Chapter 15
Moerrven
Sky did not speak on the walk from the Archive to the inn. He let us into the room, and closed and locked the door with a click that felt final. And rather judgmental.
The room was beautiful. Stone walls, heated floor, a bed wide enough for a troll with plenty of room for a human companion.
The bath was sunk into the floor, deep and empty, waiting to be filled.
Under any other circumstances, I would have been in that bath already, and I would have been hoping Sky would join me.
Sky sat on the edge of the bed and looked at me with an expression I had not seen from him before: cold, still, stripped of the bright, chaotic energy that powered his every interaction. It made my stomach drop.
“Why did we take six days to get here,” he said, “when Frostholm is only one day away?”
“The Greymere route can be unreliable. Weather, rockfalls—”
“Bullshit.”
I flinched. The word landed like a slap, and not the sort Sky delivered with a crop. I had miscalculated badly.
“You went around on purpose. You knew there was a shorter route and you didn’t take it, and you didn’t tell me. Why?”
“Sky—”
“Pip is out there somewhere, alone in a strange land! My family is on the other side of a magical mirror and I don’t know if I’ll ever see them again, and we just found out that the information I need was in the village we already passed through, and you added five extra days to the trip.
Why?” His voice cracked on the last word.
I had done this. My cowardice had cost him days.
Days that mattered more to him than I had allowed myself to consider, because considering it would have meant explaining why I could not take the short road.
Sky had been laughing and fucking and playing with me while his world was on the other side of a mirror he could not reach.
But explaining would mean saying her name and thinking about what had happened to her. I could not.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I don’t want sorry. I want the reason. I want you to stop lying to me and just communicate whatever the fuck is going on with you.”
I stood by the window with my hands clasped behind my back and said nothing, because the reason was lodged in my throat like a stone.
“Take off your clothes,” Sky said.
My head turned. “What?”
“Strip. Everything off. You have behaved very badly, holding something important back just as we’ve been talking about communication. I think you’re craving punishment, aren’t you?”
The word punishment moved through me like an electrical current.
In the forest, it had been play, exploration.
The crop and the paddle had been used for pleasure, for sensation, for the discovery of what my body wanted.
Sky’s voice had a different edge, not cruel, but certain.
He was not going to let me hide behind silence.
Tears pricked at the back of my eyes as I made my decision. One word from me, and I knew he’d stop, he’d back off and he’d let me be, simmering in his anger, but never pushing my limits past my line once I drew it.
But, if I didn’t draw that line, what would he do? He would do everything that made him Sky. I took off my shirt and trousers and stood naked in the lamplight. Sky pointed at the bed.
I met his eyes and gave him a quiet nod, and some of the stiffness left his shoulders. Walking over to the big, luxurious bed, I pulled the fine blankets back, evicting Poppy to the windowsill, and lay down on my stomach.
He laid the paddle and the crop beside me on the sheets.
His hands moved over my shoulders, my arms, kneading the muscles there.
My body responded to his touch the way it always did, leaning into it, wanting more.
When he skimmed his hands over the trolgar, he let me in, opened up a door to emotions he usually buried under sex and passion.
He was still angry, but it was controlled.
And under the anger, I could sense something else: concern, care, worry.
It was a quiet hint at what it might be like to belong to him for real.
“I know it’s hard to talk about things that hurt,” he said, softer now, his hands warm on my skin. “But you need to stop holding everything in. My grandfather used to say something like, ‘secrets become walls and truths become doors.’ No, that’s not quite right. Well, you get what I mean.”
“How did you get so wise?”
He chuckled softly. “I have people in my life who are smarter than me, and I listen to them. Ever tried that?”
“People smarter than me? Are you sure?”
“Positive.” He swatted my ass. “At least in some ways. For me it was my grandfather. He ran a wushu and tai chi school, traditional martial arts.” As he spoke, his hands skimmed over my back, loosening the muscles with skilled fingers.
“He passed recently, and my mother took over the school. She wants me to teach, too, instead of dancing.”
“But you are a dancer, not a fighter.”
“Wushu is like dance, beautiful and elegant, with moves that are more show than substance. There are weapons, also more show than substance. Maybe I’ll show you sometime.”
“I’d like that.”
“Good.” He worked lower, massaging my ass now, digging deep into muscles that I didn’t know were sore from the long journey.
“Now I want you to be quiet for a moment, and think about what it means to open yourself up to me. To reach a place of trust where no emotion is too scary to share. Because I’ve got you, sweetheart. ”
“I hope so. I will try,” I whispered.
“If you need to go around, we’ll go around. But we won’t do it because you hid the truth. We’ll do it because you expressed your need and communicated the problem clearly. Understood?”
“I think so. I just didn’t want to disappoint you?”
“Honesty would never disappoint me, sweetheart. It’s all this subterfuge that bothers me. And for what reason?”
He was right, I knew he was right. But I still couldn’t say it.
“You understand what you did wrong, then?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And do you accept your punishment?”
“I do.”
The first tap of the crop landed between my shoulder blades. Light. A warm-up. I knew this rhythm from the forest, the way Sky built sensation incrementally, reading my body’s responses with a precision that rivaled my own literary instincts.
He didn’t grill me with questions. He went quiet, allowing me to lose myself in what he was doing. Another strike. My hands fisted in the sheets. The sting bloomed and traveled, and the words tried to climb my throat but would not come.
“Do you trust me with your feelings the way you trust me with your body?” Sky asked, and the question cut deeper than any crop.
“Sky, please—”
He hit me again, and I moaned, pressing my hips up into the touch. The pain was bright and clean and it was bypassing the locked doors in my mind, routing around the careful barriers I had built.
“Little pain slut. You’re enjoying this.”
“I’m not little.” But I was enjoying it, and I wasn’t even sure I understood why.
He switched to the paddle. The first strike made the bed frame creak and drove the air from my lungs.
The thud of it was deep and certain, nothing like the crop’s sharp sting, and it sent a wave of heat through my body that made my cock pulse against the mattress.
It was right at the edge of too much, at a place where I considered asking him to stop.
“Count for me, baby. Ten hits.”
The leather cracked across my skin, a hot, thudding kind of pain, enough to bring tears to my eyes. “One,” I managed. “Please?”
He shifted on the mattress next to me, soothing the place he’d hit with his free hand. “Please stop, or please more?” He slid his hand between my legs, skimming down my crack and cupping my balls, and before I could think about it, I was arching my back and lifting my hips to give him access.
That part of me was his, after all. He moaned softly, a noise I wasn’t even sure he was aware he was making as he found me hard, wrapping his fingers around my shaft.
“Please more,” I said. “Definitely more.”
He chuckled, squeezing my cock. “Does it feel good?”
I couldn’t admit it out loud, but my body told him everything he needed to know.
He struck twice. “Two… three,” I groaned, rutting into his hand. The blood was rising to the surface of my skin, my ass hot and tender and sensitized, and each impact sent a shock through my cock.
My emotions were right at the surface, tears and pain and years of closing myself off in a controlled little box all rushing out of me. I was trembling, the formal structures of my mind coming apart at the joints.
“Can you come from this, little pain slut?” The paddle landed again.
“I don’t know. Oh, fuck—”
“Count, Moerrven.”
“Four… five…” The numbers were getting harder to form.
My mouth was not cooperating. “Ah — oh gods. Six… seven…” The emotions hit me hard, washing over me in waves with every strike, and the last three counts came out as grunts that hardly sounded like numbers.
I was sobbing, tears streaming down my cheeks, and my hips were lifting to meet each strike like I was offering him something I did not know how to offer any other way.
Every impact shook loose another layer of the composure I had mortared into place over five years.
Underneath it was grief and shame and wanting, all of it pouring out of me through the place where leather met skin.
He stopped. I lay there shaking, my face pressed into the pillow, my cock aching, my skin on fire. He wiped a tear from my cheek with a tenderness that made something crack inside my chest.
“Are you ready to talk now?”
“Could you do more?” My voice did not sound like mine. “Ten more. Please? I was very bad, wasn’t I?”
“Are you sure?” he asked.
Shameless, I wiggled my ass. “Break me, Sky,” I said.