I’m watching a video. I can’t believe what I’m seeing.

Picture Jesus on the cross. Picture him out in the sun writhing in agony twenty feet in the air. Picture his feet and hands bloody and dusty from the iron nails. Picture the defeated look on his face.

What I’m watching is sort of like that, except instead of Jesus it’s a woman, and instead of a defeated look on her face she has a mouth full of semen. Her skin is dark brown. She’s Muslim, but instead of being completely covered, she’s naked. Disgraced. The crusty white filth is slowly dropping from her mouth onto her naked body. This poor girl, her body is half skin, half whip marks. The crisscrossed red lines on her body, they look like the American flag. The semen is slowly drooling down from her mouth, on her breasts, her stomach, and dropping fifteen feet to the ground. Some of it stays attached, falling down her legs, reaching the iron nail in her feet.

“You noticed the American flag resemblance too, huh?” Dean says. My partner on the case and commanding officer of our unit, Dean began showing me these videos yesterday. This one, of the crucified woman, is the seventeenth video. There’s eight more to go.

It’s so fucking hot in the break room, I can feel the sweat on my neck. My blouse is sticking to my skin, and my skirt feels like it weighs a hundred pounds.

“Amy?” Dean says. “You okay?”

It’s because I’m breathing deeply. Fucking heat. The video is disturbing me on a thousand levels and I can’t take it.

“Turn it off, please,” I say.

“Okay,” he said. “You want a break?”

“Yeah,” I say. “More than anything.”

Dean shuts the VCR off and we leave the room. Air conditioned bliss hits us like a Mack truck and everyone in the office sees the relief on our faces.

“Poor bastards,” Tom said, when he heard we got this assignment. “Wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy.”

I follow Dean outside and he hands me a smoke. I put it in between my lips and I tie my hair back. My mom always said I should be lucky I’m blonde. Thin-haired girls got it easier in the summer. I couldn’t imagine what girls with big hair felt like.

“So she was alive?” I ask, lighting up.

Dean looks at the cement beneath us and says “Yeah. For a while.”

“They’re all alive,” I say. “For a while.”

The first tape we got, a naked woman knelt in a cage barely big enough to hold her. It sank in an empty tank that slowly filled with water. I heard her scream until she drowned. Another video, a woman was leashed by the neck to a pole out in the desert. She froze to death overnight.

None of the tapes showed anyone outside of the victims, and none of the tapes had any markings on them.

This was not a typical assignment. They don’t teach you how to deal with serial snuff films in the academy.

A few days ago, Dean brought me into his office and said I’d be working with him for the next few weeks.

It seemed like an honour at the time.

He told me, “You won’t like this one, so get any ideas of fun out of your head right now. I picked you because you’re the smartest woman here, but I picked you mostly because you’re a woman.”

It seemed like an insult at the time.

The job was, we had to look at these videos that were being sent in. We had to figure out why they were being sent in, who was doing it, and why they were doing what they were doing.

As in, why they were killing women in horrible ways in the Middle East.

“We’re going to have to go, you know,” he says, finishing off his cigarette.

“I’m sorry?”

“These tapes,” he says, “They’re just receipts. The crime is being committed weeks before we hear about it, and the only people telling us are the criminals.”

He says, “Absolutely no fucking way we’re going to catch them this way.”

I ask him, “Are these tapes being sent anywhere else?”

“We sent emails out yesterday to every major bureau. We don’t know, but we don’t think so.”

“So, you think they’ll let us go?” I say. I think about the way I say the words, as if I want to go or something.

“It’s probably inevitable,” Dean says, dropping his smoke to the ground and squishing it with his shoe. “I figure the rate we’re getting these tapes, they’ll send us pretty fast. Once we have a shipping address, anyway.”

“I’ve never been to that part of the world,” I say, feeling small. I’ve never really been anywhere outside of Los Angeles.

“I’ve got to be honest with you,” Dean says, not knowing nearly the weight these words would eventually hold. “This is probably going to be the worst vacation you ever had.”

I didn’t have to fuck Dean in order to get my job at the FBI, but if it had been one of the points in the interview, I probably would have.

You never know what you’ll do until you do it.

If during my interview, Dean had stood in front of me and pulled out his dick, I would have sucked it. I would have extended my mouth and let him have the hole, and when he was done with it, I’d stand up from my chair, bend over, and give him my pussy. I would have given it in an instant. Still would. Dean was a monster of a man, towering inches above me at almost seven feet. He was built out of old muscle, and his body moved in the way you’d imagine hunters in Babylonian times might. He didn’t walk so much as lumber. He didn’t speak so much as command. That dark, bullet-wounded voice of his, well, I’ve never yet been able to say no to him.

I didn’t know if it was his build, or the fact that he was my superior officer. In the way that, professionally, you had to obey him. It was difficult, as I’m sure it is for many people, not to wonder what it would be like if your boss ruled you in other ways.

After watching those tapes for the rest of the afternoon, I got so hot I needed to take a shower the second I got home. The second the door closed my clothes came off. I was sweating bad. I worried about catching a fever. I tossed my clothes into my hamper in the closet and hit my shower. As the hot water came, I felt such relief. It had been a long couple of days. The scariest thing is, by the end of the day my senses had somewhat dulled. After watching over a dozen unique and torturous murders, I no longer felt sick. I could take the gore, and I could tune out the screams. I could even watch the screen right as the victims died. By the end of the day, I’d stopped wincing, and I stopped needing breaks every twenty minutes. But I never stopped sweating.

Nude, in the shower, I returned to a standby favorite. My fingers rubbing slowly around my clit, I closed my eyes and thought of Dean, naked and on top of me. We’re on a bed, and he’s thrusting me hard. I can see his abs and his amazing tan, and I can feel the weight of his bottom half on my thighs. His left hand, it’s on my tits, alternating pinching, squeezing, and massaging. His right hand is holding my wrists in place above my head.

Sometimes, when you want to cool down, the opposite happens. I begin to sweat even harder, leaning against the cold tile of the shower, touching myself while fantasy Dean comes inside me, his grip on my wrists getting tighter and tighter.

A scary thing happens when I come. My fantasy shifts. Dean isn’t holding my arms anymore. His hands are around my neck. I’m choking. I can’t breathe. But I can’t stop coming, either. I drop to my knees, the steaming hot water pounding my back as I regain my breath. For a second, it felt like I couldn’t breathe for real.

From my knees, I turn the shower off, and I take a second to regain my composure before getting back up.

Later, I’m watching TV alone and I realize exactly why I fantasize about Dean. He’s the closest thing I’ve had to a steady relationship in years. I have it weird. I’m successful, I’m strong, and I can’t stand men who can’t match me. There are lots of strong men out there, but few of them aren’t jerks. This makes the dating pool pretty thin.

Unless, of course, I just eventually succumb to the whole jerk thing. It’s been wrestling in my head for some time now. What’s worse, a man who isn’t nice to you, or no man at all?

Okay, it’s not exactly the most romantic of questions, but desperate times, you know? I can imagine it’s the same for men. After a while, their standards go down. Well, turns out it works both ways. This is the reason I ended up going out to the local pub in the hopes of picking up.

The next day at the office, three more tapes sat on my desk. Dean, sitting in his chair dealing with other files, I knew I’d have to look at these without him. That didn’t mean I’d be watching them alone, however. It was my one demand. Never put me in a room alone with these tapes. They wouldn’t come out in one piece.

Jared was the resident tech intern, working more hours for less money than any of us. He was useful for the case because he knew all the terms. We knew he could probably hack our emails at any moment, so none of us ever dared to ask why.

Jared sat to my right as I put in the first tape. Just like all the others, the white snowy static turned quickly into a shaky scene. There was no graphic, no intro. Never any faces. It took me only a second to find the victim, a young, naked brown-skinned woman with her wrists tied above her head by a metal chain. As if tied to a fishing line, the woman was dangling from the chain, her arms in obvious pain, her face twisted to show her suffering. The camera closed in on the woman and panned her from head to toe. When the camera got to her feet, it became obvious they were a few inches off the ground. It was never clear where the chain above her ended. For several moments, she just hung there, like laundry waiting to dry.

“You can find stuff like this on youtube,” Jared said. “Other than the nudity, of course. Obviously, there’s no direct sexuality going on, so they’re allowed to air it. It’s a kink thing. Some guys like to tie up their girls.”

I said, staring at the naked woman, “I think this goes a little farther than kink, Jared.”

“Oh, absolutely. At least, in the ways we think about it. You know, most people think of kink as games couples play when they think their marriage is on the rocks, but kink is ultimately about power. Whether it’s tying up your girlfriend with a silk cloth or kidnapping and hanging someone out to burn in the desert heat like this, it’s all about setting dominance over someone you want to control.”

“Let me get this straight,” I said. “You’re saying that they’re all one in the same? Some couple spanking one another are basically doing the same thing as whoever is doing this to these women?”

Jared touched his nose, an old habit from when he wore glasses. “Essentially, yes. It’s all about asserting power and control, like I said. Whoever is sending us these tapes, they’re just ramping it up to eleven.”

The tape appeared to fast forward by itself into the evening. The woman stayed in the exact same position. She couldn’t fall asleep, but she never really cried out, either. Either it was staged, or she’d realized there was nobody within 100 miles that would ever help her.

The tape fast-forwarded again to the morning. The woman appeared exhausted, but incapable of losing consciousness due to the pain in her arms. It seemed like this torture would go on forever, but then Jared noticed something.

“Look,” he said. “Pause it. Bring it back.” I rewound the tape slightly. He paused. Was it because I bent over? I stood back up and caught his eyes dart back into place.

“Hey,” I said. “Watch it.” Jared looked apologetic, but a good bit of me wanted him to own the moment and be a man. A good bit of me wanted this dark room to be darker, more lockable.

In my head, I’m thinking “Jared, lock the door.” I’m thinking “Jared, come closer.”

“Why?”

“Just do it Jared. Turn off the snuff film, and unzip your fly. I want that cock of yours lodged deep in my mouth, and I want it right fucking now.”

In my head, Jared stands above me, my hair in a ponytail made by his fists, my jaw cracked open with his bulging dick ramming the back of my throat. My hands holding themselves behind my back, unable to stop the onslaught of come on my tongue.

“Amy?” Jared asks. “Are you okay?”

I snapped out of it. “Fine,” I said. “Let’s watch the next one.”

I sat back down and let Jared show me the little thing he noticed, the fact that although this woman was in intense pain and agony, there was a trickle of fluid running down her thigh. It wasn’t blood, and it wasn’t spit.

“Pre-cum,” Jared said. “She’s turned on.”

He said, “She’s been turned on the entire time.”

The next morning I wake up and there’s a guy in my bed I barely recognize. Picked him up the night before. I don’t want to see his face, and I don’t want to have to deal with it. I stare at my alarm clock. I’ve got to start work in half an hour. There’s absolutely no way I’m going to get there on time, and there’s no way I’m going to appear as if I didn’t get fucked the night before.
The guy next to me, he starts moving. He notices I’m up. He smiles.
Shit, I think.
“Morning,” I say.
“Morning to you, lovely.”
We look at each other for a second. He’s still half asleep.
“I’m John,” he says, “in case you don’t remember from last night.”
“Thanks,” I say. “I’m Amy.”
I begin to get out of bed, but John grabs my arm and pulls me back. I feel his chest on my back, and I can’t help but scream a little.
“Calm down,” he said. “I’m just not done with you yet.”
Oh, for the love of God.
“Look buddy,” I say, wrangling my arm free. “Last night was fun. I think. But I’ve got to get to work. You’ve got to get out of here.”
“Now look,” he said. “I’m a nice guy. You don’t have to kick me out right away.”
“I’m sure you’re real nice, John. But that’s not the point. Time is.”
“Well, do it quickly then.” John pulled off the covers. That hard on I thought I’d taken care of the night before was back.
“Excuse me?” I asked. I mean, I knew he was serious. I just thought he was going to be nicer about it.
“Take care of me quickly and I’ll let you go.”
“Let me go, huh?”
“That’s right,” he said, smiling. “You’re my prisoner. I’ve taken you captive. And you have to do as I say.”
I looked at him. I couldn’t help but admire the hilarity of the situation.
After a moment, I smiled back and said “Whatever you say.”
Within a second his cock was in my mouth. I was going to get him off in less than a minute. I knew it. His eyes rolled back and he moaned, something about me being a good girl. I bobbed my head quickly, slurping his precum and getting it nice and hot and quick. I could feel it was on its way.
“Good girl,” he said again.
I lifted my mouth off his cock for a second and said “Thank you.”
“That’s right bitch,” he said. “Thank me for the privilege of letting you suck my cock.”
I was never going to see this guy again, and it was in the moment, and I figured it would get him off faster, so I said “Thank you for letting me suck your cock.”
I looked right at him, and I could see his eyes beam. Then I saw them close. His mouth opened. He began to moan harder. I could feel his cock in my mouth begin to pulse. He was going to cum any second now.
It wasn’t as much cum as it was the night before, which wasn’t surprising. What was, however, was that after he finished cumming in my mouth he grabbed my hair, balled it up in his fist, and pulled me back up to his mouth.
“Good girl,” he said again. The look on his face was pure confidence, as if he’d found the key to a locked room filled with whores and gold.
I looked up at him with a little bit of shock. Sure, I’d said those things, but that was during sex, and it was to get him off. I didn’t really mean to thank him. Christ, shouldn’t he be thanking me?
“That was so hot,” he said. “We have to do this again.”
“We’ll see,” I said. “I’ll think about it. But first I have to get to work.”
“You’re calling in sick.”
“Excuse me?” I asked. He pulled my hair. It didn’t hurt. Just enough to make me alert.
“You’re calling in sick.” He repeated. It wasn’t a suggestion.
“And why am I calling in sick?” I asked, more forthrightly.
“Because I just met you last night, and last night was really fun, but it was really vanilla.”
“Are you criticizing my fucking last night?”
He laughed. “Not criticizing at all, girl. Just pointing out that what you just did was very different than what you did last night.”
“And what did I just do?”
“You obeyed me.”
“What?”
“I told you to do something you didn’t want to do, and you did it.”
“So? It’s sex. Part of it is giving the other person what they want, you know.”
“But what did you get out of this exchange just now?”
I said, “I thought I’d get you off quickly so I could go to work, like I just said I had to do.”
“Right,” he said. “But then I called you a bitch, and you thanked me for it.”
“That’s just sex talk,” I said.
“Was it?”
“Absolutely.”
“Well, that’s what I wanted to find out. Why I wanted you to call in sick. To see if you’re actually a kinky girl or if you’re just nice.”
“Trust me,” I said. “I’m just nice.”
“I’m sure you are,” he said. He let go of my hair. “Fine, go off to work.”
“Thank you,” I stammered. I’m not sure why I thanked him that time, but damned if he didn’t notice.
He reached across to my bed stand and grabbed my phone.
“What are you doing?” I asked, grabbing for it. He held me off with one hand.
“I’m taking your phone number,” he said. “From the place you work.”
“I didn’t say you could have that,” I said.
“I’m not asking,” he slyly replied. I was getting annoyed now. I grabbed the phone out of his hand.
“Damn,” he said. “Only got the first 5 numbers.”
“Good,” I said, putting on my pants. “Get out of my bed.”
“As you wish, my lady.”
Within five minutes he was out of my apartment. He didn’t say anything, but he didn’t have to. His smile said enough.