Chapter 26 Blooming Agony #3
Shame burned through me, hotter than any physical pain he had inflicted. I wanted to close my legs, to hide this most intimate betrayal, but my body would not listen. Instead, my knees opened further, as if welcoming his touch.
“Ah, Princess,” Valen said, his voice rich with satisfaction. “We both know you are anything but indifferent.” His thumb brushed higher, finding the wetness there, undeniable evidence of my body’s response to him.
I turned my face away, unable to bear the triumph in his eyes. He stood abruptly, catching my chin, forcing me to meet his gaze as another bruise formed beneath his fingers.
“Look at me,” he commanded, all pretense of gentleness gone from his voice. “I want to see your eyes when you lie to yourself.”
His hand between my thighs moved slightly, thumb grazing my most sensitive flesh without penetrating. The touch sent a jolt of unwanted pleasure through me, mingling with the pain of the bruises that now decorated my inner thighs like obscene fingerprints.
My body arched toward him, the chains above me rattling with the sudden movement. The sound echoed through the cell, a metallic accusation that made my cheeks burn hotter with shame. I was betraying myself, betraying everything I had sworn to uphold—my dignity, my hatred, my very sense of self.
“This means nothing,” I forced myself to say, though the words emerged strained and uneven. “I still feel nothing.”
Valen laughed softly, the sound like silk dragged across gravel.
“Is that what you tell yourself? That your wet cunt means nothing? That your racing heart, your quickened breath, are merely instinctive responses?” His thumb pressed more firmly against me, causing my hips to jerk involuntarily.
“Poor unwanted princess, still lying to herself.”
A moan escaped me before I could swallow it, the sound hanging between us like an admission. Valen’s eyes lit with victory, his free hand moving to cup my breast, thumb brushing across the nipple until it hardened beneath his touch.
“Indifference,” he said, leaning closer until his breath caressed my ear, “doesn’t feel like this.”
I shook my head, a jerky, desperate motion. I couldn’t want this. I wouldn’t want this.
Gods, I wanted this.
“Do you want me to stop?” His fingers dipped lower, gathering the evidence of my arousal, spreading it with torturous slowness. “Tell me to stop, and I will. But mean it, Princess. Convince me.”
I opened my mouth, the command forming on my tongue, but what emerged instead was a broken moan as his finger slid inside me. My body clenched around the intrusion, welcoming rather than rejecting.
Valen’s smile was predatory, triumphant. “I thought not.”
Slowly, he worked his finger in and out of me, my muscles tensing as he curled it, finding that spot that made my vision blur at the edges. I bit my lip hard enough to taste blood, desperate to maintain some semblance of control even as my body surrendered to his ministrations.
“So wet,” he murmured, adding a second finger, stretching me in a way that made my knees numb. Only the chains kept me upright as pleasure coiled tighter in my core, building with an intensity that terrified me. “So responsive. Tell me again how you feel nothing.”
I squeezed my eyes shut, refusing to look at him, refusing to acknowledge what was happening.
But my body betrayed me with every shuddering breath, every involuntary arch into his touch.
The chains above me rattled with each movement, a metallic counterpoint to the wet sounds of his fingers working between my thighs.
“Open your eyes,” Valen commanded, his hand moving from my breast to grip my jaw. “I want you to see who’s doing this to you. I want you to remember.”
When I refused, his thumb pressed harder against my clit, circling with merciless precision. A strangled sound tore from my throat, something between a sob and a moan.
“Open. Your. Eyes.” Each word punctuated by the thrust of his fingers, deeper, more demanding.
My eyes flew open, meeting his gaze just as he added a third finger, stretching me in a way that sent sparks shooting up my spine. His pupils were blown wide, the irises crimson around depthless black.
His movements quickened, fingers thrusting deeper, the heel of his palm grinding against my clit with each movement.
My body tightened around him, the coil of pleasure winding impossibly taut.
I tried to hold back, to deny him this final victory, but my hips betrayed me, grinding against his hand with shameless need.
“Stop fighting it,” he whispered, his voice rough with something dangerously close to desire. “Give in. Show me who owns you.”
I tried to resist, to stop the tide rising within me, but my body was no longer my own.
When his thumb replaced his palm, circling that sensitive bundle of nerves while his fingers curled inside me, I shattered.
Pleasure crashed through me in merciless waves, my body convulsing around his fingers as I cried out, the sound torn from somewhere deep and primal within me.
Valen’s smile was victorious as he worked me through the aftershocks, prolonging my humiliation with each deliberate stroke. When I finally stilled, trembling and spent, he withdrew his fingers slowly, making sure I felt every inch of their departure.
He raised his hand between us, fingers glistening with evidence of my shame. “Indifference does not come all over my fingers, Princess,” he murmured, his voice silken with satisfaction, his own arousal obvious by the tent of his pants. “Remember that the next time you claim to feel nothing for me.”
Something broke inside me then, from my release, my silence, my humiliation. A single tear slipped from the corner of my eye, tracking a warm path down my cheek before falling to the bloodstained ground.
Valen went still, his entire body freezing as if caught in amber. His eyes fixed on that tear with an intensity that bordered on reverence, his breathing suspended as he watched it fall.
“There,” he whispered, something like wonder in his voice. “There you are.”
The tear hadn’t been intentional. It hadn’t been a calculated surrender or a strategic retreat. It had simply been too much—too many conflicting sensations, too many contradictions to hold within myself without something giving way.
Valen seemed to understand this, his expression shifting to one of profound satisfaction. He had breached my defenses at last, found the fracture in my armor and exploited it with devastating precision.
Another tear escaped, this one falling faster, as if pulled by the gravity of the first. Valen watched its descent with the same fascination, the same hungry gratification.
His thumb brushed the wet track on my cheek, gentle as a lover’s caress. “Beautiful,” he murmured. “Perfect.”
Before I could respond, he leaned forward and pressed his lips to mine. The kiss was gentle, almost chaste, his mouth soft against my torn lip. Then came the familiar bloom of pain, spreading from the point of contact.
I felt the bruise beginning, and instead of pulling away, he deepened the contact, tongue tracing the seam of my mouth.
The effect was immediate and overwhelming.
Heat exploded behind my eyes, racing through my veins like liquid fire.
My lips tingled, then burned, the sensation spreading across my face and down my throat.
I made a sound against his mouth—half protest, half surrender—and he swallowed it, one hand sliding into my hair to hold me in place for his terrible, wonderful assault.
When he finally pulled away, I gasped for air, feeling as though I’d been drowning and rescued simultaneously. My lips throbbed with what I knew must be a bruise as dark as the others marking my body.
“There,” he said, his thumb brushing across my newly bruised lips.
“Now you’ll remember me with every word you speak.
With every breath you take. With every morsel of food that passes these lips.
” His eyes met mine, intense and unblinking.
“You’ll think of me even when I’m not here.
Try again to tell me you feel indifferent toward me. ”
He was right—the simple act of drawing breath across my sensitized lips sent shivers of pain through me.
I would remember him long after he left this cell, contrary to what I told him before this torture began.
I closed my eyes, trying to center myself, to find some core of resistance that hadn’t yet been compromised.
Valen stepped back, surveying his handiwork with evident satisfaction.
My body was a canvas of dark contusions, blooming like crescent-shaped violets in a moonlit field.
From the hollow of my throat to the tender insides of my thighs, his touch had left its indelible mark.
My breath still came hard, shallow and ragged, from the pleasure he had torn from me.
“Beautiful,” he said again, the word carrying a weight of possession that made my skin crawl even as heat continued to pool low in my belly. “I think we’re making progress, Princess. Real progress.”
He turned toward the door, movements casual as if we’d just shared a pleasant conversation rather than an escalation of his torment. “The guards will come to let you down at some point,” he said over his shoulder. “Rest well. The next we see each other promises to be... exciting.”
Then he was gone, his footsteps fading down the corridor, leaving me hanging from the chains, bruised and aching and still, shamefully, aroused.
I closed my eyes against fresh tears that threatened to fall, unwilling to give him more of my emotional release, even in his absence.
The chains above rattled softly as I shifted, seeking a position that might ease the strain on my shoulders, the ache in my wrists.
But there was no comfort to be found—only the promise of more darkness, more pain, more confusion when tomorrow came.
The real wound wasn’t the bruises, painful as they were. It was the knowledge that my body had betrayed me, had responded to Valen’s touch with desire rather than simply pain. What did that make me? What twisted, broken thing was I becoming in the darkness of this dungeon?
Beneath that, another horror dawned—the awareness that the wall separating my cell from my harbinger’s was thin enough that he would have heard everything.
Every gasp, every exchange, every moment of weakness I had shown.
How I had come apart at my torturer’s hands.
The thought of him—that ancient, enigmatic presence—bearing witness to my degradation added a fresh layer of shame to an already unbearable situation.
And beneath it all, the terrible, unwelcome knowledge that some small, twisted part of me was already anticipating the Blood God’s return.