Vienna Bargain Read online

  “Then I will strip you, and punish you for disobeying.”

  She’d known that was what he’d say, but the mention of punishment still made her heart pound with fear.

  Her body clearly wasn’t in sync with her brain, because her pussy clenched in reaction to his words.

  Alena opened her eyes, unsure what she was going to do—obey or fight—and looked around for the first time. She’d seen the room when she walked in, of course, but she hadn’t actually looked. Her focus had been inward, and behind her where Alexander was.

  They were standing in a simple, elegant home office. The desk was positioned facing a large window that gave a slightly different view of the protected marshland and meadows. From here she could also see the Bavarian-castle style wing.

  She’d just been thinking of him as a knight, and now there was a castle.

  Besides the desk, with its high-backed brown leather chair, there was a small seating area with an armchair and a two-person couch. A tall bookcase against the wall behind the couch invited someone to select a book and have a seat.

  It reminded her of the library area in his home in Vienna.

  There was also a set of floor-to-ceiling storage cabinets which had a band of carving running across the center of all the doors, a rolling bar cart, and two doors besides the one they’d just passed through.

  She scanned the room a second time, looking for any tie rings, hooks, or other bondage points. It looked far more like a billionaire’s office than a bondage room.

  The desk chair was the wrong height to be bent over, and the arms prevented it from being used for a spanking. The armchair had similar issues thanks to an arched back. The couch was about the right height, and a spanking was always better on a couch, but on the whole it was a rather vanilla, if elegant, space.

  “This is your play room?”

  “You don’t believe me?”

  “I just…” It was unnerving that he was still standing behind her. Was it because he wanted to make sure she didn’t make a break for the exit? She glanced at the other doors—one in each interior wall—and wondered where they led. “It seems anticlimactic that we traveled all this way so you could torture and rape me in a home office.”

  “I will not rape you.”

  “Just the torture then.”

  “Among other things.”

  Well that was terrifying and sexy and those two emotions were an unholy mix that made her feel slightly sick to her stomach.

  She pressed one hand to her belly and took shallow breaths.

  “This isn’t the playroom.” He was closer now, she could tell from the sound of his voice. The floor was wooden; she should have heard his steps, but the sound of her breathing must have covered it. “Strip. Then I’ll take you there.”

  “I have to be naked to enter the playroom?”

  He um-hmed in confirmation and played with her hair.

  “Just me, or do you make your other slave strip before she’s in your playroom too?”

  Alexander didn’t answer. For a long time they were silent. In the past she’d been able to handle that silence, but now it made her feel jittery. Unable to stand it any longer, she turned to face him.

  Alexander was so close that as she turned, her shoulder skimmed his chest. Her eyes needed a minute to focus, and when they did she found herself staring at, studying, his lips.

  “I’ll warn you one last time.” He reached out and toyed with a lock of her hair, which only made the jangling, jittery feeling worse. “Strip.”

  Alena closed her eyes and turned her head down and away. At her sides her hands curled into fists, then released.

  Eyes still closed, she reached for her waistband. When the pants slithered to the floor, Alena stepped backwards out of both those and her shoes, putting enough distance between them that she was able to pull her shirt up and off. She let it drop, then reached down to peel off the no-show socks she preferred when wearing flats.

  There was something so mundane about taking off socks that it made the moment seem more invasive. Seeing someone strip off socks at the end of a long day was a little intimacy shared by couples. Removing socks was rarely part of a striptease, because it wasn’t all that sexy.

  The socks joined her shirt, leaving her in her bra and panties. Both were a basic tan-shade of nude. Again that made it seem more intrusive, because these were items she would never have worn to a club.

  When she’d gotten dressed this morning—with a security guard standing watch outside the bedroom door—she’d considered putting on some of the lingerie she’d brought as possible club attire, but hadn’t yet worn. Doing so would make her feel more submissive.

  And that was why she hadn’t. This wasn’t agreed-upon, negotiated play.

  This was coercion.

  A devil’s bargain.

  She had no obligation to make herself appealing.

  You could have opted for jail in Serbia. Eventually it would have been straightened out.

  Alena reached back for the clasp of her bra. With a shrug it skidded down her arms and fell to the floor.

  Alexander watched her dispassionately, one hand tucked into the pocket of his slacks. There were dark circles under his eyes. Had he slept? She had, but fitfully, aware of the guard standing by the door they hadn’t let her close, and plagued by anxiety for the future.

  Hooking her thumbs in the waistband of her panties, she let them drop.

  Once she was totally naked the anxiety faded, eclipsed by visceral fear.

  She was naked and the most vulnerable, most in-danger, she’d ever been in her adult life.

  No one knew where she was. There was no chance of running for an embassy even if she did manage to get out of the house. Assuming there was a U.S. embassy, it would be in the capital, and based on the flight map she’d covertly studied on the jet, Moldova’s capital wasn’t anywhere near her current location.

  Despite that, and though she was scared, she no longer felt jittery. The fear was hard and cold inside her, almost reassuring in its weight.

  He stared at her, quiet and almost dispassionate. A billionaire examining yet another one of his possessions.

  Anger flared back to life as the seconds ticked by. Not rage as she’d felt on the stairs, but a cool anger that matched the ice of her fear.

  Alexander pulled his hand from his pocket. In it he held a folded piece of leather. The buckle glinted in the light.

  A collar.

  “Lift up your hair.”

  Alena gathered her hair, twisting it into a loose bun and securing it with one hand. The acrimony she felt kept her from shaking or flinching away as he slid the leather around her neck.

  He buckled it loosely enough that she could easily put two or three fingers between it and her skin. On one hand that was reassuring, but on the other that probably meant he planned to leave it on her for longer than the course of a scene.

  He would leave it on her for the remainder of their three weeks.

  Metal clicked and then she felt a small padlock fall into place at the hollow of her throat. Her free hand curled into a fist, but her tone was perfectly polite when she said, “May I release my hair, Sir?”

  Alexander’s brows drew together and he studied her face, as if trying to understand her sudden shift. Alena raised her chin, and met his gaze.

  She would play the part of a submissive when doing so cost her nothing. Addressing him as ‘Sir’ and going naked were both easy. Wearing the collar was less so, but doable.

  But she would not lower her eyes. That was where she would draw the line, and if he demanded it, that was where she would defy him, even if it meant physical pain.

  That rather noble ideal of defiance was undermined by the fact that her traitorous body was most definitely aroused. If he fingered her sex, he’d find her wet and ready to be fucked.

  The situation should horrify her, and in many ways it did, but how many times had she fantasized about being kidnapped and turned into a sex slave for a ha
ndsome, demanding master?

  Now the master in her fantasy had a face. Alexander’s face.

  When this was over she was going to need some intense therapy to reverse her Stockholm syndrome.

  “Yes.”

  She dropped her arm, standing before him defiant yet obedient, naked but unashamed.

  Alexander reached out, but instead of touching her hair this time, his fingers skimmed down her cheek. He dropped his hand and looked away, frowning before finally saying, “Follow me.”

  He led the way to the seating arrangement, but much to her confusion walked behind the couch. He paused at the bookcase to study it, and Alena craned her neck trying to see what he was grabbing. She didn’t think she’d seen anything but books on the shelves, but she hadn’t looked closely.

  He pulled on a book, then released it, where it dropped back into place with an alarmingly loud thud. Then the bookcase started to swing open, revealing a hidden doorway. Lights clicked on, illuminating the top of a spiral staircase.

  “You have a secret passage.” She didn’t bother to hide her delight. Some things were just too damned cool not to acknowledge.

  “I do.” Alexander motioned to the stairs. “And it offers privacy for my playroom.”

  This time she couldn’t stop the shiver, and her voice trembled a little. “No one else knows about this room?”

  “No.”

  “Meaning that in sixty years when they level this monstrosity, they’ll find my bones amid the rubble.”

  Alexander’s lips twitched. “They might not level this wing. It isn’t monstrous.”

  “Ah, good, so my remains will decompose to dust in your secret torture chamber.” It was meant to be both a joke and challenge. A way to make sure he knew that she knew exactly what was at stake.

  Her life.

  Alexander motioned to the top of the stairs, and for a moment she considered running.

  It’s just a game, just a game.

  Her mantra, the mental framework that made her so good at what she did, was crumbling, because the stakes were too high. To her, each investigation and case was a game in which she manipulated other people like game pieces. Usually they never even knew they’d been manipulated.

  She walked past him to the head of the stairs. The first smooth wood tread was cool under her bare foot.

  Her work put her in contact with the rich and famous. People who had little to no understanding of how life really worked.

  But there were wealthy people, and then there were the uber-wealthy, whose net worth was many magnitudes higher than that of the next tier down. Men and women whose money meant rules didn’t always apply to them.

  Manipulating a man like Alexander was playing with fire.

  Another step.

  This had always been a dangerous plan. She’d shifted it from dangerous to deadly when she let her emotions, her needs, change the strategy.

  She kept a hold of the rails on either side as the stairs continued descending. She’d assumed they were going to the ground floor but there had been too many steps for that. Or maybe it just seemed that way because her heart was racing and she had to force herself to take deep breaths so she wouldn’t hyperventilate.

  She relaxed marginally when she heard Alexander’s footsteps behind her, following her down.

  The overhead light at the top of the circular shaft containing the spiral staircase no longer illuminated the stairs. Now the only light came from small rectangular accent lights mounted in the wall shining on each step. She watched her feet, focusing on them rather than on the oppressive and growing darkness.

  When she reached the bottom, stepping from cool wood to outright cold stone, she wanted to whimper in relief. At the foot of the stairs was a small landing area and a door set into the concrete wall. The door was plain metal, like something that belonged in a warehouse, except there was no handle.

  Alexander nudged her gently out of the way. He flipped open a panel beside the door, revealing a keypad.

  “Would you like to enter the code?”

  Alena blinked at him, his question so unexpected that for a moment she was flummoxed. “Fibonacci sequence?”

  “To the tenth place.” He glanced at her. “I’ll change it.”

  The keys beeped as he pressed them, then a thunk seemed to travel through the walls. A round handle popped out of the door. Retractable handle—an uncommon security measure, but usually effective. She looked at the heavy door and keypad.

  “We’re underground, aren’t we? Not just in a secret room on the first floor.”

  “Yes.” He grabbed the handle and with a firm twist popped the door open.

  “It’s an underground prison,” she murmured.

  Alexander paused and looked over his shoulder at her. For a moment she thought she saw a shift—a softening around the eyes and mouth—but it was gone before she was sure she’d really seen it.

  “A panic room.”

  “You turned your panic room into a dungeon?”

  “I value my privacy.”

  Alexander stepped in, pushing the door all the way open and holding it for her.

  Alena looked at the underground playroom, felt the collar around her neck, and knew that if she wanted to get out of this with her sanity intact she’d have to be smart. Smart enough to remember he was her opponent, and this wasn’t some elaborate role-play. He wasn’t both the sexily malevolent villain and the black knight come to rescue her.

  Alexander hooked his finger through the D-ring on her collar and tugged her into his private dungeon.

  The walls, floor, and ceiling were uniform gray cement, and the room was lit by a dozen can lights embedded in the concrete overhead. The room wasn’t a saferoom-turned-dungeon, but instead a bit of both. There was a small generator and industrial-looking wall mounted cabinet tucked into an alcove.

  Opposite the door was a rectangular opening revealing a utilitarian bathroom with a toilet-sink combo and a circular water tank about the size of a phone booth, held to the wall by thick metal straps.

  She studiously examined the non-BDSM safe room elements, ignoring the dungeon bed that held court in the middle of the room.

  Alexander had released the collar once she was inside, and when the door thunked closed, she wasn’t able to suppress a mewl of fear. When he put his hand on the small of her back she nearly sank to the floor in relief. Despite the fact that she hadn’t heard him leave, that she’d been able to hear his breathing in the stillness of the room, she’d been terrified that he’d abandoned her in this gray coffin.

  “Regretting our bargain?” Alexander motioned to the bed.

  “The bondage bed is so far down my list of worries it’s not even on the first page.”

  Alexander blinked, then frowned.

  Alena turned in a slow circle. “I’m terrified of being trapped underground in this lightless, airless cement box.” There was a handle on the inside of the door, and that calmed her a little.

  “This is a panic room, not a prison.”

  “Aren’t I your prisoner?”

  “You made a disadvantageous bargain.”

  “You gave me no choice and we both know it.”

  “I am not the one who— And this isn’t—” Alexander stopped mid-sentence and paused. “The keypad locks and unlocks this door.” He pointed to a black LCD screen mounted in the concrete beside the door. “You may leave whenever you want. I will not change the code.”

  Alena arched a brow. “Really?”

  “Yes. You can walk out of this room at any time.”

  The look on his face made it clear he wanted to draw this out, to make a show of both offering her a choice while also making it so that any choice but staying here, right where he wanted her, was abhorrent.

  “Let me guess, I can leave this dungeon, but I won’t get access to my clothes, phone, or passport.” Her panic receding, Alena walked towards the bondage bed. “Maybe I find a phone, but I don’t speak any of the local languages, making it very har
d for me to phone an embassy.”

  Alexander’s irked expression told her she was right.

  “Or maybe your plan is if I try to leave the villa, the bodyguards might mistake me for an intruder and shoot me.”

  “I have no intention of killing you.”

  “Pardon me, of course not. It’s hard to torture information out of a dead body.” She reached up and flicked a chain dangling from the tall post at the foot of the bondage bed.

  “Tell me who you are.”

  She arched a brow. “I’m sure you have people working on that.”

  The Alena Moore identity was solid, but nothing was unbreakable. With enough time his people would be able to trace back and find out who she was. She just had to hope the data had gotten through and it was being put to use.

  He didn’t reply.

  Alena flicked the chain again, then started to circle around the bed. The posts of the frame extended nearly to the ceiling, supporting a canopy of metal lattice.

  The evenly spaced metal slats of the lattice created a pattern of diamonds. Decorative, but also functional—having all those bars overhead undoubtedly served as convenient places to loop rope or hook chain.

  Short chains were bolted onto each of the four posts, near the top where the posts met the metal canopy. The large-link chains dangled all the way to the floor, offering him a multitude of options. It could be as simple as securing wrists in a classic arms-raised pose, while strapping ankles to the bottom of the frame, recreating St. Andrew’s cross-stule bondage.

  The mattress—covered by a black fitted sheet and nothing else, was raised up taller than most beds, especially in Europe. She leaned against it, measuring—the mattress came up to the top of her hip.

  Which meant it was probably the perfect height for Alexander to fuck anyone bent over the bed while he stood beside it.

  Under the elevated mattress was storage. The meter-long drawers reminded her a bit of wide, low two-drawer filing cabinets. Or maybe it was the small locks above each of the four drawers’ handles that made her think of filing cabinets.

  She doubted there were files inside.