Page 4 of Vicious King

“Please forgive me,” I said, tears spilling from my eyes. “Please, Elias.”

“Now why would I do that?” he said. He grabbed my right arm and yanked me toward the door.

I screamed and tried to dig my heels in as he pulled me down the hall, but as usual, he was much stronger than me. “Don’t kill me! Please!” I cried.

Elias stopped. “Is that what you think I’m going to do?” he asked, looking down at me with a narrowed, heavy-lidded gaze.

I nodded tearfully. “Yes.”

“I’m not going to kill you. I don’t want to,” he said crisply. Then he started dragging me down the hall again.

The message there seemed quite clear. He wasn’t going to kill me, but if he ever wanted to, he could. He would.

He took me upstairs to the communal bathroom I usually showered in with the other girls each morning. Right now, it was completely empty. I was already naked, so it only took a few seconds for Elias to turn one of the showers on and shove me into the cubicle.

Just a few hours ago I would’ve welcomed a shower. But not this one. The water was freezing, making my nipples ache painfully, and Elias was roughly holding a few strands of my hair, forcing my head back so that the full blast of the shower hit me right in the face before streaming over the rest of my hair. I felt like I was going to drown, right here in the cubicle.

Elias finally let go, and I coughed and spluttered as I cowered away from him. The blood that had dried in my hair yesterday was now circling the drain.

He pointed to a few bottles along the side of the shower. “Wash yourself properly,” he ordered.

I did as he said with trembling hands, quickly lathering my hair with shampoo just in case any bloody remnants were left in the strands. Then I rubbed myself down with a sweet-scented shower gel.

When I was fresh and clean, Elias turned the shower off. He had a towel in his hand now, but he didn’t offer it to me. I stood before him, teeth chattering, waiting for him to speak.

After two full minutes of this painfully confusing experience, I realized what was happening. He wanted me to ask him for the towel. Or beg.

“Please, may I have the towel?” I mumbled.

“Ask me properly,” he said stiffly.

I faltered for a moment. My thoughts and feelings were still at war with each other: one major part of me broken-down and beaten, telling me it was pointless to fight back now that I knew there was no escape, and the other tiny little part of me still trying to cling to my old identity with all its hatred of the man before me.

I knew he didn’t deserve my submission, and he knew he wasn’t my true ‘master’. He knew I didn’t sell myself to this place. He knew all along, and he mocked me the entire time; made me believe he could be a lifeline for me.

In a way, he was still a lifeline, but not in the way he led me to believe all those weeks ago. He was the only one who could decide my fate, but he wouldn’t be lenient with me or help me get out of here because he cared for me in any way, like I originally hoped for when he told me he didn’t know I was here against my will. No, that was all a lie, and he would choose whether to be lenient with me entirely at his own whim, probably based on nothing more than how much I pleased him.

In the end, that meant I had to submit. Go along with whatever he said, just to keep myself alive.

“Please, Master, may I have the towel?” I said softly, my shoulders slumping with defeat.

He handed it to me. “When you’re dry, I want you to blow-dry your hair and put on some makeup. You look like you’re half-dead.”

I am half-dead,I thought drearily. This wasn’t a proper life, after all. I was nothing but a slave with no chance of escape. A ghost going through the daily motions until I was finally allowed to move on to the afterlife.

Maybe I should’ve just jumped off that awful gray cliff yesterday.

But it was too late for that now.

I did as Elias said and dried my hair before applying some foundation, blush, eyeliner and shadow. Mellie had taught me a few tricks when she’d done my makeup in the past, so I knew a way to make my eyes seem less puffy and more awake using white eyeliner along the waterline and brown eyeshadow on the bottom eyelid. I momentarily hoped that it would make me look a bit more wide-eyed and innocent to Elias so that he might go easier on me, but I quickly realized that was just more wishful thinking.

He hated me, and he would always treat me accordingly.

When I was done, he led me out of the bathroom and up to the second floor. I was still naked, but I’d stopped caring about anyone seeing me like this a long time ago. Being in this place stripped me of those mortified feelings and replaced them with another type of shame and humiliation.

“When we get to the Lodge, you’ll have a collar,” Elias said as he strode down the hallway ahead of me. He turned his head over his shoulder a second later, a smirk playing on his lips. “I’ll be able to lead you around on a leash or a chain. Something to look forward to.”

I lowered my eyes to the parquet floor. The way I was treated here was bad enough, but when I got to the Lodge, I would be considered as nothing more than an animal. Collared, leashed, chained. No longer a person.

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