She returned to her chair, flinching when her ass made contact with the cushion. But she picked up her soda and made every effort to obey his stricture not to show her discomfort.
The corners of Bell’s otherwise serious mouth curved up slightly. When he was sure she was watching, he wrapped his hand around his shaft through the cotton, stroking it a few times before releasing it. Before her eyes, he willed himself down again.
“You like to torture me,” Maya said.
“You like to be tortured,” Bell replied. “Your misplaced guilt might grow tiresome in the future, but for now, I am more than willing to fulfill your every need, my dear. And what I am ill-equipped for, the Ringmaster has graciously agreed to take up the slack. If you need me to be your hellfire demon, how can I refuse? Let me assure you, Maya, I haven’t even started.”
* * * *
He hadn’t. Maya wouldn’t call his repertoire original, but anything more original might have been more to the Ringmaster’s tastes. Maya sometimes had dreams about them, the things Bell whispered he would do if he really let go and if he had a true appetite for it. He’d had centuries of practice with other hapless wishers. He limited himself out of his affection for her alone.
Maya had convinced Bell to raise the weekly whipping back up to twenty strikes, because anything less felt too brief. Bell continued to heal the injuries that the Ringmaster gave her. But Bell didn’t immediately heal the bruises and mild scrapes that his own ministrations conjured onto her skin. He’d leave them on all week until Saturday night, when the healing potion for the whip welts would heal the lesser surface injuries as well.
Most of the wounds and bruises had to be kept out of sight of any guests’ view of her body, but it was amazing how much he could do with what he was given. He also seemed to have an endless supply of tools to punish her. Switch, riding crop, handle of a whip, flogger, length of chain, razor blade, sandpaper, clamps, the same rough rope he had used on her wrists, both sides of a hairbrush…
Though he would sometimes get hard doing it to her, he hadn’t initially mixed the torture with their pleasure. Recently, however, the lines had blurred, and he wasn’t the one who had blurred them.
Sometimes heat would blossom from the pain or just from the power of his attention upon her as he did it. She couldn’t hide that from him.
With the needles especially.
He was so careful and clean, so exact on where or how deeply he pinched and pierced through her skin. Now needles pricked across the left and right sides of her back like two spiny ridges, raising never more than tiny beads of blood.
“You should go to Troy one evening before Christina gets to him,” Bell said as he stepped back to admire his artistry. “Ask for a custom design down your arms to set off the cuffs. I’m sure he’d be pleased to work with this canvas. If you like these”—he stroked along the line of needles, making her gasp, digging crescents into her own arms—“you’ll definitely enjoy what Troy has to offer. And I think I should like to see his work on your skin.”
Maya rested naked on the bench in the ring, where Bell initiated most of their activities these days, save the ones that followed the Ringmaster’s sessions. In fact, she was in much the same position she assumed with the Ringmaster.
Bell caressed her intimately with his gaze. Intimate, yes, yet their sexual interaction had changed. Bell was holding something back, something important, and she couldn’t put a finger on it. Whatever it was, it certainly wasn’t his sadistic side.
“Is that an order?” Maya asked, a little buzzed and on the edge of flushed exhaustion after all that damn intensity he had leveled at her. “Never wanted a tattoo before.”
“It’s a suggestion,” Bell said. “Stand, palms on the bench. Present yourself to me.”
Maya braced herself, straightening her legs where she straddled the bench. Her head dropped as Bell bypassed any preliminaries and delved deep into her cunt with three fingers at once, twisting and stroking. Maya panted, resisting the urge to push back on him. It was funny that she’d had no idea how turned on she was until Bell had showed her.
“You’ve been dripping on our nice bench, Maya,” Bell said, pulling his hand out slightly before plunging in again.
She bit her lip, but a moan squeezed from her mouth.
“I hardly think this has been punishment at all,” he added.
He plucked at the outer part of the needles on the left side of her back like a harpist playing a scale. Down the outer left, up the inner left, down the inner right, up the outer right, the needles pulling at the layer of her skin over the metal. She twitched helplessly, but she also arched her back to take more of his hand inside of her.
“I wish you could see what you look like,” Bell murmured, licking over the thin flesh covering the needled ridge he had created. “Maybe we can do this again when my funhouse design is finalized and executed. There will be mirrors to use then. But for now…I really don’t think this is enough, as you say. I think I’ve been exceedingly easy on you these past few weeks, my dear. All pain, not enough shame, especially since you seem to crave the pain now. Who could have predicted that?”
Smug, arrogant prick. Maya clutched the sides of the bench as he yanked his hand out of her, leaving her empty.
“Stand up all the way, Maya. We’re taking a walk.”
“What? Outside?” Maya asked. The question had slipped out before she’d been able to stop it. She was doing that more lately, ever since things had started getting blurry. Worse, the son of a bitch seemed to know it and like it, even when he ‘retaliated’.
He tugged one needle lightly. “You already know what happens to trespassers, so you don’t have to worry. There are only my people out there. We will avoid them.”
“They’ll see…”
“Some of them might,” Bell replied. Another tug at another needle. “Most of them won’t. You mean you don’t feel it? Lady Sasha and Lord Mikhail have found another victim, my dear, and this”—he roughly circled her pulsing clit with his thumb—“isn’t going away until we finish.”
It would be deceptively simple to tell herself that the incubus and succubus were the reason why she was so confused tonight, but that didn’t explain last night. Or the night before. Or the week before.
“Would you prefer to stay here?” Bell asked. He nipped her earlobe, sucked at it the way he might suck elsewhere. Her arousal wrung out a new moan and new wetness between her legs.
“Yes.”
“That’s why we’re going,” Bell said. This time he bit her earlobe hard enough to leave dent marks. “If you cannot stand their eyes on you, that is what we will invite. If you fear they will know what it is we do… Well, darling, that is no secret anymore. Let them watch. Let them envy you. Let them envy me. Perhaps I’ll harvest another wish from it.” His chuckle carried a wicked, harsh edge.
A font of what ifs ricocheted in her skull, mostly to do with which sharp implement Valorie would use to skewer her first if she stumbled upon Maya engaged in whatever new perversity Bell had cooked up within his dark imagination. Needles and knifeplay were one thing—Maya didn’t think she could ever find pleasure from a broadsword in her belly.
Bell lifted her wrists, holding the leather cuffs to her gaze. “You promised me, Maya.”
He held her hand to give her balance while she swept her leg over the bench and gingerly followed him across the sawdust floor, out the back exit then into Oddity Row. Under the bright full moonlight, she wore nothing but a pair of cuffs and two lines of silver needles down her back. Between her legs, her cunt ached, her folds tingling full and sensitive and swollen, wanting his fingers, his mouth or his cock there again. But she didn’t ask for it. What he would give, he would give.
It disturbed her, though, how her arousal continued even stronger and needier when they stepped out in the open, where she feared they would cross paths with someone unsavory or unsympathetic.
She thought she heard something from the direction of the elepha
nt compound, ominous clicks and tears too thick to be fabric. But Maya couldn’t see anything, thank God. It really was surprising how many idiots tried to get into Arcanium to make trouble, given how often the clowns looked well fed on the occasions that Maya had the misfortune of bumping into them.
Bell leaped onto the carousel and offered his hand again to help her mount. As she did so, wincing from the added pull against the needles, the carousel lights switched on. The clinking calliope music started mid-song, and the carousel began to turn.
“Does he stay here all night?” Maya asked, staring in mild alarm at the golem working the carousel.
“Where else does he have to go?” Bell replied dismissively.
“That’s disturbing,” she said. “Where do the others, um, shut down?”
“They stand in booths or congregate in the elephant tents. It used to disturb Greta and Allen as well, but they’ve grown to appreciate the company of people who won’t kick their sides like horses.”
“Those are the elephants? The elephants are human too, right?” Maya asked.
Bell nodded and curled an arm around her waist, bothering the needles at the small of her back. He brought her hips against his.
“Is anything here what it seems to be?” Maya muttered.
“You call us demon, which in the old tongues only means spirits, lesser divine entities—daemon. It was only later that it started to mean heathen gods and devils. However, jinn is what we truly are, and by our very definition, we hide. We construct façades to conceal the Lovecraftian chaos behind. We hide so that we may be among. Of course things are not what they seem. Arcanium is a circus, a carnival, a trick enveloped in a sham and a con. It is the way of things.” He led her backward to the painted wooden octopus.
“I’m not sure how hygienic this is,” Maya said. “I’m not saying no, I just…”
Bell mounted the octopus backward behind the bulbous head of the angry cephalopod, the staring eye surprisingly intelligent, like an offspring of Cthulhu in miniature. He undid the fastenings of his trousers and pushed them down only enough to free his rising, thickening erection.
“Does this satisfy your scruples? I’m insulted you would question my devotion to tending my circus. Either way, though, the golems will take care of the carousel after we leave,” Bell said. “Come. Ride me, golam.”
She carefully grasped the pole behind Bell’s back and slipped her foot into the octopus’ stirrup. Again, she winced as she stepped up then straddled the tentacles. She half expected Bell to animate them, to feel them brush between her thighs as she arranged herself to face Bell. However, Bell simply observed her as she climbed up. His thin irises were a sparkling rainbow from the contrasting bright carousel lights, but something darker lurked behind the unnaturally dilated pupils.
Bell closed his hands at her waist, fingers just short of the needles but aggravating them anyway. They were really starting to hurt her now, like an extended series of wasp stings down her back. He lifted her up with little effort, and she grabbed the pole behind him with the other hand, too. Maya couldn’t breathe as he held her, the muscles of his arms taut in shadowy, colorful contour. Then he slowly brought her down, and her pussy accepted him like an embrace. She still clung to the pole with one hand, but she released the other to wrap her arm around Bell’s neck. He slid his hands down to hold her ass, kneading with firm fingers.
When he lifted her up again, at the same time that the carousel raised their octopus, her breasts pressed against his face, but he didn’t pay them any attention. He fixed his gaze upon her face. She dropped down over his cock once more, sinking all the way to the base, poised to kiss him, but he turned his face away slightly.
“You don’t kiss me—fuck—anymore,” Maya said.
The carousel continued its up and down and around and around ride, and Bell moved her over him like a warm, living toy in time. Was it just her or was the ride going faster? The eerie calliope music played higher and more urgent, a surreal soundtrack for their activities. Like much of her life lately, the sex felt like a dream bordering on a nightmare—a nightmare for which she would cling to sleep in order to stay.
Bell’s mouth twitched. He leaned in, angling Maya’s head as though to give her the kiss he had been denying her, the kiss that suddenly made her mouth water and her lips as full and sensitive as the folds tight around Bell’s cock. He brushed his lips softer than a whisper against hers…then dipped down to her neck, lifting her up before letting gravity forcefully slide her down. At the same time, he closed his teeth over her neck, biting hard, too hard to be pleasurable.
Yet she cried out, the pained sound strangled by her pleasure. An animalistic growl rolled over the flesh of her neck as he shifted his grip then bit down again, thrusting his hips up to meet her as she ground down.
Maya felt none of the affection that he had been withholding and that she had just discovered she missed. Instead, he made his possession irrevocably known. Not possession of her as a slave—that was what her cuffs were for. His bite as he surged in her made all of her his, needle wings, irreconcilable guilt, empty soul, lush curves, inner and outer scars, snarky retorts, meat, bones, mind, spirit, his. It wasn’t nice. It wasn’t good. Her nipples were tight and desperate against his chest. Her cunt clenched like a fist, even as a thin line of blood trickled down her collarbone and between her breasts.
They rode their evil carousel octopus at a ferocious pace, her moans drowned out by the maniacal music, the bright lights exposing their deeds for any to witness Bell making her his. She had never been so much someone else’s, so little her own, almost as if this entire exercise from Derrick’s wish to now had been about that transfer of the deed to her self. Piece by piece, and none of it taken—Maya had given ground every step of the way.
She gave more of it now, shouting as some of the needles tore her skin in thin lines. But she drove forward, needed him to stake his claim even more than she needed to come.
She was not her own.
Maya capitulated, knuckled under, released, nearly blacking out from the light-headedness flooding through her mind.
He didn’t come inside her, but he stilled, licking at the blood he had drawn. The ecstasy of painful submission dissipated as quickly as it had gathered and peaked. She slumped in his arms.
She, too, said nothing as he lifted her off him and set her on the slowing carousel floor. He tucked himself, softening, into his trousers and slid down to join her.
“I’ll need to get something for that, much as I would like it to stay,” he finally said, touching his fingertips to the wound then bringing them to his lips to taste. “Customers would talk. It’s a bit more alarming than the average love bite. These, however… Turn around.”
The carousel had slowed but not stopped, and she clung to the saddle of the skeleton horse next to the octopus as he slipped each needle out of her, one by one. He put the needles back in his bag.
“I must return these to Misha as well,” Bell added. “Stay here in the light. I will return shortly.”
She didn’t bother to point out she was naked and bleeding. He already knew. He wanted her to stay here on purpose.
Maya buried her face in her arms, ragged, confused. She clutched at guilt that she had briefly forgotten and bound it to the stinging needle pricks over her back. That’s what this was supposed to be about.
Her greatest fear was that she would fail even at being penitent, unable to hold onto the regret and shame longer than a few weeks, that she would lose sight of why she was doing all this in the first place.
“Hello, bloody thief.” A descriptor rather than an invective.
Maya looked up.
Valorie had joined the carousing animals, a darker figure than they. Long and curved and reflecting insanely happy colors, a knife glinted from her hand.
Chapter Nine
“You’re not even bothering to do it behind closed curtains anymore,” Valorie said. She cradled the knife handle loosely. It reflected the uni
nterested golem at an art house angle. Without Bell, the golem would only do what it was programmed to do—work the carousel.
And Bell was gone.
Then Maya had a chilling thought that curled happily with the nest of cold-blooded creatures writhing in her belly.
Bell had known. He had grown weary with her, maybe turned off by her guilt or tired of torturing her when he’d had other plans for their time together. He had known Valorie was going to confront her like she was doing now.
Bell had left so that Valorie could get rid of her.
“It was supposed to be private,” Maya said, inching back.
Valorie stepped forward at the same pace. A stand-off on a carousel didn’t really go anywhere, but Valorie could do just as much damage in a circle. She looked up at the sparkling lights and gears and the lack of walls. “Yeah, real private,” she said. “You think I don’t know what you’ve been doing with him? You’re dead wrong. I think I’d notice not having a man in my bed. I think I’d notice another woman in my bed.”
“I think it’s technically his bed,” Maya said, sidestepping to the edge of the carousel and grabbing an eight-legged horse’s pole.
Valorie wore boots, not to mention she was clothed and armed. She had all the advantages at the moment. Probably not the best time to resort to sarcastic technicalities.
“No, it’s mine,” Valorie said. “Who do you think wished for that RV? That was my wish. He could have made one for you, a tiny, functional trailer like everyone else’s. And what does he do? You charm him into keeping you with him in the second-nicest place in Arcanium, eventually creeping your way into my bed where you don’t belong. Were you laughing at me while he fucked you there?”
“I’m going to give you some leniency because you’ve been here a long time,” Maya said. “And don’t take this personally. You’re kind of nuts. You should really have that paranoia checked.”
“Is it paranoia that you’re naked and I’ve seen and heard you fucking him? And what I haven’t seen or heard, the rest of Arcanium whispers about.” Valorie sneered and tightened her grip on the knife, her body poised to strike.
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