Kaden drained his beer. “I want you to move in with us. I want you to live with us, and I’ll teach you. We’ll teach you. She’s nearly an expert in shibari, so she can take over teaching my classes. She’s going to need your help taking care of me. After I’m gone, she’ll need you to take care of her.”
“I’ve got to eat, man. How am I supposed to do all this and go to school and work?” He was trying to find an excuse to get him out of this, one that Kaden would agree was valid.
One that wouldn’t make him look like a total chickenshit asshole.
Kaden’s dying.
“Quit your job. You’re only working part-time, for crying out loud. I’ll take care of everything. I’ll even draw up an agreement. You take at least a couple of semesters off. We’ll pay for your school, pay off your outstanding student loans, everything. You live here, help Leah, help me. Once…” His voice choked up. Seth felt something inside him die at the sound.
“Once I’m gone,” Kaden finally continued, “you marry Leah and stay with her for at least a year. I’ll draw up a prenup for you guys. After the year, if the two of you want to get divorced you can, as long as you promise you’ll still be her Master unless she falls in love with someone else who is capable of taking over. You can make sure he’ll take good care of her. If he meets your approval, then you can train him for her.”
As crazy as this situation was, the thought of someone else being with Leah spun a strange, cold thread inside Seth. It knotted around his gut, drawing tight.
“Dude,” he whispered, shocked, “you’re asking me to marry your wife?”
“Well, not until after I’m dead.” Kaden’s practical smile chilled Seth. “It’ll keep the government from taxing the hell out of you. You’ll be able to access the assets, as her husband. Hell of a lot easier than trying to leave it to you.”
Kaden was a control freak, meticulously planned everything, he always had. Probably one of the reasons he was such a damn good attorney.
This, however, stretched beyond the pale.
Apparently Kaden sensed Seth had reached his immediate limit for processing information. He went quiet and let his friend think things through. After a few minutes, Kaden quietly spoke. “She enjoys it. I didn’t force her into this. She craves it. It’s security for her. She knows I will always protect her. I promised.”
“This isn’t a cave where some other guy will drag her away by her hair, dude. Get real.”
Kaden glanced through the sliders to the lanai, where Leah tended the steaks on the grill.
“I’m not going to tell you everything tonight. I will, however, give you a little insight. Leah grew up in foster care, spent most of her childhood there.”
Well that made things clear as mud. “So?”
“Her biological father was sent to jail. Her mom died when she was two.”
If Kade had a point, Seth wished he’d hurry the hell up and make it. “Again, so?”
Kaden took a deep breath. “He went to jail for raping Leah when she was seven.”
Seth felt like the wind had been knocked out of him. “Holy fuck,” he whispered.
Kaden nodded. “Her life went downhill from there, if you can imagine that.” He walked to the fridge and got another beer. He held up one for Seth, who shook his head.
Maybe he shouldn’t have a lot of alcohol tonight.
“That’s why we’ve never had kids,” Kaden explained. “Why she can’t have kids. Between that and…other things that happened to her over the years. She didn’t want to go through the surgeries and IVF and all that crap. I respected her decision.”
Seth reeled. Leah seemed to be the most put-together person, besides Kaden, that he’d ever known. He’d never heard her talk about her past or her family beyond meeting Kaden. He just assumed she was estranged from them. He never would have guessed…
Holy fuck.
Kaden leaned over the counter and dropped his voice. “She needs things. It helps her cope. She doesn’t feel or express emotional pain like you and me. She needs safety and security. She needs someone who will care for and about her and understand why she needs…things. Someone she can put her full trust in. It’s how she’s made it all these years.”
Seth could barely stand the intensity in Kaden’s grey eyes.
“Seth, I wouldn’t ask you if I didn’t think you could take good care of her.”
“What ‘things’ are you talking about?”
“I’ll show you after dinner.”
* * * *
When Leah returned with the steaks and vegetables—Seth’s steak cooked exactly the way he liked it, as always—he couldn’t help but stare at her.
She managed a wan smile and looked at Kaden.
He nodded. “Tonight, that’s one you don’t have to worry about. Okay, love?”
Seth couldn’t help himself. “One what?”
“Rule,” Kaden replied, as if it was nothing. “Normally when we’re formal she must ask for permission before speaking to someone unless I’ve already said it’s okay.”
Seth didn’t know if it was his friend’s words or the matter-of-fact tone that threw him. “Permission?”
Leah nodded. “Master takes very good care of me. He wants to make sure I don’t talk with someone I shouldn’t. I prefer it that way.”
He’d seen this woman work a room full of hundreds of people at a fundraising banquet, Sarasota’s movers and shakers, greeting guests and organizing the caterer and servers.
And she was asking permission to speak to him?
As if reading his thoughts, she smiled again. “I know it’s sort of a lot to get used to.”
“Get used to?” He stared at them. “I mean, I thought I knew you two! You’re my best friends. How could I not know this was going on?”
“What was I supposed to say?” Kaden asked. “Hey, Seth, guess what? Want to hear what Leah and I do when the door’s locked and the blinds are drawn?”
“You weren’t doing this when I stayed with you after my surgery.”
Leah nodded. “Yes, we were. We just weren’t formal while you were with us, but we were still doing this.”
“But…but you’re so normal!”
Finally, a genuine, sly smile from Leah. “You’ll be surprised who’s into the lifestyle.”
Kaden took over. “That’s the whole point. It’s not like what you see on the Internet. A majority of the people who are into some sort of kink, you’d never know it unless you ran into them doing it somewhere. It’s not a bunch of horny freaks fucking anything that moves and wearing masks. I mean, yeah, there are some people like that. Most people are like us.” He gently stroked Leah’s cheek. Something about the tender gesture saddened Seth. “Well, maybe not like us. A lot of people aren’t into it twenty-four/seven like we are.”
Seth studied them. They both watched him. “Leah, are you telling me you’re willingly his slave?” He already knew her answer. How many times had he envied her devotion to Kaden over the years?
A lot.
“Master takes very good care of me.” Her voice choked up a little at the end as Kaden’s eyes met hers. “He’s always taken very good care of me,” she whispered, nuzzling his hand when he stroked her cheek again.
“Let’s eat before it gets cold,” Kaden said as he removed his glasses and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.
* * * *
After dinner, Leah cleared the table while Kaden led Seth to the back of the house, to a room he’d always assumed was Kaden’s private home office. He hadn’t been in there since construction was completed. Normally it stayed locked, a small electronic number combination pad just above the knob.
“You need to see this,” Kaden said. “And I don’t want you to be shocked or surprised.”
“Too late for that,” he muttered.
Kaden opened the door.
Inside looked like something out of a porn movie, only better quality and more tastefully decorated. A low, padded bench with leather cuffs at
tached at each end. An X-shaped frame. A large rack holding…
Holy fuck.
Whips, riding crops, and various other implements of torture.
The odd collection explained the keyless lock. During construction, Seth had asked him if he needed it because of his files.
“Something like that,” Kaden had said with a smirk. “Keys are a pain in the ass. I’d rather have a combo lock. I don’t want people wandering in here when we have guests over.”
Seth hadn’t questioned it at the time. He knew Kade had a lot of high-profile corporate clients. It made sense to him then.
Made perfect sense now, even if he was still in shock.
Kaden walked across the room to a bookshelf and pulled down a photo album. “Come here,” he said.
His legs numb, Seth walked over while Kaden flipped through the pages, finding what he wanted.
“This is shibari.” He pointed to a page of pictures of Leah trussed in intricate rope bindings, a ball gag in her mouth, looking…
Well, looking like she was enjoying herself.
Kaden flipped through page after page, naming the different rope configurations.
“She’s my model and assistant during classes.” He smiled, his finger trailing over one particularly intricate looking configuration. “And at home, of course, she’s my practice model.” He closed the album and put it back on the shelf before pulling down another one. This time he flipped to a page of pictures taken by someone else apparently, because Kaden and Leah were both in the shot. It looked like he was speaking to a gathered group of people. Leah was bound—naked—to a bench similar to the one in the room behind him.
Kaden wore jeans but was shirtless and holding a—
“Is that a whip?”
Kaden nodded. “Singletail. Specially made. That one’s my favorite. Cost me nearly eight hundred dollars. This was a basic singletail class. Problem is, too many assholes think they can use one on a person when they really can’t. I spend several hours a week practicing to get and stay as good as I am.”
Maybe that explained Kaden’s naturally muscled physique despite never going to a gym. Kaden wasn’t ripped, yet he was firm and trim while Seth had managed to gain about twenty pounds and go soft since his best days in the Army.
Kaden put that album away and turned to Seth. He dropped his voice. “Have you ever looked at her arms?”
Seth hesitated before he nodded. He’d noticed the scars. Now he wondered if Kaden had done that to her. The possibility sickened him.
“She did most of that to herself before we ever met. Do you know what cutting is?”
“Not really.” But relief crept back in.
Kaden glanced to the open doorway behind Seth, as if listening for sounds from the kitchen. Leah was still cleaning up dinner. Seth could hear her singing to herself at the other end of the house. Apparently satisfied that she couldn’t hear them, Kaden lowered his voice and continued. “Some people, for various reasons, need pain. They use it. It’s how they function, how they deal with their emotions. Some use it to help relieve intense emotional pain in an external way. Some use it to feel like they’re connected to life again. Some just flat-out get off on it.”
“There’s medications for that kind of crap, dude.”
“When you’re a fourteen-year-old girl and being forced to give your foster brother blow-jobs and getting sodomized by him because he threatens to get you thrown out on the street, you don’t exactly trot down to a shrink and ask for a pill.”
Seth blanched, sickened. What kind of hell had she been through?
“She didn’t take the news well last night, obviously. I needed to give her a long session last night to get her to cry. She’s had two more today already. I took the day off from work. I knew she’d need me.”
“She likes this?”
“She needs it. There’s a lot I can’t tell you tonight. You just have to see it for yourself. She’s not a pain slut like some are. We have very specific routines and rituals we’ve developed over the years that help her stay calm and focused and deal with life.” He motioned Seth over to a chair in the corner. Seth walked over and sat, his mind reeling.
“When we were first dating,” Kaden continued, “she worked at a restaurant near USF. That’s where we met. I went in after class one day. She was beautiful. I never believed in love at first sight until I met her. She claimed she was a klutz in the kitchen, always getting these weird injuries, mostly cuts and burns on her arms. She always had something. I had no reason not to believe her. Until I talked her into spending the weekend at my apartment and she got up to make coffee.”
Kaden’s gaze drifted, his mind’s eye traveling back in time. “She didn’t hear me get up. I walked into the kitchen and watched her take a knife out of the drawer and lay it against her arm. She closed her eyes like she was saying a prayer or something, and when I screamed, she jumped.
“I wanted to haul her to the hospital. I thought she was trying to kill herself. She was so upset I’d seen her, she got dressed and ran out. I panicked. I couldn’t find her. She wouldn’t answer my calls, wouldn’t come to the door at her apartment. I finally staked out her workplace and made her talk to me.
“She wouldn’t tell me why. She broke up with me right there even though she was crying and…it just felt like she didn’t really want that. I can’t explain it. I begged her to talk to me and she wouldn’t. I knew I was in love with her, and it was killing me that she wouldn’t talk to me. I knew she’d had a crappy life, but I didn’t know everything.”
Kaden wiped his eyes. This wasn’t easy for him. “I went in every day after class and would sit and try to get her to talk to me. When she quit a few days later, I finally got one of the other waitresses to tell me where she went. Then she told me something else. ‘She loves you, but she’s scared of people. If you want her to open up to you, you need to prove you’re not going anywhere and won’t hurt her.’
“I was losing my mind. After three weeks I waited for her at her apartment one night and begged her to let me talk to her. She finally let me in, and she was like a fucking zombie, man. She looked like a dead woman. She told me she loved me, but that she couldn’t see me anymore. I was sitting there on the couch trying to talk her into changing her mind when she got up and walked to the kitchen. Before I could get there, she’d cut herself.”
“Fuck!”
Kaden nodded. “Then she started screaming. She screamed and cried, and she let me hold her. I sat there on the floor with her for an hour, and she finally told me about her father and the shit that happened to her growing up. What she did to deal with it. She told me she wanted me to find someone ‘normal’ who could feel emotions without cutting them out of her flesh.” He studied his hands for a minute. “I told her I didn’t care. I loved her. That I wanted to help her.”
He took his glasses off and laid them on the bookcase. “She tried. Man, she fucking tried. I got her to move in with me. Every day I felt it building in her. Like a volcano. But the weird thing was, the more I felt it building in her, it’s like the deader she got outside, right? She came home from work all happy one afternoon, and I saw she had a new burn on her arm.”
He looked at Seth, his eyes glistening again. “I got so fucking scared and angry that she’d hurt herself. I just lost it. She’d promised not to do it anymore. I should have known better, that she couldn’t stop herself. We got into a fight, screaming at each other. I grabbed her and hauled her into my lap, yanked her pants down and spanked the crap out of her.”
“Fuck!” Seth couldn’t imagine Kaden blowing his cool. He’d never seen his friend lose it, ever. He was the hothead, Kaden always coming to his rescue.
Kaden smiled. “I felt like shit, like fucking dirt. Then she fell off my lap, and she looked up at me and had this…absolutely gorgeous smile on her face. My hand hurt like a sonofabitch. I knew I must have bruised her a little, but she looked at me in a way I’d never seen her look at me before. She grabbed me and fucking
kissed me and practically raped me right there on the couch. It was the hottest sex we’d had, and the sex was pretty damn good to start with.
“So I asked her after, when we’d finally made it to my bedroom a few hours later, what the hell that was about. She shook her head and said she didn’t know. It was like something had just sort of popped free in her when I did that. So I made her a deal.”
He frowned, working his hands again. “I told her if she could go the entire next day, just one damn day, without hurting herself, and that I would check every inch of her flesh for a new wound, I would spank her again the next night.”
“Fuck!” Seth wished he could say something—anything—other than that, but that was all he could manage.
Kaden nodded. “Right. That’s exactly what I thought. I was desperate. What the hell was I supposed to do? I didn’t even know if it would work. So I get home from classes the next day and she gets home from work later and she runs in, I mean she’s stripping her clothes off the second she gets through the door, asking me to look at her and check her over. I made her stand there and wait. She started to beg. I told her if she didn’t behave, I wouldn’t spank her.
“It’s like she became a freaking statue, just waiting for me. I finished what I was doing and told her to go lie in bed. I get there and she’s waiting for me. I start looking her over, taking my time, trying to be seductive about it, and I realize she’s fucking wet. I mean, like you wouldn’t believe. I asked her what was up with that, and she said she couldn’t stop thinking about getting spanked all day.”
“Did she ever hurt herself again?”
“A few times early on. After that, no. Not intentionally. We had a deal that if she got hurt, she would immediately tell me so I would know it wasn’t intentional. I haven’t had to worry about that for years now. That’s because we have this. Usually she doesn’t even need it every day, or just something light, not a full session. The deal was I would take care of that for her. I was in control of that. She began to beg for more. One day I had to threaten her again that if she didn’t behave, I would make her wait another day before her next spanking. That made her even hornier.”