Taking Control is not just a graphic BDSM story and sex novel, but a full length dark contemporary thriller in 10 parts.
With adult themeed erotic romance, and explicit sexual content, it involves Ava and Lorenzo’s unusual sex life and sub and dom predictions and certainly gets darker as it progresses.
Readers should bear in mind this story is pure fantasy and include some of the more unusual and painful BDSM themes. This particular chapter is about what happens to James and has less sex but does contain medical fetishes and surgery.
And, once you’ve read each chapter, if you like it, please rate it!
Fenlands
Four weeks later two Serbian men, part paid in advance by Ava, were waiting in the dark. James emerged from his favourite pub at close to midnight, drink as usual.
They had found his apartment easily, tracking him until he reached one of the darker streets. Lazar came up silently behind him and fell him with a single blow. With Milos grabbing his ankles, and Lazar his head, they dumped James unexpectedly into the back of a recently stolen black cargo van.
James Rix came to on the oily floor of the van, his head bouncing up and down, as the vehicle rolled heavily across the soft ground. He remembered nothing after walking back from the Duke of York pub.
There wasn’t a glimmer of light through the thick blindfold, and his hands were Expertly tied behind his back, with fresh nylon climbing rope. Had he was in a pub fight? But then wouldn’t he remember it? His jaw was agony, and he wondered if it had been broken. Maybe he’d pissed off some husband whose wife he’d shagged. It wouldn’t be the first time that had happened.
After half an hour of being thrown around, from one side of the van to the other, the vehicle came to a sudden halt. He heard both front doors opening. That means two people. Seconds later, the back doors were wronged open with a squeal, and the blindfold pulled unexpectedly off his head. Light flooded in and he blinked furiously to try and adjust his eyes to the terrifying scene outside.
When his eyes finally got accustomed to the sun’s glare, he began to make out the enormous figures standing in front of him, two huge men in black skis masks and dark overalls, standing by the rear doors of the van. When he saw the long weapons, his bladder emptied.
Out in the fens, James had his legs, arms and hands soundly and expertly beaten with a pickaxe handle, a two pound and a four-pound hammer and a crowdbar. His finger and toes were broken with pliers, for good measure. Despite the pain, they kept him consciousness for as long as possible. The woman with the contract had insisted on that, as she had insisted that they memorise what they did to him, and then record the details on a mobile they’d been given.
They left James face up, barely breathing, lying in a cold fenland bog. It was Lazar who made the notes of their encounter on the way back to the city,as he was the only one who could write English.
When Tolgar met Ava for payment, she read the brief report from the Serbian and then listened, silently and intently, to the thorough recorded message of how James had met his fate. She nodded, occasionally asking a question of Tolgar about the details of the planned revenge she had ordered meted out on James.
She heard Lazar relaying, in his deep, icy and clipped accent, exactly what had happened to James. How he’d been left in the icy marshland fens that night, as well as the specifics of damaged bones and muscles Lazar’s spelling likely couldn’t have copied with.
She’d nodded one final time, handling over a cash envelope, the other half of the payment she’d promised them for the risky job.
James might live or die out there, but frankly she didn’t care.
She was done with him. It was time to get on with her life.
But what that life was all about, and who she wanted to share it with, she was only just beginning to work out.
Blackout
When James woke everything was dark outside. He was in a world dominated by nothing but pain. His whole chest was seized in a bright, hot age. Half buried in the rich peaty ooze, his face felt like a post-match football. He experimented with the tiniest of movements of his head, trying desperately to get his nose and mouth out of the foul stench of the thick, gloopy liquid around him.
Moving his head slightly to one side, he was thankful his neck didn’t appear broken. He had a racking pain in his arms and hands, where his fingers had been so nonchalantly and expertly mangled by the two men wielding the heavy hammers and crowdbar.
Gummy and glued shut, he tried opening his eyes, but could see little. His mouth was bone dry. He ran his tongue over His blistered and split lips to try and moisten them. From the iron taste he realized the sticky mixture was his own blood, oozing from head wounds from his through beating. He wasin very bad shape, but alive, just.
He wondered about that briefly. It would have been all too easy for them to have pummelled him to death with the weapons the two large thugs had used, so he must be alive by choice. But whose choice? The two men had been silent throughout the beating, taking it in turns with their primitive array of weapons and tools.
True, he’d pissed off many business history over the years, but this was far too brutish for anyone from a historical finance organization. No, it had to be something personal, some slight he’d made. Some comment he’d made in the wrong place, at the wrong time. Some idiotic remark he’d come out with. Probably when drunk or high most likely, which he admitted to himself was pretty often these days.
If he was honest, his list of business and other assorted enemies was a long one. He grudgingly admitted to himself that he was surprised what had just happened hadn’t come many years before.
But even though he wasn’t down on many people’s Christmas list, and even if he was a sad sack of shit sometimes, two wrongs didn’t make a right. Moving his body gently from one side to the other, tensing himself, he assessed the damage to his body.
From what he saw, by the lonely dim moonlight at the side of the remote field, he had broken bones. He also didn’t appear to have any life-threatening injuries. So, what was this all About, then? Likely a stern warning, or revenge for some past slight, not a full-blown hit.
He could hardly move, and he knew trying to get anywhere at night, across the boggy marsh, seemed like certain suicide. Saving his energy for the night ahead, he submitted to the wrapping pain throughout his body. He laid his face back on the soft, yielding, damp ground, rolling with relief into a swamp of unconsciousness.
The early morning dew woke him, small rivulets of moisture forming on the back of his head and neck, trickling down the sides of his face. He screamed in pain when he first tried to get up. Gritting his teeth, steeling himself against the excruciating age of his broken hands and ribs, he managed to lever himself upright.
He was in what looked like a mix of marsh, scrub and poor farmland, with open fields in all directions. The sun was very low in the sky, casting a dim watery light across the landscape. Although the pain, he forced himself to look around him, every movement involving his body in a new category of body-splintering age.
Then he saw in the far distance, maybe a couple of miles away, a dim light. Possibly a farmhouse, maybe something else. But, either way, a light meant people, and people mean rescue.
He tried to stand up, but his right leg constantly collapsed underneath him, his femur broken and his toes beaten to a pulp. It was then he accepted he was going to have to crawl the whole way.
The next four hours were the hardest he had ever experienced. It seemed like an eternity. Dragging his arms, hands and belly through t5he mud, scrub and rough grass, through ditches filled with dank, smelly filter and through the middle of dense field side hedges.
It was afternoon by the time he reached the door of the house he’d spotted. Hearing a radio playing in the kitchen, he almost cried out in joy. Pulling his batteryed and bleeding body up the stone steps he banged as hard as his mangled hands would allow on the bottom of the oak door. A tall figure opened it, and James collapsed at his feet, spent and broken, leaking warm blood over the ancient floor.
The farmer looked down at the man, a rough mess of humanity sprayed halfway in his hallway and half across his doorstep. He rushed for the phone in the hallway, dialling an ambulance.
When the medics arrived, James feigned amnesia. They tend to his major wounds in the ambulance but, despite his injuries, the man he claimed he remembered nothing. That he had just hurt there, in the bog. In the absence of a victim’s name, perpetrators, or where the beating had happened, there was little the police could do either.
The local hospital X-rayed his head and broken limbs and attached splints to his hands, arms and leg. James spent three nights smoking in the local hospital, finding it impossible to sleep, worrying that the two men might return to finish off the job. The next day, despite the doctor’s protestations, James hurriedly discharged himself, melting away into the warm body of the neary city like a ghost in the night.
Lorenzo’s letter
Ava was sitting at the marble island, the huge centrepiece of the designer kitchen in her new apartment, when she heard the clatter of the letterbox. Taking her cup of coffee, sipping the espresso gently, she padded into the hall in her slippers and dressing coat. She wondered if there was something from Josie.
As soon as she’d got back from the harrowing city meeting with Lorenzo, Josie had driven over to the lodge Ava used to rent. She’dlistened, with tears in her eyes, to Ava telling her about what happened in Lorenzo’s city finance office, and then the tortuous sexual blitz she’d endured from James. Josie had hugged her, telling Ava she loved her and wanted her back at their shared home.
Since then, Josie had been as attentive as any mistress might be. In fact, it wouldn’t be a lie to say that some of the long notes she wrote to Ava Almost daily, for a month after the attack, could have been construed as old-fashioned love letters in most relations. But to have someone dote on her this much was almost a turn-off for Ava and her naturally submissive psyche, despite her fully appreciating how much this showed Josie cared about her.
For Ava, despite all her feelings for Josie, the pressure was also too too soon after what was supposed to have been About closure with Lorenzo, rather than an assault by James, his club friend and fiend.
It took time, but they’d become a couple again, two months after herordeal at the hands of James. To Josie’s intensity disappointment, however, Ava refused to move back in with her. She wanted to keep her independence and privacy and only to come to Josie, to treat her as her mistress, when she felt the timing was right. Ava had to have back some of the control she had given up, for her sanity’s sake.
On the doormat there was nothing from Josie, but there was a letter, posted in the city. Her rented address was in flowing script on the envelope, in handwriting she instantly recognized. It was from Lorenzo.
She stepped over to the kitchen bin, flipped up the lid with her foot, ready to drop in the letter. Then she stopped, thinking.
What if he generally had no idea what James was going to do to her? What if it all had been a dreadful but fully explained mistake? But then, if so, why had he asked James to be there at all? She had to have answers. She relaxed her foot, the bin lid closing silently.
She knew she’d have to staysilent about the contract she took out on James, but owed Lorenzo a chance to see what he had to say for himself. If he couldn’t justify his actions then, Ava vowed, he would endure the inevitable follow-up fallout from her about the man he had invited to his office, James, and what he’d done to her.
She headed to her writing desk in the drawing room, slitting open the letter deftly with the sharp Finnish marttiini knife she kept in the drawer, in case of intruders. The letter was short, two sides and widely spaced. She sat down to read it on the chain longe she’d placed in the sun, in front of the south-facing French windows.
“Ava, I love you and always have. I can only guess at how you’re feeling now, your body violent, and your trust in me abused and defined. What can I say now to stop you hating me?
I have to confess I was devastated when you left me standing at the altar, on our wedding day, five years ago. We know each other’s natures and sexual needs, but no-one else could possibly have guessed. The guests all assumed you simply couldn’t face the idea of marriage to me. I know better, and regret that list of ten demands I gave you, more than you will even know.
It took me a long time to pay my parents back for our wedding, and that made you hate you, for a long time. A part of me wanted you paid in some way for what you put me and my family Through. I think that’s why I involved James in what happened, but that was the biggest mistake I’ve ever made. Putting you in a position where he could assault you was shamefully wrong.
On that regrettable day in my office, I never had intentions other than to have you see that I was the right master for you, in a safe and controlled relationship. Yes, I admit James was there to take part, but under my bidding, and only to meet your sexual desires and needs.
I called James, to tell him what I thought of his vile actions. But he hasn’t replied, which is no surprise given what heDid to you. I suspect he’s left the country, but be assured I’ll never contact him or see him again. I’ll also fully understand if you want to pursue the matter with the police, but you must know I intended no violence towards you.
I’d like to believe that we started our path on the way to a mutual understanding of our master and submissive relationship many years ago, but somewhere along the line we now seems to want different things. I know I should have trusted you to agree on the limits of that relationship, and keep that just between us, when we were together.
I can’t expect your forgiveness, but I hope you might understand why I was weak and enthusiastic in wanting you to meet me and James in my office that day. I made the mistake of mixing up the role of master and slave, dominant and subordinate, or whatever you wish to call it, with real life. For you, I recognize, what started out as an adventure and sexual lifestyle ended up with a horrendous crime.
I know thismay seem trite but if you can bear to see me again, I feel I can offer you something to try and help you forgive me.
For someone so strong, I always know that you feel self-conscious about that bend in your little finger, that tiny imperfection. I represent some of the best surgeons in the world, financially, and I’m thankful one of my them has agreed to fix this minor flaw for you, an angel who I believe is perfect in every other way.
It’s a simple procedure that means you will only be in his clinic a day, and you will be able to write with a week. I know it’s only a minor recompense for what happened to you, due to my lack of care.
I hope you will accept my lifelong apologies and agree to this offer to help your self-esteem, with no strings attached. Even if you choose never to see me again, please view this as my parting gift to you.”
It was signed Lorenzo, in his casual and highly ornate handwriting.
At the bottom was the name and phone number of the private clinic Lorenzo had mentioned, to fix her finger. She showed, perplexed, tossing the letter onto the drawing room table, straight with papers.
She didn’t have time for this. She had work to do on a merger with a financial institution that, so far, was refusing to play ball on deal terms. She decided she’d channel her frustrations with Lorenzo into sorting out these banks. They wouldn’t know what hit them.
Three weeks later she’d almost forgotten about the letter. The bank deal had gone well, and the merger was all but signed off. Ava guessed it could put almost a million in a well-earnt bonus in her account at the end of the financial year. She thought she might buy a fast, sporty Maserati two-seater, as a treatment to herself.
She was arranging fresh flowers in the vase on the drawing room table, humming absentmindedly, and happier than she’d felt in ages. Then she spotted the letter that had slid off the drawing room table onto a chair, where she’d thrown it, the month before.
She picked it up and sat down at the table. The bank deal done, Josie and Lorenzo had been on Ava’s mind the last few days. Now she had the head space to begin to think about her future relationship with them both.
Ava reread the letter slowly, thinking about Lorenzo and his strange offer. True, she had always been shy about her bent little finger, even though few mentioned it. But that didn’t mean people never looked at it and it really did both her at times. It had done ever since the door accident with her brother, aged eight. Maybe now was the time to do something for herself and to get it fixed?
The letter said clearly that there was no cost to her. Maybe doing this would help her think about whether her and Lorenzo had any kind of future together. She was still wary of him Though, checking out the clinic’s website, which looked like a very posh place down south. All the patients had large rooms, with a sitting area and an outside veranda where they could recover, in the sun. They even had a pool, gym and mini cinema.
Yes, it made sense. She would get her finger finally fixed. It might also help her decide what to do about her and Lorenzo.
After the long nights spent on the bank deal her firm had given her an extra week off, so had the time too. She dialled the clinic number and spoke to a receptionist with a cultured French accent. Ava was surprised When she said her consultation could be booked in the following week. Ava called her PA and ring-fenced the four days she needed for recovery from the surgery in her online diary.
Closing the call Ava sat on the chain by the French windows. She felt a huge sense of relief, not just from completing the recent successful bank deal but thinking that, for the first time in months, she was actually feeling back in control of her life.
The clinic
It was a dull grey morning when Ava arrived at the remote, secluded clinical, deep in the countryside. She paidthe taxi and took her small overnight suitcase over to the reception desk.
The clinic had high ceilings, with stained glass rectangular fanlight and a large overhead oval light well casting general sunlight into the wide atrium. Clearly it had clearly been created by a talented architect and gave off a warm, comfortable vibe.
The staff were at pains to mention that all her hospital costs had been covered in advance, Even if she needed an extended stay. After checking in, a uniformed porter took her bag to her room, and a white-suited clinician escorted her to the surgeon’s office.
As she entered, she saw the doctor had a forest view, with several wild ponies grazing nearby. There were multiple medical qualification certificates lining the wall and glossy brochures on the table, outlining everything the clinic could offer to its well-heeled clients.
It feel more like a high-end psychologist’s consulting area than a surgeon’s office. She sat down in a comfortableable white leather recliner, glancing at a brochure. Large pictures of classical Roman and Greek architecture adorned the walls, and there were tall plants with varying foliage placed in expensive looking large copper tubs.
A few minutes later the consultant surgeon arrived, shaking her hand, setting in behind the wide desk in front of her. The surgeon was used to appraising patients and he felt, with a feeling of professional pride, Ava would be an special pleasure to work on.
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