Page 28 of Passion's Wicked Torment

The drugged feeling came upon her very quickly. She felt woozy and light headed. The room began to swirl in a circle before her eyes. The last words she heard before blacking out completely were from one of the henchman to Ironman: “Why don’t you just kill her, boss . . . like you did that reporter.”

CHAPTER 16

Kristin drifted in and out of consciousness during the next few days. Each time she awoke, she found herself either in the back of a rumbling truck or in some dingy roadside motel room. The weather kept growing colder with each passing day, meaning they really were taking her north to Canada, as Ironman had threatened.

She was kept constantly drugged and in almost a stupor. Often, when she was semi-conscious, she heard the two men talking to each other. Once she heard them talking about Chad over a game of stud poker in the back of the moving truck.

“How do you think he killed him, Stryker?”

“Cement overshoes, that’s what I hear. Then dropped him in the lake.”

“That’ll teach him. Ironman don’t like no reporters snooping around in our affairs.”

“It’ll teach him, all right. Terry was the one who done it. He said he was glad to get it over with. The only reason Ironman was keeping that Fleming bastard alive this long was so—”

“No!” moaned Kristin, her mouth so numb she could barely make the word come out.

“Hey, Stryker, she’s awake again.”

“No!” she cried out, struggling up from her mattress in the corner of the truck bed. They came over to her, and she tried to scratch at them, to kick them, but her body was so lacking in strength, she could barely move. “He didn’t do that to Chad!” she cried out. “Say he didn’t do it!” Her mouth was so rubbery, and her lips were so numb, the words were barely decipherable.

They put her back in the corner on the mattress she had been lying on. “I think she’s talking about that dead reporter,” Stryker said.

“Don’t you understand?” she screamed at him hysterically, her eyes wild. “He’s my brother! My brother! He can’t have killed my brother. No, nooo!”

“What’s she mumbling about?” the other man asked.

“I don’t know,” Stryker said. “I can’t make any of it out.” He had his hands full holding her wrists as she tried to scratch at him.

“Should I get out the bottle?”

“Nah,” said Stryker. “We gave her enough this morning. She’ll run out of steam any minute now and be as peaceful as a babe.”

Kristin was indeed losing her tenuous grip on consciousness. She continued struggling, but her efforts were pitiful. She was crying now. Weeping for her dear brother Chad . . . dead. Killed by Ironman. Killed by someone named Terry, at Ironman’s command.

“Oh, Chad!” she cried out once more.

“What the hell is she saying?” Stryker asked.

Kristin didn’t hear the reply. Blackness descended on her again in a warm, mellow engulfing wave, which was so familiar to her by now, it was almost a friend.

When she finally was allowed to return to full consciousness, she found herself on a large, clean bed in a spacious room with big, shuttered windows. She was dressed in only a flimsy robe. From beyond the door of her room came the rowdy sound of drunken male voices.

Kristin’s only thoughts were of grief for her dead brother. She made up her mind not to speak of it, though, for if word got back to Ironman that she was Chad’s sister, Ironman might torture her to see if she knew the information Chad was supposed to have known. She thanked God her mumbled words on the truck had been unclear.

She wept for Chad, feeling bitter grief. But soon her grief was replaced by another emotion, which blocked out all else: stark terror. Her situation, she realized, was hopeless. She had no way of knowing, then, that she was soon to come into contact with a unique, dynamic grizzly bear of a man who would alter the course of her life.

For two days straight, Kristin was raped repeatedly. It was horrible. The men were as Ironman had said, women-starved goldminers—happy, uncouth and with whiskey on their breath. They laughed at Kristin’s resistance and refused to believe her pleas for help. They had been told that she enjoyed “pretending” to resist, because it excited her.

The two days seemed like an eternity, but when they were over, she could hardly remember them. She had been drugged the entire time in a way that put her into a stupor, though did not make her lose consciousness.

Vroman, a sharp-nosed humorless man who ran the bordello, had come in twice a day to force her to drink from a bottle of pale pink, sweet tasting liquid. Often Stryker came in with him. Stryker was his second-in-command and had been visiting Ironman earlier only to report on how the business was doing. The potion they forced Kristin to drink was mostly alcohol, she could tell, but there was something else in it too. It was this extra ingredient that kept her woozy and rubbermouthed and made everything spin about. Vroman told her that it was codeine or morphine or something similar sounding. She couldn’t remember; she had been too drugged at the time.

After the ordeal of her first two days was over, she was left entirely alone for a day. They had something special in store for her and wanted her to have time to recover. Kristin was aching and emotionally traumatized from all she had been through, but still, the day of respite was sheer bliss. She lay in bed on clean sheets and let her body recover, waiting for the moment when she would be strong enough to plan an escape. While she had been drugged, any thoughts of escape were futile. Aside from not being able to even walk straight, she had not been able to think straight either. Now things were getting better.

Her room was surprisingly clean and comfortable. In fact, it was much better than what she would have expected for a bordello. It contained a private bathroom and shower, large windows—which, in her case, were shuttered and locked—and a firm, large, fourposter bed. The building in which the brothel resided was once a hotel, which had been abandoned during the early 1900s, when the original Yukon gold rush had ended. Then, when a new gold vein and new methods made both placer mining and drill mining profitable again, the hotel was taken over by Vroman. He turned it into a brothel for Ironman, who was the absentee owner.

The morning after Kristin’s single day of luxurious freedom, Vroman came into the room, followed by Stryker carrying a tray with breakfast. Kristin spied the familiar pale-pink bottle protruding from Vroman’s coat pocket, and she shrank back fearfully. “Oh, no, not that again!”

Vroman laughed meanly. “You don’t know how lucky you are, girl. Lots of people would pay lots o’ money for this kind of narcotized liquor. It’s damn hard to get around here.”

“Don’t drug me anymore. I can’t stand it.”

“Yeah, you hate it, but you’re a lot easier to manage when you’re woozy, that’s the fact o’ the matter.” He removed the bottle from his pocket and uncorked it. He sniffed from it, closed his eyes with pleasure and recorked it. “Besides, this isn’t just the ordinary stuff. I added a new ingredient that’ll make you enjoy yourself a bit more . . . physically.”

The thought repulsed Kristin. It was not only of what he might have put into the bottle, but also of having to endure more forced relations. Her eyes darted to the door. Stryker, a strong man with long, dirty hair under a derby hat, immediately moved in front of it to block off any chance of her trying to escape.

“Eat your breakfast now,” ordered Vroman. “Then we’ll give you a drink o’ your favorite medicine here. Afterward, we got a real surprise for you.” He grinned lewdly. “You’ll love it, girl. I absolute guarantee. You ever hear of Guy Faraday?”

Kristin had heard of him. Every young girl in America had heard of him. Along with Valentino and John Barrymore, he had been the reigning male idol of the silver screen a few years back. The three of them had had women moaning in their seats each time their presence graced the screen. Valentino and Barrymore were still major stars, but Faraday had disappeared from films a year or two back as the result of some scandal. The details had been h

ushed up, but Faraday had been blacklisted, never to work for a major studio again. Kristin remembered him as having been the most dashing, charming and handsome of the three “heartthrob stars,” as they were called by the gossip magazines.

---