I dropped my head back down and twisted it to the right, looking toward my hand. Without my glasses I couldn’t see much detail, but the leather-looking cuff appeared to have a metal buckle and D-ring type of hardware securing it both to my wrist and then to the bedpost by a short strap. I twisted my arm slowly and found that the restraint was loose enough to allow movement within it. I glanced back quickly and saw that Felicity was still in the throes of her experience and paying little or no attention to me for the moment.
Rolling my head back to the side, I rotated my arm once again, this time pulling as well. The heel of my palm slipped down into the cuff and stopped cold, the hard edge of the restraint bit sharply into the back of my hand, and I could feel it abrading the skin as I kept applying the downward pressure.
Casting my glance to the left, I tried the same tactic on the other arm, gaining the same fruitless results. Still, I didn’t give up until I heard my wife’s breathing begin to come under control and then felt her weight shifting back fully onto my stomach as she pushed herself up and forward.
She was wearing an expression of pure contentment, with her eyelids drooping heavily and a pouting smile caressing her lips. But, simply the way she was breathing told me she wasn’t going to roll over and go to sleep-nor did she have plans for cuddling.
No, Miranda was just getting started.
“Hmmmmmm,” she purred. “That was good.”
“Glad you enjoyed it,” I quipped, unable to contain my disdain for the spirit inhabiting my wife.
She giggled, almost musically, looking down at me with a wicked smile.
“I did,” she replied. “Didn’t you?”
“Not particularly.”
“Hmmmmm…” she purred again, a thoughtful tone underscoring the hum.
She rocked to the side, lifting up and planting her stocking clad knee in the center of my chest, then pitched forward and placed her weight on it. I grunted as the air was forced out of my lungs, and I felt my ribcage flex inward. I heard her quickly shuffle something off to the left of my head, then she rocked back and slid her knee down as she dropped herself hard onto my stomach, forcing me to huff out the breath I’d only just managed to suck in.
Settling herself in, she slipped the wrapper from a cigar and then nipped the end of it with my guillotine cutter. I recognized the stogie as one of the real-deal Cuban smokes a friend had recently brought back for me from a trip to the Caribbean. How he had gotten them back into the country I hadn’t asked-not that it mattered now.
She was watching me watch her, and she seemed to find it amusing. After a moment of fiddling about with the dark brown roll of tobacco, she waved it in front of my face.
“You don’t mind, do you?” she drawled in a mocking tone. “I helped myself.”
“Go ahead,” I returned. “Tell him it’s with my compliments.”
“Him?” she asked, cocking her head to the side.
“Papa Legba,” I replied.
“What makes you think it’s for Papa?”
“Educated guess.”
“Hmmmmm,” she purred once again.
Without another word she double-clicked a lighter then brought the long stream of flame against the foot of the cigar, rolling it slowly. Then, she carefully placed the tight roll of tobacco between her lips and proceeded to set the end alight, twisting it slowly and puffing hard. A cloud of blue-white smoke billowed around her, and she didn’t even flinch. Just one more sign that my wife was no longer my wife, as she would have gone into a sneezing fit immediately.
My hands were already starting to throb where I had pulled them down into the restraints. I knew that the scrapes were going to start getting inflamed, and swelling would be quick to follow. I wasn’t even sure that I would be able to extract my hands as they were now, but if they became swollen, there wouldn’t even be a thread of a chance. Of course, I also knew it was going to take more than a mere second or two and some obvious strain to accomplish, if at all. Therefore trying to make it happen while her attention was actually focused on me was out of the question. That would only prompt her to tighten them more or do something even worse. What, I didn’t even want to imagine.
“So,” she finally said, still regarding me as she puffed gently on the Cuban stogie. “How do you know about Papa?”
“I read a lot.”
She didn’t reply. Instead she hooked her dainty finger around the cigar and pulled it from between her lips. With a quick flick she knocked ash from the end, aiming it directly at my face as she had done earlier with the cigarette. Then, pursing her lips, she blew gently on the burning end of the roll, making the ember glow bright reddish-orange. Turning it in her hand, she then carefully placed the lit end into her mouth and closed her lips tightly around it.
Once again a billow of smoke began to encircle her head as she blew out through the cigar. Just as I knew from my research, that the cigar was intended for Papa Legba, I also knew that what she was now doing was, in effect, smoking it for him.
After a few moments, she extracted the cigar from her mouth and grinned at me. Once again, without warning she set about her regimen of torture. Reaching forward to my chest, she took my left nipple between her thumb and forefinger, squeezed hard, and then twisted.
This time my subconscious didn’t intervene. I immediately yelped as the pain shot through the sensitive nerve cluster then grimaced as she continued to pinch and twist.
“How…” she began.
Even through my pain, I could tell that she had caught her breath before she could get the sentence out of her mouth, and that could only mean one thing. She was getting aroused all over again.
“How does that feel?” she finally said, managing to get out the entire sentence before she began to pant as she had done before.
The throb in my skull ramped up and seemed to pulsate in unison with her oncoming orgasm. I fought to concentrate through both it and the pain she was inflicting on my chest. I knew an opportunity was soon going to present itself; I just had to be able to take advantage of it. Unfortunately, whether or not that would happen was going to be directly connected to how much pain I was going to be able to endure and still remain conscious.
She let go of the sensitive skin then slowly raked her nails across my chest, digging hard at the earlier burn as she continued watching my face.
The influx of pleasure that was overtaking her seemed to be coming faster-and even more intensely than it had the first time. If this was the normal pattern then it had to be like a drug. Something akin to the neuro-psychology experiment where a rat was wired to be able to self-stimulate the pleasure centers of its own brain with the press of a bar in its cage; which it did with relish, foregoing food, water, and sleep, until it simply expired. Only, this wasn’t an electrode-wearing rat in a lab. This was my wife’s body, and a malevolent spirit was using her as a vehicle in order to experience the same repetitive rush.
Given what I was seeing now, it wasn’t hard to extrapolate what had occurred at the various crime scenes. If progressively intensifying sexual climaxes in return for increasingly cruel tortures were how this Lwa worked, I couldn’t even begin to imagine what level of rapture the actual kill would trigger. I looked back up at her and watched as she carefully regarded the burning end of the cigar, flicking her gaze between it and me. It didn’t take a genius to see what was coming, and I wasn’t entirely sure I was prepared for it, even with the advance knowledge.
Still, the last climax had kept her occupied for a few minutes. If this was going to be even more intense, I just might have enough time to get free. What I was going to do after that was anyone’s guess, but at least I would actually be in a position to do something other than die. I decided quickly that as insane as it seemed, antagonizing her into the next phase of cruelty was my best course of action. Judging from her present state, it wasn’t going to take much to set her off.