Punished by the Dictator's Daughter (The Initiation 3, Book 3) (4 page)

I can do nothing but nod again. I feel like a
marionette whose strings are being jerked, especially at the neck
area. But I have no choice.

6

I wait and wait and wait until the darkness
of night covers the windows. But Mansk appears at two a.m., just as
he promised.

He throws me some garments.

“Put these on,” he says.

“Where’s Gerta?”

“Not here.”

He watches me impatiently as I dress. I don a
white ruffled blouse and blue peasant skirt – creased and worn with
multiple washings. Mansk gestures to my head, and I wrap the dirty
scarf he has given me around my scalp, carefully tucking in my rich
mahogany hair. The shoes that he hands me are sturdy and old.

When I have finished, he says, “You look like
a country girl.”

He dips his hand in the ashes of the
crackling heath and smears soot on my face. His gestures are tender
and his eyes hold mine. He is almost paternal, though his
fatherliness is tinged with a border of lust. I am somewhat more
nervous at this than the actual escape. It is as if the entire
atmosphere is a tinderbox waiting to be lighted by a spark. A
premonition of dire things to come.

“Where are Max and Greg?” I say to ease the
tension.

“Safe.”

“Where is Aimelie?” I know her father is
still on his execution tour around the countryside, which is
comforting. But still –

“She’s asleep. I arranged for her food to be
drugged. You ask too many questions. Now come.”

I follow him in haste. The corridors of the
castle are strangely deserted at this time of night. We pass a
solitary guard, but he is seated at a table with a mug of some
steaming drink, looking out of the window. I daren’t say anything
to Mansk and he too acts nonchalant, as if I am a peasant girl he
has decided to squirrel for a liaison. Perhaps he has done this
with many castle girls before, I will never know.

We exit through a side door. The vista of
night is eerily calm, and the shadows of swaying trees throw
ghostly relief against the stark, midnight blue background.
Somewhere in the near distance, a dog howls. Voices speaking in
low, guttural tongues waft through the wind, and against a lighted
window, I see the outline of a man with a rifle sticking from his
back.

My heart beats so hard that I am sure
everyone in the castle must have heard it. What is the penalty for
capture? Instant execution? I should be so lucky. It might be a
protracted, long-drawn affair that involves racks and other
medieval torture devices.

Sweat trickles down my back. My skin is
flushed and heated despite the relative cool of the breeze.

Mansk does not offer explanation or comfort
as he strides towards a copse of trees. I think part of my terror
is in not knowing fully if he will betray me. How sure am I that he
will really help us escape? This could be an elaborate ploy to
entrap me after all. Sure, his sister was executed. But that
doesn’t mean he has turned against Potchenko’s regime. The
psychology of people who have been caged for too long and who have
never known freedom is new territory for me, and I’m putting my
entire life as well as that of my friends into such a person’s
hands.

I almost stumble over an errant root. Max
clasps my arm before I can fall down. To my credit, I have not made
a sound, even when my throat feels like decrying my surmounting
tension. He does not say anything either as he pulls me along by
the hand. We delve into the trees until we come to a clearing.

What I see makes me take a step back.

A huge cart drawn by two horses awaits us
there. On it is a large stack of hay – so high that it rises to the
higher branches of the trees. The driver holds a modern day
flashlight. He shines this onto my frightened, black-streaked face.
I blink and hold my hands up to shield my eyes from the glare.

Mansk says something in a low voice to him,
and he retorts. He does not take his eyes off me, and I catch that
predatory glint in them again that I have encountered in so many of
the guards and grooms here – the sly urge of a child who sneaks
candy out of a jar when his mother is not looking.

Mansk ducks under the cart, the bottom of
which is about only two feet above the ground. He beckons to me
and, after a moment’s hesitation, I follow him. The driver shines
the flashlight for both of us. I can see his smile in the
half-darkness – a gap-toothed, stained apparition that would have
made me run for the cliffs had I met him under different
circumstances.

In fact, I’m not entirely sure I shouldn’t be
running now.

Mansk fiddles with something under the cart,
and I can see that it is some sort of latch. This springs a small
trap door, which falls open with a slight squeak that makes me jump
and almost hit my head against the bottom of the cart.

“Get in,” Mansk insists.

I look up and see a space like the interior
of a plain wooden coffin. It is not empty. Max and Greg – fully
clothed in similar peasant garb – are squeezed in; two big men who
can barely find room to flex their elbows.

And I am to squeeze in with them.

“Gina,” Max cries softly in relief.

I have not seen him for the longest time. One
look at his beautiful face is enough to send those familiar
stirrings coursing through my heart – the ones that mean all things
to me: love, duty, belonging, home. They say absence makes the
heart grow fonder, and he is like an oasis to the parched after a
long desert trek. All my old feelings of love come rushing back
again.

I spy Greg’s face. He too sees my devotion to
Max, and he has gone deathly still.

Oh no. I am confused once again. I love Max,
but I love Greg as well. This past week has cemented our
relationship. We fucked every day, tied to each other in positions
that would have made breeders envious. We talked as we fucked,
steering away from the real topic at hand that neither of us wants
to talk about:
Max is still your boyfriend
.
What are you
going to do about us?

Can’t I have the two of them? Can’t we all
live in some impossibly happy, impossibly surreal ménage a trois?
Can’t we all fuck like rabbits and share one another in some rich,
idyllic fantasy where mad dictator’s daughters and Alice don’t
exist?

Greg offers me his hand to help me climb
inside. Of course. Now is not the time to think about three-ways
and relationships when we are not even sure we will survive. But I
guess our impending mortality makes us examine life a little
closer.

Once I am safely ensconced inside the crawl
space, it is truly a tight squeeze. I am sandwiched between my two
beautiful boys. Max wraps his arms around me, as does Greg. Our
hearts beat in unison.

“No talking in there. If we stop, do not move
a muscle,” Mansk warns us.

I suppose there are not going to be any
toilet stops.

Mansk shuts the latch. The boys tighten their
grips around me as the darkness closes in on us. We are now three
souls in our shared coffin. As the cart begins to move, our
entwined bodies jerk with the momentum, and we begin our perilous
journey into the unknown.

*

I don’t quite know how long we have been in
there, but it seems like forever. I am dangerously thirsty. My
bladder is increasingly full. My right calf is bursting with pins
and needles, and there is a buzzing sound in my ears. The
clop-clop-clop of hooves is comforting. They denote progress to
wherever we are going, and I frankly don’t know where that is. But
the closer we are to getting out of here is fine by me.

Mansk didn’t mention we would be getting to
the border by cart. How long will it take? Three days? Well, when
he finally opens this crawlspace and finds our dead, dehydrated
bodies, maybe he will be sorry he hadn’t left us any food or
drink.

But yes, yes, yes, I know. I’m getting ahead
of myself once again. I have to put my faith in him. If he was
going to betray us, he wouldn’t go through this elaborate
cart-and-horse shenanigan, right? And the cart would have been
stopped a long time ago.

Maybe I spoke too soon. Because the sudden
absence of movement and the cessation of the clop-clop-clop
suggests that we have stopped.

Uh oh.

I hear voices. Loud authoritative voices. The
driver speaks, and strain as I may, I do not hear Mansk’s deep,
gruff voice. Is he even with us? Suddenly, I am afraid. Mansk’s
presence (or suggested presence) is paramount to my comfort. Now we
are in the hands of this lecherous driver, who may or may not
choose to betray us.

The boys sense it too, as evidenced by their
tense musculature. Max grips me fiercely, willing his strength to
flow into me. I am pressed to his body, facing him, while Greg
clasps me from behind in some odd semblance of three-way
copulation.

The voices continue to argue. To be terse.
Someone raps on the side of the cart. My body is rigid, and I will
myself not to breathe. I clench my fists, feeling the beads of
sweat pool on my side – the side that is quashed to the bottom of
this hidden space. There’s a scream building inside my head that is
begging to be let out before it would volcanically explode.

The male voices continue to argue. All kinds
of images course through my mind in painful cacophony. If I get out
of here, I swear I’m not going to be a sex slave again, no matter
how much someone is willing to pay me. There are better ways of
bartering my soul. I am going to be kind to everyone and be a good
partner to whoever is willing to have me. I can’t even think about
my possibilities with Max and Greg, even though they are
bodies-to-body with me. I daren’t allow myself to hope.

I just hope the Guillotine blade will be
quick. And really, now that I come to think about it – it is a
merciful execution. Hanging, electrocution, lethal injection,
firing squad. They are all merciful.

I am so caught up in my own doomsday reverie
that I scarcely register that the cart is once again moving –
unscathed – and the clomping of the horses’ hooves have resumed. Of
course, for all I know, the cart could have been compounded by the
municipal police in this land and taken to the . . . oh, I don’t
know . . . scrap metal heap or wherever it is they incinerate
carts.

When we finally stop, the trapdoor opens once
again. I would have fallen out if Greg had not caught me by the
waist.

We emerge into the sunshine, blinking back
the sudden brightness. Our limbs are stiff as stiff can be. We are
in the countryside. The air is fresh and crisp and sparkling with
morning, and the fields are abundant with freshly mown hay, which
has been rolled up in bales. Cows graze nearby, their tails
swishing.

Mansk gazes at me, smiling. He stands beside
a woman in a white apron.

“Gina, Max, Greg, this is my wife, Suri.”

Wife!

He didn’t tell me he had a wife when he was
boning me. And more, apparently, because two young boys below the
age of ten come running up.

Suri beams from ear to ear. She is a
weather-beaten peasant woman with nut-brown skin, the kind who
probably spends most of her days toiling under the sun. She looks
older than Mansk, which surprises me. She speaks to Mansk in
Urskan, and he says something back. She nods.

Then she holds out her arms to me.

“Welcome,” she says warmly. “You am
hungry.”

I have received so little kindness in this
world that I simply crumple and fall into her arms.

7

Suri feeds and clothes all of us, and for
posterity, I do not tell her how her husband has fucked me. I do
not tell her about his crush on me. From the averted gazes and
shifty guilt of his expression every time he crosses my path, he
does not tell her either.

The house is chaotic, and from what I gather,
it does not belong to Mansk. The people in Ursk own nothing.
Everything belongs to the state, and they are given money credits
for the work they have put in and an assigned property to stay in.
Mansk’s work – as a senior personal guard to Potchenko and his
household – takes him to the city for protracted periods of time.
But his wife and children are not allowed to join him because they
have been assigned to toil the fields.

In short, I understand why Mansk feels the
need to have feminine company in the city, away from his wife. I
guess I am no different from a prostitute, only he doesn’t have to
pay for me. In dollars and cents.

The house is filled with various family
members – all related to Mansk in some way or other, either by
blood or marriage. Figures. Mansk introduces us to his brother, an
angry-looking man who seems eternally pissed at the world.

“He has not recovered from our sister’s
death,” Mansk explains.

“Have you?” I ask him gently.

He looks torn. “I tried to, but I . . .
couldn’t.”

I rest my hand lightly upon his. “I
know.”

At the same time, I have my own demons with
Max and Greg to exorcise. We are not given the luxury of alone time
in this bustling household, where it is imminent that something of
great import is about to happen. But Max senses something.

He says, trying to make his tone affable,
“Did you see a lot of Greg when I was with Aimelie?”

I shrug, my heart pounding. “No more than the
usual.”

He glances at me askew. “Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

I don’t want to face any showdowns now. If
there even is a showdown, I should be so lucky. Although Max says
he loves me and we are practically girlfriend and boyfriend,
something about our entire relationship – with the mix of Russell
and Alice and Greg and sexual slavery – is so off-kilter and
unsettling that I can never really be sure. Like if his love
includes sharing me with his entire family (which he did) or
selling me to some billionaire’s BDSM sex club (which he might
after we get married, you never know).