Chapter Seventeen
JAQ
I can see it in the strain of her face, she is right on the edge, teetering between breaking and shattering. The war playing out behind her eyes is more intoxicating than anything her body is doing.
She doesn't want to give us this.
That is the most depraved part of all of it. It’s not the cabin, the darkness or the things we are doing to her, but the fact that she is fighting the pleasure even as she drowns in it. Fighting the surrender even as her body betrays her completely.
She hates how much she wants this.
Hates that it's us. Hates that after everything—the island, the collar, two years of consequences she doesn't even fully understand yet—she is on her hands and knees in our kitchen, choosing to stay.
That battle behind her eyes is the thing I cannot look away from.
Gus steps back and leans against the far counter, arms folded.
She makes a small, fractured and involuntary sound that moves through me like a current.
She didn't mean to make it. She would take it back if she could.
The fact that she can't is its own particular cruelty and I relish every second of it.
Duke is unhurried in the way that only Duke can be, the kind of patience that isn't calm, it's controlled devastation.
He works her with the focused intensity of someone who has thought about this specific moment for a long time and intends to make it last. The sounds she makes are continuous now, layered, each one more unguarded than the last. I watch her try to suppress them and fail, then hate herself for failing.
Good.
I want her unguarded. I want every wall she has ever built stripped down to nothing in this room.
I drop to my knees in front of her and grip her chin, not gently, and force her eyes to mine.
What I find there is devastating. Not just want.
Not just the blissed out vacancy of someone lost in sensation.
There is something rawer underneath it. Something that has been living in her since before this island, since before whatever she did to us.
Something desperately hungry for exactly this: to be seen, to be chosen, to matter enough to be ruined by someone who knows exactly what they are ruining.
She thought she had buried that part of herself.
We found it anyway.
“Look at me,” I say quietly. The quiet is worse than shouting and we both know it.
She looks.
“Every wall you have,” I murmur, dragging my thumb across her lip, feeling her breath fracture against my skin, “every plan, every scheme, every carefully calculated move, none of it matters here. In here you are exactly what you are and nothing else.” I hold her gaze while Duke positions himself at her entrance.
“And what you are is our dirty, filthy, depraved little slut.”
The shudder that moves through her is not from cold.
“Say it,” I growl.
She presses her lips together. Defiant even now.
Duke thrusts inside her and the defiance dissolves into a cry that bounces off the kitchen walls and fills the space completely. Gus makes a sound from across the room that he immediately suppresses and I file that away with savage satisfaction.
I watch her fight the pleasure and lose.
Watching her try to hold onto some last shred of herself and feel it slip through her fingers like water.
There is something in witnessing that, something in being the person who gets to see exactly what lives underneath all that armor, that is more intoxicating than anything else this island has offered.
This is the real punishment.
Not the collar, the chain, the chores or any of the things we planned to do to her. Those were parlor tricks. This… watching her choose us despite everything, watching her body and her heart betray every wall her mind tried to build, this is the actual reckoning.
She is falling apart in the dark of this kitchen and the worst part for her, the most devastating part, is that it feels like coming home.
I can see it in her face. The recognition of it. The fury at the recognition.
“Stop fucking fighting it,” I tell her.
“I can't,” she grits out between ragged breaths.
“Then let me do it for you.”
The sound she makes when she finally stops fighting, when she drops her head and surrenders the last of it and just feels it, is the most honest thing I have heard from her since she arrived on this island.
It moves through me like an axe splitting something open.
Gus pushes off the counter and crosses toward us and for once he isn't composed. For once the careful distance he keeps between himself and anything that could reach him is gone, and what is underneath it is exactly as complicated and damning as I always knew it would be.
We are in trouble.
All three of us.
And from the wrecked, wondering, terrified look on her face as her eyes find Gus approaching through the firelight—
So is she.
The orgasm that takes her is not the sharp violent thing of the earlier hours.
It is enormous and slow, it moves through her like a wave collapsing, and she shakes and grips the edge of the table in a white-knuckle grip and makes a sound that is almost silent, the kind of sound that only happens when something goes too deep for volume.
The kitchen breathes around us.
And in the ringing quiet that follows, with the fire burning low and Gus lowering himself onto the floor beside her, something shifts in the air between the four of us that none of us are going to be able to take back.
Good.
I don't want it back.