Owner (Blood Brotherhood 2)

But enough of my philosophizing. I have a girl to wash, evidence to destroy.

With the worst of the once human goo safely down the plug hole and off to marinate and slowly decay with the rest of the Brotherhood’s waste, I can run a bath for the thief.

I insert the plug and she sits patiently, letting the warm water fill up around her. She’s very quiet now that she’s naked and contained. Her face is flushed with shame. She’s hiding from me under her curls, keeping her head down, but there is too much of her exposed for her to truly hide.

This girl is mine now. Her guilt makes her belong to me. She has abdicated all the power of an independent, law-abiding woman, and she has become my captive little sinner.

As I suspected, the warmth of the bath helps to bring her back to herself.

“Hell,” she says, letting her fingers run through the water. “I’ve really fucked up, haven’t I.”

“Yes.” I hand her the soap. “Get cleaned up.”

She lets the soap slip from between her fingers and slide into the bath. “What’s the point?”

“The point is that today is not the last day. There will be tomorrow, and the next day. And you will have to atone for your sins sooner or later, and probably again and again. That is how the worst crimes work. They create a debt that must be paid for one's entire life.”

“I guess his bill is settled then, whoever that was. I did him a favor, maybe.”

“Unlikely. The bill is not settled upon death, it remains with the soul.”

"You are not making me feel better.”

“I am not trying to make you feel better. I am trying to make you understand what a significant and unfixable mistake you have made.”

She splashes me with the bathwater. It’s not a playful action. It's a tearful one. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m sorry I took your fucking hammer. And I’m more sorry I cracked someone's skull with it, but I guess I can’t tell him that, can I?”

“It is too late for apologies to either one of us.”

She starts to cry again. I want to thrash her. I want to chastise her so thoroughly she is completely humiliated and humbled. But for now, she is traumatized and that is not a frame of mind I can use.

So instead of beating her to within an inch of her helpless little life, I wash her. I have to dip into the bath to get the soap she lost, but I am soon using it to clean her, touching every part of her deliciously naked body with careful, and even reverent caresses. She is curvy and she is soft. There is something so delicate about her, the way she sits in the bath with her full breasts pressing against her gently rolled stomach.

She’s sitting with her knees drawn up, her head down, her arms wrapped around her lower legs. I have to unfurl her gently like a flower, teasing her hands free of their grip and lowering her legs. She has dark curling down at the apex of her thighs. I spread them under the guise of washing her and find my fingers tracing up the length of them.

There’s no resistance from this bright, terrible, lovely, awful woman. Just a soft moan I am sure she did not intend for me to hear. I no longer know if I am cleaning her, caressing her, or trying to seduce her. The latter seems unnecessary. She's mine. She will yield to me because that is the way of things.

I didn't intend on being this intimate this quickly, but ultimately, I made the choice to allow the hammer out of my sight and subsequently lose it. One could say this is my fault. If you extrapolate that, you could even say that what has happened to little Anita here is also my fault. But that seems like a little too much blame for my liking. So I wash her, and I consider that I might offer some words of comfort after all.

“It won't ever leave you,” I repeat. “But it will lessen over time and become something you can learn from.”

“What’s the lesson? Don’t bash people in the head with a hammer? I already fucking knew that, didn’t I?”

“Don't steal. Don’t lie. And do as you are told when I tell you what to do.”

“Are you planning on telling me what to do?”

“Yes,” I tell her. “Very much so. From this day forth. You don’t take a breath I don’t sanction. You took my hammer. Now I am taking you.”

Anita

He means it. He really means it. I felt it when he first took me over his lap. He is possessive. He was mad I took a priceless artifact and relic, but I think he would have been mad if I’d taken his pencil. He’s that sort of man.