Chapter Three
Ellery looked up as the door leading into one of the lounge rooms at the back of the club swung open. Two men stepped inside, and Ellery had to assume that they were the men who’d asked to meet him. Ellery ran his eyes over them, quickly taking stock.
They were both strangers.
The first man was roughly the same age as Ellery, tall and broad across the shoulders with a thick mane of dark brown hair tied back at his nape with a length of leather.
He exuded dominance, although Ellery never recalled seeing him in any of the local clubs, and he was certainly the kind of guy who would be remembered.
The second man was smaller, younger, and no more familiar to Ellery than the first. The only thing that he could be sure about, as the men made their way toward him, was that the younger man was the first man’s sub—that was clear in every inch of body language between them.
“You wish to speak to me?” Ellery asked.
“Yes.” No apology. No small talk. The dom didn’t waste a single word.
Ellery indicated the leather armchairs set around a low table with a brief wave of the hand. “We haven’t met.” He didn’t bother to make it a question.
“Not officially.” The dom extended his hand to Ellery over the table. “Professor Joseph Arslan.”
The name sent a wave of emotions rolling through Ellery, making it harder than ever for him to ignore the uncomfortable feeling that had been growing inside him ever since he’d left the lions’ den.
Pushing the memories away, he calmly shook Arslan’s hand before turning toward the sub. “That makes you Ryland.”
The sub nodded.
“I take it Kefir mentioned us by name last weekend?” Arslan said.
Ellery nodded, just once, as he took his seat.
Arslan folded his tall frame into the chair opposite Ellery, and, ignoring the other seats, Ryland quickly settled himself on the floor at his master’s feet.
Ellery had the distinct feeling he was being inspected, judged, by both men. He met Arslan’s gaze and held it. It was one of those petty, mine’s-bigger-than-yours things. But Ellery still found himself cheerfully willing to be damned before he looked down first.
“You agreed to be thrown to my pride last weekend,” Arslan said, after several minutes of silence. When he broke their locked gazes, there was no submission to the move. Arslan looked him over from top to toe, as if trying to work out something about him.
“I did,” Ellery allowed.
“Why?”
Ellery slowly ran his eyes over Arslan in return, making sure that the leader of the lions would be well aware that he was being judged, too.
“The doms who run these clubs have a duty of care toward the local submissives. They say they’re well treated when they visit you.
I needed to be sure they were telling us the truth. ”
The room fell perfectly silent, perfectly still. Unless Ellery was very much mistaken, Ryland was actually holding his breath, unsure how his master would react.
“Last Saturday’s meeting of the pride wasn’t…typical,” Arslan said, guardedly. Ryland started to breathe again.
Ellery raised an eyebrow, all apparently polite curiosity while his heart raced faster and his palms turned slick. “Oh?”
“The pride invites you to return to the den this weekend, so you may see how a sacrifice is usually treated.”
There was more to it than that. Ellery could see it in Arslan’s eyes. The guy obviously wasn’t someone who made a habit of saying anything other than exactly what he thought, but it was equally clear that there was some ulterior motive behind his invitation—something he wasn’t rushing to declare.
He’d be able to see Kefir again. The thought sprung up inside Ellery’s head so quickly it didn’t seem to be born of any real mental practice. It took real thoughts a few seconds to catch up.
There would be no “seeing”, not if he was trussed up the same way as before.
“How much, exactly, would I be able to see of what was happening?”
“You’d be there as our…”
“Guest,” Ryland suggested when Arslan seemed unsure or the right word.
Arslan nodded his acceptance of the term “A blindfold wouldn’t be considered necessary for a guest—nor would the cuffs.”
There was no thought process that could overrule Ellery’s instincts then. Kefir, no blindfold, no cuffs. Ellery didn’t need to know anything else before he gave his answer.
“I’ll be there.”
* * * * *
“What the hell’s he doing here?”
Ellery glanced around as he stepped into what appeared to be a formal dining room. Three young men were already in there and were busy undressing each other on the opposite side of the huge dining table.
“Manners, Blaine,” Arslan said, as he closed the door behind them. “You, too, Luther. Ellery is to be our guest tonight.”
Ellery didn’t need to hear Blaine’s name, or even see him standing next to Marrick, in order to place his voice.
The brat from the previous weekend—Ellery looked him up and down.
Blond, beautiful, brainless—and apparently part of a well-matched pair with the man standing on the other side of Marrick.
No doubt the other one, Luther, had been the second set of hands that had led Ellery into the den the previous weekend.
Ellery dismissed both brats from his thoughts, not particularly inclined to label them as real doms, even if it was obvious that Marrick was submitting to them.
Taking off his leather jacket, Ellery draped it over the back of one of the dining room chairs.
The meetings of the lions were always conducted naked.
Ryland, who seemed to consider himself some sort of unofficial interpreter for his feline master, had made that clear toward the end of Ellery’s conversation with Arslan.
Arslan had already been naked when he answered the door that night. As Ellery stripped out of his own clothes, he noticed several other sets of garments scattered around the room. Apparently, there were already several naked men somewhere in the house.
Kefir might be one of them. Ellery’s pulse shot up a notch. Jeans and T-shirt quickly dispensed with, it wasn’t long before he was as naked as he could get. Kicking his boots under the chair so they wouldn’t be tripped over, he turned back to Arslan.
They made their way across the entrance hall and into another room. The whole house was well-heated enough that it was comfortable to walk through it naked, but the room he walked into then was even warmer.
Overheated air engulfed Ellery as they stepped inside, just as it had a week before. He quickly scanned the room.
Ryland he knew. There were half a dozen other men—half a dozen lions—who he had no way of recognising from his previous visit. And, there, standing right next to Ryland, was a smaller lion. He was staring straight at Ellery, as if a ghost had walked into the room.
Any questions that might have lingered in Ellery’s mind regarding whether Arslan had informed Kefir that the man he’d met the previous week would be returning to the lions’ den were answered in that moment. No one was that good at feigning shock
Stepping forward, remaining outwardly calm and in control of his every action, Ellery stopped directly in front of Kefir. The boy was beautiful. There was no other word for it.
Big brown eyes stared up at Ellery. His lips were slightly parted. As Ellery watched, Kefir’s tongue flicked out to moisten those lips, calling up the memory of that same tongue exploring his skin a week before.
Ellery nodded a greeting. “Kefir.”
The little lion swallowed. “You…you came back.”
“Yes.” Ellery smiled slightly. Kefir was pretty when he was speechless.
Settling his hand on the small of Kefir’s back, he gently led him away from the rest of the group, toward a sofa in a quieter part of the room. “Are there any rules about where men sit at these meetings?”
Kefir shook his head. As he lowered himself onto one end of the sofa, Ellery sat next to him.
With the blindfold finally gone, he felt more than entitled to make up for lost time. He ran his eyes leisurely over the little lion’s body. He was all lean lines of muscle, his form barely obscured by a smattering of pale blond hairs.
As he watched, Kefir drew up his feet onto the sofa in front of him and curled his arms around his legs.
The posture hid far too much of his body.
It seemed to do so more by accident than design and be born more out of habit than anxiety.
It still grated on Ellery’s nerves a little, and he itched to reach out and rearrange the boy into a more pleasing shape.
But he forced himself to resist the temptation to start issuing orders while he was still cautiously feeling his way forward in a culture he wasn’t familiar with.
Knowing exactly what he’d do with Kefir if the boy had wandered into a leather club was one thing, but it didn’t really help him in the lions’ den.
Far better to move warily and have everything he wanted in the long run than grab at something he’d like in that moment and see everything slip through his fingers.
“I’m glad you came back,” Kefir said, as their eyes met again.
“So am I.”
The sound of a car stopping on the gravel driveway pulled at Ellery’s attention. He looked up, just in time to see half the lions in the room turn their gazes away from him and Kefir toward the window.
“Luther, Blaine.”
Ellery glanced across to the two brats. The car’s arrival didn’t seem to interest them in the least; they were both still glaring at him as if he were offering them some sort of mortal insult merely by existing.
Ellery raised an eyebrow, silently inviting them to speak up if they had anything to say.
“Whenever you’re both ready,” Arslan bit out, any small amount of patience that had been in his voice a moment before, rapidly draining away.