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A moment later, his free hand settled on the small of my back—warm, strong, and commanding. That simple touch grounded me even as my body trembled beneath it. My breath came faster, shallow and uneven, every inch of my skin prickling with heat and fear and want so strong I could barely stand it.

I didn’t look back. I trusted him.

The leather hissed as Nikolai swung the belt, whispering its promise through the air and I tensed, anticipating that very first lash.

Then it landed.

It wasn’t light.

It cracked across the swell of my ass with a sting so fierce I cried out. My hips jolted forward, the pain blooming like fire and settling deep. I barely had time to breathe before the next one followed, angled slightly lower, the burn deeper this time, layering over the first.

I whimpered, but I didn’t pull away.

I didn’t ask him to stop. I wanted this.

Every sound, every hit, every breathless pause between.

“Good girl,” he praised above me, his voice thick with desire. “Arch that pretty bottom for me. Show me what a good girl you can be.”

I arched my back. The belt whipped the tops of my thighs, and I keened from the burning sting.

He belted me hard and fast. I quickly lost count as my world centered on each burning lash. I could feel each welt rising, each line of fire branding me as his own.

The belt marked me in even, deliberate strokes, each one precise and layered with control.

I was panting, my legs shaking, tears hot at the corners of my eyes, not so much from pain, but from everything it unwrapped inside me. All the tension. All the noise. All the walls I hadn’t known I was still holding onto.

“You’re doing so well,” he praised, his hand soothing over the heat of my skin, “Look at you. Taking your punishment so perfectly.”

“Please, Daddy. It hurts,” I whined.

“I know,” he said. “It’s supposed to. But you can take it, can’t you?”

“Yes, Daddy. I can take it if you want me to,” I breathed, the words falling out of me like a confession.

Another lash landed, harder now, across both cheeks. Again and again until I cried out, and sobbed into the sheets.

And then, I truly started to cry.

Big fat tears rolled down my cheeks as the belt whipped my bare ass over and over again until full-throated sobs tore out of me. Yet his belt continued to fall.

I didn’t beg him to stop, though, because I wanted to be truly punished by Nikolai, and somewhere between the pain and the praise, something inside me broke.

Not in a way that made me feel small.

In a way that made me feelfree.

I went quiet then, and it was the quiet of true surrender to my husband. My body limp, my breath uneven, my skin blazing under his belt that still hovered in the air behind me.

Then the belt finally stopped falling, though my ass didn’t stop burning. His fingers caressed my sore, welted backside, dipping between my thighs.

“You’re even more soaked than before, baby girl,” he observed, and I nodded, tears still streaming down my cheeks.

“Yes, Daddy,” I said, my voice broken. I looked back over my shoulder, my glassy eyes meeting his almost black ones. He cleared his throat and then said the words I both wanted to hear and feared he would say.

“Your punishment isn’t over, baby girl, but you knew that already.You know what needs to happen next, don’t you?”

A surge of fear flashed through me and my clit pulsed.