KING (Mistress & Master of Restraint) (38 page)

My eyes flutter shut from the sensation of Ezra’s velvety touch- a touch I’ve crave
d since I hit puberty. I gently rest my forehead against Regina’s and fall into bliss.

“Just relax and breathe,” Ezra hums to both of us. “This
will feel incredible, I promise.”

“Christ,” I hiss, and I join Ezra’s answering chuckle. Whether he laughs from me taking the Lord’s name in vain again or because he’s slowly inserting me alongside his cock inside Regina, I don’t know. It doesn’t fucking matter, this is…
this double penetration is… incredible.

“Oh fuck,” Regina moans. “Shit… you can’t compete with this. I’ll never be the same again. You’re… you’re both in there,” she stammers in
astonishment. “At the same time.”

I don’t move, and neither does Regina. We embrace one another, our foreheads resting against each other. Ezra moves for us. Excruciatingly slow, he thrusts. All I can do is experience. Experience the sensation of his velvety cock sliding along mine. The beat of his heart is an added pleasure that can never be duplicated. The warmth of Regina’
s breath puffing against my lips is precious. The flutter of her eyelashes tickling my cheeks hurts my heart. The maddening quiver that squeezes our cocks together as her internal muscles clench and release almost has me spilling hot inside her.

“Don’t cum until it’s just the two of you,” Ezra warns. A silent switch
is flipped inside my mind as Ezra speaks words that release a suggestion he’d planted without my knowledge. My new-found stamina isn’t all by my choice. I realize that now, as the climax that was rushing for release, retreats and ebbs. 

Seconds later, Ezra is roaring his orgasm to the moon. His smoky voice is rough and hoarse as he shouts our names. He scalds me, scalds Regina from the inside out as he releases deep inside her.
A series of shudders wrack Ezra’s body, undulating down his spine in waves. I hold Regina up, stabilizing the three of us, as Ezra’s legs lose all strength.

“That was incredible,” Ezra whimpers. As he pulls out, Regina writhes in pleasurable agony. It didn’t escape my notice that she didn’t cum either. I don’t know if this wasn’t doing it for her, or out of respect for me, she denied herself the pleasure.

“Tonight will be difficult,” Ezra softly murmurs in my ear, so low that Regina can’t even hear it. “You won’t sleep your last night here alone. You will be held as you sleep,” he vows.

Ezra pulls away,
gently laying Regina on her back with me still between her thighs. I position myself over her so that I don’t crush her. I look over my shoulder to tell Ezra I’ll see him in a while, assuming he will be the one keeping me company. But he’s already gone. The Maze’s shadows swallow him in the dark of night.

I turn back to Regina and gaze down at her. Tears stream down her face, one splatters her cheek and I realize it’s my contribution.

“This is your goodbye, isn’t it?” It’s not an accusation, just simple fact. I nod my head yes and she sobs a gut-wrenching sound that tears my heart from my chest and lays it at her feet. Her strong body is reduced to wracking sobs.

I settle on top of her, covering her body with my own. Wrapping my arms around her tightly, I cry. I cry like I’ve never crie
d before- not when Grant died, not when Regina was torn from my life, or even when Jamie returned a different man than the father I’d loved.

I cry because I am
freely giving up my Queen. She was a fantasy I’d built over a lifetime of disappointments. She was the one person that would always love me and never let me down. 

“This is the last time we will ever touch intimately like this, Queen. Never again… we can never go here again. We have to move on.” My voice is rough, filled with grief and sorrow.

“I know. I promise,” Regina whimpers in a small voice.

We are one, Regina and I. Not because we are connected through sex, even though I’
m no longer inside of her. We are of one soul. She will forever hold a vital part of me within her and her within me.

Queen
I breathe to the wind, releasing the last vestiges of the entity I’d fabricated in my five-year-old mind.

“You’ll never call me that again, will you? Not even in your private thoughts,” Regina softly cries.

“No… no, I can’t. It… it would hurt too much,” I reluctantly admit. I never want her to know the depth of my pain- pain I’d created by allowing us to go down a path we should’ve never taken. Regina was meant to be someone specific for me, and when that opportunity was taken away, I created another role for her. I manipulated and connived until I was one of the most important people in her life, because I knew to the bottom of my soul that I should be tied for first place in her heart. I wasn’t meant to be relegated next to Jamie and Marcus as the men she loved. I was meant to stand by two others- Niel and Ella.

“What will you call me?” she whispers, her green gaze piercing me like a dagger to the heart.

“I… I was… I was thinking I could call you… Mom.”

~Chapter Thirty-Four~

“Mom?”
Regina whimpers, followed by a soul-crushing sound that I’d hoped to never hear again. It’s the death-wail that tolled around the study when she found out Grant was dead. I remember it spilling out into the foyer and permeating the entire Estate. It reached Niel and my ears and it resonated in our souls, irreparably altering us for all eternity. I remember thinking that it was suppressed inward, fundamentally changing Ella as she formed in her mother’s womb. That sound echoed in the winding labyrinth of halls for years- truly earning the name Misery Castle. It echoed until Regina and Jamie returned, and still the house weeps.

Regina… Regina lies naked in my arm
s and makes that sound for me- the sound of devastating loss.

We hold each other and weep. Working backward
, I recount our miserable journey. Tonight marks the end of almost nineteen years of torment. There were good times, but they were laced with the bitter taint of deceit. Our marriage: no matter how many ways I try to spin the thread, it still resembles a macabre tapestry. Mutual survival: the survival of my siblings, myself, and Regina, that was the foundation of our marriage. Not love, partnership, or a need to connect ourselves irrevocably. I can spin and spin the thread, but it’s still doesn’t form the comforting image that should have been.

It doesn’t make the loss any less painful. Death would be a welcome vacation from the emotions bombarding me, ruining me, warping me, and reforming me into someone I’ve never been before.

Backward, backwards I review our lives together. We walked separately, yet parallel, through hell and came out alive. Grant should have never died. My father should have taken Regina as his wife. They should have raised us as a nuclear family: the eldest, artistic gay son, the middle child with his mother’s genius mind, and the sensitive daughter who takes after her father. That is what should have been.

We went off course and it ruined us. But there is no walking backwards. There is no changing the past. I can’t go back to that first day, the day Albert drove Regina up the drive. The day she got out and I ask for her name. The day I named her… I should have called her mom and told her never to leave me again. I should have done more, been more
, so she would have stayed.

And later…
I should have begged her to stay with me as Adelaide half-carried her from our house. Regina’s dead-eyes stared through me, never knowing she was saying her final goodbyes. Her eyes still haunt my nightmares to this day. The deafening silence that followed her absence was far worse than the echoing death-wail. Months… months upon months I was mute. The only person who heard my voice was Niel. A tiny child, a child the same age I was when I met her, supported me and breathed regenerating purpose into my soul.

Niel and I mourned her as
we mourned our father and the sister we’d never met. Years followed years followed years of hopeful mourning. The older we became, the closer we were to reconnecting with her, to meeting our sister. It was like living with a ghost that shadowed your soul every moment of your existence. It was maddening, fantasy building.

The night I found out Regina
was in the Brownstone, the very building I was standing in, I went postal. Room to room, I tore through that house. The only thing that calmed me was Marcus. He gave me five minutes to pull myself together, if I succeeded, I could see her. I was calm in five seconds. As soon as my brain absorbed the knowledge that it was the only way I would finally see Queen, I was in control. I agreed to Marc’s restrictions. I would’ve agreed to anything, just to see her.

The disappointment was soul-crushing. After eight
torturous years, to finally see her, hear her, touch her, and Regina was ensconced in latex, unable to see or hear me. My eyes and fingers feasted on every outline of her body. Her voice sang in my mind, so much more vibrant than the facsimile that played out in my memories.

Do you want to kiss me
? She’d said, and my heart soared. Moments from receiving my kiss, Marcus pulled us apart. After I left the room, it took Cortez, Roman, and Dexter to contain me. I knew Marcus was in there touching her, touching what was mine. I was pulled from the house, destroying anything I could get my hands on.

I plotted, connived,
and manipulated. Never again would they keep Regina from me. No man or agency could keep me from her- keep Niel from her- keep Ella from us. The only solution I could see was marriage. My wife, my children- my nuclear family- I would finally get that fantasy I’d built up as a child.

Marcus, figuring out my plan, stalled me. He’d made me promise that I wouldn’t contact her until her initiation. I’d made the promise in haste, filled with unfathomable emotions
from knowing she was within my grasp. In less than a heartbeat, I’d conceded. I would’ve done anything to see Regina that night. Stalled, I firmed my plans until Marcus couldn’t stop me.

There was real fear in Marc’s eyes when the night of Regina’s initiation came, and he
punished me for that fear. He punished himself at the same time. The two men who loved Regina more than life itself had to watch her with Cort and Ezra. The guys were his family and my friends. It was torturous agony.

Two
hours after Regina yelled
Sunshine, gitcha ass over here
and tore her blindfold off, we were husband and wife.

Now I hold her, Regina my wife, as we say our goodbyes to that life
we’d built and prepare to move towards a new phase- towards the lives we would’ve led if we hadn’t gone off track. I will live my own life and she will either choose to be with my father or her lover.

I
f I could turn back time: I would’ve called her mom. I would’ve run after her. Grant would be the stronger man he is today, but as Regina’s husband. They would be King and Queen of Misery Castle.

But I can’t turn back
time. The only thing I can do is right all the wrongs. Tomorrow Regina will no longer be my wife and starting tonight…

The person I was dies in the Maze while holding the most im
portant woman in his life. Whitt was the gentleman, who selflessly harbored all this responsibility that wasn’t his. Whitt was the conniving pervert who would stop at nothing to obtain the object of his desires. Whitt was the boy who held onto dreams and fantasies. Whitt dies a horrific, painful death.

…
And from the ashes rises a man, just as his father rose from the ashes of a lesser man. Daniel Whittenhower II is awakened.

“Shh… I’m so sorry for eve
rything,” I gently murmur in Regina’s ear as she mentally breaks for the first time. I know how she feels. We are never apart- ever. She is riding this heinous journey with me. “Shh…”

“Can I still call you Sunshine?”
Regina says when she begins to resurface from her despair.

“
You can call me anything you wish, except for husband. You can call me cat shit if it pleases you, Mom.”

Mom breaks down in my arms,
a mourning mess. I believe the gravity of her own life is hitting her, as is mine. You never knew what you had until it’s gone. You never see the right path until it’s unavailable. Mom had to be strong for us, as I had to be strong for them. She never grieved. She died inside, but she never grieved… and now she does.

“Here,” a warm blanket is passed to me. I stare up into the
warm amber eyes of one of the greatest men I’ve ever known- the man who will make my mom happy.

“Thanks, Marc,” I sniffle, wiping the tears from beneath my eyes. He gently nods at me and swoops in to lift his hysterical fiancée. Without a word, he carries her away
, leaving me alone in my miseries and realizations. I watch them traverse the Maze until they disappear from my line of sight.