Page 32 of Taken By Touch and Torment

I kept my heart steady even when Durian’s hand trailed down my back. Even when I saw clearly this thread of desire, a premonition of what he planned to do, I stayed inside my body. I stayed inside the only place that still had power.

I was not a victim.

“Whose cunt is this, pet?”

“Yours, Master,” I said, my voice shaking.

I slithered inside Durian’s mind like a snake in his garden, camouflaged to blend in with the scattered bones and rotted earth. I leaned into my intuition, this magick that demanded my acceptance if I ever wanted to transform from hunted to hunter.

I lifted his desires in my palms, gauging their weight against my own strength—and I searched for the path of least resistance.

When Durian’s fingers skated over my pussy, I leaned into his feather-light touch. I moaned softly and then froze, as if the reaction had been entirely unconscious, born of desperation and need.

Durian froze too.

And that’s when I unhinged my metaphorical jaw, and I bit.

She may fear you, but she also desires you as much as you desire her, I whispered to his mind. She is desperate for your touch. She respects the mark of a true leader—everything that Rune was not. She only recoils from you because she knows you love pain, and you would never give her what she wants if she revealed it to you. But in the end, she’s a weak human who slipped and showed her cards. This is the time to strike, to make her even more desperate for you. Soon she will be nothing but a puddle of need at your feet.

“Oh, pet,” Durian said, his voice sickly sweet as he withdrew his hand. “Did you really think you could manipulate me?”

I held my breath. My skin was ice where Durian’s hand had brushed, however soft and brief. My heart hammered erratically.

“I hear your heart pumping with lust, you pitiful whore,” he said. “You are my slave to use at will, not the other way around. The pleasure of my venom in your blood is all you get until your needy pussy is aching from neglect. If anyone catches you playing with yourself, I will cut off your hands.”

I whimpered softly, as if torn to shreds by his words. But underneath the layers of deceit, buried somewhere Durian couldn’t reach, I smiled.

I’d done something else, when I’d been projecting my magick. A sneaky little burst of inspiration that came from the part of my subconscious that was constantly scheming, building roadmaps for manipulation, and analyzing patterns of behavior.

“Yes, Master,” I answered.

Durian delivered a mean blow to my ass with an open palm. Before he could earn another cry from my lips, heavy knocking sounded from the front door.

He didn’t show any emotion as he left me bared and spread as a piece of human furniture in his living room. He merely answered the door as if I no longer existed.

“New word has arrived from the kingdom. The meeting location has changed,” Brennan’s strong voice echoed through the space.

As soon as he saw me, a room away, I felt it. I replenished my powers with his gaze on my nude form. This evening’s attire—only my heavy black collar—was supposed to humiliate me.

I chose to leverage it for every advantage it gave.

When I’d influenced Durian, I had also cast out a line through an invisible thread that connected me to Brennan. My hook had already been buried in his back, the moment he’d first laid eyes on me. Since that dinner where Durian had dangled me in front of him, that thread had gotten stronger.

I’d lured him here after priming him for days. He likely wasn’t the one originally charged with delivering this message.

As the men talked in hushed whispers, I shoved the new trauma in with the old and closed the hatch. It was getting crammed down there.

I used everything I’d overheard, every subtle cue and slip of the tongue, and I melded my observations with the intuition of my magick. I slid between the cracks of Brennan’s psyche with ease, as if he’d left the door wide open for me.

You’ve found her. Durian might know how to rule Valentin, but he never learned how to deal with females, I whispered to Brennan’s mind, digging and rooting deeper. The poor girl needs a man like you to show her what being with a righteous son of Lillian is truly like. She would worship you. You only need to draw her away, carefully. Durian will grow bored as he always does. That doesn’t mean this delicious plaything needs to go to waste.

“Perfect,” was all I heard Durian say, and another sharp burst of intuition heated my neck. This time, I couldn’t be sure of what I was picking up on. I was too enmeshed in my current scheme to spread myself thinner.

“I can ensure that no one touches her,” Brennan said. “You’d be humoring the aunts and their bloated egos. They want her to spend time with the other servants and learn Lillian’s will.”

I reached out to both men at once, coaxing them each delicately, keeping a tight grip on both reins. Durian was far more difficult to influence, but in the end, he acquiesced. After all, he felt as though he’d won this round.

In reality, Durian had been relying on me more and more to relieve every ounce of his paranoia and stress. He may have been brutalizing me, but he was also hooked. More than he’d ever imagined. He feared how much he’d been thinking of me, thirsting for my blood, proving to me without words how much stronger and more powerful he was than Rune.

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