THE FIRST WEEK after Berlin, Erika was...angry.
If that was the right word to describe the intensity of the emotions that jostled around inside her, fighting for supremacy, shifting and changing and sandbagging her every time she thought she had a handle on what was happening inside her.
Because she refused to accept that it had been a full-scale sea change.
She had spent two more days with Dorian.
Two more days filled with...more. With him.
Playing the kind of games she learned were called playing and games when they weren’t really playing at all. Not when they could change a person so completely. So profoundly.
Dorian had tied her up. He’d experimented with cuffs and collars and other binding things. He arranged her on that massive bed of his, attaching her wrists and ankles to the handy chains welded to those steel posters, and he taught her things about herself that she hadn’t known were there.
Over and over again.
And afterward, when she was lost in that buzzy, intense space that only he could put her in—where her mind and her emotions and her body were all one, all his—she told him stark truths she’d spent her whole life hiding from.
That she’d thought her father had left her, specifically, when he’d died. She had been the last one to see him and she had learned, during his illness, that good girls were quiet. Silent. Diffident and biddable at all times. And somehow, once he was gone, she’d decided that there was no point in being a good girl when people went ahead and died.
So she went in the opposite direction.
Hard.
She told him things she’d never really put into words before. That yes, as he’d suggested, a major part of why she’d dropped out of university was because she’d actually been good at studying and it made her feel like her old self again. Like that good girl she’d lost along the way, or not lost. That made it sound like something that had just happened. When she’d deliberately set about exterminating any traces of that girl who longed to please, bit by bit and year by year, until no one remembered she’d ever existed except Erika herself.
And though she never would have put it into words the way Dorian had, she’d shoved Conrad away, too. Because the people who loved her—who genuinely cared for her—died. Her mother was a safe space in that regard because as far as Erika could tell, she truly cared only about herself. Everything else was window dressing. Erika didn’t expect anything from her and the beauty of it was, Chriszette never disappointed.
She couldn’t believe the things Dorian got her to talk about.
He’d introduced her to a real flogger, not the hen-night jokey versions she’d thought were real before. He taught her the exquisite fear, twined as it was with an almost overwhelming sense of delirious need, for that arch of his brow that promised exactly the pain, punishment and pleasure she wanted.
She discovered she liked anything—sooner or later, and sometimes only because of where they ended up—if Dorian delivered it.
Erika found he could read her body with a fluency that should have terrified her. That did terrify her, sometimes. He knew how far to push her, and it was always further than she thought she could go.
He always asked her if she needed her safe word.
And then, when she gave him the green light, he used it push her limits. Over and over again during those two days that seemed like so much longer to her. Several lifetimes, at least.
Erika found herself caught between her own worst impulses, as if he’d tied her there. Deliberately. She wanted to run. She wanted to kneel. She wanted to lose herself in him on the one hand, and on the other, she wanted to prove her independence. Leap to her feet, storm out and make him regret that he had ever pretended to know her.
In his hands she was made of passion and dark greed, and rewarded for both. He made her cry and he made her come, and then he held her against him as she sobbed and slept and told him the stories she kept deep inside her and had never told another living soul.
She felt like a different person with him, and that was the real betrayal. In that brief span of time, a single weekend, she felt like the woman she’d secretly always wanted to be. Beautiful. Capable.
Lovable, something kept whispering inside her.
Dorian didn’t tell her he loved her and she wouldn’t have believed it if he did, but still. There was a look in his dark gaze. A certain gleam when he looked at her that made her wonder what it would be like. To always be here, with him, and a part of this powerful thing they shared. Part of this beautiful dance of mirroring, reflection and awareness.
Mixed in with blistering-hot sex and too many orgasms to count.
It would be a very lucky woman indeed who found herself kept forever by this man, she found herself thinking on that final morning. He’d bent her over the couch, where he’d spanked her that first night, burying his hands in her hair to hold her head where he wanted it. And he’d taken her with a brutal elegance that had left her wrecked in his wake.
Dorian had gazed at her before he’d left, tucking himself away into a three-piece suit that made him almost look like a stranger after the days of T-shirts, jeans and his dominance—were it not for that intensity and power of his that no suit could hide. He filled rooms with every breath, confidence and assurance stamped deep into his bones.
He looked at her as she panted and shook through the aftershocks. He looked through her, his mouth unsmiling and too much knowledge in his gaze.
He hadn’t said goodbye. He hadn’t said he would see her soon, indicating that he expected her to be there when he got back from his business meetings in Zürich.
“When I ring you,” he said in that tone that made every hair on her body feel as if it was standing on end, “I expect you to answer.”
It was almost as if he knew what she was going to do.
First, Erika had sobbed, there on that leather couch, where he’d first introduced her to herself.
Then she’d left, wearing the clothes she’d come in that first night and not capable of giving a single shit that she was on the streets of Berlin at midday on a Monday with her thong visible, her ass cheeks hanging out and a tiny, strappy little top that might as well have shouted her interest in bondage to everybody she passed on the street.
But it was Berlin, so nobody paid her the slightest bit of attention.
And that stung, too. Because it was impossible to discount everything Dorian had told her when there she was, prancing down the street as if she wanted some stranger to pay her some mind.
He had introduced her to herself, then confronted her with all that meant, and she didn’t like it.
She’d gone back to her hotel, packed up her things and gotten the hell out of Germany.
But another fun fact about her madcap existence, about which she bragged to all and sundry as if she loved every second of it, was that she didn’t have anywhere to go. Not really. She lived out of hotels, or in the guest suites at friends’ houses. She’d been doing it so long that she’d long since stopped thinking too closely to be...rootless.
Untethered. Unattached.
If asked, she called it freedom. Pure happiness, she’d said a few weeks back. She’d been on her way to Berlin with a small stopover in Copenhagen to see the sort of friends who asked deep questions over wine, not because they were deep themselves, but because they liked to compete with their answers. The better to pretend their shallow lives had depth.
Erika was fantastic at pretending to be the happiest.
Are you happy? Dorian had asked her. Mercilessly. Or have you wrapped up hapless in a curated social media feed and forgotten that the core of all that glossy performance is emptiness?
In retrospect, what Erika was happy about was that she’d been gagged when he’d asked that question, because she still didn’t know how to answer it.
Nor did the answer come to her as she landed in England, and made her way to Devon, where her mother was living it up in a country manor with her latest conquest, who claimed a Windsor connection and spent as much time tramping about his property with his dogs as he did tending to his gout flare-ups.
Not that Chriszette was ever in the mood to entertain a full-grown daughter for more than the odd meal.
Erika was dispatched to a renovated carriage house far enough away from than main hall that Chriszette could pretend she wasn’t about, where she assured herself that she was perfectly fucking happy. And then fumed, like it was her job to prove it.
She was angry with herself for putting herself into that situation in Berlin in the first place. What had she been thinking? She was angry with her brother in general for being an overbearing asshole, and specifically for having such terrible taste in friends. She was angry with her mother, who could have taken maybe five minutes from her own narcissism to do a little parenting, back in the day, when her daughter was clearly acting out her grief—but hadn’t bothered. And certainly felt no compulsion to make up for that now.
And she was deeply, volcanically angry at Dorian.
Because she couldn’t help feeling that the only revenge taken had been against her. By her, which was worse, because she’d been correct in her initial assessment, if nothing else. Dorian was an excellent weapon.
“You’ll forget him in about forty-eight hours,” she told herself, out loud and with great confidence, when she sat down on the side of her carriage house bed, high in the eaves. “Less, probably.”
Because forgetting about men was something Erika was very, very good at. But Dorian wasn’t like other men. He didn’t fade away, out of sight and out of mind.
For the first time in her life, Erika was plagued with insomnia, hollow-eyed and up at all hours, because her body wanted what it couldn’t have. It wanted Dorian’s body next to hers, holding her tight, when she’d spent her entire previous life asserting with great confidence that she was the kind of person who didn’t like to cuddle while she slept.
She never had, before.
But then, there were a lot of things she’d never done before that weekend in Berlin with Dorian.
And toward the end of that first week and into the second week after she’d left him, Erika mostly just cried.
She felt tossed out to sea and abandoned while wave after wave of old, ugly emotion found her and sank her. Over and over again.
She almost thought it would be easier to drown.
But Dorian didn’t let her.
He didn’t call every day. Perhaps every other day. Sometimes he sounded terse, busy, and she hated that she felt particularly special that he made time for her. Other times he sounded tired, and she wished she could have the opportunity to soothe him. But he always sounded like him. Dark and richly textured and him.
“I don’t want to talk to you,” she said when she picked up the phone, the way she often did. Because even if that was true, she still obeyed him. He’d told her he expected her to answer and here she was, answering. Every time. “But you asked me to answer when you rang. Behold my obedience.”
“I never doubted you, Erika.” His voice did magical, terrible things to her body. Her nipples pinched so hard she could feel that line of sensation spiral down into her clit. She was wet instantly. Soft and ready for whatever he might do to her. “Are you ready to talk about your feelings yet?”
“I talk about my feelings all day every day,” she lied, and pretended she didn’t feel a little kick of pleasure when he laughed. “It’s true. I stop people on the street and download my every last emotion. I’ve already made a lot of new friends that way.”
That was slightly less of a lie, if a person counted storming about in England’s greenest hills and shouting at passing sheep.
She doubted very much the Dorian would count that at all.
“It sounds to me like you’ve taken a little emotional dip and have stayed there,” he said. “I told you that you might.”
“Not everything is a pageant of intensity,” she snapped, and she was aware as she said it that she clearly didn’t believe that herself. Because if she did, she wouldn’t be sitting in her carriage house bedroom on her mother’s lover’s estate, with all the curtains closed tight against the drizzle of another English afternoon. God, she was so sick of her own shit. “And here’s a fun fact. Not every emotion I have has something to do with you.”
“I’m delighted to hear it,” Dorian said smoothly, but still, there was that undercurrent that kicked at her and made her sit a little straighter. “I just landed in London. Your brother’s party is this weekend. Now that you’re so marvelously recovered from all the intimacy we shared, I hope you remember the promise you made me.”
“Go to hell.”
Dorian made a tsking sound that blazed through like the warning it was, making her body light up. Wet, needy, naughty—and desperate for the discipline only he could administer.
She wanted to hate herself for that but she couldn’t quite get there. Not with his voice in her ear.
“That does not bode well for you, kitten,” he said, with that soft, amused menace that made her...glow.
She cleared her throat. “What I do or don’t do concerning my brother is no business of yours.”
“If you say so.”
And she could swear, if she closed her eyes, she could see the look he was wearing on his face when he sounded like that. All that dark, dangerous patience in his gaze. That unyielding power stamped into that unsmiling mouth that made her feel weak in all the best ways. What was it about this man that made her silly straight through?
“Are you touching yourself?” he asked, his voice stern.
Erika froze, because sure enough, she’d reached down between her legs with one hand, and was pressing the heel of her palm against her throbbing clit. How the hell had he known that? “No.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
Her hand fell away from her pussy as if he’d ordered her to stop touching herself. As if he’d reached over and physically removed her hand, more like.
“I’m not lying,” she said. And his silence felt as sharp a rebuke as a slap on the ass. She sighed. “Now.”
“Good,” he said, and she could hear laughter and satisfaction then. And all that glorious heat. “Don’t. As far as I’m concerned, that’s my pussy and you can’t touch it without my permission. I’ll know, kitten. And there will be consequences.”
“You can’t just say things like that to people, Dorian. Are you insane? I can do anything I want with my body.”
“What’s that?” he asked, sounding mild and stern at once. The combination made goose bumps rise all over her skin. “Was that your safe word? Or was it another round of predictable complaints because you like to deal with your uncertainty by shooting off your mouth?”
She wanted to hang up on him. She didn’t. And she hated herself for that, too.
“I’ll see you this weekend,” he promised her. Though it sounded a lot more like a threat. “And I’ll expect you to remember every detail of the promise you made me, Erika. Because you can be certain I do.”
And he cut off the call before she could protest. Deliberately, she was sure.
But something about his voice galvanized her. She got out of the bed where she’d been conducting her experiments in insomnia and petulance. She threw open the curtains and glared out at the gray day. She went down into the kitchen of the carriage house and stared around, uninspired, at the dry cereal boxes that had provided her with the bulk of her nutrition since she’d arrived. Because her mother certainly didn’t want her grown daughter taking meals at the big house with her lover. Erika’s very existence was a testament to Chriszette’s age.
Erika had learned that lesson the hard way. And years ago. Now she accepted the fact that her mother liked to control her in between affairs, but never during them. A situation that had suited them both since Erika had left university.
Does it suit you? a dark voice that sounded suspiciously like Dorian’s asked inside her. Or do you put up with it because she treats you the way you think you deserve to be treated?
“Shut up, Dorian,” she muttered into the empty kitchen.
Her body was still flushed, and wound up, and she thought that maybe she should go ahead and handle her own needs. Because fuck him. Who cared what he ordered her to do? He wasn’t the boss of her.
But even when she sat down, then slipped her hand back between her legs, she couldn’t do it.
Because you want to be his, something that was all her whispered, telling her more truths she didn’t want to face.
Erika went on a long, punishing walk. When she’d exhausted herself, she trudged back to the carriage house and took a long bath. She soaked in the hot water until she was so heartily sick of herself and her own endlessly cycling thoughts that she thought she might scream.
She wrapped herself in a bath towel, then padded back to the bedroom. She picked up her phone, scowled at it for a while, and admitted that what she really wanted was for Dorian to call her again. Especially now that they were in the same country again.
I’ll see you this weekend, he’d said, and she shivered now, because she would see him again.
But that meant she would be seeing other people, too. Maybe it was time to stop recovering from Berlin and start handling her actual life. The one that went on no matter how many hard truths Dorian had marked into her skin that weekend.
Erika pulled up Jenny’s number.
So, she texted, what do you think I should wear to your ENGAGEMENT PARTY to MY BROTHER?
Her phone rang almost immediately.
“Oh my God, Erika,” Jenny cried when Erika picked up. “I thought you were blanking me.”
“I wasn’t not blanking you.”
“Where are you? Are you still in Germany?”
“No,” Erika said, her body flushed from her bath. She looked down at herself, caught by that same awareness that had haunted her since she’d left Berlin. That this wasn’t her body any longer. That he’d made it his. And why was that the only thing that seemed to soothe her? “I’m in Devon with Chriszette and her latest fling. Lord Something or Other. I only stayed in Berlin for that one weekend.”
The way she often had, over these last six months. Jenny would think nothing of it. Another weekend clubbing, that was all. And Erika would let her think it, because she couldn’t articulate what had happened between her and Dorian to herself. There was no way she could explain it to anyone else.
And maybe that was why, when the silence stretched out between them, she let it. Because she understood it.
“It would be better to see you in person—and before the party,” Jenny said after a moment. “Can you come up to London?”
Erika looked around at the carriage house that had become a prison of all the emotions she’d told Dorian she wasn’t experiencing. She thought about the fact she’d be seeing Dorian himself this weekend, and all the anticipation and anxiety, need and longing that kicked up. She thought about the promise she’d made him and what that would mean—could she really apologize to her brother?
Her brother, whom Jenny was marrying, for reasons unclear.
“As a matter of fact,” Erika said, “I would love to come to London. I could use a break.”
She did not add from me.
Because that would require explanations she didn’t want to give, not even to her oldest friend.
But if she could, she thought the next morning as she caught the train from Cranbrook to London Waterloo Station, she would have left herself behind.