Birds of Paradise

  I failed to breathe as he did so, desire pooling at the bottom of my stomach. The dark and ugly desire I felt whenever I was around him. And whenever I wasn’t.

  “I want you to be ugly,” he continued, watching the knife as he used it to play with tendrils of my hair. “Anyone can be beautiful. It’s so common. Effortless. Empty. I need you to be ugly so I can be too. I need to see your ugly because that’s the only thing I want. That’s real. That, I can possess.”

  The knife cut through strands of my hair and they fluttered soundlessly to our feet, mixing with the scraps of fabric lying there.

  “You can possess all of me,” I croaked, not moving to stop him. He could’ve hacked off everything for all I cared.

  It meant nothing to me.

  He lowered the knife, shaking his head.

  “No one can possess beauty,” he said. “It’s like trying to hold onto water, grasp it in your fist. It doesn’t hold its shape. Doesn’t mean anything. Isn’t worth anything.”

  His knife moved back down, trailing the scars on my abdomen.

  “Ugliness, on the other hand,” he murmured, “is lasting. Is tangible. It can be taken. Owned.” There was a pregnant pause. “Loved.”

  I froze. And not because the knife was edging around my pubic bone, the tip trailing the hair below.

  “You love me?” I whispered. He’d never said it after that time before I’d killed Christopher.

  Lukyan pressed the flat of his knife against my clit.

  My breathing quickened and desire rushed through my body like a drug. My cheeks flushed with the flame the cold steel was turning into an inferno.

  “I love you,” he agreed, voice flat. “More than I hate you.”

  “I thought I was of too little consequence for you to hate,” I rasped, challenging him in the midst of my desire.

  Lukyan’s hand moved in place of the knife, exploring my wetness. “You know that was a lie. And not one I was telling you.” His fingers entered me, and his eyes darkened with my sharp gasp. “One I was telling myself.”

  The knife moved back up my body as his fingers moved inside me. Pain mingled with my pleasure as the sharp edge punctured my skin on its journey. It settled at my neck as Lukyan’s gaze went from the blood it created to my eyes.

  “I’ve been the villain from the start, Elizabeth,” he said. “You met me as the villain, got to know me as the villain…”

  He trailed off, and that in itself was jarring. He didn’t pause in the middle of sentences like other people did when their words caught up with them, affected them. That would be a sign of weakness, of humanity. He didn’t show such signs. Not until lately.

  “You fell in love with me as the villain.” His voice was little more than a rasp. The knife pressed harder. “Make sure you remember that I’m not going to turn into the hero just because I love you back.”

  I climaxed the second his lips met the spot where the knife had cut open my neck, kissing the wound, the blood. His teeth grazed the area as aftershocks rattled my bones.

  I was dimly aware of the knife clattering to the floor, of him lifting my limp, twitching, naked body and carrying me to the bed. Of the soft embrace of the mattress as he threw me onto it.

  My focus became sharper as his eyes ran over my bleeding, exposed body. His hands made quick work of his shirt, smearing bright red stains over the fabric as he undid the buttons.

  My blood.

  Staining his shirt.

  I liked that.

  I loved that.

  I took one long blink and he was naked. Standing over me like a jackal. Like a predator. I expected him to kneel on the bed, cover his body with mine, roughly enter me. Make me pass out with his relentless pursuit of my pleasure.

  He did not.

  Instead, he stalked to his closet, disappearing in its depths.

  The words “Don’t move a fucking muscle. Don’t even breathe” floated behind me, settling on my skin.

  My lungs somehow obeyed.

  Time flickered and he was back at the end of the bed, like he’d never left. Nothing had changed. His body glistened in the dim light, carving itself out of the black of the room. His muscles were etched from stone, his erection the only thing signifying his desire. That and the thickness to the air in the room.

  “You can breathe now,” he said.

  I exhaled, roughly, long and hard. The control he had on my most basic of instincts, the control I gladly gave him, taunted the edges of my retreating climax, shaking me with the knowledge that there was more to come.

  Silver glinted off the object in his hands, the object I hadn’t seen before because of my distraction. Instantly, the fear that was only contributing to my desire took over, chasing it away.

  I didn’t move because my limbs locked up, frozen with the jarring effect of such intense pleasure chased by such visceral and intense terror. All coaxed out from the steel in his grip.

  Handcuffs.

  I liked his control. I liked that he caused me pain. That he was rough. That he yanked my hair, bruised me, took me in every space available to him. All the things Christopher used to do. The violence of it all was not so different but somehow worlds away. I’d learned to welcome the marriage with that terror etched by Christopher and the pleasure tattooed by Lukyan.

  It had contributed to it, the pleasure. The wrongness of it somehow comforted me. There was no need to hide my depravity. Lukyan needed it.

  But the handcuffs aroused something different in me.

  “Lukyan,” I choked, fear a vise around my throat.

  His expression didn’t falter, though I knew he sensed the change in the room. That he was attuned to even the slightest hitch in my breath, so he was aware of the fact I was no longer comfortable in my discomfort.

  He didn’t speak. Instead, he advanced, not even giving me the chance to retreat as I tried to do at the last minute. His body trapped me underneath him, and I restrained the urge to struggle like a banshee.

  Lukyan’s eyes stilled me.

  Still, he didn’t speak. Didn’t try to comfort me, placate my fear.

  Instead, his hands went to my back. I flinched at the cold impact from the handcuffs, despite not even moving when Lukyan had cut me with a knife moments before.

  This was different.

  The handcuffs rattled against the pipe as I struggled, as blood ran down my wrists with the force of my struggles. I felt the warm liquid on my frozen skin, but not the pain. There should’ve been pain. There had to have been pain. Pain was meant to come with blood.

  It didn’t.

  I was numb.

  My insides and my outsides.

  Outsides because of the fact that I was in a damp basement with no electricity, let alone heating, and it was the middle of December. Or it had been. Maybe it was later now.

  I didn’t know how long I’d been in here.

  My skin was alternately as heavy as lead and then so light I wondered if I’d died already. But if you were dead, you weren’t cold. Your bones weren’t so cold that it seemed they were frozen to your flesh.

  Beautiful icicles clung to lank strands of my hair matted in the blood around my face.

  There was a sharp clang, and the floor rattled with the opening of the door. I didn’t have time to be afraid of what fresh horrors awaited me because in one blink, Christopher was in front of me.

  Maybe I passed out.

  I had to have passed out.

  Did it matter?

  Why didn’t I die?

  There was a deafening click and my hands, the ones I thought now belonged above my head, fell to my sides. They must’ve had weights attached to them, because their downward trajectory didn’t stop at the place my shoulder sockets allowed. They continued to fall, taking my body with them until I was little more than a crumpled pile on the floor.

  Still, I didn’t die.

  Christopher watched me. Smiled at me, the handcuffs dangling between his thumb and forefinger. They were rusted from the damp in
the room.

  I squinted. No, that wasn’t rust. That was my blood, dried and rotting against the metal. My stomach roiled, and I somehow moved to my hands and knees to dry heave.

  There was little more than remains of the yellowing acid in my stomach. But I had to expel it. Something about my blood rotting on those handcuffs sickened me more than anything else that had happened down here. Rotting like my body inevitably would when I did something else wrong.

  “You’re lucky I’m forgiving,” Christopher said, his voice far away, an echo. “I didn’t kill you for trying to organize your little… extended holiday? Is that what we should call it?”

  My escape attempt. The one that took all my effort, all my scattered and shameful courage to plan.

  He tapped the cuffs against his thigh. “Yes, I think that’s the best thing to call it,” he decided. “And we’ll call this the lesson for thinking you could plan, let alone execute such a thing.”

  Another skip in time, because Christopher was bent at the knees, eye level with me. The handcuffs swayed in front of me as he dangled them almost playfully.

  My eyes couldn’t escape the coppery tint of my blood. Closer now, I could see some chunks of my skin I’d peeled off in my struggles when the rats had started nibbling at my bleeding and bare feet.

  They’d probably saved me, the rats. Because of them, I was forced to keep moving so they wouldn’t feast on my flesh. So then I didn’t freeze to death.

  I thought rats were meant to bring death. Encourage it. They carried the Black Plague, didn’t they? Caused millions of deaths. What was one more?

  But God wasn’t that gracious.

  So there was more pain. So I lived longer to endure more pain.

  And those handcuffs and my rotting flesh attached to them were burned into my brain.

  The memory shook my body with its force. I had to twitch my hands, gaze desperately down at my feet to make sure there wasn’t a rodent trying to devour me while I was still alive.

  “Elizabeth?” Lukyan asked, still on top of me, watching me. A small glimmer of worry shadowed his blank face.

  I clutched the image of him, of the pressure of his body against mine. I was here. This was real.

  “I lied,” I whispered.

  He jerked his eyebrow.

  “When you asked if I ever tried to run,” I clarified, my voice shaking. “I didn’t know I was lying, exactly. I just… it was so unpleasant that I didn’t let myself consciously remember it. Maybe that’s why I told myself I didn’t run. Clung to the fact that I was a coward. That was easier to live with than the memory.”

  I shivered as the cold basement beckoned me back. Damp air assaulted my senses, the smell of my blood. Of the rats. Of my own waste because I couldn’t go anywhere but the bucket positioned crudely below my naked body. Cold nipped at my skin, more biting than the tiny sharp teeth of the rodents.

  My eyes went to the handcuffs, still in Lukyan’s hands. “I—he used them to… teach me a lesson,” I whispered. “I think I was down there for a week.” My brow furrowed. “I don’t know, though. I don’t know how someone could survive that for a whole week. But I guess I did. Because I’m here.” The last sentence was more of a plea, a desperate reminder that I was, in fact, alive.

  “You’re here,” Lukyan said firmly. No other whispered words of comfort. No tenderness. But I didn’t need that. I needed the iron of his voice to weigh me down in the moment.

  He rolled swiftly and smoothly so I was on top of him, pushing at my chest. I let him manipulate me like a puppet, my body moving upward so I straddled him. I gasped at the brush of his hardness against my sensitive core.

  His eyes were brands, owning me, searing my skin. Cold metal was pressed into my hand. It shocked me enough to move under my own power and look down at the cuffs my fingers had reflexively closed around. My first instinct was to throw them as far away from me as possible.

  Lukyan’s hands closed around my own as if he sensed I was going to do so.

  “Elizabeth.”

  My eyes snapped back up to his instead of inspecting the clean metal, searching for a coppery stain.

  He didn’t say anything. No, he just made sure I was looking at him when he purposefully let my hand go so he could extend his hands above his head, wrap them around the wrought iron headboard.

  His meaning was clear.

  I looked from his arms to the cuffs in my hand.

  He didn’t say anything. Didn’t command me to do anything. Words had abandoned us, leaving us both with instincts.

  I let the meaning, the invitation, hang in the air for a long while, sucking in the rough air. The handcuffs that had originally felt so repulsive in my grip were now morphing. They were heavy, but much like a gun was. Power from the object seeped into my palm. Into my blood.

  The click of the fastening alerted me to the fact that my monster had already made the decision I had been too afraid to make. I trailed my fingertips along the flexed muscles of Lukyan’s biceps, veins straining against the skin from the unnatural angle.

  He hissed as I tightened the steel. His teeth grazed my nipple as I leaned forward just enough to give him purchase on the sensitive skin.

  I sank deeper, let him close his mouth against me, let him work at my breasts violently.

  His cock pulsed against me as I rubbed my arousal against him, soaking us both in the truth of what the handcuffs, the power, was doing to me. My hips started to move against him. His growl vibrated my nipple.

  I leaned back, the cold air an assault on my bare skin. His eyes glowed with the ferocity of a caged animal. The cuffs rattled against the metal as he bucked up, trying to touch me.

  My palms flattened against the mattress and I began to crawl upward, my clit crying out with the loss of his hardness to create friction. I let my bare core rub against his abs as I crawled farther, as my lips touched the area where the metal met the skin of his wrists. My hands gripped the top of the headboard, and I used the metal to pull myself up so I hovered just above his mouth, my knees on either side of his face.

  His rough exhale sent a warm rush of air right against the skin that was crying out for his mouth. My stomach flipped with the reaction of his breath against the most intimate part of me.

  “Elizabeth, lower your fucking pussy so I can taste how much your control turns you on,” he demanded, his voice tight from frustration.

  The bite of his tone, the rattling of his cuffs in his desperation sent another rush of desire through me, almost enough to send me over the edge without any contact.

  My fingertips trailed over his. He locked them together, in the only gesture of force he was currently allowed.

  Power.

  Control.

  He was giving me that.

  The man who valued these things above all else.

  “Elizabeth,” he warned. “If I don’t get to eat your cunt at this moment, I won’t let you come until you’ve crossed over into insanity.”

  My hips lowered.

  He ate me.

  Furiously.

  Exquisitely.

  Beyond the realm of sanity.

  His fingers stayed clutched to mine as I let him take control over me. My hips ground against him. White stars exploded in my vision as I climaxed again and again.

  His mouth chased away the cold. Took me to the edge of the grave and back again. Made me forget about the rot and the copper stain on the handcuffs.

  There was nothing but his mouth on me. His surrender to my power.

  I gasped as I surfaced from his assault. No longer content to slowly tease him, draw out the movements, my body slid down his and I impaled myself on his cock before he even knew what I was doing.

  His entire body strained against the handcuffs, tensing as he let out a feral growl. His eyes glowed with desire so dark it melted into the walls behind us. I rode him. Hard. Despite the sensitivity of my skin, despite the fact I was sure I might not survive another climax, I slammed us together again and again, m
ilking both of our depravity into each other, into the air.

  “Get your fucking mouth down here now,” he choked out before his cock tightened inside me.

  I did as he asked, and he claimed it the second I pressed my lips to his. I drowned in him, in the taste of my power on his lips. He immediately took control of the kiss, since it was the only thing he had control over.

  Everything was visceral, carnal, between us, like we’d carved out a piece of the world that was our own to be as dark and depraved as we wanted.

  His body stiffened against mine, and my insides began to pulse with yet another climax. His teeth sank into my bottom lip as I milked his brutal and intense orgasm out of him.

  It lasted for an age, our pleasure, more intense than anything that had come before it.

  Time wasn’t to be trusted, because in one long blink, I was collapsed against his chest, our bodies damp with sweat, sticking to each other. The air was perfumed with the sharp scent of our sex. It settled into my bones.

  He was still hard inside me, body still taut as he strained against the cuffs.

  I blinked, moving slightly to meet his eyes. Even the small movement jostled me, and I let out a small cry as he twitched inside me.

  His eyes darkened. “You’re going to uncuff me,” he instructed, “so I can show you how fucking magnificent that was.” He jerked his hips up. “So I can worship and punish you at the same time.”

  It scared me, the darkness, the animal growl in his voice.

  But I uncuffed him anyway.

  “That was cruel,” I whispered into the darkness.

  Neither Lukyan nor the darkness answered.

  “You knew they’d do something to me, the cuffs,” I continued.

  “I suspected,” he answered finally, the darkness of the room injected into his tone.

  “And yet you still brought them,” I accused.

  “You’re complaining?” he asked, his hand ghosting between my legs, brushing at the area that had never experienced such condensed amounts of pleasure as it had been subject to in the hours previous.

  “No,” I whispered. “But in order to get there”—I hitched my breath as his hand flattened between my legs—“I had to go through hell first.”