Page 58 of Nikolay

Maddie.

Maddie in the leather, curves filling the straps instead of that slender witch’s body. Maddie’s chestnut hair loosed down her back. Maddie’s whiskey-colored eyes heavy-lidded beneath amber light. Maddie’s thighs spread by consent and hunger, her mouth parted, her pulse visible in the smooth line of her throat.

I took a swallow of whiskey; I did not taste.

The vampire produced a flogger from the side table—a leather-handled thing with multiple soft falls, supple and dark. He drew it once over his own palm, testing weight and flexibility.

“Impact,” Bohdan said, “is not blunt enthusiasm. Watch the wrist.”

The first strike landed lightly across the witch’s upper thighs.

A soft crack of leather against skin. Not harsh. Not timid either. Enough to sting.

Her body swung a fraction in the straps. A breath left her.

“Surface sting,” Bohdan continued. “Broad distribution. Hear the sound difference? That is not a deep strike. He’s warming tissue, building sensation, mapping response.”

Again.

This time across her hips.

Then lower, closer to the inside of her thighs. The witch’s fingers tightened on the side ropes.

The vampire’s wrist was exquisite. That was the only word for it. Controlled arc. Measured follow-through. Each pass placed, each pause deliberate. The flogger striped her skin in slow, rising patterns, drawing pink warmth across the tender flesh of her thighs and ass until her whole body seemed to hum on the edge between anticipation and ache.

Bohdan spoke over it as if delivering a lecture in some depraved academy. “Observe the difference between a strike meant to mark, and a strike meant to overwhelm. Pressure calibration is not masculine instinct, whatever lesser men will tell you. It is attention. It is practice. It is listening with the hand.”

The witch moaned on the fifth pass, low and involuntary.

The room grew stiller.

Even the Ironwood table, which had held itself apart from the rest of Obsidian all evening, seemed drawn into the same hush as everybody else. Music pulsed beneath it all, low bass under the skin, but the stage had become the room’s true heartbeat now.

The vampire set the flogger aside and crouched before the swing.

He looked up at the witch first. Waited. She nodded, breath already ragged.

Then he bent and ran his tongue through her in one long, unhurried stroke.

The sound she made tore out of her with no polish left on it.

A loud, open moan cracked the room in two.

My hand tightened around my glass.

Bohdan, damn him, did not miss a beat. “Oral attention after impact,” he said into the microphone, voice turned silk-dark and faintly amused. “An old favorite. Enhanced blood flow. Heightened nerve response. Also, in fairness, she appears to like it.”

The witch’s head fell back. The swing creaked softly as her hips lifted toward the vampire’s mouth. Her wetness shone in the stage light. He did not rush. He tasted her as if the room had all night and he intended to use every minute of it.

Maddie.

Not the witch. Maddie.

My mind was merciless now. I saw her there instead with such clarity it bordered on hallucination. Her curves soft and lush against the dark leather. Her breath breaking. Her thighs trembling when a mouth found her. Her hands white-knuckled on the ropes. The little hitch she gave sometimes when surprised into pleasure. The line of her throat offered up, exposed, vulnerable only because she chose to be.

The vampire slid two fingers into the witch and curled them.

She cried out.