Page 146 of Powerhouse: Boxed Set
I took another step back, then another, suddenly feeling cornered, my skin too hot and too tight. The flesh she’d sewn back together over the angelic cherub on my hand throbbed acutely. Irrationally, I felt like ripping out the stitches and throwing them at her feet.
There was no oxygen in the room. Bianca had robbed me of it like a little thief.
“Congratulations,” I said, the words forced out of me, scraping my throat to ruin before I thrust them over my tongue. “You’re already better than your mother.”
I turned on my heel in a flash, but not fast enough to miss the crumbling devastation my words wrought on her pretty, tear and cum-stained face. My heartbeat too hard, too slow. I felt like I was dying.
Still, I stalked to the door of my office, knowing I’d avoid it for days, until the smell of her Lucky Charms and teenage-girl cum evaporated from the air, until I could shut my eyes and not see her there on her knees, crying as I left.
This time, the tears weren’t anything but ugly.
As ugly as my words.
As ugly as my heart.
When I closed the door on her, it felt final, fatalistic. Something newborn in my chest, tender and small but growing since Bianca entered this house, withered and then died.
I staggered against the closed door, a hand braced against the lion statue flanking the office. I gave myself one single moment, brief as a lit emergency flare, to feel panic and grief, despair and yearning.
When I straightened after that, adjusting my diamond cuff links, the ones Bryant gifted me after my first and second kill, I walked down the hall the same man I’d been before.
Before the office encounter.
Before the Belcantes lit Lion Court up from within.
Before that fated evening, what felt like eons ago, when Bianca opened the door to her pitiful house and accepted my rose.
Tiernan Morelli, the monster, and not Tiernan Morelli, the man.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Bianca
We didn’t speakfor two weeks.
I couldn’t even blame it entirely on Tiernan, because I was avoiding him just as assiduously as he seemed to be avoiding me.
Fourteen days and I still didn’t know what to make of the incident in Tiernan’s office.
I wasn’t so much shocked by my reaction to his domineering manner as I was by the extent of my longing for it to happenagain. I’d always harbored dark, wicked thoughts. Always dreamed of being bent and twisted like origami into the shapes of a man’s choosing. It shamed me, because I was a smart, independent, young woman with a spine and a healthy dose of self-respect. What kind of woman loved being throat-fucked until her voice was ragged for days? What kind of woman loved to be used like a wet hole for a thick, gorgeous dick? What kind of woman thought being called “a good little thing” was the sexiest thing she’d ever heard?
Me, I guess.
There was no getting around it.
My nipples hardened into jeweled peaks every time I remembered being filled up, clutched tight, and fucked in the face. It was hard to understand that my deviancy could exist separately from my identity, but I forced myself to carefully detach the two, like stuck pages in a magazine.
I did research on it, found out it was called pain play, rough sex, Domination and submission.
I found examples of deviancy in art, because that was a medium I always turned to for solace and for understanding. I found a Rembrandt sketch of a monk breaking his vows with another man in a field of corn. My favorite artist, Pablo Picasso, had a rather astonishing collection of erotic art, includingLa Doleur, a painting depicting a woman shamelessly fellating a man in the same manner I had sucked off Tiernan. Artists from Michelangelo to Cezanne and Correggio who had painted scenes of the beautiful mortal, Leda, seduced or raped by Zeus in the form of a swan. The same Japanese artist known for the famousThe Great Wave off Kanagawacreated an erotic tangling of a nude female and a massive sea monster.
It proved to me that humanity had always been transfixed by the sharper edges and darker corners of sexuality. It soothed me to know that if I was a deviant, so were many of the brilliant artists I’d idolized since my youth.
My sexual predilections were mollified, but not the painful, unreliable stirrings of my heart.
I couldn’t research how I felt about Tiernan because I didn’t know how to put it into words.
I was, in a sense, captivated by him. In the way a child was afraid of the monsters under his bed yet refused to look beneath it, to banish them in the light forevermore. Some part of melikedthat I didn’t understand him, that he could be cruel and heartless, then unquestionably, erratically kind.
