Free Love's Savage Bonds by Jeb

make it even harder to breathe through the stifling gag.
     
    “Showing tender spirit now, Philip?”
Lefanu looked thoughtfully at the half-drunken Lord of the Manor.
     
    “Well, no... I just thought it would be
harder for her to answer our questions if she can't speak.” Philip giggled at a
point he must have thought so obvious as to be a joke.
     
    “Ah, yes… questions.” Lefanu gave
Catherine an odd look, then once more regarded Philip. An odd silence hung in
the air between the two men; then, shrugging, Philip addressed his wife.
     
    “I should tell you, my dear, that
Colonel Lefanu is rather expert at inflicting pain-- it's a sort of specialty
of his.”
     
    She didn’t doubt that for a second, and
the thin cord that bit painfully into Catherine's wrists was a clear reminder.
She had already endured more pain than she'd have thought she could bear, but
in the depths of her soul, she knew that Lefanu had barely begun to exercise
his outrages upon her.
     
    At Philip's drunken encomium, the
Frenchman favored Catherine with a thin smile, then turned to address Philip.
“Perhaps, first, you might answer a question for me, my friend.”
     
    “Well, certainly, if I can,” Philip
looked as puzzled as Catherine felt, but she was glad for anything that took
the Frenchman's attentions away from her.
     
    Lefanu regarded Philip, and raised an
eyebrow.
     
    “What, precisely, was your brother
looking for when he came here?” The Frenchman's manner was casual, but
Catherine could sense something simmering underneath it.
     
    “Oh, well,” Philip chuckled. “You know
Charles, he's always—”
     
    “It was a small leather book, as I
understand it.” Lefanu responded flatly.
     
    “Well, it might have—”
     
    “In fact,” Lefanu continued, his voice
now level and hard, “your servants described what sounded rather like a ledger
of accounts.” His voice was the low sibilation of a jungle predator. “Would the
accounts recorded in that book have had anything to do with me?”
     
    Philip's mouth just hung stupidly open,
and with his failure to respond, Lefanu's voice changed from a purr to a
whipcrack as he took a step toward Philip.
     
    “You kept that wretched book to
blackmail me.” Lefanu's voice was
icier than any Catherine had ever heard; glad though she was for the delay in
her own interrogation, she wished Philip were sober enough to read the menace
in Lefanu’s face.
     
    “Oh, just a bit of insurance, surely.”
Philip did his best to make his laugh a casual one. “And you've been paid for
your efforts.”
     
    “Yes... yes, I have,” Lefanu regarded
him strangely. “I received my thirty pieces of silver, while you...” and he
nodded around the room at the sumptuous furnishings before returning his
piercing gaze to Catherine's bound form, her lush figure only enhanced by her dishabille ... 
“you received the kingdom of heaven.”
     
    “What the devil do you mean by that?”
Philip spluttered
     
    For answer, Lefanu drew a small pistol
from his pocket, and without a word fired a shot into Philip's breast.
     
    Catherine gasped, then shrieked into
her gag as her husband blinked once in astonishment, then simply fell to the
floor like an old bag of rags.
     
    Catherine wanted to leap to her feet
from the chair; to bolt, escape—but Lefanu casually stepped over Philip's body
as if it were no more than a fold in the rug, set down the pistol, and stood looking
down in the chair at the terrified captive.
     
    “Such a shame... widowed so young.” The
smarmy smile on Lefanu's face would have been enough to sicken Catherine, even
without the cold-blooded murder she had just witnessed.  She tried to turn
away from him, but the Frenchman threaded powerful fingers into her luxuriant
mane, and forced her face up to his.
     
    “I fear, though, Lady Catherine, that
your next marriage will be of even shorter duration.”
     
    Next marriage? It took several seconds for the full horror of
that