Yield (42 page)

“Not by my specific orders, but yes, it happened as a result of what I wanted. I can’t change the past.”

There was a rawness in his voice that I’d never heard before – not just anger. Sadness and anger?

“You. I wanted you. I take responsibility for that. You should know by now that I’m honest. I’ve made mistakes.” He laughed, bitterly. “Most of them lately are because of you. I need you in my life and I’m not letting you go, Wren. I’m also going to care for you. You see, I’m the only man who truly understands who you are. I know the real you.”

What the fuck? That scared me.

What did he know?

A dark thing stirred at the back of my mind. A place, a circumstance, a history, I’d avoided since forever. There was a time when I knew I might have done bad things, no matter what I’d been told.

Was I right to fear myself, after all?

“No,” I whispered. “You’re lying.”

“I’m not. I’m going to tell you the truth about yourself.”

What truth? My heart stuttered like someone had turned off the switch. “You’re lying...” I swallowed. “You’re fucking lying!”

“You don’t swear at me. Never. I’ll reserve punishment for this until after. Caring for you means showing you what you are. Who you are.” He pulled up my chin so I had to meet his gaze. “You’re more than you think, as well as less.”

I scrambled, pinned there by ideas, by thoughts, as well as his hand. He had plans and I didn’t want to see them happen. I said quietly, “I’m pregnant with your child.”

“I know. It’s part of why I decided I had to have you.” His grip on my face began to hurt. “I love you Wren, whether you want me to or not.”

Love? Him?

“Then you can’t do anything bad to me. I might lose the baby.”

“You’re dictating to me?” He laughed. “I can do as many bad things to you as I want to. What comes next isn’t punishment anyway. I’m going to be careful. You’ll be fine. You’re young, healthy. You can stand this because without this we will be
nothing
. I don’t want to be your nothing, Wren. I want all of you and I will do anything to make that come true. Fucking anything.”

And then, I glimpsed that part of him I’d often seen – the devoted sadist.

I looked away and tried to calm myself. What was coming, if not punishment? I didn’t like the sounds of any of this. To stall him, I’d ask what I absolutely did not want to know. Ever. But what choice did I have?

“What is it then? What do you think you know about me?”

“These are facts. I’ll tell you
then
you’re allowed to think about them but you’re not to blame yourself.

“First. Glass was there when your father died. He led the team that assaulted my House. He may have fired the shot that killed him. I don’t know. To be fair, I’d have done the same thing, concealed my involvement by distracting you.”

Glass? My man, my hero? I blinked, staring at Moghul’s chest, at his nipple of all things. I couldn’t get my head around this. Yet it made total sense. It explained why he’d first come to me, the unease I’d felt when he led me around town. That feeling he was concealing something.

“It’s true?” I could hear my own puzzled tone as if the question was said by someone else.

“Yes. Your father was a man more perverted than I am. That’s also true. What you make of that’s up to you.”

Yeah.
I shrugged.
Old news.
That meant nothing to me...

He patted me lightly, doing more of his
caring
, I guessed. The feeling sank in though and it helped me, no matter the who and the whys.

Damn.

Tears started and I blinked them away. Glass had lied to me, but what he’d done since must mean more? His dishonesty paled in comparison with what I’d seen him do since then. He was still my man...and I was still here.

“Okay.” I gulped. “Go on.” What else did he have?

That last fact, yes, it was truth. I’d deal with it later. Poor Glass, he’d probably hated doing that to me, once he and I had become lovers.

“Second. This is in your past. You’ve always been afraid that you killed your fiancé, Nathan. He was stabbed to death. The police blamed a home invader or a burglar. They never caught him. You were hospitalized for months afterward, partly because your father insisted. Powerful man, your father, he hated your fiancé, from what I can tell. My detective dug all this up and more. You had a child and she was stillborn. You were on drugs for sleeping problems for years afterward, off and on, though you had problems before the murder. The pathologist speculated to my man, not on paper, just verbally, that your sleep disorder contributed.”

Contributed? What?

I was listening and checking off facts as he went. Which of these was the one? “Tell me.”

“The murder, it wasn’t murder. It was manslaughter. You killed him. You used the knife on your fiancé. The forensic report was subtly altered to say a tall man did it. Old footprints were attributed to a thief. Blood was found on a doorknob that wasn’t actually there.”

My mind went blank.

“Digging that up took a lot of money. Your father protected you, I suppose.”

Or the family name. That. It wouldn’t have been me.

“We all have crosses to bear, Wren. Me, you, Glass. No one is innocent. No one. Now you know your hands aren’t clean.”

Crosses to bear. Yes, and I was crumbling under the weight. Had he done me a favor by telling me? How? But I’d always wanted to know what truly happened to Nathan.

My dark place was real.

This would be why I’d had flashbacks, for a year after his death, of knives rising and falling. Of blood.

It had been me all along. Why had my father lied to me?

I’d killed Nathan, my sweet, innocent Nathan. He’d barely graduated from being a boyfriend. An architecture student, a beautiful person. I’d planned a family with him, against my father’s wishes.

How quaint. My mouth twitched. I’d been pregnant then too.

The coincidence was so ironic and so awful. I put my hand to my stomach. And now I carried another man’s child. I was sure I was going to pay for this later but right now I was numb. I’d suspected this for so long, been told I was wrong. And now, Moghul, my worst enemy, had somehow become a sort of perverted friend. Why did he have to be the one who found this out?

I was wrecked. Crying, what was that? It was impossible. I had no tears for this.

I wanted to curl up in a corner and wrap my arms over my head and do nothing. Inside my head was a wasteland.

The blood on my hands was real.

“No,” I whispered. “No. I can’t...” I shook my head.

Here I was, snuggled up to the man who’d kidnapped me. The man I’d tried to knife only days ago. Why wasn’t he afraid I’d do it again? Maybe he was? Nothing was the right way up. He said he cared for me and that he was truthful, and I guess he was, he did. He’d only hurt me physically in ways that I, in my own perversion, loved. Even his punishments only jarred me, made me think, made me look up to him afterward, and that was
so
wrong too.

Bad was good. Good was bad. My head up and dumped me into a swamp where none of my ideas would come to an end. They circled me, endlessly, like sharks and flotsam and zombie babies and yeah, stuff. Mess.

I clawed my hands into my hair and groaned out my frustration. “Let me go! Please.”

“Shhh. I’m going to help you. I want you to keep your eyes on me. Don’t be afraid of me or of what will happen. Do you hear me, Wren? All you need to do is listen to me. Answer,” he grated out the last and I flinched.

Fuck.

I nodded, my hands still in my hair. He nudged them away.

“Words, please, Wren. Look at me.”

My whirling thoughts slowed. “Yes. I heard you.”

I raised my head, the sofa upholstery rasping against my ear as I did so, and I locked my gaze on him as he’d asked. It was easy to do, far easier than disobeying. As I looked into his eyes, at the darkness of his gaze, I sank thankfully into that waiting space. The carousel of gibbering that had filled my head only seconds before died away. I needed something I could do without having to think.

I needed this.

His smile warmed me. “Put your wrists at your back, Wren.”

Even as I watched and listened, that transformation sneaked over his face and his voice became a deadly purr. I remembered what that meant from so many previous times:
I want to do things to you that I’ll like, though you may not.

I welcomed that. I wanted to be hurt. Needed it. It was a relief to know this was coming.

I put my hands behind me and he locked my wrists together. His arm muscles pressed on me from above and below, and my bewilderment sank me. I liked how that felt.

For a fleeting second I entertained a doubt. How traitorous this was to Glass, accepting this man’s dominance over me, but...I could do nothing about that. There was only me here. And Moghul.

“This is only until I have you ready. Then, I’ll release your hands. I don’t want you panicking.”

Panic? He said he knew me but I had nothing left inside. I’d used up my emotions, my strength, whatever it was that drove me. If he wanted me to stand up and be flogged, I’d crumple in a heap.

Moghul wormed his arm out from under me, disentangled our bodies, and stood. Then he helped me to my feet but kept a hand on my arm.

I could see what he intended now. The ropes hanging from some sort of block and tackle affair beside his pit, the steel table, the row of hooks, the bottles and swabs. I swallowed. Maybe I had energy left for fear, after all.

“Wren, look at me.”

I swung my head. “Why? Why this. You said –”

“Keep your eyes on me, remember.”

“Yes.”

“This is
not
punishment. I think you’ll...like this. However, if you take your eyes off me again, I will be unhappy.”

Unhappy
snapped into place in my head and made all sorts of weird connections that came together and summed up like a jigsaw puzzle. I didn’t want to make him unhappy. Oh yes, I’d fallen back into fucked-up land where what he wanted mattered to me.

I took my lip between my teeth and I didn’t take my eyes off him. Watching him watching me was keeping me functioning. I needed this, I reminded myself. I could feel my eyes widen, the room soften. A familiar, ingrained response.

He ducked low, to my eye level. “That helps?”

We both knew what he meant. I drew in a breath and admitted it. “Yes.”

“Good. You know I like hurting you, but this, though it may hurt, you will like it, a lot. If I’m wrong, your screams will tell me.”

I blinked.
Screams. Oh
. Well then. That was okay.

“Lie on the table on your stomach.” There was a small portable step. He held my arms to steady me as I obeyed. With my wrists cuffed, at the last, it was more allowing him to lower me, and then adjusting where I lay.

My skin stuck to the table and the steel was cold.

Like this, I couldn’t always see him as he moved about.

On a tray was a row of hooks. They were thick – far bigger than any needle that ever went into a dog. I knew my needle sizes and sixteen gauge was the biggest I’d seen. Whatever gauge these were, they were far bigger, and thus, far more fascinating.

Those were going in me?

This wasn’t punishment? I was beginning to understand. Last time he’d threatened me with these he’d been angry. Moghul, when he simply was being sadistic, I trusted him not to hurt me too much. If he said I could take this, I believed him.

I’d learned to trust him. That, by itself, seemed more perverted than anything else in this room.

The anticipation had me on edge. I’d taken pain before, but this was new. Having a ton of metal hooked into me, how would I react?

“Here.” Moghul unrolled a poster and attached it to the railing around the pit, so I could see it. “See how happy she is?”

The smile on her face as the young woman dangled from hooks in midair was...ecstatic.

“Wow,” I whispered.

“Keep looking at me. Nothing exists but you and me. Remember that.”

But when I couldn’t see him, I sneaked looks at the equipment and the woman too. As he swabbed my back with some sort of alcohol and drew on surgical gloves, I saw how total Moghul’s concentration was on his task. I was the center of his universe.

He told me what he meant to do while he worked, forewarned me.

The weariness of my days of travel, and the battering I’d taken from all the other things, too many to recall, were thrown to the background. The chaos faded, vanished, gone. I rocked when he pushed me. My eyes varied from full-on alert to a humming sort of calm when I half-closed them.

I listened and his words embroidered the peace, like stitches weaving on a tapestry.

Words...

He would push metal through my skin, so the hook went deep into my subcutaneous area...human skin was strong...people did this for fun. Lots of people. I wouldn’t bleed, much, if at all.

The patter reassured me.

Four hooks in total.

His explanations didn’t remove all fear, but they added layers of excitement, reassurance, trust.

I need this.

When he said, “I’m pushing in the first.” The room paused. He cut me with something and I gasped. I tensed, my mons and my breasts were naturally three of the main places of pressure between my body and the table. As if they bore all my weight.

My blood seemed to pulse stronger, and I became aware of the sexual...undertones of this act.

Moghul, shoving metal into me, while I was bound.

I needed to stop fantasizing. My arousal embarrassed me.

“Ready?”

He’d actually asked me?

I eyed him, blinking slowly, and nodded, alert for the prick of sharpness at my back.

The sink of the thick hook into my back beneath my shoulder blade sent a sizzling wave of pleasure cascading through me so quickly I gasped, and I was almost coming before I grasped what was happening. I bowed my head, eyes shut, feeling him push it out the other side, determined not to embarrass myself.

“Hmmm.” He stopped before me, stared a moment, then retrieved the next hook.

On the second hook, I was gritting my teeth, but not from the pain.