CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
ZARA
Liberation is being stripped of all constraints. Yoked to a safe harbor. Finding power in pliancy.
Naked and chosen and free to be flawed.
I’ve trekked countless miles across the globe in my life, a nomad traveling beyond restrictions but crumpling from the weight of a single stone.
And belonging to no one.
Maybe that’s why being nude, collared, flattened, and bound to a grand piano reads as erotic emancipation.
“Wider,” Axel demands from between my legs.
He thrusts two fingers in and out of my wet heat, hitting that coveted target while playing Beethoven’s Für Elise with the other hand. His brand of punishment is always music to my ears. Pun intended.
I gingerly lift my feet, spread my thighs more, and set my heels down on keys further out. With the lid closed, the sounds are somewhat muffled, but it still fills the apartment with an abrupt melding of high and low notes. Which immediately wins me a delicious smack on my pussy.
“Jesus,” I hiss as one of my heels bumbles and evokes a booming rumble to thunder against my core.
Another spank. Another sting. Another curse.
“When do you get to come, Zara?”
My husband is relentless, never losing focus.
His talent knows no bounds—a godfather who plays piano is a newfound fetish.
Though I’m not sure it would be as appealing if he weren’t touching me at the same time.
Still, the thought of him forced to follow through with his torture when he’s unquestionably hard as a rock renders this classical tune award-winning.
This would be a hell of a show at Carnegie Hall.
“When my feet are where you told me to keep them and you finish the song without interruption.” I gaze at the coffered ceiling and attempt to center myself before tacking on a snarky, “Mr. Noire.”
“Good girl.” He chuckles. “Let’s try again, Mrs. Noire.”
The opening notes resound, and I’m close to screaming. I’ve lost count of how many times he’s played and I’ve faltered. He’s riled me up so much that the lewd sloshing of my arousal harmonizes with the chords. I’m shaking and panting and desperate after weeks without his magic touch.
This time, he pays homage to my clit, swirling it with the same decadent cadence as the masterpiece beneath his fingertips. A bead of sweat cascades from my temple, but I can’t catch it because one wrist is anchored with his tie hitched to a piano leg and the other is secured with his belt.
My vision clouds. My heart rate matches the accelerating rhythm of the piano. My limbs quake. So close to the cadenza. So close to my climax. I can taste the standing-ovation encore on my tongue.
Plunge and whirl. Notes and tingles. Vibrations and harmony.
“Oh God, Axel, I … please. Don’t stop.” My hips buck of their own accord, reaching for the divine source of the friction and knocking one of my feet free. I return my heel to where he wants it as delicately as possible, to the chirp of tinny keys and my muttered, “Fuck.”
Another smack. Another breath puffed out of me.
Pain and petitions. Rapture and thrill. Empty lungs and trembling limbs.
“We were almost there, darling. A few more beats, a little more trust in me to deliver, and I would’ve given you everything you needed.”
He might be in awe of me, but I think he’s still salty that I took off on him. And, yeah, that’s fair. No matter the reason, I would’ve been distraught and irate if he’d disappeared without explanation.
Does this punishment fit the crime? Unless the serenade is ceaseless, I vote, Yes. Oh, hell yes.
Once again, his fingers rollick across the keyboard and caper over my throbbing clit, a unified dance of classical precision, immediately edging me to my peak.
A chill zips up my spine, contradictory warmth ignites in every cell, and my muscles begin to liquefy.
“I trust you. Only you.” My head lolls to the side, and I glimpse a sliver of his handsome face bathed in moonlight—dark scruff, strong jaw, and ocean eyes that drown the loneliness.
Always so imposing.
A growl of satisfaction pours from him. My Atlas.
He carries the heavens, but unlike the Greek myth, my man loves a woman from hell.
He’d carry that eternal-damnation burden, too, if I asked him to.
But after all these years—all his guilt and atonement and servitude—maybe he’ll let me love him enough to shield him from the inferno.
He can hold the celestial sphere, and I can smother Hades.
That could be the one thing my soul gets right—the one reason I’m worthy of being his queen—since it’s lost to everything else.
“Stay here with me,” he commands. “Who holds your shame, Zara?” Even over the notes and chords and crescendo of the ballad, there’s a brokenness threading his husky tenor that sinks into my depths.
He always knows. He won’t berate me because he senses the loathing I have for myself. Everything feels possible in his embrace. He turns my greatest fears and desires inside out and upside down.
“You,” I pant, dizzy and floating from the overwhelming sensations cocooning me. “You carry it all.”
“That’s right,” he praises. “You’re doing so good. My radiant Thorn. Almost there. Plant your heels, and you can come as soon as you hear those beginning notes repeating.”
With two fingers buried inside me, his thumb circles my clit to the galvanic tempo of a climb, a well-paced meter directing the ascent into air too thin to consume.
My muscles coil. My fists clench. My breathing stalls.
All in anticipation of that familiar pattern of Für Elise’s beginning and end.
Until it’s washing over me, like a tsunami in a desert.
The pummeling annihilation becomes the oasis.
A carnal moan blasts out of my lungs, trumping any other sound with a symphony of rhapsodies, proclaiming the quenched wreckage of my haven. My back bows as I tug on my restraints, and drips of euphoria leak from my eyes.
Shake and shudder. Gasps and groans. Boneless and buoyant.
I’m lost to a foggy haze of jubilation, all of it flitting behind my hooded eyelids.
In a flash of delirium, Axel’s cock is sweeping over me. His king’s crown teases my oversensitive, pulsing core. I’m spent, utterly blissed out, but that mere swipe awakens the insatiable beast he painstakingly trained to reach for a multitude of orgasms.
“Yes. More,” I breathe.
“Begging looks so beautiful on you.” He keeps gliding his tip up and down, taunting me. “Some people believe Beethoven said, ‘To play a wrong note is insignificant; to play without passion is inexcusable.’ I see his point.”
God, I love this man.
I belt out a laugh, tears still sliding down my temples, arms still bound. “I’m not sure this is the passion he was getting at or the way he approached missed notes.”
“For his sake, let’s hope it was.” With that, his lips quirk into a smirk, he notches himself at my entrance, and he slides inside me.
After a few weeks apart, the stretch from his substantial length and girth ripples through me. Glorious agony.
He freezes, affording us both a chance to adjust as he wheezes, “Fuck,” and eventually manages, “This … you are my heaven, Zar.” Intensity floods him. “My purpose will always be to love and protect you. Nothing will ever be too trivial. If you were dizzy, I’d stop the world from spinning.”
So heart-wrenchingly romantic.
But since he can’t resist teasing, his hand glides through the valley of my breasts, kneading them and tweaking my nipples along the way.
The rough pads of his fingertips trail to the flat plane of my stomach, the dip of my ribs, the nooks along the apex of my legs.
Every skim is ecstasy and torment, the perfect brush, but not quite where I want it.
He settles into a rhythm, working himself a little deeper each time, until I’m writhing beneath him, pleading for more, and he’s hovering over me, furiously breaking me free from my bindings.
He pulls me upright, dragging me to the edge of the piano.
My feet stutter over the keys, his thighs knocking into some of their own to offer us a clunky jingle as he palms my lower back to keep me in place. Then he slams into me.
I’m not sure when he shed is clothing, but standing before me is a god in nothing but glasses. He doesn’t need them to fuck me, of course, but I confessed to how sexy they were on our honeymoon, and he looks pretty smug about it right now.
Deserving.
Though I suppose the sight of me wearing nothing but the diamond collar of thorns is as devastating to him.
As soon as I throw my arms around his neck, he fists my hair to wrench my head in the angle he wants, and his mouth captures mine.
His hunger grows with every press of his lips, every probe of his tongue, every pump of his hips.
A triumphant groan flows from him when I fumble with my footing to pull him in deeper.
He kisses with an all-consuming vehemence, like this is where he’s most himself and he’s desperate to devour the unseen, authentic pieces of me in return.
Restoring me with a sanative tonic and searing the deepest recesses of my being with his brand of possessiveness.
And I gladly give him everything I am, confident he can shoulder it.
The star-speckled sky drifts inside. Floral scents and echoed notes. A balmy breeze and heavenly perch in yet one more city with him—all of them the best destinations of my life because of the man willing to ruin me and enwrap me in equal measure.
With our own twist on the coda, he releases my lips, cradles my face, and hitches his piercing blues to mine, intent on vowing through each shallow breath and mind-blowing caress that he sees every part of me—the ugly, callous, and ruthless skill used for a life I’m not sure is mine and the heart who dreams of more, who loves with every chain of my DNA.
It’s a gaze I never want to let go of, one I hope to hold until my last breath.