by Sykes, Julia
I was nervous at the prospect of exposing Smith at the graveside service, but he had insisted on accompanying me. And despite my worry for him, I wasn’t going to let fear of that Bastard keep me from honoring Tuck’s life. My mind was eased by Clayton’s assurances that the FBI would be closely monitoring the area, ensuring that no one could get close to the graveyard without them noticing.
The black sedan in which I was riding was rapidly approaching the graveyard. In a few minutes, I would face my parents and Becs for the first time since the shooting. I would have to face Tucker’s parents. Did they know their son was dead because of me? They must at least suspect. Why would anyone have a reason to murder sweet Tucker?
I shuddered, and Smith’s arm tightened around my shoulder. I was wedged between him and Clayton in the back seat. To my surprise, Clayton’s hand covered mine, giving it a reassuring squeeze.
I glanced up to find his bright blue eyes regarding me with uncharacteristic solemnity.
“We’ll be right beside you the whole time, Lydia,” he told me firmly.
“Thank you,” I whispered, blinking back the haze at the corners of my eyes. I wasn’t ready to cry yet. There would be plenty of that in a little while.
When we stepped out of the car, Smith kept his hand firmly pressed against my lower back, and Clayton stuck close to my other side. Neither man was tense, but their eyes carefully surveyed our surroundings, scanning the faces of the grief-stricken people who were gathering beneath a tent by an open grave.
The sight of the dark, damp earth piled high, waiting to trap Tucker beneath its weight, made my stomach turn. I jerked my eyes away, taking a deep breath through my nose to push back my nausea.
My gaze fell on Becs, who was crying into her father’s shoulder. In the wake of her raw pain, all of my conflicted feelings regarding her relationship with Tucker fell away. I made my way over to her; years of holding each other through difficult times led me to her by instinct more than conscious choice.
“Becs.” I said her name weakly as I approached her.
At the sound of my voice, she stiffened against her father. She didn’t look at me. Automatically, I reached out to touch her shoulder comfortingly. My fingertips had barely brushed her when she whirled on me.
I took an involuntary step back in the wake of her furious snarl.
“Becs…” I trailed off, the words shriveling in my throat at the hateful light that darkened her eyes.
“Don’t you dare touch me, you whore,” she hissed.
My mouth fell open on a pained gasp. I felt as though my best friend had punched me in the gut. A part of me knew I should turn and run, but shock rooted me in place.
“It’s your fault! Tuck -” She choked on his name. “He told me about that place, that club you went to.”
My lungs seemed to stop working as she hurled out the information like an accusation.
“That’s why you were kidnapped. Because you’re a perverted freak! You should have stayed gone! It’s your fault he’s dead! It’s your fault, Lydia!”
She was shrieking now. Time slowed down as her words sliced into me like tiny shards of ice, melding together and crystalizing in my heart, transforming it into a jagged, frozen lump in my chest.
I could feel the needle pricks of everyone’s eyes on me, judging me, blaming me.
Master’s arm tightened around my waist, and his rage slapped up against me like a palpable thing. Becs’ eyes widened as it hit her as well, and she shrank back against her father.
“James!” Clayton said sharply, warningly. “Don’t.”
His voice lowered as he addressed me gently. “Do you want to leave, Lydia?”
I managed a jerky nod.
Becs was right. How dare I sit with the rest of Tuck’s loved ones and mourn him when I was the reason he had been taken from them? Of course they wouldn’t welcome his killer to cry alongside them as he was lowered into the ground.
I wanted the world to blur around me, to sink into the numbness of shock. But everything was mercilessly sharp, my senses taking in the angry buzz of the mourners’ whispered words of disapproval, registering the disgust in their eyes.
I stared resolutely down at my feet as Master and Clayton steered me back towards the parking lot. The slow, mournful drumbeats of Jimmy Eat World’s “Hear You Me” started up behind me. They followed me even once I was ensconced in the black sedan, reverberating in my head with their torturously melancholy rhythm.
We flew back to New York that night. There was nothing left for me in Chicago. Nothing but tears and death and betrayal. And a sadistic man lurking in the shadows, waiting to hurt more of the people I loved. Even if they didn’t love me anymore.
Smith did his best to calm me, to comfort me. His hands never stopped touching me from the time we left the funeral to when we entered his apartment hours later.
Despite the emptiness of my ravaged insides, warmth weakly sparked in my belly at the sight of the stark space. Rather than being left cold by its severity, its simplicity was calming. Everything was as I remembered, as I had obsessively committed to memory so that it would never fade away. Only a month ago, I had thought I would never see this place again. Now, being here felt more right than being in Tucker’s townhouse or even my parents’ house.
I breathed in amber and whiskey.
Home.
This was where I belonged.
My frozen heart thawed slightly when my eyes fell on the white wall in the living room. It was no longer blank; Smith had left my drawings where I had hung them on the day I left him. Upon closer inspection, I could tell that the paper was slightly crinkled, as though it had been crushed into a tight ball and then carefully, lovingly smoothed back out.
“I never did get those frames,” he said gruffly, almost apologetically, as he noticed the direction of my gaze.
I turned to him, my eyes wide with wonder. “You kept them,” I breathed.
His expression was almost harsh in its intensity as he gently tucked a lock of stray hair behind my ear.
“I told you, Lydia: I’m not letting you go. I never let you go.”
“I love you.”
It was an essential truth that had lived inside of me for weeks, lingering deep within my soul since the moment I had first opened my eyes to find him staring down at me from my bedside. The love I had felt for him in those first days had been borne of gratitude, of slavish devotion. But it had grown to something all-encompassing, something real. It had swelled to a powerful force that was too much for my soul to contain. The intensity of it pulsed in a blissful ache in the center of my being.
Smith – Master – grabbed me up in his arms, crushing me to him. His eyes burned into me, twin stars falling to Earth to sear into my soul.
“I love you too, Lydia. So fucking much it hurts.”
His lips captured mine with bruising force, imparting the pain of his love to me. I gave it right back, for once meeting the ferocity of his kiss rather than surrendering. My hands cupped the nape of his neck, my fingernails pressing into his skin as I held him to me. He growled into my mouth, his teeth catching my lower lip sharply.
His hands were at the hem of my dress, hastily working it up my body to wrench it over my head. My fingers made quick work of the buttons on his shirt, making their way to his belt as he shrugged it off.
I had barely managed to unzip his trousers when he gripped my shoulders, taking me tumbling down onto the thick carpet along with him. He didn’t bother to finish undressing; the white-blue flames blazing in his eyes spoke of obsessive hunger that bordered on madness, and all of his focus honed on taking what he wanted.
He gripped my panties in both hands, ripping them off me with one jerk of his powerful arms. Without hesitation, his cock impaled me, driving in so fast and deep that fireworks popped across my vision. I welcomed the edge of pain that accompanied the pleasure that permeated deeper than just my flesh. My legs wrapped around his hips as I rocked up into him, taking him further into myself.
Our coupling was frenzied, all of his careful control gone. The possessive, ravenous beast inside of him had taken over, and it would have what it wanted.
It wanted to consume me.
No words passed between us, no commands or meekly-spoken acquiescent utterances. There were only the raw, animalistic sounds that filled the space around us. Our love surpassed the capacity of human articulation, so we expressed it in the only way our bodies knew how: joining so closely that I wasn’t sure where I ended and he began.
We climaxed together, our bodies in perfect sync. As we came down, our sharp pants were the only sounds as we held one another. We lingered in that primal state, the heat of our flushed skin bleeding into one another communicating more than our words ever could. He rained soft kisses down on me, marking every part of my face, my neck, my chest. I returned the same reverent attention to him, marking him in kind.
After a while, he scooped me up and carried me to the shower, where we tenderly washed each other’s bodies with loving, worshipful attention. Despite all of the terrible things that had transpired that day, I fell into sleep as soon as he laid me on his bed. He didn’t need to use his restraints to keep me there; the tender touch of his skin against mine tethered me to him more securely than chains ever could.
“Do you want to talk about what happened yesterday?” Smith asked gently as we lay in bed the next morning, his fingers stroking down my naked back. I knew he wasn’t asking about the sex or the “I love yous” we had exchanged.
The funeral.
A cold knot formed in the pit of my stomach at the memory of Becs’ hate-filled glare, of her venomous words.
“I… She was right,” I whispered. “It is my fault.”
Deep down, I had already known it, but having my best friend shriek the words at me in front of all of Tucker’s loved ones had laid it out before me with stark, cutting clarity.
His fingers curled beneath my chin, forcing my gaze up to his. I looked up into his eyes to find my Master staring back at me reprovingly.
“No. It’s not. Nothing that Bastard has done is your fault.”
“But if I hadn’t left Tuck, if I hadn’t decided to pursue BDSM, that Bastard never would have taken me. If I weren’t a perverted freak, he wouldn’t have known me at all. And Tucker would still be alive.”
Becs’ cruel words were bitter on my tongue. But that didn’t stop them from being true.
Master softly brushed a tear from my cheek, but his hard expression didn’t waver with his tender touch.
“You’re not a freak, Lydia. And you’re not a whore.” His jaw ticked as he ground out the last word. Becs’ accusations were obviously sharp in his mind as well. “Tell me what drew you to BDSM. Why did you decide to explore the lifestyle?”
I blinked, thrown off by the question. I hadn’t thought about it in so long. All of my memories of my early days at Dusk had seemed so insignificant in the wake of what had happened. They only mattered so far as being the impetus for my abduction, and for that, they were better left in the recesses of my mind. I hadn’t realized that I had tucked them away until that moment. I hadn’t accessed them while I was trying to make things work with Tucker, and then I had become so absorbed in my dynamic with Master that I hadn’t bothered to recall the pale imitations of D/s I had dabbled in at Dusk.
I thought back to my early discussions with my friends on the scene as I had struggled to make sense of my need for BDSM.
“It wasn’t something I really thought about until my early twenties,” I began slowly. “I was happy with what Tucker and I had when we first got together. Maybe there had always been a latent interest there. I’m not sure. But it wasn’t until after the wedding and the miscarriage that I became curious about it.”
I turned introspective, my thoughts flashing through the disappointments that had followed those fateful events. “I used to think I was a bit of a rebel; I liked thinking of myself as a free-spirited artistic type. But then I got pregnant. I was reckless and irresponsible, and I let down everyone I loved: my parents, Tucker, myself. Two years into my marriage, I found myself trapped in a life I had never envisioned for myself, but I didn’t dare break free and go back to school as I wanted to do so badly. That would be irresponsible, and I would let everyone down again. I lost control of my own life because I couldn’t bring myself to disappoint the people I loved. I craved for someone to take that control for me, to lift that feeling of chaos just for a little while by taking the responsibility out of my hands.”
I searched his face intently as I arrived at the root of my desires. “I was so tired of worrying all the time about how my actions might affect other people. I needed someone who I could trust to take away that worry.”
Master traced his thumb across my furrowed brow.
“And you couldn’t ask your loved ones for help because you couldn’t burden them with your worries. You thought you had put them through enough worry because of you, and you took responsibility for ensuring their happiness at the cost of your own.”
“Yes.”
How could he see me so clearly? He easily understood my deepest needs, needs that had taken me years to sort through and comprehend.
He fixed me with a serious stare. “Do you think wanting to trust someone deeply enough to allow him to help and support you makes you a whore?”
“Well… No. Not when you put it that way. But -”
He touched his fingers to my lips, silencing me.
“There is nothing wrong with your desires, Lydia. You’re a strong woman, and you need someone with a firm hand to challenge that strength in order for you to allow yourself to let go.” He gave me a lopsided smile. “Luckily for you, helping and supporting you suits my kinks; I definitely don’t mind taking you in hand. Accept it: you were made for me, sweetheart. And there’s nothing perverted about that.”
“No,” I agreed fervently. “And even if it were, I’m too happy to care. I like being yours, Master. I love you.”
“You see?” He said with a cocky grin. “It’s so much easier when you just accept that I’m right.”
I scoffed at him, my voice dripping with sarcasm. “Please forgive me for daring to question your wisdom, Master. I’ll blindly accept whatever you say from now on. Won’t that make for stimulating conversations.”
He laughed. “You have a smart mouth, sub. By all means, feel free to question me whenever you like. If I feel you’re being deliberately impertinent, I can always gag you.”
My gasp was a mixture of shock and arousal. His fingers traced around my parted lips.
“Well, isn’t that sweet? Open and eager. I think a pretty red ball gag would suit you nicely, girl.”
My mouth closed with an audible snap, barring entry. I glared up at him in warning, unwilling to open my lips again to deliver a snappy retort.
He just chuckled at my threatening frown. “I think a blindfold will be in order, too. I can’t risk your eyes burning a hole in my head.”
Even as my scowl intensified, I couldn’t stop my body from pressing up against him more closely, my pulsing clit seeking stimulation against his hard thigh.
It really shouldn’t be legal for a man to look so arrogantly amused.
My disappointed whine was involuntary when he rolled away from me and got to his feet. At the sound of my protest, he cocked his head at me with a condescending grin.
“Did you want something, sweetheart?”
My jaw clenched, anger and something darker burning in my gut. He was toying with me. Did he really expect me to ask him to blindfold and gag me?
Hell no. It was one thing to melt under his touch, to cede everything to him at the power of his drugging kiss. Well, I wasn’t about to beg him to take me in hand while he was being such a cocky ass.
Even if he was a devastatingly sexy cocky ass whose smug expression and glinting eyes did funny things to my insides. That expression messed with my brain, and for a second I actually considered falling to my knees and begging him t
o use me as he desired.
I shook my head at myself and straightened my shoulders as I got to my feet as well.
If anything, my show of bravado only appeared to please him further. I pursed my lips and resolutely ignored the gathering heat between my legs.
“Breakfast?” I asked pointedly. I had hoped to sound cool and unruffled, but he didn’t miss the fact that I couldn’t manage to force out more than one word.
He stepped to the side with a gentlemanly gesture towards the door. “After you,” he prompted me to walk ahead of him. I couldn’t hold back my disappointed frown when he didn’t touch me as I passed. His grin widened in response. I didn’t trust the playful light in his eyes at all.
His strategy became all too clear as I cooked breakfast: he wasn’t going to touch me in any way until I asked him to fulfill the little fantasy he had spun for me. Well, I wasn’t going to give in so easily.
We began a silent battle of wills as I did everything I could to tempt him with my body. I wore nothing but an apron in the kitchen, and I made sure to sway my hips as I worked around the small space. I even made a show of dropping a fork just so I could slowly bend to retrieve it from the floor before arching over the sink as I washed it. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that his hand was fisted on the countertop, belying his carefully calm expression. I quickly turned to hide my smirk.
Our game continued through mid-morning, by which time we were both thoroughly frustrated.
“This is stupid!” I finally burst out. “Just fuck me already.”
He arched a cool eyebrow at me from where he was seated at the opposite end of the couch. I waited for his mocking reply, for his sharp admonishment. I couldn’t predict how he would react, but I fully expected some sort of reaction.
But he just stared at me, fixing me in place with his suddenly icy eyes. I found I couldn’t break away, and his power began to pulse over me. I sank under its weight, my mind giving way to its irresistible force. He didn’t move until my breath was coming in short, shallow pants and my body was trembling.
He stood slowly, and my eyes remained riveted on his as he stepped towards my end of the couch. Within seconds, he was towering above me, his implacable gaze boring into my soul.
