Page 23 of Salt in the Wound
His heart beat steadily under my ear. I wondered whatthe worldwas. If it was something more than fidelity. Something impossible to give.
“Did you have a typical college experience?” I asked after a minute.
He didn’t answer at first, the soothing strokes on my back now turning to slow caresses of my hair. “I suppose my freshman year could have been called typical. But then Carpathia happened and we went to war. I enlisted as soon as I could, joined the Rangers eighteen months after that. And I never looked back.”
“Never?”
A short exhale. “Even if I’d regretted my choices, there are some doorways you can’t walk back through. I could have gone back to school after the war ended with Maxen Colchester’s heroics, but the chance of having a typical college experience? That died with the first person I killed.”
There was a lull, and then he said, softly, “Do you know of any doorways like that, Isolde? The ones that can’t be walked back through?”
I was all the way back inside my body now, and it was just as well, because my stomach had started to churn. I was about to walk though many of those doorways. Maybe I already had.
I opened my mouth to say so, and then awareness dawned like a cold, white light inside my mind. I was about to give him answers that I didn’t want to give, insights into my psyche that I couldn’taffordto give, not this early in the game. And with the blindfold tied neatly around my eyes, it was easy to see the truth.
I was being interrogated.
By a former spy, by someone who was sitting on such a treasure trove of private information that both the Catholic Church and Wall Street wanted in.
This was an interrogation, and it was working, and it was all because I’d had some kind of vertigo attack while crawling. I couldn’t have been more disgusted with myself.
I pushed off his lap, suddenly needing to be apart from him, needing to be on my feet, needing to see. I tore off the blindfold and then flinched as light assaulted me. Even the dim glow up here was too much.
“There’s not much you can do to make your sight return faster,” volunteered Mark.
I wouldn’t glare, I wouldn’t sneer, I’d already exposed too much of myself by scrambling away from him like that. Bybreaking the scene, as my research would say. Without a safe word.
Breaking the incredibly intense, deeply painful scene of…me sitting comfortably on his lap.
Shame crawled up my throat.Weak.I was weak.
I hated being weak.
“I should have said my safe word,” I said woodenly. Mark was already standing, tugging at his rolled sleeves so that his shirt’s seams laid in geometric lines on his body again.
“It was your first scene,” he said. “I think you did well, given the circumstances. This is all we’ll do our first time at the club together anyway. We don’t want to give them too much at first anyway.”
My eyes were finally adjusting, and I could meet his eyes as I asked, “Who isthem?”
He slid his hands into his trouser pockets, his stance confident and wide. “Guests of my club. Employees of my club. Everyone involved with Lyonesse, really. They will be curious: I’ve made use of the occasional submissive, but I’ve never claimed one. Collared one.”
“Collared,” I echoed. Yes, I’d read about that too. But somehow I hadn’t—it hadn’t connected for me—
Mark was watching me carefully. “It’s only for show, Isolde. You won’t be collared in truth.”
Right. Right. But still there was something in me that resisted, that couldn’t accept what this was, what Mark’s world was built around. “I just…I don’t know if I understand this,” I heard myself say. I’d nearly passed out fromcrawling, so what was going to happen when we pretended to do anything more?
“You don’t understand…what? Collaring? Kink?” His gaze was steady, cold. Indelibly Mark Trevena.
“All of it,” I said. The blindfold was still in my hands and I held it up. “Why does anyone choose this? Why does anyone choosemore, the parts with the cropping and flogging and pain?”
He regarded me with that perceptive stare. “So you’ve never run until your legs gave out? Never kicked a post or bag until you were crying in pain?”
I went still.
“You’ve never told a sparring partner that they could go harder with you, that they didn’t have to hold back as much? You’ve never felt cleansed by pain? Reset by hurt? You’ve never felt like blood and bruises spelled out a secret story, a hidden story, meant only for you?”
He was guessing all of this. He had to be. He couldn’t know that he was right. He couldn’t know that above all else, I wanted to be allowed to hurt myself for God.
