Eyes down, the girl rubbed her palms over her bare thighs. Nine weeks earlier, Van lured the eighteen-year-old beauty from a seedy neighborhood in southern Texas, where she had lived with three older brothers. Perhaps they could’ve been commended for warding off horny boyfriends and protecting her chastity. The sad irony of her innocence was, it had set her in Van’s sights.
A shiver assaulted Liv down to her bones. Whether it was from dwelling on the girl’s future, Liv’s damp skin from the boy’s shower, or the exchange of words she’d had with him, she needed the warmth of a gentle voice. “You have permission to speak.”
She lifted intelligent blue eyes. “Are you okay, Mistress?”
The question, although touching, couldn’t keep her mind off the boy’s allegation.
You rape them.
Two girls. He was her sixth boy. She’d shared sexual intimacy with all of them, including the girl blinking up at her, but she’d never allowed sexual intercourse. She’d never considered the other stuff rape. “I’m fine.” She smiled, and it felt strained, achy.
What if she was wrong? She’d permitted the boys release countless times, removed from the purpose of training, without Van’s knowledge. There were no cameras in the house to monitor her actions. They’d pleaded for sex. She’d responded with hand jobs. During those moments, she only meant to offer them comfort. Perhaps that was how Van viewed his unions with her.
Uncertainty twisted her up, and within the turbulence arose an even more unsettling thought. None of her intimate encounters compared to the moment she’d just vacated. Lying beneath that boy, pinned by the burnish of his defiant green eyes and the unwitting seduction of his physique, she’d felt a new kind of stirring. It was accidental in its creation, but the inconvenient truth was she wanted him. Not only that, she wanted him to want her.
Startled by her vulnerable thoughts, she angled her head away so the girl couldn’t see the emotions creasing her face.
“You’re cold and wet, Mistress. Would you like me to prepare the shower to warm you up?”
The bathroom in this chamber was enclosed and, more importantly, out of reach of the boy’s studious gaze. Swallowing the bitterness of the job, she made herself answer in the severe tone the girl was conditioned to hearing. “Yes. Don’t make me wait.”
Twenty minutes later, showered and dressed in an oversize t-shirt, Liv returned to her room.
He lay on his back on the rug, arms above his head to accommodate the chains. His soft snoring thrummed through the room, thanks to the sleeping pills she’d diluted in his water. But even in the grip of sleep, he wore a brooding look that pulled at his eyebrows and sharpened the bones in his chiseled face. A fringe of lashes shadowed his cheeks, and the lines on his forehead drew deep grooves.
Humans adapted quickly, and when they understood the boundaries, they worked within them. His aggressive attempts to overthrow her had been expected. All captives emerged from the box demanding answers and tossing clumsy punches. But there was something subtly different about his temperament. He wasn’t desperate enough.
He wasn’t scared enough.
She flipped off the light, submersing the room in darkness, and stretched alongside his body. The whisper of his breath and the clean scent of his skin navigated her toward his face. Lost so deeply in sleep, he didn’t stir as she speared her fingers through the thick muss of his textured hair.
The first meeting with the buyer was in two weeks. Two weeks to mold this boy-man into some semblance of a boy-slave, one who would be deemed satisfactory by a misogynist whack-job. Could she beat the contempt and righteousness out of him in that short amount of time?
It was a psychological battle she intended to win, because the boy wouldn’t suffer for his disobedience the way Mom and Mattie would.
Resolve guided her hands, lifting the edge of the rug and unfurling a thin latex sheet from beneath it. Half of the sheath was held down by his body. It was also glued to the subfloor. She folded the loose half over him, crawling quietly to his other side.
He coughed as she hefted the closest shoulder and rolled him on his side, the bones in his arm indiscernible through the hard layers of compact muscle. A few careful tugs on the carpet, his breathing stuttering and steadying, and the rug pulled free from his weight. She set it behind her and returned him to his back.
At his feet, she pulled a zipper around the edges of the latex, sliding it toward his head and removing the chains from his wrist cuffs as she went. Through the night, it would be a plastic sleeping bag. With the sides zipped together, she cinched the latex around his shoulders.
That done, she curled up on the mattress, lit a cigarette, and walked through her preparations for the next day. The nature of mornings in captivity was either they woke up remembering where they were and what was expected or they were punished and dropped in hell. The captive’s first day was always hell.
Chapter 13
The gravity of confinement bore down on Josh’s sleep-dazed utopia. It was a relentless press, dragging against his skin and nudging him to wake. Lying on his back, he reached up to rub the fog from his eyes and couldn’t move his hands. He tried to lift his legs. Couldn’t move those either. His heart rate exploded, ripping the haze of sleep from his brain.
The oblivion behind his eyelids was replaced with the blank stare of a masked face. It floated above him, a ghastly-white monition against ruffled waves of chestnut hair.
Arms pinned at his sides, he blinked to clear his vision as her brown eyes watched him through the eyeholes of the opaque disguise. A nondescript nose, pointy chin, and cheekbones molded the white, oval-shaped face. It would’ve been androgynous, except for the puckered, red-painted mouth, the upper lip arching in two dramatically-peaked points.
He lifted his head, dragged his focus from the mask to where she straddled his ribs and arms, and wasn’t sure which had his heart pumping faster. The blood-red bra and panties that bared her body or the latex body bag that sheathed his.
An impending sense of doom sparked the compulsion to fight. His muscles tightened, heating his skin and constricting against the stretchy rubber. He could give into his rising panic and shout, writhe, and wear himself out. Or he could conquer his impulses, behave with reason, and deny her the satisfaction of his fear. At least his backside was safe at the moment.
He peered into the eyes behind the mask and searched for a human being. The pupils, lifeless and frozen, might as well have been painted glass. His jaw tightened. “Damn. I’m still in this nightmare?”
There, a flicker of raw umber in the glass. His heart danced in his chest. Then the flicker disappeared with a sweep of latex as she stretched the covering from his neck to his crown.
He gulped against sudden claustrophobia, catching pockets of air in the see-through plastic wrap. Bucking and kicking and straining his neck, there was no room to maneuver. The transparent rubber clung to every inch of him, his skin sweating and slipping along it uselessly.
His inhales thinned, every other breath sealing the bag against his mouth and nose. He squirmed toward the top opening, but it cinched around his neck and ensnared his head. He could lift his head to scan down the expanse of his body, but he couldn’t roll, couldn’t sit up. It was as if he was cemented to the floor.
The whine of a motor screeched through the room and vibrated the wood against his back. Oxygen vanished. The latex shrunk, compressing his arms to his sides and sinking his body to the floor. His nerves rampaged with realization. She was sucking the air from the bag with a vacuum, trapping him, suffocating him.