Salt in the Wound (Lyonesse)

by Sierra Simone

Psalm 144:1. Which if you flipped to in the Bible, would read: Blessed be the Lord, my rock, who trains my hands for battle, my fingers for war.

He was rolling up his sleeves to expose sun-bronzed forearms, his fingers working the fabric in quick, deft rolls.

His voice was deep and rough and cold. Ice wouldn’t melt in that voice. But it was mannerly, polite. Some devils hide, you see. Right in plain sight.

I didn’t smell cologne or any other kind of expensive scent, which seemed unusual for someone who would go to the trouble to wear such a nice suit; instead, I only smelled fresh and clean air, soap, perhaps, and something else underneath it. The way the air smells after rain, maybe.

Yum

“This,” the stranger said, flipping the knife and then catching it expertly with the blade pointing down, “is reverse grip.” “Like a serial killer,” Bryn chirped from over by the mirrors.

“Good,” he said, and when he said good in that rough, cold voice, something flickered in my chest, in my thoughts, gone before I could really perceive it.

about sifting through people so subtly that they wouldn’t know you’d been sifting at all.

I felt the place where his hand had been on my back the rest of the night.

I woke at dawn the next day, my heart slamming against my ribs, slick flesh pulsing between my legs. I wasn’t ignorant of sex; I knew that I’d had an orgasm in my dream. Just as I knew Mark Trevena had been in my dream.

Do you know what he does?” Bryn asked, looking over at me. Her dark ponytail swung in a long arc over her shoulders. She asked like she already knew, like the answer mattered. “He said he was a business associate of my father’s.” “Izzy, he runs a sex club.” I stumbled, barely catching myself before I fell. Of all the things she could have said, I would have never⁠— Sex clubs were real? Truly real?

“Lav said it’s very secret, someplace in DC. And everyone goes there, like everyone who matters, and from all over the world. And it’s not just a sex club, but it’s like a fetish club or something. You know, spanking and people pretending to be puppies and stuff.”

“I didn’t want to have this conversation yet, but it’s just as well,” he said shortly. “It was no accident that you met Mark Trevena last night. You will be seeing much more of him over the coming months—and years.” There was something in his tone—in his face—that made my skin prickle, my muscles tense. Danger. After years and years in the dojo, my body often recognized danger before my mind could catch up. “I will?” I asked, unable to modulate the wariness in my voice. “Yes,” my father said. “Because you are to marry him.”

Three weeks after that, my mother had died in a car crash.

suspicious

“Trevena was CIA. Special operations.” My father paused, seemed to decide on a different way to start. “His club, Lyonesse, is different from its competitors in many ways, but the chief difference is this: he doesn’t accept payment in money, only in information. His patrons are politicians, diplomats, celebrities, royalty. All of them have to pay in knowledge exclusive to their positions.”

“So in a way, Mark has never left the field of intelligence,” my father continued. “And intelligence is a generous word for what he used to do, anyway—he was the devil they sent in to scourge the other devils. And he was the best in the world at it.”

I hated him just then. I hated that he was taking my reaction and making it seem as if I were the unreasonable one, the foolish one for having a plan for my life that didn’t include him abruptly announcing that I was going to marry a stranger.

I hated that I couldn’t stop myself from speaking, from exploding.

only God was big enough, gentle and patient enough, to receive all the pain and emptiness I’d felt and to fold it inside of his mighty heart.

As if by dressing simply enough, I could pretend to him and myself that I hadn’t been having arching, twisting dreams for the last three weeks—dreams that featured cold blue eyes and large, capable hands. It meant nothing. It meant only that lust was nipping at my heels like any other temptation, but I would beat it back.

So much could happen in four years.

So it boiled down to the same thing for Mark and my father and Mortimer too. I was a means to an end, and that end was the mysterious, all-important information. Mortimer wanted it for the Church, my father for money. I didn’t know why Mark wanted it. Perhaps only to broker it, to profit from it. To consolidate his obscure throne back in DC. Information.

poached lobster with grape and fennel salad.

gross

There was something buzzing under my skin. A warning maybe. An ancient instinct that told me that a storm was coming, that a wolf was in the woods.

I tried to settle my pulse. I didn’t even know why it was racing now. Mark didn’t expect anything real from me…surely that was a relief. Surely I was satisfied by that.

I opened my mouth to tell him that it wasn’t incomplete at all, that of course I didn’t want to have sex. But the words wouldn’t come. I realized, with slow-dawning horror, that saying them would feel like lying.

“You do not have to have sex with me, Isolde, but I will say this—I am possessive by nature. Once we are married, I’m not interested in you having sex with anyone else, even if we aren’t fucking. In addition to my…nature, it would not help our carefully crafted appearance of unity if an affair of yours became known.”

The smile deepened the barest amount, before he turned serious again. “Issues of fidelity aside, we’ll need to expand your idea of sex. It’s far more than just penetration, and it’s also a signature of my play. The people at my club know this about me.” He spread his hands on the table, as if to say, this is out of my control.

Yes, of course, people watching. That was what this entire conversation had been about. People would watch me and Mark together; they would watch me pretending to submit. It almost made me light-headed to think about, but in a way that reminded me of the first few seconds before a sparring match at a tournament. It was uncomfortably close to excitement.

“I’ll do it,” I said to the dark window. “Wonderful,” said my fiancé. “We’ll start rehearsing tomorrow.” Rehearsing. It made sense. I could hardly show up to Mark’s club and expect to perform my new role flawlessly on the first try. Like learning how to use a knife or reciting a new prayer, mastery only came through practice, praxis.

He took my left hand where it rested on the table and wrapped his fingers around it. The contact nearly made me jump; his hand was huge and warm and the strength restrained in it was unnerving.

And at some point, surely, his eyes had to grow warmer? His manner less cutting? I recognized I was hardly a cuddly person myself, but I did think I was easy to be around. Fair to the people around me.

my eyes went to the man in front of me. The narrow hips, the wide shoulders stretching the seams of his shirt.

You aren’t a typical person, Isolde,” Mark said as we reached the landing. “But it’s hard not to look at other people living their normal, messy lives and wonder what it would be like. To be one of them.” It was so like my thoughts that day in the library that I wasn’t sure how to answer. It either meant Mark was incredibly perceptive, or that he and I shared this normality-nostalgia in common. I wasn’t sure what unsettled me more.

You would push limits on purpose?” I asked doubtfully. That seemed to defeat the entire purpose of limits, according to all I’d read. “A hard limit, most likely not. But a soft limit? Yes. Entirely.”

Isolde, if you have been trying to comfort yourself with the belief that I must secretly be a good man—that my transparency so far has proven that I must somehow care about fairness and kindness—then I must ask you to stop.

“Your hands are free. The blindfold is not tight. Your safe word is right here between us the moment you need it. Breathe.”

“You don’t expect it…but maybe you would still like it?” His chest moved underneath me. He’d lifted his shoulder in a shrug I couldn’t see. “There’s no end to what I would like, Isolde. I learned a long time ago to put some reasonable limits on what I ask of people, because otherwise I will ask the world of them.”

There was a strange feeling that came with the realization, almost like a thrill, to know that he’d thought about me while we weren’t together. I had the same feeling whenever he emailed me about my ongoing education in kink, especially when those emails came late at night. I imagined him in bed in that Billionaire’s Row penthouse, his phone in his hand and his thoughts on me.

I hadn’t had as many hard limits as I’d thought. I wasn’t sure what to make of that.

Whatever impression of me the world had, I would use it against them to get what I wanted. If they saw me as weak, depraved, unimportant, under someone else’s control…all the better for what I needed to do.

What was happening to me? Six months ago, I couldn’t believe my father would allow a man like Mark at a party, and now here I was silently keening to be treated like a whore.

It wasn’t until the DJ on the dance floor put up the countdown to midnight and Mark shifted underneath me that I realized my bottom had been nestled against a thick erection, long enough to make me swallow.

There. I’d admitted it. I wanted to. I wanted sex, and sex with Mark, and not because it would make me better at gathering information or leveraging his club to help the Church, but because he had glittering eyes and large hands and sometimes said things like I asked for you.

Conversely, he knew far more about me than I knew about him, and in that moment, him looking at me, that kiss last week lingering between us, I couldn’t bear for him to know this: that I wanted him to stop doing scenes with other people. I couldn’t even bear for myself to know it.

I sincerely hoped he was writing off my goose bumps and pebbled nipples as something to do with the cool air of the loft, and not what they really were, which was a response to him cinching and constricting me. A response to feeling trapped and held. It made my belly swim and my heart pound.

His fingertips found my navel. Drew circles around it. “I’d reach between your legs and check to see if your clitoris was erect, and if it was, I’d begin toying with it.” His fingers echoed his words, rubbing a spot just above my navel. “I’d then see how wet you were for me. Wet enough to take my fingers, perhaps…”

“I’d make you come until that cunt was nice and flushed for me, and then I’d uncuff you from the cross and carry you to the table. I’d spread your legs so that everyone could see between them and see what you’d done.”

I can’t say I’ve wrapped my head around this engagement yet, but anyone brave enough to let Mark collar them is someone I’m honored to meet.”

Did I have a secret weakness for wicked grins? Or just for beautiful Dominants in general?

Play helpless, play weak. It’s just part of the game. But it chafed all the same.