“I was very young, and I really thought I shouldn’t remember the things that happened. The first time they took me, kicking and screaming from Reaper and my sisters. That first time when they hurt me so bad, I didn’t think I could survive. My sisters tried to stop them from taking us, and they beat them in front of us. Then they took them and did horrible things to them and threw them down into the freezing-cold basement, where we had to watch them die.”
Little beads of sweat trickled down his face. He tightened his fingers around her ankle as the doors in his mind widened, spilling those memories out along with blood and death. So many. He pressed his fingers deeper into his eyes, deeper into her ankle.
“I had no real idea of sex. What it should or shouldn’t be. I was too young. I just knew I didn’t want to hurt like that, and I fought them every chance I could get. Apparently, there was a group that really enjoyed hurting their partners, and they thought it would be great fun to teach me that was how to get aroused.”
He shook his head. “I’m not telling you this very well, but it’s the best I can do, Seychelle. I watched them whipping girls and boys. The first time it was done to me, I went after them, ripping the whip out of their hands and trying to flog them. I was just a little kid, and they found it amusing. I was considered really good-looking, and they liked to take turns whipping me. By that, I mean forcing me to go down on one of them while another whipped me. The more I fought, the more they kept at me. This went on for years. The rapes, the whips, the floggings. It was brutal.”
He couldn’t look at her, his past merging with his present so that he could smell the sex, the blood. Feel the combination surrounding him. “They were training some boy, about fifteen, and I was probably eight when I took the whip from the fifteen-year-old and turned it on him. After that, I was the one learning to wield that whip. There was no way I was going to let them tear me up like that if I could help it.”
He had no idea those little droplets of sweat were tears until the room turned blurry. He used his arm to swipe across his face because he couldn’t let go of her. She was sanity. His only sanity in that moment when his past was so close.
“When I would lay perfect stripes on someone, they would reward me, sucking my dick, making me come. I swear I didn’t know the difference, only that it was better to feel good than to hurt like hell. I was very good at training others to like pain. Erotic pain. Pain and pleasure are so close, so intertwined, and it isn’t that difficult to confuse the two sensations. I was so good at it. I could turn pain into pleasure every time. Every way. I did that shit for years, Seychelle, and they called me the Master of Pain, the Whip Master, so many other titles. And I earned every one of them.”
He closed his eyes against the memories, of thin red streaks and tears, of his body moving in others. The trouble was, those memories were behind his eyelids. Carved into his soul. There was no getting rid of them.
“I liked training them. I liked seeing my mark on them. Each year I got better. The better I got, the harder it was for anyone to assault me. I learned to fight. I learned to hurt others. I learned so many really ugly things without knowing they weren’t right. It was the only sex I knew. I didn’t even know it was done any other way.”
He had been shaped into a monster without any realization that was what was happening. He was twisted into something unrecognizable. Something vile.
“I hurt others so I wouldn’t get hurt, at first. Then because it kept my brother from getting hurt—at least, that was what I believed. Then my body was so confused it didn’t know how to have an erection unless I was marking someone. While I trained my partners to like pain, I didn’t realize I was being trained to need to give it. To see those marks. It’s been impossible to have any kind of an erection without it.”
It was a confession, straight up. He left out the terrible, brutal details. The things that had put those scars all over his body. The children he’d watched die. The girls he’d trained given away when his handlers got tired of them and wanted newer playthings so they could start all over again. Watching those first girls being cruelly tortured and eventually killed. He didn’t give her those things, but they were all there inside of him, swimming in that red-hot pool of rage.
“There’s no way to reverse years of damage. Over twenty years, Seychelle. I’ve tried to fight it. I’ve read everything I could get my hands on in the hopes of being different, but it isn’t going to happen. I know that. And I know that these things trapped inside of me, the voices of the dead wailing for justice, I know I’ll never be rid of them. I need to avenge them just the way I need to mark my partner and then make it all better.”