“Oh… oh fuck,” I gasp, my head lolling back. My nails, chipped and caked with dried kohl, dig into the leather binds around my wrists until the skin of my palms splits. “Jex… please… it feels like… oh god, oh god…”
He steps into the space between my legs, his shadow looming over me like a god of ruin. He doesn’t touch the machine. He doesn’t have to. He just watches the way my pussy reacts to the tapping—the way the lips are swollen, bright red, and pulsing in time with the remote.
“I told you, sweetheart,” he whispers, his voice a low, gravelly vibration that competes with the hum of the motor. He leans in, his mouth finding the sensitive cord of my neck. He doesn’t kiss me; he sucks the skin hard, marking me, his teeth grazing the tendon. “God isn’t here to save you. God didn’t even show up for the rehearsal.”
I let out a broken, high-pitched moan as he licks a path from my collarbone to my ear. I can feel the heat of his body, the scent of tea and gunpowder, clashing with the electric fire the anchor is sparking in my veins.
“Look at you,” he rasps, pulling back just enough to stare at the wreckage of my lap. “Fuck, Hallow. You’re fucking dripping all over my floor.”
I look down, my vision swimming. He’s right. Theslick, clear heat of my arousal is streaming down my thighs, fat droplets falling from the base of the vibrating anchor and splashing onto the dusty floorboards. It’s a steady, rhythmic drip-drop that sounds like a clock counting down my sanity.
Jex lets out a slow, dark exhale. He drops the remote onto the floor—leaving it on that torturous, licking tempo—and sinks to his hands and knees in the glass and the filth.
My breath hitches. “Jex?”
He doesn’t answer. He crawls forward until his face is inches from the wood. I watch, paralysed by a mix of shame and a hunger so deep it feels like a physical ache, as he tilts his head. He extends his tongue, slow and deliberate, and licks a long, broad streak of my cum directly off the floorboards.
He swallows, his eyes snapping up to mine. They’re dark, blown out, reflecting the orange fire of the burning pier outside.
“Tastes like a goddamn miracle,” he growls, his voice thicker than before. He licks another spot, his tongue dragging over the rough wood, savouring the salt and the heat of my undoing.
He stays there, on all fours like a predator, looking up at me through the curtain of his hair. “Do you hear them, Hallow? The sirens? They’re coming for the Mayor. But nobody’s coming for us. We’re the only ones left in the world.”
He reaches up, his hand wrapping around my calf, squeezing until it hurts. The anchor inside me spikes, the remote on the floor buzzing against the wood, and I feelanother wave of release building—bigger, darker, and more violent than the last.
“Please,” I sob, my body arching into the chains. “Jex, please, I can’t… I’m going to break…”
“Break then,” he snarls, his tongue darting out to catch a fresh drop before it hits the ground. “I want to hear the sound of it.”
I’m hanging there, a vibrating wreck of nerves and salt, watching him rise from the floor like a demon pulling itself out of the pit. He doesn’t wipe his mouth. He just stares at me, his eyes dark with a hunger that feels older than the city itself.
He reaches for a red plastic jerrycan leaning against the vanity. The sloshing sound of the gasoline is heavy, a liquid threat that cuts through the cloying smell of my own sex.
“You think those men saw you, Hallow?” he rasps, stepping into the circle of my spread legs. He doesn’t touch me yet. He just stands there, the fumes of the gas making my head swim. “Those suits? Those pigs Aris sold your skin to? They didn’t touch you. They touched a ghost. They didn’t deserve a single fucking inch of the girl I remember.”
He reaches out, his thumb tracing the line of my jaw, dragging down to my throat. His skin is hot, calloused, and smells of iron.
“You were always mine,” he growls, his face inches from mine. “Before the needles. Before the padded cells. Do you have any goddamn idea how many nights I sat in the dark, stroking my cock until it bled, just thinking about the way your skin would taste? About the wayyou’d scream my name if I was the one hurting you instead of them?”
I let out a broken, shuddering sob, my body still twitching under the rhythmic tapping of the anchor inside me. “Jex…”
“Shut up,” he snarls, and then he hits me with it—the kiss.
It’s not a kiss; it’s a collision. It’s hot, wet, and tastes like the Earl Grey and the cum he just licked off the floor. He devours my mouth, his tongue forcing my teeth open, claiming the space like he’s trying to swallow my very breath. It’s so intense, so violently possessive, that the friction of his lips against mine makes my stomach flip. I find myself kissing him back with a desperate, starving ferocity, my bound hands straining against the ceiling as I try to pull him closer, to melt into the heat of him.
He pulls away just an inch, our spit connecting us in a thin, silver thread in the red light.
“Here’s the deal, sweetheart,” he whispers, his breath hitching. He kicks the remote on the floor, and a digital timer on the screen starts a sixty-second countdown. 60… 59… 58…
He begins to walk in a slow circle around me, tilting the jerrycan. The clear, amber liquid splashes onto the floorboards, soaking into the dust and the glass, forming a perfect, shimmering ring of death around my suspended body. The smell is suffocating—raw, chemical, and lethal.
“If you cum before that timer hits zero,” he says, his voice a low, terrifying promise, “I don’t light the match. You get to live. You get to be mine for another day.”
He stops in front of me, his hand reaching out tograb the anchor vibrating inside me, twisting it sharply so it grinds against my bone.
“But if you don’t…” He pulls a zippo from his pocket. He flicks it open. The small, orange flame dances in the reflection of my terrified eyes. “Then we both burn. Right here. In the middle of the mess we made.”
The timer hits 45. The anchor is screaming inside me, the tapping turning into a frantic, high-speed assault. I’m caught between the fire and the filth, my body arching, my pussy sobbing for the release that is now the only thing keeping me from the flame.