Page 30 of Bought

The cane lands again and I shriek. He didn’t land that stroke on fresh skin. He laid it across the others, finding six little points where my flesh was already sore and tender, and lighting hellfire across them.

“I will do this until they find it,” he informs me. “A house this size. That could take a while…”

“No!

Crack!

The cane lands again, I swear and cry out. “You’re a fucking psychopath!”

“I’m just determined, Casey. You don’t know what you’re doing. You don’t know what is at stake here. I need that phone you used to contact the FBI, and I need it now.”

There is a serious note in his voice, a particular intensity that makes me think that maybe there really is more to this. He wants that phone badly. He’s been harsh in the past, but he’s never punished me this hard.

“So this is how you deal with her.”

The new voice doesn’t belong to an agent. It doesn’t belong to a guard. Or any one of the people who could have, should have helped me. It belongs to Jack Ford.

He’s standing between the agents, his upper lip curled in what might be disgust or what might be a sneer of some other origin. I can’t tell. I am exposed to him as much as I am to the rest of these men, because Ethan doesn’t give a damn for my privacy.

Ethan turns around, the cane clutched in his hand. “This isn’t a good time, Jack.”

“I can tell,” Jack smirks. “And I can tell you’ve got everything under control too.”

This interruption is giving my ass a reprieve from the cane, but not from the pain. That has been stoked so it burns on without input from Ethan.

“I do,” Ethan growls. Ethan is taller than Jack. I didn’t notice that the other night when Jack came swanning in like he owned the place, but he has several inches on him and he’s a lot broader. I notice that because even from my less than useful vantage point, I can tell there’s more tension than before. Tension that seems to be on the verge of potentially erupting into real violence.

“Gentlemen, we don’t have time for this,” one of the agents says. “Any of this,” he adds, looking at me. I guess Ethan’s unorthodox approach to inquisition isn’t going down quite as well as he expected.

“You can liaise with the head of my guard,” Ethan says to the agents. “Jack, you can get the hell out of here. I’m dealing with my girl.”

His girl. Those words should outrage me, given what he is doing to me. But they don’t. They make me warm inside—not as warm as my burning ass, but still. His possession means something. I don’t know what, but something. Maybe I could forgive him for this, if he let me up now.

It also fails to escape me how he talks to the FBI agents. He speaks as if he is in command of them. He just dismissed them, for Christ’s sake. They can’t like that one bit. Nobody joins a federal agency to become some twisted billionaire’s lackey.

Jack lets out a snort and gives a shrug, as if he doesn’t care. But I see the flash in his eye before he turns away, and I feel how his gaze lingers on me. I feel goosebumps on my skin, in spite of the heat of the moment and the room at large.

In very short order, the room empties aside from Ethan, me, and Forsyth, who seems to think that the dismissal didn’t apply to him.

“Bring me the clamps, please, Forsyth.”

The clamps? I’m already shackled to this surface, what else could he possibly clamp?

“Ethan…”

“You ready to tell me where that phone is yet?”

I fall silent again. I’m not ready to capitulate to him. This was supposed to be the day I got out. It was supposed to be the day he went down. The day I righted the wrong I’ve been trying to fix since I found it. A lot of people are relying on me to get Vipyr out of their lives. They might not know it. They might never know me, or anything I went through to try to stop what Ethan and Jack are doing but this matters. He’s desperate to get that phone. Anything that obstructs him is good.

“I guess not,” he snorts. “That’s fine, Casey. You and I are going to have a very long evening together.”

“The clamps, sir.”

“Thank you, Forsyth. Bring me the ropes, please, two of the paddles, the leather flogger, and…” he pauses for a moment, “the wand.”

“Wand?” I snort. “You want to do some magic?”

“I think it will have an enchanting effect on you,” he smirks.

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