Black Light: Valentine Roulette (Black Light Series Book 3)

by Livia Grant

Her belly tightened and the hard, cool foreignness of the hook embedded in her bowels prodded that much deeper and pulled at the back of her scalp that much harder. She tipped her head back to ease the pressure. She tried not to open her eyes, but she couldn’t resist. His back was to her now as he hunkered down at his bag again. Unable to see through her arms or below her shoulders, she couldn’t tell what he was doing. She thought she heard the plastic rattle of the markers knocking together, but then he stretched his arm and she caught a glimpse of a long black cord smoothing out between his hands.

  Was he going to flog her with a cord? Her stomach somersaulted all over again, only this time due more to nerves than arousal.

  “What is that for?”

  “This.” He held up the violet wand. With no glass electrode set into the end, it looked like a thick black headless Hitachi, right up until he plugged the black cord into it.

  She jerked, gaffing herself on the hook before she remembered not to move her head. Still, it wasn’t the hook or the minor awkwardness of her restrictions that put that thin note of panic into her voice. “You said we weren’t going to use that.”

  “We will,” he reminded her, “but we won’t. See?”

  She really had to crane her neck in order to see it when he strapped the holster around his waist and dropped the black handle of the wand into it. It might not be in his hand, but that didn’t make her feel better. It was going to have to be used, she knew. Whether she liked it or not, if the violet wand was not the focus of the scene, then they would lose the competition.

  Abby swallowed hard, barely noticing the hard flat plane of Newton’s stomach or the bunch and flex of his shoulders as he pulled his shirt off over his head and tossed it aside. At some point, she was going to have to pull up her non-existent big girl panties and just do it.

  Or call the club safeword.

  God, she hated electrical play.

  Right up until Newton set up a footswitch, turned the wand on, adjusted the setting down low and then picked up the end of the body cable he’d plugged into it. With his eyes on her, quite deliberately, he tucked the conductive end into the waistband of his pants, pressing it snug up against his hip.

  “I’m not going to touch you with the wand,” he said, showing her both empty hands. Then, just as deliberately, he reached for her. As if in slow motion, Abby watched his finger extend as the distance between his hand and her breast closed. He never actually touched her. He didn’t have to. He only had to come close enough for the spark to jump from the tip of his flesh to the stiffened peak of her nipple.

  Her whole body jolted, though the shock was little more than she would have received after scuffing her socks across the carpet. She caught her breath all over again, her hands gripping tight to the rigging as Newton trailed his fingers, dragging a prickly spider-crawl of static zaps along the under curve of each breast in turn. “Oh shit,” she breathed, her belly flinching, her skin still crawling long after he took his hands away.

  Newton’s smile was pure evil. “That’s the lowest setting and I’m content not only to keep it there, but to turn it off now and then and give you a nice, gentle, perhaps even easy ride all the way to the finish line. However…” He winked. “…where’s the fun in that?”

  “Oh shit!” Abby yelped again, fists squeezing tight on the rigging, the anal hook jabbing as deep as it would go as she cringed inward and Newton let both hands trail her sides, not quite touching, his fingertips just close enough to let the electrical current of the wand leap from his skin into hers. She could hear the spidery crackling, the hum of the wand, and every inch of her arched and writhed at the static crawling that followed his caress into the dip of her waist, across her stomach, over her hips and down her thighs.

  “Absolute obedience,” Newton said as his hands came drifting back up between her legs. “That’s what you’re going to give me, because each time you don’t I’m going to turn the setting up. Can you bear it?”

  She forgot about the anal hook only until she tried to nod. She groaned instead.

  “Good girl. Let’s test that, shall we? Close your eyes. And this time—” He winked. “—keep them closed if you know what’s good for you.”

  Her body was humming, throbbing. Everywhere he had touched her, the nerves were awakened and buzzing. She didn’t want to close her eyes, afraid of how much stronger the sensation might be if she couldn’t see it, brace for it, before he touched her. And yet, she could feel the wetness growing between her legs, as well as the giddiness with which her pussy eagerly absorbed everything he did.

  Humming—half nerves, half anticipation—Abby obeyed him. Clinging to the suspension hook, she trembled while she waited for the next shock, the next caress, the next command.

  The heat of his breath brushed her cheek. If not for the hook and the constant pressure pulling on her hair, she’d have raised her head, turned toward the source of that breath, made herself available for the static kiss that was sure to follow. Except that Newton didn’t kiss her. She heard the click of the floor switch before the wand ceased its threatening hum, and then he whispered, “Keep your eyes closed. Concentrate. You’re going to feel the tip of a marker touch you on the back. It’s going to write something and I want you to tell me what it says. If you can, your reward will be one full minute of absolute delight. If you can’t, you and I are going to writhe and shriek our way through sixty long seconds of hell. Do you understand what I’ve just told you?”

  “Yes,” Abby quavered. God help her, she still wanted to kiss him. Newton! And yet in this moment she couldn’t for the life of her think of anyone she’d rather have whispering this same bewitching threat.

  “Here’s the marker,” he warned, but even knowing it was coming when she felt the tap of that narrow touch just below her right shoulder blade, she still jumped. “Easy, sweetheart. You can do this.”

  The heat of a gentle hand covered her left breast, cupping, holding, lightly plucking at the tip, teasing her with back and forth passes of his thumb that sometimes touched and sometimes didn’t, and God if her nipples didn’t ache for the lack of more. The way her lips still ached, tingling in the same hyper-electric way her hips tingled from the caress of his spidery hands.

  “Concentrate,” Newton reminded and all of Abby’s nerves locked on the tip of the marker as it moved over her skin. She felt the squiggle of an ‘s’ or maybe a ‘b’, but whoever was writing did it faster than she was prepared for and her senses were so fractured, quivering and caught between the anticipation of what had already happened and what was yet to come. How many letters had been drawn? Was it four, five maybe? Was punctuation involved?

  “Slut?” she guessed, opting for what she hoped was a safe guess. Over the years, she’d seen a few of these types of scenes and ‘slut’ was almost always involved. Her pussy tightened, liking the idea.

  “Not even close,” Newton replied.

  The marker, Newton, all sense of ‘other’ touching left her. She heard the click of the footswitch, the aggressive hum of the current as he turned it up two notches and though she braced herself, drawing two quick deep breathes, she lost all her air in one startled shriek when he zapped both her jutting, tightly budded nipples at once. Her eyes flew open, but seeing it coming didn’t help her bear it any better. She kept hold of the suspension hook, but only just. She jerked and stamped, and twisted, wrenching her hips, her breasts, her legs backwards, forwards, convulsively from side to side, anywhere and everywhere she might escape the next biting jolt of electricity his tapping fingers sought to impart, and finding no avenue of escape anywhere at all.

  He left no part of her unmolested. Hell, he’d called it, and certainly that’s where he took her as he raked his fingers down her body, dragging the dancing, crackling sparks of electricity over her hips and buttocks and down the backs of oh so sensitive legs. He tortured her feet and she howled, but nowhere near as loudly or as emphatically as her shrieks became as his fingers began that slow drift back up her body,
across her knees, up the inner slope of her thighs to the slick wet drips of lubrication that gathered up all those tingling jolts, dispersed them through the moisture and shot them all the way into her sex. Up into her clutching, spasming womb. All through the inner and outer nerves of her overstimulated clit. She tried to climb the suspension rigging up into the rafters, until her feet went out from under her and she flopped and floundered on the hook while he rolled his fingers all around her clit, zapping but not touching, no matter how she moved.

  “Time,” he proclaimed, shutting off the wand and cupping her mons, his fingers attempting to soothe all the places he had just sparked, but there was no reprieve. Her body was a live wire, sparking now in all her tiniest nerve endings. Buzzing in the calming cocoon that Newton made of himself when he took her into his arms. “Shh, shhh,” he lulled. Until that moment, she didn’t even realize every breath came with its own mewling-whimpering sound. “What color are you, Abby?”

  They hadn’t talked about either the color or number systems, but she had attended enough dungeons and played in enough scenes that when he asked she automatically answered, “Green.”

  “Where are you, one to ten?”

  “Seven,” she panted, the pressure on her hair and head too heavy to raise. “My neck…”

  Without letting her go, he reached around her and plucked the ribbon free of the hook. The pressure eased immediately and she dragged her head up in relief.

  “Slow breaths,” he said, taking hold of the back of the anal hook.

  Resting her head against his shoulder, she did as he told her. Her sex protested the loss as Newton eased it from her ass. His fingers circled her rim, but that only made the ache of emptiness within her that much harder to ignore.

  “Here comes the marker,” he murmured against her cheek, and Abby opened her eyes. He hadn’t let her go, not one time, so that meant he must have passed the anal hook to someone else. She stared into the crook of his neck, knowing she’d be mortified about that part of it later because right now, every sense she had zeroed in on the tip of the marker that had just come to rest on the small of her back. Right above her buttocks.

  “Two minutes of heaven if you get it right; two minutes of torment if you’re wrong.” His hands smoothed her hair down her back before moving lower still, catching her by the hips and holding her steady. “Concentrate.”

  Body humming, barely breathing, this time Abby felt a few stick lines and then that same squiggle again. What, was it a phrase? The same as before, or a different one? Wait, that was a ‘t’? So, some stick lines, a squiggle and a ‘t’…

  “‘I’m stubborn’?” she guessed. What were the chances? After all she’d done to him these last two years, ‘stubborn’ was the kindest thing she could think of to describe herself.

  “Nice try, but incorrect.”

  Abby’s stomach fell when she heard the click of the footswitch reactivating the violet wand. Two minutes of hell. Not one this time, but double what she had already endured. Her eyes were huge when Newton stepped back from her.

  “Can you take it?” he asked, but her heart stumbled, her sex pulsed, and that look on his face said he already knew she wasn’t going to quit. No matter what he did, she wouldn’t. She refused.

  “Let go if you need to,” he reminded a half second before the zap of his fingertips came back into sharp contact with her nipples.

  Her pussy wept.

  Big, dumb jerk.

  Chapter 6

  Her areolae were swollen with desire, making them seem twice their normal size. The nipples were tight beads, lost among a sea of goose bumps that covered her breasts, belly, and legs. A sheen of feminine wetness coated the inner slope of her thighs, dripping from swollen folds to create a dark damp stain on the carpet under her. He didn’t know whose bright idea brought carpeting into a place like this, but if there was justice in the world, that person would be responsible for cleaning the floors before the next party.

  “Time,” a man in the audience quietly said, and Newton immediately shut off the wand.

  Once more, he closed the distance between them, wrapping his arms around her, lending her the strength her badly shaking body needed just to remain standing and filling his senses with the intoxication that the cloud of her arousal had left in the air between them. Pleasure and pain were too closely interwoven for her right now. He could see it in the dazedness of her eyes as her groaning moans calmed to pants and mews, and ragged gasps for air that seemed incapable of filling the deletion inside her.

  God, she was beautiful. Newton held her, rocked her, moved with her dwindling undulations until she fell into step with his gentle back and forth swaying like long-lost lovers dancing heart to heart. Never in his wildest dreams would he have thought Abby—snarky, sarcastic Abby, the bane of his dominant existence at least as far as party nights went—capable of responding to him like this. Never in his wildest dreams would he have thought he’d have this much fun—good, clean, honest fun without a single dip into harsh payback—playing with her, either. But he was. More than fun, this was exactly what he had come to Black Light for tonight and he was riding high in topspace, playing her body better than David Garrett ever played a fiddle, depriving his own the sweet release he never once suspected he would desire to achieve with this of all submissives, of all women.

  Abby.

  She melted against him, panting, gasping, rolling her hips and probably mindless of the high salute his cock was giving her behind the confines of his zipped fly. She was flying in subspace. Soaring so far above and beyond herself that he could have done anything, suggested any kink or depravity and she’d have followed him into it. Newton folded his arms around her that much tighter, danced with her that much slower, grateful for her that he wasn’t that kind of man. Whatever else happened by the end of this night, Newton could already tell he wasn’t going to leave this party quite the same as when he’d come into it.

  “What color are you?” he asked, soft as a kiss against her cheek.

  Her shaky breath caressed his own. “Green,” she whispered.

  “One to ten, what number?”

  “Five,” she breathed.

  Yeah, she was soaring in subspace all right. Flying so high with her endorphins pumping so wildly through her that he could see the euphoria in her eyes. But then, he could also see the trembling in her hands as she barely kept hold of the suspension hook. He could see the exhaustion in her as easily as he could see the sweat shining on her skin, and the arousal shining brighter, a beacon luring him to tease and touch and even to taste—what would it hurt?—once, just once before bringing this scene to its definitive end.

  He checked the clock: eleven minutes left before he could successfully call the scene. He checked Abby next, sending the time-keeper for a bottle of water and holding it for her while she drank. Slow sips. He wiped her brow and her body—as if the conductivity of the violet wand were his paramount concern, rather than dragging out the time—and then he signaled his helper out in the audience—a middle-aged submissive in a Little pinafore and pigtails—from her Daddy’s knee. She came forward eagerly, marker in hand though she waited to uncap it until he motioned with a tap where he wanted her to write. He mouthed the same phrase and she nodded before stepping in close enough to comfortably write down the length of Abby’s spine.

  “Five minutes,” he warned, feeling how Abby’s breath caught and her body tensed when she felt the first touch of the marker on her back. “Pleasure or pain. Close your eyes.”

  He felt the flutter of her lashes against the side of his neck as she obeyed.

  “Concentrate.”

  She curled into him. Did she even realize she’d just done that? Probably not. This was Abby, after all. He brushed a kiss across her forehead anyway and held her tighter before motioning the Little to write. She went slowly, each letter big enough to be read even from across the room and he could feel Abby’s tension as she struggled through the fog of subspace to match the letters in h
er mind.

  “I’m straight?” she murmured.

  Newton lost his composure to a smile. “That’s up to you, darling, but that’s not what’s on your back.”

  She was so close to being done. He could see it in her eyes, mixed in behind the weariness and the arousal and the rush of groggy confusion that was subspace. Someone with a love for electrical play could have done more and gone much longer, but Abby wasn’t one of them. This wasn’t her kink and it was taking a lot out of her. Were this any other day, any other submissive, he’d have called the scene. But this wasn’t any other day, and more importantly, it wasn’t any other submissive. This was Abby, and their time was short. By eleven measly minutes… ten now. He eyed the clock, in the back of his mind weighing what he knew he should do with how he knew she would receive it. Were she anyone else, he wouldn’t care—literally anyone else would be reasonable. But Abby…

  She had made his life miserable over one misunderstood comment made two years ago. If he called the scene now, over ten minutes, Abby would not take it gracefully. She might even take it personally. Another brick added to the guilt and mortar wall she had built up in her mind for why something so awful had happened to her. Not because she had fallen prey to the advantages of a predator, but because of some continuous perceived weakness.

  A good Dom knew when to call a scene.

  A good Dom also made damn sure the injuries he or she inflicted were always the consensual kind.

  “No,” she moaned, as if she could read the direction of his thoughts. Or perhaps because she could feel him already reaching for the wand. He turned the setting all the way down, knowing in this state the next five minutes were going to take everything out of her that she had left, no matter what.

  “Sorry, sweetheart,” he said, feigning cheerful regret while he checked her pupils and then her pulse, the slight tremble in her hands, and finally made his decision. “Rules are rules. You wouldn’t think much of me if I failed to enforce them.”