The Master Who Taught Me to Desire Pain

Saira woke with a start in the marble bed, just as she had the times before. She had been locked in that room of the palace for two days, beneath sheets that were no longer white, and every time she closed her eyes, the images returned. Not the physical pain—that she knew and almost welcomed—but the other thing: the way the old man had degraded her during training, until he had reduced her to something smaller than a shadow.

She had only wanted to vent her rage. To hit until she was empty. But the old lord was too ancient and too rotten with hatred to understand that a woman could strike with all her strength and still be asking for help. He had mistaken it for ambition. He had answered in kind. And he had plunged her into the most absolute misery.

Now she was alone, with fractured wrists and her mind in tatters, and there was only one name in her head. A name she had not spoken aloud for more than a year.

All the pain you feel, you must dedicate to me.

He had told her that long ago, in another life. And although she was stronger now, although she could shatter mountains with a gesture, she still obeyed that order as though it were the only truth she had left.

She slowly moved her broken wrists. Tears ran along her temples as she probed her own wounds, smiling through the suffering.

“All my pain is dedicated to you,” she whispered to the ceiling. “Every tear, every scream, every torture. It’s for you and belongs to you.”

She rotated her fractured arms, searching for the exact point where it burned most, taking delight in it like someone scratching an itch they should not scratch.

“Damn you. Why did you teach me this?”

Her sobbing became nervous. She dug her nails into the cuts she had made herself, opening them a little farther, moving her body precisely where the pain was unbearable.

“Why didn’t you want to come see me?” Her breathing came in broken gasps. “I need you. I don’t care if they’re after us, I don’t care if I die, I don’t care if everything stops. Look: this pain is yours. All of this is yours.”

She lowered her hands to her belly and scratched herself until she bled.

“I don’t want you to leave me again. I’ll find you wherever you are.”

***

She slapped herself with her uninjured hand. The blow reverberated through her skull and left her clear for a moment, without thoughts, floating in that white stillness that only punishment granted her.

“I haven’t looked for you,” she reproached herself, her voice breaking. “I’ve been bad. I became more powerful than you, and that’s why you left me alone. Your absence is my punishment. I’ve been bad, haven’t I? Haven’t I?”

She struck herself twice more, without restraint, while her other hand slipped beneath the blanket. She felt the heat, the shameful moisture of her own body responding to something so twisted she did not even dare name it.

“Bad girl. Whore. You don’t even know how to keep your master at your side.”

She penetrated herself with one finger. She barely felt it. She shook her head in frustration.

“That doesn’t hurt,” she said, speaking to herself as though he were the one correcting her. “Silly goddess. He doesn’t like it that way.”

She thrust four fingers inside at once, viciously, without the slightest delicacy. The moan that escaped her was more panic than pleasure.

“That’s better. It has to hurt. For him. For you.” Her sobbing turned hysterical. “You want me to suffer. You want it to hurt me. My pain is your pleasure.”

She pulled out her hand, clenched her fist, and went very still, trembling. Her shattered wrist clouded her judgment. Even so, she rose, got onto all fours on the unmade bed, and let her forehead fall against the mattress.

“I’m your property,” she murmured, and her voice broke on the final syllable.

She collapsed face-first. Her body could take no more. And then, in her delirium, she spoke the name of the only person who understood her, the friend who had begged her days earlier to go find him.

“Damn Marén and her conversation. Dren… Dren, come, hurt me, please, I need it. Pain makes me feel loved. It makes me feel loved. It makes me feel loved.”

With a brutal effort, still lying facedown, she slid her hand beneath the torn nightgown and rubbed herself furiously, sobbing now, deranged, completely lost.

***

“Where has your composure gone, little masochistic princess?”

The voice came from a corner where no one had been a second earlier. Saira turned her head with a start and saw him: leaning against the obsidian wall, his arms crossed, looking at her the way one looks at a wounded animal.

“Dren… is that you?” Hope trembled in her throat.

“You’ve lost your faculties since becoming what you are.” He advanced one noiseless step. “You weren’t even capable of noticing I was here.”

“How long have you…?”

“I arrived before you, you miserable whore.”

She did not know what to say. Shame and hope mingled in a choked cry that he cut off with a hard blow to the mouth, then watched her with a judge’s coldness.

“Look at you,” he said. “You’re broken and filthy. You don’t smell like you used to. You’re not even worthy.”

Saira wept in silence, her face contorted.

“Forgive me,” she murmured.

“At least one of my lessons proved useful. You’d better keep obeying me.”

She nodded against the mattress.

“What do you want from me this time, Lord Dren?”

“To see whether you were still the same as ever. But I can see you’re not. Damn corrupt little brat.”

“I’ve been stupid.” The words spilled from her. “I never should have left. We should have stayed together, the two of us. If only none of this had…”

He silenced her with a slap. He seized her broken wrist and held it before her face.

“The past cannot be changed, you know that. You deserve it for being selfish. For turning your back on me.”

“It wasn’t me,” she protested, choking. “They don’t want us together. You know that, don’t you?”

“I think you underestimate me.”

“I don’t. I swear.”

“I watched you many times during your retreat. All that year, you could have sensed me. But you have no instinct left. There’s nothing left of the bitch I trained.”

“I have to try harder,” she said, and she meant it.

***

Dren squeezed her wrist harder and harder while his other hand closed around her throat.

“You’re so focused on climbing that you don’t look at the ground beneath your feet,” he said. “You’ve lost your foundations. You’re powerful, yes, but incapable of feeling anything within arm’s reach of your nose.”

Saira writhed in pain and, without meaning to, moaned as she felt his touch again. It was the only thing she had wanted in years. With her free hand, she covered the one he had around her throat, and instead of trying to pull it away, she pressed it inward, helping him strangle her harder, looking at him with a mixture of defiance and absolute surrender.

He loosened his grip. He released her abruptly.

“You don’t decide,” he said. “I never gave you that right.”

With tremendous effort, Saira sat up until she was kneeling. She pressed her forehead to the stone floor.

“My lord,” she recited, “it would be an undeserved pleasure if you made me feel what I felt before. I beg you. My master, my mentor. I can do no more in this state. I implore you to make me suffer, to make me live again as I did when I was still a simple mortal. I beg you to impose yourself upon me.”

Dren looked at her for a moment with something resembling approval. Then, without another word, he vanished from her field of vision. She remained tense, unable to understand where he had gone, until she felt a foot strike the back of her neck and send her sprawling facedown onto the floor again.

The foot settled on her head, pinning her in place. Saira tried to turn her face to see him. He spat on her. Bewilderment and humiliation coursed through her like an electric current.

He leaned over her back, brought both her wrists together in one hand, and held them against her spine.

“Remember this well,” he murmured in her ear. “Your wettest dreams can become your nights of terror if you go on like this. And don’t blame me if I’m rougher from now on. You’re not as fragile as you used to be. I know it.”

Saira wept with emotion and pain as she felt him push her torn nightgown up to her navel. He spat on her again, this time on her buttocks, and struck her hard enough to make her cry out gratefully.

“Do you remember when you used to tell yourself that one finger wasn’t enough?” he asked mockingly, thrusting one inside her from behind.

She released a broken gasp, clutching the edge of the bed with her free hand as Dren’s finger sank in and out, slowly at first and then with increasingly filthy violence. The cold stone beneath her cheek contrasted with the brutal heat beginning to open her from within. He held her by the waist and forced her to arch farther, pushing with cruel precision until she trembled from head to toe.

“That’s it,” he murmured. “I want to hear you. I want to know where it hurts.”

Saira sobbed harder, her weeping blending into a long moan when Dren spread her buttocks with one hand and inserted two more fingers, stretching her without mercy. She bit her lip until it bled, trying to endure the thrusting of that hand as it opened and fingered her with a brutality that tore small spasms from her belly.

“Just one?” Dren whispered mockingly, withdrawing them barely before entering again with all four, one by one, until she was trembling. “That doesn’t hurt, silly goddess. He wouldn’t like it, would he? It has to hurt. Let’s try four.”

She moaned, stifled, her face pressed into the floor. Her hips moved on their own, treacherous, seeking more of that unbearable pressure. He noticed the trembling and chuckled under his breath, enjoying it with obscene calm.

“Look at you,” he told her. “So broken that even when you suffer, you beg me for more.”

Half-conscious, she begged him to stop. He laughed and moved away for a moment, revealing himself fully before her clouded eyes.

“Lubricate yourself,” he said. “You’ll thank me.”

Barely able to move, Saira obeyed with a sick happiness until she was ready for him. Dren rose and kicked her into the wall. She fell facedown, staining the white nightgown with blood, and he finished tearing it apart with one pull, leaving her entire back bare.

She could no longer see clearly. She knew she might pass out at any moment. That was why he acted quickly and penetrated her in one thrust; the pain, lacerating and above all humiliating, seemed to bring her back to life. He seized her injured arm and twisted it behind her back, wrenching it cruelly as he pounded into her without the slightest mercy.

The thrust was sharp and brutal, all the way in. Saira screamed, and the scream immediately broke into a wet moan as Dren withdrew and thrust back in, setting a punishing rhythm that made the bed creak and her shoulders shake. He had her pinned against the stone, her arm bent behind her, and every blow tore a mixture of unbearable pain and relief from her. He gripped her by the hip and spread her wider, burying himself with a violence that left her breathless.

“Today you’re nothing but a broken toy,” he kept repeating. “Used one last time before the trash.”

He said it so many times that Saira’s wrist ended up bent all the way to her nape. She could feel nothing but that twisted arm and the immense pain splitting her apart inside, stripping away what little she still had intact, if anything remained.

***

When he withdrew, he wiped himself on the shreds of her nightgown without even looking at her. Saira, her voice destroyed, begged him to finish as he had the last time, to quench his thirst that way, saying that nothing mattered anymore, that she only wanted to see him satisfied with his good pupil. In response, Dren seized her by the throat, lifted her, released her, and drove his fist into her belly. Saira doubled over onto her knees and vomited blood at his feet.

“I think I’m going to pass out if we continue,” she gasped.

“Do it,” he said. “You’ve served your purpose. You don’t need to remain conscious. You fulfilled your role.”

“But… aren’t you going to finish?”

“You don’t decide that, whore. Besides”—he tilted his head, listening to something she could not hear—“someone is coming here. And I shouldn’t be here.”

Saira did not understand. Then she felt the air in the room grow thicker, as though time itself were moving backward around her. The cracks in the wall closed. The white nightgown was whole again on her body. The blood vanished from the obsidian floor.

When she caught her breath, she was alone again in the marble bed, badly wounded but healed of her deepest injuries, unable to understand how he had managed to do that. Only a faint trace of his scent remained in the air, and inside her the certainty that, for one night, she had felt loved again.