Pain from my mother’s secrets. Grief from his mother’s murder. The crushing realization that mine might still be breathing out there somewhere. It’s too much to carry inside my own head. I need him to drown it all out.
I turn toward the bed, but he catches my hips, spinning me back around. He finds the zipper of my dress and yanks it down so violently the teeth split apart. The fabric pools at my feet and he’s already reaching for me again, palms sliding up my ribcage to cup my breasts through my bra.
“I need you naked,” he says, voice rough as gravel. “I need all of you.”
My bra is gone in seconds, tossed somewhere behind him. He hooks his fingers in my panties and tears them off, the fabricbiting into my skin before it gives way. I’m completely bare while he’s fully dressed, blood-soaked and lethal looking.
Abram’s corpse strapped to the chair mere feet away should make me sick. The smell of blood is everywhere. On his hands, his shirt, smeared across my skin where he’s touching me. It should disgust me. Instead, arousal floods through me in a hot, dizzy rush.
He did this for me. Became a monster so I wouldn’t have to.
He grabs my jaw, forcing me to meet his eyes while his other hand slides between my thighs. Two fingers drive inside me without warning and I gasp.
“I’m going to mark you tonight, make you mine. Take you apart until there’s nothing left but need and sensation and my name on your lips.” He curls his fingers, finding that spot inside me that makes my knees weak. “If it’s too much you tell me.”
His pale eyes are wild, pupils blown wide, something feral lurking in them. “I want all of you. Everything you’re feeling right now, give it to me.”
He steps back, his gaze raking over my naked body with an intensity that makes my skin prickle. Then he moves to the armoire against the wall, yanking it open. He pulls out a leather flogger, black with multiple tails, and tests it against his palm. The sharp crack makes me flinch.
After that he pulls out a metal bar, about three feet long, with leather cuffs attached at each end. A spreader bar. My stomach flips.
“On the bed,” he orders. “Lie down on your back.”
I cross to the bed and climb onto the mattress, lying back against the pillows. My heart pounds so hard it drums in my ears. I’ve never done this, never let anyone have this kind of control over my body. But with Kirill, I want to surrender. The fear threading through my arousal only makes it sharper, more intense. I trust him, even in this dark twisted moment.
He approaches the bed with the spreader bar and flogger, setting the latter aside within reach. “Ankles,” he says.
I spread my legs and he secures the leather cuffs around each ankle, the metal bar forcing them wide apart. I can’t close them, can’t hide myself. The vulnerability makes my breath come faster.
“Now roll over. Ass up, head down.”
The position is awkward with the bar between my thighs, but I manage to flip onto my stomach and push my hips up. My face presses into the mattress, the bar keeping my thighs spread obscenely wide.
“Perfect,” he says, his hand trailing down my spine. “Now give me your hands.”
I reach back, and he binds my wrists together with what feels like rope, then connects them to the center of the bar behind my back. The position is immediately uncomfortable. My shoulders pull, my spine arches to accommodate the angle, and I’m completely exposed with no way to move or protect myself.
My cheek presses hard into the mattress, neck twisted at an angle that’s not quite painful but not comfortable either. I can’t shift my weight without the rope biting into my wrists, can’t close my legs, can’t do anything but stay exactly where he’s put me.
The helplessness sends a dark thrill through my body.
“Don’t let go unless you use your safe word,” he says, though the instruction is almost laughable now. I couldn’t let go if I tried.
I feel him step back, hear him retrieve the flogger.
The first lash of the flogger across my shoulders makes me gasp. Not painful, only a sharp sting that blooms into warmth. The second lands lower, across my shoulder blades, harder. My skin prickles with sensation.
He lashes me again, and again, each strike harder than the last. The pain spreads across my back in waves, sharp and stinging, bleeding into pleasure that makes my thighs tremble. My breathing goes ragged, heat pooling low in my belly because of, not despite, the burning in my skin.
“That’s it,” he says, his free hand sliding around to cup my breast, thumb finding my nipple. “Take it. Show me how strong you are.”
The contrast between the pain on my back and the pleasure at my breast is dizzying. I arch into both sensations, a moan escaping my throat.
The flogger cracks across my ass and I yelp, the sound swallowed by the mattress. The impact makes the metal bar jerk, which tugs at my wrists, and makes my shoulders burn.
“Beautiful,” he says, delivering another blow to my other cheek. “You’re fucking beautiful like this.”
He works me over methodically, each hit placed with precision, painting welts across my ass and thighs. The pain builds into a crescendo that has tears streaming down my face.
