Please help me celebrate my very first novella publication. It has just been released through Republica Press
He pulled the edges of the dress aside and surveyed her bared chest. “Everything that is beautiful hurts.”
His finger flicked at the small gold ring in her left nipple. It stung a little as the metal slid through the newly made wound. “Perhaps I should have waited to give you these once you were awake. You’ll never fully appreciate their beauty, because you didn’t suffer for them.”
“Why didn’t you?”
He cupped her breasts and squeezed them gently; his gaze didn’t stray from them. The pressure made them throb dully. “I was thinking only of myself. That’s my right.”
He lowered his face to her chest and nestled against the swell of one breast. He inhaled deeply, opened his mouth and pressed it over the nipple and the ring. As he began to suck, the pain grew acute. Jennifer stiffened and balled her fists, turning her head toward the dark wall of windows.
He sucked rhythmically, and with every suck, the ring pulled against the raw wound. At first she tried hard not to make a sound, knowing instinctively that he would like to hear her pain. But gradually it seemed that silence wasn’t a battle worth fighting for, and she gave a little sob of pain, and then another, with each tug of the ring.
When he switched breasts, she felt him shift, and then the heat of his hand on the bare skin of her thigh.
The rhythm of the pain was hypnotic. At first it was sharp and localized, but as he continued, it bloomed and spread over a wider area, like a city pulsing light. No matter how hard she tried, it was impossible not to fall into it. She was aware he was touching her. Down, between her legs, he rubbed her through her panties. But all she could feel was the lake of pain at her chest. Bright, blinding flashes ebbed away only to be replaced by others. They would never, ever stop.
Until they did. She heard a pop as his mouth released.
When Jennifer left the cold and damp of London for the sparkle and bustle of Tokyo, she imagined she’d fine a world full of cherry blossom festivals, ancient tea ceremonies and Geishas. What she got instead was a cramped, shared apartment, harassment on the subway and a mind-numbing job as a hostess at the Blonde Chick Bar in Roppongi.
With a single, unintentional insult all that changed. She wakes up to find that she has been kidnapped by Shindo: a sadistic Yakuza demi-god who doesn’t take his loss of face easily. Caught between his hatred of all things foreign and a growing obsession with this blonde gaijin, he is determined to make her pay for her rejection in sadistic and degrading ways.
‘A woman’s lot is to endure,’ says the fox spirit in her dreams, but Jennifer wonders whether there are indeed fates worse than death. Little by little, she finds out.
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