Chapter 11 #2
The St. Andrew's Cross is set at the edge of the primary scening area, amber light casting long shadows across the dark flooring.
Other people are in the room. A couple negotiating near the suspension rig.
Two Doms talking quietly at the edge of the space.
A submissive kneeling near the far wall, eyes down, waiting.
Marion is visible in the lounge archway, comfortable, watching nothing in particular.
People will see me. The thought drops from somewhere abstract into the part of my brain that controls my pulse.
"Turn around."
I obey. Something cold touches my spine and I flinch before I register the blade.
A small knife, quick and precise. He draws it down through the corset lacing and I hear the tiny pops of each cross giving way, one after another.
The tension releases in stages, the boning loosening around my ribs.
I catch a breath that goes deeper than anything the corset permitted.
He eases the corset away from my body. His knuckles brush the newly exposed skin of my back as he peels it free. The air hits bare flesh and I'm standing beside the Cross in a thong and a collar with the room behind me.
Everyone just watched Obsidian undress me with a knife. I'm not merely half naked. He made me half naked in front of them.
"The dresser keeps spare laces," he says. Matter of fact. As though that's the detail that requires addressing.
He hands the corset to a passing attendant.
A leather roll is already waiting on the shelf beside the Cross.
His, not the club's. He unties the cord and lays it open, and I see the instruments inside.
Several handles nested in individual pockets, leather and wood and metal, each one chosen for a specific purpose I'm not experienced enough to name.
This is Obsidian's personal kit. Every piece selected by a man who doesn't do anything carelessly.
I don't know what half of it does. Normally, not knowing makes me reach for the answer. Here, it makes my pulse jump. I'm placing myself in the hands of someone who knows exactly what each instrument will do to me, and for once the ignorance isn't a problem I need to solve.
He lifts the flogger from its pocket. Polished rosewood handle, turned smooth, fitted to his grip. The braided leather transitions into long black falls that spill over his fingers. The leather is supple, conditioned, and clearly used before by hands that know what they're doing.
The sight of the falls hanging against his thigh sends a pulse through my abdomen that has nothing to do with the investigation.
I don't want the corset back. Tonight it would be a barrier between the flogger and my skin, and I've never felt a flogger. Everything I've read says the first time is intense. The smart move is more protection, not less, but I want sensation not protection.
"Face the Cross." Command, not suggestion. "Arms up. Grip the handles."
I turn. The leather-wrapped X fills my field of vision. Padded leather cuffs hang below the grips. When I grip the handles, the position opens my back, my shoulders, my ribs. Everything exposed.
He buckles padded cuffs around my wrists. Protection, not restraint. My fingers grip the handles above them. Nothing is keeping me here except the command I chose to obey.
The vulnerability is total and it's different from the shibari. The rope held me in place. This is my hands holding me in place. The cuffs protect my wrists, but the choice to stay is mine at every second.
And the private room held what passed between us where nobody could see it. The main floor offers no such mercy.
"Savannah or red stops everything." His mouth is close to my ear, his breath warm against the skin above the collar. "Yellow slows it down. Green keeps it going. Tell me you understand."
"I understand."
"Color?"
"Green."
Nothing happens.
He's behind me. I can't see him. I can hear leather shifting, the quiet sound of him adjusting his grip on the flogger handle, but he doesn't touch me. Somewhere in the room, a glass clinks against a tabletop. A whispered negotiation goes silent. The air on my bare back feels like it has weight.
I wait. My skin waits.
He steps back. The distance opens between us and the air feels different without him close.
The falls drag across my shoulders without warning, slow, leather tips trailing over bare skin like fingertips.
My skin quivers under the contact. Every nerve ending wakes up and pays attention.
He draws the falls down my spine, then lifts them away.
The absence sharpens the sensation rather than dulling it. Every place the leather touched is still humming, waiting for more.
The first strike lands between my shoulder blades.
Light. A warm-up pass, the falls spreading across my skin like a broad, firm hand.
The leather is soft, conditioned. The sound it makes against bare skin is a dull thud that I feel in my sternum.
It doesn't hurt. It feels like a deep-tissue massage delivered through leather, and the warmth it leaves behind radiates outward like stepping into sunlight.
The second pass crosses the first, lower, across the middle of my back.
Harder. The warmth blooms outward from the contact, sinking into muscle.
My fingers tighten on the handles. The tension I've been holding between my shoulder blades for days starts to loosen under the impact, and the relief of it is startling.
He finds a rhythm. Each pass builds on the last, and my body starts meeting the flogger instead of bracing against it. Shoulders. Upper back. The sides of my rib cage where the sensation sharpens and my breathing catches.
The rhythm is hypnotic. My thoughts start to thin. The kitchen table, the red pen, the pattern with Gaudet's name across it—they're receding with every strike, replaced by something simpler. Impact. Warmth. The leather returning to my skin.
I can feel the room behind me. Eyes on my bare skin. The hush that falls when a scene is live. The flogger is loud enough for the nearest observers to hear each strike, and I'm not quiet either.
The falls land heavier. The warmth has become heat, spreading across my entire back in overlapping waves. My skin is alive with it, tingling in the pause between strikes, craving the next one before it arrives.
Something is shifting in my body. The pain—and it is pain now, sharper than the warm-up—is converting to something else.
The heat spreads deeper than muscle. It pools low in my belly and between my thighs, and I understand, suddenly and physically, why people do this.
The flogger isn't punishment. It's a key.
"Color." His voice behind me.
"Green." The word comes out thick.
He pauses. Fingertips trace down my spine, featherlight after the weight of the falls. The contrast buckles my knees. Then the flogger returns.
The next pass wraps lower, catching the curve where my buttocks meet my thighs. Sharper. Hotter. The heat rolls through my hips and settles between my thighs with a heaviness I can't ignore.
My thighs press together. My face burns. The flogger is doing this to me in front of people.
Sebastien pauses. His palm flattens between my shoulder blades. The contact on sensitized skin is electric—gentle after the flogger's rhythm, and my spine arches into him because gentle is almost harder to take. My body doesn't know what to do with tender after impact.
"Breathe."
The air reaches me on the third try. His hand lifts.
The flogger resumes, and I sink into it.
That's the only word. Sink. My body has learned the cadence and it's no longer bracing.
It's opening. The flogger is dissolving every knot, every wall, every layer of control I built between Claire's death and this moment.
The hits come harder. Sweat runs between my shoulder blades. I can feel how wet I am every time my hips shift, the thong clinging to swollen flesh, useless. Anyone behind me can see.
The falls graze the outside of my upper thigh, trailing across the curve above the thong. My grip wrenches on the handles. The sound that rips out of me is guttural, raw, pulled from somewhere I didn't know was open.
The room hears it. I hear the room hear it.
Something cracks. Not my skin. Not the leather. The construct.
I walked into this building with a cover story and a dead sister's name. I'm on a St. Andrew's Cross while a man I'm lying to works my body like he owns the map of it.
And the sound I just made wasn't scripted. Everyone on the floor heard it.
The flogger stops. He sets it on the frame hook.
A pause. His breathing has changed. I can hear it behind me, fractionally faster than it was when we started.
Both palms press against my lower back. The heat from the flogger makes them feel like lit matches, and I gasp at the contact. Fingers spread wide across my waist, sliding down over my hips. Thumbs trace bone. Every inch of skin the flogger touched is screaming under his hands.
"Don't take it back," he says against my ear. His voice has gone rough. The control is thinning. "Give me the rest."
A hand slides down the front of my hip. Follows the crease where thigh meets pelvis. Fingers hook the waistband of the thong and pull it aside.
Air on slick, exposed skin. I'm open from behind, and the room is right there. I can't close my legs. I can't cover myself. I stay exactly where he put me.
"Color."
"Green." The word comes out wrecked.
He runs two fingers through me from behind. Slow. The slickness is obscene, coating his fingers, and the sound of it in the quiet room sends heat flooding up my throat. He parts the folds with a deliberateness that makes my hips jerk forward into the Cross.
He finds my clit. Circles once. My moan carries across the main floor and I don't care. I can't care.
Fingers slide through me with the same patience he gives the scotch he never drinks. The patience is worse than speed. It leaves me nowhere to hide.