Total pages in book: 100
Estimated words: 101988 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 510(@200wpm)___ 408(@250wpm)___ 340(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 101988 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 510(@200wpm)___ 408(@250wpm)___ 340(@300wpm)
Grabbing a handful of perfectly seasoned peanuts, I shoved them all in my mouth and laughed. Victor’s question bounced around in my wondrously empty mind, and my body turned jittery with relief.
Bursting at the seams with emotions I didn’t know how to fucking process, I strode to Victor and slung my arm around his slender shoulders. Peter shot me a look before his gaze sneaked back to where Ily hung silent and miserable in her binds.
“You know what, Vic?” I kissed the cocksucker on the cheek. “I feel fan-fucking-tastic.” Glancing at the spread of snacks, I shrugged. “In fact, I’ve worked up quite the appetite.”
“Oh?” Victor chuckled and stepped out of my half embrace. His eyes narrowed, full of unreadable things. “You’ve indulged in enough pussy tonight I’m sure, so what are you hungering for now?”
“A juicy bloody steak.”
Peter winced.
Ily gagged.
And Victor merely smiled like the reptile he was, still watching me a tad too closely. “As you wish. Peter, take Ily to see Dr Belford and then put her to bed. I expect to see you both bright-eyed and bushy-tailed in the morning.”
“Yes, Sir V.” Peter staggered to his feet, flinching beneath bruises slowly blooming on his throat. Bruises Victor had given him or another Master before Ily and I found him in the corridor?
Either way, my heart didn’t skitter like it used to.
The hero inside me didn’t rise to save the day.
That motherfucker was dead.
Good riddance.
“Come along then, mon ami.” Victor strode to the door and cracked it open. He shook his head just once at the guards—guards who’d been briefed to kill me if I’d failed. Immediately, all four bowed and siphoned out into the night.
Looking me up and down as if he still didn’t trust me, Victor said, “I’ll wake the chef and celebrate with you. After all…it’s not every day I have a hand in freeing someone who was so determined not to be freed.”
I smirked and strode past him.
I walked on fucking sunshine and rainbows. “Guess I owe you a thank-you.”
“Guess so.” Victor laughed softly as he slipped beside me.
The door slowly swung closed, blocking off the dead zoo, my past life, and the girl who’d been the crux of my transformation.
I didn’t look back.
Chapter Three
………………………….
Ily
I MANAGED NOT TO CRY.
I didn’t cry as Henri cut me.
Didn’t cry as he fucked me.
Didn’t cry as Peter gently unbuckled and unshackled me, shoved off the tatters of my torn negligee, or when he slipped his kind arm around me and guided me, ever so tenderly, to Dr Belford’s private rooms. The same rooms he’d been slipping out of when we’d found him an hour or so ago.
God…has it only been an hour?
Eager dawn did its best to lighten the midnight sky, quickly glimpsed in the arrow slits along the corridor as we moved like ghouls in the dark.
It couldn’t have been a single hour.
I felt ancient.
A time-worn antique that no longer knew how to walk or talk or breathe.
Peter didn’t say a word as he knocked softly on the door and waited for an equally soft voice to grant us entry.
I didn’t cry as he guided me inside just as Dr Belford clicked on a lamp and shrugged into a pink fleece dressing gown. Didn’t cry as she took one look at my naked, cum-smeared, blood-letted state and patted the operating table shoved against the wall of her private sitting room.
Everything about her space scrambled my head.
She was as much a prisoner here as us. Once a slave and now the tending physician to a hundred more, she’d invoked Victor’s generosity enough to warrant clothes that weren’t see-through and rooms with locks on the doors. Yet even in her quaint lounge with its grey couch and normal-looking glass coffee table, the large metallic cupboard with neatly typed labels on its many, many drawers screamed surgery.
Trembles found me as Peter helped settle me on the white-sheet-covered table. He didn’t speak as he went to Dr Belford’s couch and snagged the thick yellow-and-cream knitted blanket that looked homemade.
Dr Belford went to argue but then nodded. “You can’t take it down to your quarters, but you can use it while you’re here. Not my rules, you understand. If it were up to me, you could take every damn thing he’s given me and share it around.”
“I know.” Peter gritted his teeth and bundled me up. He wrapped me so tight, drawing the corners beneath my chin, he almost choked me.
Sighing heavily, he kissed my forehead and spoke to Dr Belford. “He used a clean blade. Shallow cuts. She didn’t bleed much.”
“How much is much?” Dr Belford asked.
“I think Victor ordered about five mil or so.”
“Good. At least she doesn’t need a transfusion.”
I shuddered.
The fact that she had the ability to do such a procedure painted horror stories in my head.
I huddled deeper into my borrowed blanket.