The Cure He Craves

Chapter19

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 trembles. This isn’t the clinical rhythm of the flogger. This is rage. This is the silent scream I swallow every time Marcus looks at me. This is the frustration of prescriptions and lies and being a thing owned.

I brought the whip down again. And again.

The lines crisscross. Red welts rise, some already beading with tiny droplets of blood. The sound is all wrong—it’s not the controlled impact of therapy. It’s violence. His breathing is ragged, each exhaling a punched-out groan. But he doesn’t fall. He doesn’t use the safeword. He takes it.

“Is this it?” I hear myself snarl, my melodic voice gone, replaced by something raw and ugly. “Is this the silence you wanted?”

I swing with everything I have. The tip wraps around his side, biting into the flesh over his ribs. He cries out, a sharp, broken sound, and his hands fist against his thighs.

I freeze.

My arm drops to my side. The whip dangles, its leather stained now. I step around him, my heels clicking on the polished floor, to see his face.

His eyes are squeezed shut. Tears track clean lines through the sweat on his cheeks. His jaw is clenched so tight I can see the muscles jumping. But it’s his back that stops my heart. A latticework of angry red welts, raised and furious. Several are split open, weeping slow, crimson tears down the plane of his back. The skin is a ruined map of my fury.

I did this.

The whip slips from my fingers. It hits the floor with a dull, final thud.

A sob cracks my chest open. It’s a sound I’ve never heard myself—guttural, helpless. My hands come up to cover my mouth, but the tears are already falling, hot and shameful. I stumble back, my legs giving out, and I sink to my knees a few feet from him.

“Oh god. Adrian. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

He moves before I finish speaking. In an instant, he’s there, on his knees in front of me. He doesn’t touch his back. He reaches for me, his hands—warm, strong—closing around my wrists, pulling my hands away from my face.

“Look at me.” His voice is rough, scraped raw, but utterly firm. “Elara, Look at me.”

I force my eyes up. His black eyes hold mine, no trace of pain in them. Only a fierce, blazing certainty.

“I’m okay,” he says, each word a deliberate anchor. “I am not in pain.”

“Your back—”

“Is exactly what I wanted.” He squeezes my wrists. “You did exactly what I wanted. You gave me the silence. You gave me your truth. All of it. Do you understand?”

I shake my head, another sob hiccuping out of me. He releases one of my wrists and brings his hand to my cheek, his thumb wiping away a tear. The gesture is unbearably tender.

“You didn’t hurt me,” he whispers. “You freed me.”

I stare at him, at the absolute conviction in his face, and the storm inside me breaks, leaving only a hollow, trembling exhaustion. The clock in my head screams. Time’s up.

I pull away from his touch. The warmth of his hand leaves a cold imprint on my skin.

“I have to go.”

My voice is flat. Dead. I push myself to my feet, my legs unsteady. I don’t look at the whip on the floor. I don’t look at his ruined back. I walk to where my medical bag sits by the door, my movements robotic. I pick it up. The weight of it is a familiar lie.

I don’t say goodbye. I don’t look back. I open the door to his penthouse and step out into the sterile hallway, leaving the truth room and the man inside it behind.

The drive home is a blur of streetlights and shadows. My face is dry now. Numb. I park in the garage of the large, silent penthouse. All the lights are off except for the exit signs. And the living room lamp.

Marcus is waiting.

I let myself in, the door clicking shut with a sound like a trap springing. He’s sitting in his armchair, a glass of amber liquid in his hand. He doesn’t look up as I set my bag down.

“Thirty-four minutes,” he says, his voice quiet. Too quiet.

“The patient was critical. It took longer to stabilize.” The lie falls from my lips, practiced and smooth.

He finally looks at me. His eyes travel over me, from my heels to my face, lingering on my eyes. He smiles. It doesn’t reach his eyes.

“Come here.”

I take a step forward.

“Closer.”

I stop in front of his chair. He sets his glass down on the side table with a precise click.

Then his hand flashes out. It’s not a slap. It’s a closed-fist punch, straight into my stomach.

All the air leaves my body in a whoosh. I double over, gasping, pain exploding through my core. Before I can fall, his other hand fists in my hair, yanking me upright. Tears of pure, shocking agony spring to my eyes.

“You disobeyed me,” he says, his breath hot against my ear.

He shoves me. I stumbled back, hitting the edge of the sofa, and collapsed to the floor. The world swims. I try to curl into a ball, my arms coming up to protect my head.

It doesn’t matter.

The first kick lands against my ribs. A sharp, cracking pain. I cry out.

“You left this house when I told you to stay.”

Another kick, higher, catching my shoulder. My body jerks across the polished wood floor.

“You belong to me.”

His foot connects with my thigh, a deep, bruising impact. I can’t breathe. I can only make small animal sounds as each blow lands, a systematic punishment mapping itself across my body. The pain is a white noise, drowning out everything—the memory of the whip, Adrian’s voice, my own tears. There is only this. Only his rage. Only the proof, written in bruises, of who I really am.