Chapter 11

eleven

SIX WEEKS LATER

“Everything is ready for your visit,” Mortimer was saying on the phone. “Do you have everything you need on your end?”

I thought of the suitcase currently sitting in the middle of my DC hotel room. Neatly packed with clothes for a hot Roman summer, along with toiletries and one very beautiful knife. “Yes,” I said. “And more.”

“Marvelous.” My uncle sounded delighted. “We’ll talk more when you arrive. I’m so excited to see you, my child.”

We said our goodbyes, and I ended the call, pacing a little around the sumptuous waiting room I’d been put in when I’d arrived at Lyonesse thirty minutes ago. Tonight was Lyonesse’s anniversary celebration, and then tomorrow I’d fly from DC to Rome. I would finally get to join my uncle and help him with his work for the first time, even if it was only for a few weeks, and I couldn’t wait. A taste of the life I could have had without Mark, maybe, serving God in the heart of his earthly kingdom.

The door clicked open, and I turned to see the woman who’d sat next to Mark on New Year’s Eve. She was wearing a black pencil skirt made of something shiny—latex, maybe, or PVC—and a white blouse. She had a narrow jaw, high cheekbones, and eyes that tilted up at the corners. Her mouth—wide and full—was painted a red that brought out the jeweled hue in her deep brown skin. Something about her reminded me of Mark and the man who’d sat behind him, and it took me a minute to realize what it was.

Her expression. Lifted brow, neutral mouth.

It was the way Mark looked at me when I was cuffed to his furniture.

I cleared my throat. “Hello. I’m here for the celebration.”

“I know,” she said and closed the door behind her. “Mark sent me to help you get ready. He’d do it himself, but he’s glad-handing the early guests. I’m Dinah, the club manager.”

I took her offered hand as she approached. “I’m Isolde Laurence.”

“The fiancée,” Dinah said. “I can’t say I’ve wrapped my head around this engagement yet, but anyone brave enough to let Mark collar them is someone I’m honored to meet.” She gave me a small smile. “God have mercy on your soul, and all that. Now, follow me to your dressing room. I believe Mark has already set aside everything you’ll need.”

Walking with Dinah through the club was like walking with the mayor. People stopped her, called out to her, fell in step beside her and handed her things. Though the celebration wouldn’t officially start for another hour, there were already plenty of small catastrophes brewing: the bar was out of the vintage cognac the Canadian ambassador preferred; there was some mix-up with a C-drama actor’s room and the number of submissives waiting for him there. Some of the early guests were already drinking heavily enough that they’d need to be barred from the playrooms later. A lube-warmer had broken in a playroom and no one could find a replacement.

Dinah handled it all easily, naturally, with the knowledge and authority of someone in her element, and I wondered how she’d come to work for Mark in the first place. Was this the kind of position that could even be advertised for?

“How much has Mark told you about Lyonesse?” Dinah asked, and I wondered how much he’d told her about us, about the real nature of our engagement.

With a glance at the easy set of her shoulders and relaxed expression, I decided to answer truthfully, if vaguely. “Not much. Most of our conversations involving kink have been about us, not the club.”

“Well, then, since you’ve only been here once before, let me give you a proper introduction to how the club works.” Dinah stopped by an elevator and pressed a button. The doors opened immediately.

“Lyonesse is not a brothel,” she said as we stepped inside and she selected our destination. The doors closed silently and we whooshed down two floors. “Legally speaking, guests don’t pay us for sex.”

some mix-up with a C-drama actor’s room and the number of submissives waiting for him there. Some of the early guests were already drinking heavily enough that they’d need to be barred from the playrooms later. A lube-warmer had broken in a playroom and no one could find a replacement.

Dinah handled it all easily, naturally, with the knowledge and authority of someone in her element, and I wondered how she’d come to work for Mark in the first place. Was this the kind of position that could even be advertised for?

“How much has Mark told you about Lyonesse?” Dinah asked, and I wondered how much he’d told her about us, about the real nature of our engagement.

With a glance at the easy set of her shoulders and relaxed expression, I decided to answer truthfully, if vaguely. “Not much. Most of our conversations involving kink have been about us, not the club.”

“Well, then, since you’ve only been here once before, let me give you a proper introduction to how the club works.” Dinah stopped by an elevator and pressed a button. The doors opened immediately.

“Lyonesse is not a brothel,” she said as we stepped inside and she selected our destination. The doors closed silently and we whooshed down two floors. “Legally speaking, guests don’t pay us for sex.”

“Ah,” I said. Doubtfully.

“I know, it looks like that on the face of things. But our guests are members, and as members, they are allowed to use our facilities for their needs. They’re also allowed to do anything they’d like with those facilities, including fuck inside them.”

“But you have submissives who work for the club.” The elevator doors opened, and we stepped out into a glass-walled space overlooking the open center room of the building, the same one Mark’s nook had overlooked on New Year’s Eve.

“We have Dominants too,” said Dinah. “But our members don’t pay for our employees’ use. They are here to serve in the same way the bartenders and kitchen staff serve—as part of a member’s benefits and part of the experience Lyonesse provides. No extra payment required.”

We were walking to the far end of the space now, toward a glass door leading to a hallway. The room below was empty for now, the stage at its front curtained off from the rest.

“Of course, this gets sticky from the law’s perspective. Lyonesse dodges this in two ways. Firstly, that our Dominants and submissives work for our club only to meet the kink needs of members. Meaning that they are there explicitly for a scene and nothing else. Kink does not have to equal sex, and indeed, we do have several members who have a need for kink separate from sex. If a member would like sex along with a scene, this is a distinct and private negotiation between the Dominant or submissive and our member. Our Dom or sub is not paid for consensual and spontaneous sex, of course. But if they happen to receive gifts of money or valuables after…”

We reached the door and Dinah opened it with a press of her narrow silver watch to a pad next to the door.

“Would that really hold up to scrutiny?” I asked. “Especially if Lyonesse were to facilitate those private negotiations?”

“Of course not,” Dinah said crisply as she stopped in front of a door. “That’s why Mark bribes and blackmails half the district’s officials to look the other way.”

“Oh.”

“It’s only half, because the other half are already members here,” Dinah added with a wicked grin.

My belly flipped to see her smile. Did I have a secret weakness for wicked grins? Or just for beautiful Dominants in general?

“You’ll see your things are already waiting,” said Dinah, opening the door to a dressing room paneled in black wood and with a single window looking over the low DC skyline. “The glass is one-way, don’t worry. Just dress, and soon you’ll be led to the stage and your scene. You and Mark are the first on tonight, and the crowd will be easy to impress. They worship Mark, so all you have to do is be pretty and helpless and they’ll be creaming themselves.”

I walked over to the open closet door. There was a short white dress inside, thin enough to be translucent, along with a long white ribbon for my hair. There were no shoes, but there was a pair of boy shorts. My eyes lingered on them, not sure what to think. I appreciated that Mark was giving me these small nods to modesty, that the plan was to pretend as much as possible, but if I wanted him to feel something for me, then we needed to…progress.

Physically.

Unfortunately, I was also certain that Mark would not like it if I went off script and disobeyed his tacit command to wear what he wanted.

“Thank you,” I told Dinah, already taking the dress from the hanger.

“Happy to help,” she said, and then she paused with her hand on the door, her coffee-brown eyes on mine. “You are the most composed submissive I’ve ever seen—composed enough that I’m already wondering what it would take to fracture all that gorgeous control of yours. Just be you out there on the stage, and I know you’ll give us all a hell of a show.”

And then she left me to dress alone.

* * *

The pale womanfrom New Year’s Eve came to collect me, and then together we went downstairs to the backstage area. I shivered in my short white dress, and she—Andrea was her name—looked over at me with a gaze so disapproving that I could feel it burn along my skin. But she didn’t speak, and I didn’t either, feeling suddenly very young. Just a college student in a tiny white dress that barely covered my backside, my feet bare and my hair tied in a simple braid and bound with a ribbon. And she was a grown woman, every bit an adult with her tailored suit and perfectly waved hair.

What must she think, I wondered, about Mark being engaged to nineteen-year-old me?

What must they all think?

From backstage, I could hear someone giving a speech to the room, the crowd laughing and applauding at all the right moments. It was dark back here, the only light coming in from the stage lights, and I had the surreal moment of briefly not recognizing my own life.

Isolde Laurence, banking heiress—Isolde Laurence, who wanted to be a nun—was about to walk onto a stage wearing nothing but a flimsy silk nightie and allow herself to be cuffed to a cross and flogged. In front of hundreds and hundreds of people.

The person talking ended their speech and the stage went dark. Andrea took my upper arm and led me onstage, and I resisted the instinct to pull free, to twist against her wrist in a way that would immediately break her hold.

Play helpless, play weak. It’s just part of the game.

But it chafed all the same.

I was led to the middle of the stage and left there, standing in the near-darkness, listening to the whistles and calls of the crowd. They were hungry for the night to begin, for the depravity to commence, and when the lights came up to reveal me standing there, looking lost and nervous, they erupted.

I breathed into my stomach, calming my nerves by staring back at them, by finding the exits behind them, by counting the rooms on the upper levels that looked out onto the stage.

They were just people. Just people eager for sex and for violence, and they were no different from the Manhattanites and Londoners my uncle had trained me to spy on. And in some cases, they were literally no different because they were in fact the same people.

Hyssop. Hyssop. It was a chant in my head. Hyssop.

I could stop this at any point.

Hy—

Mark stepped out from the other side of the stage, again in an all-black tuxedo.

The crowd lost it.

Screams, shouts, roars—the space was now a well of noise, and all of it in adulation of its leader. Mark nodded at them, and then his blue eyes slid over to me. I swallowed. It had been three months since I’d last seen him, and the effect seeing him had on me was alarming. Embarrassing.

But effective, perhaps, because I saw him notice my fast breathing, my tongue darting out to wet my lower lip, and those blue eyes darkened.

He strode over to me, long, easy steps in that fallen angel tuxedo of his, and moved between me and the crowd.

“Ready?” he asked, looking down at me.

The stage lights were directly behind him, turning him into nothing more than a silhouette. I could only make out the immaculate sweep of his hair away from his face, the outline of his carved cheekbones.

“Yes.” I looked down at his dress shoes. The light was hurting my eyes.

“Say your safe word if you need to,” he said, and he sounded more serious than I’d ever heard him. “I’ll need to make tonight look convincing.”

“Give me what you’d give any submissive, Mark.” I met his eyes again. “Sir, I mean.”

“But you’re not any submissive,” he said, leaning close to murmur in my ear. “You’re going to be my wife.”

The way he said wife sent a hot, electric thrill racing down my spine. He said it like it was a personal fantasy of his—the filthiest pleasure he could imagine.

A delicious tension stole up my thighs as he stepped back and turned to face the crowd. He said nothing, but he didn’t need to. They fell silent on their own, held captive by his attention and his desire.

Music began to fill the room, low and pulsing, and then Mark took my hand and bent his head over it. His lips, warm and soft, brushed over my knuckles, and the crowd stirred, loving it, loving this small, gallant kindness before I was strapped down and punished.

It was hard not to love it too. Hard not to love the way he looked at me through his lashes as he lifted his lips, the way he tugged me closer to him with his eyes burning into mine. His other hand found my hip and then my ass, squeezing it roughly through the dress. He tugged it up, exposing my boy-short-covered backside, and then looked over my shoulder and down at what he’d revealed, giving me a quick, hard slap.

The room roared its approval as I gasped. The pain was sharp and short, there and gone again, but it still sent adrenaline zinging through my blood. If this were a sparring match, I’d shake it off and put my guards back up to fight again. But this wasn’t a sparring match, or even a fair fight. I was consecrated to pain tonight. I was an offering to it.

Just like I’d hoped to do for God, I would hurt for my future husband. And hope that I could keep my head clear as my heart sang with joy for it.

Mark wrapped his hand around my braid and walked me over to the St. Andrew’s Cross in the middle of the stage. His expression was as cool as ever, but there was something different about him in front of his club, something a little more energetic. His strides were longer, his shoulders looser. When he cuffed me to the cross and then turned to ask the crowd if he should get his flogger, his voice was dripping with a smooth, seductive malice I’d only heard once before: at my father’s rooftop party.

He was performing for them. Their king. Their chosen devil.

And they loved it. As he smacked my bottom again before he stepped away to get his flogger. As he came back and used my braid to tilt my head to the side. As he ghosted his lips over my neck until I squirmed and then bit down hard enough to make me cry out.

Their cheers and calls mixed with the low, tugging bass of the music, and when the flogger’s tails licked at my back for the first time, the noise was deafening. There was another rush of adrenaline, and everything felt sharp, so very sharp. The noise, the lingering sting from Mark’s bite, the air brushing the underside of my bottom, it all reminded me that I was on display. That the people on the floor could undoubtedly see up my dress, see right through it under these bright lights. They could see me flinch as Mark struck my back again; they could see the flogger’s kisses surely rising on my skin right now.

Hyssop.

Hyssop.

Cleanse me with hyssop and I will be clean…

Mark’s lazy, exploratory flicks began to change. They came faster now, like needles dancing over my shoulder blades, all cutting heat and sting, and I was shifting on the cross without realizing it, trying to escape the feeling when it came, and then seeking it out when it left. I didn’t know what I wanted, if I wanted it to go or if I wanted it to come, and then the flicks changed again, no longer solitary strikes but a rhythm, a razor rain on my back. Unceasing, fast, relentless, and I couldn’t catch my breath, couldn’t find my center, couldn’t find anything except for him behind me and the pain burning like hellfire along my skin.

He stopped and I sucked in the cool air, dizzy from lack of oxygen. The crowd was quieter now, as if enthralled, and Mark paced behind me like a cat, patient and deadly.

It was only a handful of seconds before my thoughts cleared and I could lift my head—which was when he struck again. Fire upon fire, painting my shoulder blades red, giving me wings made of stinging, scarlet welts.

Needles under my skin, my center slipping away, breath long forgotten.

The heat was everywhere: my back, my throat, my chest. Swirling like liquid fire in my belly and simmering between my spread thighs.

Mark paused again, then paced patiently behind me again. There was a method to his pauses, but I couldn’t figure it out. I hadn’t moaned or grunted. I hadn’t collapsed against the cross or whispered for him to stop.

Maybe it was like music, with movements and lulls and crescendos. Or maybe it was like sparring, coming together in a flurry of strikes and then breaking apart again.

Whatever the method was, it matched whatever was happening inside me. The world had gone from sharply vivid to blurred to the point of abstraction. The music had sunk into my bones along with the heat from his flogger; I was breathing in time to it, breathing in time to his strikes; they were all the same thing now. Breath, music, pain. My breasts ached as if by proxy, craving the leather too, and my clitoris was aching even more.

Another pause, and then—

Mark lifted up the hem of my dress, a gesture entirely for show, given how short it was. The crowd screamed, and then the flogger snapped against my exposed ass, harder than it had on my back. I jumped in my cuffs, and the crowd screamed louder. Again I felt the leather, again I heard the screams, and it was all so strange, because they were screaming to see me played with for their amusement, for their pleasure, but it was almost like they were screaming for me, like their voices were my own, and they were sharing this with me, the highs and the lows, the burn and then the insidious heat that followed after.

Mark spared nothing, it felt like, giving me all his strength, all his cruelty, and I was crying, shivering, but something else was happening too, the same thing that happened when I kicked the kicking post at my school until I couldn’t stand anymore, the same thing that happened whenever I knelt on the cold marble floor of my church until I was numb…

The pain was tugging me under or pulling me up, I never knew which, and it was cold and it was hot, and it was sluicing over me and it was burning me alive; it was cleansing me with water and searing away my impurities. My breath was like a flower furling and unfurling in my stomach, the imperceptible stillness between each inhale and exhale beckoning like heaven itself. God was here, around me. Inside me, a fullness in my veins and a joy nestled in the close, wet chambers of my heart.

This—this was what I had begged my uncle for. The gift of feeling God through pain, of feeling my transgressions burned away, my heart cleansed and full. And here I was, ecstatic with it in full view of hundreds, sagging into Mark’s chest as he dropped his flogger to the floor and uncuffed me from the cross.

He swept me up into his arms, and I blinked up at him. In the bright stage lights, his eyes were a brilliant blue, almost aqua, a warm and clear sea.

“Are you going to spank me now?” I whispered.

That had been a plan—yes, the plan. The plan made a thousand years ago. Flogging, and then spanking. He would pretend to make me come after. I was supposed to fake my pleasure, and the subtler, the better, he’d told me. No Meg Ryan theatrics.

He looked down at me. “Yes,” he said so that only I could hear him under the music and the crowd. “Do you remember your safe word?”

“Yes. But I won’t use it.” My murmurs sounded dreamy even to myself; I sounded drugged. “I want you to hurt me more.”

Something moved behind his eyes, gone before I could identify it. And then he bent his head and licked the side of my face.

The crowd roared their approval, and I shivered as I understood what he’d done.

He’d licked the tears off my cheek.

I was carried to a padded leather table and bent over it without ceremony, my dress impatiently shoved up past my hips and a large hand coming between my shoulder blades to pin me to the table. The room behind us was desperate now, a keening, hungry edge to their calls and cheers, and the first hard smack to my ass came with thunderous applause.

Mark didn’t pause to acknowledge it, didn’t slow down in the least. His hand came again and again, harder than the flogger, and faster too—strike after strike after strike.

On the sixth one, I cracked, letting out a grunt, and on the seventh one, I moaned so loudly that the audience heard. They stilled, going quiet, treating themselves to my choked-off cries and groans, which were fast turning into sobs.

It hurt so badly, and it felt so fucking good—like being filled with cold, clean water, filled with stillness and peace, and also like being purified like gold in a fire. The pressure against my aching breasts felt like destiny, and my nearly exposed cunt as I was bent over the table felt like fate.

Mark’s hands were on my back and punishing my backside, but his touch was everywhere, his will was everywhere, and there was no unspooling that from any other feeling, the cleansed feeling, the God-feeling, the euphoria of it all… Each strike was a fresh surge of heat to my sex, an invisible mouth licking me between the legs.

I lost count after the eleventh strike, my body shivering and my heart sliding into my stomach, and I wondered if the lights were bright enough that the audience could see the shape of my pussy through my underwear. I wondered if they could see that I was flushed and slick there. I wondered if Mark could see. I wondered if he wanted to fuck my cunt, right now on this stage, pulling my underwear down to my ankles and unbuttoning his tuxedo pants and impaling me in front of everyone here. I wondered what it would feel like, him sliding thick and merciless inside me, taking his pleasure, using my hole until he filled me full.

I wondered if he’d leave me there after, for everyone to see how I’d been used.

I almost didn’t realize it was happening as it was building, the rest of my body was so hot and tight—but it was unmistakable, urgent. Necessary.

I was about to have an orgasm.

I was about to have an orgasm in front of hundreds of people, with my dress shoved up around my hips and my bottom red from my future husband’s hand.

No. No, that couldn’t happen—that wasn’t me, that wasn’t supposed to be how this worked. I was supposed to pretend; I wasn’t supposed to do this for real, be this for real—

Hyssop.

I could say it. I could stop it before it happened, claw back whatever dignity I possibly could before my body betrayed me. It was as simple as one word. Two syllables.

I could say it, and I believed that Mark would honor it.

But I didn’t say it. I didn’t say anything.

I grunted and I cried. I gasped against the leather top of the table.

And then pleasure ripped through me like fabric tearing in two, sudden and violent and irreversible, and my pussy clenched tight and then released. Again, again—clench, release—surges that stole my very breath, until I was panting, mouth open against the leather, shuddering and shaking and crying.

I’d never felt anything like this. Not with my furtive grasps toward pain with my kneeling and my kicking post. Not during my tentative flirtations with pleasure, alone in bed with my hand between my legs and my face turned toward the wall. Not even in my dreams, knotted and coiled as they were.

This—this was new.

And it was breaking me, soiling me, tearing all my good and dignified intentions in half.

Mark was still spanking me through it, and after a final strike that sent a ragged moan from my lips, I felt him step closer. He rubbed a hand over my abused backside, sending sparks trailing after his touch.

“What do you think?” he asked his admirers in that cool, seductive voice. “Has she pleased me? Has she earned something in return?”

They went wild, of course, but I wasn’t paying attention to them. I was only paying attention to Mark’s hand sliding under my ribs to find my throat, to him pulling me up against his chest and turning us so that we faced the crowd. A thick erection dug into my back; he was hard from beating me. My sadistic fiancé.

His free hand found the hem of my dress and moved up my thigh to cup my pussy.

I shivered against him, the pressure and heat of his hand so wonderful that I wanted to push against it, grind shamelessly against it. Make him hold me there forever. Even in front of everyone here. Maybe especially in front of everyone here.

Distantly, I knew I would be appalled by these thoughts later, but I didn’t care, I couldn’t care. I was pressed against Mark Trevena with his hand between my legs and all I wanted was more.

I knew, also distantly, that he would probably be able to guess the effect the scene had on me, and whatever shred of self-preservation I had left was begging me to stop this before he could find out. Begging me to keep it our secret, because once he knew the effect this had on me—that he had on me—he would never unknow it. And surely he would use it for his own agenda somehow.

I would, in his shoes.

But I didn’t stop him as his hand moved—with the approving screams of the audience—to the waistband of my boy shorts. I didn’t say my safe word. I just shivered against him, his other hand still collaring my throat, as he dipped his fingers past the elastic and down to my pussy.

He was trying not to touch me, I could feel that right away; he was trying to keep a nearly invisible distance between his touch and my skin. But my boy shorts were tight and the angle was strange, and his fingertips brushed once over my vulva.

He froze behind me, his hand going still, and again, his fingertips skated over my slick seam. Intentionally this time.

A rough exhale near my ear.

“Did you come?” he asked in a low voice.

I hesitated, and then gave a tiny nod.

Another exhale.

He didn’t speak again.

Neither did he touch me again. He lifted his hand the barest amount and then pretended to masturbate me in front of the audience until I pretended to have an orgasm.

I wished I had the courage to ask him to touch me for real, to make me come for real.

I wished I had the courage to say take me, use me, press my face into the floor and make me scream.

I could hate myself for that.

And maybe I already did.