His Indecent Revelations (Bound and Shackled to the Billionaire BDSM Erotic Romance) (2 page)

I love him.

If he dies, I will die too. Emotionally. Psychologically. Physically. I won’t eat. I won’t sleep. I will starve myself like a hunger artist. I will just pine and waste away.

There’s a void in her chest so hollow and deep that she thinks she has died and her heart has been cored out by the demons in Purgatory.

It is a long time before she finally regains her senses. And this time when she wakes up, she is sober and empty. Whatever drugs they have given her have leached away her spirit. She is but a husk of her former self – vacant-eyed and hollow.

She is also no longer on the island.

She is lying upon a resplendent bed. A white silken canopy tents above her, shielding the ceiling from her gaze. The room she is in is filled with magnificent carpets done in Persian weave. Gilded furniture decorates the walls, and the dome-shaped windows display a rose-colored vista of desertscape.

Desert.

She rises to her feet, which are shaky from the lack of use. She has visibly lost weight. Someone has dressed her in a silk robe, although she is naked underneath. Such opulence compared to what she had been used to for the past several days. She wonders if they feel sorry for her now that Channing is dead.

Channing.

She’s trying not to think of him . . . to think of his death. At the thought of him dead, her soul shrivels again and withdraws into its shell.

Barefooted, she pads to the window and looks out. The desert wind is sharp and biting. The temperature is also much colder than she expected, although the red ball of the sun burns in a cloudless sky.

She is now in Baghdad. No question about it. Where else would she be?

Everything must come back full circle to the past. Whatever transgressions that have been committed must now be paid back in full.

She stares out of the window for a long, long time, inhaling the dry air, wondering about everything and nothing. Mostly, she sees Channing’s face everywhere even though she tries hard not to – in the clouds, on the parched rocky ground and in the scorching red orb of the sun.

A movement behind her stirs her from her deep melancholy. Someone comes out of the shadows. Someone veiled and masked.

Susan turns. She watches as Alia detaches herself from behind a pillar.

Alia whispers, “I wanted to see you. To speak with you.”

Susan stays silent. Whatever fight she once possessed has been bled away by Channing’s murder. Alia comes into the light. Her half-mask gleams coldly. She smells of cinnamon and a strange, exotic spice. Like sandalwood and yet not sandalwood.

“I suppose you had ferried me to Baghdad,” Susan says.

“East of Baghdad. This citadel is built upon the ruins of the old one.”

“You drugged me and put me in a straightjacket like a mental patient.”

“You were mental. We had to stop you from hurting yourself.”

“I thought you wanted me dead.”

“On the contrary, you have done me no harm. Why should I want you dead?”

Susan shakes her head.
Because you’re mad and you don’t really know it? Because your mental faculties have been fragmented by what you’ve been through – and your only thirst is now for revenge? And that may include destroying everything Channing loves . . . or purportedly loves . . . since he never really said it to me?

Alia wafts to the window and looks out. There’s a soft mist in her brown eyes.

“I grew up in this place. My father used to ride with me across the desert. We had Arabian mares, the most beautiful in the region. He used to love me so much . . . when I did what he wanted of me. All my life, I lived for him. Until – ”

She doesn’t have to finish. Susan knows what she is going to say. Until I met Channing. And Hugh.

“Which of them did you love more?” she asks, aware that she is speaking to Channing’s murderer.

“Ah, the eternal question. Channing . . . so handsome in his uniform, so commanding. Radiating power and authority everywhere he goes. Even my father was impressed with him. And then there was Hugh, equally as handsome, but so different. He was poetic, artistic, a dreamer.”

Susan closes her eyes.
You killed Channing.

“Who knows which brother a girl can love more when she has such a feast of riches before her eyes? Though I suspect they courted me because I was the only woman in miles they can relate to. I spoke English. I was educated and refined.”

Alia’s face hardens.

“I thought I loved Channing more. But there was always Hugh, worming his way into my affections. My love for him grew and grew. And in the end, there was only Hugh.”

Her words are horribly prophetic, Susan thinks.

“So what happened after you had the child?”

“I came back here to my father’s citadel, only to find ashes and soot. The people I lived with were all dead and buried. But there was Hugh. He was alive. Somehow, he managed to escape the fate his brother had in store for him. Together, we rebuilt our lives with the little money my father had left in our foreign bank accounts. Channing and his friends had taken most of our fortune – the gold bullion buried in the secret vaults.

“Throughout the years, we healed each other. But the fire of vengeance burned within us. I waited. Oh, how I waited to be strong enough, to be rich enough for the moment to strike back. The thing is . . . there was a time when I never thought I could hate Channing.” Alia barks a short, sharp laugh. “But there you have it. Life never turns out the way it is promised, even if you were born a desert princess.”

She fingers the curtains.

“This was my room when I was a girl. I had it built just the way it was. So tell me.” She swings to Susan. “Was Channing kind to you? Did you treat you well?”

Susan remembers the bondage and spanking she endured in their earlier days together. And then the subsequent events that shaped and changed their relationship. There was affection. Love . . . even though he would never say it to jinx her.

Well, it’s all too late anyway.

Her heart flinches as she replies, “Yes, he treated me very well.”

“At least he learned his lesson where women are concerned. Is he still a good lover? Can he pleasure a woman in bed?”

What an absurd question, Susan thinks.

“I don’t think he has changed that much from when you knew him,” she says, her tone icy. “But why does that concern you? You have Hugh.”

“Indeed. But Hugh can no longer be my lover in the physical sense.” Alia’s eyes take on a faraway look. “The child was so huge that I was badly injured when it came out of me. The women of the Order did not believe in Caesareans. I barely survived. I healed in time, but there were terrible scars. Scars that would not allow me to experience physical love again.”

Susan can well imagine the gravity of what Alia went through. The horror washes through her. No wonder Alia is so damaged. And no wonder Hugh took her, Susan, so freely, as if he knows there will be no repercussions from Alia. As if he had Alia’s blessing.
Fuck her if you must. Fuck her to punish him.

Susan says, unable to mask the pain in her voice, “You’ve had your revenge. He’s dead. I don’t even want to ask you what you’re going to do to me now that I’ve served my purpose to lure Channing to you.”

Alia throws her a sweet smile. “What makes you think Channing is dead? Do you think I’d make his way out of this world so easy?”

Susan freezes.

*

She trembles as Alia leads her down the corridors of the new citadel. She’s afraid of what she will find.

Her elation of discovering that Channing is still alive is now tempered with her terror of finding him infirmed . . . or worse.

What have they done to him?

The shrieking in her head would not abate. Neither would the hammering of hands from inside her skull, trying to escape from this miserable existence where nothing can ever be the same again.

The words ‘Channing, Channing, Channing’ tumble in her mind, gathering moss. It is easier to fixate on a name rather than a frightening image of what that beautiful, virile man has been reduced to. Oh, can she even bear to look upon him after what they’ve done?

How much of why she loves Channing has been wrought by his beauty?

She clenches her fists.

You stupid, stupid girl. How could you ever think you love Channing for his aesthetics alone? You love him for everything he is, and if he has to wear a mask for the rest of his life, you’d love him just the same.

They enter a courtyard. In the center, surrounded by a spiked iron fence, is a rose red house made of brick.

Alia says, “Enter as you wish. Tend to him. He needs you more than ever.”

Susan rushes inside the house, her heart galloping like wild horses.

What she sees makes her stop in her tracks.

4

Channing lies on a bed, unmoving. His eyes are closed, swollen and purple. His lower lip is cut. He is covered with a sheet, but she can see the yellowing bruises on his naked torso and arms.

“Channing!” she cries.

She throws herself onto the side of the bed. She touches his cheeks, forehead, lips, arms – but he does not respond. He breathes the sleep of the comatose.

“Oh Channing,” she whispers, tears filling her eyes.

She reaches under the sheet to clasp his hand, willing him to life. But he does not open his eyes. She squeezes his palm, trying to let her own life force flow into him – to heal him, to make him whole again. But try as she may, he still does not wake up.

Her tears spill over her cheeks in a deluge. She sinks to her haunches by his bed, still grasping onto his hand. She doesn’t ever want to let him go.

I love you,
she says silently, kissing his hand.

She sits for hours this way. And when she falls asleep, she lies on the floor beside his bed so that he would not have to sleep alone.

*

She tends to his wounds with the gauze, cotton and alcohol she finds in the drawers. The little house is rustic in the way of a Middle Eastern peasant abode, with warm brick walls and a traditional kitchen.

But despite her careful ministrations, he burns up with fever.

Under the sheets, he wears the bruises and cuts of being severely beaten up. She feels for broken bones, but can detect nothing save a suspiciously mobile rib on the right side of his chest. There is also a suppurating open wound on his left testicle, which fills her with panic. What have they done to him? What have they
tried
to do to him?

Oh, she can’t bear to think of what he had been through. Her thorough examination of his body reveals that his anus has been severely compromised. With a deep shudder, she remembers the chair he had been tethered to, and the hole made in its seat.

She sponges his brow with a cold compress. Over and over, she wrings it dry and soaks it in ice cold water again. But his skin still flushes with the sheen of the unwell. He does not seem to be sweating it off either. And more alarmingly, he does not wake up. He lies there on the bed like a beautiful fallen angel. His features are not at rest and he does not sleep the sleep of the peaceful. The orbs of his eyes beneath his closed eyelids are constantly in flux, dreaming stuff that can only be nightmares from the tortured expression on his face.

If only she can give him her life!

Their meals are brought to them every day by a woman in a black burqa. Nothing fancy. Certainly not steak and potatoes but plain rice and broth filled with sour-tasting vegetables.

Susan says to her, “Please . . . we need a doctor. Can you get us a doctor?”

The woman blesses herself in the Arabic fashion and shakes her head.

Susan is left to fret and tear her hair out over Channing. She can’t feed him. She can’t make him drink anything. And meanwhile, he is wasting away before her eyes.

She goes to the spiked iron gates and screams her lungs out – “Alia! Please, we need a doctor!” – over and over, hoping to rouse someone to their plight. But her cries only echo in the cavernous walls surrounding the house. Is anyone around at all in this section of the citadel? What a strange place this prison is, built almost as an isolated gaol for long-term political prisoners.

She is certain Alia knows that Channing is very ill. Which means she intends to let him rot without any medical aid . . . and for Susan to watch him die a slow death.

No!

Something tells her Channing would not last long unless she does something. For he has been stricken with not only an illness of the body. His spirit is suffering and he has lost the will to fight.

But what can she do? She is as much a prisoner as he is. She can cut open her arm and let her blood drip into him, but he would be none the better. If only she was more resourceful. If only she had more survival skills. She briefly contemplates overpowering the burqa-clad woman and holding her hostage, but decides that Alia probably would not respond.