ISAK & Red: An enemies-to-lovers Dark Romance Read online

  “Fuck.” I struggled to find air.

  “Yes. Fuck.” He licked at my pussy. “You taste good.”

  I think I gurgled something at him.

  Whatever.

  Dropped there, I slept a while on the tousled bed before dawn, heard him run the shower.

  I awoke with him inside me again. He dragged me off the bed, with my hands weakly clutching at quilt, pulling some of it onto the floor where pillows waited.

  And him. I heard him chuckle, felt him kneel and straddle me.

  From behind, he thrust in.

  Pleasure bloomed. I squeaked.

  Belly down, I blinked away sleep, felt him drive in then thud full hilt inside my pussy, parting my already spread legs. He draped me over two pillows, rucking up the strayed quilt.

  I was plowed thoroughly, woken completely, and when I tried to climb to hands and knees, he squashed me floorward and kept pounding.

  The floor shifted, or I was sliding, smothered under toppling pillows and rumpled quilt. Mounted, fucked, and thumped into the floor, I keened at the forced pleasure.

  Then he was coming and was withdrawing, with the last of his come squirted onto my back.

  The wet, splattering warmth was obvious. I had barely clawed at the sheets and seen light and the room, and he flopped down near my side.

  Come covered my legs and back.

  “Ugh.” I shut my eyes. “Mess.”

  “Not yours to worry about. We will go soon. You can shower and then we’ll pack.”

  I made a harrumphing sound into the pillow gathered under my face, sighed. Then realized I tasted blood. My lip stung and seemed to be swollen. When I touched it, my finger collected blood. His rough sex had crammed my face into something too hard.

  Blood always looked appalling. As I stared at the it, he noticed and studied me, but said nothing. My ankle hurt too, and I would surely have a bruise there.

  The hardness in his expression was nothing new.

  Another day, another scene where I’d had orgasms and temporary joy. I had been a fuckdoll rather than a person. One never felt like anything more than used after a mesmer had you. Thoroughly used, but the hope for more had a habit of making my eyes sting with unexpected tears. Like now. I wiped them away.

  Hope was ever present. How did you make a man who had forgotten the meaning of right and moral figure out what good was?

  Make that figure out what it was, again. He must have once been ordinary?

  That was it. I must make him remember how to be ordinary. I stuck a bookmark on that.

  Isak, ordinary… hmmm.

  The dog barged in then – Banjo – shoving open the door with its nose. It wagged its tail madly looking from me to Isak and back, as if wondering who to go to. Or where its next meal was coming from.

  “Here, boy.” Isak beckoned to him then sat on the bed and patted the dog. He was still unreadable, but the behavior was new.

  When had I ever seen the man with a pet?

  First base in ordinary – patting a dog. Chalk up a one on my list.

  There was hope. There was always a seed of hope, wriggling up from the dark cracks in the pavement.

  CHAPTER 12

  RED

  With Banjo happily camped in the back seat, we drove off at dawn with Isak at the wheel – heading south-west at the intersection outside the town simply because he felt like going that way. The road was well-cared for with few potholes, though it narrowed to single lane here and there.

  The two of us, venturing into the unknown, except I knew him well. The reverse was also true. He knew me.

  Though I had a helluva lot more gaps in my memories.

  While I mused on this, the car rattled over bumps. A paperback slipped from the dashboard and dropped onto my legs. Having caught it before it fell into the footwell, I glanced at the cover then began to flick through the pages. Isak had been reading this. Reading used to be a thing I did. Books had been a balm, a way to escape the rude reality of the world.

  The owner of the car must have left the book. Wait, no. This had been in the car before this one? I flicked more pages, not really seeing them, and a pen rolled from the middle. I checked the cover again.

  Eddie Izzard. What an odd name. Wasn’t he a comedian? Believe Me: A Memoir of Love, Death, and Jazz Chickens. I snorted a laugh. Maybe I should read this?

  Or not.

  I dropped the book into the footwell and found the pen still balanced on my knee. Idly, I twirled it in my fingers, as if learning a cheerleading baton routine.

  That episode at Ted’s house had begun this road-trip escape.

  New memories shook into place. Ugly ones.

  His men hauling me to a sofa and stripping my underwear down to my ankles. The jolting pain as the shove of a hand in the middle of my back forced me to collapse over the arm of the sofa…

  I could remember more than I had before. My brain was making more sense of things.

  A girl had come into the room with a gun pushed to her jaw by her own delicate, slender-fingered hands. I could see it. Her own hands.

  That.

  It was bizarre.

  I sat straighter in the seat. Her youth made her remarkable because I knew now why she had done it. I remembered words, conversations and more.

  Isak had controlled her. Of course he had. It crawled a sourness into my stomach.

  Had he really done that?

  Though my mind had been partially AWOL, I was sure. She had been a teenager at most, but likely younger than thirteen.

  The paleness of her face and smallness of the wrists on those gun-holding hands.

  “Ted’s daughter,” I whispered.

  “What?” Isak turned his head. The car kept growling along.

  “Did you hook a child with those dirty claws of yours?” Oh, now. I was being brave. Too fucking brave. Dangerously so. But that was such a dirty thing to do. Dirtier than the dirtiest acts he had forced on me. “Did you?”

  The wrinkles on his forehead deepened and stayed deep. Was that worry? Not him. Isak regarded me with robot steel in his gaze and said nothing.

  “Did you… grab a very young girl with your mesmer power? And if so, why? How many other kids have you laid hands on?” My lips pinched tight. How would I ever know what was true if he denied it?

  This riled me more than anything. Rage lit up my insides in a righteous, red-hot flare.

  Again, I waited for an answer and found my fingers wrapped around that pen, tight enough to make them whiten.

  “You don’t want to be asking me—”

  I ignored the grit in his voice, the warning there.

  “I do! Do you grab onto young girls, and I just never saw it?” Here was I, the angel of righteousness.

  He turned his attention to the road, and I could see he was waiting for me to simply forget my line of inquiry.

  My heartbeats made louder and louder lub-dubs. Wait. Wait… He has to answer. He cannot just be silent.

  He was.

  My anger climbed, tightened, coiled, wrenched in. It wasn’t just this, it was everything he had ever done to me and to the others.

  Fuck you. Fuck you, Isak. You don’t get to do this. Though I knew it wasn’t likely to succeed even as I did it, even as my right hand dived across the space between us with that pen angled to stick his eye and hopefully drive into his brain.

  Not missing this time. I grunted in the last microsecond of the swing.

  The pen and my fist smacked into him. He had thrown up his hand and the pen had pierced his palm. It sank in. Half an inch deep. I let go, breathless, awed. The pen stayed there, embedded, until he plucked it out with his teeth.

  Freeze.

  That was a command.

  Breathless was nothing. I lost the ability to breathe for a while, until he relented.

  Seconds only, and maybe I would’ve overcome that fatal command. Maybe. Else he’d be using it on random assholes.

  I gasped in air, chest heaving, with the rest of me faste
ned to the upholstery.

  His command made me a statue in my seat, while he slowed, and exited and drove somewhere. I’d known. Of course I couldn’t kill him, no matter how much I wanted to. I’d still needed to try, for my own sanity and indignant morality.

  Laughable how dumb us humans can be.

  The car had stopped and ahead were trees.

  “Get out.” The car door opened, and I was able to unbuckle the seatbelt and climb out. He stood there, assessing me, the rigid lines of his jaw the main physical clue to his rage. I could feel it though – we connected enough for the backwash to scare me.

  “You do not get to accuse me of fucking kids. Ever!” He spat the last word as he slammed the door. His nostrils flared and he flicked his gaze down me as if I were goop scraped from the bottom of his shoe.

  “Strip then walk there.” His fingers flicked open toward a large white gum tree with its bark peeling off it like paper. “Be glad I’m not fucking burying you.”

  He’d said fuck, twice. That alone rang alarms.

  I undressed, trembling, tripping on my panties as I drew them off. With my clothing laid in a lonely pile among the sprigs of grass on the mostly bare red earth, it did seem as if I was about to be shot and buried. I was aware of the traffic noises, but they were distant. I hoped we were concealed. Turning my head to check that proved impossible. He wouldn’t want us arrested though, would he?

  He’s not killing me but… what have I done?

  I ended up with my back to the wide trunk, with bark scraping at my skin. Drooping branches and leaves framed the sky and an angry Isak. He hauled off his T-shirt, revealing his torso and the ripple of muscles that I had zero doubt were about to be used to hurt me. That V of stomach ridges taunted me, luring the eye downward, into his pants… I shook, partly in fear, partly in desire, and felt the rise and scrunch of my nipples as he observed me.

  That familiar shiver of soft heat down my front, seeping into my flesh and hastening my breaths, making my pussy swell and making me yearn for him…

  If I spread my thighs, maybe it would make him change his mind?

  I shut my eyes in a futile attempt to gain serenity, yet still I trembled.

  Fucked up beyond all recognition – this was my normal.

  “What did you do wrong, Red?” Oh my, that growly voice and those piercing eyes – they reached inside me and messed me up, bigtime.

  I swallowed, listened to my heart for all of five beats. Where is my courage?

  I made myself focus on his face. “I said… I suggested you were a pedo.”

  “You did. And you will never do that again. Say it.”

  “I won’t.” I sucked on my bottom lip and poked at with my tongue. “I promise, I won’t.” In actual fact, his extreme reaction had reassured me. “Why then?”

  “Her? She was our only chance. What do I do with you?” He cocked his head slightly and began to draw his belt from the loops of his pants. The slither of that was always snakelike to my mind – full of the ominous promise of pain and lust and mindfucks.

  “Say, please.” He smiled his flat smile.

  “Please,” I croaked, tongue-swiped my lips.

  “Good.”

  The first flick of the belt was a shock as it swatted across my breast, my nipple, smacking in, flaring pain, and then… then making me moan. The flood of heat then that first hint of wetness between my legs.

  Already, he slew me. Hating my reaction was old. My feet shifted, crunching on the dry leaves. An ant crawled over my hip. I still hated this.

  “I truly need to punish you. Not orgasms, not the seesaw of joy and hurt, just fucking with you and hurting you. How much you have angered me. How. Fucking. Much.” The belt flicked and lashed at me, forced more pain through my flesh. More strikes, more, harder ones on my thighs. I squealed and dearly wished to run away, but I could not.

  Then I managed a sway to the right.

  “Don’t move away.”

  I dug my hands into the bark on either side of me and cursed on the next strike.

  Isak chuckled. “That’s it. Show me how much this hurts.” The bass-deep tone of his words stirred me even as he goaded.

  “Spread your legs.”

  I did so.

  He whacked the belt onto my pussy, once, twice.

  Fuck. I gasped and writhed like a mouse stuck in a trap. My scuffling feet cleared a space in the dirt underfoot.

  I cried out in whispers then croaky shouts that pained my throat. Tears wove down my face. Then… finally, he stopped, and I saw him through my tears, red-faced, panting, with his teeth showing.

  The blood from the wound on his palm had curled to his fingertips. That same hand gripped the belt. The end of the belt coiled on the ground and the blood fell in small drops to the dirt beside it – no doubt the wound had reopened due to the effort he’d employed to whip me.

  Karma. Fucking karma.

  Panting, sobbing, I felt the fire throb across my stomach, breasts, and thighs.

  “This is what happens when I lose it. Do not do this again.”

  I blinked, shook my head.

  His eyes were fixed on me. “I’m not done.”

  Fear renewed as he stepped in and tied my wrists at my front with his shirt then hoisted them higher so he could use my dress to rope them to a branch above me. He turned me to face the tree.

  “Not done.” He ground out the words as if extinguishing a cigarette butt on my body, then he stepped backward with a slow, deliberate tread – one, two, three.

  I blinked away tears, leaned my forehead on the tree.

  When several smacks from the belt landed on my back then on my rear, I jerked at each and every blow.

  A long pause followed.

  I sneaked a glance over my shoulder and saw him squatting with his hands threaded through his hair, and he was staring at me. Only this time I didn’t feel I was goop from his shoe. An alien pet? A possession he couldn’t recall buying? Yeah, I didn’t know his precise thoughts, only that he’d left me pining for him. And that he desired me and was confused.

  Isak, confused?

  Over and over, he made me want this, despite the punishment. It was demeaning and inevitable, and I really should be used to it.

  I sagged into the bindings on my wrists and let the ties take some of my weight – not a good move, since it made the cloth tighten.

  CHAPTER 13

  ISAK

  Eddie Izzard: ‘What do you do in life? What do you create, what do you make, what do you add to the human existence? That is what matters.’

  Funny how a book can say something, and yet the meaning doesn’t hit you for hours.

  Unlike my belt – Red knew when I hit her with that, instantly. Her back and ass were crisscrossed with long welts. I released my hands from my hair and slowly stood.

  As a mesmer, I just wanted to hurt her and make her do my bidding, and to gratify myself.

  And as a man?

  My anger had died away and been mixed up with different sorts of angers and feelings – feelings I hadn’t known until now. I’d been angry that Red had assumed I was a pedophile.

  Mostly I was angry because it was her saying it.

  Which meant I valued her opinion? My lip curled.

  And now… I was annoyed. A few weeks ago, her attitude would have amused me, then I’d have fucked with her just because I was a mesmer. Who cared what the little people thought? Fuck them all.

  Red was excruciatingly different.

  I still wanted to punish that sweet ass, although the fact that she wanted to come right now made me smile. I could detect serious want thriving inside her – and how her legs trembled as I amped the volume.

  Everything I had done to her had trained her into this cutely female response.

  Purposefully, I dripped more desire upon her psyche, giving her libido a big, hot, luscious lick, then I walked in and cupped first her bare ass then the front of her pussy. My fingers slicked through a copious amount of female wetness
where it had leaked from her slit.

  I probed her. I played with her, and oh the wriggles she gave me, the small soft noises, the whimpers as I stuck and plunged my two fingers into her cunt and then sucked them out. Her hands twined and shifted in the cloth rope above.

  How much did I love a trapped and needy Red? More than the world itself.

  “You’ve got no escape – not from the belt, and not from me.” I jerked my hand and raised her higher, off her feet, making her an ornament perched on my hand. I snaked my arm about her waist. “And I don’t think I’ll let you come.”

  She wriggled and gave a shocked gasp. As a reward for her thinking me worse than I truly was, I fingered her in earnest. With my thumb, I circled her little erect clit, toying with it with my other hand clamped on her hip and pulling her into me. I ground my dick into her, made her sway and throw her head back as the pleasure from my probing, squeezing fingers enticed her onward, to the very peak of an orgasm.

  “Want to come?”

  “Mmm. Yes?”

  “That was a yes?” I stuck my fingers in her again, pretended to fuck her ass and held her there in limbo, helpless, impaled and locked between the bar of my arm, my fingers in her cunt, and my very hard dick.

  “Oh.” A sharp intake of air. “Yes. Yes, yes. Please, yes.”

  “Even though I belted you so hard the strikes have left these beautiful…” I leaned away and admired the marks on her back. “Bruises and red stripes. These welts…”

  I bit her shoulder, squeezed her poor abused butt. She yelped but recovered after a spate of panting.

  Red nodded, wildly.

  “Bad luck.”

  I pushed away, backed off and left her teetering for a few seconds, until she recovered her footing.

  Red leaned into the tree and said soft words I could not understand.

  “What?”

  “Please?”

  “Not today. Not. Today.”

  “Isak?”

  “No. Hell, no.”

  “Fuck.”

  What matters is what you create in this life. Got it.

  I was creating something wonderful. Then, I hesitated.