Chapter Thirty-Three Charlotte
Chapter Thirty-Three
Charlotte
“Lucifer,” I whisper as he steps toward me. “Lucifer, don’t. Please.”
I stick out a hand as I try to stop him, but I have my safe word, and I don’t use it, so my cries mean nothing. He prowls toward me, roughly taking me by the wrist as he leads me toward his playroom, not stopping even when I beg him to let go of me.
Even though we haven’t negotiated this scene like we have the others recently.
Even though I’m shaking with fear.
When we reach the playroom, he shoves me onto the floor in front of his devil’s chair and forces me to my knees.
“If it’s a villain you want, then it’s a villain I’ll be for you, Charlotte.”
His voice is colder, crueler than I’ve ever heard it, and for a moment, I have the insane thought that this is the voice people hear when they arrive in Hell, when the torture begins.
As they drown amid the sounds of their own screaming.
“This punishment’s for you, after all. To teach you a lesson. For fucking around with your own safety.”
I’m crying now, but I don’t exactly know why. He hasn’t done anything to hurt me yet, at least not physically.
But the fact that I’ve disappointed him this much, hurt him this much, destroys me.
I open my mouth, trying to speak, but the emotions constricting my throat make it difficult to swallow.
“Who hurt you to the point you need to push me away like this?”
I sniffle as he returns from the rack that houses his dungeon tools and other kink paraphernalia.
But I already know the answer.
He holds a long, red satin ribbon in his hands that’s clearly intended to bind me.
“Who hurt you to the point that you enjoy endangering yourself needlessly?” he roars, clearly furious. The hellfire flickering in his eyes makes me flinch. “You’re lucky I haven’t gutted that bloody father of yours.”
A sudden feeling of cold ripples through me. A tingling discomfort.
If I was smart, or maybe had more self-preservation like he wants me to, I would keep my mouth shut or simply mutter a quiet “yes, sir” and hope I could convince him to treat me like I’m still the good girl I want to be. But I’m not smart, and I’m not a good girl when it comes to my own self-preservation. I’m a brat.
And the knowledge that he’s right thrums in my pulse. A flush of fury.
I open my mouth, half-tempted to tell him that it wasn’t my father who hurt me, not like this, that there are still things he doesn’t know about me, but I bite down on my tongue at the last second, holding it in.
The truth will only make his punishment worse.
Best save it for another day.
“Place your hands together,” he says.
I cup my hands, where I’m still kneeling on the floor before him, as he growls, “Like a prayer.”
I press my palms flat, raising them above my head as he starts to bind me. Some weirdly beautiful, intricate shibari that I’ll never be able to get out of on my own. I’ve done my research. After the first time he played with me.
With each wrap of the ribbon, the smooth silk tightening against my skin, I feel his disappointment in me. The way I’ve hurt him.
And worse, the way I’ve risked hurting myself.
For no other reason than my own immaturity.
As soon as he’s finished, he releases me and climbs onto the dais, dropping down into his chair. His earthly throne. I lift my head toward him, swallowing at the sight of how that cursed chair makes him look. Draped over it like he is, he looks the part then. Like a dark, indolent god. Or a wicked king.
Prince of Darkness. Prince of wicked deeds.
He turns his head toward me, and even that small movement is predatory, otherworldly. “Come here, Charlotte,” he growls to me.
I rise with a bit of difficulty, thanks to the fact that my hands are bound, swallowing down the lump of embarrassment in my throat as I stumble up and onto the dais, standing like a subject before my king.
From my king. That’s what the caption on my post after the first night we spent together read. Even then, I don’t think I could have known how true it would be.
Lucifer’s shirtless—he must have stripped off his suit coat and vest at some point while he was binding me—and he undoes his belt buckle now, the devious look in his eyes reminding me a little of when I first met Azmodeus at his club.
Vicious. Animalistic.
A monster barely leashed.
“Are you going to use your belt on me?” I whisper, voice shaking.
“No, but I should.” His eyes hold a dangerous mix of desire and fury. “But for this, only my hand will do.”
The thought instantly embarrasses me, my face, neck, and ears flaming ridiculously hot.
Like I’m a child who needs to be punished.
But that’s exactly how he means for me to feel, isn’t it?
Because that’s exactly what I was being ...
A child who refused to recognize her own limits, her own capabilities, to the point that I risked my own safety. All I had to do to protect myself was be honest with him.
I drop my head, defeated, nodding before I whisper, “Yes, Daddy.”
Clearly there’s still a little bit of a good girl in me.
Lucifer beckons.
I sit down on his lap then, my now naked bottom positioned on top of his knees while my hands remain bound at my front. My wrists are wrapped up like a present. My dress is long gone. He tore it from me somewhere along the way to the playroom, but he’ll buy me another, easily.
He’ll buy me anything I ask for. Give me anything I want.
Only if I behave . . .
With my hands bound, he makes quick work of putting me over his knee, my ass tilted skyward like he’s baring it and my pussy toward the heavens.
“Do you know what I do to punish brats, Charlotte?”
I’m not sure whether he means here in his playroom or in Hell, and I don’t have the courage to ask, honestly. So I shake my head as I whisper, “No, sir.”
“Well, you’re about to learn, darling.” He rubs a reverent hand over me, making me spread my legs more. Until I’m eager. “The answer isn’t what you’d expect it to be. I don’t force them into submission.” His finger dips inside me, smearing my juices over my already swollen pussy. “I enjoy breaking them, you see.” He whispers it so close to my ear I feel his words shiver through me. “So that they want to be punished. Feel they deserve it.”
Exactly like he’s done to me.
“Now, you’re going to count the number of days you lied to me. The number of days you needlessly risked yourself.” He rubs the flattened palm of his hand over my behind, both a threat and a promise of the pain and pleasure he’ll give to me. “Your safe word is inferno,” he reminds me.
But I don’t use it.
He’s right. I did put myself in danger.
By not telling him someone was threatening me.
So I let him. I let him do it.
“One,” I whisper.
His first blow comes down onto my ass, hard, sending me careening forward as I tense to keep my balance steady. It smarts and stings. Bad enough I almost yelp, but I know from experience now it isn’t the first blow that’s the worst.
It’s the last.
The final strike before he has his way with me.
The pain turns to heat, slowly radiating outward until I feel my pussy grow impossibly wet. In anticipation.
“Two,” I breathe.
This time, the sting deepens, the flush making my skin red. Even as my pussy slickens more. In preparation for what I know follows. In aching need for it.
“Faster, Charlotte,” he demands. “Don’t stall on the recovery.”
“Three,” I mutter through clenched teeth. Bracing for the third blow.
Now it’s really starting to hurt.
“Four,” I gasp hurriedly, my heart racing as I try to clench for the impact and fail.
“Five.” Now my ass is fully burning, and we’re not even halfway through. Already, my pussy is aching, dripping for him.
“Six,” I whimper.
It’s somewhere between six and eight that I lose the ability to speak, and he takes over counting for me, each number more damning than the last as they fall from his lips.
“Nine.”
By the time he’s nearly finished, I’m crying, but still, I don’t use my safe word.
He’s right. He has broken me.
I crave this. Crave him.
No one else will ever be able to care for me this way.
Be both my lover and tormentor.
Exactly like I need. Like I want.
I’m shaking by the time he reaches the last count, my body vibrating with the euphoric high of the pain. With the peak of pleasure I know follows.
The delicious feel of his cock as it presses against my entrance. The way he fills me. Until there isn’t any room left. Only him. The powerful thrust of his hips, each plunge making me clench, tighter and tighter until he gifts me his permission and sends me careening over the cliff into the abyss. The pleasure as his cum paints my insides so deep that I sometimes think I might die from the delicious torture of it, even as darkness swirls through my vision, even as I see stars.
But when he delivers the final blow, my body lurching forward with the momentum of it, my desperate cry going unanswered, he strokes a single finger over the outside of my pussy, bringing it to his lips as he whispers, “A shame you’ll be alone tonight.”
He casts me from his lap, like I’m not worth anything to him, giving a quick tug at the ribbon that binds my hands.
It falls away from my wrists as he stalks out of the playroom, leaving me alone.
I curl in on myself then, going quiet and still. A despair too deep to fathom ripping through me. As I lie there unmoving, in my mind I scream into the playroom’s empty void.
Not because he hurt me.
And not because he decided to torture me like this.
But because I know, without a doubt, I’ve just undone all the progress I’d made with him.
All within a single evening.
It isn’t until a few hours later, once I’ve showered and tended to myself, that I start to get legitimately angry. Not because he didn’t sleep with me. Even the devil deserves the right to decide whether he wants to have sex. But because he tempted me into submission, only to cruelly rip my pleasure away.
To leave me to my own guilt. And without aftercare, for that matter.
A particularly dickish move, even for him.
This is the most callous he’s been toward me in days, the first time he’s threatened to punish me in nearly a week. Even though I enjoyed the last time, not to mention all the other activities we’ve tried in his playroom over the last couple weeks, I’m so frustrated by how our stupid argument derailed all the headway we’ve made that I can’t help but want to scream.
My therapist would call this progress. That I’ve learned to recognize victim-blaming, even if I should have told Lucifer sooner. It’s not my fault some stalker is targeting me, and, more importantly, I refuse to believe those kinds of oppressive lies about myself.
No matter who’s saying them to me.
Though Lucifer played no small part in that recognition.
The words he whispered to me, or at least what I think he did, that first evening we slept together, lessened my own shame in a way that felt like he’d somehow absolved me. The feeling was only temporary, of course. Not even sex with the devil can heal the years of physical and religious abuse I endured from my father, and, more importantly, the other trauma that led me to flee here in the first place, but that doesn’t mean I’ve learned my lesson. Not fully.
So even though I know Lucifer is hurt, concerned for me in his own twisted way, I pull out my phone and open my email.
Greed, I’d love to meet. Below you’ll find my availability.
Best,
Charlotte