Chapter 6

six

We did not begin. Mark was called back to DC on business later that night and sent his regrets via text message.

In fact, he couldn’t make it up to Manhattan for another eight weeks, which should have meant a glorious reprieve while I started attending Columbia, but only meant my nerves felt scraped raw every day I didn’t hear from him. Would it be tonight that I would be summoned? Tomorrow? The day after that?

During classes, during karate, and during my morning and evening prayers. It was like being haunted, but this was no ghost from the past. This was my future, haunting me.

Mark did send me reading materials, however—a link to a digital folder attached to a short email.

Isolde, you may find these useful in supporting our charade. I will happily answer any questions you have.

Yours faithfully,

Mark Trevena

I opened the email while sitting in the cavernous reading room of one of Columbia’s libraries. Chandeliers hung above me, and all around me were sighs and echoes and the soft flutter of turning pages. For a long moment, regret was an axe splitting me in half.

I could be just like everyone else in here, my biggest problem some upcoming paper, my highest stakes a GPA no one outside of the world of academia would ever care about. I could have the rest of my life unspooling in front of me, a beckoning road. I could have choices and possibilities and mistakes to make.

But I was spoken for, my future was spoken for, and instead of fretting over tests or thinking of cute classmates, I was worried about pretending to be a submissive for a fiancé I didn’t want, all while trying to use said fiancé to help my father’s bank so that I could really help my uncle protect the Church. It was a tangle of pretense that I already felt anchored and cinched by. Strangled by.

And it had barely even started.

I closed my eyes for a minute, pushing my fear and my anger back down into my stomach.I would make it through this. I had made it through every task that had ever been set to me; how could I fail when Mortimer had made sure I knew how important this was?

I opened my eyes, and making sure no one had a good sightline on my laptop, I clicked the link and began studying kink like it was a class I needed to graduate.

* * *

It wasthe first truly cold day of the school year when Mark texted me.

I’ll be in the city next week. I presume the reading material was sufficient?

I paused as I read his message, the bracing wind seeking my skin through my scarf. Other students brushed past me as I stood on the plaza in the middle of campus; it was the beginning of December and the end-of-semester desperation had taken hold. I too had been mildly stressed about my final projects and exams, but Mark’s text wiped that all away. There now was something much larger to preoccupy my thoughts.

It was.

And then I almost laughed at the absurdity of it all. Sufficient. Like I’d been reading up on how to change a doorknob or make raspberry jam.

I think I understand enough to play the part.

You are a good student. I believe it.

I was a good student. I’d read every word of what he’d sent me, and I could be tested on it, quizzed, cross-examined. I now knew the theory of dominance and submission, the biological responses to pain, pleasure, and deprivation, and the different methods to administer each. I knew more about Mark’s club now too—a glass citadel by the water named Lyonesse. It had just opened a couple of years ago, and was already famed for its exclusivity and utter, utter secrecy. People flew from around the world to go there.

So yes, I knew so much more than I had before. Facts, data. Explanations and history.

But I still couldn’t reconcile the idea of myself with that word. Submissive.

I hated that I was grateful to Mark for allowing me this small reprieve of merely pretending submission, but I was, I was grateful.

And if there was a part of me that lingered over the idea of punishment, if there was a part of me that noticed how very close this was to corporal penance, that remembered dreams best forgotten…

Well. No one had to know but me and God.

I can meet you tonight.

I typed it before I could lose my nerve. There was no point in delaying it—it had to happen, and the more practice I had, the better I’d be at pretending in front of other people. And it was stupid to be nervous about seeing Mark again.

He was my fiancé; he would be my husband. Seeing each other was inevitable. How much, I still wasn’t sure, but I was bracing myself for anything.

And at some point, surely, his eyes had to grow warmer? His manner less cutting? I recognized I was hardly a cuddly person myself, but I did think I was easy to be around. Fair to the people around me.

Or maybe he was cool and detached with everyone? Perhaps he’d never been able to turn off whatever he’d needed to excel when he’d been in the CIA. The devil they sent in to scourge the other devils. That’s what my father had said about him.

I’ll be looking forward to it.

He sent an address next, an expensive new-build on Billionaire’s Row. His Manhattan residence, I assumed.

With a deep, steadying breath, I turned on my heel and started walking the way I’d come. I needed to get ready.

* * *

If I’d neededproof that whatever Mark did at Lyonesse was profitable, here it was, because no one was buying a penthouse like this with a former government employee’s salary.

When the elevator to his home opened, I was greeted by two stories of windows overlooking Central Park, a cavernous space of glass and white walls and orderly bookshelves. I stepped forward, noting that aside from one hallway behind me, everything else on both levels was open. It should have felt wasteful, this much space in Manhattan, but there was something so pragmatic about the way it was finished and furnished that it was hard to find fault with it. It wasn’t trying to point to anything more—not money, not power, not pretension—and for that reason the wealth and power it represented felt all the more apparent.

“Isolde,” came a voice from my left. I turned to see Mark walking toward me, wearing only slacks and a button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up. His shoes gleamed against the dark wood floors.

His eyes went immediately to my left hand, and I thought I saw a flash of satisfaction in them when he saw that I was wearing his ring.

“I’m glad you could make it tonight,” he said. He stopped just behind me, and I could feel, rather than see, that his hands had lifted. Awareness prickled at the back of my neck as adrenaline injected itself into my bloodstream. Was he going to grab me from behind? Reach around to crush my throat?

“May I?” he asked, in a voice that would have been gallant if it weren’t so low and rough.

The coat. He wanted to help me with my coat.

“Yes,” I said, and the word came out too faint, too weak. “Thank you.”

“Manners. I like that.” He deftly unwound my scarf and pulled it from my neck, and the pads of his fingers brushed against my throat. I prayed he didn’t notice the tremble that went through me then—from fear, from leftover adrenaline. From the knowledge that tonight I would learn how to be his, even if it was only to act the part later.

He eased me out of my coat with a fluid grace that betrayed much practice, and then I heard footsteps. I turned to see him putting my things away in a neat little closet, and I took a moment to absorb Mark in his own domain while he was occupied.

He still moved like he did that day in the dojo with the knife, with a sort of casual grace—but there was something more languid about his movements here. I wouldn’t call it relaxed, because purpose was still scrawled all over his actions, cut into the unreadable expression on his face. But there was something more patient about him, a patience that felt almost leisurely. A man who had all the time in the world to do what he wanted.

He closed the door to the coat closet and moved to face me. And all that purpose and patience was now bent on me. As if he was so secure here in his minimalist aerie that he could pour all of his attention on me instead of his surroundings.

My breath caught in my chest as his eyes dropped down my body. I hadn’t known what to wear to a fake BDSM training session, so I’d worn high-waisted bike shorts and a sports bra; he’d be able to see the shape of my body, but very little else, save for a strip of skin between my bra and shorts. My breasts were nothing special and mostly contained by the bra, and the shorts came down nearly to my knees.

When I’d dressed, I’d imagined his ire being piqued by this obvious barrier between him and my body, this clear signal that sex was nowhere on the table. I’d imagined him looking disappointed, maybe, or even pensive, like he was thinking of a way to get me out of my clothes.

I’d been wrong.

Mark nodded at me, and there was approval in his tone when he said, “Good. Follow me.”

He led me to the glass-railed stairs in the corner, and I followed him up to the second floor of the penthouse, which was lofted above the first. The stairs were meant to capture the best of the view—the park, the lights, the dark ribbon of the river—but my eyes went to the man in front of me. The narrow hips, the wide shoulders stretching the seams of his shirt. The bare forearms, suntanned even in December. It made me wonder if he really did spend all his time in Washington, DC.

“How are you liking Columbia? College life?” he asked over his shoulder, and I quickly turned my eyes away so he wouldn’t catch me staring.

“It’s good,” I answered automatically. And then more honestly, “I don’t know how much of a typical college life I’m living, so it’s hard to say.”

“You aren’t a typical person, Isolde,” Mark said as we reached the landing. “But it’s hard not to look at other people living their normal, messy lives and wonder what it would be like. To be one of them.”

It was so like my thoughts that day in the library that I wasn’t sure how to answer. It either meant Mark was incredibly perceptive, or that he and I shared this normality-nostalgia in common. I wasn’t sure what unsettled me more.

Nearly as unsettling as this almost-small-talk between us. Like I was someone worth getting to know, and not a bride paid for in advance.

The loft was open to the same windows as the lower level and floored in the same dark wood as below. It was lit by slim wall sconces and furnished with solid pieces upholstered in leather. It took seeing the St. Andrew’s Cross for me to realize that the furniture was upholstered in leather for a reason.

Mark was walking over to a lamp in the corner, flicking it on. What I had thought was a wall was actually a cleverly built cabinet, constructed so that it stretched the full height of the space, the seams of the doors concealed. That would be where the implements were kept. The toys.

The things Mark liked to use when he played.

“Have you picked a major yet?” he asked as he opened one of the cabinet doors. I knew from years of sparring and spying at parties that even though his eyes were straight ahead, his attention was completely on me.

As always, that attention was a restless flame licking at my skin. All this time being a cardinal’s little mouse, scurrying between millionaires and billionaires and politicians, and I still didn’t know why some people had that power and others didn’t. Most people were just people, but there was the rare person who somehow felt like more, like they saw more, were more, and to have them look at you, talk to you, listen to you…

He was a spy. A devil, I reminded myself. It had been his job to coax and cajole and coerce. But it was my job to cajole the devil now.

I had to be careful; I had to play this game better than him.

“Art history with a double major in business finance,” I said, running my fingers along the edge of a flat leather platform. It could have been a table, except I saw the cuffs dangling from the corners. A hole in the middle, not big enough for anyone to fall through, but too big to be a mistake.

“It’s for a cock,” Mark said, having observed me looking.

“Yours?” I asked without thinking, and he seemed very close to smiling then. There was a pull to his mouth, a certain light to his eyes.

It made me want—well, I wasn’t sure.

“I’m not usually the one on the table,” Mark said finally, and then turned back to the cabinet, rolling out a drawer. “You should remove your shoes now.”

“Not usually?” I asked, bending over to do as he asked, pulling my shoes off and setting them to the side.

“Never,” he amended, and he did sound amused now. “Was art history always the plan?”

“The plan was theology,” I said, which was true. It had been the middle ground between a business finance degree and joining a convent right after high school. “But my father still insisted on business finance, and so I decided to change to something that would pair better with it after I graduate. The ability to accurately value art or antiques for the private market seemed fairly employable, if niche, and I want to work in a field I’m passionate about before I’m requisitioned for the bank after my father retires.”

“Art history seems like a far cry from theology, but I suppose that makes sense.” Mark pushed the drawer closed and then closed the cabinet door. I expected to see anything in his hands just then—the things I had learned about—whips, crops, and clamps, things that could be inserted inside me—but when he walked toward me, all I saw was a length of white silk.

“I, um.” My brain was firing uselessly, trying to make sense of what he would want with a piece of silk while trying to rebut his mild assertion. “I’m mainly interested in religious art, in liturgical objects and antiques, and their valuation. I’m hoping to work for the Church eventually…”

Mark stopped just in front of me, the silk dangling casually from his fist, and I couldn’t pretend it wasn’t the only thing I was thinking about.

“Are we starting?” I asked hesitantly.

“We already have,” Mark replied.

I stared at him.

“And remember,” he said, “this is all for the sake of you learning to act the part. You are not submitting to me truly.”

“Right,” I said.

We’d already started. He was going to blindfold me.

The floor felt very, very far away all of a sudden.

And then I wanted to slap myself. I’d sparred with men twice my size, I’d battered bags until my knuckles bled, I’d waded through ballrooms of people who had the power to end lives. Why was this such a big deal?

“I’m going to blindfold you,” he said. “And then your job will be to trust me. To obey me. Again, only for the sake of this lesson, and if you silently hate me in your heart the entire time, it makes no difference to our purposes, so long as you can school yourself to keep it hidden. That said, I would like to touch you tonight, if that’s permissible.”

He wanted to touch me.

My face burned. All of me burned. “I—not my—”

I couldn’t finish.

“Cunt?” he suggested. “Ass? Tits?”

I nodded.

“Noted. Is everywhere else okay?”

I needed to think about this, but my thoughts were fragile threads that snapped the moment I grabbed hold of them. “Where else would you even want to touch?” I finally asked, and his hand twitched around the blindfold.

“Where indeed,” he said enigmatically. And then, “We’ll need a word for when you’d like to me stop.”

A safe word. Yes, I’d read about those, had assumed I’d need one, even if it would just be used for show.

“Hyssop,” I said, the one thing I was sure about tonight.

“Hyssop,” he said, and those dark gold eyelashes dropped down and back up. He was surprised, I thought. Something about it had surprised him. “My sacrifice, O God, is a contrite spirit,” he quoted, citing the same Psalm I’d been thinking of when I had chosen hyssop for my safe word. “A contrite, humbled heart, O God, you will not scorn.”

Cleanse me with hyssop and I will be clean.

“Say it when you need to stop. A submissive of mine would have their limits pushed; I would do it on purpose. Concurrently, I would also expect any submissive of mine to be extremely vocal about their limits and boundaries.”

“You would push limits on purpose?” I asked doubtfully. That seemed to defeat the entire purpose of limits, according to all I’d read.

“A hard limit, most likely not. But a soft limit? Yes. Entirely.”

“Why?”

He lifted a shoulder. “Because I want to. Isolde, if you have been trying to comfort yourself with the belief that I must secretly be a good man—that my transparency so far has proven that I must somehow care about fairness and kindness—then I must ask you to stop. Tonight, if you can.” Without waiting for me to respond, he lifted the hand with the blindfold. “May I?”

I licked my lips. After that speech of his, nodding took more effort than anything else I’d ever done. But I managed it. “Yes.”

Mark’s eyes were the same color as the night sky as he lifted the blindfold to my eyes.

“Since this is only us pretending,” he said, wrapping the silk around my head and tying it, “I’m only going to train you as to what I like, and what I would demand from someone who was mine. This won’t be a comprehensive education in kink, so if you sense gaps in your schooling, that will be why.”

He’d tied the blindfold perfectly, without catching my hair and also without any looseness or remaining visibility. It gave me no physical discomfort, but the disorientation and panic that followed were arresting. I couldn’t see—anything.

Not him, not the loft, not any hint of light.

He could kill me, and I wouldn’t be able to stop him. He could slap me, kick me, push me down the stairs—

I jumped back as warm fingers found my wrist, but they held me fast, catching my movement before it had even gotten started. His grip wasn’t painful, but it was definite, pressing into my skin, and I realized he was measuring my pulse.

“Breathe, Isolde,” he said. His voice was firm. Calm. “Breathe.”

I didn’t think I could. I’d never been this exposed, this helpless, not since I was twelve and walking around not knowing my mother could die at any second. I’d been ambushed by grief, by the jagged shock of disillusionment, and ever since, I’d made myself as aware, as safe as possible.

“Isolde,” Mark said, “I’m taking both your hands now. I’m lifting them. Feel what I make you feel.”

He lifted my hands and soon my fingers encountered the silk of the blindfold. Loops of it—not knots.

He’d tied the blindfold in a bow. I could pull it off with a mere tug.

He must have felt my hands relax a little at the discovery and he lowered them.

“Your hands are free. The blindfold is not tight. Your safe word is right here between us the moment you need it. Breathe.”

He was right. He was right.

I was okay.

Slowly, I found my breath again, one inhale after the other, until my body caught up with my mind. We didn’t need to panic.

“I’d like you to get to your knees.”

I didn’t move at first, abruptly aware of the windows all around us, of how I must be on display in the glass-walled loft. The whole penthouse had felt so private a moment ago, but now being asked to do this, it had transformed in my mind to a stage, a shadow box.

“No one will be able to see up here without a drone.” Mark’s voice sounded a little farther away now, as if he’d taken two steps back. “And there’s no sightline into this space from any of the other buildings nearby.”

Once again, he’d accurately read my mind. It set me on edge.

“That was why I bought it,” he added.

“So that you could use this place for kink?”

“Among other reasons,” he replied. “Kneel, Isolde.”

I decided to trust him about the privacy. If anyone would be concerned with sightlines, it would undoubtedly be a former spy. And anyway, I knew I’d have to kneel for him at some point. That was very central in my research; it was a surrender of power, a show of obedience and trust.

In my case, only a show.

I dropped lightly to my knees, years of martial arts making the movement easy.

“Good,” I heard Mark say. “Now I want you to crawl toward my voice. I’m sitting on the bench near the middle of the room; I’m sure you saw it as you walked up.”

I had seen it. But…

“Crawl?” It was a good thing we weren’t doing this for real, because I would have made a terrible submissive.

“Yes, crawl,” Mark said. There was amusement in his voice again. “This is something you may have to do when we are at the club, so I promise this isn’t gratuitous humiliation.”

“Why?”

“Why?”

“I mean why do you like making someone crawl?”

“Why wouldn’t I?” Mark didn’t sound angry. If anything, he sounded baffled.

“It’s just—” All the kinky stuff had seemed so clear in the reading he’d sent over. But now that we were here… “How is it sexy?”

He answered immediately. “In your case, I think your tits will hang nicely and the ends of all those pretty, blond tresses will drag on the floor. That proud little chin that you tip up at me whenever you think you’re being stoic will be facing the floor. Those strong, slender fingers will be splayed as you crawl, and your ass will be up for me to enjoy.”

I couldn’t find the words to respond.

“And I want you to do it, so that you can tell me what you think the appeal is,” he added. “It will be your job to act the part, after all, and actors have to find their motivation, or so I hear.”

Motivation. Right.

Play the part. Both for Mark and for myself.

I pressed my palms to the floor, feeling how much more vulnerable I was like this. Now I couldn’t see or make use of my hands.

I shifted my weight forward, and my hair slid off my shoulders. I couldn’t see it, but I could feel that Mark had been right—my hair was dragging on the floor as I crawled. And I didn’t doubt that my breasts were hanging a little too, the fabric of the sports bra not enough to withstand gravity at this angle.

I moved toward where I’d last heard his voice, where I believed the bench to be, and tried to ignore how awkward it felt. Everything was awkward the first time. A new kata, a new prayer, going through the cafeteria at college. It was practice that bred ease, not rightness. And if I were going to pretend like this was right for me, what would I be feeling right now? Noticing with senses honed from years of eavesdropping?

Mark’s breathing. Yes. It seemed a little rougher now, a little more tightly controlled.

From watching me crawl?

Warmth bloomed on my chest as I continued moving, becoming fully aware of how my backside was moving from side to side as I crawled, how my back had curved. How fragile and humble I must have seemed with my blindfold on and my head down.

If this were right for me, I’d be thinking about my effect on Mark, about how pleased he’d be with my obedience, how aroused he’d be by the sight of me like this, debased and willing. I’d be thinking that if I continued to please him, he might touch me. He might have me spread my knees apart so he could slide his fingers past the waistband of my bike shorts and feel if I were wet. He might bend me over and make use of me until I was limp and boneless and he was satisfied for the night.

And if this were right for me, that thought would have me tormented with need. I’d want it so much that my breathing would speed up and the ache between my thighs would blossom into something full and distracting. There would be nothing I wouldn’t do to have Mark keep noticing me.

“Very good,” murmured Mark as my fingertips touched his shoes. “You may settle back on your knees now.”

I did—and then swayed.

I’d become dizzy somehow. Me—the athlete, the martial artist. I’d never been dizzy a day in my life, and yet here I was, my lips and fingers tingling, unable to tell up from down—

Mark caught me before I fell, and with a strength that made me envious and exhilarated at the same time, pulled me onto his lap. I was tucked against the solid expanse of his chest, his arms holding me fast, a palm rubbing my back in firm, vertical strokes.

My face was still tingling, and I was so helpless, and I realized he was asking me a question, something about school, something in a low, conversational tone that was still rough and cool, but warmer than I’d ever heard it.

He’d asked again about my majors, I thought.

“Art history was actually my uncle’s idea,” I mumbled. I was too disoriented not to let my cheek rest on his shoulder. My legs were draped over his thigh and my heels pressed into the taut leather of the bench. My bottom was planted right in his lap. Something about that felt right. Good. Like Mark was a chair made especially for me.

“It was your uncle’s idea,” Mark repeated, still stroking my back and cuddling me. His voice was so nice. Feeling him hold me was nice. I was floating.

“He wants me to work for him after I graduate.” And then I stopped. Even floating, I knew I shouldn’t have said that. I was supposed to have switched to art history because it fit a deep interest of mine, not because a career in assessing religious art and antiquities would be an excellent cover for the real work Mortimer wanted me to do.

But thankfully, Mark didn’t seem to notice anything unusual about what I’d said. It wasn’t so odd anyway, right? Lots of young people went to work for family members after college. It was only my uncle’s position that made it atypical.

“Why did you decide to stay at home instead of living on campus?” Mark asked. “Or getting your own place?”

It was small talk, meant to soothe. He was helping me come back into my own body.

It was working.

“There didn’t seem to be much point,” I said. My fingers and toes still tingled, but my lips and cheeks no longer did. “The penthouse is much quieter, and I only spend as much time on campus as I have to.”

“The point would be having a semblance of a college experience,” Mark said. He was still rubbing my back. It was warm. Nice. I wasn’t sure anyone had held me this close for this long in years. My mother had been the last, maybe.

“Like you mentioned earlier, I’m hardly a typical college girl. And anyway, what does that even mean, a college experience? Drinking with strangers? Having sex with them? Would you really prefer that?”

Mark’s hands briefly tightened against me and then relaxed. It happened so quickly that I almost thought I’d imagined it. But I knew I hadn’t.

I am possessive by nature.

“I can’t say that I would,” he said calmly. “Although I do not expect your fidelity until we are married.”

I should have felt relief then—not that I had any plans on utilizing that freedom—but there was something deliberate about his choice of words. “You don’t expect it…but maybe you would still like it?”

His chest moved underneath me. He’d lifted his shoulder in a shrug I couldn’t see. “There’s no end to what I would like, Isolde. I learned a long time ago to put some reasonable limits on what I ask of people, because otherwise I will ask the world of them.”

His heart beat steadily under my ear. I wondered what the world was. If it was something more than fidelity. Something impossible to give.

“Did you have a typical college experience?” I asked after a minute.

He didn’t answer at first, the soothing strokes on my back now turning to slow caresses of my hair. “I suppose my freshman year could have been called typical. But then Carpathia happened and we went to war. I enlisted as soon as I could, joined the Rangers eighteen months after that. And I never looked back.”

“Never?”

A short exhale. “Even if I’d regretted my choices, there are some doorways you can’t walk back through. I could have gone back to school after the war ended with Maxen Colchester’s heroics, but the chance of having a typical college experience? That died with the first person I killed.”

There was a lull, and then he said, softly, “Do you know of any doorways like that, Isolde? The ones that can’t be walked back through?”

I was all the way back inside my body now, and it was just as well, because my stomach had started to churn. I was about to walk though many of those doorways. Maybe I already had.

I opened my mouth to say so, and then awareness dawned like a cold, white light inside my mind. I was about to give him answers that I didn’t want to give, insights into my psyche that I couldn’t afford to give, not this early in the game. And with the blindfold tied neatly around my eyes, it was easy to see the truth.

I was being interrogated.

By a former spy, by someone who was sitting on such a treasure trove of private information that both the Catholic Church and Wall Street wanted in.

This was an interrogation, and it was working, and it was all because I’d had some kind of vertigo attack while crawling. I couldn’t have been more disgusted with myself.

I pushed off his lap, suddenly needing to be apart from him, needing to be on my feet, needing to see. I tore off the blindfold and then flinched as light assaulted me. Even the dim glow up here was too much.

“There’s not much you can do to make your sight return faster,” volunteered Mark.

I wouldn’t glare, I wouldn’t sneer, I’d already exposed too much of myself by scrambling away from him like that. By breaking the scene, as my research would say. Without a safe word.

Breaking the incredibly intense, deeply painful scene of…me sitting comfortably on his lap.

Shame crawled up my throat. Weak. I was weak.

I hated being weak.

“I should have said my safe word,” I said woodenly. Mark was already standing, tugging at his rolled sleeves so that his shirt’s seams laid in geometric lines on his body again.

“It was your first scene,” he said. “I think you did well, given the circumstances. This is all we’ll do our first time at the club together anyway. We don’t want to give them too much at first anyway.”

My eyes were finally adjusting, and I could meet his eyes as I asked, “Who is them?”

He slid his hands into his trouser pockets, his stance confident and wide. “Guests of my club. Employees of my club. Everyone involved with Lyonesse, really. They will be curious: I’ve made use of the occasional submissive, but I’ve never claimed one. Collared one.”

“Collared,” I echoed. Yes, I’d read about that too. But somehow I hadn’t—it hadn’t connected for me—

Mark was watching me carefully. “It’s only for show, Isolde. You won’t be collared in truth.”

Right. Right. But still there was something in me that resisted, that couldn’t accept what this was, what Mark’s world was built around. “I just…I don’t know if I understand this,” I heard myself say. I’d nearly passed out from crawling, so what was going to happen when we pretended to do anything more?

“You don’t understand…what? Collaring? Kink?” His gaze was steady, cold. Indelibly Mark Trevena.

“All of it,” I said. The blindfold was still in my hands and I held it up. “Why does anyone choose this? Why does anyone choose more, the parts with the cropping and flogging and pain?”

He regarded me with that perceptive stare. “So you’ve never run until your legs gave out? Never kicked a post or bag until you were crying in pain?”

I went still.

“You’ve never told a sparring partner that they could go harder with you, that they didn’t have to hold back as much? You’ve never felt cleansed by pain? Reset by hurt? You’ve never felt like blood and bruises spelled out a secret story, a hidden story, meant only for you?”

He was guessing all of this. He had to be. He couldn’t know that he was right. He couldn’t know that above all else, I wanted to be allowed to hurt myself for God.

But this wasn’t the same thing at all. I knew it wasn’t. It couldn’t be.

I didn’t answer him; instead, I sat down and began pulling on my shoes, dropping the blindfold next to me. “I’m free for three weeks around winter break, excepting Christmas,” I said, without looking at him. “Otherwise, I won’t be able to make it to DC until spring break.”

“Isolde,” Mark said, and I ignored him, standing up and grabbing the blindfold as I did.

“You can text or call. I’ll need at least a day’s notice to arrange travel.”

“Isolde,” Mark said again.

I finally looked at him.

I was furious with him. I was furious with myself. I was furious with Mortimer and my father and with my mother for dying and leaving me alone with these men.

“I meant what I said.” Mark dipped his head toward the blindfold in my hand. “You did well tonight.”

I could have laughed if I wasn’t so angry at everything and everyone right now. “I couldn’t even sit in your lap for ten minutes. No one is going to believe I have the power to interest you.”

I could see him touch the tip of his tongue to his teeth, and then he pressed his lips together. “That won’t be a problem,” he finally said. “And let me call you a car.”

“That would be nice. Thank you.” I extended the blindfold to him, and he strode forward to take it. When his fingers brushed mine, I remembered how warm and hard his body had been around me. How his fingers had felt in my hair as he’d caressed me.

I was ashamed I’d let him hold me like that.

I was even more ashamed that I’d liked it.

* * *

That night,as I dreamed alone in my bed, shame followed me from vision to vision, filling my belly even as I woke up on my stomach, rutting against my mattress as I half-unconsciously rode my way through a panting climax.