Chapter 5 #2
Fergal’s heart hammered against the mat.
Every nerve in his body was lit up, every point of contact with Gregor’s body sending signals that had nothing to do with combat.
Gregor’s hand burned around his wrist. Gregor’s thigh pressed heavy between his own.
Gregor’s breath, ragged and hot, stirred the hair at Fergal’s temple.
And Gregor’s cock—hard and thick—pressed against Fergal’s ass.
He should yield. That was the rule. Tap out, concede, end this before it became something neither of them could take back. Instead, Fergal rolled his hips slowly, deliberately, pushing his ass back against Gregor with an intent that couldn’t be mistaken for anything other than exactly what it was.
Gregor went rigid. Every muscle in his body locked. A sound escaped him that was low, strangled, and barely human. “Yield,” Gregor rasped. His voice was wrecked. “Fergal, yield.”
His first name. Not “Your Highness.” Not “Prince Fergal.” Just Fergal, torn from somewhere deep and desperate, and hearing it in that broken voice was better than any victory Fergal had ever imagined.
He turned his head, his cheek pressed against the mat, and looked back at Gregor over his shoulder. Those gray eyes were wild—dilated nearly black, the steel swallowed by something raw and hungry and terrified.
“Make me,” Fergal whispered.
Gregor’s hand released his wrist. For a suspended, airless moment, nothing happened. Then Gregor’s body retreated, leaving Fergal shivering for a moment before Gregor’s open palm connected with Fergal’s ass with a crack that echoed off the stone walls like a gunshot.
The sound punched through the room. Through Fergal, through every defense and pretense and game he’d been playing. His gasp was involuntary, shocked out of him by the impact. The instant, blazing heat that followed lit up his nervous system like a struck match.
Gregor’s hand hovered, trembling, above where it had landed.
Fergal could feel the heat of his palm radiating through the thin fabric of his track pants.
Could feel Gregor’s breathing, which was ragged, horrified, wanting.
Fergal moaned, a small, involuntary sound that slipped out before he could catch it.
In the silence of the training room, it was deafening.
Gregor spanked him again. Harder. The crack was sharper this time, the sting deeper, and Fergal’s fingers curled against the mat as his back arched into it.
A sound escaped through his clenched teeth—something between a hiss and a groan that seemed to shatter whatever was left of Gregor’s restraint.
A third strike. A fourth. Each one landed with devastating precision on a slightly different spot, like Gregor’s hand knew exactly where to aim for maximum impact.
Every blow drove the breath from Fergal’s lungs and replaced it with fire.
His entire body was burning, every nerve ending screaming, and he was so hard it was almost painful, his cock trapped against the mat with Gregor’s weight still pinning him down.
Then it stopped. Gregor wrenched himself away like he’d been burned. Fergal heard him scramble backward, boots scuffing against stone. His breathing sounded like it was being dragged through broken glass.
Fergal rolled over slowly. His ass throbbed, his heart was trying to break through his ribs, and his track pants were doing absolutely nothing to hide his arousal. He didn’t care. He was looking at Gregor.
Gregor stood with his back against the far wall, as far from Fergal as the room allowed.
His face was ashen. His hands were shaking, those same hands that had just spanked a crown prince with the confidence of a man who knew exactly what he was doing.
His chest heaved with each breath, and his eyes…
His eyes looked like a man staring at the wreckage of a catastrophe he’d caused.
Not angry. Not aroused. Destroyed.
Something shifted inside Fergal’s chest. The triumph he’d expected to feel, the satisfaction of finally cracking Gregor’s composure, evaporated.
In its place was something fiercer, something protective.
Because that expression on Gregor’s face showed him what Gregor was telling himself had happened.
What he had done. What kind of man it had made him.
“Don’t.” Fergal sat up, his voice softer than he’d intended. “Don’t you dare apologize.”
“I just—” Gregor’s voice was barely a whisper. He looked down at his own hand like it belonged to someone else.
“You did exactly what I wanted. What I’ve been wanting for a long time. What I was all but asking for. And if you try to turn this into something shameful, I swear to every god that ever existed, I will use every single one of my abilities to make your life a living hell.”
The threat was absurd—a young dragon prince threatening magical torment against the most disciplined man in the compound—but the ferocity behind it was real.
And it did what Fergal intended. It yanked Gregor out of his spiral, enough for those gray eyes to focus on Fergal instead of whatever horror he was constructing in his own head.
“This can’t happen,” Gregor said. His voice was raw.
“It already did.”
“We can’t… We’re both alphas. It would never—”
“I’m well aware.”
“I’m your tutor. Your guard. I’m—”
“Over three centuries old. I know. I can do math.” Fergal stood and crossed the room, his steps deliberate, holding Gregor’s gaze. “I’m not a child, Gregor. I haven’t been a child for a long time. And you know that, or your hand wouldn’t still be tingling.”
Gregor flinched. His right hand curled into a fist at his side—but not before Fergal caught the involuntary flex of his fingers from the ghost of contact still burning in his palm.
Fergal stopped an arm’s length away, standing close enough that Gregor could feel his presence without being trapped by it.
“I haven’t used my abilities on you, and I won’t,” Fergal said quietly.
“I promised, and I keep my promises. I won’t push tonight.
But I’m not going to pretend that didn’t happen, and I won’t let you pretend either.
” He held Gregor’s gaze until the older man’s eyes glistened, and something in Fergal’s chest cracked at the sight of it.
“This is real, Gregor. Whatever’s between us is real. ”
He left before he could do something stupid like touch him, walking out of the training room on legs that weren’t quite steady, his ass still burning, his pulse a war drum in his ears, every step sending a delicious reminder of Gregor’s handprints through his entire body.
Back in his room, he pressed his back against the closed door and exhaled.
His hands were shaking. Hell, his whole body was shaking.
He closed his eyes, and the memory hit him—Gregor’s weight on top of him, Gregor’s ragged breath in his ear, the crack of Gregor’s palm, and the lightning bolt of sensation that followed.
He touched the places where Gregor’s hand had landed. Even through the fabric, the skin was hot. Tender. He pressed his fingers against it and shivered. Not from pain.
From the memory of Gregor’s control shattering. From the sound Gregor had made—half growl, half groan—in the fraction of a second before the first strike. From the devastating, undeniable proof that underneath all that discipline and duty and distance, Gregor wanted him badly enough to break.
But the triumph was already fading, replaced by something Fergal hadn’t expected. Something that sat heavy in his chest and ached in a way that had nothing to do with the handprints on his ass.
Gregor’s face had shown horror, shame. And the way he’d looked at his own hand like it was a weapon that had discharged without permission…
Fergal didn’t want that. He didn’t want Gregor’s shame or his guilt or his self-punishment.
He wanted the man who’d pinned him to the mat and called him by his name.
The man who’d broken through centuries of iron control because Fergal had goaded him into it.
The man whose hand had known exactly where to land, exactly how hard, because some part of him had been imagining it long before today.
He wanted to be the person Gregor didn’t have to hide from. The place where all those locked doors could finally open.
He just had to convince Gregor of that. And if a year of patience had taught Fergal anything, it was that the walls around Gregor’s heart weren’t going to come down from one spanking—no matter how satisfying that spanking had been.
But they’d cracked. Oh, how they had cracked.
And Fergal had never encountered a crack he didn’t know how to widen.