Page 28 of Vicious King

9

Tatum

My hand trailedalong the dark wood-paneled walls as I slowly stepped through the halls of the Lodge. I hummed a soft tune to myself as I went.

After two weeks here, I still wasn’t even a quarter of the way through exploring the sprawling mansion. It was so big that I discovered something new every day, and sometimes I suspected it was like the haunted house from Rose Red that never stopped growing, with extra wings suddenly sprouting from it in the night.

I knew that was just a fictional horror movie, but to be fair, my life had turned into quite the horror show over these last few months. Also, if any mansion in the world was bound to be haunted, it was this one. Whenever I wandered around, I could practically feel the cold, lonely ghosts of past captives. The occasional moans coming from some of the rooms certainly didn’t help matters.

Today, I’d made my way up to the third floor in my exploration attempt. My bedroom door on the second floor was always unlocked, and like the other girls here, I was free to wander wherever I wanted as long as I followed the rules. Most of the girls preferred to remain in the privacy of their rooms or in the main living areas assigned to us, resigned to their fates as they curled up around roaring hearths, but I was more curious than that. I wanted to know every inch of this place, wanted to conjure up a mental map of the place whenever necessary.

As I walked past a library and farther down the hall, admiring the prints and paintings on the walls, I thought of Elias. His piercing gaze, his strong arms, his roaming hands. His perfect cock.

Things with him were still different than before. Part of me had initially worried that he’d go back to his angry, hateful self after a while, but in the weeks I’d been here, he’d remained calm and caring whenever he was around me. He spent as much time with me as he could, he often tried to talk to me, and he brought me to countless climaxes. Once again, he was acting like we were a regular old couple.

I wasn’t delusional, though. I knew any appearance of normalcy between the two of us was just a Band-Aid covering a gaping wound.

If I wanted to stay alive and escape this place one day, I had to do everything possible to ignore, to resist, to not even acknowledge the spark we shared. Of course I would continue being compliant and well-behaved, but I couldn’t let things go any further than that, emotionally speaking. How could I? It wasn’t like Elias and I would ever run away together, get married, and maintain an equal partnership. As nice as he’d been lately, he was still one of my captors. That was the sort of power imbalance no one ever really made it through unscathed.

And yet, whenever I saw him, there was that same jolt of attraction. That tingle of pure excitement. The air would turn hot and thick, weighing heavily on my skin like sultry summer heat, and my thoughts would become jumbled and clogged with desire.

Maybe part of me needed that thrill of the forbidden, the taboo, that sense of being with someone totally inappropriate and doing something I knew was wrong. After all, I’d always fantasized about it in the past, back when I was still a college student in a normal life. But that didn’t make it right.

I saw a door standing ajar up ahead on the right. I pushed on it and stepped inside, wondering if it was another library.

Instead, I found myself in what appeared to be a mini hospital, with white-sheeted beds, medical equipment and monitors everywhere. I recognized the nurse from the island standing by one of the beds, making notes on a clipboard.

Sitting on the edge of that bed was a pretty blonde woman who appeared to be in her early thirties. Her hair was glossy and curled, and her skin glowed. When she shifted a little, I saw a swollen belly and realized with a stark shock that she was at least six months pregnant.

There was another pregnant woman too, sitting on one of the other beds while another nurse or doctor wrapped a cuff around her arm to check her blood pressure.

Every head turned within seconds of me opening the door. No one looked happy to see me.

“Sorry, I’m a… a bit lost,” I stammered.

The nurse closer to me narrowed her eyes and stalked over to the door. “This isn’t supposed to be open,” she said sharply. “Please leave.”

I fled back down the hall and dashed down the winding staircase, wondering what the hell I’d just seen. Who were those women? Did they accidentally get pregnant by society members? What was going to happen to them when they had their babies? And what about the babies themselves?

As the questions whirled around my mind, I headed all the way to the ground floor and stepped out into one of the mansion’s back courtyards. Out here, there were arched loggias on the first floor and covered balconies on the second. They were adorned with ivy, which had been meticulously hand-woven around stone columns and across archways. A large garden bed lay a few yards beyond, in the middle of the court.

In the weeks I’d been at the Lodge, this had become my favorite place to wander down to whenever I wanted some fresh air. But today, it wasn’t helping. It was freezing outside, even colder than usual, and the howling winds made tree branches and bushes thrash in the distance as beds of blood-red phlox flowers swayed in the garden. It reminded me of that awful stormy day on the island, and I was struck with a sudden vertiginous sensation as I imagined myself nearly plunging off a cliff again.

With a shudder, I turned and headed back inside. I needed to find somewhere else to relax and take my mind off whatever the hell the society was hiding on the third floor. Somewhere quiet and comforting.

I came across it fifteen minutes later. An arched double door stood wide open on the left of the hallway I was exploring, and I saw Pri standing inside the room, her eyes wide as she admired a collection of golden trophies.

Simply seeing her there took me back to my old life and my days at Roden, before everything went so wrong. She was a direct link to the past, reminding me of who I used to be, and the thought of talking to her calmed me.

“Hey,” I said with a tentative smile, stepping inside the room.

She turned to me and smiled back. “Hi,” she said softly. “You’re exploring too, huh?”

“Not much else to do around here, aside from TV or reading. What is this place?”

“Not sure. I only just found it.”

We peered around at the expansive space. The walls were lined with cabinets, each one filled with trophies and medals with inscribed names. There were also several mounted deer heads on the bare upper parts of the mint green walls, and a bearskin rug lay on the floor on the opposite end.

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