Page 30 of Lacey's Fight

They stopped inside a small room with a large window taking up most of one wall. The door behind them was closed and locked, and for a moment Lacey worried that their cover had been blown after all, and Amelia was going to order them interrogated and murdered.

But instead, she pulled out a video camera. “I’m sure you understand that since you have found the behind-the-scenes workings of what we do here I can’t let you go without some sort of insurance.”

“Insurance?” Ben barked in a tone sharp enough to cut glass.

“So you don’t think about double-crossing me,” Amelia expanded.

“What kind of insurance exactly?” Lacey asked. There was no way she would touch one of the girls here, and she knew Ben wouldn’t either. They’d end this right here if it came down to it. They might lose The Master, might lose a few of the other men who would come to make purchases, but they would at least save these girls.

“One of our girls has been acting up. She requires some discipline before the auction tomorrow night,” Amelia explained. “You watch the punishment session, we film you watching, so you are not able to claim at a later date that you were unaware of what was going on here. Do we have a deal?”

Her insides trembled with revulsion, but Lacey kept her expression serene, if a little bored. “I really have no interest in the training of slaves. If we did, we would have done that part ourselves and saved some money. But if you insist then we have no problem with that, do we, darling?”

Ben stood behind her, a solid wall at her back. She felt the same tension swirling inside her radiating off him, but his voice was steady when he spoke. “Hurry up and get it done. I don’t like my wife to be exposed to the rougher side of life.”

Amelia nodded to one of the men, who pulled out a radio and told another man to bring the girl in. She held up a video camera, careful to keep herself out of the frame.

On the other side of the window, a girl was marched into the room. She was naked, pale, too thin, with fading bruises littered across her otherwise smooth porcelain skin. Her ankles were shackled meaning she stumbled and walked awkwardly, and her wrists were also handcuffed together.

In the middle of the room was a wooden bench. The girl was taken to it and bent over it, her shackled ankles chained on one side while her wrists were bound on the other leaving her on all fours. The bench was angled slightly so that her bare backside was elevated. The man who had brought her in retrieved a whip that was hanging on the wall and carried it over to the girl.

With the first blow, Lacey wasn’t sure who flinched more, her or the poor girl being abused.

By the third blow, she was struggling to contain her anger.

By the sixth, she could hardly hold back her tears.

By the tenth, she was reliving in her mind every single time she had been tied up, naked, and vulnerable while The Master tore at her fragile skin with a whip.

Pain, humiliation, terror, the trifecta of what her life had been back then.

What life was for these girls.

That she was standing by and doing nothing to stop this girl from being tortured would be a black mark that would score her soul for eternity.

* * *

August 5th

9:29 P.M.

Ben was worried.

Not about himself or their safety. Well, not physical safety anyway. But he was worried about how Lacey was handling things emotionally.

What had happened in the underground tunnels had been rough on her.

No, beyond rough, it had been hell for her.

Given what he knew about her past, he could far too easily imagine Lacey as the one being held captive. Her naked body bound and beaten, terrified but not broken.

This woman couldn’t be broken. That he was convinced of.

She was so much stronger than he could ever hope to be.

Lacey Smith was the very definition of a survivor.

Which was why it hurt him to see the blank look in her eyes. To anyone else you wouldn’t be able to tell anything was wrong. When she spoke, her voice was still bright, her smile appeared genuine, and she chattered away to anyone who came near them. After the disaster that was the trip down to the underground tunnels, they’d come back to the manor house and had lunch. Then they’d taken a swim in the pool, sat in the spa for a while, and talked with a couple of the other people here for the auction.

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