Chapter 24
It’s after the equinox,and I wake long before dawn.
I watch the dark water move in the ceiling until it becomes shimmery and pink and orange, and then I draw in a deep breath and let the fear swimming in my blood turn to adrenaline, to the heat of a challenge.
It’s been a month since Mark fucked me on a bed surrounded by nightshade and foxglove.
A month of nights in the hall, of being the model submissive he trained me to be.
A month of catching Tristan looking at me or Tristan catching me looking at him and then both of us quietly burning alive.
A month of Mark, his scent, his blue eyes, his cold voice. His bruises and orgasms and dry jokes. Finding him reading at odd times and reading the oddest things—yellowed murder mysteries and depressing war poetry. Sometimes fantasy novels that I know Tristan has also read, like Mark is trying to understand why Tristan liked them.
A month of knowing that what I felt years ago is still true.
I’m in love with my husband.
Which is a terrible idea and will probably end very badly for me. Saint Michael the archangel, defend us in battle, I pray, my favorite prayer, and then I turn in my husband’s arms to face him.
He sleeps lightly, but he does sleep, especially after a good fuck like he gave me last night. Everyone’s face looks different in repose—an unsettling truth I’ve learned as a saint—but Mark’s especially. The face that gives nothing away while awake is now impossibly expressive: soft lips that flicker with silent dream words, eyebrows pulling together, the occasional pout. In his sleep, he is sweeter, gentler. Still a mystery, but one with clues at least.
I study the light playing over his full lips and the slope of his nose. Lying like this, I can see the small ridge where it might have been broken once.
I pray one more time and then speak my husband’s name.
His eyes open immediately, his breathing changing only the smallest amount. I wouldn’t have felt it if I weren’t crushed to his chest.
“Isolde,” he says. His voice is rough and drowsy. “Good morning.”
“As of seventeen minutes ago, it’s officially been a month,” I say without any kind of preamble.
He is very still. “That’s right,” he says.
“My answer is the same.”
I feel the flex of his hands against me, one on my back and one in my hair. “Truly?”
“Truly, sir.”
He groans, his mouth coming against mine in a hot, wet kiss. He tastes like the mint of his toothpaste still, with a hint of lingering juniper. The gin from last night.
“My God,” he says between kisses. “You have no idea how I’ve suffered. You make me want to break my own rules, over and over again.”
I laugh a little against his mouth, the sound strange to me and throaty. I haven’t laughed while being mauled like this since the yacht with Tristan. “Is sex every night considered suffering now?”
The hand in my hair is tight, and the one on my hip is bruising. “When will you start believing the things I say? I told you I would hold nothing back. I want to have you all the time, always, everywhere. I want you to be my shadows-and-glass girl—to be made of shadows with me. And”—he leans down to nip at my lower lip—“as much as I don’t mind an audience, I would like to enjoy you privately too.”
One hand slips between my legs, palming me over my silk sleep shorts.
“What’s your safeword?” he asks.
“Hyssop—”
I barely finish saying it before I’m on my back and he’s on top of me. His hair is completely unstyled, a gold mess, and it hangs between us. He blocks out what little light there is, nothing but arms and shoulders, and his hand is around my neck, gentle but unyielding. A collar made of flesh and bone.
“I have you now,” he says, and it almost sounds like he doesn’t believe it. Like he’s woken up and found that a dream he had is now here in his waking life. “You belong to me.”
“Yes,” I whisper.
His kiss is hard, a plundering thing, and his hand stays curled around my throat as his tongue delves deep, strokes against mine, as his lips spread mine open. I can feel the hard length of him pressed against my core, and even through his boxer briefs and my shorts, he’s burning hot, a brand pulled straight from the coals. Every time he rocks against me, a scatter of sparks shoots in my belly, kindling in the cradle of my groin. I whimper; he grunts. We’re fucking through our clothes. He bends down to lick and suck at my neck above his fingers and then drags his lips back to mine like just the few seconds away has him starving.
“You’re smiling,” he says against my mouth. “Tell me why.”
“Because this is so normal,” I whisper. “Making out until it turns into sex. I didn’t know you did that.”
He laughs, and I feel the laugh against my lips, a vibration from his chest into mine. “And I didn’t know you were so easily surprised.” He shifts, finding my thigh and tucking it around his hip. “Perhaps I’ve been normal all this time and only pretending otherwise.”
But the hand around my throat and the vicious roll of his hips say otherwise. This is still him, still the Mark who operates a Sybian as easily as most people operate a toaster. But this is something new, something almost frightening in its authenticity. We are laughing and dry-fucking like a couple on their first date, and yet I still feel that thrilling plunge of surrender, that tipping forward into a bottomless well of him, him, him.
He rides me through our clothes until I stiffen underneath him and release with a soft, punched exhale, the friction and the dig of his elbow against my ribs giving me just enough pain to let go of the constant control I have over my body.
I’m still contracting as he moves, kneeling between my legs and pulling off my shorts. Dawn is pressing into the corners of the room, and there must be enough light now that he can see the place between my thighs. He stares at it a moment, his breathing ragged, and then he gets onto his stomach, using his thumbs to spread my labia open.
“You are so beautiful here,” he says in a low, appreciative voice. “Like a flower after rain.”
He works his thumbs closer to the center, pressing me farther apart. I can feel his breath against the wet hole at the center of me, the ripe bud above. I know he can see my anus like this too, and I think about how he went down on me in the limousine, his thumb buried in my backside.
Mark moves his hands and then runs his nose along the crease of my thigh. I’ve kept myself bare since before the wedding, and I’m so glad for it this morning because I can feel his every breath across my sensitive skin, every inhale and every exhale. He presses his nose harder into me and then parts his lips against my cunt, inhaling with nose and mouth both.
“Stunning,” he murmurs to himself. “Exquisite.”
He uses his thumbs to part me again and treats himself to a long, swirling lick and then to several deep laps. My clit is already swollen and exposed, but he tugs up on the hood even more and uses the tip of his tongue to flick against the glans. My hips lift, and he slides an arm under one of my thighs and then bands a forearm across my hips.
“Now, now,” he says, his voice rough around the edges. “You wouldn’t want to get in trouble now, would you? A good girl like you?”
“No—no, sir.”
“Of course not. That’s why you’ll stay still for your husband.”
I try, I really do try. But his mouth is too wicked there, too shamefully curious. He goes inside me with it, both above and below. He maps every contour of my clit until I’m panting, my stomach quivering, my skin damp. And then he does something I could have never, ever in a thousand years guessed that Mark Trevena would have wanted to do.
He has me sit on his face.
Has meis not exactly the truth—I’m manhandled there after he lies down on his back—and his fingers are clamped tightly around my hips. My hands scrabble at the tall headboard, trying to find something to hang on to so that my full weight isn’t on his face, but I can’t find anything to grab. Mark pulls me harder against his mouth anyway, sucking my clit and then working my hips over the impossibly soft velvet of his tongue.
My eyes are struggling to keep focus now; I’ve lost all control over my breathing. I can barely keep myself upright as the inner muscles of my core start pulling tighter and tighter. When I drop my head down, I find his eyes closed and his eyebrows pulled together, like he’s savoring this, like I taste good enough that he needs to shut out all his other senses in order to properly enjoy it.
And then when he opens his eyes, he looks at me with a gaze no less avid than I’ve seen from him while I’ve been cuffed to a bench.
“I’m going to come, sir,” I manage to say, not sure what the etiquette is here, when we’re alone.
He just slaps my ass hard enough to make me squeak. “You better,” he says and then starts sucking me again. There’s another smack on the ass when I least expect it and then another.
The pain is like a rush of fresh water every time, bracing and then shocking, stepping into a cold, clear pool and being washed clean.
He moves me over his face, like I’m fucking his mouth in earnest, but of course it’s all him, all those brutal hands on my hips, all his will and his dominion. It pleases him to have me ride his face, so I am. It pleased him to smell and nuzzle me earlier, so he did. It pleased him to make out, and so we kissed until our lips were swollen.
Maybe that’s the difference between public Mark and private Mark. In the hall, everything must give the appearance of power, must reify his position as master of decadence and discipline.
Here, he can do whatever he wants, things that on the surface might not look dominant but are still relentlessly so at their heart. Between the two of us, there is no confusion, no loss of the edge of control or power that thrills us both. Even if I’m getting kissed like I’m in the back seat of a car, even if I’m sitting on his face, it’s still him, him, at the center of me.
The bliss from his mouth is like a saw jaggedly cleaving me in two, and when it finally reaches my core, I gasp his name and curl forward, my hands finding his head and holding on for balance.
I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve touched his hair, and it is a hedonistic pleasure all its own to feel the thick silk of it between my fingers and against my palms. In the growing morning light, it’s as gold as a crown, the halo on a medieval saint.
Mark lifts me off his mouth when I’m done, and his lips and chin shine wetly in the fresh sunlight. He gives me a sinful grin as he tosses me onto my back as if I weigh nothing and then crawls over me.
“Take off my underwear,” he says, sucking at my stiff nipples through the silk tank top I slept in. “Get me ready to fuck.”
He must only mean by disrobing him because there’s no question that his body is ready for intercourse. When I push his boxer briefs down to his muscle-cut thighs, his dick slowly bobs free, jutting in front of him like a ruddy, angry pole.
His mouth is hot through the silk, sucking lovingly and then hard enough to make me squirm, and finally I get his underwear to his knees and all the way off.
“I want to go bare,” he says, lifting his head to look at me. “Is that okay? If I leave my cum inside you?”
I have an IUD, and we both get tested every month as part of Lyonesse’s membership regulations. “Yes, please,” I whisper. “I’d like that…very much.”
I’m very, very slick now, but my sex-swollen cunt still takes Mark a few tries to fit himself into. He pushes his plump tip in first and then the first half of his erection, stretching me so full that I close my eyes. And then he braces his knees on the bed, wraps his arms around me, and shoves home in a slide that has me whimpering.
He lets out a shuddering groan as he moves fully within me, bare for the first time.
“You are a pearl beyond price,” he tells me on a broken breath. “You are made of heaven itself.”
He’s pinning me fully to the bed now, with his hands on my wrists, which are pressed against the mattress on either side of my head, and with the weight of him flattening my breasts against his chest. His hips move cruelly, stoking a fresh orgasm there, just enough roughness to make ecstasy sing through my blood. Every pull has him dragging up against my aching nub, and every push sends him so deep that I’m sure he’s almost to my heart.
He drags his mouth over mine in a scorching kiss. I taste myself now, sweet and distinct, and I try to lick myself off his lips, which makes him smile.
“You like how that tastes?” he murmurs. “Now you know why I can’t get enough of it.”
With him fully on top of me like this, I can feel the quivering in his arms and thighs, the trembling breaths in his chest, the shudder of his stomach. It is strange to be like this in the daylight, with the sun gilding our skin, with the water-light from the ceiling dancing over the bed, but perhaps it’s fitting too. None of the neon-shifted shadows of the hall, none of the leather-accented moodiness of the playrooms. I can see every fleck of gold that makes up the morning shadow on Mark’s jaw. I can see every knot and jag of the barely healed wound in his shoulder.
I can see the way he looks at me, like no way I’ve ever seen him look at me before. With desire, yes; with respect, also yes—no matter what depravities we play at, he’s always asked my permission, always given me safety, always cared about my opinion.
But this look…
This is something new. Something almost like what I felt between us on our wedding night as we played chess. Because as he’s staring down at me with eyes like the ocean and still that brutal use of my cunt, I feel?—
What could possibly be the word for it? Esteemed? Dear?
Adored?
He comes as he kisses me again, going still and then rutting like a beast, filling me full. It drips from me and still he keeps fucking, grunting, his head dropping beside mine and his harsh breath in my ear.
The heavy pulses of his erection subside, and we breathe together. He’s still deep in my body.
“I thought you said you were going to make me suffer for it,” I tease, and he turns his head and nips the muscle connecting my neck to my shoulder.
“Bold of you to dare me,” he breathes, moving his head down to my breast and biting the curve of it through the silk. He rolls off me and then taps my thigh. “Spread for me.”
I spread, a familiar nervousness knitting in my stomach. “I didn’t mean you had to?—”
He smacks my wet cunt so hard I see stars, and just as I try to close my legs and roll away, he starts rubbing my stinging clit. It feels so good and a little bit awful, and oh God.
“I can’t come again,” I plead. “Please, sir. I can’t.”
“Hmm,” Mark says. “I don’t care.” He’s now lying on his side, watching me with undisguised fascination as he masturbates me toward my third climax of the morning. “I want to play with my toy.”
And I have to say goodbye to the version of Isolde that wanted to be a nun, that wanted to annul this marriage and walk away, because I don’t think I can ever walk away from this. I don’t think I could ever leave behind the man with hair like a halo and a body made for sex. I don’t think I could walk away from playful Mark, tender Mark…even cold and cruel Mark, who still reminds me of the implacable desert god I chose as my own.
Even St. Michael can’t protect me from the snares of the devil when I’m the one laying myself in his traps.