When Demons Are Redeemed: The Dominant's Muse

Ten - Year Anniversary -- The Promotion

TEN

Year Anniversary -- The Promotion

As days turn into weeks and then weeks into months without Tristan ridding himself of her, Catherine continues to follow him from city to city, from hotel suite to hotel suite, and from arena to arena as well, when she is forced to attend that night’s performance. His music, however, has not recovered its former magic for her, and she now only vaguely recalls the tremendous high of that first night when she and Malika had stood side by side, watching him perform.

Tristan’s fans, of course, must not know about Catherine, and so, she remains well hidden in the shadows. When the singer leaves the tour for a few days at a time, she remains behind in a hotel with her own guards, Rudy and Logan, a way of life that has left her with no sense of home at all.

The many guns that Catherine sees all around her are  all symbols to her of her captivity, of her containment, as she does not feel that they are there to protect her, since she senses herself most expendable due to Tristan’s echoing threat of her inevitable “accident.” Everyone from Tristan’s dangerous world, however,  is very much aware that attempting anything against his property would beget violence, not because he loves Catherine or anything as whimsical as that, but because she is his, and doing anything to her would therefore be perceived as a direct insult to Tristan, as an attack against him, which the Taliano family would not allow to stand without ruthless redress.

During this last year with Tristan, Catherine has repeatedly done her work, her “everything,“ and has pleased and impressed her employer. She knows to draw from her bag or recipe book something that nullifies his control only when a rare mood is upon him when he is willing to surrender that control. Being quite perceptive, intuitive even, at guessing what Tristan is in the mood for sexually, her actions and reactions consequently strike the right chord most of the time, which impresses him. As for those times when she does miss his cues, Tristan is swift and abrupt in setting her straight. To please him, Catherine does know to begin some sessions pretending to want to take the lead in order that he can then enjoy subduing her, and, all in all, she does have the wherewithal to do what must be done. That momentary odd feeling on that first night, it has not returned. She knows the real him. And observes almost every day all the fans who do not.

Although Tristan imposes many rules on Catherine, she manages to find ways around some of them, which at times amuses him, but at other times, truly annoys him. She has not, however, utterly angered him yet to a crescendo into an all-out fury, but doing so is bound to happen sooner or later, and Tristan’s cruelty knows no bounds then.           

Just last week, on his twenty-first birthday, when Tristan had been teased by his father about a certain whore still being a part of his inner circle after a year, a part of him had felt that that very crescendo might come to possess him right  then and there, before family and friends gathered to mark his milestone birthday. It had taken Tristan some time to get over that ribbing, and he had calmed down only after repeating to himself a few times that what mattered the most was that he was still the only person that Catherine had in the world, that she was still what he wanted, and that she still gave him what he desired. Before he was over the teasing, however, he had given thought to not reinvesting into the family business the large sum of money that he inherited that day. It was an irrational consideration that would have never come to pass, but he had been upset enough to play it out in his mind. All that people had seen of that upset, however, had been something in his eyes that had told them that something was not quite right. But no blow up. No words. No crescendo.