MASTER_-_Eden_Bradley-final_formatted

by Aspose

  My entire body surges. I bite back the sensation, bite the inside of my lip until I taste blood.

  No. Fuck no.

  “I want what the two of you want,” she answers instantly. “I’m not being coy. You know it’s the truth. I will love you both no matter what. But, Master Damon, when you sent me away, I have to tell you, it crushed me. It broke my heart, and…”

  She bites her lip, and when her eyes gloss over with tears, I feel like an absolute bastard. I don’t know what to say. My own pain is nothing compared to hers. God, that I hurt her!

  She blinks hard, wipes her eyes with her fingertips, then goes on. “It broke my heart, and my trust. We’ve been talking about it, and this makes sense to me. I need to see your willingness, because this isn’t simply about a contract anymore—it’s personal. And because of that, the very formal roles required in a place like the Training House have been disrupted. Seeing you vulnerable enough to submit…well, I know how much trust that would have to entail on your part—for all of us, really.”

  The room is closing in on me, my head throbbing as I try to wrap my brain around what they’re suggesting. “Do you? Because I don’t know that I can even begin to imagine.”

  “I know it would require much, much more, given who and what you are, than it does for someone like myself, who is so completely a slave at heart. I also know I would have to trust you both completely in order to allow myself to participate in that dynamic. It would be so different—for me, for you, for all of us. And I wouldn’t in a million years believe it was at all a reasonable thing to ask if I didn’t know something of your past, that you’ve been in slave space before. But it seems to me that changes everything—or, it can.”

  Her green eyes are enormous, still shining with unshed tears and with an urgency that cuts me to the core.

  She glances at Christopher, who gives a small, reassuring nod. “Master Damon, if Christopher believes it’s so, then I have to believe, too. But do I want this to happen? Yes. Yes, please! I need to build that trust with you again. I want us all to be together. And I know it may not pan out that way, but I’m hoping you’ll agree to try. I can’t bear the thought of you being lost to me, and I can’t go back.”

  Though my mind is still grappling with all she’s said, I nod. “I understand.”

  “So,” Christopher asks, “shall we begin our negotiations?”

  The battle raging inside me is hitting a fever pitch. Complete overload. Emotion. Desire. Loss. Need.

  Need.

  To be with them, a part of them. Perhaps at any cost. Even if that cost is the sense of self I’ve so carefully and meticulously created over the years.

  “You have to understand—and I think you do, and it’s probably giving you a greater joy in proposing this scheme—I’ve kept myself laced into this very tight corner in order to function as I felt I must. You, Christopher, are one of a very rare few who have managed to flourish in both roles in the tightly-held circles we run in.”

  “I know it. I’m fucking proud of it. But this is the only way. And you may have lost a part of yourself, Damon, but that doesn’t mean it’s gone forever. The seed is in there. I can sense it in you or I wouldn’t even bother to ask.”

  I shake my head. “I don’t know. I don’t think you really see—”

  “You know damn well I do. I would never try to coerce anyone into serving me if they didn’t have it in them. Do you trust that? Trust me?”

  “I do trust you,” I admit grudgingly.

  “Do you trust my instincts?”

  Swallowing hard, I give a small nod. For the most part it’s true, and God help me, I’m feeling that far-off sinking sensation I haven’t felt in…how long? Years. There is a certain comfort in it, in knowing my mind can still go to those places, even if I’m not the slave I was then. Even though much of me is convinced I can’t possibly do this.

  “It’s never occurred to me that I might ever want to serve anyone again,” I say quietly. “Or that I’d be able to have what you do. I don’t think I’ve truly wanted to. But if this is the only way…” I swallow hard against the lump in my throat threatening to choke me on my own raging need, and the remnants of anger and betrayal that must pale in comparison to theirs. “If this is the only way back to you two, then…”

  He smiles—not the snarky grin he so often wears, but a real smile, and the fact that I’ve pleased him shimmers through my system like a series of small, sensual shocks. Hell, it’s all a shock to me. But I have to try to give myself over to whatever is happening here. My body is leading the way, but the rest of me follows—with an enormous struggle, but I’m trying to accept the fact that the things he’s saying to me are beginning to make sense.

  “I take it that means ‘yes’,” he says, “but you know you have to tell me clearly.”

  “I need some time.”

  “No.”

  “Christopher—”

  “No, Damon. You decide now.”

  The world spins off its axis beneath my feet, making my head reel. The entire universe is whirling by too quickly for me to focus, to hang on to anything.

  I say from between clenched teeth, “I have no fucking idea how to let the control go anymore.”

  “You just do it,” he says, his tone gentler. “I’ll help you. Shit, I’ll make you.”

  “Yes,” I hiss, hardly believing the single word as it leaves my lips—lips that ache for his, and for hers. My heart is hammering and my palms are damp with perspiration. “I am ready to negotiate, to discuss my being in service. To you, Christopher.”

  “Oh!”

  I turn to find Aimée with her mouth in a pink ‘o’, a single tear coursing down her cheek.

  “Master Damon, I am so, so glad,” she says, her fingers flexing on the edge of the sofa cushion. Her cheeks are flushed, her eyes a more brilliant green than I’ve ever seen them.

  “Just ‘Damon’ now,” Christopher says, and I know it’s true.

  He takes my arm and guides me to sit at a table by one of the windows overlooking the crashing, gray sea, and takes the seat across from me. “We won’t need a written contract—your verbal consent is enough for now. This will be a temporary agreement, while we both see how you take to being mine.”

  I nod again, my body numb, my mind on hyper-alert, listening closely to everything he says.

  “But unlike Aimée,” he continues, “you won’t really belong to me until we get through an initial trial period. We will both have to see if you can shift everything, accept your new life, your role as my slave, before you become my property. As you said, it’s been a long time, and while I see the slave inside you, how readily you’ll be able to tap into it—how readily I’ll be able to—remains to be seen. I expect a full fucking freak-out from you. The crucial element will be what happens after that.” He leans toward me, his golden-hazel eyes glittering, as if they could throw sparks. So damn beautiful. “It has to be this way, for now.”

  “Yes, of course. Even I can’t tell you how I’ll react. I don’t know that I can be broken down the way a slave must.”

  The slow grin is back. So wicked. He is all sexual predator. Not that he’s ever been anything else, even as a slave. The idea is more unsettling than ever.

  “Again,” he says, “you leave that to me.”

  I feel a strange sense of relief…and yet it’s familiar. Comforting in a way I haven’t experienced since the time when I first arrived at The Training House.

  I was only nineteen years old then. I wouldn’t accept anyone so young into the House now, but those were different times. The parlor looked much the same then as it does now. It’s always held the same scents: expensive scotch, expensive cologne, the wool of the fine carpets edged with the sharp aroma of wood smoke from the fireplace, summer or winter. He was so very handsome. Stunning. But even more alluring was the air about him, the way he held himself…

  “Tell me of your qualifications, Boy,” Master Stephan demands.

  My legs are sh
aking, my cock harder than it’s ever been. I can barely believe this is happening, yet nothing has ever felt more real in my life. Thank God.

  “Sir, I… Have you not had a chance to review my application, my reference letters?”

  He steps closer, his silky movements as threatening as his presence at my side, as the hand going into my hair and pulling my head back until I know deep in my bones never to question this man again—in word or in thought. He is too good. Too deliciously commanding, his touch electric. And I know he will hurt me in all the right ways—hurt me until the core of my pain has been washed away in suffering and servitude.

  “Answer me.”

  Taking a moment to breathe him in—his scent, his authority—I exhale, and answer. “I have been in formal training for only one year, but I’ve been with a Dominant since I was fifteen. She had me top girls for her pleasure, sometimes. And once, another boy, which I liked. I’ve been given to other Masters, which I’ve liked even more. No…I’m sorry. I didn’t like it. I loved it. Reveled in it.” My head is spinning. What was the question? I scramble to say the right thing. “I am experienced at tea service and boot blacking. I have been thoroughly trained in massage, and can take a great deal of pain, Sir.”

  “You will call me Master, and nothing else, unless I instruct you otherwise. Is that clear?”

  His handsome face holds more authority than I have ever seen in a person—authority and an elegant beauty that reverberates in every cell in my body. It feels like magic, as if my fondest fantasies are about to be fulfilled, and I know with complete certainty they are. I want to go down on my knees for this man. Need to. How have I ever wanted anything but to submit to the kind of total slavehood that’s been promised to me at the Training House?

  “Please, Master,” I whisper, shamefaced at my own stark need, at my twitching cock. But it’s always been like this. Shame, in its painful loveliness. I love it all. I love him. Instantly.

  And I’m feeling it all again now, on an even larger and more painful, and infinitely more complex, scale.

  “Christopher,” I whisper urgently, “you know I love you both.”

  “Yes,” he says, “and therefore, I believe you can do this, if you want it enough. Do you?”

  Staring at his beautiful face, I see the strength in every line. He is the strongest person I have ever known. Stronger, by far, than my lost Master Stephan ever was. Stronger than any of us. And this may be exactly what I’ve needed all these years, as loath as I am to admit it. Or it may be the thing that will destroy me.

  Do I want it badly enough to take such a risk? I can’t answer that without some degree of doubt. I must do this. And it terrifies me. But the “must” fuels the “want”.

  Fuck.

  “Yes. I want it.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  That slow, evil and beautiful smile spreads over his face, then in a flash he’s out of his chair, his hand gripping the back of my neck and taking me right down to my knees. I don’t have time to think about it, to think about anything. I am in absolute shock. But I’m going down, the world blurring before my eyes, chemicals and pleasure and humiliation flooding my brain so quickly I can’t possibly process it all.

  This is it. This is real. This is where it begins.

  I don’t know how I can do this. I don’t know how I can refuse—or even how I can resist any longer. It’s Christopher, after all. Has anyone ever been able to resist him?

  He starts stripping my clothes off, and it’s all happening so fast—too fast, and yet, in some sense, I know this is the only way I can do it. It has to all be taken from me without giving me a chance to really think about it. It has to be forced on me, now that I’ve agreed to allow it to be. If I have a moment to pause, I’ll change my mind.

  Who am I kidding? I am not about to change my mind—not now.

  Fear is like a live wire in my body, trying to short out the other sensations, and I’m fighting to wrestle it away even as the rest of me slides almost automatically into accepting his command.

  He’s rough with me—rough enough that my shirt tears. I don’t care. My cock is aching. I need his rough hands on my body, on the raging erection that is all for him right now.

  Christopher.

  Master Christopher.

  Fucking Christ. This is what it’s come to. What I’ve come to, and I can still hardly believe it.

  When he pushes me down onto the rug, mashing my face against the rough fibers, it hits me all over again how damn serious this is, how much more serious it’s about to be. It’s hard to accept how frightened I am—and I’m as turned on as I’ve ever been in all my years in kink. Even better knowing that Aimée is watching this happen, which strikes me as odd until I remember what an exhibitionist I once was.

  Yes, I love an audience. I want to impress her, want to impress them both. Christopher has talked many times of his ego, but mine may well match his.

  He holds me down by the neck with one hand, and presses on the small of my back with the other. My stiff cock grinds as hard into the carpet as my cheek. I force myself to hold very still, not to arch my hips into the rug, which is all I want to do. No…what I want is to make him happy.

  God help me.

  His face is suddenly next to mine, and he whispers to me the way one would a lover. “I can see your struggle, can see it building. But it’s all fucking useless, you know. I’m the one in charge now, and don’t think for a minute I don’t plan to play that out to full advantage. And oh, yeah, I have a little revenge in mind. Well, not ‘revenge’, exactly. Think of it as punishment for your transgressions. You know the beauty of punishment, don’t you, Damon? As much as you know the agony of it. Expect me to go very hard on you.”

  I stifle a moan. Or is it a groan of despair?

  When he yanks my body over, turning me onto my back, I can’t hold it back. I groan aloud—at the manhandling, at his exquisite face above me and the utter command in his expression. At the damn helplessness of my position.

  As his gaze rakes over my body, I realize how naked I am. Not that I didn’t know it before. God, I don’t know what I’m thinking. My brain is in a fog, which I quickly understand is subspace. Slavespace. And some distant part of me is furious.

  “You are a beautiful Boy, Damon,” he says, reaching out to pinch one of my nipples between hard, hurting fingers.

  I yelp. I’ve grown soft over the years. He only grins and leans down to take the same sore nipple between his strong, white teeth, and as he bites into the tender flesh, I have to grit my own teeth against the cry that lodges in my throat. It’s fucking awful. It’s fucking wonderful. My cock is pulsing, in an agony of need. And as if he can read my mind, he straddles my body and grabs my naked flesh in his hand, squeezing hard at the base. If he weren’t squeezing so damn tightly, I might come in a heated burst of spiraling lust. I am totally out of control. But that’s what this is about, isn’t it? I have no control. He has it all.

  Yes.

  Fuck.

  He begins a vicious pumping motion, his strong hand gripping my cock as he strokes up, ending just beneath the swollen head, then down to grip the base, then back up again. My hips want to pump into his fist. Need to.

  Biting my lip, I fight for some self-control. But my traitorous hips arch, and he slaps the tip of my cock so hard it leaves me momentarily breathless.

  “No, Damon,” he says harshly.

  “Don’t tell me what to do!”

  He slaps my face, and it does exactly what it’s intended to—it shuts me the hell up, inside and out. It reminds of my place. I can’t stand it.

  Pressing down on my hip bone with the heel of one hand, he continues his rough and lovely torture of my aching cock. My balls draw up hard, my belly tightens, and pleasure and pain are like some insane dance in my system, melding together. Inextricably bound. I keep my gaze on his face, which is lost in concentration. I have to admit, I love that he’s so entirely focused on me. I cannot even think of him as the slave at this
moment, and perhaps never again. He is so much the Master.

  My Master.

  Come gathers in my balls, beginning the pumping pulse that signals my climax.

  “No. Hold it back,” he demands.

  I bite my lip harder, and when my tongue darts out I taste blood. It doesn’t help—it only makes it more difficult not to come.

  “I will make you bleed,” he tells me. “Your blood is mine. Your come is mine. Tell me.”

  “No,” I pant. “No.”

  He slaps me again, leaving my cheek burning. I am ashamed—that I am arguing with him. That another slap was required. That I don’t have more self-discipline. That I am in this situation, where I am allowing someone to slap me!

  “Tell me, Damon, if you know what’s good for you, and I think you do.”

  The problem is, I do. God damn him. And damn him even more for making me like it.

  “It’s…it’s all yours,” I gasp.

  “Is it? Then how dare you start to get off without my permission? How dare you draw your own blood?”

  He slaps my face so hard it makes my ears ring. But it also brings some measure of containment, and I breathe through the pleasure and the pain, breathe in the degradation of being hit across the face. And want to beg for more.

  I keep my mouth shut.

  But he knows what to do—oh, fuck, he knows. Shifting his grip until he’s got the base of my balls fisted in his hand, he makes a ring there, drawing them down and tugging hard, which almost makes me spurt all over him. But in a breath he’s pulling so damn hard, the pain holds me back, even as it spurs me on. I’ve forgotten this about the pain/pleasure continuum.

  Need to come.

  Can’t possibly come.

  And fuck, it hurts. It hurts like hell, and he’s too fucking beautiful, and I know Aimée is watching, and I am absolutely, abjectly humiliated.

  I hate knowing it will only get worse. I hate the part of me that revels in that knowledge.

  Still gripping my balls, Christopher orders Aimée, “Unzip me. Good girl. Take my dick out.”