I feel her deflate beneath the firmness of my body, and instinctively my forehead drops to the crown of her skull, my nose in her hair, roses and earth filling my nostrils, grounding me.
“I don’t want to fight with you,” I tell her in a rare moment of vulnerability, throat constricting with the lump forming in it. “I love you too much for this shit.”
That’s truth.
It isn’t another lie.
Not this time.
It doesn’t matter that we’ve spent so long apart, I feel it in my marrow.
She’s silent beneath me, trapped between my body and the wall, her breaths still hard as mine slow. I can feel her heart hammering against my own, and it eases me, having her here. Alive. Not a taunting head on a silver platter displayed to me as a punishment. She’s here, in the flesh, breathing, heart beating, fighting.
I just need to keep it that way.
“Nells,” it’s relief, the way I breathe out her name, the feel of it on my tongue warming my blood as my cock kicks once more. “Nellie, baby.” Her hair stirs with the warmth of my breath, her body so very still beneath the crush of mine. “Novus is important.”
She scoffs, a light snort, her back bumping my chest with the huffed exhale of air from her throat, but I keep pinning her, I keep talking.
“You will see and hear things tonight that will disgust you,” I tell her honestly. “We will participate in rituals and practicesthat will curdle your insides and make your teeth clench, but we,you, willdo them.”
Because we have no choice.
Because I want to keep you.
Because everyone in The Obsidian is going to try to take you from me.
“I need you to trust that I will forever keep you safe, Penelope.” One of my hands smooths down her side, over the shiny fabric of her dress, settling on the curve of her hip, my fingers splaying over her pelvis. “You don’t show anything on your face, you don’t react, you don’t pull away from me. You don’t object. You move when I move.” She is so still beneath me, pressed into the wall, it’s like she’s hardly here at all, her breathing slowed, her heart a soft drum. “If I can’t keep you under control, Little Lamb, someone else will come along to try and prove that they can.”
It’s a truth that doesn’t bear thinking about. Because that’s what it is. A truth. One I’ve seen. One I’ve witnessed. One I’ve participated in.
Women are as precious as they are disposable in The Obsidian and regardless of whether Nellie is mine or not, Paired or otherwise, she will never be safe if she shows rebellion.
“We are Two, Nellie, you and I.”
I’m still breathing in her scent, letting it calm my racing heart even as more blood floods to my aching cock. I’m insatiable, I will never be able to get enough of this girl.
“I just don’t understand,” she finally whispers in reply, breathy, slow, innocent. “I just want to be yours.”
My heart clenches with her confession, something I have wanted to hear all my life, of her free will. Not coerced, not forced, not ordered or demanded.
Free.
“Youaremine,” it’s like thunder tears from my chest, my hand tightening on her hip, my other tight around her neck. “You are mine and I am yours; I don’t ever want you to question that, okay?” My forehead is still resting against her crown, her own against the wall now where my hand slipped down, closing around her neck. “Okay?”
“Yes, Billy,” breath oozes like sludge out of my lungs, everything inside of me tight and coiled, ready to spring.
“I love you,” I tell her again, because, honestly, I don’t think I’ll ever get to say it enough. “I love you more than any soul has ever loved another.”
Nellie says nothing in response, her silence as deafening as the ringing of a death knell. But I don’t need to think about that either. I just need to get her through this first night of many.
“I’m your person,” I remind her, because as much as I now own her, she owns me too, and I’ll keep reiterating that until I take my last breath. “In every darkness, in every light, I am yours and you are mine.”
Penelope’s eyes are big and round as I lead her through the house, her hand in mine, traversing corridors and stairwells, each one grander and more opulent than the last. We head away from our rooms, the spaces dipping between shadowed and well lit, until we make it to the centre of the house.
Polished wooden railings encircle the open space below and above, a stained glass dome ceiling overhead. There are people milling about where we stand looking down on them from two floors above, a further three floors above us. Nellie grips thebanister with her free hand, her delicate fingers curling over the mahogany. She peers down, her eyes flicking everywhere, over everyone, trying to take it all in.
I try to see what she sees, how she sees it, but this is so normal to me, natural. A hundred of Father Black’s closest followers dressed in formal wear, clinking champagne flutes and rocks glasses like they’re all completely sound of mind. Normal.
