Chapter 11
Knife made it to the end of a major scavenging run and hit a safehouse checkpoint. He saved his progress, set the controller down, and glanced at the clock on the wall.
Only twenty minutes since he’d last lifted her, but he planned to fuck her face again the next time he brought her down, and damn, but he needed to sink inside her again.
A shorter time up would make her think she’d gone into super-deep subspace, probably. Yet another mind-fuck.
Then he could leave her up longer, nearly two full hours, before bringing her down for the last time.
Because the point of these ten hours in the air was to properly season her for the final two hours, where he’d play with her nonstop, without reprieve.
Zero sensory input, making everything ultra-sensitive, and then too much sensory input. A total overload. More than she could possibly handle.
Knife stood, walked to the wall, and worked the pulleys to lower her yet again.
Her body was still arched beautifully, the crotch rope tight, knots pressed deep. The hood, headphones, and cinnamon were doing their job — she was floating, helpless, and completely cut off from the world.
First, he turned the egg and plug on medium, then he unzipped the mouth hole, loosened the strap under her chin, and watched her reaction to the sensory input after going so long without.
But only for a few seconds. His cock was already rock hard, and he grabbed her left wrist, looped some fingers through the chest harness to anchor her, and then tickled her lips to get her to open them wider.
The second there was room, he crammed his dick into her mouth, wrapped his right hand around the back of her head, and sank all the way in, far into her throat.
Wolves can alter the size of their dicks. For a modern wolf, the mass has to stay the same, but they can go short and fat, or long and thin, and he went long.
It meant a lot of traveling to get all the way in and then far enough out to let her breathe, and he sank into the feeling. Her throat squeezing him, her lips and tongue. Fuck, but he’d never tire of this.
Fifteen minutes later, when he was nearing an orgasm but holding back to enjoy her longer, his wolf surged up, surfacing in his psyche, and he figuratively stepped to the side to let his inner animal enjoy their girl. He didn’t completely yield control but handed over enough the wolf could act.
But this wasn’t just his wolf wanting to take everything in. Oh no, this was more than dominance and hunger. His wolf needed more. Recognition. Claiming.
His inner animal wanted to mark her, to make her take every drop while he held her exactly where he wanted her.
Knife carefully monitored her breathing and scent while his wolf took over, slamming their hips against her face, ruthlessly fucking her while preparing to mark her and claim her in the way his wolf most understood.
His wolf didn’t understand why they couldn’t keep her. Why the one female whose wolf submitted so perfectly, whose pain and surrender tasted like everything he’d ever wanted, was the one female they could never truly keep.
The grief of it sat cold and sharp in his chest even as he fucked her face harder, deeper, chasing the tight heat of her throat. His wolf growled low inside him, but Knife kept enough control to stay out of her throat long enough for her to gasp air in every third thrust.
When he finally came, it hit hard — thick, pulsing jets shooting from his balls through his dick and straight down her throat. He held her head steady until he was empty, and then the wolf stepped back before Knife had to make it happen.
But then, while fully back in control, so he couldn’t blame it on his wolf, before he zipped the mouth hole closed again, he brushed his thumb across her swollen lower lip, tracing the wet curve with a tenderness that surprised even him.
And then he stepped back in shock, because this wasn’t aftercare. Not yet.
And fuckbuddies don’t do that during scenes.
The realization landed like a punch to the solar plexus. He wasn’t supposed to feel this. Not with her. Not when he knew exactly why it could never work.
He zipped the mouth closed and walked to the wall for the TENS unit.
This was about shock and pain. Not tender moments.
He stepped between her legs, opening them wider, and placed the smallest TENS pads on either side of her clit. She’d have no idea what those touches meant, but she was about to find out.
He turned the dial and her entire body jolted the instant the electricity hit. Her shrieks easily escaped the hood, and she writhed hard against the ropes.
She’d come to him for pain, for the loss of control she feels when she hangs in his ropes, and he was damned well going to give it to her. He couldn’t change the motherfucking supernatural rules, but he could absolutely control what happened in this room.
He counted to seven, turned it off, counted to five, and turned it back on.
No warning. Just sudden, relentless electricity lighting up her clit from the inside while the knots ground against her with every twitch.
Off, and then back on at double the intensity. Her hips bucked uselessly, screams filling the room despite the leather hood.
He gave her a short rest while he retrieved his belt.
Back on, more screams, and he flayed her inner thighs while the TENS continued pulsing.
Two completely different kinds of pain at once — the crisp, burning impact of leather and the buzzing, electric fire shooting through her clit.
Her nervous system didn’t know which to fight first. She convulsed, jerking violently in the suspension, the ropes creaking as she tried and failed to escape either sensation.
He kept the layering going for several long minutes, alternating the strength of the TENS with fresh belt strokes, watching every reaction with quiet, clinical hunger.
Finally, he turned the unit off, removed the pads, gave her more fluids, reattached the chin strap, added another drop of cinnamon to the cottonball under her nose, closed the nose and mouth holes, and worked the pulleys again.
He raised her back into the air — higher this time — and set his phone for an hour and fifty minutes.
Nearly two more hours of nothing but ropes, knots, and cinnamon.
Then he would bring her down for the last time.
- - - ? - - -
Time had stopped pretending to move in any direction Tuesday recognized.
There was only the arch of her body. The eternal, architectural fact of her spine bent backward against its own nature, the slow fire radiating outward from nearly every major joint of her body, and some of the minor ones.
Her right shoulder burned with a deep, structural ache that had long since passed the point of sharp and settled into something akin to a geological fault line about to break — like pressure that had been building for centuries rather than hours.
And her left hip, connected to her right shoulder through her hand and foot, throbbed in time to her heart.
She’d tried, more times than she could count, to think around the pain. To go somewhere else.
She had not succeeded.
The cinnamon was still there, stronger than ever. She thought it might always be there.
She’d tried to track time. She remembered trying. She didn’t remember the specific conclusions she’d reached, only that she’d tried and failed, and there’d been a reason she stopped.
Her free arm was now nothing more than a dead weight. The shoulder ached until it’d become its own separate entity, a passenger she was carrying through whatever this was, its complaints adding to the larger chorus without distinguishing themselves from it.
Her body had become a democracy of pain. Everything had a vote and nothing was silent.
She was aware, in some distant administrative way, that she could safeword. She held ketchup somewhere in an offshoot of her brain while her body burned, filed away under do not press this button under any circumstances.
She wasn’t a quitter, and he had plans for her. She was not a woman who tapped out before the thing was finished. She simply had to hang in his ropes until he decided she’d suffered enough.
Remaining was the entire job now.
Her wolf was still present, still watching, but in the background. It wasn’t her body hanging in the ropes, and she was interested in this man. Curious about what he did next.
The knot against Tuesday’s clit had stopped being a knot and started being a fact of physics, like gravity and the speed of light. It simply was, and her body had reorganized itself around its permanence.
She had no idea how many times she’d been up and down. She only knew it was hard to find subspace again once he pulled her out of it, and that he kept doing so. Clearly, he wanted her to experience this and not float through it.
She thought about the French toast. The sparkling shiraz chilling in the bowl of ice because he wasn’t a wine person, but he’d gone to the store and asked…
The thought dissolved before she finished it, unraveling into the dark behind the hood.
There was only the arch of her spine, her throbbing shoulder, her strained hip, the cinnamon drowning out all other smells, the silence, the nothing-nothing-nothing of having no information from the world outside her own burning body.
She breathed.
It was the only verb left available to her besides the bad ones: hurt, throb, strain, spasm.
So she focused on the air moving in and out of her body, and tried to ignore what the movement did to all the ropes.
The pain didn’t care. The pain was patient in a way she was beginning to understand was not cruelty but simply the nature of the thing — it would be here when she got to the other side of this, and it would be here during, and there was nothing to do about that except breathe and wait.
And not tap out. To trust the man who put her here.
To believe he had a plan, and the other side of it would be a payoff.
She breathed.
The ropes held her.
And time did what it wanted.