A/N: Okay. Warning! The mature stuff continues—and yes, it is edited—, but only for part of the chapter. After that, the story picks up, and the next several chapters will have nothing in them to make anybody blush…

I heard his footsteps, metallic and harsh, die away as Doctor Doom ascended to his chambers above. What with costumed adventurers stopping by every so often to try to oust my liege lord, the castle often had to have some part or other rebuilt, and most recently, it had been his tower. He had made considerable changes in the process; it was now more than two stories taller. I found myself wondering just what those changes had been…

I was still shackled to the chaise lounge as he had left me, blindfolded and fraught with desire. It seemed as if I had a second heart between my legs, which beat and throbbed with sweet frustration. I stretched my legs, bent them and drew my knees up. Being blindfolded had added to my state of tension—not knowing where or when the next caress would follow.

My protracted, troubling, troublesome innocence would soon come to an end. I would welcome the pain of initiation, for the sake of the fulfillment to follow.

But I was afraid as well. Working for Doctor Doom was not like working for any ordinary man—it was more like working to defuse a ticking bomb; having to guess which wire would stop the countdown, fearing, even while I cut it, that it was rigged to detonate anyway, or that my well-intentioned action would set it off. It was difficult to say what he needed to hear while making it sound like what he wanted to hear.

Or perhaps it was like being a lion-tamer, even one who had great affection for the large cats she worked with, and they in turn, for her. Like that famous entertainer/trainer who was mauled by his own white tiger, one could never forget that it was not human, nor a house cat —and one day, out of anger, whim, or misplaced playfulness, could come the great swipe of a razor-clawed paw, bearing with it pain, disfigurement, even death.

I was in such a state that I desired consummation far more than mere bland safety, however.

A seeming eternity later, I heard sounds—the sounds made by someone approaching.

It did not sound like him

I tensed up, the erotic fog burning off in a sudden surge of fear. Who might it be, if it was not him?

He had ordered me not to speak, except to answer questions. I spoke out anyway.

"Who is there?" I asked of the void.

"I am," came the voice of Doom. "Is something wrong?"

"I couldn't tell who it was—you didn't sound as you normally do."

He had been coming closer to me all the while. Now the chaise shook as he joined me on it. Cool velvet brushed my naked flesh, as he bent over me, his hands on either side of my head to support him.

"Ah, but I could hardly continue in full armor. Not only could I not feel your tempting skin—"I guessed that the velvet must be a robe. "—but it wasn't designed for activity of this sort. It would be cold, hard, and, owing to the servomotors, possibly fatal to you—which I would find distasteful. And besides, there is also—this."

He kissed me. He had removed his mask.

The kiss began as gently as the way he had touched my face earlier, but it quickly became more urgent, even savage. I could hardly believe this was happening, as his tongue uncurled and glided between my lips to touch mine. I noticed, deliriously, that there were unevennesses to his lips, a ridge here, a roughness there—I realized it that it must be scar tissue I was feeling.

His face was a mystery that the entire world wondered about; it was right there, uncovered, before me—and I was the one who was masked. I returned his kiss with even greater force, and he moved a hand to my breast.

Instinctively, I tried to raise my arms, to return his embraces, to search and find where he wanted to be touched, but the chains clanked as they drew me up, far short. He did not want that from me—not now, and perhaps not ever.

He broke the kiss finally, and shifted, the chaise creaking as he slid down my body to kiss first one breast and then the other, returning to the first to nurse and suckle at it, flicking my nipple with his tongue, while he teased the other with his hand, wringing a shuddering groan from me.

He paused and sat up; the velvet swept back and forth over me before it disappeared—he had taken off the robe. Now we were skin against skin, all over, everywhere. He was a large man, built solidly—not fat, but hard muscle.

He climbed back up my body to claim my mouth again. While he kissed me, he sent one hand traveling down…

It was a long kiss, but it did eventually end, and when it did, he began to speak again. "Now, what is this here? Something like an orchid, serving as the gate to a garden—a very tropical garden. I'd like to visit that garden—but the door is barred. Now, what shall I do?"

I couldn't think of what to say. I had never imagined this situation, and even if I had, out of all the moods of Victor Von Doom that I had ever witnessed—and I had witnessed quite a few—playfulness had never been one of them. The language he used didn't surprise me—he loathed vulgarity in all its forms. He wasn't about to say f--- even while he was doing just that.

Anyway, right then I could focus on little but what was going on.

"You're going to have to tell me." he coaxed.

I found my voice. "Break down the door. Slowly!" I added.

"Is that what you want?" he queried.

"Yes!" I gasped out.

"Then you shall have it,"

It hurt. It hurt, and not in a way I had been expecting, not the way it was written about in the novels and stories, not like a little barrier breaking, followed by ecstasy and the end of all discomfort. It was a deeper, intramuscular pain. I wanted to brace myself against it, but I remembered that relaxing was supposed to make it easier.

That part of me was muscle, and an unused muscle stiffens up. A never-used muscle hurts when it's finally stretched—. I bit my lip, wincing against the pain. Every centimeter he sank in made me ache further.

It did nothing to dispel my arousal…

"I'm glad," he informed me, "that you're not weeping or pleading with me to stop. That would be quite tedious of you—there!"

"And now—," he put his hands under my buttocks and lifted me up a little so he could slide forward. As my legs wrapped around his waist, his right hand went to my clitoris, and he began to strum it, thrusting in and out gently, rocking on his heels. I could feel an incredible tension building in his body as he moved against me.

"Yes—"he growled, deep in his throat, "a very nice place to visit."

There is no metaphor for what happens to me more apt than a rollercoaster ride-the long steady climb to the first summit, a moment of weightlessness, and then—I could feel that building, despite the intense discomfort I still felt.

"But," he continued, "am I welcome here? I want to know that my efforts on your behalf are being appreciated."

"Yes—" I gasped, "And may I say—that your selflessness moves me—no—it touches me deeply—Oh!"

He chuckled. He actually chuckled! "Sometimes my magnanimity astounds even me." I could hear a grin in his voice.

Doom had made a joke. I was practically in shock.

Then I crested the first peak, and my orgasm was upon me. Nothing would stop it now; it would go until it ended on its own.

He immediately reacted by lunging forward and starting to move in earnest. I had felt him straining to stay in control while he pleasured me, and, achieving that, he allowed his own to overtake him.

What followed was hard, fast and driving. He grasped my hips with both hands, then he cried out wordlessly. He groaned and snarled through to the end, which was a long time coming.

He collapsed on me, spent. I couldn't hold him in my arms, but I could wrap my legs around him, so I did, and laughed out of sheer happiness.

He laughed with me. Inside me, I could feel him twitch, soften, retreat, which gave me a strange internal tickle.

We lay there for a timeless time in the silence of pleasurable exhaustion. He finally stirred, raised himself up on an elbow, and began to trace my lips with a finger. "You came," he said, triumphantly. "I made you come. Your first time, and I made you come."

Self-satisfaction was one of his moods that I knew well. Anyhow, from what I had heard from friends about their own deflorations, he had every right to be smug.

"Enormously, my lord." I agreed with him. It is always safe to agree with him, but it is best when it's true.

"While ordinarily you might only be getting started, you are new to this, so I shan't importune you further tonight—and you may speak freely again now."

He stood. I heard him move around the room before he returned to unlock my shackles. I sat up and stretched my arms. He hooked a finger under the elastic of the sleep mask and removed it, too.

"May I open my eyes now?" I asked.

"Of course." He was standing before me in a grey velvet robe.

He was wearing a mask again, a different one than the one he wore with the armor. It was held on his head with a cap-like arrangement of straps, like a welder's mask. His hair was dark brown, with a few threads of silver salted through it.

He handed me the sleep mask. "You will want to keep this. There is something I want to make perfectly clear. Whenever I choose that we should be intimate, you will wear this or one like it. You will not remove it until I say you may. If I choose to spend the night beside you, you will not peek at me while I sleep, as Psyche did to Cupid. Most significantly and to the point, you will never attempt to see my face. That is something I will not countenance—an offense I will never forgive. Do you understand?"

"Yes, my lord." I bowed my head. Now that my mind was no longer clouded by frustration and lust, the cold water of potential consequence was waking me up fast. What had I done? What would happen now?

I wasn't afraid of getting pregnant, as I had used oral contraceptives to ease my menstrual cycles for five years now—nor was I afraid of contracting a disease from him, as sex with someone who has touched no one else in over ten years could hardly be safer. But now that I was Doom's lover, everything was complicated.

"Very good." he replied. I found my underwear and trousers and put them on, but without a top, how was I supposed to get back to my suite? I turned to see him holding out a silk robe.

"Thank you." I said, as I slipped it on. It wasn't mine, but it fit me well. It looked and felt new, and it was cinnamon colored, a shade I often wore.

"You're almost certainly tired, and I am sure you will want to bathe." he informed me. "Come upstairs."

"To your bathroom?" I asked, surprised.

"No, to yours." he said, and then added something that shocked and terrified me more than anything else which had occurred in the past two hours. "You are my wife now, after all."

"Your wife?" I cried.

"I am an honorable man," Doom told me, proudly. "I promised you would not suffer for this; I promised you would only rise higher in my esteem. If I did not marry you, you would become the subject of rumors, vile gossip, and calumny. Those of my lackeys who did not insult you to your face would toady to you and insult you behind your back. In any case, I have no taste for squalid assignations and the to-ing and fro-ing that would go on in the middle of the night. It will be much simpler if we are married."

Latveria is not like America. There is an ancient and obscure law which gives the ruler of Latveria the right, for the good of the state—as determined by the ruler, of course—to take as consort any woman, regardless of her marital status or feelings in the matter. No ceremony or license is necessary—and should the match not prosper, no divorce.

Doom was an absolute monarch. I thought about another absolute monarch from history: King Henry the Eighth of England. His will was all—and what of his wives? Six of them—divorced, beheaded, dead from childbirth—at least that fate was unlikely today—another divorced, another beheaded, the last outliving him by the skin of her teeth.

At least I had learned to school my face. The shock showed, but the dismay did not.

He grew impatient. "Have you anything to say, my dear?"

I swallowed. "I am not worthy of the great honor you would do me, my lord. That I should be—should be your lover is more than I ever dreamed of. That is enough for me."

He was pleased by my answer. "I find your modesty most charming, and it does you credit. But if I find you worthy, then you are. Come!" He beckoned me to climb the stairs.

I went, wincing a little as I pulled on all the muscles that had been stretched in unfamiliar directions. The stone staircase turned and wound upward, and as I climbed, my mind worked frantically. What was I going to do? If he tired of me, or if I displeased him, he almost certainly wouldn't bother to divorce me. Anne Boleyn, Henry the Eighth's second wife and Elizabeth the First's mother, went to the block on trumped up charges of treason, witchcraft, incest and adultery—but it was really because she couldn't give Henry a son.

What was I going to do? Call on some costumed adventurer for rescue?

"The announcement of our marriage will be made tomorrow morning," he said, as we climbed the stairs. "You will want to tell your mother before that. Perhaps we shall do so together." By my mother he meant, not my birth mother, but the kind and good Latverian woman who claimed me as hers.

More nightmare. What about her? She was a widow, and I, her only 'child'. What would he do to her if I balked, ran away, defected? She would have to come along. What then? All my savings were in banks that Doom controlled. I would have no resources.

He was still talking. "There will be a public ceremony, of course. The people of Latveria should bear witness to such an important event of my reign. It will be held in one week. It could be held tomorrow, except that I thought to allow you time to have a dress made. I understand such things are important to a bride."

He paused, seeming to wait for an answer.

"Thank you, my lord," I said, obediently.

"Here we are—your rooms, my dear." He opened the door wide, gesturing that I should go in.

I gasped. It was beautiful. It was like a museum or a historical site. It was like Rebecca's room in the Hitchcock movie of the same name, lacking nothing in grandeur, elegance, luxury. The furnishings were a gentle blue-green. Like the silk robe, it was a shade I often wore.

But it looked nothing like a room that belonged to me, or ever could.

"It's too beautiful, my lord. I haven't the words." I managed.

"My own chambers are through here." He pointed to a door. "Naturally, you will not enter them except when I have specifically invited you."

"Of course, my lord." I replied.

"Then I will bid you good night." he said, and waited.

It took me only a split second to realize what he was waiting for. I went to him and twined my arms around his neck. This mask had an open space for his mouth, without a piece of grillwork in the hole. I could kiss him through the aperture, and did.

"I'm still dazed." I said, truthfully. "It'll be days before I can believe this is real."

"Will this help to convince you?" He slipped a hand inside my robe.

"No—but it will make me want to do again what I really am too sore to enjoy right now."

"Abandoned creature." Victor Von Doom chuckled. "I really am quite fond of you, you know."

"And I of you, my lord." I replied, automatically.

That didn't make it untrue, though. I did care about him. I had cared long before this.

Besides, I needed him for other reasons. An Ancient Greek philosopher had said he could move the world, if only he had a big enough lever and a place to stand. I was trying to move the world, with Latveria as my place to stand, and Doom as my lever…

"Good night, then."

"Good night."

He closed and locked the door between us.

I wondered if I were being locked in or locked out.

Did it matter?

I remembered my comparison of how working for Doom was like lion-taming as I looked around the room. What a lovely cage I was going to be sharing with a lion…

I really was feeling dazed by all that had happened. Two hours ago or so, I had been enjoying an after-dinner read in the library, and now…

I wandered over to the vast, curtained bed that dominated the room. It rose so high that there were stairs to assist me into it. Of course it was a poem of comfort. I looked at the elaborate and sturdy bedstead from a different perspective than I would have done that morning. The way it was made—the high, arching canopy, the posts, the pierced and carved headboard and footboard—convinced me it had been chosen, or, more likely, made to maximize the possible configurations for restraints.

Clearly, all of that celibacy had done something to Doom. He was now determined to enjoy himself, and had picked me to help. Lucky me…I was only being half-facetious.

I got down off the bed and wandered over to one of the doors opposite the entryway. It proved to be a bathroom, although if someone had mistaken it for a greenhouse or even a rainforest grotto, it would have been understandable, because the outside wall was mostly glass and there were several dozen orchids in full bloom scattered around the room.

The bathtub was also glass. I was sticky all over, and a bath seemed like an excellent idea, so I hunted around for handles and a faucet. All I found was a touch pad, and after a moment, I figured out that what I had to do was enter the temperature of water I wanted, and it would well up silently in the tub. I chose 37 degrees Celsius—blood heat.

I found some bath salts and put them in, then went looking around while the tub filled. The shower stall was shale and teak and resembled a cascade in a forest glen. After I discovered the Linen Closet of the Gods, full of enough towels to last a year, I found that the toilet and bidet had a room all to themselves, with an attendant sink—one of three.

This bathroom was larger than the entire suite I had occupied up until then.

My reaction to all of that surreal luxury was not: Look at this! And it's mine! All mine! It was panic. I couldn't live there. I couldn't live up to all that.

After a moment's reflection, I calmed down. It wasn't really there to pamper me. It was there for him. He would be using these rooms also, presumably often, and he had had it fitted out as he wanted it. There are certain forms of self-indulgence that men consider effeminate, and however much they might enjoy them, they would never permit themselves to do so without a woman on hand…for whatever reason. His own bathroom was probably Spartan and minimalistic.

I laid the beautiful robe over a chair near the tub, slipped out of the trousers and underwear, and slid myself into the tub. I hoped I wasn't going to have to clean and maintain all this. The castle maids had cleaned even my little closet of a bathroom, however, so of course they would take care of the Master's wife's suite…

That was when it hit me, and I began to shiver in a tub full of hot water.

I was going to be, or, according to him, already was, the wife of Victor Von Doom.

He was honorable, generous, responsible, and brilliant beyond genius. He had turned out to have an unexpected sense of humor, and had proven to be a passionate lover. He had been both gentle and considerate with me. I appreciated all of those qualities, deeply.

But he was also vain, capricious, paranoid, power-mad, vicious, prone to violence, and dangerous, dangerous, dangerous.

I should do anything to get away from him. But I had known he was dangerous long before I went to sit in the embassy every day for a week, waiting to see if he would grant me an audience. I knew before… That was partly why I had gone to him, with my secret plans locked in my brain, to convince him it would be to his advantage to hire me.

He was also decidedly kinky. If restraints and domination put in an appearance during our first encounter, I could only wonder what would surface once he loosened up over time. I attributed the blindfold to his vanity and paranoia, however. Sometimes a cigar is only a cigar.

As I thought about what we had done together on that chaise, a wave of sense memory swept over me. I had liked it. I liked him. I had liked all of it. I had liked the mystery, the uncertainty of the blindfold.

Rather than binding me, the restraints and the blindfold had set me free. Without them, I would, knowing me, have been stiff, awkward, and self-conscious. I would have been worrying if he—who ever he might have been—thought my breasts were too small or my butt too big. I would have worried that my skin was pasty, and if I were being too passionate, too eager, too desperate. I probably would have been too nervous to enjoy it. But instead—instead I had thought only of what was going on. Once I consented, every thing that followed had been out of my hands, and I had relaxed.

I was kinky, too. I had a kink complementary to his. I was looking forward to what would come, to exploring where this would lead. The pleasure was an addiction.

I wasn't going to leave him. I wasn't even going to try.

I reflected that I was, in several different ways—there was no other word for it—

Doomed.

A/N: Please review. You don't have to sign it if you're embarrassed.