Chapter 2
Chapter Two
Yanking on my bonds did nothing, my beautiful leather straps holding firm, tightly but not too tightly, fucking perfectly. My cock instantly hardened, a sickening, swooping thrill careening through my belly.
I writhed like an eel, thrashing, bright spots flashing in my vision as I lost oxygen, panicking—the hand moved enough that I could suck in air through my nose, but my mouth couldn’t open.
My magic thrashed too, spinning wildly, lighting up the room with tendrils and pennants of glimmering blue and green that only another practitioner could see. I directed it at my assailant, but it wrapped around and over him and slid off again, as if he’d been encased in magical glass.
The blankets tangled around my legs, his weight bore down on me, and his harsh, hot breath brushed over my ear.
I shivered down to my bones and collapsed, limp, cheeks damp with perspiration and tears, my chest shuddering with every shallow inhale. The center of me had gone twisty and molten, a toxic mix of agonized desire and terror.
His scent surrounded me. Hot and sharp, like a spark from tempered steel. Rich and fragrant, the aroma of pine needles and wild herbs crushed underfoot while walking through a mountain forest.
And all alpha. That I could be sure of.
The man pinning me to my bed, who’d broken into my house and sneaked into my basement workshop and stolen my beautiful leather restraints, running them through his big hands, padding almost silently upstairs with them, stalking me in my bedroom as I lay asleep and unknowing and helpless…
If I’d been able to, I would’ve moaned. My cock throbbed again, trapped awkwardly between my thigh and the mattress.
Fuck. An alpha. And apparently impervious to my magic, which left me completely at his mercy.
Impervious to my magic, and also to my warding. Did he have magic of his own? He couldn’t. I’d be able to smell it, an almost fizzy overtone always found in a magic-using-being’s scent. But I took a deeper inhale, double-checking.
My heart skipped a beat.
That scent… it echoed in the part of my brain that processed information shifters took in instinctively.
I knew that scent, now that I’d paid attention to more than the alpha-ness of it, or at least I knew a version of it. A much younger, much less mature version, the first scent I’d ever used to bring myself off, gasping, a stolen T-shirt pressed to my face…
My heart buzzed more than raced, a vibration in every part of me, my skull too tight and my skin on fire.
He’d left me—left the pack. Left all of us behind, because he wouldn’t follow my grandfather’s rules and forget about his past.
It couldn’t be. He couldn’t have been the one to make me feel that frisson down my spine all those paranoid nights.
Standing in the woods, alpha eyes glowing just out of sight, watching me peer into the darkness and frown, with such arrogant, misplaced confidence in my own magic and the security of my home.
But if it was him, if it was…
He nuzzled into my neck, soft and sweet.
Would some unknown assailant, someone who’d never cared about me, touch me so gently?
Or—could that be how he’d dodged my wards?
They’d have been much easier to get past if he didn’t mean me any harm.
I’d designed them that way, because magic responded much more flexibly and contextually to intent than it did to black-and-white rules.
Firm lips closed on my earlobe, the pressure arrowing straight down between my legs.
The agonized sob that tore out of my chest moved my own lips against his callused palm in a parody of a kiss.
His free hand slid around my ribs, fingers spreading over my pec, kneading my flesh through the thin T-shirt I’d worn to bed.
“Please,” I tried to say, another whimpering almost-kiss.
The alpha’s low laugh rumbled through my back, and he released my ear with a flick of his tongue. I’d almost gotten used to his weight on me. But when he moved, settling his knees more firmly to either side of me and pushing his hips down, I nearly twitched out of my skin.
“If you’re trying to tell me how much you want this, believe me, I already know,” he said.
“I’ve seen you when you thought you were alone.
Smelled you. Heard all those little sounds you make and all the things you say when you’re talking to yourself.
And I’m seeing you and scenting you and hearing you right now.
You want an alpha. You want to be taken and used. ”
His voice had changed between youth and full adulthood, if it even was his voice. Deeper, rougher, more confident, but with something underlying it, some timbre or cadence that hadn’t changed. Maybe? Gods.
Whoever the fuck it was rolled his hips in a way that suggested he knew exactly how I wanted to be taken and used.
“Mmmmm!” This time I achieved some volume, but the effort of it brought fresh tears to my eyes, and they rolled down and pooled against his fingers, which didn’t so much as twitch.
“I’m going to uncover your pretty mouth in a minute,” he went on.
“You’ll have your chance to say no to me.
I’m not going to force you. And I’m not even going to make you say yes.
I don’t need to humiliate you, Finian. I’m just going to make you come on my knot so many times you don’t need to say a fucking word to tell me how you feel about it. ”
He didn’t need to humiliate me? Seriously?
Despite everything, I scoffed, although it came out more of a snort and a lick and a squirm.
Didn’t need to—had he lost his fucking mind?
Probably, since he’d broken into my house and tied me up.
It’d be humiliating as hell to come on his knot so many times that I wouldn’t need to say a word.
And he would make me. He’d barely even have to try, fuck, because he’d broken into my house and tied me up.
As if in response to my thoughts, the straps around my wrists shimmied slightly, pulsing a bit tighter.
Actually… shit. They had shimmied in response to my thoughts. I’d made them. They were uniquely attuned to my magic.
Squinching my eyes shut, I tried to ignore the hand still splayed across my chest, and the warm lips on the side of my neck, and focus on the straps. The magic I’d imbued them with shimmered in my shaman’s senses. It called to me, like to like.
Release me, I told them. Because I had to, right?
Escape from him. I couldn’t look myself in the eye in the mirror after this if I didn’t at least try to get away.
Let me go and wrap around this interloper instead.
An image formed in my mind of a rugged blond alpha strapped to my bed, muscles bulging, fangs snarling, cock hard and throbbing and ready for me to slide down and…
fuck, no, not that! Dammit. Anyway, Rob’s hair had probably gotten darker.
Or this wasn’t him at all. Let me go, damn you! I created you!
The pulse of magic I received in response was the magical sex toy equivalent of shrugging, blowing a raspberry, and going right back to ignoring me.
Yeah. Apparently I really did have to mean it.
“First I think I’ll eat you out for a while,” the alpha went on, unerringly hitting one of my talking-myself-through-an-orgasm high points.
How many times had he listened to me, watched me, scented me? Maybe I shouldn’t have been so vocal when I got myself off, talking about what I wished someone would do to me, thinking I was alone.
“How deep inside you do you think I can get my tongue? Maybe I should tie your ankles too, so you can’t even try to close your legs.
I’d be able to suck and lick fucking everything.
” He slid his hand down my chest, over my stomach, and wrapped it around my straining cock, giving it a hard squeeze.
“Get you so wet and sloppy you’d be—fuck, Finian,” he breathed, as my whole body shook and I came, suddenly, like lightning, turning myself inside out, drenching my boxers and his hand.
Every muscle quivered. I closed my eyes and gave in.
That had to be Rob’s voice. Didn’t it? It had been so long. Nearly twenty years. He’d only been seventeen when he left, and I’d been thirteen, and he’d always treated me like a kid, just like you’d expect.
But my fantasies had started when I’d been an adolescent, and they’d never faded. Neither had the hurt or the loss.
Now I could feel his cock, even harder against the backs of my thighs, big enough to ruin me.
A thick alpha cock, gods, please let it be Rob’s, with a huge alpha knot. He’d take what he wanted, shoving that massive cock into my clenching heat until I milked him dry.
Shit, I was already getting hard again. The alpha stroked me, I shuddered, and he chuckled.
At last he took his hand away from my mouth, leaving me sweaty and gasping, my lips tingling.
“All right, Finian,” he said, as I sucked in air, still too squished into the mattress to be able to fill my lungs completely. “Time to say no to me. Or don’t say anything at all.”
“Rob,” I whispered, and he went absolutely still. His hand on my cock tensed dangerously, and I let out a helpless kind of squeak.
He moved so quickly he cut off the end of the sound, his hand clapping back over my mouth.
“That’s something else,” he growled. “I warned you. And you didn’t fucking listen.”
You need to fucking listen to me, Finian! I can’t change what I am. You’ll understand when you’re older.
Nineteen years ago, standing at the border of my pack’s territory, and pleading with Rob not to go… I hadn’t understood then, and though I’d gotten a lot older, I still didn’t.
He pulled his hand out from under me, giving my now fully erect cock another stroke as he did, and took hold of the back of my boxers.
And then he hesitated, his harsh breaths echoing in my quiet bedroom. Even the raccoons had fucked off somewhere else for the night, probably after one sniff of the unmistakably terrifying scent of an apex predator on the hunt. I could hear my own heart pounding bruisingly against my ribs.
That moment of indecision—of mercy?—tipped the scales for me.
I knew this man. Or I’d known the boy he’d been, anyway. And I’d trusted him as much as I’d ever trusted anyone in my life.
He could’ve knocked on my door, but instead he’d chosen to break into my house and do… this.
And gods, but I wanted it. All of it. Even if I didn’t know him anymore, even if he’d turned into someone who’d seem, to the rest of the world, to be a totally different person.
This time, when I moved my lips behind his hand, it was really a kiss. The curl of my tongue against his palm showed him what he could do to me, if he wanted.
Not that I could stop him either way.
My little whimper came out involuntarily.
He tore my underwear down the back with a rending rip, claws shredding cotton.
No more hesitation, then.