Total pages in book: 94
Estimated words: 88279 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 441(@200wpm)___ 353(@250wpm)___ 294(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 88279 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 441(@200wpm)___ 353(@250wpm)___ 294(@300wpm)
It’s happening. Good gods, it’s really happening. I stop clenching my hands and press my palms to my bare thighs. There’s no going back now. I have their agreement. All that’s left is to ensure I don’t break the terms.
Ensure I pick one of them to keep forever at the end of this. That I give up any chance at freedom, and accept that no matter how these two weeks end, I lose. I can’t think about any of it too hard. Instead, I focus on the here and now. A safe word. Simple, really. I look down at my hands. “Candlestick.”
“Good.” Beast straightens. “Let’s get started.”
Chapter 3
Gaeton
I don’t want to do this.
I slouch into the chair I recently vacated, still trying to come to terms that Isabelle Belmonte is here and bargaining her body and future away because of some bullshit power struggle her sisters are embarking on. Oh, the power struggles didn’t feel like bullshit when I was working under the Man in Black. They felt vital and world-ending. Now, I’m not so sure. What the hell is it all for? I don’t have answers, and I’m not sure anyone in this room does. Isabelle will say it’s for the continued safety of her family and the people under their protection. Beast? I have no fucking idea what goes on in that man’s head.
Beast stalks around Isabelle like one of the great cats toying with its food. Building anticipation for the strike, enjoying the way she jumps a little every time he moves out of her line of sight.
If I were a better man, I’d call this whole thing off and haul Isabelle out of the Underworld and right back to the safe embrace of her sisters. They might have sent her here to draw us back, but there’s no chance in hell that Cordelia and Sienna approved of us defiling their youngest sister. They’d barely tolerated us before and we treated Isabelle like a queen. I can fault Beast many things, but I can’t fault him that.
“Gaeton.” The snap in his voice is a hook in my stomach, slamming me into the here and now.
I resent the fuck out of it. He’s not my Dom. He’s not even my friend. He’s a man I used to hate and now am forced to tolerate from time to time. I glare. “Maybe you get off on playing with someone who’s just going through the motions, but that’s not my kink. I like consent, you bastard.”
“Mmm.” His deep voice rumbles through the room, seeming to wrap around all of us. “Our little Isabelle wants to be punished. It’s why you came here, isn’t it, princess?”
“Yes,” she breathes. She’s watching him like she’s never seen him before. There’s fear there, yes, but there’s no missing the way her lips part and her eyes go hazy with need. Just like there’s no missing her nipples pressed against the silk of her dress when he pulled her hair.
Or maybe I’m just deluding myself in an attempt to justify taking from her exactly what I want. To fuck her and humiliate her and make her cry from the intoxicating mix of pleasure and pain, her senses so overloaded that she can’t do anything but beg for what I will give her.
Maybe.
“Gaeton still needs convincing.” Beast shakes his head slowly. I can’t help watching him as he gathers her hair and lifts it from her neck. We might have scened together in the past, but it was always beneath another’s guidance, playing support in someone else’s fantasy. I’ve never seen Beast orchestrate his own scene. When he plays, he plays behind closed doors, and Hades’s submissives are too professional to gossip about it afterward.
He twines her hair around his fist, gently but inexorably bending her back so that she’s depending on his strength to keep her off the floor. Her breath comes faster now, her tits shaking a little with each inhale and exhale. Realizing she’s not wearing a bra nearly has me groaning aloud. I clench my fists to keep still, to keep myself apart. I might have agreed to Beast’s bargain, but I don’t trust this. I don’t trust him.
“Part your thighs, princess.” Beast’s command might rumble, but he sounds almost like he’s sitting down to dinner. Barely affected. If not for the way he devours her with his gaze, I might actually believe it.
Isabelle moves slowly, obeying him in fits and starts until her thighs are splayed wide. Even as I tell myself not to look, my gaze is dragged down, down, down to where she’s revealed herself. “Fuck.”
“Tell me what you see.”
Again, I obey that snapped command even as I tell myself not to. “She’s not wearing panties.”
“Dirty girl,” he murmurs. “You were planning on fucking us back into submission.”
“No.”
“Yes.” He reaches down, quick as a snake, and pinches her nipple hard enough that I wince. Isabelle cries out, but she’s not arching away from him. She’s pressing her chest into his touch.