Chapter 2

That had been three weeks ago.

Karin had crawled painfully up the stairs and out of the basement, then up some more stairs to her room. She hurt all over. She was confused and humiliated. She just knew she had done something to make Bill hate her, that she had screwed up somehow, but exactly what that was, she wasn't clear.

The next day, she was efficiently moved to a small apartment in one of the company's commercial warehouses downtown. Not an excess word was exchanged between the three of them. Bill had the cook come in to her room early in the morning and pack a few of her things while she was in the shower. By the time she made her way out of the bathroom, a pair of shorts and a halter-top lay out on the bed. She dressed herself in those and she left the mansion in a taxi. She wasn't offered any breakfast.

The building they moved her into was in one of the older industrial sections of town. The apartment had its own separate entrance via the parking garage adjacent. Originally it had been designed to house an on-site General Manager for the factory. Built in the twenties or thirties, it was opulent, the furnishings big and solid. One of the previous owners had sealed the apartment off and isolated it from the working area. The factory was long since abandoned as it was too far for cheap middle management and engineers to commute that far into the downtown area and the building was now used as an overflow storehouse for raw materials. The inside of the warehouse was gritty with dirt, vermin and disuse.

The apartment, although separate, had been vacant for a long time and some of the grime of the warehouse had filtered into it. It was dirty, smelly, and in the middle of nowhere as far as shopping was concerned. As far as she knew, Bill had intended this to be an insult to her.

She identified with the abandoned little apartment, however. It just felt like she and it belonged together.

Just before she had closed the door to the taxi, the cook had shoved an envelope into her hands. She sat down and read the short, terse note inside. She learned that Bill had provided her a bank account. Each week, money would be deposited into the account automatically, provided she 'behaved herself.' Food would be delivered by a 'local' Mom and Pop grocery store. All she had to do was call and order. There were directions for her to go shopping for a suitable dress at a fancy boutique the next week. A car would pick her up at a certain time and that she had better be ready. Or else.

Bill would have been astonished had he seen his abused and beaten wife's expression. Karin was literally astonished at her new wealth and the wonderful apartment. She had more money now than she ever had before, and she was happy to be alone on her own. She sat for a long time on the dirty couch, hugging herself, laughing joyously at her freedom, tempered only by the twinges of pain from her bruised and battered body.

She immediately threw herself into various diversions. Part of the first day was spent examining the rooms, determining what needed to be done to fix up the old apartment. There was surprisingly little to do, other than cleaning. It had apparently been a luxury apartment at one time with an extra-large bath, a beautiful rooftop patio with a hot tub, and good quality solid furniture. But that had been several years ago, as was obvious from the out of date fabrics and fashions of the furnishings.

Karin had plunged into what she knew best. Hell, it was all she knew how to do. Housework. She swept and cleaned and scrubbed, put up new drapes. dusted and swept and mopped the floors. The activity helped keep her mind occupied and her body active, loosening those sore and aching muscles. It kept her busy for about a day and a half. Then she set about re-arranging the furniture to her liking.

During the re-arranging process, she discovered that Bill had lived in the apartment, long ago, when he was just starting out. This must have been one of the first buildings to house one of his company's manufacturing plants. She discovered a section of a diary kept by a much younger Bill. The bound notebook had been wedged down behind a section of a bookcase and the wall. It had apparently fallen down and was forgotten when he moved out. She didn't know at first what it was and was about to toss it out when a clipping from an old newspaper fluttered to the ground.

Picking up the clipping, she read it. Her interest piqued, she leafed through the book, looking for other information. What she found stunned her. The diary picked up in the middle of an involved plot, as this was just one section of a multi-volume diary. The more she read the more familiar names she read, names she had heard in the last six months. They were the names of Bill's competitors and clients. Some were unfamiliar. But she got the gist of it. In Bill's own handwriting were the detailed plots he had planned and implemented to destroy one of his rivals. As far as she could see, the only thing the rival had done was to be an honest businessman. There were several sneering passages about how goody-goody the bastard was.

At first, she thought the plotting had just been theories, mock rage stuff. Then, as she read the daily entries, the chilling story unfolded. It told how, after careful planning, Bill had set in motion a fabrication of lies and half-truths that had wiped the man out. The passages became savage, describing the depths to which the man had fallen. Bill described how the man had come to him, not knowing it had been Bill who had planned and started the whole thing. Bill described how he had 'helped' the guy out — for a price, of course. That price was a partnership in the failing company he had helped to destroy.

What chilled Karin to the bone was that the old newspaper clipping was the story of the gruesome murder-suicide of the broken man and his wife. A couple of the passages in the diary led her to believe it had not been a voluntary suicide, but that someone, namely Bill, had been there to help him out of his misery. The same misery Bill had put him in.

The sudden realization that Bill was that calculating, that cold, that unfeeling hit her like a hammer. It suddenly became very clear to her that she had to grow up and take charge of her life. And fast. Now, this didn't happen like a bolt of lightning from the sky, but the mental shift in her attitude was there. Being alone and on her own for the first time helped. But she also realized that she was totally unprepared for living in a cruel world. No one was going to protect her anymore, no one was going to help her. She was on her own.

Such deep thoughts were frightening to her. She tried to keep as busy as she could during the day by exploring the factories and the stores surrounding the apartment. She would walk for hours, pushing her body until the soreness from the beating was indistinguishable from the soreness of the overworked muscles. Gradually, her body healed. She was eventually able to wear heavier blouses and shirts over her tenderized breasts. She had been receiving a lot of cat-calls and wolf whistles on her walks around the area. Some of the guys were gross, but a couple of them were cute, too. Although she still wasn't comfortable with all the blatant sexual attention, she was making tremendous strides in her level of self-confidence. Besides, she kind of liked turning on all those men.

Walking all that time gave her time to think, too. For once in her life she was able to focus. The pain helped, so did her absolute fear of being left alone. She knew she wasn't as stupid as people thought, but now she knew she wasn't going to be able to rely on her "charms", as her mother called them, to get by. Now she would use them to her advantage and show no quarter. She didn't become smart just by wanting to be, but she became more observant and careful.

She had discovered, drained, cleaned and filled the hot tub on the terrace, and was pleasantly surprised when it ran perfectly. It had been an exorbitant luxury when it was installed 20-25 years ago and it had been built to last. She enjoyed the hot soothing bubbling water often in the evenings. It felt so decadent to be naked in the middle of downtown and outside in the open air. She spent hours soaking in the bubbling water, letting the soothing currents soak away the last of her aches and pains. She kind of zoned out in the hot tub. The cares of the day and the fears of tomorrow faded away.

But eventually she had to get out of the water. To try to sleep. It seemed to her that she would lie in bed all night long as her thoughts raced forwards to her date. She wondered what the man would be like. What would he ask her to do? Could she do it? Could she not do it?

Then the itching would start. It was the kind of itch she couldn't quite scratch. But she tried to and she would almost succeed. She would then remember those intense feelings she had felt in the basement at the hands of those two sadistic brutes. Fresh tears of humiliation would fill her eyes as she realized just how turned on she had been at the rough treatment they had given her. Her cheeks would flame red with her shame, but even embarrassment could not diminish the rising urgency of her need.

Pushing her shame aside, she focused on trying to feel that same sexual rush again. Her fingers blurred in between her legs in frustrated persistence as the itch wouldn't go away and still she couldn't get off, couldn't quite reach that cliff and go over. After several frustrating nights, she started doing things to try to get herself off. Like pinching her nipples hard. Like Bill had done that night that had felt soooo goood.

That stimulus worked for a while, but it wasn't enough. Something was missing. She started to play with some old cords from the drapes, first twisting them around her legs, binding them tightly together. The heat she felt in her sex told her she was on the right track. While her feet and legs were tied, she fantasized about being totally controlled, totally restrained. The idea made her hotter and wetter between her legs.

She tried running the cords through her legs and pulling the twisted strands up tight against her pussy. She twisted the ends in her hands and sawed the braided coarse rope back and forth across her clit. She managed to cum a couple of times that way, too, but something was still missing.

These limited excursions led to her attempting full self-bondage. First she would tie her ankles together and secure them to the foot of the bed with a short rope. She tied her knees together next. She put another band of cords across her calves and one around her mid-thighs. She would pull the ropes so hard that the tightly tied ropes cut into her skin, dividing her shapely pins into segments.