Prove Your Obedience(3)

The guest let go of me, and hands I couldn’t name hauled me up off my knees like I weighed nothing. Daddy’s grip closed around my arm. Before I could find my balance, I was flung forward, and the edge of the desk met my stomach. The cool wood bit into my skin as they pressed me down, my arms stretched out wide, my cheek turned against the polished surface.

The robe was already gone from my shoulders. They pulled it the rest of the way away, and the cold air of the study closed over me. There was no dignity left to protect. Only the hard wood beneath me and the sound of my own breath, loud and uneven in the quiet.

Daddy’s voice was right beside my ear, low and hungry. “Face down, Grace. Don’t you dare lift your head.”

I didn’t.

I pressed my forehead against the wood and breathed, trying to remember what it felt like to be certain of anything. The lamp cast its low glow across the surface in front of me, and I stared at it until the light blurred.

The guest stepped up behind me. His hands settled on my hips. A sound broke out of me, and it was muffled at once when Daddy’s hand clamped over my mouth.

What came after, I knew only in pieces. The heat of Daddy’s breath against my neck. The sharp press of his teeth at my shoulder, hard enough to leave a mark. The desk shifting beneath me, and the lamp rattling faintly on its base. I kept my eyes shut and held on to the grain of the wood as if it could keep me from coming apart.

“Feel that?” Daddy murmured against my ear, his fingers still pressed against my jaw. “That’s what you get when you’re too much for one man, Grace.”

Tears ran down my face and soaked into the desk. I wanted to answer him. I wanted to say something, anything, that would prove I was still myself. But there was only the pounding of my heart and the heat in my face and the terrible, tangled feeling I couldn’t name. Fear and want and shame wound together so tightly that I couldn’t pull one thread loose without the rest.

“There she is,” the guest said, his voice rough. “She likes it.”

“She does now,” Daddy replied, almost amused. “She’s been greedy for it all night.”

The words landed like a slap. I wanted to deny them. I couldn’t, because some part of me had stopped arguing a long time ago.

The room tilted. My vision went white at the edges, and a tremor ran through me from my shoulders to my fingertips. My legs shook so badly I couldn’t have stood if they’d let me. I lost track of time. I lost track of where I ended and the night began.

Somewhere in the distance, the clock on the mantel kept ticking. It was the only thing in the room that hadn’t changed. I clung to the sound, but it kept slipping away from me, one tick at a time.

“That’s my good girl,” Daddy said.

I wanted to hate the way those words made me feel. I wanted to hate him. I wasn’t sure I had ever managed it, not even once.

Then his voice cut through the haze like a knife. “That’s enough. You’re done with her.”

The guest stepped away. The cold rushed in where he had been, and I whimpered into Daddy’s palm, shaking, hollow, unsure whether what I felt was relief.

Daddy took his place behind me. His hands settled on my hips, steady and certain, and I understood that nothing about this night was ending.

“You’re mine now, Grace,” he said against my ear. “Both of us. And you’re going to feel it.”

I was broken. Completely, helplessly broken. My body trembled under the weight of everything that had happened, and my mind had gone somewhere far away, somewhere quiet, where neither of them could reach me.

I thought of the door, and the key, and the sound the lock had made when this began. I had walked into this room on my own two feet. That was the truth I couldn’t escape, and it sat heavy in my chest.

The study filled with the sound of my own breathing, ragged and small. I was a shaking woman bent over a desk, belonging to two men who had decided I was theirs.

And Daddy was only getting started.