I walk over to the cabinet that holds the whips and floggers and pick up the leather-bound whip. The whip is heavy in my hand. The braided leather feels like a promise, or a sentence. Adrian kneels on the floor, naked, his back to me, a canvas of pale skin and tense muscle. He doesn’t turn. He just waits.
Marcus’s voice is still in my head. The thirty-minute clock is a drumbeat in my chest. Twenty-two minutes left. Twenty-two minutes of this before I have to go back to being his.
I lift my arm. The air whistles.
The crack against his skin is louder than I expected. A sharp, wet sound. He jerks forward, a gasp tearing from his throat. A red line blooms across his shoulder blade, vivid and immediate.
I don’t think. I just swing again.
Another line, parallel to the first. His whole body
