Chapter 6: The Costume Party Invitation
Entry: October 31st
The text came three days after the night with Cana. Three days of moving through my routines at the hospital like a ghost, my hands performing tasks while my mind replayed the slick sound of the harness, the shudder of a body giving in.Mira noticed my quiet. She put it down to stress from my practicum.
When my phone buzzed on the kitchen counter, she was right there, chopping vegetables for a salad.I watched her read the screen over my shoulder.
Z: Costume party at The Broken Crown on Saturday.Come.Bring your sister.Mira’s knife stilled. A slow smile spread across her face. “A party,” she said, and I heard the old thrill in her voice, the one I used to chase as a kid trailing after her. “We should go.It’ll be fun. You need to get out of your head.”
You have no idea where my head is, I thought.But I nodded.“Yeah. Okay.”
Me: What’s the theme?Z: Temptation.
Saturday arrived with a brittle autumn chill.Mira spent the afternoon transforming herself in her bedroom. I could hear the rustle of fabric, the occasional curse as she wrestled with something. I stood before my own closet, my fingers brushing past my few dresses.Temptation.The word felt like a key in a lock.
I chose leather pants, black and impossibly tight, that I’d bought on a whim and never worn.A cropped white linen blouse. I used a spare bootlace to tie it closed under my breasts, leaving my stomach bare.The effect was sharp, predatory. In the mirror, I didn’t see a nursing student. I saw someone who knew how to use a cutlass.I slid the plastic prop into my belt.
Mira’s door opened just as the doorbell rang.She was a vision in black lace and satin. A corset that pushed her breasts up into dramatic swell, the tops dusted with something shimmery. Fishnet stockings, thigh-high boots with a deadly heel. Delicate, semi-sheer wings were affixed to her back, frames of black wire strung with sheer fabric. Her long white hair was curled into voluptuous waves.A succubus.She grinned, striking a pose. “Do I look tempting enough?”
My throat was dry.“Yes.”
The bell chimed again, impatiently.
I opened the door.Zeref stood in the hallway, and the air seemed to thin. His costume was simple, brutal. A tight, long-sleeved shirt and trousers in a matte, blood-red vinyl that looked like skin.Small, sculpted horns curled back from his forehead. A thin, pointed tail swayed slightly behind him.The devil. His eyes, dark as pitch, swept over Mira first, a frank appraisal that made her blush-laugh.Then they cut to me. They traveled from my tricorne hat, down the exposed line of my throat, over the taut skin of my midriff, down the length of the leather-clad legs. His predatory smile wasn’t hidden tonight.It was the centerpiece.
“Well,” he said, his voice a low purr.“A succubus and a pirate. Quite the pair of temptresses.” His gaze lingered on the knot of my blouse. “Ready for some mischief?”
“Always,” Mira laughed, grabbing a small clutch. She kissed my cheek, her scent—jasmine and night-blooming flowers—overwhelming. “Let’s go before I break an ankle in these things.”
The Broken Crown was a basement pub, all low ceilings, stone walls, and the accumulated heat of a hundred bodies.Music pulsed through the floor—a deep, tribal beat swallowed by the roar of conversation. The air was thick with the smell of spilled beer, cheap perfume, and sweat. People in elaborate costumes pressed against each other, a kaleidoscope of angels and demons, monsters and fantasies.
Zeref moved through the crowd with an unnatural ease, people parting for him without seeming to know why. He found a high-top table near the back, a semi-private nook shadowed by a large, faux-stone pillar. He ordered a bottle of expensive tequila and three glasses with a nod to the bartender, who knew him.Mira was in her element. She danced near our table, her wings trembling with her movements, drawing eyes. She laughed at shouts from across the room, tossing her hair. She was the shimmering center of gravity, and I watched her, feeling the cold key of power in my pocket.
Zeref leaned close to my ear, his breath hot.“She has no idea, does she? How badly you want to ruin her.”
I didn’t look at him.I watched her throat as she threw her head back to drink. “No.”
“Good.” He poured a shot of clear tequila and pushed it toward me. “Tonight, you learn to tempt in public. To make her want without knowing it’s you she’s wanting.”
Mira came back, flushed and breathing hard. “God, it’s hot in here!” She fanned herself, which only accentuated the rise and fall of her corseted chest.She reached for the tequila Zeref offered, her fingers brushing his.
He held her gaze as she drank. “Having fun, Mira?”
“So much.” Her eyes were bright. “You were right, this was a great idea.”
“Ideas are my specialty.” His hand, resting on the table, was inches from mine. “Lisanna’s costume is quite striking, don’t you think? So… authoritative.”
Mira blinked, as if really seeing me for the first time tonight. Her eyes tracked over the leather, the bare skin, the defiant set of my jaw under the hat. A flicker of something—surprise, confusion, a dawning recognition—passed through her expression.It wasn’t the usual protective pride. It was assessment.“You look… different, Lis,” she said, her voice slightly unmoored.
“It’s a costume,” I said, my voice flat.I took a shot. The tequila burned a clean line down to my stomach.The music shifted, something slower, heavier. Zeref’s hand closed around my wrist under the table.His thumb pressed into my pulse point. “Dance with your sister.”
It wasn’t a suggestion. It was the next step in the manual.My heart hammered against his grip. I looked at Mira, who was swaying slightly to the beat, watching the dance floor with a tipsy smile. The key turned in the lock.I stood.I took her hand.“Dance with me.”
She laughed, surprised. “Since when do you dance?”
“Since now.”
I led her into the thick of the crowd. Bodies pressed in from all sides, a ocean of heat and movement. We found a small space and she began to dance, eyes closed, lost in the music and the effect she was having on the space around her.I moved closer.My hands found her hips. She opened her eyes, startled, but the alcohol and the atmosphere softened the surprise into a slow, tipsy smile. “Alright, pirate,” she slurred playfully.I pulled her against me. The rigid boning of her corset dug into my bare stomach. The netting of her stockings scratched my leather-clad legs. I moved with her, not to the music’s beat, but to a slower, more possessive rhythm.My face was near her neck. I could smell the sweat mingling with her perfume.Her laughter faded.Her breathing changed.This wasn’t sisterly anymore. The crowd forced us even closer.My thigh slipped between hers as we turned.
A stranger, a man dressed as a satyr, leered at her.He reached out a hand toward her wing.
My arm shot out, faster than I thought possible.My hand clamped around his wrist. I didn’t say a word. I just looked at him, the cold from my gut pouring into my eyes.He flinched, muttered something, and melted back into the crowd.
Mira stared at me.Her pupils were wide, black pools in the strobe light. “Lisanna…”
I leaned in, my lips brushing the shell of her ear.I could feel her shudder. “You’re mine tonight,” I whispered, the words swallowed by the music. “No one else gets to touch.”
I felt her melt. It was a physical sensation, a giving way of the muscles in her back under my hands. A little sigh escaped her, a sound I’d only ever heard through a wall.It was submission.Not to Zeref.To me.
From the shadows of our table, I knew he was watching.This was the lesson.The application of theory.The public claim.
I guided her, drunk on power, back through the throng. She was pliant, her earlier boisterous energy replaced by a dazed quiet. When we reached the table, Zeref’s smile was a knife-edge of approval.
When we reached the table, Zeref’s smile was a knife-edge of approval. He didn’t speak. He simply pushed a full glass of water toward Mira, whose fingers trembled slightly wrapping around it. “The air outside is cold,” he said, his voice cutting neatly through the bass still thrumming in my bones. “I’ll call the car.”
The ride home was silent except for the slick sound of tires on wet pavement. Mira stared out the window, her reflection ghostly against the black glass. She hadn’t looked at me since the dance floor. The space between us on the leather seat felt charged, a vacuum waiting to be filled. Zeref sat across from us, a dark silhouette observing the experiment’s progress.
He walked us to the apartment door but didn’t cross the threshold. “My work here is done,” he murmured, his hand briefly squeezing my shoulder. His other hand tipped Mira’s chin up. “Sweet dreams, succubus.” Then he was gone, melting back into the elevator’s light.
The apartment was dark and still, holding the day’s emptiness. Mira flicked on a lamp, its weak glow making the shadows in the living room seem deeper. She stumbled once, kicking off her boots with clumsy, uncoordinated motions. The wings snagged on the doorframe. “Damn these things,” she slurred, fumbling for the clasp.
“Let me.”
My voice sounded foreign. She went still. I stepped behind her, my knuckles brushing the hot skin of her back as I worked the small latch. The wire frame loosened. I lifted the wings away and set them carefully on the couch. They looked pathetic now, a discarded prop.
She turned around. The corset forced her breaths into shallow, visible lifts of her chest. Smudged makeup darkened her eyes. “What was that, Lis?” Her question was a whisper scraped raw. “On the dance floor.”
“You were distracted.” I reached up and slowly removed my tricorne hat. I placed it over the wings. “I was bringing you back.”
“By claiming me?” A confused, fragile laugh escaped her. “Since when do you… since when do you touch me like that?”
I moved past her into the kitchen, needing to break the line of her gaze. I filled a glass with water, the tap’s groan loud in the silence. “You’ve been touched like that before. I’ve heard it.” I didn’t look at her. “Through the wall.”
The silence that followed was absolute. I could feel the shift, the moment understanding began its cold, terrible drip. She remembered the door left ajar. The noises she’d assumed were private.
“You watched.” Her voice wasn’t accusing. It was hollow with realization.
“Yes.” I turned and leaned against the counter, the cool granite at my back. I took a sip of water, let her see the steady grip of my hand. “I watched him. I watched you. I saw what you needed.”
She crossed her arms over her chest, a defensive gesture that only emphasized what the corset revealed. “That was… that’s private, Lisanna. That was for me. It’s just sex with him, it doesn’t mean—”
“I know what it is.” I put the glass down. The click was definitive. “It’s a transaction. You get pleasure. He gets control.” I took a step toward her. “But you don’t unravel for him, Mira. Not really. You perform.”
Another step. The living room rug was soft under my stocking feet.
“I heard the difference.” My voice dropped, matching the low rhythm from the club. “The moment you stopped thinking. The moment it wasn’t a performance anymore. That sound… it wasn’t for him.”
She was backed against the arm of the sofa now, nowhere to go. Her eyes were wide, glistening. “Stop.”
I didn’t. I closed the final distance until the scent of her, jasmine and sweat and her, filled my head. My hands came up, not to grab, but to hover beside her face. “You taught me how to care for people. How to be gentle.” My thumbs brushed the high arches of her cheekbones. “You never taught me how to want.”
A tear broke free, tracing through the shimmer on her skin. She was shaking.
“I want to be the reason,” I whispered, my mouth so close to hers I felt her next ragged exhale. “Let me be the reason you come apart.”
I kissed her.
It wasn’t gentle. It was a claim. My mouth found hers with all the pent-up hunger I’d mapped onto Cana’s body, all the furious longing from years of watching her live in a light I couldn’t touch. She made a muffled sound against my lips—a protest that dissolved into a gasp as my tongue swept in. Her hands came up, fluttering, then fisted in the material of my cropped blouse. She wasn’t pushing me away. She was holding on.
I guided her down onto the sofa. The old cushions sighed beneath us. I straddled her hips, the leather of my pants creaking, pinning the thick satin of her skirt. I broke the kiss to look at her. Her lips were parted, swollen, her breath coming in quick pulses. The defiance was gone. Raw need stared back at me. It was terrifying. It was everything.
My fingers went to the laces of her corset. They were complex, a series of knots and pulls. I worked them with a clinical focus I’d learned in my nursing textbooks, each tug loosening the tight hold. With each inch of give, her breathing deepened. When the final lace slipped free, I peeled the stiff material away.
She lay there in the lamplight, exposed from the waist up. Her skin was marked with red lines from the boning. I traced one with my fingertip, then lowered my head and followed it with my tongue. She arched off the couch, a sharp cry escaping her. Her hands tangled in my short hair.
I explored her with my mouth, learning the geography I’d only ever imagined. I was methodical, worshipful, ruthless. I listened. Every hitched breath, every stifled moan was a clue. When my teeth grazed a particular spot on her neck, her whole body seized. I did it again.
“Lisanna… God… we can’t…”
“We are.” I sat back, pulling the tied lace of my own blouse. The knot gave way. I shrugged it off. Her eyes drank in the sight of me—the same but entirely different. I took her hand and placed it over my heart. “Feel that? That’s for you. It’s always been for you.”
A sob broke from her then. It sounded like relief. It sounded like surrender.
She pulled me down to her, and this time her kiss was hungry, desperate. Her hands were everywhere, mapping my back, my ribs, fumbling with the button of my pants. The world narrowed to the scratch of the sofa fabric, the taste of salt on her skin, the overwhelming rightness of her weight beneath me. There were no more thoughts of Zeref, of Cana, of lessons. There was only the frantic, silent language of hands and mouths, the frantic race toward a cliff we’d both seen from a distance for years.
I slipped my hand between us, beneath the waistband of her stockings. She was wet, hot, ready. Her eyes flew open, locking onto mine. I saw the final fragment of her resistance shatter.
“Please,” she breathed, the word a prayer and a command.
I obeyed.
I obeyed. My fingers slid through her wetness, feeling her clench around nothing, and her head fell back against the couch cushion with a hard thump. A ragged moan tore from her throat, a sound so honest it seemed to scrape the walls clean.
I watched her face, studying the frantic dance of pleasure and disbelief beneath her closed eyelids. This was the unraveling.I had caused it.
A sudden, violent need seized me—to see, to consume, to own the source of that sound. I shifted off the sofa, my knees hitting the hardwood floor with a jarring crack.The cool air of the room washed over my heated skin. I looked up at her, sprawled on the edge of the cushion, legs half-open, chest heaving.Her gaze was cloudy, drunk on sensation.“Open,” I said, my voice rough.
Her thighs tightened instinctively.I placed my hands on the inside of her knees. Her skin was fever-hot.I didn’t ask again. I pushed, applying steady, unyielding pressure until her legs fell apart, revealing the dark, soaked triangle of her panties stretched taut over her. The intricate fishnet of her stockings mapped a diamond pattern across her trembling inner thighs.
I hooked my fingers into the waistband of her stockings and her panties. I didn’t slide them down.I tore them.The sound was a sharp, punctuating rip in the humid silence. The delicate fishnet shredded like cobwebs. The cotton of her panties gave way with a dry thread-snap. She cried out, a short, sharp sound of shock, but she didn’t close her legs.She lifted her hips off the sofa, a silent, desperate offering.
I stared at her, fully exposed now.The dark, neat curls glistening under the lamplight. The swollen, pink folds, slick and utterly open. I could smell her, a dense, musky perfume that was uniquely Mira, mixed with the ghost of her jasmine lotion. It was the scent from the hallway, concentrated and real.
My tongue touched her first in a slow, flat stroke from bottom to top.Her entire body bowed, a strained arch that lifted her shoulders off the couch. “Fuck!” The word was guttural, torn from some deep, untapped place.
I did it again, learning her shape. The salt-bitter taste of her skin, the richer, primal flavor of her arousal. I focused on the hard nub of her clit, circling it with the tip of my tongue, then sucking it gently.
“Oh God, Lisanna… right there, please, right there—” Her words dissolved into a choked gasp.
I pushed my tongue inside her, fucking her with it, mimicking what I’d seen in the dark room, what I’d practiced on Cana.But this was different.This was a conquest. Her heels dug into my back, her hands fisted in my hair, pulling almost to the point of pain. The rhythm of her hips against my face was frantic, unlearned, and purely instinctual.
“Don’t stop, don’t you fucking stop,” she chanted, her voice breaking on each syllable.I added a finger, sliding it into her tight, clutching heat. She was so wet it was effortless. The intrusion made her scream, a raw, unfiltered sound that echoed in our quiet apartment. I curled my finger, searching, remembering anatomy textbooks, remembering Cana’s gasped instructions.I found the spot.Her reaction was instant, electrocuting. Her thighs clamped around my head, blinding me, her sounds becoming shrill, continuous. I worked her with my mouth and my finger, a relentless, focused rhythm. The world was reduced to this: the taste of her, the sound of her, the violent tremor of her muscles under my hands gripping her thighs.
“I’m gonna—I can’t—Lisanna, I’m gonna come!” It was a warning, a plea, a prayer.I sucked harder, pushed deeper. Her orgasm ripped through her, a seismic shock. Her body stiffened, rigid, and a broken, sobbing wail was forced from her lungs as she came against my mouth, a flood of wet heat pulsing around my finger. I drank her down, my own need a desperate, throbbing ache between my legs, but this was enough.This was everything.
She collapsed, boneless, her limbs sliding off me.Ragged, hiccuping breaths filled the silence. I rested my forehead against her inner thigh, feeling the aftershocks twitch through her skin.The lamp flickered.
From the floor, I looked up at her ruined form.Her torn stockings. The shine of sweat and saliva on her skin.The deep, languid emptiness in her half-lidded eyes.
She slowly turned her head to look down at me.Her expression was shattered, hollowed out, awe-struck.
“You…” she whispered, her voice utterly spent. “You were watching… and you learned all that?”
I climbed up, my own body aching. I loomed over her, caging her with my arms on the sofa back. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, never breaking eye contact. “I didn’t learn it for him,” I said, the truth finally naked between us. “I learned it for you.”