“When you try to kill yourself in my goddamn dungeon, it becomes my business,” he said, wrapping a blanket around her. “Now shut your fucking mouth before I’m tempted to whip you some more.”
*** *** ***
Valentina lay nude, face-down, on a poster bed in a half-lit, white-painted room. An identical bed stood in stark relief against the opposite wall. Besides the four tall posts making up the frames, both beds were enclosed on three sides—and on top—with iron bars.
Cages. These weren’t beds. They were cages.
No, they were beds. She was going mad, even madder than she’d been when she’d incited Jake and Damon into scening with her in the back room. She’d been hurting and she’d wanted to hurt worse, and now she hurt so bad she almost couldn’t draw breath. She felt empty, like some vast hole had opened inside her that could never be healed. She hated when she got this way, when she did dangerous, impulsive things because she didn’t have a name for the emotions inside her, or any way to control them as they swarmed in her brain.
Look, Mr. Lemaitre had thundered as he held her in his bathroom. Look what you’ve done to yourself. Horrible, garish cuts and welts covered her from her shoulders to her ass and hips, and even to the backs of her thighs. It hadn’t seemed like so much in the moment but now it looked awful. There would be bruises, he said, and then he’d said a lot of other very cruel things. He’d stood with her in his white-granite guest room shower and washed off the blood, and lectured her until tears mixed with the water coursing down her cheeks. You don’t even know them, he’d said. They are nothing to you. How can you give this much of yourself to them?
He didn’t understand. He didn’t understand that she’d been giving herself to him, not them.
But that only went to show how crazy she was. She’d wanted his attention, perhaps his regret. Even his anger. Well, she had that. She wanted Mr. Lemaitre but he didn’t want her, and she didn’t know how to process that, how to get over it.
She winced as his fingertips salved a cut on her shoulder blade, and knew she needed to say true things to him. It was the only way to reverse this horrible slide and make up for her mistakes, so when the first truth came to her she spoke it aloud in the oppressive silence. “If I could go back in time, I wouldn’t do it again.”
He moved from her shoulder blade to a cut on the tender skin near her spine. “I’m glad to hear that.” His voice was tight, dripping with something like sarcasm, but not the roar of disapproval it had been before.
“It’s just... My brain... When I start to feel—”
“If you are going to make more excuses, save them.”
She fell silent, biting her lip. “Monsieur—”
“I don’t want to hear excuses. I need to understand what’s driving this behavior of yours. I need to know how to stop it, because it can’t continue.”
“My grandmother said I had il Diavolo inside me. How do you say it? Diablo?”
“The devil,” he murmured. “What a lazy excuse.”
She sighed and turned her face into the pillow. It smelled faintly of lavender but it wasn’t girly. It smelled fresh and crisp, like the towels he’d dried her with, like the pristine white robe he’d shrugged into. Like him. His house, what she’d caught of it as he dragged her to this room, was also very crisp, with no color, no clutter. It was so unlike her own place, trashed with the various detritus she compulsively collected. What would it be like to let go of all that and stay in this plain white room, in this cage bed, forever? She started to cry. She knew why she wanted him. She wanted control, and he could control her. Not forever. He wasn’t a man to stay with a slave forever, but he could teach her to balance her behavior, to think first. To wait before she acted impulsively.
“I need you,” she mouthed against the pillow, too softly for him to hear.
“What?”
She curled her hands into fists as he moved to her buttocks, rubbing the warmed medicine into her cuts. His fingers were as strong and masterful as the rest of him. Her pussy reacted with a tingling warmth, even in her misery and pain. She pressed one of her fists into her eyes to smear away the tears.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know how else to get your attention.”
His fingers stopped still. “You did this to get my attention? You risked your life and endured this abuse to get my attention?”
“Mr. Lemaitre—”
“If you needed my attention, you could have come to my office as I said. You could have sent me an email.” He massaged salve into a smarting cut on the back of her thighs. “I am available to my performers. You need only ask for an appointment.”
“You know that’s not the type of attention I’m talking about. It’s not the attention I need.”
“You need. It’s all about your needs, isn’t it?” Again, she caught the scent of heat and clean lavender. His robe was stark white against his tan, furred chest. She tried to turn to him but he stopped her with a hand on her back. “No. Give the cream a moment to absorb before you roll over and smear it everywhere.”
That hand holding her still...it was everything she wanted. Control. Protection.
“I want to be yours, Mr. Lemaitre,” she cried. “I want to be yours so badly.”
“Do you? I never would have guessed.”
She twisted to meet his eyes. “Don’t mock me. Don’t laugh at me, please. It’s the truth, and it’s killing me that you don’t want me.”
“You mustn’t mock me,” he replied, the thunder back in his voice. “You don’t want to be mine. You haven’t the first idea about submission. You want a thrill, an experience. You want me to fuck you until you get your rocks off. You want the adrenaline rush.”
“No. Yes.” She sighed, following him with her gaze as he went to the bathroom to wash his hands. “I want you to use me and control me, like you did with your slaves. I want your power, your possession.”
“You want my cock, because you’re a nymphomaniac with poor impulse control.”
“That’s not true.” She lay back down. “Well, it is true, but there’s so much more than that in my heart.” Her voice roughened in her frustration. “You won’t even try to understand what I’m feeling.”
“I don’t think you understand what you’re feeling.” He returned and sat in the chair beside her, looking over her whip-marked body. “This is an ill-fated attraction, Valentina. How can I make it stop?”
Oh, those words hurt her. She had to make him see... “Make love to me. Just once,” she begged. “Touch me just once so I can know the feeling of your...your magic.”
“My magic?” He shook his head. “Jason’s right. You don’t live in the real world.” He stood and paced away from her.
“Mr. Lemaitre, I would give anything to belong to you.”
He turned back, holding up a finger. “Don’t. Don’t say you would give anything, especially to someone like me, because I’ll take you up on that offer and you won’t like it.”
“I would like it. I’d do anything for you. Anything, anything, anything.” She yelled the word at him, her heart pounding. “You know how I feel, I know you do. I only have this one life and I want to experience everything I desire.”
“Everything you desire?”
“Yes, and you are keeping me from doing it.”
“And you need this to be fulfilled in life? You need to be mine? To be taken by me, used by me? Possessed by me, as you so dramatically put it?”
“Yes,” she cried. “That’s what I need.”
He crossed his arms over his chest. “What will you offer that I need? What will I get out of this possession, besides a recurrent headache?”
Valentina’s face flushed red, because she hadn’t once, not once, considered his side of things.
“Ah, but you see, my dear, that’s the rub,” he said quietly. “I’m not a service top. I take slaves for my pleasure, not theirs. I have less than no interest in your needs, Valentina, except as they intersect with what I desire.
”
She swallowed hard. “Well...what do you desire?”
His piercing gaze transformed from something reproachful to something more speculative. It scared her a little, the assessment in his expression.
“I think you’re a selfish hedonist who wants what she wants,” he said. “That’s not slavery, you know. It isn’t even power exchange. It’s topping from the bottom and I don’t tolerate it in those I ‘possess.’”
Valentina tried not to be distracted by the growing tent in his robe. “You...you would have to teach me to be better. I need control.”
“You would have to. I need. You’re still not listening, Valentina,” he said, coming back to the bed. “The only one having their needs met in a relationship between us would be me.”