Page 99 of Retrograde

I rack my brain, thinking about what first made me feel there was something between us, but it’s like reaching in the dark. My mind is a jumbled mess, confused and unreliable.

“Yes. And I did that deliberately, you daft bitch. To be able to look you in the eye and tell you that I played you. That I manipulated you and your silly little feelings.” His voice is sharp and relentless, forcing me to hear him out even when I don’t want to. And every word is like a physical blow.

“All I ever wanted was to make you feel as you made me feel all those years ago. Betrayed. I’ll never forget who you are. You’ll never be anything more to me than a thing I like to fuck. Is that fucking clear already?”

A shameful half-sob claws its way up my throat. He gets on the bed with me, forcing me back until I’m lying on the pillows, trapped underneath him. He is above me, and everywhere I look, like a cage.

“That’s all you are and all you’ll ever be. My toy. My pet. Here to be rewarded for obedience, punished for defiance, and discarded at the side of a road somewhere when it stops being fun for its master.”

Tears streaming down my face, I shake my head over and over like a child protesting. “I don’t believe you. I do not believe you!”

His smile only grows nastier, his tone more vicious. The man I got to know over the past few weeks is gone. Back is the Necromancer as I first met him, leering at me, threatening me, excited to hurt me.

He undresses me mechanically, and I’m so stunned that I barely register it when he reaches into the bedside table drawer to take something out. I don’t protest when metal bites into my wrists, and he cuffs both my arms to the headboard. I have no resistance left. He crushed it all.

“I’ll make you believe me, Hotshot,” he growls, the twisted anticipation in his voice clear and unmistakable. “If it’s not enough to tell you, then let me fucking show you.”

He yanks my legs further apart, exposing my pussy to him, opening me up. I want to say something, but my voice breaks apart in a sob.

“Stop crying.” His eyes clash with mine. “You’re not the first bitch to go stupid for a man’s cock.” His fingers brush my entrance, rough and proprietary. His touch isn’t a caress—it’s a claim, a condemnation. He chuckles menacingly when he finds me, as he knew he would, swollen and completely soaked.

“Your pathetic tears would be a lot more convincing if your cunt wasn’t weeping for me even harder at the same time.”

I chew the inside of my cheek until I taste blood, but it’s no use, the tears keep flowing. I can’t stop them. I’m a snivelling mess. And that helplessness, more than his rough treatment, ignites my own anger.

“And what you’re saying would be a lot more convincing if you ever kept your word,” I spit at him, struggling against my bonds. “You said you’d kill me, and you didn’t. You said you’d make me suffer, and instead you did the opposite.” I scoff, terror and satisfaction fusing in my veins as I watch the colour drain from his face. “What a letdown. The big, scary Necromancer, a legend among men and the monster of my nightmares ... is all bark and no bite.”

His eyes turn dark like dying stars turning into black holes, until they become bottomless pits of destruction.

“You want bite, huh?”

“Uh-huh,” I challenge him even as tremors rush through me, visceral fear pooling in my belly.

“Then I’ll give you bite.”

Sharp pain cuts across my cheek, and before I know what’s happening, his hand crushes my windpipe. My throat collapses in his grip. Then even worse agony distracts me when his teeth sink into my shoulder and soon something warm trickles down my chest.

I try to scream, but he’s robbed me of my voice. My mouth is wide open, but no sound comes out except for strangled gurgling.

And even that dies down when he leans over me, the tip of his cock aligns with my pussy, and he rams inside of me in one brutal thrust, hitting my cervix. He gives me no time to recover. He sets a punishing pace, rutting into me, the searing burn of his intrusion completely overwhelming, and the cold, hard pressure of his piercing maddening and unrelenting.

A half-formed thought floats through my mind, a realisation that this whole time, every time he fucked me, he’s been holding back. That he was careful not to hurt me the way he’s hurting me now. And the most messed-up part of it all is that I can’t tell whether I feel discarded now that he no longer wants to protect me from himself, or whether I feel robbed. Robbed of all the times he could have fucked me this way and didn’t.

I gag harder, eyes popping, pressure building at my temples, and unwanted, savage pleasure already unspooling in my core.

Oh god.

I can’t let him make me come. Not like this. For all that remains that I still value in myself, I cannot let him have that victory, too.

I close my eyes, trying to distance myself from him, trying to focus on the pain—the blood vessels in my neck and face on the verge of rupturing, the burn of the fresh bite on my shoulder, the sensation of being torn apart with each thrust.

But it’s no use.

My nerve endings are sizzling with bliss I’m powerless to stop, rushing up my whole body, tingling all over.

“You’re about to come, aren’t you?”

“No,” I mouth.