Chapter Two #2
Marrick looked up and met Blaine’s gaze.
Up close and without the blindfold, his eyes were a stunning, piercing blue, but they were open just a fraction too wide.
He was smiling. But the smile was too broad, too forced.
He didn’t actually look happy. His expression didn’t improve when Luther joined them on the stage.
Even on the other side of the room, Blaine could hear muttering between the humans that congregated behind their leader. The word “lions” floated across to them, loud enough that even a human would have been able to hear it.
“Lions?” Marrick echoed. “You’re the lions from…”
Blaine tilted his head to one side as he studied him, wondering who the hell Marrick had thought they were before.
“You’re the damn lions!” Marrick muttered again. He looked from him to Luther and back again.
Luther looked just as confused by his reaction as Blaine felt.
Their pet took a deep breath and let it out very slowly. His scent slowly changed. The fear faded from him until it was hard to remember that it had ever existed.
“Marrick, you know them?” one of the men in the doorway demanded.
“Yes. No. I…” Marrick shook his head as he looked from Blaine to Luther and back again.
“You’re them—you’re the lions. I…” He lifted his hand and rubbed his fingers against his forehead.
Leaving Luther to keep an eye on the other humans, Blaine gently moved Marrick’s hand away from his head and inspected the skin he’d been rubbing at, trying to see if he was hurt.
“Marrick, if this is part of some scene…” The lead human sounded angry now. Blaine snarled at him, unwilling to let anyone put a trace of fear back into their pet’s scent.
“What? No. I had no idea—”
“You’re not answerable to him.” Blaine was very sure of that. Marrick was answerable to two people—him and Luther—no one else. Except possibly Arslan, some conscientious part of Blaine’s brain forced him to mentally add. He was pretty sure the whole world was answerable to Arslan.
“He’s the dungeon monitor,” Marrick said.
Blaine looked across at the man in the doorway, not quite willing to admit complete ignorance of the term in front of either Marrick or the other men. A glance at Luther showed he had no more idea what the words meant than he did.
“He makes sure no one gets hurt at the club,” Marrick explained.
“You weren’t doing your job,” Luther quickly informed the monitor. “He was hurting Marrick.” He pointed out the man who’d held the whip.
“It was…” Marrick turned and looked up at him. For the first time, he didn’t look confused as hell. “You thought he was hurting me...”
“He was. We saw—”
Marrick shook his head.
“Arslan is on his way.” The words were whispered to the lead human—the dungeon whatever the hell he was called. It took the hearing of a lion to make it out, but Arslan’s name caught both his and Luther’s attention very thoroughly.
They hadn’t done anything wrong. Arslan might not really approve of them being there, but he’d definitely approve of them stopping anyone hurting Marrick—Blaine had never been more certain of anything in his life.
Humans had to be looked after—Arslan was the lion who’d taught them that in the first place—and Marrick was their human.
The dungeon monitor looked at the three of them, each in turn, as if he had no idea what to do with them.
“They can’t stay in here,” one of the men whispered behind them.
The monitor sighed. “You can all wait for him in one of the back rooms,” he announced eventually.
“We’re leaving,” Blaine said.
Marrick looked up and met his eyes. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Arslan had also taught them that humans required patience—a lot of patience.
“We’ll stay until Arslan arrives,” Luther suggested as a compromise. Then, Arslan could deal with the other humans, and they could be left in peace with Marrick.
Yes, that plan had merit. Blaine nodded his agreement.
*
They were the lions.
Marrick repeated the fact over and over inside his head.
They were the lions. As he closed his eyes, the images of the two men snapped into place within his memories of that night.
He’d played the scene over and over in his head so often over the last couple of weeks.
He hadn’t thought anything could be better than what his imagination had cooked up to fill in for his lack of vision.
But, damn, he’d never guessed the guys he’d screwed looked that hot!
Enticingly dishevelled blond hair, gorgeously golden skin, and line upon line of muscle. They looked like Hollywood film stars, beamed down into the middle of a kinky club. And, currently, one of them was the before the disaster struck picture, while the other was the after shot.
The clothes worn by the guy who’d pinned Huntley to the wall were ripped in some really interesting places, as if he’d somehow half-torn them off himself from the inside out.
His jeans were split, along the right side of his crotch.
The only pity was that he’d obviously decided to dress to the left that day.
The guy who’d joined Marrick on the stage first was more fully clothed than the other, and he had a more serious expression, but those were almost the only differences between them at first glance.
Marrick looked from one lion to the other as they paced around the small room at the back of the club like caged animals. Like lions at the zoo… Bowing his head as he rested his forearms on his knees, Marrick fought back a ridiculous urge to burst into fits of laugher.
He was sure neither lion would be impressed if he gave in to temptation to giggle. He doubted the dominants still lurking in the room would love him for it either. He had the vague suspicion that they all already thought he was far more trouble than he was worth.
The more junior dominants had been ushered out of the room ages ago. Only four of the older doms remained now—two by the door and two flanking the sofa where Marrick had been ordered to sit.
Marrick wasn’t exactly sure what the remaining doms were supposed to do if the lions decided to freak out. He’d felt the lions’ well-muscled bodies pressed against him, felt the barely restrained strength in them—and the whole time he’d been aware that they were being careful with him.
If they weren’t inclined to be careful, he doubted any four humans would be much of a challenge to them, doms or not.
Marrick looked up. The one he was pretty sure was called Blaine, the one who was fully dressed and more serious looking, had stopped pacing.
He was staring across the room at Marrick, now.
It had taken a hell of a lot of arguing and a lot of references to someone called Arslan for the lions to agree that they should await Arslan’s arrival on opposite sides of the room to Marrick.
Marrick held the lion’s gaze. Blaine tilted his head on the side, as if curious about something. The torn up one that was almost certainly called Luther stopped pacing, too. He looked over Blaine’s shoulder, following his gaze, and all of his attention focused in on Marrick.
The tension in the room doubled. One of the human dominants shuffled his feet—another stopped leaning against the wall by the door and started to take a more active kind of interest in the men he’d been ordered to watch.
Just as Blaine seemed to be about to take a step forward, a voice drifted through from the corridor outside.
It was muffled by the wall between them, but Marrick still recognised it.
He’d heard it at the lions’ den. Deep, rich and with an air of authority, it was hard to forget.
Arslan was the guy who’d been in charge of the den.
The door swung open. The man who walked in suited the voice pretty well.
Big guy, who looked kind of pissed off with the world.
Another, smaller, guy stepped into the room in Arslan’s wake, but Marrick’s attention stayed on Arslan since he was the one who was freaking the other lions out so effectively.
The dom who was acting as the club’s dungeon monitor that night appeared in the doorway and nodded to the other human doms, calling them all out of the room. Marrick watched them go without a word.
He was pretty sure he should feel nervous about being left alone with four lions.
It would have been a very sensible thing to feel.
The room hummed with tension, and Marrick didn’t have a clue what was going on, but he felt that strange calm settle over him.
Either some part of him felt safe with them, or all the blood rushing to his cock had starved his brain, and he just wasn’t processing things the way he should have been.
“What happened?” Arslan demanded as Luther and Blaine both turned to face him.
Luther and Blaine started talking at the same time, their words overlapping each other and quickly blurring together in a confusion of noise until a snarling roar from Arslan suddenly silenced them both.
The sound sent a shiver down Marrick’s spine, even while he was in a position to know it was nothing more than the kind of yell a frustrated babysitter might aim at a pair of tantrumming toddlers. He could just picture what the men outside the room would be imagining right then.
Marrick couldn’t keep his amusement back a second longer. A shout of laughter burst out of him, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it. He covered his mouth with his hand, but it did little to muffle the sound.
Every pair of eyes in the room turned towards him. For a few seconds, the lions just started at him in bemusement, as if only just remembering there was a human present. Then, all at once, three of them turned their attention back to each other.
The one that was almost certainly called Blaine took a deep breath and let it out very slowly—he really did have a bloody brilliant build…