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He looked amazed. For one instant he looked impressed. And then he just snarled, "Shut your mouth," and hit Chloe again, catching her at the place where her legs joined her ass.
She'd stopped screaming now. She was breathing hard, but her face had changed. She looked lighter, somehow, beatific, like she was on really good acid or really good E. I watched, amazed, as she offered up her ass to the extent she could move, and yet the beating remained horrendous, the misery stick leaving dark streaks of flushed skin behind it.
Chloe had gone somewhere else. Suddenly I wasn't so sure I could get her out. I wasn't sure she would even want out. I felt small and sad and lost.
"Come here."
The command came out of a bout of personal darkness, as if lights had gone off all around me. As if I were blindfolded.
"No." But it came out pleading, not determined.
"Come. Here. Or I will make it so. Much. Worse."
I went. It was like being out of body, like the worst times I've ever depersonalized, sliding out of myself, dissociating until I couldn't tell if I was awake or asleep.
He took my hands roughly, jerking me faster than I was walking on my own, dragged me to a place where rings hung down from the ceiling. He tied my wrists together tightly, lacing them into leather cuffs that wouldn't move, then connecting rings on the cuffs to leashes that hung from the rings in the ceiling. He yanked until I rose up on my toes, body taut.
"Please." The voice didn't even sound like mine. I wasn't like Chloe. I couldn't take what she'd just undergone. I couldn't take that thing he'd beaten her with. I could see it from the corner of my eye and it terrified me, it might as well have been a rattlesnake lying there.
"Shut up."
I was on tiptoe. I was taut. Every muscle ached with tension and terror.
Claude picked up the stick he'd used on Chloe and I drew in my breath, expecting to scream. But he just looked at it and then threw it toward a sink in the back of the room. It hit some distance away, rolled, and was still.
I let out a trembling breath.
Claude walked in the same direction he'd just thrown the stick and I caught my breath again, but when I twisted, trying to see, I could see him picking out a fat, black leather strap, long and heavy and with not much give.
"Claude…" Chloe said. Her head was up, her eyes open though not very focused. She was looking at the strap.
"I don't care," he said.
"But I don't think – "
"Shut up!" He shouted it and turned and rained a dozen blows on her back with the thing, hard enough the welts showed instantly and Chloe stopped talking, put her head down, squeezed her eyes closed.
I had no doubt she was back in her body behind those eyes again. She'd come back from flying, from subspace, for me.
I would get her out of here or I'd kill Claude. One or the other.
Or both.
The first hard blow hit my ass and I screamed.
40
Annie
He let me down after two dozen. I was shaking and crying and in agony from the leather. I couldn't imagine what Chloe felt like.
This wasn't what I'd been led to believe was out there. This wasn't lifestyle. This wasn't normal. This wasn't fucking sane.
I wanted my gun. I wanted a baseball bat. Hell, I wanted the weapon he'd beat his wife with.
Whatever my judgment, whatever her screams had said of what was being done to her, she'd been lost in the mystery after the first part. It wasn't until he'd beaten her with the belt that she'd lost her glow and collapsed in pain and tears.
Yes, but that was the problem. That was abuse. That was violence. Even if that was fucking consensual it was wrong and dangerous and everything I feared of the men in Cole St. Martin's little group.
