Mona Lisa Craving Read online

  He stroked me slowly, sweetly, brought me once more to the edge that way, nothing more. Kept me trembling there on the brink for so long that it became like agony and ecstasy combined. Wanting and having. But not enough, not enough.

  “Dante.” I said his name over and over again feverishly. My body lifted into his, but he held me in his rhythm with a restraining hand upon my hip, not allowing a faster beat. When I tried for more, he stopped and stared down at me with those fierce, glittering eyes, withholding his body until I yielded once more to that gentle, maddening stroking. He was deaf to my cries for “harder, faster, more,” delivered first as a command, then as a plea. Nothing moved him from that torturing slow and easy pace. Not his tight, straining body. Not my inner clenching, my weeping need for him. Honey poured out of me. So wet was I that you heard the slurping sounds we made as he slipped in and out of me.

  I finally surrendered and lay quiescent beneath him, just accepting his easy thrusts, what he chose to give me, with silent tears rolling down my cheeks with the pleasure and frustration he had built up in me. He lapped up the spilled wetness with tender strokes of his tongue.

  “Dulcaeta”—beloved—“don’t cry.”

  The endearment only made more tears flow.

  “Please,” I begged. Nothing else. Just that plea.

  Looking down into my eyes, he gave a shuddering sigh.

  “Thank you for this time. For this sweet gift,” he said. He didn’t alter the force or speed of his rhythm. But his hand slid beneath my thighs and I felt his fingers stroke my wet outer lips, probe over where he stretched me, penetrated me. He traced that sensitive, swollen tissue back to where it rucked up tight and became perineal tissue, and his touch there was even more sensitive, disturbing. My breath hitched, and my body clenched around his shaft as he grazed a fingertip around my back opening.

  With eyes both tender and fierce, his voice gentle and rough, he said, “Come for me,” and pressed down, sliding that moistened fingertip into me, penetrating me as his cock withdrew and stroked back into my sheath, easy, gentle.

  “Come for me,” he demanded. And I did. With crying blessed relief, I finally came. A rippling tremor that seized him, squeezed him so tightly inside me. A release that broke gently over me like the wash of calm waters against the still shore. A sweet convulsing easing that went on and on until I felt it trigger his.

  Like the wash and play of our light—my shine dimming as his brightened—so did his release begin as mine ended. Extending it until it felt like one endless, gentle liberation. A letting go.

  A rippling, shuddering, cleansing of the senses, washing us anew.

  NINETEEN

  WHEN DAYLIGHT CAME, it was with the thought of him, the lingering taste and feel of him as I lay there in my bed. He had imprinted himself on my body, in my mind. He’d been saying good-bye. And that had felt wrong…because I wanted him to stay.

  Yes. A simple truth. I didn’t want him to go.

  I’ll tell him, I thought. I’ll tell him tonight that I want him to stay.

  It was that thought that finally soothed me to sleep. And then I dreamed.

  I remembered.

  AMAN WAS inside of me and I was riding him with vigorous abandon as he sweated and glowed and moaned beneath me. He was on his back, chained to a bench, his hands and ankles restrained by silver shackles. It was Shel, the warrior cut down by Barrabus’s sword in my last remembered dream, saved from death only at my intervention. He had whip marks reddening his chest, his thighs. Some had cut through the skin, drawing blood. They were marks that I had deliberately inflicted on him, I came to realize with some shock. Not in punishment, but in love play.

  We were inside a dark room lit by torchlight. A dungeon, I would have thought, with all the whips, crops, floggers, and chains along the wall, on the floor. But the bolted benches and the various wooden frames were padded, the chains lined with fleece. And Shel’s moans were not those of pain but of ecstatic rapture.

  Not a dungeon. A playroom, I realized.

  My playroom.

  I plunged down on top of him and felt his shaft, a huge, hard thing, slide into me. Beneath that I felt the pleasurable bite of leather straps. Without looking down, I knew that what I felt was a cock and ball harness secured tightly around Shel, making his phallus almost painfully hard and engorged, swollen to a very large size. The straps separating his balls lifted them into tight sacs. The sensation, I knew, was much more acute for him this way. When I next thrust myself down on him, I ground a bit against those stretched balls, and felt a powerful wave of energy spill from him along with his agonized cry of pleasure caused by the torturous pain.

  “My Queen!” he cried. All the muscles of his body were strained tight as I rode him that way for a few more strokes. His hips were strapped down so he couldn’t move, only I could, and I knew that the sense of helplessness devastated him even more.

  “Don’t come,” I ordered, my voice cool and calm, utterly confident in the authority I wielded over the man I was fucking.

  I shifted the angle forward, easing off his balls, and savored the feel of his penis sinking into me in that new position. Goddess, he was like rigid metal, so hard he was. The tightness of the bindings was such that his erection had to be almost uncomfortably hard by now, a discomfort that caused him to become even more erect. A vicious cycle of pain causing pleasure causing more pain.

  It was a delicate, deliberate dance, mingling pleasure with pain, and I did it effortlessly, keeping Shel there at that razor’s edge, my fingers stroking lightly, lovingly, over the raw wounds I had inflicted, pulling an almost frenzied groan from him. His body was twitching now with shudders.

  “Mistress, please…I can’t hold back—”

  “You can. And you will. Or you will displease me greatly.”

  I don’t know what disturbed me more. Hearing that cool, dispassionate voice. Or seeing the utter control I wielded so ruthlessly, so knowingly, like a priestess serving up pleasure bleeding on the altar of pain.

  I watched Mona Lyra give in to her own pleasure then, throwing back her head and closing her eyes, enjoying the hard, swollen shaft she rode with increasing rhythm and almost fierce force, glowing with the moon’s light. Utterly sure that Shel would obey her. It was odd thinking what she thought, feeling what she did. Seeing that gloriously, sexually dominant creature dancing with such abandon upon the man she ruthlessly used and pleasured. Seeing her as me…a much different me. I felt what she felt…the tightening pleasure, the bitter-sweet taste of coming ecstasy, heightened and sweetened by the control she wielded as her right. She was lost in abandon and utterly aware at the same time of the straining man beneath her, throbbing within her. Who grew even more excited, I saw, by her seemingly callous use of him.

  When both their lights were blindingly bright, so bright they made the torchlight seem but a dim glow, she opened her eyes and looked down at him. Through her eyes, I saw Shel’s light brown eyes darken until they were almost black, glazed with pleasure that was filled with the sweet bite of desperate pain, his face and body so strained they was literally twitching with tremors—a man brought sublimely to the point of breaking pleasure. He was like a man clinging to the edge of a cliff by just his fingertips, feeling the ground start to crumble beneath them and desperately fighting to hold on just a little bit longer, one more second, even as he felt himself begin to fall. Then and only then did I finally release him. Release us both.

  “Come now,” I commanded.

  With tears in his eyes, his lips bloodied from where he had bit down on them in his frantic struggle to hold back the trembling tide of his release, he did with a harsh cry that filled the room. He came in a great shuddering, spilling tide inside of me, his hips bucking up into me as much as the restraints allowed as he convulsed almost violently, spurting, ejaculating into me.

  Shel’s release lifted me into my mine, and I felt it roar through me, a whitewash of ecstasy that ripped through my body, arching me above him so terrib
ly tight for one powerful, blissful moment.

  It was then, when we were both caught up in our body’s rapture, helpless in its throes, that I sensed something wrong. Too late.

  A blade swept down, and with one clean slice, Shel’s head parted from his body. He died even while he was still inside of me, filling my womb with his seed. Light flashed—his energy, his life force being released.

  His body, his solid flesh, crumbled into ashes. And just like that he was gone. I fell onto the bench, heard the clink of empty chains hitting the ground, saw the cock harness tumble down. And I screamed. With rage, with fury, with sorrow.

  “Noooo!” It was an anguished cry torn from my soul. Then more quietly, more mournfully, “Oh Goddess…Shel.”

  Still shaking with the ripples of release, I looked up into the face of the enemy who had breached my fortress silently. Undetected until he took sudden form and substance before me now.

  I’d never seen him before, and yet his face was familiar to me…to Mona Lyra. He stood before me like an avenging angel, the edge of his sword biting into my neck, drawing a slow trickle of blood. His face was like stone. Dispassionate, some would have said, but only if they could not see his eyes. His eyes were of the palest blue, like a glacier lake, and just as cold. Ghost eyes. Deadly and merciless. Around his neck he wore a glowing amulet, a brilliant orange stone speckled with black. On his wrists glimmered dark red warrior bands, ones I had seen before. I knew then who he was and why he appeared so familiar. I’d killed his father almost ten years before.

  “No one can hear us,” he said, making me wonder at the unusual magic he wielded. “Do you know who I am?”

  I looked into those eyes. Felt the merciless impact of them. “You are Damian, Barrabus’s son. Wounded in battle and then gone. Everyone thought you dead.” For good reason. The battlefield had been coated inches thick with blood and ashes.

  “I would not allow myself to die. Not while you yet lived.” He spoke coolly, almost impassively, but his light blue eyes glowed with a dangerous, burning heat, flashing almost the color of silver, our greatest weakness. It was as if he touched that metal alloy to my skin when he looked at me with those blindingly bright eyes. I found myself unable to move, to strike out at him, my body chained by invisible bonds.

  “Are you a demon?” I asked as fear trailed its chilly fingers down my spine. I knew of nothing else that could have ensorcelled me like this. That had this degree of mental strength, holding me helpless beneath his gaze.

  A small smile touched his lips, a feral gesture somehow. “Not yet.”

  “You didn’t need to kill Shel.”

  “Do you mourn him? Feel pain at his loss?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good!” The word exploded viciously out from him; and his body trembled with his fierce anger and satisfaction. His slight movement cut the sword deeper into my neck, the blade a cool silver burning in my flesh. “I want to give you as much pain as you gave me when you killed my father, and then my mother, too, for she ended her life the next day when she learned of his death. I want you to ache, to hurt…if it is even possible for an icy bitch like you to feel.”

  “I feel,” I said with the heat of tears stinging my eyes.

  “I hope you do. By the holy fire of Hell, I hope you do.” Shaking, as if it took everything in him to do so, he withdrew his sword. Then with a casual strength that was even more frightening because I was helpless to move or fight against him, he lowered me to my back and secured my arms, wrists, and legs to the bench with the silver restraints. On top of that, he chained me with his will, a mental command my muscles were unable to disobey.

  “Stay like this until I return for you.”

  I could not move. Not one single muscle of my body. I could only speak, and the dread that welled up within me spilled out into my voice. “Where are you going?”

  He lowered his face down to me like a lover. Spoke to me in the soft, whispering tones of one. “To kill all who belong to you here in this castle. Your men, your women.”

  Everything in me shouted no. I gathered everything I could to break free. Called upon the abundant power that had always been innate—and found myself utterly helpless.

  With my eyes wild upon his implacable face, I drew on my last reserve, upon the pearly moles in my palm, the Goddess’s visible favor upon me. With blessed relief, I felt them begin to tingle, to answer my call.

  His sword came swinging down in a graceful arc. One cut with almost negligent force. I felt the reverberation of the blade bite into the wooden bench as my severed hands fell to the ground in a spurting fountain of blood, chopped off just above the manacles. The metal restraints fell to the ground with a heavy clunk, still attached to my dismembered limbs.

  I didn’t scream. Not aloud. Just in my mind. A scream that went on and on and on interminably. I opened my mouth and words spilled out. “I beg of you, don’t kill them. Do what you will with me, but my people are innocent.”

  He looked down at me, his eyes pale burning flames. “No one in this war is innocent,” he said in a gentle tone.

  Panic choked my voice, fear twisting it ruthlessly. “Your father…your father was honorable. He would not have slain innocents.”

  “I am not my father.”

  “Don’t. Please, don’t. Just me,” I begged with tears spilling down my face. With my blood spreading like an echoing sea of sorrow around me.

  “Vengeance is mine, and it is terrible. Hush.” And with that soft-spoken command, I could no longer speak. Could only scream in my mind as I watched him turn and walk out the door, go up the stairs. A moment of terrible silence, and the screams began. The cries of horror, the shrieks of pain that echoed and rang in the fortress. Cries that filled my mind and did not stop, even when all sound faded away and all heartbeats ended until I heard only mine and that of one other. His.

  When he finally returned, I was light-headed and weak from blood loss, and from the pain that consumed my body, ravaged my heart, my soul. He released me from his mental control, freed my legs of the silver shackles. And a sick, almost mindless fury filled me. Swelled me with a hate so strong that it possessed me, expanding within me with a terrible, powerful pressure, even as I lay there physically helpless before him.

  “I curse you,” I said in a voice that was mine and not mine. In a voice that was deeper, more resonant, filled with a power that came not from me alone, but was channeled through my Goddess’s Tears. They glowed from my amputated hands. “I curse you to a life that will never end. To deaths that are not true deaths. You will live again and again to die unceasingly, returning to an ever-diminishing seed until only you alone remain. May your soul be cursed in endless torment for what you have done today.”

  “It already is,” Damian, the son of Barrabus, said. He raised his sword. “Know this before you go, witch Queen. I will lay waste to all that you hold dear. Anything and everything that you ever loved, I will destroy.” And with that last promise, the sword, drenched red with my blood, my people’s blood, came swinging down…

  IAWOKE WITH a scream. With tears streaming down my face, sobs choking my chest. Arms held me, and I viciously fought against them.

  “It’s a dream. Just a dream, Mona Lisa.”

  My name and a face—Dontaine’s—brought me to startling awareness of him and all the others who had come running at my cry: Thaddeus, the worried faces of Jamie and Tersa, Rosemary, Chami, Aquila, and Tomas. Everyone in the household.

  “Oh God,” I whispered. My people now, I thought, while the shrilling screams of my dead and dying people from the past echoed in my mind.

  “You had a nightmare,” Dontaine soothed.

  No, not a nightmare, I thought. Something much worse than that.

  Memory.

  TWENTY

  IREMEMBERED HOW I died.

  But it was the other memory, the memory of how all my people had died, that utterly devastated me. And the memory of the tool of their destruction. Damian…and myself.

/>   Dante came to me as he had come all the nights before at the gloaming of the day. I studied him as he entered the sitting room where I had sat and waited for him for over two long hours, and gazed at him with memories both old and new. I saw him as he was now—young, easy, relaxed. Happy, even. And over that reality, I saw the monster in my dreams, the cold, burning eyes, the merciless face. I saw the bloody swing of the sword, heard the shrieks, the wails of my people as they died. It was as if ghostly images of the past clung and superimposed themselves over the slimmer body and younger face of the man before me.

  I had not known that the curse Dante bore had come from me.

  I’d cursed him. And I wondered if I had cursed myself as well. You could not invoke such a thing without some of it coming back upon yourself.

  I searched that face, looking for evil. But could not find it in him unless I saw it in myself also. He had killed, as I had killed. Sought vengeance, as I had sought vengeance in the end. We had simply used different means. Was his choice any better or worse than mine? I did not know. Both things that we had done were horrendous. I could see that, understand that in my mind. I’d reached that fair and logical conclusion after two hours of careful thought, deciding how to proceed. But my body was less logically governed. Coldness pervaded my body when he stepped through the door, and an almost wild, wrenching fear seized me. It was a reaction not governed by reason or will.

  A riptide of primitive instinct sent my control splintering away, and I overset my chair, sent it crashing to the floor as I hastily stood and backed away from him like a wild animal trapped.

  He stopped. Froze still. And that easy, happy light that had filled his eyes upon seeing me died away. All the warmth seeped out, leaving his eyes like pale, glimmering ice.