Page 66 of Bitter Burn
Then his fingers are on the straps of my slip, underneath them. He slides the straps down my shoulders, and the silk kisses its way down my body to make a red puddle at my feet. He deliberately steps back and examines my naked form. It’s a critical look—there’s nothing of approval in it at all—but his hand twitches briefly at his side.
“Over there,” he orders coolly, and he inclines his head at the mat.
I go to stand in the middle, shivering, trying not to look directly at the crowd. They loved me once—cheered for me, accepted me. Took my pain and pleasure as their own. Now I’m naked in front of them, and I feel like I’m being pressed into wine.
It’s always real for me.
I look over at my husband, who is currently stripping off his suit jacket and then rolling up his sleeves. His vest is tailored to his torso without leaving a single gap or pucker; the snow-white fabric of his sleeves against his muscled forearms is a museum-worthy display of arrogance and strength.
I would be wine for him. He told me it needed to be real, and it is, realer than I let him believe while I convinced him it was all for the club, all for my reputation and therefore my safety. That part is still true, but it’s also true that I do want to prove something to him. That I want to show him that I’m still his, that I can be strong, that I’m ready to fight.
If that requires being crushed with shame and torment, so be it.
Without glancing over at me, Mark reaches out and flicks the sheet off the table with the panache of a magician. I’m just as eager as the guests to see what’s on it—even if my eagerness is limned in dread. But the crowd hums in something like disappointment when they see Mark’s tools for the night—not canes and crops and Wartenberg wheels, not the stuff of nightmares—but headphones and a length of silk and lots of synthetic rope. The orange-handled rope shears are the only thing on the table that look even remotely alarming, and they’re only there as a precaution.
I remember the mat under my feet and then look up to see two rings high above me. I look back to Mark, a little confused. Suspension isn’t something we’ve done, but it’s not one of my limits, hard or soft, and Mark has bound me with rope plenty of times.
Mark meets my questioning gaze with a detached one of his own as Dinah addresses the crowd once more. “How to give an ordeal to a little pain slut like our Isolde?” she asks. “Mark could cane her until she screams, gag her until she chokes, but it would feel right to her, wouldn’t it? To someone who feels clean after they hurt? No, that wouldn’t work at all.”
Mark approaches me with a length of red rope in his hand and, walking around the front of me, smoothly and methodically begins wrapping the rope around my chest into a harness. How can this be it for the trial? Are we lying to the club right now? Pretending that I’m afraid of bondage or suspension?
“I thought you said this needed to be real,” I murmur.
He pauses his work, and there’s pity in his expression when he says, “It will be.”
I don’t know what to make of this. I’ve enjoyed it every time Mark’s tied me up, run happy fingers over the lingering rope marks, been enthralled anytime we’ve had an expert in the club show off the poses and transitions of suspension bondage. Mark is even doing one of my favorite things right now, using the rope to frame my breasts in an elaborate pattern, something that makes them more sensitive even without any squeezing or compression. And the process is hypnotic, the warm brush of knuckles and fingers, the strangely supportive web of pressure, the soft hiss of the synthetic fibers against themselves.
My nerves are singing with apprehension; I still don’t know what’s going on. But there’s a drugging, slurring kind of thrill trickling into my thoughts now, something that’s a cousin to desire and dreaminess both.
Soon, I’m wrapped neatly from collarbones to ribs, my arms free because Mark is fussy about arms, wrists, and hands. People don’t care enough about radial neuropathy, he’d grumbled to me now and again, and while no one needs nerve damage, I’m only just now appreciating that Mark took extra care with my hands because he knew how I used them. Because he used his own the same way. Very hard to cut the throats of your enemies if your hands are numb because a bad top didn’t notice them turning purple.
He gets more rope, red as fresh blood, and returns to me, kneeling down to wrap my hips and thighs. It would be better if I kept my face toward the audience, if they could see the scraps of trepidation and shame, but I can’t do anything other than watch Mark as he lines up the rope and begins wrapping it around my hips with an intoxicating mix of precision and ease. His experience doesn’t lessen his attention for an instant; he is focused entirely on the red lengths belting my hips and framing my cunt. He is studying and checking his work as if there is nothing else in the world at all, no one else in the room, no days after today. Only the rope on my skin in parallel wraps and loops, only the gentle shush of the fibers as he pulls one length through the rest.
The stage lights catch in his hair as he bends his head to curve the rope where my backside meets my thighs, his hands sure and patient as they pull the rope back through the opening between my legs, the occasional brush of his fingers against my exposed sex almost too much to endure with dignity. The muscles of his back and shoulders shift under his shirt and vest, and his forearms flex against his rolled shirtsleeves as he pulls the rope through a final time and uses the excess to tie a garter onto one thigh.
It’s purely decorative, I know, just a nice way to use the extra rope, but as he traces the line of it once with his thumb before standing, I get the feeling it’s a decoration he likes very much.
My ankles are wrapped individually, and then finally Mark moves to my arms. Cuffs made of rope are knotted at each wrist, and then my arms are raised one at a time and bent at the elbow with my wrists resting at the back of my neck. The rope secures my arms like this, like wings around my head, and then Mark walks behind me and checks every single hitch and tuck with the scrutiny of a forensic auditor.
“No pins or needles?” he asks, sliding his fingers under the rope and then tugging here and there. “You can feel it when I pinch your pinkie? Your thumb? Can you feel my fingernail on your forearm now? And this one? Good.”
I’m a little dazed from the steady, efficient eroticism of the act, and it takes me a moment to realize that Hugo has joined us onstage, striding on to the approval of the crowd and giving them a polished, royal sort of wave as he walks up to us.
I don’t know what he’s doing here, but there’s a small bloom of certainty in my belly that I’d be more than okay with him staying up here, being part of the scene. Sharing is something that we haven’t done—something complicated by the very nonconsensual sharing I did with Tristan in Belgrade and in Lyonesse’s own garden—but Mark knows it’s on the list of things I’ll do…even on the list of things I’d like to do, provided Mark is there with me when it happens. And maybe that’s the punishment, the trial—have the unfaithful wife act out her sins in front of an audience. Maybe Kayden would come up too. Maybe even Tristan…
But Hugo only gives me a Gallic buss on the cheek and then starts walking around me, checking ropes and knots, kneeling to check the harness around my hips and cunt and the ropes around my ankles. He asks me the same questions as Mark—gives me stern instructions to let Mark know the moment I feel any pins and needles, any at all, and then goes to stand next to Dinah at the edge of the stage.
I haven’t forgotten that Mark is a master of the spectacle, that he knows how to stir and soothe the crowd according to his purposes, but it’s still fascinating to see it again as he slowly stalks around me, his hand finding my waist, my hip, and then finally my hair. He wraps it around his fist as he comes to stand in front of me, his eyes veiled and his expression scornful.
The guests, lulled into something like a reverie by the rhythmic and beautiful decoration of my body with the ropes, lean forward, recognizing the moment as a threshold into the next act.
Mark, the showman, whose skills weren’t honed on a stage but in the field with fake passports and a seductive smile, lets the moment germinate and unfold. Allows the tender shoot of it to find the light of their curiosity and impatience.
And then he says, loud enough for them to hear, “Would you like to say anything before we begin?”
I take a breath, impeded slightly by the position of my arms, and say, “Only that I love you, sir.”
A tremble across his mouth, so subtle that I think I’m the only one who can see it. “Yes, of course. Only that,” he says.
