Chapter Eleven

 

 

 

At first, Kitty tried to help Victor up, but Valorie and Lennon ducked under each of Victor’s arms.

“We got him,” Valorie said quietly. “It’s okay. You look like you’re going to fall over.”

“Thank you,” Kitty said.

She followed the entire Arcanium cast into the big top. Everyone gathered near the partition around the ring, sitting anxiously in silence like schoolchildren who had all been caught doing something they shouldn’t.

Bell called up the spotlight and conjured the bench to the center.

“Ringmaster!” he called. His voice didn’t quite fill the room the way that the Ringmaster’s did, but it did well enough to send a shudder through his rapt audience.

The Ringmaster strode into the ring. He still had a knife sticking out of his back, but he walked as though he didn’t even remember it was there. He stopped in front of Bell, towering over him.

Bell was not easily quelled by something as immaterial as size.

The fortune teller grasped the hilt of the knife and yanked it out. The Ringmaster winced and his right knee buckled slightly, but he straightened himself up right after, his face a complete blank except for the swirling darkness in his eyes.

Now Kitty knew what that darkness was. But she also knew she had the barest understanding of what he was capable of in that darkness. Victor’s screams echoed through her head.

Bell stepped away from the Ringmaster and went around the ring, holding the bloody knife in his hand, pointing it at everyone he passed until he reached Victor, settled between Valorie and Lennon.

Bell suddenly threw the knife straight into Victor’s heart.

Victor let out an oomph like air being let out of an inner tube. He doubled over.

Then Victor pulled the knife out of his chest. The wound closed quickly, like the gashes of the whip had.

“Your intentions were well-meant at the beginning. But if the Ringmaster had not already dealt back the suffering that you gave him, I would command you into the ring as well,” Bell said. Neither mercy nor compassion dared touch his expression, stonier than Victor’s could ever be. “For your more impulsive actions and your violence against another member of the Arcanium cast, however, you will continue to suffer your broken bones until after his punishment is dealt. Don’t argue with me, boy,” Bell added when Victor opened his mouth. “You have done things right tonight, but you have also done things wrong. I know men’s hearts. I know demons’ minds. I am the arbiter. I am the law in this land. So hold…your…tongue. Your reckless ignorance has given you enough trouble, don’t you think?”

Victor continued to hold himself against the pain, resentment and resignation in the set of his mouth. But not hatred. Bell was right. He usually was. Victor might as well try to beat against moonlight.

Bell moved on from him, taking just a few steps before stopping in front of Kitty, who sat next to Joanne and Jane, with Maya, Caroline, Colm and Riley behind her.

Bell held out his hand.

Kitty knew better than to question or deny him in this state. She put her hand in his and lifted her torn and filthy skirt to step over the partition.

“First, Kitty, I must apologize to you,” Bell said. “With the Halloween season, I was busy and became complacent. I knew the danger too late. When the Ringmaster did not come for Maya’s session, only then did I seek to recognize the threat to Arcanium, and that threat was spread out in different parts of the circus. With the clowns near enough to Caroline to protect her and with the Ringmaster after you, I had to direct my attention to our homes where more of us were at risk.”

Bell lifted her chin to inspect the bruise on one cheek and the knife wounds on the other and around her mouth.

“The Ringmaster dealt their punishment well,” he murmured. “I’d already seen that a band of cowards like these would strike. I anticipated an influx of slaves so that I could bring my funhouse to fruition. It makes the attack that much more of an embarrassment to me.”

“I don’t expect you to be omniscient or omnipresent, especially since I’m the one who encourages you not to live so much in other people’s minds,” Kitty said. “You wouldn’t put me in danger on purpose. And without the Ringmaster there, you wouldn’t have abandoned me. I know that.”

He leaned his forehead against hers, closing his eyes.

Kitty wrapped her arms around him, drawing his head down to her bloodstained breasts. “It’s okay,” she whispered. “Justice has been and will be dealt. You haven’t seen Arcanium’s end tonight. We’re all okay.”

In the sixteen years that Kitty had spent in the circus, it had never been struck with such forethought, strategy or intent—and their attackers hadn’t even realized what they had been attacking. She’d heard stories. After all, Colm had been trapped in human form and bound to the carousel for fifty years for trying to take Arcanium away from Bell. But Kitty had never experienced it personally before. Most violence committed against them was what the law considered crimes of passion and opportunity—improvised, hardly the invasion of Normandy.

Bell gathered himself back together and removed himself from her embrace, but his gaze was gentle. It was brief, but Kitty thought she saw the broken places inside of him—the fear he’d experienced for his people—as they mended.

If anyone around the ring was stunned by Bell losing his composure in front of them, they made no mention of it or gave any sign of derision. He had many negative qualities, but no one could accuse Bell of not fiercely loving and protecting Arcanium.

“There is still balance left to restore,” Bell said. He stepped away from Kitty and faced the Ringmaster. Of all the people to condemn Bell for his unconcealed emotional weakness, the Ringmaster might have, but he merely continued to stand there, staring at the bench in the center of the spotlight. It was a simple thing, just three pieces of wood nailed together, gray with age. The golems cleaned the blood off after every beating.

“You,” Bell said, his voice once again effortlessly filling the room. “You were brought into Arcanium to dole out its punishments. Tonight, you and Victor traded violence for violence, sometimes for the good of the circus—however misguided—and sometimes for your own gain. If you had stopped when Kitty stopped you, perhaps the scale would have been balanced. Then you, of all people, stepped over my line and dealt pain when the man was no longer a threat to you.”

Bell drew the Ringmaster’s discarded whip from the small bag on his leather belt, which should not have been able to hold a whip.

“I cannot allow such a thing to come from my own lieutenant,” he said. Then he softened his voice but not his tone, which became more brittle with each word, as he confined the rest of the chastisement to the small triangle he, the Ringmaster and Kitty made. “Not even for a woman.”

He didn’t look at her, but Kitty sensed his awareness of her.

“You tried to take over my circus to create your own dungeon,” Bell said in a dangerous purr, circling the Ringmaster. “You almost drew all these souls and demons whom you have protected all these years into the hell from which you came, the hell which you came here to escape. If you ever bring your hell here again, if you ever try to take over my Arcanium, I will not give you a third chance, Ringmaster. I will cast you out into the world that will no longer admire you, no longer fear you, and I will find myself another ringmaster. Now, if you want to stay here, with your people and the woman who fills the hollow, dark places in your head…”

He raised his voice once more, the privacy shattered in favor of more public punishment. “Strip yourself of your clothing and submit to the punishment that, under different circumstances, I would have you deal.”

The Ringmaster curled his hands into fists.

But among all those in Arcanium who might underestimate Bell, the Ringmaster was perhaps the only one who could fully understand what Bell was. Kitty thought she did pretty damn well for a human woman. The Ringmaster, though, wasn’t of the earthbound jinn that made up the rest of the Arcanium demons. They were immortal, but nothing in their demeanor or behavior suggested they knew anything of forever the way that the Ringmaster and Bell did. Those two tethered themselves to Kitty’s level for her, but Kitty knew better than to try to grasp them.

And the Ringmaster knew better than to disobey.

In all things, the denizens of Arcanium ultimately answered to the Ringmaster. But the Ringmaster always had to answer to the true master of Arcanium. The wish that bound him here, the secrets that Bell held against him…these compelled the Ringmaster into submission.

The Ringmaster brought his fingers to the fastenings of his jacket. He removed it, handed it to Kitty then began on his trousers.

Kitty could practically hear the air being sucked out of the ring. The Ringmaster was actually going to bring himself low before the entire assembly. The man they so greatly feared, who had dealt them unimaginable pain, now offered himself for the same humiliation.

It was the very definition of inconceivable, and yet the Ringmaster toed off his boots and bared his massive form to the gaze of Arcanium. He only had eyes for Kitty as he did so. He handed her the rest of his clothes.

The Ringmaster stood in the spotlight, naked, vulnerable, yet magnificent. Kitty felt oddly invaded by the fact that others could see him as well when it had been a sight solely for her for so long. However, none of them had seen his true form. That was still only for her, and Bell didn’t ask for her to give that up as well.

“Yes, you are right to look to her,” Bell said to him. “Your obvious offense was against Victor, but he is unable to punish you in his present state, and it is the soul-deep offense against Kitty that matters most. I cannot run or protect Arcanium without you, nor can I do that without her.”

Bell grasped the Ringmaster’s jaw, his fingers digging into the cheek hollows above the curl of the Ringmaster’s facial hair. He spoke again for Kitty’s and Ringmaster’s benefit alone. “And you cannot function without her either. We are three of an Arcanium kind—the jinni, the demon and the woman. I will not have you destroy that in defense of a truth already etched into your bones.”

He thrust the Ringmaster’s face away.

“Now, present yourself for your whip.”

Bell took the clothes from Kitty’s arm as she stared at him in shock.

“I can’t do that,” Kitty said.

He gave her the handle of the whip. “You can. And you will.”

“I don’t know how.” She couldn’t think of anything else to say. She stared at the whip as though it was one of Lady Sasha’s vipers.

“Now you do.”

And she did. Simple as that, when she wrapped her hand around the handle, she knew how to wield it—as though the Ringmaster himself had imbued the leather with his knowledge and memory of every session.

“I’m not the one—” Kitty tried to say.

“You’re the only one,” Bell said, touching his fingers to her lips to silence her. “You don’t have it in you to be cruel, Kitty, but this is not about cruelty, as it is for him. This is about balance. It’s about control. He will accept this whip from you and you alone. And only you can deal his punishment as it is meant to be dealt. You’ll see. Ringmaster, I will not tell you again. Present yourself, or I will remove you like a leech from this circus.”

A murmur came from the shadow of the audience as the Ringmaster ignored Bell but looked to Kitty holding the whip…

And lowered himself onto the bench, the broad expanse of his back bright against the spotlight, one hand between his legs to guard his genitals but nothing to cover his firm, sculpted ass or his thighs. His knees reached the ground to brace him, and he pressed his free hand against the sawdust of the ring he usually commanded. The spotlight, however, couldn’t reach his eyes, no matter how hard it tried.

Kitty stepped forward as though in a dream. She swung the thong and fall of the whip behind her as though sweeping her skirt back. It brushed the sawdust like his fingers.

“How many?” she asked, her gaze fixed upon the Ringmaster’s back. Was this how he saw every person lying on that bench? As a blank canvas waiting for the unflinching strokes of a master artist?

“As many as you believe he needs,” Bell replied. “It is why I cannot be the one to wield his whip. I am unable to remain objective, and the scope of what constitutes an appropriate punishment from me would take far too long.”

“Please step back,” Kitty said.

She wasn’t sure, because he retreated to the corner of her eye, but she thought she saw the trace of a chillingly tender smile on his lips before he stepped out of view. Kitty chose not to examine it. Instead, she focused all her attention on the Ringmaster. It was easy to do. The audience beyond the edges of the spot fell away into far kinder darkness than the Ringmaster could offer.

He lay there, beautiful from head to toe. His nakedness only revealed how lovely he was to her.

Kitty brought the handle up in front of her shoulder, the braid looping behind her, then brought her arm forward with a flick, pointing the handle directly at the Ringmaster’s back. She didn’t have to give it all her strength in order for it to inflict tremendous pain, but the Ringmaster always gave it great strength, and she did what she could to compare.

The whip was a dangerous tool that wasn’t as easy as it looked, but Bell had given her the knowledge, the way he imbued anyone in the circus with the skills they needed. The whip felt as comfortable in her hand as she imagined it felt in the Ringmaster’s, and she knew how to ensure the maximum amount of pain upon his flesh without hurting herself in the process. There had been quite enough of that tonight.

The whip cracked right where it hit the Ringmaster’s shoulder, curling over the contours at a rate beyond the speed of sound and decelerating as it went, but that didn’t make it slow.

The Ringmaster twitched violently at the contact. When Kitty brought the tail back toward her, it revealed a perfect welt, a bleeding line in the center where she’d split the skin.

One blow wasn’t enough.

How many times had the cast of Arcanium wished they could be in this position? Perhaps that was part of the reason that Bell had handed the Ringmaster over to her. She had no personal vendetta to repay from any whipping that he had given, no scars deep in her mind where the healing potions could never reach.

She carried with her the memory of his hand on her ass, on her cheek, but no sense of revenge. She nurtured none of that in her heart, not even with what he had done to Victor in a mixture of fear and jealousy—the latter which he needn’t have felt and the former which she could understand completely.

Even this humiliation before the cast would be better than for his desire for her to cause them to question him. To question his utter disregard for the integrity of their hides, the thousands of ways that he longed to torture them. To question his very demonic nature—dismiss it the way they dismissed such mild demons as Lennon, Ciàran and Moss.

If anything, they might fear him more after Kitty had finished with him. He’d have more reason to show even less mercy when he got behind his whip again, just to ensure that no one believed that he’d been tenderized by the punishment.

However, after admitting that Kitty had a place in his darkness, there was no way for the Ringmaster to take back the revelation that he was as capable of emotional weakness as any human soul—not unless he completely destroyed her in an attempt to destroy that weakness.

As long as she resided in Arcanium, the Ringmaster could not harm her without further and increasingly worse punishment. And Kitty thought that this evening showed that she was not so easy to exorcise from what passed for his heart, no matter how great his fear.

Driven by the rhythm of the whip, Kitty found she felt very much the same. An astonishing calm settled on her like the weight of his arm in her tent or of the blankets over her in the winter.

Somewhere after the first seven or so strokes, she lost count. The number wasn’t important. What was important was the darkening of the flesh planes of his back. The way that the blood pooled in the valley of his spine and between his buttocks, dripping onto the sawdust below and on the hungry wood of the bench. The way he jerked under the leather, his muscles tensing and releasing with each blow.

But unlike every other whipping Kitty had witnessed, the Ringmaster didn’t cry. At a certain point, all dignity went out of the window—a body responded to the pain in a helplessly physical way. It was natural, nothing to be ashamed of. Even the most hardened man wept.

The Ringmaster didn’t.

Kitty remembered hearing or reading somewhere that the chemical composition of tears revealed why they were shed. Whatever he suffered, he was incapable of releasing it in his tears.

She struck him until the latticework of welts and cuts covered his back in a thin layer of blood and her arm started to stiffen up. Only then did she let the whip fall from her fingers to the ground.

Kitty had been exhausted before this whole ordeal. Now she thought she might collapse right here. The ring seemed to swim and dip and rock from side to side. It settled back to normal, but she fell to her knees, head a million miles away. She swayed where she knelt.

The Ringmaster crawled his fingers across the ground until they brushed her skirt.

There it was again, the same glint in his black eyes and curve of his lips that he’d given to Victor, but he tried less to hide it from her. Admiration.

“Show’s over,” Bell declared. “Maya will be at my RV with healing potion for those of you who need it. I regret that I can’t keep Arcanium closed tomorrow, so you should get some sleep before early breakfast. No, you need to leave too. Kitty is done for the evening.”

Kitty peered over the Ringmaster’s bloody back. Victor was trying to enter the ring. She raised her hand to him and mouthed, “I’m fine.”

“She’ll still be here tomorrow,” Bell said a little less harshly, gripping Victor’s shoulders to hold him away. “I will take care of her. Get your potion and get some sleep. Go.”

Victor backed away. He still appeared concerned as he allowed Valorie to guide him out of the big top entrance.

When everyone but the three of them had left, Bell returned to the center of the ring. The Ringmaster grunted as he pushed himself upright, uncovering himself and using both hands to brace himself on the bench. It creaked under his weight.

Bell knuckled the Ringmaster’s chin up then backhanded him soundly.

“Do you think me soft, Ringmaster?” Bell asked. The danger in his voice was inversely proportional to the volume.

The Ringmaster shook his head no.

“Do you doubt me when I say that if you try to take over Arcanium again, I’ll put you in a place that makes being trapped in a carousel mount seem tame?” Bell asked.

The Ringmaster shook his head again. On the outside, he was perfectly blank, perfectly still, but underneath, Kitty could sense the writhing fury that he held back—because Bell had every right to do what he was doing now. It was what the Ringmaster had signed on for when he’d joined Arcanium, just like everyone else.

Bell pointed his finger at the Ringmaster. The tip dented the Ringmaster’s lips. “You have shackled yourself to me. You gave the key to me. You are the master of the ring, but I am your master. You are mine. Do you understand that?”

“Yes,” the Ringmaster said, the word rolling deep into the silence.

“If you took joy in anything that wasn’t your job or Kitty, I would rip that away from you. But I need you to do your job, and I wouldn’t deny Kitty the dubious pleasure of your company,” Bell said. “Do not disappoint me ever again.”

“No,” the Ringmaster said.

Bell held his hand out to Kitty to help her to her feet.

“I’d recommend that you leave him to heal and get your well-needed rest, but you won’t do it,” Bell said. “I will permit you to eat your breakfast in your tent while customers are present, but you must open your curtain when the park opens.”

“Yes, sir,” Kitty said.

“Don’t ‘sir’ me,” he murmured, pulling a healing potion bottle out of her hair, which was probably a mess by now. The glass was cool in her stiff hand. “This is for you, not him. He will heal quickly enough on his own. And once again, little Kitty cat, my most profound apologies.”

Kitty covered his hand with hers, her only response before he followed the rest of his cast out of the big top, leaving Kitty and the Ringmaster alone.

The Ringmaster could now stand, holding himself straight. She got a glimpse of his back. Bell had been right. Using a healing potion on him was a waste of expensive magic. His back was still a bloody mess and a patchwork of lines, but the welts were less angry, the places where the skin had opened thinner and cleaner.

“Did it even hurt?” Kitty asked.

“I experience physical pain in this world,” the Ringmaster replied. He picked his whip up from the ground and curled it into a circle to rest on top of his clothes on the partition. He tilted his head as he looked back at her, his brows severe. “You whipped me.”

“Yes, I did,” she said.

“It was very good. The technique.”

“Thanks? It was my first,” Kitty said, still unsure where the Ringmaster was going with this.

It wasn’t the whipping that she believed had changed something between them. The whole day had been revelation after revelation. He didn’t know whether he wanted to want her. And she didn’t know whether she wanted to want him.

The question, it seemed, was whether they had a choice in the matter.

“Lie down on the bench,” he said. “Not on your stomach. On your back.”

“I still have no plans to let you whip me,” Kitty said.

“I have no plans to whip you,” the Ringmaster responded. “Do you believe that I seek retribution for the blows you gave me? They fade. And they were well-delivered. They do not concern me.”

As though to prove how inconsequential the wounds were to him, he circled around behind her almost before she realized that he had moved from the edge of the ring to its heart. The Ringmaster plucked the healing potion from her and set it on the ground.

When he tilted her head up, at first she thought he displayed the same reaction he’d had after she had finished the beating—the admiration for how well she had wielded his weapon.

Goosebumps rippled over the surface of her skin as she recognized the expression not as admiration but pride. In the darkness, he had silently wished to disavow her. But in the spotlight—where anyone could see them if they were to walk through the entrance—it was as though he wanted nothing more than to take complete possession of her on the very bench on which his blood still pooled, slowly soaking in.

“You can never be my only,” Kitty said quietly. “But none of them will ever have me the way that you do. Not him, not anyone.”

A soft cry escaped her lips as he yanked insistently at the corset ties in front of him to loosen the material.

“But you’re still mine.” His words trembled through her from where he spoke them into her ear. As soon as he was through with the laces, he swiftly undid the front fastenings of the corset. He threw it with uncanny accuracy at the partition near his clothes. Then he found the top of her skirt zipper and drew it down. There was no reason to care about the integrity of this skirt over the last, except to revel in the way anticipation made her lean against him. The material slid down her legs in a watery caress.

She pushed down her panties herself and undid the buckles of her sandals so that when she turned around to face him, there was nothing left in their way. She ran her hands over his chest, the black hair silky and crisp under her palms. She leaned in to take one small, brown nipple between her teeth, teasing with her tongue as she slid her arms around him to stroke over the wounds she had made.

The Ringmaster hissed through clenched teeth then let out his breath in a rough groan. He closed his fist around her braid in the same way she had taken hold of the whip, bringing her closer, pressing her body against his. When she released his nipple, she looked up at him. The angle forced her head all the way back. The Ringmaster lowered his mouth to hers, but he didn’t quite kiss her. He hovered above her, breathing in her scent, coaxing her to beg, but she wouldn’t, just trailed her nails over the lines on his back.

“Did you like hurting me, Katharine?” he asked.

“Not as much as you like hurting me.”

He took her lip between his teeth much as she had taken his nipple. He bit just a little too hard, not breaking the skin, but enough to catch her moan with his tongue before withdrawing again.

“I gave you a command,” he said evenly. Then he released her hair, pulling out the rubber band holding the braid together in the process.

Kitty stepped back, strangely shy in the spotlight as she sat on the edge of the bench and crawled back. The heat of his body had permeated the wood underneath where she lay down the way he had told her to. Kitty was briefly spared from exhaustion—adrenaline rushed through her for an entirely different reason than before.

The Ringmaster stood at the end of the bench. He took his hardening cock into his hand, stroking himself as he gazed down upon her with heavy lids. She clasped her hands just under her breasts.

“Spread your legs on either side of the bench.”

Her breath quickened and became shallower as she did as he’d commanded. She let her legs fall until she straddled the bench. With her legs parted, she gave the Ringmaster full view of what the singular experience of whipping him had done to her. She felt herself soften even more under his scrutiny.

He rested a knee between her legs as he continued to stroke his shaft, shifting the velvet skin over the massive, swelling erection, twisting slightly with every pass.

Kitty unclasped her hands to cup her breasts, the broad peaks tight and flushed. She was going crazy with need the more he looked at her. He never saw her like this. He saw her in the lamplight and shadow of her tent. In the dim flickering light of the booth. In such darkness that only touch was his sight. The spotlight hid nothing, revealed everything with stark, unforgiving illumination. There was nothing to forgive in what she saw, the body that he had chosen when he took human form—a body to excite and tempt even though he’d never shown any interest in where such excitement or temptation could lead a woman or a man. Only with her.

“Beautiful.” In his characteristic way, the word resonated through the ring without effort, vibrating through the ground under her feet and the bench under her back. She spread her legs wider, her cunt tightening.

He slid his hand to cover one of hers over her breast, forcing her to squeeze harder before drawing it back down with his between her legs.

“Prepare yourself,” he said. “I am going to take you as a man. I’m going to make you scream again, for me this time. Then I’m going to take you as myself. All of me. And I will not use my magic. You don’t need it to take me in, do you?”

He pushed her fingers into her cunt. She sank them in the rest of the way, biting her lip. God, the way he looked at her. She was surrounded by light, light so bright it could blind her if she looked straight into it, but it was his darkness that filled her gaze, his silhouette looming over her, the frame of the hair on his face, and those eyes…it always came back to those beautiful, horrifying eyes. Eyes that could belong to nothing but a demon. Eyes that took in everything that made her a freak and saw something that he wanted more than anything—more than his own pride, more than control, more than his precious cruelty, more than Arcanium itself, which he would have laid to waste, all of it screaming in the dark…and her wrapped in it like an embrace, the only one spared from his hell.

It didn’t take long for two fingers to become three, four, delving deep but not as deep as he could go, the sound of them moving inside her broken by the Ringmaster’s heavy breathing as he watched and stroked himself to full hardness. There was no urgency for him. He could have watched her stretch her cunt and pleasure herself all night if that was his fancy, and she might have been able to keep up the fevered tension of lust inside her for that long as well, if only he would look at her like that the entire time.

He closed his eyes and gritted his teeth as she reached down farther and managed to get her thumb inside as well, her hand slick, her juices dripping onto the wooden bench to join his blood.

Kitty whimpered, pushing her feet against the ground as she lifted her hips to try to take her whole hand deeper.

The Ringmaster jerked her fingers out of her cunt, which gaped and felt the chill of the air as he brought her soaked hand to his erection. She smeared the wetness over it, inadequate to cover all of him. Kitty focused on the top half of his cock until his flesh gleamed and pre-cum welled from the slit. Kitty spread that over him too and licked her lips.

He batted her away. Crawling over her, the Ringmaster braced himself with a hand next to her head. Her gradually unraveling braid draped over his fingers. He grasped her thigh with the other hand. She cried out as he abruptly pulled her hips off the bench, the whole lower half of her body held up by his powerful grip, fingers digging bruises into her thigh as he aligned her cunt to his cock

She held tightly onto his arm next to her head and arched her back even more as he pushed the head of his cock into the emptiness she had made for him. Nothing short of a fist could have prepared her. He filled her, stretched her even more, forcing her to her limits.

And when he changed, he would only get bigger.

It was still uncomfortable, but the discomfort wasn’t important, because it did nothing to extinguish her arousal as he thrust into her, owning places that no ordinary man could hope to touch, using her body for his pleasure. He kept his eyes open to drink her in, though hers sometimes fluttered helplessly closed when he forced her lust through her like poison, destroying her. Animalistic sounds wrenched from her throat with each thrust. A cry. A groan. A grunt. A growl. A shout. Not yet a scream—he was taking it too slow for her to scream yet.

He dragged her down the bench to lean farther over her, depending on her legs wrapped around his waist as well as the cock buried in her pussy to hold her up. She clutched at his shoulder, frantically drawing him down until she could curl her arm around his neck. His kiss muffled her cries and sent the rumble of his own down her throat, almost substantial enough to swallow. He rolled his hips against hers and massaged her scalp with fingers that could shatter her skull.

Her orgasm was unpleasant and intensely pleasurable at the same time. Her body seized around him, trembling apart from its core. She bit his tongue. He shouted and slammed into her, the force of her climax drawing him into his own.

It wouldn’t stop. She truly thought she would fall apart, so many pieces bloody and dead in the sawdust for the clowns to eat. Her mind swirled with horrifying thoughts and with him. He pulled up from the kiss, blood dripping from between his lips, his mouth too red in the bright spotlight—but red had always been his color, and he was smiling with the blood staining his teeth.

As she thrashed around him, the Ringmaster slid a hand along her side to her thigh and guided her legs open from around him. He left a bloody mark on her calf with a kiss before drawing his cock out of her.

Kitty turned her head against her arm and just cried, tears streaming down her temples. Not from pain. Her cheek and her lips where the knife had scratched and pierced her hurt more than anything else the Ringmaster had done, the stinging and burning getting worse, as cuts tended to before they got better. The discomfort from the Ringmaster’s cock never reached outright pain.

She was overwhelmed, exhausted, exhilarated, overloaded, first too full with him inside and now too hollow without him.

The Ringmaster kissed hungrily up her stomach to her breast, sucking the peak until it ached. Then he kissed over her neck, up to her eyes, where he tasted her tears with a slow, low rumble of a moan. She stroked his back again, relishing the play of muscles under her sensitive palms as he moved over her. The lines of his whip were little more than rough scabs on his skin now.

“You’re pretty when you cry,” the Ringmaster whispered in her ear. “How lovely will you be when you scream?”

He abruptly withdrew and pinched and pulled both her nipples between his fingers, massaging and torturing them in tandem until she clutched at the bench beneath her and shrieked, her breasts jiggling as she writhed under his torment. He stood with one foot on the ground, one knee on the bench and pressed against her cunt. When he let go of her nipples with a wicked smile to watch them snap back with a ripple, she realized how turned on again she was, like slipping into a hot bath after a grueling day.

She could read his face as plainly as though he spoke.

You’re not screaming yet.

But oh, she would. He’d said she would, and so she would.

Kitty made a sound of surprise when the Ringmaster suddenly lifted more than just her lower half off the bench. Only her shoulders and head were still on the wood. He drew the rest of her up, her ass resting against his chest, his arms embracing her thighs as he tucked her legs over his shoulders. He rubbed the bristle of his beard against the smooth hair on her legs before mouthing his way to her cunt.

The Ringmaster plunged his tongue into her, lapping the mixture of her juices and his cum with deep strokes. Then he worked his tongue through her folds to her clit, drawing her wetness up with him. She quivered with every spasm of arousal that defied gravity to meet his mouth. Her breasts weighed heavy toward her chin, shaking when she did, protesting each movement. Steeling her neck and shoulders against the bench, she cupped her breasts, holding them secure as the Ringmaster continue to assault her with every flick of his tongue, tug of his teeth and caress of his lips and beard. When he closed his mouth over her clit and sucked, she keened into the light.

She hadn’t known her back could bend that way.

Abandoning her breasts, she instead scrabbled for his hands near her hips. One she could find and clutched it with all her strength. The Ringmaster brought his other one underneath her, sliding two fingers into her cunt to coat them before bringing them down and tracing them around her hole.

He was relentlessly hot and soft over her clit, which was hypersensitive from her first terrible, wonderful climax. If possible, he grew even hotter against her, almost burning, as she accepted his fingers into her ass. He was careful but driven by her need. She took measured breaths to keep from resisting his invasion and was rewarded with wave after wave of desire, heat that seemed to mimic his or emanate directly from him. Sweat dripped up her spine. He fucked her slowly but steadily with his fingers as he brought her to the edge with his mouth.

His smug, sadistic laughter rippled over her skin like prickles of sunlight on cold flesh as he gentled over her clit. The pointed tip of his tongue teased her, circling her swollen, glistening flesh, digging under the hood, tracing along the edges of her labia. He twisted his fingers inside her to make her moan and arch. The longer he watched her, though, the more his smile faded, and his swarthy face flushed red at the cheeks with lust.

She tightened her thighs against the sides of his head when he lowered his mouth closer over her again, moaning low against her clit in a command without words.

The python grip of her arousal snapped something inside her. She screamed, scratching her own chest and thigh because there was nothing else she could tear but herself. She rocked her hips against his mouth as he sucked in rhythm to her clit’s throbbing pulse and the tightening of her ass around his fingers. He drew out her far more pleasurable—yet somehow disappointing for it—orgasm until she nearly lost consciousness.

The Ringmaster caught her as she slumped. He pulled out and lifted her up, enveloping her in his arms. She could feel the hot, thick iron of his cock against her belly and the wetness where he had dragged her cunt over his chest and abdomen.

“I’m not through with you yet, Katharine,” he murmured.

Kitty pushed her foot down against his firm ass to raise herself up and kiss him from above the way he loved to do to her so much. Now she knew why—it was such a position of power. She grasped his thick hair in her fist and kissed him as though he were the drink she so desperately needed right now. A surprised groan wrenched itself from him. They rocked their bodies together, her pussy rubbing against his dripping cock, the red hair on her breasts mingling with the black hair of his chest.

She broke away with a gasp and threw her head back as he made love to her neck, worshipped her cleavage then each breast, idolizing her as only a demon could do. He undid the rest of her braid until her hair spilled over them from all sides.

“Yes,” she whispered when horns sprouted from the thick black hair entangled between her fingers.

They curled down to frame his neck and back as his growing body lifted her higher and higher from the ground. His spine became more prominent under her arm around the back of his neck. His teeth sharpened slightly as he captured her lip between them so that she could feel their transformation. Under the sole of her foot, thick, pleasantly coarse hair grew. And against her belly, his cock thickened and lengthened to the impossible size that took her at the end of every month. But that was with the magic that made it possible—the magic that demons carried with them that made even Ciàran possible to take in.

His heavy hoof broke the bench when he hitched her up higher. The ground trembled when the hoof slammed down. Her breasts pressed into the hollow of his neck, pricked by one of the horns as he regained his balance.

The Ringmaster waited until she met the swirling oil slicks, the tar pits, the monster-filled caves of his eyes. Her breath quickened under his gaze.

Then he brought her down to the head of his massive cock. He stretched her tight around him, her juices and his cum seeping out of her to ease his way. Tighter, tighter, tighter as he entered her, his jaw clenched and the flush of his face enhanced by his own sweat. Kitty whimpered and tried to hold on to him. Tighter. Tighter. Deeper.

She doubled over, her forehead knocking against his as her cunt reached its limit, from discomfort to outright pain that threatened to rip her apart.

“I can’t,” she gasped even as he continued to enter her at a careful, thick, molten pace. She shook her head, her lips drawn away from her teeth. “I can’t.” She struggled up against his hold on her, trying to lift herself up, but he was too big and she was too tight around him. “Please.”

“Shhh,” he said, stroking her hair away from her face.

And with that, the intense pain became exquisite pleasure, and she slid down the rest of his cock as though he were covered with smooth, hot melted butter. Her whimper broadened and softened into an unrestrained moan that climbed higher and higher the more she took him in.

She let her head fall back. He nudged the braid of her beard away to lick up her throat with a rasping hum of arrogant delight. He didn’t seem to take it personally that she could not fulfill part of his demands for her, not in the least.

“Now, beautiful creature, look at me,” he murmured, pulling her head forward again by the braid of her beard with the same fondness he showed for the handle of his whip. To Kitty, there was no comparison between how Robert treated her beard and the Ringmaster. The association was so dim, the dead man barely registered in her mind. “Remember, in their beds, in their arms, under their kisses, with their cocks inside you, remember that you…are…mine. As long as you live, Katharine, you are mine.”

Kitty curled her fingers around one of his horns as he slid his hands down her back to her thighs. He lifted her up the length of his erection before snapping his hips, forcing himself all the way in again. This time, magic paved his way, sparking her arousal in thousands of electrical impulses wherever nerves could feel pleasure and some places that shouldn’t have felt anything at all. After eight years of regular sex with a demon, it was easy to take such magic for granted, but Kitty certainly didn’t, especially tonight.

The Ringmaster usually set the pace, but he groaned and shoved hard into her when she started to meet the thrust of his hips, using her grip on his horn as part of her leverage.

He was fucking her standing up with nothing to brace her against, but she wasn’t even a strain for him to hold. The Ringmaster’s arms and legs flexed with his rhythm. She could feel the tension and release of his abdomen against hers. His body was a magnificent machine, his heat and the sounds rumbling from deep in his chest like that of an animal. Her toes curled in the fur at his hips. Each thrust shuddered through her like a lust quake of ever-increasing intensity, warning for the impending explosion that galloped closer, with hooves that vibrated like his when they hit the ground.

Kitty’s mouth dropped open in a steady series of moans broken only by her need to breathe as she tightened her arm around him. She leaned into his neck, burying her face against him until the wild spice and musk of his skin filled her head. Her tears dripped hot onto his shoulder.

“Mine,” he growled into her ear.

She squeezed her eyes shut and bit the base of his neck. If she could have torn and climbed her way into him, Kitty would have. But her teeth were blunt, and she lacked the claws or the strength to merge herself in that moment with the Ringmaster. He did his best to fulfill her wish, pounding her through her last orgasm, the great release, the natural disaster that billowed and flowed and blotted out the light as the smoke of his darkness filled her even more deeply than his cock. Her eyes were closed, but she could feel it pouring into her nostrils and mouth, where she breathed and drank it in. He took her wherever he could have her. She welcomed the apocalypse of his possession, riding until the eruption of brimstone heat inside her.

Kitty didn’t move. She gripped him long after the aftershocks of the orgasm had settled. Blood from his shoulder trickled into her mouth and down his chest. His cock was still hard inside her, but the Ringmaster was finished. He was simply in no more hurry than she to leave their embrace.

The Ringmaster combed his fingers through her hair. He kissed her neck until she had to leave the bite she’d given his shoulder to meet his mouth, where he didn’t dominate her but devoted lingering kisses to her lips long enough for her to realize he was taking back the places that Robert had cut with his knife. She jerked her head back slightly to meet his eyes. Then she smiled and lifted herself up to kiss him again from above. The urgency had died, but the passion, the possession, had not.

Finally, Kitty broke the kiss, panting near his mouth. “I don’t know how much sleep you need, but I need more of it than I’m going to get, because I also need a shower.”

The Ringmaster hissed as he grasped her thighs to ease his cock out of her. He reluctantly lowered her to the ground. Then he pulled the demon back into his human form, no less imposing, intimidating or handsome for the change.

He picked up the healing potion bottle from the ground and gave it to her. Before she could thank him, he swept her up into his arms. It could have been romantic. Instead, images were called to Kitty’s mind of men bringing vanquished enemies or conquered slaves back to their domain. Kitty didn’t deny him the conquest, resting her head against the hair of his chest as he led her out of the big top, both of them still completely naked. The spotlight turned off behind them.

“They’ll see,” Kitty said.

“No one will see,” the Ringmaster replied.

“Jason and Lily heard.”

The Ringmaster was silent. When he took her past her RV, she almost stopped him, but his glower was dead focused on his trailer.

The door swung open on its own and closed behind them. He set her down before turning on the lights.

She’d been in his trailer before. Prior to Bell giving her a phone, Kitty had been one of the few who’d been willing to brave the Ringmaster’s wrath to ask for time on his computer. Since she did most of her banking online these days and checked the circus website for their schedule, she’d seen the interior of the Ringmaster’s trailer plenty of times, the luxurious caravan arrangement, not quite so modern and partitioned as Bell’s. This one was more open like hers, but the space allotted to the Ringmaster was far more generous, like a small, high-end apartment instead of a many-decades-old tiny trailer like the ones most of the cast had. Kitty hadn’t wanted anything more than what Bell had given her, which was why she suspected Bell had only given her that much. However, she could still appreciate such decadence—the deep, sensual red and the lavish gold that he favored, the carved wood of the four-poster bed slotted into the floor and wall, the material of the fabrics, the stained glass of the lamps. He made no effort to conceal or curtail his expensive tastes. He was the Ringmaster.

He raised a finger to her lips before she could say anything. From his touch, a hot breeze swirled around them, ruffling the hair all over their bodies. When he pulled his finger away again, Kitty looked down at herself. Blood, sweat, tears, other things, they were all gone. Even her hair was silky and untangled. She still had her wounds, but they’d been thoroughly cleaned. She smelled like him, the same spicy scent.

He took the potion bottle from her and set it near his computer. Then he took her hands in his. As he walked backward and drew her to his bed, the lamps clicked off.

They had always slept in her tent. Always. She’d never been here to take advantage of the accommodations. Kitty sighed in pleasure when he tossed his sheets back and drew her between them with him. The feather mattress cradled her like a cloud. The sheets were unspeakably soft against her skin.

Then there was the Ringmaster himself. He pulled her in with her back to his chest, his mouth and his nose against her hair. She thought she smelled smoke, but she couldn’t tell. Almost as soon as she closed her eyes, she was gone.