Top Love: An Alpha Billionaire Romance (Young Adult Stepbrother and Billionaire Romance Stories) (33 page)

“And now?”

“I still hate her.  She’s more dead to me now than ever before.”  He met my eyes, finally gaining back some of his lost power.  “But even ghosts are hard to ignore, Barb.”

“And how do you feel about me?” I said, testing to see if there was any virility left in the chassis of this fallen giant.

“I’m not the man I was anymore, Barbara.  I’m sorry.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means I’m just going to sit here and drink my tea.  I don’t need anything else.  I don’t want anything.  Just let me retire in peace.”

“You’re too young to retire, Alfie,” I said with a smile, but his eyes seemed detached.  “You can’t give up.”

“There’s nothing to hold onto.  Life is like money, Barbara.  It comes and goes.  People take it, try to keep it, but ultimately it just passes on.  That’s all you really learn when you reach the end of the game.”

“Damn it, Alfred,” I said firmly but barely even getting his attention.  “We were engaged.”

“For your own sake, Barbara.  Just get out of here while you still can.  Find joy in your life.  I have nothing left to give you.”

***

Victoria’s sexual chokehold on Alfred Banes wasn’t the psycho sexual kink a person might think of when they hear Master-Slave.  Nothing was fun about this partnership.  She abused him and tore his ego to shreds, programming him to be a coffin of a man, catering to her every whim. 

The sad part is, even now, with Alfred Banes vehemently rejecting Victoria and refusing to even see her, she was STILL winning.  She still retained power over him because she disrupted his life.  And I think the crazy woman knew this.  That’s why I determined I was the only one who could rebuild the man I thought I knew, the one I was really falling for.

I went to Victoria’s house again, this time ready to pounce.  Not aggressive…we were all adults, obviously, and there had to be a rational way to reach her heart.  Maybe I could talk sense into her, using all my people skills learned from putting in hundreds of hours of talking to irate customers, angry about being overcharged for potatoes.  Not quite the same thing but maybe it was a start?

“You,” Victoria said with a villainous sneer, almost as if she knew how ridiculous she sounded, like playing the Wicked Witch of the West.

“I’m not here to fight.  I’m here to try to apologize.  To call a truce.”

“A truce?” she said with venom in her face.  “With you?  About Alfred?  People who have power don’t negotiate, darling.  I own Alfred’s soul. He can hide in his chamber all he wants.  But I will rid the world of his books.  And I will destroy him, just like I said I would.”

“Why, Victoria?  What good does it do you, to treat him this way?”

“Because he left me first.  He left me.  He pays the price.”

“And did it ever occur to you that what you were doing to him wasn’t love?  It wasn’t even discipline.  It just sick, Victoria.  You abused him.”

“And that’s what he wanted,” she said, giving me an earthy grin.  “You’d be surprised, darling, how many people just want to be tortured.  Pummeled.  Insulted and degraded.  Something about the ID and the Ego.  We don’t think we deserve happiness.  So what would make us happy seems boring.  What we know is just a mess of drama, trauma and suffering we chase after, thinking this time it’s going to sting less.”

“Maybe for some people.  But you know, people do outgrow that.”

“No they don’t.  People never change.  You go ask Alfie and he’ll tell you.  And be sure to throw in the word Purple Sapphire.  That’ll probably be the only sex the old man can have anymore.”

“Fuck you,” I raged, not doing very well at keeping my cool.  “You stay away from him!  You know I gave you the benefit of the doubt, Victoria!  But if this is how you treat someone…someone you were married to…then you’re the one who’s suffering.  You must be dead inside.”

“What a heroic little speech!” she laughed as I stormed out of her house, not stomaching another look at her grinning, demonic face.

“A shame, really.  You Barbara Adams seem to be a woman who can’t quite comprehend happiness either.  Maybe you should come visit me sometime.  I’ll make you hurt.  I’ll make you suffer.  I’ll make you beg for more.”

I did a double take on the creepy bitch—smiling ear to ear, even as I entered my car and flicked her off.  She was pure evil and whatever she got out of these relationships was surely beyond my comprehension or anyone else’s for that matter.  She was more like De Sade than even the writer himself—a dangerously creative mind who treated real people as flippantly as fictional characters.

I tried to put the bitch out of my mind, at least for the sake of Alfie who needed me now more than ever.  But to my chagrin, the old Dragon was piqued and her imagination ran wild.  She began stalking me, even finding my email address from a public search and Facebook profile.  I ignored the first few emails…

But the more she sent, the more “ghostly” she became…horrific, soul-churning and too aggressive to ignore.   

Dear Barbara:

I know this is your email.  And I know you’re reading this right now.  Just sitting here thinking of what I’m going to do to you when I finally kidnap you and bring you to my dungeon.  It’s going to be fun, girlfriend.

But on the subject of our mutual friend, the man I once loved and the impotent slave you feel obligated to save…

I thought you might find it interesting to see just how much of a man he really was.  I attached some pictures of some of our old dungeon sessions.

I made him do terrible things, Barbara, things any self-respecting man would never do.  But once I brought him to SubSpace his mind was completely in my hands.

I’m not going to lie to you.  Breaking a man and sucking out his soul is the biggest turn on a girl can have.

And I know you probably won’t believe me.  But just in case you don’t, I’m going to attach the pictures.  Look at them.  Study them.  Look at what kind of so called man my slave really was.  Ask yourself if you can undo all those years of conditioning I put in him.  He will never get over me.  I made sure of it.

Love you, baby

I shuddered as I tossed Victoria’s letter into the trash.  Yes, her tactic worked.  I did look at the photos.  And my heart sank as I looked at Alfie’s unflattering past.  Used and abused.  Humiliated.  Broken in spirit.  She took everything he had and destroyed his future.

Even writing a bestselling novel, for Christ’s sakes, wasn’t enough for him to purge her wickedness from his psyche.  It was never enough.  All his Master Alpha act was just a desperate reach for control.  He couldn’t love, he couldn’t even like, unless he had absolute power and authority.  It was the only way to take baby steps out of that dark corner that he never wanted to fall back into.

I realized then what I had to be to Alfie to win him, to win all of him and restore him back to the man I KNEW he could be.  The real Alfred Banes, who was locked in a cage somewhere in his damaged mind.  I had to be his savior.  I had to bring him out of the muck and to his feet. 

Because I’ve always felt, for every strong man there is a strong woman who supports him.  I had to be strong for Alfie to regain his power and destroy Victoria’s hold on him once and for all.

***

I regret that I asked Alfie, in a moment of ignorance, to tell me what kind of things Victoria did to him.  I wanted to know what I was up against and what kind of therapy might be needed to unlearn all the triggers and anchors she left behind.  I wasn’t expecting him to go into great detail, but he did.  He had nothing better to do, really, since he locked himself in his writing room only doodling on paper and thinking obsessively about the past.

He told me about one session which really turned my stomach.  But I think hearing the graphic details gave me an idea of what Alfred Banes needed to get his billion dollar value back.

Then a strange thing happened, or so Alfie told me.  At some point she electrocuted him so many times that adrenaline kicked in, activating some strange flight or fight response that left him in a trance state called SubSpace.  He said that once he reached that state, a sense of euphoria hit him, which first associated orgasmic pain and pleasure with Victoria’s training. 

He was so deeply in trance by then that he could barely say anything to Victoria’s taunts and scourges.  He reverted back to animal instinct, totally losing all concept of identity.

Whatever Victoria did worked on a primal level.  If Alfie was ever to be rescued from this relapse into destructive thinking, he had to communicate with his primal self—that emasculated identity that needed to be reborn piece by piece.

***

Alfie’s plight was on my mind, and I knew that it would take something intensive to bring him back.  But dragging Alfie to couple’s talk night or even a therapist visit just wasn’t going to happen.

The man trusted no one and the very idea of talking to someone so “little” would probably insult him.  I was the closest thing he had to someone who he could at least fathom or learn to trust…someday.

So I had to use that.  Sex was the way into his impenetrable brain.

I went to see my old therapist Bastion Togger, who I still remained good friends with, even after conquering my old self-destructive cutting habits.  Alas, that’s a long and dark story for another day! 

Bastion, always long faced and dry in the most professional manner possible, began jotting down notes, only occasionally taking the time to fix his dark glasses.

“Well, officially all of this alternative lifestyle you’re talking about is a disorder.  So if you’re asking if battling a disorder with another disorder is a good idea, I’m afraid I can’t agree with you.”

“I know.  I’m not asking about that.  I’m asking you as a rationalist…how can I bring Alfred out of this trance?  Victoria is already threatening to destroy Alfred’s life, to steal his fortune to destroy his career.  I have to deal with her.  Alfred’s reaction is completely passive.  He’s more afraid of her than death.  I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Well, yes, that is Stockholm Syndrome, if he feels strong feelings of love towards the abuser.”

“But he doesn’t love her.  He simply reacts to her sexually, she issues commands and he does them, involuntarily.  He hates that he can’t break the addiction.”

“So…it’s like a Pavlov’s Dog effect?  She rings the bell and he…licks himself?”

“In so many words, Doc,” I said with a disapproving face.  Everybody joked about it, but they couldn’t imagine what it was like to be Alfred and to be tormented so intimately by someone who used to be family.

“Well…again, I don’t claim to understand this alternative culture, because it is a disorder any way you look at it.  Are you sure that Alfred doesn’t enjoy the humiliation?  That’s part of the lure of the affair?  That he feels loss of control and can so justify cheating on you with this other woman?”

“It’s not cheating.  It’s not willful.  She is the aggressor.  She holds him hostage.”

“Well…in theory, only theory mind you…Alfred would have to recondition himself to react differently to the old triggers.  It would be a matter of reprogramming proper responses to the same stimuli, much in the way they do for drug rehabilitation.  But in this case I don’t know what the drug would be.  Perhaps sex is the drug.  If he is abstinent then using sex as a sort of spiritual ‘Methadone’.  You retrain him to be confident, to feel powerful.”

“But I don’t think a woman telling him how to be a man is going to work.  It’s counterproductive.  The old Alfred thrived off of his power.”

“Well no, he would have to feel in complete control.  The uh…what did you call it?  The aggressive mate?”

“They call it the Dom.  Or the Master.”

“Yes, that.  The Alpha party would have to retrain himself using an Omega that offered him the freedom to reprogram those triggers.  So…”

Bastion shook his head and laughed.  “I am not endorsing this by any means.  I’m just saying hypothetically, if he feels emasculated and impotent then you as his Subordinate would build his ego up again by giving him the power he craves.”

“Letting him do anything.  Letting him do the very worst, the darkest desires of his mind.  I could take it.  Let him punish me.”

“Right.  Maybe our next session should be about you, Barbara.  Why you feel inclined to accept punishment and let domineering men guide your life.”

“Sometime, Doc.  Sometime,” I said with a smile.  “And I’m sure you look forward to hearing all those tawdry stories of sexual abandon and surrender…for purely educational reasons.”

He half-smiled.  Poor guy couldn’t legally say a word to any of this madness. 

***

“I understand the concept,” Alfred said, brooding as always in his writing room, keeping the lights a bit dim so that our faces were more like shadows than real emotions.  “And in theory, I guess it makes sense.  She took the power away.  You would be giving it back.  I appreciate your zeal to help me, Barbara.  But I have to say no.”