by Raven Dark
He paused, searching my face. Seeming to come to some agreement in his mind, he nodded and handed me back my top.
Slipping the cadris top on and closing it over, I excused myself and left the clubhouse. Nervousness ate at me the closer I got to the entrance. How would I get Hawk to let me close enough to talk to him? What would I say if I had the chance? And why was my heart racing so hard it almost hurt?
“Ma—Master. You’re here.” I couldn’t control my breathing, or work moisture into my parched throat.
“I shouldn’t be here.” His voice was so quiet I almost didn’t hear him. Half in shadow, his amber eyes looked unsettling, almost unnatural. How had I never noticed how animal, how predatory they looked? He stalked toward me, but only a step before he stopped.
“Why not? Master, I’m glad you’re here.” I reached for his hand, but he moved it away. This distance was maddening when I couldn’t understand it. “Master, please just talk to me.”
He nodded to the entrance to the clubhouse. “Go back inside, Kitten. I am not safe right now.”
I opened my mouth to reply, but he turned and stalked off down the wooden walkway.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have gone after him, should have just left well enough alone and gone back to my other masters, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t remain locked in this limbic state of almost having him, but not, of his almost being mine, but always pulling back just when I thought we were connecting. It played too much havoc with my heart, especially when he wouldn’t tell me why.
With his long treads, I had to almost run to keep up. “Why is it so hard for you to talk to me? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing is wrong.” His voice was low and tight. At the entrance to his cavern, he turned to me, his face hard and expressionless. “I told you, I am Yantu. You have to accept that.”
“I would if I knew what it was I was accepting. What am I missing? You’re not giving me all the pieces of the puzzle.”
We’d talked about his warrior practices once. I knew the Yantu believed that one reached a state of perfection when they were free of emotion, having risen above them so that their actions weren’t clouded by them, but I didn’t understand how that prevented him from being with me. Or why he always pulled away whenever I got too close.
“And I don’t know why you’d think you were unsafe, Master,” I added gently.
For a moment, something flickered across his face. But then that stoic mask of his slammed back in place and there was nothing for me in his eyes but foreboding.
“You’re safer not knowing,” he rasped at last before he went into his cave.
The first real bite of impatience tugged at me. I sighed heavily and strode after him. A few paces inside the entrance to his living room, he stopped, tension rippling across his back and arms under his cut.
“I told you to leave me alone.” The raw danger in his tone nearly had me turning for the entrance, but I forced my feet to remain planted where they were. “Are you pushing me away to protect me, Master? Or are you shutting me out to protect yourself?”
Hawk let out a derisive noise and shook his head as if I’d proclaimed myself the Maker. “You make me feel too much, Kitten. I can’t be close to you and be what I need to be. I’ve made my choice.”
“So you’re avoiding me on the grounds of your Yantu ways.”
“That’s correct.”
I crossed my arms, feeling a bolt of defiance. “Which would be fine, Master…except that you aren’t doing that.”
His eyes snapped to mine, his chest expanding. “Excuse me?”
It took a lot to keep my voice calm with the way he was looking at me, like he wanted to shut me up. “I have nothing but respect for people’s choices in religions or lifestyles, Master. If you wanted me to stay away because being with me was against your ways, I would leave now, no questions asked. If you had made your choice, you wouldn’t keep coming to me and almost letting me in, and then pulling away.”
“Oh, no?” He returned to me, looming over me, arms still crossed. “What am I doing then, slave?”
“I don’t know. But what you are doing has nothing to do with your practices. It…” I pushed the word out. “It has to with fear.”
His mouth twisted. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. I fear nothing, least of all you.”
But I could see it in his eyes, in the way he kept himself so contained. His arms even tightened over his chest as if caging his heart.
There’s no getting through to him, is there? I let out a sigh.
“Master, this makes me incredibly sad. The Yantu believe a perfect state is one without emotion, but you know such a state is impossible. It makes me sad that you’ll never let anyone get close to you. That you’ll never let yourself know real happiness or joy or love. And it makes me sad that you’re using your warrior practices to hide from your own pain.”
Hawk’s dark brows slammed down, and his mouth flattened to a blade-thin line. He prowled across the small space between us and put his finger in my face, his voice low and deadly soft.
“Let me make one thing clear for you, Kitten. You know nothing about me. As your master, I’m telling you to leave. If you do not, you’ll face the consequences.”
Fear snaked its way up my spine, but something frighteningly close to anger rose up, burning it away. I dropped my arms. “I figured you for a lot of things, Hawk, many of which I may never fully understand. But I never figured you for a coward.”
I was pushing him to the brink, yes, but I’d had enough of his emotional see-saw game.
He stepped even closer to me, so that his chest was almost pressed against me, his face in mine. I could feel the anger spiking off him, hot and dangerous.
“One more time. As your master,” he said slowly and deliberately, “I am ordering you to leave or face the consequences.”
“Do what you want with me, but I’m not leaving. I’m not playing anymore. If you want to be my master, Hawk, then act like it.”
He let out a slow, livid sound rife with threat. “Consider your next words carefully, slave.” He pointed to the door. “Get. Out.”
Heart beating a little too fast, it took all I had to force my voice to remain even as I said the one thing to him that probably no slave had ever said to her master since before the Virus, before the time of slaves.
“No.”
There was no warning. Hawk’s expression didn’t even change before he grabbed me and slung me over his shoulder in one movement. His face might have been like slate, but as he carried me out of the cave and down the wooden walk, I could feel the brutality, the anger pounding off him, hard and hot.
Where was he taking me? I panted, hardly able to catch a breath.
His strides were huge and fast, eating up the ground so that I bounced on his shoulder, too much to do anything but kick my legs.
People walking past us took one look at the Captain of the Guard and chose a whole other walkway or sped up their pace, and no wonder; he must have looked frightening, carrying me as if I weighed nothing, like a Critian warlord intent on conquest.
The path he took changed to a gravel one and went up on an incline. He was headed for his mountain, for his private cave.
“Master. Wait—”
“No,” he growled. “You choose to throw your hand in the fire, you’ll be burned. I told you I am not safe. I told you to leave, you did not. You tempted me. Now you will take what I give you.”
For the first time since I’d met him, as Hawk carried me into the darkness of his medication cave, I felt the first real stab of fear with him. But when he threw me down on the thin leather mat at the back of the cave, and started stripping off his cut, I knew I was in trouble.
His eyes burned with lust. Anger. Possession.
“Master.” I stared up at him. Had he always been that huge?
Hawk stalked over to the entrance, hit a knot on the wall with his palm, and a heavy stone rolled in front of the doorway, cutting out the light from
outside and sealing us in.
Hawk crossed the space to me in two strides. He grabbed my ankle and yanked me toward him without a word.
Maker, help me, I was in for it now.
Chapter 17
Where the Heart Is
It wasn’t that I didn’t understand why Hawk was doing this. On some level I did. After a fashion, Sheriff had revealed why.
Sheriff had said Hawk didn’t know whether to fuck me or flog me. He’d been keeping me at a distance to avoid temptation, and by going to him, by not leaving him when he’d commanded it, I’d waved the red flag in front of the bull. I’d kept waving it until he’d lost whatever battle he’d been fighting to keep himself from being with me.
But there was more at play here than my pushing a dangerous man too far. I could see it in those eyes, feel it in the way he yanked me toward him, dragging me by my ankle across the mat. He meant to do more than punish me for tempting him. He wanted to hurt me, and not in the way he had the last time I was with him, when he’d used his knife on me, but in a way that went a lot more than skin deep.
“Master, you don’t have to do this.” I sat up, reaching for him.
He knelt, pushed me back down, then started undoing his belt. The sight of his big fists jerking his belt apart and working his pants open looked somehow threatening and erotic at the same time. The muscles of his wide chest and arms flexed and bulged powerfully, and the firelight from the torches on the walls of the small room threw shadows across his face, making his harsh features look almost cruel. My heart beat harshly in my throat. I swallowed hard.
“Master.” I looked into his face, pleading, employing him to understand.
He said nothing, only took out his thick cock and pumped the impressive, tanned length slowly. Eyes on mine, cold and impassive. Nothing in his expression told me what he was thinking except for one thing. He wanted me, and I wouldn’t be going anywhere until he’d shown me exactly what I was to him. Until he took me exactly how and when he wanted me.
“You’re not going to even talk to me?” I said, and I hated that my voice shook.
“Did you not tell me,” he growled in a low, quiet tone, “that I should act like your master?” As he spoke, he pulled his belt out of the loops of his leather pants. My stomach clenched thinking he was going to use it on my backside, but he grabbed my wrists instead, wrapping the belt around them.
Oh, Light, I had said that. Never had my own words pressed down with such a weight on me. I closed my eyes, trying to push away the hot sting of tears and tried to pull my hands free, not because I didn’t want him, but because I needed him to feel something other than anger when he was inside me.
Hawk shoved my wrists to the matt above my head and loomed over me. My chest rose and fell heavily on harsh breaths.
“You got yourself into this mess by forgetting your place, so we’re going to make sure you don’t make the same mistake again.”
What could I say to that? Nothing, so I let my arms and legs go slack. Hoping that if I let him know I’d accept what he did it would spare me some of his anger.
Slowly, Hawk withdrew his six-inch blade from his hip. I tensed, fear wrapping my heart in an icy fist, but he tossed the knife aside.
“No. No knife play today. I have other plans for you.” His hand slid up along my chest and cupped my throat, his palm pressing just hard enough to feel the danger. His head swooped.
Some reflex leaped up in me and I jerked my head away. His hand tightened, and he shoved my face back up to his. Then his mouth mashed against mine.
Hawk didn’t kiss me. He didn’t devour me or take pleasure from my mouth. He forced my mouth open, tongue stabbing in, hot and hard. The force behind the kiss had me trying to close my lips, and his fingers dug into my jaw until I opened it. His tongue laved my mouth, bullying.
I might have hated that kiss, if only for what it represented, but my body didn’t. My nipples quickly turned to painful pin pricks, poking at the cadris until I was sure he had to feel them stabbing at his chest. My sex was already aching, and I could feel the moisture pooling between my legs, soaking the crotch of my pants.
While his mouth savaged mine, Hawk shoved his hand between us and ripped open the front of my pants. Then he pushed his hand down between my legs, his fingers stroking my wet core.
“Feel how wet you are?” he said, lifting his head. “You want Master’s cock.”
I hated that he was right, and he knew it.
His mouth worked its way along my cheek and neck, to my ear. “Have the others had your ass, slave?”
Panic jolted me. Privately, since I’d felt Pretty Boy’s fingers back there, I’d wondered what it would feel like to have one of my masters take me that way. Under different circumstances I’d have loved to have Hawk teach me such a thing, but to have him doing so while fueled with as much anger as lust, and delivered as punishment? I wanted to tell him not to do it, but with his fingers making slow, tormenting circles through my aching sex, my muscles tightened, not with fear, but need.
“Not like that, no, Master.” My voice shook. “Pretty Boy put his fingers there.”
Hawk bent his head slowly and his tongue toyed with my nipple while his fingers slid into me. “Did you like it?” he murmured between flicks of his tongue.
I bit my lip, unable to bring myself to admit to the pleasure-pain I remembered.
“Answer me, slave.” Hawk slid his fingers in and out of me, sucking and licking at each of my nipples until I wriggled and panted and arched my back for him. “I’m gong to take your ass regardless, you might as well tell me.”
“Y-yes, I liked it.” My own voice sounded pathetically broken and sullen.
His groaned and sucked painfully hard on my nipple, then nipped the other so hard I whimpered, and my back bowed. His fingers pumped in and out of me, driving me toward an explosive climax.
Just before I came, he stopped, slid down my body, pushed my legs up, and licked at my sopping core. His tongue lapped fast and hungry until I was whimpering and fucking my master’s face.
The orgasm ripped me apart on a scream.
He sat up, his eyes bright amber fire. “Roll over,” he ordered.
My throat worked, suddenly dry. Fear kept me in place, even though some deep-seeded part of me needed to obey. Hawk spun me onto my stomach. If he noticed the tattoo on my back, he gave no sign. He ripped my pants off, and by the time he had me stripped naked, I wasn’t even on the mat anymore but lying on the hard, cool dirt floor of the cave. His big palm pushed my cheek into the dirt. The aggression startled me and I cried out, half in arousal, half in shame.
“You wanted me to behave like a master, then you will behave like a slave. When I want your ass in the air, you put your head down and your ass up like a good girl. Understand?”
I didn’t dare test him. Humiliation shredded me, but I let myself go limp under him. “Yes, Master.”
What this man was doing to me now cut deeper than anything that anyone had ever done, in some ways as much as Damien’s betrayal. Like Damien, Hawk had made me believe there was more to life for me than a slave, as if he felt something more for me than a master’s possession. Now he was stripping that all away, reducing me to the same thing Damien had, a vessel for his use, from which to slake his lust. Knowing he wasn’t evil, that his actions now came, not from a place of evil and cruelty like Damien, but from a place of pain and torment didn’t seem to help.
“Get your ass up,” Hawk bit out.
When I didn’t move fast enough, he swatted one cheek. The sting made me yelp and I lifted my hips. He pushed my legs apart, and his thick cock slid up and down my ass crack. A deep rumble of desire escaped him, and he spread my ass cheeks, one finger teasing my puckered hole.
Even though it wasn’t my first time being touched this way I tensed as though it was. He slid his finger in up to the knuckle, and I winced at the burning sting, trying to pull away, which only made the pain more intense.
“Don’t do that.�
�� His voice was hard. “Don’t pull away from Master. Relax.”
Even with the coldness of his tone, there was something in it that compelled me to obey, that made me need to please him. Hawk—all of my masters had a hold on me that made their pleasure like an addiction that had to be appeased.
My muscles relaxed. His finger slid in and out of my ass, the first inklings of pleasure mingling with pain until each made the other more intense.
“See? Is that so bad?” But there was no tenderness there. He slid his finger out and then used the other hand to toy with my clit, mounting my need.
For an instant, he released me, and I heard him shuffling around behind me. I lifted my head to look at him, but he was already kneeling between my legs again.
“Keep your head down.”
Something cool, like thick cream slicked my hole. Two of his fingers slid inside my ass, slick with whatever he’d used on me, making them go in easier. The pain was a little less, the pleasure more intense. I groaned, grinding into him.
“Good girl. You’ll enjoy my cock in your perfect ass.”
I doubted that. Tense all over again, I heard a slicking sound, then the head of his cock was pressing where his fingers had been. I was just starting to think I could handle him when he thrust into me, a single hard, deep thrust. I grunted out, unable to catch my breath from the half pain, half pleasure, and clawed at the dirt.
Suddenly, his hand was around my throat and he’d pulled me up so that my back was crushed to his chest. He buried his nose in my neck and ground into me, his fingers digging into my hip.
“Fuck, little slave. Your ass was made for this. So tight. You know the lube wasn’t for you…to make it easier on you. I’m going to use you again and again, for hours, Kitten, and I don’t want you damaged.”
He slid in and out of my hole, long, hungry strokes. I didn’t know if I was trying to get away, or fuck him back, but I felt completely helpless. I cried out and his hand squeezed on my throat just enough to let me know what he could do.
“Put your hands against the wall. I’m going to take you nice and hard.”
