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Ivan, on the other hand, seemed full of nervous energy and yet still his graceful, unhurried self, a big cat ready to spring. He turned suddenly around to me, just as we reached the top of a marble staircase that led down into darkness.
For a moment I saw in his eyes how he truly felt about me, the warmth he showed me when he held me in his lap with his arms around my trembling body. I didn’t know if he meant to wear that loving expression, but I hoped not—I hoped he simply couldn’t keep it off his face when he looked at me, as dangerous as it might prove to show his feelings.
An instant later, though, his face went hard and cruel. He spoke to Belkonov as he looked at me.
“I’m giving you this cunt on one condition, Boris. You keep her in your dungeon and she never comes out.”
CHAPTER 21
Heather
Belkonov turned, and I managed to drop my eyes quickly enough that he couldn’t tell I had had them anywhere else but on his shoes.
“Yes?” he asked. “Well… that’s disappointing, but I suppose I understand.”
My heart had started to race so frantically that I could feel the pressure of the air I took in through my nose, flaring my nostrils. Desperate to keep them from seeing that sign of my distress, I parted my lips a little so that I could take deeper breaths, trying to control the movement of my chest with each of them.
My face had become scalding hot, though, and I hoped fervently that Belkonov would attribute the blush to my having to stand there naked and leashed before the two well-dressed men, rather than my understanding of what my master had said.
“And how long,” he asked Ivan, “am I permitted to keep her alive for whipping and fucking?”
I nearly cried out with the surge of terror and horrible, perverse need that went through me at the calmly brutal words. I felt my fingers, still twined together atop my head tense hard against each other—so hard that I nearly whimpered just at that sensation.
Ivan spoke in English, then. I felt certain he had seen my terrible difficulty. What he said didn’t help in the slightest with the raging sea of emotion inside my chest, constantly threatening to overwhelm my will and my reason. At least it freed me from the worry that Belkonov would figure out that I understood Russian perfectly.
“A week,” he said decisively. Then, “Look at me, whore.”
My gospodin’s words had the hard note in them that he always used with minions who had come into disfavor. My heart rate kicked up another notch, and I thought I might fall down in a faint merely at the way Ivan’s voice could somehow get inside my body.
I looked up, into his eyes, and I saw death. I couldn’t help it: I let out a wrenching sob. My mind simply couldn’t keep up. The knowledge that the man I loved didn’t actually feel how it seemed so obvious he felt, from the ice in the gaze he fixed on me, wouldn’t take inside my brain.
He loves you. He would never have survived this long, to be your master, if he couldn’t keep his true self hidden so very well… if he couldn’t act like a monster when he needed to.
It didn’t help: no matter how many times I told myself that Ivan’s apparent cruelty didn’t represent his true nature, the sheer, almost physical force of that dismissive expression made my heart quail. The fear swept through me, even as, to my horror, I felt myself respond in a very different way between my thighs.
“You’re never going to leave your new master’s dungeon,” he told me. He turned to Belkonov, though he kept speaking in Russian. “Do you have a hood you can put over her head? When you share her with your men I don’t want them saying they fucked Antonov’s whore.”
It had become nearly impossible to continue looking at Ivan’s face. Only the operation of the compliance wand kept my eyes there as he turned back to me.
Please, Ivan, I begged, inside my head. Please… Master, please show me you love me again… just for an instant.
But he didn’t, because he couldn’t: to beam the warmth for which I felt so desperate into my eyes could cost both of us our lives. The Guardsman had made that very clear, on the embankment: the Guard had gathered enough intelligence to know that if Belkonov suspected Ivan meant to get rid of him, he would act early, and put into motion the plans he had already made to take Ivan down.
Belkonov chuckled and replied in Russian, “You deprive me of a great pleasure, Ivan, in not letting them see how greatly you esteem me, to have given me your fuck toy. But hooding her has its own pleasures, I suppose. Especially since I have a hood that will leave her mouth quite free to use as we please.”
