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“What was that all about?” Ayo asked as he
pulled his shirt off over his head.

“Anzhéla wants to see me.”

He lowered his eyes and turned away to stare
at the few personal items that littered the top of our dresser.
“When?”

“Tomorrow.”

He nodded but didn’t reply. He picked up his
hairbrush and stood staring down at it.

“Will you come with me? You were
invited.”

His eyes met mine in the mirror that hung over
the dresser. “Is that what you want?”

Was it? Part of me wanted to take him and flee
to some dark corner of the earth. To shelter him from Frey and
Anzhéla, but I couldn’t. This was my life, and they were part of
it. “Yes.”

He nodded. “Then I will.” He raised the brush
to the crown of his head, pulling it slowly through his thick
curls. The tiny
pop, pop, pop
of its bristles tearing
through his tangles the only sound in the room. His cheeks flushed
red, and he lowered the brush, staring at the dresser for the space
of one long breath.

“Does it worry you?” I asked.

He blinked, as if trying to remember what we’d
been talking about. “Meeting Anzhéla?”

I shrugged, watching his face in the
reflection. “Any of it.”

He raised the brush again, running it through
the same tangle of hair. The wind had left it a mess.
Pop, pop,
pop
. I had feeling it’d take him a while to sort it all out,
but he lowered the brush again after one pass. “Everything worries
me.”

“I’ll take care of you no matter what. You
know that, right?”

“I know.”

But he broke eye contact, shifting his focus
to his own pale reflection in the mirror. He raised the brush
again. Another slow tug through his curls.
Pop, pop, pop
.
The color rose again on his cheeks. He glanced quickly toward my
face in the mirror before turning away. He took a slow, shaky
breath, then another, releasing them carefully, the fingers of his
free hand white-knuckled on the edge of the dresser. He lifted the
brush again, and this time, his hand shook visibly as he sank the
bristles into his thick hair.

Pop, pop, pop.

His eyes drifted closed. He wavered on his
feet, leaning forward as if he needed the dresser to keep him
steady, and I stood, moving toward him, wondering if he needed
help, worrying that he was about to faint. And yet, he didn’t
appear to be in distress.

“Ayo?”

His gaze met mine in the reflection for only a
second. He looked embarrassed. He straightened his shoulders. He
raised the brush again but stopped with it an inch from his head. A
sheen of sweat glistened on his upper lip. He cleared his throat,
lowering the brush. He stared down at it with the same intensity
I’d seen on hundreds of starving faces over the years, when someone
offered a bit of bread or a word of kindness. It was an expression
of longing mixed with fear. Of being offered something desperately
needed, but fearing it was all a trap.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“It’s tangled.” He cleared his throat again.
“From the wind.”

“I can tell.”

He sighed. “I know how much you hate
it.”

“What?” I had no idea what he was talking
about, and I floundered for some explanation. “I hate your hair? Or
the wind?”

He pressed the tip of his thumb hard against
one of the bristles, the skin whitening around his nail, and I
noticed the shift of his groin under the thin fabric of his pants.
“The way I react to pain.”

And suddenly, it all became clear.

Since that first night on the yacht, I’d
avoided using his triggers against him. I was careful, when we made
love, to never fall back on what the Dollhouse had done. But once
again, what I’d thought of as nobility had felt like rejection to
him. It didn’t matter that his response to pain was a result of
training or conditioning. To him, it only felt like pleasure, and
it was a pleasure I’d continued to deny him. And now here we were,
the simple act of brushing his hair triggering his pain/pleasure
response, and he didn’t know how to handle it.

He needed that pain — I could see it in his
eyes — but he was afraid to ask for it.

The thought sent a shiver of arousal down my
spine.

I took a slow step toward him, keeping my gaze
locked on his.

“What I hated was the way he used it against
you. He didn’t give you pain to make you feel good. He did it
because he knew how much you hated him. He knew he could make your
body betray you. He liked making you hate yourself.”

He nodded slowly. “He liked making me
cry.”

I stepped closer, putting my hands on his bare
arms. “I don’t ever want to do that to you.”

“You couldn’t, Misha. You’re nothing like him,
and not just because you hate the triggers.”

“I don’t hate them. I don’t hate anything
about you.”

He nodded, but I could tell he still didn’t
understand.

“Do you like the pain?” I asked.

He hesitated, biting his lip, before jerking
his head in a terse nod. “I can’t help it. It tingles through me
and fills me up and makes me free. It makes me want more.” He shook
his head. “I can’t explain it. All I know is, it feels good,
Misha.” His voice was quiet, his eyes in the mirror begging me to
understand. “I don’t know how to make it stop.”

I reached around his waist, my hand trembling
as I did. “There’s no reason you should.”

He blinked as I slipped the brush out of his
hand, his eyebrows bunching up in confusion.

“All you need to do,” I said, as I kissed his
neck, “is tell me when you want
me
to stop.”

His eyes widened as understanding dawned, and
I raised the brush to his curls.
Pop, pop, pop
. The
resistance as I tugged through his tangled hair was surprising, the
sound strangely erotic, and Ayo moaned softly, his gaze still
locked on mine.

“Misha?” he whispered. Still unsure. Still
scared. Still afraid that his response would disgust me.

Not much chance of that. I loved seeing the
unadulterated arousal in his eyes.

“Does it still feel good?”

“Goddess, yes.”

“Then relax and enjoy it.”

He sighed, and I pulled the brush through
again, letting the bristles dig in deep. They hissed against his
hair, tearing through the tangles before letting his golden curls
bounce back into shape, and I brushed again, pulling harder this
time, his low, gratifying moans urging me on. By the third stroke,
he was breathless, leaning heavily against the dresser, panting and
moaning as I worked. By the fifth, I was as turned on as he was,
and for a while there was nothing except the soft bite of the brush
through his curls, the patter of the rain on the windows growing
more insistent, the loose shutters clanging in the wind, and Ayo’s
desperate moans.

“Misha,” he panted, his head thrown back, his
eyes closed in pleasure. “Misha, don’t stop.”

And I didn’t. I moved him to the bed, letting
his simple trousers fall to the floor. I kissed him deeply, tasting
fruit and sunlight and longing on his tongue. I felt the way he
clung to me, shaking, mutely urging me to use the brush again. To
use my hands. To mark him and hurt him and love him. To embrace him
as he was, regardless of how he’d come to be this way. After
denying him for so long, it was remarkably easy to give in now. I
became more than his lover. More than his master. I was an artist,
mixing pain and pleasure and splashing them together across the
canvas of his skin. I shadowed my caresses with pinches. I
highlighted my kisses with my teeth. I used the tines of the
hairbrush to trace thin, weeping lines down the curve of his spine,
and the flat of its reverse side to slap perfect oval-shaped welts
onto the soft flesh of his flank.

He wept, but not with shame. He cried, but it
sounded like joy. He disappeared inside himself, shivering and
begging and pleading for more until his voice grew faint and weak,
and still he whispered “more” over and over again, the word
becoming a mantra that drove me on. More pleasure. More pain. More
of both because he didn’t know one from the other, and I gave until
I ached, my cock hard and unsated, my heart huge, its tempo
pounding in my ears along with Ayo’s desperate pleas. The storm
raged over the city. They sky flashed and boomed and wept. The inn
shook around us, the wind tearing the shutters from the window and
racing into the room, circling us in our passion, cooling my
sweat-soaked flesh, stealing Ayo’s hoarse cries until he screamed,
grabbing my head and guiding my lips to his swollen cock as he
climaxed. I lapped at his flesh, sucking him as deep as I could,
swallowing hard, barely noticing as I spent myself against the
sheets.

The wind fled. The rain on my back became
little more than mist.

“Misha,” Ayo gasped, his voice half gone, “did
you say it?”

I was lost, still reeling from the strength of
my orgasm and the weight of my feelings for him. He was something
beyond human, some beautiful, tragic bird doomed to beat himself to
death against the walls of my heart. “What?”

He pulled my hair in frustration, as if by
giving some of the pain back he could make me understand. “Did you
say the word?”

“No.” It hadn’t occurred to me. I’d been too
busy trying to find new ways to please him. “Did you?”

He shook his head as lighting lit the room. “I
didn’t even think it,” he breathed. “Oh, Goddess. It happened on
its own.”

And then, before I could even quite register
why it mattered, he was crying — really, truly crying — his face in
his hands and his slender body trying to fold in on itself as sobs
wracked through him. I moved quickly to pull him into my arms, my
lips already finding the saltiness on his cheeks, my tongue burning
to soothe whatever was hurting him. “Ayo?”

Thankfully there was no shame in his eyes when
he looked at me. There was only wonder and amazement and an
alarming amount of fear.

“What’s wrong?”

“I’m real,” he gasped.

I held him tighter as the wind tore through
the room again, trying to wrench him from my arms. “Of course you
are.”

“No, you don’t know what I mean. You’ve cut me
open and spread me wide and healed every single wound he gave me,
and then you sewed me back up and now I’m real and whole and right,
but the wind keeps blowing and time keeps ticking, and it’s all
going to end. All I want is to reach into the heavens and stop the
sun in the sky. I want to swallow the moon and hold back the tides.
I want to drown the city in this night, to turn every person into
white, polished stone like the statues on the temple and transform
all of Davlova into a sparkling, timeless shrine to this one,
single moment.” He lapsed again into sobs, his fingers digging into
my back. “The black spot in my brain is beating, beating, beating
with the wind, but every other thing in the world is more perfect
than it’s ever been. I want to feel like this forever. Is it too
much to ask?”

“Yes,” I whispered into his curls, “and
no.”

“If I can’t have that, then I want the storm
to win. I want it to destroy this entire Goddess-forsaken city. I
want to die right now, right here in this bed with you. It’d be so
much easier.”

The racket of the wind seemed to drop a notch,
but the dread in my chest didn’t subside. Desperation made tears
burn behind my eyes. “Please don’t say things like
that.”

“It’d be better. Don’t you see?”

“Why? Do you know what’s going to
happen?”

He shook his head. “No. But I’ve never been so
afraid in my life.”

Goddess, how could I love him so much? My
heart ached for him. Every fiber of my being demanded that I fix
whatever was causing him pain. And yet, how could I beat an enemy I
couldn’t see?

“Everything’s going to be fine.” But my words
sounded hollow, even to me.

“We’re caught in it now. The only way out is
through.”

“What do you mean?”

“The storm.”

“It’s nothing. It’s almost past,” I said,
hoping it was true.

Fearing it wasn’t.

He sniffled, nestling against my chest. “I
wish we could stay here forever.”

I stroked his hair, sending a silent prayer to
whatever god or goddess might care to listen, not having faith in
even a single one. “So do I.”

The skies were clear by the next day, but it
did nothing to ease my sense of dread. Ayo and I were both twitchy
and silent as the time to leave drew near, both of us dreading what
was to come.

“We could run,” I said, only an hour before we
were due to leave. “We could take Donato’s boat and sail away and
never look back.”

“And go where?”

“I don’t know.” That was the problem. “Back to
Deliphine?”

He shook his head. “That won’t work. They’d
find me. No matter where we go, they’ll find me.”