2. Chapter 2 #2
He brought her to the cross with one hand at her waist, unhurried, neither dragging nor displaying her like a possession. More like guiding her into a place they had agreed she wanted to be.
The room held itself still around them.
He stood behind her and lifted both hands to the straps at her shoulders.
Even that small movement slowed the air.
He slid the slip down her arms with deliberate care, baring first one shoulder, then the elegant line of her back, then the full length of her body as the fabric whispered to the floor.
No one spoke. Crystal paused halfway to mouths.
I stood motionless near the end of the aisle, tray hanging loose from my fingers.
He bent and fastened one velvet-lined cuff around her right wrist. Then the left.
The iron gave back a low metallic click each time the buckle closed.
He spread her arms until she stood open against the cross, back to the room, face turned slightly to one side so her profile remained visible. Her lips parted on a breath.
He did not rush to the implements.
Instead, he set both palms flat at the nape of her neck and drew them down in a single long pass along her spine.
The reaction was immediate. Her skin pebbled beneath his hands. Her shoulders dropped. She exhaled, soft and shaky, and the sound of it somehow carried farther than it should have in a room full of supernatural hearing.
He did it again, slower. Down the neat groove of her back. Over the sensitive points at her waist. To the curve of her hips.
Then he reached for a flogger.
The tails were soft leather, supple and dark, and before he struck with it, he only let it trail over her shoulders.
Across the tops of her arms. Down the length of her back in dragging, feather-light sweeps that made her shiver harder than a blow would have.
He watched her response with total focus, head slightly tilted, as if her body were speaking to him in a language he had spent years learning.
The first measured strike landed across her upper back with a muted thwap of leather and a sharp inhale from her that cut right through me.
Not pain exactly. Not only pain. Something cleaner and stranger.
A ripple moved through the watching crowd, almost imperceptible but real enough I felt it in the pressure of the room.
He waited.
Then struck again. Not in the same spot. A little lower this time, the leather fanning out over muscle and skin with practiced precision. She leaned into the cross, fingers curling inside the cuffs. Her breath came faster, each exhale rougher.
He alternated the flogger with his hands. A slow pass of leather. A palm down her spine. Then one open-handed strike to the plush curve of her backside that landed crisp and sure. Her hips jolted forward, then rolled back against the iron as if her body had nowhere else to put the sensation.
Again.
A measured slap to the other side, not wild, not punishing for punishment’s sake. Rhythmic. Deliberate. His hand left a blooming flush that deepened by increments under the lights. Every impact looked chosen. Every pause, too.
The woman’s composure thinned beautifully. Not breaking yet. Just coming loose at the edges. Her mouth opened on a sound she seemed too deep inside herself to censor. One knee bent a little, then straightened when the restraint at her ankle reminded her where she was held.
He set the flogger down and stepped close enough that his chest nearly brushed her back. One hand slid into her hair and drew it over her shoulder. Then he lowered his mouth to the back of her neck.
The room went dead still.
I watched the line of his jaw move against her skin, watched the subtle parting of his lips.
His fangs grazed, not breaking, just enough to make the threat of it visible.
Her entire body arched against the restraints.
The sound that left her then was small and ragged and so nakedly needy that heat licked clean up my spine in answer.
He pressed a kiss there after, almost tender. Cruel in its tenderness, maybe.
Then one hand came around the front of her body, broad and steady, splaying flat over her sternum. Possession wasn’t the right word. Control was closer. Containment. The certainty of a person who knew exactly how much another could take and exactly how to bring her to it.
His other hand slid down her stomach.
I swallowed.
He took his time. Over the line of her ribs.
Across her navel. Lower. His fingers spread and stroked the soft inside of one thigh first, as if he intended to unravel her one nerve at a time.
She was shaking now in earnest, small tremors through her legs and belly.
When his hand finally settled between her thighs, the breath that tore out of her made several people in the crowd exhale with her.
He did not thrust his fingers in some crude performance for onlookers.
He worked her in slow, deliberate circles, patient enough to be merciless.
The heel of his hand anchored her. His fingertips moved with devastating consistency, and every pass of them changed her face by another degree—eyes squeezing shut, lips gone wet where she’d bitten them, chest heaving against the hand that held her still.
The cross gave a faint iron shudder each time her hips tried to chase the touch and met restraint instead.
His mouth found her ear. I couldn’t hear the words, if he spoke any, but I saw the effect. Her head fell back against his shoulder. Her throat bared itself fully. Her body stopped trying to fight the restraint and gave in to it all at once.
There was something almost holy in the silence around them then. Not innocence. Nothing so pale as that. But reverence, maybe, for the stripped-down truth of what was happening—her trust, his control, the room witnessing both and knowing the difference between this and harm.
Her breathing broke apart.
That was the only way to describe it. It came in pieces, no rhythm left to it, each inhale jagged and each exhale sounding less like a breath than a plea.
Her thighs began to shake hard against the black iron.
He never changed pace. Never hurried because she was close.
If anything, he became even more exacting, keeping her balanced on the edge until I thought for one stretched second he might hold her there forever.
Then her whole body seized.
A shudder started low and raced through her so violently her arms strained in the cuffs.
The cry that tore from her was full-bodied and broken at once, a sound the room took into itself like something sacred and profane in equal measure.
Her head dropped forward. Her knees nearly gave.
He kept her upright with the hand on her chest while the orgasm rolled through her in visible waves, leaving her trembling and slack against the cross.
Only then did the audience breathe.
Applause came a moment later, low and reverent exactly because nobody with any sense mistook what they’d just seen for a cheap trick.
Glasses lifted again. Someone near the bar muttered an appreciative curse.
The sound spread, but gently, as if the room itself understood the scene had not fully loosened its hold yet.
I blinked and realized my own lips were parted.
Hell.
My tray had gone loose at my side, my pulse thudding in my throat like I’d been the one with leather singing across my skin.
My cheeks felt hot, and irritation flashed through me quick as lightning because I knew better.
I had seen demonstrations before. Maybe not this couple, maybe not with that particular grave beauty and that kind of patience, but enough to know how Obsidian worked. This shouldn’t have hit me sideways.
And then I looked up.
Across the room, half-shadowed near the far aisle, stood Nikolay.
He was very still. So still he looked cut from the dark itself, too large and too composed everywhere except the face he was no longer controlling well enough to fool me.
The low light made his eyes look darker than amber, almost brown-black, until a slant of gold from the bar caught them and lit the truth underneath.
He wasn’t watching the couple on the stage.
He was watching me.
No—my face. My mouth still parted, my hand slack on the tray, my whole fool body visibly caught for one helpless second in the aftermath of what I’d just witnessed.
The expression on his face hit me so hard I forgot to breathe.
Want.
Not passing interest. Not that chilly disdain he wore around me like a bespoke coat. This was rawer than that, rough enough at the edges to make my stomach drop. It looked like hunger dragged too close to the surface. Like he’d been stripped to something he hated and couldn’t hide in time.
For one suspended heartbeat, the room fell away. The music, the applause, the movement of bodies, all of it. There was only the distance between us and that terrible, blazing look on his face.
Then his jaw locked.
It happened almost visibly, the way a door slams in a storm.
His expression hardened, desire wiped clean beneath something colder, sharper, contemptuous enough to leave a bruise.
He turned before I could make sense of whether that contempt was for me, for himself, or for the fact that I had seen him wanting at all.
And then he walked away.
I set my jaw, shifted the tray back into proper balance, and reminded myself I was at work, not sixteen and mooning over a boy who’d looked at me like sin and then flinched from the sight of it.
Table twelve still needed their wine. The demon at the booth still needed his card run.
Life went on, humiliatingly enough, even after a man looked ready to devour you across a crowded room and then decided he’d rather hate you for noticing.