Page 32 of Holy Wrath
I hesitate, my pulse fluttering. I watch as Nyatrix does nothing, says nothing. She just holds still—like she’s waiting to see what I want. Her fingers run down the handle of the flail with a delicacy that makes me shiver. Madness or sin or probably both drive me to pick up my cane and move to my bedroll, where I do as she commands.
“Are you comfortable?” Nyatrix asks, coming to kneel beside me. “With your back?”
“Yes,” I tell her, a little surprised myself. But the bedroll is padded and the pain that pulsed through me is replaced by something else entirely, drum-like and irresistible.
She nods and settles back, placing the flail down beside me. “Just ask me to stop and I will,” she repeats.
My mind wheels and I nod, my tongue too big in my mouth, the pounding between my legs reaching a fever pitch I swear I can hear .
Then the Lupa Nox bends over me and begins to unlace the front of my dress. I watch her, pulse fluttering in my throat, my breath quickening. After only a few moments, she pulls my wool gown down over my legs and drapes it on the pew, leaving me in my corset and shift.
Then Nyatrix takes the flail and runs the knotted leather ends along my arm, soft as anything. Gooseflesh breaks out across my body, and I tremble, pulling in a deep, sharp breath. I watch with wicked gratification as her eyes dip to my straining bust. She continues her path, the flail kissing my collarbones.
“Do you like that?” she breathes, her blackberry mouth moving in the lamplight.
“Yes,” I whisper as she guides the flail down the center of my chest.
When she comes to my corset, Nyatrix pauses, her gaze on mine. “Tell me to stop,” she says, her breath catching as she begins to unlace my corset with one hand, the other caressing my arm with the flail tips.
I am all trembling flesh and forbidden desire, the door to my inner room opening. But instead of folding myself up inside, something I thought long dead strides from the chamber, resurrected and renewed.
“I don’t want you to stop,” I tell the Lupa Nox, the words hitching when she folds my corset back from either side of my rib cage. I am yet again bare to her, dressed in nothing but my shift and underthings.
Her mouth moves into an expression that sends fire racing down from my breastbone to the place between my thighs, and she trails the leather cords to my chest. Carefully, with the same kind of precision she wields a blade, Nyatrix runs the flail over my already-pebbled nipples. Pleasure soars in me, and I gasp, my back arching.
“Lovely,” she murmurs, a rich color rising to her cheeks. “Just lovely, Ophelia.”
“Don’t stop,” I whimper, just in case.
“Your wish,” Nyatrix replies, trailing the cords back over my breasts and pulling another alien sound from my mouth, “is my command.”
She teases me, brushing the tip of my breasts with the firm handle of the flail until I’m panting. The need between my legs is thunderous, damp and thick as the air just before a summer rain, though I don’t know precisely what my body wants. It seems, however, that Nyatrix does.
“I’ll stop,” she reminds me.
Anticipation sweeps through me, nearly as sweet as the pleasure she’s already summoned. She slides the cords down my belly, like she knows where my desire lives, where it pants open-mouthed and needy. Quick as a wolf, Nyatrix moves, rising onto her knees and sliding one of her legs between mine.
She pauses, catching my gaze. I look up at her, an avenging goddess backlit by the sunset in a dead city, and nod my permission. She smiles then, a dangerous thing, slick and heady. Flipping the grip of the flail just as I’ve seen her do with a sword, she pulls the cords away from my body. I whimper at the sudden absence, but what comes next nearly destroys me.
With the leather handle, Nyatrix slides my shift up, exposing my twisted, marred leg.
“No!” I cry out softly. “No, stop.”
She does, sitting back before I even realize I’ve spoken the words aloud. “Are you all right?” she asks, not a stitch of frustration or anger on her face.
“Y-yes,” I say, my body throbbing for her. “I just. ..I just don’t want you to see my leg.” Shame creeps across my face, a different kind of heat.
“There is no part of you, little dove, that I would not find torturously beautiful,” the Lupa Nox assures me in a low, rough voice. “But, as I said, your wish is my command. Do you want me to stop entirely or just leave your shift where it is?”
The heedless resurrected thing inside my chest wants her to tear every stitch of clothing from my body, to bring her own bare skin to mine, to feel the undulations of her muscles as if they’re my own. But whatever it is, it’s newly born and young-blooded, and the older parts of me overwhelm its tender voice.
“Leave my shift,” I say, “but keep going.”
She grins, a monsoon of a smile, all wreckage and waves. Settling back over me, Nyatrix trails the cords down my belly again until she comes to the apex of my thighs.
“Spread your legs for me,” she murmurs, the heat of her flooding my skin.
I do what she asks without a second thought, constrained only by the edge of my shift’s skirts. She brings the handle of the flail to the apex of my thighs, gently sliding it against me until a cry falls from my lips. The noise barely sounds like me—wild and unrestrained, a sacrilege in this forgotten chapel.
“That’s perfect, Ophelia,” Nyatrix says, increasing the pressure as she rubs the flail’s handle against my tender, aching place.
“Nyatrix,” I whimper, and she pauses, looking up at me. “Please don’t stop.”
“I won’t,” she promises, one hand on the flail between my legs, the other flat on the ground beside my head, her body hovering above mine like sacred armor. Just slightly, she deepens the pressure. My back arches of its own accord, my hips moving against the flail, against her hand, my mind dipping to that dream back in Lumendei, of her as my bride, of our marital bed?—
“What a vision you are,” Nyatrix murmurs, her words nearly lost to my loudening moans, sounds I’ve never made in my entire life. “I wish you could see what I see. Your beautiful breasts, barely covered by that shift of yours. The way your hair is all around you like a golden halo. The soft hills of your perfect belly. Your thighs I’d die to bury my face between.”
Her name leaves my mouth, I think, like it’s more sacred than anything else I’ve ever known. For the first time in my life, I feel nothing but pleasure and wonder, so rich and thick that it’s like drowning in amber honey. A thunderous feeling builds in me, and I grind my hips against the flail handle, desperate for more. Her words only send my pulse racing quicker, keen as a hound.
“Am I giving you everything you want?” Nyatrix wants to know, her breath stirring my hair. Asphodels rush golden into my senses, and I gasp, tilting my chin to look at her.
“Yes,” I rasp, the word drawn out by another teetering moan as she yet again increases the pressure of the handle against me.
“Are you sure, little dove?”
Desire races through me, so many anni of unmet need, and I find the courage. “Take off my shift,” I whisper, casting my gaze down as I say the words, already tinged with self-consciousness.
Nyatrix slows her ministrations between my thighs. “If you change your mind,” she says, shifting back, “tell me. This is about you.”
I nod, I think, my chest heaving. With the handle of the flail—whose absence at the place where I’m damp and hot is deeply felt—she slides up my shift.
For the barest of moments, her gaze flits over my twisted stump of a leg, marred with corpse-white streaks. But there’s no horror, no disgust. “Each part of you is a new miracle,” Nyatrix breathes as she pulls my shift up over my hips, baring my underthings, and then over my shoulders and head, forgoing the buttons entirely. I’m entirely bare to her besides the smallclothes on my hips.
Her eyes sweep across my chest, pink with exertion, my heavy breasts, the nipples still tight and pebbled, the expanse of my belly, and then the curve of my generous thighs. “You are going to be my ruin,” the Lupa Nox growls, pitching her body back over mine. She slides the handle of the flail beneath my underthings, the leather meeting the tangle of pale curls between my thighs, and then the delicate skin beneath.
Nyatrix grinds the flail against my dampness, and I cry out, my back arching, bare chest meeting the linen of her blouse. She hitches a breath and increases the pace, the thunderstorm feeling in my belly intensifying. My blood thrums and I am lost to her, to the Sepulchyre, to whatever this knight of death and darkness asks of me.
“Touch me,” I beg, half-mad, as if a creature as glorious as her wants to actually put her skin against mine.
But she just pulls back with a sly smile. “Where, little dove? Show me with your hands. I want to see exactly what you crave.”
She slows the pace between my legs, as if to give me the tiniest room to think. I can barely do such a thing, damp with longing and wound so tight I feel I could burst into a million pieces. But my body finds a way—one hand rising from the bedroll to my breast. Unsure, I trace my fingers across my skin like the leather cords, moaning when I brush my nipple.
Nyatrix watches me like a wolf about to devour prey, her eyes black and feral. When I touch myself, her chest heaves, collarbones standing out in the low light. She says my name, I think, before taking a deep breath.
And then, just like I did, Nyatrix trails her elegant fingers across my collarbone and then lower. A moan explodes from my mouth, and her eyes flick to mine, her lips curved into an amused smile. She toys with my nipple, pinching me at the same time she drives the flail harder against me. The thunderstorm in me hums, heavy as a beehive, and a strangled sound escapes my lips.
“Come undone, Ophelia,” Nyatrix says, her words full of rough want. “Claim the pleasure you deserve.”
Something unlike anything I’ve ever felt rises like an enormous wave in my belly, growing taller and taller, finding crest after crest until it finally floods my shores, leaving me breathless and gowned in salt.
As I lie panting on the bedroll, I cannot help but wonder if the sounds the Lupa Nox drew from me are loud enough to rattle all the Saints from their plinths.