House of Dark Delights (15 page)

“Don't be silly,” she replied, amused but touched by his solicitude. “I'm hardly shy, and this
is
the entrance to his home.”

“He doesn't generally come in this way,” Elic said. “Too much risk of bumping into humans. There's another entrance hidden in the woods, closer to his chamber. He likes to use that.”

“Elic?” A darkly handsome fellow in shirtsleeves stood at the other end of the pool, squinting into the mist until his gaze lit on Lili. “Ah.” He backed up, schooling his expression, but not before she detected a grimace of disappointment at her presence in his friend's arms. “Lili. I—I beg your pardon. I didn't realize—”

“You know me?” she asked.

When he hesitated, Elic said, “Darius was in a more…feline mood when last you met.”

“Ah, yes, that watchful little gray cat,” Lili said. Darius's ancient and mysterious race, the djinn, were blessed with the ability to assume animal forms. The most powerful among them could even, it was said, make themselves invisible at will.

Darius, clearly taken aback by Elic's having revealed his shape-shifting powers to a presumed human, glared at his friend. “Elic, what the devil are you—”

“She's one of us,” Elic told him.

Darius stared at her for a moment, then scowled at his friend. “You might have told me.”

“I just did. Is anything wrong?” Elic asked him. “You seem a bit…out of sorts.”

“You've no idea,” Darius muttered. Taking in the two of them, curled up together in the water, he said, “I had a favor to ask of you, but I can see that you're…occupied, so—”

“Wait,” said Elic as his friend turned to leave, his hands fisted at his sides. Excusing himself to Lili, he waded to the opposite end of the pool and asked quietly,
“Quelle faveur?”

Crouching down so that he was at eye level with Elic, Darius glanced at Lili and whispered for a minute in French, his voice so low that she could make out only the occasional word or phrase…
belle et insatiable
…
elle veut deux hommes
…

“Où est-elle?”
Elic said.
Where is she?

“Dans le cachot.” The dungeon.

“Le cachot?”

“Elle veut être là,”
Darius said tensely.
She wants to be there.
With another glance at Lili, he said,
“Mais si—”

“Non.”
Elic looked down, shaking his head disconsolately.
“C'est impossible,”
he said with a frustrated sigh.
“Je ne peux pas—pas avec Lili.” I can't—not with Lili.

“Oui, naturellement,”
Darius said soberly.
“Je suis désolé.”

“J'aurai besoin d'un condom,”
Elic said.

Darius shook his head, something like a smile banishing his grim expression just for a moment.
“Elle est stérile.”

“Stérile? C'est bon.”
Raking his hair back with both hands, Elic said tightly,
“Je vous rencontrerai là.” I'll meet you there.

“Merci, mon ami.”
Rising, Darius said to Lili, “I apologize for my foul mood,
mademoiselle
. 'Twas an honor and a pleasure to have made your acquaintance. Dare I hope your stay with us will be a lengthy one?”

“Would that it were so,” she replied, “but the Hellfires are to depart tomorrow, and I with them.”

“I am sorry to hear it. Perhaps you can visit us again. Until then”—he bowed—“
au revoir.
”

“Au revoir.”

Elic continued gazing through the doorway for some time after his friend had disappeared into the darkness. Finally he turned to face her, but he didn't meet her eyes as he said, “I must leave.”

“I know,” she said. “You must release your seed.” To some woman Darius had found, a woman who was “beautiful and insatiable,” and who wanted two men.

“Lili.” He crossed to her swiftly, banding his arms around her in an almost painful embrace, his face buried in her hair, his erection pressing rigidly into her stomach.

“I know,
khababu
.” She pressed her lips to his chest, his throat. “You have your destiny, just as I have mine.”

“Stay with me tonight,” he rasped. “Let me hold you in my arms, just for tonight.”

“Yes. Of course.”

“I live in the northeast tower, at the very top.” He kissed her head, stroked her face. “Go there and wait for me. I shall join you as soon as I can.”

Don't think about it,
Lili told herself as she watched him striding back toward the chateau, his monk's robe flickering like a white flame in the darkness.
Don't think about
her,
whoever she is.
She was nothing to him, a mere vessel in which to relieve his lust.

A beautiful and insatiable vessel.

Don't think.
Turning, Lili stretched out onto her back, suspended like a leaf on the surface of the warm, soothing water.
Just be.

The sliver of moon in the center of the skylight—the symbol of all she once was, and would never be again—taunted Lili until she closed her eyes, whispering, “Just be…just be…”

Her mind floated along with her body, which drifted on the subtle current until her head just touched the edge of the pool nearest the entrance. She lay there, weightless and dreamy…

Until a pair of hands gently cupped her head.

“Elic?” Lili opened her eyes to find herself staring into the upside-down face of Anton Turek, kneeling over her at the edge of the pool, his eyes glowing red in the swirling mist.

“Your Abbot of the Day seems to have abandoned you,” Turek said in a low, oddly sibilant voice. “You won't mind if I step in and take his place.”

“Get away from me.” Lili seized his wrists, thrashing in the water as she struggled to free herself from his grip.

He tightened his hands like a vise, canting her head back so that all she could see was his lurid gaze against that chalk-white skin. Leaning closer, he whispered something under his breath in his own language while stroking his thumbs over her forehead.

Lili opened her mouth to scream, but it was as if her throat had grown suddenly thick and useless. Her lungs heaved, her heart hammered, but not the slightest sound could she force from her mouth.

Her hands, still clasped around his wrists, felt strangely rubbery. She tried to tighten them so as to free herself from his grip, but nothing happened, hard as she strained. Her legs, equally unresponsive, sank like dead weight into the water.

“Now you know how it feels,
mein liebes,
” he said softly, almost tenderly, “to be immobilized as you immobilize your own prey. Paralysis—'tis your weapon of choice also, is it not?”

Her eyes must have betrayed her alarm, because he said, “Oh yes, I know all about you. I know we are two of a kind, you and I. I know that we belong together.”

His lips drew back, revealing, in lieu of the ivory dental bridge he normally wore, a mouthful of yellowish stumps—save for the pair of narrow little incisors flanking his two front teeth, which curved into needle-sharp points, like the fangs of a snake.

“And soon,” he said, “we shall
be
together, for all eternity.
Jetzt schlaf.
” He touched his lips, cool and dry, to her forehead, inciting a strange, thrumming pressure in her skull. A white hiss filled her ears; her eyes drifted shut.

She fell, grasping and clawing, into oblivion.

Eight

T
HANK GOD
, thought Charlotte as she heard the key turn in the door. Darius hadn't been gone all that long, really—fifteen or twenty minutes—but it had felt much longer, with her stretched out on this rack, her limbs pulled taut, nipples smarting with every breath. And, of course, there'd been the fear that he would never return—that she would languish here, bound to this infernal machine until she'd given up the ghost. They would find her months from now, or years—just her skeleton, two little thumbscrews, that damned pear, and a white silk cravat—and wonder how the devil she'd gotten herself in such a fix.

That slap had shocked her more than hurt her, unlike the other punishments he'd dealt out, which had been administered with a ruthless but cool dispassion. The slap had been furious, impulsive, the act of a man whose self-control was slipping.

Darius entered the chamber, locking the door behind him. He regarded her in weighty silence for a moment before approaching. She was disquieted by the look in his eyes—black and brooding, almost murderous, yet with a hint of uncertainty that made him seem, if anything, even more dangerous.

He removed the thumbscrews from her nipples and the loops of rope from her wrists and ankles and ordered her to follow him to the rear of the dungeon, and to bring the cravat with her. She hastily shook out arms and legs and rubbed her rope-burned wrists—her stockings had protected her ankles—then assumed his prescribed stance and did as she'd been told.

The bay to which he led her was that which housed the whipping bench. Charlotte wondered for a moment whether he intended to use it again, until he told her to move it back into its corner. “And fluff up the straw beneath it,” he said, an order that Charlotte found baffling, but obeyed without comment.

When she turned back around, she found him maneuvering a pair of iron manacles hanging by chains from the ceiling; he was lowering them, she saw.

“Give me that,” he said, indicating the cravat.

Using his teeth, he tore the scarf into two strips, which he wrapped around her abraded wrists, tying them off like bandages.

She thanked him automatically, only to silently curse herself for disregarding, yet again, his admonition against talking.

Darius closed his eyes and shook his head, jaw outthrust, hands curling into fists, as if it were all he could do to keep from throttling her. “Did I say you could speak?” he said in a quietly menacing tone.

“I…I just—”

“Goddamn it, Charlotte!” His fury was confoundingly real, if the livid streaks staining his cheekbones were any indication. “The rules haven't changed, yet you persist in flouting them, like the cosseted, willful little strum you are. And as for these”—he nodded toward her silk-swathed wrists—“I assure you your comfort is the least of my concern—quite the contrary. It's just that these manacles were forged for a man, and I don't want your hands slipping through.”

Raising first her right arm, then her left, he closed the iron loops around her wrists, locked them, and pocketed the key.

This isn't so bad,
she thought. To be sure, she could do without the stretching of her arms after all that time on the rack, but at least she could turn her body, move her legs.

As if he'd read her mind and was hellbent on subjecting her to the maximum possible suffering, Darius adjusted the height of the manacles so that only the pointy little toes of her brocade shoes touched the floor. He stalked away wordlessly, returning a minute later with a padlock in one hand and a device in the other that she took for a horse's bit until he came closer and she got a good look at it. It was a curved strip of iron with chains dangling from either end and a rather phallic knob in the middle.

“Open your mouth.” He shoved in the knob, wrapped the chains around the nape of her neck, beneath her braid, and locked them together—a bit more snugly, she thought, than was strictly necessary. The knob, which was fatter at the tip than at the base, didn't just compress her tongue; it filled her mouth so completely that she couldn't even breathe through it, much less produce any noise.

“Since you've proven incapable of holding your tongue on your own,” he said, “the iron gag shall do it for you. 'Tis a most effective apparatus, very popular among inquisitors for its ability to block out even the most anguished screams.”

There came a rusty rattling from the other end of the dungeon as someone tried to open the door, followed by the pounding of a fist. Through the thick oak slab came a man's voice. “Darius?”

Panicked, Charlotte tried to meet Darius's gaze, but he was already striding toward the door. She craned her neck to watch him, but the mammoth columns blocked her view as he unlocked the door and, to her astonished dismay, said,
“Entrez.”

“Où est-elle?”
asked the intruder.
Where is she?

Dear God,
thought Charlotte as two pairs of footsteps headed her way.
It can't be.
He'd invited someone else down here to witness her abuse and humiliation at his hands. Her “covenant” was with Darius and Darius alone. How could he? How
dare
he?

Her dismay was compounded when the two men came into view and she recognized their visitor as Elic, the friend of Madame des Ombres who'd finagled Sir Francis into naming him Abbot of the Day. Most of the “monks” looked a bit foolish in those white silk robes, but Elic, with his height, his bearing, and his extraordinary beauty, looked positively magnificent. He was one of those men who exuded masculine sensuality, a true devotee of women who, she suspected, could fuck like a stallion while whispering the kind of heartfelt endearments every female was born wanting to hear. Charlotte had entertained the hope, before her self-imposed exile from the Hellfires earlier this evening—the very fervent hope—that she could capture Elic's eye during the banquet and discover firsthand just how hot-blooded he was beneath that cool Nordic exterior. But now…

To have this man with whom she was more than a little besotted see her like this, naked, gagged, and trussed to the ceiling…oh, and that blasted pear!

Cheeks scalding, she turned her face away as the two men came to stand before her.

“Eyes forward,” Darius snapped.

She hesitated.

He seized her chin in a painful grip and wrenched her head around to face them. “Take care, Charlotte,” he warned. “I am in no mood to tolerate defiance. Be accommodating to our guest, or you shall suffer the consequences. You have made my friend's acquaintance already, yes?”

“All too briefly. Lady Somerhurst.” Elic bowed, an act of common courtesy that struck her as incongruous, bizarre even, given the situation; yet she found a measure of comfort in the gesture. “My friend can be a bear, I know,” he said with a conspiratorial little smile, “most especially when he is of a choleric disposition, as now. Perhaps my presence here can lighten the atmosphere a bit.”

With a scornful little roll of the eyes, Darius said, “If you are done playing the gallant, perhaps you'd care to inspect my little gift, and tell me if it is to your liking.”

Darius gestured for Elic to take a turn around Charlotte, which he did. He paused behind her. She felt a little tremor deep within her as he fiddled with the knob of the steel pear, the stimulus sending pulses of arousal into her quim. “You've been a busy fellow,” he told his friend.

Darius sighed. “She's very demanding.”

She
was demanding? Was it not he who was lord and master in this unholy liaison? A stinging retort was on the tip of her tongue. Perhaps it was best, after all, that she was gagged.

“Did you shave her?” Elic asked.

“She came to me that way. Do you like it?”

“It suits her.”

A pair of unfamiliar hands—long-fingered, warm, and ever so slightly rough—stroked her backside almost reverently.
“Parfait,”
Elic murmured. “Has she ever been shared?” he asked as he circled her, admiring and caressing.

Shared?
Did he mean at the same time? wondered Charlotte, heart skittering. Two men at once?

“Never,” replied Darius, who remained behind her, pinching and kneading her arse. “But she craves it more than anything else. Don't you, my pet?” He spanked her hard when she didn't respond quickly enough to suit him.
“Don't you?”

She nodded, thinking,
How could he know that?
She'd never told him, never even hinted at it. From the beginning, it was as if he were privy to her most secret and shameful longings, most especially her need to be punished for Nat's death.

The pear shifted inside her again, this time sliding out a bit, then back in, easily because of its sheen of oil and how accustomed she'd grown to its unyielding presence within her. Darius pushed it in and out, in and out, slowly, turning and twisting, as if readying her for what was to come.

Two men at once.
She'd had offers before, tempting offers, which she'd rejected from fear that the pain would outweigh the pleasure. Now, with that fear assuaged, she trembled in anticipation.

Standing in front of her now, Elic took her breasts in his hands and squeezed them gently. She started when he thumbed her nipples, which the thumbscrews had left distended and keenly sensitive.

He stepped closer, his erection nudging her through his robe as he tilted her face up and lightly kissed her cheek. “You want this?” he whispered in her ear, too softly for Darius to hear.

She nodded.

“All of it?” He glanced at the gag, the manacles.

She nodded again.

He smoothed a hand downward over her belly, sliding a finger into her sex as if to confirm the extent of her willingness. A soft little hum of pleasure rose from his throat upon finding her wet and ready. He stroked her with just the right touch—deep but soft, in a deliciously unhurried rhythm. So raw and hot was her flesh there, thanks to the cantharides, that every brush of his fingertips kindled a little firestorm of pleasure. She widened her legs as best she could, poised as she was on the tips of her toes, and rocked into the caress, feeling the pleasure rising, rising…

“Quite a sweet little notch she's got there,” said Darius. “Surprisingly snug, considering how much company it must have entertained over the years. She's wonderfully fuckable, comes explosively.
Uses promptos facit,
eh?” Turning his head, he purred a translation into her ear, “Practice makes perfect.”

Charlotte glanced at him, wanting to say,
My Latin's probably better than yours, you arrogant bloody bastard.
Good thing she was gagged; God knows how he would have reacted to that, in his present surly humor. He'd changed since they'd begun this dark adventure. In the beginning, he was commanding, but in a quiet, restrained way, a way that inspired trust and confidence—else she never would have put herself in his hands as she did. In the interim, though, for reasons Charlotte couldn't fathom, his attitude toward her had taken on an angry, bullying edge. He'd become high-strung, belligerent. With any luck, Elic's presence here would help to keep his friend on his bearings.

She felt Darius's arm brush against her as he unbuttoned his trousers. He pulled out the pear and tossed it aside, provoking a gasp from Charlotte and a sudden, aching emptiness. “Lift her up for me,” he told Elic.

Elic did so, saying, “Wrap your legs 'round my waist, my lady. Aye, that's it.”

She felt Darius's fingers in the cleft of her arse, and then a hard pressure as he positioned the head of his cock where the pear had been. Widening his stance as if to brace himself for the effort, he gripped her hips and drove in, filling her in one slick, groaning thrust.

She shuddered—not from pain, precisely, more from shock at such swift and absolute impalement where she was least accustomed to it. He felt thick and huge inside her, stretching her open, his balls pressed right up against her.

“Are you all right?” Elic asked her.

“She's fine.” Darius reached between Charlotte and Elic with both hands, spreading her sex lips as he crooked a finger into her quim. It clenched reflexively, a telltale sign of the depth of her arousal. “Oh, yes, more than fine. It's what she's been dreaming of, a nice, hard cock buried deep in her ass, and another in this red-hot little cunny. Isn't that right,
my lady
?”

God help her, she nodded, her head rolling back against his shoulder. Raising his hands to her breasts, Darius rubbed her sex juices onto her inflamed nipples, plucking and teasing. Gripping Charlotte's legs, still banded around his waist, Elic rubbed against her, his silken robe as liquid smooth as a layer of oil between his sex and hers. She writhed deliriously, causing Darius's cock to slip in and out of her with a lubricious friction that felt like nothing else she'd ever experienced.

Elic's breath grew hectic as he ground against her, his gaze unfocused. “Hold her,” he told his friend.

Darius curled his hands under her thighs, spreading her legs wide open. He flexed his hips, thrusting her own hips forward, her own naked, flushed sex, as if in offering to his friend.

Elic fumbled with the hooks of his robe, swore under his breath and yanked it open with both hands. He had the physique of a young god, lean and muscular, his cock rearing up sleek and hard and ready. He moaned as if in an agony of lust as he entered her, pausing halfway to close his eyes and hiss something in a language unfamiliar to Charlotte, not French; it sounded Scandinavian. His cock felt almost impossibly hard, as if there were a rod of steel beneath its taut, shiny-smooth skin. Just the sight of it, wedged half-buried in her slit, made her feel as if she might spend at any moment.

Elic pressed in another inch or so, arms quivering. “Are you all right?” he asked her, a little breathlessly. “It's not too—”