Chapter 16
I have beenon this stage before—exposed, beaten, played with. And I’ve prepared myself for this moment since Mark asked for it years ago, knowing it would be smart to establish myself as part of the Lyonesse firmament as quickly as possible. Knowing that the sooner I shed the old skins of heiress and princess, the sooner I can get to work as a saint.
My pride and my reputation were always going to be the necessary price.
But I could not have predicted how it would feel to be up here with Mark, saying words that I mean and praying he means the words he says too. Looking up into those eyes and seeing an enemy and a husband and something more wicked than both.
Mark slowly, tenderly, brushes a stray lock of hair away from my face, his fingers trailing down to my jaw and then to my neck. To my shoulder, to the silk of my dress. With a sudden wrench, he yanks the fabric down to my elbow, and the dress tears easily for him, exposing my right breast. My nipple pulls into a stiff point in the cool air.
The watching guests make a soft noise, something that hisses along with the cellos and violins, and I can almost feel it on my skin, kissing along the curve of my breast, whispering over the aching tip. I’d forgotten this, in all my mental preparations. The stir of the crowd, the thrill of their eyes. A perverse need to both impress and best them and the warring pull to surrender to whatever humiliation Mark has devised.
I want them to want me; I want their wanting to make Mark want me. I want to prove that I belong, that I’m worthy of him.
Mark takes my nipple between his thumb and forefinger and rubs it thoughtfully, his eyebrows pulled together. He weighs my breast, squeezes it, tugs on the tip until I can’t help but lean forward, and then he tugs it even more until I cry out.
My voice, the sharp note of surprised pain, seems to fill the hall. It’s the air we all breathe, it’s the dark bloom among the roses and foxgloves, and I see his nostrils flare as his chest rises and falls. I think I’m the only one who can see the slight shake to his fingers as he lifts them to my mouth and pushes them past my lips.
The shaking is like a glimpse into a promised land, an unexpected vista of milk and honey, because he wants this badly. He wants me badly. And all the things he said over our chess game, all the things he said to me on the night he broke my hymen, they’re flooding my mind and washing every doubt away.
He may not love me, but he wants me. He asked for me.
I wanted you collared, and I want you mine.
You’ll be my pet, my toy, my little wife.
I suck his fingers eagerly, and I choke a little as he pushes them all the way to the back of my tongue. He pulls them free just as I do and slaps my breast hard enough to make me whimper. And then he takes me by the upper arm and hauls me to my feet, turning me to face the guests. I don’t need to look down to know that there’s a handprint now blooming on the soft skin.
“What do you think?” Mark asks the crowd. His voice is rich, beguiling. “Will she make a fine wife? Will she do for us?”
Us. I don’t know if that’s the royal we or if it’s the literal truth, and I don’t think I care. A fever is winding its way through my blood now, sinking into my muscles and under my skin. I’m covered in goose bumps, I’m shivering, I’m panting. I’m so slick between the legs with just the weight of a collar on my neck and the humiliation of having my dress torn.
The guests make a noise—a cheer, a plea, both. I’ll do, they seem to say, but they want more proof… They need another test, a harder one.
Mark lifts a finger to his lower lip in mock thoughtfulness. “Perhaps we should see more, hmm? Perhaps I should see the goods I’ve paid for.”
The guests like that. They cheer and lean forward, probably thinking Mark is delving into a little role-play, a little drama to season the display of power we’re acting out. Only a bare few in this room know how true his words are. That the words could only be truer if he’d mentioned that we’d bought each other. Lyonesse’s secrets for Laurence Bank’s.
Or so Mark thinks, anyway.
Mark’s fingers are still wrapped tightly around my arm, and he uses his other hand to find the skirt of my gown, to ruck it up to my waist with undeniable drama. Soon I can feel the air of the room against my thighs, against the damp gusset of the white thong I wear.
He lets go of my arm to cup me there, hard enough to lift me onto my toes. The sudden pressure on my cunt is a heel kick of pleasure, and I suck in a breath, needing more, needing him never to stop.
“It’s wet,” he tells the crowd. “Should we see if it’s pretty too?”
Oh, they like this. They like this a lot. The appearance of decorum is dissolving now, held together only by the way they stay sitting, the way their calls fade away with the notes of the octet still coming from the shadows.
Mark tugs the thong to the side, revealing my naked center, which, without its curls, exposes every last secret of itself. My labia are visible and my clitoris too, and judging by the way the air feels against my slick pussy, I think my arousal is more than evident.
This is the first time they’ve seen so much of me, I realize suddenly. The first time anyone other than Mark or Tristan has seen this part of my body. The wrongness of it, the shame of being witnessed like this, makes the fever in me simmer even hotter. I hope God made me wicked for his purposes because it can’t be wrong if it’s this indelible to me, right? If it goes deeper than the stain of original sin, down to the very firmament of my soul?
And the wickedness runs so deep that I can’t stop the moan that escapes my chest when Mark kicks my feet apart with brisk prerogative.
He watches as he tests the wetness and heat between my thighs. “I’ve waited so long for this,” he murmurs, and it’s barely loud enough for the microphones to catch. The guests are hushed, straining to listen. “You have no idea, Isolde. Each year of our engagement has felt like a decade. Every hour like purgatory. It’s enough to drive someone mad, this cunt.”
His lips find my earlobe, a nip that mirrors the hard press of his fingers against the swollen nerves. And then a kiss to my jaw, my cheek, so deceptively tender.
His breath over the shell of my ear is as warm as his voice is cold. Only I can hear him. “You belong to me now. Do you understand?”
It feels like even my blood is shivering. What if all along my wickedness was just a perverse attraction to danger? Knives and heartless husbands—even God—what’s the point if they’re not ready to slice me down to the bone?
I keep my reply quiet so the audience can’t hear. “You told me once to play the game like I meant it, even if I was going to lose anyway. I’m here, Mark. Playing.”
“You will lose,” he says, and his voice sounds almost…loving. If something so cold could also seem tender.
“Maybe,” I whisper, and then I turn my head to look at him. We’re close enough that our noses nearly touch, that our breath warms the other’s lips. I take the hyssop bouquet that I’m still holding, and I toss it to the side. It lands on the stage with barely a noise. Soft, springy herbs tied with ribbon. I can smell the sharp, almost-minty scent of it.
Mark’s eyes don’t leave mine, but one of his eyebrows lifts. “Is this a dare? One dropped bundle of herbs and you think I’ll concede the game to you?”
“Your move,” is all I say in response.
A smile like a sizzle of lightning and then his mouth is on mine, hard and demanding, searching for my surrender. Just as I give him my tongue, he smacks his hand against my naked cunt. The pain is like a splash of cold water, fresh and bright, and before I can feel it sluice all the way through my body, he has dropped my skirt and is now dragging me back to the bed.
As I stumble behind him, I catch a glimpse of Tristan in the wings, half in shadows next to Sedge. His eyes are intent on where Mark is holding me, pulling me, his eyebrows drawn together, his mouth pulled down. But his cheeks are flushed, and as I’m watching, his lips separate the smallest amount.
Whatever he’s feeling, it’s just as mixed up as whatever’s inside me.
Lust, doubt. Reckless misery.
Envy above almost all else because even I am envious right now. Jealous that while Tristan is watching us, I can’t tell if it’s Mark or me getting the lion’s share of all that longing.
But then I’m thrown bodily to the bed, and I can’t see Tristan any longer. There is only Mark, only his wide-shouldered silhouette, his hair gleaming in the candlelight, his weight on my hips as he straddles me.
“What’s your safeword?” he murmurs as he reaches for something at the corner of the bed.
As if I hadn’t just—quite literally—thrown my safeword to the side. As if we hadn’t discussed the elements of this performance in excruciating detail during the week leading up to our wedding.
“Hyssop.” The first leather cuff is buckled around my wrist. He checks how much room there is under the cuff and then presses on my fingernail—checking for capillary refill, I assume.
“If you feel shy about saying it because of the image we need to present,” Mark tells me quietly, “use our sign for stop. Your thumb and forefinger. I’ll know to back off then, and I’ll make it look like my choice.”
I nod. I want to protest that I don’t need it, that I can take anything he wants to do to me, but I know he needs the reassurance that I will stop him if I need to.
Not because he is good, but because he is not.
And I want to prove to him, beyond our game, that I want this. That I want him. Not only in public, for the crowd, but alone too.
I promised once that I would make you feel every hour that I’ve abstained from possessing someone—it is exponentially truer now. You will suffer for it.
Doesn’t he understand that I’ve always wanted to suffer? For God? For Mark? Even loving Tristan is the jagged pain of breathing in ice-cold air, and I can’t get enough.
My other wrist is cuffed. Dizzy lust spins inside me, and when I think about how we look right now, me in my torn wedding gown, one breast exposed and the skirt caught around my thighs, and Mark straddling me, the lust spins even faster.
Mark drops a kiss to each of my cuffed wrists, leaning over me to do it, and then levers himself off the bed with an easy, athletic grace.
“Tristan,” he says, and I hear the steady, measured strides of the soldier we’ve both had sex with.
I can’t help but look as Tristan approaches, his eyes going almost helplessly to me on the bed, a spasm of pain around his mouth before he returns his gaze to Mark.
“Hold this for me,” my husband says casually, unfastening his wristwatch and giving it to Tristan.
Tristan takes it with a nod, appearing meticulously professional from far away. From up close, however, I can see the softly wounded look in his eyes, the swallow of his throat. The shape of an erection distending the lines of his suit jacket. He looks at me once more and then leaves the stage, Mark’s watch held carefully in his hand.
Mark regards me as he unknots his bow tie, not looking at the crowd at all while he does, and then he pulls it free. It’s tossed onto the stage next to my hyssop bouquet.
He undresses carelessly, his jacket stripped off and dropped, his dress shoes toed off and left where he was standing. He steps closer to the bed as he works his shirt buttons open one by one, gradually exposing more and more skin: the cut of his collarbone, the hard chest, the tight abdomen below. Blond hair dusts over his pectorals, makes a gilded whorl around the flat rim of his navel, and then arrows down to the waistband of his pants.
He slides the shirt from his body with the noise of imported cotton over skin, and it gets dropped just as carelessly as everything else. It’s a show—I know it’s a show because there is nothing he’s not letting the audience see, and there’s no movement that’s not played with an exquisiteness of balance, of strength, of the kind of casual power that reminds everyone watching that he has utter control over their attention. Over their eyes, their thoughts, their wandering hands as they watch our bedding ceremony unfold.
It is a gift, I think, to still look predatory when you’re pulling off a pair of socks.
Finally, he is barefoot and padding to the edge of the bed, his trousers unfastened at the top but not unzipped, his hair unimpeachable despite being mostly undressed.
He cuffs my right ankle to a bottom corner of the bed and then my left, and with each restraint, his fingers go under the cuff, checking the amount of space there, and then he strokes up my calf to the inside of my knee. It tickles, and I jerk in the cuffs, but I can’t actually move. His lips quirk as he watches me try.
And then I’m cinched into place. Spread into an X on the black sheets, a sacrifice for the man now straightening up and dropping his hands to his zipper.
It is cruel of him to give me his full nakedness for the first time when I can’t touch him. To give me the sight of his back when I can’t run my fingers over the furrow of his spine or the tight curves of his ass. To give me the first glimpse of the tattooed words on one of his narrow hips when I can’t lean closer to read them.
And last night I only glimpsed it in the dark, but tonight I see it illuminated by candlelight: a livid red wound on his shoulder, just barely healed, a thing of danger and mortal violence.
The hair on his thighs is the same gold as on his chest, and when the tuxedo pants are all the way off and thrown to the side, I can see that the darkest gold of all is around his erection. It’s as beautiful as I remember from three years ago, straight and thick and lightly veined, the crown tight as stretched silk and wet along its slit. It juts up, moving only slightly as he returns to the bed and braces his knee on the edge.
He crawls over me, sleek muscle and warm skin, and dips his head to bite my exposed breast. The pain is shocking, quick, and I barely suppress the noise it summons. The pain recedes as he lifts his head to look at me, but my breathing stays fast and shallow, and my muscles stay tight.
It is thrilling how alive I feel right now. How close to something like real.
“Did you like that?” asks Mark. He speaks loudly enough for the microphones to pick up, for the crowd to hear. “Do you like it when I hurt you?”
What can I say to that? Yes when the hurting leaves broken blood vessels and purple bruises. No when the hurting leaves me alone in a dark bedroom, gutted and sobbing.
But I can hardly say that in a room full of strangers.
“Yes,” I tell him. “I like it so much.”
Too much. Tristan was good about giving me a jolt of pain to get me over the edge, but Mark hurts me like God hurts me. Like he’s chastising my very soul.
Mark rises up, looking down at me. It doesn’t matter that he’s naked, that his bare toes are braced on the sheets or that I can see where his testicles have pulled tight to his groin in the cool air. He could be a god, a victor, a king for how much authority he exudes right now.
“Tell us why you like the pain,” he purrs. “Tell us why my little wife gets so glassy-eyed when I afflict her with myself.”
I can feel the audience liking this—craving this. The brief times I’ve been at Lyonesse, the play has been unabashedly visual and sexual, bodies doing things to other bodies. But this, this is something more sexual than nakedness and punishment and orgasm. This is Mark fucking my mind, unspooling my thoughts to lick and savor, and giving me nowhere to hide. This is more exposing than even a wedding gown being hiked up to show off my aroused vulva.
“It feels good,” I finally answer.
He regards me a moment and then slides off the bed, reaching for something on the floor behind the headboard. I can’t turn all the way to watch him, not cuffed as I am, although I do see the quick flick of his gaze to the wings where Tristan is.
I’m sorry, I wish I could tell him. You were never meant to be tangled up in all this.
Mark straightens up, and my eyes fall to what’s in his hands. A riding crop, silver and black, absolutely wicked. His long fingers are curled around the silver handle, and he taps the leather keeper at the end against his palm while he walks along the edge of the bed to my feet. He’s pacing like a teacher waiting for a student to fumble toward the right answer.
“It feels right,” I try again, and Mark shakes his head.
“Not good enough,” he says. And then with a hard flick, the crop cracks against the bottom of my foot, searing into the tender arch.
It’s a half-shriek, half-groan that leaves my throat, an embarrassing noise, but I don’t have the energy to be embarrassed. Not when the pain is so vicious, so fucking mean, and I’m writhing in my restraints, trying to twist my feet away from my husband.
He comes around the other side of the bed now and bunches the silk of my skirt in his fist.
“Do you want to try again?” he asks lightly, shoving my skirt up to my waist. It’s only my thong protecting my modesty now, but in an instant, that’s gone too; he’s ripped the delicate seam at the side and stripped it right off my hips. With my ankles cuffed as they are and the skirt of my dress up around my waist, I know my pussy is visible.
And despite his showmanship, his control, I see his gaze stray to it. I see the spread of his pupils. The shining, swollen tip of his dick.
I think of his warning last night, that he was giving me a waiver.
You will suffer for it.
I want him to make me suffer for it so badly. I want him to cuff me to his real bed and use my body until I forget that we can never be on the same team. Until I forget why I’m not supposed to love and worship him.
I dredge up another answer for him, a truer answer. “It feels cleansing,” I say, trying to speak so I can be heard. “I feel clean after you hurt me.”
Crack. Crack.
I writhe in the cuffs, two lines of pain puffing across my upper thighs now. I hadn’t thought that part of my body especially sensitive, not compared to my nipples or the soles of my feet at least, but the riding crop is merciless.
Mark gives me two more strikes, one on each thigh, waits until I manage to catch my breath, and then two more. Five thin welts of fire on the top of each thigh, burning down into the muscle and bone.
I’m blinking up at the ceiling now, which is half stage guts with its loft blocks and sandbags, and half glass roof looking up into the night sky. My nipples are so hard they could rival the new marks on my thighs for how much they hurt, and my breathing is a jagged chain attached to my cunt. My thoughts are floating up to the glassed-off stars, pulled back down only by the cool charm of his voice.
“We’re getting closer, Isolde,” he says, soothing and cruel all at once. “But what is the truth? Why do you feel clean after I hurt you?”
Why indeed? Why do I feel purified, sanctified by it? Why do I feel like I’m gold refined by the fire? Like I can be full of God’s love only after I’m emptied of everything else—memories, thoughts, regrets, trespasses?
“Because I deserve it,” I whisper.
There is a pause. No riding crop, no pain. I blink up at the ceiling as Mark watches me.
“Because you deserve it,” he repeats, loudly enough for everyone to hear. His voice is fond now and almost kind. “Well. If you say so.”