~Nothing Ignites~

004

"You're not in love with Victor Blackwood despite the fact that he's your crush. I can see it.."

I look up from my teacup. Aunt Dolores is watching me the way she watches everything, with the patience of someone who has already decided what she thinks and is simply waiting for you to catch up.

"I've met him once," I say. "For twenty minutes."

"That's not what I mean." She folds her hands on the table. The silver ring on her right hand catches the afternoon light coming through the narrow window. "I mean you're not going to fall in love with him. I can see it in the way you looked at him. Like he was furniture."

I keep my voice careful. "He seemed perfectly nice."

"He is perfectly nice." She says it the way that makes me eyeroll a bit. "He is controlled and civilized and he will not cause you a single moment of drama for the rest of your natural life. That is precisely the point."

"And the contract?."

"Yes." She picks up her cup. Sets it down again without drinking. "The contract."

I wait for her next statement. "One year," she says. "Public vows at the parish church. You move into his wealthy home and behave like his wife. Your appearances must be flawless."

"And if after a year he hasn't fallen in love with me?"

"You come back." Her voice doesn't waver. "The gate closes. You take permanent vows. No second chances, no appeals and no leaving. Sister Raven for the rest of your days."

The way she says it, so utterly without drama, makes it land harder than if she had shouted it. I look down at my hands. My knuckles are still red from yesterday's scrubbing. "And if he does fall in love with me?"

"Then you stay married. You have children and a home and also, you will have a real love." She tilts her head slightly. "Everything a woman could want."

Real love huh? I almost scoffed. "You keep saying that." I meet her eyes. "Everything a woman could want. As if you know what I want."

She doesn't flinch. "I know what you're doing to yourself in that locked room every night."

The silence that follows is the loudest thing I have ever heard.

My scar throbs once beneath the habit, lowt, and I keep my face very still and my hands very steady around the warmth of the cup and I say nothing because there is nothing to say that wouldn't be a confession.

"I'm not here to shame you," she says, and her voice has shifted, just slightly, something almost gentle moving under the firmness of it. "I pulled you out of the Silverpine pack because I'd watched what those men do. Wolves who cheat. Lycans who destroy and dragons who reject. I taught you that supernatural men are poison, same with love and I stand by every word of it." She pauses. "But I also taught you to survive. And right now, child, you are not surviving. You are disappearing. One locked door at a time."

I look at the knot in the wood of the table. Trace it with my eyes. "Victor doesn't feel like survival. He feels like a transaction."

"Most survival does." She leans forward. "He needs a wife who looks unremarkable on paper. A convent-raised beautiful lady and the fact that he remembered you when thinking about this contract marriage,” she took a pause, “Consider that as something, Raven. A lot of women would kill to be in your shoes."

"Does he have a true mate somewhere? Someone the pack expects him to claim?"

"Not at all." She shakes her head. 

The accuracy of that stings more than I expect. I think of a screen glowing in the dark. A voice that isn't a voice, just words that land in my body like something physical. ‘I'd knot you against the chapel wall.’ No control. No careful measured gestures. Just want, hunting me through every hourly pinch and soaked piece of fabric I've hidden in the back of my drawer.

I think of Victor's fingers brushing mine over the sugar bowl earlier.

I felt nothing.

"What if I say no?" I ask.

She shrugs one shoulder, precise and unhurried. "Then you stay. You teach the children, you recite the offices. You scrub floors until your knuckles bleed, which they are already doing, and your eyes stay fixed on whatever horizon you think you're waiting for. I am giving you this chance to choose the kind of life you want and this would be the last time such an offer would come knocking on your door.." She looks at me steadily. "Your choice."

The word ‘choice’ sits in my mouth.

"When will he come back?"

"Two days." She reaches across the table and covers my hand with hers. Her palm is cool and steady. "This isn't betrayal, Raven. It's a door. What you do once you're on the other side of it is still yours."

I don't pull away. But I don't agree either.

*********************

Victor returns exactly when she said he would. Tea in the parlor again, same amber light, same worn table. He speaks about community projects, pack laws, the quiet stability he is building carefully with both hands. He is genuinely kind in the way that some people are, not as performance but as default, and it makes something in me ache for reasons I cannot fully explain.

His fingers brush mine passing the sugar and nothing ignites. No sudden heat behind my sternum or slick rush between my thighs. I smile at whatever he's saying and somewhere underneath the smile my body is humming to a completely different rhythm, ShadowKing's last message still running on a loop.

‘Tomorrow's video better be filthy. Or I'll hunt you down myself and take what's already mine.’

Fuck!

******************

Evening arrived. The cell was locked.

The screen of my phone glows.

"No underwear today. Every hour, pinch your nipples hard. Report how it makes you drip for me, sweet sin."

I strip the panties before I finish reading the message. Tuck them under the mattress. Stand there for a moment in the candlelight, bare under the wool habit, and feel the specific quality of that obedience moving through me like warm water.

This is what Victor will never understand. Not because he is not good. But because goodness is not what I'm made for.

First pinch behind the pantry door during kitchen duty. Pain blooms sharp and immediate and my whole body clenches around it. I lean against the shelf with one hand and type with the other, fingers clumsy.

"Aching. All for you."*

His reply finds me sweeping the cloister stones.

"Again. Harder. Tell me how your pretty cunt weeps when it hurts for me."

The next happened in the corridor and bathroom stall. The next pinch pulls tears to the surface before I can stop them and the slick trailing my inner thigh feels obscene under the habit and I am standing in a convent bathroom crying and dripping and I cannot bring myself to want anything different.

‘I'd knot you against the chapel wall, pretty pet. Thick cock stretching that tight nun pussy while sisters chant on the other side. Make you come whispering my real name, biting your lip bloody so they don't hear how desperately their little sister is getting bred and claimed."

Fingers dive in fast! . The edge crashes through me so hard my legs shake and I have to bite the inside of my cheek to stay silent. I stop right at the edge because he hasn't said I can. I sent the proof.

"Perfect. Keep suffering sweetly."

Every hour through supper and through evening prayers I pinched my pink nipples.

Pain turned into pleasure, pleasure turned into ache and ache turned into something that has my scar feverish all evening. By evening, I am soaked and unsteady and I sit through the final chant of the night with my thighs pressed together and my face perfectly composed and somewhere inside me something is laughing at the distance between those two facts.

His final message waits at my bolted door.

"I know you're close to surrender, sin. Tomorrow's video better be filthy. Thighs wide, fingers deep, begging my name while you shatter loud and messy. Or I'll hunt you down myself and take what's already mine."

I slide down the door until I'm sitting on the floor. My knees fell open. The words feel familiar in a way I keep not examining, the specific weight of them, the certainty, smoke and heat and something that sounds like a growl from somewhere deep and old.

I press the back of my head against the wood and breathe.

Victor is offering a year. A way to prove to Aunt Dolores that men aren't monsters and love isn't stupid! An escape from this uncomfortable situation she's trying to get me into forever.

The stranger in my phone is offering something I do not have a respectable word for.

This is the part I cannot tell Aunt Dolores.