Chapter One: Xanxta

 

Colin Sanderson noted the clear signs of wealth as he knocked on the door. Tom Jefferson, he knew, was a man of considerable substance and influence. Until recent times, Jefferson had lived here in Xanxta, but now resided on a rather delightful - or so Colin had heard, not having been there himself - island in the Caribbean. That island was one of two in that region where slaves were kept, as they were in Xanxta. Jefferson, Colin knew, was only staying temporarily back in Xanxta, in fact was due to return home shortly. However, he was still a man of influence in Xanxta, as Colin knew well. In fact, Colin was counting on it.

He recognised the large, muscular man who opened the door and showed him into the lounge. Colin was a big and powerful man himself - in his business, it was a requirement - but this man was at least his physical equal. Was he Bill, or Ben? Colin wasn't sure which was which. Few people outside the immediate household, in fairness, seemed to bother.

Tom Jefferson looked up from reading a newspaper and stood up politely to receive his guest. "Mister Sanderson! Welcome to my temporary home. Please take an armchair."

He was more relaxed and affable than he had been when Colin saw him last. Perhaps he had mellowed, but Colin wasn't taken in. As well as wealth and power, Tom Jefferson had an astute brain and was a very smart operator, something else Colin was counting on.

"You remember Leah, of course," Tom said.

Colin turned to see the girl, who had just entered the room. She was stark naked and stunningly beautiful, with a superb athletic body and light brown hair framing a very pretty face. Her figure was mouth-watering, especially if you like athletic, trim girls, which Colin was quite partial to. The all-over tan was to be expected on a slave of Xanxta or this Caribbean island, but it still enhanced her flawless, tight skin. She moved rather like a panther moves. Colin noted that Leah made no slightest attempt to hide her female charms: she didn't flaunt herself, but she made sure she was fully available to his gaze. She was clearly well trained: Tom Jefferson had quite a reputation in that department.

"Slave, you remember Master Sanderson?" Tom said easily.

Leah's lovely face clouded over slightly. "Er, sorry, master, but no I don't," she confessed to Colin. She would know that, if she was supposed to remember him, forgetting him could earn her a whipping.

"Quite understandable, slave," Colin said. "At the time, you were struggling like a wildcat with three of us and trying to avoid a chloroform pad."

"It was Colin's team who abducted you," Tom Jefferson elucidated.

"Oh! Sorry master, but as you say, I was focused on other things at the time."

"Quite all right," Colin said. "You certainly put up quite a fight. I got a broken finger and one of my colleagues got three broken ribs off you."

"Sorry, master," Leah apologised. "Can you forgive me?"

"It was a natural reaction for you at the time," Colin said easily. "It looks as if your mindset has changed a bit now."

"Yes, master," Leah said. "I'm very pleased now that I wasn't able to fight you off that day." That was quite an admission, but he was sure it was genuine. It was common knowledge that both of Tom Jefferson's girls were now settled and happy slaves.

At Tom Jefferson's signal, Leah served them both drinks. It was a hot day - when was it not hot in Xanxta, Colin thought - and so cool drinks were nice, though the villa was nicely air conditioned anyway. Leah then came to stand in front of Colin. His face was about level with her flat stomach and trimmed pubic bush. "May I sit on your lap and pleasure you, master?" she asked politely.

Well trained indeed, Colin reflected, but he needed to focus. "Perhaps later," he said. Tom got the message and sent Leah away with the faintest of gestures. Leah closed the door behind her, leaving the two men alone.

"You're welcome to have her later on," Tom said, as if it was of no slightest significance, which of course to him it wasn't. A smile crossed his handsome features. "As I recall, you expressed doubts that I would be able to tame her."

"I was entirely wrong and I apologise," Colin said. "You worked a miracle there."

Tom acknowledged and dismissed the apology and compliment airily, though he did clearly take a pride in how he had trained Leah and he had obviously wanted to make the point. "So, you wanted to see me," he prompted.

Colin grew more serious. "I did, and thank you for granting me your time. We have a problem and I need, at the very least, some advice."

Tom made himself comfortable in his own armchair. "Fire away," he said simply.

"Thank you. As you know, I run a small company which acquires girls for powerful and rich men in Xanxta. You yourself have used our services in obtaining Leah and others. I think there was another girl, Ellie, just before Leah?" Colin had naturally checked his records and done his homework before this meeting. Both Leah and Ellie had turned out to be excellent captures. Tom said nothing, so Colin went on. "As you know, when a master identifies a girl he wants, we usually do a careful background check, to make sure the girl doesn't have any powerful relatives who could be inconvenient, and then we plan an abduction and removal strategy. It all normally goes like clockwork."

"Apart from a broken finger and three broken ribs on one occasion," Tom observed wryly, but without malice.

Colin conceded the point, at least partially. "She certainly was a handful," he admitted, remembering the ferocious struggle Leah had put up and her abnormal strength. "But even so, there was never any danger of her escaping the actual kidnap, and the extraction from England to Xanxta went as smoothly as ever. A few false clues suggested to her family that she had run off to London, and that was that." The trick with abducting girls was always to lay a false trail, so that they were not actually listed as missing.

Again Tom said nothing, so Colin went on. "Now, recently we had a commission from a man called Tyler Mason, who I believe you know." Tom's faint grimace confirmed that, but there was no other reaction. "He identified this exceptionally lovely girl, who was working in a rather down-market bar in London. It was not a bar the likes of Mr Mason would frequent, so I think he had a scout identifying prospects for him. Anyway, we made a few enquiries, and she seemed perfect. She lived alone in a grotty bedsit, no family, no friends, no money, quite a hermit of sorts, so in we went, sedated her and brought her to Xanxta. So far, so good."

Once more Tom did not reply. He waited, patiently, for the full story, his fingers interlaced thoughtfully.

"Unlike yourself, Mr Mason prefers his girls to be calmed down and trained before he takes possession. So, we had her chained up, waited for the sedative to wear off and informed her of her new status. You usually get a mixture of tears, tantrums, disbelief and defiance, but this girl went into almost a fit. She was screaming about somebody called Harry. She was absolutely impossible to communicate with, and there was a real danger of her hurting herself in her bonds. In the end, the safest thing to do for her own welfare was to sedate her again. We tried all sorts of things, letting the sedative wear off with none of us around, threatening her with the whip, but nothing worked. She was almost catatonic. Meanwhile, we went back and dug more deeply into her background."

This was the point where it was always going to be difficult for him. Tom didn't help him out, he just sat and waited.

"In turns out that we had missed a key thing. This girl was a domestic abuse victim. Her boy friend, which was the Harry she was screaming about, had beaten her several times. In the end she had run away from him, gone into a women's refuge for a while, then got the flat, which was about as cheap as they come, and was paying for it by working all hours at the bar. Harry had been searching London for her and she was scared stiff that he would find her."

"And your background check failed to uncover any of this," Tom observed. It was not a question, and it deliberately highlighted that this was quite a large piece of information to miss.

Colin squirmed in his armchair. "We missed it altogether," he admitted frankly. "Everything else seemed so perfect. No friends or family to enquire after her."

"And now we know why."

"Well, yes, although often domestic abuse victims do have family at least. This girl doesn't." Once again Tom did not react, so Colin had to go on. "So now I have a problem. I can't get her into a suitable state to hand to Mr Mason. If I hand her to him as she is now, he ..." Colin shook his head. "It won't be nice. My side of the contract will be concluded, he will have to pay my fee, but it will be terrible. The girl just won't cope. I have a fairly robust conscience, but there are limits. I just can't give her to him. It would be like feeding a Christian to the lions in ancient Rome. I'm pretty sure her mind will collapse. She'll end up needing to be institutionalised, not that we have anywhere suitable in Xanxta to deal with such cases, so God knows what would happen to her. And yet, I don't know what else I can do with her. I can terminate the contract, write off the costs, that's no great problem. The occasional acquisition gets called off at the last minute because of concerns, so my finances allow for a write-off now and again, and Mr Mason will just shift his attention to another girl. But I don't know what I can do with the girl herself. The Slave Shop wouldn't touch her, not once I disclose everything, and she wouldn't cope with that either. So I'm absolutely stuck."

"And what do you expect me to do?" Tom asked. His voice was silky, but Colin wasn't fooled.

"I don't know," Colin admitted. "You're an acknowledged expert on training even the most difficult of girls, as that Slave Leah shows. I just thought perhaps you could give me some advice." Playing on Tom's ego, he knew, would only have limited benefits, the man was far too smart to be taken in, but Colin had no other cards to play. This whole visit was, from the start, something of a long shot.

"You could take the issue to the Xanxta city authorities," Tom said.

"You and I both know that, if I do, they will take a ... robust course of action with the girl. I don't want that."

"And they will of course ask some inconvenient questions of you," Tom observed mildly.

Colin wasn't stupid enough to defend the point. "Yes, they will," he admitted. "And yes, that could prove to be very inconvenient. As you know, I have to be licensed, to ensure no bad publicity falls on Xanxta. It could go badly for me, but I think I would get away with a telling-off, maybe an inspection, a few required improvements, but nothing more. My track record is pretty good, in fairness. Yes, Leah fought back harder than we expected when we took her, but otherwise her extraction was as smooth as any with no loose ends." He waited for Tom to comment, hoping for an acknowledgement of approval on at least some aspects of the Leah capture, but Tom again said nothing, so he went on. "But they will be ruthless with the girl. You can choose to believe this or not, but I don't want that on my conscience. Maybe I'm just getting old, but that's the way I feel."

"Mellowing with age comes to us all," Tom said, more to himself than to Colin, the latter felt. Colin waited; there was nothing else he could do. Tom thought for a moment, then eyed the other man. "You do have something more specific in mind, however." It was a statement, not a question.

Colin squirmed again. "Well ... it did occur to me that slave life on New Island, so I'm told, is much gentler than here in Xanxta. Perhaps, just perhaps, she could cope with that."

"That's far from a certainty, from what you describe," Tom said. "It is gentler, yes, but that's because the girls are carefully selected, they are well trained, compliant and accepting of their status. It's easier for the masters to be more merciful in such cases. This girl does not fit that profile by a long way. And New Island is a more delicate and less secure environment than Xanxta. If the girl were to prove to be untrainable, that would be a real problem. We don't have Xanxta's ... options."

"Or Xanxta's lack of mercy," Colin put in, hoping to appeal to Tom's humanity.

"If you deal with scorpions, sooner or later you will get stung," Tom said.

"I acknowledge that. But not everybody I have dealt with is a scorpion." It was a risky comment to make, again trying to slightly play on Tom's self-image.

"It only takes one scorpion to sting," Tom countered. "However, philosophical semantics get us nowhere." He went quiet and pensive for a minute, and Colin wisely did not break the silence. Eventually Tom spoke again.

"An interesting option does occur to me," he said, almost musingly. "It might work. The problem is that it also might not. I would need to be convinced that there is at least a possibility of success, and I would need to be assured that, if it does not, the problem reverts to being yours, and at your expense of bringing the girl back here. I see no reason why I should take your problem off your hands if I can't solve it."

"If you had a go at solving it and succeeded, that would be great all round. If you didn't succeed, it would only be fair to drop it back on me. And yes, I accept that it would be at my financial expense." Generosity and just a slight challenge to Tom were Colin's best bets. He was being quite honest, in that the euphemisms here worried him. In effect, the girl's life was at stake. It was one thing to deliver girls into slavery - after all, it had worked out well enough for Leah, he told himself. But this was different. He had never faced quite this sort of dilemma before. He was indeed getting old, he thought to himself.

"As I said, I'm not yet convinced that there is any possibility of success. I will talk to Leah and Ellie tonight, and get one or both of them to visit your holding cell tomorrow and talk to the girl. It may not have occurred to you, but a female domestic abuse victim is more likely to respond to a woman than to a man."

Colin had to more or less accept the barb. "I don't really have anybody on my staff that could talk to her," he said defensively.

"You don't have a slave of your own?"

"I do, but she's not ... of the calibre of your girls. To be honest, she's not very bright or sensitive." He waited for the second barb, that a man's slave reflected himself or words to that effect, but it didn't come. Tom Jefferson was not going to keep hitting a man who was down.

Tom stood up. "One of my girls will come to your premises tomorrow morning."

Colin knew when he was being dismissed.