Epilogue
It was a Thursday when I finally stopped pretending I didn’t know what I wanted.
Or maybe it was a Wednesday. Time moved differently on Dryac.
The suns set in the wrong order and the moons rose late and everything was slightly off kilter from the life I’d grown up in, but I’d stopped noticing that weeks ago.
What I noticed now was Bane, from the sounds of him moving through the house, the way the air changed when he entered a room, the particular quality of his silence when he was watching me.
He was watching me now.
I was cross-legged on the floor beside the low table in his study, going through a stack of manifests from the latest smuggling routes, making notes in the margins with a stylus.
Completely ordinary. Except that I was naked, because he’d asked me to be, and there was a jeweled tail seated deep in my bottom, because he’d put it there this morning without a word of explanation beyond hold still and take it, little pet.
I’d held still.
I hadn’t even argued.
That was the part I kept turning over. Weeks ago, I would have bitten him for less. Now I just held still, felt my whole body go liquid and warm, and tried to look like I was thinking about shipping manifests when I absolutely was not.
“You haven’t turned that page in eleven minutes,” Bane said.
I didn’t look up. “I’m thinking.”
“Mm.” The sound of him setting down his glass. Footsteps across the carpet, closer and closer still, until he was standing just behind me. His hand settled on the top of my head, heavy and warm. “Come here.”
He didn’t move his hand. He didn’t have to.
I set the stylus down, turned toward him, and when his fingers curled just slightly, beckoning me to him, I went onto my hands and knees, facing him where he’d settled into his chair.
He looked down at me with those feline eyes, soft and dark and entirely too knowing as I slowly crawled to him.
“Tell me what you need tonight,” he said.
“I don’t—” I stopped. Started again. “I don’t know how to say it.”
“Then show me.” He reached out, traced one finger along my jaw, tilted my chin up. “I’ve got time.”
The thing about Bane was that he never rushed.
I’d noticed it early, starting from the way he’d waited in the market for me to take that first step toward him and the way he’d held still while I raged and fought and tested every edge he had.
He always had time. He always waited. And that particular quality of patience broke me open in ways that shouting and struggling never had.
I lowered myself onto my hands.
The carpet was soft under my palms. I kept my eyes up, watching his face, daring him to make it strange or clinical or anything other than what it felt like, which was right. Which was the most frightening thing I’d ever admitted to myself.
His expression didn’t change except to warm.
“Good girl,” he said softly. Just that. And my entire chest caved in.
He leaned forward and petted me, that was the only word for it, the slow stroke of his broad hand from the crown of my head down to the nape of my neck, again and again, and I felt the tension I carried everywhere begin to unspool.
My shoulders dropped. My jaw unclenched.
Some knot behind my sternum that had been there so long I’d forgotten it existed quietly came loose.
“You’ve been carrying something all day, little pet. Tell me what it is.” he said.
“The Kessler route,” I said to the carpet. “I think there’s a problem with the third checkpoint.”
“That’s work.” His hand didn’t stop moving. “What else?”
I didn’t answer for a long moment. The plug was a warm, constant pressure. The room was quiet. His hand kept moving.
“I keep waiting to mind this,” I finally said.
“And?”
“And I don’t.” My voice came out smaller than I intended. “I keep waiting to find the part of me that minds and it’s just not there.”
He was quiet. Then he slid off the chair, down onto the floor with me, and gathered me against his chest and held me there, his chin resting on top of my head.
My hands fisted in the fabric of his shirt.
He was warm and solid and smelled like whiskey and cedar and something that had just started to mean safe in a way nothing else in my life had.
“It doesn’t have to be complicated,” he said quietly. “You’re mine and I take care of what’s mine. That’s all this is.”
“That’s a lot,” I said.
I felt him smile. “Yes,” he agreed. “It is.”
He was quiet for a moment, his hand stroking slowly down my spine and back up. “I have something for you.”
I pulled back enough to look at him.
He reached into his pocket and withdrew a length of black leather. It was soft and dark, with a small silver clasp and a single ring at the throat. He held it in both hands and looked at me, not saying anything, and waited.
He’d gotten me a collar.
My heart was very loud right then.
“You don’t have to,” he said. “It’s not a command. It’s a question.”
I reached up. Took it from his hands. Turned it over in my fingers, feeling the weight of it, the softness. The silver ring caught the light.
I gave it back to him.
I lifted my chin.
His hands were steady as he fastened it at my throat. He smoothed his thumb along the underside and I exhaled a little shakily, the last of the pretending going out of me like smoke.
“There,” he said softly. “There you are.”
He tipped my chin up and kissed me, slowly and thoroughly, the kind of kiss that was in no rush.
I melted into it, and when he pulled back his eyes were dark, his thumb still resting at my throat, just above the collar’s edge.
His eyes moved over my face the way they sometimes did, reading things I hadn’t said.
“What do you want tonight?” he asked.
A few months ago, I wouldn’t have answered that question honestly.
I would have deflected or shrugged or made a joke and let him take the lead so that whatever happened could be something done to me rather than something I’d asked for.
Asking meant wanting. Wanting meant vulnerable.
Vulnerable meant exposed in a way that had nothing to do with being naked.
But his hand was warm at my throat and the collar sat against my skin like something I’d been missing without knowing it, and I was so tired of pretending I didn’t know exactly what I needed.
“I want you to put me over your knee,” I said. My voice came out steady. Barely. “And I want—” I stopped. Looked at the middle of his chest. “I want you to spank me and I want it to sting. Then I want you to make me come. While I’m wearing this.”
Silence.
I made myself look up at him.
His expression had gone very still in the way it did when something mattered to him.
“You’re asking me to give you a spanking,” he said.
“Yes.”
He exhaled slowly through his nose. Then he reached out and curved his hand around the back of my neck, just above the collar, and the warm weight of it made my eyes close for a second.
“Good girl,” he said quietly. “Come here.”
He moved to the edge of the bed and drew me with him, and I went over his knee with none of the fight of that first time.
There was no kicking, no cursing, no furious attempt to save face in front of the market square.
Just the soft give of my body settling over his thigh, my hands finding the blanket, my cheek pressing into it.
His palm came to rest on the small of my back.
The tail shifted between my cheeks as I settled, and I gasped softly.
“Comfortable?” he asked.
“Yes, sir.”
His hand moved to my bottom, stroking slowly across both cheeks, unhurried. Mapping the territory. This always made me aware of myself, of every inch of skin that was about to bear his mark. The silver ring of the collar was cool against my throat. I focused on it.
“What’s mine tonight?” he asked.
“Everything,” I said into the blanket.
His palm lifted and came down hard. The sound cracked through the quiet room and the sting bloomed out across my skin.
I exhaled hard. He didn’t wait for me to gather myself before the next one landed, and the next, a slow relentless rhythm that I sank into like water.
Each one drove the tail a little deeper, and I whimpered, the sensation tangling together until I couldn’t have separated the sting from the heat from the desperate ache between my thighs.
“You’re doing so well,” he murmured, his free hand moving to stroke down my spine. “Look how well you take it.”
I made a sound I didn’t have a name for.
He spanked me harder then, the lower curve of my cheeks, the spot that always undid me, and I cried out and gripped the blanket and pushed my hips back toward him rather than away, chasing it, asking for it without words the way I was only learning how to do.
“That’s it,” he said softly. “That’s my good little pet.”
His hand slipped between my thighs.
I was soaked. I’d known I would be and I was still somehow shocked by it, by how completely my body had given itself over to him, and his fingers moved with the certainty of a man who had learned exactly what I needed even when I couldn’t say it.
His thumb pressed and circled and his palm cracked down on my bottom once more, hard enough to make me see white, and a low pressure gathered at the base of my spine like a building storm.
“Please,” I managed. “Please, sir—”
“I know,” he said. “I’ve got you.”
His fingers worked me steady and sure and the spanking didn’t stop, one hand still lightly slapping my ass while the other was devoted entirely to my pleasure, and I stopped trying to hold anything back.
The collar lay against my throat. The tail rested in between my bottom cheeks, making me feel impossibly full.
His hand was on my skin. I was exactly where I had asked to be.
I shattered over his knee with his name in my mouth, shaking apart in his grip, and he held me through every second of it. His palm was gentle now, rubbing slow circles across my burning cheeks while I came down from somewhere very far away.
When I finally stilled, he lifted me carefully and settled me against his chest. His hand found the ring at my collar and held it, just held it, and I pressed my face into his neck and breathed.
“Okay?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said. My voice was wrecked. “Yeah. More than okay.”
He pressed his lips to my temple. Then his hands moved to my hips and his voice dropped low against my ear, dark with intent.
The night stretched out ahead of us, and I gave him everything he asked for and more. By the time the moons rose over Dryac I was boneless and warm and entirely, completely his.
I didn’t wait to mind it.
I knew I never would.
The End