“You do something to me. Something outrageous.”
I took him in my mouth.
I took as much of him as I could fit, which was not, in any honest accounting, much. The width of him stretched my jaw beyond anything before. I closed my mouth around the head of him and the upper inch of the shaft and sucked in a measured pull, following the bond’s instruction. The bond knew exactly what he wanted.
He shuddered.
The whole long line of him shuddered against my mouth, the involuntary lock-and-release of someone perhaps never touched like this before, and the cracks down his sternum opened in a new place, and the deep wine-purple of the room lit from the inside of him for a count of three.
He inhaled.
“The mechanics,” he said.
The voice was wrecked. He was holding on by the smallest measure of an old discipline.
“You must understand. Before we sign.”
I drew my mouth off the head of him by a fraction. I let my tongue sit against the underside. I looked up at him through the loose strands of the braid that had come down. I waited.
“If you break a clause,” he said—the voice low, broken, his long sentences coming in shorter pieces now because his body was being asked to do two things at once—“I will discipline you. I will use my hand, with your consent, on your bare bottom. I will make it red, but you will learn from it, you will enjoy it.”
I felt myself pulse with lust, and closed my mouth around him again.
He shuddered again.
“You will understand,” he said. Quietly. “Trust me, baby. Trust me to teach you.”
“Yes, Daddy.”
The word came out of me around the heat of him in my mouth.
The bond ignited again. The sigils tightened on my arm in a band of heat that was not painful this time, that was something else, that was the band a thing wears when it has been claimed.
He drew me off him.
He did it gently. The long fingers at the back of my neck lifted my head with care, and he held my face for a count, his gaze very low, and he said—
“Now. We sign.”
He reached, on the marble, for a small object I had not noticed. It was a thin pale-bone needle, set in a wooden rest beside the stylus. He lifted it. He took my left hand in his right—the hand with the iron ring, the hand with the cracks at the back of it—and he turned my palm up.
“Your blood,” he said. “On your name.”
“Yes, my Lord.”
He pricked the soft pad of my left thumb. It was a small bright clean pain, almost nothing. A bead of dark red welled up.
He set the stylus into my right hand.
He guided my left thumb to the parchment at the foot of the page, below the long bright run of clauses. I pressed the bead of my blood to the dark page. It absorbed. I took the stylus and dipped it into the blood, then I wrote my name.
Maria Price.
Pride drew the stylus to himself.
The needle was unnecessary for him. He lifted his right hand—the one with the iron ring and the cracks at the back—and turned the palm up. With a small movement of his own will, he opened a new fissure across its heart.
The gold ran.
