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The tableau of broad shoulders, muscles bunching and rippling across Thomas’

back, down to the tight flex of his buttocks and thighs, the curling of his toes, made Marcus harder, hotter. He was mindful of his strength, knowing the difference between administering pain for pleasure and pain for pain’s sake. He was straddling the line with it, choosing different areas for each stroke, then going back, increasing the agony and the burn, but increasing something else too.

The wall beyond them was mirrored, so he could tell Thomas was getting closer to climax with every blow. His expulsion of breaths, the quiet grunts and trembling, the gleam of perspiration spreading on his smooth, firm skin, told Marcus what he’d always suspected, that Thomas was a sub to the hardcore, even if it was only with him.

That exclusivity suited him just fine. If anything, it drove his lust to levels that could easily make him insane.

He closed the distance between them. Before Thomas could anticipate, Marcus laid the hand still holding the whip on his back, letting Thomas feel the texture of the braided weapon along with the fingers holding it.

When Marcus wet three fingers from his own mouth and thrust them deep between

his slave’s buttocks, he nearly growled with possessive satisfaction at Thomas’ groan of response. His thighs strained against the manacles. “Jesus…”

He had raised red welts on his skin, so now Marcus made good on his promise.

Touching his lips to those marks, he felt Thomas shudder at each touch of his mouth.

“I’m going to move back in a minute and do it some more,” Marcus said gruffly.

“Because of the pause, the initial blows will be more sensitive, so the first strikes will hurt. But instead of tensing, I want you to relax. Completely surrender to the pain, and to me. Can you do that?”

Thomas nodded, his head pressed hard against his arm. When he spoke, nerves

made his voice shake. “Yes, Master.”

“Good.”

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When Marcus moved his fingers in the tight channel of his ass, slow, steady,

Thomas rocked against his touch. God, his cock was so hard Marcus ached. “You’re so hot you’d go off like a volcano if I commanded it, wouldn’t you?”

Thomas jerked his head in another nod. “Yes, Master.”

“I love it when you call me that. When you know it’s absolutely true, so I hear it in your voice.” Marcus bent his head, soothed another welt and noticed Thomas biting down on the inside of his mouth as if to keep from crying out.

He’d changed his mind. He wanted to hear Thomas cry out. In fact, he wanted to

hear him scream.

* * * * *

Marcus was moving around to his front. The heat of his body brushed Thomas, the whip circling his waist, the loop of it dropping low on his ass. When Marcus released his ankles, Thomas heard some type of mechanism humming. His arms drew taut, his body stretching, his heels leaving the ground…

“Marcus—”

“Be still, pet.”

His feet left the floor completely, his shoulders straining with his own weight. He was moving, a conveyor taking him…backward? It was hard to tell blindfolded, but his body came up against an uneven vertical metal surface, like the bars of some type of cage. His shoulder blades, buttocks and heels were against them.

Marcus took him back to the ground again, though he kept him stretched out pretty well, his toes barely brushing the floor. What contraption was he up against? Thomas couldn’t remember what all was in the room, so distracted by what Marcus was going to do to him here.

“All points—head, shoulders, heels—stay right against these bars, pet. Or I stop.”

Stop what? Then Thomas felt the whip tighten on his hips so he had to pull against him to stay in position. His mind as well as his body froze as Marcus’ mouth closed over his bare cock.

Marcus had mouthed him there before, usually after he’d wrestled Thomas to the

ground to tease him with the passing caress of his warm breath, the playful sandpaper stroke of his jaw in the late afternoon. But never like this, where Thomas felt the full blissful suction of his mouth taking him deep while Marcus held the whip in a tight grip compressing his ass cheeks.

He used the whip to move Thomas as he wished, making him have to focus on obeying Marcus’ order against Marcus’ own strength, which had the effect of stretching the rubber band reaction in his lower body even tauter.

When Marcus’ tongue flicked on Thomas’ head, he gasped. Though he gripped the

chain with both hands to try to stay still, he couldn’t. Oh God, there was no way… He 107

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tried to hold his heels and shoulders in a fixed position as Marcus had demanded, but his body swayed and moved.

“Master, I can’t… Oh God…”

Marcus removed his mouth. With swift and ruthless functionality, he closed

something over Thomas’ chest, shoulders, throat and face and snapped it closed, then did the same across his legs at mid-thigh, leaving just his groin and head area free. It was a tight, constricting fit, making Thomas grunt with need. Marcus ignored him, went back to work on him with his mouth.

He’d put him in some sort of modified iron maiden. Under the blindfold, Thomas

was locked in darkness, in the hell-born pleasure of that mouth, its slow friction up and down his length, the lash of the tongue, the addition of strong fingers, moving between his legs to find his rim again, teasing his hips into a jerky rhythm as Marcus slid several fingers back in. It was the knife edge of pleasure, cutting him deep, but he hung onto the blade with both hands, needing it too much to fall off, even if it cut him to the core and split him in half.

Marcus was performing long, slow glides along his length with his mouth. Rocking back and forth on his Master’s fingertips, Thomas couldn’t contain his response. He made a strangled sound of pain, an attempted warning, but rather than pulling back, Marcus took him deeper, hand curling on Thomas’ hip, the cylindrical shape of the whip pressed against his skin, between hot palms and his damp flesh.

As Thomas jerked forward, jetting, Marcus took his release into the back of his throat with expert precision, growling his approval as Thomas cried out with the power of the sensation.

He rocked and bucked, hearing the rhythmic clank of the chains, their clatter

against the iron maiden as he jerked. Somewhere else in the room, another slave released among the sounds of punishment and flogging.

Then as he was still shuddering, Marcus pulled his mouth away, removed his

fingers. Rising, he moved behind Thomas.

Taking a firm, possessive hold of Thomas’ throat with the whip hand, Marcus

reached down, put those three fingers back in, thrusting, thrusting. Then a fourth finger. Then a fifth.

All five, stretching the way as Marcus slowly, inexorably worked his hand in until he was fully there, deep in the rectum, negotiating the curves, seeming to know Thomas’ body inside and out. His fingers curled and he was fisting Thomas, his

forearm between his ass cheeks, his wrist stretching him open.

Marcus had never fisted him before, but Thomas was so open to him in every way

now that he trusted, didn’t tense, let Marcus all the way in and suddenly found himself fuller than he’d ever been, an indescribable feeling. He thought he’d finished climaxing, but he found he was wrong. His cock jetted anew, as if Marcus was milking a reservoir Thomas hadn’t known he’d had, taking the orgasm to a cataclysmic level.

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Thomas’ shout became a scream, all the thoughts in his mind exploding so there

was nothing but this second in time, the universe stopping as everything else vanished.

And even then Marcus was not done with him, still ruthlessly working him, keeping Thomas screaming, convulsing in the restraint of the iron maiden as if in a seizure.

He might have blacked out at last. He wasn’t sure. All he knew was when he finally came down, he was hanging limply against the cuffs, his shoulder joints aching like hell. His mouth was open, lips stretched back to draw shuddering gasps.

He could hear at least two of the Masters murmuring to one another in appreciation of the stimulation to their own scene, could sense the eyes of the other subs on him.

Perhaps envious. Perhaps counting themselves lucky their Masters didn’t strip them so raw. But it didn’t matter. He was Marcus’. There was no thinking about that, no choice.

His back stung like holy hell and his cock felt wrung out but all he wanted,

desperately needed, was Marcus. Enough to beg.

“Please touch me.”

He needed intimacy, the emotion behind the physical punch of what Marcus had

just done to him.

Marcus moved around him, so close to Thomas’ body Thomas felt the brush of his

slacks against his knees. The whip slithered over his buttocks and fell to the outside of his legs as Marcus dropped it. Grasping Thomas’ waist, a proprietary touch, he leaned in, pressed his lips to Thomas’ throat just below his ear, then across his cheekbone. The forehead, the slope of his nose. The eyes beneath the blindfold.

Thomas stood in the manacles, vibrating, overwhelmed with words he couldn’t say.

Didn’t know if he knew how to say them, because they contained all the heartbreak of the world mixed with its ephemeral joy. Waking to the aroma of breakfast when he was eight. Feeling the heat of the setting sun on his skin while falling asleep on Kate’s back at ten.

Turning and seeing Marcus for the very first time. Moments too powerful to be

contained by the human heart and therefore having a peculiar way of making the soul hurt, as if there was something to mourn in the midst of the happiness. As if happiness itself couldn’t exist without shadows to define it.

Thomas parted his lips. He understood his Master would kiss his mouth when he

desired to do so, and he was embracing his pleasure by staying still. But when Marcus at last cupped his jaw and pressed his mouth to Thomas’ lips, he made a soft noise, a breath of sound into that welcome place, teasing Marcus’ tongue, everything in him straining, needing. He never wanted Marcus to remove the blindfold, for truth and desire were easier to hold onto in this cleansing darkness.

“Yours,” he said abruptly, a hoarse whisper into that heated cavern. “Always.”

He’d said it earlier, in a different way. But he wanted Marcus to know it, to realize it was the one thing he
could
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painting. Actually, the two were intertwined, expressions of the soul without which he was just a shell. He supposed it was no wonder Marcus was a gallery owner.

“All mine,” Marcus agreed, the voice of his soul.

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“Tomorrow’s your day,” Marcus had said on the way home. “Wherever, however

you want to paint. Wherever you lead, I’ll follow.”

“Maybe hell will freeze over too,” Thomas had responded with a snort.

They’d had pie and coffee at a late-night restaurant after they left the club, talked about other things. Art, New York… Hell, what they’d each been catching on television lately, but they’d stayed away from everything that happened at Detonation, both understanding that needed time to settle. When they got back to the cottage and Marcus finally went on to bed, with a mere reserved brush of lips and a steady, long look, Thomas had stayed in the living room, ostensibly to sketch.

In reality he was too wired.

He’d sat up a long time, thinking about everything that had happened. As he put together bits and pieces he’d barely been able to register while at the club, he’d come upon an unexpected revelation that turned him on his axis. Ironically, the twinge of hurt he’d felt at Marcus’ reserve when they got home had been the key that opened the door. And what he’d seen in that new room had transformed the hurt into an altogether different reaction.

There at the end, Marcus hadn’t been sure of himself. Of what was happening,

where they were going. If he’d crossed the line, and he had, several times. It had taken Thomas back to the words of the first night, the ones he hadn’t believed.

I love you.
At one time he’d have given anything to hear those words from Marcus’

mouth, when he’d been naïve enough to believe them. When Marcus had said it that first day, he hadn’t wanted to hear it, had really brushed it off with no consideration at all, because the idea was ludicrous. However, sitting on the couch into the early hours of morning, he had to accept that it was entirely possible the words might be true.

The conflict and apprehension that came with that idea made him reckless, restive.

He stayed awake, watching the sky start to light, and felt the desire build in him to sketch, create. Images crowded into his brain like rabid fans at a rock concert, vying for the lead singer’s attention in a variety of provocative ways. He wanted to shout and rage and spin in circles, the way his mind was doing. He wanted to
go
. Needed to go and wanted to pull Marcus into flight right along with him. Have him beside him to tease and talk to, to share it all.

That was when he got up and made the coffee.

* * * * *

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Someone was trying to wake him up, and it was barely light outside, a time no

normal person would think of getting out of bed. Marcus cracked open an eye and saw the clock confirm the horrifying truth. “It’s not even daytime yet.”

“It’s seven a.m.” Thomas waved the coffee under his nose again, retracted it when Marcus narrowed his eyes to slits. “What, all that beauty will fall apart if you get less than twelve hours?”

“It might. My hair won’t style right and my butt will drag the ground all day long.”

“Your ass couldn’t sag if you tied weights to it.”

Marcus closed his eyes again.

A gentle stroking started in his hair, a thumb passing along his temple. It was a soothing caress that perversely made him want to keep drifting, even as it brought him to a waking state. It was almost like the faraway memory of a mother’s touch, where all was well and forgiven, even before the sin was committed. Safety and peace.