Chapter 17
The texture on my ceiling looks like an octopus—eight arms, bulbous head, the whole deal.
Ask me how I know this.
Six days ago, Emmaleen was in throne position between my thighs, her cheek pressed against my leg, breath warming the tip of my hard cock inside my pants as I fed her tiny bits of perfectly seared steak.
Every time I placed a morsel on her tongue, she would close her lips around my fingers in a seductive way, teasing me with an implied promise of a blowjob if I would just order her to do it.
Her pupils were dilated and gleaming with that particular fever that foreshadowed a tangent, and that night's digression was on octopi.
She was about to wreck my evening with whatever chaos lived in her head and I was completely captivated.
I didn't tell her that. I never told her how much I liked listening to her talk, and now she's in Boston laughing about books with Lorcan ó Fearghail while I'm staring at ceiling texture, wondering if octopi feel heartbreak three times harder than the rest of us.
The octopus shifts slightly when I blink, tentacles rearranging themselves across the plaster.
Emmaleen told me octopi can fit through any opening larger than their beak—the only hard part of their entire body. They're escape artists. Contortionists. Masters of disappearing through impossibly small spaces.
She said it while kneeling between my legs, her tongue darting out to catch a drip of butter from my thumb.
"That's me," she whispered, grinning up at me with that crooked smile that made my chest feel too tight. "I'm the octopus. Give me one crack in your heart and I'll squeeze through. Three hearts means I love you three times harder when I do."
I gripped her hair and told her to shut up and eat.
Because the truth is, there isn't just one crack in my heart for her. There's a fucking cavernous gap as wide as the distance between us right now.
Last night I watched Lorcan position her in his blasphemous chapel kneeler while I sat in my surveillance room, hand wrapped around my cock.
Part of the deal. My condition for allowing her to stay in Boston.
Lorcan gets to close her punishment loop. I get cameras.
I watched him teach her Position Secunda—ass up, legs spread, hands in prayer—and felt something break open in my chest when she struggled to hold it.
He was patient. Grounding. Everything I'm not.
He spanked her seventeen times while she counted and prayed, and I came twice before he even slid inside her.
The first time was when she lost count and didn't manipulate him, didn't beg or deflect—she just cried and willfully started over with only Lorcan's encouragement as a salve.
The second time was when Lorcan wrapped his hand around her throat.
I told him not to touch her there. Made him promise not to choke her.
He did it anyway.
And how did she respond? She pressed his hand tighter against her own neck, choosing it, wanting it, the same way she chose the collar I gave her.
I should've fantasized about killing him for that.
Instead I jerked off again, furious and hard and completely fucking broken, because watching her surrender to Lorcan felt like watching her choose someone better than me.
Someone who bathes her like it's worship instead of maintenance.
Someone who reads.
Someone who doesn't have a monster living inside him that whispers take, take, take until there's nothing left.
I was certain Emmaleen would find the whole chapel performance absurd. That she'd crack jokes about Catholic guilt repackaged as kink, compare Lorcan to some obscure character from a novel I've never read, earn herself three more demerits for commentary before he even got the candles lit.
She'd been irreverent about everything else—my notebooks, my Lamborghini, my entire operation. Why would a sex chapel in South Boston be any different?
But she wasn't.
She was solemn.
Emmaleen didn't break character. Didn't smirk. Didn't spiral. Didn't compare lighting seventeen candles to some pop culture reference I wouldn't get.
She just knelt in that prayer position, forehead pressed to the desk, whispering Lorcan's name like it was actually sacred.
Saint Lorcan, deliver me. Saint Lorcan, guide me.
I kept waiting for her to laugh. To recognize the theatre for what it was—a man cosplaying as spiritual authority while sporting a visible erection under monastic robes.
She didn't laugh.
She prayed.
And Lorcan's punishment was… challenging.
I didn't expect that.
Our entire phone call was Lorcan insisting he'd walked away from the lifestyle, wasn't that person anymore. Then he shows up with a fucking sex chapel complete with prie-dieu and discipline cords like he's been running scenes every Sunday?
He delivered her punishment with exquisite technique.
The way he made her count strikes while maintaining the prayer is cognitive load theory in action—overload the prefrontal cortex with competing tasks until conscious resistance collapses and you're operating purely on trained response.
It's the same principle they used at St. Augustine's. Recite Latin conjugations while holding stress positions. Sing hymns while being beaten.
Your brain can't process rebellion when it's drowning in conflicting inputs.
Jino thinks he's the master of psychological conditioning—and I will allow that, he's far more into the theory than I am. But I'm not ignorant of what I'm doing in the dungeon.
I know exactly what happens when you drown the mind in competing demands until obedience becomes the only relief.
Religion, honor, family, brotherhood… whatever.
It's all the same.
I grew up steeped in this brand of mental manipulation.
But so did Lorcan.
The problem here isn't that he's better at this than me. I would never concede that. The problem is… he's different than me.
Jino, Lorcan, and I all look at the same goal—be her Master, teach her how to obey, make her mine—and each of us sees three very different ways to get there.
Jino and his drills. His structure. His boundaries.
Lorcan and his reverence. His symbolism. His romanticism.
And me with my planning. My precision. My gravitas.
Emmaleen orbits me like a planet.
I am her sun.
But even planets drift. The orbit isn't a perfect circle, it's an ellipse.
And last night, Lorcan's gravity pulled harder than I expected.
When she lost count, he didn't let it slide. He reset to zero. Made her start over. No shortcuts, no mercy, just patient insistence that she could complete the task if she focused.
He didn't mock her for failing. Didn't add punishment for the failure.
He just… waited.
Grounded her with his hand on her hip. Reminded her of the prayer. Let her collect herself before continuing.
That's not amateur hour. That's a Dom who understands the difference between breaking someone and building endurance.
I would've added strikes for losing count. Made it twenty. Thirty. Pushed until she used her safe word just to prove the point that she couldn't handle what I required.
Lorcan gave her space to succeed.
Infuriating.
I can't even get properly mad about the choking—though we're absolutely having words about that breach—because watching the footage, Lorcan was completely in control.
His hand on her throat wasn't rage or hunger. It was precision.
He pulled out of the choke at the exact moment to make her explode. Not a second too long. Not tentative or hesitant.
Perfect.
The kind of perfect that only comes from years of practice despite his protests about being reformed.
And Emmaleen responded like he'd unlocked something I'd been fumbling with for weeks.
She came so hard she went nonverbal. Just gasping, shaking, completely undone.
Have I ever given her the chance to respond to me like that?
Then there was the book talk. Of course they bonded over some Dan Brown wannabe—Vatican conspiracies, Celtic artifacts, Indiana Jones if he was Irish. She was lighting up like a fucking megalopolis over plot holes in a thriller I've never read.
Because what kind of serious person reads fiction?
I thought I'd have ammunition. Lorcan crossed the line—no safe word, just raw intuition and arrogance. I was ready to shred him for it, prove he's reckless, prove she's safer with me.
But every time her breath hitched wrong, he paused. Every time her shoulders tensed beyond arousal into panic, he grounded her. He didn't ask permission—he just knew. Read her body like I read contracts, like I catalog exits in a room.
He didn't need her to say wisteria.
He knew before she did.
Lorcan's got the whole romantic production—castles in Galway, that fucking accent that makes everything sound like poetry, the chapel with its theatrical bullshit, the copper tub, the books.
All I've got is a monster in a dungeon.
Lorcan makes punishment feel like worship.
I just make it feel like punishment.
I didn't even try to jerk off in the shower this morning.
My brain's too busy circling the problem, searching for the angle I'm missing. The solution that doesn't exist.
Emmaleen doesn't need two monsters.
And Lorcan's version—the one wrapped in Irish castles and prayer rituals and copper bathtubs—is objectively more romantic than mine.
I dress with mechanical precision. Charcoal three-piece suit, Italian wool, tailored to eliminate even the suggestion of a wrinkle.
The armor I wear because looking perfect is the only control I have left.
I descend the stairs, adjusting my cufflinks for the third time. As I pass the control room on my way to the kitchen, movement catches my eye.
Jino's hunched over the command center, scribbling furiously in a notebook.
I enter. "What are you doing?"
He springs up like I've caught him committing a crime, notebook outstretched. "The chapel scene—last night—did you see the way he structured the cognitive load? The prayer combined with the count, it's—"
"I've seen the footage," I cut him off, irritation sharpening my voice. "I don't need a play-by-play."
Jino puts up a hand, pointing to the screens. "Wait. Just—look."
"I don't need to look—"