Author's note: Traumatised by being held hostage in the cafe siege, Chloe has chosen a new direction in her life. She gives up her steady boyfriend and stable job to seek out new thrills in risky encounters. Covalent has laid out his plans to make her disappear and Chloe finds herself spiraling deeper and deeper into his fantasy of total control.
The story contains themes of female submission, edge play and autassassinophilia. Discretion is advised: please check the story tags to see whether this a series you'll enjoy.]
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IN OVER MY HEAD
It's hot inside the storage warehouse, and I follow dutifully behind the girl leading me down the aisle to the space I've rented. I gave her a card linked to my bank account, which they'll debit automatically each month. At the current rental rate, I have enough cash in the account for a decade.
"This is you," she tells me, stopping in front of a door, "C thirty-six. Here's your lock."
I take the lock she's offering me. It's a four-digit combination lock, as per Covalent's detailed instructions, because there's no key to lose. I set it to a number I'll remember: my Dad's birthday.
"All good?" she asks, smiling, but I can tell she's anxious to get away: it's busy.
"All good from here," I tell her, and she turns.
By the time she gets to the corner, she's probably already forgotten about me. I open the door and step inside my storage area.
It's more of a broom closet, the smallest space they rent out. It's big enough for my four boxes and a few bits and pieces of miscellaneous shit that I didn't manage to sell. It's all part of a carefully crafted narrative, under Covalent's direction. I'm going travelling, taking a career break and seeing the world. The storage unit is part of that story. The posts on my socials are also part of that story. Covalent required that he has full access to my accounts and I've complied, turning over my passwords and emails to him.
When I asked him why, he was brutally honest. He's going to keep posting updates, showing people I'm still alive. He's going to plot out a journey for me to take. He's going to look up the pictures, posting pretty sunsets and responding to messages as if I'm having the adventure of my life. His rationale is simple and chilling: there is a point where an absence becomes a missing persons case, and a point where a missing persons case becomes a search for a body. His intention is to keep me active on the socials for months or years, until we're long past the point that any security footage has rolled over and any mobile phone tower data logs have been wiped, until everything that could be used to piece together my final movements has been erased.
After that point, he's told me he's just going to post less and less often, until everyone gradually loses contact, until I become someone they used to know. He asked me how it makes me feel, to know that he'll make sure that no-one misses me, that no-one ever comes looking. I couldn't answer him, staggered by the breathtaking simplicity of his plan: the best way to hide a body is if no-one ever thinks they need to search.
Standing in the storage closet, I'm finally here at last. All that remains for me is to put on the same black summer dress and flat shoes that I wore for the bus trip to the boatshed. This time, though, I have a train ticket and a set of directions for when I reach my destination. I strip naked, pulling the dress and shoes out of my shoulder bag. I put them on and then turn my phone off. It goes into the shoulder bag, then the bag is left on top of the packing box. I step back into the corridor, taking one long last look at all my stuff, all the remnants of my life. Finally, I swing the door shut and lock it.
Chloe is locked inside there, put into storage, frozen in time. I imagine her, naked and silent, standing in front of the boxes in the dark, just another piece of property that no-one needed. Instead, an anonymous woman in a short black summer dress walks back out, past the reception. The girl on the desk is now dealing with customers and she doesn't look up as I pass, but there's a security camera mounted on the wall. It would have seen me emerge from the storage closet, linking up to the one that scans the loading area that would track me leaving the building. It would coincide nicely with the camera in the train station that notes my arrival and the camera on the train that watches me enter the carriage and take a seat. I'm tracked and logged every step of the way, an electronic trail that I can't do anything about, that even Covalent can't do anything about. He's enlisted an ally, though, a partner-in-crime able to erase all the footage and wipe all the logs: time.
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The train winds out of the city, leaving behind the blanket of heat that's settled over it, and gains altitude. I sit in an almost empty carriage, watching the view change from rows and rows of suburban streets, to rural properties and then finally to a vast treescape. The carriage is air-conditioned, but it's struggling to keep up with the sun blazing down on one side of the train mercilessly. I shift in my seat, feeling the cotton sticking to my bottom as I perspire.
I've been here before, but now I feel different. Riding the bus out to the boatshed, I was petrified, feeling awfully exposed as I stripped away everything that could have saved me. This time, without my phone, without a wallet, I'm even more exposed, but it hasn't made me feel the same. I know what I'm getting into. I know what I asked for. The journey to the boatshed was a fantasy for a weekend: this time I know there's no way back.
The journey is going to take a couple of hours and I have nothing to distract me. Covalent must have realised this because he's given me explicit permission to touch myself for the first time in two weeks. So, I sit there in the heat and cross my arms, grasping my nipple through the fabric of my dress and rolling it between my thumb and my finger. There is a station that we're going to pass that I need to wait for before I'm allowed to progress. I check the rail network map and work out that it's an hour away still.
The hour feels like a lifetime. The sun beats down on me through the window as I toy with myself, until I can feel the cotton hanging damply against my back. There's moisture between my legs too, but it's from a different heat. I pinch my hardened nipple and close my eyes, resting my forehead against the window, feeling the little reciprocal tingles of pleasure deep inside my clit as I squeeze. I cross my legs, rubbing my inner thighs together, squirming. I'm slick and hot and desperate. The station Covalent mentioned is still two stops away. The train is climbing steadily through the hills and it feels like it's slowing down deliberately, making me wait.
I think of Toby, for some reason. He'd heard that I quit the job from someone and he called to ask how I was going. I could read between the lines, and I avoided the conversation he wanted to have, right up until the point that he just came out with it and asked me if I wanted to get back together. Even now, remembering it makes me feel like a shit. I fobbed him off, but I could tell he knew I was lying. Maybe that just encouraged him, led him to believe that the truth was that I was ashamed of my actions and that he could grant me forgiveness and we could get past it.
