Chapter 26 Blooming Agony #2
“Your body is so… eloquent,” he said, voice low and intimate in my ear.
“Feel how it responds to me.” His fingers traced the path of a scar that curved from my shoulder blade to the middle of my back.
“Goosebumps rising beneath my touch. Muscles tensing, then yielding.
Your pulse—“ his thumb pressed lightly against the side of my neck, finding the frantic beat there, “—racing. Like a frightened little bird’s.”
I tried to focus on my breathing, on maintaining the pretense of indifference, but my body had become a traitor. Each point of contact sent unwelcome sparks skittering across my nerve endings, a subtle current I couldn’t redirect or contain.
His hand slid around to my stomach, palm flat against the skin there. This close, I could smell him—clean linen and something darker beneath, like smoke and metal.
I could feel the solid warmth of his chest against my back, the controlled strength in the arm that held me. His lips brushed the nape of my neck, and I shuddered, unable to control my reaction.
It would be so easy to lean into his touch. So easy to surrender.
His free hand moved to cup my chin, thumb brushing across my lower lip, a fleeting touch that nonetheless sent a jolt through me. My mouth tingled in its wake, a sensation I refused to acknowledge as anything but revulsion.
“Do you know what fascinates me about you?” Valen asked, his breath ghosting across my bare skin as he turned my head to look at him.
“Not your beauty, though that is considerable. Not your defiance, entertaining as it is. It’s the contradiction you embody—strength and vulnerability, pride and shame, hatred and.
..” he paused, his eyes locking with mine, “...what you are calling indifference.”
The thumb tracing my ribs shifted upwards to draw along the underside of my breast. My breath came faster as my nipple hardened in response, a whimper of need almost escaping my tightly closed lips with the threat of a fuller touch.
“So reactive,” he murmured, noting the reaction with evident satisfaction. “And yet you claim you feel nothing for me. Curious, isn’t it, how the body reveals what the mind tries so hard to conceal?”
His hand drifted from my breast, tracing the path from my sternum to my navel. My stomach muscles contracted involuntarily, a response I hated even as it happened.
“I could touch you,” he said, his voice contemplative.
“Properly, I mean. As a man touches a woman he desires. I could make you forget, for a few moments at least, all that stands between us.” His fingers hovered over the junction of my thighs, close enough that I could feel their heat.
“I could remind your body of the pleasure it once found in my hands.”
The suggestion sent a confused tangle of revulsion and unwanted heat through me. I wanted to recoil from the very idea, yet found myself unable to pull away, the chains above me restricting movement as effectively as they restricted choice.
His eyes met mine, searching for something I refused to reveal. “But that would hardly serve my purpose here, would it? I am meant to be torturing you, after all. Breaking you piece by piece until nothing remains but the raw material from which I can forge something new.”
Then he smiled, the expression carrying no warmth.
“Although,” he added, head tilting toward me in consideration, “perhaps there’s no reason those purposes can’t align. Pleasure and pain are merely different aspects of the same impulse, aren’t they? Different paths to the same destination.”
Slowly, as if allowing me the time to pull away, he leaned forward and pressed his lips to the curve of my shoulder. The contact was so unexpected, so jarringly intimate, that for a moment I could form no thought beyond bewilderment.
Then came the pain.
It started as warmth, blooming outward from the point of contact, but rapidly transformed into a deep, throbbing ache that seemed to penetrate to the bone. I gasped before I could catch myself, the sound sharp in the quiet cell.
I glanced down in horror to see a dark bruise spreading from the place his lips had touched, the skin mottling purple and black as if I’d been struck with tremendous force.
Valen pulled back, observing his handiwork with evident fascination.
“Blood,” he murmured, reaching out to trace the edges of the bruise with gentle fingers.
“Usually it enjoys to be drawn out—“ he skimmed a finger along one of the older cuts across my abdomen, “—but it can be manipulated to stay within. Driven from capillaries, rupturing vessels beneath the skin.”
His hand moved to my collarbone, fingers pressing lightly against the skin. I watched in sick fascination as another bruise blossomed beneath his touch, spreading like spilled ink across pale parchment.
“Lovely,” he whispered, his eyes darkening as he watched the mark form. “You wear my touch so well.”
Before I could recover, his lips found the place below my ear, pressing firmly against the sensitive skin. Again came that initial moment of warmth, followed by the deep, penetrating ache. This time I was prepared, biting down hard on the inside of my cheek to keep from making a sound.
Valen still noticed. His hand came up to cradle the back of my head, fingers tangling in my hair with deceptive gentleness, as if to both comfort and hold me still.
He moved lower, his mouth finding the curve of my breast. This kiss was different—slower, almost reverent, his lips parting slightly against my skin.
The pain, when it came, bloomed more gradually, building in waves that made my chest constrict and my breath catch in my throat.
A sound escaped me then—not quite a moan, not quite a whimper, but something caught between the two.
“Yes,” Valen breathed, his eyes lifting to meet mine, pupils dilated with what could have been bloodlust or something significantly more dangerous. “Let me hear you, Princess.”
I wanted to look away, to hide the confusion and unwanted heat spreading through me, but his grip on my hair tightened, forcing me to maintain eye contact as his mouth descended to the underswell of my breast, leaving another mark in its wake.
His mouth moved to my ribs, teeth grazing the sensitive skin before his lips pressed firmly against it.
The bruise that formed there was darker than the others, almost black at its center.
I watched in fascination as it spread, tendrils of discoloration following the paths of blood vessels beneath my skin.
His fingers traced the pattern of bruises he had created, each touch gentle yet possessive. The contrast was jarring—tenderness overlaid with violence, care mingled with cruelty. It was as if he wanted to worship the canvas even as he damaged it, to honor what he destroyed.
“You wear my power so beautifully,” he murmured, his voice low enough that it might have been mistaken for affection in any other context. “Like you were made for this—for me.”
Before I could form a response, he released my hair and knelt before me, hands gripping my thighs to steady my suspended form.
The position brought his face level with my abdomen, his breath warm against my navel.
There was something uniquely humiliating about this posture—the Blood King on his knees, yet still entirely in control, while I hung helpless above him.
“So many possibilities,” he murmured, his thumbs tracing circles on my inner thighs, each point of contact sending conflicting signals of pleasure and warning to my overwrought nerves. “Where next, princess? Where shall I leave my mark?”
My stomach clenched with anticipation and dread as his mouth pressed against my abdomen, just below my ribs. This time, I couldn’t suppress the shudder that ran through my entire body.
The bruise that formed was larger than the others, spreading across my stomach like spilled wine.
Within its boundaries, I could feel my blood responding to his call—flowing in unnatural patterns, nerve endings singing with a sensation that defied description.
Not quite pain, not quite pleasure, but something that contained elements of both.
I said nothing, focusing on the stone wall, trying to separate my consciousness from my body’s responses. But when his lips pressed against the soft flesh of my inner thigh, dangerously high, the deep groan that escaped me couldn’t be contained.
Valen’s eyes darkened at the sound—the iris nearly swallowed by pupil, and within the darkness, a hint of copper shimmered, betraying the god beneath the human mask.
“What was that, Princess? Not indifference, surely.” His thumb traced small circles against the bruise he’d just created, sending sparks of sensation shooting directly to my core. “Tell me how you feel now.”
I pressed my lips together, refusing to answer. The question was a trap, and we both knew it. Any response—hatred, disgust, pain—would contradict my earlier claim of indifference. But Valen was no longer content with my silence.
His hand slid to my inner thigh, hovering just inches from the apex of my legs. “Shall I touch you here?” he asked, his voice dropping to a whisper. “Shall I mark you where only I will ever see? Where you’ll feel the reminder of me with every step, every shift of your body?”
Rationality abandoned me in that moment, my body responding to his proximity, to the perverse intimacy of his touch, with a rush of heat that had nothing to do with revulsion. I felt myself lean closer to him, a physical reaction I couldn’t control no matter how my mind screamed against it.
He noticed—of course he did. Nothing escaped those ancient, predator’s eyes.
“Interesting,” he murmured, his free hand moving to my other thigh, higher now, close enough that his thumb could have brushed the exact spot I needed him.
He studied my face as another bruise bloomed beneath his touch, watching for the conflicting signals of pain and unwanted arousal. “Very interesting indeed.”