CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Intermundia
I’m getting worried. Does D.M. need help? #WhereisDante? (@deisebloombastic)
My wrists stayed pressed against the wood. Restrained, but not subjugated. The necklace lay cold between my breasts, a constant reminder that I had chosen this. Myself, him. Us.
Dante circled the bed with a satisfied predator’s slowness. His bare feet made almost no sound on the floor. But my body heard everything—the whisper of his pants against his thigh, his measured breathing, cruelly steady. Every second of silence was a provocation.
When the wax dripped again, this time onto my lower belly, my muscles tensed. Then his breath ghosted over my skin, adding another layer of torture.
“Still hot?” he asked, not touching me.
I nodded, silent. My voice caught between clenched teeth.
“Excellent.” I felt him leave the bed. The anticipation shattered with a metallic sound unfurling softly through the room, and I held my breath.
“You still breathing, Doctor?” His voice came low, heavy with intent.
A cold touch slid across my belly. Metal? No. Glass. A hot drop spread immediately after, contrasting with the cold. Oil?
“I want you to feel your own body as if it were the first time,” he said, spreading the liquid with his fingertips, deliberately avoiding the places that screamed for attention.
My skin prickled before he even touched me. The anticipation hurt.
“You’re sensitive here…” His hand trailed along the side of my ribs. “…and extremely reactive here.” His fingers grazed the inside of my thigh, without invading, without satisfying.
I let out a low moan. I felt shame. Arousal. Surrender.
He moved closer, and the heat of his body enveloped me.
“I see the Helena you try to hide, the one who comes undone without being touched. The one who needs to be contained so she doesn’t lose herself.”
His hands spread my thighs, opening me to him, and my hunger seemed ready to be sated. His fingers slid firmly along the inside of my thigh again, then traveled down to my ankles.
His hands held my legs open until the metallic sound rang again, and what little control I still had gave way to complete surrender when he restrained my ankles, leaving me utterly open and vulnerable. Dante had stripped away my ability to react.
“Who are you when all that’s left is to feel?” His voice came from somewhere beyond, because my eyes had closed without command. I knew there was no turning back from here. Looking back felt like staring at a blank page.
His teeth scraped my shoulder, lightly. It wasn’t pain. It was dominion.
He took my breast into his mouth. My nipples, still sensitive, felt a different kind of touch.
Dante’s tongue circled with exacting precision.
There was moisture, heat, and a rhythm that shifted between slow and sudden, like someone composing music with their mouth.
But it was what came with it—his ragged breathing, the wet sound of his mouth between sucks, and the fingers that held the rest of my body still—that composed the true orchestra of chaos.
He alternated between licking and sucking. The nipple trapped between his lips, gently pulled, then released with an almost inaudible pop—one that cracked like a whip through my core.
My hips craved movement and contact, but my body wouldn’t obey me. It was as if every cell obeyed him instead. His touch. His command. As if my center of pleasure no longer resided between my legs but had shifted to wherever Dante placed his attention.
Dante bit, and I was transported.
The cold precision of someone who knows exactly where to draw the line between pleasure and punishment. His tongue came next, like a brief respite between waves, but from here I could no longer see the shore.
My lungs begged for air.
With the same perverse devotion he’d shown the first breast, Dante moved to the second. Each time his mouth consumed a bit more of me, invisible currents running between my breasts exploded in my clit—without him even touching it.
My muscles contracted and I drifted without a beacon through waters I’d never expected to navigate. I trembled all over, held only by the bonds at my wrists. It was primitive, the way my body seemed to break through physical barriers to consume itself in combustion.
Dante sucked with restrained force, his teeth grazing, his fingers pressing lightly on the sides of my breast as if coaxing the last note from an instrument about to shatter.
I came.
Not with a scream. But with a muffled gasp, deep, tearing through my chest. An orgasm that undid me from the inside out. My muscles contracted in spasms that didn’t come from my thighs but from my heart, my spine, my restrained shoulders, my soul.
He continued for a few more seconds. As if he wanted to watch me shatter completely.
And I let him.
Because in that moment, I was no longer Helena Torres.
I was an ethereal sketch of a sensation that couldn’t possibly be human.
My mind spiraled.
My eyes opened when his scent reached me. I breathed him in like a starving beast.
Dante looked down at me, his cock already free of his pants. It was so hard it glistened. The veins looked ready to burst.
My mouth watered and he smiled like a son of a bitch.
A damn torturer.
He stroked the length and the head before sliding it across my lips. I don’t think I’d ever sucked anyone upside down, but I was desperate to try.
“Open your mouth,” he ordered.
I obeyed.
He slid inside my mouth, dragging the head across my tongue. He went deep and I gagged, but that didn’t stop him. He did it again and growled when I instinctively tried to hold him back.
“If you want me to stop, show me your palms.” He slid out and I clenched my fists. “Good girl.”
His fingers pressed against my nipples—still barely recovered—and he thrust into my mouth again. I wanted this so badly it was like my body was begging him to pierce me. To split me open just so I could feel more.
He slapped my breasts and I felt it between my legs.
Every time I gagged, he seemed closer to coming. On me, inside me, anywhere he wanted to claim.
“Stop!” he shouted suddenly.
And I stopped, panting and confused. As if we’d been running toward the abyss and he’d caught me at the last second before the fall.
He looked at me, but I couldn’t find him in his eyes. As if he too was stepping backward, and a bit of earth was sliding down the cliff. Dante released the latch at my neck and I checked to see if my hands had opened on their own.
“You can’t leave me here.” I ground my hips against the mattress. “Did I do something wrong?”
Dante walked around the bed and with a single tug of the sheet flipped my body over. The sound of the chains mingled with my startled breathing.
“What’s the fun in coming on you without seeing the cum dripping from that smart mouth of yours, doctor?” He climbed onto my chest, braced himself against the footboard, and slid his cock into my mouth again. This time, he made it clear he was going all the way.
He went deep until he exploded. I felt his veins pulse against my tongue, his cock releasing the milky liquid that filled my mouth. Dante gripped even tighter when I pressed my tongue against the slit that was still spurting.
The heat of the cum dripping from my mouth became even more sensual when he looked down at me, a wicked smile forming on his lips. Dante was in heaven, and my mouth was pouring the nectar of paradise.
Dante freed me, but I didn’t move. The sheet clung to my sweaty skin, and the silence pressed down like an anvil on the vulnerability of what we weren’t saying.
There was no more hunger in his gaze, but something worse. Something that swayed without rhythm, like the flame of a candle burning down to nothing.
He leaned down and cleaned the corners of my mouth with his fingers.
He said nothing. Neither did I.
And no words were necessary—or even possible—that could have made sense.
I sighed, turning on my side to hug the pillow, still too weak to move. I felt him sit behind me, his arm wrapping around my waist as if holding me with him in a world that threatened to disappear for both of us.
“Why did you look at me that way?” I whispered, my voice faltering, like a child in the dark.
Dante took his time answering.
The silence between the question and the answer felt like a crossing between two worlds that should never meet.
“Because I wanted to stop time,” he finally said. “But all I ever learn is how to kill it. Fast. As if every second by your side is an imminent threat.”
I closed my eyes, trying to erase the image his pain painted on the wound I’d been holding together with tape for the last two days.
He kissed the back of my head, and his breath lingered there, trapped in my hair, as if wanting to hide from his own heart by finding shelter in mine.
“And what happens when time starts running again?” I asked.
Morning light invaded the room through the gaps in the window. In daylight, the room looked so different. And if it weren’t for the trails of clothes and the candle wax on the floor, no one would ever know how many times I’d moaned his name the night before.
I went downstairs to find him in the kitchen making coffee. He was so absorbed he didn’t notice me approach, but he smiled when he saw I was wearing his shirt. The scent wrapped around me as if the weekend could be stored in cotton and woody cologne.
“You look… normal,” I ventured, sitting on the kitchen counter.
“And you look mine.” He placed a cup in front of me. And the box, right beside it. “Which is a bigger problem.”
“Are you going to return me?” I asked, staring at the black rose on the leather lid.
“No.”
The answer cut.
But his tone was calm. Firm. Without disdain. Without possession.
Still, I swallowed hard.
“This isn’t an ending, Helena. It’s an intermission.”
“Between paradise and what?”
“Between who I am… and what they’ll try to make of me. Of us.”
He touched my face with the back of his hand. His touch was light—maybe the lightest he’d ever given me. As if he were afraid of breaking me.
All that lightness of his hurt me in return.
“I can’t ask you to choose between us and the truth. But if you ever have to, promise me something?”
I nodded, unable to find my voice.
“Destroy me with clean hands.”
My stomach sank.
And I could hear the pile of emotions crashing down, as if his words were an elephant in a crystal palace.
“I... I”
“No.” His finger pressed against my lips. “You don’t need to tell me... I trust you.”
“Dante... I think”
He didn’t wait for the last crystals to hit the floor. His mouth claimed mine in our farewell kiss, as if he were memorizing every detail of the taste to survive the coming war.