Chapter 1 #4
When he speaks, his voice is calm, measured, and deep. There’s even warmth in it. A hint of affection that finds its way in between the very few cracks in my armor. I might only be twenty-three, but I have constructed what I thought was an impenetrable hide.
“I’m going to give you to the count of five to put down that weapon, or I’m going to take my belt off and whip your bare ass so hard you remember what respect is, little whelp.”
I feel a hot flush suffuse my face in an instant.
Obviously I am not going to put down the knife.
It’s my only leverage. But the way he just spoke to me is doing things to me.
It almost feels like foreplay. We are in a brightly lit room, open plan, with a glass door behind him.
There is no real privacy here, though I’d bet nobody from my little pack can see that I have a knife pulled on him from behind.
They’ll be able to see it on the cameras though.
“Five… Four… It doesn’t have to be like this,” he murmurs. “It’s going to hurt terribly if you let me get to the end of the countdown.”
I stare in his eyes and don’t fucking move.
“Three… two… last chance, little one…”
He pauses for what feels like a small eternity.
And then he moves. Faster than I would have thought a man his size was capable of moving. He grips my wrist and turns his body at the same time, so even if I did jab the knife forward it would go past him rather than through him.
He spins me around and deposits me face down on my desk in the least cluttered part. Prototypes tumble onto the floor around my legs as he yanks at my jeans and the same elasticated waist that makes them so comfortable betrays me by making it easy for him to bare my ass in one go.
I am cursing and kicking. I make contact with his legs more than once. I wish I’d worn heavy boots today. The rubber in these sneakers just serves to soften the blows.
“I warned you,” he says, still sounding so fucking calm. “You had every opportunity to avoid this. Think about that when you feel the belt.”
“I’m going to fucking kill you!” I shout back at him.
I hear the sound of his belt whipping out of his pants. He must have gotten it off one-handed, because the other is entirely taken up with the task of keeping me pinned down.
“No, my dear, you won’t. What you will do is take your spanking, and learn something from it.”
I hear the belt again, this time slicing through the air.
Crack!
It makes contact with my ass, dead center across both cheeks. The sudden pain makes me gasp. I curse at the top of my lungs, call him every name I can think of and some that generate out of thin air.
Crack!
The belt lands again, showing me that my protests don’t matter. He doesn’t care if I curse at him. He doesn’t care about anything besides punishing me. Fucker.
It hurts like hell.
Every time the belt lands, it sends a fresh bolt of heat through me. Fuck this guy. He’s everything I thought he was. Brutal, domineering, demanding.
Crack!
I can’t think for the bursts of heat and pain that just keep pulsing through me.
“I’m going to fucking take everything from you,” I swear. “You’re going to regret the fucking day you were born.”
He pauses for a moment, one hand on the back of my neck. He lays the belt over my hips, leaving it there like he’s going to use it again in a moment.
“You’ve never been spanked before, have you?”
“No,” I growl.
“Alright. I should probably have taught you how to take one first. If you’d started off being a little less of a brat, I could have done this over my knee. Used my hand. But you pulled a knife and now you’ve got some welts from my belt.”
I feel his hand on my ass the moment after that, rubbing the heated skin.
“Say sorry, and I’ll stop now,” he purrs in my ear.
“Fuck you.”
He pauses, then chuckles. “Do you like pain, whelp?”
“Fuck off.”
Crack!
That belt lands again, and I cry out. I want so badly to resist the pain, but that searing hot fucking lash is enough to break my stoicism.
He’s chuckling as he punishes me now. Asshole.
* * *
Rex
I did not think I was going to have this much fun when I came here. I expected to quibble over specific terms in a document that even I can be barely bothered to read. I thought, at best, I’d get to beat the hell out of a little smartass wannabe alpha.
I guess, on some level, I am doing just that. But it is far more enjoyable, and I feel much more tender than I anticipated.
I like this girl.
Even more than the mate bond, I like her.
Her ass has got to be burning right now. It’s hot and red and I can tell by how responsive she is, no matter how hard she tries to hide it, that she’s feeling every bit of it. She’s brave. And she’s bold. And she’s going to make beautiful babies for me.
She’s soaked, too. Her arousal is tracking from her pussy and smearing on her inner thighs.
I can’t take my eyes off her, the curling blonde hair doing nothing to hide the swelling of her lips.
I haven’t touched her there yet. I don’t want to reward her.
I like this state she’s in right now, starting to learn a lesson.
I could fuck her right here, mount her in the office she had the gall to try to kick me out of. But I want her to come the first time I breed her, and I do not want her to come today. She’s been a bad girl, and bad girls do not get orgasms.
She’s had enough of the belt, but I don’t want to let her up, not yet.
A lot of the punishment is keeping her in position, exposed and sore.
Teaching her that this is a consequence.
She might learn to obey me quickly, then this would be more of a recreational occurrence.
Or, more likely, I’m going to have to handle her more often than not. The idea excites me.
“You’re in heat,” I tell her.
“I am not,” she denies immediately, sniffing as she does.
But we both know she is. Her body is producing hormones at a prodigious rate, a reaction sparked by my presence.
I’ve heard female shifters talk about this before.
The first time she meets her fated mate, her body begins making her incredibly fertile.
The effect will compound over days with full contact between us, and will become even more pronounced once she is mated.
A less patient male would have his cock inside her already, knot swelling in her tight pussy. I want to maintain more control than that rough penetration would allow.
* * *
Nicky
I feel like I am losing my mind. My ass is burning, my eyes are full of tears, and I am absolutely soaked with arousal. This brutal alpha has turned me into an animal.
He’s got me pinned down without a shred of dignity. He knows exactly what is happening to me. I can’t even pretend that it’s not. My body keeps betraying me, making my reactions entirely undeniable.
I don’t know what I’m going to do. I don’t know what I can do. My hips are gyrating like I’m begging to be fucked. Maybe I am begging for it. I don’t know. I never really even knew what it felt like to want it before.
My pack calls me the ice queen. I have a reputation as being completely uninterested in sex.
That’s kind of normal in our world. Female shifters often don’t cycle until they meet their mates.
Our bodies are a little easier on us than full human females that way.
It’s pretty much the only way it’s easier, and I think it’s about to get harder. A lot harder.
Click. Click. Click.
That’s the sound of more than one weapon being cocked. Rex doesn’t move. He doesn’t let me go. I feel him stiffen.
“Get away from her, buddy.”
“He’s not your buddy,” a second voice chimes in.
“Step away from the lady,” a third voice follows.
I let out a laugh of relief. Finally Laura must have gotten word to our security.
I bet they were playing video games. They probably forgot to look at the monitors.
Actually, that would be good if they’d forgotten to do that.
I don’t want anybody to ever see what just happened to me.
I’m going to have the footage showing the events between us deleted.
I reach back and pull up my pants as quick as I can. The feeling of my jeans rubbing over the belted flesh is not good, but it’s better than letting those three catch a view of me without them. The second I get them all the way up I feel so much better. More like myself.
I take several steps away from Rex, toward my security team. They’re all young guys, not one of them older than twenty-one, but all over eighteen. The sweet spot for being just the right kind of bold and reckless, in my opinion.
Simon (twenty, dark hair, dark eyes, I found him trying to rip off pizza joints), is wearing flipflops and no shirt.
We’re fortunate he bothered with shorts.
The boys can all shift already. Females can’t take their wolf forms until they’re bred, and the reason I just tried to eviscerate Rex Regent is because I have absolutely no intention of allowing myself to be bred ever.
Sex seems like fun, but I won’t be shifting.
I might be a wolf, but there’s no need to get all physical about it. I intend to keep my human form.
Then there’s Cal. He is wearing sweatpants on the bottom half, and a Master Chief cosplay chest piece.
He’s tall and blond and probably the closest to Rex in terms of height.
He’s also broad, built like an absolute unit.
When he’s in a good mood, he has the sunny demeanor of that baby on that TV show.
When he’s not, he’s as intimidating as any Viking might be.
That fits, as he’s a stray out of Minnesota, chased out of his pack at thirteen because the older males wanted to get rid of future competition.
He would have been real competition, too.
Then there’s Sam. Sam has sandy brown hair, a lean build, and almost as much height as Cal. He can be overlooked, compared to the other two sometimes because he does things like wear clothes. He has jeans and a hoodie on. Almost makes the crocs on his feet forgivable.