The Prince's Slave Read online

  Except here was death, glaring at her.

  “I…I’m sorry,” she stammered.

  “For what?”

  “For upsetting you. For being rude. I…I didn’t mean anything by it.”

  “Yes you did. You meant to assert your independence. To comfort yourself.”

  She dropped her eyes, studying the floor.

  “Look at me.” The tone of command—and expectation—was unmistakable. She did as he asked. “And I understand. I know what you’ve seen, and heard, and read, both online and from friends. I know what you saw at the auction. There are men, some of whom I know and, even worse, some of whom with whom I’ve worked, who purchase women simply to hurt them. To maim them. To kill them. Women who, by and large, won’t be missed. But sometimes the daughters, or wives, of business rivals. Sometimes women who’ve scorned them somehow.

  “I know, too, that reality pales in comparison to what the mind can dream up. No actual torture, however severe, could possibly compete with what you’ve no doubt convinced yourself is going to happen.” His eyes bored into hers. “So we’re going to get this over with.

  “I’d planned on initiating you…differently. But we can’t have this between us, this fear of the unknown. If you’re going to fear me,” he continued, “then fear something concrete.”

  “Differently…?” she echoed.

  “More gently.”

  He turned and, walking over to the window, began unbuttoning his shirt.

  His tone turned musing. “Like a frog, in a pot of water. Did you ever perform that experiment, when you were younger? If you catch a particularly big, juicy frog, say in one of your mother’s ornamental ponds, you can amuse yourself by taking it inside and placing it in a pot of cool water. The frog will, nine times out of ten, remain in the pot; the environment isn’t threatening, as it’s familiar, and the water feels pleasant.

  “Then place the pot on the stove and, without alerting the frog to what you are doing, turn on the heat. Low is optimal; the final result takes longer, but success is more assured. The frog, still happily enjoying its new home, slowly boils to death without ever becoming aware of the danger. Or, at least, by the time the frog does become aware of the danger, it’s far too incapacitated to fight back.” He stripped his shirt of, tossing it onto a nearby chair.

  “I don’t know. I’ve never had a chance to ask the frog.”

  Belle turned and ran. She almost threw herself into the door, her hands scrabbling at the knob. It wouldn’t turn.

  “I have the key,” Ash said conversationally

  She turned, her thin chest heaving. “What are you going to do?”

  He hadn’t removed his pants, but he had taken off his shoes. He padded around the room, barefoot, intent on his own business. He seemed in no rush to answer her. And then, finally, he turned.

  His eyes met hers. “Show you how bad it can get.”

  Her eyes widened. “But I—please—I don’t—”

  “And then,” he continued, ignoring her, “you can stop pestering me with useless, missish questions about cages.”

  Her hands were sweaty on the doorknob.

  She couldn’t believe that she’d slept with this man. Given her virginity to him and—if not willingly, then at least not entirely unwillingly. She’d felt loved. Cherished. And, part of her realized now, she’d dared to believe that all this talk of him having no soul had been a lie. That by describing himself as a sadist he’d meant to scare her. Or simply that, because he’d brought her here, he had a certain image of himself. A romantic self-loathing, like in Beauty and the Beast.

  But no. He wasn’t Prince Adam. He was the sultan, who’d tired of her stories.

  The door was some kind of dark wood, lustrous with layers of polish and rock hard with age. It didn’t budge. Not even a little. A harsh, dry sob escaped her. Minutes ago, she’d been sitting at the dining room table. Antagonizing him. What in God’s name had she been thinking? Part of her—the rational part—knew that he’d been going to do whatever he’d been going to do. His actions were out of her control, and no honeyed words on her part could change him. But the greater part of her wished, profoundly, more than anything, for a chance to take everything back.

  He pulled her roughly from the door. Her hands smarted. She’d gripped the slick brass as hard as she could but, in the end, she’d been no match for his strength. And he was strong. He carried her, as casually as if she’d been a child, over to the fireplace and put her down next to the padded ottoman.

  She glanced nervously at the flames, dancing in the fireplace. So innocent looking. So cheerful.

  “Undress yourself.”

  “No.”

  He ripped her dress off of her with a neat tug, leaving her gasping. Then, with a flick of the wrist, he produced something from his pocket. It glittered in the light, like it was alive. A knife. He slid the knife up between her breasts, faster than she could react, and with another flick of the wrist parted her from her bra. It had been a pale peach lace, and strapless. Next came her panties, each movement equally casual. Finally, she stood before him naked. She crossed her arms over her chest in a protective gesture.

  They studied each other in the firelight. His eyes were hard. The cold, uncaring gray of granite. Hers were filled with tears.

  “The door is locked,” he repeated again, “and only I have the key. People may or may not hear you if you scream. But no one will come. Do you understand?”

  She nodded.

  “There’s just me. My house. My rules. And beyond that, the stars.”

  She sniffed. “But—”

  “And the mountains. And tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, of people who don’t care about you. Your suffering means nothing to them. If you found them, they’d turn you in themselves or sell you to someone else. You’re defenseless, and you have no friends.”

  “Please, I’m sorry, I—”

  “I don’t use safe words. Safe words are an illusion. They can be ignored, or they can be misused. I want you to trust me. To depend on me, and to rely on me, because you realize that I am all you have. I understand that trust takes time, and is earned. But what’s been happening tonight…is a barrier to trust. And I intend to break down that barrier, whether you wish it or no. Do you understand?”

  “What…are you going to do to me?”

  But he didn’t answer.

  He grabbed her again and, turning her around, forced her to kneel down on the ottoman. It was a bizarrely large piece of furniture and in any other environment would have seemed outsized. But here, where everything was outsized, it fit in. And, unlike the rest of the furniture in the room, it was new.

  He placed his hand between her shoulder blades and with firm but gentle pressure forced her down onto the tufted leather. Lying prone, the ottoman was just large enough to hold her.

  Deftly, he bound her hands and feet. Her head was still free, although she had a limited range of motion. She could stare to one side or the other, that was all.

  She tested her bounds. They weren’t tight enough to limit circulation, but they were too tight to let her move. And they didn’t budge. She’d grown up on the ocean; she recognized a man who knew how to tie knots. Probably, the harder she pulled the tighter the knot would become. That was how knots were designed to work.

  Her mind was wandering, just like it had on the night she’d been captured. Which seemed a thousand years ago now, something that had happened to a different girl named Belle Wainwright. A different girl with a different life, and different fears. That Belle’s greatest fear had been finding a decent job that she could tolerate. She’d been filled with the existential angst of quo vadis. This Belle was immobilized at the hands of a crazy person and didn’t know if he was about to skin her alive or chop one of her limbs off or put her eyes out.

  He knelt down beside her. With a surprisingly gentle touch, he brushed an errant lock of hair out of her face and tucked it behind her ear. She shut her eyes. She didn’t want to se
e him. His hand disappeared and the light changed, indicating that he’d stood up. She still didn’t open her eyes. Why hadn’t she fought harder to keep him from tying her down? Why had she just gone to sleep the night before, instead of spending those hours looking for a way to escape?

  She castigated herself over and over again, in every possible way, for allowing this to happen to her. For being complicit in her own torture.

  Gradually, she became aware of noises. “This isn’t your fault,” he said, as if he’d read her mind. He’d done that, before. “You’re in an untenable situation.

  “And you’re right,” he continued, his back to her as he moved about the room. “I do want you to be honest. But you’re not being honest. You’re being petulant and very, very difficult.” He paused. “If what you said to Luna can be believed—and Luna is a sweet girl—you have thoughts you’re not sharing.”

  She couldn’t see everything he was doing, only what happened when he came into her line of vision. And so far, he seemed to be preparing something. Something—she didn’t know what.

  She felt a fresh stab of anxiety deep inside her bowels.

  The fireplace was, like everything else in the castle, massive. To the right side of the hearth sat a wrought iron holder for fireplace tools: all the usual ones, plus one or two that Belle didn’t recognize. She’d never had a real fireplace in her house, growing up, although many of her friends subsisted on wood heat. They and their parents spent the summers foraging for fallen logs in national forests and dragging them home to split.

  Ash bent down and, selecting a tool, lifted it free. He held it just where she could see it: a long, thin, elegant-looking piece of wrought iron with what appeared to be some sort of scrolling acanthus leaf at the end. The brand itself was about three inches across, but to Belle looked massive. Her field of vision would admit nothing else.

  Turning, he slipped it right into the grate. Underneath the coals. They glowed an ugly orange-red color, flaring briefly.

  And then he disappeared.

  She could hear him, but not see him.

  But she couldn’t tell what he was doing.

  “The Christian so-called justice system employed a number of different tactics, in obtaining confessions. Tactics that were later used on my people, by the Raj. Sometimes in furtherance of whatever government agenda mattered most on that particular day and sometimes simply for personal pleasure. For every man who truly loved a native woman and made her his bride in the true sense were ten who acted out their sick fantasies on voiceless non-citizens who couldn’t fight back.”

  The anger in his voice was real, and that scared her the most of all.

  “Of course,” he continued, “we ourselves are hardly blameless. The most vicious forms of torture ever invented come from India.” At this, he sounded almost proud. “My personal favorite is the tub. Anglophiles all know about the Judas cradle, the rack, the iron maiden. And even, often, more obscure forms of torture like the tongue torturer and the lead sprinkler.”

  Reappearing, he bent down to check the brand. “The lead sprinkler was shaped something like a censor, only instead of incense it dispensed molten lead or on occasion other things like boiling tar. I have one,” he added, “in the trophy room. I have an extensive weapons collection.”

  He stood up. “Molten lead was dripped on the prisoner’s stomach, or genitals, or on occasion in their eyes.” He turned. “A terrible way to go blind, don’t you think? Not that there is a good way. That’s always been a fear of mine,” he mused. “Going blind. Is it for you?”

  He disappeared again, leaving her only with his voice. “Now, the sad truth is that devices like the iron maiden were rarely ever used. Rather, they were kept in dungeons for, ah…instructional purposes. But the tub. The tub was used. May still be used today, in some parts of India. Or elsewhere. Who’s to say, really?

  “Vigilantism is common in a country where, often, the worst perpetrators of crime are the police themselves. The armed forces in some areas, too, operate with a degree of relative impunity. The original idea behind this lack of oversight was decent, if both far fetched and idealistic: that our tender-hearted police agents would have a free hand to fight crime. Which, being police agents, must naturally be their primary goal.

  “Instead I grew up in a country where officials are bribed to look the other way so that women can be forced to commit suttee. Where men are murdered for defending their daughters from rape, or for being homosexual. After Afghanistan and the Congo, where rape and mutilation are used as tools of war, India is the third most dangerous place in the world for women.”

  Belle was doing her best to keep her heartbeat under control, breathing in and out and trying to maintain some sort of grip on herself before she plunged utterly into the depths of mindless panic. It was all she could do, as it was, not to start screaming. Her heart felt like a bird, beating its wings wildly against the bars of its cage. She worried, honestly, that she might simply die of fear before he had a chance to hurt her.

  “But back to the tub.” His tone, as ever, was calm. Pleasant, even, as though he were telling her about a planned trip to the beach. “The victim was trussed up and placed in a tub, with only his head protruding. He was then forced to ingest large amounts of milk and honey, until he had terrible diarrhea. Then, more honey was poured over him to attract insects.

  “Now, so far, this merely sounds revolting. Not torturous. After all, many is the American college student who’s woken up in a puddle of his own excrement and been none the worse. Yes?”

  He was doing something, just out of Belle’s range of vision; she couldn’t tell what.

  “But the insidious thing was that after a few days of being exposed to the sun, attracting insects, unable to move, the prisoner’s flesh would begin to necrose and turn gangrenous. Depending on how cruel his torturers were, the forced feedings would be continued so as to prevent the comparatively easier death of dehydration.

  “Soon, his flesh decaying around him as he watched, swimming in a puddle of his own excrement, the prisoner would start to feel maggots burrowing inside him as they ate him from the inside out.”

  He checked the brand again. “Death, when it finally occurred, was usually from septic shock.”

  He pulled the brand from the coals. The end was glowing white hot. He turned, regarding her. Walking over to the ottoman, he knelt down again. He held the brand very close to her face, so close that she didn’t dare move for fear of burning herself. The metal was mesmerizing.

  “And now,” he said, “we’re going to engage in a little torture of our own.”

  Straightening, he moved behind her.

  “A burn wound, if left untreated, can also be a horrible way to die. Supposedly, one can feel the infection spreading slowly through one’s system, eating one from within.”

  He brushed his hand along her flank. His touch was repulsive to her. And then it sank in: he was going to brand her. And then do God knew what. Brand her again? Leave her to die? He’d mentioned—horrible things—and all of a sudden she was screaming. She couldn’t stop herself. She thrashed wildly on the ottoman, her throat raw, as the fullness of his intent sank in. This—to be permanently scarred and disfigured was bad enough but what area of her body would be next? Her face? Her eyes? Her—somewhere else?

  She hadn’t known she possessed such strength. Despite the firmness of her bonds she managed to almost raise herself up off the tufted leather as she twisted to and fro. Her eyes squeezed shut, she fought him mindlessly. It took her a moment to realize that the high, keening sound she heard was coming from her.

  And then she felt him on top of her, pinning her. She heard the sizzle of the brand as she felt it push into her skin. Her nostrils were assaulted with the sick-sweet smell of burning meat.

  THIRTY-TWO

  She half choked, half howled. The smell was everywhere, all around her, rich and pungent and stomach twisting. Her nerves tingled.

  And then it was over.


  She waited for the shock of the assault to bloom into pain. Nauseating pain, the kind that could only be borne in silence. She’d felt that pain before, as a child, when she fell out of a tree and broke her arm. Glancing over through the long grasses, she’d seen the protruding bone.

  But this…nothing.

  Just the emptiness of shock.

  She was barely conscious of him untying her, turning her, and lifting her off the ottoman. His touch was gentle. She slumped against him, unable to do otherwise, and then he was sitting on the floor and she was still in his arms and something warm was around her. A blanket.

  “You’re alright,” he said.

  “No….”

  “Touch your hip.”

  The skin still tingled. She’d expected even the soft friction of the blanket to be agony, but it wasn’t. Hesitantly, confused, she did as he asked. Dreading what she’d discover.

  Just the lightest feather touch, and then more.

  She felt no burn, only smooth skin.

  “But,” she stammered, “how?”

  He held up the brand and, involuntarily, she flinched.

  “Touch it,” he said. “It’s perfectly cool.”

  She did. It was. Cold, even. She stared. She didn’t understand.

  “The body,” he supplied, still holding her as she recovered, “can be a strange and wondrous thing. Its initial response to extreme cold is almost identical to that of extreme heat. Fool the mind into believing it’s experiencing one, instead of the other, and it will respond accordingly—or seem to. You believed that you were being burned, because I built that expectation up in your mind. But you were never in any danger.”

  “But I—I smelled burning meat.”

  He gestured toward the bench, a few feet in front of them. “Look.”