But unlike every other whipping Kitty had witnessed, the Ringmaster didn’t cry. At a certain point, all dignity went out of the window—a body responded to the pain in a helplessly physical way. It was natural, nothing to be ashamed of. Even the most hardened man wept.
The Ringmaster didn’t.
Kitty remembered hearing or reading somewhere that the chemical composition of tears revealed why they were shed. Whatever he suffered, he was incapable of releasing it in his tears.
She struck him until the latticework of welts and cuts covered his back in a thin layer of blood and her arm started to stiffen up. Only then did she let the whip fall from her fingers to the ground.
Kitty had been exhausted before this whole ordeal. Now she thought she might collapse right here. The ring seemed to swim and dip and rock from side to side. It settled back to normal, but she fell to her knees, head a million miles away. She swayed where she knelt.
The Ringmaster crawled his fingers across the ground until they brushed her skirt.
There it was again, the same glint in his black eyes and curve of his lips that he’d given to Victor, but he tried less to hide it from her. Admiration.
“Show’s over,” Bell declared. “Maya will be at my RV with healing potion for those of you who need it. I regret that I can’t keep Arcanium closed tomorrow, so you should get some sleep before early breakfast. No, you need to leave too. Kitty is done for the evening.”
Kitty peered over the Ringmaster’s bloody back. Victor was trying to enter the ring. She raised her hand to him and mouthed, “I’m fine.”
“She’ll still be here tomorrow,” Bell said a little less harshly, gripping Victor’s shoulders to hold him away. “I will take care of her. Get your potion and get some sleep. Go.”
Victor backed away. He still appeared concerned as he allowed Valorie to guide him out of the big top entrance.
When everyone but the three of them had left, Bell returned to the center of the ring. The Ringmaster grunted as he pushed himself upright, uncovering himself and using both hands to brace himself on the bench. It creaked under his weight.
Bell knuckled the Ringmaster’s chin up then backhanded him soundly.
“Do you think me soft, Ringmaster?” Bell asked. The danger in his voice was inversely proportional to the volume.
The Ringmaster shook his head no.
“Do you doubt me when I say that if you try to take over Arcanium again, I’ll put you in a place that makes being trapped in a carousel mount seem tame?” Bell asked.
The Ringmaster shook his head again. On the outside, he was perfectly blank, perfectly still, but underneath, Kitty could sense the writhing fury that he held back—because Bell had every right to do what he was doing now. It was what the Ringmaster had signed on for when he’d joined Arcanium, just like everyone else.
Bell pointed his finger at the Ringmaster. The tip dented the Ringmaster’s lips. “You have shackled yourself to me. You gave the key to me. You are the master of the ring, but I am your master. You are mine. Do you understand that?”
“Yes,” the Ringmaster said, the word rolling deep into the silence.
“If you took joy in anything that wasn’t your job or Kitty, I would rip that away from you. But I need you to do your job, and I wouldn’t deny Kitty the dubious pleasure of your company,” Bell said. “Do not disappoint me ever again.”
“No,” the Ringmaster said.
Bell held his hand out to Kitty to help her to her feet.
“I’d recommend that you leave him to heal and get your well-needed rest, but you won’t do it,” Bell said. “I will permit you to eat your breakfast in your tent while customers are present, but you must open your curtain when the park opens.”
“Yes, sir,” Kitty said.
“Don’t ‘sir’ me,” he murmured, pulling a healing potion bottle out of her hair, which was probably a mess by now. The glass was cool in her stiff hand. “This is for you, not him. He will heal quickly enough on his own. And once again, little Kitty cat, my most profound apologies.”
Kitty covered his hand with hers, her only response before he followed the rest of his cast out of the big top, leaving Kitty and the Ringmaster alone.
The Ringmaster could now stand, holding himself straight. She got a glimpse of his back. Bell had been right. Using a healing potion on him was a waste of expensive magic. His back was still a bloody mess and a patchwork of lines, but the welts were less angry, the places where the skin had opened thinner and cleaner.
“Did it even hurt?” Kitty asked.
“I experience physical pain in this world,” the Ringmaster replied. He picked his whip up from the ground and curled it into a circle to rest on top of his clothes on the partition. He tilted his head as he looked back at her, his brows severe. “You whipped me.”
“Yes, I did,” she said.
“It was very good. The technique.”
“Thanks? It was my first,” Kitty said, still unsure where the Ringmaster was going with this.
It wasn’t the whipping that she believed had changed something between them. The whole day had been revelation after revelation. He didn’t know whether he wanted to want her. And she didn’t know whether she wanted to want him.
The question, it seemed, was whether they had a choice in the matter.
“Lie down on the bench,” he said. “Not on your stomach. On your back.”
“I still have no plans to let you whip me,” Kitty said.
“I have no plans to whip you,” the Ringmaster responded. “Do you believe that I seek retribution for the blows you gave me? They fade. And they were well-delivered. They do not concern me.”
As though to prove how inconsequential the wounds were to him, he circled around behind her almost before she realized that he had moved from the edge of the ring to its heart. The Ringmaster plucked the healing potion from her and set it on the ground.
When he tilted her head up, at first she thought he displayed the same reaction he’d had after she had finished the beating—the admiration for how well she had wielded his weapon.
Goosebumps rippled over the surface of her skin as she recognized the expression not as admiration but pride. In the darkness, he had silently wished to disavow her. But in the spotlight—where anyone could see them if they were to walk through the entrance—it was as though he wanted nothing more than to take complete possession of her on the very bench on which his blood still pooled, slowly soaking in.
“You can never be my only,” Kitty said quietly. “But none of them will ever have me the way that you do. Not him, not anyone.”
A soft cry escaped her lips as he yanked insistently at the corset ties in front of him to loosen the material.
“But you’re still mine.” His words trembled through her from where he spoke them into her ear. As soon as he was through with the laces, he swiftly undid the front fastenings of the corset. He threw it with uncanny accuracy at the partition near his clothes. Then he found the top of her skirt zipper and drew it down. There was no reason to care about the integrity of this skirt over the last, except to revel in the way anticipation made her lean against him. The material slid down her legs in a watery caress.
She pushed down her panties herself and undid the buckles of her sandals so that when she turned around to face him, there was nothing left in their way. She ran her hands over his chest, the black hair silky and crisp under her palms. She leaned in to take one small, brown nipple between her teeth, teasing with her tongue as she slid her arms around him to stroke over the wounds she had made.
The Ringmaster hissed through clenched teeth then let out his breath in a rough groan. He closed his fist around her braid in the same way she had taken hold of the whip, bringing her closer, pressing her body against his. When she released his nipple, she looked up at him. The angle forced her head all the way back. The Ringmaster lowered his mouth to hers, but he didn’t quite kiss her. He hovered above her, breathing in her scent, coaxing her
to beg, but she wouldn’t, just trailed her nails over the lines on his back.
“Did you like hurting me, Katharine?” he asked.
“Not as much as you like hurting me.”
He took her lip between his teeth much as she had taken his nipple. He bit just a little too hard, not breaking the skin, but enough to catch her moan with his tongue before withdrawing again.
“I gave you a command,” he said evenly. Then he released her hair, pulling out the rubber band holding the braid together in the process.
Kitty stepped back, strangely shy in the spotlight as she sat on the edge of the bench and crawled back. The heat of his body had permeated the wood underneath where she lay down the way he had told her to. Kitty was briefly spared from exhaustion—adrenaline rushed through her for an entirely different reason than before.
The Ringmaster stood at the end of the bench. He took his hardening cock into his hand, stroking himself as he gazed down upon her with heavy lids. She clasped her hands just under her breasts.
“Spread your legs on either side of the bench.”
Her breath quickened and became shallower as she did as he’d commanded. She let her legs fall until she straddled the bench. With her legs parted, she gave the Ringmaster full view of what the singular experience of whipping him had done to her. She felt herself soften even more under his scrutiny.
He rested a knee between her legs as he continued to stroke his shaft, shifting the velvet skin over the massive, swelling erection, twisting slightly with every pass.
Kitty unclasped her hands to cup her breasts, the broad peaks tight and flushed. She was going crazy with need the more he looked at her. He never saw her like this. He saw her in the lamplight and shadow of her tent. In the dim flickering light of the booth. In such darkness that only touch was his sight. The spotlight hid nothing, revealed everything with stark, unforgiving illumination. There was nothing to forgive in what she saw, the body that he had chosen when he took human form—a body to excite and tempt even though he’d never shown any interest in where such excitement or temptation could lead a woman or a man. Only with her.
“Beautiful.” In his characteristic way, the word resonated through the ring without effort, vibrating through the ground under her feet and the bench under her back. She spread her legs wider, her cunt tightening.
He slid his hand to cover one of hers over her breast, forcing her to squeeze harder before drawing it back down with his between her legs.
“Prepare yourself,” he said. “I am going to take you as a man. I’m going to make you scream again, for me this time. Then I’m going to take you as myself. All of me. And I will not use my magic. You don’t need it to take me in, do you?”
He pushed her fingers into her cunt. She sank them in the rest of the way, biting her lip. God, the way he looked at her. She was surrounded by light, light so bright it could blind her if she looked straight into it, but it was his darkness that filled her gaze, his silhouette looming over her, the frame of the hair on his face, and those eyes…it always came back to those beautiful, horrifying eyes. Eyes that could belong to nothing but a demon. Eyes that took in everything that made her a freak and saw something that he wanted more than anything—more than his own pride, more than control, more than his precious cruelty, more than Arcanium itself, which he would have laid to waste, all of it screaming in the dark…and her wrapped in it like an embrace, the only one spared from his hell.
It didn’t take long for two fingers to become three, four, delving deep but not as deep as he could go, the sound of them moving inside her broken by the Ringmaster’s heavy breathing as he watched and stroked himself to full hardness. There was no urgency for him. He could have watched her stretch her cunt and pleasure herself all night if that was his fancy, and she might have been able to keep up the fevered tension of lust inside her for that long as well, if only he would look at her like that the entire time.
He closed his eyes and gritted his teeth as she reached down farther and managed to get her thumb inside as well, her hand slick, her juices dripping onto the wooden bench to join his blood.
Kitty whimpered, pushing her feet against the ground as she lifted her hips to try to take her whole hand deeper.
The Ringmaster jerked her fingers out of her cunt, which gaped and felt the chill of the air as he brought her soaked hand to his erection. She smeared the wetness over it, inadequate to cover all of him. Kitty focused on the top half of his cock until his flesh gleamed and pre-cum welled from the slit. Kitty spread that over him too and licked her lips.
He batted her away. Crawling over her, the Ringmaster braced himself with a hand next to her head. Her gradually unraveling braid draped over his fingers. He grasped her thigh with the other hand. She cried out as he abruptly pulled her hips off the bench, the whole lower half of her body held up by his powerful grip, fingers digging bruises into her thigh as he aligned her cunt to his cock
She held tightly onto his arm next to her head and arched her back even more as he pushed the head of his cock into the emptiness she had made for him. Nothing short of a fist could have prepared her. He filled her, stretched her even more, forcing her to her limits.
And when he changed, he would only get bigger.
It was still uncomfortable, but the discomfort wasn’t important, because it did nothing to extinguish her arousal as he thrust into her, owning places that no ordinary man could hope to touch, using her body for his pleasure. He kept his eyes open to drink her in, though hers sometimes fluttered helplessly closed when he forced her lust through her like poison, destroying her. Animalistic sounds wrenched from her throat with each thrust. A cry. A groan. A grunt. A growl. A shout. Not yet a scream—he was taking it too slow for her to scream yet.
He dragged her down the bench to lean farther over her, depending on her legs wrapped around his waist as well as the cock buried in her pussy to hold her up. She clutched at his shoulder, frantically drawing him down until she could curl her arm around his neck. His kiss muffled her cries and sent the rumble of his own down her throat, almost substantial enough to swallow. He rolled his hips against hers and massaged her scalp with fingers that could shatter her skull.
Her orgasm was unpleasant and intensely pleasurable at the same time. Her body seized around him, trembling apart from its core. She bit his tongue. He shouted and slammed into her, the force of her climax drawing him into his own.
It wouldn’t stop. She truly thought she would fall apart, so many pieces bloody and dead in the sawdust for the clowns to eat. Her mind swirled with horrifying thoughts and with him. He pulled up from the kiss, blood dripping from between his lips, his mouth too red in the bright spotlight—but red had always been his color, and he was smiling with the blood staining his teeth.
As she thrashed around him, the Ringmaster slid a hand along her side to her thigh and guided her legs open from around him. He left a bloody mark on her calf with a kiss before drawing his cock out of her.
Kitty turned her head against her arm and just cried, tears streaming down her temples. Not from pain. Her cheek and her lips where the knife had scratched and pierced her hurt more than anything else the Ringmaster had done, the stinging and burning getting worse, as cuts tended to before they got better. The discomfort from the Ringmaster’s cock never reached outright pain.
She was overwhelmed, exhausted, exhilarated, overloaded, first too full with him inside and now too hollow without him.
The Ringmaster kissed hungrily up her stomach to her breast, sucking the peak until it ached. Then he kissed over her neck, up to her eyes, where he tasted her tears with a slow, low rumble of a moan. She stroked his back again, relishing the play of muscles under her sensitive palms as he moved over her. The lines of his whip were little more than rough scabs on his skin now.
“You’re pretty when you cry,” the Ringmaster whispered in her ear. “How lovely will you be when you scream?”
He abruptly withdrew and pinched and pulled both her
nipples between his fingers, massaging and torturing them in tandem until she clutched at the bench beneath her and shrieked, her breasts jiggling as she writhed under his torment. He stood with one foot on the ground, one knee on the bench and pressed against her cunt. When he let go of her nipples with a wicked smile to watch them snap back with a ripple, she realized how turned on again she was, like slipping into a hot bath after a grueling day.
She could read his face as plainly as though he spoke.
You’re not screaming yet.
But oh, she would. He’d said she would, and so she would.
Kitty made a sound of surprise when the Ringmaster suddenly lifted more than just her lower half off the bench. Only her shoulders and head were still on the wood. He drew the rest of her up, her ass resting against his chest, his arms embracing her thighs as he tucked her legs over his shoulders. He rubbed the bristle of his beard against the smooth hair on her legs before mouthing his way to her cunt.
The Ringmaster plunged his tongue into her, lapping the mixture of her juices and his cum with deep strokes. Then he worked his tongue through her folds to her clit, drawing her wetness up with him. She quivered with every spasm of arousal that defied gravity to meet his mouth. Her breasts weighed heavy toward her chin, shaking when she did, protesting each movement. Steeling her neck and shoulders against the bench, she cupped her breasts, holding them secure as the Ringmaster continue to assault her with every flick of his tongue, tug of his teeth and caress of his lips and beard. When he closed his mouth over her clit and sucked, she keened into the light.
She hadn’t known her back could bend that way.
Abandoning her breasts, she instead scrabbled for his hands near her hips. One she could find and clutched it with all her strength. The Ringmaster brought his other one underneath her, sliding two fingers into her cunt to coat them before bringing them down and tracing them around her hole.
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