Ringmaster

by Aurelia T. Evans

  “What has gotten into you?” Kitty asked. It wasn’t just her position and the corset that made her breathless. She gripped the edge in wordless frustration. Was everyone losing their minds?

  He chuckled.

  He’d never made a sound like that before. Kitty had seen him smile. When Bell told him to give twenty lashes or more. When Maya walked into the ring on Saturday nights. It didn’t have quite the same quality when he addressed an audience as when he didn’t have to conceal his intent. His genuine smiles were truly beautiful, truly horrifying in their beauty. His laughter was the same.

  “What has gotten into me? That question once suggested possession,” the Ringmaster said. “I have not been possessed, Katharine. What could possibly possess me?”

  Once again, that crunch of the grass and dirt under his boots.

  Because the night was so cool, the heat from his legs through the leather trousers was made all the more apparent against her legs, against her ass, which seemed presented to him by the way she had arranged herself.

  One couldn’t call the Ringmaster well-spoken, especially when compared to the melodramatic persona he assumed in the ring itself. But he was downright articulate right now. The stilted, stuttering demon of their first encounter seemed to have found his tongue.

  “I am a demon. I was born demon from the fires of a hell that I served for millennia. I do not question what I am. I do not deny it,” the Ringmaster said. He pushed his hips against her ass and bent over her familiarly to grasp her wrists and jerk them behind her back.

  Kitty gave a small cry at the strain against her shoulders. He pulled her arms up her back a little more to make her squirm on the edge of pain.

  “Keep them there,” he said.

  If she did as he’d said, it would be even harder for her to get up again. Her cheek was pressed hard against the wood, which smelled of cigarette smoke, circus food and sweat.

  Kitty interlaced her fingers between the wings of her shoulder blades to hold them where he had put them.

  “All these years, you knew that you let a demon fuck you. You never stopped it, even though you could have, with the restrictions that Bell placed upon me. After all these years, I have finally realized what troubled me,” the Ringmaster said. “It was that you never really saw the demon. You only saw the demon tamed. Do you understand what you accept into your bed, Katharine?”

  There were gentle tugs on her scalp from her braid. It took her a minute to realize that he was undoing it.

  But only part of the way up, just above her clasped hands.

  He took one wrist and wrapped a piece of the braid around it with a firm twist. He did the same to the other wrist before efficiently tying the braid back down her back.

  She thought that if she wriggled her wrists, her hair would be slippery enough for her to slip out if she needed to. When she tested it, she was surprised to find that her hair was soft but inflexible. As rope, it was unrelenting.

  The only thing she could manage to say was, “I didn’t know you could braid.”

  “I know how to bind,” the Ringmaster replied. “Dear girl, do you yet realize that Bell can’t save you? He has never been able to see into my mind.”

  “The reason I’m not shivering in my sandals right now is because, even if it’s true that he can’t read you, he can still read me,” Kitty said. Actually, now that her hair held her arms back instead of Kitty having to hold them up on her own, she was surprisingly comfortable. At a kind of peace, as though the haze of exhaustion had settled into her like autumn chill or the Ringmaster’s heat. The partition wasn’t the softest of places, but she could close her eyes and, tired as she was, she might even be able to sleep here.

  “Are you so sure of that?” the Ringmaster asked.

  “He wouldn’t employ a demon he couldn’t control,” Kitty said.

  “Control.” The word was velvet in her ear, smooth through clenched teeth. “He believes he can control me as he controls you.”

  “He doesn’t control me,” Kitty said.

  “Then what makes you think he controls me?”

  His whip hit the wood in front of her eyes. Kitty flinched, but the Ringmaster had simply tossed the circle of his whip down next to her.

  “He doesn’t have to control me,” Kitty said. “Does he have to control you?”

  “Every minute of every day.”

  He jerked her up by her braid.

  “In his sleep he controls me. In my sleep he controls me. But he will not remove my memory. I would never wish that of him,” the Ringmaster said. He made short work of her copper spider web corset, undoing the hooks and throwing it onto the partition.

  As soon as her corset was off, he dug his fingers into the hair above her braid and pushed her back down like an interrogator forcing his subject’s head under water. He pressed her into the wood too hard, mashing her cheek against it until she cried out. Her breasts were also crushed against the stiff wood, plumping to either side. They were sensitive to the harsh sensation of the partition against them, as though she could sense every detail of the wood grain. It roughed over her nipples, which felt hard as quartz chips and not just from the cold.

  “I remember lifetimes of torture, Katharine. We had devices that humans, in their admirable variety, had not begun to imagine. I could touch a soul and burn it to its core. I wielded my whip upon the backs of thousands, one torment after another. I never tired. I never flinched. I never relented. I dealt that which gave me true pleasure every day, every night, until I rose from the hell I inhabited and cut my swath in your world.”

  He trailed his large, strong fingers down her shoulders, lingering where her wrists had been tied as though admiring his handiwork, then trailed them farther down her back until he reached the fitted waist of her skirt.

  “What changed?” Kitty asked.

  He huffed, a low, furious exhalation like a bull.

  She squirmed with a helpless moan when he grasped the material and tore it with his bare hands. He had been kinder to the corset, which had taken more skill, effort and time. The skirt was much more easily replaced. She barely gave its destruction a thought.

  Then he ripped her panties off, and she was completely naked to his gaze, bound by her own hair, unable to get away from him as he closed his hands around her thighs and jerked them apart.

  “What changed? Nothing changed. I was ensnared, captured like a beast in a net. Bell promised me the opportunity to join the dungeon he had created. He offered me the position of Master, the controller of the ring, the one to distribute the punishments. He deceived me,” the Ringmaster said. “This…this is no dungeon. Bell likes to play with humans like toys, but his play is far from the exquisite cruelty and endless hell on earth that he promised me.”

  “Did he promise?” Kitty asked. “Did he really?”

  “No,” the Ringmaster admitted with bitterness in his voice like nightshade. She heard the gentle whisper of leather and skin. He was taking off his trousers. “Ever the slippery eel, he implied. He said as much without saying anything at all. If he had not ensnared me into a wish, I would have hung him on a hook and had my way with him for five centuries or longer, until the jinni had learned better than to trap his own kind.”

  He came up behind her again, still the man, his cock a rigid, burning branding iron against her ass as he dug his fingers into her waist hard enough to bruise. Kitty struggled against her hair bonds.

  “For two centuries, I have served that wishful jinni as his faithful attack dog, while he feeds me nothing but scraps. You saw the mealy worms with which he attempts to indulge his demon—your petulant puppy of a man.”

  The Ringmaster shoved three of his fingers into her pussy. This wasn’t his cock. There was no magic to help her accommodate his girth this time. First she was empty then his fingers split her through, forcing themselves in and stretching her cunt all around them.

  “Why?” the Ringmaster growled. “Why are you this wet? You shouldn’t—”

>   He thrust them in again before opening his fingers inside her wide enough to make her whine high in her head, but when he pulled out, she panted and tried to control how much she wanted him back inside. Now that the incubus and succubus magic had something to latch onto, she was practically dripping with desperation. It was cold where it trickled down and dried.

  He struck his palm over her buttocks, spanking her as hard as he could, with the thick, meaty sound of a powerful hand meeting a cushioned ass—once, twice, three times, four times, five. One blow for each lash he had given Victor.

  “Why do you want this, woman?” the Ringmaster demanded as he hit her.

  Five hadn’t been enough for Victor, and five wasn’t enough for her. He kept raining the painful blows down on her. They ground her hips against the edge of the partition and rubbed her breasts and stomach and cheek on the wood until everything was raw and flushed from friction.

  “Tell me to stop,” he rumbled above her.

  Kitty turned her head the other way, bracing herself against the blows. But she didn’t say anything.

  He plunged three fingers into her cunt again then withdrew one and inserted it into her hole, using only her juices to lubricate the way. It was uncomfortable, but other men had done this with her, and she knew how to relax—no matter how tense the rest of her was.

  “Tell me to stop, Katharine,” he repeated. “Stop wanting it. Tell me to stop.”

  He slapped her ass and her thighs as he finger-fucked her, speeding up his thrusts until she was arching her back each time, the partition pressing against her pubic bone in painful but delicious pressure.

  “Damn you!” he shouted. He yanked his hand out of her and shook it. A few drops of her juices hit her back. “Damn you into my hell, woman. Don’t you know that I would have you like this on my dining room table, three pairs of anguish inside you, one in your rectum, one in your cunt and the other in your pretty little mouth? I would shave every inch of you so that you couldn’t have a single pretty hair on your vain body, everything beautiful about you stripped away until you were nothing. I would flog this skin”—he smoothed his hands over her back and cupped her sides where her ribs met her breasts—“with tails that ended in glass to gouge you into a mess of bloody meat, but it wouldn’t kill you. Oh no. There’s no death where I would take you. And take you. And take you. And take you until you were raw and bleeding and too broken to scream, so I would have my other slaves scream for you, because that is music to my ears, Katharine. Do you understand?”

  He grabbed her braid above her hands, which pulled on her head and neck and on her wrists. She cried out, her mouth dropping open. When he lifted her up, her breasts hung heavy beneath her, and her nipples brushed the wood in agonizing tickles. All balance and control were lost. He had her helpless in his grip.

  “I’m not going to take you with the magic making it easy,” the Ringmaster said in her ear. “Tell me not to.”

  “No,” she gasped.

  “That’s right,” he said, jerking her braid again. “Tell me not to.”

  “No,” she whispered. She turned to peer up at him. He smoldered with hellfire black not just in his eyes but everywhere on his face, in his posture, in the tension of his muscles, everywhere. “Don’t stop.”

  He slapped her breast then sharply pinched and tugged at her nipple. He did it again and again while she writhed against his body, his intimidating cock nestled almost sweetly in the cleft of her ass, smearing it with pre-cum. He switched his hold on her braid to punish the other breast. She was shaking her head, tears hot and stinging in the inside corner of her eyes, wetting the hair on her cheeks and passing salt onto her lips.

  The Ringmaster released her hair, dropping her as though she was nothing more than a briefcase before grabbing her hips and pushing his cock into her.

  He was much too big. His fingers couldn’t prepare her for him. Her saliva wetted the wood where her mouth was open against it. She wanted to bite, but there was nothing to hold onto. She wanted to tear her nails through something, but all she could so was dig them into her palms. The head of his cock hit her cervix and beyond. Again, it was intensely uncomfortable, something so hot, so hard, so tremendous inside of her without magic to make room.

  But with the discomfort came a rough, intense storm of lust that clamped around him and sizzled through her veins like hot oil—something fiercer, more dangerous, darker than any lust she had ever felt before. It was too obscene to even be considered desire. Desire was polite. What throttled through her was anything but polite.

  A grating noise clawed through her throat as the Ringmaster pulled back then filled her again, until she almost felt like she was going to tear apart, but she didn’t. She spread her legs wider, moaning in tortured ecstasy as her cunt molded itself around the contours of his cock, in spite of the abuse that it gave her.

  He grabbed her braid again, using it to hold her down as he snatched the whip from next to her and held it before her eyes. Then he pulled her head up and looped the circle of leather around her neck under her chin. He used the whip and his grip on her hair to hold her up, not choking her but painfully positioning her, forcing her back into a curve.

  “Tell…me…to…stop,” the Ringmaster rumbled through clenched teeth as he thrust into her, making her breasts swing. He shook her. “Say it!” he bellowed.

  “God, don’t stop,” she begged.

  The Ringmaster dropped his forehead against her hair above the start of her braid, his breath like a furnace against her neck as he huffed and panted, fucking her against the partition so hard she thought it might be stripping off thin layers of skin. He jerked his hold on her hair and on the whip. She briefly thought that he would snap her neck, but she couldn’t focus long enough on the fear for it to stay.

  Kitty had been reduced to sensation—her mind, her responsibilities, her obligations, her standards, everything gone out into the darkness like moths. It didn’t matter where the sensations were unpleasant or painful, because there were other sensations that were giant forked lightning in the storm clouds of her body—sweat, tears and juices nothing more than a deluge of rain. She spiraled, spiraled, spiraled like a hurricane around the center of her cunt, until she twitched violently up with sounds that she never would have guessed could come from her as she reached a climax like nothing she’d known. She tightened impossibly around the erection that already stretched her to the brink.

  The Ringmaster dropped the whip and wrenched her head to the side to close his mouth over her neck, too rough to be a kiss. Yet what else could it be? Because it didn’t hurt, his teeth locking around her flesh but not breaking it, his lips and his tongue hot and gentle, the prickle of his beard teasing her shoulder. His free hand clasped her breast hard, but not so hard that he seemed like he wanted to wrench it off. On the contrary, he held her as though he never wanted to let her go as he shoved his cock into her all the way to the base, grinding his hips against her ass through his own orgasm. She could feel his cock lengthening, pushing inside her, as he filled her with heat so much stronger than her own that, for a moment, it was like she was burning.

  She writhed until the heat dispersed. To her shock, another climax shuddered through her like a strong afterthought, and the Ringmaster held her even closer, releasing his hold on her hair to wrap his arm under her breasts so that her hands pressed against his abdomen.

  He kissed all over her neck, under her chin, over the top of her breast that he cupped in his massive hand.

  “Look what you make me do,” he murmured near her ear before making her shiver with kisses right where he’d spoken.

  “You didn’t have to,” Kitty whispered. Her neck was swollen at the top of her throat, like she had a small inflated inner tube behind her tongue from the whip. It would subside.

  The Ringmaster stroked over the red places on her breasts where the wood had rubbed against her, rocking his still-hard cock inside her, against the thick, soft swelling of her post-orgasm cunt. “Tell me to
stop,” he said.

  She turned her head to look at him where he’d rested his chin against her shoulder.

  “I don’t need to,” she said.

  He met her when she leaned toward him, their mouths angling to taste, the sharpness of his teeth on her lip an edge she craved as she moaned into the kiss. At no point had Bell come riding in like a morally gray knight to stop the Ringmaster from doing any of the things he had done, nor would Kitty have wanted him to.

  Kitty gave a quiet cry as he caught her lower lip between his teeth and eased his cock out of her. She felt as though she was terribly open from him. Their combined fluids trickled down her thigh. His erection softened against her hip, the choice made.

  “Damn women,” he muttered, retreating from her and leaving her, for a moment, terribly alone.

  Awkward with her arms still bound behind her back, she rolled onto her side and pushed herself to her feet. The Ringmaster had reclined on the ground, heedless of the dirt or the potential for insects—no more than any satyr would care, even though he kept his human appearance as he stared up at the booth’s ceiling. His eyes were black all the way to the edges, the only evidence of his demonic origins.

  Kitty knelt beside him like a servant girl. He turned his expressionless face toward her.

  “You don’t like that Maya offers herself to you instead of you whipping her against her will? You don’t like it when I offer myself to you?” Kitty asked. “You don’t have to do any of it. You can wish yourself out like anyone else.”

  The Ringmaster didn’t answer. Whatever had inspired him to speak tonight had fled or perhaps hidden itself back in its pitch black cave. He just reached behind her to pull the rubber band from the bottom of her braid. He unwove it up to her wrists. She groaned as she bent her aching arms back to the front, in spite of their protests.

  The Ringmaster continued to free her hair from the braid until it spread over her shoulders and draped over her breasts. He reached up through the curtain of it to close his hand around her neck, but the gesture was possessive, not aggressive.