from a darkened garden and the atrocities she’d seen, “there won’t be anything to know. It’ll be over and done with, and Braun won’t be any wiser.”
“And that, right there, is what will shatter your dynamic into splinters. Irreparable shards of what you could have with him. Honesty, trust, communication. The tenets of the lifestyle. Blunt deception is...Jesus, if any of my subs pulled a stunt like this, I’d kick their ass to the curb and walk away without looking back.” Connie’s voice was hard, the Domme in full swing. “Being scared is no reason to deceive him, Bodie.”
“If I tell him, then what?” Bodie almost shouted. This time when she pulled on her hand, Connie let it go, and she lurched to her feet, swaddled in the blanket he’d bought for her. “He’ll treat me like I’m fragile!”
Connie laughed lightly, a contrast to her dark Domme tone. “Sweetheart, he wears kid gloves with you now. The manner in how he treats you won’t change—the way he claims you the first time will be the only difference.”
“Then what does it matter? Rough or gentle, does it actually fucking affect him if he doesn’t know?” A little freaked out by the fact she was actually discussing losing her virginity, she paced like a rabid wolf, biting her index finger. “If I’m going to have sex, I just want it over with, goddamn it.”
Connie shoved onto her feet and crossed her arms over her chest. The look in her eyes—when Bodie dared meet them—was intimidating. “And if he hurts you in the process? That not only affects him, Boadicea, but be damn sure it will have lasting and damaging consequences for you. One bad experience can sour sex for you for the rest of your life, instead of opening possibilities.”
Screwing her eyes shut didn’t stop the memories assaulting her like fists raining down on her head. That one awful night when she’d dragged herself to the Callahan’s house to turn herself into the whore her father told her she was. Standing in the shadow of the house, her insides freezing with the depravity of what she was seeing, and the soul-consuming fear that the girl bleeding and strapped down on the picnic bench could have been her if she’d arrived just a little bit earlier.
Three teenaged boys she’d known for years—more through their father’s connection to hers than through actual interaction with them—tormenting the petite blonde no more than a couple years older than Bodie had been. Coarse blue rope tied around her wrists and ankles, rubbing her pale skin until blood stained both.
The edges of a dirty rag stuffed into her mouth visible around the duct tape muffling her frantic screams, reducing them to incoherent grunts.
Bodie remembered gagging once, swiftly, as the youngest Callahan—Robert, named after his asshat of a father—stripped off his clothes and stood bathed in the murky yellow light of the security lights. His brothers had slapped him on the back, cheering him on, and he’d gleefully climbed onto the table, on top of the girl, and...
Bodie had already had her one bad experience and it hadn’t even been hers. She was still paying for her cowardice now, the moral weight of running from the gruesome tableau instead of trying to help the girl still crushing Bodie into the ground eleven years later.
Bodie’s parents had brushed it off when she told them what the Callahan brothers were doing—because after all, boys will be boys. They’d threatened her with the same experience, complete with the Callahan boys doling out the punishment, if she dared breathe a word to anyone else.
Monsters guarding monsters.
To this day, Bodie didn’t know whether the girl had been left alive. No body matching her description was ever reported found, there’d never been a mention of her on the news as missing or dead, but knowing what her father was capable of and how close he was to Callahan Senior, Bodie had no foolish dreams of the girl surviving that night.
The only one left suffering was Bodie.
“I thought guys wanted virgins?” Here came the cocky attitude again, the walls drawing in to shield herself from memories and Connie’s wrath. “The whole ‘my penis is Christopher Columbus’ fantasy they have.”
Connie snorted out a laugh. “Jesus, where do you come up with this stuff? I don’t think any man I’ve ever known has fantasized about his cock emulating Christopher Columbus. And honestly? As much as they brag about what they’d do to a virgin, half of them would