Page 189 of What We Burn

“You disobeyed us tonight,” Eli says. He trails a finger down my spine and every muscle in my back pulls tight. “You ran off. Put yourself in danger. Now you’re going to get the punishment you earned.”

He steps back so I’m framed by both their bodies, the leash stretched tight. For half a second, nothing moves but my breathing. And then Knox is in front of me, crouched so his now-unmasked face is level with mine. His hands cup my jaw, and he brushes his thumb along my lower lip.

“Still hungry, Fury?”

I don’t trust my voice, so I just nod.

He forces my mouth open with the pad of his thumb, and slides two thick fingers past my teeth, pressing down on my tongue. I gag a little, instinctive, but he shushes me, thumb stroking my cheekbone.

“Breathe through it,” he says, and I do, letting his fingers fuck my mouth slow while the sting of humiliation and arousal blooms between my legs and coats the inside of my thighs. Eli moves to my side, watching, arms folded, mouth tight with anticipation. I can feel their approval before either of them speaks—it’s in the way Knox holds me, the way Eli tracks the movement of my lips, the way their bodies lean in, greedier by the second.

Knox adds a third finger, stretching me wide. It hurts, but I like it. I like the way it makes my eyes water, like the urge to cry is just another way to come undone. He rocks his hand gently, in and out. I drool helplessly onto his knuckles and let him have what he wants.

“Look at her,” Eli says, almost to himself. “You ever see anyone want it this bad, even in here?”

Knox withdraws his fingers and wipes my chin with the back of his hand. “Not in a long time,” he says. “You’re beautiful when you’re being ruined, Fury.”

I glow under the praise, heat pooling low in my belly. I don’t know if it’s the aftershock of murder, the collar, or just these two watching me like I’m the only thing that matters in this whole deviant universe—but all I want is to be seen, wanted, broken, and rebuilt by hands that understand me.

Knox leans in and kisses my forehead, the contradiction making my brain short out.

“You’re doing so good, Fury. Take what you’re given.”

Then he stands, unzipping his pants, and frees his cock. It’s heavy, dark, already swelling.

Eli’s eyes flash. “She needs to take it all, Knox.”

Knox slides his cock in where his fingers were—filling my mouth in one easy push, the girth an insult and a gift. He’s not rough at first. He wants to feel me want it. He lets me choke on it, lips stretched glossy and obscene. And I do. I push past my gag reflex, ignoring the tears running down my face, focused on the sense memory of power switching hands and what it feels like to offer everything up, over and over, and realize you’re still not emptied. I want to give more. I want to disappear into this.

He fucks my mouth faster, growls softly as he pushes deeper, hands holding my head just so until my nose is pressed up into coarse hair and I can’t breathe at all. My eyes roll up. My lungs burn as he fucks my throat. My vision blurs, and I try to moan around his cock. I can feel him twitch, a warning. He draws back just enough that air floods back into my depleted lungs. Then he pinches my cheeks between his fingers and groans as he lets go, his hot cum coating my tongue. I moan and swallow it down, my cunt throbbing with want. Then Knox wipes his tip roughly across my cheek and I let him mark me. Want him to.

“Doing so good, Fury.”

Eli’s eyes are black coals now, burning through his restraint. I sense the moment he loses it. He pulls me upright by the leash so fast the world lurches sideways. My knees slip and I land hard against him, backward, his chest pressed to my spine. His arms clamp around me, steel trap—one across my ribs, the other snaking through my hair and forcing my head back until his mouth hovers at the edge of my ear.

“You want to be fucking reckless?” he growls, and the sound slithers inside me, straight to the pit of my stomach. “You want to make us watch you go feral, make us worry you’ll come home in pieces?”

He slides his hand down, fingers hooking into the neckline of my dress and yanking it down until both my breasts are exposed to the cool air, nipples already hard and aching from everything that’s happened tonight.

“Then you’re going to take everything we give you—choke it down and ask for more. Understood?”

I nod, or mean to, but the grip in my hair makes it a tremble instead. The leash cinches up at my throat, a wordless warning, and then Eli bites my ear hard. “Answer, Sage.”

“Yes—Eli, yes,” I gasp.

Knox’s laugh is a single, delighted rumble.

Eli brings my wrists behind me one at a time and buckles leather cuffs around them, then clips them together at the small of my back. I feel everything. The precise way the padded bench forces my knees apart. How easily my body is arranged by hands that know every inch of resistance and how to bend it open.

My shoulders burn with the pressure. Another part of the lesson: what it feels like to be made defenseless and know exactly who holds me.

Eli releases me and steps toward the wall, and I track him by sound—the whisper of his shoes on carpet, the small metallic clink of him selecting something from the display. When he comes back, he crouches in front of me and opens his palm.

Two silver clamps sit there, joined by a thin chain that pools in his hand like spilled mercury.

My stomach drops straight through the floor of myself.

“You know what these are?” he asks.