Lethal Sin (Dangerous Games Book 1) (4 page)

“We’ll see about that.” Mateo’s voice pulled her out of her morbid daydream, and his hands busied themselves uncuffing her. For a moment she felt excited that he might be releasing her, might be giving up, but instead he had another binding ready to slip her wrist into, and he tightened it quickly. As he removed the last cuff and attached the other strap he spoke above her, “I’ll come back later. You just stay here and don’t wander off.”

A joke.

The fucker had made a joke.

Before she could get out her own retort he’d already walked to the door and opened it. Instead of screaming after him, she just grumbled to herself as she heard it snap shut.

The new position of her arms was giving a welcome relief to her neck and back. She could brace her elbows on the front of the pads that her knees were planted on instead of balancing her weight on her cheek. Camille was grateful, but she didn’t understand why he’d offered her that kindness. If he were trying to torture her, wouldn’t it be better to keep her bound in a painful position?

She sighed and rolled her neck, evaluating the furniture she was tied to for any weaknesses. The nylon straps kept her hands firmly against the lower pads, and the mechanism for loosening them was too complicated for her to manipulate with just her mouth.

Nope, no easy way out of this one.

That meant she had to be patient. Had to survive what he had planned for her long enough to find a weak spot that she could use to her advantage. Just as she had settled against the pad to relax her tense muscles the A/C kicked on in the room, pumping a chilling blast of air into the large space that slowly reached out for her skin.

“Dick,” Camille muttered as the temp in the room steadily dropped.

Chapter Three

Humans have a frustrating reliance on time. Before we had clocks we measured its passage by the movement of the sun or the moon and stars across the sky. Now we use watches, and clocks on DVRs and microwaves and phones. Humanity is constantly surrounded by measurements of time, living and structuring their lives by it in such a seamless fashion that it was hard to remember just how reliant our species was on something so ephemeral. It was a comfort to know how much time had passed, or how little – and the brain did strange things when there was no method to track it.

For a while, Camille had just focused on her breathing. Counting her breaths like the ticking seconds of a clock, but then a twinge in her back had thrown off her count and she’d lost it like smoke on the wind. That had been when the weird shit set in. To fill the empty, white noise of the space her mind had summoned a cacophony of images and memories to assault her with. Sucking her into vivid moments of her past, both pleasant and vicious, which was her brain’s useless attempt to insulate her from the inane absence of any other stimuli.

The one memory that kept playing on a loop was the one she wished would go away the most. The night she’d been dragged in front of Patrick Callahan and shoved into one of the plush leather chairs in front of his massive desk, which sat in his ridiculously opulent office, inside his even more ridiculous house.

He had lectured her for a while, and she had barely paid attention until he had thrown the picture of the boy in front of her. White blond hair, messy and in his eyes, too much like her own. He was sitting outside a school surrounded by friends and laughing, completely oblivious to the one who had snapped the photo.

Then had come the ultimatum – work for Callahan, exclusively, no more free agent shit, or the kid would die. Painfully.

The moment had felt like suffocating, and in the tight bindings on top of Mateo’s demented little sex ottoman, her lungs were threatening to lock up once more. It was only the return of another full-body shiver that suppressed the urge to hyperventilate and finally tore her out of the Groundhog Day like hell of remembering Callahan’s cruel smile as his fingers had drummed on the table awaiting her answer.

She was too cold to freak out, to lose her shit. She needed all of her energy focused on keeping sensation in her fingertips so she could adequately strangle Mateo as soon as his happy ass showed back up. The joints in her knuckles creaked as she stretched her fingers and then pulled them back into a fist slowly.

The sound of the door popping open behind her made her laugh silently.
Speak of the devil and he appears
.

His heavy steps moved towards her casually, no rush to them, and she imagined his broad, muscled body making the suit work as he came forward. In preparation Camille pressed her sharp nails into her palms again, urging the skin to wake up despite the chill. Without a word he stroked his too-warm hand up her thigh, lingering as he rubbed across the numb welts on her ass, forcing her to recognize the heat in his skin.

Fuck.

“Alright. Let’s try this again.” Mateo pulled his hand from her and she instantly felt the absence of the warmth, a fresh chill raising bumps along her arms and legs. “Where is he?”

Camille gritted her teeth, hating herself for the answer she was about to give. “Fuck off.”

“Not ready to share yet?” His voice was light, unconcerned, but she imagined he had a lot more clothing on than she did, and based on the warmth of his hand it seemed like he’d just been camped out in front of a fire, under a fucking blanket, with a mug of cocoa.
Bastard
.

“I’m sorry, I must not have annunciated clearly. Fuck. Off.” She turned to look over her shoulder and once again begrudged him for being so handsome. With a quiet laugh he pushed his dark hair off his forehead.

“Okay, I’ll move on to the next stage then.” He wandered away from her back to his wall of deviant toys, and she tried her best to bite back the question, but her mouth ran away from her.

She blamed the cold.

“What do you mean by next stage?”

His eyebrows were raised when he turned to look at her. “Well…” he turned away for a moment and then grabbed a riding crop from a hook on the wall before moving towards her slowly. “Earlier you had pain, then pleasure, then deprivation of something important. In this case, warmth.”

“So?” She asked, watching carefully as he ran the leather of the crop over the palm of his hand.

“So, you still haven’t answered me. That means we’re back to pain.” Without another comment he brought his arm back with the crop and it landed with crippling accuracy right where her ass met her thighs. The pain was so much worse than the strap that a cry escaped her lips before she could clamp her mouth shut. 

Camille gasped as he landed the next vicious strike at the tops of her thighs, making her buck forward against her bindings. She struggled to find that center she normally retreated to whenever something bad happened, or whenever she had to
do
something bad. The place where nothing could touch her, where she was numb to it all, but it was infuriatingly out of reach.

She was too cold, her mind too scattered, and the lashes just kept coming.

He walked around her and the crop started coming from the other direction, leaving lines of fire in its wake that overlapped with the welts he’d given her earlier in the night. This hurt, and because she couldn’t even fight back there was no solid adrenaline dump to make her ignore the pain. What she wouldn’t give to be free of the damn bindings so she could rip that crop from his hands and hit
him
a few dozen times with it.

“Fuck!” She hissed through her teeth, letting the word drag into a low growl of frustration as he paused.

“You know what will make this stop. Give me an address.” A sharp swat from the crop across her already sore ass made her bite down on her tongue to stay quiet. “Going to talk?”

“No!” She shouted at the top of her lungs, and the rush that followed the outburst felt good. It was a decent push of adrenaline, reminding her that even though she was tied down and currently at this asshat’s mercy, she was still herself.

“Good, because I’m not done anyway.” He rained down a series of blows that felt endless, each vicious, fiery spike of pain didn’t even have time to recede before the next landed, and there were tears on her cheeks by the time he stopped, breathing heavily behind her.

Camille’s own breathing was ragged, and she had to swallow a hiccup as she roughly wiped her cheeks against her shoulders so he wouldn’t see the tears, although her mascara was probably long ruined. The pulsing of the hot skin across her ass wouldn’t abate. It was a constant, humiliating ache and she hated that all of her self-control meant nothing with this kind of torture.

Why couldn’t he just hit her like a normal evil henchman? Why didn’t he just threaten and shout at her like every other asshole she’d dealt with in all her years in this world?

The girl was shaking, her muscles trembling on the spanking bench, and through the red haze in his head he was trying to evaluate whether it was a lingering reaction to the cold, or if the crop had sent her into some kind of shock.

People in shock were not particularly helpful, and part of him felt a strange pang of concern for her. She hadn’t cussed at him in at least ten minutes, and that was not a good sign.

Fuck it
.

He threw the crop against the wall, and the snap of it made her jump against the straps holding her down. If he wanted, he could easily fuck her atop the bench. It would take almost no effort to tear the lace of her panties, yank her hips back, and drive himself deep inside her – and although it would slake the ever-growing lust he felt for her, it wouldn’t be worth it if she was too far gone to even react. If he couldn’t even feel her come underneath him.

Reaching forward he brushed a fingertip over a dark welt, already bruised from the force he’d used the crop. There were bright, red welts all over her ass and the tops of her thighs. Several spots already darkening with beautiful bruises that would create a kaleidoscope of colors over the next few days.

If you have her that long
.

Mateo shoved that voice away and flattened his palm over her ass. It was the only place on her body that was warm at the moment, the rush of blood called to the surface by the toy making it an incredibly sharp contrast as he trailed his hand down her thighs until he reached the cooling sweat behind her knees, and the chilled skin of her calves.

She sniffled, and he immediately stepped around her and his cock became a steel bar in his pants as she looked up at him. Her nose was perfectly red, her cheeks flushed, her lips pouty from her chewing on them in her agony – and her eyes.
Fuck
. Those perfectly blue eyes looked even bluer with the sheen of tears still on them, framed by her mascara that had smeared in all the right ways.

Why did she have to be so beautiful? So strong? So defiant?

The girl was flipping every one of his internal switches, but with Scarpa already calling him repeatedly asking if he had the information, he didn’t have time to screw around.

There was something missing from her gaze though. Her fight was leaving her, which should have felt like a victory, but instead it felt like a loss.

Scrambling mentally he dropped his hands to his hips and stared down at her, and a moment later she broke eye contact and rested her cheek against the soft leather.

No.
This wouldn’t do.

“I have a deal for you…” He spoke quietly, and with absolutely no sane logic whatsoever he leaned down and released her left wrist from the binding. “If you can make it to the door, then I’ll put you in your own room for the night.” The shock of his words made her jerk her head up to meet his eyes, but he avoided her gaze and then walked around to untether her ankles before he could talk himself out of it.

Mateo swallowed as she sat up, straddling the bench so she could lean over to undo the last strap around her right wrist. From the back she looked like some kind of fantasy, knees spread wide, her skirt not quite covering her ass as half of it was still hung around her hips. The marks,
his
marks
, plainly visible on her tanned skin.

His pulse kicked up a notch as she stretched one long leg towards the floor, planting her toes down before she carefully eased off. The girl moved much slower than he expected, but considering the several hours she’d spent tied down it made sense.

She turned to face him slowly, her eyes evaluating him like the predator he knew he was, but she was no weak little rabbit, and he was keeping his distance until he could figure out what she was going to do. The last thing he wanted was a broken nose on top of the ear that was still ringing at random from her close-range shot earlier.

“So, how is this going to go?” Her voice was soft, but he could tell by the way she was testing her balance between her feet that she wasn’t planning on taking it easy.

“I think that’s up to you, doll face. If you reach the door, you get to go lay down and sleep for a while before we pick things back up in the morning.”

“And if I don’t reach the door?”

“Then I get to do what I want with you for the rest of the night.” Mateo couldn’t hide the grin that spread across his lips. It was already well after three in the morning, but there were a couple of hours until dawn yet.

“No knife this time?” She asked, showing her neck where the thin cut he’d made had already scabbed over, although her blood was still a dry, dark smear around it.

“No knife, and I put your gun somewhere safe.” A thrill rushed through him as she smiled slowly. This girl was trouble. A lot of trouble. But he found himself thanking Scarpa for calling him in when Eddie failed, because trouble like
this
was fun.

“Tell me, does your boss pay you well?”

The question threw him off, but he shrugged a shoulder. “I’d say so.”

“Well enough for you to have health insurance?” Her small smile spread into an all-out grin and he found himself laughing.

“Alright, girl. Come and get me.” He raised his hand and beckoned her forward, but she just threw her hair over her shoulder and began to take measured steps to her right. Tracking her, he sidestepped along with her, keeping himself between her and the door.