Chapter 12 Sadaré #2
“Breathe,” he says, his voice once more at my ear. Luckily I don’t startle, because the knife is just under my breast. “You need to breathe. If you do it steadily—if you stay calm and trust me—you won’t get hurt.”
I release the breath I was holding, a rush of lightheadedness following. He’s right, of course. I need air, despite the mindless terror gripping me. So, just as I do with intense pain, I try my best to breathe through it.
Oddly enough, it works. I start to ride the waves of fear with my breath, and the knife floats over the swells of my ribs instead of digging in.
Even when it tickles, I slowly exhale instead of jerk away.
After a while, I sink into the strange sensation—almost cut loose from my flesh despite the constant reminder of the blade skating over my skin.
But it doesn’t poke me again. He carves chill, invisible lines all over my body, while I simply let him shape me how he wants.
I’m drifting on a dark, distant sea in my mind when Daesra’s words float to the surface once more:
You were the brightest light in a sea of darkness. Before you came to me, I was lost.
No, I can’t help thinking. Now I’m in darkness. I’m losing myself.
It’s almost a relieving distraction from my thoughts when the edge of the knife begins to climb my breast, circling inward—drawing my awareness to a different sensation that stirs to life deep inside me.
Closer and closer it spirals in on the center.
My nipples harden to tingling nubs, and a fresh heat ignites between my legs.
Isha dances the point of the blade on the barest tip of my nipple, somehow without piercing me, even as my chest heaves. “You teased me with this meal last time, and told me I would have to beg for it. Do you hear me begging?”
In point of fact, after I told him he would have to beg for it, I touched his face with the hand that had pleasured me. He told me he would repay me in kind.
“No,” I whisper.
“Do you want it anyway?”
Slowly, ever so slowly, the point of the knife rides down the slope of my breast, over the ridges of my ribs, and into the dip of my stomach.
I breathe through it all, even as it follows the channel of my inner thigh and wanders so delicately up the slight mound between my legs—resting over my most sensitive of spots.
The slightest twitch, and I would feel unimaginable pain.
This is it. The moment I knew would come. The time to prove my willingness.
“Yes.” I exhale with a shuddering breath, but that’s all of me that moves.
This is how I work my way into his heart—the knife he won’t notice sliding between his ribs. I try not to think about the potency of my own need. It’s only the natural response of my body to deprivation, anyway. Not a response to Isha, in particular. At least that’s what I tell myself.
I’m sorry, Daesra. And then I block out any thought of him. I have to, for this to be believable.
Isha’s voice, a soft command: “Tell me how much you want it.”
The fear, the humiliation, only heightens my arousal.
I’m practically dripping as I begin to beg him shamelessly.
“Please. Please. I want it. I want it so badly I can hardly think of anything else.” I trust him to know I don’t mean the blade, which is exactly what he wants.
My blind trust—literally, since I’m blindfolded.
My voice is ragged with desire. “Give it to me, I’m begging you. ”
For one excruciating moment, I have no idea what he’ll do next. Then I feel the cool sharpness of the knife withdraw, little more than a whisper there and then gone, replaced by the sudden press of his warm hand between my legs, cupping me as firmly as if he were claiming that territory as his.
I groan aloud—the only sound I can make. His palm puts delicious pressure exactly where I want it, and his fingertips are so close to where they need to be. They only need to curl a bit more…
And they do, parting me with smooth surety, just as I lift my hips in silent plea. One finger slips inside me, and I groan even louder, impaling myself deeper, greedy with want. I find coherence only to beg, “Yes, yes, yes, more. Please.”
A second finger follows. Then a third, stretching me and filling me with strained hunger. When I clench hard around him, it’s his breath that stutters.
“So tight and wet for me,” he manages in a low growl. “So ready, after waiting so patiently.”
I’d hardly call balancing precariously on an actual knife’s edge “waiting patiently”—but then his fingers curl inside of me, stroking.
A wave of pleasure rocks my entire body, and my hips buck like they couldn’t under the blade.
He even chuckles as I throw back my head and moan loud enough for everyone in the east keep to know what Isha is doing to me in the dining hall.
“So eager.” While he continues moving inside me, his thumb circles the spot he’d just threatened with the tip of the knife.
The risk of danger, followed by the too-brief press of his palm, must have made it oversensitive.
Because my back arches off the table as a burst of hot pleasure radiates out from my core to the tips of my fingers and toes.
And it doesn’t stop as his thumb keeps circling.
“Good. That’s it. Take it how I know you want it. ”
He caresses me with praise as well as fingers, coaxing and beckoning my body to respond as ably as he’d quieted my mind earlier.
He’s yet molding my flesh into the shapes he wants, but my motions are frenzied now instead of still.
All of that pent-up energy unfurls within me.
My arms tug against their cuffs as pleasure rolls through me again and again, my chest and hips dipping and surging with the rise and fall of his hand.
His thumb circles faster and his fingers stroke harder, and my shoulders grow numb to the pain of pressing into the table for better leverage to thrust against him.
The waves build upon each other, stacking, until they reach a crest inside of me.
A hot flush rises up my neck and into my cheeks—the warm breeze that precedes the oncoming storm.
I break apart in his hand like I didn’t under the blade.
I’m barely aware of arching entirely off the table until the strain of my bonds pulls me back to earth.
My muscles finally relent, and I sink onto the smooth marble surface, now warm and slick with my sweat, my unthinking screams still echoing in the unseen hall around me.
I feel boneless but weightless, drifting once more, my body and mind utterly spent.
“Open your mouth,” a disembodied, deep voice commands behind the darkness of my blindfold.
I can’t think; I only obey. I part my lips, and three of his fingers shove their way inside.
My own sharp, tangy flavor surprises me in my daze.
I should have expected it. After I touched his cheek while drenched in my own pleasure, he retaliated by putting his wine-dipped fingers in my mouth, promising it wouldn’t be wine next time.
He kept his promise—threefold.
“Lick them clean.”
I do, licking and sucking on his fingers as best as I can until I taste nothing but his own skin and the faint bitterness of the seeds on my tongue.
He whips them out of my mouth only to plunge them back inside me down below, wet with my saliva, hooking me like he once hooked my cheek.
Except, instead of drawing my face toward his, he pulls my hips up off the table, his palm flush against my bone.
I can’t help bucking against him like a fish on a line.
He doesn’t let me go, only gives me a little warning shake as if he were merely gripping the scruff of my neck.
It’s so invasive, so controlling, so intimate—a leash on my very core.
I shudder around his fingers, clenching hungrily.
“Open again,” he says.
I open my mouth obediently, my taste still lingering on my lips, expecting him to release me and repeat what he did before. But he doesn’t. He keeps hold of me and uses his other hand to drop something onto my waiting tongue. It’s small, with a pebbly texture.
A berry.
I nearly choke despite how soft it is and try to spit it out in protest, but he seals my lips with his hand. I groan furiously against his palm. I even try licking him, as a child would to get another child to let go, but it has no effect. He only shushes me.
“Chew.” He jerks on my core again to emphasize the word.
So I do, even as tears build and leak out of my eyes under the blindfold. I’m glad the cloth is there to mask and absorb them—and to hide my shame. Because I’m not only crying out of despair.
The burst of sweet flavor is bliss. It’s a blackberry—my favorite, which is ironic. Or intentional, on his part, giving me what he thought I would like most. He must have seen me eyeing them. It tastes better than anything I can remember, probably because I’m starving.
He uncovers my mouth only long enough to drop in another one.
And another. I keep chewing and crying silently, trying my best not to dislodge the seeds in my cheek.
I worry I may have swallowed at least one of them when he starts feeding me larger bites of fruit, though it’s hard to tell with all the juice and pulp in my mouth.
At the very least the seeds might counteract the effects of eating—the poison lurking under the sweet.
“There you go. Now swallow.” In contrast to my inner turmoil, Isha’s voice is soft and measured. He even pets my hair soothingly between bites once he determines he no longer needs to cover my mouth. “You must eat, little one, or you’ll fade away. I don’t want you to fade away.”
There’s real concern in his voice. I doubt he wants me to eat only for that reason, but his sentiment is real.
He’s beginning to truly care for me.
And I’m forgetting Daesra.