“You already have,” I murmured into the bed, fighting the heaviness of sleep to stay awake. The clock on the mantelpiece indicated that it was late evening; I’d been asleep for a few hours at least. “Let me take care of you again.”
I could almost hear the smile that I knew had to be on his face. “I know you want to. But I would also be a very bad teacher if I didn’t help my student recover from her lesson. Now this will hurt for just a moment, but then I promise it will make much of your pain go away.”
And then I felt his fingers trail down my back, tracing the line of my tailbone as it curved into my ass and the sore, soft flesh between my legs. I tried to stir, my body shying away, but he kept one hand on my back. “Stay still for a moment,” he said, authority coloring his words. I stayed, but I couldn’t help squeezing my eyes shut as I felt more oil—a different kind, gauging by the temperature—slide down my skin. And then a single finger pressed against the tight entrance of my ass, pushing in slowly but forcefully. My breath caught—it hurt—and I tried not to cry out.
“Shh,” Mr. Markham soothed, the hand on my back now gentling me, like I was a skittish horse. “Shh. Let me take care of you.”
The finger worked in and out of me, and it was only after a minute or two of the tear-inducing pain, that I realized he wasn’t getting ready to fuck me again. He was coating me with oil, inside and out.
“This will numb the pain significantly,” he said. “I promise.”
And he was right. Within a handful of minutes, the raw pain faded, replaced with a tingling warmth.
“Better?” he asked, climbing off the bed to wash his hands in the nearby basin.
“Much,” I said.
When he came back to me, he held a small glass of a reddish brown liquid. He helped me sit up and bade me to drink it, which I did, although it tasted terrible. He gave me cold water to wash the bitter taste out of my mouth.
“Have you ever had laudanum?”
I shook my head.
He seemed a little surprised. “It will dull the pain and help you sleep, but it may make you sleep very deeply or with very vivid dreams. Don’t be frightened if that’s the case—I will be here with you.” He helped me settle back into the bed. “I must leave you for a time—I am expecting a visitor—but once I finish speaking with him, I promise I will be with you for the rest of the night.” He swept a tender kiss across my cheek and then left.
I wished he would stay, but at the same time, I was happy to have a moment to myself, not because I wanted to be away from him necessarily, but because I still needed to process the events of today. The running, the catching, the fucking. All of it, so full of love and turmoil and pain.
Had I known that Mr. Markham could be so barbaric? Surely I had—there was nothing about anything he did that led me to believe he was a gentle soul, deep down. But I would be lying to myself if I didn’t admit that I had been genuinely frightened of him last night, genuinely trying to get away, mere seconds away from uttering our signal. He had hurt me—on purpose—had punished me and had been aroused by doing so. No gentleman did that. No gentleman grew rigid and thick at the thought of a woman sobbing underneath him.
But Mr. Markham did.
I rolled onto my side, watching the fire, feeling the pleasant burn of laudanum pumping through my veins, feeling the sweet ache in my pussy and the tingling numbness of other recovering parts. Why wasn’t I running away then? Why hadn’t I told him right after that it had been too much, too painful, and that I was leaving? Why did I want it to happen again?
Did that mean something was wrong with me? Was I the truly twisted one in our engagement?
The thought followed me as I spiraled down into sleep. The sleep was as thick as marsh mud, a gloppy clinging sleep that made me wakeful and fretful and sweaty. I twisted in the bed, sweet dreams of kisses and clouds morphing into visions of a frozen field, of Mr. Markham laughing over Violet’s corpse. Visions of him fucking her as violently as he had fucked me, visions of him fucking Molly, of him fucking Brightmore. It’s not real, I would manage to think as I clawed my way back to consciousness, but then I would tumble right back down into the nightmares.
I dreamed I was in a cage, a circus cage, the walls made of iron bars and placed in the middle of a wide tent. There were faces in the crowd, faces I knew—Silas and Molly and Gideon and Helene and the others—and there was a cage next to me. Violet was inside, gripping the bars and staring at me with a tear-streaked face.
Footsteps echoed, boots on the hard-packed dirt of the ground, and Mr. Markham came into view. I could see only his legs, long and firm, and a whip dangling at his side. I knew—somehow—that if I didn’t perform, if I was an unsatisfactory pet, that I would feel the whip. I looked at Violet, now sobbing, and I also knew that something worse than punishment might happen. If I disappointed Julian, would I be abandoned? Killed?
Except—how disturbing—there was a part of me that craved this fear. In fact, it barely felt like fear at all because it was so energizing, so electrifying. God, what was wrong with me?
The whip struck the ground and I jumped, starting to shudder with dread and excitement as the keys jingled. I was about to be let out. I would have to perform…
I jolted awake, the sheets twisted tightly around me and sweat making my hair stick to my face. Adrenaline spiked through me and the laudanum made it impossible to think clearly, and I couldn’t tell whether the walls were made of stone or iron bars and I could hear the keys still jangling, jangling…
But it was the clatter of hooves in the courtyard. Mr. Markham’s visitor.
I decided to get up and get a drink, which I did, groggily and shakily, my hands and limbs feeling too weak to hold my glass. The laudanum. It worked well.
I leaned against the window, resting my tired head against the glass, as a small man with white hair climbed easily off his horse. Nobody came out to greet him, but a rectangle of yellow light cast on the dim driveway told me that the door was opened. The man strode right in, his posture respectable and polite but his steps determined.
It was the man from the hotel in York. The one who had known my name.
I made a decision despite the growing murkiness of my thoughts, pulling on the scarlet dressing gown and belting it tightly, moving to the door as quietly as I could. A thousand questions raced through my mind. Did Mr. Markham know this man? Had he known him when he’d seen him in York? And how did the man know me? And, above all, why hadn’t Mr. Markham told me that this visitor was the same person we’d seen in York?
Was he trying to keep it a secret?
