Chapter 38
Zephyr
I don’t like to admit it, but an Unseelie cannot lie. I’m showing off with the flogger.
Showing off for my bride and all my new mates.
Well, by the moon, Ash deserves my best effort.
Zara wisely chose for him my softest flogger, doeskin tails dyed a pale gray—a toy I commissioned specifically for Ash—to warm him up for us.
With so many in this bed tonight who are new to the game, not to mention Maxim’s past trauma, I’ve decided our usual blood play should be a deferred pleasure.
Ash loves to bleed for me. And he heals with Seelie swiftness.
But I won’t make him bleed tonight.
Still, it has to be said.
No one in our bed—including our cautiously intrigued dragon shifter, lurking in my periphery and feigning disinterest—seems to mind the mouthwatering sight of Ash’s sculpted buttocks blushing rosy red.
Naked except for my crown and the swirl of my long green hair, I wield my flogger with precision and grace, adding an elegant flourish with every stroke to impress my audience.
In the riveted silence of our bridal chamber, the whisper of suede hisses through the air, punctuated by the rhythm of Neo’s quickened breaths. That sweet boy is aroused merely from watching. This flogger will be a good way to begin with him as well…
But only once I’m certain he is ready.
Under the lavender glow of the witchfire crystals over my bed, Ash writhes against the wooden X of my St. Andrew’s Cross.
He groans through gritted teeth with every stinging slap of tails against tender skin.
In the past, my consort has taken much worse than this from me and still begged for more.
So I know he is—in the main—groaning for effect.
To please me.
Ash and I have been playing this game together for a very long time.
It has always been consensual.
But it hasn’t always been play.
I quicken my pace and alter my angle to bring the next blow, sharp and sudden, lashing across the backs of his corded thighs.
This time Ash’s groan is real, breathed out around the sibilants of a heartfelt Seelie curse. His fists clench around the cross, brawny wrists flexing in fur-lined manacles. His wings, tattooed across his shoulders and flowing down his powerful back, ripple and twitch with strain.
I aim my next blow with exquisite precision, hair sweeping around my shoulders as I strike. This time the tails wrap around the tender insides of Ash’s spread legs.
Perilously close to the swollen balls, ruddy and heavy with arousal, exposed and swinging between my consort’s thighs.
Ash whimpers, high and breathy.
Ah, Goddess.
Now this is a sound that pleases me.
“Oh, crap,” Neo whispers, panting so hard he can barely speak. “Zephyr… don’t…”
“Zephyr knows what he’s doing, baby,” Zara murmurs in his ear. “Plus it’s all done with Ash’s consent. Ash has a safe word. Don’t you, big man?”
“Never used it,” Ash grunts, also breathing heavily. “Never needed to, not with Sparrow. But yeah. Don’t worry, kiddo. I’m into it.”
Heading these words of reassurance from the lovers we both share, Neo pulls in a shaky breath and nods.
Only then do I resume my efforts on Ash’s reddening flesh.
Our bride is wrapped around Neo, with her head tucked against his chest so she can hear his heartbeat. Even while her clever fingers unbutton and unzip the fabric straining over his blatant boner.
Lucius also has a protective arm wrapped around Neo, and the boy is frankly clinging to both his alphas for reassurance. But Zara has Neo carefully positioned so he can see Ash and me both from the side.
This placement grants me a pleasing view of my mates’ faces.
Neo is wide-eyed and riveted, so absorbed by the sights and sounds of Ash’s torment—and by myself as Ash’s unquestioned master—behind the steamy lenses of his eyeglasses that the boy has forgotten to blush.
“See?” Zara says to him in that throaty sex voice we all adore. “You can see how much they both like it.”
I allow myself a small smirk as I swing the flogger anew. The tails unfurl through the air to lash the globes of Ash’s buttocks along the tender lower curve, already reddened to a livid brick. Ash gasps and writhes against his restraints.
I’m already hard—my straining erection the object of Zara’s commentary.
Now a fresh surge of molten heat swells my shaft and tightens my balls.
Zara’s turquoise gaze slides over my naked body with a hunger that intensifies my plight. Her face is flushed with rising heat, perspiration glittering in diamond beads along her temples.
Then her gaze shifts to Ash’s groin. Her tongue sneaks out to lick the kissable bow of her upper lip.
“Wow,” she breathes. “Ash really likes what you’re doing to him, Your Radiance.”
“Believe me, I’m well aware.” I know him—know the magnificent body of my beloved—as well as I know my own flesh.
By now, his mighty cock will be in desperate need of tending.
’Tis another of those deferred pleasures I’m anticipating.
“Yeah. Wow.” Neo looks and sounds dazed. “I, uh, think I’d like it too. I mean, you know, later. When you’re ready.”
“Then it’s the spanking bench for you, sweeting, when the time is right.
We’ll discuss all the fine points and agree on your safe word before we begin.
” I run the flogger’s swinging tails through my fingers and eye Neo’s beautifully sculpted frame, Academy trousers and briefs still clinging to his hips.
Zara strokes the thick girth of his dick through the cloth.
“Okay.” Neo nods so hard his glasses slide down his nose.
Zara pushes his spectacles back into place with an indulgent smile and nuzzles his neck.
“However,” I decree, “you can strip for me now, Neo Mercury. A pinch of anticipation to whet the appetite.”
Maxim stops pacing around the bed and growls. Happily, I judge that sound to be a growl of anticipation rather than warning.
The dragon shifter and I have not yet fucked.
But I already know, without any need for discussion whatsoever, that I will never use my toys on him. For that one, being flogged has never been foreplay.
Only torture.
Besides which, in this harem, Maxim seems inclined to bend only for Lucius. That encounter hasn’t happened yet between them, but I fully expect it will.
Still, perhaps I too can broaden Maxim’s horizons.
After all, I don’t need to flog a man to fuck him.
“Come on, baby,” Zara murmurs to Neo. “Let’s get you naked. It’s our wedding night.”
The boy requires no further persuasion, but happily wiggles his trousers down his hips. His ruddy cock springs into view, swollen head weeping under Zara’s kneading hands, his girth rising from a thatch of ginger curls against a redhead’s milk-white skin.
Neo scrambles out of his trousers and kicks out of his briefs with an eagerness that makes me smile and Ash groan. Lucius braces a hand under Neo’s elbow to steady him. Zara bundles up his discarded clothing with a giggle.
“Very nice, sweeting,” I praise him, merely for the pleasure of seeing Neo blush to the roots of his hair.
I’m winding up to administer another lash to Ash’s expectant buttocks when, unexpectedly, Lucius unhands Neo and steps forward.
The wolf has shed his jacket and unbuttoned his shirt. Now his hairy chest and knotted abs peek through the crisp fabric.
“Neo may be willing now, in the abstract,” Lucius growls at me through his prodigious fangs. “But do anything he doesn’t like, Your Radiance, and I’ll strap you to that cross myself. When I swing a lash, it’s not for play. Be warned.”
A pulse of shock stills my hand on the flogger.
The tails snap back an inch from Ash’s twitching and ferociously reddened buttocks.
My gaze locks on Lucius, normally my mild-mannered partner in the hotly anticipated academic exchange program we are launching between Icarus and the Avalon Academy.
“I submit to no man,” I say quietly. “In your world, Lucius Aries, we are equals. Here in Avalon, I am the only king.”
Yet, for some reason, I’m grinning at the wolf’s threat so fiercely my own fangs are showing.
“Yeah, no, that’s a negative. We’re all equal in this harem, Your Transcendence. No matter where in any world we happen to be.” Zara’s gorgeous face is intent, determined to ensure I know my place in her royal harem.
Still, her pupils are dilated and her lush breasts rising and falling too swiftly to conceal her own arousal.
All too clearly, my bride wants the wolf and me fucking instead of fighting.
She wants all of us together.
In all ways.
But she’s wise enough to realize that goal will take more than one night to accomplish.
“I will not name myself any man’s master in our bed,” I concede, choosing my words with Unseelie care. “Until the man himself names me master, of his own free will, as Ash has done.”
“To hear that from me, you will wait a very long time,” Maxim mutters in my ear. “I am not like Ash.”
But the dragon punctuates this dark promise by rubbing his bristly gold-stubbled jaw against my cheek to scent me. A whiff of brimstone and leather—deeply appealing to any dragonrider—fills my head.
I turn my head to find Max’s mouth in a tease of a kiss that tastes like burnt cinnamon. Yet I’m careful not to spook this skittish shifter.
For the two of us, this is our first kiss.
“Even so, Maxim Rasputin,” I breathe, gazing straight into his fiery golden eyes, “Xhevith is not the only dragon I intend to ride.”
His slitted pupils dilate, which is a hallmark of arousal in a dragon.
Max chuffs out a snort that isn’t quite a chuckle against my mouth. “In Russia, we have a saying for this, dragonrider: Hope dies last.”
“But springs eternal,” Zara murmurs, low and languid. “Yum, you two.”
With a slow swipe of tongue along my lower lip, Maxim eases out of my grasp, deftly avoiding the flogger I am still loosely holding.
I will definitely pursue matters much further with this one.
But only at a time when my hands are empty.