Page 34 of Salt in the Wound
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The pale womanfrom New Year’s Eve came to collect me, and then together we went downstairs to the backstage area. I shivered in my short white dress, and she—Andrea was her name—looked over at me with a gaze so disapproving that I could feel it burn along my skin. But she didn’t speak, and I didn’t either, feeling suddenly very young. Just a college student in a tiny white dress that barely covered my backside, my feet bare and my hair tied in a simple braid and bound with a ribbon. And she was a grown woman, every bit an adult with her tailored suit and perfectly waved hair.
What must she think, I wondered, about Mark being engaged to nineteen-year-old me?
What must they all think?
From backstage, I could hear someone giving a speech to the room, the crowd laughing and applauding at all the right moments. It was dark back here, the only light coming in from the stage lights, and I had the surreal moment of briefly not recognizing my own life.
Isolde Laurence, banking heiress—Isolde Laurence, who wanted to be a nun—was about to walk onto a stage wearing nothing but a flimsy silk nightie and allow herself to be cuffed to a cross and flogged. In front of hundreds and hundreds of people.
The person talking ended their speech and the stage went dark. Andrea took my upper arm and led me onstage, and I resisted the instinct to pull free, to twist against her wrist in a way that would immediately break her hold.
Play helpless, play weak.It’s just part of the game.
But it chafed all the same.
I was led to the middle of the stage and left there, standing in the near-darkness, listening to the whistles and calls of the crowd. They were hungry for the night to begin, for the depravity to commence, and when the lights came up to reveal me standing there, looking lost and nervous, they erupted.
I breathed into my stomach, calming my nerves by staring back at them, by finding the exits behind them, by counting the rooms on the upper levels that looked out onto the stage.
They were just people. Just people eager for sex and for violence, and they were no different from the Manhattanites and Londoners my uncle had trained me to spy on. And in some cases, they were literally no different because they were in fact the same people.
Hyssop.Hyssop. It was a chant in my head.Hyssop.
I could stop this at any point.
Hy—
Mark stepped out from the other side of the stage, again in an all-black tuxedo.
The crowd lost it.
Screams, shouts, roars—the space was now a well of noise, and all of it in adulation of its leader. Mark nodded at them, and then his blue eyes slid over to me. I swallowed. It had been three months since I’d last seen him, and the effect seeing him had on me was alarming. Embarrassing.
But effective, perhaps, because I saw him notice my fast breathing, my tongue darting out to wet my lower lip, and those blue eyes darkened.
He strode over to me, long, easy steps in that fallen angel tuxedo of his, and moved between me and the crowd.
“Ready?” he asked, looking down at me.
The stage lights were directly behind him, turning him into nothing more than a silhouette. I could only make out the immaculate sweep of his hair away from his face, the outline of his carved cheekbones.
“Yes.” I looked down at his dress shoes. The light was hurting my eyes.
“Say your safe word if you need to,” he said, and he sounded more serious than I’d ever heard him. “I’ll need to make tonight look convincing.”
“Give me what you’d give any submissive, Mark.” I met his eyes again. “Sir, I mean.”
“But you’re not any submissive,” he said, leaning close to murmur in my ear. “You’re going to be my wife.”
The way he saidwifesent a hot, electric thrill racing down my spine. He said it like it was a personal fantasy of his—the filthiest pleasure he could imagine.
A delicious tension stole up my thighs as he stepped back and turned to face the crowd. He said nothing, but he didn’t need to. They fell silent on their own, held captive by his attention and his desire.
Music began to fill the room, low and pulsing, and then Mark took my hand and bent his head over it. His lips, warm and soft, brushed over my knuckles, and the crowd stirred, loving it, loving this small, gallant kindness before I was strapped down and punished.
It was hard not to love it too. Hard not to love the way he looked at me through his lashes as he lifted his lips, the way he tugged me closer to him with his eyes burning into mine. His other hand found my hip and then my ass, squeezing it roughly through the dress. He tugged it up, exposing my boy-short-covered backside, and then looked over my shoulder and down at what he’d revealed, giving me a quick, hard slap.
