13. Breaking the Digital Wall
thirteen
Breaking the Digital Wall
Ifound myself in a chair near the fireplace, the bourbon Charles had handed me sitting untouched on the side table.
It was warm. Every drink in this house went warm before I could finish it.
My own pulse did the counting, a hard, steady tick against my collar.
It hadn’t slowed since Charles had looked at me and said, ‘Soon.’
The bass from the main hall still came through the walls in a low, bloodless thump, no melody in it anymore, just rhythm, and underneath it I could hear ice shifting in glasses, low laughter, ...
the low murmur of men who had already decided the night had gone well.
Charles stood near the bar with his own glass refreshed, talking to nobody in particular and everybody at once, the way he did.
“The convention numbers are strong,” he said, not looking at me, addressing the room as if it were a board.
“Performance reviews have been exemplary. Exceeded all projections.” He turned his glass a quarter turn, studying the light through the liquid.
“Demand is such that we’ll need to restructure the asset’s schedule for the next quarter. Open up more availability.”
“That’s good,” I said. The words came out clipped, arriving half a beat off from where they should have landed, and I heard the wrongness of my own rhythm even as I said it.
My eyes had already cut past him, toward the archway that led out of the east wing, toward the corridor beyond it that I couldn’t see from this chair but knew ran straight down to the gym.
“Repeat client rate is the real metric,” Charles went on, unbothered by whatever he’d heard in my voice. “First-time bookings tell you about interest. Repeat bookings tell you about value.” He took a slow sip. “We’re seeing repeat requests specifically.”
“For her,” I said, the words a statement, not a question.
“For her,” Charles confirmed, flat, no more weight on it than he’d give a line on a spreadsheet.
He glanced toward one of his senior men across the room, some private acknowledgment passing between them that I wasn’t included in, and then his attention came back to me, unhurried, the way it always came back to things, on his own schedule and nobody else’s.
My chest was doing something I didn’t like, rising and falling in short, audible pulls that I couldn’t smooth out no matter how many times I told myself to breathe slower.
My hand found the glass again and I still didn’t drink from it, just held it, the cut crystal pressing ridges into my palm, and I looked toward the archway a second time, then a third, unable to keep my eyes from doing it.
“When does she come back tonight,” I said.
I’d asked some version of this an hour ago and gotten nothing but when the session closes.
I asked it again anyway, because the closing of the session was the only thing left in the entire building I cared about, and because sitting in this chair with a warm drink and a party thumping through the walls had stopped feeling like something I could keep doing.
Charles set his own glass down on the bar, unhurried, and checked his watch, not with any urgency in the motion, ...
a man simply confirming a fact he already knew.
He looked up from it and found me across the room with those flat gray eyes that never seemed to need anything from a room before they’d already taken it.
“The clients are finished with her,” he said. “She’s yours to collect.”
Nothing in his tone marked the sentence as anything other than a logistics update, the same register he’d have used to tell me a shipment had cleared customs. He didn’t smile.
He didn’t ask if I wanted a minute to compose myself, didn’t offer to walk me there, didn’t do anything that resembled ceremony.
“East corridor,” he said. “Third door on the left.”
He turned back to the bar and poured another two fingers of bourbon, his attention already gone. He didn’t watch me stand or cross the room. I was just fulfilling the delivery phase of a transaction that, for him, had already closed. He had structured the deal; the rest was just logistics.
I was moving before I’d fully registered deciding to move, my glass abandoned on the side table without a thought spared for it, my legs carrying me out of the warm amber light of the east wing and into a corridor lined with framed architectural prints, black and white renderings of buildings that had nothing to do with anything happening in this house tonight.
Recessed halogen sconces threw small pools of white light along the runner underfoot, evenly spaced, and my footsteps came faster with every one I passed, the sound of my own dress shoes on hardwood the only thing I could hear clearly now, the party’s bass dropping away behind me a decibel at a time until it had thinned to almost nothing.
The corridor bent once, and the air changed with it, the warm cologne-and-bourbon smell of the party giving way to something flatter, cooler, a mechanical hum bleeding through a door somewhere ahead of me, ventilation working overtime against whatever heat six months of use had built up in that room.
Under the hum came the smell, unmistakable even at this distance, sweat gone stale and thick, and beneath that something closer and more particular, the smell of a great deal of sex that had happened in one contained space over one long night.
My pulse was hammering hard enough now that I felt it in my own teeth, my collar soaked through, my hands not quite steady at my sides.
I counted the doors without meaning to, first, second, ...
and by the time I reached the third, my stride had broken into a kind of forward fall...
, my hand already finding the door handle before the last of my footsteps had finished landing on the hardwood behind me.
***
The door gave under my hand. No monitor, no glass, no encryption.
Just the room itself. Halogen light washed across black rubber floors, and from the long mirrored walls, the training bench repeated into infinity.
At the center of it all, at the center of every reflection, was Sara.
Strapped down exactly where the last of fifteen men had left her.
Her wrists were cuffed to the forward anchors, the leather straps darkened with sweat where her skin had worked against them for however many hours this had run.
Her thighs were bound wide at the ankles, held open on the bench’s incline, and every inch of her between them glistened under the light, a slick, translucent sheen coating her stomach, the insides of both thighs, pooling in the small hollow at the base of her spine where gravity had carried the accumulated evidence of the night and left it there to gather.
Her hair hung plastered flat and dark against the back of her neck, in damp, heavy ropes, and her skin had gone flushed everywhere the light touched, with five distinct finger-shaped marks pressed deep into the flesh of her hips.
The two cameras Charles had mounted stood exactly where I’d watched him square them earlier that night, one aimed dead level at her face, one angled in behind her, both still running, small red lights holding steady on each housing, recording a room that had, until this second, had no need of a third witness standing inside it.
My shoes made a flat, deliberate sound against the rubber with every step I took toward her, no carpet here to swallow it, and the sound carried clean through the room’s mechanical hum.
Sara’s head turned at the second footstep, slow at first and then all at once, her whole face swinging toward the noise with an alertness that hadn’t dimmed a single degree across however many hours she’d spent bound to that bench.
Her nostrils flared. Wide, violent, immediate, no warm-up to it at all, the tell arriving whole and total the instant her eyes found mine, and what filled her face after that held no embarrassment, no flicker of recognition.
Her gaze met mine the way it had met every other man's tonight: as the next client in line.
Her eyes held mine with a wild, unblinking brightness, glassy and lit from somewhere far past exhaustion, and her lips parted on a breath before she spoke.
“Yes,” she said. One flat syllable, no question riding under it, no doubt either, and her hips rolled against the bench’s restraints on the word, a wet, tacky sound rising off the leather where her skin had bonded to it and pulled loose again.
I reached the bench and my hands were shaking before I’d even lifted them, a fine, visible tremor running down through my knuckles the same way it had over the basin six nights earlier, except there was no cloth in my hand this time, nothing between my skin and hers.
I laid my palm flat against the inside of her thigh first, high, close to where the restraint cuff bit into her ankle, and felt the slick, cooling wetness there give under my fingers, thick in places, thinner in others, ...
the layered evidence of every man who had finished inside her or on her through the long hours of the session.
I dragged my hand slow along the length of her thigh, feeling the evidence under my own fingertips.
The raised welt at her hip. The faint bruising at one knee.
My fingers found her, spread and swollen, still glistening.
The muscle there was gone slack from overuse, telling me more plainly than any camera ever had exactly how much she’d taken tonight.
I didn’t say anything. There was nothing left in my throat that would have come out as words.
I unbuckled my belt with hands that still hadn’t steadied, the leather sliding free of its loop with a small, dry hiss, and I let my slacks drop where I stood, and Sara’s eyes never left my face while I did it, ...
that wild brightness holding, fixed and absolute...
, tracking me the exact way I’d watched her track fifteen men across a locked feed, no difference in the look at all, no softening for the fact of who I was.
I gripped the restraint bar mounted above her head, both hands closing around the cold metal, and I positioned myself between her open thighs, and when I pushed into her the give was immediate and total, no resistance anywhere, just heat and slickness closing around me in a rush that punched a groan out of my own chest before I’d decided to make one.
She was drenched, swollen, the walls of her pulsing loose and wet around every inch I gave her, and I felt, more than saw, the accumulated fluid of the whole night shift and give beneath the new pressure of me, her body a used, open thing that had stopped belonging to any single man hours ago and now belonged, for these few minutes, to me alone by simple accident of arrival.
Her nostrils flared harder the deeper I drove into her, a hard, sustained pull of air through her nose that timed itself to my own rhythm within seconds, and her hips rocked up to meet me despite the restraints holding her wide, straining against the cuffs with a hunger that had nothing performed left in it, no different from the hunger she’d shown a stranger three hours earlier.
Her eyes stayed locked on my face, wide and wet at the corners, but there was no love in the look.
There was only flat, hungry compliance. It was the fixed, total readiness of a body converted into an instrument, and she took me the way she’d taken every man before me: without distinction, without tenderness, her slick flesh gripping me on every stroke while her breath came ragged through a mouth that had forgotten how to shape words.
I drove into her harder, my grip tight on the bar above her head.
She met every stroke, hips straining against leather, nostrils flared, wild eyes fixed on mine.
She was watching me the same way she’d watched the fifteenth stranger.
Buried inside her used body, under the flat white light, I felt the truth of what I was to her.
The final client of the evening. Nothing more, and nothing less.