A look of pity flashed across his face, and then he was angry. “You will go. You will go to the room, you will take a shower, and you will be ready in twenty minutes. Now!”
I lost it. I was shaking my head and sobbing before I could stop myself. “I can’t,” I said.
He said nothing, and so finally I looked up at him.
“Natalia,” he said, after taking a deep breath. “I know this is hard. You don’t... you can’t understand.”
For a moment, looking at him, his eyes seemed to warm from their usual cool state, and I found myself actually thinking that he cared. “You have to trust me,” he said sharply. “I am doing this for your own good—”
“I don’t even know who you are,” I said. I had started off yelling, but I quieted down midsentence. Who could say why? Was I falling for his act? Or was I just trying to save myself from another spanking?
Muscle along his jaw pulsed as he stared at me. The soft look in his eyes hardened. “Go,” he said quietly, his arm going out to the right. “Go now, if you know what is good for you. If you disobey me I—”
His breath caught in his throat, and in my chest a delicious, but very real, spasm of fear twisted.
“I will make sure you regret it.”
I pushed the plate away and slid off the stool. Something about his voice told me he was down to business.
* * *
Ishowered as fastas I could and got dressed while my skin was still slightly wet. The clothes he had brought me were as nice as the ones in the basket, but there was nothing very warm to choose from. I selected another pair of jeans, a perfect fit, which was mystifying and a little bit scary, and a white shirt. There were a pair of white panties, and no bra. Oh, well, I thought, and put the shirt on anyway. It was a plain t-shirt that hugged my figure. I glanced in the mirror: I looked good. Sexy. Appealing. And part of me didn’t actually mind that.
I calculated one problem while I hastily searched the room looking for... I don’t know, something useful.
He had come inside of me, and the reality of that was just starting to set in.
I’d run out of money for the pill a couple of months ago, which hadn’t mattered very much because I didn’t even have time to sleep with any of the sleazebags who came through my neck of the woods—and I wouldn’t have wanted to anyway. So, money being what it was, I’d kept them around to use as a morning-after fix.
I didn’t have that now. And that was, potentially, a very big problem.
Even bigger than that problem was the fact that I had some stupid, stupid, stupid thing floating in my head that I almostlikedthe idea that he had filled me up with his seed and made me pregnant—
“Stop,” I whispered to myself, opening drawers, searching for anything useful. What? A map, a scrap of paper, a knife, a screw, something,anything...
But all the drawers were empty. It was like this wasn’t a real house.
I whirled around, scanning the windows—tinted, like the one in the first room I had been brought to.
But with something that looked like a handle, or a crank.
I ran to the window, not really sure what I thought I would do next if it opened. The crank wouldn’t budge. I hit it with my free hand and pulled at the same time.
“Natalia.”
His voice was low, calm as it had been when he had come to Kitty Bang Bang.
Fuck.
I froze.
“What are you doing that for?” he said, and without turning around I sensed him moving toward me in the room. “Hmm? You’re not trying to escape again?”
I let out a gasp of desperation. Jesus. Here came the tears again. I hit the crank again in frustration. “I just... I can’t just... I need to know where we are. I can’t... leave everything.”
I sounded hysterical. Sweat was gathering on the back of my neck, and the tears were about to overflow.
He was behind me in an instant, the heat of his body against me, lulling me into that false sense of safety. His arms, muscled and thicker than I remembered, slid around me, over my own puny forearms, and another blubbering gasp left me, as I realized how silly I was to think I could get away from him, overpower him, sneak away from him... maybe how little I actually wanted to...
