Chapter 30
THIRTY
ABADDON
“Where were you?” I growl, the words tearing from me with the force of a thing that has not been properly fed.
She is back in my castle. My brothers are locked away. My feathers are only slightly singed, and the ache from Thing’s bite is already receding. It could be far worse. Yet the heat under my skin has not cooled. It flickers hotter at her silence.
I slam my hand against the stone above her head the moment we pass into my hall, a thunderous sound that makes the torches shiver.
The echo answers me, rolling across the vast space that spans the castle’s full width, past the cold fireplace large enough to roast an ox, all the way up to the heavy timber beams blackened with age.
The sound seems to go on forever in this empty fortress, a reminder that there is no one for miles who might hear her if she screams.
“Tell me where you were, and who gave you those clothes.” My clawed fingers scrape a clean line through unfamiliar fabric as I speak. The smell on them is all wrong—human, recent, other.
She meets me with an almost insolent glare. My teeth bare, but her defiance steadies something in me. Anger is one thing; challenge is another.
I like challenge.
“You wear only what I allow,” I rasp out. “Who were you with?”
Her hands find her hips. That small, brave tilt makes the lion under my ribs purr.
“Stop screaming in my face,” she snaps. “You don’t own the air I walk through.”
For a heartbeat, I am astonished at her nerve. Then coldness blankets my rage like a winter cloak. Punishment is a blunt instrument. There are sharper, sweeter arts. I will teach her. I will turn obedience into an all-encompassing act of worship.
“You broke your word,” I say softly. The sound is worse than a roar; it is the hush before a storm. “You will learn to obey.” I do not shout. My cold authority has teeth.
She takes me in, and I see the flash—her mind racing, the old distrust fracturing into something dangerously like calculation. She opens her mouth; I taste it.
She will not be easily tamed.
Good.
“You will beg to serve me,” I promise and seeing the responding fury in her eyes warms my chest like a flame lit in a dark place.
“Never,” she spits and kicks. One sharp blow lands against my wing. A clever, dangerous blow that sings through my bones. I laugh because the heat that surges through me isn’t anger at all.
It’s hunger. She is back, and she is mine.
I sweep her up in a single motion, secure and practiced, one arm securely around her middle so she cannot slip free. She always fights. I think I love the sound of her resistance. She’s so alive in my hands. She writhes and struggles and curses, and my hunger swells with every heartbeat.
“You will learn your manners,” I tell her, not cruelly, but with the firmness of a man who keeps promises. “And you will learn to obey—as a consort ought.”
“Ha!” she hisses. “No man will ever make me small again!”
“Then prove it,” I say. “Show me you can be both defiant and still crave all that I offer you.” The paradox delights me. If she can master it, the devotion she offers afterward will be sweeter than any conquest.
I take wing with her in my arms, and the Great Hall blurs. She screeches as we fly up the stairway, my wings beating the cold air into a hush. She kicks at me again—a small, furious thing—and I relish the spark that flash-burns across my hide.
When we reach the bedchamber, I drop her down on the fresh furs I laid out earlier and watch as she bounces, enraged.
“Don’t manhandle me!” she screams. The fire in her eyes only lights me up more inside.
I move like a shadow and flip her gently, but with purpose, so that she lies face down. Her face presses into the soft fur, and the sight of her little backside twitching with anger as she tries to scramble away is unbearable and holy all at once.
I use my wings and knees to pin her, and she keeps kicking and fighting for purchase.
“I am no man,” I say, each word a vow. “I am monster.”
She keeps wriggling like a wildcat until I tie braided strips of soft cloth—not too tight—around each ankle and wrist, and then knot them to the bedposts.
When her limbs are secure, she raises her head and spits over her shoulder at me, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?
” But I can hear the tremor beneath the words that speaks of something else entirely.
The craving I spoke of earlier—she is feeling it.
I see it in her eyes. I smell her lusting scent in the air.
I step back and uncover the whip I fetched before I came for her: not the torture implement from my dungeon woven with nettles and cold metal, but a subtler instrument—a supple, leather short-lash, braided and featherlight compared to the dungeon instruments.
For her, I have a sweeter discipline planned.
“You will learn to obey,” I tell her again, and this time there is no threat in it; only intent. “This is training, beloved. Consent is our covenant. If you refuse at any point, say the word, and I will stop. Will you trust me enough to learn?”
She looks at me then in a way that makes something in me crack open—not like a wound, but like a seed opening to light. She is furious, stunned, and proud.
But beneath that is a small, fierce creature who wants to be known. Who wants to experience and see and feel everything that this world—and all the worlds beyond she never knew about until she met me—might possibly have in store for her.
She swallows, and finally, I get an answer in words.
“Teach me, then,” she says, the words a ragged admission. “Teach me to obey.”
The consent is a bell, and my whole body answers.
I set the short lash to my nose and inhale; the memory of other rooms, other disciplines, rises briefly and is gone. This will not be the brutal lesson of the dungeon. This will be worship disguised as schooling.
I kneel on the bed, the fur warm under my knee, and run the flat of my palm once down her spine. Her flesh is warm and soft. I trace from the swell of her hip to the hollow of her tailbone, then to the generous rounds of her ass. The sight of her now—bound, flushed, defiant—is a sacrament.
“I will enjoy marking you,” I murmur, and there is no malice in the promise, only the hungry reverence of a maker adoring his favorite thing.
“Go to hell,” she spits, but the sharpness is quickening. There is fire in her voice, and I will use that spark. “I thought you were better than any man.”
“Oh,” I answer, low and pleased. “I am much better than any man. I am yours.”
I let the whip fall once across her ass, a measured, stinging kiss that makes her hiss. I do not aim to bruise; I aim to write my name across the places she yields.
I let the leather sing, watching her breasts heave and her hands clench at the bedposts. With clenched teeth, I watch how she takes it and then takes it again. Each strike is metered mercy: sometimes sharp, then soft, all working toward the heat that blooms into pleasure.
Between lashes, I kneel and slide one palm between her legs, seeking the place that makes her whimper.
She trembles under my touch; her breath stutters like a flame.
When she begins to writhe, her ankles pulling and back arching, I press a thumb to the spot and whisper, “Good. See? You are exquisite.”
She spits out a string of curses and then—suddenly, dangerously—fists her hands beneath her on the bed, fingernails digging into the furs. The sound she makes isn’t pleading.
“You son of a—” she says, and then breaks off into a sobbing laugh.
I slide down to her ass again and, with the gentlest force, glide a finger along the crease before going deeper.
Stroking a rhythm to match my next crack of leather.
My wings curl, enclosing us, their shadow creating an intimate, warm little den where there’s no other world beyond the heat of her body and my touch.
I want to teach her how exquisite surrender can be.
She fights still, in hisses and in twisting hips and in the angry red flare of her cheeks. But when she meets my eyes, our hungers roar together, and I see her choice.
She is giving herself, not as a beaten thing, but as a worthy prize.
I smile, and it is soft.
“Then learn,” I whisper tantalizingly. “Learn how to beg. Learn how to savor. Learn that when you bind yourself to me, I will not break you. I will build a place inside me for you. And inside you, for me.”
She spits one last defiant thing, then gives in with a single breath, the kind that is not surrender but a receiving. “Teach me,” she says again, and it is the most beautiful thing I have heard.
So I teach.
I sting and I soothe. I take care that every mark is balanced by a kiss. I press my thumb to the pulse of her neck and murmur about how she smells. How she is mine, how she is perfect. My commands are soft, my palms careful; my roughness is a language of worship.
I teach her not to answer from fear but from want. That want—raw, honest, bright—is the honey I will drown in.
When at last I step back, my chest heaves and my wings are heavy with motion. She is breathless and weeping and laughing all at once. Her limbs are still tied, but there is no panic in her eyes anymore. There is a new something there: a hard, shining thread of trust that had not been spun before.
“You did well,” I tell her, and mean it more than any threat I could make. “Obedience is a practice. So is pleasure.”
She glares at me, but there is a small, crooked smile hiding the fury. “Don’t think this means I’m yours for the taking,” she mutters.
“No,” I answer, and bow my head in a mock courtly motion that makes us both laugh, brittle and soft. “You are yours. I am only the fortunate beast who gets to keep you.”
We both know we are playing a dangerous game.
That is the point.
I tuck the whip away, press a feathered kiss to the small of her back, and settle over her like a promise.
“Let the training continue,” I murmur. “If you will it, little consort, I will spend an eternity teaching you.”
She answers with a strangled noise that is half-laugh, half-moan, and in it I hear the covenant sealed.