Page 25 of H Is for Hardcore

I moaned in response, bucked against him.

“But I’m not going to,” he said, still rubbing me as if to belie his words. “I could smell it on you, you know, smell how turned on you were by the knives. Told myself it was my imagination, wishful thinking or something. But I was right, I wasn’t I?”

I nodded frantically.

“Yeah, I could make you come like this…but what a waste.”

With a shhh of steel moving against leather, he unsheathed his belt knife again, pressed it against my mound.

Even through denim, I imagined I could feel its cold kiss. I could definitely feel the pressure, the threat—felt it cut straight into my clit and send me flying higher. My eyes widened. I strained, so close to coming I could taste it, willing him to move the blade, to apply just a little more pressure.

“But this isn’t really how you want to come, is it? You want to feel it against your skin, feel it cutting you?”

I mouthed, “Yes.”

“Then show me which knife you want to feel first.”

Trembling, I pointed out the ones that had particularly caught my eye.

“Loki and Sigyn,” he said. “They don’t all have names but they told me theirs. Sigyn is the wife of Loki in Norse mythology—devoted, but had a few tricks of her own—and I can see from your face you know who Loki is.”

I had chosen well.

We ended up in the back room of the shop, set up as a workshop. No actual forge, to my disappointment (but where would it have fit?) but a workbench scattered with tools, dusted with bits of wood, bone, and leather. He moved aside a work in progress—it looked as though he was creating a hilt with a piece of amber inlaid in the pommel—to make room for me to perch on the workbench.

I was hoping he’d simply cut my clothing away, but he didn’t.

Not until I got down to my bra and drenched, useless panties.

Then with one shudder-inducing flick of lethal little Sigyn on each, he severed my bra straps. The knife, cutting edge out, then traced a path between my breasts, and I had to force myself to hold still at the sweet metal caress. Another flick and the bra fell off, destroyed.

Just as neatly and easily, he cut through the narrow bands of elastic that held my string bikini panties in place. I barely felt the knife touch me—he was that quick and that careful—but it didn’t matter. I was lost and I liked it that way.

He changed knives then, switching to Loki, and circled the flat of the blade on one excited nipple. “Please,” I whispered, and he knew what I wanted, because he turned the knife, let me taste the edge dancing lightly on that sensitive nub.

The tip pricked the tender nipple once, twice, before he moved on to the other one, torturing me with all too gentle sensation.

“Please.” Desperation edged my voice, gave me a blade of my own. “Please, I want to feel…”

He smirked. “Of course you do.”

The blade moved down my belly, leaving shudders and a fine white scratch in its wake. The steel was cool, but it set me on fire, and when it reached the curve of my pubic mound, it was all I could do not to buck forward, to provoke him to cut me in that intimate area.

With his free hand, he pushed my knees open. I spread them wider still, wet and yet terrified by a sudden image of him pushing the blade inside me, fucking me with deadly intent.

I clenched and squirmed back at the same time, the seduction of the fantasy warring with its dangerous reality, and with the crazy fact I was playing dangerous games with someone whose name I didn’t know.

“Relax,” he said, and his deep voice was soothing. “No cuts here. Nothing to mar this pretty pussy. Just a little tease.” He turned the knife in his hand, making sure the unsharpened spine was touching me. I saw him do it—but what my eyes told me, my brain and nerve endings refused to accept. The touch of cold steel seared my labia, pierced my clit, brought me to the verge of orgasm. It felt like my skin blossomed with blood behind the knife, but it was only my own juices blossoming in my terrified excitement.

Finally, when I could feel my muscles clenching and jumping, not just in my pussy but all over, so my skin twitched like a nervous racehorse’s, he pricked at my mound with the knife while his thumb circled my clit and I rode the warring sensations—cold, hardness, near-pain, and the more familiar spiraling pleasure—to an orgasm that felt like I’d been born into a forge’s heat.

When I recovered breath and strength, he asked me, with an old-world gallantry that surprised me under the circumstances, if I were ready for Sigyn to taste me. Something in his manner told me he half-expected a no.

Part of me—the sensible part, I suppose—clamored to say no. But with my pussy drenched and throbbing, my skin still tingling from Loki’s gentlest caresses, I couldn’t turn back.

He had me lie facedown on the workbench, a worn gray sweat-shirt under my head as a pillow.

Panic washed over me when he stepped away, opened a drawer in the workbench. Was he going to pull out a different knife, a larger one, take this fantasy to its bloody, demented conclusion? What sense I had left told me to bolt, but I couldn’t move. My body was both languid and tense with anticipation, and I couldn’t get it to obey logic. I could barely make myself turn my head to watch him.

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