Dangerous Ties

by Devyn Quinn

  She could still see it vividly in her mind, though.

  So much blood. So goddamned much blood covered his shredded body. Skin gaped open in some spots and hung in limp patches in others, revealing that the muscle and bone beneath had suffered the same dire consequences as the rest of him.

  For long seconds, she could only gape and gasp and fight the bile churning in her throat. Then survival kicked in. In many ways, he’d saved her, given her back a life she hadn’t known she’d been missing. She owed him for that, owed him nothing less than everything.

  Leia attempted to shove her way past the laboring midgets, only to be knocked backward and thrust onto her butt in the dirt. Snarling, she leapt to her feet. God saw fit to gift her with a big ass, and right now she saw clearly His logic. With her ample hips and ass paving the way, she pushed back into the pack, this time refusing to be deterred.

  She emerged on the other side victorious and nearly smiled over her feat. Nearly until her gaze fell on Sebastian’s mangled form. He lay less than a foot away. His eyes were closed, and long black lashes fanned their undersides. Sweat consumed his body while his breathing came far too shallow. She could only guess the skin-shifter’s circular chanting had somehow guided him back here—no way could he have made it on his own.

  “Get out of the way! You can’t help him!” Aubrie shouted.

  Leia met the female’s eyes and growled, “I’m not going anywhere.”

  Small but strong hands grabbed hold of her arms from behind, yanking them painfully behind her back. “Leave, human. You’re not wanted here,” a male voice retorted.

  More hands joined those first ones, jerking her backward, dragging her across the dirt, away from Sebastian.

  Madly, she twisted her torso and wrenched at her arms. “Goddammit, let me help!”

  The hands kept pulling, blunt fingernails digging into her flesh, gouging at the soft tissue until she could see no more than his bared feet. Please, she pleaded with her mind, praying he could still somehow read her thoughts. Please let me help you.

  “Let her go. Let her see what I am.”

  Sebastian’s voice was low, thready, and still she recognized it. Still, her pulse spiked with hope. He was conscious. He was asking for her.

  Again, she thrashed at the arms holding her in place. “Let me see him. Let me see him!”

  The hands released. The pack of skin-shifters parted. She raced those few precious feet to Sebastian’s side. Falling on her knees in the dirt, she dipped her fingers into a bowl of Camaloe. Coating his torn body with the herb that healed her in more ways than one, praying all the while she wasn’t hurting him further with her ministrations, she met his eyes. “What happened?”

  “I killed someone.” Malice reflected in his voice.

  Leia’s hands shook as she applied the herb to another wound, and his muscles lurched beneath her touch. Holy Jesus, how could he ever recover? “You’re hurt so badly.”

  His eyes narrowed. “I said I killed someone, Leia. How the hell can you care if I’m hurt?”

  “How can I not?” Such little time they’d been together, and yet, somehow, she felt she’d known him far longer, remembered him from another time. He’d been adamant about the fact that they hadn’t met previously. He’d also been adamant about the fact that he would never raise his fist in violence. She believed that first a lie, the second honest truth. If he’d killed someone tonight, it had been done in self-defense. “Tell me how to fix this.”

  Sebastian’s glare remained intact, his lips firm and unyielding for nearly a minute. His mouth curved then, slowly and slyly, into a devilish grin that lent an edge of danger to the air while it raised the fine hairs at the back of her neck. “You want to make it better?”

  “Yes.” No matter the sudden bolt of fear coursing through her, she would do anything to heal him. At her nod, his hand came up, sliding past her cheek to grip her unkempt hair with brute strength she couldn’t believe he still possessed.

  A madman’s laugh, high-pitched and manic, rolled from his mouth, echoing off the cell walls as he forced her gaze to fall on his cock. Not limp or injured like the rest of him, but solid and thick with arousal. “Then suck my dick, slave,” he goaded. “Take it all the way inside. Show everyone what a good little pet you are.”

  Leia sucked in a stunned gasp. Humiliation burned through her body, blistering her cheeks. She hadn’t given a thought to her nudity from the moment she’d awoken to find herself with equally nude company. Now, she realized how exposed she was. How many eyes watched her every move. Eyes that still held concern for their master but, now, also open desire.

  “Do it!” Sebastian roared, his grip on her hair intensifying to the point shards of pain tore through her skull.

  To hell with the skin-shifters. To hell with this ultimate invasion of privacy. If it meant sacrificing her pride after only just getting it back, she would do it. “Yes, Master,” she uttered almost silently. Then she took his member between her lips.

  He moaned with that first contact, low, long, and keening. A sound caught between pleasure and pain, heaven and hell. Moving her mouth up and down his steely rod, Leia licked from oozing tip to throbbing base, loving his hot taste and silky texture even as she felt guilt for enjoying herself in his moment of need.

  Taking the sac of his testicles in one hand, she gently massaged his balls. She risked releasing his cock then to feed his nuts into her mouth, savoring the taste and texture of those too. Crisp pubic hair teased her upper lip and nose, raising a sneeze out of nowhere.

  Her mouth worked around his balls as the sneeze released, her lips opening and then clamping down hard without intention. Sebastian grunted, and his battered thighs went taut, muscles contracting around her upper half, locking her body in place between his legs.

  The action was so reminiscent of every other sensual game he’d played with her, Leia’s pussy pulsed with expectation. Meeting his eyes with apology in her own, she brought her mouth back to his sex, gobbling his cock up and sucking it deep.

  Without acknowledgment, he jerked his gaze away. “Heal her, Aubrie.”

  “But, Master, she’s not injur—”

  “Do it! The right way.”

  Past the deliciously erotic pumping and pulsing of his shaft in her mouth, Leia detected the caution in Aubrie’s voice. Warning threatened at her mind. No time did she have to reflect on that warning before the female’s fingers moved between her thighs from behind, probing the shaved lips of her pussy, then pushing briskly inside.

  Not with fingers, but with tongue.

  Like the first time Aubrie ate at her cunt, the female seemed to know her body intimately, knew just where to lick and suck to have her sex slick and heavy with want. Instinct registered the urge to fight back, to block the invasion. Sebastian’s staying grip and the upward shove of his hips in time with the downward thrust of her mouth wouldn’t allow her to listen to that instinct.

  He needed this, needed her.

  Leia repeated the stabilizing thought in her mind again and again as the female’s tongue, teeth, and lips feasted on her pussy, and electric sensation built like a tempest in her core. Sebastian’s cock moved faster between her lips with each of Aubrie’s heightened pumps. The female slipped a finger inside Leia’s sheath, working it together with her tongue, and heat chased through Leia like a wildfire, racing her heart and boiling her blood.

  She knew wildfires. Knew how dangerous they could be. Knew it was a wildfire of her own creation that had her here now with Sebastian. Sucking his cock with relish, moaning around his hard flesh for each of Aubrie’s feverish moves, she paid him back for putting out her fire, for giving her back her life. And he paid her back in kind by shooting his cum into her mouth.

  His seed slid down her throat, hot and silky, and coupled with Aubrie’s continual mouth fucks, more ecstasy than Leia could bear. Panting around his cock, she gave into her own orgasm, coming around Aubrie’s tongue as wave after wave of pleasure rippled through her.r />
  “That’s good, isn’t it? The feel of Aubrie’s tongue in your pussy, making you come and then sucking you dry?” Sebastian’s voice was hard, his tone mocking.

  Playing a game. Playing another game, Leia thought distantly, oblivious to her surroundings as her heart boomed and mini-tremors rocked her to the core.

  “Bet you didn’t know your tastes ran that dark, did you, slave?” he continued in the acerbic tone. “You like it rough. Like it when a guy swats you around a bit, when he jams his dick up your asshole.” Aubrie’s tongue jerked from Leia’s sex, and a hand swatted across her ass, hard, stinging. Not bringing to life dark passion but brutal pain that squeaked a cry from her lips. “You’re just another dirty girl. A toy made for a man’s amusement. No amount of running’s gonna change that.”

  The hand he gripped her hair with released to take hold of his cock and pull it from her mouth. He bounded to his feet then, bounded up and knocked her backward, making her topple Aubrie in the process. Bounded as if he’d never been injured at all.

  Past his bitterly taunting words, Leia remembered with shameful clarity how injured he’d been and how, in the wake of pleasure, she’d forgotten all about it. Despite his behavior, his body was still torn. Blood still caked his bruised and battered skin, and lay thick and acidic on the air.

  He seemed oblivious to his pain now. The sense of his suffering was gone from her mind as well. As was Sebastian gone from her sight, as he stalked to the dirt wall and moved directly through it.

  Forgetting his jeers and her shame, she shot to her feet and darted to the wall, pounded at the solid earth until her knuckles stung. “Goddammit, come back!”

  A small hand settled on her upper arm. “He’s not in the right mood, Leia.” Aubrie spoke in a voice mingled with lust and compassion. “He can’t listen right now. Can’t respond to you as the Sebastian you’ve come to know.”

  Then who the hell could he respond to her as?

  Fear for his safety lodging emotion in her throat, she turned to regard Aubrie and was taken aback at the sight of the other skin-shifters. Not only did she forget Sebastian’s injuries, but she’d been so rapt in pleasure, she’d forgotten the other shifters were even in this cell.

  Embarrassment rose up anew. Disregarding the slow burn in her cheeks, Leia addressed the group as a whole. “How can you just let him go? There’s so much blood.”

  “It’s not his,” Aubrie explained. “Sebastian’s heart beats like a mortal, but no blood flows through his veins. He can’t die in the traditional sense. He can only move on.”

  “Then the blood…It belonged to the person he killed?”

  “The bear, yes.”

  Bear? “He was that crazed over a bear? I thought he killed a human. Or one of your kind.”

  “Bear, human, or shifter doesn’t matter to Sebastian. He’s the protector of this land. It’s his job to keep all safe. When he fails to do so, when an animal dies, he feels it’s his duty to take on their suffering. In a way, he becomes that animal. Not in body, but in spirit, in actions.”

  The emotion in Leia’s throat thickened as the grim possibility in Aubrie’s admission caught up with her. She swallowed hard, fighting to keep her voice from trembling. “Will he move on tonight because of his injuries?”

  Aubrie looked to the wall he’d left through. When she looked back, uncertainty filled her eyes. “He should be okay. Later tonight. Or by morning. Will you?”

  “I don’t know.” How could she when Aubrie looked so unconvinced of her words? When even if Sebastian was miraculously okay, she now knew with certainty their days together would soon come to an abrupt and final end?

  Earlier tonight, Leia knew she wouldn’t like leaving him. Now, she acknowledged that she would hate it, and that she would do everything in her power to see that moment never came to pass.

  8

  Sebastian had no right returning to Leia, tonight or ever. She wasn’t his, the way he’d once taken such great pleasure in pretending. After the merciless way he’d treated her earlier this night, handling and taunting her in a manner befitting her asshole of a dead ex, the mere thought of his touch would likely sicken her.

  He had no right returning. But he had to go to her anyway.

  Not bothering to dress, he slipped through the back door of his log home and traversed the short stretch to the slate of flint emerging from the hillside. He’d loathed killing the black bear, but thoughts of Leia wouldn’t allow him to lie idly in wait of his next life while the animal ripped him limb from limb. If he hadn’t returned, one of the skin-shifters would probably have seen to her release. Probably hadn’t been good enough, not where she was concerned.

  The enraged bear’s spirit was out of Sebastian now. With his body healed and his senses his own, he could detect Leia’s heightened breathing and anxious thoughts before he cleared the dirt wall and stepped onto the holding-area floor.

  Immediately, her head jerked up. Eying him head to toe, once and then again, she rose from the bed mat. Flickering light from the wall-mounted gas lantern shone in her eyes, drawing out joint forces of trepidation and relief. “Sebastian.” His name slipped quietly from her lips. “You came back.”

  Christ, she looked so worried. So upset to think she might never see him again, that no one might ever see him again for the extent of his injuries. Just as he had no right returning, he had no right opening his arms to her, or even believing she would want them. He opened them anyway, opened them and hoped like hell she filled them.

  She didn’t move. Didn’t do anything more than stare at him for long seconds while his heart slammed into his ribs. Then, slowly, a smile curved her lips.

  Crossing to him, Leia hugged his body close. “I was so afraid for you.”

  The words whispered hot and moist against his chest, and it struck him for all that went on the last days, for all the times he’d watched her in the grips of passion over the years, they’d never been this intimate.

  Sebastian wanted to drop his mouth to hers and kiss her with every ounce of the tenderness he’d been forced to deny. Instead, he just held on, just accepted he was lucky to be getting even this close. “After the way I treated you, what right do you have to be worried about me?”

  She tipped her head back, chin digging against his chest. “Most of it I loved. What I didn’t enjoy, you couldn’t help.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “Aubrie told me about the bear and how its spirit entered your body. Even if she hadn’t, it wouldn’t have mattered. I know you’d never hurt me, or anyone else intentionally.”

  She sounded so positive, her thoughts so strong and self-assured. If it weren’t for knowing their futures could never be intertwined, he would have admitted his love for her then and there.

  But he knew what the future held. And he knew he could never admit how long ago he’d fallen for her.

  Releasing her, Sebastian crossed to the wall chest and sat down. “I’ve been deceiving you, Leia. I deluded you into thinking you’re a submissive who needs a master to make her feel complete. You aren’t. Binding you, forcing you to call me master, holding you captive…It was the only way I knew to make you remember the truth of your desires. You like the darker side of ecstasy—thrill in it until your body’s little more than a dripping wet pussy—but that isn’t all that you are. All that you need.”

  Leia nodded, acquiescence filling her eyes as she started over. “You’re right, it isn’t. Not now. Not tonight.” Going down on her knees on the dirt at his feet, she took his hands in hers. “You’ve opened my eyes, Sebastian. Allowed me to see clearly what my body craves. Right now, there’s only one thing it wants. One man.”

  Hell, he shouldn’t even consider the sensual offer simmering in her eyes, the unconcealed emotion and lustful thoughts that accompanied it. But how could he say no? How could he turn down this lone chance to make love with her?

  He couldn’t.

  Pulling her to her feet as he came to his own, he led her
to the mat in the corner. The natural and free Leia he’d first come to know wouldn’t have a single problem making love on a mat. How completely the Leia with him now had reverted to that Leia of years ago, he wasn’t certain. “I have a house. With a real bed.”

  “Tomorrow we can use it.” Slipping her hand from his, she lay back on the mat and opened her arms to him, her legs. “Today I want this place. Our place.”

  There would be no tomorrow for them. No ours of any kind.

  Choosing to ignore that abhorrent reality, Sebastian went down on his knees and crawled between her legs. So sweet and pink and damp her pussy was for him. This time, he didn’t stop to consider his actions or fight guilt, but brought his mouth to her opening and tasted her essence. Stroking his fingertips along the soft skin of her inner thighs, he licked at her labia with lazy swipes, luxuriating in her taste. Delicious. Creamy. A taste he could easily get lost in.

  He loved her sex with his mouth for long, languid minutes, until her cunt pulsed seductively around his tongue and her hips bucked up with her moan. He turned his lips on her thigh then, kissing a warm, wet path from inside to front to outside.

  Leia released a sound caught between squeal and giggle. “That tickles.”

  Ticklish. He’d never known that about her. He liked that added familiarity, too damned much.

  Turning her onto her belly, he concentrated on making good on his vow from that first day by brushing his mouth over a dimpled butt cheek and kissing the supple flesh.

  Sighing, she came up on her hands and knees. Her legs parted several inches, exposing the tight hole of her anus and the swelling folds of her vagina. “Will you take me this way?”

  It wasn’t a question filled with reservation but hope. A sign she was ready to embrace her darker desires, to admit she needed more than vanilla from her lovers. In answer, Sebastian brought his lips to the union of her buttocks and kissed his way down her crack.