Lover Unleashed - J. R. Ward [44]
His voice got hoarse. “You’re killing me here. I can’t be trusted with you right now. So you’ve got to do it. Please. God, just do—”
ELEVEN
Ravasz. Sbarduno. Grilletto. Trekker.
The word trigger banged around V’s skull in all the languages he could put it into, his brain spicin’ his vocabulary up for shits and giggles—because it was either that or the thing would cannibalize itself.
As he rocked his Google Translate, his feet took him through his penthouse at the Commodore over and over again, his relentless pacing turning the place into a multimillion-dollar hamster-wheel equivalent.
Black walls. Black ceiling. Black floor. Night view of Caldwell that was never what he came here for.
Through the kitchen, through the living room, through the bedroom and back.
Again. And again.
In the light of black candles.
He’d bought the condo about five years ago, when the building was still under construction. As soon as the skeleton had risen down by the river, he’d been determined to own one-half of the top of the skyscraper. But not as some kind of home—he’d always had a place away from where he slept. Even before Wrath had consolidated the Brotherhood into Darius’s old mansion, V had been in the habit of keeping where he crashed and stashed his weapons separate from his . . . other activities.
On this night, feeling as he did, the fact that he had come here was both logical and ludicrous.
Over the decades and centuries, he’d developed not only a reputation in the race, but a stable of males and females who needed what he had to give. And as soon as he’d taken possession of this unit, he’d brought them here to this black hole for a very specific kind of sex.
Here, he’d shed their blood.
And he’d made them scream and cry out.
And he’d fucked them or had them fucked.
V paused by his worktable, the old wood battered and marked not just from the tools of his trade, but from blood and orgasms and wax.
God, sometimes the only way to know how far you’d come was to return to where you once had been.
Reaching forward with his gloved hand, he took hold of the thick leather bindings he used to keep his subs where he wanted them.
Had used, he corrected himself. As in past tense. Now that he had Jane, he didn’t do those things anymore—hadn’t had the impulse.
Glancing over at the wall, he measured his collection of toys: Whips and chains and barbed wire. Clamps and ball gags and razor blades. Floggers. Lengths of chain.
The games he played—had played—were not for the faint of heart or the beginners or the casually curious. For hard-core subs, there was such a fine line between sexual release and death—both got you off, but the latter was your last shot. Literally. And he was the ultimate master, capable of taking others where they needed to go . . . and one thin inch past that.
Which was why they all came for him.
Had come for him—
To him, he corrected.
Fuck.
And that was why his relationship with Jane had been a revelation. With her in his life, he hadn’t felt the burning need for any of this. Not for the relative anonymity, not for the control he exerted over his subs, not for the pain he enjoyed inflicting on himself, not for that sense of power or the pounding releases.
After all this time, he’d thought he’d been transformed.
Wrong.
That internal switch was still with him, and it had been flipped to the “on” position.
Then again, the urge to commit matricide was stressful as shit—when you couldn’t act on it.
V leaned in and fingered a leather flogger that had stainless-steel balls tied on its ends. As the lengths filtered through the fingers of his ungloved hand, he wanted to throw up . . . because standing here, he would have given anything for a slice of what he’d had before—
No, wait. As he stared at his table, he revised that. He wanted to be what he once had had. Before Jane, he’d had sex as a Dom because it was the only way