Master's Flame (26 page)

“Put your hands over your head and spread your legs wider,” he ordered. “Show us how much you like it.” There was total silence as Valentina complied. Such a good slave. Not one word or motion of protest, only complete submission. He stared a moment at her glistening pussy, watched her arch her back and sigh as Girard moved into her. Too soon, his pumping ass blocked out Michel’s view.

Ah, well. He could spend the time deciding who went next. He lined up three more guys, some of them dominant types who liked submissive pussy, some of them, like Girard, subs who were eager to be forced to perform. He made sure they were all wearing condoms. When the fourth guy had trouble mounting Valentina, Michel provided lube. Through all of this, Valentina kept her hands over her head as he’d ordered her. He watched her carefully for signs of dismay or protest but she was beautifully surrendered, a slave for the ages. If she was dry, well, that was bound to happen after four guys had fucked her.

He tagged a pair of men next, and told one to use her mouth and one to use her pussy. By now guys were lined up ten deep, taking places without even asking his permission, and Michel started to have the first inkling that what he was doing might be a bit beyond back room fun. In between this group and the next, Valentina looked over at him with a gutted, bewildered look.

She didn’t have a safeword. She’d never had a safeword. Slow, he was so slow. And so cruel.

One of the dominants he knew, one he respected, walked by his chair on the way to the door. “While you’re at it, why don’t you put a noose around her neck, you fucking asshole?”

Michel pretended not to hear him. He decided that guy wouldn’t be invited into his back room ever again. But after one more pair of men fucked Valentina, Michel decided that particular scene had gone on long enough, and yelled at everyone to get out.

*** *** ***

Valentina lay very still on the floor. Her pussy hurt. Her mouth tasted like latex and a little bit of vomit, because the last guy had thrust in her too hard.
My Master is going to come save me now
, she thought.
That’s what this whole scene was about, right? He’s going to make me endure this and then he’s going to come and gather me up and soothe me...

But he only sat staring at her from his chair. He looked unhappy. Angry. After all she’d gone through, the scene, the gangbang, he didn’t even look turned on. This upset her so much that she started to cry. Or maybe she was crying because a dozen cocks that weren’t her Master’s had just pressed into her one after the other, without respite.

I didn’t like that
, she wanted to scream.
I hated that. I hate you.

He finally got up from his chair and approached her, standing over her. “
Calme-toi, petite
. Don’t cry. It was just a scene.”

That made her cry harder. With a grim noise of frustration, he went toward the wall. She braced for some kind of punishment, but he brought back a blanket and wrapped it around her. “Let’s take you home and get you cleaned up.”

Yes, she wanted to get cleaned up. She wanted to clean this entire night off her memory forever, from the moment he’d given her the velvet corset until now, when he hauled her up without the least bit of tenderness and bundled her out to his car.

“I want to go home,” she said, shivering in the back seat.

“We’re going home.”

“I want you to take me to my home.”

His piercing eyes flicked at the rearview. “No,” he said in a hard voice. “You’re going back to my place and you’re going to spend the night there.”

“I don’t want you to touch me.”

He looked away again. “Our two hours are over. So if you don’t want me to touch you, I won’t.”

Our two hours?

I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.

As much as she had loved him earlier this evening, she hated him now. She hated him for refusing to care for her and love her. She hated him for giving her to other men so carelessly and coldly. It hadn’t even turned him on. So why?

“Why did you do that?” she asked. She meant to sound angry, but the words came out as a thin whine. “Why did you let all those men fuck me and breathe on me and sweat on me...?” She fell silent, unable to say more.

“I did it because I felt like it.” She could see his frown in profile, his immovable expression. “I did it because you’re my slave and I thought you needed some cock.”

She wanted to rip his cock off and shove it up his ass. “I hated it. I hated every second of it.”

“I’m sure you did. But you went through it anyway at my direction, which is the very definition of slavery. Good girl.”

She shot him a scathing look, even though he couldn’t see it through the back of his head. “I don’t think it’s the definition of slavery. I don’t think I’m that good of a girl, because I hate you right now.”

He gave a bitten-off laugh. “From love to hate in one night. Of course.”

“I want to go home.”

“You’re not going home. You can leave in the morning if you wish.”

“If you try to touch me—”

“I’m not going to touch you,” he said, cutting her off. “You and I have come to the natural end of things, don’t you think? It’s time for me to find a new slave, one who’s a bit less mercurial. All this loving and hating is making my head spin.”

She squeezed her hands in her lap and didn’t respond. It had been a very long night and she was far beyond fighting, far beyond anything but surviving. At his house, he made her shower while he stood outside the glass with his arms crossed over his chest. She stayed in the steaming enclosure for thirty minutes, maybe forty, just wanting him to leave, until finally he reached in and turned off the water and ordered her out.

They had another standoff outside the cage. He insisted on locking her in. She insisted on being unlocked. He finally left in disgust, telling her she could do whatever the hell she wanted.

She sat on the edge of her cage bed, leaning against the slack, unlocked panel of bars for a long, long time. Hours, it seemed. She was like a captive bird so befuddled by freedom that she didn’t fly through the door when it was opened. But she had to find the courage to fly. She knew that.

If she could only understand why he acted the way he did. She knew she wouldn’t be attracted to him if he was an evil, soulless man. She might be an emotional basket case, but she was an intuitive emotional basket case. Mr. Lemaitre was missing some part of his soul that allowed him to feel love properly. Perhaps that was why, no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t finish a sketch or painting of him.

She got to her feet and set off quietly through his echoing, empty house. If he was watching on his cameras he would know, but she didn’t care anymore. She went into his kitchen and opened the drawer where he kept things like scissors and screwdrivers and duct tape. She pulled out his thick black marker and returned to the white room. She stood just beneath the camera in the corner, and uncapped the marker and put it to the wall. She let her passion guide her, let loose the roiling emotions that wouldn’t be still. Her intuition, her feelings, she let it all guide the sweeping movements of her hand.

She drew in reckless strokes that left great black swaths on the wall. She drew the Mr. Lemaitre she knew, who was stern, cruel, conflicted, complex, and not completely finished. She made his eyes pierce, she made his lips frown. She made his hair a great tornado of blackness on his head, the way it looked when he ran his fingers through it and set it on end. She made the Master she knew and the Master who was unknowable, and when she finished the spare likeness, it looked so bleak she started to weep.

She pressed her hand over her mouth. She didn’t want him to hear her. He might not be watching but he could hear when she made sounds. She went to the closet where Mr. Lemaitre kept her clothes and threw on a black top and pants. She packed a couple bags of things and left the rest. She left the painting of Sara and Jason for Mr. Lemaitre to gift or destroy as he wished. She didn’t care about anything anymore except getting away from the picture she’d drawn on the wall. Part of her wanted to scribble it away, but he would still be there beneath the obfuscation, glaring out from the wall.

Instead she took the pen over to the contract wall where it said
I belong to Le Maître
and crossed out
belong to
. She replaced the words with
hate
in big block letters. She stood back and looked at it through tears.

I hate Le Maître
.

But that was a lie. She might hate the things he’d done to her. She might hate the picture of him on the wall. She certainly hated that he was not a complete person, but she couldn’t hate him. He was her perfect other half and always would be, no matter how much that hurt.

So she crossed out the word
hate
and wrote
love
.

I love Le Maître
.

Something about seeing it there after everything they’d been through... It seemed like something worth repeating, so she wrote it again, and again, and again, bigger and bigger until the words took up whole walls. Until the words overpowered the sad drawing of him. She was going to leave him alone the way he wanted, but she’d still love him forever and she wanted him to know.

Then she took her couple of bags and left through the back door, disarming the security system the way she’d seen him do a hundred times. If he was watching her, he didn’t try to stop her. She was pretty sure, by this point, that he wasn’t watching, or he just didn’t care. Either way it didn’t matter. It was past time for her to go.

Michel hadn’t used drugs or alcohol to inebriation for many years, but he fell into bed like a man passing out, and woke up with something very much like a hangover hurting his brain.

But not clouding his memory, no. He wasn’t that fortunate. The events of the previous evening unwound in his head with perfect clarity before he was awake enough to block them out. Yelling, fighting, hurting, killing. Not actual murder, but the killing of a relationship with such complete violence that it couldn’t be revived. He had done all those things the night before, subconsciously perhaps, but he’d done it. It was, after all, the way he’d been raised.

But it was for the best. It was time to return to safety and sanity. He would have to issue apologies and retreat from the Citadel for a while, and apologize to Valentina. He would send her a note and some flowers, not to excuse what he’d done, but to reassure her none of it was her fault.

As for him, he had finally gotten a work of art based on him. In the style of Valentina, it was direct, true, and illuminating. No buttons, candy, leaves, hardware, or cellophane, no. She had used harsh, monotone lines on his harsh, monotone wall, and captured every ounce of harsh, monotone pain in his soul.

But she hadn’t stopped there. Over all four walls, she had written, over and over,
I love you
, because she knew exactly how to hurt him as much as he hurt her. She hurt him by being Valentina, who coated the world in love and emotion, not even caring who it stuck to. He couldn’t even go in the room to repaint it, and he couldn’t bear to let anyone else see it. So her graffiti remained, a nightmare he saw every time he closed his eyes. The energy of her words, the walls themselves, seemed to throb through every night. It kept him awake in his harsh, monotone bedroom where he slept alone.

Still, he went to work. He continued to live. He watched Valentina when she didn’t know it, to be sure she was okay. She was Valentina, so of course she was okay. She was still fire,
La Vampa,
all-powerful. She continued to smile and laugh and embrace the world around her, and did beautiful work with her hand-to-hand act. He had all her things delivered back to her apartment, except the painting of Jason and Sara, which he planned to present to them at the time of their wedding.

Safety and sanity. He longed for it, and in her absence from his life, he found some part of it. Then Jason returned to town.

“Is it true?” he asked, storming into his office. He was red-faced, livid. “Is it true you ran a train on Valentina in your fucking back room last week?”

Michel didn’t look up from his laptop. “Do you have an appointment?”

“I’m going to make an appointment on your fucking face in a couple of seconds. Answer my question, motherfucker. Did you let twenty guys gangbang Valentina last weekend?”

He couldn’t help arching a brow. “Twenty? Is that the rumor? There weren’t more than fourteen. And I’ve warned you several times not to call me a motherfucker.”

“You are such a motherfucking asshole. You are such an unbelievable asshole to her.”

Michel shut his computer with a sigh. “If you’re not going to leave—”

“I’m not going to leave until you explain how this is appropriate courtship behavior. Are you taking relationship advice from the Marquis de Sade? Have you started smoking crack? Should I be concerned about your mental health? Has she broken your motherfucking brain?”

He gritted his teeth. “Valentina and I are no longer together.”

Jason clutched his chest in feigned shock. “Oh no. You’re kidding? You let fourteen other guys fuck her like a piece of meat in your back room, and she broke up with you?”

His theatrics weren’t doing anything for the headache punishing Michel’s temples. If he could get just one night of decent sleep... “She didn’t break up with me,” he said. “I broke up with her. I mean, I released her. We weren’t dating, as you know. She was only my slave.”

“Only your slave. Oh, okay, I see.”

“It amused me to watch other men fuck her. There’s no more to it than that.”

“Except that you’re in love with her.”

Michel opened his laptop again. “I’m busy.”

“Everyone knows you’re in love with her, Michel, everyone but you. How can someone so intelligent be so clueless?” Jason made the universal sign for his head exploding, along with the requisite sound effects.

Michel rolled his eyes. “Are you finished?”

“No, I’m not finished.” Jason planted himself in the seat across from Michel’s desk. “I want to tell you something else. There were almost a hundred people in your back room that night—”