Page 18 of Irish Vice

I don’t know why I want this. Why I need this. Why Braiden’s violence is the only thing that makes me truly whole. All I know is this is what I truly desire. This is right. This isme.

The fourth blow lands higher than the first. The fifth stripes my right ass-cheek. The sixth hits my left.

My eyes are closed. My jaw is stretched. I’m wound tight, waiting, waiting, waiting, knowing the next touch will send me over the edge.

I barely hear the rasp of his zipper. The belt trails between my shoulder blades and down my spine, over the arch of my hot, bruised ass. He pulls it away as he shifts his weight, leaning back from my body.

And when the belt falls this time, it’s the hardest blow yet, cutting deepest, slashing across all the other lines. My muscles clench. My nerves scream. My clit goes incandescent and there’s a word I’m supposed to say, a number I’m supposed to know, but I’ve forgotten how to count, forgotten how to speak, and all I can do is spin tighter and tighter and tighter.

Just as I fall off the edge of darkness into blinding light, Braiden presses into me. His cock fills me, completes me, merges into my spiraling spine. I’m seizing, sobbing, desperate for more as his fingers clutch my hips. His thumbs dig into the searing lines he’s carved into my flesh.

I drown in my orgasm, losing myself, losing him, and just when I think I must spin back to earth, he thrusts even harder, and I crest a brand new peak.

This time, I feel his cock in my belly, in my lungs, in my brain. He plows the deepest, darkest parts of me, pushing hard, moving fast, and when he comes—swearing Irish oaths I’ll never understand—I fold around him a third time, each ripple, every roll carrying me farther than the one before.

I black out, or maybe I really am transformed into something more than human.

When I come back to my senses, we’re both on the bed. Braiden leans against the headboard. He’s cradling me, my back against his chest, his arms tight around me. My soaked satin panties are nowhere in sight.

“Mo chailín maith,” he says.

His lips are lost in my hair, and he tells me I’m safe, and Idon’t know why I was in danger, and he tells me he’s sorry, and I don’t know what he’s done. His thumb is soft on my cheek, and I realize he’s wiping away tears I didn’t know I shed.

I can’t tell how much time passes before he pulls a blanket up to my shoulders. He reaches to the nightstand and helps me with a glass of water. As I sip, he reaches into his nightstand drawer, coming up with arnica gel that smells like rosemary and sage.

He smooths it into my throbbing skin, the heat of his hand a second type of salve. He whispers as he tends to me, telling me I’m gorgeous, telling me I’m his.

When he’s finished with all the stripes he gave me, his hand moves to my throat. He slips past my collar, past the platinum that has heated to match my blood. He finds the bruise on my pulse point, the place where Madden pressed his gun, and he soothes that too.

I sleep for a while, but I don’t remember any dreams. When I wake, he’s sitting beside me, propped against the headboard, his hand splayed over my hip.

I reach for my throat, slipping a finger beneath the emerald nestled there.

“Go back to sleep,” he says.

But I shake my head. I tug at the collar, feeling the lock at the nape of my neck.

He sighs and finds the key. When the hasp springs loose I snag a deep breath.

“Sleep,piscín,” Braiden says, setting the collar on the nightstand.

But I don’t sleep. I stand. I take a step in my bare feet. Another. I find the shoes I don’t remember shedding. I smooth my hands down my rumpled skirt.

Braiden could stop me. He could drag me back to bed. Tie me up if I fight him. Break my body and my spirit with another shattering orgasm.

But he doesn’t do any of that.

He lets me go.

So I unlock the door. I make my way through the darkened house to the mudroom. I cross the garden. And I enter the lonely pool house I now call home.

8

BRAIDEN

Six weeks ago, I kept an office in downtown Philadelphia, at the back of a pub. My grandad was the first man to pour Guinness at the Hare and Harp, long before the mahogany bar was scarred by decades of drunks. My da was the man who built out the basement, adding soundproofing and a drain so the Fishtown Boys had a place to do their wetwork.

And I’m the man who lost the place, saw it burned to the ground, victim of a skirmish with Russo. I took a baseball bat to his prize Lamborghini. He torched the Hare.