Page 41 of Torment

12

Jolie

“Take it,”Mason growled, bringing the thin cane down on my ass for the sixth time. “Take every fucking bit.”

All the air flew out of my lungs as fire streaked across my skin. I cried out, delirious from the pain and pleasure combined. There was a whooshing sound as the cane flew through the air again, hitting yet another spot on my delicate cheeks, eliciting another shrill cry from my lips.

“Ready to tell me anything yet, fucktoy?” Mason asked before hitting me again.

“No,” I choked out, squeezing my eyes shut.

Fiery, stinging pain raced across my skin, and at the same time, longing washed like a physical substance through my veins, sending prickles from the nape of my neck to the tips of my toes. I needed to come. Badly.

I was tied down to the trestle table in the Penance room. Before Mason shoved me onto it earlier, he’d forced me into a pair of vibrating panties. Every time he hit me with the cane in his right hand, he used his left hand to turn on the controller and send tingles shooting over my clit. Now I was a drenched, desperate mess. A toy to be played with and manipulated in every way.

“You know I’m not going to let you come until you help me out,” Mason said, fingers caressing the back of my neck. He’d stopped hitting me for a moment, and the panties were no longer vibrating.

I moaned and twisted on the table, trying to rub myself against it to free the hot pressure inside me, but I couldn’t move more than a quarter of an inch. My wrists were firmly bound with rope on one end, and my ankles were restrained too. I had no way out.

There was also nowhere I would rather be.

We’d kept up this pattern over the last three days. Mason would drag me out of my submerged cell to hurt me or fuck me—sometimes both at the same time—in order to try and get me to tell him information about my father, and I took all the pain along with the pleasure, knowing they might be the last things I ever felt. Sometimes I even purposefully misbehaved so that Mason would spend a longer time punishing me. I’d come to crave it all, because it meant I could spend time with him.

That time was running out, though. With every day that passed, every tick of the clock, my life drew closer and closer to an end.

I had four days left now, and the hours seemed to be flying by at warp speed. I knew I’d already been in the Penance room with Mason for half the day, but it felt like only a few minutes had passed.

I shut my eyes again, not wanting Mason to see the fearful expression within them or the tears that were threatening to spill onto the table. Every time I thought about my impending execution at his hands, an icy quiver ascended the ladder of my spine, overwhelming me with a sense of looming dread. No matter what sort of torture Mason inflicted on me, there was nothing worse than that cold feeling of terror.

I didn’t know what to do to make it stop. I wasn’t sure if there was even anything I could do, other than wait for my fate.

I couldn’t tell Mason anything he demanded to know, because there wasn’t anything to tell. To the best of my knowledge, my father and the other New Eden men were dead and had been for years. He simply refused to believe this. Still, there was nothing I could give him. I had the same amount of information now as I did eight years ago. None whatsoever.

On the other hand, if I didn’t tell him something soon, I would die.

I opened my eyes again, summoning up an expression of cold steel so that Mason wouldn’t see how badly he’d affected me with the fear he instilled in my soul. I wouldn’t let him have that satisfaction. Even when his fingers closed around my throat a few days from now, stealing my very last breath, I wouldn’t let him have it.

In fact, the only expression shining in my eyes when he killed me would be warmth and affection. He would have to spend the rest of his life knowing he murdered someone who still loved him despite all the horror and pain he’d meted out to them. That was a death in itself. His soul would be so far gone into blackness, so corrupted by all the violence and hatred, that it simply wouldn’t exist anymore.

He suddenly lashed me with the cane again, making me whimper as a burning stripe of pain lit up my nerve endings. When I gritted my teeth a second later, taking deep breaths through my nose in order to dull the scorching agony, a seed of an idea took hold in the dark soil of my mind and started to grow.

I’d asked myself a thousand times why I still loved Mason despite everything he’d done to me, and I’d never come up with a solid answer other than ‘I just do’ or ‘maybe I’m sick in the head’. My feelings for him seemed to dull my mind on occasion, blanketing my thoughts in a sunny sense of hope that had no reason to exist in this dark place, filling me with these ridiculous little fragments of faith that told me the warmth of my love would eventually melt the ice around his heart.

Even though ninety-nine percent of my petrified mind was sure I would die at Mason’s hand in four days, this other tiny part of me believed he would finally notice the look in my eyes and change his mind at the last minute, ultimately deciding to let me live. That part of me actually believed he would take me in his arms and say he loved me too, and somehow everything he’d put me through wouldn’t matter anymore.

That was completely delusional.

For one, Mason already knew how I felt about him. He manipulated that information out of me days ago, just so he could break me down even further, and he made it very clear that it was nothing but amusement for him. Secondly, he’d also made it clear that he would never love me again. He told me right to my face.

There might be hope for me yet, but it had nothing to do with love and forgiveness or Mason changing his mind. No, the only chance I had of getting out of this mess alive was to force myself to become as cold and detached as him. Do what I thought he would do.

I also had to stop asking myself why I loved him, and start telling myself not to instead. I had to forget who he used to be eight years ago and look at the objective facts of who he was now; approach him as if he were a complete stranger.

He was violent. Cruel. Sadistic. Vengeful. He wanted to hurt me, rape me, and kill me. Was that a man worthy of my undying love and devotion?

Hell no.

Furthermore, I was getting tired of playing the victim and believing that I might actually deserve to die. Mason had manipulated me ever since he kidnapped me and brought me here, dredging up my worst fears and my old cult beliefs to make me think I’d earned every ounce of pain and suffering. He made me feel like I genuinely deserved to be killed for the things I’d done eight years ago.

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