I screamed into the gag as he caressed my pussy with his mouth. His tongue flicked, and trailed, and licked, and pressed, bringing me so close to climax I thought at least five times I would finally go over the edge. But he did this only to pull away and let me sit there, tied up, crying, screaming that I was sorry but into a gag that made it impossible for him to hear. The blood pounded in my ears. I could think of nothing else but how much I wanted him to set me free, to let the climax grip me and squeeze me and make me pass out from its sheer terrifying pleasure.
But he just continued to tease me with his tongue, working me up, closing his lips around the whole root and rolling it around in his hot mouth while he placed a palm on my ass and dipped his fingers into my quivering hole.
And then, so suddenly that it felt like I had been thrown into a cement wall, he stood up, and left me with nothing touching my body, no way to bring myself to the heights needed for release.
“Now, Natalia, I am going to leave you like that for a while. That’s your punishment. And we’ll see, when I come back, if you can be a little more obedient.”
I didn’t want to let him know that he had such power over me, but I could not stop myself from screaming into the gag and throwing my head back.
But he was gone, and I was tied up so tightly I could not possibly break loose.
And between my legs, my pussy pounded and throbbed, wanting nothing more than to finally, finally be tipped over the edge, however terrifying it might be.
Chapter Fifteen
Alaric
I waited in the dark, drinking on the couch, hoping to amuse myself with something else—anything else—but there was no place to turn to in my mind, no plan to make, nothing that could distract me from thinking about her.
I could almost tell myself that I was still on track with my intentions; that this was a game designed to get her to submit to me, to obey me, all to the end of getting her to do what I wanted. I could tell myself that what I wanted was to rid myself of the problem of Natalia Karkarov once and for all.
But I felt much more out of control than that, and I knew these were lies even as I repeated them inside my head.
The real reason I had her tied up right then was because I couldn’t control myself with her. The real reason I had stopped was because I needed to regain my self-control, not lose myself in the velvety depths of her flesh. Her pussy was so tight, so wet, so perfectly suited to my size, that every minute movement of her body had jerked me to the teetering edge of losing control. And she had enjoyed the pleasure of being taken from behind, had melted into the role of being dominated as intimately as that.
I could feel an obsession with her taking over the parts of my mind that needed to be dedicated to planning without feeling, without addition, without desire.
When I returned to her, she put on a good show of being broken and ready to be obedient. She had gone limp, leaning into her restraints, her breathing rapid but her body relenting. I pushed her sweat-soaked hair from her face, and she stared ahead of her, her eyes vacant as though she had finally given in and would let me do what I wanted with her.
I pulled the gag from her mouth, and she breathed easier as I stroked her hair away from her face and her hot neck.
“Do you want me to untie you now, Natalia?”
I should have known by how she answered, by the slight hesitation as she fought against her will to resist me, that she was not yet fully broken. Maybe I did know, maybe I could feel beneath her skin, her spirit still coiled up tightly, waiting for a chance to spring. But I wanted her so badly I could no longer wait.
“Yes, sir,” she whispered.
I traced my fingers down her spine, her skin so wet it was slippery. Between her legs she was soaked, her juices dripping down her thighs. I played with the eyelet of her ass, dipping my fingers into the hot velvet inside of her and feeling her body flex against the restraints in pleasure.
“Will you be a good girl for me?”
Of course she murmured, “Yes, sir,” but if she hadn’t, who knows if I could have resisted her? As the words left her mouth I felt relief, and then hunger for her started to consume me again. I moved behind her, one hand deep inside her quivering pussy, and I made her moan as I removed the ropes around her wrists.
“Stay just like that,” I told her, putting her hands, palms down, against her round bottom. A quick learner—or a good liar—she gripped her flesh and pulled herself apart for me. Her bottom rose and fell slightly, beckoning me to take her.
“This time,” I growled at her, “I want you to remain still. Do not move. Show me that you can take what I give you, and only if you can be very, very good, and very, very obedient, will I let you come. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir,” she breathed. Around my fingers her pussy throbbed, and I pinched her clit between my thumb and forefinger. She turned her face to moan into the pillows, and her left hand began to slip from her ass.
“Keep your hands where I put them, Natalia. Hold yourself open for me.”
She obeyed me, but her body was tense beneath her skin, ready to boil over.
My cock was throbbing, pre-cum gushing from the tip. Slowly, I pulled my hand from inside of her and started to bring it to my lips to taste her, but the tangy scent of her drove me so wild my cock throbbed against her ass, and I knew I wouldn’t last long enough to punish her properly if I could savor her in my mouth.
Later, I decided.
Her body was hot, her pussy tight and soaking wet as I slid slowly inside of her. She moaned into the sheets, and her fingernails sank into her ass. I could feel her feet twisting between my legs, but she remained obedient and did not move as I fucked her slowly, my eyes on the view of her engorged red cunt around my cock, the inviting pink hole inside of which her skin was so soft and velvety that thinking of it almost pushed me over the edge.
I had to stop, or I would have lost control. That made me angry—no woman had ever made me lose control.
Annoyed, I pushed her over onto her back. The light pink petals of her pussy were glistening with her excitement as she spread her legs open for me. I commanded her to do it and she did it: she laid her hands to either side of her. These were signs of her submission, but her eyes met mine and I could see in them that she was still defiant.
I pushed her hands to the frame of the table and found the restraints to tie her down, blood pounding in my ears, my muscles flexing with a surge of feelings I did not enjoy.
Loss of control.
This enraged me.
I was not very gentle with the defiant little brat, who was making me lose control, as I untied her legs and pushed her ankles to her hands.
“Hold yourself open,” I commanded her, and she did my bidding, spreading her long legs apart so that I could slap her pussy and make her gasp, and pinch her clit until the pain must have overtaken the pleasure that made her shudder. Her eyes grew wet and she bit into her lip, her legs trembled with the strain of holding them and holding back her own need. She dug her nails into her calves—but the defiance in her eyes would not diminish.
I grabbed her by the hair and fed my cock into her mouth. “Look at me,” I told her, as I disappeared into her throat. I could feel her gag, I could see her eyes grow wetter until tears streamed down her face. She met my eyes in this, the most submissive of all acts, her body bent to my every whim, my cock deep in her throat, and still she had some power over me.
I came in her mouth and made her swallow my cum, and when I asked her to lick me clean she did it with her eyes on mine, but this still did not quench my desire for power or make her break. She ran her tongue along my cock and opened her mouth to take my balls inside of her as I commanded, her tongue working me to a frenzy again, but the fire inside of her did not go out.
Frustrated, I pushed her back onto her hands and knees and found a leather strap. Her ass was crisscrossed with the marks of my previous training, and I flogged her without mercy, making her count out her punishment, hoping that
she would beg me to stop and let me know that she was broken. Her voice cracked, her skin turned red, and her hands shook when I made her rub the welts I had given her, but when I told her to put her hands on them and massage them, she did as I asked.
I should have left her there longer, made her pay more dearly, really broken her.
But I didn’t.
I didn’t, because I couldn’t wait, because I was so hard from the hours I managed to wait for her that I couldn’t wait any longer, because the wait was torturing me as much as it was her, because I had created a problem for myself: I needed her.
Did she know what she doing? Did she know that she held a power over me that I could not control, that she might have believed that I had power over her, when in fact it was the other way around?
Nothing could satisfy me; I buried myself in her pussy and barely managed to pull out before I came again, and no matter how I restrained her, no matter how creatively I tied her up to be motionless, her body moved around me in waves of silky pleasure that I could not escape from, even after I came onto her skin and exhausted her so that I had to carry her to her bedroom. She stayed with me, embedded in my mind. No matter how many times I had her, I wanted more, and I couldn’t stop thinking about her.
This went on for days, until I had her right where I had believed that I wanted her; she gave herself to me completely, let me do anything I wanted to her, turned onto her stomach and let me take her any way I chose. When I told her to beg, she begged, and when I told her to swallow my cum, she sucked me dry. If I told her to lie still and wait for my permission to come, she did what I asked of her. But every device designed to give me power over her only made her own power over me stronger.
She stopped asking me when I would release her, and as we lay entangled after I used her body, because I didn’t want her away from me, I was relieved that the words never left her mouth because I didn’t have an answer. I would never let her go, and yet if she were to command me to do it, could I resist giving her what she wanted?
Until one night, she was nearly sleeping, with her head lying on my chest. I was entertaining the weak fantasy that I indulged in: that I could somehow have her like this, for all of time, and that there was no reason I could not.
“What do you want from me?” she said quietly, half-asleep.
I wasn’t able to say anything more than, “This. Just this.” And then she was quiet for so long, while my heart pounded with a new sort of fear I had never felt before, the cold icy fingers of having told her the truth, of revealing that she had won in this game of power, whether she knew it or not.
She turned her head to look up at me, her blue eyes wide and wet. “Alaric,” she said, her fingers trailing lazily on my chest. Her touch burned through me; it was all I could feel, pulling at something inside of me until I felt so stretched by it that I might snap. “I have something I need to ask you for.”
Anything, I wanted to say. Did she know that she could ask me for anything? That she was more powerful than she could imagine? I hated her in that moment, as much as I loved her and needed her.
She pushed herself up on her elbows to look at me, her long hair brushing over my chest. “I’ll do anything you say,” she said. “But...” Her eyes filled with tears. It took all the strength I could muster not to brush them away, not to reveal to her that I would do anything to make her stop crying. Anything but let her go, anything but tell her that she had consumed me.
I remained silent. A hot tear fell on my chest and sent an ache through me that made me even angrier with myself, with her, with the helplessness she was subjecting me to.
“I have a commitment,” she said, her voice cracking.
My mind went first to commitment to another man, and my whole body was heated in a flash; I was ready to fight for her, to kill for her, to destroy her ‘commitment.’ I seethed inwardly, unable to speak.
“There’s a girl, a friend, Lucy... she’s... she helped me through everything in life, she’s my foster sister...”
She kept talking, and the wave of anger inside of me crashed up against the walls of my body and slowly ebbed away. “She... she’s not well. She was never adopted, she needs to be in a mental health facility, and she... the state ones are so terrible, I couldn’t leave her there, and so I’ve been paying for her, that’s why I worked at Kitty Bang Bang...” Her voice turned into a sob. “I don’t care about anything else, but she doesn’t have anyone. I just have to make sure she’s okay.”
She rose to sitting, her legs curled underneath her. Relief—that she hadn’t told me she loved some other man, that the explanation for her working for Andrej Sulov was something so benign—was flooding through me. She was not a stripper, not a prostitute, not a drug addict: all of her confessions had been true.
Her eyes were wet and supplicant; this was the first time I had felt that she was truly giving in to me, truly begging me, and it must have cost her defiant spirit so much to ask.
I touched her cheek and ran my fingers over her perfect mouth. “What do you want, Natalia?” I asked her.
She closed her eyes and tears splashed onto her cheeks. “Could you... she’s at a place called Stoney Creek. She’ll be... she’ll be moved somewhere else, somewhere horrible if her bills aren’t paid. I don’t have any money; I don’t even know...” Her voice ended in a sob. “But you could do it, couldn’t you? You could pay for her?”
She was twisting her fingers together. I realized that this request must have been the ultimate submission for her, the ultimate humiliation.
I recoiled from her, sitting up, my hands on her shoulders.
Touching her was more than I could bear, making her cry like that, feeling the grip of her power over me, it was all too much.
“Give me the information,” I said angrily.
I rose and put on my clothes. I needed to be away from her, to exercise, she was pulling me in too deep. “Give me the information and I will send someone to handle it.”
I walked to the door and unlocked it, leaving her on the bed.
I made the mistake of looking back. She was wiping a tear away, her face confused, a painful mixture of fear and adoration burning at me from behind her blue eyes. This was not how I wanted to win her, not how I wanted things to be, though I couldn’t say why. My intentions had been to break her, but not like this, not in a way that left her no choice. “So you—”
“I will handle it. I will pay for your friend.”
I turned and left, the coil of tension wrapping more and more tightly within me with every step, her face burning into my vision, my mind, my soul.
“Thank you,” I heard her say.
The words were like acid thrown at my back, and they burned and burned all night as I ran on the treadmill, trying to run away from Natalia Karkarov and her power over me.
Chapter Sixteen
Natalia
Days turned easily into weeks, until I lost count of them and no longer knew how long I had been out of my life. Sometimes I wondered what was going on there... but I had few real friends, and even fewer things I really cared about. If Lucy’s bills were taken care of, it was all that really mattered anywhere else in the world but here, with him.
I spent a lot of time sitting on the beach, reading books, thinking. I had a floaty mattress I could take out hundreds of yards without the water going up past my chest. It was warm and pleasant, and a breeze came along in the afternoon to cool me off. Sometimes I thought about Andrej, about the dank, shitty club, all the sticky booze on the floor and the terrible men, and I was thankful to be away from it all.
But mostly, lying in the warm water, I thought about Alaric.
There was a darkness to him, and one that couldn’t be denied. If that was all there had been inside of him, though, I would have simply accepted my fate here, trapped on his island, as a temporary, semi-pleasurable thing, that I would end as soon as I could get away from him. Or he tired of me. Or something changed.
He had claimed every i
nch of my body as his, and when he took me, I let him have me however he wanted. He had bound me into contorted positions and made me beg him for release, and I would have been lying to say I didn’t take any pleasure from it. I liked to submit to him, on a feral level.
And if that had been all there was, that is all I would have thought about—the strength of him, overpowering me, forcing me to do his bidding, punishing me deliciously when I failed to please him.
But there was more to him than that. Something deep and inaccessible, that surfaced in strange moments. At times he could display deep tenderness. One day I had floated into a sea of small jellyfish and they had stung my legs. He was there in a second to fish me out of the water, stoically getting stung all over himself, and then he treated my stings with such gentle care it was hard to believe he was the same man who had pushed me to my hands and knees to pleasure him with my mouth, my pussy, and my ass for hours in the morning. And then, he had summoned from his seemingly interminable on-call workers, ten men to clear the whole bay of jellyfish by patrolling it all with a net.
All so I could enjoy the water again.
But as soon as he became tender like this, and our eyes would meet in a moment so close to being... normal, like two people who were dating or in a regular relationship, he would withdraw suddenly and sharply. His eyes would turn dark again, and he would be cold, sending me to my room. Or sometimes he would take me to his special room to be punished, and the punishment would be severe, even though I had done nothing.
I was determined not to let him break me like that. I knew there was something behind his darkness. Something there that he didn’t want to reveal.
And for a long time, that was the obsession I had with him—he was a mystery I wanted to unravel, more out of curiosity than anything else. My body craved him, and my mind was fascinated by him, and I was trapped there anyway, so I slowly let go of the guilt I felt for enjoying my kidnapping so much.
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