They Are Going to Drop Me Somewhere and I Already Know I Will Not Want to Come Back

Victor Draven

The Cruel Dungeon

I have been thinking about the drop. Not the way a man thinks about a dental appointment, something to be tolerated and filed. I have been thinking about it the way I used to think about a very large acquisition in the hours before the papers were signed, that particular anticipatory weight that sits below the ribs and refuses to move. Mistress Lynne has not told me when it will happen. She has not told me where. I paid for that specific omission, built it into the original agreement, initialed it on page forty-seven of a document I had my lawyers review before I handed them my final check and thanked them for their service. What I will know is this: at some point they will put a hood over my head, drive me somewhere, and leave me in an unknown country with no money, no phone, no identification, no contacts, and no language I necessarily speak. That is what I purchased. I paid seven figures for the privilege of standing at an arrivals gate with nothing in my pockets except whatever Mistress Lynne has decided I deserve to know. The cage on my body right now has been there for so long that I measure time in its weight. It has been eleven months since I last came. Eleven months of purple velvet walls and candlelight and the specific humiliation of a man who commanded boardrooms now requiring written permission to do anything at all. And when I think about the drop, when I really sit with it in the dark of The Cruel Dungeon, what I feel is not dread. What I feel is something I cannot quite name because the last time I felt it I was twenty-three years old and had nothing.

Here is what I know about myself, and I know it with the precision of a man who has spent four decades studying the subject. I built everything I have on the certainty that I am the most competent person in any room I enter. This was not arrogance. It was, for a very long time, demonstrably correct. What I could not have told you, before I walked through the entrance of Mistress Lynne's Lair and handed Claire my final personal documents at the grand entrance with her impeccable purple uniform and her expression that gave me absolutely nothing, was that this certainty was the thing I was most desperate to lose. I knew it the way you know something you cannot say aloud at dinner. The fortune did not buy me freedom. It bought me the permanent obligation to be right. Every wire transfer I have made to Mistress Lynne since checking into The Cruel Dungeon has been a payment against that debt. I have given her $4.2 million so far. I think about that number while I lie here in the dark and the cage does its patient, immovable work on my body and I cannot do a single thing about it. Four point two million dollars, and what I received in return is the slow, exquisite destruction of the man who thought he needed to be worth something. The drop is the final installment. Whatever country I land in, whatever language is on the signs, whatever coins are in whatever currency I do not have, that man will not be there. I paid Mistress Lynne an enormous sum to make certain of it.

I am writing this from inside The Cruel Dungeon at two in the morning because I cannot sleep. The candles are burning low, aubergine wax pooling on purple velvet that cost more per meter than most people spend on a week's groceries, all of it purchased with my own money before I surrendered the accounts. The chastity device is steel and it is entirely indifferent to what I want, which is the point, which is what I paid for, which does not make it any easier to lie here thinking about an airport I do not know in a country I cannot name. I am not afraid of being dropped. I have reviewed the scenario calmly and with my full analytical capacity and what I have concluded is this: a man with nothing is the most free he will ever be, and I have not been free in forty years, and I am going to land somewhere without a single dollar and the cage will be gone because Mistress Lynne will have the key and I will have only myself, the original version, the one before the money decided what I was. I find this thought so overwhelming that I have been lying here for three hours with the cage pressing into me in the particular way it does at this hour, eleven months of deprivation turning every thought into something that throbs and does not resolve, and I am genuinely unsure whether I am terrified or aroused, and I have enough self-awareness left to recognize that in this specific dungeon, at this specific hour, those two things are the same.