Chapter 17
The crop comesagainst the sole of my untouched foot.
The leather keeper swats my bared nipple until I’m groaning, and then a sharp strike lands squarely on my clit. I scream, my back arching off the bed, the pain like a spear into my entrails, a lance from my pussy all the way to my heart, separating rib from rib and lung from lung.
I am torn apart, and I am alive, and the very air around me seems to sparkle with joy, with the presence of God. Tears track down the sides of my face, into my hair, fast and thick, and everything inside me is empty and dazed. I am a vessel of breath and joy.
I don’t know how much time passes like that, but Mark is crawling over me again, this time with his erection gloved in clear latex, and then he settles between my spread thighs with a rough exhale. His thighs are so firm and large against mine, his sheathed cock is a forge-hot bar pressing against my clitoris, and his large hands are planted on either side of my head, caging me in a jail made of muscle and husband.
With him right over me, I can see so much that I didn’t before. The white threads and pink divots of infinitesimal scars on his chest and arms, the notch of his Adam’s apple. The different shades of platinum and gold in his hair.
Our eyes meet, and with the way the stage lights fall and the candles around us flicker, I can see the disparities of color in his irises, the infinite crypts of marine blue and the frill of azure around his pupils. All of it blue, but all of it different, shifting, intricate. A labyrinth, but the monster isn’t only in the middle this time.
My thighs sting miserably where Mark’s own thighs rub against the edges of the fresh welts—being cuffed like this means that I can’t spread my legs any farther apart than they already are. The abused soles of my feet are screaming. And when Mark lowers his mouth to my breast and sucks on the battered tip, I give a groan that has the audience reacting in gasps and scattered cheers.
My husband lifts his head to look at me, his mouth wet and his eyes hooded.
“Let’s see if I can play by my own rules,” he says, almost to himself, and then presses his mouth to mine. His lips are warm, as soft as his erection isn’t, and there’s something hesitant in the way he parts my lips to taste me. Or maybe not hesitant—it’s hard to imagine Mark as anything other than entirely certain all of the time—but careful. Thoughtful. Like this is something he’s chosen to do, but at a price he didn’t want to pay.
There are cheers now, but I can barely hear them. His breath is all there is, along with the shift of the bed underneath him as he slides his arms under my shoulders to cradle my head from below, keeping my mouth exactly where he wants it. There is the sound of our lips, parting, moving—and all of it is lost to the rush of my blood anyway, to the gorgeous, slipping, falling feeling of this. Of Mark kissing me like he’s risking something, putting something on the line.
The caution of his kiss slips as his fingers spread through my hair, as his weight presses me into the bed. His tongue is dipping and seeking, stroking along my own, and with a low groan, he crushes his mouth even harder against mine.
I kiss back as much as I can while spread and cuffed, while my head is trapped in the cradle of his strong hands, but I’m resourceful. And I’m so desperate for this that it will shame me later when I’m in my right mind.
I open my mouth for him, chase his tongue. I breathe in his exhales and feed him mine in return. I try to lift my hips and my chest, hating the silk still separating our stomachs.
“You’re still a terrible idea,” he whispers against my mouth, an echo of what he told me that night on my father’s desk. “The worst I’ve ever had.”
“Then don’t let me go to waste,” I reply, and he groans again, biting my lip and then my jaw and then sucking at my pulse through my neck.
“Never,” he mutters, lifting up on his hands. “You were too dearly bought.”
Tristan and I always fell on each other, eager and impatient animals, grabbing and fumbling until we found our way to pleasure. But watching Mark deliberately rise and take himself in hand is more obscene than the mindless lust Tristan and I shared on the yacht. There is no ambiguity here, no excuse. There is intention in every movement and shift, in the rake of his eyes from my sucked-on neck to my sex, in the flex of his biceps and shoulder as he checks the condom and then fits the swollen tip of his penis to my center. He doesn’t look at the crowd to see if they’re watching—their attention is a living thing, palpable even through my dizzy float of endorphins—but he does look over the headboard once. To the wings.
I wonder what Tristan is thinking right now, what he’s feeling. If he feels jealousy the same way I feel it, like a crush around the chest and a clench in the belly. If his flesh responds to emotional pain like it’s physical pain. Like there’s no difference between Mark leaving invisible welts with his absence and leaving welts with a riding crop.
The first push is a labored one, both of us so swollen with need, and Mark only gains a half inch, not even his whole tip. He adjusts the hand planted by my head, his other hand keeping his erection in place as his hips shift.
He pushes again, a brutal intrusion, and I toss my head between my restrained arms as he shifts and then gains another few thick inches. The stretch itself is scorchingly erotic, the fullness feeding the fever in my veins and coaxing it higher and higher. Pleasure is a relentless tug below my navel, and it twines through the lingering pain, dumping more chemicals into my blood. It blooms in darker blooms than even the flowers nestled poisonously in the hall.
The audience is growing raucous now; I hear movement along with the cheers and calls. When I turn my head, I can make out disarray and skin, although it’s difficult to see much more through the glow of the stage lights and my own sparking vision.
“They’re jealous,” Mark whispers. He is breathless, breathless when he never lost his breath sparring me or even flogging my ass within an inch of its life. “They want to be playing with you. Using you. Touching this gorgeous—cunt?—”
A flex, and I think he’s almost all the way in. His eyes burn over my face, and the muscles in his neck and shoulders are tight. He is tight all the way down, in fact, his chest and stomach held in trembling restraint, a damp sheen on his skin like he’s been fighting on a second front this entire time. Keeping himself leashed.
I think about what the crowd is seeing, all six foot and some inches of his nakedness, the flexure of his backside, the poised strength of his thighs and back. He seems entirely unselfconscious, as if performing for his members is the same in a tuxedo as it is in only a condom, and images from last night’s dream flicker in my thoughts. Mark wearing only a gold torc around his neck, torchlight on his naked body, a pillar of arrogant ease.
A final push. His hips are flush to mine; my belly is full; I can hardly breathe. His head drops, some hair escaping its ruthless hold to hang down over his forehead. His chest is moving hard now, heaving, and he mumbles, “God, how I’ve wanted this.”
“How I’ve wanted you,” I say on a breath, and it should serve my purposes, it should be part of my seduction, but, of course, it’s also the truth, the rawest honesty. I’ve wanted him and I’ve loved him and he’s burned in me for years. A fever of the heart. A fever of the brain.
He captures my mouth again, a punishing kiss coupled with a deep, agonizing thrust. I moan into his mouth, the faint kiss of pain inside my cunt matching the hard kiss above, and he does it again, a stroke so deep that it feels like he’s trying to reach the very air I breathe.
The audience loves it, and there’s a feral edge in their voices now, a wildness. We’ve cajoled them past what decorum can bear, led them to a laden feast and made them watch as we sunk our teeth into plump and juicy fruit.
One of Mark’s hands finds my collar to stroke and then he moves to my waist, clutching it and then my ass with bruising possessiveness, all while he tries to split me in half with his unholy flesh. Sometimes he just watches me, a flush to his cheeks and almost no blue left to his eyes, the intensity of his gaze as he pierces my center over and over again absolutely harrowing.
The orgasm is an abyss at my feet, a yawning annihilation, and I’m terrified of it, terrified of pleasure that immense. I fight it, sucking in breath after breath, squirming as much as I can, but Mark’s invasion is relentless: thick, filthy caresses on the inside of me while the hilt of his dick kneads the throbbing knot at the top of my pussy. And it’s too much, I think, too much for me to stop. Maybe I could fight off the pain or the pleasure by themselves; maybe I could resist the seasoned vigor of his body. Maybe I could resist the way he’s looking at me, this prize he’s bought, his little wife sitting across his mental chessboard, a shadows-and-glass girl only a few whispered pleas from being fully his.
But I can’t resist all of it together, and God help me, I can’t resist it knowing that Tristan is watching from the wings. Not because I want him to ache, to want, but because having his green eyes on me is as close as I can get to touching him again.
And the guests, the guests too—their cries and moans as they touch each other and themselves in front of the stage, their gasps and goads and whispers as Mark fucks me, relentlessly. Not like a bride, but like a wife, all tenderness gone and nothing but hard mating left behind.
He lays himself fully on top of me now, hips still working to drive himself deep, and he buries his nose in my hair as he fucks. He licks my neck. He pushes his arms underneath me and crushes our bodies together so that I can feel the hammering of his powerful heart in his chest, the quiver in his stomach and thighs as pleasure bores through him.
He runs his tongue over the pulse in my neck just above my collar and then kisses my face. My tears. He’s eating them.
And then he wedges his hand between our stomachs, pushing down to where we’re fitted together.
“Don’t,” I plead, almost panicked at the thought of him making me come. The climax is too much, too big, and I won’t survive it. Just like I might not survive him. “Don’t!”
“Oh, sweetheart,” he says, the syllables impish and a little mean. “Don’t is not your safeword.”
I grope for the right word as his fingers reach my clit; I claw it up my throat. Hyssop. Hyssop. An exhale, a sibilation, a plosive. I should say it—fuck—I should say it because his fingers are too expert, too sure, and the climax is there, imminent, a fatal well with no light and no bottom.
But I don’t say it. I can’t seem to make myself, to form the word—and maybe it’s my competitive nature or maybe it’s just masochism, plain and simple, but I press my lips together. Even the whimpers aren’t leaving my throat right now.
I feel Mark’s mouth curving against my neck and then on my cheek. He’s smiling, and I close my eyes so I don’t see it because I definitelycan’t handle that on top of everything else.
“That’s what I thought,” he says, and this is loud enough for the hall to hear, and they laugh and groan with lust, and it doesn’t matter because I open my eyes and see him above me, nearly as undone as I am, with his blown pupils and his swollen lips. His tousled hair, which now has a stray violet from my braid caught in the gold.
“I’m going to come.” It’s a whisper, an exhaled prayer. “Oh God. Oh my God.”
Mark licks my mouth, like he wants to eat the words off my lips. He’s still smiling, evil and tyrannical and amused. “Sir will do for now.”
I come.
It’s a cataclysm, a plunge into nothing, just like I feared it would be. The contractions rip up from my belly and thighs and rob my breath, they tear down to the aching soles of my feet and make my toes curl. I’m thrashing underneath him, fighting my cuffs, every muscle yanking me through the flood.
I can barely see—there’s only his wickedly handsome face—and I can barely hear—there are only my cries and the cries of the crowd—and I’m sobbing as my body keeps surging and clenching around his sex. I’m sobbing because he is so very here, on me and inside me, because the crowd is here too, grunting with me, groaning with me. Our pleasure shared, our hunger joined.
I am not alone.
I am not alone.
He fucks me through my sobs, crooning low in my ear as he uses my wet cunt the way I know he wants—ruthlessly. He presses his face against the side of mine as he ruts into the soft, tight center of me, his fingertips finding my collar as he’s murmuring his iniquitous little nothings?—
This perfect cunt, my wife has a perfect cunt?—
You got me all wet; can you feel how wet everything is?—
I can’t stop—so fucking tight, sweetheart?—
Going to give you this every day, every hour, going to give you all my cum?—
He goes still, his mouth dropping to mine, lips grazing lips. But he doesn’t press down, doesn’t kiss me properly. Instead our breath is shared, our eyes are locked, as he shudders and then swells inside me. With a ragged groan, he fills the condom in heavy, hot jerks that I can feel with every inch of my being. On and on as our lips brush, our eyes search, and then his shut as he finally presses his mouth fully to mine and gives me several more thrusts. As if to make sure that he’s milked every last drop from his body. As if he truly can’t stop fucking me.
And this is not the first time Mark and I have had sex, and this is not the ceremony that matters legally or sacramentally.
But the fading, flickering spasms of our shared pleasure…his tongue slanting and kneading and tasting even as he still pulses his release…the lingering sear of the pain he gave me and the cool, clean freedom washing over it like water—yes, our vows are sealed. In our own way, maybe, with witnesses and restraints and creepy flowers, but they’re sealed nonetheless. We are more than married in the eyes of the law and God, we are sewn together with possession and surrender.
I’m collared; he’s triumphant.
And we can’t stop kissing. His tongue is playful, his lips wonderfully soft as his mouth slants and stamps over mine.
The kiss in the cathedral was only the prelude, a pale ghost compared to how he kisses me now. If earlier he was fucking me like a wife rather than a bride, now he kisses me like a pet. Like a plaything. And oh, how that makes my cunt ache, my clit kick again with swelling arousal. I’ve spent the past three years making myself into a killer, a weapon, a thing of ice and prayer, and now I’m turning into a wet, mewling kitten after a good kiss. I don’t know if I can forgive myself for it.
To the raw approbation of the crowd, Mark lifts up and pulls free of my pussy, one hand wrapped around his root to keep the condom on. He moves around the side, deposits the condom somewhere unseen, and returns to the bed. He then uncuffs me with practiced efficiency, flexing my fingers and toes and testing any marks the cuffs left behind.
I don’t realize I’m still crying until he reaches for me. Before I know it, he’s sitting against the headboard, and I’m cradled against his naked chest. His arms are around me, and he tilts my face up to his so he can catch my tears and lick them off his fingers.
“How do you feel, little wife?” he asks. He’s speaking so the guests can hear. The aftercare is part of our performance tonight, which I knew coming into this, and yet it feels strangely transgressive. More so than them seeing my nakedness, more so than them seeing Mark penetrate me.
I press my face into his shoulder. “I don’t know,” I whisper. Wetly. My tears are spilling onto his chest now.
“It’s okay not to know,” he says. The cool reserve is creeping back into his voice, but it’s still a little hoarse, a little ragged, and I can feel his heart thumping swiftly against his ribs. It’s comforting to know he’s affected too. That what we just did had some kind of power over him.
“I don’t feel alone right now,” I volunteer, knowing he’ll understand why that matters. “I feel dizzy and good and clean and—not alone.”
He gives me a slow, lazy smile. I think it’s for the benefit of the crowd, but it works on me too. “No, you’re not alone, Isolde. Look at them. Look at your people, your fellow deviants. Look at them touching for you. Fucking for you.”
He takes my chin in his hand and guides me to look out into the hall. And he’s right: they are touching for me and fucking for me. Stripped clothes and writhing forms, people straddling, kneeling, stretched out on the ground. Sucking and screwing. Some are only watching, and some are only watching us, and yet the mood is fully hedonistic.
The demons have been let out to play.
He strokes my hair, flowers sticking between us along with my tears. It’s so easy to breathe in his arms and so easy to cry, even though I don’t fully know why I’m crying. It just feels like what I’m supposed to do.
“They loved you,” Mark says, and his voice is low now. Just for us. “I knew they would.”
And you?I want to ask. Do you love me?
But I’m afraid of the answer. He thinks I’ll destroy him. It’s hard to love someone when you know they’re actually a knife pressed against your throat.
I should know.