by Nora Ash
A kiss from his scorching lips skimmed her inner thigh. “My pleasure, little Breeder.”
Kain’s voice was husky and dark, sending a small shiver through her tired body. It prodded at her instincts to awaken and be of service to the male who’d pleased her so, and when she glanced down past his head she saw the unmistakable sign of his need.
“Let me help you, too.” She smiled softly when he frowned up at her, before sliding her palms over his strong, wide shoulders. He rose obediently to his feet when she tugged at his arms, but when she leaned forward and let her tongue swipe experimentally at his giant cock head, he jerked back as if she’d burned him.
“What?” Selma knotted her brows in confusion.”Doesn’t that feel good to demons?”
“Of course it does,” he growled. “But I will not take pleasure from you again. I’d rather die than take advantage of you one more time.”
Oh, for Heaven’s sake! “You’re not taking advantage of me! Seriously, can’t you employ those damn voodoo senses you guys run around with to know that I’m not scared of you? That I like—”
A roar interrupted her mid-sentence, making her jaw clamp shut from surprise.
“I will not take pleasure from you! You are high from hormones and don’t know what you want!” Kain glared down at her, but seemed to soften at the sight of her startled expression. He sighed deeply and reached out a hand to caress her cheek. “I will tend to you if you so desire while you’re still in my care, but I will not be penetrating your body, nor will I accept a release from you. Once you regain your senses, you will be thankful. Do not press me on the matter, little one.”
Selma opened her mouth to argue with his assumptions of knowing her mind better than she did, but his eyebrow quirked in warning made her change her mind. Nothing would be gained from fighting over it right now.
She wasn’t fully aware what had changed in her to make her actually want to be with him like that, but she did know that something deep inside needed to feel the brutal stretch of his claim just one more time before they separated.
Ignoring the twinge in her stomach at the thought of saying goodbye she closed her eyes and let her exhausted body collapse back down on the bed. She’d need rest before she’d be capable of anything, much less spreading her legs for him again.
And she would feel him move within her before he gave her up—no matter how much of a gentleman he was planning on being about it.
* * *
It was a pretty surreal experience, sitting in his car next to what felt like the small, soft center of the entire goddamn universe, breathing in her intoxicating scent and knowing she belonged to him.
At least for a little while longer.
“Kain?”
He didn’t need to turn his attention away from the road to know her gentle, brown eyes were resting on him—could feel her gaze on his face like rays of morning sun.
“Mhm?”
“What … what will happen to my parents? After I disappear? Marathín ….”
Kain felt his lip curl up in anger at the mention of the demon who’d dared to mount his mate. “He will not get to them. I have had them under surveillance since you were taken in, and I will continue to do so until they have lived out their natural lives. You do not need to worry about their safety.”
“I’ll never get to see them again, will I?”
The sadness in her voice made that uncomfortable, soft thing inside of him that he’d forgotten even existed before she waltzed into his life throb uncomfortably.
“No,” he said. “I don’t think you will, little one.”
The soft touch of her fingers on his leather clad arm made the permanent erection between his thighs twitch eagerly. It hadn’t settled down since he’d tasted her sweet pussy two days before, turning every moment of his waking hours into a painful reminder of what he’d done.
Yet even though his insides felt tight with shame and horror from forcing himself on her, his entire body yearned to claim her again. The possessive instincts that’d been released when he mounted her for the world to see tore at his resolve, demanding that he take her. She was his mate, his Breeder. And when he’d been inside of her, the pain he still carried had been blitzed away by the bliss of her wet embrace.
“Will you tell them that I am okay? Somehow make them understand that they don’t need to mourn?”
A pain that’d returned a thousand fold when he regained his senses and realized what he’d done.
“I will try to find a way.”
“Thank you. So much—for everything.” She withdrew her hand, and he heard her blow air out. “Seriously. I won’t ever be able to repay you—three hundred million dollars? Can you really just pull that out of your budget?”
Some small, primitive part of him wanted to boast with how he could provide for her—and remind her how he’d won a fight against the Prince of Demons to claim her. Apparently she didn’t quite understand how much more significant beating demon royalty was compared to the price he’d paid for her. However, he didn’t need to nudge her already flaring urge to submit to him any further.
“I have to shift some assets around to pay in full, but it will not ruin me. You don’t need to think about repaying me anything—it’s a small sacrifice compared to what you have to give up because of my kind.”
She went quiet next to him, and he smelled a touch of sadness in her otherwise delicious scent.
Kain bit down on his urge to coo at her to make it go away, forcing his focus to stay on the road. She had every right to feel sadness, and the more he indulged his need to treat her like a mate, the tighter he’d get wrapped up in the overpowering instincts that would refuse to let her go.
* * *
Selma was quiet beside him until they finally stopped at a small hotel off the highway. It wasn’t exactly as high-class as he’d have preferred to offer his Breeder, but at least it was better than the first seedy hotel they’d stayed at together when she was still on the run.
“If we look for something more suitable, we’ll have to steer too far off course,” he explained as she looked at the Best Western he’d chosen for the night. Mild shame made him slam the car door hard enough to make her jump, which immediately had his protective urges rising. Being Mated was seriously hard work.
“You know, I’m not exactly a glamour girl, Kain. This is more than suitable.” She gave him a sardonic look, softened with a small smile. “Come on. I’m tired from the drive.”
Frowning, he followed her in to book their room. Despite the lingering sadness in her smell, she still seemed completely at ease around him. Though his scent would continue to have an impact on her as long as they were within a few yards of each other, he knew of no other newly-claimed woman who acted this calm right after being Mated. Even when Breeders had had a smooth transition into their new lives, they tended to be skittish and traumatized in the weeks after having experienced an auction.
Selma, who’d been so terrified of his kind she’d risked her life to escape them, now seemed in complete balance, as if the brutal claiming in front of his peers had mellowed her out completely.
The girl remained a baffling mystery to him.
When they finally made it to the small, plush room he’d rented for the night, Selma didn’t even bother giving it a cursory look before she stripped down. Right in front of him.
Kain bit the inside of his cheek as he watched her step out of the small pile of fabric at her feet and head for the bed—naked.
He’d brought her a few changes of clothes for the road, along with a silken night gown, but she ignored the luggage he’d carried in for her benefit, as if she had no grasp of how close he was to losing the iron grip he had on his self-control. He’d wanted to throw her down and ravage her all fucking day, and the sight of her bare form didn’t exactly help that.
She was still a bit too thin for his liking—Breeders needed plenty of roundness to sustain the rough needs of their mates—but the Governor had obviously ensur
ed she’d been properly fed since coming into his care. And she was a beautiful girl, with that long, dark hair, full lips and shapely legs.
When she bent over to climb into the bed, he caught a glimpse of the dark thatch of hair between her slightly parted thighs. Flashes of having her on her hands and knees in front of him, the soft cleft hidden there opened wide around his brutal girth, made him groan low in his throat with desire and his cock throb painfully.
The inviting sight of her round ass and soft pussy disappeared from view when she slipped underneath the covers, but his need stayed exactly as urgent. It wasn’t just the blissful sensation of being buried balls-deep in her tight cunt that had him flex his hands in a desperate attempt at keeping in control—it was everything about being with her, and feeling her small body soothe his own in ways he’d never thought possible before that auction. He needed to touch her skin, suckle her breasts, taste her maddening juices—
“Kain?”
He jerked at the sound of her voice, somehow managing to tip his spiraling thoughts back into the present.
“Yes?” Even to his own ears, he sounded unusually gruff.
“Come to bed?”
Maybe she was purposefully trying to torture him.
Moving stiffly, he removed his shoes, socks, coat and jeans. The erection tenting his boxer shorts was painfully obvious, but she’d be blind if she hadn’t spotted it already, and he didn’t want the rough material of his pants making her uncomfortable.
When he walked hesitantly towards the bed, Selma lifted the blankets, displaying most of her glorious nakedness with the invitation.
Kain climbed in next to her, careful not to touch any part of her body. Unfortunately, he hadn’t even settled in completely before the girl rolled over, hiking a thigh over his legs and wrapping her arm across his chest.
“You’re so tense,” she murmured.
He could feel the soft press of her breasts against his side, and the heat radiating from her core against his thigh.
“You know why.” There was no point in pretending he wasn’t fighting tooth and nail to rein in the raging monster inside that fought wildly to take her by the hips, flip her over and force her to give up that tantalizing little cunt, until she could no longer move. “You’re playing with fire.”
Nimble fingers stroked over his skin. “I know you’re struggling with the attraction between us. I mean, it’s not like it’s a secret that you want to make love to me.” She raised her leg a little higher, bumping gently against his rock hard cock for emphasis.
Kain snorted. “What I want to do to you doesn’t even come close to being described as making love. How have you forgotten what I am, behind the human disguise? You know what it feels like to be taken by a demon—I want to consume every last ounce of you. Don’t test my resolve.”
His mate went quiet for a little while, but her fingers never stopped caressing his chest. It felt oddly soothing, though every touch sent burning heat down to his crotch.
“Marathín came to see me, before the auction.”
His body went rigid from shock and anger.
“What?”
“He was my procurer, so they allowed him to perform the test to see if I was ready to be claimed by a Lord. Do you know how that’s done?”
He did. The thought of her helpless through such a procedure from the man who’d tried to make her his sent scalding rage through his veins, dampening the lust in its wake.
“He touched my brand and made me beg for it. He pressed his entire hand into me, all the way up behind my pelvis … I don’t think you can fully understand what it feels like, to be completely at someone’s mercy like that, because you will never have to submit the very core of your body to anyone. It hurt, and it was so humiliating—and he made me want it. But the worst part was what he told me while he fisted me. He told me he’d never, ever give up on making me his. He wants to consume every ounce of me, until there’s nothing left but an empty shell he can fuck and breed.”
She looked up at him, catching his gaze with those bottomless chocolate eyes. “Trust me, I know what it’s like to be consumed by a demon. That’s not what it’s like to be with you, even when you open me as wide as he did, fuck me as hard, and say that I’m yours. Because I want you to, because you give me everything you are when you do—because you’re going against every instinct you have to give me the freedom I told you I wanted. You’re not like him—you’re not like any of the monsters that showed up at that auction to win the right to force me into slavery for the rest of my miserable existence.”
Something felt sore in his chest—the same something he hadn’t even been aware existed before he woke up with her in his arms for the first time. He was starting to recognize it as an odd and not entirely pleasant mix of fierce, protective urges and something soft and vulnerable that belonged just to her.
“I still have the instincts, even if I fight against them. You don’t seem to understand how badly every fiber of my being wants to claim and possess you.”
To his surprise, her only reaction to his shameful admission was to put her head back down on his shoulder after kissing his skin gently.
“I will rip him apart for what he did to you.”
“I hope you will.”
Her softly spoken admission should have shocked him—she was so gentle and kind, and hearing her say that she wished for someone’s painful demise was rather out of character. However, all he felt was warm satisfaction from knowing that she would appreciate the revenge he’d take on her behalf.
They lay in silence for a time before she said, “Tell me about your mother.”
Kain turned his head to look at her in the soft light from the bedside lamps. Her eyes were open, but she seemed focused on the hand she kept stroking across his T-shirt covered chest and stomach.
He’d never really talked about her, or about what happened, with anyone else. His memory of her was painful and bitter to both him and his brother, and his father could not take the mention of her. He’d once come across an old necklace of hers, several years after her death, and had ripped apart several rooms in a fit of rage just from the sight of it.
But not a day went by that Kain didn’t think about her.
“She was beautiful. I remember her long, black hair and caramel brown eyes. And she had very soft hands. She was in her mid twenties when my father won her at the auction, and already married to a human man. Her son was about a year old. When I was born she’d been with my father for four years, and not a day went by that she didn’t plead with him to let her return to her old life. She missed her husband and son desperately. My father thought that having me would help her accept a life by his side, but it didn’t. She had no interest in me, or my brother, when he came along three years later. I remember her referring to us as devil spawn, and the product of rape, when my father asked her to take care of us.
“Sometimes, when we were very little, she would hold us. She’d cry while she did, but I still remember the feeling of her arms around me. I used to wish I was bigger, so I could have held and soothed her instead.”
He wasn’t entirely sure why he was telling her this, but the words flowed without effort from the place he’d locked away the memories of his mother. The soft sensation of the girl in his arms, and her soothing smell, seemed to encourage the memories of his mother to rush to the surface, eager to be shared with someone who might understand better than anyone how she’d felt.
“How old were you, when she died?” Selma asked. She moved closer to his body, as if she knew how her nearness soothed him.
“I was nine.” He stroked her hair gently, pausing for a moment when the bitter pain of the time around his mother’s suicide resurfaced. “She’d been growing more and more desolate for the past few years. Refused to have anything to do with my brother or I, threatened us while my father was in the room. Told us she would kill us in a heartbeat if it meant getting her real son back. I don’t know if she meant it, or if it was an attempt at
making my father set her free, but he couldn’t ignore the threat. He had finally had enough of her refusal to accept that she was his mate, not the wife of her human husband, and he did the only thing he could think of to break through her resistance.
“He kept her in the mark’s thrall for weeks, only giving her breaks so she could eat and sleep. My brother and I … we heard her scream day and night while he mated her, and cry inconsolably the few hours he didn’t. We begged him to stop, because the sound of it … of all of it … it was…. But he said he couldn’t, that she was sick and needed help—that he had failed in his duty as her mate to make her content in her life with him, and that he had to rectify his mistakes to save her. So he took her until the mark finally broke her. I think something in her mind eventually snapped. But she became docile, calm … and he thought she was saved. That she’d just need a little time to recover before she’d become the mate and mother she was supposed to be. The first day my father left her side to attend to his business she slit her wrists and bled out before he returned to find her.”
“I’m so sorry,” Selma whispered into his shoulder. Her lips pressed gently against the fabric of his shirt, and her arm constricted tightly around his chest, easing the ache there with the pressure of her body against his. “For how you lost her, but also for the way you grew up. You should have been cared for by the woman who brought you into this world, despite the circumstances.”
He shrugged, fighting the pull of the chasm in his gut at the too vibrant memory. “She couldn’t handle losing her first son, nor her husband. It might have been different, had she not had either when she was caught.”
“Did you ever meet him? Her older son?”
“My father killed him and her husband the day after she died. He was wild with sorrow and fury, and blamed them for taking her away. I never met either of them.” He’d thought about him—his human half brother. Wondered if they’d had anything at all in common, despite being of different races.
