Chapter 10
EMILY
Another three days passed. She spent them with the girls and got to know Rampage even better.
The longer she was there, the more relaxed the girls got with showing her their little sides.
As the time passed, she found herself itching to know what he’d be like as a Daddy.
No, as her Daddy. Which, the girls had already decided he was, even if neither Rampage or Emily had spoken about it yet.
She knew when she did it that it was a bad idea. She wasn’t quite sure if she was testing her limits or pushing Rampage into acting, but whatever she was doing, she knew she shouldn’t be.
That was the thing she couldn't claim ignorance about later. She'd known, in the specific way you knew things when you were doing them anyway, that slipping out the side gate while Irish was occupied with Clover and Rampage was on a call was not within the parameters of what she'd agreed to.
She'd told herself it was fine. She needed air. Real air, not porch air, just a walk down the road and back, twenty minutes, nobody would notice. She was an adult woman who had been walking unaccompanied for twenty-six years and the threat was neutralized and she was not a prisoner.
She'd lost track of time and had been gone forty minutes.
She heard his bike before she saw him come up the road behind her. He pulled up beside her on the road just a few yards from the compound gate and she kept walking because stopping felt like an admission.
"Emily."
"I'm almost back."
"Stop walking."
She stopped. Turned.
He was looking at her with an expression that wasn't anger exactly. She'd seen anger before and this wasn't it. It was something more controlled and more deliberate, the specific stillness of a man who had already decided how this was going to go. She swallowed hard.
"Get on," he said.
She got on.
The ride back was two minutes. He helped her off, took her by the elbow and walked her inside and through the compound and up the stairs without a word, and the silence had a particular weight to it that she felt in her chest the whole way up.
He closed the door to her room behind them.
"You know what the rule was," he said.
"I needed air."
"You needed air." He held her gaze. "And the rule?"
She pressed her lips together.
"Emily."
"I know what the rule was," she said quietly.
"Then you know you broke it." He crossed the room and sat on the edge of the bed, and the look on his face was level and certain and completely without cruelty. "Come here."
Her heart rate did something significant. She literally felt it racing. Oh god.
"I want to talk about what's about to happen," he said, before she'd moved. "Not to scare you. Because you should know exactly what this is."
She came to stand in front of him, close, and he looked up at her with that steady, deliberate attention.
"You broke a rule that exists to keep you safe," he said. "Not a rule I made to control you, but a rule you agreed to because you understood why it mattered." He paused. "Do you still understand why it matters?"
She swallowed. "Yes."
"Tell me."
"Because the threat isn't fully resolved and I agreed to stay close and I went out alone without telling anyone." She held his gaze. "I know."
"Okay." He reached up and took her hand, turned it palm up, held it.
"I'm going to put you over my knee, and I'm going to spank you.
And when it's done, it's done. All of it, clean, forgiven, we move forward.
" His thumb moved across her palm. "That's what this is. Not punishment for the sake of it, discipline so you don’t do it again. Do you want a safeword?" he asked.
She nodded. "Red," she said. It came out steadier than she expected.
"You say it, everything stops. No questions, no anything. Just stops." He held her gaze. "Do you understand?"
"Yes."
"Is this okay with you? Me holding you accountable? Because I want this. I want this with you. I want you to be my girl and I want you to know what that means, in entirety. It means when you mess up, I’m going to make sure you don’t want to do it again. I’m going to ask you again, is this okay?"
She stood there for a moment with her hand in his and the room quiet around them and thought about all the times she'd read this exact scene and felt it in the pit of her stomach and told herself it was just fiction, just preference, just something that lived in books.
But not now. Now it was real. Was this okay?
"Yes," she said. "It's okay."
He guided her forward and over his knee in one steady movement, his hand firm at the small of her back, and she braced her palms against the mattress and felt…
everything. The vulnerability of the position, the warmth of his thighs under her, the specific reality of this being actual and not imagined.
She wasn’t reading another chapter in a book, she was experiencing what she’d fantasized over for a decade.
His hand moved in slow circles at the base of her spine. Grounding. Deliberate.
"You know why this is happening," he said.
"Yes, Daddy." The word came out before she'd decided to say it, pulled up from somewhere true and immediate.
She felt him go still for just a half-second. Then his hand pressed, warm and certain, at her back.
"Good girl," he said quietly.
His hand lifted.
The first smack landed firm and precise and she gasped. It was sharp and startled her, the sting spreading out from the point of contact, hotter than she'd expected.
The second landed on the other side before the first had finished processing.
"You went out alone," he said. Calm. Even. "Without telling anyone."
Smack. Smack.
"Oh—" She gripped the comforter. "I know, I—"
"You agreed to the rule." Another, steady rhythm, unhurried. "You knew that it was to keep you safe and you disregarded it."
The heat was building fast, each smack layering on the last, and she was squirming against his grip at her waist — firm, immovable, not harsh, just there — and her eyes were stinging.
"I'm sorry," she said and meant it. The shake in her voice surprised her, the genuine remorse that had nothing to do with the physical and everything to do with the look on his face when he'd pulled up beside her on that road.
"I know you are," he said. He didn't stop. "But you need this to remember the next time you decide to try and break one of our rules."
"I will—" Her voice broke. "I will remember, I promise—"
"I know." Two more, deliberate and firm. "Because I'm going to make sure." He didn’t say another word for a long few minutes but instead let his hand do the talking. Swat after swat came down until he’d thoroughly punished her. Her entire butt throbbed.
She was crying now, not dramatically, just actually crying, the tears coming from the specific place where the physical sensation met the emotional reality of having broken his trust and of having worried him. She’d done the exact thing she'd said she wouldn't.
His hand came to rest against her butt, rubbing slow circles over the now flaming flesh.
"That's my girl," he said quietly. "You took that well."
She sniffled into the comforter.
"It's done," he said. "All of it. You hear me? Done and over."
He brought her up off his knee and into his lap in one smooth movement, and she curled into him instinctively, face against his neck, and his arms came around her fully and held on.
She cried a little more and he let her, one hand slow on her back, one hand in her hair.
"I worried you," she said, when she could. Muffled against his neck.
"Yes."
"I didn't think about that part. I was thinking about myself, how I wanted to go for a walk."
"I know." His hand moved through her hair. "That's what the rule is for. So you don't have to think about the threat part. I think about it. You follow the rule." He paused. "That's how this works."
She pressed closer. "I don't like worrying you."
"Good. I hope you remember that next time."
"I will." She meant it completely. "I really will."
He pressed his lips to her hair. Held them there.
They stayed like that for a long time, the room quiet and warm around them, Emily loose and wrung out and somehow lighter, the specific lightness of something that had been carried and then put down.
"Okay?" he said eventually.
"Yeah." She pulled back just enough to look at him. His face was warm, the controlled stillness of it softer at the edges than it ever was when other people were watching. "Really okay."
He reached up and brushed a tear track from her cheek with his thumb. "You took your spanking like a good girl, I’m proud of you."
She felt that settle all the way down.
"Can we stay here for a bit?" she asked.
"As long as you need."
She tucked back into his arms.
"For the record," she said, after a moment.
"Yeah."
"I understand the rule."
"I know you do."
"And I'm going to follow it."
"I know that too."
A pause.
"Daddy?"
"Yeah, baby girl."
"I'm glad it was you." She said it quietly, into the warmth of his neck. "That it's you. For all of it."
His arms tightened around her, the answer of someone who didn't need more words than that. She didn’t know when it had happened, but she knew it was true, he was her Daddy.
He didn't move for a long time and didn't want to. There was nowhere else she wanted to be, no impulse to pull away or regroup in private or manage the aftermath by herself. She just stayed where she was, tucked against him, and let the room be quiet.
Her bottom was warm and her eyes were dry now and her whole body felt like something had been wrung out of it and hadn't been replaced with anything except space. Clean, quiet space.
She'd read about this. The drop and the float, the specific altered quality of the time after. She'd read it and highlighted it and thought she understood it intellectually, the way you thought you understood swimming before you'd ever been in water.
She hadn't understood it at all.