Chapter 25
MARKS OF MERCY
As the leader, Einar had the first pick when it came to lodgings, which meant that I did, really. Most people would stay in erstwhile hotel rooms, but he and I chose a little stone cottage just beyond our new main hall.
It had wonderful, worn wooden floors and only four rooms: an adorable little kitchen with pale green cupboards and wooden countertops right by the entrance, a living room with a fireplace and a flower-patterned sofa, a bedroom with curtains of the same pattern, and finally an ensuite bathroom.
There were no corridors, and the doors from one room led to the next one.
I had always wanted to live in one like it, yet I could find no joy in it as I spent most of the next day attempting to make it habitable.
I stood on my tiptoes, trying to reach cobwebs like net swings in the corner of our new living room, when I heard the front door open and shut.
“It’s just me,” Einar announced.
He walked behind me and, embracing me with one hand, he took the duster from me with the other and achieved the task in less than a second.
“Thanks.” I took the duster back from him and proceeded to clean the walnut coffee table, throwing the doily from it onto a pile of cloths to wash.
“Josh and Russ just left for the Rotunda. We’ll hold the funeral tomorrow, once everyone’s settled.”
My airways constricted at his words, and I only made an indeterminate sort of noise at the back of my throat in response. I carried on with my dusting stubbornly, not meeting his eye.
“Love, you have to put what happened behind you.”
“I know.”
“Ren, stop. You’re the messiest person I’ve ever met. We both know you don’t give a toss whether it’s dusty in here.” He took me in his arms by force to make me abandon cleaning the bookshelves for about the tenth time. “What can I do to help?”
“Take me somewhere private,” I replied to him without even thinking about it first, not knowing that I would say it, but sensing that it was what I needed, regardless.
“Alright, let’s go. Don’t forget your bow.”
We set off on an uphill path through the forest in the direction of Mount Oro, a rocky giant that dominated Vizzavona’s skyline.
We didn’t aim for the top, though, just for the first clearing above the tree-covered area.
It was a rocky outcrop sparsely covered with grass and enclosed by an alder alcove.
On the rough ground we spread out a blanket that Einar had carried up in his backpack. He took off his own T-shirt and made to undress me, but I stopped him.
I set my bow aside, unzipped my fleece jacket, and peeled off my tee and my sports bra in a single, practised movement.
He watched wordlessly, caressing me with his sight.
I undid the button on my trousers and turned around to give him a full view of me as I slid them and my underwear down my legs, bending over in doing so.
The rumble of a waking lion sounded behind me.
I stepped out of the crumpled fabric and turned back around to find his pupils sufficiently dilated by raw lust, as if a night had descended onto the icy pools of his irises.
Pleased, I dropped to my knees very slowly, my eyes spearing his until my shins rested on the ground, its hardness only somewhat softened by the blanket. Then I lowered my sight demurely, my hands flat on my thighs.
“Sir,” I addressed him, aiming for a tone of submissive assertiveness that was by no means easy to achieve. “Punish me. I want you to. I deserve it.”
He let out a sound close to a strangled cough before sitting on his heels opposite me.
“Ren ... for what? For yesterday?”
I shot him a look of mutinous displeasure, firmly deciding to slap him if he tried to coddle me in any way. But Einar was no fool and rarely made mistakes where my desires were concerned.
“Yes, Sir. Please. Punish me,” I repeated firmly, my refusal to meet his eye a rebellion in its own right.
He breathed heavily through his nose with the air of a man settling down to a job.
I half expected him to flat out refuse, but instead he asked in a measured tone, “And if I do, will you promise not to blame yourself anymore? Will you accept that, doing what we do, horrible things will happen, and that you cannot be responsible for every single person with you?”
“But I was responsible for him! They are my archers. It is my fault!” Guilt and sorrow swelled uncontrollably inside my chest, and I had to bite my lip to prevent myself from crying. “I should have checked the inside of that building better.”
“No, they should have checked it better. You are responsible for training and instructing them to give them the best chances out there.” He spoke patiently, wiping a stray tear that rolled down my cheek with a tender brush of his fingertips.
“But, my love, you are not responsible for keeping every single one of them alive. That’s not your job.
It cannot be anyone’s job. You can grieve what happened today, but you cannot hold yourself accountable for it. Aye?”
I kept my eyes stubbornly downcast.
“Won’t you do it?”
“I will,” he said, and I exhaled deeply with relief because his voice finally obtained that cold, flat quality I had been waiting for. “On two conditions. The first one is that your tears are my hard limit. You will tell me to stop if I get close to making you cry.”
“You won’t,” I assured him matter-of-factly, glancing up at him.
Something menacing flashed through his face, challengingly, and there was no doubt in my mind that, at that moment, he wanted to prove me wrong. But it passed quickly.
“The second condition is that you will quit torturing yourself. That’s my job now, and it’ll be up to me how much pain I want you to feel today. Can you promise me that?”
“Yes, but only if you’re very harsh with me. Sir.” I was a little breathless, and my voice shook because fear was already coursing through my veins, thick like molten metal.
“Oh, I will be, babydoll,” he replied unhesitatingly, with a threatening edge in his voice.
I was both astonished and at the same time unsurprised that he was true to his word.
Without further ado, he yanked me down to the ground by my hair.
He grabbed both my wrists and pressed them onto my back with only one of his hands, holding me in place with alarming efficiency.
The earth felt very hard through the blanket, little rocks pressing onto my breasts, sensitive from cold as well as from reckless excitement.
He bundled my discarded clothes single-handedly and forced them underneath my hips to raise them higher. Looking in the other direction, I could hear him unbuckling his belt with his free hand. I shivered from anticipation, feeling ablaze despite the icy wind assailing my bare flesh.
Then, without much warning, the first lick of the leather came with a sharp, satisfying crack.
I whimpered, but the sound barely escaped my lips before the second stroke followed, just as brutal as the first. I could tell that Einar wasn’t using his full strength, but he was sparing less of it than may have been expected.
His pacing was even more unforgiving than his force, not giving me any time to recover between the lashes.
I gave up counting them at six. By then, I was no longer able to refrain from writhing like a tortured worm, pinned to the ground by his hand, its knuckles pressing solidly onto the bones of my smaller back.
My gasps turned into undignified choked yelps.
“Your arse looks so beautiful with my marks on it,” Einar crooned in a strangled voice between the blows. “It’s like I’m painting a masterpiece.”
With each flesh-searing lash, I was certain I could not possibly take another.
And yet the last thing I wanted was for the torment to cease.
Not only because I was blissfully freed of thinking by its acute intensity.
I was also deliriously excited with even greater intensity at being so completely at his mercy.
At being able to trust him to cause me pain without hurting me.
Still, I would be lying if I said I didn’t welcome it when he paused after a while and massaged me, his touch startlingly tender on the sore area.
“You’re taking it well.” Despite the praise, his voice was stern and ice-cold, promising danger. “So well that I might even be persuaded to lace the pain with pleasure.” His fingers traced the swell of my hip before inching steadily deeper between my legs. “If you ask nicely enough ...”
“No,” I told him firmly, gritting my teeth, and he exhaled sharply with surprise. “Do. It. Harder.”
“Huh,” he hummed with a sound that I knew customarily accompanied the shrug of his broad shoulders.
The hand with the belt left my rear, exposing it once more to the harsh punishment, the strokes loud and regular like a heartbeat.
I could feel small bruises forming on my breast from being pushed into the ground.
The sting of each lash cut further and further from its source of origin, exploding through my whole body.
Carrying with it an insane breed of lust that spread like a forest fire through every fibre of my being.
Not much later, though, and very abruptly, the sensation became agony, and I was very suddenly done with craving it.
Even though different in terms of physical sensation, that moment was, in its nature, very similar to an orgasm, a culmination.
A release that had been years in the making.
I no longer had the strength to choke down on the scream threatening to escape me, and I let it slip free.
Einar stopped immediately.
“Well?” he addressed me.
“It wasn’t my fault,” I said simply, too exhausted to question it or argue.
Unexpectedly, the weight that had been crushing me the whole day was gone.
I hadn’t expected to be true to the promise I made Einar.
I merely craved physical hurt to escape the much worse emotional one.
Yet I found that I was released from my terrible guilt, feeling light as a feather.
I also found that now I desired Einar’s embrace, wished to feel safe and loved in the same hands that caused me to suffer just moments ago.
Later, he would carry me home for most of the way as if I was indeed light as a feather, making me feel not for the first time as if he knew exactly what went on in my mind. Or perhaps to compensate for his earlier pitilessness, no matter how welcome.
“Did I get too carried away?” he would ask then.
“No,” I would assure him firmly, and he would sigh with relief. “You took it precisely as far as I wanted you to. But to be honest, I wasn’t sure you would.”
“I wasn’t sure either,” he would admit with an incredulous shake of his head.
“You were not exaggerating when you said you wanted me to be harsh with you. It’s not so much about the submission for you, is it?
It’s the pain you like,” he would ask nonchalantly and without judgment, only the scandalous twinkle in his eyes betraying his own excitement.
“Yes. God, yes,” I would confess out loud for the first time in my life and without feeling an ounce of shame. “Do you think you can handle that?”
“Can I handle it…” he would huff. “I’m almost insulted you have to ask.”
His words notwithstanding, his smile would be generous with understanding
“I’ll never love you more than when you put yourself at my mercy,” he would vow softly.
But that was all later. In that moment, his hands closed firmly around my waist and lifted me off the ground. It is a testament to how handsome I found his face that I forced myself to look away from the temptation that was the intimidating bulge of his erection.
Immediately, I saw cracks in the strict, commanding facade he wore for our dark game. Guilty concern showed through the tender lines around his eyes, and fear gathered in the creases on his forehead.
“Are you alright, babydoll?”
His internal struggle was written clearly in visage, his need for reassurance sparring against his fear of disappointing me by breaking out of his role to ask me for it.
“Yes, Sir, thank you. Except, of course, you’re making my cunt cry big, juicy tears with how much I need your cock inside of me.”
He bit his lip hard, likely to stop himself from bursting out laughing. A grateful smile twinkled in his eyes despite his features hardening, the facade mending itself.
“Is that right?”
His hands tensed on my body. Then one of them closed around my breast, its skin warm but rough, whilst the other slithered slowly between my legs to assure itself of the fact.
I moaned desolately as his fingers slid skilfully over the most sensitive part of me.
Finding me ready for him beyond measure, he withdrew his hand, reacting to its glistening findings with a carnivorous grumble in his throat.
He licked my arousal off his fingers greedily.
“Turn around and get on all fours, babydoll.”