Read What He Shields (What He Wants Book Seventeen) for Free Online

and didn’t offer
any further explanation.   I wanted
to ask him where we were going, what his new plan was, but I knew it would be
fruitless.   There was no way he was
going to answer me.
    A few moments later, he pulled up in front of a
fancy looking building on the Upper East Side.   It looked like an apartment building,
one of those buildings that realtors splashed on their brochures to show they
were worthy of the kind of clientele who could afford to live in building like
this.
    Noah got out of the car and walked around,
opened the door for me.
    “Get out of the car, Charlotte.”
    I stepped onto the sidewalk, the blast of air
that came out of the grate below reminding me I had no panties on.   I pulled at the bottom of my skirt
self-consciously, even though I was more than covered.
    Noah led me to the side of the building, where
there was a large steel door marked “LAUNDRY.”
    He pulled a key from his pocket, slid it into
the lock, and opened the door.
    “What is this?”   I asked, trying to peer inside.   But I couldn’t see anything but
darkness.
    The expression on Noah’s face changed for just
a second, the hard angle of his jaw softening as he took me in.   “Do you trust me?” he whispered.  
    I nodded.
    “Tell me,” he said, his voice gruff with
emotion and desire.   “I need to hear
you say it.”
    “I trust you.”
    He pushed the door all the way open, then
reached his hand in and flipped on the light.  
    I walked into the room.
    It was a small room, windowless, the walls
cinderblocks.
    There was nothing in it.
    No, that wasn’t true.   It wasn’t that there was nothing in it, there was just nothing normal in it.   No beds, no furniture, no washing
machines like the outside sign would lead you to believe.
    There were only three things in the room, each
one sending a deeper shiver down my spine.
    The first thing was a filing cabinet.   Actually, it wasn’t just one filing
cabinet.   It was a whole wall filled
with filing cabinets, all of them the same gun-metal grey.   Each one was locked not with
a normal lock and key mechanism, but with a thick padlock, like whatever was
inside was so important it needed to be guarded extra safely.
    The second thing in the room was a cage.   It was high and square like a jail cell.   It was tall, so tall it almost reached
the ceiling, and shackles hung in random intervals from the steel bars.
    The third thing in the room was actually inside
of the cage.   It was an L-shaped
metal contraption.   The base was
covered in shag carpet, and the long part of the L was made up of a metal rod
that stood straight up in the air.   Off of this metal rod were three smaller metal rods sticking out
perpendicular to the first rod, two of them with cuffs, one of them with what
looked like a dildo stuck to the end of it.
    Other that that, the room was bare.
    Noah closed the door behind him and locked it
with an audible click.
    The air was cold and I stood there shivering - I
couldn’t tell if it was because of the chill in the air or the anticipation of what
was about to come.
    I turned to him.
    He was watching me carefully, trying to gauge
my reaction.
    “Where are we?”   I asked.
    “In the laundry room of a building I own.”   He reached into the bag he’d grabbed
from the bodega, pulled out a bottle of whiskey and tossed the bag onto the
floor before taking a long pull from the bottle.
    “Why are you drinking?” I asked.
    “Because I need something to take the edge
off.”
    “Take the edge off what?”
    “You disobeying me.   And what it does to me inside when I
think of someone hurting you.”
    It was dim in here, the only light coming from
a couple of bulbs overhead and the small amount of outside light that was
coming in from the two tiny windows that lined the wall, up by the
ceiling.   “What is that?” I nodded
to the metal contraption.
    “A cage.”
    “No, not the cage.   What’s inside of it?”
    “An impaler.”   He took