Chapter 6 #2
“They’ll be magic too, your pups,” I say, trying not to grin as I rub salt into the wound. “You can’t change her fundamental qualities. She has abilities that we do not, and they will not stay with her. They will pass through her.”
He scowls at me. “Are you trying to wind me up?”
Yes.
“No,” I lie. “I’m just having a necessary conversation. We haven’t had a moment to talk since we agreed to take her and share her.”
“That’s true,” he admits, unwittingly falling into my trap. “I intend to take up my post in Eclipse. You and Thorn will have a place there. We will be among our own kind, and it will be safe to raise pups. Is there any objection to that plan?”
“I had intended to return to the isles,” I say.
“You can do that on vacations,” he dismisses me immediately. “Eclipse City is the best place in the world to raise wolf pups. They can attend the academy there, too. The king’s own mate was raised there. It’s the only choice that makes any sense.”
We are interrupted by the cabin door opening. Thorn carries Tabby inside and lays her down on one of the bottom beds.
“She hates it here,” he says grimly. “I think we need to reconsider the train.”
“What are we reconsidering about the train?” Krall is already tense. Good.
“We should get off of it at the next stop.”
“Next stop isn’t for hours. She’ll be used to it by then. Stop coddling her,” Krall says.
Oh, perfect. He’s going to alienate the girl and Thorn.
“I’ll coddle her if I want,” Thorn says.
The discord is delicious. I can see how this will play out.
Krall will become increasingly authoritarian, because that is how he knows how to exert control.
Thorn will become annoyed, because every instinct in his body is telling him to protect his mate. “She deserves to be looked after.”
“She needs to face her fears,” Krall says. “Giving her attention when she’s scared only rewards her for fear.”
“She’s the most fearless person I’ve ever met!” Thorn snaps back. “She stood between us and certain death two nights ago, and now you have the nerve to say she needs to be more brave? You cowered behind her, as did we all!”
I have to work incredibly hard to hide my grin. Thorn is correct, but he’s the kind of correct that agitates Krall. The sort of correct that undermines the old man’s vision of himself. He was busy calling our mate cowardly, and now Thorn has thrown it back at him. Beautiful work.
“Don’t you talk to me like that, whelp. You’ll respect me, even in disagreement.”
“Not if you keep saying stupid shit like that,” Thorn shoots back. “I don’t respect anybody who doesn’t respect my mate.”
“Our mate.”
“Stop arguing!” Tabby shouts quite suddenly.
Her ire is raised to the extent there is a loud, snapping, booming sound in the cabin, and a small bolt of electricity grounds itself between us, setting the carpet on fire.
I casually step on the conflagration, and open the top window for a little fresh air.
“Now look what you’ve done,” Thorn says. “You’ve agitated her.”
Tabby
I hate this train. But I hate bickering even more. They’re fighting over me like I have absolutely no free will, no brain of my own whatsoever. When I snap, I call down an accidental spell, but of course the old man doesn’t consider the possibility that it’s an accident.
“I told you no more magic,” Krall growls. “You’re going to be punished for that.”
I look at Thorn. A moment ago I didn’t want them to argue, now I want him to argue on my behalf. “Are you going to let him hit me?”
“No,” Thorn says, practically snorting with rage. “I have no intention of allowing that.”
“You’ll get out of the way, boy, and you’ll let me punish her. We all agreed, no magic. She got away with it last night, but she just set the fucking cabin on fire. She’s getting her ass warmed, and that’s all there is to it.”
Thorn stands up. Krall pushes him to the side roughly and grabs me.
“Don’t,” Skor says, grabbing Thorn by both arms. “She’ll get hurt in the fray.”
“Asshole!” Thorn curses. “Let her go!”
“Go cool off,” Skor says, pushing him out of the cabin door. “Go outside, boy.”
Thorn takes a swing at Skor. It never makes contact. It stops midair, as if he lost the nerve to do it—or as if something stopped him.
“What the fuck?” He sounds confused for a second, then Skor pushes him back again.
“Go,” he says, his voice deep and authoritative. “It’s best for everyone you don’t see this.”
Thorn wants back in the room. I know that. But he doesn’t come back. I think I hear his feet retreating down the hall as he does as he is told. Is he afraid of these two, that they would be able to hurt him in a fight if it were to come to it? Or did Skor just pull some shit?
I don’t have time to think about everything I’ve just seen. Krall sits down on the lower bunk, throws me over his lap, yanks my dress up over my hips, and starts spanking me with rough, hard swats that make me yowl from the very first one that lands.
“When I say no magic, I mean. No. Magic,” he growls, punctuating every one of his words with another of those harsh slaps designed to make me whine and cringe.
“You can’t stop me!”
“I can,” he says. “I can do so many things to you that you don’t even realize I can do. Like this.”
He spanks me again, but this time the slap doesn’t land on my cheeks, or my thighs, but directly across my pussy.
I gasp in shock and outrage, and try to escape, but there’s no way out of his grip.
He is so much stronger than I am, and I truly hate that fact.
I deserve to feel something other than completely helpless in his arms.
“You will not do magic,” he lectures. “And you will not give me attitude.”
“Thorn gave you attitude, not me! Spank him!”
There’s a moment in which Krall pauses, and I feel him snort and then make a strange sort of movement, almost as if he is trying not to laugh.
“The boy is past spanking. You? I still have hope for,” he says, redoubling his efforts to thrash me soundly.
He is right about one thing. I am not thinking about the motion of the train anymore.
Instead, I am thinking about how much my ass hurts, and how my pussy lips are stinging, and how I’m starting to respond in ways that don’t make sense at all.
“You’re soaked,” he says, confirming my feelings. “Every time I punish you, you get wet, did you know that?”
I bite my lower lip in order not to say something smart that he will find disrespectful, because my intellect threatens his control.
He doesn’t like my powers because they make him feel powerless.
I don’t want to get in more trouble right now.
I am caught in the middle of some very intense alpha pack dynamics, and I am always going to be the one who comes off second best, physically at least.
Does he know I could snap a bolt down on him whenever I feel like it? That though I am small and soft and physically weak, I can protect myself? Not without hurting him, though. Not sure he deserves the kindness of my restraint.
Males always underestimate females. My own father almost died a few years ago when one of his ungifted wives slipped a good dose of poison herb into his mead.
“I asked you a question,” he growls, spanking my ass again just as I am thinking about the merits of poison.
“You did?”
“I said you get wet every time I punish you,” he says, gripping my hair and pulling my head up. “Do you like feeling this way? Do you enjoy pain? What is it that turns you on so much?”
His questions make me blush. He can’t just let me be aroused. He has to make a whole deal of it. It’s not fair, it’s kind of fucked up, it’s sort of hot, and my hips roll, answering without my having answered at all.
“Do you like knowing that a man old enough to be your father owns your pussy?” He keeps asking questions, each one more shameful than the last.
I feel a little tingle of dark excitement at that question. He just said he owns my pussy, and my pussy very much likes to be owned. I like being owned. There’s a charge to those words and thoughts that makes everything in my body respond.
“You do, don’t you, naughty little girl,” he says, running his fingers over my pussy. “You spent so long wandering those dangerous mountains, fighting monsters, nobody looking after you like they should.”
Two of his fingers slide into my interior, stretching me gently. “Oh, there you go,” he says. “So wet. So tight. So eager to have your daddy use you and pleasure you.”
I am glad I set the precedent of not really replying, because I can’t in any way bring myself to admit how much I am enjoying his attention right now.
There is something comforting about being taken so thoroughly in hand, because he’s right.
I wasn’t looked after. Nobody is looked after in the mountains.
It’s a place where the strong survive and the weak are consumed.
This is one of the first times in my life that I have been both weak and safe.
Krall slides his fingers in and out of me with an almost casual touch. He is playing with my body in a very enjoyable way, sweet almost. Tender, maybe.
“That’s right,” he murmurs. “Submit to me, baby. You can be a good girl for me. This wet little hole is going to be used the way it was always supposed to be used.”
I wanted to kill him two minutes ago. Right now I think I might love him. Emotions are such fickle things when intense sex is involved.
He slides me off his lap and puts me over the edge of the bed, keeping me in place with one large hairy hand at the back of my neck.
I feel him kneel down behind me and then his cock is deep inside my pussy, fucking me hard.
I was a virgin two days ago, and I am still sore from what was done to me the night I lost my purity, but he does not seem to know or care.
He thrusts his cock inside my aching sex and he makes me take a series of rough, punishing thrusts clearly designed to show me that my body is his to use when he wants to.