“Bell…” Maya gasped as he wedged a second finger into her, stretching her like his human cock. Her breasts caught on his chest from her sweat, and she clutched at his shoulders as she rubbed her clit against his abdomen and willed Bell to screw her harder—twist, bruise, hit that spot again until she screamed her release.
When she dug her nails into his smooth skin, although it didn’t leave a mark behind, he withdrew from her cunt.
Maya hit his chest with a sharp slap in frustration, but Bell just laughed. He grabbed her neck like a person scolding a kitten and raised her upright.
“Not tonight,” Bell said.
“Are you shitting me?” Maya said. She swallowed against a shriek.
“You’ve already come once tonight at my dispensation. There’s no particular reason why I should allow you to come again,” Bell said.
“No reas― How about the fact that I’m this close?”
“Wet, desperate and tasty,” Bell said, bringing the fingers covered with her juices to his mouth. He licked and sucked every last trace of her arousal from them, never tearing his eyes away from hers. “Do you think you deserve an orgasm?”
“I didn’t wish that you’d hurt Valorie, did I?” Maya said.
“I was under the impression from our conversation that, despite sparing her, you still don’t believe your debt is repaid,” Bell replied.
He stroked her back, reminding her of the settled, pin-focused pain that he had given her earlier that night, and the reason. In the blossoming heat of her pleasure, she had already forgotten, so soon after reminding herself how essential it was not to forget.
“Is your debt repaid, Maya?” Bell asked, teasing the entrance of her cunt.
Maya pressed her forehead to his chest and hit his shoulder again. “No.”
“No,” Bell repeated. “Then I can give you no reward for the mercy that you’ve shown. It merely means that you have less debt to repay. You have my goodwill, my dear, but nothing more.”
Maya whimpered as he continued to stroke her pussy, slow, gentle, too little to do anything more than tease.
“I could keep you from sleep and torment you all night,” Bell purred. “I could bring you to the brink and back again and again until you dissolve in tears and pleas, until you are a bundle of nothing but raw nerves, your juices coating your thighs. I am tireless. I have stamina you cannot even begin to fathom. It would alleviate your debt considerably, and perhaps by the end of it, you would be willing to bow to me as your new god just for me to let you have your release. But I am a benevolent master,” he added with a broad, beautiful smile.
He laid her out on the pillows to cool down and recover. Everything between her legs felt soft and pulsing and screamed silently to come. Maya hugged a pillow next to Bell’s leg with some resentment. Bell was just doing what she had requested of him, but did he have to go out of his way to build her up then pull the flying carpet out from under her?
Valorie climbed up nearer Bell’s shoulder. The biggest part of his arm was wider around than Valorie’s waist. He could snap Valorie in half like kindling. Instead, he carefully cradled her.
The downside to trying to sleep through the tension of denied orgasm was that it took much longer than usual in spite of her exhaustion, which was probably why Valorie thought Maya was asleep when she murmured to Bell, “I think I’m going to start looking elsewhere for my needs.”
“I was under the impression I was far from inadequate,” Bell said.
Maya could hear the grin in Bell’s reply.
“No, no, I love you and I think I always will,” Valorie said. “It’s always been you, Bell. You have a piece of me no one else can ever have. And of course, I’ll stay with the circus. Until I finally get bored or something. Since that hasn’t happened in almost twenty years, I’ll probably stick around for a while. But you don’t love me like I love you. You like her more. You’ve liked her more than me from the beginning. Everyone can see it. Everyone can tell.”
Maya peeked over her arm. Bell was stroking Valorie’s stomach with his knuckles, his fingers brushing her breasts.
“I don’t know what it was about a girl you’d met for ten minutes that was better than the woman you’d been with for this long. All I know is that she captured you when you captured her. I don’t know how much of that she knows. Hell, I don’t know how much of it you know.”
Bell remained silent.
“I’m in the way. Lennon might be a slimy wretch of a guard dog, but we seem to have this kind of hate chemistry going on at the moment. We’re familiar. He’ll do until someone else comes along. Someone more mine.”
“Someone will come for you,” Bell said. “And you’re still mine now.”
“You said it like that, so it must be true,” Valorie said. “But Maya’s yours, too, and I’m okay with that now.”
“I’ll create a different home for myself and her,” Bell said. “The RV is yours, of course. You may invite Lennon to join you, or you can forbid him from ever stepping foot in the doorway without paying a hefty toll, if that is your preference.”
Valorie giggled.
“I imagine Lennon’s trailer will find some alternative use in the near future,” Bell mused.
“More company?” Valorie asked.
“Always.”
Bell fell quiet for a while, although he continued caressing Valorie, who had closed her eyes again.
“Mine,” Bell murmured.
He glanced directly at Maya. She didn’t try to pretend she hadn’t been listening. She just met his gaze, shaken all the way to the center of her spine at the quiet blue intensity, the hottest part of a flame.
“Mine,” he repeated in a whisper like a gust of wind. “Maya.”
Chapter Ten
Maya shifted nervously from one foot to the other. Black lace tickled the back of her thighs from the bustle at the bottom of the dark red corset, accented with even more black lace. It cinched tightly across her waist and cupped her breasts to just above their peaks. When she raised her arms, the dusky areolae showed, but that was apparently intentional.
For the first time in Maya’s experience, the circus had set up right outside a city without attaching to a faire, which meant it could commit more fully to its burlesque circus roots. It also meant new costumes like this one, which Maya had fallen in love with in spite of how revealing it was. Just a pair of frilly black panties, what Kitty called bloomers, and the corset that Kitty had tailored to contain her every curve without Maya feeling packed in. This way, she didn’t have a skirt for anyone to look up when she took to the high wire for her first performance.
She had walked the tightrope many times since the traumatic fleeing for her life from the last week, but that didn’t mean she was ready for a performance in front of a bunch of people staring at her crotch and taking bets on whether she was going to fall out of her corset before she fell off the rope.
Bell had assured her that the people who came to these kinds of performances—the ones where Arcanium strictly enforced an all-day over-eighteen policy—were incredibly supportive, especially with newcomers. No one would be immature enough to yell at her to fall, and if they were, well, the local kink communities had their own way to deal with things that didn’t involve bloody death.
Not to mention Maya couldn’t fall unless she wanted to.
That had been a weird experiment, exploring all the ways in which she couldn’t fall, as Bell had given her instructions from under the rope. Bell had told her audiences loved to try to figure out how Arcanium performers managed such feats. Regular attendees—the ones who sometimes followed the circus or always showed up when it was in town—often obsessed over Seth and Lars and their impossible act.
“Now they’ll have a new obsession,” Bell had whispered against her neck after catching her.
The man might have once said he didn’t like to share, but for such a possessive demon, he had a remarkable proclivity for sharing and showing her off. It would be more annoyi
ng if she didn’t know it came from a place of pride for her rather than just pride of her.
“You’ll do fine,” Kitty said, checking Maya’s hair one more time and fussing over her a little more than she might fuss over the others. After all, it was Maya’s debut.
“Yeah,” Maya replied. “If the electric violin doesn’t scare me to death again.”
Maya and Kitty stepped out of Tragedy, Comedy and Murphy’s way as they exited the ring. Next, Lady Sasha and Lord Mikhail, to prime the room.
Bell came up behind her and wrapped his arms around her waist.
“Just don’t kiss her,” Kitty said. “Lipstick.” Valorie often went on with nothing but gloss because her coloring needed little help, but Kitty had gone for something more stylized and dramatic for Maya, which involved putting enough makeup on her lips and eyes to qualify her as a clown. It made Maya look almost nothing like herself. It was amazing.
Kitty needn’t have worried, though. Bell still hadn’t kissed her any closer than her neck since the Ringmaster had whipped her the first time. Maya was ashamed to say that her mouth hungered for him. He gave her the rest of his body to play with, and vice versa, but it wasn’t the same, human or jinn.
And no kissing was just the tip of the phallic iceberg, because he still wasn’t letting her come either. A whole week in a sex-demon-charged circus, Bell would paint her ass black and blue and play with the needles and the razors in the places the costume covered and tease her mercilessly with his tongue and his cock…but he would always stop before letting her come. It was a damn good thing Lady Sasha and Lord Mikhail hadn’t fed this week, or else it would have gone from incredibly frustrating to actual torture on level with the Ringmaster’s sessions.
Cuffs or no cuffs, she couldn’t complain, because punishment was still his to give. If he chose to withhold the devastating heat of his kisses or keep her in a constant low hum of arousal—stimulated to an almost painful intensity just by his presence and a gentle touch—she could protest, but that protest would get her nowhere.
She leaned against his shoulder anyway.
“Are you ready?” he murmured. He licked one of the mostly healed marks he had made on her neck. The power of the incubus and succubus now held sway.
“No,” Maya replied.
“It is impossible for you to fail,” Bell said.
“Stage fright doesn’t listen to reason.”
“I’ll have a drink back here for you when you finish,” Bell said. “Something stronger than ale.”
“Now you’re speaking my language. Don’t suppose I can have it before?”
Bell turned her head so that she could see his raised eyebrow.
“No, I guess that wouldn’t be wise,” Maya answered for him.
“I’d recommend that you pretend they’re one of your old classes, but I think it might mortify you more if you thought any of your students would see you,” Bell said, grinning against her ear.
“If they even recognized me. But thank you. Now there’s no way I’m going to wonder if I’m going to scar one of my students for life one of these days.”
“Just trying to help,” Bell said.
Lily sauntered past them, followed by Christina, walking awkwardly but determinedly without her legs. Maya stopped Lily for a moment so that she could scratch the tiger along her spine. Lily swung her head around, her eyes narrowing with pleasure. Then Maya waved after her and Christina, silently wishing them luck. Christina nodded it back at her.
After the Ringmaster finished introducing the oddities to the audience, which was filled to the brim all the way around the three-quarter circle, Maya took a deep breath. Seth and Lars were on the catwalk waiting for their blue light. But Maya’s electric violin music began, and the light in the ring went carnival red.
The Ringmaster’s voice caressed through the darkness. “Next, a new addition to Arcanium, and making her high wire debut… A beautifully plumaged rare bird as comfortable in the air as you are on the ground, she was raised in a now demolished skyscraper and is always pursuing her next greatest high. Put your hands together for the lovely, scarlet Mistress Maya.”
Bell gently pushed her right through the curtain almost before she was ready, but Maya gathered herself together, spread her arms and curtsied to a swell of applause. She thought she heard a few moans and groans and sighs leftover from Lady Sasha’s and Lord Mikhail’s presence, but from where she stood, the audience had gone dark. There was only her red-light district world and the ladder to the platform.
To the rising crescendo of the music, Maya climbed to the platform and poised on the edge, hands above her head as though she were about to take a dive, which presented her breasts to the men and women who loved them. She adjusted her feet inside her leather slippers with the gripping soles and separated toes, but in the end those weren’t so much to keep her on the rope as they were to support her feet.
Maya began by flipping onto the rope with a sideways round-off. She landed on her feet and used the momentum to grab the rope with her hands and stand on them, toes pointed to the sky. Exclamations of amazement interspersed with applause as she began to walk the rope on her hands. Her arms shook as she focused on balance and form.
Bell had given her knowledge of technique as well as the strength and grace that came from a lifetime of performing these kinds of acts. But it would take longer than a week for Maya to trust that with which Bell had imbued her in a matter of seconds.
When she reached the middle of the rope, Maya did a backbend forward and rose up on her feet to another round of applause.
Remember to smile, Maya reminded herself. She flashed one as she adjusted her breasts so they were more adequately covered after having been under the influence of gravity for a few upside-down minutes. There was a ripple of laughter.
Maya reached into her bodice and pulled out a trio of metal rings. Sweat beaded on her forehead, but she kept smiling. To the rhythm of the music, Maya threw them into the air one by one and juggled as she walked back and forth on the wire, sometimes switching up the technique to keep it exciting. Juggling was another skill Bell had given her, apparently requisite for all Arcanium cast members.
She caught two of the rings then threw the last one much higher, almost all the way into the catwalk. Maya crouched then used the tension of the wire and her own strength and new flexibility to do a full flip backward. The audience sucked the air out of the room with their nervous gasps, but she stuck the landing and snatched the last ring out of the air. Smiling broadly, she hooked the rings onto her wrist and spread her arms to curtsy on the wire.
The rings slipped off over the cuffs and fell to the ground, clattering violently. Maya wobbled, her eyes going wide, and when she bowed to the western section of the audience, she pitched straight forward as though she was going to belly flop onto the ground.
And she stopped short in the air, perfectly horizontal and parallel to the ground, as though she had collapsed into an invisible cushion, Maya still kept her toes curved around the rope, but in a way that would hardly have kept her there.
With exaggerated surprise reminiscent of Tragedy, Maya slowly willed herself upright again, her body straight as a board, to the excited, perplexed and delighted murmurs of the audience, while the electric violin music rose to its climax.
Then she ran across the wire and cartwheeled onto the other platform before making her final bow. She and Bell would think of other things to add to the act in time, but this was enough for her first time, at least to keep her nerves from giving out.
Maya had never thought she’d enjoy audience acclaim, but she panted in the red spotlight, and applause hit her like bursts of cool air on her heated skin. One of the trapeze swings lowered in front of her, and she climbed onto it. As she waved goodnight, she ascended into the heavens to the conch roar of the audience clapping and whistling.
Seth and Lars helped her off her trapeze while golems moved her high wire equipment to the side to make room for Seth and Lars’ aeri
al act. Lars smiled and slapped her shoulder lightly in congratulations. Maya grinned like a lunatic and thought about slapping his ass right back. For these kinds of performances, when the cast wore leather, they went all the way to buffed and shining black that hugged the finely formed flanks on both men, not to mention the studded straps over their chests. It wasn’t just fucking hot because it was summer.
The next greatest high, indeed. Sure, the performance had been short, but she’d like to see anyone else in the audience do it.
As promised, Bell was waiting for her backstage with a cold glass of scotch on the rocks. Not only that, but she got an eyeful of him in his own pair of leather pants. They did absolutely nothing to conceal a single attribute or asset.
But she wasn’t going to let that distract her. Too much. “Thank Dionysus,” Maya said. She took two deep swallows, relishing the head rush and spread of warmth in her stomach.
“You did splendidly,” Bell murmured, leading her away from the curtain. “You don’t have to stay for the rest if you’d like some air.”
“No, I’m good with the nectar of the gods and post-performance endorphins,” Maya replied.
“Seth and Lars leave immediately after. You have no obligation.”
“I like it in here,” Maya said.
A return of Bell’s unreadable smile. He traced the line of her jaw with his thumb.
“We’ve set up a tent for the Kinksters’ dinner and meeting. They plan to have some demonstrations, instruction, suggestions.” He wrapped his hands around her cuffed wrists to pull her closer, the glint in his eyes playful. “Perhaps they’ll have a seminar about Masters and slaves, new things we might try.”
“Like, say, actually letting me finish?” Maya said.
He dipped down to kiss her then stopped himself. “Oh. Lipstick.” His grin broadened like the demon he was.
“You’re killing me here, Bell,” Maya said. She leaned her forehead on his chin. “The way it’s escalating, soon you’re not going to even touch me. You’ll convince Lady Sasha and Lord Mikhail to fuck each other right in front of us, then you’ll jerk off on me and you three will walk away and just leave me there with a huge ladyboner and no way to get rid of it. Because you would totally do that to me at this point.”
Fortune Page 25