Page 4 of He Who Sleeps

Her black hair had grown, as she wanted to please her seven...which was a truth she had only recently started to explore. They liked her hair long, and she was endeavoring to keep them happy. She wasn’t sure when that actually happened, but this year...it felt different because she had decided things would be different.

This year she was getting answers.

She glossed her lips just as her phone buzzed. The car was there. Grabbing her keys, she walked out and down her fifth-story walk up to the street below. The driver was there, standing by the door, which he opened as she approached. He held his hand out, and she placed her keys and phone in his, a condition of their arrangement, and smiled at him. He was wearing a half mask, black with a spider across the side, but he didn’t acknowledge her. He never did.

She slipped into the back seat and moments later they were crawling through the streets and onto the interstate toward her destination. She looked down, seeing the note, and the glass of champagne.

Drink. Relax. We will be in the dining room.

She did what they asked and settled in, knowing that whatever she was ingesting would relax her enough to not care where she was going, or how she got there, as with previous years.

The trip was quick, though it could be that she was used to it, and it wasn’t long before the car was stopping, and she was being helped out by Spider. She nodded to him and walked up to the house.

A sprawling affair, it was all black, with columns holding the façade up and the double doors flanked by stone gryphons, the knockers black and sooty. The place, always interesting to her, set her mind reeling with hazy memories from prior years. But she couldn’t focus on that. Beyond the doorstheywaited.

Each year it was something else. The first year at the mansion, they met her in the foyer. The second they had been in the sitting room. Now, they waited in the dining room. As she stepped up the steps to the doors, they opened and she passed through, feeling the whoosh as they closed behind her. Intimately acquainted with the house, she walked to the left and down the hall to the door where she knew they would be waiting.

Unbuttoning her coat, she looked down to the glittery, high-end heels she was wearing, and attempted to get her nerves and excitement under control. Whatever was beyond the doors waiting for her, whatever they were planning, she was both terrified and intrigued.

She never knew why they did this...didn’t have one fucking idea why she was even following through with it. Aside from the fact that the seven made her...feel. Two nights a year she was a person she wasn’t sure she liked, but craved to be. Because of them. Because of what they put her through.

She opened the doors to see them all sitting, sprawling, masks in place, dressed in dark suits, black on black on black.

They were like a renaissance work of art, flame-lit and tenebrous, and it was clear they were going for effect. Which seemed kind of crazy. Were they trying to impress her with their display? It wasn't like they needed to. She'd made the agreement—two nights a year to stop them killing anyone. They didn't need her approval in any way, and yet here they were, laid out in a feast of masked flesh.

"Like what you see?" It was no surprise that Stitches broke first. She'd learned he was the most impulsive of them all, even though his kinks took a...delicate touch.

“Of what I can see, yes,” she said boldly.

“Take the coat off,” Neon commanded, sitting forward. She suspected he was the one that had chosen the dress this time. Shedding the coat, she placed it on the chair just in front of her, and looked back to them. The dress was black, as it always was, tailored perfectly to her curves and generous ass, satin but for the large swaths of mesh and lace that tore through the center like razor strikes.

The top was a sweetheart, the satin just covering her nipples, the rest of her flesh peeking through, and the bottom was tight to her hips and then flared well above her knees to give her movement. Squaring her shoulders, she stood there for their perusal.

"Do a spin, princess," Snake commanded her.

She did, slowly like she knew they liked, allowing the firelight to glint off the material and the jet beads that were sewn into the lace. She heard a low growl, still not sure who had the ass fetish when she turned.

"Remind me to blindfold you and sink my teeth into that juicy ass," Devil murmured. "Fucking beautiful."

She turned all the way around, a smirk on her face. If she had her way, shewouldwatch him sink those teeth into her ass. She stood still, her body alight with sensation at the eyes she knew were on her. Her nipples pearled under the material, her core clenched, and she welcomed the feeling. At first it had freaked her out how much this pageantry turned her on, but now...

“The perfect dark bride,” Neon said softly.

"Who wants to go first?" Devil asked, his voice still soft behind the mask so she had to strain to hear it over the crackling fire. "No, not you, Stitches. You went first last year."

“And she needed extra recovery time,” Goblin said. “Ghosty neither.”

Ghost turned toward him and flipped him off, his glove-covered hand glinting in the light as much as the knife he had sticking in the table.

"I'll go first," Snake said, rising to his feet with graceful poise.

She shivered, trying not to react. Snake’s brand of attention was both the most and least invasive and, since that first time, he had her fiending for what he did with her. She had hoped it would be him or Devil to start. The rest were...a lot.

“A request for my room?” she asked and looked to Devil, who seemed to be their defacto leader. Once dawn hit for the day ahead, they left her ‘til the evening to recover, replenish and nourish her body.

"What do you want?" His eyes were dark and impenetrable behind the mask, but they didn't seem unkind.

“Arnica Epsom salts,” she said, knowing after at least three of them that night, she would need to soak.

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