At first, I bite back my cries because I don’t want to give that Russian cunt the satisfaction of hearing my pain. But one slap—the flat of Cole’s hand across the cane’s marks—takes me by complete surprise, and I wail without meaning to.
The sound unlocks something inside me, opening up a reservoir of power I didn’t know I held. After that, I scream. I weep. I beg.
But I never, ever sayred.
Near the end, Cole is close to coming. I hear it in his breathing. I feel it in his fingers, excavating my hips. I’m sobbing, exhausted, barely able to support myself on elbows and knees.
As Cole empties inside me, he reaches around and pinches my clit.
I’m not supposed to do this. I shouldn’t be able to come—not with the agony he’s extracted from every nerve in my body. But his familiar pinch does it, along with his ferocious roar. He’s aching, and I’m spent, but his touch carries me over the edge.
This isn’t the blinding orgasm of the first time he tied me up in a hotel room in Boston. It isn’t the overwhelming symphony he’s played on me in our dungeon at home. It isn’t the fierce redemption he gave me after he watched me execute the monster who haunted my childhood.
This orgasm is tiny. It pulls me into the deepest parts of my brain. It spins me tighter and tighter, into a place no other man has taken me, into a sanctuary where no other man will ever, ever be. It’s the most beautiful gift Cole could ever give me.
I’m stunned when he pulls out. Immediately, I ache in places I didn’t know had nerves. I’m bleeding and I’m burned and I’m frozen. I’m shivering so hard my teeth feel like they’re shattering inside my head.
But Cole is whispering in my ear. He’s saying that he has me, that no one can hurt us, that we’re safe.
I don’t have to move.
I don’t have to speak.
I don’t have to think.
Cole will take care of everything.
Someone is moaning, the same sound rising and falling, over and over like a siren blocks away.
“Hush,” Cole says.
His arms fold around me. He smells like soap and shampoo and toothpaste.
“Take this,” he says. “It will help with the pain.”
He puts something on the back of my tongue. Before I can gag, he brings a cool, hard edge to my mouth. I purse my lips like a greedy little bird, and I swallow.
“Go back to sleep,” he says.
I do.
Cole holds me in a shower. After, he wraps my hair in a towel and my body in a robe. He walks me back to a bed, and he helps me curl up on my side. He pulls a blanket up to my ear.
“Don’t go,” I say.
“I’m here.”
“Hold me,” I say.
He climbs into bed beside me. I reach for his arm and pull it close to my side.
“Don’t leave me.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“Say that again.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
