The way her spine curved.
The way her shoulders trembled.
Beautiful.
The sounds she made—half gasps, half whimpers, muffled against the wood—were better than any confession I've ever extracted. Better than any plea I've heard in a back room with duct tape and zip ties. Those sounds werevoluntary. Offered. Given as freely as her flesh.
My cock stirs.
I note this with the same detachment I'd note the weather. It's a physical response. Mechanical. The body reacting to stimuli the mind has already cataloged and filed underuseful leverage.
She didn't use her safe word.
Thirty-seven strikes. The way she counted the last fifteen, voice breaking, tears streaming down her face and pooling on the platform beneath her cheek.
But she didn't saywisteria.
I swing my legs out of bed and stand. The floor is cold beneath my feet. My reflection in the bathroom mirror is exactly what I expected—bruises blooming across my ribs, the cut above my brow, stubble darker than I usually allow it to get.
I look like I've been in a war.
Technically, I have.
The shower runs hot. I step under the spray and let it scald my shoulders, my back, the knot of tension that lives permanently between my shoulder blades. The water turns the cuts on my knuckles pink, washing away dried blood like sins during confession.
The throb between my legs is still present.
I close my eyes, leaning one palm flat against the tiled wall. I wrap the other hand around my cock and begin a slow pull until the fantasies surface. Emmaleen on her knees. Emmaleen bent over the training platform. Emmaleen spread across the throne.
Emmaleen with tears tracking down her face as she counts every strike.
My cock pulses in my hand. It should disturb me how quickly I harden at the memory of her pain. But I'm beyond that particular moral threshold. Once you've killed for a woman, jerking off to the thought of her submission seems a minor trespass.
The water beats down, hot enough to turn my skin red. I stroke myself with practiced efficiency, remembering the arch of her back, the way her ass had reddened under the crop. The sharp gasps when I tightened the clamps on her nipples.
She took all of it. Every strike. Every torment.
And she never used her safe word.
My breath comes in short, sharp bursts as I approach the edge. I think of Emmaleen's face when I first ordered her to strip in front of me in my pool house apartment. The defiance in her eyes giving way to arousal. The flush spreading across her chest. The way she dug her nails into me as I fucked her against the wall.
It was primal. Desperate. I wanted her so bad.
And if Rico hadn’t ruined it…
If Rico hadn’t ruined it… what? my monster asks.
The voice is mine but not mine. Darker. Hungrier. The part of me that was born in a warehouse tied to a post. The part that learned early that the world punishes weakness and rewards control.
You’d be a couple now instead of a power dynamic? You’d invite her to move in here? Let her sleep in your bed? Poor homeless girl. Down on her luck. Giovanni fancies himself a savior…
My hand grips my cock harder as I stroke, the punishing rhythm matching the beat of my pulse. Behind closed lids, I seeher—not as she is now, locked in the dungeon's bedroom—but as she will be. After weeks. Months. When the training takes.
She'll learn to wake before I do, to kneel by the bed with her hands placed palms-up on her thighs, awaiting my first instruction. Her eyes will stay downcast until I permit her to look at me. A good little slave.
No.
Not slave. Property.Mine.