CHAPTER 16
Zaid
In the fireplace room, Heather perched on the sofa next to me, facing the window, gazing out at the lush green scenery, a mug of coffee in her hands. It was a picturesque, beautiful sight, as if she were a painting. Heather had the ability to make me forget. The pain, the suffering, the years spent agonizing over the ways to get rid of the scum of the earth. All of that disappeared when we were together. A calmness cascaded through me, even as my fists itched for a handful of her hair, even as my body ached to be pressed against hers, the warm flush of her caned ass against my cock. During training, when we discussed the gift of her submission, how to convince the enemy that she was nothing more than a play-thing, a toy, and not the undercover decoy sent to capture him,even then, when he was in our thoughts, our conversations, he was only a name made up of ordinary letters. He was nothing.
But everything had changed with a simple phone call.
Heather glanced at me and smiled. I wanted to return the expression, but I couldn’t. Not now. Not with what was on my mind. I scowled and turned to my work, trying to study the blueprints of the Great Pleasures Palace.
Eric wants to see Heather again, Grant’s voice rang in my ear, the words haunting, as if they came from Eric himself. Our phone call had been short, and though I knew the situation, I had no idea of the depth. It was worse than I expected. Upon returning from the cemetery, Grant reported the actual wording from Eric’s crony.Eric requests the slave’s presence.
My slave. My toy. Heather.
By requesting Heather, the dynamic of the situation had shifted. Where once she had been someone’s slave, a stranger’s servant, a toy to be shown off,nowshe was an item to be fetched, a thing, an object. I could no longer offer her as my slave. She was now beyond that in Eric’s eyes. And that wasn’t the worst of it.
He hadn’t called formyslave. He had requestedtheslave. He didn’t respect the relationship we had, and by using those words, he wanted to make a show of it. To force the issue.
Eric wanted Heather.MyHeather. Knowing Eric, he wouldn’t let it go until he had her, all of her. Alone.
I closed my eyes, rubbing my temple. I could imagine the concerned look on Heather’s face. I opened my eyes, focusing on anything—the window, the books, the wet bar, the sculpture, the door to the hallway—anything, but Heather. I needed to reinforce the distance. I was letting myself get too close.
I reminded myself that my design had always been this: Heather will be offered as a gift. She will endure Eric’s torture, then she will slyly slip a sedative in Eric’s drink. The sedative wouldn’t take longer than a half an hour to take effect, but if it did, if Eric inflicted the worst? Then she died for the cause. She died for her sister. Heather was supposed to be expendable.
But she wasn’t. Not anymore.
We had spent what I originally thought was an adequate amount of time on self-defense training, but now it didn’t seem like enough. High protocol submission came naturally to her; why not use the extra time on learning self-defense, on how to flee from the most desperate situations? Heather could handle her own; I trusted her to do that. But I internally scolded myself for indulging in more protocol training than was necessary. There was a difference between defense and attack, a disparity between discipline and punishment. Eric wanted to punish Heather. It wasn’t about broken glass or the wasted scotch, but the fact that I had refused him the opportunity to wallow in her misery. It was a test on me as much as it was on her. I should never have let them in the same room.
What had I done?
I stood and motioned for Heather to follow me. “Training,” I said. “Meet me in the garden.”
After changing into a shirt and jeans, I glared at myself in the mirror. Dark hair, muscles with bulging veins, a scar cutting my face in half. The scar was proof that my mother had died, that I had survived. But my dark eyes, just like his? They were proof. I was a beast, a fucking monster, like he was. What difference was there between him and me?
In the backyard, Heather sniffed a wildflower, the purple petals tickling her nose, and it made me sick to think of how I could have ever planned to take a person like Heather, and use her for my own selfish needs. To not think twice about extinguishing her life.
Heather’s outlook on the world, her belief that we were all part of the same system, trying to make the earth better for our loved ones, was flawed. I could still admit that. An old me would have laughed at her, told her she was blind, a hopeless romantic waiting for her doom.
But after understanding where she came from, how her mind truly worked, after falling for Heather, Iwantedto believe her. To see the nature of the world the way she did. Taking meaning at face value, not seeing any ulterior motive.
She fingered her collar, a new habit she had developed. I resisted the urge to kiss her.
In silence, we hiked through the woods, in the direction of the hatch. I stopped in the middle of the clearing. The green and brown grass beneath our feet, a border of fir trees to keep us contained. No one would hear us out here. Not even them.
“Hit me,” I said.
Heather stared at me, waiting for an explanation. There was none.
“I gave you an order,” I said, my voice firm. “Don’t make me repeat myself.”
She shuddered, looking for an escape. I could read her face. Her mind was screaming that this was a trap. That there was more to it than I was letting on.
And I knew I had kept secrets from her. I had lied. I had done the one thing she hated more than anything in the world.
The cell door, holding his faceless followers, held those secrets. Her sister had been one of them.
“Why?” Heather asked.
A rush of anger overcame me, my skin prickling with heat. In another world, with a different submissive, I would’ve slapped her for questioning me.
