My world had shrunk. Nothing existed but my body and the god damned clamps attached to it. No past, no future. There were only the twenty seconds of torturous pleasure, and the intervals in between where I vacillated between begging for more, and pleading with it to stop for good. No more. I couldn’t take anymore.

I cried out as the vibrations started again. Never enough to get me there. Only enough to keep my body reaching for it. I focused on the most erotic thoughts I could imagine, trying to urge my body over the precipice. I was shameless; I didn’t care anymore how dirty or wrong those images were. Nothing mattered but putting me out of this exquisite misery.

I conjured images of Derek fucking my ass, ramming into me from behind while he buried his fingers in my sex. Then I saw me on my knees, hands tied behind my back and my backside stinging from a spanking while my mouth stretched to accommodate his incredible cock.

So close. I was so close. And then the vibrations stopped. I screamed in frustration while impotent tears slid down my temples. I couldn’t take anymore. I was exhausted to the core and desperate for a release that wasn’t going to come.

I’d tried to use the intervals in between to think about things that would kill my arousal, but it refused to subside, and every time the vibrations started up again, it threw my body into overdrive.

My heart was pounding, I was drenched in sweat and I hadn’t been able to breathe normally since Derek tied my ankles and wrists to the posts. Could I die from this? It was possible, wasn’t it? How long could a body possibly stay revved up like this before it conked out?

My body clenched tight, toes curled and hands squeezed into fists. A minute passed, maybe two. It was going to turn on anytime now.

Maybe seconds. Maybe minutes.

Anytime.

Oh god. My whole body jolted as the vibrations shot through me. I was crying out. I could hear it, but it was white background noise. There was only the fiery heat blazing in my sex. I was so close. Please, just a few more seconds.

“No!” I screamed as the vibrations stopped for what felt like the thousandth time.

“You don’t sound like you’re enjoying yourself, Pet.”

He was here. I hadn’t noticed the door open, but he was finally here.

“Please. Please make it stop, Master. I can’t…I’m going to die.”

He chuckled as he approached. Chuckled! I was dying from the damn thing he’d hooked up to me, and he was laughing. I wanted to slap him. First I wanted him to let me come, and then I wanted to slap him.

He whipped off his shirt, and my greedy, horny eyes took in every inch of his hard torso. Chiseled chest. Broad shoulders. Thin veins that stood out on the sinewy muscles of his arms. Washboard abs. Narrow hips peeking out above the waist of his pants. God, he was sex personified. I wanted to taste every inch of his flesh.

“Would you like to come?”

“Yes! God, yes.”

“I want you to tell me the naughtiest thing you’ve thought about since I left, and I’ll consider letting you come.”

I was vaguely aware that I should be embarrassed, but I needed this too much to care. “I thought about you, Master. Your enormous cock in my ass while you fingered me.”

I cried out as the vibrations started again while his eyes got brighter, even fierier than they’d already been.

“Is that so? I like your thinking, Pet.”

“Please, Master,” I moaned.

He removed the clamp from my clit, but before I could breathe a sigh of relief, his fingers replaced it, rubbing soft and slow. I tried to press my clit harder against him, but he wouldn’t allow it. The fingers on his other hand slid along my sex, so slippery it felt like I was covered in the lube he’d put on the plug. And when he held his fingers up in front of me, I could see they were soaking wet.

I watched as he slid them into his mouth and sucked off my juices. Then his fingers were back, gliding along my sex. He lifted them to my mouth this time. I offered no resistance when he pushed them past my lips. I sucked just as greedily as he had.

As if in reward, he replaced his fingers on my clit with his tongue. God yes, it was all I needed.

I only just managed to avoid biting down on the finger still in my mouth as an orgasm tore through my body with the force of a hurricane. Wave after wave after wave. I wasn’t sure if it was ever going to stop.

When it finally did begin to subside, his tongue left me, and I thought I might just fall asleep in the blink of an eye and not wake up for a week. But then he was untying me and stripping off his pants. My mouth started to water and the flames that had only just barely been squelched flared to life.

He gripped his massive erection and stroked it slowly while he looked down at me. When his eyes settled between my open legs, I started to worry that he intended to do the thing I’d thought about. Suddenly, I wanted the plug out of me, as if that could somehow make him forget all about that part of me.

“Relax, Pet. I’m not going to fuck you there…yet. But I am going to keep that plug in your ass while I fuck your pussy.”

Now that he’d put that worry to rest, arousal surged through me at full force. He was on top of me in seconds, and his cock slid through my wetness up to my clit. I jerked beneath him as I lunged for his mouth. He let me slide my tongue between his lips and it was strangely erotic to know we were both tasting me.

He thrust in all of a sudden, hard and deep. God, so freaking deep. Though he only filled one part of me, I could feel him everywhere, from my fingertips to my toes. Connected. Joined. Possessing every fiber of my being.

I wrapped my legs around his hips and reached for his shoulders at the same time, clinging to him as he withdrew until only the tip of him remained inside me. He lingered there, and I arched my hips, trying to draw him back in deeper.

“Tell me what you want,” he demanded against my lips.

“I want you to fuck me, Master. I don’t want you to ever stop.”

He groaned and plunged in, but just a little. “It seems this morning has made you greedy, Pet.”

Was that a good or bad thing? I had no idea what the right answer was. Had it even been a question? So I just nodded against him.

“Good. I like you this way,” he said as he slammed in deep.

I cried out as he thrust against my cervix. It hurt in the most sinfully exquisite way. The pain burst outward and electrified every nerve in my sex.

“You like that?” he asked as he withdrew and rammed back in.

“Yes,” I cried. “Don’t stop. Please, don’t stop.”

And he didn’t. He drove in deep, over and over again. I climbed so high, so fast, I had to look down to see heaven by the time he sent me careening over the precipice.

“Fuck!” he shouted as shockwaves pulsed through my own body, and he swelled deep inside me.

I imagined his liquid heat filling me as I continued to spasm around him, forcing every drop of come from him before he collapsed on top of me.

When he withdrew, he leaned up to watch as he removed the plug from my body. I felt empty, but I was too tired to care.

I closed my eyes the moment he rolled onto his back and I was nestled in the crook of his arms. I could feel his heart beating against my hand on his chest, and the steady rhythm brought me under fast. I was so tired. It felt like I’d spent the past hours running a gruelling marathon with a fifty-pound weight on my shoulders. So tired.

“Scar, I need you to get dressed.”

His words seemed muffled and I had to struggle to make sense of them. And once I had, I wanted to ignore them and continue to drift off, wrapped in his arms. Something in his tone kept me there though. It wasn’t urgency exactly, but he wasn’t happy about something.

“What’s wrong, Master?” I asked, trying to will my arms to push me up.

“I went to meet with someone—someone who’s going to help us. He’s come back with me.”

I bolted upright and looked around, my tiredness forgotten. Someone here? No, I didn’t want anyone but Derek here. Derek was safe. I could trust him.

“Breathe, Scar. It’s OK.”

I grabbed onto his words. I breathed in and out slowly, and I tried to believe it was OK. He was rubbing my back, but it made me cognizant of the wounds there, and I wanted him to stop.

He did stop, without me asking, and he sat up, too. “Do you remember the man who helped us escape?”

I thought back to that day, though it was the last thing I wanted to do. I remembered the men who had whipped me. I could see Derek’s big frame appearing there outside my cell, and felt the overwhelming urge to make him leave me there. I saw my father and the man holding the gun to his head. I could recall grabbing the gun Derek had placed on the floor for me, and I remembered shooting my father.

Another man, though?—one that had helped us? There was no help in that place. There was no help in hell. But wait, I vaguely recalled another figure standing there. He’d led the way out of the basement and then disappeared to unlock the doors.

Oh god, the doors. He was the man who controlled the locks? He was the one who’d unlocked my cell to let those monsters in over and over again? He was here, in Derek’s house? No, please no. He couldn’t be here.

“Please, I don’t want him here. He was there. He saw…everything. He let them…”

“Scar, I wish there was another way, but there isn’t. Michael—that’s his name—he hated what happened to you. He wanted to help, but there was nothing he could do, not until I showed up there.”

I nodded, trying to accept what he was saying, but it wasn’t just that he hadn’t stopped them. I wasn’t stupid—they would never have let him interfere. But he knew everything. He’d seen everything. He’d watched my wretched body respond to the things they did to me.

“I know you don’t want this, but there’s more I have to tell you. OK?”

“OK,” I whispered, though I wasn’t sure if I was acknowledging he had more to tell me, or that I was OK to listen—I wasn’t sure about the latter.

“Your mother had a sister. Her name was Alicia. Marcos took her—eight years ago. Before that, Alicia was married—to Michael. In a roundabout way, that makes him your uncle.”

My uncle? I dimly recalled my mother talking about a sister, but I’d never met her. I had an aunt?—married to a man who was apparently my uncle? I’d never had an uncle before, and I didn’t want one now. It made it worse, didn’t it? It wasn’t some stranger who’d borne witness to my depravity. It was a man who’d been married to my own flesh and blood.

“You don’t have to come meet him if you don’t want to. I just thought if he was going to be in the house, you’d prefer it, so it didn’t feel as much like a stranger was here.”

What Derek was saying made sense, but he didn’t understand. He still thought there was nothing dirty or wrong about how my body had responded. He didn’t understand that of all the things they did to me, that was the worst. The wounds on my body, they would heal, but the ones in my soul, the ones that had torn bigger with every orgasm they drew from my body, it felt like they would fester forever.

They’d changed my perception of myself. I’d always been terrified of turning into a whore like my father had accused me, but I’d always fought it, too. I’d known that part of me existed, and worked damn hard to keep it buried down deep.

If I was being brutally honest though, in that dungeon, I’d stopped fighting. It didn’t take long before that twisted part of me looked forward to it because there was no pain when he forced me to feel pleasure. No whips. No fists. No tearing me apart. For those few minutes, there was only pleasure.

How could I face the man who’d seen me become a whore? Would he scoff at the feelings I had for Derek? Would he think someone like me was incapable of loving a man with every piece of my heart when I had willingly given my body to someone else?

I was about to tell Derek I didn’t want to see him, that I couldn’t possibly face him when another thought—a much more important thought—struck me. Derek had said this man was here to help. Help, how? Help Derek confront Mateo Lopez? Or help get me far away from here? If it was the latter, I needed to meet this man. I needed to get to know him—fast—so I could figure out exactly how to manipulate him into ignoring Derek’s plan.

I couldn’t get on that plane. I needed to follow Derek so I could help him. I could distract Lopez’s men, or even Lopez himself. I could shoot them if I needed to—I’d shot the man who’d been my father for years without hesitation when he’d threatened Derek’s life. So, I knew I could do this. And this man who knew all my darkest secrets was going to help me.

“All right,” I whispered.

He nodded and stood up, striding across the room to the closet bare naked. I loved that he was so comfortable with his body. There was something immensely appealing about that kind of confidence. So, I didn’t try to avert my gaze when he came back to the bed with a sweater in one hand. He grabbed one of the other unopened boxes and my breath caught in my throat. I’d seen—and experienced—the things in those boxes. What could he possibly have in mind now?

“Don’t worry, Pet, there are no surprises in this box. Just clothes.”

Thank god. He opened the box and handed me a pair of tights and a t-shirt, along with basic underthings. I hadn’t worn anything like these since before…before I’d been taken from Derek. It felt strange to put on clothes that covered up so much of me, but I couldn’t deny these were better than those old clothes. They were soft against my skin, obviously expensive fabric. And covering up made me feel a little better about meeting the man downstairs.

It wasn’t cold in the house, but Derek helped me put on his sweater, and though the arms hung down past my fingertips, it was better. Like armor.

He brushed my hair back and gathered it into a ponytail at the nape of my neck and then brought me a damp cloth for my face before he turned his attention to his own clothes. He could be so gentle when he wanted to be. It was strange, in the most wonderful way. He could tie me up, pin me down and spank me with just as much ease as when he brushed my hair or held me in his arms. I’d seen every side of him, and the way he embodied them all was fascinating.

He took my hand when he was dressed and lingered only long enough to drop a light kiss on my forehead before he led me out of the room and down the stairs. My hands trembled, but I kept steering my thoughts back to the task at hand—finding a way to get that man to help me. It was all that mattered.