Chapter 5
Silas
I’d come back from my hunt to find the cabin empty and Katie’s scent leading out through the trapdoor I’d idiotically assumed she wouldn’t discover.
After throwing on boots, jeans, and a flannel, I’d left the cabin at a run, following a trail which told me she’d travelled by bus, then foot, then bus again, with a detour through a park. Her scent told me her anxiety had spiked sharply there, and then she’d headed east, moving fast.
The sulfur stench still lingering in the air around the park made clear why she’d run.
I followed her scent into a quiet neighborhood, my wolf complaining all the while that if I was going to tear ass out of the cabin without even snarfing down a protein bar then I should at least take a moment to eat somebody’s chihuahua. My stomach rumbled in apparent agreement.
I found the building without difficulty. Her scent went up an exterior stair and through a second-floor door. A friend’s apartment, probably. The building was quiet. It was late enough that the early risers had already left and early enough that the late sleepers hadn’t yet surfaced.
Though lockpicking had never come easily to me, I’d found myself wandering suburban Santa Fe in the buff after an inopportunely timed shift on enough occasions over the years that I’d learned the basics, and the basics were all getting through this door required.
The apartment smelled of her, layered deep now under sleep and soap and a warm sweetness that told me she’d been in need of her mate and had done something about it without me. My cock gave an angry throb.
She was asleep on her back, one arm thrown over her face, her dark hair fanned across the pillow.
She’d found clothes somewhere, leggings and a sweatshirt too wide in the shoulders for her frame.
Her mouth was slightly open. She looked like she was sleeping the deep, genuine sleep of someone who had finally conceded to exhaustion after fighting it for too long.
She also looked exactly like a woman who needed to be over my knee.
I crossed the room and sat on the edge of the bed.
Her eyes opened immediately.
“How did you—” She scrambled back against the headboard, pulling the sheet up. “How did you find me?”
“Your scent.”
“I showered.”
“I know.” I looked at her steadily. “You still smell like you.”
Her jaw tightened and her chin came up. “I was going to come back.”
I gave her a skeptical look in lieu of a reply.
“I was considering coming back.”
“Katie.” My voice came out level. “I told you to stay.”
“And I chose not to.” She kept her eyes on mine. “I’m a person. I get to make choices.”
“Your choices put you alone in an alley with the very thing you’ve been running from.”
“I got out of there alright.”
“You did,” I agreed. “Because dragging someone away in broad daylight isn’t how it operates. It’s patient. It would have followed your trail and waited for its chance to carry you off.”
She didn’t reply right away, and when she spoke again her voice was softer, more tentative.
“I smelled it.”
“I know you did.”
Something crossed her face. Not fear, but the expression of someone who has been holding a question at arm’s length for a while and just felt their grip slip. “You were going to explain things. Before your spine decided to relocate itself.”
“I’m going to explain everything. But first I’m going to spank your bare ass so red you don’t even think about running away from me again.”
The shift in the room was immediate. Her pupils widened. Her breath changed, a fractional quickening she couldn’t have controlled if she’d tried. “Excuse me?”
“You left the cabin after I told you explicitly to stay. You went to your apartment building, which is the first place the skinwalker would look for you. You left me no way to protect you and spent the night alone with nobody else protecting you either.”
She pulled the sheet up another inch. “You’ve known me for, like, two minutes—”
“I spent a week almost killing myself to stay in human form while visiting a hospital to watch over you, and last night you were thirty feet from a skinwalker in an alley because you couldn’t just do what you were told.
” I was getting pissed off just saying it out loud, though the scent of her arousal was unmistakable and it mollified me a bit.
“You can’t just—”
Before she could react, I caught her wrist and pulled her across the bed and over my lap, then tugged her leggings down in one motion, baring her from the waist down.
Without waiting for her inevitable protest, I brought my palm down on the left cheek with enough force that she yelped at the sting, both hands slamming flat against the mattress.
“I—you—” She scrambled for words.
The second spank landed on her right cheek, equally hard, and a sharp intake of breath cut off whatever new exclamation or demand she’d been building toward.
“I told you to stay.” Her skin pinked as I continued smacking her bottom.
“I told you before I left. I told you clearly.” I spanked her lower, catching the crease at the top of her thigh, and the sound that came from her was not quite a yelp and not quite a moan.
“Instead you went to your own apartment of all places.”
“I didn’t go in!” She gasped as my palm fell again. “I just looked—”
“You were two blocks away, alone and on foot.” Two more sharp slaps followed, and she curled slightly over my knee, her hands now fisting the sheet instead of bracing against it. “Do you understand why that’s not a distinction that interests me?”
Without waiting for a response I didn’t expect to be impressed by anyway, I landed three more hard smacks across the fullest part of both cheeks, watching the flush deepen to a vivid rose that I found deeply satisfying.
“This is what happens when you put yourself in danger because you can’t stand to be told what to do, even by your mate.
I’m going to make sure you remember it.”
I spanked her thoroughly, covering every inch of her upturned bottom until it glowed a uniform, deep crimson and her desire to debate with me had finally been tamed for the moment.
When my hand finally came to rest against the heated curve of her ass, she breathed out in a long, ragged shudder. Sliding two fingers between her thighs, I found her absolutely drenched.
“I guess my hard cock in this tight little pussy wasn’t enough to teach you you’re mine,” I said, stroking through her slick folds while she shivered. “You also needed a bright red ass.”
“I hate you,” she said into the sheet.
“No you don’t.” I pressed two fingers inside and she clenched around them with a low cry, her hips rocking helplessly back. “Your pussy certainly doesn’t.”
She pushed back against my hand and I pulled my fingers free, earning a whimper.
“Up.” I moved her off my lap and stood, working the buttons of my jeans while she pushed herself to her knees on the mattress, her spanked bottom on display, her face flushed, and her eyes gone dark and liquid. “Get that sweatshirt off.”
She pulled it over her head. She wasn’t wearing a bra underneath.
Katie was so goddamn beautiful it made something tighten in my chest that had nothing to do with mating instinct. Just her, specifically. The line of her collarbone and the flush running from her face down across her chest, the dark hair loose around her shoulders, those eyes.
I got on the bed behind her, grabbed her hips, and hauled her back against me. She gasped as I dragged my cock through her folds without entering, taking my time enjoying her slick heat.
“Silas—”
It was the first time she’d used my name. I hadn’t told it to her. She must have heard it somewhere, probably in the hospital, and held onto it until now. I liked the sound of it on her lips.
I drove into her in a single, savage thrust.
She cried out and grabbed the headboard with both hands, knuckles whitening. The push of her back against my pelvis was involuntary, her body demanding more, and I gave her more, pulling back and driving forward in a rhythm that was fast from the outset and didn’t slow down.
The bedframe hit the wall on the first thrust and kept hitting it. She didn’t suppress her cries, she just let them out, which I found I liked unreasonably much.
“You’re mine now.” I gripped her hips and drove deeper, and she pitched forward, catching herself on the headboard.
I smacked her scalded ass hard and her whole body clenched around me in a convulsion that nearly finished us both.
She moaned so hard it came out silent, her mouth open and her head dropping between her arms. I landed another slap on the same spot and watched the shockwave roll through her, her pussy spasming around my still brutally thrusting cock.
I didn’t let her come. Not yet. I brought her to the edge twice, reading her breathing and the quality of her grip on the headboard, and pulled back both times.
“Please.” She pressed the word out through her teeth. “Please, I need—”
“I know what you need. You’re not getting it yet.” I pulled out entirely, and before she could process the loss, I shoved two fingers into her soaking wet pussy, coating them thoroughly and then bringing them to her tightest hole and working them in to the second knuckle.
Katie yelped, her whole body lurching forward in an attempt to pull away, but my fingers followed without hesitation.
I used my other hand to push her face down into the mattress, holding her there with my palm flat between her shoulder blades while I finger-fucked her ass hard and deep and thoroughly, until the keening coming from her throat was continuous and unbroken and her body had abandoned every last pretense of holding anything back from me.
“Naughty little mates only get to come with their bottom sore inside and out.”