Blood Red Rose Page 5

  “Now, don’t you think we should play, little one?” he asked.

  “Y-yes,” I whispered.

  “Answer properly,” he reminded me sweetly, but the sugar in his voice was drenched with venom. “Answer like a little whore should.”

  “Yes, Sir, please play with me,” I whispered.

  “Very well,” he grinned. “Let’s get you out of those clothes and teach you how to suck a cock.”

  7

  Thorn

  It was hard watching what was happening to her on the screen.

  Every cell in my body wanted me to get the fuck out of the room and into the Mansion. My body twitched in protest, telling me to go and get her. But I forced myself to stay rooted to the spot, and because I was a fucking masochist, I made myself watch the screen as well.

  He knew not to mistreat her, yet he’d done so twice in that room alone. I could only imagine how off the rails Ellis would go if he got a taste of her sweet virgin pussy. I would have to keep him grounded. She didn’t belong to him, and never would. Her future master had been the reason she was brought into the Mansion in the first place. And that master was me.

  I remembered taking Harlow in that alley. Sticking the needle in her neck and watching her go down, dropping the rose I’d sent her as a little reminder of whom she belonged to before I finally ripped her away from the life she knew so well. Before I started working her to her full potential, giving her a reason to live, a reason to breathe. She would be such a beautiful slave once she was fully trained. I’d hired only the best men to do it.

  I had my doubts about Ellis. He’d been working for us since he was a kid, a restless and reckless as fuck youth who would have done anything, fucked over anyone, for a five-dollar bill. But I taught him how to behave. How to hold the deeply rooted anger he felt inside and unleash it only when the opportunity was right. I raised Ellis into the man he was today, and I knew I wanted him to work out her kinks for me.

  There had always been the option of me training her myself. Yet I decided against it, unable to face the training process and be disappointed yet again. I wasn’t sure whether she would stay with me forever yet. All I knew was that I was compelled by her striking beauty, by her firecracker personality, and most of all, by the way she danced.

  I’d seen the Nutcracker the night I took her, and her dance was glorious.

  I’d never been much for the visual arts, let alone dancing. But to see Harlow Granger on the stage, when she was in her element, in the zone, was an absolute treat. I had no doubt she would be feted by the community. That she would gain countless fans and admirers along the way. It was hard not to fall in love with what she displayed when she stood center stage. The incredible range of emotions she managed to show with her body. The way her legs and arms and torso twisted, danced, twirled. She was incredible. And when I saw something as beautiful as she was, I had to keep it. Take it. Treasure it. Steal it.

  I was a collector, always had been, since I was a little boy. I saw beautiful things and I took them away from where they grew and prospered. It was the case with Harlow, and it had been the case with my very first rose.

  I still remembered wandering into the gardens when I was a little boy. How fascinated I’d been by the beautiful trellis of climbing, velvety red roses. So entranced I had to take one, cut it down with my pocket knife and hold its trembling dew-covered petals between my fingers.

  I’d been punished for it harshly. When my father found out, he decided to teach me a lesson. He worked as a gardener for a rich man, and if the man found out the gardener’s kid was going around stealing his property, we’d both be punished. That is what my father explained to me calmly before he gave me ten lashes of the whip they used with the horses. I still bore the marks, the scars the whip had carved into my back.

  The rose, I was allowed to keep. My father deemed it would be important for me to remember the lesson I’d gotten that night in the barn. So I’d kept it. But instead of drying it like my father had imagined, I’d become entranced by the idea of keeping the fragile flower alive. I tried so many ways of keeping it from wilting. Kept trying. I still had the rose. It was nowhere near as beautiful as it had been on the day I stole it almost thirty years ago. Yet it symbolized a tortured part of my past I couldn’t bring myself to let go of.

  In a lot of ways, Harlow reminded me of that rose. I’d always been fascinated by the luscious flowers, ever since that moment of seeing the sunlight peeking through the trellis, illuminating the heads of the crimson red flowers. Harlow had stood out just like that, and when I saw her for the very first time, I knew I would once keep her for myself. That night when she danced in the Nutcracker had been a rash decision. It would have probably been best for me to stay away, so no one would connect me with the girl or recognize my face. Yet I needed to see her dance. And I wasn’t fucking disappointed.

  Now, I watched her on her knees, submitting to a man whom I’d practically raised like a kid brother. I watched her crying openly, her expertly applied makeup running down her pretty face in black streaks. Her lipstick was smudged from where Ellis had forced his fingers into her mouth, and she looked tired, her eyes red-rimmed and filled with terror.

  I didn’t want to cause the girl harm. My goal wasn’t to damage her permanently. Just train her into the perfect little whore, who would come to me willingly and be desperate for me, her new owner. I wanted someone to break her into the woman I wanted first. And then I would continue to do the job until she was in pieces.

  “Deep in thought?”

  I turned around at the sound of my voice, my vision darkening when I noticed I had a visitor.

  The REC room was off limits to most of my employees. It was a room covered in screens, with one large one dominating the space. I was watching the room Harlow was in from every angle. I didn’t want to have company while I was doing it, and the mere fact she’d deemed it acceptable to join me in the room annoyed me.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked coldly.

  “Seeing if you’d like anything,” she whispered, stepping next to me and leaving a fleeting kiss on my cheek.

  A kiss that might have destroyed me years ago but left me cold in the presence of Harlow Granger, my new obsession suffering so beautifully on the big screen.

  “I’m fine,” I replied dismissively, my attention back on the big screen. Suddenly, I decided I wanted her input. Maybe she would have an opinion on Harlow. “What do you think of her? Is she cut out for this?”

  She stepped closer to the screen until her nose was almost touching the pixels of Harlow sobbing softly on the floor as Ellis stripped in front of her. It was hard to watch, yet I found myself unable to tear my eyes away from what was happening in front of me. She was such a beautiful mess. I couldn’t wait to taste those pretty tears on my own tongue, though it would be a while yet.

  “She’s scared,” she muttered, her finger trailing Harlow’s features on the screen. “Can’t you tell?”

  “Of course I can,” I replied sharply. “She should be. It’s her first fucking day.”

  She glanced at me over her shoulder, her smile sly.

  “I was scared on my first day,” she said softly. “Do you remember?”

  She approached me, her fingers twirling around my collar, smoothing out the fabric. I snatched her hand in mine and glared at her.

  “You need to remember your place,” I growled at her. “Or do I need to remind you what you are in this house?”

  “Maybe,” she whispered, her voice heavily accented, just like it always was when she got aroused.

  I turned her around, her back trembling against my chest as I gripped her by the throat.

  “You’re nothing but a plaything,” I told her darkly. “A toy for my men to play with. I could have all of them on you at once if I decided that’s what I wanted. You know that, don’t you? It’s what you’re so fucking scared of… Yet so desperate for, you’re dripping down your legs as we speak.”

  She whimpere
d. I didn’t even need to check if I was right, her moans spoke of it themselves. I wasn’t going to start playing her wicked games again, anyway. Not by a longshot – I was done with her and the sweet fucked-upness of her twisted mind. I’d only met one person who could match my own kind of crazy – and it was her. Together, we were an unstoppable force. But we were also a tornado of insanity, of mindless self-indulgence and the need to ruin everything we touched.

  I’d hurt her enough, and she’d messed with my head enough for one lifetime. I was done dipping my dick in crazy.

  “I hope you do,” she whispered against my fingers around her neck. “I hope you make them all fuck me… Like you used to, do you remember?”

  How could I forget? Days of pure carnal pleasure, of satisfying every need my body had with hers and using her to get myself off, in any way I saw fit. She’d been my slave once. Now, there was nothing but contempt for her in my heart, contempt, and a peculiar kind of gentle curiosity, which sometimes piqued my interest.

  But I was done again, and I let her go. She choked and sputtered as she moved back towards the screen, pointing towards the girl suffering on her knees.

  “You’re doing it to her,” she snarled. “Don’t think it makes you any less of a monster just because you’re not the one doing it.”

  She was right. I was still the same, fucked-up me I’d always been. Perhaps I was even worse now, since I was letting others do my dirty work.

  Someone once told me you had to break a bird’s wings to make it stay a beautiful captive, singing its song of sorrow in a pretty gilded cage. Yet wasn’t I taking the coward’s way out by not clipping the bird’s wings myself?

  I hated that she was right, and I refused to acknowledge her words. Instead, I turned back to the screen and stared at my pretty girl’s mouth being raped.

  Because that was what Ellis was doing. What he’d been instructed to do. To break her by taking her clit and her ass and her mouth, but leaving her pretty virgin pussy untouched for me. I may have been a monster, but even I couldn’t deny myself the simple pleasure of her first time. I needed to be the one to do it. I knew her training would be harder with that tight cunt being off limits, but it was the order I gave, and I was planning on sticking to it.

  “She is a beautiful girl,” she remarked, a hint of jealousy in her voice. “Is she going to be your only one?”

  She knew of my habit to only keep one girl at a time. Currently, I didn’t have anyone. I had been without a slave for almost a year, ever since I’d visited pretty little Harlow in her apartment and gotten a consolation prize – a lock of her pretty blonde hair that I kept in my breast pocket.

  “You don’t get to ask questions,” I told her. “And, in fact, it’s time for you to go.”

  She glared at me as I grabbed her wrist and forced her towards the exit.

  “She doesn’t even know you, Thorn,” she spat out at me. “How are you going to make her love you when she doesn’t even know she’s here for you?”

  “You leave that up to me, Pia,” I snarled back, shutting the door firmly behind her.

  But the thought lingered, and the question imprinted itself on my mind.

  My obsession with making her love me… it was insane. It was the desire of a madman, yet one I couldn’t let go of. Usually I didn’t give a shit if my submissives gave a fuck about me in the romantic sense, but ever since I’d met her, the thought of making Harlow Granger fall for me persisted, making me do rash things I would come to regret in the future.

  Yet I couldn’t stop myself.

  I knew the only way I would truly own her was to make her fall in love.

  And I would stop at nothing until I saw the look of pure adoration in her pretty young face.

  8

  Harlow

  For days, I didn’t leave my bed.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about what had happened in that room with the man I only knew as Sir. What he’d forced me to do, and how he’d made me enjoy it, too. I wanted to hate him for it, yet it seemed almost impossible to blame him for how my body had responded. Guilt and shame threatened to swallow me up whole as the mute maid led me back to my room that night.

  I’d been told by the man I was allowed to leave my room, spend some time with the other girls and get to know everyone. But after what he’d done to me, I found myself unwilling to venture outside again. For the first time since I’d been taken, I felt broken, useless. Like I would never get the drive back, the desire to run away from their perverted empire and to live a life of my own again.

  Flashes of memories of that day still took over my mind at the most random moments. Him, forcing his cock into my mouth and making me swallow his cum. Stroking my hair as he jerked off into my mouth, making me strip down for him and watching my body with hungry, wolf-like eyes that told me he wanted to do so much more to me. And I was afraid of it – afraid of him and what he was capable of, because I had a feeling this was just the tip of a terrible iceberg, and he had plenty more horrors to unleash on me.

  It wasn’t that I felt sore or hurt. It was more the violation, what he’d done to my body when I was powerless to resist it. I hated him for it and for having control over me when every instinct in my body was fighting his touch, his caresses and the sweet nothings he whispered in my ear when he took my mouth like it had always belonged to him.

  I thought about my previous life too often, torturing myself with images of my smiling friends. Carina and Amber, even Madame’s frown as she made me work harder. I thought about Mummy a lot. I never thought about my father. He’d written me off a long time ago.

  On the fourth day of my self-imposed isolation, the door opened somewhere between lunch and dinner, and the woman I’d met a week ago walked in.

  I turned my glassy eyes towards her. Part of me hated the fact that she was the one to come check up on me. Why not the man who had abused me? Shouldn’t he be the one to put the final nail in my coffin, after he’d used and then discarded my body like it was worth absolutely nothing? Yet I didn’t question it, didn’t say a word to Pia. I was too tired, weary from what seemed to be the new normal.

  “Hello,” she said in her melodic, beautiful voice. “I heard you’ve been feeling a little under the weather.”

  I didn’t respond, just looked at the floor while she pulled up the chair from my vanity and sat next to my bed.

  “Somehow, with all this rest you’re getting, you still manage to look tired,” she sighed, and I opened my mouth to tell her to fuck off, but she interrupted me. “The first time is always hard. It’s not always pleasant. Many of the girls don’t consent. And I understand how confusing it is to actually like what’s being done to you.”

  I hated that she was right, but instead of arguing with her about that, I chose another topic.

  “How would you know?” I asked softly. “You have no idea what it’s like.”

  “You don’t think I went through this?” she asked me.

  She lifted her leg to show me the mark on her ankle. I’d seen the tattoo before when the maid had taken me through the main living area. All the other girls seemed to have it. The small black tattoo of a coiled snake on their ankle. I hated it. Hated the thought that I would probably be forced to get one, too.

  “We share more than you might think,” Pia told me with a sweet smile. She was a different woman to the one I’d met a week ago. Softer, gentler. I realized she probably felt sorry for me, and I didn’t even try to win her respect back. I’d been beaten. She’d won, and so had the man who’d forced my first sexual encounter on me.

  “I don’t want to be here,” I whispered. “I want my life back.”

  She reached towards me, smoothing a lock of hair off my forehead. Her touch was cool and gentle, and I leaned against her hand, even though she seemed to be every bit the monster my captor had proved to be. But I was grateful then that it had been her to come and visit me, not him. I couldn’t handle him that day. The way he mocked me, how rough he was, how intent he was
on making me into a mindless little toy. I was so close to breaking point.

  “Have you been sleeping?” Pia asked me, and I shook my head no. Despite all the time I’d spent in my room, I had barely slept at all. I was turning into an insomniac, and the hours stretched into eternity as I lay on the bed, staring off into the distance and shamelessly hoping I would just die.

  “I’m sorry,” Pia went on. “But I have something that might help you.”

  She pulled out a little plastic orange bottle and placed it on my nightstand. There were three big white pills in it.

  “They’re sleeping pills,” she explained. “Take one tonight and sleep it off, and I’ll be back tomorrow to check on you and make sure you’re alright. Does that sound okay?”

  I didn’t respond, but my bottom lip trembled as she took out one of those enormous pills and a glass of water from my nightstand. She helped me sit up in bed and I downed the pill with the water she gave me. I didn’t want to, but she made me open my mouth and lift my tongue, so she could make sure I’d really swallowed it. I had other plans for the rest of the pills though. So far, they were the closest thing I had to a weapon inside my prison.

  She gave me a smile again as I lay back on the bed. My eyelids were already getting heavy.

  “See?” Pia asked. “You’re going to be asleep in no time, and you’ll be able to get some much-needed rest.”

  Her words blurred together, and I had more and more trouble keeping my eyes open as she smoothed her fingers over my eyelids. Suddenly, I grew scared of what would happen to me while I was sleeping. What if they were planning something else? What if somebody was going to attack me while I slept, take advantage of my body like the man had?

  I cried out in protest, but no sound came out. I was being pulled under, thrust into a sleep so heavy I couldn’t even feel Pia’s fingers on me anymore. I resisted the darkness, fighting it off, but it was inevitable. In seconds, I was fast asleep.