Dangerous Ties

by Devyn Quinn

  Even if it meant enduring death by another’s hands again himself.

  3

  Leia let her body go limp against the pole, allowing the thick vines around her chest and arms to help support her. With Sebastian gone, she had no reason to feign courage, or toss out scathing words and threats that could well come back to harm her. She could be afraid. Cry. Kick and scream. And then get over the feeble-ass pity party and figure out how the hell she would escape these vines that weren’t normal without injuring herself further before her captor who was neither dead nor alive returned.

  Laughter over the incredulity of her situation bubbled up. Before it could escape, words echoed from the recesses of the dark wall. “I’ll be back. Don’t come without me.”

  She drew ramrod straight as the laughter died in her throat, replaced with soul-wearing agony. He wasn’t gone. For the better part of five minutes he’d been standing there silent, somewhere in the black abyss, watching her. Waiting.

  For what?

  Her to break down in hysterics so he had some final fodder for his twisted sense of humor before he left to do Satan only knew what? Probably spank Aubrie’s erection a few more times. Or maybe the midget would be in female form, and Sebastian would toss her over his lap and pleasure in paddling her pussy from the rear.

  Leia’s own pussy, chilled and hypersensitive from the gel he spread over and into it, throbbed with the iniquitous thought.

  Glowering into the blackness, she groaned. If it was the last thing she did, she would regain control of her body’s desires.

  “That you think I could want to—” Speech left her on a sharply indrawn breath.

  Holy Jesus! Something was inside her, moving around in her sex, expanding, pulsing. Fucking her like some imaginary dildo. Some dildo that was every bit as efficient and knowing as Aubrie, stroking up into her in a way she couldn’t ignore.

  “That’s the Camaloe. And my influence over it. Don’t come without me, slave.” Demand edged the order. “You won’t like the consequences.”

  Slave.

  Icicles of rage skated along Leia’s spine. The blunt edge of salon nails pinched back into her palms while hatred burned through her.

  She was no man’s slave, damnit! No man’s. No creature’s. “You might as well kill me now. I’ll never be your slave.”

  Once you enjoyed it.

  She shook off the phantom thought. It was no more her bidding than her amorous response to Aubrie’s handling had been, or the dampening of her sex was now.

  She would never enjoy being Sebastian’s slave, but she also would never lay her life on the line, the way she’d intimated. She expected him to recognize that truth and call her on the lie. He didn’t respond. Didn’t speak another word.

  Body strung taut with tension and vines, Leia waited for some sound, some shadow. Some dark, sensual god of a man who wasn’t quite human to emerge from the blackness. Seconds ticked on, drawing out into minutes. The Camaloe thickened until it filled her vagina to completion. The fucking sensation ceased, leaving her sex feeling stuffed full yet strangely empty and aching.

  None of it she wanted.

  “Stop being a chickenshit and get out here!” The daring words worked once to call her captor out of hiding. This time he didn’t appear. This time it seemed he really was gone.

  For the first time, the earthen cell felt truly like a chamber. Dank. Isolated.

  Leia fought off a shiver, knowing it was about nerves and not the weather—this time of year the temperatures never dipped below the seventies. And isolation was a good thing. It meant time for thought.

  For strategizing her escape.

  She let the tension drain from her body once more, relying on her bindings and the pole at her back for support as she studied the walls surrounding her. From what she could see of the three nearest, they were nothing but hard-packed earth. No chance of escape there even if she could somehow break free of the vines. Which left the mysterious fourth wall, or the ceiling.

  Tipping her head back, she studied the maze of tree roots and moss several feet above. Earlier, sunlight had bled down from small openings, coloring the moss in soft yellow browns and greens. Now the light was faint, the overhead canvas looking dark and dead. Night was falling.

  Her first night here?

  She’d assumed as much, but who knew how long she’d been unconscious? Maybe it was a second or third night. Only, wouldn’t Aubrie have undressed her and tended to her injuries before this? And wouldn’t her body hurt more from the strain of standing, not to mention being fettered?

  How long would it even take for someone to come looking for her?

  Would anyone come?

  She did have friends in the city, colleagues at the museum where she’d been lucky to find employment after discovering she had an excellent eye for Art Nouveau. But anyone who cared enough to seek her out? Damnit, she hadn’t even told anyone where she was going. Hadn’t dared to open that black hole of humiliation.

  She might as well be dead, because no one was coming for her. She was going to die down here, rot away little by little while a midget and her master took turns screwing with her mind and body.

  Frail thoughts littered with bleakness, but Leia couldn’t stop them. Couldn’t stop those that came directly on their heels. These ones dark. Foreboding. Thoughts that made her belly roil with nausea and her mind threaten to purge every vile moment of her brief, married life with Ken.

  Just when her racing mind would have spun too rapidly to bear without screaming, the Camaloe resurged inside her. The pace wasn’t an insistent pumping as it had been before, but gentle, hypnotic. Lovely really. Cooling her insides and yet somehow warming her, too, filtering delicious heat from her pussy outward. Spanning calming sensations along her nerves, soothing her frayed thoughts.

  She rocked gently with the lulling pace, feeling her vagina soften and moisten. Her clit tingled with want, but the pace wasn’t enough to bring her to climax.

  Just enough to ease, to comfort.

  Her eyelids flickered shut.

  Leia forced her eyes back open, her body stone erect. To sleep in these unknown circumstances would be insane. But darkness was flooding her cell fast now, drawing long shadows on the visible walls, and she was so tired…

  The odds of escape would have to be better with a fresh mind. Yes, she had slept for some quantity of time after being knocked unconscious, but that couldn’t have been restful sleep to feel so weary. Not like the kind of sleep pulling at her consciousness, making it impossible to keep her eyes open and her mind alert a moment longer.

  Rolling her shoulders back against the pole, she heeded the warming sensations lulling her from deep within and gave in to the call of exhaustion.

  Husky laughter rolling from her lips, Leia dashed barefoot out the door and into the summer sun. Anticipation and wild thrill kept the laughter coming and her blood flowing hot as she ran.

  She loved it when Ken played these games. Acted the part of master to her sub.

  She didn’t dare to look back, but she could hear the soles of his workboots pounding against the wood floor as he followed her out off the little one-room shack they were slowly remodeling. Their home was tiny now—smaller still it seemed nestled so deeply in the woods—but one day it would be bigger. One day the walls would be painted a charming yellow and echo the giggles of a half-dozen kids.

  For now, it was all she could do to focus on running through the endless rush of trees and wildflowers, over the tangle of brush and roots that lined the forest floor.

  Pulse racing, body on fire for what was to come, Leia made it nearly to the edge of the stream where they collected fresh water before arms closed around her middle.

  Viselike. Unyielding. Wonderful.

  Gasping out a sound that was half anxious screech/half delighted squeal, she felt Ken’s grip go lax. He knocked her off her feet then. Knocked her to the ground—cheek kissing the grass-mottled earth and rigid nipples poking into the dirt throug
h the flimsy cotton of her tee—and left her lying there beside the stream, floundering like a fish, while he came over her lower thighs.

  With his knees pinned against the backs of hers, he fisted her short jean skirt in one hand and jerked the loose material up past her ass. “No panties.” The sun warmed her bare skin as the flat of his palm connected with her butt, swatting the cheeks and leaving a delightful sting. “What’d I tell you about not wearing panties, slave?”

  “S-sorry, Master. I forgot.” As if she could ever forget the white-hot thrill of those erotic promises of his. All the wicked and delicious ways he would punish her should he catch her pantiless again.

  “I’ll have to make certain next time you remember.” Glinting command and dark promise edged his words, lifting goose bumps on Leia’s skin.

  The weight of his body left hers, quickly replaced with the weight of a lone booted foot against her back. Instinct had her fighting the pressure on her spine, struggling to push herself off the ground and away from the tickling sweep of scattered grasses against her lips.

  Instantly, she stilled with the swooshing hiss of material sliding against material. The unmistakable crack of leather split the afternoon air.

  “Oh.” Her pussy fluttered expectantly.

  Tension and excitement balled together in her belly. From the corner of one eye, she caught the movement of the tail of Ken’s belt whipping into the air. Slowly, it arced downward, lashing out, licking into the soft flesh of her buttocks. Not hard enough to leave its mark on her body, just hard enough to leave its mark on her growing need.

  Yes. Yes. Yes!

  Stinging heat spiraled down from the tender tissue to the gathering well of juices in her cunt. Giving up the fight to plant her palms on the ground, she fisted her hands at her sides and waited for a second irresistible lashing.

  The belt flicked higher this time, the leather licking at her ass with a decadent nip she felt all the way to the tips of her throbbing nipples. She squirmed on the ground, biting her lip to keep from pleading for release. The pleasure was so much more intense when she let that first biting pain build into a slow, keen, darkly sensual ache.

  But Ken wasn’t letting it build, not this way.

  “Did I tell you that you could move? You do nothing without my command. Nothing!” His boot lifted from her back, and his knees returned to the backs of hers. Rough fingers took hold of her labia and parted her sex from behind. Something stiff and slim and hard, she quickly recognized as the tail of his belt, pushed up into her sheath. “Fuck this belt, slave. Show me how much of it you can take.”

  He fed it inside her, doubled it up, and spread her until her pussy burned and a hot ball of electric sensation stormed through her from the sheer intensity.

  Without warning, the other end of the belt whacked down across her exposed ass—fast, solid, hard. She jerked, and her nipples scraped along the ground, triggering a chain reaction in her pussy, throbbing her clit. “Oh, God.”

  The belt came again, the doubled-up tail pumping into her creamy sex in tandem. Tension dragged at her eyelids until they were clamped shut. Her face pressed tight against the grass. Her hips stayed in place by some magical force other than herself. She wanted to move them. Wanted to grind her cunt against the hard earth.

  I need to come. So badly.

  The pressure of Ken’s knee changed until she could feel his lower stomach pressing against her back. His breath teased across one of her earlobes, hot and tawdry, chanting a near-silent warning, “Don’t you come.”

  “I can’t stop,” she risked wailing, risked one little wriggle of her mound against the forest floor. “Not when you treat me this way.”

  The pressure shifted again as he straightened. She expected to feel the lash of the belt for her insubordination, hoped for it. Needed it to gain that final release. The tail end of it jerked from her cunt instead, and she whimpered.

  Strong hands took hold of her wrists, gripped them, yanked her arms behind her back. Damp leather cinched around her wrists in the next instant, trapping them in place together at the small of her back.

  “You’re mine. All mine. I’ll treat you however I want to treat you.” Fingers shoved into her sex from behind, pumping up into her slick walls, sliding between her labia to caress the hard, aching pearl of her clit.

  Now she would come. Now she couldn’t help herself.

  “Don’t come without me, slave.” Demand edged the order. “You won’t like the consequences.”

  Oh, but she would. She always did.

  With her ass and pussy afire, Leia panted an elated sigh against the ground. Even if their home never grew to more than one room. Even if they weren’t blessed with children, so long as she had this man by her side, this man who catered to her most intimate fantasies and every secret dream, she would never have a want for more.

  Sebastian’s senses prickled with keen awareness as he stepped into the clearing that surrounded his home. With the spirit of the fox alive and pumping wild in his blood, he moved past the sedate log structure to the four-by-four slate of unremarkable flint emerging from the foot of a wildgrass-dusted hill.

  Typically, he relied on Aubrie or another skin-shifter’s loyalty and unabashed hedonism to keep his body engaged while he waited for the dying drags of an animal’s soul and its power over him to wane. Tonight, even before he transferred through the flint, and the dirt that lay beyond it, into the holding area, Leia’s ragged breathing echoed like a tempest in his ears, rousing his nearly half-decade-old want for her and her alone.

  One booted foot on the hard-packed soil that was the cell’s floor, his cock went rigid beneath the loincloth, and every nerve stood on end as his body primed to pounce. Nocturnal eyes of the fox cut through the darkness of fallen night to view her naked, erect form. His jaw tensed with how closely she resembled the woman he remembered—the one who snubbed materialism as fully as she embraced the darker side of ecstasy.

  This was his Leia.

  A true vixen, she writhed in the vines, all but shoving her bare, stunning breasts toward him. One arm had managed to work its way partially free of its binding. The fingers of that hand fondled her pussy from behind. With no hair blocking the view, he could easily see the slickness of her sex, the juices streaming down her inner thighs. How fiercely hard and red she’d worked her clit.

  All while she slumbered.

  The Camaloe had done its job, healed her minor injuries while starting her on the path to remembering. Now he must do his own job.

  Ignoring the yearning the scent of her arousal stirred in his blood and the innate urge to leap at her and take her down, not as prey but lover, Sebastian moved forward.

  As if she too were somehow caught up in the fox’s spirit, her senses attuned as his own, her eyes opened with his first step. For a moment, her fingers continued to fondle and her gaze hung on to the mask of lust. Then the ice returned, her body going rigid. He’d yet to light the lantern that hung from the dirt wall behind her. While he could see her past the blackness, she shouldn’t be able to see him.

  “I know you’re here.” Leia’s voice came cool with a touch of unsteady.

  Sidestepping several feet confirmed she knew no such thing. She might be able to detect a change in the space’s chemistry, but her attention remained fixed on the wall that doubled as a gateway to the outside world.

  Wearing a smug grin, he continued over. “Good dream?”

  Her head snapped around with his proximity. Her chilly gaze nearly even with his own, she jerked the fingers from her sex to join their still-secured mates behind her back. “Yes, I was dreaming that you were the one in vines.”

  Sebastian darted soundlessly behind her to slap a palm across a dimpled butt cheek. “Don’t lie to me, slave.”

  The breath wheezed out of her with the whack. She jerked forward, placing nearly a foot between her body and the support rod. “Damn you, I wasn’t lying!”

  He filled the space she’d vacated, slipping behind her, p
ulling the softness of her rosy ass flush to his thighs. Pumping a finger into the slick valley of her sex, he coasted his lips along her neck up to her ear. “Bullshit.” He gave the lobe a punishing nip. “You’d never get this wet in the role of master.”

  “The vines were wrapped around your neck.”

  Where Leia’s words carried bite, the shifting of her hips in time with his propelling digit spoke only of want. Her pussy contracted as he changed course, caressing her clit with the rough pad of his finger. Erotic sensation spirited through her, building tight, wet need in her core while starting her pulse into a mad scurry.

  And he felt it all.

  For one brief, incredible, breath-stealing moment, Sebastian had back the fragile connection of mind, body, and emotion he’d once shared with her. When it came to detecting emotions in animals and those beings that were not of human origin, the empath gift was something to alternately value and scorn—if he couldn’t sense their suffering, he wouldn’t feel compelled to lighten it by taking on their pain himself. Leia was the only human he’d ever been able to read. Reestablishing that link full-time, knowing precisely what her body wanted and her mind refused to share, could only aid his quest.

  He released a dark chuckle as her death threat caught up with him. “It’s good to see Ken didn’t kill all of your fight.”

  Leia went stiff, and for another fleeting moment, he knew the panic slicing through her as if it were his own. “How do you know about Ken?”

  Fuck, he hadn’t meant to share that knowledge so soon. Still, it wouldn’t have to hurt anything, so long as he revealed only what suited the cause.

  Sebastian shifted his body, letting her feel the hard ridge of his erection against her upper ass. The knuckles of his free hand stroked along her neck, down the side of a breast. “I know most everything there is to know about you, Leia. I know what he did to you. I know when I’m through with you”—turning his hand, he palmed the globe and gave the nipple a subduing squeeze—“when I’ve reminded your body what it craves, you’ll be on your knees, worshipping at my feet with gratitude.”