He brought his left hand up, ran the back of it over my jaw, the side of my cheek.
“This is the mouth that lied about it.”
His right hand lifted my bound wrists, holding them in front of my chest so I could see the gold in the mirror.
“These are the hands that signed the bond yesterday, and broke it today.”
The color in my face was feverish.
He leaned in, put his mouth to my ear.
“This is the woman who wrote Salt and Stay. This is the woman the bond chose. Look at her.”
I tried to look away. The discomfort in my spine made it almost impossible to keep my eyes on the mirror.
He caught my jaw, brought it back.
“No words, baby,” he said. “Daddy is talking now.”
He gathered my hair in his left hand, not tight, just enough that my head stayed facing forward. His right hand traced a single line down my spine, from the base of my neck to the small of my back, a slow pulse of heat that made me shiver even though the room was womb-warm. He let the anticipation build for a full five seconds, maybe ten, until my whole body was a single held note.
“I will strike you five times, do you understand?”
“I do, Daddy.”
Then, with no warning at all, he brought his palm down across the soft curve of my ass.
The sound echoed, more a shockwave than a sound—louder, more final, than any word I’d ever written. The painwas immediate, bright, perfectly calibrated: not violence, but precision, a daemon’s arithmetic of cause and effect. My body jerked forward, wrists straining against the cord, but he held my hair and the movement went nowhere.
“Again,” he said, voice flat, measured.
He did not wait forthe pain to subside before delivering the next. His palm cracked down again, exactly in the same place. My vision doubled, lightning-bright. The echo off the walls was a round, perfect note: agony, and its hum, and the slow, lush anticipation of the third.
The third landed lower, on the swell where thigh met flesh. I choked on the sound that wanted out of me, a wrung-thin whimper, but he held my hair tight and the sound went nowhere except into the mirror, where the woman in the glass looked red and wrecked and acutely, mortally alive.
The fourth was slower. He ran his hand down first, a long, languorous sweep that set every nerve on fire, and then he delivered it. My body arched, the line of my back drawn sharp from the force of the blow. My heels skidded on the mirror floor, but he was ready for it, bracing my arms in his hands and my head in his grip, and the whole world funneled to a single, shivering point.
The fifth did not come right away. He let the heat of the last one bloom and spread, let the pain become the only thing I could see, let it fill the room and rebound in the mirror until the girl staring back at me was nothing but color: cheekbones high with fever, eyes blurred with tears, mouth open in a half-scream that my throat would not, could not, release.
He brought his hand up, rested it on the nape of my neck, and held me there. The weight of it was not cruel. It was a mercy.
“Why are you being corrected?” he asked, the words an anchor thrown through the storm.
“Because I deflected,” I managed. My voice was wrong, the register too high, too small. He nodded, the motion a slow, inexorable affirmation in the glass.
“And what happens when you deflect.”
“This.”
“Yes. And . . . this.”
He slid a hand between my thighs.
He did not ask. He did not even wait for my body to respond. The first touch was a test; the second, a confirmation. I was wet, impossibly wet, the kind of soaked that had nothing to do with physical readiness and everything to do with having stood in front of a thousand-year-old demon in full dress and made him proud.
He slid a finger inside, slow, the motion exact. The cord at my wrists kept my hands out of the way. The reflection showed every detail—the clench of my thighs, the arch in my back, the helpless way my eyes went half-shut when the pleasure started.
He said, “Eyes open.”
