Unorthodox (Sick Love Book 1) Page 3

  Ben does the hard work, and he’s paid well for it. One week isn’t enough time to create a perfect sex slave. Not even really a good one. I don’t need that; her owner will train her how she sees fit.

  What I need is her cooperation.

  And her sessions with Ben were enough to have Addison crying for me in the night after three days.

  Tomorrow evening, Ben leaves.

  I don’t know if she’ll cry for me any more after that, but I guess we’ll see.

  Now, though, nearing midnight as I wait outside of her room, I hear her pleading for me. And the damndest thing about manipulating a future slave? A girl that you want to break down to nothing?

  They actually want you when they think you’re not the monster.

  And as long as you stay below the level of evil they’ve suffered during the day—in this case, Ben—you can get away with almost anything.

  I’ll likely have a few weeks to play with her. A few weeks while her father scrambles for money that I couldn’t give a fuck about.

  A few weeks, and I’ll get something back I thought I’d lost forever.

  His finger down my spine is chilling.

  Chilling, and taunting, and torture.

  It reaches the waistband of my cotton pajamas, pauses, and for a second, I hold my breath.

  Hoping.

  Praying.

  I don’t even believe in God, but for this to go further—for him to slide his finger into my shorts, shift around my hips to the front, slip in between my thighs and touch me—I’d get on my knees and beg any god at all.

  Doesn’t he know I’ve been waiting?

  Doesn’t he know this secret in the dark isn’t just one way? It isn’t just his silent steps on the wooden floors I crave in the night. Not just his arms around me after a particularly hellish day.

  It’s not just him driving this darkness.

  This madness.

  Not anymore.

  Not since…

  I don’t let myself think about it. My back is still sore. My wrists still hurt. I can still taste Ben on my tongue.

  I don’t think about it.

  The drugs make it easier.

  Something is in my food.

  It’s why she forces me to finish it, the woman that works in this house.

  My mind is heavy, dull. But it keeps the pain away and lets Max touch me in ways I won’t resist. I don’t want to resist him under this haze.

  I want his touch.

  But Max’s internal battle with himself is over and his finger slips up my spine again, causing me to shiver.

  From the sensation.

  And from the loss. From knowing he won’t do it. He won’t fully satisfy me.

  I know why.

  I know what he’s doing. I know that despite his touch and his care and his quiet comfort in the dark, I know he’s manipulating me.

  But after six days with Ben, I don’t care. I thought I was ready for this. I thought my father’s rough hands and my uncle’s twisted commands made me different. Stronger.

  I’m not.

  And I’m not strong enough to manipulate Max in the way he’s manipulating me.

  Even though he has to know that when I leave this house, I’ll be so far from his to fuck with, it’ll be laughable. He has to know that if he wants me, he should take me now.

  Because one of these days I’ll leave completely, and I won’t come back.

  One night I won’t be here at all.

  He’ll come from his room to mine as he’s done the past five nights, and he’ll find this bed empty.

  One night I won’t come back, and what will he do then?

  Maybe someone will replace me.

  Maybe another girl will be pining over him exactly as I am now.

  He kneads his fingers against my bare shoulder and I almost groan at his strong, sure touch. At the way he works the aches in my muscles out, the way my days spent training and pushing my body and mind under Ben and honing it as close to perfection as I can possibly get it all fade away under his touch.

  This pressure is firm and sure and strong, but it’s…kind.

  He isn’t always so kind.

  He’s not a monster like Ben, but sometimes he tells me horrible things. Sometimes he taunts me with wicked words of what he’s going to do to someone else after he’s gone back to his room. Sometimes the anger in my chest manifests into violence in my fingers but fighting him is a waste of my time.

  It always ends the same way. My face in the mattress with his erection against my back as he pins me down.

  But he won’t finish it.

  He never finishes it.

  I hate him for that.

  I hate the way his hands move up the column of my neck now, gently coming around to my throat, then he curls his fingers around my flesh.

  I hate that I know what he’s doing. I hate how he squeezes slowly so I don’t squirm. Even as he steals the breath from me.

  Even as he pulls me by my throat onto my back and props himself up to look down at me as he chokes me. In the darkness of my room, he can barely see me, nor I him. But the TV is glowing blue along one wall, and the light illuminates the planes of his face, smooth and sharp and pale like they’re carved from granite.

  I hate how even that light dissipates as my vision turns to black and I open my mouth to gasp.

  I hate how much I love that his saliva drips from his mouth onto my tongue and he tastes clean, like peppermint, and just as I’m slipping under, and all I can feel and taste and breathe are him, he leans in close to my ear.

  “That’s right, baby girl, all you need comes from me.” Then he loosens his grip around my throat and I’m pulling air, but before I can get enough, he kisses me, harsh and possessive and raw.

  His teeth clash with mine, his tongue is down my throat, and his hands haven’t left my neck.

  “Is it like this with him?” he asks me, pulling away, letting me breathe. “Does he fuck with you this good, Addison?”

  I buck my hips, wanting him between my thighs. Any part of him. I’d take anything. I just want more.

  But he laughs, sucking my bottom lip harshly, biting it between his teeth before he pulls back, hands still around my throat. “I don’t want your body, stupid girl. Everyone will have that. Pay attention, Addison. It’s your mind I want to fuck.”

  He doesn’t know it yet, but even through the haze of the drugs, I know one thing with certainty. My mind is already fucked.

  It has been since I was a child.

  Ben is in my room before the sun rises again.

  It’s been this way for the past six days. Six days, and I’ve marked every one of them with a tiny cut on my inner forearm, from another dull razor left in my bathroom to replace the one I lost when Ben pushed me down the stairs.

  The door to my room is the only escape.

  After the pain I was in the last time I tried, I don’t try again.

  The window in here is at the very top of the ceiling, a small square looking out at a blue sky. I can see nothing but sky from it.

  I don’t know where I am.

  The only way to find out is through the door, but beyond the door is the same man with the rifle strapped across his chest. The same man that was outside of my window at Danik’s house. The same man who let Ben take me down those stairs.

  “Up.” Ben’s voice is jarring in the silence of my room.

  I stumble out of bed, my eyes heavy with sleep. Every night is the same. I crawl into bed and close my eyes, knowing I won’t escape this hell. I whimper in the night, half awake, half drugged, and Max comes.

  Max steps into my room and he holds me.

  He tortures me, but he caresses me.

  He makes my body respond to him in ways I don’t like, but I don’t care. I don’t care because his touch is the only gentle thing I’ll receive all day, even when it’s not that gentle. Compared to the rest of the hands that have touched me, his are featherlight.

  My feet scurry across
the wooden floor, away from the bed, so Ben understands I’m listening to his command.

  I thought I was immune to the scent of the pine floor cleaner the woman in this house uses to clean with, even though it’s overwhelming in my room.

  But I haven’t puked any more at night like I did the first three. Not that that ever did me any good anyway. The scent was still there. And the housekeeper brought more drugged food, waited until I forced it down.

  The drugs brought relief.

  And after those three nights, exhaustion won over the flashbacks, and I stopped getting sick. I found myself lulled to sleep with Max in my bed, his heady, masculine scent—a lot like the smell of the ocean, in the strangest of ways—covering the pine.

  The pine, and the memories of Uncle Cade and what he made me and Danik do.

  In the mornings though, I smell it all over again. Almost as if getting out of the bed Max slips away from when I fall asleep is like walking into the room all over again.

  I feel hot all over, like I’m going to be sick. My stomach convulses and I try to breathe through my mouth to dull the scent. To block out the memories of Cade. And Danik. And the things we did to each other.

  The memories with my father, though more recent, are easier to push away. There’s no scent attached to those. Nothing but the feeling of lying in his bed, my eyes locked on the ceiling afterward.

  But the pine cleaner is like a constant reminder of what happened with my uncle.

  “Bathroom,” Ben commands me, crossing his arms over his chest. He has wavy, dark blond hair and deep blue eyes. He’s nearly as tall as Max, and he’s broader. He can’t be much older than me, and yet the way he treats me…it’s as if I’m…nothing.

  In this house, that’s true.

  I shudder, remembering what Ben did to me when I came to that second morning. After I tried to run.

  I head toward the bathroom, arms wrapped around my chest.

  I’m in a white tank top, white shorts. I don’t have a dresser here. There are a few items in the closet that Max hung up when he first brought me here, but I’m not allowed to pick my clothes.

  Ben has them laid out on my bed every day when I leave the bathroom.

  After I brush my teeth and my hair.

  I glance in the mirror at my green eyes, the circles of blue beneath them. My face looks hollower somehow, and when I pinch my stomach, there’s nearly nothing to hold onto.

  One week.

  It’s been one week, and I barely recognize myself—body or mind.

  Although, that’s not quite true, either.

  Max isn’t the only monster I’ve ever let into my bed, and I wasn’t drugged for them. It’s just this time the monsters have sharper claws.

  My eyes dip down to my breasts, and I think about my surgery a year ago. About coming to, my father beaming as I lay on the gurney, feeling like an elephant was on my chest. Strangely, he didn’t touch me after that.

  Maybe they’re actually the same kind of monsters here as they are back home.

  After I brush my teeth and rinse, I risk a glance at my back, picking up the edge of my tank top as I look in the mirror to see my skin.

  I bite back a gasp, tasting blood in my mouth.

  The flesh isn’t open, but the marks from the whip…they’re still there.

  “Hurry. Up.” Ben’s words are low, right at the door, and I nearly jump as I yank the hem of my shirt down.

  Swallowing my fear, I turn to the door and pull it open quickly. If I’m not quick, things hurt far more.

  Ben’s deep blue eyes are on mine, but I quickly look away. No eye contact.

  I’m not quick enough.

  Ben hits me across the face and my head spins to the side, my face on fire. I open my mouth, flex my jaw.

  Hear it click.

  Getting hit by a man isn’t a new thing for me. My father is violent in every sense of the word. Uncle Cade was, too.

  Still, it’s a feeling you never really get used to.

  I flex my jaw again, tasting more iron in my mouth as I bring a shaking hand up to my lips to wipe the blood away.

  “Are you done?” Ben asks me, but it’s a trick. I’m a fast learner, and I knew his questions were tricks the first day we started this.

  Growing up in a house like I did, you quickly learned to read the moods of violent men. Reading incorrectly could get you killed.

  I swallow down the blood in my mouth and nod once without looking at him. If I speak, I get hit again.

  I don’t want that.

  I drop my hand, keep my head turned to the side so I don’t have to see Ben. So I don’t accidentally meet his eye again, see his dark blue gaze studying me, waiting for me to fuck up.

  He’s attractive enough, if you have a thing for demons.

  Sometimes I do.

  “Get on your knees,” he says calmly, almost politely. But I recognize the challenge lurking too.

  My entire life has prepared me for a man like Ben.

  My father is a monster. The men he hired to guard me were made of the same evil he is. And men like that? They thrive on your disobedience.

  They crave the punishment.

  I know Ben wants me to fight him, so he can punish me again. He doesn’t want me on my knees. He wants another excuse to hurt me.

  Slowly, though, I sink to a bow anyway. All the way to the floor. I can play this game.

  And it is just a game.

  My father will come for me, to save face. Not out of love, or duty, or because he misses me. But because having his daughter taken will be a blow to his reputation.

  He let Max have me, temporarily, to settle a debt. But he’ll come.

  And even if he doesn’t care, even if he doesn’t come, Danik will.

  Danik will come for me.

  Someone will fucking come for me.

  I keep my eyes on the wooden floor, and when Ben squats down and I feel something soft coming around my neck, I don’t look up. I’m barely breathing.

  He loops the band of material tight, but not too tight.

  If I could draw breath, I’d still find oxygen in my lungs. As it is, I’m not sure that’s what I want at all.

  Ben stands after he attaches something to my…collar.

  He jerks it, and I crawl on my hands and knees behind him, toward my door.

  We practiced with the collar yesterday.

  I realize I haven’t changed today, into the usual bodysuit I wear with the open back that allows him to make the strike of the whip more painful and that bothers me.

  I’m not sure why, but it does.

  Routine here is what I’ve learned to crave. The first day, I didn’t know what to expect. I tried to beg. Plead. Cry. Scream.

  The second day, I tried to run.

  The third day, my face swollen, my lips cracked, I stopped being stupid.

  But when I crawl past the guard outside of my door, see his shoes, the hem of his fitted black pants, I have the sudden urge to cling to him. To beg him to help me.

  To get Max.

  But Max…

  Max knows.

  This is his house.

  He knows.

  And still, in the night when he comes to soothe me… I let him. Maybe it’s the drugs. Or that I’m exhausted. Perhaps both.

  It’s probably something far worse.

  I think, in my entire eighteen years, his hands are the most gentle that have ever touched me.

  I hear Ben lead her down the hallway just as my hands go around Evora’s throat.

  Addison is shuffling on her hands and knees. It’s a sound I recognize well. It’s how all of the women at my father’s compound were expected to walk, save for my mother.

  Many days, my mother was so black and blue she couldn’t walk at all.

  Not for the first time this week, I have to force myself back to the present. Force myself not to think about my mother, or Oliver, my brother.

  About all the fucking ways I failed them both.

  I glance
at the bloody knife on the white sheets of my bed, bringing back my focus. It’s tempting, but Evora and I have both bled enough. And with her throat tightening around the tip of my cock, my hand cutting off what was left of her air supply, I’ll be done soon anyway.

  I look down into her deep brown eyes, watch her face turn pink as she fights the panic from not being able to breathe.

  She doesn’t look away from me though. Not once. And she’s not even my slave.

  Just the adult daughter of a friend. A girl I use after I slip out of Addison’s bed.

  I loosen my hold on Evora’s throat as I finish in her mouth, my blood-coated fingers threading in her hair. She gasps for breath and the way her mouth opens wider and then closes again as she tries to draw out my orgasm for as long as possible, feels really fucking good.

  When I’m finished, eyes still locked on hers, I drag her off of my cock by her hair. She licks her lips clean of me and her own saliva, and then looks down at the floor, hands on her bare thighs, legs tucked underneath her.

  She might not be a slave, but she knows what I like—total obedience.

  I run my thumb over her swollen lip, smooth back her long, dark hair, pressing my fingertips against the ridges of her skull. “Good girl.”

  Then I get ready to watch Addison on her last day of training, to see just how much work I’ll have to put into her the next few weeks.

  She’s holding out hope her father is coming back for her. Maybe her brother.

  But they’re not.

  I know they’re not.

  Because someone has already made an offer for her that I just can’t refuse.

  She isn’t crying. That’s the first thing I notice as I descend the stairs into the basement where Dante stands guard at the top.

  She’s not crying, and I don’t hear the crack of the whip against her back, so I assume she’s behaving herself.

  Still, I don’t make my presence known. I don’t want her to fuck up, and I don’t want her to think I’m here to save her.

  I have no business being thought of as anyone’s savior.

  If she starts crying, I’ll need to leave. I hate crying. Some men get off on it, and I understand why. Knowing you brought someone to the point of tears, holding their emotions in the palm of your hand, their physical limitations, the mental ones…it’s a heady experience. Like floating in the clouds, but your feet are firmly planted on the ground, a girl’s throat beneath your fingers.