Things Aren’t Just Things

In the midst of her organizing the auction, a phone call disrupted more than her plans and threatened to change everything in Amity’s world.

Things Aren’t Just Things

Journey to the Mistress’s Academy in 3 Parts

Things Aren’t Just Things – Prologue

HE CALLED HIMSELF a healer. Not a doctor, not a nurse, not a spiritual guide. He was the healer. He walked into the dark room, stopped and listened. Shrieks echoed off the walls. Pleas to be released. Promises he’d do what they demanded. Vows that they could do anything to him and he’d obey. Each wail of terror felt like it was sucking the air out of the suffering man’s lungs.

The healer felt like he was suffocating.

No one had to tell him how much pain the agonized creature was trapped in. Words couldn’t describe even if anyone tried.

He turned his head when he sensed two others in the room. They cared about the man’s suffering. He could sense that as much as he felt their confusion. They didn’t know how to help the man shrieking in the center of the room. But they wanted to.

That’s why she brought the healer here.

The two people exuded waves of overwhelming frustration. The healer knew they were powerful people, each powerful in the same way but from opposite poles. Yet they were listening helplessly to the man’s desperate cries that reverberated throughout the room.

“Yes,” the healer replied to my unasked question.

I wrapped my arm around My Cop’s back and felt rock-hard tension in every muscle. He was my only line of defense if the healer I bought at the Only the Best auction posed a threat. He hadn’t been vetted by My Cop’s researchers, and I’d sent his security team out of the building to try to give the nearly hysterical former soldier a sense of safety. It didn’t work. He was still pleading, crying and making wild promises to nonexistent captors. He was stuck in the nightmare they imprisoned him in, one that led him to come to the heartbreaking conclusion that he had only one way out. If he couldn’t kill himself, he’d make them do it for him.

He was back in that place in his head, even though he’d escaped more than a year-and-a-half ago and wound up owned by an inept woman who put him up for sale in the auction.

That’s where I saw him and bought him after threatening Big Mike with my single-tail to put an end to his bidding war with me.

They didn’t have to unmask him when the bidding started because it wasn’t his face that told me who he was. I recognized the unit tattoo on his shoulder. When I first brought him and one other soldier to my world, I called him “Two” for the two stars he wore on his shoulders. The other was “One.” My Cop begged me to fix what was wrong with One. Back then, Two was an above-average pain boy with the heart of an undefeated warrior. One was different. He turned out to be a lot more.

The one-star had been tortured when he was taken prisoner but he built a space in his mind that he retreated to when they brutalized him. After he was repatriated, he passed every psych test they threw at him and the doctors declared him fit to serve. His single star was all he had to hold onto except that time I kept him here. Those two days were burned so deep inside him, it kept him going on the outside when he felt empty inside.

One hid his problem from everyone except My Cop who knew something was wrong. It had to be fixable, even though he didn’t know what it was. “He’s a good man,” My Cop said. Two hours with One showed me what he was hiding. That night, I fixed it.

One was impotent. He’d learned to live alone physically and emotionally for years. That night, with the help of my red-handled whip, I ended his problem and sent him home whole. I kept my eye on him for two years, made him live according to my rules from sunup until bedtime and when he put in his papers, he begged to come back. Now he’s Gage, one of my exclusives, whose aura glows when he makes me happy. It shines every day.

Two was more complicated. Something about him told me there was more inside him than even he knew. He had more years to go in the service, so I made him a remote, mainly for clients who wanted to rent pain sluts. Clients who traveled near where he was stationed paid to use him in quality hotels when their schedules meshed. Two was thrilled to see an incoming appointment and always thanked me when the client left. The clients gushed.

That lasted until they sent him overseas on a murky assignment whose details he couldn’t share with me. I’m used to that; after all, that’s life with My Cop. But My Cop is in a category by himself. He’s the only man who will ever wake up next to me in the morning.

Two finally asked to be released. Whatever that mission was, he was getting trained 24/7 and I had few clients traveling overseas to who wanted to rent him. We parted and I didn’t hear from or about him again.

Until I saw him for sale at the auction. The scars on his arms, back, legs and cheeks weren’t mine or from my clients. They were brutal, inflicted by sadists. I have a rule about pain. It must have a purpose and that purpose is always mine.

It took My Cop and two men on his team to control Two’s outburst on the private jet when we flew back to Amityworld after the auction. He needed two more to wrestle him into the building we were standing in now and strap him to the bench so he couldn’t hurt himself.

I know what slave frenzy is — that insanity I put boys in to make them know I own their only way back — but that wasn’t the state Two was in. He was reliving the horrors he endured so vividly, words were useless and touch only made him scream more.

I saw only two options. Either I’d dose him with black gel, wipe every memory and thought from his head, then sell him to a shadowy household where he’d never be heard from again. Or I’d rebuild him, give him back his life and see where that led.

Gage was adamant that I didn’t send Two back into hell. Once was enough. My Cop asked me to rescue him. Zayn spent taxing hours with Two, trying to reduce his stress with his Tantric skills.

Nothing worked.

On the last morning of the auction, my stable manager showed me a third option. Quinn led me to the leftovers in a corner of the auction building and pointed to a boy standing by himself, oblivious to the commotion of last-minute sales and shipping what we bought.

His tag said he was a healer. Before I could say anything, the boy spoke first. “Please let me help. His essence needs the work your boy is doing. I can heal his native spirit.”

I was determined to rescue Two but didn’t know how. That’s why the healer was standing silently next to him. He’d answered what I didn’t ask out loud. It was a simple question.

“Can you heal him?”

He’d already said yes, so I had only one more thing to say. “Help me rescue him.”

Amity’s Note – Things, Journey to the Mistress’s Academy

WHEN THE AUCTION was over, there was a long to-do list waiting for me. Every item needed my attention. Even with the new bigender house manager built by Reckoning and my personal girl who is supposed to take care of my schedule when I’m away, there were gaps in their work. Only one was a household issue, but it was serious. Most glitches came from the stable.

I expected some problems at home when I took Quinn with me to the auction. He was expert at keeping my two dozen boys in line, given his drill sergeant history. That’s one reason I prefer Marines. You don’t have to tell them twice what to do. My Cop is partial to Rangers. They make up his teams, the stealthy ones that keep my world safe. The ones dressed in black that I rarely see.

It was going to take more than a week to straighten out the problems on my list so they never happened again, whether I was there or traveling. That’s the difference between discipline and punishment. Discipline fixes the offender. Punishment teaches the rest of the stable not to let what I did to the rule breaker happen to them.

The threat of pain is a very good instructional tool. Real pain is more effective, especially when it’s done in front of others. They see it, hear it and don’t want to feel it so they learn to behave.

When our limo pulled into the transport garage after the auction, My Cop’s team was struggling to constrain Two, who must have suffered some kind of psychological break right before the plane’s wheels touched down. My Cop hauled Two over his shoulders down the airstairs like a side of struggling beef and laid him on the floor in the limo’s back seat under my feet. Two moaned and shuddered for the entire two-hour drive. Once we parked, My Cop wrestled Two out of the car, laid him on the garage floor while four black-clad men with weapons on their belts held him down. With their boots.

My Cop’s focus was on the traumatized former soldier and needed clear space to deal with him. He sent Zayn to his attic cell with instructions to do whatever he does there with oils and herbs, the ones that make my nights so special. Tyler, exhausted from being handed over to Big Mike’s brothers at the auction for my fun, labored up two staircases and fell on his cot. He sent Quinn to the stable to deal with the shipment of men I bought at the auction. Quinn ran double-time to get as far from the garage as he could, away from Two who was still quaking and screaming on the garage floor.

My Cop’s last instruction was to Jenna, my 5’11” big-boned personal girl with pitiful breasts that I planned to have fixed in a few weeks. I like my personals to have big bosoms; huge is better. I enjoy watching them bounce when they run. Jenna’s would barely fill a B-cup if I ever let her wear a bra.

He told her to ignore my luggage for now and take me to my office until he sounded the all clear. To make matters worse, he stationed Gage outside my office door with instructions not to let me leave until he was relieved.

I tried. Gage wouldn’t budge.

When it comes to my safety, my exclusives obey My Cop. Given what happened in the past, I reluctantly agreed.

I didn’t have to like it.

Hours later, My Cop told me Two was in rough shape and a danger to himself and therefore to me. He didn’t want me to know how he got him into the punishment building and tried everything he could to keep me from going there.

It didn’t work. I bought Two. I owned him. I take care of my property.

That’s why I bought the healer, a last-minute purchase from the leftovers bin.

Quinn was surprisingly useful at the auction and that was another decision I had to make. He was an excellent stable manager but he had a lot more to offer than that. He had talents I could use and skills I needed.

Before I decided where to start on my list of problems, there was someone I wanted to talk to. She always has the right answers. My inner voice speaks only to me. And to Amityworld.