I felt very much like one of those black-centered blooms, falling apart with every breath I took without even one witness to my dematerialization.
He wanted me like this.
Lost like decaying particles in a petri dish.
I didn’t have to hear his British accent clipping the words into neat little explanations to understand why.
He wanted me broken.
A beautiful, hollow shell to break open and fuck into.
It wasn’t enough to own my person and rape my body. He wanted to empty my soul so that the only thing I was filled with was his cock and his cum.
His words from days ago broke into the blackness of my world and shone blindingly bright.
“When I drive into that virgin cunt and smear your blood on my cock, you’ll cry. Not because I’m hurting you, even though I am. No, you’ll cry because you are going to be so empty, so useless that you’ll beg and sob to be filled by something. And that something will be me, Cosima. My fingers in your asshole, my thick cock in your spasming cunt, my tongue in your mouth, and your soul crushed right under my heel as I fuck up into you and you cry out the name of your Master.”
He visited me frequently, hovering in the doorway, a black smudge against the bright hope of light spilling in from the hall beyond. There was always silence while he observed me curled into varying positions like a hermit crab without its shell, pathetically naked and fundamentally vulnerable.
Then his voice would come, smooth as velvet but violent, a ribbon tied too tight around my throat.
“Are you ready to kneel and greet your Master?”
The words played throughout my head like an infinite echo long after I’d rejected him with spitting words or frozen silence.
They taunted me.
I didn’t want to kneel for anyone, to rely on my beauty and my body to get me out of yet another bind, but my choices were non-existent, and my spirit was cracking right down the middle.
I never could have known absence—of light, of sound, of food and drink, but most of all, company—could be weaponised so savagely.
But I felt run through by the steel edge of my lonesomeness, and I knew the next time Alexander stood in the doorway, I would be ready, though unwilling, to kneel and greet my Master.
The next time he opened the door, I was standing.
It took energy I didn’t have, and my legs shook, but I faced the door with my hands fisted on my hips and my chin squared.
It was a longer way to fall to my knees, but I had a point to prove.
I wasn’t a mindless, soulless slave.
I was a human, a woman, and an Italian one at that. I had too much spine to crumple without a fight.
“My beauty,” Alexander said, his accented voice quiet but carrying. “Are you ready to kneel and greet your Master?”
“I am. Though I’d like to discuss it first.”
There was cool humour in his tone as he made his way across the long room. “Oh? I’m curious enough to allow it.”
I bit my lip to keep from raging at him for his arrogance.
“I want to say first that I understand the bargain I entered into to keep my family safe. I won’t do anything to jeopardize their safety, so yes, I’m willing to kneel and be the sick slave you need to slack your deviant tendencies.” He was close enough then to see his eyes flash like lightning-filled storm clouds. “But I need you to know that I’m more than just your property or a hole for you to stick your cock into.”
I pulled in a shaky deep breath and steeled my shoulders against the tsunami of sorrow crashing over my head. “Each time I touch you, I will be thinking about my hands braiding my sister’s hair, tending to my brother’s scrapes and bruises, and rolling semolina dough with my mama. Every time you ask me to kneel, I will think about sitting in a field of poppies on a Napoleon hillside and running my fingers over their silken edges. When you force me to take you inside my body, I will remember the tender dreams I had of love and romance as a girl before I knew better, and I will hide in those memories until you are done.
“You may own my body, Lord Thornton, but you will never own my mind, my spirit, or my heart.”
I stood there with tears on my cheeks, my chest heaving as if I had just completed a race, and I stared at him in pure, joyous defiance.
The revolutionary had spoken.
There would be no rebellion, but it felt magnificent to give my anarchist a voice in the face of this tyrant.
Alexander blinked from where he had come to a stop not two feet before me. Slowly, he raised his hands, and for a second, I believed he would strike me down.