me but not be afraid of me. There was a big fucking difference. From me, she’d learn the beauty of fear that intensifies pleasure. I wanted all of her orgasms right there on the border between good and bad, between yes and no, between exactly right and too much.
That was where we would exist in this dungeon. That was where we would lock horns: where fear stokes the flames. Where destruction meets rebirth.
I carried her back to where I had the chains and irons. I grabbed her arm and pinned it against the stone wall, restraining her left wrist first. She tried to fight her way free. She scratched the shit out of me—snarling as she left three long angry marks up my forearm that made me instantly hard.
Fight all you want, baby. Let me feel your power. Show me what I’m up against.
The iron cuff was exactly the right size; she couldn’t slip her wrist through, but it wasn’t so tight as to make her hand go numb. As soon as I had the left cuff secured, she instinctively began to submit; she might not have even known it, but a little of the fight drained out of her and she started to relax.
To reward her, I gently shifted her hair to one side so that it was over her left breast, not against the stone behind her. I used my tenderest touch, even letting myself brush her cheek with my own.
Fuck, how I adored her. And goddamn, how I needed to be inside her.
She studied me as I secured her other wrist. I looked into her eyes once the shackle was closed, telling her—without saying a goddamned word—that I would always take care of her. She was my possession, more important than the fucking kingdom itself.
“What you and I are going to do here, it’s a process. It’s about boundaries and fear. It’s about you and me. Light and dark. Submission and domination. It will be us.”
Her eyes flashed a little, and a crimson flush crept from her tits to her neck to her cheeks. I turned away from her, heading across the room to get a basin of water. But as I did, she thrashed against her bindings.
“Please, Randal. Please don’t leave me. I don’t want to be alone. Please!”
I spun around to face her.
“You think I’d ever fucking leave you?” In her eyes, I saw genuine terror at being left there, and it broke my heart. I never wanted to see that kind of fear. She had no fucking clue what this was all about, I knew that. She had no idea the pleasures of denial and suffering. No idea that only through pain can we find real pleasure.
But she was damned well going to learn it.
All she knew was that she was somewhere cold, and dark, with chains on the walls and weapons of torture everywhere, with a beast of man who’d just killed three men without blinking an eye. But the line between pain and pleasure was fucking razor thin. I had to teach her how to walk that tightrope.
I stood close to her, close enough to let her feel my hard cock against her belly. I ran my knuckle down her cheek.
“I’ve waited over a year and a half to get my hands on you, Iris. The last thing I’d ever do is leave you. You are safe here. I promise. You need this, you know that. You need to let someone else take it all for you, and that’s my purpose in life. I can help you forget.”
She searched my face, like she didn’t quite believe me. “What do you mean? More than a year and a half?”
It was my job to make her believe it. Now and always.
“The harvest festival before last, that was when I first saw you. I couldn’t believe it then that you might actually want me as much as I wanted you, but here we are and all you need to know is you’re mine. And I’m going to do whatever the fuck I want to this perfect body. I will protect it and care for it. It’s the most valuable thing I fucking own.”
I pressed her up against the wall, making her chains clatter. What I needed her to understand was that everything—every conversation, every movement, was up to me. So I took hold of her dress, right above her tits, and with three ferocious yanks I ripped the fabric right down the middle, revealing first