by CD Reiss
He slapped his wet hand hard against my clit. It hurt so badly I lifted my bottom from the couch and screamed, but every sting, every jangling nerve blossomed into pleasure, and I gasped.
“You like it.” He slapped again, and the pleasure bloomed bigger.
“I love it.”
“What are you going to do when I feel too guilty to do this?”
The slap after was harder than the others, and I howled. He yanked my legs apart, and when I looked down, he had the belt again.
“No,” I whispered.
“Come on, Grey. What’s a limit if you can’t push it?”
He hit me with the belt. The pain was extraordinary, exquisite, nearly unbearable, and so was the explosion of pleasure. I cried to God when he touched my raw clit, pinching it between two fingers. I was overstimulated and sore, overwhelmed with sensation.
Tight in his fingers, hood pulled back, he exposed my bare, red clit, pinching until the blood flowed to the rawest part. I got up on my elbows and locked eyes with him as he lowered his head and flicked it with his tongue.
My body expanded, taking up the entire room in electricity and heat, but I didn’t explode. The detonator got warm but didn’t blow.
“I think I knew the minute I met you.” He gave me a tortuous lick. “I think I knew about you, but I didn’t know about me.” Still pinching, he flicked his nail on a raw membrane and thousands of nerve endings screamed in pain.
“I knew!” I cried, biting back a scream that would bring the police to the door. “About me.”
He licked the bulb between his fingers. I was so close, yet he pulled away, leaving me on the edge. “Has it occurred to you I have no significant war trauma because my desire to hurt you is trauma enough?”
“No, that’s not—”
Another flick and I writhed in pain.
“I can’t. Caden, I can’t take it.”
“Yes, you can.”
He put his lips around my clit and softly, gently, barely sucked on it. Then he let his fingers go. As the blood flowed back, expanding the capillaries and thrumming against the nerves, the pain grew explosive, but the pleasure of his mouth was just ahead of it, pulling the pain out to the brink of orgasm.
Then he stopped.
“Correlation,” I said breathlessly. “Not cause.”
He stood over me like a tower pushing up against the limits of the ceiling. “You’re saying I’m not traumatized by my own needs, but that they just happen to correlate to this disaster of a marriage?”
Disaster of a marriage?
That was an ice-cold knife in my gut. Through everything, neither of us had labeled our union as anything but a buoy in a rough sea. The one stable, invariable thing through his ever-changing mental state.
I put my legs down. “What did you just say?”
“Don’t worry about it. Really, Greyson. Tomorrow, I’ll wake up in love again. Ready to conquer the world with my woman. Et cetera, et cetera.” He put his hands on my knees and pressed them open slowly. I resisted. “But when you look at it objectively, and really, I’m the objective one here, this is a nightmare.” He jerked my knees apart with more strength than I had to keep them closed. I fell back. “And you’re feeding it.”
He wedged himself between my open legs and pulled down his zipper.
“Are you angry?” In this state, he usually didn’t feel anything. If he was angry, it was a step in the right direction.
“No.” His cock was in his fist. “Not angry.”
Seeking leverage in soft cushions, I tried to get up to a sitting position. “There’s a name for this. For you.”
“I’ve been called an asshole already.”
“Not asshole. Something clinical.”
“Really, baby?” He lined his cock along my entrance.
“Sadist.”
“No, no. That’s—”
“Your father. And you.”
He thrust his cock into me, and I was torn between rage and the edge of climax. “I wasn’t like this until you.” He pushed so deep it hurt. So deep his body rubbed my raw, sensitive clit.
“You were too weak to see it.” I looked deeply into the firmament behind his eyes. “Sadist.”
He twisted me, pinning my right arm under my own weight and my left behind my back, fucking me as though he wanted to push through me. “You made this monster. How do you like it?”
Did I create this? Did he become what I wanted?
Did it matter?
“Sadist.” I squeaked it one last time before his hands found my throat.
He bent me harder, pushing on my windpipe to growl in my ear. “Is this what you wanted?”
“Yes.” I was choking.
“You like the monster I’ve become?”
“I love it.” Barely a breath.
“I knew it.” His fingers tightened.
I was handing him my life and my sex and my orgasm with both hands. I’d fantasized about this since I was a girl and finally… I had only a single breath to use to stop him.
“I love you,” I croaked before he cut my air off completely.
In my last gasps, the orgasm detonated. Hot shrapnel pinged off the shell of my skin, stinging my armor from the inside, fighting for life, stiffening with pleasure as I looked into two holes punched through a rigid, red face, open to the blue Iraqi sky.
And black.
Chapter Twenty-Three
greyson
His face, briefly.
His lips on mine, briefly.
Then a breath like breathing charcoal.
Burn.
Breath again.
Cough.
Burn.
Darkness.
Cold.
Heave.
I got on my hands and knees, gulping air. Rolled to sitting. Shook out my bad wrist. No pain.
The lamp was still on, but the light in the sky was completely out. His clothes were all over the room—shirt on the coffee table, jacket over the fireplace grate—as if he’d stripped on fire.
If anything between Caden and I had ever been bad or dangerous, it didn’t come close to what had just happened on the couch.
Was it the Blackthorne treatments? Were they stretching the time between episodes but making them more severe?
I got my coat on and clutched it closed against a coldness it couldn’t protect me from. A chill from inside me. My feet were frigid against the wood. The front door was still locked. Between my legs, soreness and overuse hung like a weight. That had been the most intense sex I’d ever had. I didn’t know if I’d live through it again.
“Caden?”
I flicked on the kitchen light. Empty.
Up the stairs. Lights still out. No sound.
“Caden!”
Office empty. Spare bedroom empty. Our room. Nothing.
I went back downstairs, continuing to the hall between my office and the back door.
Locked from the inside.
My eye caught the basement door. It wasn’t closed all the way. I opened it, and a waft of cold air hit me. I thought of running for shoes but decided to bear the cold, creaky steps.
Halfway down, shrouded in blackness, feeling the stone walls for the conduit to the light switch, I knew he was there. I couldn’t see or hear him, but I knew.
“Caden?”
No answer, but I found the switch and clacked on the light. It flickered and steadied to a flat blue with a constant buzz.
Down to the dirt floor I crept, moving the false wall to the speakeasy and turning on the lights to illuminate the crumbling boxes and mosaic floor. I didn’t waste time calling his name or looking in the corners. I knew where he was. The wall with the false vase was already half open. I made my way to the safe and opened it, turning on lights as I went.
The light right outside the safe was off. I flipped it on and opened the false wall in the back, crouching to get into the concrete room.
Caden was in the bottle room, huddled in the corner, naked and shivering. His
beautiful body was rendered sexless in distress.
I rushed to him, dropping to my knees.
He didn’t look at me.
Putting my hand on his cold skin, I squeezed his arm. “Hey.”
His eyes were open and he was breathing evenly, but he didn’t reply.
“Captain,” I whispered, “it’s cold.”
He turned to face me. His eyes were the clear blue sky, his lips were full and soft, and his jaw was strong and square.
I knew that face, but I didn’t.
But I did.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
I knew that face in the moments before his release, in the sorrow of the man who’d wept in my arms after holding death and pain in his hands for eight straight days. This was the face I’d loved on my wedding day and in the broken hours of night.
I put my hands on that face and said his name.
“Damon.”
* * *
TO BE CONTINUED
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