His hips slammed against my cheeks. He didn’t stop. He drove in over and over again. The pain didn’t relent. It grew, like an oxygen-rich fire, it blazed. And my world shrunk. Nothing existed but his invading erection and the pain that shot out and engulfed every fiber of my being. I couldn’t think beyond it. I reached for what I needed—an image of Derek to grab onto with all my might—but there was only pain.
Time passed, or it didn’t. I really couldn’t tell. The pain began to ebb, just a little as if the edges of it had grown fuzzy. The excruciating dry rub gave way to the liquid fire. Blood. My own blood was lubricating his thrusts.
I wanted to die. I couldn’t hold on, waiting for Derek. I wasn’t brave. I wasn’t strong. I was torn and used, bloody and broken. And it hadn’t even been hours since the monster inside me had appeared outside my cell. A few more hours…a few days…how much would there be left for Derek to save?
I became aware of a new pain. Beneath his merciless thrusts, my cheek had been thumped and grated against the stone floor. It rivaled but didn’t top, the pain of his thrusts. It was just more fuel for the unbearable fire consuming me.
Eventually, it was over. He rammed in deeper, so deep I felt him in every part of me, but then he stilled. His disgusting grunts reached me above my own hoarse screams and then he withdrew. He was done.
With a shove, he knocked me to the floor. I didn’t curl up. I didn’t try to get up. I laid there. Ruined. Used. I didn’t even bother to try to cover myself when another figure appeared outside the cell. It wasn’t Derek, though I wasn’t sure it would matter if it was. Was there anything left to save?
It was another unfamiliar face, but it looked no more capable of human emotion than the other one. He shoved two towels at my tormentor—a wet one and a dry one—while he leered at my abused body with a sickening heat in his eyes.
Two towels landed on the floor in front of me. Three more things plunked down next to the towels—a tube of something, a bottle of water and a foil-wrapped package that looked like a protein or energy bar.
“Clean yourself up and eat, slave. You have one hour.”
The two men left together, and I recognized the click of the lock when they’d shut the prison bars. I laid there watching their feet until they stepped out of sight. Then I listened. Ten more steps to the door, which sounded like it opened without difficulty for them. The door closed with another quiet click. And then there was silence.
I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t muster the strength to pick myself up off the floor. I’d once thought the room Derek had held me captive in had been hell…I’d been wrong. So pathetically naïve to think his brand of torture had been brutal, sadistic.
I looked at the things the man had left, searching for something that could help me. Not to heal, not to defend myself, and not to scale the wall and slip through the window. There was only one escape from this hell, and I needed to do it now before they returned. But there was clearly no way to turn the things on the floor into merciful bringers of death.
One hour and he’d be back. One hour to do what he’d said, or else god only knew what punishments he would heap onto whatever he had planned.
With shaking limbs, I forced myself to hands and feet. I slipped the dry towel beneath my bloody knees and knelt, but I couldn’t sit back on my heels and had to hold onto the wall to stay upright. I decided to work from the top down, my face first, unsuccessfully stifling a cry as I pressed the lukewarm towel to my shredded cheek.
Inspecting the tube of cream, it turned out to be a healing serum, and I patted it on liberally. Five percent lidocaine. It wasn’t nearly as good as the cream Derek had rubbed into my flesh with tender hands after Marcos had marred it, but it did take some of the stings out, so I rubbed a small bit into the other side of my face where the monster had no doubt left his handprint.
My arms and chest were easier—nothing but red marks from his rough handling. I tried to reach my back with the towel, but was only partially successful, though my stomach turned seeing the lines of blood soaking into the cloth from the lash wounds.
Then lower. I dabbed at the place where he’d been, and when I pulled the towel away and found it saturated with blood and semen, I doubled over, my stomach once again trying to bring up food that wasn’t there.