9. Nine #2
Each breath fogged it, a ragged halo around my face, while Zephyr used his free hand to snap the collar like a leash, forcing my head up and my eyes wide. I could almost see Arrow’s features behind the one-way mirror—flat, cruel, and rapt.
The whip fell again—across my back this time, just below the edge of the corset, and this time I did make a noise. The sound was half-throated, a sharp, raw wound forcibly drawn from me. Everything blurred, the heat, the ache, the squeeze of fabric and flesh.
Zephyr propped me against the glass, splayed, and ran his tongue up the side of my throat.
“You’re doing it for him,” he whispered, almost gently. I would have spat in his face if I hadn’t already started to tremble.
Watching my face, Zephyr searched my pupils, and gauged just how much fight I had left. He found it and smiled with a glimpse of real, unscripted respect.
He let me go.
I melted to a crouch, knees open, face pressed to the glass as he reached down and caught my hair, forcing me to look straight into the black window.
Then, he wrapped my head with a blindfold and tied it tight, eliminating my vision.
He stayed quiet for a few seconds, and I heard some rustling nearby.
Zephyr’s favorite act was eliminating one or more senses. He said it raised the others to compensate for the loss of sight and, in turn, would make the sensations more intense.
His hands drifted down my spine and hooked into the zipper of the corset, dragging it open one inch at a time until my lungs tasted air again.
The climate in the room had changed.
It was harder.
The silence felt heavy, like Arrow’s demands for an exclusive show had replaced the air itself.
A shudder ran up my legs, and if Zephyr felt weakness, he didn’t mention it. Crueler than before, he slid his palm up beneath the open panels of latex and cupped my breast, his thumb circling the red of my nipple until I hissed.
“You could safe out,” he whispered.
We weren’t putting on a show for anyone but the man on the other side—no crowd, no bored regulars, just Arrow Romanov learning what kind of bride his future would taste like.
“I’m not done yet,” I ground out.
Zephyr loosed the corset and yanked it down in one clean motion, naked from waist up and collar still biting in, fingers skating down until he cupped the heat between my thighs. I jerked, but god did I want to see Arrow’s face at the sight.
“Open,” he whispered, and I did, knee to knee, letting his fingers part me.
He let the moment hang.
A snap. A click of metal, then cold wrapped around my wrists—cuffs this time, not rope, and the panic hit me. Zephyr yanked my arms behind me, immobilizing me at the window. I wanted to twist, to kick, but the metal bit and my pulse exploded.
“Pretty girl,” he murmured, almost to himself. “He’s nearly feral for you.”
I opened my mouth to curse, but all that came out was a moan. He pressed his palm between my thighs and left it there, hot and heavy, denying even friction. My heart jackhammered.
Through the fabric mask, noise blurred into a hum, and I imagined Arrow’s face split by a smile, the white sweep of his teeth slicing through the ink-black observation booth. My skin prickled, raw and alive, waiting for the next strike.
Zephyr edged his hand higher, fingers gliding inside, and fuck, I could not help the whimper. Humiliation burned in my cheeks.
“Say thank you,” he ordered, his lips so close they scraped my ear.
“Thank you,” I matched him, daring him to punish me again.
He did. He caught my nipple between his thumb and knuckle, twisted hard enough to make me yelp, and then soothed the sting with the pad of his tongue. Mixed signals, but I drank them down to the last drop.
Zephyr worked me with slow, careful fingers, keeping me right at the edge, never giving release. My breath fogged the glass as I soaked the acrylic stage, hating what the voyeurs must have been thinking—hating, even more, how much I wanted to be seen.
Strip me down, expose every nerve, make me his. That was Arrow’s game, even if he didn’t have the balls to play it himself.
The vibration of authority shifted in the room. Zephyr’s hands went rigid, then he let go, abandoning me there, panting with the mask still tight. For a moment, there was nothing but the sound of my rasping breaths and the sick, sweet scent of friction and sweat.
Then a door opened, and heavy footsteps approached—unhurried, and absolute.
I heard the high click of cufflinks, the soft thunder of bespoke soles, and then silence.
Arrow.
He didn’t speak. He didn’t need to. I felt the weight of his gaze sear through the fabric and skin and nerve to the root of me.
A gloveless hand, somehow hotter than Zephyr’s, cupped my jaw, his thumb dragged lines along the bone.
He pressed his thumb into the groove below my lower lip, shifting my face up.
I inhaled—the scent of gin, cedar, and cigarette filling my nostrils.
He held me, suspended, until the tension in my neck ached.
“You like putting on a show,” Arrow murmured, voice so low it vibrated in my ribs.
I was alone with him in the glass coffin with my wrists cuffed. I bared my teeth, every sense boiling with adrenaline, and a battered yearning for obliteration.
“Open your mouth.”
He tilted my chin higher.
I hesitated. He pressed harder, thumb bruising my jaw, and waited. I opened it, and he spat in it. The shock of it snapped me out of my body, and for one feral, shivering second, I hated him enough to want to come. I swallowed because I was raised to do so, and imagined he was smiling.
“I’ll always make you swallow,” he said, wiping his thumb across my lips, smearing the black to a bruise.
“I’d cut off your hand for trying,” I spat back.
“You could try.” Arrow leaned in, mouth pressed almost to my ear, breath hot enough to scald. “And then you’ll die with the taste of me on your tongue, little viper.”
My pulse hammered so wildly it audibly thumped inside the latex, and I thought, for a splinter of time, that I could snap my teeth shut and take him with me.
But Arrow was a step ahead.
He had me by the nape, dragging my head tighter against his thigh. “You want to break yourself on me?” The air shifted. “I’ll let you.”
I grinned. “Not the first time a man begged for my teeth.”
He responded by unzipping his pants, then traced the line of my cheek with the tip of his cock, slow and deliberate, as if browsing a menu instead of confronting a mouth with a will of its own.
The mask made everything else blur until all I could sense was Arrow’s pulse, thick and insistent, and the way the salt of his skin set my tongue alight before he even entered me.
“Open wider, Harlowe.”
The command was a velvet noose. My jaw ached, and I spat out a laugh, but it dissolved into a gasp as he forced the head past my lips, barely pausing for the edge of my teeth.
His dick was thick, and I had to adjust my lips and tongue to fit him.
He tasted like skin and salt and violence—different from Zephyr, or anyone else who’d ever tried to own me.
I bit down, just enough to drag a ragged exhale from him, and he didn’t flinch. His hand clamped over the back of my skull, fingers digging into my scalp, pinning my head in place as his hips rolled forward.
My lungs cinched around the shock of him. He held me there, letting me gag, my throat stretched around him, and only when I thought I’d suffocate did he draw back, allowing me to gasp for air.
“You bite me again, and I’ll cut out your tongue,” he whispered, violence lazy in his voice.
But under the threat, I heard the thrum in his blood. He liked it when I gagged or tried to flinch away.
He found the rhythm ruthlessly. One hand on my hair, holding my skull perfectly steady, he used my mouth like a thing, a vessel, as if my personhood was secondary to the performance of being gagged and nearly broken on his cock.
The mask pressed the heat of my breath back into my face, distilling every sense to these few inches of air, and Arrow’s scent, who thrust deep enough to star my vision and then retreat, teasing me with the promise of release that never came.