The music has slowed down or maybe it just feels that way. Yuri takes me with a tenderness that feels like heaven, like we’re a girl and a boy making sweet, innocent love on the couch. My pussy feels so tight around his cock and he fills me so completely I almost cry. I look up at the ceiling and think about our day, about how the Goddess is showing us that heaven lives within hell, that you have to pass through hell to get to your heaven.
“This is heaven,” I groan as Yuri’s back tightens and he pumps a bit harder into me. I’m so wet now he’s moving smoothly inside me, and I nod again and wrap my legs around his waist. He growls and bites my neck, and when he rams hard into me and makes my teeth rattle, I know he’s close.
We come together a moment later, and my vision goes black as Yuri floods me with heat that burns its way up through my body all the way to my throat. He yells as he pulls back and drives back in and explodes again, and I scream when I feel his heavy balls slap against my wet underside and clench like they’re serving up more seed.
I feel myself overflowing down my crack as Yuri shouts again and pushes more of his thick semen into me, and when I come again and scream and don’t hear myself scream, I realize the music just changed again.
Yuri collapses against my neck with a groan, his heavy body smothering me, his panting shaking me. My eyes are wide open and my body’s humming, but the music’s thumping and I feel the Goddess watching, feel her whispering, feel her saying that heaven and hell are two sides of the coin, that if you want one, you need to accept the other, that the secret that only the enlightened ones understand is that it’s all heaven and it’s all hell and not everyone can understand that and not everyone wants to understand it.
“But I do,” I whisper as Yuri kisses my neck and my lips and my cheeks. “I want to understand it. All of it. Heaven and hell. That’s where the divine lives. She lives on both sides of the line, in the night and the day, the dark and the light. That’s why people need preparation for enlightenment, why so many go insane when they see that the Goddess is a multi-tentacled beast who gives life and takes it, who teases you with pleasure and torments you with pain, that the real Goddess is both an angel and a demon, like Kaali or Medusa. Or me.”
And now I dig my nails back into those raw cuts on Yuri’s back, ripping the tender clots open and making him roar in pleasure that comes from the pain. He pulls back off me and grabs me by the hair and yanks me up off the glass floor of the center stage. I scream as the music howls, and now Yuri forces me down over his knee and raises his hand and brings it down hard three times on my ass.
The slaps ring out like gunshots, and I wail as Yuri spanks me like the demon-goddess is guiding his hand. Tears roll down my cheeks as I laugh and sob at the same time, as pleasure and pain rack my body at once, as the two-headed goddess dances above us, clapping a hundred hands all at once.
My ass stings and burns as I get spanked like a bad nun at the altar, and I’m so wet that I’m dripping all over Yuri’s lap. He massages my tender ass that’s just been spanked raw, and I groan as the pleasure of his touch converts the pain to something sickeningly sweet. I groan again as he spreads my asscheeks and runs his fingers along my dark crack. Then I gasp when he holds my buttocks wide open and spits on my asshole.
Both sides of the coin, I think as Yuri circles my rim and then pushes his thick thumb into my asshole and holds it there. I stare at my reflection in the dark glass floor of the stage. The lights are bright and hot and the music is heavy and dark. Yuri spanks my bottom again, once on each cheek. Then he stops, but I can hear something else.
I crane my neck towards the club-floor, and then I yelp when I see people standing around the stage! It’s all women, and I realize it must be the dancers who came in for their shifts! Ohmygod, they must have seen the bodies! Ohmygoodness, they must have seen me get spanked! Ohmybeavens, they’re . . . they’re . . . they’re . . .
They’re clapping.
They’re fucking clapping!
I’m about to push Yuri away and cover myself and say no, this is too much, that I’m not ready to see how far the Goddess wants me to go, what she wants me to experience, how much darkness she wants to bring out in me.
But I don’t push him away.
I don’t because I understand what the Goddess is teaching me.
What she’s showing me.
What she’s offering me.
She’s offering me a chance to straddle both sides of the chasm, to rule over my darkness and my light, to accept my darkness and my light, to love my darkness and my light.
My heaven and my hell.
My always and my forever.
And as the thought comes, so does Yuri. He comes from behind, holding me down as we face the hooting, hollering audience of sinners and believers, his muscular hips driving his thick shaft deep into my darkest of holes, his heavy balls shooting the last of his seed into the depths of my anus as my climax splinters my mind like an exploding star.
10
YURI
“They think you’re a star, an angel, a fucking goddess,” I say to Yasmin as we walk back to the truck after dumping the bodies in what’s now a very organic landfill on the edge of Salt Lake City. “I talked to the girls. Nobody’s going to say a thing. They hated Grigori and they’re glad he’s gone. And since Grigori killed the Mother Supreme and she killed him, the girls can’t blackmail us. Besides, I don’t think they’d have said a thing anyway. It’s like you cast a spell over them. The way you danced up there after we finished? Damn, Yasmin. Who are you? Nun or necromancer?”
She turns red like a ruby as we drive out of the landfill lot and head back to the club. “I’m both,” she says after a long silence. I nod like I understand. And I do understand. I just can’t fucking explain it.
Can’t explain it in words.
But maybe that’s because the Goddess speaks without words.
Speaks in a different language.
The language of always.
The language of forever.
The language of us.
EPILOGUE
FIVE YEARS LATER
YASMIN
“That’s a nice photo of us,” Yuri says. He hands me his phone and takes the four-year old twins Yes and Yen from my aching arms.
I glance at the photo and frown. “Do I really look that pregnant? I’ve got to ordain twenty new nuns next week. I’m going to look like a balloon in my habit on stage!”
“I thought you did away with wearing habits at the convent,” he says, patting my baby-belly and then slyly squeezing my milk-swollen boobs. I glance at the twins but they’ve seen that so many times it’s not even a thing. I can’t wait until they go into society and show the world how they've been raised.
I wonder what people will say when they explain that Daddy runs a Bratva-financed strip club and Mommy is Mother Supreme at a revived, highly modified version of the old Ravarnian Faith.
“We still wear habits for the formal ordaining ceremonies,” I remind him. “And of course, once the nuns go out on their missions, they can wear habits if they choose.”
“Do a lot of them do that?”
I nod. “Ritual is important in religion. You need to get into the act so you can lose yourself, so your audiences can lose themselves.” I shrug as I waddle my pregnant ass into the main club room and wave to some of the dancers who’ve been with us for years. “Not so different from what we do here,” I say as we watch a couple of girls on stage practice some new moves. “It’s a ritual for people to lose themselves, to get a glimpse of heaven—or hell, if that’s what on their minds.”
Yuri grins, raising an eyebrow as he steals a glance down my cleavage. “Is that what’s on your mind?” he whispers.
“Hell is very much on my mind every time I think of birthing triplets with big heads that clearly come from your side of the family.” I pat my belly and Yuri sizes up his forehead and frowns like he doesn’t think his head is that big. It is, trust me.
&
nbsp; “I wish we had some family alive,” Yuri says, taking the phone back and sighing at our family photo. “Though of course there would be some tension if my father was still alive. He was Russian, you know. Married a Ravarnian and eventually defected and fought in the Ravarnian Revolution, of course. But still there would have been some tension with your Mama, yes?”
I smile up at him as I think of Mama and how she fled the country alone with me and her green suitcase. It occurs to me I never told Yuri the story of how she stuffed me into that suitcase to get past the Russian soldiers guarding the docks. I tell him as we watch the dancers get ready for the happy-hour crowd. He doesn’t say anything, and I turn my attention to the twins. They’re fine, but when I look back at Yuri he’s ashen.
“What’s with you?” I say. “Are you still pissed about that big-head comment?”
Yuri blinks and looks at me like I just pulled him back from someplace else. He blinks again and shakes his head and rubs his jaw. “Green suitcase?” he says, his voice low, his words halting. “Your mother put you in a green suitcase? At the docks? Really? You are lying to me, yes? Did I drunkenly tell you the story of my father and now you are playing a joke on my big head, yes?”
“What story of your father? All you told me was that je was stationed in Ravarnia while in the Russian army. He got a Ravarnian girl pregnant with you, refused to marry her for years, and then suddenly changed his mind and eloped with her to Ravarnia.”
Yuri glances at the twins. They’re being fawned over by sweet-smelling strippers in tinsel and titty-stickers. He looks back at me and steps close.
“Yasmin, listen,” he says, his face no longer ashen but flushed red with an excitement I feel in my heart. “My father . . . the day he decided to marry my mother and accept me as his son . . . that day something happened.” He pauses and shakes his head and looks at me with one eye closed like he’s still wondering if I’m messing with him. I’m not. He takes a breath and draws even closer. “It happened at the docks, Yasmin.” He swallows and now my heart pounds louder than the music. “A girl with a green suitcase,” Yuri whispers. “My father and two others stopped her. They stopped many in those days. Some they arrested. Others they let flee in return for . . . things. Money. Other things. You understand?”
I close my eyes and my heart sinks and I nod. Mama never did tell me what she offered in return for her life. And my life. Oh, please, no. Please don’t tell me something I can’t unhear.
“My father says the girl was a teenager, so young but with lines on her face already,” Yuri says. Sounds like Mama, I think as I touch my heart and hold back the tears. “She was prepared to offer anything to get on that ship. Anything, you understand?”
I can’t speak and I can’t even nod.
Yuri slips his arm around my shoulder and pulls me close, kissing me on the forehead and smiling even though I can’t smile.
“But then, before anything happened, my father says he looked at that green suitcase and something happened to him. He doesn’t understand it, but it was like a thought was put into his head. Not a thought in words, but a thought in feeling. He just felt like he had to let this teenager with a green suitcase go past them. Unmolested. Untouched.”
A sob bursts out of me, and Yuri holds me so tight I can barely breathe. But he’s warm and I need to be held tight right now.
“You must understand, Yasmin, my father was not a good man. He and the others did unspeakable things and laughed about it. But not that night. Not with that girl. That girl who was carrying precious cargo in her green suitcase. Carrying her for me. For his son. For this, Yasmin.”
Now we both break, and we bury ourselves in each other and turn from the others so they don’t see. I don’t want them to see even though they’ve all seen me and Yuri naked under these lights. I don’t want them to see because this is for us.
It’s a private moment.
A moment of wonder.
A moment where you’re so overwhelmed by the web the Goddess spins that you can’t understand it without your head whirling like a dervish, without your heart exploding like a star, without your soul singing like it knows the words.
The words to your song.
The notes to your music.
The ending to your story.
Saving the Sinner (Curvy for Keeps Book 9) Page 6
