Page 169 of The Enslaved Duet

Again.

She deserved to be punished in whichever way I saw fit, and I deserved to watch her struggle to meet each demand as recompense.

Her eyes flared, hot as the center of a flame. I could read the angry question in that heat as easily as ink from a page.

Why are you not rescuing me from this place?

My answering grin sliced through the left half of my face and filled my chest with a different kind of cold.

Not one of rage, but the cool metallic edged precision that comes from stepping into Domination.

I dragged her closer by the leash instead of leaning down myself because every action from here on out was meant to emphasize the power discrepancy between us.

I led, and she followed.

“Because,topolina,” I responded to her unspoken demand, “I am not your saviour come to take you away to a fairy-tale land. I am your Master, andthis? This is my domain.”

Her shiver ran through the leather leash into my hand, a steel rod transporting the lightning current of her desire straight through my flesh.

The power of the moment was so tangible, I could feel my very skin hum.

Without warning, I released the tension on the leash, but instead of collapsing to the ground in a tangle of ungainly limbs, Cosima floated like silk to the ground in the perfect pose of obedience.

Her composure was the only response I needed to know she wanted this,neededthis, as much as I did.

In the complicated dance of our recoupling, this was the main combination of moves. All I needed to do was lead, and my beauty would, always, inevitably, follow.

A small silver table on wheels like you might find in an emergency room was set up to one side of the stage where I’d deposited my toys as I walked past, and I returned to it then. Ostensibly, I organized the implements there as if musing over the scene I planned to see out with my slave. In reality, I needed a moment to look at her again, folded into submission so impactful that it seemed to hit like a flaming arrow through my chest.

I took in the heavy weight of her perfectly formed breasts, the ruddy brown tips of her nipples puckered in the deliberately cold air. They were large breasts, edging toward profane on her slight frame, her tiny waist and flagrant dip beneath the swells, her hips rounded but slight as they narrowed into the longest legs I’d ever seen. She was perfection. Not because she met the standard definition of beauty as measured by media and modern ideals, but because there was a painfully attractive duality to her form; confidence and power stamped into every dip of her curves while every hollow held the youthful vulnerability of someone much less seasoned than her tragic experiences had made her.

Looking at her like that reminded me in acute ways I’d been blind to see before, that tending to her the way I would was the greatest of all my considerable gifts and responsibilities.

Carefully, I removed my suit jacket and laid it over the table before methodically rolling up the sleeves of my dress shirt.

“Who may we say is performing?” one of the judges asked from their long table at the center of the room.

I could see a slave bent over under the table servicing him, his cock glistening and alien in the blue light of the club.

As carefully as I folded my blazer, I collapsed the vibrancy of my affection for Cosima into a small, pressed package and tucked it into the farthest reaches of my mind so that when I turned to face the room full of men I planned to eviscerate to ash, all they would see was one of their own.

An arrogant lord who believed that everyone should bend the knee to his powers and persuasions.

“I am Alexander Davenport, Earl of Thornton, heir to the Duchy of Greythorn. And this,” I said as I crossed to the woman I planned to spend the next hour breaking apart and the next century putting back together, “is my slave.”

Cosima

He had me trussed up and tied down in a series of complicated knots by rope as silky and black as my hair. It slithered over my skin and then constricted; a snake wrapped unerringly around its prey. It provided the same curiously meditative euphoria that a near-death experience lends; that clarity and almost morbid anticipation that can give dying men an erection. I was naked but for those ropes, and they seemed to confirm my nakedness and highlight the utter exposure of my body to the masses.

I was panting by the time he finished methodically binding me into position, breasts cinched so tightly they were ruddy swells like desert rock, feet trapped wide apart with only my toes braced against the ground, arms bound in a single plait over my head, connected to a lowered hook from the ceiling. My cunt was utterly exposed, the frigid air like pointed teeth on my delicate flesh, the greedy eyes of the men in the club hot as a branding iron against my clit.

It was wrong to be aroused by such blatant humiliation. I was made up like a doll for the pleasure of my Master, to be flaunted like a prize in front of spectators and panelists who would judge me for my sexuality, my obedience, and the gradation of my submission.

It was wrong to so easily—no—greedilysubmit to his domination when only hours ago I’d convinced myself I would never capitulate to his attentions again, but a small part of me knew even then how wrong I was to cast that intention in stone. An unassailable symbiosis existed between us, like the moon with the tides. Everything I was seemed tied to his will. I wondered dazedly if the fight I’d been waging against my baser instincts for the past four years, struggling to live again after years of survival, had been a hoax I’d concocted for myself. There was never any question in my heart that I would ever defy the inexorable pull of Alexander Davenport if he should call for me, but I’d thought he never would again, so I’d fooled myself into thinking I wouldn’t heed the order if it came. My body on the ground, pliant and ready as wet clay to be moulded into the shapes of his desire underscored the wrongness of my thoughts over the last near half decade.

It was wrong, but it felt deliciously heavy in my sex, as heady as a drug through my bloodstream. If I wasn’t tied down to metal spikes skewered into the stage floor, I would have drifted away into subspace before he’d even really begun to reclaim me.

No, it wasn’t the spikes that kept me secure.