🔥 Released 🔥
An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from The Witness He Kept by Isla Wilde
⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This bonus chapter takes place after the epilogue of The Witness He Kept, on the day Dorian comes home. It contains major spoilers and very explicit sexual content (18+), including bondage, and it runs hotter than the book. Read the novel first for the full experience.
One paper bag, three hours of road, one iron headboard. Explicit content — 18+.
Released
Eleven months, two weeks and four days.
I didn’t count them out loud. Nobody at Ashby counted out loud. You counted the way you breathed, without deciding to, and you didn’t let anybody see you do it, because a man who’s counting is a man who has something to lose, and in a place like that it’s better if nobody knows what it is.
I had a photograph taped inside my locker door. Not of her face. Of a page. One sheet of yellow legal paper in her handwriting, sent in the second week with no letter attached:
Terms.
1. You come home.
2. That’s all of them.
—S.M.C.
The C was new. We’d done it at the county clerk’s office nine days before I reported, on a Tuesday, in the room with the bad carpet and the plastic flowers, with Theo standing beside her in a borrowed tie and Lin standing beside me in her overalls, because she’d refused on principle to change. Walt was there. Naomi was there, and cried, and denied it in the parking lot, and Lin said, “I saw you,” and Naomi said, “You saw nothing, Sato.” Sloane wore a gray dress and her grandmother’s watch. She’d wound it eighteen turns that morning. I’d watched her do it.
Ortiz cut the monitor off my ankle in her office the next day with a pair of shears and said, “Don’t come back, Cade,” and then shook my hand.
And then I’d gone in, and Sloane had driven three hours north every other Saturday in the green Tacoma and sat across a bolted table from me for exactly the length of visiting hours, to the minute, and talked about forensic reconstruction of loan portfolios, and taken my left hand on the table where the guards could see, and run her thumb over the two fingers that don’t bend.
Fifty-one weeks. Twenty-six Saturdays. She never missed one. She never once cried in that room.
She cried in the parking lot. I know because a man on my block had the window that faced it, and he told me in March, not unkindly, as if he thought I ought to know. I didn’t tell her he’d told me. Some things you keep because they’re not yours to spend.
They let me out at 9:12 on a Thursday morning in October.
I came through the last door with a paper bag. Inside it: the clothes I’d worn in, a wallet with eleven dollars, a library paperback I’d forgotten to return, and nothing else. The air outside smelled like cut grass and diesel. I stood on the sidewalk and let it hit me.
The green Tacoma was parked across the road with the engine off.
She was leaning on the driver’s door with her arms folded. Jeans, boots, a navy sweater, her hair up through a pencil, which meant she’d been working in the cab while she waited. Of course she had. She’d have brought a file. She’d have been here since seven and pretended she’d just arrived.
She didn’t wave. She didn’t come running. She watched me cross the road the way she’d watched me cross the shed the night of the itemization, as if I were a figure she was checking against the source document.
I stopped in front of her.
“You’re late,” she said. “Release was nine.”
“Paperwork.”
“Twelve minutes of paperwork.” Her voice was perfectly steady. “I timed it.”
“I know you did.”
She looked at my face for a long time. Then her chin did something it never does, a small hard tremor she clamped down on at once, and she unfolded her arms and took my face in both hands and kissed me on the side of a county road in front of a federal correctional facility with two guards smoking by the gate.
It wasn’t careful. It was eleven months of Saturdays across a bolted table. Her fingers dug into my jaw. Her mouth opened under mine and she made a sound into it, low and furious and wrecked, and I dropped the paper bag on the gravel and got both arms around her and lifted her off her feet against the truck door, and one of the guards whistled, and neither of us cared.
When she let me go her eyes were wet and she was glaring at me.
“Get in the truck,” she said. “Don’t talk to me. If you talk to me I’ll pull over, and it’s three hours, and I’d like to get you home first.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Don’t.” Her mouth twitched. “That’s worse.”
I got in the truck.
She drove the whole way with her right hand on my thigh.
Not moving. Just there, heavy and warm through the cheap trousers, her thumb resting on the inside seam. Every few miles it tightened, as if she were checking I was still solid, and every time it tightened something in me pulled tight with it. Three hours. I watched the trees go by and the towns and the sky, and I didn’t look at her, because if I looked at her I was going to ask her to pull over, and she’d asked me not to.
At the second hour her hand moved two inches higher.
I shut my eyes.
“Problem?” she said, eyes on the road.
“No.”
Her thumb drew one slow line up the seam and stopped. “You’re lying. I can feel you lying.”
“You said don’t talk.”
“I said don’t talk to me.” Her thumb moved again. “I didn’t say don’t answer.”
By the time we came over the last rise and the harbor opened out below us, gray and silver, with the north shore curving away to the left and our road at the end of it, I was hard enough to hurt and she knew it and hadn’t moved her hand an inch further. She’d kept me there for an hour on purpose, at exactly that point, the way she’d kept me tied to a brass rail on a dead boat once. She’d had eleven months to plan it.
She pulled into the gravel by the deck. Turned off the engine. Sat there.
The house looked the same. New roof. The cheap smoke detector I’d watched her screw into the kitchen ceiling herself. The pine table through the window. The water, close enough to hear.
“Theo did the gutters,” she said. “Lin sent wine and a note that says Don’t. I don’t know what it means. Jonah sent a ledger, a real one, green cloth, blank. For the house accounts. He says we should start as we mean to go on.” She was still looking at the windshield. “I washed the sheets this morning. I’ve washed them every Thursday for fifty-one weeks. Nobody’s slept on your side.”
“Sloane.”
“I’m not finished.” Her hand was still on my thigh. It was shaking now, very finely. “I made a list. Of what I want tonight. It’s in my pocket. I wrote it in July. I’ve revised it eleven times.”
“Can I see it?”
“No.” She finally turned and looked at me. “You’ll hear it.”
She walked me into our bedroom by the hand and shut the door, and leaned her back against it, and turned the deadbolt she’d installed herself.
The room was full of afternoon light off the water. The bed under the window. Her iron headboard, brought from Canal Street, the bars painted white now. On the nightstand, coiled flat, a length of dark silk.
My tie. The one she’d pulled off my collar in the sail loft and bound me to the Marguerite with and kept in her pocket ever since. She’d tied herself to that headboard with it once, and asked me to.
“Item one,” she said. “Take it off. All of it. I want to look at you first.”
I took it off. The cheap shirt, the trousers, the prison-issue socks I was going to burn. I stood in the middle of our bedroom with the light on me, and she looked.
She took her time. She’d always take her time. She looked at the coin scar and the shoulder ridge, at the three silver lines on my forearm that were on page twenty-six and belonged to her now, at the pink seam above my left elbow where the terminal had gone through. She looked at the ankle where the monitor had been, and the faint pale band it had left. She looked at my cock, hard and aching from three hours of her thumb, and she didn’t hurry past it.
“You lost weight,” she said.
“The food.”
“Ten pounds.” She pushed off the door. “I’ll put it back.”
She came to me still dressed. Put her palms flat on my chest and walked me backward until my legs hit the edge of the bed, and pushed, and I sat.
“Item two.” She picked the silk up off the nightstand. “Hands.”
I lay back on our bed and lifted my arms above my head and crossed my wrists against the white iron bars, and she climbed up over me in her jeans and sweater, straddling my chest, and tied me. Twice around. Once around the bar. A clove hitch, quick and neat. Lin had taught her on a chair leg a long time ago, and she’d had a lot of practice since.
“Safeword,” she said, looking down at me.
“Stop.”
“Good.” She sat back on my stomach. She was warm through the denim. “You’re not going to use it.”
“No.”
“Because item three,” Sloane said, and pulled the pencil out of her hair and let it fall around her shoulders, “is that for the next hour, you don’t get to do anything. You lie there. You let me have you. I’ve had fifty-one weeks of a bolted table and a guard counting the minutes, and I’m going to take every single one of them back.”
She pulled the sweater off over her head. Nothing underneath. My breath went out of me.
“You can watch,” she said. “You can talk. You can beg.” She leaned down until her hair fell around both our faces and her bare breasts brushed my chest, and her mouth was an inch from mine. “Item four is the begging. It’s underlined.”
She kissed me first. Long and slow and deep, my wrists straining against the silk before I’d even decided to pull, her hands in my hair holding my head exactly where she wanted it. Then she started down.
My throat. The place under my jaw that she knows. The coin scar, which she kissed the way she’d kissed it the first night in the loft, her lips parted, her tongue tracing the edge. She went lower and spent a long time on my chest, her mouth and her teeth and her tongue, until I was arching off the mattress into her and the bars rang.
“Sloane—”
“I know.” She bit the inside of my hip. Not gently. “I don’t care.”
She got off the bed and stood and undid her jeans and pushed them down, and her underwear with them, and kicked them away, and stood naked at the foot of our bed in the afternoon light, watching my face while I looked at her.
Eleven months. I’d thought about her every night in a cell with a man snoring eight feet away. I’d built her in the dark out of memory, the curve of her hip and the freckle low on her ribs and the dark hair between her thighs and the way she bit her lip when she was about to come. I’d got it wrong. Every detail. Memory had made her smaller.
“Say it,” she said.
“You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
“Not that.” She climbed back onto the bed, onto her knees between my legs. “You know what.”
“Please.”
She smiled. Slow and warm and absolutely merciless. Then she bent her head and took me in her mouth.
I made a noise I had never made in my life. My hips came up off the bed and she put one forearm across them and held me down and took me deeper, her tongue flat and hot along the underside, her hand wrapped around the base. She went slow. She went so slow I could feel every inch of her mouth, the heat of it, the wet pull as she drew back to the tip and swirled her tongue and sank down again. She watched me the whole time. She’d learned that from me.
“Sloane. Christ. I can’t—”
She pulled off. Held me in her fist, perfectly still, while I shook. “Can’t what?”
“I’m not going to last. It’s been a year.”
“I know exactly how long it’s been.” She licked me once, root to tip, lazily. “That’s why I’m going to stop every time you get close. Until you beg properly. Item four. Underlined.”
She did it three times.
Three times she took me to the edge with her mouth and her hand until my whole body was locked and my wrists were burning in the silk and I could feel it coming up my spine, and three times she stopped, and sat back on her heels, and watched me fall back from it with my chest heaving and her name coming out of me in pieces. The third time I begged. Not her name. Not please. All of it, everything, a year of it in a rush. I told her I’d thought about her mouth every night. I told her I’d dreamed about her on the pine table and woken up hard in a cell with my hand over my own mouth. I told her I’d never wanted anything in my life the way I wanted to be inside her right now, this second, and that if she didn’t let me I was going to come apart in our bed with my hands tied and nothing touching me but the air.
She listened to every word. Her eyes were very bright.
“Better,” she said, and climbed up over my hips.
She was soaked. I felt it as she settled over me, hot and slick against my cock, rocking once along the length of me without taking me in, and her breath stuttered and her eyes fell half shut.
“I’ve been wet since the gate,” she said, low. “Since you came across the road with your paper bag. I’ve been wet for three hours in that truck with my hand on you, listening to you breathe.” She reached down between us and held me and lined me up. “Look at me.”
I looked at her.
She sank down.
All the way. One long slide, slow and relentless, until I was buried to the root inside her and her thighs were tight against my hips and her palms were flat on my chest. We both stopped breathing. She was so hot and so tight around me that the edges of the room went white. She stayed there, full of me, not moving, her head bowed and her hair hanging down, and I felt her clench around me, once, on purpose, and nearly came from that alone.
“Don’t,” she whispered. “Not yet. Not until I say.”
“Then move. Please. Sloane. Wife. Please.”
Her head came up.
I’d never called her that. Not in the clerk’s office, not across the bolted table. I’d been saving it without knowing I was saving it.
Something went across her face that I would have given the rest of my life to keep, and then she started to move.
She rode me slow at first, rising all the way up until I nearly slipped out of her and sinking back down, her nails dragging down my chest. Then not slow. She leaned forward and braced her hands on the white iron bars beside my bound wrists and fucked me hard, her breasts swaying above my face, the headboard banging the wall in a rhythm the whole north shore could have counted. I strained up into her every time she came down. She ground her clit against me at the bottom of every stroke and her breath broke into short high cries.
“That’s it,” I said. “That’s it. Take it. Take all of it. You waited a year for this. Use me.”
“Dorian—”
“Look at you. Look how good you feel. You’re dripping down me. You’re so tight I can’t think.”
“Don’t stop talking,” she gasped. “Don’t you dare stop talking.”
“I’m not going anywhere. Not ever again. I’m right here inside you, where I belong, and tomorrow I’m going to make you coffee and the day after that and every day after that for the rest of your life—”
She came.
Hard, with her head thrown back and my name torn out of her, clamping around me in long brutal waves that went on and on. She dropped forward onto my chest, shuddering, still grinding down on me, and I felt every pulse of it, and I held on. God knows how. I held on with my teeth in my lip and my wrists bleeding into the silk, because she hadn’t said.
She lay on me, panting, her face in my neck. Then she lifted her head and looked at me with her hair stuck to her cheek and her eyes black and soft.
“You didn’t come,” she said.
“You didn’t say.”
Something broke open in her face. She reached up over my head and pulled one end of the silk, and the clove hitch fell apart in her hand, the way it always does, and my wrists were free.
“Item five,” Sloane said against my mouth. “Take me like you’re allowed.”
I rolled us.
I had her on her back under the white iron in one motion without pulling out of her, and she gasped and laughed and wrapped her legs around my waist, and I caught both her wrists in my left hand and pinned them above her head against the bars where mine had been.
“Good girl,” I said.
She shuddered all the way down, under me, around me. She still does. She always will.
I fucked her the way I’d dreamed of it for fifty-one weeks. Deep and hard and slow and then not slow, her wrists in my hand and my mouth on her throat, her heels digging into the backs of my thighs and pulling me in. I found the angle that makes her arch off the mattress, and kept it, and told her what she was. Mine. My wife. My whole life, held down under me in our own bed with the windows open, and nobody counting the minutes, and nobody at the door.
She came again, sobbing my name, her nails in my back where I’d let go of her wrists so she could hold on.
I came with her. A year of it. I buried myself in her as deep as I could go and came so hard I couldn’t see, my face in her hair, saying her name, saying I love you, I love you, the way I do now. Every time. Because I can.
Afterward the light had gone gold over the water.
She lay on my chest with my hand moving in her hair. Her grandmother’s watch ticked on her wrist against my ribs. My wrists stung. Hers had red marks across them from my fingers. Neither of us looked at the clock.
“There was a sixth item,” she said eventually, into my skin.
“Tell me.”
She reached over to the nightstand, to the pocket of her jeans on the floor beside it, and came back with a folded square of yellow legal paper, soft at the creases from eleven revisions. She opened it and held it up where I could see.
Five items, in her careful hand, every one crossed out with a single ruled line.
Under them, the sixth.
6. Ask him how he wants his coffee in the morning.
(He’s never once told me.)
I looked at it for a long time.
“Black,” I said finally. “I never drank it. Not once. Not at the Saltbox, not at the Yard. I poured it every morning and let it go cold because I didn’t think I’d earned anything warm.”
She was quiet. Then she folded the paper back up, and drew a line through number six with her fingernail, and put it on the nightstand on top of the silk.
“Black,” Sloane said. “Hot. And you drink it.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She bit my chest for that. I deserved it.
In the morning I made two cups, and I stood at our stove with my sleeves rolled up and watched my wife drink hers too fast and burn her tongue, and I drank mine.
It was the first one I ever finished.
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