I move to stand behind her, folding my arm across her belly and pulling her close to my still-clad chest. My cock twitches hard at the contact, and she gasps at the pressure against the small of her back.
Taking advantage of her parted lips, I slip my thumb inside. I fuck her mouth slowly, letting her circle me with her tongue. She leans forward, eager, whining for more pressure.
I answer by guiding the dildo between her legs.
Her whine changes pitch, her lips growing tight around my thumb as I stretch her folds below. She shakes her head, as if the sensation is too intense, but she arches her back, forcing her ass against my still-clothed cock.
My thumb fills her mouth. The dildo fills her pussy. The bulge behind my zipper presses into her crack. Her toes point and her thighs turn to iron and she groans as I start to move, pumping past both pairs of lips, the ones around my thumb and the ones around the slick molded dick.
“Yes,” she says around my thumb, the word vibrating deep in her throat. “Harder. More. Yes, yes, y?—”
I pull away mere seconds before she comes. One more stroke, above or below, one more twitch of my desperate, aching cock, and she’d break.
Mouth empty, she howls. She presses her thighs together, fighting to keep the dildo inside. Maybe she thinks she can grind against it, squeeze it tight and reach the escape she craves.
But she’s too hot and the silicon is too slick and even though it’s mammoth, it slips free to the floor.
“You motherfucking shitehawk!” she shouts, loud enough to be heard in the security command center in the garage, if this room weren’t sound-proofed with the finest acoustic control system on the market.
I’ve primed her in every way I know. She continues to swear as I make my way back to the armoire. I slide open a drawer at the bottom to retrieve my newest purchase. It only arrived yesterday. It’s the reason I’ve brought Kate here tonight. It’s the final thing she needs to see in this newly rebuilt dungeon, the last thing she has to accept.
“Goddamn it,” Kate says, as I straighten and close the drawer. “Let me down or finish me off, you fucking sadistic arsehole.”
“Sadistic,” I say, my back still toward her. “What a perfect word to choose.”
Something about my tone warns her, or maybe she reads the angle of my arm. Perhaps she sees some reflection in the polished armoire door, or else her brain finally makes the inevitable connection, closing up a link she opened when she strung up Tarasov five long weeks ago.
Whatever the cause, she falls silent. Every atom of air in the room is suddenly charged with electricity. A single spark couldignite the dungeon around us, could level every building on this block.
I turn to face her, holding out the item in my hand.
It’s a spreader, made of iron, burnished the same gold-washed brass as all the metal in the room. It has two cruel loops for her feet. She’ll barely be able to touch the ground once I have her locked in.
Brandishing the device, I cross to her suspended body. I kneel before her and capture her right foot with my firmest grasp. I tug her leg toward the outer limit of my metal bar, positioning her ankle for the loop. I’m ready to close her in, to exorcise the past.
But I’m frozen before the metal touches her flesh because Kate sobs, “Red.”
7
KATE
Red.
I say it. I hear it. I feel it, like a bucket of feckin’ seawater sluicing over my pounding head.
I don’t want to use my safeword. I want to be strong enough to take every delicious torment my husband, my Dom, devises. I don’t want to be the sub who fails.
But it’s not failure to keep myself safe. If I can’t tell the truth, we can’t play these games. It’s not fair to Cole, and it’s not fair to me.
And the truth is I can’t bear to be locked in a spreader. Not now, not here, not where I tortured Pyotr Tarasov with a similar device.
I don’t regret what I did. I deserved revenge. But looking at that thing in Cole’s firm hand, feeling the icy metal against the bone of my ankle, anticipating the absolute, unforgiving helplessness of being suspended and splayed…
I can’t do it.
Cole doesn’t fight me. There’s nothing about the set of his mouth that shows he’s disappointed. He doesn’t throw the spreader to the ground; he simply sets it on the floor, using a gentle push of his foot to move it out of reach.
He straightens and slips behind me. Before I can feel a heartbeat of panic, he guides my hands up and over the hook. He supports my arms for nearly a minute, giving my muscles a chance to relax without cramping, and then he eases my elbows to my sides. He strips my twisted bra from my wrists.
