“Soaking wet,” he rasped into my ear as he dragged his nose down the column of my throat.
I squirmed as he sank his teeth into the flesh where my neck met my shoulder. His hand curled firmly over my pussy, two fingers sinking inside me to bump gently against the barrier of my virginity.
“My beauty likes to be used by her Master,” he continued to say as he ground the palm of his hand into my clit.
Instantly, I was on the verge of orgasming. I panted and winced, trying to stave off the overwhelming heat and the need to grind into his hand for further friction.
“The slave with a spine of steel melts with one touch to her swollen cunt. I’ll remember that next time you try to stand up to me.”
I swallowed the ragged edge of a groan.
“But I will not let you come this morning.” He smiled against my wet cheek when I whimpered in protest. “Be happy I am not punishing you for trying to manipulate me. I will not be wrapped around your little finger, slave. Remember that today each time your greedy cunt yearns for the press of my fingers and tongue.”
He pulled away from me abruptly and stepped out of the shower without further ado. I watched slightly stupefied as he dried off and tied a towel around his lean hips.
“You have exactly ninety seconds to finish washing, and then I expect you to dress me. If you attempt to touch yourself, I will introduce you to the ancient stockade we keep in the backyard.”
Immediately, my pussy still pulsing and my mind sitting eschew on my head like a crooked hat, I did as he bade.
I spent hours walking the house after he left for the day. It was named Pearl Hall quite aptly as there were pearls inlaid in elaborate furnishings and scalloping the edge of sconces and doorframe plasterwork. There were priceless historical trappings everywhere I looked, from the centuries-old tapestries that covered the walls to the delicate draperies pulled back from every window. There was also surveillance everywhere. Cameras, sensors, and keypads beside some locked doors that seemed to call for fingerprints or retina scans.
I felt those technological eyes watching me as I lingered over paintings, and I hated that the only thing I’d been given to wear was one of Alexander’s thin, cotton button-ups. Someone was tracking my every step through the manor and that knowledge made me feel like Alexander’s “little mouse” even though he wasn’t at the house to hunt me himself.
When I tried to open the front doors for some fresh air, Riddick appeared behind me, silent but heavy with censure. He would stop me, I knew, if I somehow found a way to get past the heavy lock. He appeared again when I lingered too long over a set of intricately carved wooden doors. He didn’t touch me, but his presence was enough to have me scuttling forward like a scolded child.
Around midday, my stomach began to rumble, and I went in search of the kitchens, descending the grand staircase onto the main floor and then taking a smaller, darker one into the pit of the house.
Instantly, the eerie quiet permeating the upper levels was perforated with giggles and erratic chatter.
I wanted to be a part of the noise. I wanted to sit down with another woman and talk about the strange things happening to my body. My bizarre attraction to Alexander was even more confounding than puberty had been, and I yearned for someone to smooth the ragged edges of my panic with their wisdom.
What I really wanted was Mama to sit me down at the kitchen table with a simple task like rolling out pasta dough so that my anxious thoughts were steadied by a mundane task. Only then would she roll out her wisdom as calmly and proficiently as she kneaded the semolina under her fingers.
Even Elena would know what to say to me given her relationship with Christopher, a much older family friend who had been courting Elena since she was sixteen. They slept together even though she had never explicitly told me so. I could tell by the slashes of high colour on her cheekbones when she returned from his home, the way she smelled like him in secret places like behind her ears and in the hollow of her collarbones. She would break my attraction apart the way a mathematician would, into equations with logical outcomes.
It was the kind of advice I needed then, not Sebastian’s empathy or Giselle’s romanticism, but learned wisdom and defined logical. The why and how of my attraction to someone who was more monster than man.
I swept down the worn stone floor into a huge, airy kitchen that somehow maintained the feel of ancient grandeur while being completely modernized. There were a handful of servants working around the room and more sitting at a massive table off to the left, happily living out their day.