Mistress Felicia stood so close to him now that he could count her eyelashes. She had the tiniest beauty mark under her right eye. He longed to kiss it. He longed to kiss her, to taste her full lips, her skin, her body inside and out.

“You want to kiss me, don’t you?” she asked.

“So much, Maîtresse.”

“Your mouth has to earn it.” She raised her riding crop and slipped it between his teeth. He bit it and held it in place. “I’m going to bruise the front of your body first. You keep the crop in your mouth the entire time, and you’ll get your kiss.”

He nodded his understanding and clamped his teeth even tighter on the crop. As sadistic as this task was, he appreciated the consideration. With the crop in his mouth, he wouldn’t be tempted to cry out. And the last thing he wanted was for anyone in the house to know what he was doing right now. He needed this city to fear him. If they saw him like this—tied up, naked, vulnerable—he would never be seen the same way again.

From her bag she produced a cane—two feet long and made of rattan.

She raised her arms and brought them high. With a quick and vicious flick, she struck Kingsley’s forearm two inches under the cuff. She hadn’t been kidding. She intended to bruise his entire body from his wrists to his ankles.

Down his right arm she worked, striking him in even intervals, one inch and then lower an inch, and then lower an inch. The pain surprised him every time. Sharp, stinging and deep... He knew he’d have red welts for a day from the cane and bruises for at least a week if not longer.

From his right arm she moved to his left, hitting him again with controlled but brutal strikes. Søren had never hit him or struck him on this part of his body before, on the smooth skin from his elbow to armpit. But he’d cut him there one night, short shallow slices with a razor blade on the inside of his upper arms and inner thighs. They’d fucked afterward, face to face, chest to chest...it was one of the few times Søren hadn’t tied him up before sex. Kingsley remembered wrapping his arms around Søren’s shoulders, his legs around his back. Blood had covered them both. When it was over Søren even had a streak of it on his face. He’d looked primal as a wild animal with the slash of crimson across his cheek and the firelight glowing behind him—a wolf in a cave unafraid of fire. In that heated, sacred hour, with his eyes nothing but pupils, his hair slick with sweat, Søren had appeared to him like a beast, a demon, or a god. Kingsley hadn’t cared which as long as he could worship at the altar of the blood-stained being who’d made a sacrifice of him.

“You do love pain, don’t you?” Mistress Felicia asked, her voice low and sensual. As he had the crop in his mouth he couldn’t answer in words. His ragged breathing and erection surely told her all she needed to know. “I can tell. You lose yourself in the pain.”

He leaned his head back and closed his eyes as she ran her fingers over the welts on his arms, renewing the pain.

“Lose yourself, then,” Mistress Felicia said. “Go wherever the pain wants to take you—into your mind, into your past, into your darkest dreams. Go as far away as you need to. I’ll come for you, and I’ll find you and bring you back.”

If he could have spoken he would have thanked her. They were the words he most needed to hear, especially now as she worked his chest over, striking even the scar tissue left by the bullet wounds. She had no fear of the damage done to him by the violence of other men, and for that he would have kissed her feet could he have reached them.

He closed his eyes and let himself fall away into the crucible of pain. It burned. He burned. Everything burned. And through the fire he walked, barefoot and heedless of the flames. The path of the fire led him into his past, back to the first night Søren had him. When he came through the flames, he was sixteen again and running through the woods outside his school. He heard twigs breaking under his feet, the crunch of leaves, the soft thud of his soles on bare ground. And Søren was behind him, gaining on him. Why did he run? For eleven years he’d asked him that question. Yes, he’d run in fear. When he’d seen the look in Søren’s eyes, he knew what was coming. But what Søren intended was everything Kingsley wanted.

Why did he run?

He ran for the pleasure of being pursued. That Søren wanted him so much that he would run after him even through the minefield of sharp hills, quick descents, grasping tree branches, tearing thorns. But was that why he ran? The true reason?

The fire caught up the half truths and burned them to ashes.

And then Kingsley remembered something he’d forgotten ever since that night. He’d wrenched himself from Søren’s grip and taken off again. But he’d paused once, turned around and smiled at Søren. Come and get me, that smile had said.

Søren had come and gotten him.

“Where are you?” Mistress Felicia whispered in his ear. She took the crop from his mouth. “Tell me where you are in your mind.”

“A forest,” Kingsley said. “I’m sixteen. And I’m running, and I don’t know why.”

“You know why.”

“He’s chasing me.”

“Who?”

“The boy I love.”

“The sadist.”

“Yes.”

“If you love him, why are you running?”

“I want him to catch me.”

“Has he caught you before?”

“No...the night in the forest was our first time.”