Frustrated, I pushed her back onto her hands and knees and found a leather strap. Her ass was crisscrossed with the marks of my previous training, and I flogged her without mercy, making her count out her punishment, hoping that she would beg me to stop and let me know that she was broken. Her voice cracked, her skin turned red, and her hands shook when I made her rub the welts I had given her, but when I told her to put her hands on them and massage them, she did as I asked.
I should have left her there longer, made her pay more dearly, really broken her.
But I didn’t.
I didn’t, because I couldn’t wait, because I was so hard from the hours I managed to wait for her that I couldn’t wait any longer, because the wait was torturing me as much as it was her, because I had created a problem for myself: Ineededher.
Did she know what she doing? Did she know that she held a power over me that I could not control, that she might have believed that I had power over her, when in fact it was the other way around?
Nothing could satisfy me; I buried myself in her pussy and barely managed to pull out before I came again, and no matter how I restrained her, no matter how creatively I tied her up to be motionless, her body moved around me in waves of silky pleasure that I could not escape from, even after I came onto her skin and exhausted her so that I had to carry her to her bedroom. She stayed with me, embedded in my mind. No matter how many times I had her, I wanted more, and I couldn’t stop thinking about her.
This went on for days, until I had her right where I had believed that I wanted her; she gave herself to me completely, let me do anything I wanted to her, turned onto her stomach and let me take her any way I chose. When I told her to beg, she begged, and when I told her to swallow my cum, she sucked me dry. If I told her to lie still and wait for my permission to come, she did what I asked of her. But every device designed to give me power over her only made her own power over me stronger.
She stopped asking me when I would release her, and as we lay entangled after I used her body, because I didn’t want her away from me, I was relieved that the words never left her mouth because I didn’t have an answer. I would never let her go, and yet if she were to command me to do it, could I resist giving her what she wanted?
Until one night, she was nearly sleeping, with her head lying on my chest. I was entertaining the weak fantasy that I indulged in: that I could somehow have her like this, for all of time, and that there was no reason I could not.
“What do you want from me?” she said quietly, half-asleep.
I wasn’t able to say anything more than, “This. Just this.” And then she was quiet for so long, while my heart pounded with a new sort of fear I had never felt before, the cold icy fingers of having told her the truth, of revealing that she had won in this game of power, whether she knew it or not.
She turned her head to look up at me, her blue eyes wide and wet. “Alaric,” she said, her fingers trailing lazily on my chest. Her touch burned through me; it was all I could feel, pulling at something inside of me until I felt so stretched by it that I might snap. “I have something I need to ask you for.”
Anything, I wanted to say. Did she know that she could ask me for anything? That she was more powerful than she could imagine? I hated her in that moment, as much as I loved her and needed her.
She pushed herself up on her elbows to look at me, her long hair brushing over my chest. “I’ll do anything you say,” she said. “But...” Her eyes filled with tears. It took all the strength I could muster not to brush them away, not to reveal to her that I would do anything to make her stop crying. Anything but let her go, anything but tell her that she had consumed me.
I remained silent. A hot tear fell on my chest and sent an ache through me that made me even angrier with myself, with her, with the helplessness she was subjecting me to.
“I have a commitment,” she said, her voice cracking.
My mind went first to commitment to another man, and my whole body was heated in a flash; I was ready to fight for her, to kill for her, to destroy her ‘commitment.’ I seethed inwardly, unable to speak.
“There’s a girl, a friend, Lucy... she’s... she helped me through everything in life, she’s my foster sister...”
She kept talking, and the wave of anger inside of me crashed up against the walls of my body and slowly ebbed away. “She... she’s not well. She was never adopted, she needs to be in a mental health facility, and she... the state ones are so terrible, I couldn’t leave her there, and so I’ve been paying for her, that’s why I worked at Kitty Bang Bang...” Her voice turned into a sob. “I don’t care about anything else, but she doesn’t have anyone. I just have to make sure she’s okay.”
She rose to sitting, her legs curled underneath her. Relief—that she hadn’t told me she loved some other man, that the explanation for her working for Andrej Sulov was something so benign—was flooding through me. She was not a stripper, not a prostitute, not a drug addict: all of her confessions had been true.
Her eyes were wet and supplicant; this was the first time I had felt that she was truly giving in to me, truly begging me, and it must have cost her defiant spirit so much to ask.
I touched her cheek and ran my fingers over her perfect mouth. “What do you want, Natalia?” I asked her.
She closed her eyes and tears splashed onto her cheeks. “Could you... she’s at a place called Stoney Creek. She’ll be... she’ll be moved somewhere else, somewhere horrible if her bills aren’t paid. I don’t have any money; I don’t even know...” Her voice ended in a sob. “But you could do it, couldn’t you? You could pay for her?”
She was twisting her fingers together. I realized that this request must have been the ultimate submission for her, the ultimate humiliation.
I recoiled from her, sitting up, my hands on her shoulders.
Touching her was more than I could bear, making her cry like that, feeling the grip of her power over me, it was all too much.
“Give me the information,” I said angrily.
I rose and put on my clothes. I needed to be away from her, to exercise, she was pulling me in too deep. “Give me the information and I will send someone to handle it.”
I walked to the door and unlocked it, leaving her on the bed.
I made the mistake of looking back. She was wiping a tear away, her face confused, a painful mixture of fear and adoration burning at me from behind her blue eyes. This was not how I wanted to win her, not how I wanted things to be, though I couldn’t say why. My intentions had been to break her, but not like this, not in a way that left her no choice. “So you—”
