Chapter 9
Arianette
The late-autumn sun slants through the high windows of the humanities building, painting long gold rectangles across the floor.
Outside, the maple trees have bled out into violent crimson.
After being locked in the cage for days, I notice everything: how the hallways smell like wet wool coats, and the faint metallic tang of old radiators.
Whispers follow me down the hallway the way they always have, but the flavor has changed.
Before, they were pitying, horrified, morbidly curious: the girl who was taken, the body by the river that wasn’t a body after all.
Now it’s more of a fascination. I’m no longer that girl. Now, I’m the Baroness.
The King’s wife.
The halls are crowded as everyone files out of the lecture rooms. Damon walks next to me, fingers curled around my waist. When I spot the sign above the door, I look up at him and ask, “Can I stop and… you know…”
He studies me with those dark eyes, piercings threaded through his eyebrows and lip. He knows what I’m asking for and why. “Yeah, don’t fuck around. We’re meeting Hunter at the quad in ten.”
“I won’t be long.”
I duck into the women’s restroom on the second floor.
The door sighs shut behind me, muffling the hallway noise to a dull heartbeat.
I lock myself in the handicapped stall, set my bag on the baby-changing station, and open the small, black leather kit Damon pressed into my hand when we got in Hunter’s truck.
“Clean it twice a day until it heals,” he’d said, voice low, thumb brushing the fresh piercing between my legs like it was the most natural thing in the world. “We wouldn’t want an infection.”
The antiseptic stings. I hiss through my teeth, lean my forehead against the cool metal wall, and count to ten.
The new jewelry tugs every time I move. A constant reminder.
The sound of the restroom door opening and closing tips me off that I’m not alone.
I finish up quickly, and when I come out, there’s a girl at the sink.
Not just a girl.
Story.
She’s perched at the middle mirror, one hip against the counter, long dark hair spilling over the back of her sweater. She’s unfairly beautiful with huge velvet-brown eyes that meet mine as I approach the sink.
“Fuck, I look like a nightmare,” she mutters, uncapping concealer. She dots it beneath her eyes. “I didn’t get any sleep last night.” She catches my gaze in the mirror and smirks. “But you just got named Baroness and married the King. I imagine you know what it’s like.”
Heat floods my face. My mind flashes to the ritual from the night before and the piercing throbs in answer. I look away after noticing the leather cuff wrapped around Story’s wrist. There’s no mistaking who the gold skull in the center with the Greek letters LDZ etched across the top belongs to.
Who she belongs to.
Absently, my fingers drift to the black leather collar locked around my throat, which tightens with every swallow. The Barons’ pentagram is affixed dead center. “I know it feels weird,” she says quietly, watching me in the mirror, “having their mark on you. But there’s value behind it.”
I drop my hand like I’ve been burned and stare hard at my own reflection.
“Oh.” Story gives a low, amused chuckle. “No talking, right?” She rolls her eyes, pats beneath them with the little sponge. “They’re all so fucking predictable.”
I stay silent. The faucet drips in the far sink: plink… plink… plink.
She caps the concealer, drops it back into her bag with a soft clack. “Look, don’t worry. I won’t tell them that we saw one another.”
She smooths the makeup with her fingertips. Already she looks brighter, like someone turned the dimmer switch up a notch.
“It doesn’t feel weird,” I say. My voice sounds rusty in the tiled room. “The collar.”
The piercing… well, that’s another thing altogether.
Story shrugs. “Well, I thought it was weird at first. But I got used to it, and now I don’t mind.”
She pulls out lip gloss next and paints her mouth cherry red in one smooth stroke.
“What do you mean by ‘value?’” I ask.
“That strip of leather is all you need in Forsyth.” She presses her lips together, blots once on a tissue. “Protection. Royal reputation.” A humorless smile. “Power.”
The Hunt. The cage. The Shadows painting me with their seed while Hunter and Damon thrust into me. I swallow and the collar shifts.
“I’m not sure I feel any of those things.”
“That’s the thing.” She drops the gloss back into her purse, zipping it with finality. “No matter how you feel, no matter what’s going on behind the walls of your house, that’s what it represents to everyone else.” She meets my eyes in the mirror, steady. “I recommend you embrace it.”
I nod.
She turns, pleated skirt swinging high across the backs of her thighs, short enough to almost reveal the curve of her butt. “Oh, I almost forgot.” Her smile softens, genuine this time. “Your wedding dress really was gorgeous.”
The compliment startles me. “Thank you.”
She pauses at the door, fingers on the push-bar, and gives me a look that isn’t quite pity. “It’ll get easier, Arianette. I promise.”
The door swings shut. The restroom falls quiet except for that dripping faucet and the low hum of the vents overhead.
The ball of dread in my stomach hasn’t shrunk, but for the first time since the fire, it feels… looser. Like maybe, just maybe, there’s room to breathe inside the collar after all.
I hope she’s right.
The studio smells exactly the way it always has: rosin, sweat, and the faint ghost of cedar from the barre. The mirrors are fogged at the edges from twenty bodies breathing hard. Madame Duval claps once, loud as a gunshot, and we fall into fifth.
I’m in the front line today, closest to the piano, near the wall of seats that rises like dark bleachers.
He’s there.
Hunter.
Damon isn’t with him; he left me with Hunter at the fountain and rushed off to his next class.
My other Baron has his hood up, arms folded on the railing, chin resting on his forearm.
He watches closely, like I’m something he’s studying in one of his books.
Like I belong to him. Like every tendu and every breath is a private performance he paid for in blood and vows.
Madame doesn’t acknowledge him; none of the girls do, although it’s obvious they sense him. They’ve learned not to look too long at the men who wait for us–the royal house girls. This may be what Story meant about reputation and power.
“New phrase,” Madame says in her smoke-and-bourbon voice. “Glissade, jeté entrelacé, double tour en l’air, land in his arms, but today no partner. You throw yourselves. You catch yourselves. Show me you don’t need anyone.”
She wants defiance. She always wants defiance.
The pianist attacks the keys. I attack the floor.
Dance has lived in my bones since I was small enough to stand on a coffee table in lace-trimmed socks while Uncle Owen’s friends drank cognac and applauded like I was a prima ballerina instead of a bruised little girl. Back then, the music was the only thing allowed to touch me without asking.
Today, everything touches.
The new piercing is swollen and hot, rubbing raw with every landing, every cambré, every time my legs open into second for a soaring jeté.
I’m slick before we’re ten minutes in, the seam of my leotard soaked, the metal kissing nerves that have no business being this awake in public.
My nipples are just as bad; the healed bars through them feel heavier than usual, aching against the stretchy fabric every time my chest lifts on an inhale.
Damon knew what he was doing. I think about him with every jolt in my nerves.
I throw the double tour and spot Hunter in the mirror instead of the wall. His eyes don’t blink. He’s perfectly still, predator-quiet, and the knowledge that he can see the tremor in my thighs, the flush riding high on my chest, makes the next eight fouettés vicious.
I finish the phrase shaking, sweat cooling too fast in the draft from the vents. After Christy rolls her ankle, Madame claps us out early, and the room empties in a rustle of towels and whispered gossip.
I can’t follow them to the dressing room. I take a deep breath and go the other direction, ducking behind the curtain. I make it three steps into the backstage corridor before I hear footsteps behind me.
Hunter steps through and pulls the door shut behind him, cutting the light to a thin red line from the EXIT sign. The corridor shrinks to nothing but cinderblock, dust, and the low thrum of the building’s old pipes.
He doesn’t speak at first. He just looks at me: chest heaving, lips swollen from my own teeth, leotard clinging wetly to every place it shouldn’t. My thighs are trembling so hard the seams of my tights whisper.
“You’re shaking,” he says, voice so low that I can’t tell if he’s curious or confused. “What’s wrong?”
I swallow. “The piercing. It’s… agitating.”
He takes one step closer, then another, until I have to tip my head back to hold his eyes. “It’s too fresh.”
To touch. To get relief. “I know.”
We’re so close to one another, and to my surprise, he places one palm flat against the wall behind me, then the other, caging me in. Still, he doesn’t touch me. Never. His gaze drops to my chest, to the hard outline of the bars under pink fabric. “Pull the straps down. Show me what’s mine.”
My hands obey before my brain catches up. The leotard peels away; cool air hits flushed skin, and my nipples tighten painfully around the silver. He drinks in the sight, and I know that even if he won’t touch me, he wants me. That much is obvious.
“Touch them,” he commands. “Slow. Then hard. Don’t close your eyes. Look at me while you do it.”
I roll the bars between my fingers: twist, tug, and twist again. The sting shoots straight down to the swollen, forbidden place between my legs. My breath stutters.
“Good,” he praises, voice rough. “Again. Harder. Imagine my teeth.”
I do. God, I do. My hips rock forward, chasing friction that isn’t there. He watches every involuntary jerk, every shudder, with his pupils blown wide.
“I wouldn’t just toy with those bars, Arianette.” His hand runs down the front of his pants, cock throbbing at the seam. “I’d sink my teeth in, biting down on your flesh, waiting for you to scream.”
A rush of warmth pools between my legs. He looks down and inhales deeply.
“You’re dripping down your thighs,” he says, conversational and cruel. “I can smell it. You’re not allowed to touch that pretty new pussy piercing yet, but you’re going to come just from this, aren’t you?”
“Yes—” It’s half sob.
“Then do it. Come for me, Hex. Right now. Quiet.”
I pinch and pull one last time, so hard my vision whites out. The orgasm slams through me, silent and brutal, thighs clamping together around nothing while I sag against the wall. He doesn’t move to catch me; he lets me ride it out on my own, shaking, tears pricking at the corners of my eyes.
When the aftershocks fade, he steps in close enough that his hoodie brushes my bare breasts. Close enough that I feel the heat of him everywhere except where I need it most.
He reaches down, tugs my straps gently back into place, fingers lingering on the collar at my throat.
The gentle movement… well, it’s unexpected, but the goosebumps that spread across my skin aren’t from arousal.
It’s trepidation. Hunter doesn’t touch me for a reason that I don’t understand, but my body is sure of one thing: he isn’t safe.
“Fix your face and get yourself together,” he says. “I got a text from Graves. You’re going out with the King tonight.”
“I’m doing what?” I ask, knees still shaky. But he’s gone, melting back through a service door I didn’t even see, leaving me wrecked and trembling in the dark.