The hairbrush came down for the first time.
I counted to 11 before I screamed.
2
Cole
There was a little bit of blood. Not much. Just enough that I knew I'd broken the skin.
It only made me hotter for her.
I'd told Annie when she came here – when she was brought here, sold to me by a bad cop out of Seattle who I turned in not long after – that she didn't have to sleep with me.
That was true. She didn't. I wanted her to, though. Wanted it bad. I wanted to make her cry for me, saying my name, screaming it. I wanted to hurt her, to bend her to my will until she begged for the pain, and then I'd withhold it.
I wanted her to be mine.
But standing in the shower, Annie left behind and duct taped to the bed, thinking about what she'd done, or more likely seething against me, I knew I wanted more than just for her to want me and want what I doled out to her. I wanted more than for her to crave the pain I could give if I chose and not if it suited me.
I wanted her well.
If that sounds altruistic, so be it.
I went into pharmaceuticals because of my grandfather. Best man I ever knew, he raised me after my father took off. After my mother died. When there was only me. My grandmother was in the picture, a sweet woman now in her nineties living across the country in Florida as if retirement there were a law and not a choice.
When my grandfather died, in his late eighties and sane as he ever was, he was in terrible pain that even opiates couldn't touch and by then, to his shame, he was addicted.
I swore to find something better. To help those people humbled and harmed by drugs.
And when he died, my grandfather made me promise he wouldn't let anything bad ever happen to my grandmother.
She tried to shush him but it was an easy promise to make. I'd already put myself through med school, already chosen a path that could help those people who were aching and grinding their way through terminal illnesses to do so with a modicum of grace and a lack of pain that ensured their last days with family weren't cruel.
Cruel was what I was. That was my pleasure.
Helping was my profession.
The drugs Annie was taking were natural, rainforest derivatives that I'd seen more than once take down an opiate addiction and render it a memory. She was one of the test subjects, carefully chosen because she was between a rock and a hard place.
Right now, that was my hard place. Leaning a shoulder against the smooth stone of the shower, standing in the warm wet darkness with only the light coming in from a small high window, I reached down and wrapped one fist around my cock, stroking while I thought of her white cheeks shaking under the onslaught of the hairbrush.
She bore it poorly.
I smiled as I ran my hand out, stroking slowly for now, prolonging the self pleasure. Annie was a take charge cop. She was in command whenever possible and ceded the position unwillingly. When her life fell apart around her and circumstances were beyond her control, she crumbled.
I was here to un-crumble her. After that I might return her to her regularly scheduled life. And I might not.
For this afternoon, I had something else in mind. My hand moved faster of its own accord as I thought about what I meant to do to her.
For now, that involved letting her go. Or letting her think that I would. I was going to offer her a choice. Stay here and continue the cure, continue the remedy for the toxins ruining her life. That meant stay every bit as hidden away as she would for an undercover operation. No contact with her boyfriend. No contact with her father. I had already made inquiries. He was out of the hospital and out of the rehab center and ready to face the charges mounted against him. If she broke cover to testify, she'd ruin the operation that she so desperately wanted to finish: taking down at least one of the fet suppliers on the streets of her hometown.
It had to be up to her.
So her choice: If she stayed, she submitted to me. I'd put her on a daily training regime, food and vitamins and water, exercise and punishment when she needed it, correction when she needed it. Or simply when I wanted to be entertained.
She still didn't have to have sex with me. My back arched as my cock hardened and my balls drew up, the pulsation starting before everything sprayed across the shower, washed away in the flood of hot water. I could take care of that myself.
But she'd be collared. A silver collar, made by top of the line fetish jewelers. The kind of collar that locked on and only I would have the key. If she left, she'd have to be cut out of it.
Wrapped around the collar - the shock collar dog owners use as "invisible fencing." I'd have the remote.
It was that, or she could head back into the world and try to make her way free of fet for the next 20 days, until her leave was up and after that decide what she wanted to do. She'd be out on the street, free to return to Mark and her father, free to break her cover and testify or contact the police and testify in some other way. She didn't even know that Samuels had been fired. She'd have to navigate all of that on her own.
She was crying in her room when I left the shower. That was music to my ears. She had to be beaten down before she could be built back up. That's the problem with strength. It can get in the way.
I could tell by where the sound was coming from in her room that she'd freed herself from the duct tape. Also good. She was still fighting. She needed to fight. Me. Herself. Her addiction.
I walked into her room still naked and wet from the shower, pulling on a robe as I entered but leaving it hanging open, framing my cock, which was getting hard again just looking at her. There were tracks of tears on her face. If I ordered her to pull off the sweats she'd put back on, I'd see the hot, angry red of her ass.
I didn't order it.
I ordered her to sit down on the hard-back hard-seat chair I'd used to punish her.
She winced when she did it but she did it.
"I have an offer to make you. Clearly there are some problems with your recovery."
Her lips started to frame a word. Her eyes were so big and dark, the lashes wet with the remnants of her tears. She was going to say It was only Advil.
I didn't give her a chance. "You have some options. Which you choose has everything to do with how much you want to go back to your life, your job, your father, your fiancé." I said that last deliberately, pretty sure already that she didn't want to go back to him. She just wasn't ready to admit it.
The way I was standing, her eyes kept straying to my tumescent dick. There was a hunger there, one I had no intention of feeding yet. I had other ways of taking care of that. If she wanted my cock, she'd have to work for it, and when I gave it to her, I'd hurt her.
I knew what she'd been through. I knew what Jesse Baylor had done to her. I knew what she'd gone back for. I knew she mourned him despite what he'd done.
I knew she wanted her life back, that she was devastated by her own slide into the addiction she was fighting on the streets, and more so, almost definitely, by her growing need to be hurt, to be fucked hard, to be dominated, kept, punished.
For her growing attraction to me.
So I was going to set her free. Or as free as she would think she was. And watch her come back to me of her own accord. Ready to become a sweet submissive.
"Here are your choices," I said, and stated it bluntly.