It’s somewhere after twenty that I lose count.
But it’s long before twenty that I’m wet.
“You’ll still receive the punishment you deserve.” He’s so cool, so matter-of-fact about it. “But you can admit it. Confession is good for the soul.”
I can’t confess. I cannot. That is the one thing I cannot do, and I know it as certainly as I know that this is going to be a long, hard session. This one will leave a mark. Still, it doesn’t matter. Confession might be good for the soul, but it is bad for the body. It’s lethal for the body.
My family is lethal.
That’s the only thought I allow to cross my mind, the only thought that can break through the heat blooming across my ass, the deep, aching pain that makes me...
...hot.
Hot for him.
Hot for this.
So hot that even when he stops, I don’t stop moving. I can’t. I can barely move an inch, I’m so tightly restrained, but I rock my hips as much as I can. God, if only I could make contact with the bench, if only I could...
I so want his hand between my legs.
I receive the harsh pelting of a belt across my thighs instead. It’s a bright-white leather pain, and the first blow makes me scream. I know, intellectually, somewhere in the part of my mind that’s still processing regular thoughts, that it could get worse, but it’s the accumulation of all the sensations that tears the cry from my mouth.
“I hate liars, but I love that sound.”
Cassian’s words ring like a bell just before the next stripe lands. The two things together—the words and the belt—are a shock. In that instant, something clarifies in my mind. This isn’t about me.
This is not about me.
Cassian has never said anything about himself before a punishment. It has always been a transaction, and the transaction is not between us. It’s between him and someone else, and I’m only caught in the middle. But he loves the sound of my scream so I let out another one. A tear slips from the corner of my eye. The belt trips against something—the side of his leg?—and then he is a shadow next to my head.
He presses a thumb to my cheek where the tear has fallen, and I turn just enough to see what he’s doing. He lifts that hand to his mouth, and then he licks the salt on his skin.
From me.
It takes my breath away.
“Confess.”
At first I can’t speak. He’s knocked all the air out of me and then some. But I force an inhalation of breath into my lungs. “You’re—no—priest.”
That flame lights behind his dark eyes, behind the eyes of the man who has tasted my tears, and I see in his face that he wants more of them.
But I want more of them, too.
Not tears.
The pain.
Because it feels like something else. Something else is twisted up in it that makes me feel so alive.
So absolved.
That’s not what Cassian came here to do, but he’s doing it anyway, and I can’t explain it—I can’t explain anything. I can only wait as he moves back around behind me.
There’s a ringing silence, a silence as cold and delicate as the first snow in winter, and then the belt lands against me again in a red fury. Once. Twice. Three times. Then he adjusts the angle and wraps it around to my inner thighs, soft flesh that’s only been touched by grasping hands and my own fingertips. All I can think about is getting my clit to the surface of the bench. All I can think about is how filthy this makes me, how shameful...
How much I want it.
If he would just reach between my legs and give me release, I would be his forever.
You are already his forever.
The voice blends in with Cassian’s. He’s saying something, but I only catch “—for the paddle.”
I’m shuddering, shaking on the bench, but he moves to the front of me, to the wall where the tools hang, and I blink through hazed eyes as he selects one and returns to his previous position behind me.
“Four strokes.” His voice shines with authority. With power. I’m tied down. He loves it. I love it. I— “And then I’ll decide how many more.”
16
Cassian
God, she’s pretty when she cries. And I’ve been making Justice cry for the better part of an hour.
I’m very nearly finished.
“Last one,” I say into the sound of her breathing, each inhale a gasp, each exhale ragged.
I’ve gone too far, and I know it.
I’ve lost all sense of the boundaries I normally clutch to with white-knuckled fists. We are outside the contract now. No contract I’ve ever accepted has called for punishments this sustained. Some of them have been close—some of them have been maddeningly specific in the pain they want to inflict—but I have to admit that this stopped being about administering an agreement a long time ago. Before I even stepped into the room.
The cane balances so perfectly in my hand. It’s rattan, varnished, with a little bit of give—a vicious thing. And it hardly ever enters the picture with contracts. They can only handle so much, and I prefer to stretch it out, to make it last, to make an impact.
It’s made an impact on Justice. The three stripes across her red ass are angrier by far than anything else I’ve done to her.
I should stop.
But I don’t want to.
I want more.
My blood sings with it, rages with it, even as she shivers against the straps of the bench. Her breath huffs out in little cries that sound on the verge of begging. I’m not sure she knows she’s making any noise, and I don’t care.
One more. One more.
I bring the cane back and let it fly through the air with a whistle as sharp as a knife. When it lands, it sends her head jerking forward, her entire body tensing and pulling, but there’s nowhere to go. I have expertly restrained her. Of course I have. And the cry that tears from her throat is raw. It echoes in my ears. It runs down into my blood and through every one of my veins, a silvery, sick pleasure.
This is different.
I walk to the wall with its hangers lined up for every implement and put the cane back into its place, the rushing in my head so loud it blocks out every other sound, even Justice’s fresh wave of sobs.
In an instant, the knowledge screeches to a halt at the center of me.
I’ve gone too far.
I knew that before the last stroke, but now I know it in a different way. Down to the marrow in my bones, I know it, and I press a fist to my lips to keep in the noise that threatens to come loose.
It felt so good.
It felt so fucking good.
And why? Because she defied me? Because she spit at my feet the first time she saw me? Because she resisted, and resisted, and because I loved the look of her spread out underneath me far more than I’ve loved any other sight in my wretched life? Did I think I could punish that out of my own head by punishing her? Did I think I could erase the tangled knots of this contract, the twisting stupidity of my own brother, by destroying the white flesh of her bottom?
It’s an awful pleasure that throbs through me now. I liked it, everything I did to her. I wanted it. I craved it. I have craved it from the moment my father let me take over a contract.
I can’t think.
I turn back toward her and I should feel guilty at the sight of her, hanging uselessly in her restraints, bent over the bench that humiliates all of them. Not a single contract has been able to hold in her tears across the bench, but I’ve never drawn so many from one woman.
Mika’s shadow hovers outside the door. I can see where her feet break up the light from the hallway in the slim crack at the bottom of the doorframe, waiting. According to protocol, I should walk out of here right now and let my assistant come in to clean up the mess. It’s Mika who should release the restraints one by one, then clip Justice’s hands into cuffs and lead her back to her cell. That is the nature of the punishment. Pain, and then solitude.
But I can’t move
.
I drink her in.
The curve of her ass, still on display, still ready for punishment. The slim nip of her waist. Her breasts, pressed against the bench. She held herself up at the beginning of the punishment, as much as she could. It gave her an inch or so of clearance. Now she slumps against the leather, her cheek pressed to the smooth surface, eyes squeezed shut.
Tears falling, falling.
As they should. The stripes on her ass are only the topmost layer of the pain I caused. With my hand. With the belt. With the paddle. Thinking of it sends another surge of blood to my cock. I didn’t think I could get any harder. It turns out I can.
Justice opens her eyes.
The blue is heightened, magnified, by the red, puffy skin of her eyelids and her pink cheeks. I’ve been cruel. I worked the belt over the insides of her thighs, but I came back to the flesh of her ass again and again. I could’ve spread it out over the rest of her body, but I didn’t, I let all the pain center there. But I can see in her eyes that it didn’t stay put.
It never does, does it?
At first, her gaze is somewhere in the middle distance, as if she doesn’t notice that I’m there at all.
But then she lifts her eyelashes and looks straight at me.
The look in her eyes stops my heart.
Because it’s not a look that sings of betrayal, of a crushed soul, of a broken girl. I’ve seen enough of those expressions to know when it’s happened.
It’s a look that’s pure need.
Her lips part, the pink skin shining from the tears that have fallen over her face, and my heart seizes. I know what she’s going to say. It’ll be a curse. She’ll be raging against what I’ve done to her, desperate to get back to her cell and...
“Please.”
It’s a broken word, split down the middle by a sob, and at first it doesn’t make any sense.
And then it does.
“Please.” Her voice is a little louder this time, but no less ragged.
My entire soul bends toward her, but I don’t move an inch. Instead, I steel myself for what has to come next. She can beg all she wants, but I won’t free her. Not for another three days. Five full days, that’s what the contract says, and that’s what I’ll stick to.
I remember myself, what I’m supposed to be doing, and I take a step toward the door.
“No,” she cries. “Please don’t go.”
It freezes me in place.
“Sir.” The word sends a shiver down my spine that threatens to wrack my entire body. “Please...please.”
Nothing in the world should keep me in this room at this moment, but those words out of her mouth command my attention. I drag my eyes back to hers and search for the words to answer her. It’s the wrong idea, it’s absolutely wrong, but I’m going to answer. Her plea is a hook dug right into the center of my chest. “Why would you want me to stay?”
My tone is acid—even I can hear that—but she doesn’t flinch. No. That little movement is her hips, rising and falling, and for the first time I allow myself to see her.
To see all of her.
That tiny rock of her hips is a dead giveaway. Her face floods with fresh color, a shame that I can’t help but delight in.
“Please. I—I need you.”
I need you.
They fall like a boulder onto ice, shattering everything beneath it. Need you. Who has ever needed me to do anything in this room other than leave? I have felt it coming off each contract in waves.
I move behind her as if drawn there by a puppet master. And there, between Justice’s legs, is all the evidence I need that she is telling the truth.
Her pussy, despite having been absolutely untouched for the entirety of our session, is swollen and pink and dripping. She can’t close her thighs against me, and it seems she doesn’t want to, because even though she’s tied down to the bench, it’s like she feels my gaze and tries to spread her legs a little wider.
Her body begs for me to touch her.
“Oh, God,” Justice sobs, and it hits me all at once that she is not crying because I’ve pushed her past the point of unbearable pain. Her need for release is what’s unbearable.
I’m moving closer before I realize what I’m doing, before I can stop myself, and I reach out and put one hand on the small of her back.
A brand new sob, of a different tenor, rips from her throat, and I can feel her pressing back into my touch.
“Lower, oh, please, lower, oh—”
She is begging me to slip my fingers down over her surely throbbing ass and into the most intimate parts of her. My cock twitches against my pants.
“Sir, please—”
I jerk my hand away like her skin is a hot stove.
Justice howls, and then she’s babbling no, no, no, please, no.
“Silence.” It’s almost a shout, a last desperate attempt to stop this runaway train.
I throw myself through the door so fast I almost tackle Mika to the floor.
“Mr. Locke? Should I—Mr. Locke? Mr. Locke?”
“Yes.” I bite the word over my shoulder. Her footsteps go quickly toward the cell.
I’m blind, a mess, lurching down the hallway like a drunk, and I don’t look back.
17
Cassian
Each minute in my rooms is a razor dragging its blade across my skin. It’s slow, such an agonizingly slow pain, and nothing I do will relieve it.
I want her.
I want her here with me.
I want her to be mine.
Mine.
And not mine in a temporary way, the way all the contracts belong to me for the length of their punishment—a permanent way.
It’s impossible.
I tighten my hands into deliberate fists and release them, settling back into a chair in front of my fireplace. From a perch on the corner table my mother watches me from the stillness of a picture frame.
It’s the only one left in the house.
The photograph was taken at least a decade ago on a vacation to the south of France. She’s standing in the surf, holding her hat on her head with one hand. She could be anyone’s mother, beautiful even in middle age, but her face is enough like mine that I couldn’t deny her even if I wanted to.
I don’t want to.
And I don’t want to betray her.
The truth is a ticking vessel in the corner of my brain. I locked it there when I sent her away. My father was newly dead of an alleged heart attack, somewhere in the bowels of a Family compound overseas, and I saw the writing on the wall before the call came in.
It had been one indiscretion, on my father’s part from what I understand, though the details have always been vague. There was a contract he shouldn’t have taken. There was undisclosed involvement with the Family and it had ended with a summons to Europe. The summons had concluded with him in a casket.
My mother was smuggled out of the States the same day we got the news. The next day—
I stand up from the chair and pace in front of the fire.
The next day it was made clear that all of this would become my responsibility.
Rich families don’t want their business aired in court. Neither does the Family.
Absolute discretion has always been the standard.
And here I am, fighting against the bonds of those standards like a contract bent over my bench.
She’s not dead, the truth whispers, and I shove it back into its place. If I don’t let it in, it won’t be so hard.
It’s one contract. One woman. Behind closed doors. There is nothing to indicate that allowing myself one pleasure would have the kind of effect—
Somehow I’ve arrived at the door to my rooms and I slam the side of my fist into its panel. There is every indication that a single pleasure could bring everything crumbling to the ground.
And yet.
Yet.
There’s a knock at the door. “Mr. Locke?”
It’s Mika’s soft voice. I don’t know if
she’s been lurking outside or if the sound carried far enough for my staff to hear.
“Everything’s fine.” I force the words through gritted teeth and wait for her footsteps to retreat.
They do.
A need like this could eat a man alive. In Justice’s eyes, I’ve already seen flashes of the future without her. A version of myself gaunt and pale and wasted. I need to drink her rage and her pleasure and her pain like I need water. A man can survive without food for far longer. I’d survive without food forever if it meant one night with her.
I go back to the table with the photograph and pick up the frame in my hands. My mother smiles out at me. It’s like she knows.
Even Lysander doesn’t know. Not the truth about Justice…and not the truth about our mother.
Given his recent behavior, he can never know.
“I’m sorry.” The whispered apology falls only on the frame of the photograph, the anguish that cracks my voice heard by no one. It’ll never reach her ears, if I do my job.
And I will do it.
I will do it every day until I’m released from its strictures.
But tonight, I’m taking her for my own.
18
Justice
Silence.
Silence drips into the cell like rain, like that water torture I’ve read about on the internet.
There was no sound as that woman bound my wrists and led me back to my cage like a dog. She motioned for me to lay on the bed, and I did, my face pressed into the pillow. There was nothing to say, so I said nothing when she left the room and came back a minute or two later. I kept my eyes closed when she stepped up next to the bed, and after a pause felt gentle hands on the smarting skin of my ass. It soothed, wherever she touched. Not much. Enough so I could stand it.
I don’t dare turn over, still.
He caned me.
He caned me, and I lay over that bench with my pussy throbbing.
Why am I like this? What has made me so desperate, so depraved, that the only thing in the world that I want is Cassian Locke’s hand between my legs? Why do I want the kind of relief only he can give me? Why?
Cards of Love: Justice Page 8