This isn’t a scene, though, and Alexandre isn’t someone I met at a bar or a New York sex dungeon.
He’s a man with absolute power over me in every fathomable way. And right now, he’s so angry with me that I can’t begin to think where he might stop with this punishment, or what I might need to fear.
The possibilities are endless and too terrifying to consider.
He pulls the skirt up further, baring all of my lower back, ass, and thighs to his gaze, and I feel his hand pull away as if to strike me for the first time. But before the first blow can fall, I feel him hesitate, and then his hand does come down. But he doesn’t hit me. Instead, I feel his fingers trace one of the lingering scars on my hip where Alexei beat me with the belt as I hung from the ceiling in his chalet, and then another of them on the curve of my ass, another on my upper thigh.
“Was this Alexei?” he asks, his voice dark, and I don’t bother trying to hide my tears.
“Yes,” I manage in a choked voice, sniffling.
“What happened?” His fingers are still tracing the old marks, and again, it could have been arousing in different circumstances. My bare pussy is pressed against the crisp fabric of his pant leg, and I can feel him hardening against my belly. He’s not immune to having me across his lap like this, half-naked, any more than he was immune to watching me in the bath last night. It’s just a matter of whether or not he’ll act on it.
Not like this,I think desperately, though I don’t dare say it aloud. Whatever Alexandre does to me, I hope it’s not that. As recently as yesterday, I wanted him, and I don’t think I can bear it if he takes that away from me too, if he violates me. If he hurts me in ways that go far beyond what he could do with his hands, a belt, or other implements.
If he hurts me like that, after what I’ve started to feel for him and the restraint he’s shown so far, I think it will break me beyond repair.
I wonder if he knows that.
Unlike his questions about my feet, I don’t try to avoid answering this time. I’m too afraid to withhold anything from him now, and even if I thought I could, all I can hope is that perhaps I can get some sympathy from him now. His pity isn’t what I wanted, but I’m terrified enough to take whatever it is that I can get.
“Caterina made him angry,” I whisper through my tears, doing my best to choke them back. “He scared one of the children—Anika, I think it was—and she fought back. He knew hurting her wouldn’t stop her from fighting back. He was already raping her. So instead, he hurt the people she cared about. He knew that more than her own pain would make her fall in line. So he brought Sasha in and beat her in front of Caterina. And then me.” I bite my lower lip hard at the memory, hard enough to taste blood, the tears dripping faster down my face and onto the leather couch and the rug beneath us. “She felt responsible for Sasha, and I’m her closest friend’s best friend.”
I wonder if I should have said that last part, but I don’t think it matters now. Giving Alexandre information he could have easily found out on his own with a little digging into my past isn’t going to change what he does to me now. Being truthful with him and clarifying that I’m not holding back is my best chance. My best chance to show him that I can be hisgood girlagain.
Even now, facedown across his lap with his hand caressing my old scars, moments after he was close to blistering my ass with his hand, a part of me yearns for it. To be the girl whose hair he stroked and head he patted, the girl he fed treats and smiled at, praised, and cared for. The girl that he protected from Yvette, saying sternly,mine.Mine,in a way that felt possessive but not threatening.
Not like now.
“He knew hurting us would break her. He started with us and told her that her pregnant friend would be next, and then the children after that, if she still refused to behave. But Sasha and I were all it took.” I remember what happened after that and squeeze my eyes tightly shut against a fresh wave of tears. “He tried not to scar Sasha. She was worth a decent amount. But he didn’t care about me. I was already damaged. Ruined.Worthless.” The last isn’t a plea for Alexandre’s sympathy, though I know he might think that it is. They’re Alexei’s words, and they went deeper than even I realized. Lying across Alexandre’s lap like this, crying and broken, caught snooping, my naked ass and all of my scars bared to him, I feel exactly that. Worthless.
At the mercy of whatever Alexandre decides to do to me.
He’s silent for a long moment, his fingers tracing the scars. I can feel the tension in every line of his body, the hard ridge of him beneath my belly, straining at his fly. He’s hard, aroused, angry. Just the thought is enough to terrify me. I know what aroused and angry men are capable of. Once I would have saidnot Alexandre.
But now I’m not sure.
“Get up,” he says finally, his voice still cold and harsh, and I don’t waste a second. I scramble to my feet, my ankles tangling in the black frilled panties caught around them. I frantically kick them free onto the rug, the skirt of the maid’s dress blessedly sliding back down to cover me.
Alexandre’s face hasn’t softened. He still looks furious, his piercing blue eyes dark and angry, his mouth set in a thin line. His hands are gripping the edge of the couch on either side of him now, every muscle in his body tight and rigid. I don’t dare look at his erection, pressing noticeably against the front of his trousers. I’m afraid to draw attention to it.
The tears are still streaming down my face, my breath coming in short, hiccupping gulps. I’m seconds away from a full panic spiral, the only thing stopping me the knowledge of how little Alexandre likes myfits, as he called them. He won’t be picking me up off the floor and cleaning my face for me this time. He’ll have far less patience, and I have no idea how that might manifest.
“Beg,” he says, his thickly accented voice cutting through the air between us. “Get on your knees,petit, and beg my forgiveness. Do it now, before I change my mind.”
And what?I’d never dare ask the question, but it hangs there. What would he do to me if I refused? If I summoned the old, stubborn, defiant Ana and raised my chin, refusing to kneel to a man, refusing to beg.
If it were Franco or Alexei, I would know the answer. With Alexandre, I don’t. And somehow, that’s even more terrifying.
“Beg,” he says again, his voice rasping. “Don’t make me tell you again,petit poupée.”
Little doll.Like a puppet whose strings have been cut, I fall to my knees, ignoring how the impact feels against my already bruised joints. “I’m sorry,” I gasp, my hands on the rug, nails scratching at it, feeling the loose threads, the imperfections. The damage that Alexandre finds so endearing, so charming, sovaluable.
A hundred million dollars. I still can’t fathom it.
But now isn’t the time to try.
Now is the time, if there ever was one, to obey.
Beg.