Chapter 13
13
brAIDEN
S he didn’t use her safeword the entire time I spanked her. I waited for it, knowing I could stop myself mid-stroke. I’m the master of control.
I measured out exactly how much she could handle. I knew, even if she didn’t.
If she chose to stop short, I’d have let her. Maybe I’d lose some respect for her strength, but I would always honor her choice.
But she isn’t choosing to shut down now. She isn’t here at all. Her body is collapsed against the desk. Her face is turned to the side, tiny panting breaths leaving clouds on the glass. Her eyes are squeezed shut, like she’s praying to be spared, but she can’t manage a word, not a single syllable, not even red .
The scar near her hair stands out like a brand.
Russo. Fucking Antonio Russo.
Samantha heard her cousin being raped in the worst possible way. How many times in the past week has she replayed that phone call in her head?
Russo just hurt Samantha—took her pleasure, took her release, as surely as if he touched her with his greasy, greedy hand. And for that, he deserves to die.
I ease my fingers out of Samantha’s tight, wet cunt. Heat rises from her arse, from crimson flesh that I know will darken during the night as bruising sets in.
Russo broke her, but I’m the one who crossed the wiring in her brain. I showed her the knife-edge between pleasure and pain, and she loved it—her soaked pussy can’t lie.
But now she’s lost the line between thrill and threat. Every nerve in her body is shouting that she’s about to die.
So I lean close, taking care not to touch her. I whisper in her ear. I tell her that her body is lying. “You’re safe,” I say. “You’re fine.” And then the thing I should have promised from the start, before I made her beg, before I delivered a moment of punishment: “I’m not him.”
I’m grateful when she starts to whimper. She’s back in her head. Back in the real world, not the nightmare Russo made for her.
Now that her muscles are no longer locked with fight-or-flight adrenaline, I can ease her into my arms. There isn’t a sofa in this room, there are no good chairs, so I take her to a corner instead. I brace my back against the walls, and I pull her onto my lap, helping her spoon against me to ease the pain on her bruised arse.
She smells like my soap and my shampoo, and I realize she must have showered after I left this morning, after her long night alone in the safe room. But more than that, she smells like sex, a brine that stiffens my cock no matter how much I send the message that the dodger can just go begging.
I’ve been hard since she dropped to her knees.
It made me drunk, listening to her beg. Knowing she was yielding that control, that she accepted my authority, that I can keep her safe.
I saw the exact moment she broke. One second, she knelt there, weighing all her options, the attorney who faces down tax authorities, who keeps the freeport running night and day. The next second, she offered all that up. She gave it over to me.
She accepted that she doesn’t always have to manage the entire feckin’ world around her.
That surrender made her brave as a feckin’ warrior.
Ignoring my growling cock, I close my arms tighter around her. I press my chest to her back. I rock her slowly, gently, doing my best to ease her pain—both the fire of her arse and the ice of Russo’s crime.
“ Mo chailín maith ,” I say into her hair. “ Mo chailín maith maith. ” I say the words in Irish, because I know she’d hate them in her own tongue.
And as she calms, as she melts against me, I study the ring on her finger and think of all the ways I’ll make Russo pay.