Darkness as far as the eye could see.
Not a darkness so impenetrable that it crushed the senses with an unbearable claustrophobia, but a kind of looming shadow transparent enough to reveal the outlines of the surrounding environment.
Dead quiet.
Programmed for "all-season comfort," the air conditioner barely made a whisper. And yet the wafting air currents undulated like shimmering heat waves traversing the contours of the uneven dark. They were as a heavy, opaque mass of an ice floe descending into the depths.
And then came the faint rustling of sheets from the bed in the middle of the room. Shadows wavered back and forth, as if buoyed on the ripples of fevered heat swelling up from the deep well of silence. The shadows writhed left and right, suddenly stiffening in apparent rigidity. The occupant of the bed turned over and over, wide awake, vexed with a persistent insomnia.
Or perhaps by the visitation of bad dreams?
No, that was not it either. Not that he could not bed himself down, but that he could not raise himself up again.
His wrists were firmly bound together above his head, while his strained arms trembled slightly. He clenched his fists, suggesting an exasperated defiance of his confined state.
But he must free himself, no matter the cost. Though for one possessed of such an indomitable spirit, he did not seem to be struggling with any great frenzy of effort.
Perhaps he had given up the fight or had grown weary of resistance. His expression remained inscrutable, though now and then there spilled from his lips a low, moaning groan—the sound of a man reaching the limits of his perseverance.
He twisted his captive body to restrain what was bursting forth uncontrollable from within him, desperately clenching his teeth in order to resist it.
In such sounds were echoes of utter pathos. At the core of these utterances, a listener could almost catch the breathings of satiated sighs, permeated with deeply lascivious colors and scents.
Son—of—a—bitch! You—
The maledictions rose in his mouth, his breath shaking, his lips trembling, the mounting frenzy of his pounding pulse burning at his throat. As the repeated imprecations welled up and oozed away, he knew that doing so only ate away at his innards like a powerful poison. And yet the curses spilled out of him.
Goddamn fucking—!
Shedding tears without shame or honor, his eroded willpower and punished pride tossed to the wind, he scolded himself, biting his bottom lip hard enough to draw blood.
No matter how hard he screamed, his cries reached no ears but his own. He was struck by the realization that if he cried for mercy at the top of his lungs, no one would listen. For the room in which he was bound, in stark contrast to its resplendent furnishings, was nothing if not a bleak jail cell.
How much time had passed since he'd been injected with the aphrodisiac? He'd lost all sense of time passing. Possibly a mere ten minutes, but it was more likely that a good hour had passed since the injection. His head throbbed to the core of his brain.
The muscles in his groin tightened to the point of pain. Spasms shook him to his fingertips. His breath grew ragged and his parched throat cried out for relief. And then there was his hotly erect member, so aroused as to send a dull numbness seeping through his loins, so engorged as to press the veins and capillaries to the bursting point.
His whole body had to climax! He could not restrain himself any longer!
Contorting his body and grinding his thighs together only intensified the agony, for his constricted organ seemed to want to spend itself in the worst way possible. His field of vision misted red. From his nether regions, the fevered convulsions surged through him, threatening to splinter his spine.
Restrained by a ring at the base of his cock, he couldn't ejaculate. Not at all. "Son of a bitch!" he spat, his lips trembling. Barely conscious, he repeated the word over and over, "Shit, shit, shit!"
He knew of no other way to escape the searing torture that even breathing had become.
That was when the door to the room slid open, right to left. Preoccupied with the anguish consuming him to the core, he didn't notice the Man entering the room.
The Man approached the Captive with careful steps. He carried himself with a supple grace, the thick carpet itself absorbing any audible evidence of his presence. Wordlessly he touched a switch by the bed.
The room at once filled with soft light. Having been held prisoner in darkness, the gentle brightness all but blinded the Captive. Even when narrowing his eyes, it took him a long minute to become accustomed to the light.
He took in the striking countenance of a beautiful yet merciless Man who seemed not to possess a speck of vulnerability, and tears sprang to his eyes. His willpower and endurance, stretched now to the breaking point, suddenly sagged in the face of the Man.
"And how are we doing? Holding up well enough?"
The Man's voice was several degrees colder than his indifferent mien suggested. A listener could not help but be persuaded by the particular firmness in his voice, a firmness that imparted the harshness of someone well-accustomed to giving orders.
"Enough already!" the Captive implored, twisting his body, choking back tears.
And yet the Man moved not an eyebrow. "I offered you the chance to take your best shot with any of the others. I gave you no leave to go and mount up some bitch!"
There was a disturbing discrepancy between the nonchalant tone of his voice and his eyes, which were cold as death. "At the very least, you knew that Mimea was espoused, did you not? Even Raoul is casting aspersions, saying you've gone and ruined everything. These are your just desserts."
The Captive could only lie there, catching his breath in response to the deliberate, yet harsh, words flung his way.
"Did your vanity really convince you that you could win Mimea over? That being the case, even if you were simply playing Casanova, you surely knew that there are rules of the game that must be respected?"
Behind the Man, a woman's shrill voice shot through the room. "It wasn't a game!"
The Captive shrank back, as if stung by the snap of her voice. His eyes widened in surprise, seeing Mimea's face exposed to the world after so many clandestine trysts.
"She insisted on meeting you, and she wouldn't take no for an answer. Well, it's said that love is blind, but what the two of you don't seem to understand is that this is not your decision to make. So let's hear it straight from the horse's mouth."
Hear what? the Captive's quavering eyes asked silently, vaguely beginning to anticipate what the man was going to say next.
"The relationship was never real—that is what he said. If not Mimea, then any warm body would have sufficed. He was intrigued only by the body being female."
At that moment, another sensation crept up the Captive's spine. Not the arousing spasms of pleasure, but something more akin a cold, dark despair.
"As long as he was given an unoccupied pussy in which to quench his hot, throbbing manhood, it did not matter whose it was. Isn't that what you said?"
The Man would not be challenged. The threats implicit in the undercurrents of his voice overwhelmed the senses. The Captive's cheeks stiffened, and in that frozen state he gulped for breath and swallowed, hard.
But before he could will his trembling lips to respond, the woman spoke up. "That's a lie! You're all ganging up on us, trying to destroy our relationship!" She hardened her voice and glared reproachfully at the Man. To Mimea, the person who could shackle her lover as he pleased was more a rival for her affections than a symbol of ultimate authority.
"Do you know who Raoul chose as my partner? Jena! Supposedly because he's got good genes—" The way her words trembled and trailed off indicated the desperate nature of her emotions. "I'll have none of it! His perverted nature is written all over his face. The thought of being held by him... of having a child by him... makes me sick!"
As a woman this was something her pride would not allow, and yet almost in the same breath she addressed the Captive, with a certain pained affection. "You're different from other people, aren't you? You love only me, don't you?"
But the Captive didn't hear the half of what she said. It took all his effort simply to keep from groaning aloud, contorting his body in order to stave off the recognition of that which had been thrusting itself into the conversation this whole time. The only thing he salvaged from Mimea's words was that the exposure of his covert meetings with her would bring down censure upon her head.
Back when their secret became public, his mates had joined in the castigations. "We've got no use for a chap who falls for a slumming Academy-manufactured princess."
Of Mimea it was said: "She's no judge of men, falling for trash like that." Such were the manner of words spoken behind her back. The envied product of the Academy on the one hand, and himself on the other: born and raised among the dregs.
But Mimea knew. Beneath the shadows of the ceaseless ridicule, behind the scourging hands of public censure and the daggers of reproachful looks, one and all had acutely realized what a rare specimen he was.
Despite the merits of his lineage (or the lack thereof), despite the beauty of his countenance (or the lack thereof), despite his criminal record (or the lack thereof)—the uniqueness of his presence alone bewitched people. For good or ill, that primal sense of self that up until then he'd believed had been etched in stone had been crushed without mercy.
Mimea had seen the end from the beginning: the day-to-day deceptions keeping them apart, the affectations of territoriality, the souls glittering beneath the bell jar.
Amongst all her colleagues he was the most beautiful of all. None of the flagrant and malicious gossip, or the dark jealousies, or the insidious behavior got under his skin. His speech and conduct remained uncivilized in the extreme and his utterly uncooperative spirit never allowed him to go along just to get along. Nevertheless, his actions were not without meaning. He alone achieved a particular kind of "purity."
Which was why Mimea wanted him, no matter what. Although both birds in a cage, she wanted to believe that their pairing might lead to something completely new.
That was why she reached out to him, why she teased him with kisses, threw herself into his embrace, and so ardently desired to fuse their bodies as one. Thus would he become hers and hers alone.
Such had been the brittle, naive dreams she dreamed.
Despite his outwardly blunt and curt behavior, up until a few days ago he had always looked at her with eyes softer than any other. Now, however, he turned his face away with no offer of explanation. To Mimea, this burden was the hardest to bear. His silence kindled in her an inexpressible anxiety.
"Why won't you say anything?"
She now had to confront reality: he didn't wish to see her. What was the value of a life bound by invisible chains? A life compelled
The jumble of thoughts pained her heart. Unable to bear it any longer, she cried out almost hysterically. "Why won't you look at me? Say something, please!"
She raised her eyebrows and pursed her red lips, knowing he was unlikely to spare her even a glance. In one moment, she had been shown the ugliness of an unimaginable betrayal, illustrated in the turned back of the Captive who would not even rise to defend himself with a man's typical bluster. She could not speak, for all her anger—such was the fire in her eyes.
Ah, this is the end, the Captive thought in his heart.
"Coward!" Mimea reviled him, her voice almost becoming a scream.
With that came a rending, tearing sensation in his back, like being flogged with a nail-studded whip. He bit down on his lip all the harder. Brine oozed from parted teeth, stinging his throat as if wrapping it in thorns, the pain twining together with the scorching heat of the poison burning in his chest. His limbs stiffened. It was either a moan or a sobbing groan that emerged from his locked jaws.
Even he hardly knew the difference. Standing at his back, Mimea turned away, her lips trembling. "And perhaps you as well have learned a thing or two?"
Having assured himself that Mimea was moving with all due haste toward the door, the Man sat down on the edge of the bed. He was taking his time.
"Well, this conclusion was entirely obvious from the beginning," he murmured smoothly. He stripped off the blankets, revealing a naked body that was still in the process of growing into an adult. The supple symmetry in the Captive's maturing limbs and the manner in which his body writhed in the agonies of pleasure only worked to arouse the Man's sadism.
The Man's gaze crawled across the Captive's body. His cold and placid eyes reflected no heightened passion, no racing pulse. Only when the Man's cruel gaze fell between the Captive's thighs did his face darken in the slightest.
The hard, aroused crown of the Captive's manhood cried out to his tormentor. I want to come! Let me climax!
"You want to come?" the Man whispered, in a coaxing voice.
The Captive's lips trembled as he caught his breath, his watering eyes pleading for him. He forced himself to nod stiffly, repeatedly.
The Captive took a deep breath as the Man deftly parted his knees. He believed at long last he was about to be released from this maddening torture.
However, as if to scorn such rash optimism, with not so much as glance at his swollen, ripened cock, the Man exposed the underside of the Captive's left thigh and with his finger gently stroked the valley dividing the two hillocks.
With a groan, the Captive's eyes rolled back in his head.
"You enjoyed Mimea's pleasures without my leave. Did you really believe that you could wrap up everything so cleanly after it was made known, just like that?"
For the first time, a real shadow of fear clouded the Captive's eyes.
As always, the Man was the most serene of masters, to the point of appearing excessively frigid. But beneath the facade of this man, whose voice never wavered in the slightest, hid the face of a hard and relentless taskmaster. The Captive knew this better than any.
Which is why, at this juncture, he did not throw himself at the man's mercy, pleading "Why?"
When his relationship with Mimea had been revealed to the Man, he'd been the defiant one. He'd cuckolded her consort and lost himself in the affair that ensued. It was something anyone could have done, but that was not why he did it.
He loved Mimea. Her glamorous appearance. Her pure and cultivated haughtiness. Her ignorance of the real world, into which she never ventured beyond her assigned place in life. The softness of her skin wherever he touched her. He loved everything about her.
She held no prejudices toward him the way others did. She was his only companion. She accepted all of his maverick qualities at face value, and him as a mere human being. And yet he knew that there was a dark side to their brief "honeymoon" together, and whenever they spoke to each other as "lovers"... and that was the secret thrill he got from betraying the Man.
It was because the Captive had found himself in a gilded cage he had never desired. For a feral child who'd never stooped to lick another's boots, who'd known nothing but his own hard-earned selfrespect, that uncontrollable sense of claustrophobia was suffocating him.
In this state, things could only go from bad to worse. He was chaffing at the bit, rotting from the inside out, and it was killing him. Casting his bruised pride to the wind and kissing up to the Man would destroy it once and for all.
That's why, even when the moment of truth came, he took it lightly. That made his sense of guilt toward the Man—and all the more so toward Mimea—that much more intense.
But now. Now, fear touched his heart. "With Mimea—it was—we did it only once."
He knew that the Man would never fall for such a clumsy excuse, but he also knew, with a certain sense of dread, that he had to offer some sort of rationalization.
"One time is as good as a hundred, as far as I am concerned. That you held her in your arms is reason enough."
The ball of the Man's finger crept teasingly toward his anus. The Captive jerked. Not only had his penis ripened to an oozing plumpness from such paroxysms of pleasure, but the hidden flower of his bowels as well. That which under ordinary circumstances opened its petals only to persistent foreplay had already become enchanted.
As if to drive home the reality of its promiscuous condition, the Man skimmed the folds of the flower with his fingertips. "You like it the best here, like this—"
No!
But his body betrayed the Captive before the words could emerge from his throat.
The realization that he was powerless to restrain himself only left him more afraid. Goosebumps erupted wherever his flesh succumbed to the mining pins and needles of pleasure.
Slowly, the Man penetrated him with his finger, triggering provocative undulations in the Captive's body. The sensation aroused a guttural groan as his loins twisted and writhed uncontrollably.
"What's this? Trying to salvage your ego even now? How about giving us a good yelp for a change?"
The Man's voice possessed the stillness of permafrost, as far removed from his normal coolness as could be imagined. Indeed, such imaginings alone left the Captive speechless with fear. With every turn of the Man's lasciviously worming finger, the chronic throbbing contracted further, producing an intense and spreading numbness throughout his body.
Half-unconsciously the Captive tightened his sphincter. But instead of repelling the invasion of the foreign object, his body gripped the Man's digit more tightly, drawing it deeply inside him with increasing pleasure. And as he did so, the quivering in his loins began to mount slowly with a shameless, if charming desperation.
And yet...
Clearly not even that was sufficient for the Man, who licked his earlobe and murmured in his ear. "Yes, that's a good boy."
"Hiiii—" trilled the Captive. There was a small scream, and his back arched. The whirlpool of tiny, tingling teeth gnawing at his spine suddenly bared their fangs and pierced the top of his skull. His outstretched arms and strained legs jerked and convulsed.
With a vengeance the Man jammed his finger deeper, causing fiery darts to scorch the insides of the Captive's eyelids. He caught his breath, feeling as if every blood vessel in his body was about to burst. Not only his swollen cock, but his painfully erect nipples as well.
He could have escaped the truly unbearable agony by fainting, but the Man forced him to pant laboriously for air, not letting him come. Bringing the bud of his anus to such effulgent bloom, the Man bound him to consciousness with lust, toying with his nether parts without respite.
"Ahhhh... haaaa... hnnnnn..."
The Captive's trembling lips shock with ragged breaths that pulsed in his throat. His hips heaved violently, yet drew forth only a premature, glistening thread, and with it not a single promise of release.
"Aaaaargh...!"
With every half-cry that escaped his throat, cries approaching a scream, his body burned all the way down to the tip of his rod's honeyed mouth. Such was the unimaginable menace in the Man's practiced foreplay.
The Man toyed mercilessly with the Captive's piercingly hard nipples, making him keen. He brought forth the naked head of the Captive's shuddering stamen to caress it with his fingertips, making the Captive howl. His anus having tightly swallowed one finger, the Man twisted in a second, forcing it wider.
"Hiii—yaaa—!"
As tears streamed down his face, the Captive gasped, pleading in ragged shards of language. "Enough... no more... won't... do... it... again... ahhh!"
He was begging, pleading for forgiveness. Not again. Never again. He'd never do it again!
Mercy!
The earnest words rose again and again as if in a fevered delirium from his benumbed, frozen mouth. The Man once again whispered into his ear. "I'll let you come. As often as you wish. Until you regret that you ever held Mimea in your arms."
And then with unequalled, frigid calmness, he pronounced the verdict, one imbued with a maddening darkness: "You are my pet. Know this to the marrow of your bones."
The Man's upturned blue eyes were so unimaginably beautiful that they could make anybody tremble with awe. In this moment, however, they also glimmered with an icy fire—perhaps revealing the fury of his wounded pride, or rather, a manifestation of his uncontrollable obsession.
It did not matter which of these was correct. For the Man was aware that at the base of his haughty convictions, there swirled a dark whirlpool of twisted jealousy towards Mimea.