Yield (13 page)

If I had, I’d never have been out on the beach with only the moonlight to guide me.

If...

Footsteps sifting sand had made me turn halfway toward them. One person wasn’t a danger.

Only they moved swiftly and wrapped themselves around me. Something hard and sharp jammed into my arm muscle. I felt the cold and expanding pain of an injection. Whatever it was, I had to get free before the effects hit me. I had ages, didn’t I? Most things took longer than the movies showed. I panicked though, thrashed about. Kicked. Tried to scream past the wadding over my mouth and eyes. Too many arms. More than one man, surely?

Maybe it was a long time. Maybe a second. It seemed like forever, afterward.

Memories surfed in my head as I bounced about in some vehicle. I’d struggled, I think, but ended up halfway to the beach before everything, and me, floated off into nowhere and nothing.

My mouth was full of dry paper. My head ached with the rush of a hundred prickling needles. Someone far away whispered nonsense. Was it me? All irrelevant and wrong. My tongue poked at dryness.
Here
was somewhere that made me sleepy. Drifting off was far, far easier than...thinking.

Glass

After half an hour, I became worried and trekked across to the beach in the dark. The torch illuminated dunes, waves creeping up the beach to the
shush
of water shifting sand, and a long, empty expanse. Horseshoe Bay was a huge arc of a beach, miles long, but she’d never have wandered far. Wren wasn’t that foolish.

She didn’t have a gun – nothing, just her in her shorts and top when she’d walked out that door.

For once being silent and sneaky might be the wrong thing to do. If she was hurt, she might hear me and yell back. If she was being dragged away, she might make an extra effort and scream. Whoever had her would be alerted but...I weighed it up, and I yelled.

“Wren! Can you hear me? Yell if you can.”

I listened, again, quietly turning.

Shit. Fuck. Shit-fucking hell.

I jogged farther down the beach, praying, while listening. Only the rough scuffing sound of my feet came to my ears above the crumple and wash.

Though the upper beach was a mass of churned sand and footprints, down low the tide was going out and the sand was flat and gleaming in the light. Except there, a few feet away.

I squatted to look, touching the damp sand.

The bare footprints were the right size for a woman. I followed along the beach and found a place where several bigger prints merged into a small flurry of dug-up sand. After that, the bigger shoeprints went toward the road, where they’d come from, and hers ended.

Nothing more. I turned on the spot with the torch shining out into the dark. Nothing.

When I followed the new prints they crossed the dunes to the road. There were no cars parked here, perhaps a smell of car exhaust, or maybe I was imagining.

“Wren! Wren!” I listened again and heard crickets then I screamed my loudest, “Wren!” Further down this street intersected with a more major street that swept on to the shops. Headlights cruised there. But here. Nothing.

I put my hand to my sore throat. That last yell had almost ripped off the lining.

“Fuck, woman, what’s happened to you? Where have you gone?”

I dug out my phone to take some pictures before the sand blew away and obliterated evidence. I’d need to call Hugh. The police, maybe.

She’d been a bit unhappy with me, for some reason, I’d sensed it, but this? It couldn’t be a part of that? Why would she disappear? I put my hands on my head, giving the street one last survey.

What the fuck had happened?

Something bad. Maybe something like Vetrov.

If it had, I was going to find him and shove his dick down his throat, fill him full of holes, then stomp in his fucking face.

Moghul

The surreal feeling began when I picked her up at five AM. The low-light camera that I’d strapped to a tree showed her abductors had abandoned the car by the side of the small road, as arranged, and driven off in another. I drove up, drew on gloves, and popped the trunk.

The lightbulb in the trunk had been removed, but the moonlight angling in past my shoulder and the penlight I flicked on showed me enough.

There she lay. It was indeed her.

Wren. Such a pretty name for such a beautiful woman.

Her hair had strayed in dark swirling tangles about her neck and face. Her shirt had bunched up and showed midriff. Her shorts revealed the lower curve of her ass and were as indecent as the peekaboo neckline of her dress at the restaurant. I already knew what the edge of her areolas looked like, courtesy of that dress.

At the time, being aware Glass was seeing her body the same as I, had thrown me into some weird jealous mood.

No longer. The man had lost her.

I hesitated for all of half a second before tugging off one glove and pulling down the T-shirt and the cup of her bra with two fingers, reacquainting myself with the appearance of her areola. My leisurely aim painted circles of light across her breasts, on her parted lips, her eyelashes, and on the leather cuffs about her wrists where they’d fastened them at her back.

Fuck.

Putting clamps on her tits would be one of the firsts.

I’d never been such a perverted fuck until now.

I’d done all sorts of shit by proxy over the net, and kink in real life to willing submissive women, but this, tonight... It caught me up and whirled me off into some predatory space where I was ultra-aware of her and me and this car trunk, and of nothing else.

Had the world been turned into irradiated mist? Maybe. All I cared about was now and here.

Focus on what needs doing.
I took in an indispensable lungful of oxygen, having forgotten to breathe while I stared.

The dissociative sedative was still circulating in her bloodstream in high concentrations and would be for a few more hours. She was awake but barely aware of her surroundings.

Even so, any drug was a risk. I leaned in and listened, while resting my palm on her chest then I fumbled at her neck until I found the bump of her carotid artery pulse.

Breathing – good. Pulse – good. Relief poured in.

So odd, to be able to touch her.

I clicked off the light and straightened, still aware of her seductive scent and remembering the soft give of her skin underneath my fingers. My heart thumped heavily.

Not obsessed, hell no. I scoffed at my own naivety.

I worked my arms under her and carried her to my own trunk, crunching stray leaves under my boot and grinding them into the bitumen surface of the road. Then I gently lowered her and tucked her legs up to accommodate the temporary soundproofing. The partition between the trunk and the back seat had plenty of gaps and air would be plentiful. She could breathe. In daytime she might’ve cooked from the sun beating down on the metal. Nighttime was perfect.

There were no human sounds here, in this eucalypt forest north of town, just an owl, some bugs making bug noises, and distant cars grumbling along the highway.

I slammed the trunk shut, walked to the open driver’s side door, and slid into my seat.

Then...I freaked, a little.

What the hell was I doing?

Rules, limitations, boundaries, being sensible according to what my brain said was best – these had formed my compass for surviving for the twenty-five years since I hit teenager times. I
lived
my rules.

“Holy fuck,” I muttered, thinking of her back there and me here, holding the wheel, staring out at the darkness.

In one day, I’d turned everything upside down.

The drive back to the island and over on the ferry wasn’t nerve wracking. Confusing would sum it up best. The chance that anyone would find out I had a woman in my trunk was infinitesimal. I had on my faded T-shirt, shorts, and the gym shoes I wore when boating, fishing or hiking. The sleeping bag and backpack piled on the back seat made it look like I’d been camping.

No one would stop me.

I had Wren.

Every time I recalled that, most of my blood likely rushed to my dick, or my head, or both. I felt like a king and that was something I hadn’t felt for years. Guess I was world weary. Tired of what I did, no matter how crazy it would be to any onlooker. I’d done it all, but mostly kept my worst fucked-up-edness situations outside my ten-mile zone of exclusion. It was always over there. Never here.

The people around my car on the ferry were clueless. This was easy.

Deciding what to do with her was the difficult part.

My meticulous planning had been all about the acquisition. The future was where my problems began.

*****

Moghul

By nine in the morning she was stirring. I had the syringe of Valium ready, in case she developed muscle spasms. Sometimes recovery caused those. I wasn’t keen on having to find a vein and do this. Scared I’d fuck up and kill her. It wasn’t likely, since Valium was about the safest thing about this whole situation, still, it scared me.

That was the crux of my problem.

I’d lain here for hours, in the subdued lighting, in this enormous room devoted to fucking, flogging, and restraining submissives, and I’d worried. A foreign concept that, to me – worry of the sort where you were swearing at yourself.

Slowly, everything had sorted itself out in my head. Killing her, accidentally or on purpose was not happening. Yet, it was one of three future possibilities. The hard crunch of facts, the application of logic, told me so.

Clearly, I’d flunked serial killer school. Seriously badly, flunked it.

I rolled off the leather-upholstered platform. Built for restraining my girls and for easy cleaning, it made a good bed, though it was hard on the back.

I paced to the distant controls and turned up the recessed ceiling lights, and completed a last survey to make sure nothing was out of place. The leather collar on her neck had steel reinforcing inside and was locked together. Only my key would get that off. Same with the chain leash I’d attached to the wall. The burgundy wrist and ankle cuffs were also reinforced and locked on.

For now, she was free to move except for the leash. All the equipment was far out of reach.

Wren lifted her head from the red leather of her bed, coughed, and rubbed her eyes.

I checked the fit of the black mask I wore then picked up the plastic cup of water. I’d hacked away most of the leather from a gimp mask so it only went around my head at nose and eye level. Ragged, but it would do. Wearing a proper gimp mask fulltime was a pain in the ass. I’d dyed my scruffy brown hair black. Luckily a twenty-four hour chemist had been open. All done with a smidgen of anger because my actions said I
might
let her go. But I was never one for denying reality.

In a few weeks I’d have to decide.

Kill her. Train her until she obeyed me absolutely. Let her go.

Those were my options. I’d seen all the trouble Chris had been through with his women. Training a woman until you were certain they were bound to you irrevocably was like trying to catch a storm and bring it to heel.

Submission in BDSM was different and consensual. The submissive could walk away from the relationship at any time, and many did, the same as any vanilla relationship, no matter what labels you applied – slaves could still walk. No law could hold someone to any contract signed between kinksters. Slaves could become not-slaves.

This had to be permanent. Obedience needed to be ingrained and automatic, so that no matter what I did to her, she would remain so – a difficult task and one that would need a new approach. Beating her or humiliating her until she shrank away to a shell of a person was repulsive to me. The key to this would be personalized to Wren. I
needed
to find that key.

Everyone had flaws and weaknesses. With enough time, it should be possible?

Maybe. Guaranteed? No.

I should’ve fucking seen this. I guess I hadn’t wanted to.

I’d never kill her. Would I? I really doubted that I could.

The man I’d killed recently had been my personal first. Bad enough. A woman...maybe. Wren? My head ached at the idea.

Fuck no.

Wearing the mask and dyeing my hair let me keep those options open.

“Who...are...?” She blinked, her arms propping her off her side, elbows flexed, her eyes still dull from the drug, and her gorgeous hair trailing over her shoulders. “Who are you?”

I slowly approached her, considering my first words. I’m sure I wore my sadistic smile. My subs had told me I often did, when contemplating how to I was going to use them, what I was going to do to them.

Like a man about to take his first step on the moon, I wanted to get this right.

“I’m the man...who now...” My boots tapped the timing of my words on the big, white tiles. “Owns you.”

Wren

Owns you?

Shit.
Even in the fuzzy state my mind was in, terror splintered my heart. Where was I?

The room was minimal in furniture and huge, and so clean it somehow reminded me of a hospital, a luxurious one. My terror escalated. Alone. I kept looking, sweeping from left to right while watching this guy. His five feet distance still invaded my private space because he fucking wore a black leather mask. Only covering the eyes, mostly. But that was enough.

Who wore masks? What had I done last night?

Nightclub?

A small sunken pool to the left, white tiles, distant door, him, tiles...I blinked. Beyond him, a lovely mural of some sort. On the wall to the right... Jesus. Whips, chains, things made of leather that dangled from hooks. More things that looked ugly and as if made to hurt. Bits of furniture I didn’t quite understand. A cross.

I’d been kidnapped.

Bizarrely, I catalogued his clothes. Plain gray shirt with buttons. Black cargo pants. Did serial killers wear that?

Maybe. What was he planning to do with me?

Terror took flight and became something worse. My chest hurt from the way my heart struggled to beat fast enough for me to run.