Page 14 of By Sin To Atone

“What’s your name?” I ask.

“Blue Masterson.”

“Your real name.”

She doesn’t answer my question. “I’m bleeding here. I need stitches. There could be glass in the cut.”

“That’d be too bad for you but too good for me. Name.”

“Blue. Blue Masterson,” she says more loudly.

I exhale, shake my head. “If you think you know what I did,” I start, referencing her first message to me. “Don’t you think you should watch yourself around me, Blue?”

At that her expression changes. She searches my face. I wonder what she sees. What I see, even in this dimly lit room, is that she’s young. Nowhere near the twenty-seven on her ID. She’s completely out of her league. And the look in her eyes in that moment, the uncertainty, the expression of someone lost, it triggers something inside me. Because I know this look. I’ve seen it before.

And I’ve ignored it.

I shake my head. Now is not the time to reminisce. I need to remember why she’s here. Why I was forced to return to this place that holds all the bad memories of my past.

What I know about Blue Masterson isn’t much. But she somehow got her hands on information about me that, if it gets out, will hurt those I care about and possibly destroy me. That’s not nothing. She’s not some pickpocket, dollar store thief. She is much more capable than that. And I need to know exactly what she knows and how she came to know it before I can make any decisions about her well-being. Her future. Whether or not she’ll have one.

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-seven.”

“And I’m Santa Clause.”

Her face says it all. Cocky arrogance replaces what I saw an instant ago. She clenches her jaw tight, lips in a sneer, head tilted so she’s somehow managing to look down her nose at me from her position kneeling at my feet.

“How. Old. Are. You?”

“Twenty. Seven.” She mimics my tone.

I smile. She smiles wider.

“Cute,” I say, and she dips her head like she’s taking a fucking bow and before she even sees me move, I fist that handful of hair again. This time, she lets out a scream as I draw her up by her hair. It’s painful, I’m sure. She mewls, her neck twisted as she clutches my forearm with both hands. I march her toward the desk, lift the chair to set it out of the way and push her face-down over the desk. I kick her legs out wide to stand between them, grip the waistband of the oversized sweatpants and tug them off.

She gasps but I’m not done yet. I flip the skirt of the uniform, if you can call it that, up over her ass and smack a cheek hard.

She clenches, gasps, her back stiffening.

I hook a finger into the snaps at the crotch and with one tug, they snap open, and her ass is right there on display just for me. I take a minute to enjoy the sight of her sweet, round cheeks, the skin just beginning to pink.

But only good girls get spankings.

And Blue here is not a good girl.

I cup her sex, dig my fingers into tender flesh.

“No!” She begins her fight anew, adrenaline must be coursing through her veins. She flails her arms, pushing back from the desk, and I shift my grip to take her wrists. I draw them out, and lean over her, pinning her with my weight, reminding myself she’s not here to be fucked.

“I asked you a question,” I say, voice low and deep and somehow calm sounding.

“Nineteen! I’m fucking Nineteen!”

“You sure?”

She nods, rattling off her birthday as if to prove she’s not lying. “Please don’t hurt me!”

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