Already, he slew me. Hating my reaction was old. My feet shifted, crunching on the dry leaves. An ant crawled over my hip. I still hated this.
“I truly need to punish you. Not orgasms, not the seesaw of joy and hurt, just fucking with you and hurting you. How much you have angered me. How. Fucking. Much.” The belt flicked and lashed at me, forced more pain through my flesh. More strikes, more, harder ones on my thighs. I squealed and dearly wished to run away, but I could not.
Then I managed a sway to the right.
“Don’t move away.”
I dug my hands into the bark on either side of me and cursed on the next strike.
Isak chuckled. “That’s it. Show me how much this hurts.” The bass-deep tone of his words stirred me even as he goaded.
“Spread your legs.”
I did so.
He whacked the belt onto my pussy, once, twice.
Fuck. I gasped and writhed like a mouse stuck in a trap. My scuffling feet cleared a space in the dirt underfoot.
I cried out in whispers then croaky shouts that pained my throat. Tears wove down my face. Then… finally, he stopped, and I saw him through my tears, red-faced, panting, with his teeth showing.
The blood from the wound on his palm had curled to his fingertips. That same hand gripped the belt. The end of the belt coiled on the ground and the blood fell in small drops to the dirt beside it – no doubt the wound had reopened due to the effort he’d employed to whip me.
Karma. Fucking karma.
Panting, sobbing, I felt the fire throb across my stomach, breasts, and thighs.
“This is what happens when I lose it. Do not do this again.”
I blinked, shook my head.
His eyes were fixed on me. “I’m not done.”
Fear renewed as he stepped in and tied my wrists at my front with his shirt then hoisted them higher so he could use my dress to rope them to a branch above me. He turned me to face the tree.
“Not done.” He ground out the words as if extinguishing a cigarette butt on my body, then he stepped backward with a slow, deliberate tread – one, two, three.
I blinked away tears, leaned my forehead on the tree.
When several smacks from the belt landed on my back then on my rear, I jerked at each and every blow.
A long pause followed.
I sneaked a glance over my shoulder and saw him squatting with his hands threaded through his hair, and he was staring at me. Only this time I didn’t feel I was goop from his shoe. An alien pet? A possession he couldn’t recall buying? Yeah, I didn’t know his precise thoughts, only that he’d left me pining for him. And that he desired me and was confused.
Isak, confused?
Over and over, he made me want this, despite the punishment. It was demeaning and inevitable, and I really should be used to it.
I sagged into the bindings on my wrists and let the ties take some of my weight – not a good move, since it made the cloth tighten.
CHAPTER 13
ISAK
Eddie Izzard: ‘What do you do in life? What do you create, what do you make, what do you add to the human existence? That is what matters.’
Funny how a book can say something, and yet the meaning doesn’t hit you for hours.
Unlike my belt – Red knew when I hit her with that, instantly. Her back and ass were crisscrossed with long welts. I released my hands from my hair and slowly stood.
As a mesmer, I just wanted to hurt her and make her do my bidding, and to gratify myself.
And as a man?
My anger had died away and been mixed up with different sorts of angers and feelings – feelings I hadn’t known until now. I’d been angry that Red had assumed I was a pedophile.
Mostly I was angry because it was her saying it.
Which meant I valued her opinion? My lip curled.
And now… I was annoyed. A few weeks ago, her attitude would have amused me, then I’d have fucked with her just because I was a mesmer. Who cared what the little people thought? Fuck them all.
Red was excruciatingly different.
I still wanted to punish that sweet ass, although the fact that she wanted to come right now made me smile. I could detect serious want thriving inside her – and how her legs trembled as I amped the volume.
Everything I had done to her had trained her into this cutely female response.
Purposefully, I dripped more desire upon her psyche, giving her libido a big, hot, luscious lick, then I walked in and cupped first her bare ass then the front of her pussy. My fingers slicked through a copious amount of female wetness where it had leaked from her slit.
I probed her. I played with her, and oh the wriggles she gave me, the small soft noises, the whimpers as I stuck and plunged my two fingers into her cunt and then sucked them out. Her hands twined and shifted in the cloth rope above.
How much did I love a trapped and needy Red? More than the world itself.
“You’ve got no escape – not from the belt, and not from me.” I jerked my hand and raised her higher, off her feet, making her an ornament perched on my hand. I snaked my arm about her waist. “And I don’t think I’ll let you come.”
She wriggled and gave a shocked gasp. As a reward for her thinking me worse than I truly was, I fingered her in earnest. With my thumb, I circled her little erect clit, toying with it with my other hand clamped
