Chapter 7 #2
Despite the memories coursing like hot lava through my veins, burning with both nostalgia and regret, I keep my tone cold. “Is this conversation going somewhere?”
“You bet your life it is.” His voice turns quiet, his words sounding sinister. “You owe me another name.”
I gape at him. “For what? So that you can punish the men you yourself sent after me?”
“I told them not to harm you.”
“Why?” I push out a laugh. “So that you could use me one more time to get your revenge?”
He tilts his head and narrows his eyes, his non-verbal language telling me not to test his patience.
“Because you’re mine.” He hauls me closer, causing our bodies to collide. “Which part of that didn’t you understand?”
“And after?” I look into his eyes where the golden flames burn cold instead of hot. “When I’ve served my purpose? Is that when you’re going to kill me?”
He doesn’t as much as blink. “Noah needs his mother.”
“So this is about Noah now, is it?”
His voice drops another octave. “And not about you?” He caresses my neck, dragging this thumb over the vein that pulses there. “Do you want me to care?”
I grit my teeth. “Not for a second. I don’t give a damn about you. I don’t care what you feel or what you don’t. You no longer have any effect on me.”
He smiles as if he doesn’t believe me. “Prove it. Take off your jeans and show me your cunt isn’t wet.”
On cue, at the crass words, liquid heat spills between my legs. What is wrong with me?
I strain in his hold. “Let me go.”
He doesn’t budge. “His name, Tatiana.”
“I don’t know,” I exclaim.
He walks me backward to the room. “Where did it happen?”
“New York.” I glance behind me, frightened now, not of him but of my reaction as the back of my legs hit the bed. “I hadn’t left the city yet.”
He pushes me down until I’m sitting on the mattress. “Before or after Noah was born?”
My heartbeat picks up in alarm as he grips the waistband of my jeans and yanks me to the edge of the bed.
“Dante, what are you doing?”
Ignoring my question, he pops the button and pulls down the zipper. “Answer me, Tatiana. My patience is running thin. I think you want a taste of my belt instead of my hand.”
Cold sweat runs down my armpits. The fear is sharp and traitorous, the idea of the pain almost sending me spiraling down a pit of memories from the darkest night of my life. Yet I’m too proud to tell him to stop, too scared that he’ll see what the idea of a whipping does to me.
Instead, I give him what he wants. “Before Noah was born.”
“How long before he was born?”
“I was four months pregnant.”
Rage flashes through his eyes. That he shows the fury so clearly instead of masking it as he usually does only scares me more.
He pushes me onto my back, grabs the legs of the jeans, and pulls them free in a single movement. “What happened?”
I can handle anything, but not this, not to be thrown back so viciously into the nightmare that left me in a heap of bleeding pulp. I can fight for Noah and our lives, but I’m not strong enough to go back to that night. This is the one thing that will break me, and I can’t allow him to do that.
My reply is rushed. “He waited for me outside a supermarket.”
He drops the jeans on the floor. “Then what?”
“I tried to dodge him when I realized I was being followed.”
He dips a finger in the elastic of my panties and pulls them down my thighs.
Inside, I start shaking. “I went up a fire escape at the back of a building.”
Holding my gaze, he frees my feet from the panties before balling the cotton in a fist. At least my oversized T-shirt falls down to my thighs, protecting my modesty.
I speak faster, wanting this to end. No, to prevent it. “I wasn’t fast enough. He found me.”
Dante lifts the underwear to his nose and inhales deeply, just like he used to do.
I push onto my elbows, wanting to be ready if he strikes. If he flips me over and presses my face into the covers, I’m not sure I’ll survive it. “He caught my ankle. I slipped and hit my chin on the metal step.”
Dante drops the panties on my jeans. He cups my knees and pushes them apart, letting my legs dangle over the side of the bed.
Like a mouse confronted by a snake, I’m paralyzed. “I got in a kick. My foot connected with his face, and he fell.”
He pulls the hem of the T-shirt up to my middle, leaving me exposed from the waist down. I want to fight, but I can’t move a finger. I know from experience I’m not going to win. Like bad déjà vu, the knowledge freezes me.
He pushes me down with a hand on my shoulder until I’m once more lying flat on my back. “Who stitched you up?”
“I had a little money. I went to a nurse my mother used to call out when my father’s men were injured. She never asked questions, and she accepted cash.”
Staring at the center of my legs, he unbuckles his belt.
I should plead, but despite the fear, I’m too proud. “That’s all I know.”
He pulls the belt from the loops in his waistband and folds it double, holding it with the buckle in his palm. “What did he look like?”
I think I may hyperventilate.
I speak faster. “Red hair and freckles. Crooked nose. Eyebrow piercings.”
He steps between my legs. “Clothes?”
“It was dark. I barely got a look at his face in the streetlight.”
He lowers the belt to the junction of my legs, dragging the leather over my folds.
Sensations assault me from all sides, the fear mixing with shameful arousal.
I open my mouth to tell him to stop, to lay down my pride and admit I can’t take this, that I’m too weak, but the sharp sting of the leather as he brings it down between my legs pulls me from the past back to the present.
I’m no longer there, on that night, but here, in the room, with Dante standing between my thighs and my pussy burning with a fire that heats more than just my skin.
The reaction catches me off guard. The pain isn’t excruciating.
It’s pleasant, if pain can be called that, and strangely liberating.
It allows me to feel pleasure without guilt simply because it’s so different from the sweet pleasure we shared before.
The ugliness of these sensations doesn’t feel like a betrayal of myself.
I can let myself go and not worry that I’m giving Dante something he has no right of taking, because the only thing he’s getting is the not-so-pretty side of me.
He brings the belt down again, softer this time. “Clothes. What did he wear?”
Resisting the urge to lift my hips and chase after the friction, I fist my hands in the covers. “Nothing that stood out.”
He spanks me again, aiming lower. My back arches. And again. When he slowly drags the belt over my folds, the tell-tale tingling is already building in my abdomen.
“Jeans and a T-shirt,” I blurt out.
He punishes me one more time. Pleasure sears through my skin to burn right down to my core.
“Wait,” I cry out, terrified that I’ll come.
“A cap.” I suck in a breath when he flicks the belt over my folds where it hurts less and burns hotter.
“With a Yankees logo.” The man’s sinister grin flashes through my mind, something sparkling in the dim streetlight.
“He had a gold-capped tooth.” I want to close my legs, but Dante is still standing between them. “That’s all.”
Pushing his right knee onto the bed, he bends down and tests my folds with a finger. I don’t think I’ve ever been this wet.
He stills with the digit barely parting me, satisfaction slipping into the darkness of his smile. “Good girl.”
He never spoke to me like that. He never treated me like a submissive or a pet trained to react on his command. This is what I wanted, but it also burrows like a thorn under my skin.
“I told you everything I remember.” I sit up and try to push him away with my hands on his shoulders. “You can get off of me now.”
He kneels on the bed, forcing me to scoot back to make space for him. “Not yet.”
“Dante.”
His face is expressionless, giving me nothing. “Are you going to tell me you’re not enjoying being treated like a needy slut? Isn’t this how you wanted it? You want it to be rough so you can hate it.” He drags the belt over my folds. “But you don’t, do you?”
“Dante,” I say again.
What I’m truly hating is the fact that he can read me so easily.
“You can make it stop. Just say the word. Or tell me to love you like before. You know I’m capable.
No matter how much you pretend, you haven’t forgotten how sweet it can be.
” He taunts me with his words, dangling the craving for affection like a carrot in front of me.
“It’s yours for the taking. All you have to do is ask me. ”
I open my mouth to say no, but the word dies on my lips when he spanks me with the belt between my legs.
I’m split open and vulnerable, and he holds an instrument that can inflict terrible pain, yet he knows exactly how far he can push me.
He knows exactly how to walk the fine line between torture and pleasure.
He knows how to mix depravity and desire.
“Give me this.” He rubs away the sting with the smooth, cool leather. “And you won’t want for anything.” When I remain quiet, a look of disappointment passes through his eyes, but he replaces it quickly with quiet acceptance. “As you wish. Like a bitch in heat it’ll be, my stubborn pet.”
How can I agree when he offers me the same deal as before? Only, like he said, it’s not a deal, and he’s not asking. Not really. Not when he delivers a few light taps in quick succession.
I break apart beneath him, my orgasm ripping through me with a brutality I’ve never experienced.
He spanks me through it, making the pleasure spike even higher, and then he wrestles every aftershock from me that my spent body is capable of giving him by gliding the belt up and down my folds, paying special attention to my clit.