Chapter 497 | Aspirationally

Chapter 497: 497 | Aspirationally

My worst turned out to be exactly what she’d ordered.

I stripped the leather off her the same way I’d stripped everything else tonight, without ceremony, without asking. The bustier laces gave under my fingers and her breasts spilled free, already heavy, already leaking, twin drops of milk catching the torchlight the Sanctum had provided because apparently even fake dungeons came with mood lighting.

"There they are," I said.

"Don’t talk about my tits like they’re a surprise gift."

"They kind of are." I cupped one, thumbed the nipple, and watched her breath stutter. "Every time. Fresh disappointment for the world that you keep these hidden under a leather jacket and a bad attitude."

"The bad attitude is load-bearing." Her hips rolled against nothing again, chains rattling, the fishnets I’d bitten through now torn wider. "Take it away and I fall apart."

"Good." I dropped my mouth to her breast and pulled.

Milk flooded my tongue, dark and rich, coffee and chocolate and that ghost of heat that was purely Addison, and the System pinged fifty points somewhere in my peripheral vision. Silver-tier. Two days of life per mouthful and I wasn’t counting because counting felt like an insult when she was making that sound, that low broken vibration climbing out of her chest while she strained against the cuffs and tried to press herself deeper into my mouth.

"Harder." Her voice cracked. "Bite. I know you want to."

I bit.

Euphoric Feedback at seven, threaded straight through the pain, and Addison Baxter came off the frame with a scream that would’ve gotten us evicted from any building with neighbors. Her back arched. Milk sprayed across my chest in a hot line, and she didn’t stop, kept talking, kept spilling filth out of that black-lipsticked mouth while her body did things her brain hadn’t approved.

"That’s it, come on, harder, I’m not gonna break, I’ve taken worse from training dummies, do it like you fucking mean it—"

I pulled off her breast. She was flushed all the way down her chest, the violet contacts swimming, mascara tracking in dark rivers.

"You talk a lot," I said.

"It’s my brand."

"It’s a problem." I looked around the dungeon she’d built, at the chains and the frame and the little rack of implements the Sanctum had generated because Addison’s imagination had specifications. On a hook near the wall hung a strip of black leather with buckles at each end. A gag. Of course she’d requested a gag. She’d probably drawn a diagram.

I unhooked it.

Addison’s eyes tracked the movement, and the brown underneath the violet went wide, and her mouth opened to say something cutting.

"Wait, that’s—okay yeah, put it in my mouth, I dare you, I bet you won’t actually—"

I fit the leather between her teeth and buckled it behind her head before she finished the sentence.

The effect was immediate and glorious. Addison Baxter, the scariest first-year in Obsidian, the girl who’d made an upperclassman flinch just by looking at him, the foulest mouth on campus, went silent. Her chest heaved. Her eyes blazed above the gag, furious and turned on in equal measure, and the sound she made now was muffled and desperate and a thousand times more honest than any threat she’d ever hissed at me.

"Better," I said. "You’re prettier when you can’t insult me."

She glared. She also pressed her thighs together as far as the frame allowed, which told me everything.

"You wanted to be helpless." I trailed a finger down her stomach, past the navel piercing, to the torn fishnets and the soaked leather beneath. "So no scythes. No scratching. No running your mouth until I forget you’re supposed to be following orders." I pressed two fingers into her and she keened behind the gag, hips bucking. "Just you, tied to a wall, taking exactly what I give you."

Her eyes rolled back. Drool started at the corner of the gag and tracked down her chin, mixing with the smeared lipstick, and she looked so thoroughly wrecked that the graft in my chest actually purred, the smug bastard, like it had been waiting six weeks for me to reduce a Silver-rank goth berserker to a shaking mess in a fake dungeon.

Somewhere in the back of my skull the dark purple ring burned steady. Seventy-eight percent devotion climbing higher by the second.

I worked her with my hand while I drank from her again, and the combination lit her up like a fuse. Every pull of my mouth, every curl of my fingers, every notch I climbed on Euphoric Feedback stacked on the last until Addison hung in the cuffs and shook and made muffled pleading noises around the leather that had no words in them anymore.

Her second peak hit her sideways. No warning, no build I could see, just her whole body locking rigid and then unraveling all at once, and she squirted, actually squirted, moisture running down both thighs and onto the stone floor while she screamed into the gag and the chains rang like church bells.

I held her through it. Kept my fingers moving, kept my mouth on her breast, kept her riding the wave until she sagged and her knees gave out and the restraints took her full weight.

"Two," I said against her skin.

She made a sound. Might’ve been a curse. Might’ve been my name. Impossible to tell through a mouthful of leather, and that was the point.

I straightened and reached behind her head. Unbuckled the gag. She spat it out and gasped and dragged in air like she’d surfaced from deep water.

"You—" Her voice was gone, reduced to gravel. "You gagged me."

"You requested a gag. It was hanging right there."

"I requested it aspirationally. I didn’t think you’d—" She stopped. Licked her lips. The drool and lipstick had smeared into abstract art across her chin and she made no move to fix it. "Do it again."

"The gag?"

"All of it. The gag, the—" Her hips twitched. "Everything. I need—" And there it was, the crack, the thing underneath the leather and the eyeliner and the death metal and the forty knives named after serial killers. Her voice dropped to something small. "I need one more. You said three. Don’t stop at two, that’s—that’s worse than never starting."

I looked at her. The real Addison, the one who read shojo manga under blankets and slept with a stuffed bat, the one who’d walked through a hospital lobby in a trench coat because Aurora asked and because some part of her had already decided I was worth the humiliation. She hung in the cuffs with her armor gone, brown eyes showing through the shifted contacts, asking me for the one thing she’d never learned how to ask anyone for.

"I’m not going to stop," I said.

Something in her face broke open. Just for a second. Then she scowled to cover it, which was so perfectly Addison that I nearly laughed.

"Good. Because if you leave me hanging I’ll haunt you. I’ll come back as a vengeful spirit and rearrange your furniture at three in the morning."

"You’re afraid of ghosts."

"WHO TOLD YOU—" She caught herself. Her eyes narrowed. "Aurora. Aurora told you. I’m going to murder her."

"Later." I stripped off my shorts. "Right now you’ve got a job."