It’s adorable—and so fucking alluring that it causes my cock to stand in attention.

  Fuck, I can’t wait to bury myself between her legs.

  She doesn’t say a word, doesn’t fight, doesn’t even flinch when the door opens, revealing the dark chamber behind.

  But her face tells me everything I need to know.

  She’s terrified, stunned in surprise, but most of all: intrigued. Of course she would be. There’s a dirty little nymph hiding beneath all that apparent innocence. I’m the only one who knows about it —and the only who knows how to please that part of her.

  A gasp flees her lips when I step through the door, tightening my grip on her as if I was afraid she could try to run from me. She doesn’t. In fact, she does quite the opposite by tensing her embrace around my neck just as much, holding on to me in fear, ignoring the fact that I’m the one she should be afraid of.

  The dungeon next to her bedroom is entirely dipped in the most common colors associated with the blend of pain and pleasure: black and red. Deep red wallpaper covers all four walls, while the wooden floor and ceiling are as black as the night, matching the leather that most of the upholstery furniture is equipped with. The St. Andrew cross to our left, facing the boarded-up windows on the opposite wall is my pride and joy in this room. It’s never been used before and it has been built with Petal in mind, adjusted to her measurements, just like everything else in this room, the bondage bench, the hooks on the ceiling that will allow me to suspend her. Everything.

  The prospect of this room makes my length harden even more, and it doesn’t help that Petal starts to squirm in my embrace, suddenly realizing what she got herself into.

  “No,” she breathes. “No, no, please—”

  “Hush.” I cut her off, stiffening my grip around her. “Fight me and you’ll only make this harder on yourself.”

  She inhales in shock, and her struggle intensifies when I take another step forward, trying to decide where I should put her first, what I should do with her first. Fuck, there’s so much I want to do to her, so much I’ve been thinking of ever since I knew this dream would become a reality. And now that I can finally put it into action, I’m overwhelmed by the possibilities laid out for me.

  Once again, it’s Petal who makes the decision for me. Her eyes scurry through the room, jumping from one piece of furniture to the next, from one utensil lined up in the glass cabinets to another, never resting on anything for longer than a moment.

  Until she spots the canes. A blush blossoms on her cheeks when she sees them, neatly aligned right next to the St. Andrews Cross.

  The canes, of course. Why am I not surprised.

  Evoking a gasp, she struggles in my arms while I carry her over to the cross. But once we reach it and I let her stand on her own feet again, she doesn’t do anything that could resemble a flight attempt. Instead, she freezes, her wide eyes glued to the cross right in front of her. She has seen it before, not this particular one, but a similar one, in a different house, at a different time. I wonder if she remembers? There’s a taste of recognition on her gaze, but I’m certain that she can’t place the sensation of déjà vu that may have taken a hold of her just now.

  I didn’t tie her to the cross the last time we were standing in front of one like this. But she wanted me to. I can still hear her shy plea, mixed with such a strong color of shame that it was painful to witness. She was never allowed to wish for anything, to desire the things that make her heart jump.

  The restraint that kept her from living the life she yearned for was so strong, it even penetrated her thoughts.

  But all of that is gone now. Erased and freed, she’s faced with an urge she doesn’t understand. And it’s that need that allows for me to proceed. She doesn’t even flinch when I reach for her wrist with one hand while placing the other at the small of her back, giving her a little push forward so she’s pressed against the cross while I close the first shackle around her wrist.

  Her eyes are wide with questions when she seeks my gaze. “What is this?”

  Her question echoes through the room unanswered, while I continue to fasten the shackles around her other wrist and ankles. Her breathing accelerates, causing her whole body to move in strong heaves.

  “What are you going to do?”

  Another question that won’t receive a verbal response. But it won’t remain without reply like the first one.

  I approach her, placing myself behind her back so I can feel the outline of her perky ass pushed against my hardness. I almost explode with desire when I feel her leaning back, toying with my hunger as she feels out the bulge caused by my erection.

  “Oh, Petal, be careful.”

  My warning is barely more than a whisper, hissed against her ear. She stiffens, not moving an inch, even when I move my hand between us, traveling up her spine with the tips of my fingers until I reach the top of the thin gown she’s wearing. I hook a finger underneath the hem, relishing the way she takes a deep breath in anticipation—before I take a sudden step back, tearing the fabric apart and exposing her body to my eyes.

  She flinches as the silky gown is torn from her body, trying to look back over her shoulder to find my eyes with hers. But I evade her pleading gaze, moving over to the wall with the canes she adored just a few moments before. There’s a vast selection to choose from, but instinct leads me to a very particular cane right away. It’s made of wood, a little longer than most of the others and so thin that it looks like it could break upon impact.

  I know it won’t, though. No matter how hard I hit her with it.

  She jerks up, even when I just graze along her thigh, the wood barely connecting with her impeccable skin. I move the cane across her behind, teasing her with a tender caress that holds the promise for something entirely different. She quivers, her little hands clenching into fists while she presses her forehead against the cross, bowing her head slightly.

  No backtalk. No questions.

  She doesn’t try to talk me out of it. She doesn’t protest. She doesn’t wonder.

  No. My Petal just waits.

  Chapter 40

  Petal

  Molten iron. That’s what it feels like. A thin line of blazing heat, joined in a very specific place as it leaves its bite on my behind. And then another one. An infliction so cruel that it brings tears to my eyes.

  He doesn’t leave anything to chance, I can tell that much. Each one of his strikes is well thought out and meticulously placed. Alternating between sides, left, right, left, right, as he slowly moves downward, until he has covered the entire area from my lower back to the backside of my thighs. I can feel the lines where the cane meets my skin long after the impact happened. Not every stroke hurts the same. Some come with such agony that they blind me momentarily, making it impossible to think straight, let alone process the burn, before the next follows. The hit that follows such blindingly strong bites is usually a lot more gentle, almost pleasant as it heats my skin with its own kind of pain.

  I’m sweating, panting and mewling, my exertion becoming more obvious with every blow—but I never scream. I never cry, I never beg or yell out for him to stop.

  Until now.

  Because just when I thought he’d be done with it, after leaving a last and particularly painful assault at the back of my left thigh, he moves the cane back up, grazing the wood along my sore skin, still prickling with a warm afterburn—before he begins anew.

  I can’t suppress a shrill cry this time. It’s too much. The cane lands on the exact same spot it did when he first started, telling of his perfect aim when the attack is more than just an addition to its predecessors. It’s a memory just as much, a memory of the anguish that was unleashed before.

  And it follows another, again, kissing skin that has been burned before. My shriek is so loud that I scare myself, jerking in fear of my own voice.

  “No, no, no please!” I plead, unable to control the tone of my voice. It sounds foreign, like that of a stranger. “I can’t! Please stop!”

  Swoosh.

  The sound caused by the cane as it is swung through the air is more petrifying than the attack itself. It’s piercingly loud, drowning out everything else, even my own wailing I can no longer stop.

  I continue pleading and begging, but my voice is so far away, so strange and distanced from myself that I’m not even sure it’s truly there. Am I still crying? Am I still begging for him to stop? Is that my voice out there, howling and wailing in between stifling sobs—or am I imagining things?

  My vision blurs and I close my eyes, shielding myself from the outside world and the anguish that has become too much to bear.

  Why is he doing this to me? What have I done to deserve this?

  I’m dizzy, thrown back and forth between blinding pain and confusing warmth that embraces me like a soothing blanket. I don’t know what this warmth is, and I don’t understand how it’s possible that there’s anything pleasant within all of this. But there is. I’m sure of it now.

  And there comes a point where it takes over. The pain of his continuing strokes is still there, but they’ve lost their meaning. Their anguish no longer controls me. Something else does.

  I’m smiling, tasting salty liquid as my tears crawl down my cheeks and between my lips, mixing with sweat that pearls down my temples.

  What is this? What am I feeling?

  I’m happy.

  How can I be happy?

  All of a sudden, the blows stop coming, and my tortured skin remains untouched, out in the open but no longer receiving fiery bites from the cane.

  No. Don’t stop. Not now!

  The mewl that flees my mouth now is not one evoked by pain but sorrow. I’m floating, lost and confused but with a smile on my face, put there by insanity. His voice pierces through my hazy delirium, but I don’t catch the words. He’s closer now, leaning against my anguished back like he did before, and fiddling with the shackles around my wrists.

  And a moment later, I’m falling. My limbs are no longer secured to the cross, providing no support when my legs give in and my vision darkens, despite my eyes being wide open now.

  He catches me, his strong arms wrapping around me and lifting me up while my head falls back.

  “No.” I can hear my protest, but I don’t understand it. Do I really want him to continue?

  I think I do. The pain was more intense, more cruel and mind-numbing than any other he’s inflicted on me before—but it brought me here. It sent me to this paradise, this odd high that’s nothing but sheer bliss. He stopped just as I got here. Why did he stop now?

  I’m scared that it will end any moment, scared that I will return to the puzzling reality that makes me question my own sanity, scared of the pain that awaits there. I’d rather have this. This ecstasy, this dream.

  I hold on to it with such vigor that I don’t even realize I’m no longer in his arms until my body is already pressed against something else. Warm and neither soft nor hard. Leather. I’m lying on my stomach, on a bench so narrow that my arms and legs are falling to the sides, and while it wakes memories of the moment I woke up downstairs in the basement, it’s very different to then. The place is different, my physical position, and—most of all—the way I feel.

  My hands are resting on yet another leather surface, as are my knees. There are shackles, again, holding my limbs in place while I feel his hands on my hips, pulling me closer to the back end of the bench with my naked core exposed to him.

  The clouds in my head haven’t diminished. They’re still there, allowing me to see just enough to not get lost entirely, while keeping me at the edge of unconsciousness. If I didn’t know any better, I would say he drugged me, put something in my food or the water the girl keeps bringing on a regular basis. But I know that that’s not it. Not this time. I haven’t been drugged, but the effect of the cane was as close as it gets.

  His touch brings sudden clarity to my mind. I can feel his skilled fingers where I have felt them before, parting my folds and gliding in between with ease. Shame heats my entire body while he fingers me from behind, using only one hand to toy with my swollen nub.

  “I knew it,” he hisses, now moving next to me while his hand never leaves my center. He leans down next to my left ear, spreading me with two fingers as he leans in so close that his lips are almost touching my ear. “You are a pain slut, Petal. I always knew you were.”

  I yelp in shocked desperation when he withdraws his hand from my entrance, only to land a sharp slap on the broken skin of my ass. The pain doesn’t equal the one inflicted by the cane earlier. It’s not as piercing and not quite as hot—but agonizing still.

  Deliciously agonizing.

  He straightens up, massaging my clit with his thumb while stretching me with a third finger. My sweet elation is only fueled by the afterburn throbbing through my behind that his spanking caused. When he first spanked me down in the basement, I never would have thought that I could ever like it, that I could ever feel the way I do right now.

  But there are a lot of things I didn’t expect—and even more I have forgotten.

  Did the girl in the video ask for this? Is this what she craved?

  Did he do this to her, too?

  My heart jolts when I hear him rummaging behind me. Buttons are opened and heavy fabric grazes along his skin as it travels down to the floor. I can hear the buckle of his belt and a zipper being pulled down, followed by the sound of more rustling fabric. My position doesn’t allow even the slightest turn to glance back over my shoulder, but I don’t have to look to know what’s about to happen. Finally.

  “Do you want this, Petal?”

  It’s the first time he’s ever asked me this question. The first time he ever cared for my opinion on anything. I gasp when he removes his hand from my core, replacing it with the thick tip of his cock. He’s so hard, pushing forward just enough to part my outer folds without being inside me yet.

  “Say it,” he urges. His voice is breathless, telling of his own enticement. “Say what you want, Petal. Or you won’t get it.”

  He puts meaning to his words by moving back, removing his hardness from my core—to which I respond with a desperate groan. I’m so aroused, so wet and throbbing, with a hunger that makes me dizzy with its intensity.

  If he stops now, I’ll go mad. It’s bad enough that he stopped the fiery kisses to my skin just as I was beginning to enjoy them, but I won’t let him withhold this from me.

  “Fuck me!” I plead, my voice resembling a frenzied cry. “Please, oh please, fuck me!”

  It’s humiliating and wrong to beg my captor for this, and I try to tell myself that I’m only doing it because of the girl in the video, because she told me to trust him, because she must be the one who wanted this all along. Her, not me. We are the same person, but we’re strangers to each other still.

  And I know I’m lying. I’m not doing this for her. I’m doing this for myself.

  The strain that spreads through my core when he thrusts forward has no equal. I’ve had his size in front of my face before, barely able to wrap my lips around it as he asked me to clean him off. I knew of his magnitude, but I wasn’t prepared for this. I wasn’t prepared to be stretched by him with such ferocity. It feels like he’s tearing me apart, shoving his length in and out of me without consideration. The groans that accompany his thrusts are deep and pervasive, coming from deep within his chest and almost sounding as if he was in pain.

  He grabs me by the hips, his fingers digging into my flesh and waking new stings of pain across my tortured skin. I wasn’t sure what he meant by what he said earlier, but I think I’m beginning to understand now as the affliction caused by his violent grip spirals my arousal out of control.

  I groan, leaning back into him as he fills me with his massive length, each brutal push bringing me closer to my climax, each spark caused by his painful grip fueling my luscious vertigo.

  I need more of this. More of his heated assault, more carnal brutality—more punishment by his strict hand.

  More of it all. This is bliss, but it isn’t enough.

  Even when my rapture tears me apart, I’m yearning for more, begging for more and crying as if it wasn’t euphoria ripping through my body but frantic deprivation.

  It only gets worse as the waves of delight recede and the only solace I’m left with is feeling him inside me, his fierce tremors pulsating through my core as he finds his release with a despair equal to mine.

  Chapter 41

  J

  “More! More!”

  There was a point when her voice hardly sounded human anymore. Rather, it resembled a carnal outcry, like you’d expect from a coyote out in the wild. It egged me on, turning the tables in the way that I was no longer the one pushing her, but it was the other way around.

  “More! I need more!”

  The cane left its mark on her delicate skin, and the sight of the deep red stripes on her behind drove spurred me on even more, leaving no room for restraint or concern for sanity, neither hers nor mine.

  But now my mind is clearing as the fog of lust slowly dissolves. I remain motionless, frozen to a pillar of salt with my cock still buried inside her while my heart races as if in the midst of a marathon.

  Years I’ve been waiting for this moment. So many years.

  And now that I’m here, finally having her the way I’ve wanted for so long, I’m not elated in the way I expected.

  I’m torn. Torn between two emotions that couldn’t be further apart from each other. There’s bliss and delight, a feeling of accomplishment and a happiness I haven’t known before—but it’s spoiled by something. There’s something dark lurking between us, joining us when we’d rather be alone.

  Does she feel it, too?

  I lean forward, still buried inside her as I hover over her back, holding her by the shoulders as I plant a kiss on the side of her sweaty cheek. She’s trembling beneath me, probably still recovering from her high. Squirming, she repositions herself, pressing her broken skin against my body.