Where All Paths Lead

Chapter 3

It had been the comforting warmth and relief of finally having his beloved slave in his possession, safe and close, that had pulled Vidar into the sleep that had so often evaded him and rarely heeded even the prescription sedatives on the worst nights. It was the cold settling over where she’d laid that woke him now. His long, flat hand smoothed over the bedsheets as his brain, dazed from the abrupt reintroduction to natural sleep, slowly and patiently collected thought. The idea of her absence occurred to him as a sensation of loss he could not place, as though he’d just woken from a lonesome dream he could no longer recall anything of but sorrow. With the drag of his hand, his shoulder and arm ached a bit from handling the wide sudden motion of the bullwhip, that ache bleeding memory into his thoughts that brought something sharper than what he had allowed himself to feel before. Guilt pierced through that ache, magnifying it, spreading it like a chemical burn upon his mind. Anger washed over him to drown that guilt, to cover it in a balm of blame toward anything and anyone other than himself that had put the whip in his hand and tore muffled screams from her when he could not soften the impact of the cowhide cutting her flesh. He could apply anger to anywhere, but guilt only went inward to where he could not bring himself to look. Consciousness roared up from that balm of anger and all at once, his mind was a bustling, hot, overcrowded calamity of thought that converged to one sharp point: Simone was gone.

Vidar stumbled out of the empty, cold bed that was still damp with their sweat and sex, her scent stirring up from the sheets with his abrupt movements. The freshness of her sweat clinging to him and mingling with his own riled him further. He’d miscalculated, misjudged her obedience to be the same as what had kept her in Anders’ house even throughout all that they’d done to her there, but she’d escaped from here at the first opportunity. That she would remain so complacent with the circumstances set for her by him was an assumption he had made from some silly idea of loyalty she had toward him. She’d kept what he’d done, no matter how vile, a secret, but secrets were not solely kept out of loyalty.

He tore through his house and only found what was missing: his coat, his wallet, his keys, his car, and more alarmingly, his rifle and ammunition. A chill froze each notch of his spine in a rapid flash as he considered how the girl he had freshly whipped and raped had taken a loaded rifle in her small hands while he had napped, completely unaware. While she had not murdered him the way his brain automatically completed that envisioned scene, he hated that she had wounded him by leaving. That she could wound him. There was never a place for tenderness between them, but he’d allowed the beginnings of such delusions to take root under a mindless pursuit of unmonitored desire and rampant emotion. Her submission, surrender, secrecy, and servitude were not devotion no matter how effective Leif’s conditioning was, just like his misguided affection towards her was not love. It had never been love and it could never be love. Scorched earth permitted nothing to grow; not the deeply buried seeds of guilt, not the invasive spores of delusion. No, there was nothing there to wound but his pride. There was nothing else that could be.

He sat hunched over his knees in his unlit living room, breathing hard from his frustrated and fruitless search while he tried to move his thoughts away from the aggravating depth of disturbance her leaving had inflicted and instead focused on what to do. Maier was dead, and with him, Vidar was either free or in more dire circumstances with the people that maniac had been working for. Either case had led him to the same conclusion that disappearing was the most rational choice, but now that she was gone, he found himself stuck. The plan was still rational, yet he was not. Even though she had betrayed him and would likely betray him again, he could not vanish without her. He had to find her.

From all that Maier had told him, the police could not be trusted. As easy as reporting his car stolen would make this, he could not have the cops finding Simone only to have her delivered to Leif’s captors for the hefty bounty they’d placed on capturing her alive. How Maier had gotten to her first when she’d made such a public spectacle of herself was pure luck of the madman being in the area and alerted to the live feed of her thrashing someone in a café on social media. Vidar could only hope she wouldn’t do something so garishly ostentatious again. No, he would have to do this with as little exposure as possible. He’d need to do this himself.