10. Ten #2
Zephyr bowed low in a pantomime of defeat.
Good man. He’d known how to lose since before he knew how to win.
I caught his gaze and nodded once, signaling that whatever debts clustered around Harlowe tonight, they were paid.
He dipped his head and disappeared to the wings, where the rest of the pain-freaks and exhibitionists hovered hungrily.
Under the spotlight, Harlowe held her ground.
Her breaths stuttered, raw and wet, but she made no play for dignity.
She let the crowd see the ruin—arms striped in purple, ribs laddered with red, jaw hanging at an insolent tilt.
I leaned in, lips at her ear, and said, “Are you satisfied now, moya malen’kaya gadyuka? ”*
“Not even close,” she whispered back, her voice ruined from the show, but the defiance in it was undiminished. “Will you finish it, killer?”
I pressed my mouth to her ear, my teeth grazing the delicate cartilage. “Do you want mercy or spectacle?”
“Neither.” She let the word hitch, then angled her face to me in a perfect, insolent dare.
She pulled her hand from mine and walked to the altar beneath the stone cross, watching me as I approached.
The crowd, sensing a once-in-a-century violence about to snap, fell silent, voices stilled mid-gasp, drinks forgotten in midair.
Every man, woman, and animal packed into the velvet pews of La Lune Noire measured their next breath against what I would do with my enemy bride.
I let the moment swell. Let rumor be made flesh.
The Romanovs and Virellis would resolve not at the negotiating table, but on a stage slicked with spit, cum, and blood, and I was nothing if not a man who honored tradition.
Following her to the altar, my boots thudded on the stage. I took off my suit jacket, tossing it to the ground before I rolled up my sleeves. I felt the hard pulse of my own life in my teeth, the smile building behind them.
Never before had I wanted to devour and protect something so much at once.
Harlowe’s eyes were fixed on a ghost in the rafters. The slip she wore was nothing now, already torn down one side, and I saw in her hunched angle how the pain resonated deep, and how she craved it to keep her from crumbling into ash.
Hands behind her, she didn’t look at me when I approached, and that was a kind of provocation, too.
I reached forward and, with the barest whisper, touched her earlobe, grazing the black hair that framed her bruises.
I circled to her front, palms up, inviting her to lash out.
When she didn’t, I pushed her to lie back on the altar, then took her hands and lifted them overhead, guiding her wrists to the heavy iron rungs bolted to either side of the altar.
She didn’t resist, and I respected her for that.
I respected her for not flinching even when the cold bit into her.
I worked quickly, buckling the thick leather cuffs around her wrists and cinching them to the wood, leaving her stretched and exposed, nothing but her breath and resolve holding her upright under the scrutiny of a city full of monsters.
In the front row, the crowd pressed in, carnivorous with curiosity. I could feel their heat, their hunger, but they were nothing compared to the current between Harlowe and me.
I stepped back, rolling my shoulders, and let my gaze devour her, and cataloged every wound, and every shadow.
She dropped her chin, her jaw trembling just a fraction where blood and adrenaline finally collided.
Reaching down, I worked the torn silk up over her hips, and then left it bunched at her waist, the pale slip a flag of surrender I would never allow her to raise.
“She needs a brand,” someone whispered in the crowd, and the words rippled up to the high beams, exposing the collective, secret wish of the crowd—see her suffer, see her break, see if she could stand and be proud at the end.
She would. That was the point of her.
I ran the flat of my palm up her thigh, slowly, deliberately, ignoring the way the crowd hissed at the violence they thought might come next. I left my hand on her leg just long enough to make the room’s pulse slow to a quiver.
The stage swallowed every breath, the dark alive with teeth and envy. I tilted her face up, thumb under her chin, and let her see me. The hush in the cathedral was so total it became its own kind of violence.
“Tell them what you are,” I said, loud enough for the crowd but too soft to be overheard by God.
Harlowe’s eyes blazed, sapphire glass catching the candlelight as she studied me. I could see the rational part of her brain fighting this moment, but the animal couldn’t. She needed to be destroyed. It was the only thing that made her feel real.
And then I saw her decide.
She made a show of struggle, wrists twitching against the cuffs, chin up, but her eyes never left mine.
“I’m the offering, and the monster gets to take what he wants.”
A hard shiver ran through the room. I felt it in my backbone, the way a wolf feels the tremor of prey even before it’s chased. I bent over her so our faces were haloed together for the crowd.
We were animus and anima, a curse and its fulfillment.
I ran my hand up her side, fingers pressing hard enough to tally each rib, each stuttering breath.
She made no sound. Not yet.
Looking at the audience, I let them eat the sight—Giovanni Virelli’s daughter, a dark angel, splayed out under my hands, marked in colors that matched nothing but her father’s worst fears.
“You came for a crucifixion,” I told her.
“Go fuck yourself,” she said, so soft only I could hear the shake in it.
Without a word, I pressed her shoulders back into the altar, letting the collective desire of a hundred strangers buoy her body’s refusal to fold.
I hooked her ankles over the edge and splayed her out.
Then, just as in the old country, when the fathers of fathers branded their daughters to prove ownership, I pulled the knife from my belt.
Harlowe’s eyes widened, not in terror, not even in shock, but in a mute and absolute euphoria. The crowd gasped. She didn’t. She only bit down on her lower lip, as if unwilling to betray even a molecule of pain to anyone but me.
I brought the knife to just above her skin, and the blade kissed the flesh at the divot of her hip. This wasn’t for their benefit. This was for me alone.
She held her body so still, so rigid, that I could almost see the shapes of the prayers she choked back. The knife didn’t touch her, not yet, but the specter of it, the near-miss of being branded alive, was enough.
“Do it,” she mouthed, not a plea or a dare, just the honest primal language of wanting a witness.
So I did, letting her see the flash of steel before I pressed it to her skin, just hard enough to pink the surface.
Not enough to bleed, not yet, but enough to split the noise in the room from pleasure to reverence.
I felt her shiver, her whole body quaking against the altar, and for a second, I wanted to slide the blade deeper, take her to the edge and see exactly where she’d break.
But that would have lacked originality. I wanted her alive, her memory intact, and the agony pure for years.
Pressing the knife to her hip, I carved the first letter of my name—just an A, a single arch, bright red against her perfect skin. When I let go, blood beaded, running like a tear down her thigh. She flinched, but her face told the crowd she’d come here for this.
Holding her gaze, I leaned in, my tongue flicking the cut. It tasted of salt and old bitterness and something only we could name. The crowd moaned as if they’d been struck.
The voyeurism in the room went from prurient to rapturous, and for one moment, we both belonged to something bigger than violence or debt.
It was power, naked and holy.
I sucked the blood until it stopped, then cleaned the knife on the hem of her slip, leaving a wet streak of crimson. I could have released her—I should have. But I could see the wetness of her arousal pool beneath her, her sweet pussy lips glistening in the light, and I couldn’t let her go.
Instead, I traced the flat of the knife handle down her sternum, watching her body arch against the cold metal. She shuddered, breath catching as I dragged it between her breasts.
A strip of her nightgown tore easily under the blade—silk surrendering without resistance. I wrapped the scrap around the handle, binding it loosely, letting the soft fabric catch the light.
Positioning the knife handle at her entrance, I hesitated so she could feel the weight of it, the promise of it. When I pushed inside her, she gasped—that gasp becoming a moan as I moved it slowly, letting the silk brush against her walls while her body clenched around it.
Her head fell back, her neck completely exposed to me.
The room throb with anticipation, every gaze crawling over the two of us. Then, just to prove her body was mine to display, I withdrew the knife, and dipped two fingers between her legs, letting the crowd see what shamed her more than violence ever could, the sticky evidence of her own need.
She jerked, nearly convulsed, and the moan that ripped from her throat was a sound I’d never heard from her before—a sound that spiked the crowd’s hunger into riot.
I pressed my thumb into the bleeding crescent of my mark on her hip while I fucked her with my fingers, slow and showy, while every last eye in the cathedral watched.
Her whole body reached for it, arched into the pain.
She tried to spread her thighs, but the cuffs held fast, so she bucked in tiny, exquisite increments.
When I bent to lick the blood and taste her together, the room hissed.
Catching her face in my hand, I squashed her cheeks so her lips bruised and parted, and said in her ear, “This is what it means to be a Romanov, moya malen’kaya gadyuka.* Even your agony is performance.”