Lethal Sin (Dangerous Games Book 1) Read online

  The insinuation that he wanted her to dominate him made an inner part of him roar and he stomped towards her. Her confident gaze flickered just before he grabbed her hair and pushed her back against the wall, crushing her against it with his weight. The soft yelp that escaped her as the cuffs dug painfully into her arms made him instantly hard again. “Want to rethink how you’d like to talk to me?”

  “Not particularly,” she groaned, and then she tried to bring her knee up into his crotch. He twisted his hips to block her, and then she brought her boot down hard into his ankle. It was, honestly, only luck and reflexes that made him divert her kick so that it just scraped down his pant leg, likely leaving behind a vicious scratch. Mateo gripped her hair harder and immediately second-guessed his decision to press himself against her so quickly, because her curves were messing with his head, and he hadn’t even begun to try and get the information his boss needed from her.

  She’s just a job.

  The words repeated in his head, over and over, until he finally felt centered enough to jerk her forward off the wall and push her towards the spanking bench. She tried to pull back, to halt his progress with her, but when it only resulted in a sharper pull to her hair and an unpleasant angle to her neck, she eventually relented. Stopping her just in front of the spanking bench he leaned down to speak directly into her ear, “To be honest, I don’t care how you tell me what I want to know, just as long as you give me what I need. If you’re screaming while you do it that only makes my day a little better.”

  “Asshole,” she mumbled and he chuckled a little as he bent her over the spanking bench, laying her lithe body along the central padded section.

  “Put your knees up on the pads on either side.” He delivered it like a command, and it was a voice he was used to women, and most men, obeying – but she didn’t even twitch. With a sigh he shoved her face down on the center pad and dropped the strap so he could grab her leg behind the knee and lift it up. When she struggled he pinched her inner thigh hard. She jumped, but it was all the surprise he needed to get her in place. Keeping a strong grip in her hair he shifted to the other side and repeated it.

  Fuck.

  She looked perfect laid across his spanking bench. Her ass high in the air, her legs spread wide to keep her balanced atop it. It would be even better if she were naked, but that was a whole different step to his process and as much as he wanted it he reined himself in and focused on the long zipper of her boot. With his free hand he dragged it down slowly, letting the sound fill the space so she had no choice but to be aware that he was removing her clothing piece by piece.

  Her fists clenched into tight balls in the small of her back and he grinned, tugging off her boot with a quick jerk before tossing it aside. Mateo trailed his hand up her calf, brushing her thigh with his fingertips as he moved behind her. He released her hair as he did the same to the other shoe, and from his new position he could clearly see that her eyes were shut tight.

  This was bothering her more than she would admit.

  “Listen.” He tossed her boot to meet its mate before leaning down to scoop up the nylon loop that would hold her in place for him. “Mr. Scarpa only wants to know where Mr. Callahan is set up. You tell me, and I can make this all be over real quick.”

  She laughed. “Offering to kill me already? What happened to the long game?” Her blue-gray eyes were open again and she angled her head so she could look up at him. All of that blonde hair was in her face and he leaned over to brush it back.

  “Oh, doll face, I’m an old pro at the long game. In fact, I’m looking forward to the long game with this sweet ass of yours.” Mateo smiled as her grin faltered and he tightened the nylon strap with a swift tug, locking her leg in place. He turned away and focused on her other ankle, catching it in the air as she tried to plant it on the floor beside her. It didn’t take long before he had her other leg tethered to the spanking bench, and with her wrists bound behind her back she had no choice but to shift forward to give herself a little more balance.

  “If you think this is all it takes to get me to talk, you’re mistaken.” The girl’s voice had a bit more strain in it than it had earlier, but that could be attributed to her position on the bench and not necessarily her situation.

  Damn, she’s feisty.

  Everything about her made him want to control her, to force her to submit. A feral growl rumbled in his chest, but he closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He needed to be smart right now, not let her trip him up, and that meant thinking with the head on his shoulders and not the one straining the front of his pants.

  Opening his eyes again, he spoke softly. “Honestly, I’m hoping you hold out as long as you can stand it, because this is going to be fun.” Reaching into his pocket he flicked open his knife again and the sound of it clicking made her thighs tense. His cock practically knocked against his fly, begging to be released, and he had to take a breath to suppress the urge to take her.

  Not yet.

  It took no effort at all after he flipped her skirt up to shred her tights to nothing, eventually tucking his knife away so he could tear the fragile material with his bare hands to reveal her long, tanned legs.

  She had the smallest scrap of fabric covering her pussy, a black lace thong that framed her ass like the piece of art that it was. Well, it was about to be art once he added a few new strokes to the canvas.

  Finally, he scooped the leather of the strap back into his hand and tested the flex of it again. With no warning he brought his arm back and landed the first strike across both ass cheeks, and she let out a short yelp through clenched teeth. The second and third strikes landed progressively lower, but she had locked herself down, breathing hard through her nose so that she wouldn’t make a peep.

  That was fine, if she wanted to play hardball he was the man for the job.

  The pain was searing. It wasn’t anything like a punch to the ribs, or a kick taken during a hand-to-hand fight. This was sharp, hot, and she was helpless to stop it or defend against it tethered to his fucking furniture like a sacrifice for some long-forgotten primordial god.

  In this case, it was more like she was a sacrifice for Benito Scarpa, head bastard of the Italians.

  This was why she had always refused to pick sides before. Being a free agent meant she had no real enemies. Hell, she’d even done a surveillance and info grab job for the man five years before. Scarpa didn’t fuck around, but he paid on time and he was honest – she’d thought they had left on solid terms, but whatever help she’d provided him and his enterprise had clearly not been enough to afford her any leeway under the current circumstances.

  Another snap of the leather across her ass had her twisting, digging her nails into her palms as the sharp sting bled into the pulsing heat across her skin. Camille’s cheek was pressed hard into the padded two by four underneath her, and she tried not to tense as she heard the next whip of the strap through the air, but by the time it landed she was locked up in expectation – and that only made it hurt worse. Groaning low she turned her head to the other side, straining her abs to give her the space to do it since her arms couldn’t do anything. Even her legs were useless on this damned contraption. She had tried to pull against the bindings on her ankles, but it had made no difference and he’d landed the next strike just a little harder as if that was going to stop her trying.

  The ache was constant now, building on top of itself as a new, burning lash landed just where her ass met her thighs and tears pricked the edges of her eyes as she bit down on a cry.

  She was not going to give him the satisfaction of knowing this hurt. Even when her skin felt bruised and fiery at the same time, and the palms of her hands ached from the force of driving her nails into them.

  A second later his warm hand was cupping her ass, squeezing the flesh until the welts woke up anew and she squirmed despite her best efforts to stay still. “Ready to talk yet?” His voice was sinfully dark, a growl appropriate for a room like this.

  Cami
lle just clenched her jaw tighter, suppressing the urge to fight as his fingers toyed with the waist of her panties. As exposed as she was in this position, she was sure the thin scrap of lace that formed the thong was doing very little to give her modesty, but it was still something.

  She wasn’t an idiot though. She knew he was going to fuck her. She knew it like prey knew when it was being hunted by a predator. It was just a matter of time, and for some reason that thought didn’t summon the kind of base fear she had expected. Instead, as his fingers slid beneath the lace and stroked her pussy, Camille was only aware of just how soaked she was, and of the myriad ways in which the heat from her ass and all her aches were focusing between her thighs and causing her clit to pound.

  “You’re wet.” Mateo’s voice sounded as astonished as she felt, and a foreign blush crept up her chest, scalding her cheeks as if she were some virginal teen. He dipped one finger inside her and she instantly clenched around the invasion. “Tell me… are you enjoying this?”

  “Maybe you are an idiot,” Camille muttered, struggling to keep her voice even as he dragged the wetness over her clit and began a slow, torturous rhythm that made her hips want to press forward.

  “You can say whatever you like, but your body is telling the truth.” Mateo sped up his touch and she gasped before she caught herself, clenching her jaw together to fight the urge to moan as sparks coiled up her spine. His mouth landed on her waist where her shirt had ridden up, and he licked at the exposed skin before nipping it sharply with his teeth. Just as the pleasure was starting to override the reality of her situation, he suddenly pulled his hand back, leaving her breathing hard and craving that last little nudge that would send her tumbling into orgasm. “Tell me where he is and I’ll make you come.”

  As much as she wanted to scream, she forced herself to laugh. “Wow, you really are overconfident, aren’t you?”

  Stepping around to the side she was facing he crouched down in front of her, a devilish smile tugging at his lips. He slipped his middle finger slowly between his lips, tasting her, and a hot rush flooded down her spine at the way his dark gaze remained locked on hers. “You’re delicious, girl. Here, taste.”

  He grabbed her face hard, digging his fingers into her cheeks to pry her jaw open and then he slid two of his fingers inside her mouth. The tangy sweetness of her juices flooded her tongue and she tried to jerk her head back, but he held her firm, making her cheeks ache from the strain. Then he pulled his hand away and released her, standing up to tower over her.

  “I can be patient. Maybe you just need a little time to think over your situation, let it all… settle in.” As he said the last words he ran his hand over the welts across her ass, squeezing them firmly.

  “I promise. Nothing you do is going to make me tell you where he is.”

  Hell, if she could tell him, she would – but some things were worth more than your own pathetic life. For the millionth time Camille cursed Patrick Callahan, and she dreamed of driving a knife into his stomach so he’d die slow with plenty of time to know exactly who had killed him, and why.

  “We’ll see about that.” Mateo’s voice pulled her out of her morbid daydream, and his hands busied themselves uncuffing her. For a moment she felt excited that he might be releasing her, might be giving up, but instead he had another binding ready to slip her wrist into, and he tightened it quickly. As he removed the last cuff and attached the other strap he spoke above her, “I’ll come back later. You just stay here and don’t wander off.”

  A joke.

  The fucker had made a joke.

  Before she could get out her own retort he’d already walked to the door and opened it. Instead of screaming after him, she just grumbled to herself as she heard it snap shut.

  The new position of her arms was giving a welcome relief to her neck and back. She could brace her elbows on the front of the pads that her knees were planted on instead of balancing her weight on her cheek. Camille was grateful, but she didn’t understand why he’d offered her that kindness. If he were trying to torture her, wouldn’t it be better to keep her bound in a painful position?

  She sighed and rolled her neck, evaluating the furniture she was tied to for any weaknesses. The nylon straps kept her hands firmly against the lower pads, and the mechanism for loosening them was too complicated for her to manipulate with just her mouth.

  Nope, no easy way out of this one.

  That meant she had to be patient. Had to survive what he had planned for her long enough to find a weak spot that she could use to her advantage. Just as she had settled against the pad to relax her tense muscles the A/C kicked on in the room, pumping a chilling blast of air into the large space that slowly reached out for her skin.

  “Dick,” Camille muttered as the temp in the room steadily dropped.

  Chapter Three

  Humans have a frustrating reliance on time. Before we had clocks we measured its passage by the movement of the sun or the moon and stars across the sky. Now we use watches, and clocks on DVRs and microwaves and phones. Humanity is constantly surrounded by measurements of time, living and structuring their lives by it in such a seamless fashion that it was hard to remember just how reliant our species was on something so ephemeral. It was a comfort to know how much time had passed, or how little – and the brain did strange things when there was no method to track it.

  For a while, Camille had just focused on her breathing. Counting her breaths like the ticking seconds of a clock, but then a twinge in her back had thrown off her count and she’d lost it like smoke on the wind. That had been when the weird shit set in. To fill the empty, white noise of the space her mind had summoned a cacophony of images and memories to assault her with. Sucking her into vivid moments of her past, both pleasant and vicious, which was her brain’s useless attempt to insulate her from the inane absence of any other stimuli.

  The one memory that kept playing on a loop was the one she wished would go away the most. The night she’d been dragged in front of Patrick Callahan and shoved into one of the plush leather chairs in front of his massive desk, which sat in his ridiculously opulent office, inside his even more ridiculous house.

  He had lectured her for a while, and she had barely paid attention until he had thrown the picture of the boy in front of her. White blond hair, messy and in his eyes, too much like her own. He was sitting outside a school surrounded by friends and laughing, completely oblivious to the one who had snapped the photo.

  Then had come the ultimatum – work for Callahan, exclusively, no more free agent shit, or the kid would die. Painfully.

  The moment had felt like suffocating, and in the tight bindings on top of Mateo’s demented little sex ottoman, her lungs were threatening to lock up once more. It was only the return of another full-body shiver that suppressed the urge to hyperventilate and finally tore her out of the Groundhog Day like hell of remembering Callahan’s cruel smile as his fingers had drummed on the table awaiting her answer.

  She was too cold to freak out, to lose her shit. She needed all of her energy focused on keeping sensation in her fingertips so she could adequately strangle Mateo as soon as his happy ass showed back up. The joints in her knuckles creaked as she stretched her fingers and then pulled them back into a fist slowly.

  The sound of the door popping open behind her made her laugh silently. Speak of the devil and he appears.

  His heavy steps moved towards her casually, no rush to them, and she imagined his broad, muscled body making the suit work as he came forward. In preparation Camille pressed her sharp nails into her palms again, urging the skin to wake up despite the chill. Without a word he stroked his too-warm hand up her thigh, lingering as he rubbed across the numb welts on her ass, forcing her to recognize the heat in his skin.

  Fuck.

  “Alright. Let’s try this again.” Mateo pulled his hand from her and she instantly felt the absence of the warmth, a fresh chill raising bumps along her arms and legs. “Where is he?”

  Cami
lle gritted her teeth, hating herself for the answer she was about to give. “Fuck off.”

  “Not ready to share yet?” His voice was light, unconcerned, but she imagined he had a lot more clothing on than she did, and based on the warmth of his hand it seemed like he’d just been camped out in front of a fire, under a fucking blanket, with a mug of cocoa. Bastard.

  “I’m sorry, I must not have annunciated clearly. Fuck. Off.” She turned to look over her shoulder and once again begrudged him for being so handsome. With a quiet laugh he pushed his dark hair off his forehead.

  “Okay, I’ll move on to the next stage then.” He wandered away from her back to his wall of deviant toys, and she tried her best to bite back the question, but her mouth ran away from her.

  She blamed the cold.

  “What do you mean by next stage?”

  His eyebrows were raised when he turned to look at her. “Well…” he turned away for a moment and then grabbed a riding crop from a hook on the wall before moving towards her slowly. “Earlier you had pain, then pleasure, then deprivation of something important. In this case, warmth.”

  “So?” She asked, watching carefully as he ran the leather of the crop over the palm of his hand.

  “So, you still haven’t answered me. That means we’re back to pain.” Without another comment he brought his arm back with the crop and it landed with crippling accuracy right where her ass met her thighs. The pain was so much worse than the strap that a cry escaped her lips before she could clamp her mouth shut.

  Camille gasped as he landed the next vicious strike at the tops of her thighs, making her buck forward against her bindings. She struggled to find that center she normally retreated to whenever something bad happened, or whenever she had to do something bad. The place where nothing could touch her, where she was numb to it all, but it was infuriatingly out of reach.