Page 83 of At Her Pleasure

So did she. A woman could shred the soul inside the body, leave it standing like a hollowed-out tree.

She was used to ghosts haunting her when she did sessions. She let them stay and watch, proving they couldn’t touch her.

She retrieved her dragon tail, threading the triangle of fabric through her knuckles as she paced around him. She took her time, letting the ointment’s effect kick in. He twitched as the places where she’d raked the claw began to tingle, like a foot waking from sleep. Which anyone knew was uncomfortable, especially if movement was restricted.

He still bore marks from their warehouse session. Those weren’t a problem. Though he was moving well enough tonight—the man could take a beating—his abdomen and ribs would still be tender. She’d keep her focus on his ass, back and thighs.

She snapped the dragon tail between his shoulder blades and the air whistled through his clenched teeth. The dragon tail hurt on a normal day. The flesh-sensitizing ointment made it hurt even more.

During the pause to ensure subsequent strikes would have more impact, she gave him another order. “Turn your head back toward the cross now. Put your forehead on it.”

It removed concerns about hitting him in the face with the whip. Her next blow struck high on his shoulder. Then the middle of his back. Lower, across the buttocks. To the shoulder again, followed by the thigh. Back to the shoulders. No pattern, no way to anticipate. Increasing helplessness. Mindfuckery was also important to the escalation. Pain and suffering flooded in, breaking down his mind, taking him over completely. Making it all hers.

He jerked with the strikes. His ointment-stimulated skin had to be screaming. He ground his forehead against the cross.

She changed out the dragon tail for the cane and went back to work on his upper thighs and ass, his back. She used wrapping and tipping among the concentrated blows. Caning was an art where the smaller the target area, the more sting it had. Occasionally she brought it up between his legs, batting it against his testicles.

He was sweating, skin shuddering. She lashed the rod through the air before several of her strikes, the whipping sound making his muscles tense involuntarily before the actual blow landed.

He was grunting and yanking against his bonds, pushing himself into each blow. She paused. She usually took a break around this point, though she didn’t broadcast it that way. She’d get a drink of water and survey her handiwork. She’d maybe give her sub some water, and stroke his throat with her claws. Command him to hold still as she drew one slowly down his chest toward his nipple, watch the blood well forth and put her mouth to it. Let him see the crimson smear on her lips.

That pause, a breather, often allowed a sub to endure even more when she renewed her attack. A glance toward Olivia confirmed all was good with her, but before Cyn could move toward her water bottle, Mick spoke.

“You’re being soft on me, Mistress.”

He was staring at the cross. Having the syllables bounce off the metal made them hollow. Cyn put her hand on one of the hashmarks she’d created. The tipping she’d done should bring up some nice welts. Her right claw pressed into the hashmark. “Pardon me?”

He gritted his teeth, but he wasn’t done digging his own grave. “Maybe it doesn’t hurt you as much anymore. So you don’t have to make it hurt as bad. Maybe you don’t know what darkness is, what it takes from you.”

He turned his head and locked gazes with her. That thing that made people uneasy around him when he didn’t wear the event planner façade was there. Naked, unmasked.

“You’re just like the rest, pretending something wounded you when it was never more than a superficial scratch. You got in the car and drove away, after all. Didn’t you?”

She’d wanted to crack him open, and here he was. The savage animal. The coldness in his eyes made his mild tone all the more eerie. She didn’t scare, but it raised the hair on the back of her neck.

“Are you a bitch or not?” he asked, emotionless. “Can you really make me suffer?”

He was bleeding, sweating, shaking. She knew the signs. His pain level was easily at an eight or nine. Yet he didn’t want a break. He wanted more.

That night in the cemetery, he’d yielded to her rage. If he’d become aggressive, kicked her ass, cuffed her and put her in the car, she’d be dead or in prison now.

Faith in that memory, the one moment when someone had been fully in her corner, had driven her forward. When he reappeared in her life, the strength of that bond, the way it felt, had confirmed it hadn’t been an ephemeral thing, belonging to only that moment.

He was shitting on that sacred memory, doing his best to make her doubt it. She didn’t, but even if he hadn’t understood the depths of her darkness then, he did now. Sometime during the past ten years it had found and taken him. And now he’d opened that yawning abyss wide, a darkness far too tempting to them both. Everything they needed was there, a complete immersion in pain. Whether giving or receiving, they’d bathe in blood that was their own.

She took two steps back. He tilted his head, tracking the movement like a predator. The challenge was all over him, as evident as a shouted taunt across a battlefield.

Take us there, goddamn you. I should have let that happen that night, let it end there, for both of us, because we were better off. We were better fucking off…

The earlier thought had been a fleeting thing. Now the truth was before her. If he’d displayed this behavior in another venue, he would have been blacklisted. It was her. The walls that contained what he carried had crumbled. The tortured soul mocking her wanted the punishments of hell on this side of the ground. He could find that with her, because he knew a lot of her truths. She’d opened that door to him the night she’d cut him, and it had never closed.

Her nature, if fully unleashed, was more than willing to accommodate a self-annihilating masochist. She didn’t dream of heaven after death. She dreamed of Hell, where she could inflict punishment on every unredeemed soul through eternity.

She’d been blindsided, and it felt like a betrayal. She was suddenly very alone in this circle, and it hadn't started that way. She shared the space with someone who understood. Well enough he shouldn't have done this.

But just because it seemed like someone knew your soul, who you were, didn’t mean they did. It only meant they knew their own soul and it had aligned with yours for a little while, so you both mistook it for a bond. A connection. Until the paths diverged, and you realized you’d never known one another at all.

She’d accepted that truth a long time ago. She just hadn’t wanted to believe it about him, because what she felt for him was stronger than anything she’d ever felt toward a man.