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Before he asks, I offer him my wrists.

He nods, then pushes on my back until I’m bent over. My wrists are fastened in the cuffs and my ass is raised in the air, opening my most private area to the room, to the dozens of eyes above.

Someone brings him a bar with cuffs at either end. It’s attached to my ankles, effectively keeping them spread wide.

I can’t lift myself or twist away. I can’t hide.

Humiliation burns through me, suffocating the confidence I try to hold on to. I want to disappear between the cracks of the stone floor, but power wakes inside me every time the world tries to force me to kneel. The power to command a room, even if it’s by showing my pussy.

I look at Edwin upside down and remember what he told me. Only you and me. But I’m too exposed for that thought to survive long.

“When you receive your requested tools from our Veiled Matrons, you may begin,” Liam announces.

An older woman in a white dress and a headpiece resembling a nun’s habit rolls in a tray. The white veil over her face obscures her identity just like the masks, but I still see a hint of humanity under there. Until now, I hadn’t considered women being involved in the Serpentium Order.

With my head hanging down and blood rushing to it, the whole scene looks unreal. The tray holds objects I can’t make out from this angle. I only hope Edwin chose a toy less vicious than what I felt last night.

The metal on my body hurts constantly now. A persistent pang that makes stillness its own kind of endurance.

Edwin selects an instrument I recognize from the Black Room, one of the floggers with several long tails that hung on the wall. He steps behind me, and I try to brace for it, but there’s no way.

The first strike lands across my ass and the sting spreads outward from the point of impact. My jaw clamps shut as I make a sound through my teeth.

Another strike follows. Then another.

The leather tails bite repeatedly into my skin until the surface of my body feels lit from within.

Then he goes lower.

The next strike catches my pussy, jarring the clamp on my clit at the same time, making me jerk helplessly against the restraints. Tears spring to my eyes from the sheer intensity of it, but I clench my mouth shut, swallowing the sound until it turns into a shaky exhale.

Again.

A sob slips out before I can stop it.

Again.

This time a full cry rips from me, raw and humiliating in the way it echoes through the silence of the chamber.

Because of the angle, tears slide upward across my forehead into my hairline. Edwin doesn’t soothe me. He doesn’t give me a break before doing it again. The pain burns where it lands and speaks for itself.

Then his fingers move to the clamp on my clit. He loosens it and removes it slowly, letting the rush of blood back into the tissue in a wave of agony. A deep, pulsing ache makes my vision flicker. I let out a low sound I can’t disguise, my whole body trembling as if the pain has turned into electricity.

Edwin circles a finger around my entrance and proves how wet I am for this after my body reacted to the flogging like it was pleasure. He rubs my clit with lazy strokes, and the ache there is so intense my hips jerk before I force them still.

From the tray he picks up a small wheel edged with sharp points. He rolls it over the heated skin of my ass, the sensation prickling uncomfortably. A thousand tiny stabs make me squirm where I stand.

Then it moves lower. Closer. Over my swollen lips.

I know he’ll do it. I know he won’t spare me.

Every muscle tenses, but it changes nothing. The points bite into my oversensitive clit and I shriek, fighting the cuffs, trying to escape my own body. His other hand spreads my lips wider, keeping me open, making sure there’s no avoiding it.

Fuck!

He kneels so I can see his face better, and the sight of his grin makes desire twist strangely inside me.

“I need you extra sensitive for this,” he says softly.