Chapter the Thirty-first: Axis.

Angela had slept. I had soothed away the desire to stay awake and the emotional drain of the danger she felt caused her to black out. I carried her indoors and laid her out on the sofa.

Kneeling next to her on the carpet I leaned in and brushed her sleepiness away.

She woke with a corresponding return of fear.

"Shhh, you are safe. We just need to talk." I ran my hand across her forehead as gently as I could. Her programming kicked in and she closed her eyes, waiting for the blow to arrive. I frowned with sadness; she frowned in surprise, things were different here.

I needed to find out what I could about her life. She was the closest person to Shaw that I had met and was potentially my greatest ally, but I needed to understand the sort of help she could give me.

A sad fact hit me, that I would be unable to make any changes to her mind in case Shaw would be alerted. I told her this and she acknowledged the fact with resignation.

"I expect nothing else master."

"Don't ever call me that Angela. I am not your master."

She was puzzled, "Then who... ?"

"You are going to be free. But we need to work together to make that happen."

Her hope soared and the brightness of her smile fleetingly returned. I asked her to let me know what her story had been. She seemed frightened and was unable to put the experience in words. I needed to dip into her head once more to find out for myself.

Generally, the common model for viewing a person's life is to feel it like a string, running from the moment of birth to the moment of death. Although that isn't always the actual way that life goes, it is a good way for me to envision it. I pulled myself like a scuba diver; hand over hand, down the line of Angela's life, back to the depths of the earliest memories and then let myself rise again through her life. The line fairly dripped with Peter Shaw's sick interference.

The life experiences were clipped to her lifeline in close procession much the same way a line of washing is hung along a clothesline. I read them as if I was watching the scene unfold before of me. The birth was hanging at the very front and the dirty rag of that event smothered me in its foulness. As I found when searching through Sara's history, the life events a person remembers are but a small fraction of the total. Angela's life story included everything that happened around her. I was aware of holding the child tightly as I gasped at the horror she, and her mother, lived through.

Angela's mother, Jacqueline, gave birth to her at the precise moment that her husband and master was thrusting into her rectum with his bloated prick. Her waters and the blood of her baby's birth mixed on the rumpled bed sheets with the foul remnants of his bestial foreplay as he crouched above her, fucking her ass with heavy up-and-down thrusts.

Jacqueline screamed her agony into the urine-soaked pillow clenched in her teeth as she felt her baby tear itself from her. Her master's roar of triumph as his scalding cum filled her tender bowels filling her ears. She struggled valiantly, trying to remain conscious in fear of what he might do to her new child. The new life was hers too, it was still untouched by him.

Reaching between her knees as he continued to pound into her from behind, she took hold of her new baby girl's tiny arm and pulled the tiny rag doll up towards her face. The placenta still awaited its birth and she bore down again on the wracking pain that threatened to overtake the entirety of her body. His nails had pulled small crescents of red skin from her hips and back and the weight of his body as he pressed hard down onto her softened pelvis made the muscles of her lower back burn with pain. The splash of the clotted mass of placenta between her spread legs signalled the afterbirth. She found herself working on instinct as she took the cord between her teeth and waited for the feeble beating to subside. She found herself using the agony he was inflicting, to bite down and through the tissue. Her baby was separate and for the first time she had something that was just hers.

A few stabs of agony as he flexed in her again and then the usual flurry of blows and he was gone, telling her to clean up and be ready for her day.

Angela's early times had been protected by her mother's acquiescence to every degraded threat to her daughter's life. Angela had grown up to see her mother as the winged golden angel for whom she, herself, could have been named.

Jacqueline's courage in her defence of her infant child was overwhelming.

Angela had learned her mother's history over the course of their effective captivity. Laying together in the darkness of the kennels to which they were usually banished; whispering to each other. The spells he put on them, all the more brutal in the way in which they were made to appear happy to the outside world. Her determination that she had to protect her baby, often led to her own punishment on his orders.

The fact that he had plucked Jacqueline from the heart of her mother church, as a novice nun, made her degradation even more pointed.

Jacqueline's teachers had always admonished her class to avoid the devil and turn away from sin; to believe in the power of Christ and pray for his divine intervention. When the power of Shaw's will was turned on her, she found that their words were empty. No preparation could protect her from his commands. The actuality of meeting evil was not the level battlefield she had always imagined; with its hosts of saints and angels and benign powers rallied on one side and the forces of darkness on the other. This was an attack for which she was defenceless. The main evil came directly from herself.

From the very beginning, her body had betrayed her. At first he was anonymous, standing in the shadows out of sight, taking pleasure from afar by watching her fall from grace. Her mind was confused by the new emotions that began to hit her at odd times throughout the day, but that didn't stop her from acting on the impulses. The frantic, sickening masturbation sessions at night and then in the morning too; the sudden blurted obscenities; the angry responses to friendly questioning. All these things forebode the day that He made himself known to her. She would lie in bed, crying with confusion, not knowing why she was behaving in such a manner. The swearwords were alien to her, but she spoke them with such effect that none would believe her innocence. She began to actively search out situations where the carnal lust she felt could be taken advantage of. Grabbing other girls in the showers, slipping into the local town to entice the young farm boys and eventually do more than just entice them, she found herself totally out of depth. Like a bulimic, the hidden guilt of her own actions drew her away from those who loved her.

She spiralled down to the point where the sisters almost literally threw her out of the convent. All the while, she was unable to understand what was happening to her. Doctors and psychiatrists all declared her sane but antisocial, she simply found herself offering to fuck the nurse while the doctor watched.

By the time her master appeared, she recognised him as the punishment her sins justly deserved. At seventeen, she simply watched with terror as he fell upon her, the beating and the rape all due to her own sins. Shaw didn't take her, she went to him almost willingly, it was what she deserved.

The new life was a schizophrenic nightmare. An outward facade of normalcy; posing as his new young wife helping him to build their business, and the slave who actively participated in the abominations he demanded.

He was not so much interested in the child (and later, children) he sired. The need to corrupt an cognisant innocent meant that he would wait until the adult was grown and then take them. The children received only cursory, if sickening, attention from their father. Angela, however, saw the way her mother was treated. Their life was a fearsome ordeal only mitigated by Jacqueline's strength of character.

I leaped forward through her life, from one incident to the next, marvelling at how well she had managed to integrate into the ordinary world despite the horrors of home. The approach of Angela's womanhood was a dreadful shadow over her and her mother; then, his attentions would definitely be turned upon her.

She had been peripheral to the activities of her mother and father since the recent occurrence of her first period, but the intensity of her involvement was beginning to escalate.

I read in her mind that she was expected to be used in some ritual that Shaw was making ready. Her virginity was a very powerful prize and it was going to be lost along with her life unless she could get out of the slavery in which he held them.

The news, via her mother's bruised and bleeding mouth, that a man existed who might be able to challenge her father was the first ray of hope that either of them had had. Then my capture and the dreadfulness of the repercussions of my escape. My talisman, taken from my body at my capture was the single tool which allowed them to operate clearly. It provided Jacqueline a place to plan, without Shaw being able to know what was going on. they both knew this was their last and only hope. The carefully planned and covered work to find my details, put together in the darkness of their cell; getting those details to the attention of the school; the work to have my name brought up as a candidate for patron; they had been frightening times.

I withdrew from Angela's story, my face awash with tears of pity. She returned my gaze with a face that showed a bright hope which I wondered if I could live up to. She had grown a mind set that would accept death but expect victory, her eyes burned me with their implicit demand. More than Mab's contract, I knew at that moment that I had a destiny. I bent and kissed her hands, both of them, on the palms.