“Stop making your desires about the people who hurt you. Your desires have nothing to do with them. They areyours and yours alone.”
With that, Jayne backed away, and the girls who hadn’t already split off from the group trailed her as she took the stairs to the bottom level.
The medieval princess cone hats bobbing down the stairs somehow made me smile with their absurdity, even as I reeled from Jayne’s words. A flood of competing emotions and thoughts and impulses broke free, as if through a collapsed mental dam. I kept repeating my mission.
Lorelei. Lorelei. Lorelei.
God, why the fuck did my lifestillrevolve around Lorelei?
Heat traveled down my spine, and I moved. I followed where the clown woman had gone, toward a room in the right wing of the mansion.
“You’re stunning,” a man said before I could pass through the doorway. He wore a wolf mask that covered half his face.
I realized in this moment how insane it was that Elliothadn’tbeen masked. He was so lame and desperate for attention, hewantedeveryone to know who he was.
Billionaires and their fragile little egos.
“Thank you,” I said to the man as we both stepped into the room together.
A room filled with what appeared to be medieval torture devices. The lights from the chandelier were dim, electric pillar candles scattered about the floor. The room itself looked like a royal chamber in some ancient palace.
I glanced around for Lorelei once, as if checking a box.
Maisy would be happy to know I’d discovered the pillory she’d expressed interest in. Currently, it housed a burly, bearded man. His head and wrists dangled out of the wooden circles, and he was being flogged by another man dressed as a fairy.
“What are you getting into tonight?” the man tried again.
My eyes flitted from spectacle to spectacle. On the other end of the room, a woman’s wrists were bound above her by chains attached to the ceiling. A man circled her, grinning as he whispered things I couldn’t quite hear over the cries and moans.
The man next to me cleared his throat, as if impatient for my answer.
Jayne and Wes’s nonstop badgering for me to follow my own desires suddenly became too loud to ignore, knocking something loose in my psyche. My current desire was for the wolf to stop bothering me.
“I’m exploring,” I said curtly in a tone I was unaccustomed to.
The man’s eyes widened, but he wordlessly backed away from me with his tail between his legs. I focused back on the woman dangling from the ceiling. The man grabbed her pussy roughly, whispering in her ear.
I moved forward, past the woman sitting on a throne with an opening for the man below her to feast on her cunt, past the man on a St. Andrew’s Cross getting his balls tortured, past the wooden cage where two girls giggled—no chaperone in sight—and past the woman crying in wooden shackles as a man caned the bottom of her feet.
I planted myself in front of what most interestedme: the man groping the woman who dangled from the ceiling. He was broad and dark-haired. The woman was a tall brunette with strong Mediterranean features.
Neither of them looked at me, too enraptured by their scene. Intensity rolled from them both in waves, this potency that fascinated me as much as it terrified me. I wanted to hear what he was saying to her.
“You’re mine. Forever,” he growled. “Not even death can save you from me. I will find you over and over again, in every world. Do you understand me?”
His tone was like the crack of a whip. She nodded.
“Yes, Sir,” she said, her voice breathy.
He shoved two fingers inside her and pumped violently until she screamed and her legs shook. This was when the man finally noticed me, offering a slight smile before refocusing on the task at hand.
“Mine,” he growled again, guttural and raw. He withdrew his fingers and shoved them in her mouth as he stroked the back of her head. She sucked gratefully, devotedly.
My yearning multiplied. Not by the acts themselves, however arousing they were, but by the dynamic between them. It wasreal. I could feel it in his every word, the way their bodies angledtowards each other even as he hurt her, degraded her,ownedher.
Some people really lived like this. Some people reallyallowed themselvesto live like this.
When the man undid her wrist cuffs, shoved her to the floor, and pulled out his semi-hard cock, I realized in a split second why the floor beneath them was different from the rest of the room.
