Saskia’s hand was cramping by the time they’d finished painting for the day. She lay back on the chaise while Quill straightened the space. It didn’t matter how much they’d worked; he wasn’t willing to let the studio turn into her own personal hurricane.
“Stay here,” he said when all the tubes of paint were closed and put away and the brushes had been cleaned.
She was only too happy to comply. They’d taken a brief break for lunch and another for dinner, but both had been hurried. No words had passed between them in the dining room as they’d eaten. There had been no time for anything fancy for lunch. Just sandwiches. One of the servants had somehow gotten him to sit still long enough for roasted chicken when dinnertime came but only because it was done and ready to put on the table when he reached the dining room.
There was an intensity about Quill while he was in this art zone. Saskia had never seen anything like it. Once they’d started sketching and painting, sex wasn’t a thing that existed for him.
There was no innuendo, no inappropriate touches. It was as if everything that had happened before in the gallery had been a mere mirage. She was sure if she asked him about it, he’d tell her she was crazy, that it had never happened.
How could he flip a switch and compartmentalize all of that? As much as he liked his kink, art came first. If she wanted to be jealous of something, it should be the art. The art was his first love, and Saskia would never unseat her.
When Saskia stood behind a canvas with a brush in hand, she was just his student. All he cared about were the colors, the brush strokes, and bleeding her soul out with carefully mixed pigments for the consumption of the masses. Or that was the hope, anyway—that the masses would consume.
Nothing could sway his focus from trying to teach her to somehow translate all the things pent up inside her onto canvas.
She’d had no idea what she would paint until she started. Saskia closed her eyes, remembering what Quill had said in the studio.
“You don’t decide what to paint. The subject picks you. What’s inside you? What are you consumed with?”
“I don’t know.”
“You know. Put it on the canvas.”
She hesitated.
“I need to sketch it first.”
“I don’t care what you need to do. Do it. Stop holding back. You have so much promise. It’s all there in your portfolio, you have to stop painting what you think the world wants to see and start painting what you actually have to say. No one in this world gives a shit about your hollow fakery. Least of all, me.”
She’d been so intimidated by his technique. She knew even beginning painters could learn to paint wet-on-wet, and she could do it if someone held her hand step-by-step and gave her something specific to paint and walked her through it. But she just couldn’t see a painting that way. She couldn’t think that fast. Quill had confirmed that the thinking has to happen first, because when the paint is out, it’s too late to think. The luxury of slow-drying paint is necessary in wet-on-wet. But even that can only go so far.
The Italian word for the technique was alla prima, which means: at first attempt. The idea of painting something right the first time in a single session or a couple of them stretched over two days at most—and that only if the paint dried slowly enough—intimidated the hell out of her. And it didn’t help with the artist she worshiped hovering over her. She was sure he would be more impressed with her if he’d let her paint the traditional way she was used to. Many layers... letting each dry in between. Then she could take days, weeks, months, a year or more if she wanted on a single painting. It was so much less pressure.
“No, you’re overworking the brush. The colors are going all muddy,” he said.
“I can’t do it this way!”
“Of course you can. This is a single afternoon. Do you think I learned to paint like I paint in a single afternoon?”
“No, but... I’ve been to art school. I’ve been painting for years.”
“Not the right way. As far as I’m concerned you’re starting from scratch.”
“Are you implying alla prima is the only right way to paint?”
“Of course not, but if you have to let every layer dry, you’re stretching out the learning curve. You have to paint a lot to become great. You have to practice. The only way to do that with your technique and to actually progress at a reasonable rate is to have ten or more paintings going at once. And you’ll see uneven progress that way. If you will just try it my way, in a few weeks it will feel natural. And you’ll be able to produce far more work. I’ll walk you through it.”
Saskia’s gaze drifted to her new work drying on the easel. It was a scene from the club they’d been at the previous night—everything she could call forth from memory of the rows of bird cages with women inside.
Yes, he’d held her hand and walked her through each step of blocking things out and what to paint on top of what and when. The hardest part was not muddying the colors because she was used to not having to worry about that much at all. She disagreed with him that they were starting at square one. After all, she’d learned to draw in art school. She’d learned color mixing and canvas prepping and brush strokes. She’d been briefly taught wet-on-wet, but admittedly her instructor in that technique hadn’t been very good at teaching it. Not like Quill was. He seemed to anticipate her every question and frustration moments before she reached it.
She hadn’t been able to remember the women clearly enough to paint them right because she’d had a hard time looking at them. The faces she painted instead were generic, invented in her mind. But even then... she’d been away from her own work for too long. Outside of forgeries, she was out of the practice of calling a vision forth from absolutely nothing and turning it into something worth looking at.
“It’s a start,” Quill said, as he studied the finished piece hours after she’d blocked in the first bird cage. “We have a long road ahead of us, but it’s something. No promises, but I think I can work with this.”
At least he got to paint a live person in front of him. Creating someone from imagination or re-creating them from a snapshot in one’s mind was a whole other skill set. He expected too much from her. He was the one with the track record—proof the world cared about his work. Saskia had no such encouragement beyond his word that it was inside her. But how could he possibly know what was inside her when she wasn’t sure herself?
Quill returned with a cloth-covered first-aid wrap with a clay pack inside. He wound the cold pack around her hand. “I realize that was more than you expected to do today. I’ll try not to go so hard on you in the future. I know it’s been a long time for you.” He bent to stroke the side of her face. “It’s been a long time for me, too.”
He could fuck or play with a hundred women, but painting together was an intimacy he couldn’t and wouldn’t replace with another. It didn’t come close to forgiving the stalking, but a part of her understood the longing he’d felt to connect with someone on that level. To find someone to create with. In a way it was what everyone else did. Only others created babies, while she and Quill made art.
She still couldn’t believe the first thing he’d painted after such a long hiatus, had been her. It was right out of her silly daydreams.
“Rest your hand. Marcus is on his way to take care of you for the night.”
Quill paused in the door on his way out. “For what it’s worth, I think you’re on to the right subject matter. I just don’t think you’re giving me everything. You’re playing too safe. You’re not saying anything. I don’t feel anything from you. You’re just documenting. Learning a new technique aside, what you gave me today is not the kind of thing that can make your name. You have to be willing to give more. I guess the real question is, how badly do you want it, Saskia?”
He didn’t wait for an answer. If someone had asked her five years ago what she wanted, the answer would have been easy: To meet Joseph Quill. To paint like him. To become an artist who could live off her work while she was actually still living.
Like him.
Even if it turned out that most of his money came from running a tech company, it was still clear from the extraordinarily high prices his work fetched that he could have lived easily on just his painting if he’d wanted to. Though perhaps not to the same degree of comfort he enjoyed now as a dead artist. Or a living tech tycoon.
He certainly wasn’t the only artist who hadn’t had to become a pretty corpse before making it, but he was the one whose work excited her the most—who most closely echoed what she wanted to be. With all her still lifes and innocent portraits and landscapes, she’d been dancing around the things she really wanted to paint. She wanted to paint the darkness, not the light... the shadows under the surface of a civilized world barely contained by rule of law.
She was afraid to paint the things she felt, to be that exposed on the canvas. Even with the way Quill painted her, it wasn’t the same as extracting her own soul by her own hand and allowing others to see. It felt like a kind of psychic suicide. Far too dangerous to commit to.
She couldn’t give him what he wanted on that canvas. The closest she could get was abandoning sunsets and apples in a bowl. She could only look through a dirt-smudged window and bring back the shifting shadows she saw there. Saskia wasn’t sure what it would take to open her soul and set the artist free. But she knew Quill would go to any lengths to bring it out. A thought which both terrified and excited her.
She’d felt his frustration as he’d cleaned the artistic debris. But what did he expect? She was surprised she’d let him in this much. If she’d met him in a normal way and he’d wanted to teach her, this wouldn’t have been what she painted. It would have been a flower or a waterfall or something nice and sweet and innocent. Something that could hang in a hotel lobby without fear of the slightest offense.
Not a single person would look at it and panic or clutch at pearls.
Even knowing what he painted, she wouldn’t have been able to be so bold if he hadn’t already stripped her bare in other ways. It was hard to work up much shame for what she wanted to create after that. It wasn’t Quill she worried about seeing her work. It was others.
She jumped when she realized Marcus leaned in the doorway, quietly watching. He pushed off the door frame and joined her.
“Let me look at that.” Marcus unwrapped her hand from the ice pack and pressed lightly against her skin in various places.
Saskia winced.
“These muscles are really tight. Do you want to soak it in the tub in the salts? It might help.”
“Yes, sir.”
Marcus helped her up and led her back to the bathroom. As water filled the tub he said, “I like your painting.”
“Thanks. He doesn’t.”
“He doesn’t know everything. Did you do that from memory?”
She nodded.
“Impressive. You’re practically a camera.” He must have been to the club before to see the original cages.
Somehow Saskia doubted having such a great visual memory meant much to Quill. A machine could create a photo copy. Copies weren’t art. Quill was right. He was being generous. The painting was dead. It had no heart or honesty. It was hours and hours of work that showcased technical skill but no true artistry because she didn’t have the courage to say what she felt.
She was afraid for Quill to see how conflicted she was by both the beauty and ugliness of his world. And letting others in was out of the question.
Marcus left her to soak in the tub. When the water turned cool, she drained it and put on a robe that was lying on the bench.
She wasn’t convinced Quill even wanted her. If he did, wouldn’t she be in the main house with him in his bed?
The marble sent a rippling chill through her as she walked across it, her feet bare. Marcus sat on a bench outside the main gallery lost inside a book. He slid a bookmark between the pages and laid it beside him.
“It’s late. You should try to get some sleep.”
“Do I have to sleep in the cage?”
Marcus rose from the bench and moved a stray bit of damp hair behind her ear. “I’m afraid so.”
“Do you have to lock me in?”
“Yes. Come on. Don’t make a fuss.” Marcus took her hand and led her back into the gallery. The painting Quill had done of her the other day already hung on the wall in its own glass case. There was still plenty of empty space in the gallery—room for many more paintings—but she wondered where he would put them when he ran out of wall. Assuming he kept painting her. Maybe he’d run out of interest before he ran out of space.
When she and Marcus reached the cage, he opened the robe and slowly slid it off her shoulders. She had the uncontrollable urge to cross her arms over her chest, but he stopped her.
“No. I want to look at you.”
She forced her hands to her sides.
Marcus’s finger gently grazed her collarbone. He used both hands to cup her breasts. Then he quite unexpectedly hooked one hand behind her neck and pulled her in for a softly consuming kiss.
When he stepped away, he searched her face. Whatever he was looking for, he seemed to find. “I’m going to finish my book. After that, I’m coming back for you. You’ll want to rest while you can.”
He opened the cage and motioned her in, locking the door behind her. Saskia stretched out on the bedding and fluffed the pillows.
She thought she’d only closed her eyes for a moment when he returned but if he’d finished his book it must have been hours. He’d still been in the first half when he’d put it down to lock her in the cage.
At first, he didn’t speak, and neither did she. She didn’t want him to know she was awake. He must have watched her for ten minutes or more before he finally lowered himself onto the ground beside the cage. She arched closer when he stroked her leg, first over the blanket, then underneath it.
Saskia drew in a sharp breath.
“I knew you were awake,” Marcus said. “Did you think I’d leave you alone if you were asleep?”
“No, sir.”
“Liar.” But his tone was light.
She opened her eyes and watched him. She remained curled in the blankets, her head cushioned on the pillows.
“Are you going to open the cage?”
“No. I like you in there. Scoot closer. I want you to move the blankets out of the way and flip over so that you’re on your hands and knees. Press yourself against the bars so I don’t have to reach for you.”
A flutter of excitement shot between her legs as she moved into the requested position.
“You’ll need to put your legs through the bars so you can get closer to me.”
The black metal bars were cold against her thighs as she pressed against them.
“Lie on the pillows. You’ll be here a while.”
Saskia pulled the pillows under her and lay down, closing her eyes as Marcus began to caress between her thighs.
As he stroked her, she pressed harder against the bars, so hard, she was sure they would leave red impressions against her skin. She couldn’t get close enough to him, and she was convinced he was staying just far enough away that she’d keep pressing harder to reach him and the pleasure he teased her with.
It felt as if days passed while Marcus touched her. He took his time, letting her excitement and arousal build until she was sure the lightest feather touch would send her over the edge. Finally, he let her come.
She stole a glance at him as he licked her juices from his fingers. Then she collapsed in the cage, her breath still heavy and her heartbeat thudding against the pillows.
“My turn,” he said.
Saskia let out a pathetic whimper, not having the energy to move that far to the other end of the cage. Marcus came around to the other side nearest her. He unzipped his pants and thrust his already hardened cock through the bars closest to her.
Tentatively she reached for him, remembering how Quill had slapped her hand away and not wanting a repeat performance from Marcus.
“No,” he said. “Not your hand. I want that warm, wet mouth. I want you to suck me like I’m the last thing you’ll consume.”
Saskia scooted closer to him. “I-I don’t think he would... I’m not sure that’s allowed.”
“You’re not here to think,” he said. “You let me worry about him and what’s allowed.”
She took him into her mouth and began to gently suck.
Sun streamed down from the skylight above, making continued sleep impossible. Saskia stretched in the cage. Her arms reached out between the bars, fingers brushing against a thick piece of paper. She opened her eyes and rolled over to find a charcoal sketch of her sleeping. He’d signed it. A small ’J’, a giant ’Q’, and then a flourish that was supposed to be the rest of his name.
The woman reflected back to her looked blissed out in a post-orgasmic cat nap. Her body was loose and relaxed, extending the full length of the cage. The sheets had fallen away to reveal a bare hip as well as a breast.
Quill must have returned after she was asleep again and drawn her like this. It was the only work of his she’d ever seen where the subject’s eyes didn’t pull all the focus. But then her eyes were closed.
It was a snapshot of contentment inside a cage. It was how he saw her despite any outward protest she might seek to make. How easily he seemed to capture and transmit what he wanted to say. It wasn’t just a drawing. It spoke the truth as he saw it.
She couldn’t decide how she felt about the depiction. Everything about it seemed so incongruent, and yet there she was. She couldn’t deny what he’d seen clearly enough to sketch on paper.
It was more than a little disturbing that each time she woke in a cage seemed less upsetting than the time before. Was she becoming acclimated to this confinement? People fought and died for freedom and railed on endlessly about it, but in the end, didn’t most find a quiet cage to curl up in, accepting, almost craving some level of restriction? As long as it could be comfortable? Almost everyone preferred safety, no matter what lies passed through their lips. If they wanted freedom so badly, the way they reacted to their various forms of enslavement didn’t make any sense.
This sketch sure as hell didn’t.
But then, Saskia had just had an orgasm before drifting off, and Marcus had been with her. He’d stayed at least until she’d fallen asleep. Had he been there while Quill sketched her, or had he left the artist alone with his unconscious subject?
Precise footsteps clicked across the floor. Quill. Marcus’s stride was much different. Quill moved with a kind of smug entitlement that was hard to fake. She found herself both repulsed and pulled under by his demanding confidence.
“You’ve got thirty seconds to make a case for why I shouldn’t whip the hell out of you for what happened with Marcus last night.”
What happened with Marcus? She searched through the mental files in her brain trying to come up with what could have pissed him off so much. He’d obviously seen something from the video feed. Had he watched it before or after he’d sketched her? It had to have been after. There was an almost tender affection in that drawing. The man looming over her now didn’t seem capable of tenderness.
Marcus rushed into the gallery, exhausted from the night shift. “You know that’s not her fault.”
Quill spun on the guard. “No. It’s your fault. I said no fucking, and what did you do?”
“I didn’t fuck her!”
“So I just imagined your cock in her mouth? My mistake. It must be my advancing age. Things are so confusing now.”
“When you said fucking, it seemed clear to me you meant what normal people think fucking is!”
“I meant I didn’t want your cock inside any of her orifices. Perhaps I should have spelled that out better.”
“Perhaps you should have. I don’t see what difference it makes when you plan to whore her out anyway.”
Quill opened the cage and dragged Saskia out. She was still too disoriented to struggle or fight him.
“She was locked in a goddamned cage,” Marcus said. “How could she have stopped me? What powers did you give her to protect herself from her bodyguard?”
It was a good question. It was bewildering what he was even guarding her from. Maybe it made sense for Marcus to be there if she needed something, since Quill insisted on this cage business and couldn’t be bothered to keep her in his own room. But otherwise, it was doubtful someone would break in to steal her. She wasn’t a Monet.
A light bulb seemed to appear all at once over Marcus’s head. “Oh. I see what this is, what you’re doing. You think I’ll volunteer to take her place. And Saskia seeing the gory mess unfold will somehow be even worse for her. You just love fucking with people, don’t you?”
“You think I’d whip you instead?” Quill asked, amusement threading his voice.
“Hell yes, I do. I think you’ve been setting me up from the beginning because you want me back in your chains.”
Saskia’s eyes nearly bugged out of her head as she looked from Quill to Marcus and then back to Quill again. She’d thought the two of them were friends. Surely there had to be something closer than just employer and employee for Quill to share her. It had never seemed like a logical employment perk. But the last thing she’d suspected was that Quill once had something kinky going on with Marcus. Or was she misreading this somehow?
His gaze flicked over the guard in that same proprietary way he so often looked at Saskia. Nope. Not imagining that.
“I’ve asked, and you’ve said no. So you won’t do it for me, but you’ll do it for her?”
“I didn’t say I’d do it for her,” Marcus said.
Quill sighed, his gaze sliding to Saskia. “It’s going to be a brutal day for you, sweetheart. You’ll have Marcus to thank for that.”
It felt like he had something to prove, and that scared her. She didn’t know how bad he might get under those conditions. Quill grabbed her wrist and pushed her against the column. He was about to lock the first shackle when Marcus’s voice stopped him.
“You know she didn’t do anything wrong. All she has done since she got here is try to please both of us. She doesn’t deserve this.”
“I know. Life isn’t fair. It’s all very sad.”
Quill finished locking Saskia into the chains and went for a whip. She jumped when he snapped it in the air for effect.
“Master, please.” She’d always had a healthy fear of him, but things had escalated far beyond either healthy or fear. A quiet place inside her head kept whispering he might lose control. She might not get out of these chains. The next box she might occupy might be made of pine rather than black metal bars. “Please,” she whimpered.
Saskia couldn’t stop the tears or the trembling. He’d whipped her before, but before he’d seemed in control of himself. Right or wrong, he’d had an end game in mind that probably didn’t include her death. Now he didn’t seem to be thinking beyond the next fifteen seconds or about any consequences which might unfold past that. A lot of permanent damage could occur in just a few seconds with a very strong person wielding a whip and little reason.
“Goddammit!” Marcus said. “Unchain her.”
Quill smiled. “So you’ll take her punishment?”
“It’s intended for me. You just want me to ask for it.”
“Good boy,” he said, a slow smile spreading across his face. “You still can be taught.”
Marcus angrily stripped off his clothes while Quill unchained her and put her back in the cage.
“You will watch, Saskia. You should see firsthand just how kind and patient I’ve been with you,” Quill said.
She scooted back against the far end of the cage and wrapped herself in the sheets. Marcus seemed resigned to his fate. He wasn’t afraid, just pissed off.
He didn’t make a sound as the whip came down. Occasionally he flinched, but he wouldn’t give Quill the satisfaction of breaking. Not like Saskia had. Quill could turn her into a bundle of trembling nerves and tears with only a few lashes—or even the threat of them. Like today.
Marcus’s back muscles clenched. It appeared as if the black dragon would leap off his skin to seek vengeance against Quill. But the large ink reptile kept its fire safely in check.
That awful whip crack echoed off the walls in the gallery without another sound in the world to dampen its thunder. And still, Marcus didn’t beg or scream. The only sign he was being hurt at all were a few silent tears that trailed down his cheek and the bright red anger Quill painted across his back.
Saskia counted twenty excruciating lashes. It was obvious Quill held back far less with Marcus than he had with her. He laid the whip down and ran his hands down Marcus’s sides, groped his ass, then pressed a possessive kiss against his throat as if he were branding him.
“Tell me how much you miss this,” Quill growled against his ear.
Marcus shook his head. “I’m just doing my job. Protecting her.”
“How noble. You protect her because I told you to. You need to submit to me like you’ve always needed it. Even if it’s under the guise of doing your job.”
Quill’s hand wrapped around the front of Marcus’s body, and Saskia watched the pumping motion. Even though she couldn’t see the erection, it was obvious Marcus was already hard.
“You do miss it. Come for me.”
Marcus jerked and let out a groan—the only sound Quill had managed to extract from him the whole time he’d hung in the chains.
“We should get Saskia to lick that up, don’t you think?” Quill said.
Marcus just glared.
Quill unlocked the chains and let the other man fall, then he returned to Saskia’s cage and opened it.
“He takes care of you. Go take care of him. I’ll see you at breakfast.”
“M-master, what should I wear?”
He was so particular about everything that she didn’t want to risk riling him up even more at the moment.
Quill’s gaze panned over her. “I like what you’re wearing now.”
Nothing.
She swallowed around the hard lump in her throat. “Yes, Master.”
Saskia watched his retreat. She didn’t dare leave the cage until he was safely outside the building.
Marcus stretched out across the marble, his cheek pressed to the floor as he watched her approach. His breath was still a pant but slowly returning to normal.
“D-do you want me to prepare a bath for you?” Saskia asked.
He nodded, giving no intention he ever planned to move from that spot.
“I can’t carry you. Can you make it there on your own?”
“I’m fine, Saskia. It’s all surface shit. That bastard hasn’t owned me for a long time.”
This surface shit looked pretty bad to her. Quill had broken skin. Marcus would need to be bandaged up.
“Are you sure you want to soak like this?”
“Put the salts in. It’ll help me heal.”
She started to cry.
“It’s not that bad,” he said. “I’m not distraught. There’s no reason you should be. You’re just playing into his bullshit.”
Saskia wiped the tears off her face. “I’ve played into his bullshit from the moment I knew who he was. He knew I wouldn’t be able to resist him if I knew he was Quill.”
“This is all a chess game with him. He’s always playing six or seven moves ahead. He’s patient. God only knows how long he’s been jerking off thinking about doing what you just witnessed. You can’t let him inside your head.”
It might have been nice to have these warnings much earlier—like the day she’d brought the reproduction to the house and first met Marcus. It was far too late for disclaimers. Quill was already deep inside her. And he hadn’t even fucked her yet.