"Hooooly shit!"
Generally, Charity was much more professional. However, actually seeing Hope's face, the face of the decorated woman, was so much more shocking than Charity could have ever imagined - a face both horrifying and exotically beautiful at the same time.
Charity quickly gathered herself by smiling and attempting to say "Beautiful!" But, the emotional response that Charity felt upon viewing Hope's face had not yet finished with her. She felt a surge of arousal deep in her core, she felt her nipples pebble, and her face flush. As a result, the word she said was more whispered and morphed into a lustful "Ooooh!" by the time she made it to the last syllable.
Charity took a deep breath with her eyes closed to calm herself. When she opened her eyes again she looked across at Hope who seemed to be stoically staring back.
The most striking feature by far was Hope's eyes. The entirety of the whites of her eyes had been dyed a striking shade of lapis blue - the color of the sky in the mountains on the clearest of days. In fact, the color was a perfect match for the two jewels that Charity had noticed before hanging from the necklace.
Except, the chain from which the jewels hung was certainly no necklace! The two ends of the chain emerged from piercings - narrow tunnels that were set widely on her chin and angled up below her lower lip into her mouth. The chain hung freely off the sides of her chin weighted by the two jewels.
Her face, like her hands, was a deep shade of olive. She had a series of narrow straight lines tattooed on her chin that ran upwards to varying heights - some ending at her full lips, some not quite. Most of the lines were somewhere between dark gray and black, much fewer were the same striking blue as her eyes. Her lips were arrayed, top and bottom with a line of blue dots that seems to shimmer depending on the angle of observation.
Each cheek had two swaths of war paint looking tattoos angling up from the boundary of her face towards her nose. These at first looked ragged and wild, but, upon a closer look were very precise - two shades of black with hints of lines in her signature blue. Two more thick war-paint-style lines descended from beyond her hairline down her forehead.
Her hair was thick and pulled back and away from her face into the sweatshirt's hood - still half covering her head. The color matched her standard pallet - deep black with occasional streaks of lapis blue.
Then there were the chains... (Bondage! And Charity's crotch clenched in splendid, lonely agony once again.) Two thin, but sturdy looking jewelry chains emerged from the thick hair on her head - one down each side of her forehead. The chain on each side was threaded through a ring pierced horizontally through her dark, thick eyebrow over the center of the corresponding eye. Still, the chain continued down, across her vision, through another ring pierced high on her cheek bone, and onwards until it terminated on the lower of two chains arrayed horizontally around her face.
This lower horizontal chain seemed to originate from each of her earlobes and ran across her upper lip. Not only was it supported by the two chains hanging down across her eyes, but also by two more tiny chains that ran directly up into each of her nostrils.
A thin bar burrowed through the knot of skin between her eyes at the top of her nose. The upper horizontal chains were connected to the endpoints of this bar, extending across the width of her eye, through rings at her temples and then on back into her hair. The vertical and horizontal chains that crossed her eyes were interlinked where they met right in the center of her vision, directly over a wide dark pupil surrounded by just a sliver of emerald green iris.
Small blue jewels were occasionally woven into the chains. Merely, the act of breathing made the jewels twist enough to reflect the light to and fro in such a way that it almost made her face seem to sparkle.
"You are so beautiful!" Charity said, having just about collected herself once more.
Her lips! Charity had to squint a little. The blue dots on her lips were not jewels or paint... They were narrow sharp spikes like tiny pins! Extending perhaps a quarter inch out and away from her face, so they would not cause her any damage. But, a kiss from her would maim the tender flesh upon which the kiss was placed.
Her lips! Still, Charity was drawn to them. They were a form of chastity like her own. She and Hope were sisters in chastity, not-to-be-touched. She and this decorated woman, this beautiful, fetishtic temptress, this lethal succubus, this demoness.
"Beautiful," Charity whispered again.
<>--+-
"You seem to be holding up better - looking more rested... How are you?" Faith asked her younger sister. They were driving to the police station to meet with Detective Tumalo.
"I'm OK," Charity said. "Medication helps."
It had been three and a half weeks since Blue's disappearance. There still seemed to be no leads as to who was responsible for Blue's abduction, nor where she was being held. Additionally, Charity had received no further communication from Blue or her abductors.
"Patience," Charity said to herself whenever she had a quiet moment and was starting to feel that drowning feeling again.
"So, have you gotten anywhere with suitcase girl? What did you say her name was?" Faith asked.
"She answers to 'Hope'. It's going slow. She seems very smart, but she doesn't speak any English and we haven't been able to identify whatever language she does know. Did you know that there are over 7000 spoken languages in the world? Also, she does not seem to be very familiar with modern technology... I'm wondering if she is from some sort of indigenous, primitive, isolated tribe or something." Charity watched the city slip by through the rain-slicked windows of the car.
"According to the news," Faith said, "besides your decorated friend, the only other thing in that suitcase was some kind of journal that documented what happened to that stripper woman who went missing a couple of years ago... Ash somebody. Have you seen that journal?"
