The Tied Man (29 page)

I gave him an open-handed slap across the face that was so hard that the back of his head hit the wall.

Finn held his fingers to his mouth where a single ruby of blood shone on his bottom lip.  He brought his hand away and examined the stain with amused fascination.  ‘Thank you, Ms Bresson,’ he smiled, and staggered off before I could find even a single word of response.

‘What an ungrateful boy,’ 
Blaine
was at my shoulder.  I hadn’t even heard her enter the corridor.  ‘Now, I believe we still have quarter of an hour of your delightful company.  Royce was particularly aggrieved that you’d slipped away.’

I gave one last try.  ‘
Blaine
, those people in there – they’re not right…’

Her eyes flashed.  ‘It’s his job, you stupid, naïve girl. 
You
paint,
he
fucks.’  She paused, and became more conciliatory.  ‘If it’s any reassurance, Coyle will have done some background research on the pair of them.  They might have slightly different tastes, but that’s what I cater for here at Albermarle.  Now come on.  Perhaps the more charming you are, the more pleasant Finn’s experience will be.’

I listened to Henry’s regular, brisk footfalls echo and recede as he escaped
Blaine
’s dungeon to the haven of his kitchen to crack on with the washing up.  The poor bastard always hated stringing me up; he apologised all the while even though he had as much control over his job as I did, and he couldn’t bring himself to look at me once I was naked.  I was only glad it wasn’t Coyle’s job tonight.

I waited in the darkness, breathing deeply and urging the everything I’d necked over the last few hours to kick in fast and hard so that it would begin to quell the panic that the shadows always caused me.

A nocturnal junkie, scared of needles and scared of the dark.  The irony was hilarious.

After what could have been ten minutes or an hour, I felt the muscles in my shoulders begin to release their grip as the dope continued its steady, reassuring journey around my body.  I shifted my weight whilst my legs could still support me:  I had minutes at most until it would be easier to give in and hang by my wrists.  Payback would come the next day when every joint in my arms would scream at me for the slightest movement, but in the now of my immeasurably fucked-up existence, ‘tomorrow’ was nothing more than a shifting, inconsequential concept. 

What I needed more than anything else in the whole wide world was for the grey blanket to cover my soul and turn my thoughts into muffled thuds in a distant room and to smother the loathing like it always did once I trusted and let go.

Lilith’s ice-blue eyes, piercing the evening’s darkness as she challenged me, haunted me still.  I had been a cunt to the only woman who had ever shown a sign of giving a damn, and as the velvet fog closed in I gave a secret smile to the wall.  It looked as though my penance had already been worked out.

I heard her voice first.

‘I see the guards have caught our runaway.’

Great
, I thought. 
Role-play, and crap role-play at that
.

The location really didn’t help.  In my time at Albermarle, I had been fucked and flogged by more knights and their ladies than I cared to count, and it was always the same banal, predictable shit.  However many grand a night, months of meticulous, erotically-charged planning, and they couldn’t get beyond ten yards of lurid polyester satin and a few mangled
thees
and
thous
for their money.

‘Now slave, you’re going to have to be punished,’ Royce said, in a low voice that was his best pissed attempt at command.

Scriptless,  I kept still and silent.  Knew that my first wrong move could get me seriously hurt. 

Naturally, this was my first wrong move.

‘I
said
you’re going to have to be punished, you ignorant shit,’  Royce snarled.  ‘I expect a fucking response.’  He grabbed a handful of my hair and wrenched my head back, and I yelped in equal parts pain and shock. 

‘Yes master,’ I offered, sounding like a complete twat, but hopefully playing the role.

‘Yes,
Emperor
,’ Royce corrected me, and I squinted and forced myself to focus on my clients.  For the first time I saw what they were wearing, and I thanked God that I was too doped to remember how to laugh. 

I should have guessed by the after-dinner smalltalk:  Royce plainly fancied himself as Julius Caesar, or more likely Caligula, and had changed into an ill-fitting homemade toga that emphasised a pot belly and legs like twigs. He looked like the same, sad little man, albeit in a white king-sized sheet, but in his mind he was a Roman emperor.

Selena sat on the edge of the bed, stoned and pissed to high heaven on the cocktail of narcotics they’d been necking over dinner, her new and improved breasts spilling out of a lime green chiton that barely covered her long, bronzed thighs, and her calculating gaze appraising me as though I was her latest purchase.  Which, to my rapidly gathering concern, I was.

To start, Royce ran a trembling hand over my hair and then down my neck, spine and arse.  There was the usual moment’s dread that he had suddenly decided to get curious for his money, and I began to alter my breathing and will those muscles to relax in anticipation of the coming assault.  I could hear his excited, raw breath and I wondered if he was together enough to remember to use lube.

He bluffed me.  The only time his hand lingered was when it reached the soft flesh behind my left knee.  I felt the ball of his thumb brush across the tendons and delicate skin there and foolishly thought,
Not too bad
.

‘Are you sure you brought it?’ Selena demanded, her voice urgent and shrill.

Royce straightened from his examination.  ‘It’s in my bag, darling.  I was hardly likely to forget now, was I?  I even found a sterile one.’

I didn’t have a clue what they were on about.  Didn’t care.  Clients brought their own toys all the time, keen to play without judgement or boundaries, and as far as I was concerned it usually came down to some arsing around on the night followed by a couple of ibuprofen and a hot bath the next day.  My arms ached, my head felt like it was full of wet mud and I wanted a piss, a cigarette and my bed, preferably in that order.  Whatever they were about to do, I willed them to get a move on.

*****

I didn’t get it.  They had paid thousands to fuck each other senseless whilst a glorified rent boy dislocated his arms for the best part of a night.

Royce and Selena, dinner guests from hell and shite actors to boot, seemed content to have noisy, artless sex in as many positions as they could think of, breaking only to have another drink or check their captive for disappointingly non-existent signs of escape.  I wondered what the hell it was about this set-up that was getting them so excited – especially Selena, who was, as far as I could see, enthusiastically shagging a troll.  At the time I thought it might be some drug-induced frenzy.  It wasn’t.  It was pure, cold-blooded anticipation.

From my limited angle of vision, I saw Royce use a monogrammed Albermarle facecloth to mop the sweat from his balding head before wiping down Selena’s thighs and shaved bush.  I had given up guessing their game: she’d had enough cock to last a year, and he looked as though another round might see him off.  I was stupidly thinking that I might actually get the chance to fall into my own bed when Royce walked over and slapped me hard across the head.  He caught me on the ear and my eardrum throbbed to the sound of a tidal wave.

I hated getting hit by amateurs.  I would settle for a real bondage freak any day: they at least knew how to avoid any real damage.  Royce, like most of my clients, was simply a git with too much money and an urge to hurt someone who couldn’t thump him back.

Are you ready for your punishment, slave?’ he demanded.

‘Yes, Emperor,’ I replied, hoping that this was the response he was after this time.  I began to imagine my back turning into a sheet of ice in anticipation of whatever he’d found to whack me with.

Instead of the impact there was an odd, plastic rustle that I didn’t recognise and I felt the first dull, indistinct nudges of panic.  This wasn’t what I was expecting and I was in no position to do anything about it.  Selena picked up the cloth that Royce had used on her and forced it into my mouth.  Only the thought that I might choke to death stopped me puking on the spot.

‘Slaves who try to run need to be taught a lesson.  Something that’ll make sure they don’t do it again.’  There was something in her tone of voice that suggested she was no longer role-playing: half a kilo of
Columbia
’s finest and a few pints of champagne had sent her into her own make-believe world.  This wasn’t good – the concept of ‘boundaries’ was well out of her reach, and I was stark naked and tied to a wall.

I fought hard not to gag as she stood on the tips of her toes and entwined her arms around my neck.  I could feel her hot, desperate breath on my cheek and I instinctively recoiled as she began to nuzzle my face.  ‘You’re going to have to be hamstrung, slave.’ 

It’s hard to explain the sheer ball-shrinking terror that comes with such words, knowing that you’re in a place where they’re not just an empty threat but a promise; the culmination of someone’s ‘special night’.  I wondered if involuntarily pissing myself might be enough to put them off.  Judging by their expressions, it was unlikely.

Are you sure about this, my sweet?’ Royce asked.

‘Do it,’ Selena replied, and her lover, somewhere well and truly in another orbit by now, stooped and gripped my left leg at the ankle, clamping it hard in his deceptively strong fingers, and jabbed something cold and sharp deep into the flesh at the back of my knee. 

I rapidly learned that it took long seconds for your brain to recognise that some sadistic fucker was carving into your leg, but when the pain finally hit it was like nothing I’d ever experienced.  It began in the pit of my stomach, radiating out in unrelenting waves while the assault continued and I impotently bucked against my restraints as my whole body was engulfed and my muffled howling became nothing more than an irritating background noise.

Royce continued with his work, and I felt blood flow down my calf to pool on the stone floor.  He was in no hurry – this was his big moment after all – and Selena lay back and despe
rately fingered herself, acrylic
-taloned fingers sliding deep into her cunt as her fiancé continued his leisurely butchery.  Her loudest, fiercest orgasm of the night was reserved for this.

‘Darling, is it meant to take this long? And are you meant to cut that deep?’  Selena’s voice suddenly sounded worryingly sober.

Emperor Roycie paused in his task and I rammed my head into the wall in agony.  He didn’t notice.  ‘Well I don’t bloody well know, do I, my love?  I shouldn’t think so, but the bugger won’t keep still.’ Frustrated at my continued off-script struggling, Royce straightened up and punched me in the stomach.  ‘Fucking well stop it!’ he barked.

It wasn’t the worst blow I’d ever received, but Selena gave a pathetic little squeak of horror.  ‘
Royce!
’ she hissed. ‘What the hell have you done?  Didn’t you say we wouldn’t do anything too damaging?’

‘It’s a bit late for
that
, my love, and I didn’t think this would be quite so messy, did I?  I mean, didn’t think the bastard would fight back.’

‘Shit, what if he dies?  I mean, there’s an awful lot of blood…’

‘For fuck’s sake, woman!  You were the one who wanted the authentic experience!  If he does, I can’t imagine the BBC buying my next series, can you?’

Selena stopped being a Roman empress pretty sharpish, then.   Raw panic took over, and I heard a sob catch in her throat.  ‘We need to go, Roycie,’ she whimpered.  ‘Now, please?  I don’t want to be here anymore.’

‘And what the fuck do we say to Lady Albermarle, eh? I hardly think that this is going to make for pleasant small talk at breakfast, do you?   Hell, look at all this mess – it’s all over my toga...’

‘I don’t care what we say.  I just want to leave.  Now.  We can tell that man who brought us here I’m not well, and just go. 
Please
, Royce.’

I knew what was going on in her head.  Selena, in her naivety, still thought that if they ran far enough, fast enough, that they could leave all this behind them.  I could have told her that if they ran all the way to a small hut in the Amazon, Blaine Albermarle would track them down with a bill for the dry cleaning, but the gag that had been so kindly shoved into my mouth was making the simple task of breathing pretty tricky.  Anyway, they’d find out the hard way soon enough.

Royce was panting  now, desperately trying to find a way out of the nightmare he’d manage to create for himself.  ‘Right, come on then,’ he grunted, and I heard something metallic skitter across the floorboards, followed by two pairs of bare feet scuttling down the corridor, and then nothing at all except my own laboured breath.

I had a vague feeling that unconsciousness wasn’t meant to be smart in situations like this, but couldn’t for the life of me remember why, and then the final salvo from my personal record dose of temazepam arrived and everything ceased to matter.