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“Will it hurt?” I ask.

“Probably,” he admits, then lifts his shirt showing off his abs and chest. The peek I got earlier didn’t do him justice. I knew he was strong, but now I see the muscles behind the power I’ve experienced first hand. Under the swath of tan skin are hard-packed muscles, with a thick line of brown hair traveling between his belly button and jeans. He’s not showing me that, but up higher the silver hoops pierced through the soft flesh of his pinkish-brown nipples. “The left hurt more than the right, but now it’s just more sensitive.” He grabs my hand and flattensmy fingers over the metal ring. “The pain can be worth the pleasure, Baroness. I tried to teach you that on the altar.”

I know he’s talking about his fingers flicking and rubbing against my pussy. How it felt combined with the sharp tip of the knife. I gently tug against the bar and he hisses, licking his bottom lip. “Christ,” he mutters, and I feel the hard swell between our bodies. He pushes my hand away and drops his shirt before reaching for me again. He thumbs the peaks back to attention. “Yours are already really fucking sensitive. This is going to make it more intense.”

Having his hands on me feels both right and wrong. Good but bad. Just like him, I realize. This man is nothing but ambiguous, even without the mask. I squirm under his touch, but it only seems to encourage him even more. Tugging and pinching the nipples until I squeak, “That hurts.”

“Mmhm.” He releases me and I close my hands over my aching breasts. Damon busies himself with tearing open an antiseptic wipe. “Let’s clean you up.”

The alcohol is cool on my inflamed nipples, raw from his touch. I exhale, trying to settle my nerves, until I see him pick up the tool that looks like scissors. I slump to my back, as much to get away from him as anything else, but before I can blink, he’s got my right nipple in a death pinch.

“Hold still,” he murmurs, spreading the tool.

“Wait–” The clamp snaps around the peak of skin, followed by the sharp pinch of pain shooting along my nerves, eliciting a body-quaking shudder. A scream loosens in my throat, but he looks down at me with a hard gaze and I exhale a quiet shudder instead.

“That’s right, Baroness,” he encourages while picking up the needle with a delicate touch, “deep breaths, one after the other.”

I want to fade away, slip back into the dark recesses of my mind, but for once in my life, I’m fully alert. The sharppain searing through my tit lights every nerve, every neuron on fire, including my brain. I’m very aware that everything about this moment is the opposite of the earlier ceremony. Daylight streams through the stained glass windows and there are no lurking Shadows or the intimidating presence of the King. We’re both clean, our flesh scrubbed raw, the blood and dirt washed away. This time there are no masks between us. I can see the demon in front of me.

I take another deep breath and watch as he presses the needle against the tender flesh. I can’t feel it, the clamps already too painful.

“Be still,” he murmurs, and then pushes the needle through. My fingers twist in the bedsheet and a bright, white light flashes in front of my eyes. The scream throttles inside, but I puncture my bottom lip and he quickly pushes the bar though the fresh hole. Pierced. “Great job,” he tells me, releasing the clamp. “When I first saw you, I thought you were too weak to handle this, but I was wrong.” He looks up at me, lips curved. “You’re different than you seem.”

The praise rolls over my skin like a salve and I take a deep breath and tell him, “Do the other one. I’m ready.”

“Yeah?” The piercing in his eyebrow quirks in surprise. “You’re used to this, aren’t you?” The rough pads of his fingers run over the scars on my wrists. “You’re familiar with pain.”

The question throws me off and I don’t know how to answer. Pain is subjective. I know that. What others go through is nothing compared to my life, but pain is familiar. It’s in the way my feet hurt in my pointe shoes, the way my muscles burn after a performance, the way my heart pounds every time I step across the Manor’s threshold.

That’s the thing about pain; it can always be worse.

The man in front of me, he’s my Baron. My King chose him and that is all that matters.

“The King could have kept you for himself,” he tells me, wiping antiseptic over the other nipple, “but he gave you to us. That’s not what men do when they value something.”

My worst fear. Not that he’s given me to his men, but that he doesn’t need me. I’ve seen what happens when people are no longer needed–wanted. “How do I become that?” I ask. “Valuable?”

“I’ve already told you,” he lifts the clamps, “you just have to be a good girl.”

Damon turns back to his work and I’m glad there’s no time to recover, no acclimating, before he snaps the clamp over my left tit and the pain starts all over again.

As the sensation ripples through my body, and Damon marks me–claims me–I know it in my core.

There is no rest. There is no escape.

There is only pain.

9

Timothy

The older Iget the more grateful I am to survive another day.

With the sun rising and another Hunt behind me, I exit the tunnel into my personal quarters. My bed, imposing and made of solid black oak but with the most comfortable mattress money can buy, taunts me after the long night. In the past I would have succumbed, sleeping off the revelry. I’m older now. More disciplined.

Graves, my assistant, is already in my room, waiting for my arrival.

“Congratulations on a new class of Barons,” he says, taking my cloak and mask.