Chapter 25

Lucca brought Valerie a glass of water, and helped her move to a sitting position. The reversal— the sudden care, the tenderness— felt confusing and unsafe to Valerie; but she drank the water all the same, and the act of doing so helped her tamp down the sobbing, and gain some measure of control over her emotions. It wasn’t much.

“What do you mean, you can’t?”

Lucca sounded like she was trying be tender, maybe even consoling; but there was still a simmering anger beneath it, even if it seemed, for the moment, to be directed elsewhere.

Valerie wasn’t sure precisely what Lucca was asking; she couldn’t imagine they didn’t know the details of her arrangement with Dana.

“If.. if I use the safe word.. I have to leave.. with nothing, Mx. I… I’ll die.”

“I don’t mean that, the contract bullshit. I just mean an ordinary safe word.”

Valerie shrank back; she felt the fire of Lucca’s anger start to burn closer to her direction, and she felt panic start to regain its grip on her chest. She opened her mouth to speak, and realized that Lucca had not asked her a question. She snapped it shut again.

“Girl, just talk to me. This isn’t a game.”

Annoyance layered on to Lucca’s anger, frustration, and whatever else that Valerie couldn’t tease out.

“I— I don’t understand, Mx. I— ordinary safe word?”

“Red, yellow; stoplight.”

Valerie just shook her head at Lucca. She was shaking.

Lucca was quiet for a long time, kneeling there and looking at her. After a few minutes, Valerie couldn’t keep returning Lucca’s gaze; she rested her head against her knees, hiding behind her cuffed forearms.

“Okay, look. Get some sleep. We’ll talk about this in the morning.”

Lucca left, closing the door behind themself. Valerie eventually found a quiet center; at least, calmed enough that she could do more than sob in fear.

She was still restrained, wrists and ankles cuffed together. When they left, Lucca had seemed brooding, angry, frustrated, and more that Valerie couldn’t understand. She wasn’t sure if they had left her cuffed on purpose or if they had been too distracted to think to unbind her. It was a distinction without a difference.

Valerie dragged herself to her knees, shakily, and crawled over to the cell’s shower and basin. With her ankles locked together, she could take only the smallest steps, and crawling was faster. She relieved herself, and washed herself as best she could, still restrained. The water in the cell’s shower ran only cold, but the chill of it soothed some of the throbbing in her back, criss-crossed as it was by whip marks, as much as it left her shivering.

She took her nightly medications, drank as much water as she could manage from the tap with cupped hands, and brushed her teeth. Her stomach growled in hunger, but she ignored it as best she could; even if Lucca was there to hear a plea for food, she feared she would be punished for speaking it.

She fell asleep, finally, on the bare mattress, teeth chattering with cold as her skin air-dried; pure exhaustion winning out over pain, chill air, and discomfort.

Darkness and road noise; rough fabric, bruises, and sore muscles. Gasoline and car exhaust.

The car hit a bump and Valerie was thrown against the roof of the trunk. She bit her tongue to keep from making a noise, certain she’d be punished if she did. She tasted the iron tang of blood. She couldn’t remember how she had ended up here, again, but the terror and hopelessness felt as real as anything. There was no rescue, this time— no solace. Her world had narrowed to the muted roar of tires against asphalt and her desperation to avoid as much pain as possible.

The car jerked again; and she was thrown again. She tried uselessly to stop herself from being slammed against the trunk; but with unyielding steel biting into her wrists and ankles alike, she could not find anything to hold on to. A hard edge of metal bit into her shoulder, and she yelped despite her best efforts. She instantly knew that the yelp was an error, but it was too late.

She could sense, somehow, the swirling being of pure loathing behind the steering wheel. The car squealed to a stop, and she could read the rage in the screeching brakes. A car door was opened, and she could feel the anger like a searing heat as it spilled out of the driver’s side door. The door slammed shut, and that anger flowed around the side of the stopped car. She tried to make herself small in the corner of the trunk, as the driver wrenched the trunk open.

She gasped awake, sobbing. Her shoulder stung from a particularly bad whip strike. The cell was pitch black; at some point as she slept, the lights had been turned off and a blanket had been draped over her. She had thrown it off in the throes of her dream, and it was tangled around her bound ankles. She was cold, huddled into herself as best she could on the thin mattress. It was not the first time that this particular nightmare had visited her; and she tried to steady her breathing, to let the sobs subside, and to reassure her frayed nervous system that she was safe.

Relatively safe, she thought, desolately. She still had several days in Lucca’s care before Dana was expected to return. It was harder than usual for her to calm herself down; and with no way to mark time, she had no clue how long was left until morning. She desperately missed the sense of safety she felt in Dana’s arms, and she couldn’t stem the flow of tears down her cheeks in the darkness and silence.

She tried to focus simply on resting; letting her mind wander and observing her thoughts. She tried to keep in mind the knowledge that rest was restful, even if she couldn’t find her way back to true sleep. She had no clue how long she lay there, floating at the edge, half-awake and aware the whole time.

She imagined the next morning, and Lucca’s anger, rested and re-energized. She couldn’t help but fixate on it. The door would open, and Lucca would turn the corner, whip in hand. They would chain her to the board-marked concrete wall in the cell, exposed and defenseless, to work over the front of her body. Each crack would be a searing line of pain across Valerie’s body. She would whimper and count, and close her eyes against Lucca’s amusement. Eventually, she would cry out in pain and count, and Lucca wouldn’t even break a sweat. The fall of the whip would land against her nipple and she would break, and beg, and scream. She would forget the count, and Lucca would start over, and tally another punishment against her for good measure. She would use her safe word, and Lucca would have well and truly broken her, and there would be no miraculous third chance for her. That brief, strange respite in her life would be over and she would have nothing, not even the scraps of a job she could still cling to. She would disappoint Dana.

Or worse, a mean little voice whispered in the back of her mind, Lucca would ignore the safe word and keep going.

She dreamed again, and it was formless and shifting. A dream of impossible responsibility and inconceivable complexity. There was no correspondence to reality in the murkiness; just a crushing weight of obligation. A task that couldn’t be performed. A puzzle that couldn’t be solved. Only certainty that her action — or inaction — would have consequences; and that those consequences would fall on her shoulders. She would fail, no matter how careful or thoughtful her choices were. What failure or what action was unimportant. She dreamed, and anxiety strolled through the landscape of her mind unchecked and unhindered, spreading darkness and shadow like inky black smoke, staining everything it touched.

The door clicked unlocked and swung opened. The hallway light was blinding enough in its sudden radiance that Valerie startled awake, unaware she had finally drifted into something like sleep. Her first thought was gratitude at being freed from her dream; and then the room lights proper switched on. With a whimper, Valerie squeezed her eyes shut against the pain. There was none of the graceful and gradual morning illumination of the upstairs bedroom here- just the instantaneous switch from impenetrable darkness to searing brightness.

Her eyes adjusted enough to make out Lucca’s silhouette in the doorway; the fear started to creep back in, but it wasn’t as all-consuming as it had been the night before. It would be wildly inaccurate to say she felt rested, but she was at least marginally less exhausted.

Lucca stopped a few steps away from her, and crouched down, closer to her eye level. She pulled herself into a sitting position, wrapping the blanket around herself as much as she could, with her hands still bound together in steel.

“I was going to take those off you, but you were asleep. I didn’t want to wake you.”

Valerie couldn’t detect a trace of the prior night’s anger in Lucca’s voice, and although something in her relaxed a little bit, the swing from anger to whatever this was still left her feeling cautious. She gave no reply, uncertain what protocols were still in force and opting to be conservative in her assumptions.

Lucca gestured toward Valerie’s bound hands. “Let me see.”

Valerie obediently extended her arms out towards Lucca; the blanket slipped from her shoulders with the movement, and she shivered. The rest of Dana’s home was heated to a point where she was quite comfortable, nude; the cell was, intentionally, not. It was not intended to be a comfortable space.

Lucca pressed a key of some sort against the cuffs, and the latches obediently popped open; first one, and then the other. Valerie re-settled the blanket around herself.

“I read the contract, last night, in full. I..” Lucca sounded remorseful, which came as a surprise to Valerie. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I thought..”

They frowned; displeased with themself, Valerie thought.

“I thought this was like any other D/s situation. I should’ve..” They inhaled, and exhaled in frustration. “I should’ve known Dana can’t do anything halfway. I should’ve been more clear with you.”

Valerie let the words sink in, quietly. The apology seemed genuine, but it didn’t ease the stinging or aching in her back. She didn’t reply.

“Can we talk? I’ll buy you breakfast.. That cursed woman doesn’t have a single egg or strip of bacon in this house.”

Several possible answers collided in Valerie’s head— as you wish, or goddess, please, I’m starving, or perhaps a simple please don’t hurt me.

“Y— yes, Mx.”

Valerie wasn’t sure what other answer she could give, ultimately.

Lucca looked… sad.

“You don’t have to do that right now. Can we just be two people, for a little bit?”