Chapter 7: Touch
Time became a sticky, amorphous substance. My consciousness floated somewhere between the vibrating monstrosity in my ass, the lingering, acrid taste on my tongue, and the heavy weight of his hand on my head. Minutes or hours passed in the thick silence of the penthouse.
Slowly, the electronic hum inside me ceased. The sudden lack of vibration was its own kind of shock, leaving behind a profound, echoing emptiness. I felt a release of pressure as the sphere began to deflate, the air sighing out through the tube. It was a slow, agonizing retreat, the pressure shrinking inch by devastating inch. My body clenched uncontrollably around the diminishing intrusion, each pulse a mimicry of my earlier orgasms, but hollow and exhausted. When the shrunken, slippery ball finally slipped out and fell to the floor with a dull thud, I shuddered as if my soul had been partially evacuated. I felt impossibly open, used, a vacant cathedral after the riotous congregation has left.
Marius withdrew his hand. The loss of contact was a cold gust. I heard him shift on the sofa, his clothing rustling as he righted himself. The sound was crisp, mundane, a punctuation mark on our shared madness.
“Clean yourself up,” he said, his voice already smoothed back into its unruffled veneer, though it held a new, gravelly undertone. “You’re dripping on my floor.”
I pushed myself up, every muscle screaming in protest. My legs were unsteady. My own spend, and his, was a cold, sticky map on my thighs and belly. I looked down. On the polished concrete floor, a puddle of fluids—wine, lube, sweat, cum—reflected the city lights. A Rorschach test of our debauchery.
He stood, buttoning his trousers with precise, efficient motions. He tucked his shirt in, ran a hand through his damp hair, and was, in a moment, transformed from a shuddering, begging creature back into Marius Volkov. The only evidence was the slight flush on his neck and a certain deliberate slowness to his movements, as if his body was still quietly protesting the recent, brutal expansion.
The distance between us became a chasm.
I limped back to the bathroom. The light was too bright, clinical, exposing everything. In the mirror, I was a garish carnival ghost. Eyeliner smeared into hollows under bloodshot eyes. Pale skin splotched with red, marks from his grip and the marble edge. My mouth was swollen, bruised-looking. I looked starved, used, and victorious in a sick, temporary way.
I turned the shower to scalding. The water hit me like a barrage of needles, washing away the physical evidence in grey, swirling rivulets down the drain. The heat soothed the ache in my muscles but did nothing for the deep, inner throb, the feeling of being hollowed out and scraped raw. The shower stall was all glass and steel, an echo chamber for my shaky breaths.
When I emerged, wrapped in a towel that smelled faintly of his expensive detergent, the penthouse was changed. Low, ambient music, something instrumental and complex, filtered from hidden speakers. The air smelled of lemon and ozone, the mess already vanished as if by magic or unseen servants. He stood by the floor-to-ceiling window, a crystal tumbler of amber liquid in his hand, his back to me, silhouetted against the infinite grid of lights.
He didn’t turn. “There’s clothing for you on the bed. Wear it.”
It wasn’t my style. Laid out on the stark black duvet was a pair of simple, dark linen trousers and a black silk t-shirt. It was elegant, understated, expensive.A uniform. A subtle claim. The tags were gone.I dressed. The silk slid cool and alien over my sensitive skin. The trousers were soft, tailored, and cinched with a leather cord. It felt less like being clothed and more like being redrawn.
I padded out, barefoot on the heated floor, feeling like an imposter in my own skin.
“Better,” he said, finally glancing over his shoulder. His gaze was an appraisal, no different than if he were assessing a new piece of furniture. “We have business to discuss.”
“Business,” I echoed, my voice barely a whisper, still shredded.
“You incurred a debt in Philadelphia. The terms were your servitude. What you did tonight…” He took a slow sip of his drink. “That was discretionary. A… demonstration of the potential scope of that servitude. But currency, Reese, is more than just pleasure and pain. Power, for creatures like us, flows in specific channels.”
He walked to a low, modernist desk and opened a drawer, pulling out a slender tablet. He tapped the screen and slid it across the marble surface toward me.
“These are energy signatures.Low-level disturbances. Emotional spikes, minor hauntings, impromptu glamours. Scavenger work. Beneath my direct attention but necessary for maintaining equilibrium in my territory. They accumulate like static.”
I stared at the glowing map, dotted with pulsing red markers.I understood. My survival in Philly had been built on this very thing—skimming the surface of human emotion, taking the crumbs of fear, lust, and anger. It was grunt work. The demonic equivalent of collecting trash.
“This is the real work of your penance. You will find these anomalies. You will neutralize them. You will harvest the residual energy and return it here. Consider it community service with a nutritional component.”
The bluntness of it, the sudden shift from carnal extremism to bureaucratic supernatural cleanup, was more disorienting than any of the toys he’d used. My pride, the tiny, giddy power I’d felt at making him beg, curdled into something cold and heavy.
“You want me to be a… a janitor?” I asked, the crudeness of the word feeling good in my broken throat.
He gave a minute shrug. “An exterminator. A recycler. You will address the pests and process the waste. The energy you bring back will be quantified. It will be applied against your debt.”
“And if I don’t bring back enough?”
He set his glass down. The click of crystal on stone was final. “Then we revisit the discretionary side of your servitude. Without the preliminary entertainment. Your compliance tonight bought you a measure of autonomy. A job. You can live in the quarters I’ll provide. You can move, within limits, through the city. You can try to rebuild the pathetic scraps of your dignity. Or you can fail, and we will explore the many, many rooms in this building I haven’t yet shown you.”
The threat wasn’t roared. It was stated as a simple, logistical fact. It was more terrifying than any growled promise of violence. It spoke of infinite, cold patience and a vast inventory of torment.
He walked toward me, stopping an arm’s length away. The scent of his cologne and clean sweat enveloped me. He reached out, not to strike or caress, but to adjust the collar of the silk t-shirt, smoothing it with a chillingly paternal gesture.
“The first assignment is in the Bowery. A dive bar. The bartender has been accidentally charming patrons into giving him their life savings. A crude, untrained glamour born of desperation. It’s causing a ripple. Clean it up. The method is yours. Just don’t be seen. You start tonight.”
“Tonight?” My body felt like it had been run through a compactor.
“The energy is freshest at midnight.” He turned and walked towards his bedroom door. “Consider it a probationary shift. The car will take you.” He paused at the threshold, looking back. A ghost of something—not warmth, but a kind of stark acknowledgment—flickered in his icy eyes. “What you did here… it was a competent manipulation. Don’t mistake it for leverage. It was merely proof of concept.”
The door clicked shut behind him, leaving me alone in the vast, silent, beautiful prison. The tablet’s screen glowed in my hands, a constellation of menial tasks mapping out my new existence. The aftershocks of pleasure and pain still echoed in my bones, a fading symphony. But the true chill was settling in now, deeper than the marble, colder than his gaze. This was the cage. The games in the penthouse were just the decoration on the bars.
I looked out at the sprawling, glittering city, the labyrinth he owned a significant piece of. My new hunting ground. My new leash. A low-tier succubus on a demonic chain gang. The taste of his climax was still a faint, bitter memory on my tongue. I wondered, with a hollow ache, if that was the last real thing I’d ever be allowed to consume. I tightened my hand around the tablet, the light from its screen the only warmth in the room.
I tightened my hand around the tablet, the light from its screen the only warmth in the room. The Bowery address glowed with a passive-aggressive insistence. A silent black town car was indeed waiting at the curb when I exited the building, its engine a faint purr in the damp night. The driver was a silhouette, saying nothing as I slid into the leather interior, which smelled of polish and cold air.
The dive bar was exactly what the positioning suggested: a hole-in-the-wall with a flickering neon sign and windows grimed opaque. The emotional static hit me before I even pushed the door open. It was a sour, greasy smear of hope and avarice, the particular flavor of a weak glamour at work. Inside, the air was thick with cigarette smoke and the desperate gleam of people believing their luck had finally changed. The bartender, a gaunt man with tired eyes, moved with an unnatural confidence, his every pour and smile laced with a compulsive, parasitic charm.
I found a shadowed stool in the corner and ordered a club soda. Closing my eyes, I focused past the barrage of surface noise—the laughter, the clinking glass—and listened for the finer thread. There it was. A thin, psychic wire running from the bartender’s frantic core to the wallet of a weeping, smiling older man signing over a check. It was amateurish, leaking energy everywhere like a sieve. This wasn’t feeding; it was vomiting.
My own hunger, a hollow ache deepened by the night’s earlier expenditures, twitched in response. I didn’t devour. I siphoned. With the subtlety of a ghost, I tapped that psychic wire. I drew the raw, misshapen glamour into myself, not consuming the bartender’s meager power, but unraveling it, absorbing the chaotic emotional energy it was built upon. It tasted like copper pennies and regret.
The bartender staggered, dropping a glass. The connection snapped. The old man blinked, looking at the check in his hand with dawning, horrified confusion. The bar’s atmosphere shifted, the false warmth evaporating into the usual bleak humidity. My stomach churned with the indigestible residue of stolen yearning. The job was clean, silent, and profoundly empty.
I was back in the town car within twenty minutes, my body buzzing with a sickly, discordant energy. It wasn’t nourishing. It was like mainlining static. My skin felt too tight, my nerves scraped raw. Yet, beneath the invasive chill, a counter-current simmered. The memory of power—of Marius’s broken voice, of his muscles seizing under my mouth—thrummed in my veins, a dark and erotic echo.
The penthouse was silent when I returned. He was in the living room again, standing at the window, a different crystal glass in hand. He didn’t turn. “Report.”
“It’s done.” My voice was flat. “The glamour’s dissolved. The mark is confused but intact. The energy is…” I trailed off, feeling the unclean buzz beneath my ribs.
“The containment vessel is in the study. Evacuate it.”
The vessel was a smooth, obsidian orb on a pedestal. Placing my hands on it felt like opening a valve. The chaotic energy I’d harvested—the greasy desperation, the cheap charm—flowed out of me and into the stone, which grew faintly warm. A sense of brittle cleanliness followed, leaving me utterly drained, yet electrically aware of every inch of my body. The hollow was back, but it was a clean void, ready to be filled.
I walked back into the living room, the silk of my borrowed clothes whispering against my oversensitive skin. He was still at his post, a statue of implied dominion. The compulsion took me then, not from any order, but from the screaming need in my own cleaned-out core.
I walked up behind him and pressed my body against the line of his back. I felt him stiffen, not with rejection, but with acute attention. I buried my face in the space between his neck and shoulder, inhaling his scent—cologne, bourbon, him. My mouth found his skin, and I kissed it, not softly, but with a hungry, open-mouthed drag of my lips.
My hands slid around his waist, under his suit jacket, splaying across the hard plane of his stomach. I stroked compulsively, feeling the muscle tense under my palms, mapping the terrain I’d reduced to begging hours before. “Feels different,” I mumbled against his neck, my teeth grazing his earlobe. “The energy. It’s empty. You’re not.”
He turned in my embrace, his face unreadable, but his eyes were dark pools in the ambient light. He searched my face. “What are you doing, Reese?”
“Balancing the books.” I leaned up and kissed his mouth. It wasn’t gentle. It was a claim. To my shock, he allowed it. His lips parted, and his tongue met mine in a slow, assessing duel. When I pulled back, I gripped his hand. “Come with me.”
I led him, not to the playroom of horrors, but to his own austere bedroom. A vast platform bed dominated the space, dressed in black linens. He followed, his compliance a heavier form of power than resistance. At the bedside, I turned and pushed him, just firmly enough, to sit on the edge of the mattress.
“Stay,” I whispered, the word a parody of a command he might use.
I went to the tall armoire, opening drawers until I found what I needed: slim reels of black silk bondage rope, sleek and strong. He watched me, a cryptic smile touching his lips, as if observing a fascinating, potentially dangerous pet.
“Arms up,” I said, my fingers already working, tying a complex, inescapable knot around his left wrist, then anchoring it to the heavy wrought-iron headboard. He lifted his right arm without being asked, letting me secure it as well. The sight of him, this ancient demon, allowing himself to be bound in his own bed, sent a furious surge of heat through my drained limbs.
I knelt between his splayed legs, my hands going to his belt. I opened his trousers, freeing his cock, which was already half-hard, thickening rapidly under my gaze. I didn’t use my mouth first. I used my hand, gripping him tight at the base and slowly, agonizingly, working my fist up the length of him and back down. The foreskin slid over the head, revealing the gleaming tip.
“You came in my throat before,” I said, looking up at him as I worked. “Now you’re going to come on my hand. Then you’re going to come in my mouth. Then you’re going to come in my ass. You’re going to keep coming until there’s nothing left.”
He laughed, a low, breathy sound. “Ambitious.”
“You begged for it,” I reminded him, twisting my wrist on the upstroke. He hissed, his head falling back. I leaned forward and took him into my mouth, swallowing him down to the root in one smooth motion. I sucked him with a relentless, vacuum-tight pressure, my tongue flattening against his shaft. I brought him to the edge quickly, ruthlessly, using every trick I knew. His hips twitched against the bonds. When I felt the telltale swell, the frantic pulse, I pulled off.
I jerked him fast and rough with my lubed hand. “Come.”
He did. With a guttural shout, he erupted, stripes of hot cum painting his stomach and my fist in thick, pearly spurts. I milked him through it, squeezing every drop, watching his abdomen contract violently.
I didn’t let him soften. I bent and licked him clean, my tongue swirling over his sensitive head, tracing the veins on his shaft, lapping the spend from his skin. He groaned, a raw sound of overstimulation. I kept sucking, tenderly now, nursing him back to full, aching hardness. It didn’t take long.
“Again,” I breathed, and took him deep, setting a brutal pace. I fucked my own face on his cock, my throat relaxing, taking him all. His groans were continuous now, a broken soundtrack. I brought him to the edge a second time, feeling his balls draw up tight. I released him just before the point of no return, letting him rock against the empty air, trembling.
“Please,” he gasped, the word ripped from him again. It was sweeter than any energy.
“Please, what?”
“Let me come. I need to.”
I stood, shedding the linen trousers. I was hard, painfully so. I positioned myself over him, guiding his slick, desperate cock to my entrance. I sank down onto him in one slow, excruciating slide, sheathing him completely inside me. I was still loose, open from the sphere, yet his thickness stretched me perfectly, filled the hollow the clean-up had left.
I rode him. I set a punishing rhythm, bouncing on his lap, his bound hands helpless to guide or control. My own cock bounced, untouched. The sound of our bodies meeting was wet, flesh slapping flesh. His eyes were locked on mine, blazing with a furious, surrendered pleasure.
“Come inside me,” I commanded, clenching my internal muscles around him in a rhythmic, milking grip. “Fill me up. Do it now.”
His body went rigid. The ropes creaked as he strained against them. A deep, shuddering groan tore from his chest as he climaxed a third time, a hot, pumping flood that I felt deep in my core. I rode him through it, milking him, until he was spent, softening inside me, his whole body slick with sweat and trembling uncontrollably.
I climbed off, leaving him tied, exposed, smeared with his own release. I stretched out beside him on the black sheets, propping my head on my hand. My fingers trailed through the cum on his stomach, painting idle, erotic patterns on his skin. I traced the lines of his hips, the dip of his navel, the coarse hair leading down.
He was breathless, wrecked, completely at my mercy. I leaned close, my lips brushing his ear. “That’s three,” I whispered. “I wonder how many are left.” My finger circled the head of his softly weeping cock, a ghost of a touch. He flinched, a full-body shiver of pained sensitivity. I smiled, a slow, dark thing, and continued my gentle, torturous stroking.
I smiled, a slow, dark thing, and continued my gentle, torturous stroking. My thumb passed over the slick, exposed head of his cock, a feather-light circle. He jerked against the silk ropes, a strained, wounded sound catching in his throat. His hips twitched, a futile escape from the sensation.
“So sensitive already,” I murmured, leaning close to watch the ripples of agony and pleasure on his face. “And you’ve only just begun.”
I tightened my grip, just a fraction, and began to pump him in earnest. His body was a live wire, singing with spent tension. I worked him fast and dry, the friction brutal on his oversensitive flesh. He threw his head back, teeth bared, a strangled groan echoing off the austere walls. He was hard again, painfully so, the skin flushed deep purple. I felt the inevitable climb, a steep, shuddering ascent he had no choice but to take.
“Come,” I ordered, my voice flat.
His fourth orgasm was a dry, convulsive heave. His cock pulsed violently in my hand, but only a thin, clear dribble seeped from the slit. A sob followed the spasm, raw and unbidden. I didn’t stop. I kept stroking, my hand a merciless piston. He screamed, a short, sharp cry of genuine torment, as the stimulation continued directly through the refractory period.
“Stop. Reese, for fuck’s sake, stop.”
I ignored him. I bent and took him into my mouth, swallowing him deep. The heat and wetness were a different kind of torture. I sucked lazily, my tongue a relentless, soothing pressure on the most traumatized nerves. He was chanting no no no into the air, his body alternating between arching into the sensation and trying to recoil. I felt him swell, the fifth climax building like a wave of nausea. I pulled off, watching the frantic pulse just beneath the skin.
“Not in my mouth this time,” I whispered. I spat into my palm, slicked him, and fisted him roughly. Three hard pulls was all it took.
He came with a broken scream, his back bowing off the mattress. This release was thicker, a scant half-shot of pearly fluid that spilled over my knuckles. He collapsed, weeping openly, tears carving through the sweat on his temples. The majestic demon reduced to a shuddering, sobbing ruin on his own sheets. The power was a drug, purer and more heady than any emotional energy I’d ever stolen.
I gave him no quarter. I reached for the small vial of lubricant on the nightstand. I poured a cool, generous pool into my palm and slicked him from root to tip, the glide now obscenely smooth. He flinched at the first touch, a full-body recoil. “Please,” he begged hoarsely. “I can’t. It hurts.”
“I know,” I said, and wrapped my hand around him again.
The sixth was a slow, grueling extraction. I worked him with a slow, twisting motion, my eyes locked on his ravaged face. Every stroke was a violation. He panted, wept, his muscles standing out in cords. It took minutes. When it finally wrenched itself from him, it was a bizarre, silent event—his mouth open in a soundless cry, his cock jerking, producing nothing but a shudder and a few drops of clear fluid. He looked eviscerated.
I leaned over him, my own hard cock brushing his arm. “One more,” I breathed into his ear. “Give me one more, and I’ll let you suck me.”
His eyes, glazed and red--rimmed, focused on mine. A spark of something furious and willing flickered in the depths. A negotiation. He gave a tiny, almost imperceptible nod.
My touch changed. It became agonizingly tender. I barely grazed the underside of his shaft with my fingertips. I trailed a single nail from his balls to his tip. He whimpered, his oversensitized flesh betraying him. The lightest, most fleeting brush of my thumb across the swollen head made him convulse.
The seventh orgasm stole what was left of him. It was a pathetic, damp trembling, a physiological surrender with no visible release. A long, broken groan seeped from his lips, followed by ragged, hopeless sobs. He was utterly spent, hollowed out, a vessel cracked open.
I swiftly untied the silk ropes from the headboard. His arms fell limply to his sides. I moved up the bed, straddling his chest. I positioned my aching cock before his lips, the head resting against them. “You promised,” I said, my voice thick.
His tongue emerged, a slow, weary stroke along the slit. Then he opened his mouth, and I pushed inward. He took me, his groan vibrating along my length. The sensation was electric, a feedback loop of dominance and surrender. I lowered my body, moving into a naked, inverted sprawl. My mouth found his ruined cock, and I took him deep, swallowing him down.
We were a perfect, obscene circuit—69’d on the wreckage of his black sheets. I sucked him with a passionate, reverent intensity, my own hips moving gently, fucking his mouth. He groaned around my cock, the sound a muffled, continuous vibration of overstimulation. He tried to suck back, his tongue lapping at my shaft, but his movements were weak, uncoordinated, overwhelmed by the sensation of my own mouth on him.
Tears from his face wet my balls. His hands, now free, came up to clutch weakly at my thighs, not pushing away, but clinging, anchoring himself to the only reality left—this cyclical consumption. I felt his cock twitch helplessly against my tongue, a phantom of an eighth release that his body could no longer produce. I drank his sobs, fucked his mouth, and let the dark, reciprocal rhythm claim us both, a temporary and violently intimate parity in the silent, gleaming tower.