by Cole McCade
And something warm and rough-textured was around her neck, clasping it like a collar.
Moving slowly, her heart beating as erratic as stomping feet, she crept a hand up; she didn’t want to make any sudden movements, didn’t dare risk waking him, hoped to let that sleeping dragon lie. Carefully, she touched over her throat. Leather. A leather band, with an O-ring in the front, clasped to a chain as thick as two fingers that coiled along the pillow to loop around a metal bar in the headboard and lock in place with a padlock. It was a collar. It was a mother fucking collar. The last haze of sleep cleared in a burst of fire like crashing sparks; she curled a fist around the chain and pulled, then fumbled along the band of leather to the back, searching for the buckle.
There wasn’t one.
There was only a strange clasp, one that fit together into a seamless piece with a hole in the middle, its imprint against her fingertip shaped suspiciously like a keyhole.
“You didn’t think I’d leave you free to run, did you?” Priest murmured against her back, his voice deep and drowsy and husky with sleep.
She hadn’t even felt him stir, but the moment his arm tightened around her waist she bucked, twisting and squirming out of his grip. He let her, and she kicked away, thrusting herself back and scrambling across the bed until the chain jerked her back like a fish on a hook and cut the breath from her lips. She stilled, pulling at the collar until she could draw air again, and backed herself up against the headboard as far away from him as she could get with the covers bunched up against her and clutched against her panting, gasping chest.
He lay on his side, sprawled with the indolent languor of a wild thing utterly aware of its own power; his hair spilled in ropes over the bed, coils of gleaming platinum that only made his tanned skin darker by comparison, his shirtless chest nearly glowing in the low, deep amber afternoon light that spilled through the high windows. He’d taken his glasses off and left them folded on the headboard. Fox-gold eyes watched her from the shadow of tangled, bed-tousled strands; the lines of sleep softened his face, until for half a delusional goddamned second he actually looked like a person instead of…of…
Don’t say monster.
If you say monster again, if you really accept that, you give up all hope.
She twisted up her mouth, glaring at him. “You fucking put me on a leash?”
“As I said,” he answered mildly, “you needed sleep, but I could not trust you to run free.”
“That doesn’t mean you leash me to the bed like some kind of harem slave!”
Heated eyes dipped to where the covers fountained over her cleavage; she yanked them up farther, bunching them up to her neck.
“Your mind goes to interesting places, firefly.”
“What am I supposed to think, waking up with you fucking half-dressed and wrapped around me when I’m naked on a leash?”
“That it is my bed.” He shifted to sprawl onto his stomach, closing his eyes and pillowing his head on one folded arm. His back was a map of fresh lashes, raised red welts cutting channels across the hard musculature mapping his back; had he whipped himself again while she’d slept? “And I needed sleep as well.”
“This is fucking degrading.”
“More degrading than being tied, naked, to a chair?”
“Take. This. Fucking. Thing. Off. Me.”
He opened one gleaming eye and fixed on her. “…collar or chair. Your choice.”
“That’s not much of a choice.”
“Freedom of movement or complete immobility is a choice.” He raked her with a sharp look. “Unless you are missing the ropes.”
“No.”
She shivered, curling her fingers in the covers. Not the ropes again. Not the harsh nylon scraping against her skin, binding her up in sensations she’d never wanted. Not that moment when she’d given in and twisted in such wanton ways, telling herself it was practicality, trying to push past it, but in that moment when everything had combusted something had bloomed inside her, and she couldn’t take it back. Couldn’t take back how she’d surrendered, captive and helpless and vulnerable and bared, alone in the stillness of the warehouse and struggling against her bonds, her fear, her pleasure.
This wasn’t who she was.
It couldn’t be.
She tore her gaze from Priest, from the knowing in his gaze, from the redness of lips that had pressed against her skin and taught her that terror and hunger could feed each other into a whipping frenzy. Her gaze flicked over the warehouse. The body was gone; the chair remained, standing alone in the center of the floor like some kind of strange art exhibit—but the dead man had vanished like a terrible dream, the floor washed clean of his blood.
“…what did you do with him?” she asked. “Where is his body?”
“Do you really want to know?”
She closed her eyes, gut sinking. “No.”
The sound of denim and skin on sheets told her he was moving; his weight on the mattress brought him closer, and she turned her face away, keeping her eyes closed, as if as long as she didn’t look at him, he wasn’t there.
“Choose,” he purred. “Collar or chair, Willow.”
She wet her lips. “Why? Why are you making me? You like control, don’t you? Control the kill site. Control me. So why let me choose?”
“Because I want to.” Heat against her cheek. The roughness of scarred knuckles. She opened her eyes enough to see him, watching him through her lashes as he leaned closer. “You don’t like making choices, do you? Committing to one path.”
No. No, she didn’t like this, the way he read her like the script of her life was written on her bare flesh, and he’d torn away her clothing like opening her book’s covers to read her pages. “You think you’ve got me figured out from tying me up for less than twenty-four hours?”
“You’re already trying to figure me out in the same period.” The slow stroke of his knuckles dipped beneath her jaw, caught her chin, lifted her to meet his eyes. “I see the thoughts clicking behind your eyes, Willow. Psychoanalyzing me. Trying to dissect me. Trying to find that one loophole that will ease your fear and make this nothing but a dream you will wake from, one day.”
“Wouldn’t you, in this situation?” she whispered. “Wouldn’t you be looking for anything that would save your life?”
“Yes. So what have you learned, Dr. Armitage?”
“Only that you are very, very broken.”
A faint, sad smile ghosted across his lips, there and gone again. “I knew that.”
God, why was he so close? Why was he looking at her that way? As if he had any softness in him; as if he saw something in her, something other than his next victim, something other than a problem to be disposed of. Something other than the small nothing she’d made of herself in a life that was nothing but a collection of small nothings, false starts, broken lines that connected to nothing and no one.
Closer. Another breath of space eliminated between them, and she couldn’t stand it. She pulled away, turning her face from his touch, and focused on the far wall. On the paintings, on the haunting eyes of the dark, beautiful man who watched her as if judging her. Asking her:
What are you doing?
I don’t know, she answered. I just…don’t.
“Good for you,” she said, choking on the words.
Priest’s silence demanded she look at him, but she refused. She wasn’t doing this. This wasn’t some fantasy Beauty and the Beast scenario where her tormenter turned out to be kind but misunderstood. She hadn’t misunderstood that pool of blood; she hadn’t misunderstood that man pleading for his life. And she hadn’t misunderstood Priest’s promise, and what it meant for her the moment she shattered his concept of her innocence.
He shifted to lean against the headboard, draping his arm over one knee and studying the canvases across the room. “You stare at that painting often.”
“It’s comforting,” she said. “He seems like he knows what it means to be trapped.”
“
He’s an artist from Savannah. Haitian, I believe. They call him ‘The Grey.’ And yet for one so gray, he paints in such bold, vivid colors and emotions.”
“Maybe he’s gray inside because of that. Because he puts everything he is into his work, and doesn’t leave anything for himself.”
Like me. She looked down, curling her fingers in the sheet clutched against her chest; her other hand curled against the collar, its weight so solid against her skin, a promise of something she didn’t understand. But what do I have to show, for all the pieces of myself I give away? What beauty, what art have I created?
“Perhaps,” Priest said, and shot her through with static sparks as he brushed her shoulder, teasing a lock of hair away from her skin. “You have an interesting mind, firefly.”
“I’m afraid to say anything to that.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re weighing every word that comes out of my mouth. Waiting for me to slip. Waiting for that one wrong thing that tells you I need to be punished.”
“I’m not.” Priest lingered, fingers resting on her shoulder, light as the soft powdery touch of ash. “I’m not thinking about that right now at all.”
“Then—” She had to stop, swallow, start again. He had this way of looking at her that was palpable as a broad hand spanning to caress her skin, and under the sheet that was her only shield and shelter and safety, her nipples drew into tight, aching little peaks. Perhaps she’d damned herself, when such pleasure, everything he’d done to her, had opened a door that couldn’t be closed again—and turned her body into a thing controlled by someone else’s whims, desires, touch. She shifted uncomfortably and tried again. “Then…what are you thinking about?”
“You.” As softly as if that simple word meant something, with a weight as quiet and immense as the sky. “Would you believe that you are as much of a puzzle to me as I am to you?”
“No.”
“You are different. Bizarrely so. I find that fascinating.” Down Priest’s touch traced, marking a path that followed the jump and flutter of her pulse, following the blood in her veins until every trickle of red burned in her flesh as if it had becoming a separate living entity. “You seem, to me, rather than one long road…instead like many short paths that wander a few steps in one direction, before changing again. There is no one story; only the beginnings of many, tales unfinished and untold.”
Her pulse wouldn’t quiet, her blood racing in her ears, a roar and beat of her heart as if the earth and sky would open up inside her. “That’s true of most people.” She could barely manage a whisper, her throat so dry. “Wasn’t there something you wanted to be, when you were younger? Something other than this?”
“Si.”
“What was it?”
He paused, then curled a hand around the rosary dangling against his chest; he traced his thumb over its beads with a familiarity that had earned that loving, well-worn shine. “I failed seminary school.”
“Oh.” Her eyes widened. “Why?”
His drifting touch stopped. His fingers uncurled—then wrapped around her throat. Gently, so gently, his thumb tracing her jugular, and yet that touch whipped her bloodstream into a frenzy and turned her insides into a mad tumble. Threat. Intimacy. Eroticism. She couldn’t tell the difference when the collar was trapped between his palm and her skin, and she was starting to think with him, there was no line between.
“Because,” he breathed. “I could not control my lusts.”
But she could control hers—or try to. She wasn’t ready to let the hungry thing inside her devour her and make her its puppet, its slave, until she lived only for the next wild surrender of body and blood and bone to some carnal and ancient thing that demanded her fealty and worship. And so she waited: waited in silence, waited with her breaths coming swift and hard, waited without a response until Priest’s hand fell away, leaving nothing but the collar, warmed with the heat of his flesh. Only then did she feel safe to speak; only then did she feel safe to ask,
“Is…is that how you got the name Priest?”
He inclined his head. “One reason. I am a sinful man, but a devout one.”
“How can you think your God could possibly approve of what you do?”
“Even the archangels were called to war.” He let the rosary fall, dangling against his chest. “You ask so many things to deflect from yourself. Yet who were you, before you became nothing more than a dream deferred?”
The question hurt more than any pain he could have inflicted on her body. She looked down at her scarred hands, her work-worn hands, her hard and small and unwomanly hands, and let go of her clutch on the sheet to curl them in her lap. The scar on the knuckle of her thumb jumped out at her most, even though it was one of the oldest, the most faded. Her first accident with a soldering iron. She couldn’t help a faint smile, as she stroked a finger over that scar.
That’s it, then, her father had said. You’re not a real engineer until you’ve burnt yourself on a soldering iron. Then he’d kissed her thumb above the painful, burning wound and brushed her tears away with unsteady hands, hands that couldn’t hold the iron himself and had had to trust her with her small, young, precise fingers to do it. But don’t make it a habit. Let’s get you taken care of, First Engineer Armitage.
“You smile,” Priest said softly. “As though you remember something you love.”
She stiffened, mouth compressing, and curled her hand until her thumb disappeared into her palm. “I’m not spilling my life story to you.”
“Then answer one question for me.”
“Maybe.”
“Tell me one thing you love.”
She blinked, staring at him. That was one thing she hadn’t expected, and for long moments she didn’t know how to answer when the answer to his second question was practically the same as his first. She loved the things she’d forgotten, the boy-things she’d been teased about in school, the wood shop and computer classes and the tinkering in the back yard. The building things and the satisfaction of making something, something real, and knowing that it only worked because of her. She’d let that go when she’d dropped out of college. If she was honest with herself, she’d let it go some time around high school, and those few abortive semesters in college had been nothing more than one last gasp of air to deny that she was drowning.
Telling him that was no better than confessing her failure. She couldn’t. He deserved nothing so personal from her, even if he demanded everything so intimate.
“…colored glass,” she finally said. She wanted to give him an answer that was cheap and shallow and had nothing of herself in it, but even as she said it an ache grew behind her ribs, and she rubbed at her chest. “My uncle gave me a piece of beach glass, once, when I was six. He and my Dad had a huge fight about me, and then he gave me this piece of glass that used to be a bottle or a jar or something until someone tossed it away and left it in broken pieces. And the sand and the waves picked it up and polished it until it turned into a gemstone, and whenever the light shone through it, it changed the color of everything around it until it was like you could feel the light inside it, warm and soft.” She tilted her head back against the headboard. “I liked that. I liked that this discarded, forgotten thing could roll with the tides until it became something precious. And I liked that whenever my uncle came to see me, he brought me another piece until I had a whole collection—and when the moonlight shone on them at night, they turned my walls into a nebula of colors. Like the light inside every promise he ever made, when he swore that he would see me again.”
Priest had listened quietly, expression never changing from that thoughtful regard, something that might be interest in his eyes. No one had ever looked at her with interest, except family. As if her thoughts mattered; as if she was a discrete and concrete thing separate from the backdrop she lived in, separate from the routine that ruled her life until it became her life, and became all that she ever was.
“You speak with beauty. With passion.” He t
urned his head, his brow resting against the headboard, and regarded her intently. “Yet you walk with your head down and make yourself small, and act as if you have no value, no worth.”
She shrugged one shoulder. “I’ve never been anything but what other people want from me.”
Quick as a gunshot, he was—and she’d barely registered movement from the corner of her eye before he’d caught her chin and tilted her face up to his. “I want nothing more from you than yourself.”
“That’s a lie.” She flinched back. “You want my life. You want me to damn myself. Anything else is a very different conversation from the situation you’ve put me in.”
“Firefly…” Priest traced his thumb to the corner of her mouth, and her lips trembled. “Show me a way to let you go free, and I will take it.”
He leaned closer, and she stilled, the coils of his heat capturing her, igniting her inside with a showering burst of sparks made of the ice of fear and the fire of his touch. He was too much—too much, and every terrified part of her wanted to believe that if she found the right answer he would really do it. Really let her go.
But she was just as terrified to hope, when he’d asked Are you hoping to put your faith in me?
And then said Don’t.
Then put your faith in me. But she didn’t dare say it, her mouth frozen as he leaned closer. Closer, his fingers threading back into her hair, drawing her in until she could smell the strange stone warmth of his skin. Trust me. Trust that I won’t say anything. I’ll walk away from here and pretend to forget you and never say a word.
But when his lips parted over hers, when the very air between them tingled with the charged promise that the lightning inside him would strike, she jerked back, her heart a thing of wildness running hot and cold and everything in between.
“Don’t,” she whispered, and shook her head. “That’s…that’s too intimate.”
“Close your eyes,” he murmured huskily.
“Why?”
“Isn’t that what you always do?”
She retreated further, pulling her knees up against her chest. He had a talent for cutting her open to find the worst parts of her, and speaking of them with the detachment of a surgeon toying with the raw inner workings of a lifeless body.