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23
Annie
We shared our abduction stories. We shared food, which apparently there wasn't a shortage of. Bevington had a variety of unpleasant and innovative ways of punishing his harem, but withholding food and water wasn't part of it.
There was chocolate. I've always been indifferent to it but chocolate has something in it that changes mood, picking up the hormones or something so life seems not so bleak. It's not just the taste those people addicted to it are after. So I ate some after determining there was plenty and I wasn't depriving anyone. This whole situation was grotesque. Anything anyone had to hang on to, I didn't want to take even if it was freely offered.
"What's it like being here?" I asked. The room we were in didn't look like the normal fanciful notions of a harem with barred windows but sweet scented breezes. Even with the windows broken and therefore permanently open it smelled stuffy and like too many people were sharing too small a space. Bevington had the money to outfit different rooms all over the place but hadn't bothered. Was that laziness? Arrogance? Or something wrong with him?
Or was it just cruelty?
The guards had said everyone in the room was "mostly nice," but I didn't have any problem with any of them. In real life I have a hard time making friends. I'm standoffish and that comes off as arrogant or rude when really it's just that I hate being hurt – my sisters didn't set me up in life to expect female friendship to come automatically or easily – and I'm shy.
Lettie was a college student. She didn't have any kind of record in the criminal justice system so there was no connection there. The college she'd been snatched from was in San Francisco, which didn't mean anything yet. She was single, had a kind of large extended family but they didn't check in all that often with each other and she didn't live with anyone. If they even knew she was gone, it was just going on a month and no one had shown up to rescue her.
Nikki was from Chicago. Her husband was a tech in a hospital. She herself worked as a secretary, working from home and sending things in digitally. She'd be missed. Her job was used to her communications coming at night because her husband worked night shift. But he was leaving her and wouldn't wonder why he hadn't heard from her. if he he'd really packed up all this stuff and left, and her mother thought she was busy and her father was divorced from her mother and somewhere in the South Pacific – there was no one but her job to really notice her absence.
Mia just cried when it came her turn. Her daughter, what her mother thought of her now… I thought what her mother thought was probably immaterial. Her mother knew in her own heart that she'd abandoned her daughter. That she was back in Mia's life and trusted to take care of Mia's daughter spoke more to the current relationship. People change. And Mia was broken by this kidnapping.
I told them my own story, aware that so far I was the only "bad girl" with a record. They asked about my boyfriend and I told them a little about Cole, leaving out his last name and who he was – CEO of an international pharmaceuticals company – and what he was – a billionaire who would come looking for me.
There was always the chance that he wouldn't be able to find me. Despite my confidence in the trackers embedded in me, I wasn't going to raise any hopes in these women. That would be unfair.
I told them about my family, the altered version, and let them assume I wanted to go back to them. The boyfriend was enough. The mistake – mistake – with the Corvette. The bad cops. The drive east and then west. I was accepted as part of them.
None of us were sleepy. Bevington tended to prowl the house at night, they said, often coming up with his security escort to take a girl. No one slept easily at night. He'd fall asleep just as the sky started to lighten to that dark pre-dawn green and the harem would too, sleeping until noon when the rose and worked out because he didn't like any extra flab on them.
That sounded like a long-term observation but none of them had been his prisoner for more than two months.
So that was concerning.
I wanted information. They wanted to talk about the things he did. How he had a hard hand. How fucking hard he could spank and that he routinely then followed that up with some unforgiving implement.
When I said I knew, Lettie said we could talk with me lying down as well as sitting up. I thought about arguing but whatever she wanted to do to help me, the others looked like this was normal.
I don't like being touched much. But I needed to be accepted. I wanted to be part of the group, not the latest girl brought in who might disappear again before her two months.
I had a feeling I wasn't leaving here alone.
Lettie had arnica lotion and while it was weird, it wasn't the most inappropriate touch of my life. Not even of my last 24 hour period.
We went on talking as I lay face down on the bed, my head supported on my arms. Lettie raised my skirt and sucked in a breath. Next thing she did was undo the knot Bevington had put in my panties. I'd gotten used to the pain of them digging into my soft flesh. There'd been too much else to worry about to fix them. But having that pressure off helped.
"Who did the caning?" she asked.
Which let me know they'd seen cane strikes before and knew the ones on my ass weren't new.
"The people who sent me here. None of you were channeled through Raven in Arizona?" I tried to make it a Really? I thought that was normal! Question but there was a short pause after I asked it, so I let it go.
Her hands smoothing the lotion into my fevered skin felt wonderful. She massaged delicately, which didn't feel as wonderful, but broke up some of the muscle tension that sets in after a severe beating.
Meanwhile the three of them told me about Bevington's innovations. He used an electric play toy, a dildo wired to produce shocks about like a static electric shock from touching a doorknob or a light switch, but turned so fucking high. He chose his orifices at random, inserting the toy and turning it on for longer and longer bursts. Once he'd used a cattle prod on a girl, but she'd seizured and he hadn't done that again. He used tasers to disable girls, then left them hanging from restraints. Nikki had her shoulder dislocated by that treatment.
"Did he bring in a medic?" I asked. I got the impression he was paying a lot for the pretty fragile things he wanted to destroy and that kind of casual destruction seemed wanton.
"His goons are ex-Army. They know how to fix things." Her voice was laced with loathing. Apparently I'd gotten lucky with the choice of goons walking me up to the room.
The rest of it seemed old hat, which amazed me, but Cole had punished me so many times during the years I'd been with him, I didn't react as strongly as I could have.
