The Beast (8 page)

She howled and started to sob on the table. Her orgasm unrealized and her name given up, she kicked at him as he stood beside
her. He held her legs down and chuckled. He had realized years ago that there was nothing angrier than a woman denied her pleasure.

“What the fuck kind of sick asshole are you,” she yelled. “You’re insane! Let me go, I won’t tell anyone what you did.”

“What did I do?” he asked and held her legs down as she wiggled and fought against him. “I simply showed you what I could do to you. I made you want more just so I could get what I wanted.” He reached up and unhooked her arms. He wanted to take her to the wooden cross in the centre of the room to continue his exploration of her body, so he grabbed his knife and cut her hands free.

She reacted immediately.
“This is madness, I have nothing to tell you,” she screamed and started to fight him. “Just let me go. Please!” She surprised him with her strength and pushed up against him. She almost made it off the platform before he pushed her back and slapped her face. She jerked her head away from him and started screaming through her sobs. “Let me go! Let me go!” she was crying repeatedly, her voice sharply hitting his ears and escalating his own anxiety.

“Stop this!” he demanded but she only fought harder. She grabbed his forearms and dug her nails in, kicked at him and screamed repeatedly as she fought. Tears were streaming from under the blindfold and her face was contorted with her panicked attempt to get away.

Dimitri knew she would not get away, she could not. But if she managed to escape she would run right to the authorities and his plan to escape would be cut short. He could not let her go, especially not now with the concierge so far away. It would be a matter of hours before the RCMP showed up at his door with a search warrant. He could not allow this to happen.

It suddenly occurred to him that this had to end. He was on the run and she, although not an assassin, had no place in his world. He didn’t have the time to fuck around with somebody as alluring and unsettling as this. He wanted to quiet her, to stop her struggling against him, to end this fight.

His hand found her delicate throat and he wrapped his fingers around it, applied pressure and watched her struggle against him. He felt detached, as he often did when he was going to kill somebody. This was the right thing to do, after his flights of fancy earlier, after finding himself sympathizing her plight and uncertain of the action he would take.

He wanted to take her blindfold off, but that requi
red two hands and he was fighting to hold her down as it was. She reached for his face and tried to dig her nails in, kicked at him and wiggled wildly against his grip. She realized this was a fight for her life, and she didn’t want to lose. She opened her mouth and made a strangled sound, a dry gasp and nothing more. Dimitri squeezed harder and pressed down with his other hand on her chest. She still fought, but he could feel her pulse growing weaker under his fingers. Her kicks became weaker and her mouth stayed open in a desperate attempt to suck in any available air.

He watched her, under the weight of his hands, and knew death was coming in a few short minutes. At that moment he was grateful for the blindfold, he didn’t think he could stand the weight of her accusing stare, or see her beautiful face contorted by broken blood vessels or bulging eyes.

Her heart still pounded furiously under his hand. It was protesting his decision to end her life with the mad dash of a fearful rabbit in a cage. He watched as her body started to go limp and she slipped out of consciousness. Her pulse slowed and her face went lax. Her heart still beat; pounding under his hand he thought for a moment he could hear it hitting her ribs as it begged him to stop.

With no warning, a vivid memory surfaced and his humanity caught up to him at last.

As a child he had tamed a wild rabbit by sneaking it morsels of food throughout the long Russian winter. By spring it would come up to him when he left their tenement and he would hold it on his lap and stroke its soft fur. Its little heart would beat wildly but it allowed him to hold it, to care for it, because it had no other choice and knew no other way.

One bright sunny day his father had caught him with the rabbit, torn it from his grasp and broken his neck. Dimitri had sobbed over the death of his pet, sobbed until his father laid the boots into him and kicked him into unconsciousness.

When he awoke, there was a thick stew of rabbit meat for dinner and a pelt drying in the bathroom. Dimitri had cried again for the loss of his pet.

His father had given young Dimitri to his friends to use like a bitch that weekend. His father never forgave him the tears and told him if he wanted to cry like a girl, he would be treated like one.

Something had died in Dimitri that time. His father had been his first kill, the reason he’d fled his home and wound up on the streets. Dimitri had woken him from a drunken stupor enough to shove the rabbit fur in his face and stab him in the heart. He’d been just shy of his twelfth birthday.

The thing that died that day now stirred in Dimitri’s chest. As he hunched over Columbia, beautiful perfect Columbia, he saw himself through her eyes. It wasn’t the scars on his body that made him a
beast; it was the madness that rode as his constant companion that made him so. It had been there since that weekend, when he had been stripped of his own humanity by those drunken men, when he’d been passed around, crying and in pain, fearing for his own life, listening to his mother’s cries from the room next door. He had allowed the madness to grow while his humanity shrunk. In being consumed with revenge against Sergei, he had become the madness, the beast.

He loosened his grip from around her neck and straightened himself up. He could feel her heart still beating in the walls of her chest, so he knew she wasn’t dead, just unconscious. He pulled both hands away, shook them with disgust and stared at them. He had been moments away from destroying a beautiful girl with them, ending her life and disposing of her body like trash.

He was hit with clarity of vision, a jolt to his chest. He had planned on killing her and she was innocent. This was even outside the code of the
Bratva
he had once followed so religiously. He had a sickening feeling in the pit of his stomach and he started to back away from her prone body. He hit a chair and collapsed into it, slumped over and watched her for signs of life.

He reflected
on the people he’d murdered over the years. None of them had been innocent, every single one of them...from his father to the last men he’d murdered during Sergei’s attack, even the women...every single one of them had deserved it. This girl did not.

“Why did you stop?” she rasped, startling him and breaking his train of thought.

“I can’t do this to you,” he said, his voice heavy with contempt for the man he had allowed himself to become. It was filled with the regret of a thousand acts he couldn’t take back. A thousand moments in times long passed, decisions to kill and maim and hurt, to give into the madness. He wouldn’t give in this time, this time he would let her live.

“Please,” she begged him with a whimper. “You need to let me go now.”

“I can’t do that, my little dove,” he said with remorse. His overwhelming clarity of vision left an almost physical emptiness where his anger had been. He hadn’t realized how much a part of him the darker parts of his nature had become over the past decades. He continued, “I can’t ever let you go and yet I can’t kill you.”

“What do you mean you can’t let me go?” she asked as her voice broke into a sob. “Why can’t you just get up and open the door and let me go home?” she asked again.

He took a step back from her body and examined her again. She was simply gorgeous and he clearly didn’t have it in him to kill her, but he couldn’t let her go. Perhaps he didn’t want to let her go. Letting her leave meant she would go on and live her life, have her freedom...fuck men and have a future that did not include him. He wasn’t ready to admit it to himself quite yet, but he simply could not let her go. He saw her as the reason for his self-awareness, and he wasn’t ready to let her slip away. He didn’t want to fall into that pit again, and thought she might be the one to help him stay out.

An
idea began to germinate, a plan to keep her with him and still maintain his self-control. He would own her.

He spoke in a calm voice, as not to startle her with his decision, and said, “I have decided that you will stay with me. I have never had a pet, but I think I will make an exception for a girl like you.”

“What are you talking about?” she asked. “You want to make me your pet? To fuck me?”

“That’s not it exactly,” he said and moved beside her on the table. He himself was working out the terms of thi
s arrangement as he spoke.  “You need to earn your place in my household. You need to earn my cock. I won’t fuck you until you are begging for it.”

“But I won’t, I never will.” she exclaimed and tried to push herself up. “You just tried to kill me, how could I ever fuck you? How could I ever want you? I never, ever will.”

“I beg to differ, little dove. I could have killed you, but I didn’t. I chose to keep you alive and I am choosing to keep you with me,” he said and paused as his decision solidified in his own mind. It was done for him; he was never letting her go. He continued, “Once you realize that I could kill you at any moment and choose not to, you will be on your knees pleading for your life. After I am done playing with you, driving you mad with lust, you will beg me to fuck you. For now, I will leave you alone to think about your predicament,” he said, tightened her ropes, left her on the platform and turned to leave, “but guaranteed, one day you will beg for my cock.”

She sat in the darkness behind her blindfold and squeezed her eyes shut. Tears continued to flow in spite of her attempts to stop them. This lack of control was insane, she had endured years of abuse from her father, why was she so dangerously on the precipice in this situation? She felt as though she were standing at the edge of a great gulf of emotions, things she’d never felt before, things that terrified and fascinated her.

In losing control
of her freedom to him, she had finally lost control of her tightly guarded emotions.

She sobbed until she felt she had nothing left. Her face felt slick with snot and she tried to wipe her cheek on her arm. She started to shiv
er, in spite of the room being a comfortable temperature. She thought it must be from her nerves, her fear.

She thought back to a s
elf-defense course she had taken in grade ten. It was boring and covered a lot of the same things she’d heard a million times before, but she still remembered it. She would be ready the next time he came in; she would try to make her escape before he took more control of her.

She slept, as best she could on the hard chair. It was uncomfortable, built for design and not for sitting this long. Her head kept falling forward as well, jerking her awake into confused moments of panic.

Some time later she heard him unlock the door and come in the room. He walked to her side and was silent. She didn’t know what he was expecting, so she said nothing, waited for him to make a move.

“Why are you here?” he asked.

“I told you,” she replied.

“I went through your phone,” he said, “It’s not your phone, is it?”

“No, it’s not.”

“Who is he? Your boyfriend?” he demanded.

“No, I just met him,” she said.

“So he won’t care where you are, he’ll just want his phone back,” he said. “Does he work for me? I will leave it in the kitchen for him to find. He won’t think twice about you, he will be so grateful to have his phone and his job.”

She was silent, she knew this was true. Marco owed her nothing; she was nothing to him. Why would he think twice if she disappeared?

“I’ll take your silence as acknowledgement that nobody cares if you are here,” he said at last. She didn’t reply to this either, knowing her silence was speaking more than words could.

She didn't know how to answer any of his questions at this point, didn’t understand why he would think she was a killer. It didn’t matter though; he needed to be convinced to let her go. If she told him her name and he discovered she truly was a nobody, he would have no reason not to kill her. She wanted to survive so she could return home and rewrite her life. She would leave, take Eden with her. She would move in with Nan if she had to, but she knew her time being used by her father was done.

He finally approached her chair, sat opposite of her and she knew this was her moment to connect. He demanded her name but she refused, he punched her and terrified her, but she was resolute in her conviction. She would not crack. She would not let him find out she was a nothing, easy to kill and dispose of. She would not let him know how unimportant she was.

When he lifted her from the chair and slammed her onto a table, she was overwhelmed by his size, the pure raw animal strength he possessed. She was trembling but had gone into escape mode. She lay on the table and felt the sting of a whip on her tender stomach and yet she refused to tell him anything. She felt as though she were back home, suffering abuse at the hands of her father. She had endured this sort of physical attack hundreds of times since the moment he had moved into their lives; she knew how to handle it. Her mind retreated and she closed her eyes, able to endure.

Finally she thought he was ready to take her life, to cut her throat and end it. Her senses were on fire, each nerve ending alight with anticipation over her final moments. She cried out and tried to push him away, fought him as he held her down, gasped what she thought was going to be her last breaths.

But the captor didn’t kill her. She felt him tracing his finger along her skin, caressing her scars with the touch of a lover. Her body responded and she trembled, waiting to find out where they led.

He found her center, her clit. She had never been touched while so present in her body, so aware of her flesh. She was expecting death and instead found pleasure. He began to stroke her pussy, playing with her until she was near mad with lust and driven towards a crashing orgasm.

It would have been her first. The first with her mind fully present and aware of the sensations being wrought upon her body. Her body had betrayed her before, but her mind had always been able to flee until the act was over. She was ready to feel this though, to let every nerve ending explode as she reached the culmination of the intense sensations she was experiencing.

But he stopped. As she was ascending the peak of her most intense experience, the fucker pulled back and left her panting in the empty space. Humiliation slammed into her again and she withdrew back into herself.

Her mind was a maelstrom of emotions, she didn’t know if she wanted to die, or if she wanted to live. Did she want to run or did she want to come?

When she felt his hand around her throat, she fought as hard as she could, but somewhere deep inside she found a place of calm in the center of the storm. She wanted to live, her body reacted and she gouged and kicked him as much as she could, but her mind reached a state of serenity and time seemed to stand still. She didn’t think he would go through with it. She had nothing to base this assumption on, but she felt a strange nagging sensation that he would let her live. So she gave in, she allowed her body to go limp and she rode the waves of adrenaline until she
almost passed out.

When he pulled away
, she knew he had kept her alive for a reason. She demanded to know why, but he did not answer her at first.

“I can’t do this to you,” he said at last, his voice calm but she sensed a quaver that betrayed his own emotional turmoil. When he confessed that he had kept her alive, unable to kill her, she felt an unimaginable thrill of joy race through her body. She knew it was ridiculous, probably a symptom of some mental disorder, but she wanted him to want her. She didn’t know why, but she wanted to be valued enough by him to be wanted, to be kept alive.

She never imagined that this meant he would not just keep her alive, but he would keep her. She might never see her sister again, she might never escape this man who terrorized and fascinated her so. He declared that he now owned her like it was nothing, an every day occurrence in his life. Perhaps it was; she was probably not his first pet. She felt an odd stab of jealousy at the thought. How sick was she? That she craved being special in his world?

He got up to leave, left her on the hard platform, draped a blanket over her and headed to the door.
She didn’t want him to go though; she needed him to stay. She needed to connect with him, but she also needed to find out more about him. What about him lured her in, what about him made her think about staying, even if it was in passing. Why would she have even considered it? What was it about this muscled, savage criminal that made her body react this way?

She desperately wanted him to come back. She didn’t know why, but she wanted him to stay with he
r. Instinct perhaps? But why? If anything she should want him to leave her alone.

But if she were left alone, she would never get away. He would lock her in and the room was probably very secure. Besides, she didn’t ev
en know where she was inside the expansive penthouse; she knew it was multi leveled. How would she even find her way back to the kitchen?

Out of nowhere she remembered a tip she’d heard years before, some talk show had been doing a program on women’s safety. The irony was still not lost on her that the biggest monster she needed to protect against owned the very home she lived in. Something came back to her though, a way to save oneself when kidnapped. And this
is what she was, she supposed. Kidnapped.

The security expert had cautioned that to be dehumanized was to be a victim. If the kidnapper no longer saw you as human, you were easier to dispose of.

Columbia decided to make sure she was damn hard to dispose of. He already knew her name, and he’d already decided he wanted to allow her to live, so she would interact with him in any way possible. She wanted to connect to him on some level that forced him to acknowledge that she was a human being.

“Wait,” she said as he was leaving the room.
Even with the blanket on her, the platform was so hard that she wouldn’t be able to sleep. She was too wound up and too trapped in her flesh at the moment to get any rest. She heard him stop in his tracks and listen. “Please,” she continued, “don’t go. Don’t leave me here. I want to tell you something.”

He paused and she could almost hear the gears in his head turning. “I’m listening,” He replied at long last. Her heart was elated, which was ridiculous given the current situation. Was it possible that she was developing a crush on the man who was holding her captive?

Ridiculous, but beyond wanting him to save her life, she wanted to know more about him. More about the man who possessed the brilliant blue eye she had caught a glimpse of, the man she knew nothing about, not even his name.

“Please, sit near me,” she said and held her hand towards him. He
hesitated; she could read it in the silence of the room. At long last she heard his footsteps make their way back to her side. He dragged a heavy chair across a smooth floor and he settled near her head.

“What do you need to tell me?” he asked, “Are you ready to beg for my cock?”

She barked her laugh, a single staccato note in the open space. “I didn’t think anything else was an option. I simply want to tell you a story.”

“A story?” he asked. “Why would I waste my time with a story?”

“It might help you decide,” she answered, holding out her hand for his.

He hesitated
again; she could feel it this time as surely as she felt her own heart beating. Three small flutters of her heart passed, and finally he reached over and gripped her hand in his. His flesh was dry and warm, his hand enormous and vaguely comforting. The hand of a criminal, a murderer most likely, but the hand of a lover if given the right combination of things in the world. “Tell your story, little dove,” he said and gave her hand the smallest squeeze, as though he thought he would break her. It was the strangest feeling; the hand that had almost choked the breath from her body now hesitated at simple human touch. Her captor was a complicated man, perhaps as complicated as Columbia herself. She settled in and felt oddly at home.

“Once upon a time there was a beautiful princess,” she started.

“Wait, you are telling me a fucking fairy tale?” he demanded, “I don’t have time for this.”

“Please, just listen. There’s
no reason to be so rude about it,” she chastised him gently, careful not to push his limits. “I think it’s important for you to hear this.” She wanted to get her story out, for him to hear it before he made his mind up to keep her. She wanted him to understand the why behind her scars.

“Fine,” he said and settled into the chair, his hand still engulfing hers. She heard the chair creak under his weight and knew if she ever possessed the heart of a man such as this, she would never spend another moment afraid. The things that went bump in the night would cower in the shadow of this killer.

“Ok, I’ll start over,” she said and started her story once more. “Once upon a time there was a beautiful princess. She met a handsome prince and they fell in love. They had a beautiful daughter and all was good in the kingdom.” She sensed he was getting restless so she knew she’d have to keep it short.

“One day a hideous thing happened. The handsome prince died and left the princess and his daughter alone in the world. Terrible things befell the two of them until one day they had nowhere left to live. They had to find another kingdom in a far away land. The princess packed her daughter up and moved to a large place, a city. At first the daughter was scared because the princess had to leave her alone all the time while she worked. After a while though, the daughter became brave and was happy to be on her own.”

He cleared his throat and shifted in the chair. Columbia was pleased that he did not take his hand back. She loved the sensation of being held by him, she hadn’t been aware how lacking her life had been in terms of simple touch. She vowed that if she made it out of this alive, she would hug Eden more...if only to reassure herself that she was a human being deserving of physical contact.

“The princess came home one day and told the daughter she needed to take some treats to her grandmother’s house. The daughter was very young but not afraid so she did not mind such a task. Along the way a Big Bad Wolf found her and followed her. He wouldn’t leave her alone and asked her all about her grandmother and where she lived.”

“I think I’ve heard this one,” he interrupted suddenly. “In my country we call it…. well, something about her being little and wearing red.”

“This is not the same story,” she replied, cutting him short, and continued. “The Wolf followed her to the grandmother’s but then took her home. Everybody was happy because it seemed like the Wolf was going to be a good replacement for the dead prince and take care of the princess and her daughter. Only the daughter knew this wasn’t the case. For when she went to bed at night she would find the Wolf in her room, waiting for her. There was no fairy tale banter about big eyes and big teeth,” she said. “This was silent and fast, the Wolf knew what he wanted and the little girl couldn’t do anything about it.”