Here, he’d shed their blood.
And he’d made them scream and cry out.
And he’d fucked them or had them fucked.
V paused by his worktable, the old wood battered and marked not just from the tools of his trade, but from blood and orgasms and wax.
God, sometimes the only way to know how far you’d come was to return to where you once had been.
Reaching forward with his gloved hand, he took hold of the thick leather bindings he used to keep his subs where he wanted them.
Had used, he corrected himself. As in past tense. Now that he had Jane, he didn’t do those things anymore—hadn’t had the impulse.
Glancing over at the wall, he measured his collection of toys: Whips and chains and barbed wire. Clamps and ball gags and razor blades. Floggers. Lengths of chain.
The games he played—had played—were not for the faint of heart or the beginners or the casually curious. For hard-core subs, there was such a fine line between sexual release and death—both got you off, but the latter was your last shot. Literally. And he was the ultimate master, capable of taking others where they needed to go . . . and one thin inch past that.
Which was why they all came for him.
Had come for him—
To him, he corrected.
Fuck.
And that was why his relationship with Jane had been a revelation. With her in his life, he hadn’t felt the burning need for any of this. Not for the relative anonymity, not for the control he exerted over his subs, not for the pain he enjoyed inflicting on himself, not for that sense of power or the pounding releases.
After all this time, he’d thought he’d been transformed.
Wrong.
That internal switch was still with him, and it had been flipped to the “on” position.
Then again, the urge to commit matricide was stressful as shit—when you couldn’t act on it.
V leaned in and fingered a leather flogger that had stainless-steel balls tied on its ends. As the lengths filtered through the fingers of his ungloved hand, he wanted to throw up . . . because standing here, he would have given anything for a slice of what he’d had before—
No, wait. As he stared at his table, he revised that. He wanted to be what he once had had. Before Jane, he’d had sex as a Dom because it was the only way he’d felt safe enough to get through the act—and part of him had always wondered, especially as he was cracking the whip, so to speak, why his subs had wanted what he’d given them.
Now he had a pretty good idea: What was banging around his inner skin was so toxic and violent, it needed a release valve that was cut from its own cloth. . . .
He walked over to one of his black candles without being aware that his shitkickers were crossing the floor.
And then the thing was against his palm before he even knew he was gripping it.
His craving brought the flame upward . . . and then he tipped the lit tip toward his chest, hot black wax hitting his collarbone and rivering down to streak under his muscle shirt.
Closing his eyes, he let his head fall back as a hiss sucked through his fangs.
More wax on his bare skin. More sting.
As he got hard, half of him was on board and the other half felt like a total skeez. His gloved hand had no problems with a split personality, however. It went for the button fly on his leathers and sprang his cock.
In the candlelight, he watched himself bring the candle down and hold it over his erection . . . and then tilt the lit wick toward the floor.
A black tear slipped free of the heat source and went into a free fall—
“Fuck . . .”