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Elio moves towards me. I scrunch my eyes shut and flinch at his proximity. I feel the heat of him, the almost ominous pressure of his presence, before he abruptly draws back. I squeeze open one eye, then the other, to see him at the island, leaning back against it with the wineglass in his hand. He swirls it languorously, watching me.
We stare at each other for so long that awkwardness unfurls. I lick my lips, shifting back and forth on my feet, wondering when he’ll touch me. My traitorous body is already anticipating it, my insides coiling, and I think bitterly that if it’s wet panties he wants, he won’t be disappointed.
“Well?” Elio says, swirling his drink again and taking a sip.
“Well, what?” I huff. “Aren’t you… aren’t you going to…”
“Help you?” he finally asks. He takes a long, contemplative sip of the wine then says, “No, I don’t think I will.”
So, he wants a goddamn show then. He wants to stand there, watching me make a mess of myself, completely closed-off and unaffected. Although, maybe not all that unaffected. I risk a glance down to his crotch and see the thickened, swollen outline of his shaft through his pants.
I breathe out harshly. A mixture of relief and disappointment – disappointment that fucking terrifies me – floods through me. And with it comes arousal I can’t run from or deny. Elio watching me, his eyes dark as the sky between stars, dark with need as toxic as my own, feels like a drug. That gaze is in my bloodstream, demanding and possessive and digging deep inside me. Digging, until he can open me up and find everything, see everything. Know everything.
I know you.
“Pants down. Panties on,” he says. The command sounds stern, but I hear the way the words are laced with slight strain. A gruffness he can’t keep quiet.
I should stop this. Stop this now. But there’s fifty grand at stake, a tiny little slice of my future freedom. And there’s Elio, his breath coming harder than it should, and fuck, seeing him is what truly makes me want to do this. And I try not to think about what that means, about how screwed up I must be to want this in some strange way, as I hook my thumbs into the pants and I obey.
My glance goes to the camera, like a shiny black orb of an eye on the ceiling, and I wince, wondering if anyone else will see this. If someone else is watching even now. Maybe the guard who trailed me into this room before Elio dismissed him so quietly I didn’t even notice. Throat dry, I kick the sweatpants off, letting them skid over the spilled wine on the floor.
“How clear is the image quality from that camera feed?” I ask quietly.
“Crystal,” Elio responds, lifting his sparkling glass in the air as if to demonstrate just how clear the image of me falling apart will be for whichever men are watching now.
I’m supposed to be touching myself, I know I am, but my fists curl together in front of my pubic bone, shame spiking through me. This feeling is different from the embarrassment Elio has made me feel, the humiliation he coaxes out of me that’s so terribly erotic it takes my breath away. The thought of other men watching me right now just makes me plain anxious, maybe even afraid.
“Songbird.”
There’s a quietness in the way his voice wraps around the nickname that draws my gaze sharply.
His expression has changed. I’ve never seen his face like this. It’s not… No, it’s not soft. But there’s something there. Like the physical manifestation of an ache. And I can’t help but think, for one batshit crazy fraction of a second, that even with the scars, even with the cruelty and the eyes that want to tear me open, when he looks at me like that, like he’s tortured by something, like he’s in pain, that he’s beautiful.
“I cut off the feed to the main security hub the second I sent Robbie out of this room,” he says carefully. “I’m the only one here with you now.”
Tears of relief and gratitude burn at the back of my eyes. It’s a tiny kindness. Not even a kindness at all, really, but I latch onto it like it’s a lifeboat on the stormy sea that’s become my life.
“Are you lying?” I whisper.
His eyes are dead serious when he replies.
“I’m not going to let one of my men watch you do this.”
Not an act of kindness, then, but one of pure possessiveness. All of me belongs to him, even my pleasure.
“But… the gala…” I can’t even say it. Can’t even think about how many people must have seen me shuddering so wantonly against his thigh.
“You were fully dressed then. Well, mostly,” he says. “And you may not be aware of this, but you were so aroused that you came from barely moving at all. We were dancing close, yes, but that’s all anyone would have seen from the outside.” He pauses, then bites out, “If you think I’d let anyone else see you undressed, see you truly come undone, then you have no idea who I am.”
“Oh, I know who you are, Elio,” I say before sliding my fingers over the blue silk between my legs. He physically jolts, and at first I think it’s because of what I’m doing with my hand. But then I realize, no, it happened a split second before that. It happened when I said his name.
It’s the first time I’ve called him by his first name. I’m not sure why I do it, but I say it again, just as my finger circles the tight bud of my swelling clit.
“I know you, Elio.”
He exhales and puts down the wineglass like he’s scared he’ll snap the stem. Just like I was, except he’s strong enough to actually do it. He doesn’t take his eyes from my hand between my legs as he releases the glass onto the sparkling granite of the island.
“You’re a tyrant,” I breathe, beginning to stroke myself. “A murderer. A monster. Greedy. Selfish. Possessive. Obsessive.” I accentuate every word with a circling movement of my hand until I can’t speak anymore. But just because I can’t say the words doesn’t mean they’re not piling up in my brain. Terrible and cruel and ruinous, but you said you’d put your body between a bullet and me, and you actually fucking did it, and what am I supposed to do with that? Just what am I supposed to do with that?
