She sat on the couch next to him, the woman who still could make fear rise in my heart. Sylvia.
Even as I kept my eyes submissively lowered, I struggled to understand. Marc was Alexander Hamilton and somehow, he knew Sylvia. That wasn’t entirely a surprise, if I stopped to think about it. After all, Alexander and Dylan were business partners and Sylvia was a regular visitor at Dylan’s various fortified compounds.
But I’d given him my heart and my body in Paris. How could I have done this? How could my instincts have failed me so badly?
She leaned her body towards him and her hand came out to cup his cheek. “Are you buying a new toy?” she asked coyly, barely glancing at me. I knelt there, forgotten for the moment, while surreptitiously checking out the tableau being acted out in front of me.
“Possibly,” Marc said. Not Marc. Alexander.
Her hand moved to fiddle with his shirt buttons, while she kissed his neck. “And can I play with your toy, Alexander?” she asked him through her kisses. “Please?”
He laughed dryly, a laugh I didn’t recognize. When he had laughed in Paris, his voice had been sincere and amused and I had felt enveloped in his warmth. This laugh was a more sophisticated, yet more superficial animal. “You tend to break your toys, baby,” he pointed out.
I saw Sylvia’s pout through my eyelashes. I watched her hand grab his face and bend it towards her, her shiny, pointed teeth nipping at his earlobe. “Please, Alexander,” she wheedled. “I do love new toys.”
He laughed again but this time, his voice was indulgent. I realized I wasn’t the only one watching the pair. Two sitting areas away, a big, blond man was watching them with narrowed eyes. Anton’s bodyguard’s gaze had locked onto Sylvia. The Thai guards that worked at the BDSM club never took their eyes off the two, but for all intents and purposes, both Alexander and Sylvia were unaware that they were the focus of attention. “Tell you what, baby,” he said, his hand trailing down her body in a possessive gesture, “you can play with my toy when you come visit me in Paris, okay?”
Paris. Alexander Hamilton lived in Paris. Of course. After all, that’s where I’d run into Marc. My heart wept.
She kissed him, her body pressing against his chest. “You are so good to me,” she breathed when she pulled away. Neither of them had spared me a glance. I remained on my knees, just waiting, as was expected of a good slave. “Thank you Alexander.”
“Don’t you have to go, Sylvia?” He glanced at his watch, then at her, his lips curling into a smile. “I thought you had to work, but I’m happy to distract you from it.”
She sighed loudly and dramatically. “I do have to go,” she said. “Work, always work. I’ll see you in Paris, love.”
I couldn’t watch anymore. I couldn’t peek and see their goodbye kiss. One part of me realized that Alexander had more or less promised to bid on me. The other part was filled with fear.
Remember Dylan, I told myself. You deserve your revenge.
I did deserve my revenge. But in that moment, revenge was the least of my worries.
***
Marc walked Sylvia out of the room. I saw their heads bowed together once again in a distant corner and my eyes couldn’t pull away from them. From the way she leaned into his body, breathing in his scent. From the way she whispered something in his ear, from the way her fingers played with the lapels of his suit.
But his name wasn’t Marc. It was Alexander and unless Alexander was a common name in this gathering, this was Alexander Hamilton, the man I needed to purchase me.
My plan was rapidly unravelling. I had thought that it would have been easy to twist Alexander Hamilton around my little finger and get him to take me to Hanoi. I was going to pretend to be the shy sex slave from America who wanted desperately to see the world.
But he had to only look at me and I knew I wasn’t actress enough to play this role, not with him. There was too much chemistry in the air. My body responded too well to his nearness. My heart ached too much because he hadn’t recognized me even while my mind knew that it was a blessing that he hadn’t remembered.
Too many worlds were colliding. My one shining little ornament of a memory, my recollection of that one perfect night lay tarnished.
My panicked recollections were cut short as a bell sounded in the room. “Ladies and gentlemen,” Madame Lorraine’s voice spoke from the center of the room. A spotlight rested on her. The rest of the lights in the room dimmed. Unease prickled at the back of my scalp. “We are about to commence the bidding. But before that, I’d like our beautiful submissives to come up here.”
We all obediently made our way forward towards the empty space in the room. We stood there in the light, while the men and women who might purchase us for three months sat in the shadows and leered at us. Then, at a discreet hand motion from Madame Lorraine, Sarit appeared out of nowhere and escorted us back to the antechamber.
***