Buttons and Lace (Buttons 1)

Rape was a lot more painful than I realized. I finally understood what it meant when people said it wasn’t a crime of passion but one of violence. He didn’t get off on being inside me. He got off knowing I was in immense pain.

I knew being in captivity would be degrading, painful, and scarring. But I had no idea how bad it would be. My captor was a psychopath, and he would do a lot worse things to me the longer I stayed there.

It’d only been a few days, and I already wanted to crack.

I wanted to sob my heart out and pray for a miracle.

I wanted to curl into a ball and die.

I wanted to forget who I was and travel somewhere else, drift into a realm where thoughts didn’t exist. I just wanted to be there, hovering on a level of semiconsciousness.

But I had to stay strong. I had to follow the plan I laid out for myself. I needed to find a weapon and kill him. That’s all I had to do then I could run out of there and return home. I could return to Jacob. I could return to my job. I could return to sleeping soundly at night, knowing I would never be hurt.

You can do this, Pearl.

Just focus.

He can take your body but not your mind.

Eyes on the prize.

***

He liked to beat me.

I think he liked that more than fucking me.

He loved to play hide-and-seek. I would run off into his elaborate mansion and try to find a place where he wouldn’t find me. And he came looking for me—a bat in his hands.

When he found me—which he always did—he beat me until I passed out.

He loved to tie me up and whip me, slash me into submission. He liked to make me bleed, and when he saw my blood ooze from my skin, he made me bleed even more. He got off on a lot of sick things.

I was his plaything. I wasn’t human. He treated me like a rag doll he could throw around.

Someone made three million dollars off of this.

He probably had a yacht in the Mediterranean, a beach house in Sardinia, and a Lamborghini in his garage.

While I was smacked around.

When I got out of there, I would hunt him down. I would find him and get that three million dollars. I didn’t care about the money. But I earned it. It was mine. No one should benefit from my enslavement other than me.

I just had to get out of there.

I wasn’t sure what he did for a living, but he must do something important to own a castle. It was in the midst of a city, but I couldn’t determine where. The bars over the windows prevented my escape, but I could still look outside. It was definitely Europe. Without any distinctive landmarks in sight, I couldn’t determine exactly where I was. Maybe France. Maybe Italy. It didn’t matter. Either one of those places would have an American Embassy. All I had to do was get there and tell them I’d been kidnapped. Then I’d be on the first plane back to the States. When I got there, I would never leave again.

My tormentor was gone during the day, or at least, in a place where I couldn’t access. Guards patrolled the inside of the house, watching all the exits and windows. Cameras were placed in every room—including my bedroom. I didn’t have a single ounce of privacy. He watched every little move I made—like a dog.

I spent my time in my room, savoring the sweet hours until he returned from whatever the fuck he was doing. Every day, he took me viciously. The only exception to that was when he was sick. So far, that only happened once.

There were no clocks or electronic devices in the house besides a sound system built into the walls. I had no idea how long I’d been there. It felt like an eternity, but it could have only been a few weeks. A month, perhaps.

But it felt like a lifetime.

Since there was nothing to do during the day, I took a lot of naps. I spent my free time recovering from the injuries I’d sustained. My ribs hurt in all the places he kicked me, and my back was scarred with welts. He took off his belt and beat me with it, marking up my ass most of all.

I noticed he never hit my face—at least not hard enough to make it bruise. And he never injured me from the knees down. My shoulders and arms were spared too. My back and ass took most of the damage.

Perhaps he didn’t want anyone to know what he did to me.

There was some hope in that. If a visitor came to the house, I could tell them I was being held captive. I could show them all my marks and bruises. They would call the cops for me. No one could hear that and do nothing.