Break Me (2 page)

CHAPTER THREE

As he strode into the walk-in closet, Alex struggled to keep his inner turmoil contained. He only knew one way to release this kind of energy. Zoey seemed to be a willing participant.

Back when he’d been new at Chez Vous, Marie had taken him aside herself. She’d seen him getting more interested in some of the heavier aspects of Dom play, and she decided to take him under her wing. She’d shown him all sorts of things, not just specific ways or techniques for play, but also when one does and does not engage in a scene.

He knew exactly what Marie would say about him leading Zoey into his play room right now. She would give him that lips pursed look, and say in her quiet voice that was somehow more firm than any of the times his parents had shouted, “Alexander, are you sure that you’re in control right now?”

Yes,
he told his memory of her.
I am in control. I am totally in control
.

But if he was really in control, would he need to remind himself of it every other breath? Because as much as he wanted to play, to test his control and Zoey’s resolve, he also wanted to just fall at her feet and press his face into her stomach, to let her comfort him and reassure him with her presence. The responsible thing would probably be to just take her to bed and hold her, caress her, reassure her, give her a safe place to get her emotions out, and then call Leo and have a few stiff drinks while he panicked about what could have happened.

Everything with this woman was moving too fast, too hard, too strong. His feelings for her were overwhelming his reason, and he couldn’t afford to have that happen right now. He needed to be stronger. He needed to maintain control. This would help, because with what he had in mind, losing control wasn’t an option.

Zoey looked confused as he stood inside the closet. He gestured to her to follow him. She stared some more, but walked forward. “Are we going to Narnia?”

He made himself laugh. “The inner door doesn’t open until that one is closed.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Are you taking me to a panic room or something?”

He pushed his lips into a grin, found her hand, and gave it a squeeze. “Not exactly.”

As he pushed the hidden door in the closet open, pale lights flicked on in the room. He stepped aside and let Zoey wander in ahead of him. She turned in a slow circle, her eyes wide. “Remember when you asked where I kept my toys, and I said that some of them were in the chest in the bedroom?”

She nodded without saying a word.

“This is where I keep the rest of them.”

He wished he could see the room through her eyes. He was so used to it now, after all. He’d loosely modeled the design after the private play rooms at Chez Vous. There was a large, comfortable bed in the room, but the headboard and the footboard had been custom built to accept a variety of restraints. There were hooks on the walls and the ceiling, where a person who was restrained could have those restraints hung. There was a spanking bench. A pillory. His flogs and whips and paddles, all on display. Different shapes and materials of dildos. A few different vibrators.

She turned another slow circle, then focused on him again. There was something different in her eyes now, something quiet and reserved. Excited still? Maybe. He’d have to start slow, still. “Looks like you spared no expense,” she said.

“I didn’t,” he said, and he let the little bit of brag show in his voice. “Most of this hasn’t been used. But I wanted it here. For when there was someone to bring home to it.”

Her eyes shone a little bit, and she moved towards him, wrapping her arms around his neck and kissing him gently. He stroked his hands down her face, finding each knob of her spine and pressing gently. Some of the tension started to ease out of her, and she sighed into the kiss, melting against him.

“Do you realize what could have happened to you tonight?” he heard himself ask.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said, pressing her lips to his again.

He accepted the kiss for a moment, then broke it. “If he’d seen you. Zoey, you could be dead right now.”

She sighed, and turned away from him with more force than he expected. “Sometimes my job is dangerous. I’m okay with that.”

“What do you mean by that?”

She turned back towards him, and her mouth wore a faint smile, though her eyes were anything but happy. “I get that right now I’m a gossip columnist and my big break was about a disturbed guy who was showing his works off on the subway, shocking little old ladies and making commuters gag. But I have bigger ambitions than that, Alex. I don’t want to write trash forever.”

He scoffed, and as soon as he did, he knew it was the wrong thing. Zoey’s face tightened, and her hands went to her hips. “You’re not writing trash,” he tried, but it was too late.

“I get that for you, everything you do in the world already makes a difference. People live and die because of the decisions you make. The rest of us don’t have the world like that.”

He put up his hands, trying to forestall her assault, but the words just kept coming.

“I want to do something special. I want to make a difference. I want people to know who I am.”

“Zoey—”

“She died tonight, Alex. She died right in front of me. I should have done something, I should have tried to stop it. I should have tried to save her.”

He thought this would be where her upset finally boiled through, but no. Her eyes were dry, if angry and frightened.

“There’s nothing you could have done—”

“And that’s exactly the problem,” she said. Idly, he thought to himself that he’d never been cut off this many times by someone who wasn’t related to him. “If I had been writing the story, like I should have been—even if I’d been working with Helen’s friend to get it co-authored and out in the world... if I’d ignored you both and called the fucking police, instead of just boning you every chance I got, maybe we wouldn’t be in this damn mess.”

He reached out tentatively, his fingers brushing her arm, and she yanked furiously away from him.

“A woman died,” she said, and now there were tears, flowing down her cheeks, though her voice didn’t crack or break at all. “A woman died, your half-sister died, and all you can think about is me. I don’t want you to think about me. I don’t deserve for you to think about me.”

Everything in him churned in a windstorm of emotion, spinning him around in terrifying circles that threatened his control and his calm. “I didn’t know her,” he said, his tone careful. “I know you. I’m sad that she was hurt, but I’m scared for you.”

“Well, stop it,” she said. “I know my job looks like it’s super safe, and all I do is write a bunch of crap on whatever couch is closest, but it’s never safe. I went to her apartment when she asked me to because I thought it might help me get the story, and I live to get the story. I’m not going to apologize for that. I’m not going to say I’m sorry for putting myself in danger. I wish I could have done it better, because if I had, maybe Cindy Walden would still be alive. Maybe we’d have a better chance of finding the twins before they’re next on the hit list.”

Alex watched her, this woman that he was starting to believe that he loved, and he ran through every option he could think of to say that he understood what she was saying, and that he would support her. Every single one rang hollow in his mind. The only thing he could even pretend might help, in the end, was “What do you need me to do?”

She turned back to him, then, her eyes still brimming with tears, even as she wiped the wetness off her cheeks. “I need to feel something,” she said. “I feel like everything inside of me has been hollowed out with an ice cream scoop. I can’t close my eyes without remembering her hands—” she choked off the words, her teeth tight on her lower lip.

I shouldn’t do this. It’s insane for me to even pretend like this is a good idea.
“Strip,” he said, chilling his voice down to glacial levels. “Now.”

Trust shone in her eyes. It made him shiver, thinking that she was insane enough to trust him, even after what he’d said and done, how poorly he’d reacted to her words, and the entire situation. He didn’t deserve that. There was no tease in her motions as she stripped off the expensive clothes he’d used to bribe her to stay another day. With efficient, effortless movements, she slid her jeans down her legs, pulled her sweater over her head, unfastened her bra. Everything went into a neat pile on top of one of the chests, until she stood before him, utterly naked.

“I want to tie you down,” he said. His heart was slamming around his ribs like a caged hummingbird, and he tried again to get his breathing settled down and under control. “I want to show you what you deserve. Is that what you want?”

“Yes,” she said. Before, her voice had been thready, almost needy and distracted. Every time he’d asked permission to touch her, she’d been tangled up with lust and want, just like him. This time, her voice was soft, quiet, wrapped around a core of determination he hadn’t seen in her before.

“Still vegetables?”

She nodded, her eyes still cool and quiet.

He nodded, let the aspect of who he was when he wore the mask at Chez Vous fall over him, trusting it to keep him in line, and stepped toward her.

CHAPTER FOUR

She watched something change in his eyes, and it gave her shivers, deep down in the core of her being where most people never stood a chance of touching her. It wasn’t entirely comfortable, which made the sensation
strangely delicious. She wanted to say she hated it, she wanted to tell him to stop, but she felt greedy at the same time. She wanted to gather up the feeling of his eyes appraising her for usefulness and clutch it to her, to keep it warm on cold nights.

“Zoey,” he whispered against the back of her neck, and a small whimper escaped her. He’d told her that he needed to play, and he’d told her that he was going to tie her down, but other than that, she had absolutely no idea what was coming next.

He circled her, that odd appraising look in his eyes. He took her hands in his, brought them roughly behind her, and crossed her wrists, pressing them into her back. “Stay here,” he said. “You don’t get to move unless I say you can.”

“Yes,” she said. “Sir?” She liked how the word felt on her tongue. Master was too much, too stereotypical, but sir…it was a word she said often. To various men in her life who had some say in what she did and how she behaved. It was what she’d called her father when he got that tone in his voice. God, what would he do if he knew where she was right now? Her cheeks burned bright red, and her clit throbbed gently with excitement.

His eyes were perfectly flat and cold as he walked around her again. He stood in front of her, planted his feet, and then reached out and took each of her nipples between his fingers. He twisted them, harshly at first, and then even harder. Her ass clenched with the pain of it, her fingers fisting as she resisted the temptation to slap his hands away. “Too much?” His tone wasn’t the kind, delicate lover’s voice he’d used with her before. Even at the club, he’d been kinder.

“Yes,” she said. Her eyes were welling with tears, and the pain was sharp and hard. He didn’t stop, though, just waited, watching her.

She understood, then, why there were safe words. Because this was too much, it was way too much, she didn’t want him to do this, or anything else. And that was part of the game. Trusting someone else to know more than she did about what she could handle. Trusting someone else to take care of her body right now.

Something deep inside of her, something she’d been holding tense and tight since she was a child, unraveled. She closed her eyes, and let herself really feel his fingers on her nipples

Only they weren’t just on her nipples now. Her right remained in his vice like grip, dancing right on the edge of the kind of pain that would have brought her up on her toes and crying for a real, actual halt. He stepped closed enough that she could feel his exhalation on her forehead, and his other hand traced a path down her ribs, over the roundness of her belly, and down between her curls.

“Do you ever shave?” he asked, conversationally.

“No, sir.”

“Why not?”

“Too much work to maintain for not enough reward.”

“But you have?”

She shrugged, then bit her lip. She wasn’t supposed to move. “Once. In college.”

He nodded. “I may shave you one day. How would you feel about that? My face all up in your pussy, while a razor scrapes over your most delicate skin? Do you think you could stay still then?”

“For you,” she breathed, “anything.”

He laughed, and it was a humorless sound that gave her an entirely different kind of shiver. “One of these days, you’ll regret saying that.”

“I don’t think I will, Alex.”

The slap came fast and hard, delivered to the side of her breast. The nipple, already insulted, sent out news of the great indignation that had been done to it, and Zoey fought to keep her balance. “I’m sorry,” he said, with no more inflection in his voice than he’d had a moment before. “What did you call me?”

“Sir,” she hissed, her breath coming between clenched teeth. “I’m sorry, sir.” She opened her eyes, and wished she hadn’t. There was something wild in his eyes, and it worried her in a way she couldn’t quite put her finger on.

The finger tracing over her inner lips pushed inside of her. She was wet, wetter than she’d thought, and his finger was slim, but it was too much, too fast. She bit her lip to keep her voice inside until she could take a moment to adjust.

He didn’t give her the moment. A second finger slid into her, and she wasn’t wet enough for that. It didn’t hurt, not exactly, but she gasped as she tried to relax, tried not to fight his entrance.
All I have to do is rattle off salad ingredients, and he’ll stop if I want him to. I don’t want him to. I want to see what he does. I want to trust him
. It occurred to her, in the far reaches of her mind, that if she was thinking about wanting to trust him instead of actually trusting him, letting him tie her down might not be the greatest idea in the world, but his fingers were rough and harsh, and the heel of his palm was slapping into the lower edge of her mons, hard enough to taunt her clit without actually making her cry out like she wanted to.

“I thought my little slut would be wetter for me,” he said, his voice taunting. “Is there something you need to say to me?”

“I’m sorry,” she whimpered.

He shushed her quickly. “That’s not what I meant,” he said. “Am I hurting you, princess?”

Her heart expanded at the sound of that one single word. “No,” she said, carefully, paying close attention to her body. “It’s—rough, harder than usual. But it’s okay.”

He grinned at her, just a little. “Good.” His mouth closed over hers, matching the plundering of his fingers with that of his tongue. She dug her fingernails into her fists as she struggled to keep them close together behind her back.

It was nothing like orgasm, this unspooling of energy that was happening within her. It was intense, world-shattering, and her knees were weak and soft.

Without warning his mouth and his fingers left her. She wavered for a moment, as his support vanished, and she had to blink and try to focus her mind to understand what was happening.

Alex stood in front of her again with two small metal clamps in his hands. Silver.
No, consider the source
. The metal had that soft depth of color that one got with platinum. Which meant it was unlikely that the little green gems were paste.

She knew what he was going to do with them, but still, the urge to whimper and squirm away was intense. He taunted her with the small metal devices, pinching at her ear, her collarbone, and the firm flesh on the undersides of her breasts, before he finally let them close over her nipples, left first, then right.

The pain burned through her, sharp and intense, and she had to fight again, fight to trust him, fight to believe that he wouldn’t give her more than she could take. It faded, after a moment, from the steady, harsh pain of a burn or a cut into a steady slow ache that shot straight to her belly. A sound came from her throat, low and thick and deep, and she heard him laugh. “Good little princess,” he whispered, his breath a caress on her neck. “If you’re very, very good, next time I’ll put a special one on your clit, too.”

“No,” she said, reflexively. “Absolutely not.”

He turned her, quickly enough to throw her off balance, and then nudged her bare feet apart. He took her hands from behind her back and braced them on the foot board of the bed. “Did you just say no to me?”

“You’re talking about putting a clamp on my clit, aren’t you?” His fingers slid over her slit again, and she bit her lower lip hard. The angle he’d bent her hips at parted her thighs, left the warm wetness of her pussy exposed. She could feel beads of moisture collecting, pooling in the crevices of her body. Those two fingers slid into her a lot more easily now, and he plundered her almost casually, almost distractedly. She wanted to slam back into him, grind into his hand until she came, screaming, but he hadn’t told her she could move, and she knew better now. “That would be too much,” she said, between gritted teeth.

She almost expected the slap on the fullest part of her ass. Almost. Even then, the sudden absence of pressure from his hand and the abrupt pain of his flesh on hers, where she’d only just started to heal—her hips rocked forward, whether she wanted them to or not, and she cried out.

“I think that hurt you,” he said, his voice idle, distracted.

“More... sir,” she managed to say.

“Oh, princess.” Finally, that thick, horny need was crawling back into his voice. “Don’t you worry. There’s plenty more for you.”

His hands on her ass again, blow after blow. She gripped the foot board and let the sensations wash through her. She didn’t know what sounds she was making, how much she was begging him to keep going, and how much it hurt. She just knew that he couldn’t stop, because she couldn’t feel yet. Not really.

The blows halted, and she gasped, the sudden stinging pain becoming more intent without the constant blows to keep her in that in-between space where things didn’t matter in the same way.

“You want more,” he said. His voice was breathless. She wanted to look, to see if he was as hard as she suspected, so hard that she could see him through his jeans, but if he was, he wasn’t showing it off.

She squirmed for a moment, unsure of the rules here. Was she allowed to say yes, to tell him to obliterate her, to either fuck her senseless or beat her until the pain finally stopped?

His hand stroked down her spine, and calmness followed the gesture. “Tell me what you need, Zoey.”

“I need to stop feeling afraid,” she said—sobbed, to be honestly, though she didn’t want to admit it. “I can’t stop feeling afraid.”

“Are you afraid of me?”

She shook her head. “I’m afraid of what I saw. Of what happened.”

“Ssssh,” he said, his hands making long, slow strokes over her body, teasing over her with careful precision. “You’re here with me, now.”

And then the next blow came. It was harder, sharper, more narrowly focused. Instead of cracking across her ass, it hit her shoulders. She twisted away from the pain, a sharp hiss escaping her. “What the hell was that?”

He stared at her, and that dark light was back in his eyes, cold and more than angry. “I want you to think about something,” he said, and another blow fell across her shoulders. He was using something—it looked something like a cat o’ nine tails, with that kind of long handle, but the whip part was a thick, braided cord. It fell precisely across her shoulder blades, and she cried out again. “I want you to think about what would have happened if that asshole had found you.”

Another blow, this one on her legs. She hadn’t recovered from the sting of the last one on her shoulders, she cried out again, and one hand came free from the foot board. Alex grabbed it, pressed it back into place, and yanked at the nipple clamp on that side. It pulled free, and blood rushed back into the compressed flesh with a sensation that should have been delicious but just added to the places on her body that were screaming in pain.

“I want you to think about what it would have been like if it had been you that he’d gunned down in that hallway.” Another blow. This one came down on her ass, but it wasn’t well placed; the bulk of the strike stung, but at the very end, the flog curled around her hip, and she shrieked with the cutting sensation of pain on the edge of her hip. “I want you to think about if that woman would be sitting in her house mourning you, wishing she could have helped you, or if she would just be doing her crossword puzzle, or whatever she did when she wasn’t ruining other people’s lives.”

His arm drew back again, and Zoey let go of the foot board with both hands, holding them up in front of her. Her cheeks were wet, but she didn’t know when she’d started crying again. “Cucumbers, green peppers, I don’t fucking know what you want from me, just
stop,
” she cried out.

Alex did. He went still as a statue as Zoey’s knees gave out and she slipped down to the floor, crying furiously. Her hip, where that last blow had landed, ached and stung, and when she brushed her hand over it, she saw blood.