Annette was sure she’d reach the end of the perimeter soon. She should have reached it already. This felt much farther out than she’d been before in any other direction. What if there was a weak spot in Brian’s security? Maybe the perimeter didn’t go through this part of the woods. But of course it would have to, wouldn’t it? If he wanted to both keep people from going out and know if others were coming in that shouldn’t.
But what about wildlife? If animals tripped the perimeter would Brian get some kind of alert? She’d walked what felt like over a mile, and she was beginning to really think there was a hole in the invisible fence. Then another shock came.
Annette leapt back. When the pain of the electric zap faded, she bent and picked up a nearby rock to make a mark in the nearest tree. She’d walked straight out from a certain line at the pool and if she came this way again, she would know how far was too far if there was a marking to warn her. She didn’t want to keep getting shocked each time she miscalculated.
She remembered smelling fresh paint inside part of the house, so there were probably paint cans inside somewhere. If she could find them, she could mark the tree more permanently.
Annette wandered back to the small clearing with the sunlight shining in and the water. She sat with her back pressed up against a large oak tree near the stream and watched the tiny fish swimming by. They seemed to be carried by the current more than actively swimming.
The birds chattered loudly in the trees, sometimes swooping in and out from tree to tree, sometimes fighting with each other. She looked up suddenly. Mere feet away stood a young deer.
She held her breath, mesmerized. After a frozen moment of fear, it scampered off, going far beyond the perimeter line into the thicker woods.
Annette was really more of a city person—or she’d thought she was. But there was something safe and calming about being out in nature where she was just another one of the animals and nothing out in the real, modern world mattered at all. When she was free to go where she wanted, she could see retreating out to this peaceful place to just be.
She wasn’t sure how long she sat out there, but as the sun’s angle shifted, she worried about what time it was. She got up and practically ran back to the house. As she crossed through the cafeteria she smelled fresh bread baking. Her heart sank into her stomach when she saw the clock on the wall. It was three fifteen.
52
“You’re late.” Anton said when she burst through the door at three twenty. “What have you been doing? You’re filthy. Did you roll in mud?”
“I was outside. I’m sorry. There wasn’t a clock out there.”
He watched her until she grew visibly uncomfortable. After a minute or so, she pulled a leaf out of her long blonde hair and laid it on a table beside the door. She wouldn’t stop fidgeting.
“I take it you want to start every day with punishment, yes?”
She looked down at the ground. “No, Master.”
He closed his laptop and laid it on the bed beside him then carefully placed his folded reading glasses on top of it.
“Hmmmm,” he said, still watching her. In truth he hadn’t minded the extra time. He’d just finished the last of his emails and had arranged things at the spa to move his appointments to other massage therapists for the week. But he’d said three.
He wanted to have plenty of time with Annette to set a routine for them. He might have made a million mistakes with her already, but he wasn’t a total amateur at this. If he treated her like just another sub and moved through his training protocol, he could salvage this wreck he’d created.
Despite the fucked-up situation, he was sure he could gain her trust if he stuck to the script and didn’t introduce her to new scenarios he wasn’t in full control of. He was sure, despite placing too many demands and stresses on her too soon that she was still attracted to him. He could use that to mold and shape her. By the time he was finished, she wouldn’t remember she was a hostage. After all, whether lying or not, it wasn’t like she hadn’t agreed with him in the club that night that she wanted to be whisked away to his castle to be his property. And that conversation had taken place well before he’d mistakenly kidnapped her sister.
Anton gestured to the bathroom. “Go take another shower. Then dry your body and your hair and put on the pineapple-flavored whipped body cream in the drawer. I like the taste of it. Then you will come out here and kneel beside me with your eyes down and your legs spread with your palms face up on your knees. Do you understand these directions?”
“Yes, Master.”
“Good. Go.”
When she’d closed the bathroom door, he went down to the main floor. Besides the dungeons down below, there were several play rooms on the main level which were being set up for training. Brian and Gabe both had their hands full with this activity when Anton reached them.
Lindsay was in the city with a patient. No doubt he was interviewing her to see if he should bring her to the house to be trained and sold.
The doctor wasn’t supposed to talk about his patients, but none of them were supposed to be selling well-trained sex slaves, either. The guys—minus Anton—had poured through patient files and notes while Anton had been at the ballet and party with Annette the previous night.
They already had seven potentials to consider for training. Most of the women were isolated in the city without family or friends. It was a perfect pool to draw from. They were desperate to be taken in and taken care of, and their kinks made it easy to ply them with pleasure and pain in exchange for their absolute submission.
Several huge boxes had been delivered for the play rooms. Brian and Gabe were busy assembling a medical table with stirrups in a room where Lindsay had already set up his other medical supplies. On the far end of this room they’d set up a round bed with studio lighting and cameras.
“Are we making porn, now, too?” Anton asked, eyeing the photo shoot setup.
“Brian suggested we should take dirty pictures and video to show the buyers,” Gabe said.
“Why would we do that?” Anton asked.
Brian rolled his eyes while he struggled with some metal bolts in the table. “Because, you half-wit, we don’t want them coming to the house until money exchanges hands. We want them completely implicated. And they shouldn’t get to window shop or touch the girls if they aren’t buying. This isn’t a brothel.”
“Did everything for the other play rooms arrive?” Anton asked, deciding not to get into it with Brian right then. Annette would be out of the shower soon, and he wanted to be ready for her, not arguing with Brian over something stupid.
“It’s all still in boxes, but the dungeons are now functional if you want to use those for training. Most of the toys can be sterilized but a few I ordered in large multiples, one per girl.”
It was rare for Brian to use so many words that didn’t involve asking when he could kill someone. Anton liked to convince himself that Brian’s threats were just talk, but there was something cold and dead in his eyes which Anton had seen only a couple of times before. And those other times were definitely killers.
He left the guys to finish setting up the medical room and went next door to find a pile of boxes from several high-end sex toy shops. He opened some of them and selected the items he wanted to use on Annette. He grabbed another tube of the arousal cream from the large crate he’d ordered. After only a couple of days experience with it, he considered this cream the best tool to move her along the path he wanted her on and was willing to make full use of it. He had every intention of incorporating it into the full training regimen for all the house’s girls in the future.