"I dare. My life depends upon you having a drink with me."
"Sucky life," I said and she doubled up laughing at a really pathetic joke. "I give up. What are you on?"
She smiled. "I think it's called life." She was prying the top off a bottle of spiced rum.
"What are you planning on doing with it?" I asked.
She glanced at the drink, decided I meant something else, and said, "I'm going to miss you. That's what I'm planning. Because I can't plan anything while I'm here."
I sat down across from her and accepted the spiced rum with curiosity. I think it's supposed to be mixed with something. Drinking it straight was weird. And strong. I don't drink a lot. But I'd drink with this woman who had healed herself while living in an underground cell. I'd showed her the basest of human behavior and the darkest of places to live and she'd found a spark of light then asked the sadist to make it bigger. Cheers!
We clinked glasses. "When you're not missing me what do you plan to be doing?" I took a sip of rum – definitely needed something with it! – and instantly swallowed, coughing, in a hurry to add, "You don't have to tell me a fucking thing. I'll be happy to – "
But I broke off at the same time she said quietly, "I want to tell you." She stopped and tilted her head to one side. "You'll be happy to what?"
I pursed my lips and shook my head. "I changed my mind. I was going to say just send you off and you do what works for you but that's not true."
I saw only the faintest alarm in her eyes. I thought if I had said she had to stay with me, much of the courage she had rounded up would fall away. She would stay.
"I can't just say goodbye, Ariel. I have to know you're all right and you have everything you need. If you want to build everything up for yourself, I'll honor that, but I'm going to watch and I'm going to pick you up if you fall, and I don't think you will, but I'm still going to be there."
There were tears on her face. Ariel cared about almost nothing enough to cry.
So I took a chance. "I will never interfere with your painting. Unless you want me to."
She grinned. "How? You're going to stand behind me and offer suggestions?
Ha! "No." God it was good to see her smile. "I'm going to offer introductions. To gallery owners. Only if you want it and only when you say you're ready."
She hid behind her glass for a moment, considering. Outside the wind picked up. Summer in southern Nevada is windy. So are fall, winter and spring. It's a desert. It's windy. "I'd like that. Not yet. I want to take classes. I want to find my own style. I want to paint something that's not on my laptop."
"And isn't your cell?" Might as well admit what she'd been staying in.
She tipped the glass toward me in acknowledgement. "All that. Sir, would it be horrible if I asked that the door be left open?"
God yes. That would be unhealthy. But I couldn't tell her that. "You'd come back as a guest."
She murmured dissent. "I'd need – "
"The maze. I know. Underground. But the cell would be unlocked. How about that?"
She smiled like the sun. "That would be perfect. Sir – "
"Cole."
She blinked. "I don't know if I can get used to that."
I considered. "How about one for the road, then?" I had to know what had happened with Marilyn had been a fluke. A bad situation. I couldn't be so fucked up over Annie Knox that I couldn't function as Cole St. Martin.
In answer, she slid from the couch onto her knees, head down, hands behind her back.
"Take your clothes off."
She didn't look around to see if there were cameras or even guards in the room. She didn't look at me. She kept her head down, unbuttoned the shirt. Under it she wore nothing, only pert breasts with dark nipples, and scars, where others had hurt her far more terminally than I had.
She unbuttoned and unzipped the jeans before standing just long enough to slip them off. She wore no underwear. That made me instantly hot. My cock had already been hard. Now it was a steel bar.
Ariel knelt again, boobs out, head down, arms behind her, knees well separated so I could see her sex.
"Over my lap," I said gently. This would not be the whole of her send off. Just a start.
She stood and draped herself over my knee, my other leg holding both of hers down. "Put your hands flat on the floor and leave them there."
This was going to be hard and long.
And a warmup.
My hand crashed down on her backside and she grunted, dug her fingers into the hardwood floor that wouldn't allow her purchase.
I rubbed my hand over the cheek I'd just slapped, then hit it as hard as I could, fingers tight together, hand rigid for maximum pain. I hit her two dozen times on that side before changing to the other cheek, giving it the same treatment, watching as her pale skin went from creamy white to pink to angry purplish red. Then I moved down, slapping at the juncture of ass and thigh, making her squirm and pant and knowing if I dipped my fingers between her legs, she'd be wet, even as she grunted and cried out.
Then her thighs, decorating them with handprints and turning them angry red before I said roughly, "Part your legs." When she did, I slapped her there, feeling the fluid on my fingers before I turned her roughly in my arms so she sat more or less splayed on one knee, her legs automatically opening for me. I punished her sex, slapping until she was crying, then started on her breasts, and then I picked her up and carried her down the hall, through the interior entrance to Annie's pain room where I tied her to the cross. All the implements in this room were duplicated in her own cell but I didn't want her there. Whatever she needed from that room I'd have someone else bring it up. If she wanted, she could watch on a monitor, make sure everything was collected.
Ariel was done with that cell.
I chained her to the St. Andrew’s Cross, arms above her head, her back to the room, her legs spread wide, and I cropped every inch of her I could get to, leaving angry red marks over her back and ass and legs, and when she was dripping and I was almost broken with need, I stepped up behind her, my hands over hers where they fisted against the cross and I took her, fucking her hard until we came within seconds of each other.
For a second I rested my head against her naked, sweating shoulder. Then I laughed softly and said, "I'm going to miss you, too, Ariel."
The next day my car drove her into Las Vegas. I transferred a quarter million into an account for her.
We stood in front of the compound on a warm and windy day, the car waiting, the driver one of my best guards. Ariel had a portfolio and a laptop, several boxes of art supplies but only one small bag of clothes. There were tears shining in her eyes that didn't fall. If I'd mentioned them, she'd have blamed the bright desert sunlight.
"What do I do with the extra once I've established myself?" She meant to teach, she thought, and work in an art store or gallery. And take classes. And get a library card so she could take out book after book on the masters. I pointed out she could buy them. She said she thought minimal was okay for the time being and she liked libraries. She didn't know anybody on the outside, she said; she wanted to.