Seth studied them. They both watched him. “Leah, are you telling me you’re willingly his slave?” He already knew her answer. How many times had he envied her devotion to Kaden over the years?
A lot.
“Master takes very good care of me.” Her voice choked up a little at the end as Kaden’s eyes met hers. “He’s always taken very good care of me,” she whispered, nuzzling his hand when he stroked her cheek again.
“Let’s eat before it gets cold,” Kaden said as he removed his glasses and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand.
After dinner, Leah cleared the table while Kaden led Seth to the back of the house, to a room he’d always assumed was Kaden’s private home office. He hadn’t been in there since construction was completed. Normally it stayed locked, a small electronic number combination pad just above the knob.
“You need to see this,” Kaden said. “And I don’t want you to be shocked or surprised.”
“Too late for that,” he muttered.
Kaden opened the door.
Inside looked like something out of a porn movie, only better quality and more tastefully decorated. A low, padded bench with leather cuffs attached at each end. An X-shaped frame. A large rack holding…
Holy fuck.
Whips, riding crops, and various other implements of torture.
The odd collection explained the keyless lock. During construction, Seth had asked him if he needed it because of his files.
“Something like that,” Kaden had said with a smirk. “Keys are a pain in the ass. I’d rather have a combo lock. I don’t want people wandering in here when we have guests over.”
Seth hadn’t questioned it at the time. He knew Kade had a lot of high-profile corporate clients. It made sense to him then.
Made perfect sense now, even if he was still in shock.
Kaden walked across the room to a bookshelf and pulled down a photo album. “Come here,” he said.
His legs numb, Seth walked over while Kaden flipped through the pages, finding what he wanted.
“This is shibari.” He pointed to a page of pictures of Leah trussed in intricate rope bindings, a ball gag in her mouth, looking…
Well, looking like she was enjoying herself.
Kaden flipped through page after page, naming the different rope configurations.
“She’s my model and assistant during classes.” He smiled, his finger trailing over one particularly intricate looking configuration. “And at home, of course, she’s my practice model.” He closed the album and put it back on the shelf before pulling down another one. This time he flipped to a page of pictures taken by someone else apparently, because Kaden and Leah were both in the shot. It looked like he was speaking to a gathered group of people. Leah was bound—naked—to a bench similar to the one in the room behind him.
Kaden wore jeans but was shirtless and holding a—
“Is that a whip?”
Kaden nodded. “Singletail. Specially made. That one’s my favorite. Cost me nearly eight hundred dollars. This was a basic singletail class. Problem is, too many assholes think they can use one on a person when they really can’t. I spend several hours a week practicing to get and stay as good as I am.”
Maybe that explained Kaden’s naturally muscled physique despite never going to a gym. Kaden wasn’t ripped, yet he was firm and trim while Seth had managed to gain about twenty pounds and go soft since his best days in the Army.
Kaden put that album away and turned to Seth. He dropped his voice. “Have you ever looked at her arms?”
Seth hesitated before he nodded. He’d noticed the scars. Now he wondered if Kaden had done that to her. The possibility sickened him.
“She did most of that to herself before we ever met. Do you know what cutting is?”
“Not really.” But relief crept back in.
Kaden glanced to the open doorway behind Seth, as if listening for sounds from the kitchen. Leah was still cleaning up dinner. Seth could hear her singing to herself at the other end of the house. Apparently satisfied that she couldn’t hear them, Kaden lowered his voice and continued. “Some people, for various reasons, need pain. They use it. It’s how they function, how they deal with their emotions. Some use it to help relieve intense emotional pain in an external way. Some use it to feel like they’re connected to life again. Some just flat-out get off on it.”
“There’s medications for that kind of crap, dude.”
“When you’re a fourteen-year-old girl and being forced to give your foster brother blow-jobs and getting sodomized by him because he threatens to get you thrown out on the street, you don’t exactly trot down to a shrink and ask for a pill.”
Seth blanched, sickened. What kind of hell had she been through?
“She didn’t take the news well last night, obviously. I needed to give her a long session last night to get her to cry. She’s had two more today already. I took the day off from work. I knew she’d need me.”
“She likes this?”
“She needs it. There’s a lot I can’t tell you tonight. You just have to see it for yourself. She’s not a pain slut like some are. We have very specific routines and rituals we’ve developed over the years that help her stay calm and focused and deal with life.” He motioned Seth over to a chair in the corner. Seth walked over and sat, his mind reeling.
“When we were first dating,” Kaden continued, “she worked at a restaurant near USF. That’s where we met. I went in after class one day. She was beautiful. I never believed in love at first sight until I met her. She claimed she was a klutz in the kitchen, always getting these weird injuries, mostly cuts and burns on her arms. She always had something. I had no reason not to believe her. Until I talked her into spending the weekend at my apartment and she got up to make coffee.”
Kaden’s gaze drifted, his mind’s eye traveling back in time. “She didn’t hear me get up. I walked into the kitchen and watched her take a knife out of the drawer and lay it against her arm. She closed her eyes like she was saying a prayer or something, and when I screamed, she jumped.
“I wanted to haul her to the hospital. I thought she was trying to kill herself. She was so upset I’d seen her, she got dressed and ran out. I panicked. I couldn’t find her. She wouldn’t answer my calls, wouldn’t come to the door at her apartment. I finally staked out her workplace and made her talk to me.
“She wouldn’t tell me why. She broke up with me right there even though she was crying and…it just felt like she didn’t really want that. I can’t explain it. I begged her to talk to me and she wouldn’t. I knew I was in love with her, and it was killing me that she wouldn’t talk to me. I knew she’d had a crappy life, but I didn’t know everything.”
Kaden wiped his eyes. This wasn’t easy for him. “I went in every day after class and would sit and try to get her to talk to me. When she quit a few days later, I finally got one of the other waitresses to tell me where she went. Then she told me something else. ‘She loves you, but she’s scared of people. If you want her to open up to you, you need to prove you’re not going anywhere and won’t hurt her.’
“I was losing my mind. After three weeks I waited for her at her apartment one night and begged her to let me talk to her. She finally let me in, and she was like a fucking zombie, man. She looked like a dead woman. She told me she loved me, but that she couldn’t see me anymore. I was sitting there on the couch trying to talk her into changing her mind when she got up and walked to the kitchen. Before I could get there, she’d cut herself.”
“Fuck!”
Kaden nodded. “Then she started screaming. She screamed and cried, and she let me hold her. I sat there on the floor with her for an hour, and she finally told me about her father and the shit that happened to her growing up. What she did to deal with it. She told me she wanted me to find someone ‘normal’ who could feel emotions without cutting them out of her flesh.” He studied his hands for a minute. “I told her I didn’t care. I loved her. That I wanted to help her.”