a deep breath she shook her head as she was walked up the corridor to the peel of small bells. Jacqueline Corbeau, she still needed Raven too. She needed her strength, her single-mindedness and her absolute sense of survival if she was to get through whatever future hells were planned for her. But bound tightly to the tumultuous turmoil that was her mind, she also knew that in some way Raven now held her back.

Drawn along behind the smaller woman and stumbling toward the light, the statuesque beauty bedecked in garishly fetish Americana could no longer be sure what she needed. Escape. But what to? Should she just get away or throw everything into getting him? She was torn between two very different pasts, each of which hinted toward very distinct futures.