Once more Søren knelt between her thighs. He lapped at her sore inner lips, at her still throbbing clitoris. She rose up again and crashed once more. When Søren kissed her this time, she tasted blood.

He pushed his fingers into her tender opening. Soon he mounted her again, entered her again, f**ked her again. Their first time might have had pretensions of lovemaking. The second time he didn’t bother with any of the niceties of civilized sex. He f**ked her brutally, unapologetically, f**ked her like he would never have another chance to f**k her again this side of heaven and hell, and he would make the most of it even if it killed them both.

After he came a second time inside her, he pulled out and stared down at her naked, bleeding body. Welts and bruises scored her back. Cuts covered her feet. Her vagina felt lacerated from his thrusts. She’d come four times tonight and knew one thing for certain from the look in his eyes.

He’d only begun to hurt her tonight.

The cane came out again. Then the flogger. He unlocked her from the bonds and brought her to her hands and knees and entered her still bleeding body as she steadied herself with one hand on the headboard, one hand digging into the sheets. His hands roamed over her bruised back, her thighs and hips. He grasped her by the back of the neck and held her still as he rammed into her from behind. She felt like property in his hands, owned, possessed and enslaved.

She lost herself in the night, ceased to be Eleanor, ceased to be a person with a mind or a will of her own. She was His and His became her only identity. If someone asked her who she was, “I’m His” would be the answer. He pushed four fingers into her, more than she’d ever dreamed she could take. And yet she took them and then him again because he gave her no choice in the matter.

“How much more can you take?” he asked as he pushed her down to her stomach.

“I can take anything you want to give me,” she said. The sex and the beatings had sent her into a near-ecstatic state of peace and bliss. The pain had anesthetized her. She barely felt her body anymore. It was as if she floated above the bed. The hardest strikes of the flogger only tickled. The most vicious blow of the cane barely stung. Søren put her on her stomach and pushed into her again. For sixteen years he’d abstained from sex. He seemed determined to make up for lost time all in one night. Let him. Let him f**k her until neither one of them could move anymore. She begged to drink from this cup. She would drink until she choked on the wine of his body and his sadism. She would drink until she drowned in it.

Søren f**ked her a fourth time, pausing every few minutes to bite her back and shoulders. Then he knelt on her thighs and struck her with a thin reed cane that left a line of fire on her skin wherever it landed. Never had she dreamed he would beat her while inside her. She should never have doubted his sadism. She would never doubt it again. As he rode her with long, hard thrusts, he spoke to her and told her how proud he was to own her, how she was his most precious possession, how she pleased him more than she could imagine, how he would love her always and never let her go.

By dawn she could take no more from him. By dawn he could give no more to her. He gathered her body, bruised from shoulder to knee, front and back, and held her in his arms.

They didn’t speak of what had happened between them. What could they have said to each other? He had shown her his soul. She had given him her heart. They had joined their bodies and an immutable bond now sealed them together. And nothing could break them apart because nothing could break them.

When she awoke the next morning, the sun had joined them in bed.

Eleanor flinched as she stretched against the sheets. The bottoms of her feet throbbed. No doubt she still had shards of glass embedded in her skin. Her shoulders and back ached as if she’d been stretched on a rack. Her br**sts and ni**les were sore and swollen. Inside she was bruised and raw. She couldn’t recall ever being in this much pain.

It was the best morning of her life.

Søren opened his eyes and gazed at her like he was trying to remember where he’d seen her before. She kissed him. He kissed her back.

“So now what?” she asked.

Søren smiled and something in that smile told her she was in the biggest trouble of her life.

“Everything.”

33

Nora

NORA OPENED HER EYES AND ACROSS FROM HER IN the bed was Nico, not Søren. And she was glad to see him there, glad enough she smiled.

“Is that the end of the story?” Nico asked. She could see his eyelids were heavy, as heavy as her heart.

“The story never ends. It’s only the storyteller who grows too tired to keep telling it.”

“What happened next?”

“Kingsley came for me at Søren’s house. He came right into Søren’s bedroom and carried me to the car. I spent a week at his house recovering from that one night. Your father …” She paused and conjured the memory. She could still feel it all the way to her feet. “He put me on his bed and sat at my feet and with a pair of tweezers cleaned the shards of glass out of my skin. He said some poor bastard had to pick the shrapnel out of his chest once. This was his way of returning the kindness to the universe.”

“What happened with you and your mother?”

“She did it.” Nora rolled her eyes. “She joined a convent. When I was in college she went back to school. The order she wanted to join—the Sisters of Saint Monica—required the postulants to have a bachelor’s degree and no debt. Took her four years, but she got there. She took her first vows when I was twenty-four.”