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You’ve taken a single furious stride through the doorway when she says, “Nope. One.”
You stop short. Head cocked and arms crossed, her face is hard as the rock she once rolled away. You know this expression like the pommel of your sword.
Gideon Novemsotiria—Reverend Daughter of the Ninth House, Saint of Forgiveness, the unwitting once-furnace of your soul, she who slayed the King Undying and mended your weak and broken heart—is done with your bullshit.
You don’t move. Instead you glare back at her until she says, “Two. You want to try that again, Nova?”
Fucking hell, she can be such a pest. Of course you don’t want to try that again, Nova. You want to storm into your chambers and rage at yourself for your inadequacy. You want to stomp on her toes and curse her until she pins you to the wall with bone and makes you regret it.
But you know this question is an undeserved kindness. She’s giving you another chance to get it right.
So this time you get it right. Glaring at the floor and biting your lip, you shuck your gloves. The belt that holds your rapier clatters to the floor. You peel off your clothing without ceremony, leaving you in just your thin leather collar. Then you turn around, as you must whenever you enter your private quarters, and brace your hands on either side of the doorframe.
You know you asked her to control you like this for a reason. But right now, through the haze of fury, you can’t quite remember why.
“Head,” she reminds you, and you let your forehead fall forward to rest on the cool metal of the door. “Three. You’re meant to be in position. Are you in position, sweetheart?” she asks, and you grit your teeth.
If you didn’t know better, the unimpressed, tight tone of her voice would terrify you. Even now, fully convinced that by some bizarre mistake she is somehow in love with you, it makes your stomach flutter with anticipation.
“I asked you a question, Nova. Four.”
Feeling sorry for yourself already, you shake your head no. You’re not in position. You loathe the position that you assume each time you enter your quarters. That’s why you came up with it.
“Full fucking sentences, please. Five. Or do you need a better incentive?”
You do not need a better incentive. “No, sir, I’m not in position,” you grumble.
“You planning to fix that, then? Six.”
There’s no avoiding it any longer. You spread your feet slightly wider than your hips, and push your meager breasts out, until your nipples just brush the metal. In this position, chest pushed forward, you can’t help but present your rear to her.
But this humiliation is not enough. She clicks her tongue. “Ass up, sweetcheeks. You know the drill. Seven.”
You sigh in frustration, but arch your back. She makes a noise of satisfaction, the same one she makes when she’s sitting down to a good meal. “There you are, gorgeous. Fucking finally. Dunno why it took you so long.”
You listen with bated breath for her movement, but hear only light shifting. You know better than to turn and look back at her. Cheeks burning, you only press your tits harder into the metal.
Blessedly, terribly, she doesn’t touch you.
“Eight.”
You scoff. You can’t help it. “What the fuck was that one for?”
You picture the way she shrugs. “Because I felt like it. Watch your language, Nova. Nine and ten.”
You bite back a noise of frustration. Once more, you consider arguing with her. Perhaps you’ll resort to Plan A: throw a fit.
This morning, you didn’t wake up already furious. That doesn’t happen much anymore. No, this particular rage was mercifully someone else’s fault: a cowardly, arrogant ambassador called your lady a nasty name during the negotiations with Blood of Eden.
You would have killed him right then and there if she’d let you. But of course she didn’t. Instead she forbade you from so much as a harsh word. When you called him an even nastier name, she sent you outside, and told you to wait there until she was done.
You fumed even as you obeyed, like the scolded child you never really got the chance to be. It wasn’t the public chastisement that stung. You’re hers, her cavalier, and you like it when she shows the world.
It wasn’t even that she sided against you. It was that she sided against herself. She let him walk all over her, when he should have kissed the ground beneath her feet, weeping tears of gratitude for the gift of her presence. The same way you do, almost every night.
“Eleven.”
Her voice snaps you out of it, and you growl with frustration. “What now?”
“Oh, Nova, you didn’t know?” she mocks, and then chuckles. “You’re not wet enough.” Her voice is husky, and farther from you than you thought. You feel a puff of breath on your thigh.
You piece it together right before her hands come to the very tops of your thighs and spread you wide open: she’s knelt down behind you. She’s been inspecting you.
“Also,” she says, voice light and breezy, like she isn’t staring deeply into your exposed cunt, like she doesn’t know how it makes you squirm, “you forgot to say sir. Twelve.”
In this position, you won’t be dry for long. But you can’t let her take you down so easily.
“You want me wet?!” It comes out as a screech. You feel the flush in your cheeks deepen at the way it sounds, muffled and close with your face pressed to the door, but you can’t stop. “You allow a filthy, heedless bigot to tarnish your name, you prevent me from defending your ladyship as I ought, and yet you expect me to be aroused by this injustice?” You’ve really gone and done it now, and yet you can’t stop. “Fuck you!” you spit against the door. “Fuck you. Do not ask me to relish your denigration. It is beyond bearing.”
She says nothing. There is a long moment of silence.
Then those broad hands release your buttocks, and slide up and forward around your pelvis. Fingers wrap around the front of your hipbones. You still know their name, of course, from the countless hours of study you undertook before your existential failure was discovered, but you can’t quite remember them as her fingers press into your skin, possessive.
She grips you, and then she tugs your hips back. A gasp of shock slips out as your hands, face, breasts slide roughly down the door. Your back arches even further, and you shiver with the exposure.
Her hands slide back into place right beneath your buttocks, and two strong thumbs pull your outer labia apart. “Thirteen,” she says, under her breath, like she’s focusing on a theorem. Except in this case, the theorem is stroking up and down either side of your pussy, parting your inner labia, thumbing at your entrance. “Fourteen. Fifteen. Sixteen. Seventeen. Eighteen. Nineteen. Six sentences, right? Got anything more for me, or is it nineteen for now?”
Each count makes your stomach churn with a mix of anticipation and dread. You want a nice round total, so you say, “No.”
“Twenty.” She stands and gives you a perfunctory slap to your ass. “Wait right there. And don’t even think about mouthing off.” She barks a laugh. “You don’t want more than twenty, trust me.”
She has never been a cruel master. But she knows how much you hate waiting, and she takes her sweet time. There’s the rustle of fabric, the clink of metal. Water runs, then the sonic. Her warmth nears you again, tantalizingly close then backs away. It’s agony, but you stay where she put you all the while, tongue bitten, eyes shut, nipples stiff and sensitive where they’re pushed against the cold door.
“Ready for your warm-up?” she asks. You know whatever you say will come out insubordinate, so you say nothing. But she makes a noise of disappointment. “When I ask you a question, I want to hear a yes, sir. Do you understand, Nova?”
You grit your teeth. But you manage, “Yes, sir.”
“Good,” she says, brightly, cheerily, like she wasn’t threatening you a moment before. “So are you ready for your warm-up?”
Before you can spit, yes, sir, the first strike of her broad palm hits one side of your ass, and you gasp against the door. Your cunt clenches down on nothing. You push your ass back on instinct, in defiance of your own pride, and you take what she gives you.
The second strike hits the other side, just hard enough to make you gasp again. Then the first side. Then the other.
The strikes speed slowly, steadily, rhythmic. She’s gotten better at this since you first became her cav. Now she’s precise. She knows exactly where to hit you to stoke a warm, stinging fire in your skin, to steal your breath from your lungs.
Dimly, through the building warmth, you correct yourself. Her breath. Her lungs.
“Well?” she taunts. You struggle to remember what she asked. The real punishment hasn’t even started, and you’re already so out of it? Pitiful. Worse, only half of it is pain.
Regardless of the question, you know the answer. “Yes, sir—ah!” She gives you two hard swats to either side by way of reward.
“What do you say?”
“Thank you, sir—fuck!”
She tuts. “Twenty-one. What do you say?”
God, you love it when she talks down to you like this. “Thank you, sir.” Your voice comes out in a whine, and you let your pride go at last. “Thank you for the warm-up.”
“Someone decided to be a good girl, huh?” She gives you another round of swats, hard and hot enough that your knees nearly buckle, before she stops abruptly. She leans in behind you, pressing her clothed hips against yours, her front against your back. She kisses the back of your neck, just above the buckle of your collar. “You’re so very welcome, Nova,” she mumbles into your skin, and you can’t help it, you shiver.
Her hand snakes over your lower stomach, down between your legs. A finger dips just barely down to your entrance, avoiding your clit. “You ready?”
You want her to keep touching you. Her body is so warm and solid, pressing you so nicely down. But you say, “Yes, sir.”
She presses a kiss to your cheek like she loves you, because she does. Then she pushes away, and you fight the urge to turn and draw her back.
Her voice is ironhard again. It’s her sermon voice, the voice of the lady of the Ninth. “Count them for me like usual, Nova. Start at the top, and work your way down.” You hear metal clink again. “Whenever you’re ready.”
You take a deep breath in and say, “Twenty-one.”
Her belt stings a wide stripe across the middle of your ass. “Thank you, sir!” you gasp, gripping the doorframe.
“I don’t like doing this, Nova. You know that, don’t you?”
“Twenty.” The strike wallops you in the same place, and you cry out. “Thank you, sir.”
“I don’t like to punish you.”
“Nineteen—shit! Fuck, thank you, sir.” That one hits your sitspots, and almost makes you pull your hands away from the doorframe.
Her voice is even, steady where yours is not. “I like when you’re good for me, Nova. When you listen.”
“Eighteen,” you whine. It thuds into you, hot and sweet and merciful, like your lady. “Thank you, sir.”
“Sometimes I think you don’t want to be good for me, though. Sometimes I think you want this.”
Seventeen hits you in the upper thighs, and you yelp. Sixteen sends tendrils of pain climbing up and down your body. She’s stopped talking, you’re pretty sure, though your mind is fogging up so quickly that you can’t be certain. Tears well in your eyes at fifteen, and stream down your cheeks at thirteen.
At eleven, your hands nearly fly away from the doorframe. The sting burns throughout your body, and you’re weeping quietly into the door.
“Tits out,” she says, and you press your chest harder into the metal. “Do you need restraints?”
“No, sir,” you gasp. You can take it. You know you can. “Ten.”
But your hands betray you at nine, flying back toward your ass. “No, you don’t,” she says. “Ask me for restraints.”
She’s always known how to push your buttons. You would shake your head and refuse if you were any less pitiful right now. But burning across your backside is outdone only by the heat between your legs, and so you gasp, “please, sir,” trying to catch your breath. “Restrain me so I can take my punishment.”
Bones fly into motion at once, securing your hands to the doorframe, and your feet to the floor. The cuffs are softened with cartilage. Like she says: she never wants to hurt you.
“You know why I wanted you wet, baby?” A tendril of bone hooks neatly through the loop on the front of your collar and spirals down, securing itself to the floor. A moan escapes you as it tugs you down, and she laughs, as sweet as she takes her tea. “I’ll give you a hint. It’s the same reason you’re getting a punishment today.”
Your words should be bitter, but they’re breathy with desire and tears. “Because I’m yours, sir. Your cavalier.”
“Bingo.” You can hear her smile. Her hand is between your legs, suddenly, finger circling your entrance. You can feel that you’re soaking wet. “And your cunt?”
You sniffle. “It’s yours, sir.”
She nods. “And your tongue?”
“It’s yours, sir.”
“Exactly.” She hums. “And do you get to tell me what to do with my things?”
“No, sir,” you groan, trying not to shift. The heat between your legs is nearly unbearable, and her teasing is just making it worse. “I’m sorry, sir.”
She smiles. “You’re not, not yet. But you will be.”
Ten, nine, eight blur together. It’s so much easier when you don’t have to hold yourself in place, but so much worse as the strikes stack atop one another. You jerk against your cuffs, unable to escape.
By the last few, you’re sobbing. “Three, sir, please.” It hits, and you wail into the door. “Thank you, sir. Two, sir, please—fuck!” you screech.
“Good girl.”
“Thank you, sir. One, sir, please.” The request tumbles out before you can stop it. “On my cunt, sir, please. Hard, please, sir.”
She always gives you what you want, in the end.
When she undoes the restraints, she leaves the leash on. She helps you stand up straight, despite your wobbly legs, and she leads you over to the bed you share. Then she sits down, and eases you up onto the bed on your knees. With the leash, she tugs you gently down across her lap. Then she dissolves the bone and hooks her finger through the loop on your collar, holding you firmly in place.
“Good girl,” she’s whispering. “There you go. You took that beautifully.”
“Thank you, sir,” you weep into the blanket. Your ass and thighs are on fire, and the single, hard thwack to your cunt still echoes between your legs.
She strokes your hair gently. “Do you want to come?” You nod. “Tell me how.”
“Touch me,” you warble. “Touch me, please, sir.”
“Of course, honey.” Her fingers stroke up your cunt, across your stinging, hot skin. Her touch is agonizing and perfect. “That feel good?”
“Yes,” you moan. “Yes, please.” She smears your wetness down from your hole across your pussy, and you shiver. “Yes, sir, thank you.”
“Of course, sweetheart,” she says, beginning to rub your clit ever so lightly, in small circles. The light strokes are worlds away from the heavy thud of her belt. But the two sensations together, the echoes of the belt plus the brush of her fingers, sing through your whole body. How hard she brings you down, and how lovingly she lifts you back up.
She tells you before you even know you want it, before you’ve even registered that your hips are moving against her fingers. “You can come.”
Every motion tugs at the bruised, battered skin of your backside, and each time you think, hers, hers, hers. Hers to discipline, hers to play with, hers to drag over her lap.
You clutch her thigh, and let her pleasure sweep through you.
You howl your release into the blanket until your voice goes hoarse, and at last she pulls her hand away. “Good girl.” She rubs your back. “Good girl, Nova. Come here.”
She manages to maneuver her way onto her back, bringing you to lie atop her facefirst. You know she’ll tend to your bruises later, take agonizingly good care of you. But for now you’re content to weep into her chest, while she whispers how she loves you.
This part, no one else gets to see.