Measured steps echoed through the prison, clacking a slow, metered rhythm with each footfall. His solitary silence broke only once in a while, some half-naked prostitute or other innate screeching a shrill yell to his back as he passed on his beat. Women inmates he usually silenced with a single stare, and so his inspection in the bowels of the woman's prison usually afforded his best moments to think.
His thoughts were dark and slow, like the measuring of his march. Dispassionate, his face betrayed none of the inner torment that raged in his mind. His lips parted into a toothy sneer, his mind replaying what just transpired in his office.
She was so weak, so easy to grab and to pin, to lock up tightly with his body. Behind that distant mask of seduction, the charade of enigma, she feared him. And from now on, he would remind her of that healthy fear. Like the fear of God.
He could picture it now: her panic as she darted around the office, stacking the spilt papers, sorting them frantically. And once they were away, she'd grab a rag, a cloth, even just the hem of her dress, rubbing the polished top of his bureau clean, eradicating any scuffs or scratches from her fall…
From where he pinned her.
From where he could have taken her.
Will power, honest work, and self-control—he never relaxed his standards for himself on any account. And he certainly would not have given her that power; never would he ever allow her to believe for one moment that she could control him with seduction. As if a hundred thousand prostitutes of Paris hadn't already tried that on him.
No, he had done what was right, shown her her place and schooled her in obedience and holy fear.
'Then why did you tremble the moment the door was shut?'
Damn thoughts. He turned his gaze for a moment to silence a prisoner, her breasts naked and covered in filth, sagging over the torn neckline of her rags; her ear-splitting voice begging him to "be a dearie and let a woman go free to work." Imposed silence, he found, was contagious.
Not unlike desire. That temptress woman, her words hung in his brain, floating like a drown corpse in the river. Words sweetened with desire—hers were the first ever directed to him. Begging him to come to her, to let her...
Regardless, he knew them to be lies, calling to him like the voice of the Serpent in Eden. Temptation.
But hadn't she still clung to you as you barely refrained from choking the life from her body?
A shiver ran up from between his thighs. None of that, he told himself. Those that take what they want for themselves lose it in the end or before long. Stealing is a crime.
He reached the opposite wall of the hallway. Spinning around on his heel, he began the patrol back. The cries and shrieks of solicitation increased, but their howling and mewling barely registered to his mind, as guarded and occupied as it was. Their noises passed over him like silence, but their filthy, disgusting, abused bodies, huddling and crouching in their cells, only inspired darker more sinful thoughts.
Passing each cell, he thoughtlessly compared their sullied corpuses to another's—that one that he could not force from his mind. Breasts, defiled, bruised and bare, were nothing like those milk-white rounded mounds, so perfectly pink in the center. Another's hair, ratted and snarled could not even remotely compare to her long, undulating sheaf of straw-colored silk. And each pair of eyes never so much as drew his attention like those blue eyes, so intense in gaze and color, so insupportably insubordinate in defiance, so glittering in her games of attempted flirtation.
Her advances he had ended with a firm and iron denial. But do you really think that will stop her from attempting the same again? Don't you think she realized that by pinning her down, body along body, your heroics were just a form of encouragement?
He had to remove this desire, this aura of seduction from her. And by taking her, he'd take away the incentive. Yes, he smirked at his conclusion. That was the answer.
If he controlled everything about her, then there would be nothing about her to use over him. Not giving in to her flirtations and dirty suggestions, but possessing the very source from which they came.
Possessing her.