Chapter Twelve
Never had Arabelle wished she were stronger than him, not physically, but emotionally. The contrast of their reactions was so different. Hers were deep-felt and she displayed her hurt. His was cold, sterile, his expression stoic, enigmatic. He felt nothing for her and she wished she could say the same about him.
He forced her to bend over the table. Her struggles and name-calling, her screams, and her pleas all fell on deaf ears.
Arabelle had taken all the pieces of ribbons from the gift boxes that Everleigh had given her and turned them into a neat coil. It laid on the table and now Silas was reaching for it and unraveling it.
“Silas,” she shouted. “Let me go.”
“No,” he said with all the arrogance in the world. No matter how much she tried to get out of his grasp, nothing seemed to work.
Holding her down effortlessly he wrapped one wrist in the silk ribbon and then tied the ends to the leg of the small table. She jerked and yanked with all her might and only seemed to tighten the knots he had made.
“Stop that because hurting yourself is going to earn you ten extra strikes.”
“Oh god. You can’t keep doing this to me.”
“I can and I will. My body. My Rules,” he said and tied her other wrist to the leg of the table so that she was completely bent over the small table, her back arched, her thoughts all over the place.
He flipped her dress over her ass, then growled at her. She wasn’t wearing panties and her whole ass and pussy were on display for his viewing now.
“You beast. You imbecile. You stop degrading me this way,” she cried. But the strike of his belt on her naked ass felt as if he had shoved her entire body into a incinerator.
She howled, and her staggering breath echoed around them. He struck her again. And again.
“That’s for not obeying me when I told you to stay upstairs.”
“Why? Because you were afraid I would embarrass you? Because people would know you were married and so you couldn’t go off with your mistress and fuck her, right here in the same house you brought me to live?” she asked gritting her teeth and just dying a million deaths at a time as his belt descended on her.
“Far from it. The woman you refer to is an assassin and if she so much as harmed a strand of your hair I would snap her neck in two before her next breath.” He paused to lay his belt into her once more. She tried so hard to concentrate on his words but the war waging in her body between the pain Silas inflicted and the way she received it by getting wetter, her clit so swollen, if she squeezed her legs together she could come that way. She waded through the battlefield that was her mind and snatched at his words and tried desperately to arrange them so they made sense to her. An assassin?
“And Massimo, the man you’re defending? He’s a human trafficker and he touched you,” Silas said, his tone cold. “And now he must die because you didn’t obey me and stay upstairs.
“Silas, please I don’t understand… what are you saying, please?” she whimpered. “Who are you?” she whispered.
“A very bad man, Arabelle.”
When he resumed his punishment on her ass with his belt, he repeated that she was receiving the thick red poker hot stripes to her backside, because she had to learn to obey him.
“You’re a part of me now and I can only keep you safe if you listen to me.”
She was crying beyond measure now. He didn’t hold back in teaching her a lesson.
“I need to hear you say you understand me, Arabelle. I need to hear you say you’ll obey me, and only me.”
She held out for as long as she could. Her pride would have wanted her never to relent. Hadn’t this whole episode been about her getting out of a dead marriage?
“Yes. Yes, I’ll obey you. Please.”
“Yes, you’re a part of me now and I own you,” he said prompting her.
“I’m a part of you and you own me,” she said through her tears. Her body was too battle wary to fight him. And just as whenever he touched her, she wanted to crawl into him and stay there forever.
“Good girl,” he said softly and for the first time since she had known him, there was a different cadence to his voice. The huskiness with which he said it, the softness, the gentleness. This from the same man who had belted her and yet she couldn’t remember the pain, only the pleasure of his words now rung in her mind, and sang along her body lighting her up.
Her labored breath sounded around them. Her whimpers that her punishment was over, turned to a sigh of relief that he was going to untie her…. Until Silas reached under the table for one of the gift boxes that Everleigh had given her.
No. No. No.