Chapter 4

I make my way to the room, all the hoops in my skin begging not to have my arm’s weight pulling against them. After crawling up four stairs on its edge to get inside, I crawl over the plush bed.

The room is beautifully decorated. The outside of the house looks menacing and dilapidated, but the inside is pristinely curated and cared for.

The bed is raised so far off the ground that you need to take the steps beside it to enter, and the mattress is thick and fluffy. The blankets are soft and inviting, the complete opposite of my captor.

“Now, while I gave you an easy first task, the second one was something most wouldn’t have allowed me to do. You surprise me, Grace,” he says as he enters the room, and his use of my name has fear lacing through me again, adrenaline following and easing some of the pain from my strings .

I swallow.

How does he know my name?

My brain doesn’t have time to work it out, however.

“Lie back.”

His words are stern and loud, and my stomach flips as I try my best. I can’t lay all the way flat because I don’t want to get my strings tangled up or have any of them pull on the sensitive piercings. Also, the wound in my belly still feels like it’ll rip open at any moment.

What I did in the living room, I did to survive, and it seems I’ve displeased him even though I did the best that I could.

Even as his words seem praiseful, the look in his icy eyes behind his mask is conflicted, scary, even.

“You’re going to be rewarded,” he announces, opening a drawer on the bedside table and grabbing something from it.

He holds a massive candy cane in his hand when he climbs onto the bed and sits on his hanches between my legs. My breathing speeds as I try to close my legs, but I’d have to lift them over him, and I know he wouldn’t allow it. I shift up on the pillows, and he shakes his head.

“Don’t start misbehaving now, or this will go worse than you can imagine.”

“Please, don’t,” I whimper, anxiety thrumming in every tissue in my body.

He cocks his head to the side. “You don’t want your reward?”

He shakes the otherwise clear candy cane in his hand, with its glistening red stripes gleaming in the candlelight as he does so.

I swallow.

I have a choice.

I fight him off, rip off these strings, and maybe get outside bare and alone. Or, I go along with this and give my mom time to find me.

“I—I want my reward,” I stammer.

He nods once. “That’s what I thought. Now, be a good puppet and come closer.”

I wiggle down the bed towards him.

“Lift your knees and spread your thighs for your master,” he orders, and I listen, tears trickling down my cheeks as I expose myself fully to him and his torture.

“Not everything in this house has to hurt, puppet. This life is what you make it,” he taunts as he finds my entrance with the silicone candy cane, fucking it inside me slowly at first.

I can keep myself grounded for the first few strokes, ignoring my bodily response to infiltration. That’s until he bends, lifts his mask again to expose his perfect lips, and sucks my clit.

“Fuck!” I cry, bucking upward, pleading with a roll of my hips for more.

“See, darling. See how good it can be here? How wonderful being my good little puppet can be?”

I’m breathless, and every sinew of my body is flexing and stretching as I try to ride his mouth, where he flicks his tongue over my clit as the candy cane moves in and out of me in measured, even thrusts.

“Please,” I beg, and now I know I’m genuinely dangling over the dark side. I’m not begging for him to stop now. I’m begging for more, for him to make me come. For him to take the ache in my soul away.

“Beg your master for your orgasm!” he commands, still moving the candy cane, but his tongue has stopped its work over my clit.

I look down, seeing only the mask he has at an angle over the top of his head. His face is free and hovering over my pussy, threatening to take me where I want to go if only I behaved.

“Please, master. Please make me come.”

“And how do you want me to make you come, little puppet?”

“Suck my clit, please, master. Suck it until I come all over your candy cane.”

My words spill out, sounding mad and frantic, but he growls and sucks my clit into his mouth, moving the candy cane faster, harder, deeper, my cries echoing through the room and mixing with the sounds of the crackling fire in the fireplace at the end of the bed.

“So close, master,” I plead, begging with my tone for him not to stop, and I realize how deranged this is.

This man ran me off the road, chased me through the fucking woods, tied me to his ceiling, and now I’m writhing over his mouth like a schoolgirl about to have her first orgasm .

But I can’t care.

It feels too good.

I feel too free.

It makes no sense when I’m his bound prisoner to feel like that, so I stuff the thought away to deal with later.

“Master!” I shout, melting to bits as my orgasm slams into me, his lips only sucking my clit harder, making it seem to go on far longer than I’ve ever experienced.

The pain in my belly only adds to the overwhelming rapture.

I’m trying to catch my breath when he stops moving the candy cane. My breathing hitches as he sits back onto his haunches between my open legs, tugs the candy cane out of my center, and shoves it into his mouth to clean it.

He’s forgotten all about his mask, and I search his beautiful face for the malice it would’ve taken to have run me off the road and done everything he’s done.

But I can’t find it.

Who the fuck is this man?

I wake on my back, and my body aches from how I slept. After the mind-blowing way my kidnapper made me come, he tucked me in and told me to sleep.

I didn’t need him to command me because as soon as he’d closed the doors, I’d closed my heavy eyes and drifted off .

I listen for him for a moment before I get the blankets off me and move to the edge of the bed. I find that panties and a strapless bralette have been put on me at some point, and I wonder how the hell I’d slept through him dressing me.

But the fact that he’s given me any clothing when I’m to be his puppet perplexes me.

This entire scenario perplexes me.

As he said, I can leave through the now-open bedroom door and enter the living room.

Brown leather furniture fills the room, a roaring fire in the hearth, and a blue and tan rug beneath the furniture on the cherry wood floors.

He’s nowhere in sight, however.

When standing, my strings are too tight to do much of anything. I look like a puppet in a children’s show, awkwardly angled and dangling for someone else’s pleasure.

My stomach grumbles, reminding me how hungry I am, but I know I can’t do much for myself.

Growling in annoyance, I inspect my surroundings before I walk up the staircase from the living area. It has a matching blue paisley rug running up the middle of it, keeping the chill of winter off my feet.

I was surprised by how the cold in Florida felt when I crossed into the state only days ago.

When I get upstairs, I look around at the surrounding doors. There’s one that’s closed, and I vaguely recall him telling me there’s one I’m not allowed to go in. That’s likely the one since I can’t even reach the door handle with all my strings keeping me upright.

To my left, two more doors have been left wide open.

I don’t know what time it is because all the windows have been boarded up to give the home an abandoned feel, but it feels late, as if my internal clock is still working somewhat.

I find my kidnapper sprawled out on his back, face bare, snoring without a care in the world.

He knows I can’t get free to harm him, or at least, he seems to think so.

A tight beard on his face is dark and matches his hair, which wasps off his head in delicate waves.

His chilling eyes are hidden behind his closed lids, but my eyes wander down further.

He’s shirtless, clad in only gray sweatpants that ride his v-cut perfectly. His cock is hard beneath them as if whatever he’s dreaming about behind his closed eyes has a thrill racing its length.

Without the mask, he’s beautiful. Something out of a film or from a magazine cover, so I wonder how he came to be who he is. Why he’s kidnapping and torturing women, killing them, even?

I remember him saying that none have survived him.

But the way he looks right now, innocent and handsome, with an air of mystique, I can’t reconcile the fact that he’s a killer with the man I’m looking at.

“Look your fill yet, puppet?” His voice is absent of sleep, and I wonder if he was ever asleep to begin with .

My stomach jumps, and my chest seizes as I step back away from the bed.

“I was just hungry,” I answer, heading for the door.

“Mm, I could see that. Well, if you’re hungry, you’ll need to convince your master to get up and feed you.”

I turn back, looking over his sinful face as he grins.

It gives his beauty a twist, the smile. Turns it into something sinister and malicious.

There he is.

There’s the man capable of killing.

“Don’t make me repeat myself. I’m not a man with any amount of patience.”

His bed is the same height as mine, likely for the same reason. When I’m on my bed, I’m close enough to the ceiling that my strings have leeway. It relieves me from being strung up like the puppet he’s made me.

I slowly climb the steps to his bed, and he places his hands behind his head, awaiting what I’ll do to him.

I’m hungry, but half of me hates what I’m doing right now, even so.

Survival makes people do crazy things.

“Come, puppet. I won’t bite. Hard,” he taunts.

I climb over his body, straddling the same rock-hard cock he still has displayed beneath his sweats, and grind over it.

“And what is it that I’m to pay you for feeding me?”

“Master,” he grinds out, anger seething the edges of his beautiful eyes .

“What would you like me to do, master?” I ask again, voice shaking.

He grips my hips, holding me tightly as he slips from beneath me, coming in front of me on the bed on his knees.

“Sit.”

I drop onto my butt, sitting awkwardly with one leg dangling to the first step over the edge and one drawn up in an L shape.

On his knees, his waist is at my face.

“Take out your master’s cock,” he orders, and his voice is dripping with something sinful, but it’s nothing I’m afraid of.

Instead, it seems to sate some gnawing hunger in my stomach.

I listen, tugging down his sweats to his knees to free his massive erection.

My eyes travel over it before lifting to look at his. His hands are on the ceiling, holding onto the wooden plaque my strings anchor into on the tracks above. “Suck, darling,” he rasps out.

A shaky breath expels out of me before I lean forward with my mouth open, licking the drop of salty pre-cum off the head of him.

He hisses, and it lights something in my belly.

A candle with a primal flame I didn’t know existed within me before flickers to life.

“Be a good puppet and suck my cock, and then I’ll feed you until your heart is content. ”

Forgotten is the hunger I had, replaced with a far more bone-chilling one.

Because what I’m hungry for now is him.

The man who ran me off the road and strung me up like a plaything.