Chapter 73: Book 1: Chapter 26 (Part 2 of 3)

“Speaking of whips,” I said, and produced the Drainer’s Whip from my inventory. “For you.”

She looked at me suspiciously but took the proffered whip from my hands and her lips pulled back in a large grin as she examined it. She turned from the doorway and faced back into the room, unravelled the whip, and flicked her wrist to swish it through the air.

The whip produced a loud crack as it broke the sound barrier and Anastasia couldn’t help but giggle with glee. Then she recalled I was still there and composed herself back to stoic disapproval.

“This will do, I suppose, Captain,” she said nonchalantly.

“I give you permission to call me Torin, Ana,” I said, remembering I had forbidden her to call me anything but Captain or Sir yesterday. This jogged my memory of another order I gave her. “And I rescind the order about you having to feel all pain, unless I am disciplining you, of course. Please accept my apology that I didn’t think to clarify that before I sent you out to die.”

“Thank you, Torin,” she said.

However, a hint of bitterness remained in her tone.

“This can’t be easy for you,” I remarked and gestured to the room and its apparel.

Anastasia rolled her eyes but then they settled on the collars behind the counter and frowned and refused to say anymore. My gaze followed hers.

“Yeah, the situation isn’t ideal,” I sighed and pointed at the collars. “But I don’t see a simple solution around it that doesn’t leave us weakened in the process. The world has changed into something less civilised than what we are familiar with. That means free rein for injustice and the strong will rule over the weak. A hero from a story would fight for what is right, and in that story win. But the Darkwyrlds isn’t that kind of story and I’m certainly not the hero. My role in this is to be the bastard who kills him and take what was his.”

Anastasia gave me one of her snorts that I’d become accustomed to. “Yeah, it must be really tough for the guy that gets to give the orders. It must be a real fucking burden,” she spat out snidely.

I winced at the truth in her words. “I probably deserved that,” I sighed self-deprecatingly. “Time is up on the pity party for one. This is my life now and I’m not getting the old one back. Neither are you,” I finished pointedly.

I hopped up onto the counter and sat down, tapping the wood beside me indicating that Anastasia should do the same. I didn’t make it an order, so she resisted for a moment before relenting and clambered up to sit beside me.

“Just so you know, I have no plans to actively enslave people,” I started. “That is not who I am, even with the new Acheronian demony-ness. Not unless they deserve it, like those fuckwits who tried to take you from me. Monsters, probably, but not people. But if I come into the possession of slaves, I’m not going to fuck myself, or by extension us, by taking a moral stand on it either.

“I’ve been thinking about this a lot, even before the advent of this grandiose market. I’ll do what I can to give regular people a way out as quickly as possible. If they have someone willing or capable of paying a fair price, I’ll sell, and they can be freed by that person. Otherwise, if they are willing to trust me, they can sign as short an indenture contract as I can get away with and they will be free when their time is up.

“If they prefer to take their chances on someone more heroic coming along, killing me, and freeing them, that will be their choice. Which is the best I can do in the circumstances. This also means I won’t hesitate to seize any slaves we come across as booty. In a weird way I’m almost doing them a favour. Although I doubt they will see it that way, not in the beginning at any rate.”

Anastasia remained sullenly silent, which didn’t surprise me. Neither did the realisation that I was parroting Dean’s words about slaves being thankful to their owners from our first meeting. He really did know me better than I knew myself back then.

“But the fate of other people isn’t what’s got you all tied up in knots, is it?” I continued. “We both know you had precious little empathy for the plight of others before and probably a little less now that they could be a source of food for you.”

Anastasia grunted in annoyance beside me. “If this is you trying to be kind and reassuring, then you fucking suck at it,” she snarled without any real heat.

“No” I chuckled. “This is me being honest and hoping you will give me the courtesy of doing the same without me having to demand it.”

“That’s the fucking problem,” she snapped with a fiery temper. “You control me. You can make me do anything.”

She glanced at my crotch quickly and then averted her eyes just as swiftly, all but confirming what she had been thinking I might order her to do in the future.

“True,” I said simply. “But I won’t. Make you do anything, that is. Sure, there will be times I need to give you orders and have them followed and you may not like them. Just like my order to let the Fomorians kill your avatar, but like that order, I will only do so because it’s what is needed to save us. That us, includes you.”

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I nudged her with my elbow companionably, which elicited another unhappy noncommittal grunt.

“Or to punish insolence and insurrection,” I added more sternly. “I cannot appear weak to those who follow me. Fair or not, people do not respect weakness. They may say they do, but they don’t. And if they don’t respect you, they will seek to undermine or supplant you. I, we, can’t have that if we are going to survive and flourish.”

Anastasia harumphed but didn’t contradict me. If her father really was a Russian oligarch, she would be all too aware of what I was talking about.

“Most importantly,” I went on. “I will never order you to do what’s got you in such a foul mood.”

“Really?” she griped. “And what would that be all-knowing one? Did your Preternatural Insight let you read my mind?”

I laughed loudly at that.

“I don’t need a skill to know what might be on the mind of a beautiful young woman who finds herself at the mercy of a man, one who has complete control over her if he so desires,” I replied. “And as Meatloaf sang, I would do anything for love, but I won’t do that.”

I expected some more vitriol, but Anastasia surprised me when she giggled instead. “That’s not what those lyrics mean, you know. The whole song was actually a list of stuff he wouldn’t stop doing, not the other way around.”

“Huh?” was my enlightened response.

“In the song, he says something like I’d never forgive myself if we don’t go all the way tonight and then the lines about doing anything for love, but not that. What he won’t do is forgive himself if he doesn’t fuck her, not, well, not ‘not fuck her’ for love if that makes sense,” she explained with a quirky smile.

“Well, shit,” I exclaimed, my thunder well and truly stolen. “You get what I was saying, right? And my point stands.”

“So, you’re telling me you aren’t going to fuck me,” she mocked with obvious disbelief.

“Nope, Ana,” I whispered. “I’m telling you the only women I take into my bed are the ones who want to be there. There is a place for you if that is what you want, but only if it’s what you want. You are going to have to ask, nicely I might add, if you want a seat on the Torin meat train.”

Anastasia blushed at my unexpected forwardness and looked away. Which all but confirmed my assumptions about how she felt. Hopefully, my reassurances helped clear away some of the contrary concerns warring within her and upsetting her so much.

With the tables turned, I slipped myself off the counter and left her to ponder the terms of sexual engagement I’d laid down.

My expectations for the future were that she would hold out for a while longer, and probably up the ante on the flirtatious behaviour. She would want to test to see if I’d be true to my word or if I would buckle at the first hard-on and compel her to sleep with me.

I got the distinct impression, especially when I spotted her checking out my ass as I walked away, that she wouldn’t be as disappointed with the latter as she tried to make out. Not that it would happen, patience is a virtue and maybe the only one I was left with.

When you understood that people were walking, talking, contradictions the easier it became to process their illogical and mystifying behaviour.

Anastasia wanted me to take her to bed but was pissed that I could order her to do it, even though having sex with me is exactly what she wanted to do. Hence, her giving me verbal shit whenever she could and saving my life when she didn’t have to.

She was both glad and angry that she belonged to me, and her behaviour was befittingly variable because of this.

It would be interesting to see how long she could last before she cracked. Less than a week, I reckoned.

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