Chapter 1
Chapter One
Leather had such an undeserved reputation for being hard, tough, indicative of power—or the lack of it. But leather could be smooth and gentle. Neither strong nor weak, merely beautiful. A whisper against the skin rather than the strike of a whip or the bite of a metal-studded strap. A caress…
…The way I’d always wished someone would caress me.
But my lovingly crafted wares would contribute to someone else’s enjoyment. Not mine.
That didn’t affect the quality of my work, of course. My craftsman’s pride wouldn’t have allowed me to produce anything less than my very best.
For several weeks, I’d been hard at work on a new set of restraints, since the last spelled set I’d sent to my usual retailer had been sold.
The store manager had become something of a…
not quite friend, by most people’s far more socially active standards, but someone I actually talked to on occasion.
She’d called to tell me to expect a transfer of funds, and she’d managed to keep me on the phone—and even make me laugh—by gossiping about the man she’d made the sale to.
“Such a cutie pie,” she’d said. “Not a shifter, but obviously either from a pack or he’s spent a lot of time around us.
And he told me he bought them to tie up an alpha and then went so red, Finian, you’d have thought he was planning to use them right there in the store!
And it wouldn’t have been the first time, I swear, people are so gross.
Although if it’d been this guy and his alpha ‘best friend,’ I might’ve just hung up the closed sign and pulled up a chair… ”
And maybe I’d have wanted to pull up a chair next to hers and enjoy the incredibly hot show if the thought of it hadn’t given me a familiar envious, bitter ache under my ribs.
Instead of thinking about that I focused my mind on my work again—the story of my life. This project would be done in another day. Even lingering over the hand-tooled spellwork and carefully polishing both sides of the straps couldn’t delay me much more.
The last set had been an elegant, discreet tobacco color, guaranteed to flatter the skin tone of any being they restrained.
That’d been one of the most beautiful pieces I’d ever crafted, and my hand faltered for an instant as my mind strayed back to the guys who’d bought it.
A human. And an alpha. Not a common pairing.
Both of them were probably beautiful. Alphas always had magnetism and physical strength, even if they weren’t traditionally handsome, and the human would have to be something special to catch an alpha’s lasting attention.
Anyone could catch an alpha’s temporary attention, of course. Most of them would fuck a hole in a tree if they didn’t have anything better to do.
Or a short, plain little shaman with a weird birthmark on his face in the shape of Kazakhstan.
No, seriously. I’d done a photo comparison after a drunk Russian exchange student I’d met years ago, when I still went out to bars, had slurred something about it looking just like his neighbor to the south.
My birthmark’s borders gave me a little more of Kyrgyzstan at the corner of my mouth than the real country could claim, but otherwise…
Kazakhstan. On my fucking face. In purplish red, covering my whole right cheek, with the Russian border along my cheekbone and impinging on my eye, and the Caspian Sea coastline spilling down below my earlobe.
The one time an alpha had fucked me, he’d declined a blowjob in favor of flipping me over and taking me from behind—odd behavior for any man, I’d thought at the time, because who didn’t want to get his cock sucked before he fucked?
I certainly fucking did. Not that anyone was offering, including that alpha.
He also hadn’t called me.
Shortly after that night, he’d starting dating my cousin Jenny.
As far as I knew, he hadn’t told her about his one night with me.
I didn’t either. We weren’t close, and she hadn’t fallen in love with someone I’d liked out of malice, and why should I risk ruining her happiness because of a meaningless hookup?
At their wedding reception, which my mother had insisted I attend for my grandmother’s sake, I’d overheard one of his groomsmen asking him who the hell the ugly guy was. He’d laughed. That laugh still echoed in my mind.
“Yeah, I fucked him once before I met Jen, and then I found out they were cousins, like, small world,” he’d said, in a voice low enough that even the other shifters at the party wouldn’t hear—except for me, hidden behind a pillar nearby, trying to dodge my drunk uncle’s diatribes about the state of magic these days.
My shamanic camouflage spells, which I applied before leaving the house the way some people put on cologne, disguised my scent and magic.
Not even alpha weres could find me except through the same mundane method everyone used: looking directly at me.
“Don’t judge, dude,” my one-time-fuck-slash-cousin-in-law went on as I swiveled my head around and stared daggers through the pillar.
The groomsman shouldn’t judge him? I was the one who’d slept with this asshole, so if anyone needed judgment, I’d say it was me.
Damn it. “He’s an easy lay, totally gagging for it.
Desperate. You could hit that real quick before the buffet.
Just do what I did and get him from the back where you can’t see that shit on his face. ”
Ah. Well, that explained a lot. No way to fuck a guy’s mouth from behind—unless you used some really disgusting magic, anyway. I could probably manage it, but not without at least one fatality.
They’d never known I heard them, but I could still feel my grotesque, boner-killing face burning with humiliation, even two years later.
Although even worse than that, something dark and ugly inside me, much uglier than my outsides, had fed on that mortification. I’d never been normal. And right beside my longing for a gentle touch were other, far more unsettling cravings.
If that prick who’d married Jenny had just had the balls to admit that I disgusted him before he used me like a cheap whore, I’d probably have enjoyed that night a lot more than I had.
Ugh, I hated myself sometimes. And now my fangs and claws had started to come out. A gouge from a claw would ruin the leather completely. I might need to start over.
Fuck it. I put the restraints and polishing cloth down on my work bench with exaggerated care, because I wanted to fling them across the room and scream.
Gods, these straps were so pretty. I’d dyed the leather myself, using magic to create a deep rose with a slight otherworldly sheen to it, a color far richer and more durable than any mundane workshop could produce.
This set wouldn’t be as universally appealing as the others. Too… sexy, ironically. Too erotic. But not in the ways people usually wanted when they went shopping for a walk on the wild side; they usually wanted something overt, something strong-looking. Something dark and dangerous.
The lifestyle people often went for the same, or they’d want something really specialized and customized, fitted to their own bodies—or simply oddball to a degree that raised even my eyebrows.
These were just… perfectly sexy. Erotic. Soft but strong. The Platonic ideal of something I’d want wrapped around my wrists and ankles, pinning me for an implacable lover’s pleasure…
My cock had hardened, my breath speeding up, my face flushing enough that the left cheek would be as dark as the right.
I never tested my own merchandise, never ever—for reasons ranging from the emotionally self-protective to the “eww, someone’s going to buy it and I’m not gross and rude like that”—but the urge to wrap these around my own wrists, for one little second, long enough to close my eyes and imagine—
I ran out of my workshop as if I had a legion of vampires after me, slapping the light switch and racing up the stairs, slamming the door at the top behind me.
My kitchen was exactly the same as it had been when I’d walked through it to go down to the lower floor earlier in the day, but it looked alien to me now, every shape unfamiliar and jarring.
The coffee maker leered at me. I shook my head, stomped through, and headed for the shower.
Maybe I could wash every man in the world right out of my wavy black hair if I scrubbed hard enough, starting with the ones who only existed in my pathetic fantasies.
Like any other self-respecting shaman, I had enough wards on my house to stop that hypothetical legion of vampires, or anything else you could think of that might hurt me.
Except raccoons, of course. Those little fuckers scampered merrily through the crawlspace under the house no matter how much magic I used, banging into the plumbing and trilling, either to express affection to one another or to laugh at me and my stupid useless-against-raccoons spells.
Whatever. Screw the raccoons, anyway. It wasn’t like they meant me any harm. Probably. Except maybe to my professional pride.
Bottom line, no one who’d be a potential danger to me could get in, and in my paranoid mind, that meant nearly everyone.
My pack, a small one consisting mostly of my extended family, could visit freely, but I tended to go to them.
My house didn’t have a guest room, my folks weren’t the kind of werewolves who’d be willing to shift and sleep under a tree, and the drive up the mountain took longer than most people wanted to bother with for a day trip.
Once in a while over the years, and a bit more often in the past couple of months, I’d had the occasional prickle on the back of my neck, a tingle, a sensation like a heavy gaze resting on me, with all of my instincts rising up to meet it.
But my wards never went off, which had to mean no one had been near.
It had to, or I’d lose all faith in my own magic, and that was no way to live.
And when I stepped outside to check (still within the warding around the property line, because I might have magic on my side, but I was far from invincible), I couldn’t catch so much as a whiff (they were quite whiffy, actually) of anything but those fucking raccoons.
I dismissed the sensation as my overactive imagination, which had always been my besetting sin.
I mean, that coffee maker hadn’t actually been snickering and giving me the once-over, right? Clearly, I had some issues.
I went to bed that night in a towering temper, having brought myself off in the shower—despite my firm intention to think nothing but the sternest, least libidinous thoughts—to delicious, delirious visions of muscled alphas having their sneering, violent way with me.
Nothing but my cock had been firm.
Punching my pillow only made me angrier.
Finally, I passed out from sheer exhaustion—but I did it angrily, damn it.
A faint noise rang in my ears as I woke a couple of hours later, long enough to have hit REM sleep but not long enough for any light to be seeping through the windows. Of course, at this point in the winter, the sun wouldn’t rise until nearly eight in the morning.
What was that sound? Those little masked fuckers were getting bolder and bolder.
I lifted my head groggily, twisting my neck to get my face out of the pillow.
Although it hadn’t sounded like—a big hand wrapped around my face, covering my mouth and nose and cutting off my air, stifling my cry before I could even voice it.
At a rough, whispered command that I knew all too well, having used my own magic to create it for my newest set of restraints, soft leather slid around my arms and pinned them behind my back.