Chapter 181 Behind the church doors 5

Chapter 181 Behind the church doors 5
The house was sold out months in advance. Scalpers asked for four figures. Critics sat in the first rows with notebooks already poisoned. Tonight the new Salome would either resurrect the company or bury it forever.

Backstage smelled of terror and adrenaline: rosin, sweat, hairspray, the metallic tang of fear. Dancers ghosted through corridors painted black to hide the blood from broken toes. No one spoke above a whisper. Superstition clung to the walls like dust.

Elena stood in front of her dressing-room mirror, alone. The costume was little more than gold body paint and chains that draped across her breasts and hips, leaving back, sides, and most of her ass bare. Her skin shimmered under the lights, every muscle carved sharp from weeks of starvation and obsession. She looked like a blade dipped in honey.

Valeria knocked once and entered without waiting. She wore the Slave costume again: black straps, collar, nothing else. The leather had been adjusted since the gala; now it framed her completely naked cunt, lips already slightly swollen, as if her body knew what was coming.

They stared at each other in the mirror.

“No notes tonight,” Elena said quietly.

Valeria’s mouth curved. “Good. I’m done pretending I need them.”

The call for places came over the intercom. Five minutes.

They walked the corridor together, barefoot, chains whispering. No one dared look directly at them; the air around them crackled like static before lightning.

The overture began. The curtain rose on a bare stage washed in blood-red light.

From the first moment, the audience knew they were watching something obscene. Elena’s Salome was not seductive; she was predatory. Every movement dripped contempt and hunger. When she danced the seven veils, each scarf fell away like skin being flayed, until she stood almost entirely naked, gold paint catching the light like fresh blood.

Valeria entered as the Slave, crawling on hands and knees, collar attached to a long golden chain Elena held loosely in one fist. The choreography demanded she lick the floor in front of Salome’s feet, rise slowly, body brushing up Elena’s legs, stomach, breasts. Their eyes locked. The chain went taut.

In the wings, dancers forgot to breathe.

The pas de deux that followed was no longer acting. When Elena spun Valeria, the straps cut red lines into pale skin. When Valeria dropped to her knees and pressed her mouth to Elena’s inner thigh (choreographed as worship), her tongue actually tasted the sweat there. The audience gasped, unsure where dance ended and something forbidden began.

By the time Salome demanded the head of Jokanaan, Elena’s voice cracked with real rage, real lust. The platter was brought in, covered. She fell upon it, kissing the cold silver with a moan that carried to the back row.

Intermission.

The curtain dropped to stunned silence, then thunderous, uncertain applause.

Backstage was chaos: quick changes, ice packs, whispered panic about whether they had gone too far. Elena and Valeria moved through it like ghosts, drawn by a current no one else could feel.

They found the prop storage room by instinct: a cavernous space stacked with broken sets, dusty veils, forgotten thrones. The door had a bolt on the inside. Valeria slid it home.

The second they were alone, Elena slammed her against a tower of painted flats. Gold body paint smeared across Valeria’s breasts as Elena’s mouth claimed hers in a kiss that tasted of desperation and triumph. Hands tore at straps and chains until both of them were naked except for streaks of gold and red welts.

“I can’t wait,” Valeria rasped against Elena’s lips. “I’ve been wet since the overture.”

Elena spun her, bent her forward over a pile of velvet cushions that had once been Herod’s throne. Valeria’s knees sank into the fabric, ass tilted high, thighs already trembling.

Elena dropped behind her and spread her open with both thumbs. Valeria was drenched, folds glistening under the single work-light that leaked through the door crack. Elena licked her from clit to entrance in one long, filthy stroke.

Valeria’s moan was loud enough to risk everything. Elena didn’t care. She sealed her mouth over Valeria’s cunt and sucked, tongue fucking deep, nose grinding against her perineum. Valeria pushed back, riding Elena’s face shamelessly, hands braced on a cardboard moon.

Footsteps passed in the corridor outside (crew, stagehands, voices calling thirty seconds to places). Neither of them stopped.

Elena slid three fingers into Valeria without warning, curling hard, pumping fast while her tongue flicked relentlessly over her clit. Valeria’s entire body went rigid; she came with a strangled cry muffled against her own forearm, walls spasming, wetness flooding Elena’s hand and mouth.

Elena stood, turned Valeria roughly, and pushed her down onto the cushions. She straddled her face without ceremony, grinding down onto that greedy tongue. Valeria’s hands gripped Elena’s ass, pulling her closer, nails digging half-moons into gold-painted skin.

Elena rode her hard, hips rolling, one hand braced on the wall above them. The taste of Valeria still coated her tongue; the smell of sex filled the tiny space. She felt the second orgasm building fast, vicious.

Outside, the orchestra began the Dance of the Seven Veils reprise. They had minutes, maybe less.

“Come for me,” Valeria mumbled against her clit, words vibrating straight through Elena’s core. “I want to taste it when we go back out there.”

That did it.

Elena came with a sharp, silent scream, thighs clamping around Valeria’s head, body shaking so hard she nearly toppled them both. Valeria licked her through it, gentle now, drawing out every aftershock until Elena’s legs gave out and she slid down to kneel between Valeria’s thighs.

They kissed, slow and deep, tasting both of themselves, hearts hammering in matching frantic rhythm.

The stage manager’s voice crackled through the walls: “Places for the cistern scene. Places!”

They stood on shaky legs, wiped gold paint and slick from their faces with someone’s abandoned veil. Costumes were half ruined: chains tangled, straps torn. They didn’t fix them.

Let the audience see.

They slipped back into the wings just as the curtain rose again. No one noticed they’d been gone. Or if they did, no one dared speak.

The final scene played out like ritual sacrifice.

Salome’s mad aria. The platter revealed. The kiss.

When Elena bent over the silver dome and pressed her mouth to it, she closed her eyes and tasted Valeria instead (salt and sex and the faint metallic tang of the stage floor). The moan she let out was real. The audience felt it in their bones.

At the climax, when the soldiers crushed Salome beneath their shields, Elena collapsed willingly, body trembling with spent lust, gold paint cracked and smeared like war paint.

The curtain fell.

For one heartbeat there was silence.

Then the theater exploded.

They took twelve curtain calls. Flowers rained onto the stage. Critics stood screaming bravo until their voices gave out. Backstage became pandemonium: champagne corks, camera flashes, patrons pushing past security to touch the hem of Elena’s ruined costume like it was holy relic.

Elena and Valeria stood side by side at the final call, hands clasped behind the curtain where no one could see, fingers intertwined so tightly it hurt.

Later, in the empty theater, long after the house lights came up and the last usher locked the doors, they returned to the stage alone.

The set was still there: the platter, the veils, the blood-red moon hanging crooked overhead.

Elena pulled Valeria down onto the bare boards where thousands had just watched them burn.

They fucked one last time under the ghost light: slow, almost tender, mouths barely parting, bodies moving like they had invented the language of skin. When they came, it was quiet, foreheads pressed together, breathing each other’s names like prayer and curse at once.

Afterward they lay tangled amid scattered petals and rosin dust, city traffic a distant hum far below.

Valeria traced a finger through the gold paint still clinging to Elena’s breast.

“Tomorrow,” she said softly, “they’ll call it revolutionary. Genius. Dangerous.”

Elena turned her head, met those dark eyes that had ruined her so completely.

“Tomorrow,” she answered, “we do it again.”

Valeria smiled, slow and feral.

“Every night. Until they tear the theater down around us.”

Above them, the ghost light flickered once, as if in agreement.

Somewhere in the dark wings, the scent of jasmine and sex lingered like smoke that would never quite clear.

They were bound now: not by contracts or collars or chains of gold, but by something deeper, rawer, permanent.

The fire they had started would consume everything.

And neither of them wanted to be saved.