Chapter Luca
Luca
A roar in the distance sends a shiver down Luca’s spine and a jolt directly to his cock.
He spares a moment to be grateful that he spends a lot of time naked in their den, and even more time with a semi-hard-on in his cage, because running full tilt with an erection might have otherwise been distracting.
Running with a short, fat plug in his ass sure is new, but even that doesn’t slow him down.
Gideon is on his tail, and it’s almost like Luca can feel hot breath on the back of his neck, despite the distance between them.
Based on the roar, Luca figures he’s got a fifteen-minute head start.
He could climb a tree or hide, but that’s not the point of this whole little game—because this is a run.
Just like the old days, where alphas ran their mates down in the woods.
Archaic? Certainly.
Horribly nonconsensual? Obviously.
But Luca can’t deny that the instinctive fear pouring into his amygdala right now is oddly euphoric.
It’s strange because Luca lives in a heightened state of fight or flight, every second of his life.
Sleeping or awake, Luca relies solely on his cognitive behavioral training to overcome the feelings and distinguish between fear and anticipation.
This is both. It is so insanely arousing that Luca could easily become addicted.
He has kept his shoes on, even though he looks ridiculous, because he can’t risk damage to his feet or being caught too soon.
He does not want to ruin this weekend because he got caught crying over a splinter or an embedded rock.
The footwear makes him faster, even if it doesn’t make him more coordinated, and he is suddenly reminded that he has always been more Baby Spice than Sporty as he stumbles over a fallen tree.
Managing to keep his feet, he spots a narrow stream ahead.
He could vault it, but he gets in and wades upstream instead, to make it a little bit harder for Gideon to track him.
Ice-cold even in the heat of Tennessee summer, it helps Luca keep focused on making sure this run is everything his soulmate has ever dreamed.
Gideon never takes the easy road, no matter that he’d tell you differently. No, Gideon Carnell loves a challenge and is the living embodiment of the idiom Anything worth having is worth working for.
So Luca is going to make him work for it.
Earlier this week, while Gideon had been packing toys and secrets into his cardboard box, Luca had been watching YouTube videos on tracking and wilderness survival.
He’d needed help figuring it out because, despite popular opinion—and sometimes evidence to the contrary—Luca is not really stupid by nature. It’s just that Gideon, being Gideon, sometimes makes him stupid, because Gideon is stupid hot.
That’s where that saying comes from, Luca is sure.
He climbs up the bank of the stream after fifty feet and digs mud out from the bottom of the stream bed. It smells of wet moss and water, so he adds some fallen pine needles, too (oooh, they smell just like Jay!), and rubs the whole mess on his neck and behind his knees, to hide his aroused mocha.
Mud clings to his skin as he grabs a broken branch and tosses fallen leaves over the bank where he climbed out. The gamble of hiding his scent works too well, because now he can’t smell Gideon at all.
Ah, well, Luca wants to be caught. Eventually.
But not yet; he’s having too much fun to let it be over yet.
He lets an involuntary laugh ring out as he takes off again at a forty-five-degree angle away from his original trajectory, his steps quick and light. He climbs two large boulders in a row and jumps down on the other side.
Dodging tree branches, he hums Stayin’ Alive by the Bee Gees, nearly taking a branch to the dick when he stops to dance at his favorite part.
Thankful for the cage, it acts like a little set of dick-armor (bet no one thought about that use.
Maybe he’ll write the company a thank-you note and leave a five-star review).
Figuring that was a close call, he veers toward a rocky outcropping where he leaps over another big rock, slips on its chipped-off rock-babies, before finally rolling into an awkward upright landing like a gymnast with his arms up high.
“I’m okay!” He giggles at the near miss, the excess adrenaline needing an outlet, or he might burst.
Quickly slapping a hand over his mouth, he freezes. There’s not a sound in the tiny clearing, not even birdsong. It’s like they know there’s a big, bad wolf stalking his prey under the hot summer sun.
“Which way to go?” he whispers, much quieter now, creeping toward a larger clearing just visible through the trees. It’s the only way forward, given the high rocks off to either side, but once he breaks the treeline, there won’t be any cover for a hundred yards.
His prey response kicks into overdrive, adrenaline surging as he realizes time is ticking. With his heart racing, he breaks into a hard run like the panicked woodland creature the others sometimes jokingly call him.
The sun is high overhead, creating short shadows in the scrubby grass. Winded, Luca realizes it’s not his pulse thundering in his ears, but Gideon’s footsteps pounding behind him, and he is moving fast.
Luca will be proud of himself later because he almost makes it to the other end of the clearing before Gideon takes him to the ground.
The momentum forces him across the rough ground on his hands and knees.
Instinctively, Luca struggles, kicking out with his leg and connecting hard with his alpha’s thigh, causing Gideon to give a very satisfying grunt of pain.
Scrabbling in the dirt, he manages to get three feet away before Gideon has him by the ankle and drags him back.
“Mine,” Gideon growls, pushing him flat on his belly.
Lying heavily over his back, rock-hard cock pressed against the back of Luca’s thigh, Gideon sinks his teeth into his mating bite on the side of Luca’s neck.
Luca moans, head dropping forward to hang limply from his neck, as remembered pleasure shoots down his arms and straight to his semi-hard cock.
Gideon shifts his hips just enough to drag the plug free, tossing it aside into the dirt with a dull thud. A hand replaces Gideon’s teeth on the back of Luca’s neck, as he pulls Luca’s hips up so he’s propped on his knees.
Thighs trembling, Luca arches his back into a deep curve, popping his ass up.
Not wasting one more second, he pulls Luca’s cheeks apart, plunging his tongue deep past his rim, nipping and biting around Luca’s hole.
The sharp stings from Gideon’s fangs only take Luca higher, his tiny dick-armor pinching even more as it tries to get hard, but can’t. The denied pleasure is so intense, he wonders if he could come like this, mewling and whining.
But that’s not what he wants. He wants to come with his alpha fucking him hard and there is one sure-fire way to get his mate to take him hard and fast. Wiggling his ass, Luca begins squeaking and forcing out high-pitched moans in the hope that he’ll incite his captor to give him what he needs.
Instead, he gets a hard slap on the ass for his trouble and a firm hand on his neck, forcing his cheek more firmly in the scrubby grass.
His heart is beating out Gideon’s name in a fast staccato, and the adrenaline is a fucking rush. “Come on, alpha, fuck me. You caught me, now make me sorry I ran.”
It earns him another harsh smack, this time to his balls and taint above the fastening of the cage, the sound reverberating off the trees.
He shrieks as it burns so sweetly, and combined with his abraded hands and knees, it has his belly on fire and his cock leaking like someone turned on a faucet.
“Again, goddess. Please, alpha.”
Instead of doing it again, Gideon puts two fingers against Luca’s wet hole (It’s wet because Luca put half a bottle of lube up there before plugging himself up at the house, and now it’s leaking out and running down the inside of his thighs).
He pushes them inside before pulling them out and adding a third. Gideon groans at the squelching sound, and he pumps his fingers faster. It’s tight; Luca feels the pinch of those knuckles on his rim, and the referred heat shoots into his cock.
“Fuck me, alpha. Come on. Need it.” Again, he’s close. It wouldn’t take much for him to come like this, and even if he doesn’t have express permission, he thinks it would be worth it.
Gideon slows his ministrations instead, and it triggers something in Luca’s hindbrain.
When his alpha lets go of his hip, Luca scrambles into a run, taking off again.
This time, Gideon’s roar is right on his heels, and Luca takes a moment to turn around, because until this point, he hasn’t set eyes on his mate.
It’s a tactical error because he stops still at the sight, and Gideon takes him down at a full run, this time onto his back. He’s careful to cushion Luca’s head, but nothing else, and his back scrapes along the clearing floor.
Gideon looks…feral. It’s not hyperbole or anything, despite Luca’s tendency toward overly dramatic adjectives, because there is no better word than feral.
Luca’s alpha is naked, without his shoes.
His muscles look bigger than normal and carved from stone.
The hands that push Luca’s legs open are tipped in razor-sharp claws, and his long fangs are bared in a snarl.
This is the first time Luca has seen his soulmate wolfed out, and he hopes it isn’t the last. It stimulates a matching response in Luca, and he tilts his head to show his mate Gideon’s bite.
The wolf yanks Luca’s hands over his head with such force that his wrist bones painfully grind together, but Luca doesn’t look away. Gideon’s red eyes bore holes into Luca’s as he impales Luca on his cock with one brutal stroke.
“Mine.”
Luca lets a punched-out gasp past his lips, arching up against his mate’s grip. He struggles against his iron hold while Gideon fucks him hard and fast. It’s primal, and with every stroke, the head of Gideon’s cock rides his prostate, pushing Luca closer to coming his brains out.
Piercing hot pleasure laced with pain unmakes him, and he lets go of time and space. He sinks deeply into subspace, where he only exists because of the sensation Gideon gives him. Both grounding him and setting him free. It’s easy to go lax then, submitting completely.
Gideon growls deeper in his chest, fucking into Luca’s hole with enough force to push them across the clearing, and knocking the breath out of him with every thrust.
A scream builds in his chest. Every thrust is an agony of fire in his belly, with an answering fire between his legs.
Watching Gideon throw back in a feral roar as he comes, forcing his knot past Luca’s burning rim. It sends Luca into an orgasm, his eyes rolling back, and it’s lights out.
He comes to, tied to the bed in the cabin.
It’s dark outside, and Gideon is lying beside him, hand on his belly and nose in his armpit.
Luca is still feeling a low-grade arousal that doesn’t supersede his bone-deep sense of safety and contentment.
A quiet timer beeps somewhere, and there’s a zing of vibration around the base of his cock and up against his prostate.
“Gideon,” he whimpers as the sensations build, but Gideon doesn’t move or respond. “Alpha.”
“Sleep. I’m not done with you yet,” he growls, and there’s a perfect sting when Gideon sinks his “human” teeth into his pec.
Luca has enough brainpower left to hope Gideon never is.