Chapter 4
Kate opened her eyes to find herself in the dragon’s lair.
Her faint had come on so quickly that it was as if one moment she were looking into the eyes of a dragon, and the next she was lying on a very large, very soft bed with a coverlet of silk that felt like warm liquid beneath her body.
The fear that had claimed her senses was still present, but a new elation was growing.
She was inside a tectonic fortress. The walls, floor, and ceiling were all formed from a black rock with a shine to it that put her in mind of obsidian.
It was an imposing place, and a very large room, around the size of a small lecture hall.
There was not much in the way of furniture aside from the bed, and there were a few windows that looked out over the very plains she had been taken from and toward the great mountain in the middle distance.
They were barred, though she did not know why.
Surely the dragon was not worried about escaping from his own bed chamber.
That was her main priority however; she had to get back to the portal. As she got up and walked across the room, she could see the field where the portal had been. She was even halfway certain that she could see the location of it, though it was hard to tell at a distance.
She took a deep breath and tried to keep calm.
The dragons had all her things. Her backpack.
Her treatments. Even her umbrella, which they seemed to regard as a weapon now that she had used it ineffectively as one.
She had known that there would be risks with coming to the dragon realm, but she had not figured on incarceration as being one of them.
She had to get her stuff back, and she had to get out of this fortress, if only to continue her studies.
There was little to learn about the dragon realm inside a bedroom.
Of course, little didn’t mean nothing. Kate began to walk around the room, looking into drawers and closets.
There were not many clothes, but that was probably because the dragons seemed to be very comfortable nude.
It would be a pain to have to change out of clothes before expanding a hundred times bigger than one’s original size, she imagined.
Kate was still afraid, but she distracted herself with her investigations. There may yet be a way out of this room if she could find a key… or perhaps… she turned and looked at the door. She hadn’t even tried the door yet! Perhaps it wasn’t locked?
Kate made for the door, a heavy dark wood structure crisscrossed with some black metal reinforcement, but before she could reach out to turn the handle, the door swung open and the dragon who had captured her stepped inside.
He was still as naked as ever, aside from leather wraps around the lower parts of his forearms, and Kate averted her gaze as her cheeks flushed red again. He was so… very… anatomically correct.
“Hello, human,” he said, his voice making her squirm where she stood. “I see you have recovered from your fright.”
“Um…” Kate looked carefully at the wall, avoiding the sight of the very large, very nude man. “Would you put some clothes on, please?”
“Why would I clothe myself? I am not cold, or in any need of armor.”
“It would make me more comfortable,” Kate blushed.
“Your comfort is yet to be of my concern,” he rumbled. “I have questions for you, human, and you will answer them.”
He was arrogant and commanding and he rubbed her very much the wrong way, but she was also incredibly shy around men. Warring impulses of irritation and embarrassment left her tongue-tied and she continued to look everywhere but at him as he began to question her.
“Why did you come here?”
“I was interested…”
“Interested,” he repeated. “You breached the barrier between worlds out of… interest.”
“I’m a scientist,” she explained. “We like to explore.”
He looked at her with a suspicion she knew she had no way to assuage.
He clearly had no understanding of a curious, academic mindset.
He did not strike her as the academic or inquisitive type.
He was a masterful leader, a dominant male who imposed order.
If he did something, he probably did it for a reason, and he couldn’t imagine anyone else doing it just for the joy of learning.
She was going to have to find a way to convince him.
“Look at the samples I took,” she said. “They’re in my bag. I have grass and some dirt… I just want to learn more about this place.”
“To what end?”
“To, um, well, any end. It’s not… there’s no end point to discovery.”
“So you broke the barrier between our worlds on a whim of interest, in order to discover something for no reason at all.” He crossed his arms over his chest and looked at her with those golden eyes that seemed so wise and yet didn’t understand her at all. “You are lying to me, human.”
“I am not lying!” She looked him dead in the eye, impassioned with the hope that he would be able to believe her.
“We will see.” He reached out, took her by the arm, and drew her close as he had before, the hard lines of his body pressed against her soft, clothed curves. “I will be satisfied that you are telling me the truth when I know you no longer have the capacity to lie.”
“What do you… what?”
He began stripping her clothes from her body, her sweater disintegrating under his hand as if the very fabric simply melted away. He pulled the shredded remains of the garment from her arms and tossed it on the floor.
“Wait, how are you doing that?”
She asked the question just as his fingers found her jeans and the waistband of those gave way too, falling to the floor.
There was a faint singed smell, as if they’d gotten very hot without actually catching on fire.
But he hadn’t used fire, he’d just used his hands…
was he able to manipulate heat through his skin somehow?
Her underwear did not fare any better. In an instant, it too was gone and she was naked, her pink-tipped breasts, soft swelling stomach and thighs, and bright red patch of pubic hair all bared to his eyes.
“Hey! How… what?”
“I’m asking the questions,” the dragon growled at her, tossing her toward the bed.
Her clothing was entirely gone, every last scrap of it destroyed by his great, powerful hands.
Her bra was twisted as if it had been melted, the underwire poking out the end of one of the cups in a way she knew was unsalvageable.
She landed on the bed, one arm over her breasts as she tried to maintain some kind of modesty while being handled like a rag doll.
“You’re going to pay for that! Do you know how much bras cost!
” She snapped her annoyance at him before it occurred to her how ludicrous her words were.
She was in a world without lingerie stores, and even if he wanted to pay for what he had destroyed, nobody took dragon currency back home.
Her mind was working overtime to try to normalize a desperately strange situation, and it was failing miserably.
“Silence,” he growled, approaching her again. “You talk too much and you say too little.”
She scrambled backwards, but he simply took hold of her left ankle and dragged her back toward the rear post of the bed.
He was prepared, she noted. The long leather lashes wrapped around his wrists were unfurled to become shackles for her body.
He was not merely content with tying her ankles and wrists to the bedposts either.
Once she was subdued he fastened a loop of leather about her neck, creating a collar, and to that collar he joined a long leash, the end of which he wrapped around his hand.
It was an unnecessary extra step to take; she already could not move for being bound.
But perhaps he knew how that collar would make her feel, the thick band across her neck giving her a deep sense of being suddenly and thoroughly owned.
The dragon stood over her, his cock intimidatingly erect as he ran the tips of several of the remaining leather lashes down the length of her quivering belly, gently tugging on the leash with the other.
“Answer my questions,” he said, “and you will be rewarded with pleasure. Lie to me and you will feel only pain.”
“You have no way of knowing what is true and what isn’t,” she pointed out, panting in her vulnerable position.
“I will know. Your body will tell me,” he replied, letting the tips of the leather slide down toward the prominent rise of her lower lips covered in red curls.
“And it is a very beautiful body,” he added, almost in spite of himself.
There was an expression of desire and admiration in his eyes that made Kate feel vulnerable and aroused at the same time.
“Please let me go,” she moaned softly. “I’m not here to cause any harm, I promise.”
“Look at me.”
“I can’t,” she whimpered softly.
The leather snapped through the air and landed with a sting between her thighs, catching her down-covered lips with a stroke that was not hard enough to hurt, but certainly enough to get her attention. She gasped and stared at him in shock, his golden gaze meeting hers with a stern smirk.
“You see, you can, when you have the right stimulation.”
She blushed hard enough that it was not just her face that went red, but her cleavage as well. Her squirming attempts to cover her body were of course totally useless. All she was achieving was displaying herself more erotically for the dragon who had taken her prisoner.
“Let us begin again,” he said, more calmly now that he had her under total control. “What is your name?”
“Kate Ferrier,” she said, her words catching in her throat as the leather lashes traced over her body.
“Who sent you here, Kate?”
“I sent myself here.”
The lash trailed down her stomach and dipped between her thighs, the leather running along the slit of her sex.
“You insist on that lie,” he said. “But nobody can create a rift between the worlds on their own.”