Chapter 4 #2
“I’ve never seen a candy store, or a bar, or a hotel… or a church,” I say. I feel a bit of real trepidation when I say the word church. “What gods are worshipped in the church?”
“It’s more of a human thing,” Thorn explains cheerfully. “Wolves follow the wild gods, obviously.”
“Obviously,” I say. He’s quite nice and fun when he’s not being possessed and fucking me brutally.
“I’m going to get you candy,” he says. “There’s something called a sour patch, and it’s like sweet, but more sour than anything you’ve ever tasted in your life, so you want to spit it out, but it’s too yummy so you just suffer and it’s delicious.”
“Masochism candy? Okay…”
Skor
Thorn is distracting the girl. Good. He comes in quite useful from time to time, I suppose. Tabby is a flight risk. The desperation in her eyes when she made her break for home makes that very obvious.
I am staying quiet, restraining myself, letting my brothers take their various forms of care of her. It will be my turn soon enough.
She is delicious. I can feel her power almost more strongly now that it is not surrounded by the wilds and the darkness.
She was a thing among things last night, a drop in a very big ocean.
But out here, in the sunlight, as all semblance of mountain fades and the ground becomes dismally horizontal, she is beginning to pulse with a dark light.
An oxymoron in real terms, but it is the only real way to explain it.
I want to be inside her sex. I want to make her scream and wriggle and come for me over and over again. I will do that, too. I will ensure that whatever useless seed spilled inside her last night is eradicated and my own desire becomes her first pups.
Krall has let go of her hand now, and is letting her walk with Thorn ahead of us both.
“We’ll need to keep watch,” he says. “Restrain her overnight, perhaps.”
“Silver her at night,” I reply simply. “It will not be pleasant, but we cannot risk her running.”
“Once she is with pup, she should stop trying to escape.”
That is my hope too. Once she has been properly bred, her priorities will change.
New instincts will come to the fore. She will not be so obsessed with returning to her old home, I hope.
Either that, or she will be so consumed by the need to return nothing will be able to stop her. But that is a bridge yet to be burned.
“Thorn slept most of last night and into the day,” I say. “He can keep watch over her.”
“The boy is too soft,” Krall says predictably. “One of us needs to be awake from now on.”
“That will be exhausting. It would be easier and better to restrain her and break her more thoroughly. Another session when we reach Last Stop might help. We can tie her down and have her take our cocks in each of her tight little holes.”
“She’ll be sore from last night,” Krall says.
“Good. She deserves to be sore. Petulant little fuck toy that she is.”
I feel Krall’s eyes slide over to me, and I see the corners of his mouth tighten, his jaw flex just a little.
He didn’t like me calling her a little fuck toy.
He’s feeling possessive, and probably more than a little paternal.
He can’t help it. As much as he wants to be a ruthless asshole, he’s a good guy to his core.
That’s a pity, because good guys never see truly bad things coming.
Krall and I share a closer bond because we share a mother. Thorn and our little sister are from her sister. It is a family tree that looks more like a wreath, but a cursed lineage will do what it must to survive.
“She protected us last night,” he says.
I watch her rump move beneath the green dress she’s still wearing. She has a shapely ass. The memory of being balls deep in that snug little hole is giving me great pleasure even now.
“Yes,” I agree. “She did.”
“We owe her the same level of protection,” he says. “She doesn’t know what’s going to be good for her yet, but we can show her a world she has no notion even exists. Did you see that camp where they all lived?”
I did. It was a ramshackle shit hole with nothing to recommend it. An idle king at a dead hearth, surrounded by brides who seemed far too closely related to him to be suitable mates, trading off the daughter of some poor creature who was given to him in the hopes of finding favor.
Tabby’s father plays on his role as the Alpha at the End of the World to full advantage, but there’s nothing really in it for him. Nothing for him to spend his riches on, nobody to lord his power over. He is a haunted, hunted king, and we just took his crown jewel.
He won’t like that. We were supposed to die last night, and she was supposed to return to him with a belly full of pups. He might simply write our disappearance off as us all having perished, but I am certain I felt eyes on us as we packed camp to leave.
“Skor?”
I realize I forgot to reply to Krall.
“Yes,” I say. “It was fucking grim.”
“It was a hole in a rock,” he says. “She deserves more than that. There’s a nobility to her that transcends that origin.”
He’s putting a lot of polite and pretty words on the fact that she’s smart, fuckable, and of course, filled to the brim with magical energy that prevented her from becoming just another frostbitten mangy mountain wolf.
“She’s going to be happy with us,” he says.
By the gods of fang and fur, he is so determined to cast himself as her savior even as he forces her to leave her home against her will.
I am aware that I am not a good man. I am not even adjacent to good.
I am selfish. I am cruel. I have ulterior motives that make me untrustworthy.
But I will never tell myself that I am doing my victims a favor. I am doing myself one.