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  His Indecent Revelations (Bound and Shackled to the Billionaire)

  His Indecent Revelations (Bound and Shackled to the Billionaire)

  Midpoint

  EPILOGUE

  HIS INDECENT REVELATIONS

  (Volume 5 of ‘Bound and Shackled to the Billionaire’)

  By Aphrodite Hunt

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright 2012 by Aphrodite Hunt

  Cover art by Aphrodite Hunt

  HIS INDECENT REVELATIONS

  1

  Alia – Channing’s former love of his life – stands there like an avenging angel. The gauzy white veils of her ghostly attire tremble in the chilly draft that whips its way around the dungeons. The gleaming obsidian half-mask on her face makes her resemble a phantom.

  Susan is beyond shock.

  She blinks.

  It can’t be. She’s dead.

  Indeed. She has to be dead. This woman – this wraith standing there like the ghost of Baghdad past, like an entity who has been interred in her coffin, left for dead, but has somehow managed to struggle against her casings and escaped – is the cause of their entire predicament. The reason why Channing is the way he is; an emotionally damaged individual who is burdened constantly by his unspeakable past.

  The reason why Hugh, his twin brother, hates him enough to destroy him.

  The reason why she, Susan Chalmers, has been dragged into this unholy mess for the sole crime of falling in love with Channing Crawford at the wrong place, the wrong time.

  The way Channing is staring at Alia sends both a pang and a dagger into Susan’s heart. Channing’s blue eyes are filled with excruciating pain, regret, sorrow, shock . . . and love. It is remembered love. A love of past promises and whispered declarations upon a pillow, made after fervent coupling. A love that has been shared, reciprocated and fulfilled. A love that has been unfairly wrenched away before its time.

  And it’s all coming back to him now.

  Except that Alia’s eyes blaze with hate.

  “You,” she says in a low, dangerous voice.

  “Alia.” Channing’s voice is strangled.

  Susan can only watch on, helpless.

  Alia says, “You did this to me.” She touches the side of her masked face.

  Channing shakes his head. “Alia, no. It wasn’t like that. Please . . . I thought you were dead.”

  “You made sure of it.”

  She has a slight accent that Susan can’t place. Not exactly Middle Eastern, though Susan will be the first to admit that she is no expert in accents. But something is very wrong with Alia. Susan can’t put her exact finger on it, but it’s as if they are speaking to a person who is extremely psychologically damaged – and yet retaining all her mental faculties to do extreme harm.

  And Susan knows – with the knowledge deep in her bones – that Alia will be capable of doing them extreme harm.

  The Adam’s apple in Channing’s throat visibly runs from his jaw to his sternum. “Please, I need to know what happened to you.”

  “What’s there to tell? You let my father do this to me.” Alia fingers her mask again. Her voice is full of penned-up but controlled rage.

  “No. When your father found out about us, he went crazy. He threw me into his dungeon, which is pretty much like this one. And he tortured me.” Channing’s current bound state, with the gaping hole in his chair, leaves very little room for imagination as to what the torture might have been.

  “I know,” Alia says.

  She must have been beautiful and innocent once, Susan thinks. A sharp pain flowers in her chest.

  Channing says in a broken voice, “I had no idea what he had done to you. Only that he came to me one day in my weakened state . . . and told me he had drowned you in his swimming pool.”

  Horror washes through Susan. She cannot imagine having a father like that. She cannot imagine having a life like that – when you live in mortal fear of those who are supposed to love and protect you. No wonder Alia is so fractured.

  Alia says, “He drowned my mother in the swimming pool when he found out she was having an affair with her bodyguard. He said she had dishonored him. I was two. He told me he was about to drown me for dishonoring the family too . . . except . . . ”

  Susan sucks in her breath. Her fists are clenched so painfully that her fingernails dig into her palms. She wonders if they can make a run for it. But Channing is chained firmly to the chair. There’s no way she would leave him behind.

  Alia goes on, “Except that I was with child.”

  Now it is Channing’s turn to go pale.

  “Wh-what?”

  “My father spared my life because I was with child. Your child.”

  Dust motes swirl in the compressed air of the dungeon, moving this way and that. The hairs on Susan’s arms stand on end.

  “What happened to the child?” Channing has turned deathly still. It’s as though he has died a thousand deaths over the space of sheer moments.

  Alia maintains the same neutral tone that can be used to describe the weather. “He sent me away into the mountains to live with an Order of women who shun men. But before he banished me, he did this.”

  She removes her mask.

  If the horror had only been lurking under the surface before, it manifests full-blown in Susan now. She crams her knuckles into her mouth and bites down hard.

  It’s the only way to keep from screaming.

  2

  Susan can’t help staring at Alia’s face – or at least the ghastly half of Alia’s face which has been revealed. It’s as though someone has taken a blowtorch and systematically carved onto it with the master precision of a homicidal maniac.

  What father can do this to his child? What human being can do this to anyone? No wonder Alia seems so broken, like a doll which whose mind has been shattered and can never be put back together again.

  Channing blanches. Susan can only imagine the thought streams running through his head. Does he experience guilt? Anger? Helplessness? Does he blame himself for letting her father do this to her?

  But he had no choice! He was a prisoner. He was forced into this.

  He had no choice.

  Yeah, she has to keep telling herself that. The man she loves is not the monster his brother paints him out to be. He can’t be. She loves him too much to let his past dictate what she wants to believe in.

  And yet, the nagging doubt persists.

  Did he do all that Hugh said he did?

  Channing’s features are extremely strained, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry he did this to you.”

  “No,” she says vehemently, “you did this to me. My father told me what you did before you killed him.”

  Susan turns to Channing, mutely pleading. Please prove her wrong.

  He closes his eyes. “Yes, I did kill your father. But only because he would have killed us. It was a time of war. We were his prisoners.”

  “Liar! My father said he gave you a choice. My life for your freedom. You chose your freedom. Yours and that of your men!”

  Channing bows his head. He does not deny this.

  A crack splinters Susan’s heart.

  Now think this calmly through, the rational voice in her head says. Be objective, not emotional. If it had been you, what would you have done? What if you were given the choice of Ch
anning’s life . . . or your own?

  The answer comes to her with brutal and blinding speed.

  I’ll die for Channing.

  The obviousness of her subconscious answer stuns even her.

  Channing says, “I killed him . . . when I heard you had been murdered. I could have walked away. But when he told me . . . something broke inside of me. And he didn’t let me go. I escaped.”

  The cold rage is startling in Alia’s tone. “You let him torture me. And you killed him. In spite of everything, he was my father.”

  Once again, Channing does not deny this.

  Suppressing the choke in her throat, Susan says hoarsely, “Please . . . Channing was a prisoner then. He had no choice.”

  “He had a choice. He made it. After he killed my father in cold blood, he took everything my father had. All the gold, money and jewels he and his men could find in the citadel before dousing it in flames.”

  Channing shakes his head. “We took only the gold. We did not burn anything down intentionally. The fire was an accident.”

  “An accident which you in no small part caused. You left your brother in there to perish as well. It was premeditated . . . your murder of all those you claimed you loved.”

  Channing closes his eyes. When he opens them, his fevered blue orbs are anguished.

  “What happened to the child?” he whispers.

  “The mountains were harsh and cold, and the way the Order lived was spartan. I gave birth to the child.”

  It is clinical and detached, the way she talks about the child, Susan notes with dread.

  “The child was a male, which accounted for why my father spared me. But he was born sickly. He had a large head and stunted limbs. So the sisters of the Order took him away to be put down with the other abominations who must not be allowed to live.”

  She calls her own child an abomination. Susan feels viscerally sick.

  “So he’s dead,” Channing says flatly. The light has completely died in his eyes.

  “Yes. As you soon shall be. Forgive me for what I am about to do to you. For you see, the love we shared has fled a long time ago when you left me in there.”

  She turns from the doorway and disappears from view. Three burly guards enter the dungeon cell. One of them strides to Susan and seizes her arm.

  “No, please,” she shrieks.

  “Relax,” says the guard, “we’re not going to do anything to you. She has forbidden it. She says you’re his victim as much as she was.”

  He pulls her, struggling, out of the cell. The other two guards remain and turn ominously to Channing. Susan cannot see what they carry in their large hands.

  “No, please don’t kill him! I’ll do anything!”

  Her cries go unbidden as the guard drags her away, her feet trailing on the hard stone slabs.

  3

  Susan spends the rest of her day (or is it night?) being hysterical. She has no idea of what they are doing to Channing. She pictures him beaten and tortured in all sorts of horrible, unspeakable ways . . . and worse, murdered in cold blood. Channing’s body lies cold in her mind’s eye – bleeding, pale, sprawled upon the merciless stone slabs.

  That’s when she wakes up screaming uncontrollably, only to find herself in a straightjacket. Grim olive-skinned faces hover above her. She feels a prick on her arm, and she blacks out.

  Only to sink into more nightmares of Channing’s demise.

  No, no, no, no.

  She wouldn’t be able to bear it if he died. She doesn’t care what he did in the past. He had reasons! He was justified in killing the warlord! It was a time of war!

  He had to leave Alia behind. His arms were twisted behind his back.

  But he didn’t leave me behind.

  He came for me. He tried to rescue me.

  No matter what happened in the past – what he did, what he did not do, what he was supposed to do according to the gospels of many people – he has changed for the better now.

  I love him.

  If he dies, I will die too. Emotionally. Psychologically. Physically. I won’t eat. I won’t sleep. I will starve myself like a hunger artist. I will just pine and waste away.

  There’s a void in her chest so hollow and deep that she thinks she has died and her heart has been cored out by the demons in Purgatory.

  It is a long time before she finally regains her senses. And this time when she wakes up, she is sober and empty. Whatever drugs they have given her have leached away her spirit. She is but a husk of her former self – vacant-eyed and hollow.

  She is also no longer on the island.

  She is lying upon a resplendent bed. A white silken canopy tents above her, shielding the ceiling from her gaze. The room she is in is filled with magnificent carpets done in Persian weave. Gilded furniture decorates the walls, and the dome-shaped windows display a rose-colored vista of desertscape.

  Desert.

  She rises to her feet, which are shaky from the lack of use. She has visibly lost weight. Someone has dressed her in a silk robe, although she is naked underneath. Such opulence compared to what she had been used to for the past several days. She wonders if they feel sorry for her now that Channing is dead.

  Channing.

  She’s trying not to think of him . . . to think of his death. At the thought of him dead, her soul shrivels again and withdraws into its shell.

  Barefooted, she pads to the window and looks out. The desert wind is sharp and biting. The temperature is also much colder than she expected, although the red ball of the sun burns in a cloudless sky.

  She is now in Baghdad. No question about it. Where else would she be?

  Everything must come back full circle to the past. Whatever transgressions that have been committed must now be paid back in full.

  She stares out of the window for a long, long time, inhaling the dry air, wondering about everything and nothing. Mostly, she sees Channing’s face everywhere even though she tries hard not to – in the clouds, on the parched rocky ground and in the scorching red orb of the sun.

  A movement behind her stirs her from her deep melancholy. Someone comes out of the shadows. Someone veiled and masked.

  Susan turns. She watches as Alia detaches herself from behind a pillar.

  Alia whispers, “I wanted to see you. To speak with you.”

  Susan stays silent. Whatever fight she once possessed has been bled away by Channing’s murder. Alia comes into the light. Her half-mask gleams coldly. She smells of cinnamon and a strange, exotic spice. Like sandalwood and yet not sandalwood.

  “I suppose you had ferried me to Baghdad,” Susan says.

  “East of Baghdad. This citadel is built upon the ruins of the old one.”

  “You drugged me and put me in a straightjacket like a mental patient.”

  “You were mental. We had to stop you from hurting yourself.”

  “I thought you wanted me dead.”

  “On the contrary, you have done me no harm. Why should I want you dead?”

  Susan shakes her head. Because you’re mad and you don’t really know it? Because your mental faculties have been fragmented by what you’ve been through – and your only thirst is now for revenge? And that may include destroying everything Channing loves . . . or purportedly loves . . . since he never really said it to me?

  Alia wafts to the window and looks out. There’s a soft mist in her brown eyes.

  “I grew up in this place. My father used to ride with me across the desert. We had Arabian mares, the most beautiful in the region. He used to love me so much . . . when I did what he wanted of me. All my life, I lived for him. Until – ”

  She doesn’t have to finish. Susan knows what she is going to say. Until I met Channing. And Hugh.

  “Which of them did you love more?” she asks, aware that she is speaking to Channing’s murderer.

  “Ah, the eternal question. Channing . . . so handsome in his uniform, so commanding. Radiating power and authority everywhere he goes. Even my father was
impressed with him. And then there was Hugh, equally as handsome, but so different. He was poetic, artistic, a dreamer.”

  Susan closes her eyes. You killed Channing.

  “Who knows which brother a girl can love more when she has such a feast of riches before her eyes? Though I suspect they courted me because I was the only woman in miles they can relate to. I spoke English. I was educated and refined.”

  Alia’s face hardens.

  “I thought I loved Channing more. But there was always Hugh, worming his way into my affections. My love for him grew and grew. And in the end, there was only Hugh.”

  Her words are horribly prophetic, Susan thinks.

  “So what happened after you had the child?”

  “I came back here to my father’s citadel, only to find ashes and soot. The people I lived with were all dead and buried. But there was Hugh. He was alive. Somehow, he managed to escape the fate his brother had in store for him. Together, we rebuilt our lives with the little money my father had left in our foreign bank accounts. Channing and his friends had taken most of our fortune – the gold bullion buried in the secret vaults.

  “Throughout the years, we healed each other. But the fire of vengeance burned within us. I waited. Oh, how I waited to be strong enough, to be rich enough for the moment to strike back. The thing is . . . there was a time when I never thought I could hate Channing.” Alia barks a short, sharp laugh. “But there you have it. Life never turns out the way it is promised, even if you were born a desert princess.”

  She fingers the curtains.

  “This was my room when I was a girl. I had it built just the way it was. So tell me.” She swings to Susan. “Was Channing kind to you? Did you treat you well?”

  Susan remembers the bondage and spanking she endured in their earlier days together. And then the subsequent events that shaped and changed their relationship. There was affection. Love . . . even though he would never say it to jinx her.