Ruthless Control

by L. V. Lane

  Finished with my meal, I twirled the heavy fork in my fingers. There wasn’t a knife, which was undoubtedly a deliberate decision. I watched him through the window because I couldn’t not look at him.

  My tummy turned over in a familiar way when I thought about him knotting me earlier, and my cheeks flushed with heat. The moment of weightlessness as he rolled me under him, and the rush of intense pleasure as heat pooled in my lower belly in anticipation of the knot.

  I swallowed, my fork tumbling ceased abruptly as it clattered against the plate, and I lifted guilty eyes to find three heads had swung my way.

  Lucian turned back to the Deltas. “See what you can uncover,” he said. “I’ve got Black incoming, and that asshole is giving me a big enough of a headache without the fucking dog wading in.”

  He didn’t talk to other people the way he spoke to me, although there were times when the facade slipped. At first, I had been confused about who and what he was. I wasn’t confused anymore.

  As they left, he returned his attention to me.

  There was a stretched moment where we simply stared at each other via the reflection. I still didn’t know where this was going or what my role here even was. Unexpectedly, I worried about my parents and my brother. Concerned that my mother would be drinking too much and that my brother would blow the newly acquired money on drugs.

  And my father, I worried that he might be left holding the mess.

  I lowered my lashes and found avid interest in my half-eaten meal. Lucian was a beautiful man; had I confessed my dynamic status two years ago, he might even have petitioned for me. Any unmated Alpha with demonstrable wealth could do so.

  “What do you want to do?” my father had asked on that fateful night of my revealing as he sat me on the worn sofa of our lounge. My mother had gone to the kitchen and was loudly bemoaning our lot. I was confused, in pain, and frightened, and in this vulnerable state, the thought of being ripped from my family, as dysfunctional as they were, terrified me even more.

  At the sound of approaching footsteps, I picked up the fork and pushed the vegetables around. I had barely touched my fish. I was having problems eating lately, and I did not like to linger on the probable cause.

  I was going through the motions of shuffling food when his hand closed over both mine and the fork from behind.

  “How many days?” he asked in that smooth, disarming voice as he placed the fork out of reach on the table. The movement brought him closer, and his lips brushed against my ear.

  I sucked a sharp breath in. “I’m not going to stab you,” I said, indicating the fork. I wasn’t some misguided heroine in a book. I could see that trying to stab him would likely just piss him off and end poorly for me.

  He laughed a warm chuckle that did weird things to my resolve to hate him. “That was a terrible deflection, Pet…I have a visitor coming. Would you like to join me?”

  My head swung around to face him. “Where?”

  “No need to look so excited, love. It will be in my office, and Ethan Black is a disreputable Alpha like me. You’re not about to be rescued.”

  “Yes,” I said because I had been in this apartment for a good number of days, and even the thought of visiting his office where another disreputable Alpha would be, instilled a giddy sense of anticipation.

  His warm hand circled my throat. “If you leave the room, you will need to wear my collar. It could send…the wrong message otherwise.” I shuddered as he pressed gentle kisses to the shell of my ear. “Or you could stay here.”

  I was sure my inclusion would send whatever message he designed it to send, with or without a collar, he was just a dick, as Kais would say.

  Suddenly I missed my brother, the younger version of him who had worn easy smiles. Who had pinned me down and tickled me when we were children until I squealed, and our mother shouted at him to behave.

  Life had been so much simpler back then, and I had not understood the lot that was a non-dynamic. I did not know that I would one day become a dynamic and that it would change my life.

  Kais had also changed somewhere along the line. Work for a non-dynamic was hard to find, and he had fallen from one temporary placement to another. He was intelligent despite lacking the dynamic status, and I think this made it worse. My father was convinced he would become a Beta or even an Alpha.

  Kais had never revealed any dynamic.

  A troubled time had followed until he’d gotten in with Dino Malaxos, and it went downhill fast.

  “Do you want to leave the room?” Lucian’s thumb brushed back and forth along the column of my throat, and I found it hard to remain focused.

  “You’re manipulating me,” I said, because he was, and we both knew it.

  He chuckled and released my throat. “I’m not forcing you to wear the collar, Pet. You are free to remain here.” He was still too close, his scent surrounding me as his fingers trailed along my collarbone.

  “Only while I’m out of the apartment?”

  “Yes, it will be temporary—until you beg.” His words were a growl beside my ear, and I shuddered again. “Would you like to see it, love?”

  I thought looking at it would be a bad idea. “No…just put it on.”

  His fingers skimmed over my arm, and he pressed a kiss against my temple. There was no time to assimilate my decision before something brushed against my throat.

  An urge to panic rose out of some dark corner of my mind, but he fitted it in place quickly.

  “How does it feel, Pet? Too tight?” His fingers ran along the seam before he enclosed both the collar and my throat in his hand. The action was soothing, and I felt my fear recede. It hardly seemed possible that he had clipped it into place so fast, but I supposed he must be an expert at it by now.

  “Strange,” I said because it was. My fingers itched to touch and explore it, but I thought this would be a bad idea. Better to pretend it wasn’t there, that it was only his hand holding me.

  “Anything else?”

  Comforted? “Unsettled.” He had held his hand there before when I was panicking, and an association had been formed. “Safe,” I added on a whisper, and yet my submission to his need for this was fundamentally dangerous.

  He had had this in his pocket the whole time he was talking to first his brother, then Jordan and Kade. Had he been picturing me wearing it?

  His hand withdrew slowly, and the sensation of the collar took its place. It felt like…his hand was still there.

  “Black will be along shortly,” he said. “We should leave so you can settle before he arrives.”

  I nodded and had to fist my hands to stop them from touching the collar. Pretending it wasn’t there was easier said than done when it sucked my thoughts in like a black hole collecting stars.

  The seat was pulled out, and he held out his hand to help me to stand. My eyes lowered to the transparent scrap of clothing and my bare feet. “I can’t leave the room like this.” I didn’t enjoy being in the room wearing this. Leaving was a whole other world of angst.

  When my lashes lifted, I found him staring at my throat, and my breath trapped in my lungs.

  “You will wear whatever I wish, Pet.” His heated look encompassed all of me. “No one is going to touch you while you are with me and wear my collar.” I was busy assimilating that statement when he withdrew a long thin lead from his pocket like such an act was perfectly normal.

  His fingers tightened over it, and I froze.

  “Look at it, love.”

  I shook my head, yet the sight sucked me in. It was long, fine, and black, and I watched him unraveling it as if in slow motion. One end was lifted and connected to the collar under my chin, before he carefully looped the other end around his big hand.

  A fuzzy veil had dropped over me. A barrage of strong, yet inexplicable, emotions battered my tender psyche. Conflict, there was so much conflict. How was it possible to feel cherished and possessed at the same time when they ought to be mutually exclusive?

  He eye-fu
cked me up and down, a lazy exploration that made my knees go weak.

  “Perfect,” he said as he caught hold of the lead close to my throat…and tugged.

  I stumbled forward half a step into the hard wall of his body, catching his smirk before he palmed my throat and lowered his mouth over mine. He swallowed up my incoherent complaint, and it soon morphed into a needy moan as my whole body softened.

  He destroyed me with that kiss. His soft lips moving over mine, his rough hand holding my throat with a hint of bite, and his heady scent surrounding me sent my body into overdrive.

  He leaned back, sucking my lower lip between his teeth until it popped out.

  My lip throbbed; my whole body throbbed.

  “Are you ruining your pretty panties, Pet?”

  I shot a glare at him.

  His lips twitched as he relaxed his hold on the lead and called the elevator.

  Inside I was presented with wall to wall smoky mirrors. My eyes wanted to shut, but they were subject to their own will. I was a tiny Omega—a pet with a collar around my throat—and behind me stood a handsome Alpha. His muscular body dwarfed mine, and the hand he splayed over my lower stomach, held the end of the lead.

  And the collar?

  A hot tide swept over my body as I stared at the sparkling work of art. It was nothing like I had expected. I had seen the Beta pets in his collar, plain, ugly strips of leather.

  I blinked the tears away because I did not understand any of this.

  “It’s beautiful,” I said.

  Our eyes met in the glass, then, lashes lowering, he leaned to press a kiss against my temple. The sight was both tender and erotic, the way his hand flattened then tightened over my abdomen, and the way the negligee shifted against my skin. My cheeks flushed, and my lips, swollen from our earlier kiss, parted on a gasp. His lashes lifted, and I was trapped by that look…until the elevator door opened.

  His office was as I remembered it. When I last stood here, I had been living the life of a non-dynamic and working at a smart coffee house. My life had been a precarious balancing act. It was still precarious, and I still did not know what the future held. For a brief moment, I had allowed myself to imagine the freedom to escape. Maybe leave for another world where no one knew me, and I could live without fear.

  Two black-suited floor managers stood to either side of the door. Neither of them spared me a glance.

  I didn’t linger on them either. A black cushion had been placed on the floor beside the couch, and I knew instantly what it was for. I stopped, and so did Lucian, and I could feel his intense study.

  He waited, giving me time to come to terms with what it meant. What had I been thinking? That I might sit beside him like his equal? I wasn’t his equal, I was his pet, and I wore his collar around my throat. He had drugged me and confessed that he never meant to give me up.

  I allowed him to guide me over to the low seating arrangement where the cushion waited for me to kneel. Beyond the floor to ceiling windows, the nightclub was busy. Like Chimera, it never stopped. I had never been part of that world, but Lucian owned both it and me.

  “What happens to the discarded pets?”

  He didn’t answer for the longest time, but then the corners of his eyes crinkled, and he said, “They make their new masters very happy.”

  I was still reeling from that statement as he relaxed into the seat, and I stood there like a fool trying to come to terms with all of this. Expression expectant, he waited.

  I knelt.

  “Good girl,” he said, stroking his big hand over my hair before letting it rest against his thigh. The end of my leash lay over his muscular leg, and his hand sat on top.

  I felt—connected to him through that lead, the collar around my throat wasn’t tight, but it had a presence that I could not switch my mind off from.

  “We are bringing him through now,” a floor manager said.

  Lucian nodded, and soon after, the largest Alpha I had ever seen entered the office—tall, dark hair, eyes narrowed, and radiating danger.

  My lashes lowered, and I plastered myself against Lucian’s leg. “He’s harmless, Pet,” Lucian said, and I detected amusement in his tone. “It’s her first time in a collar,” he added.

  My entire body was stiff with tension, and I stared at the end of my lead, now wrapped in Lucian’s other hand so he could stroke his fingers through my hair.

  “That dickhead you have working for you is taking his fucking time,” Ethan said by way of greeting, the seat creaking as his body settled opposite to us.

  Lucian laughed. I had pressed so closely against his leg that I shook with it.

  After this fraught opening, they proceeded to discuss a man by the name of Erison Tsing. It soon became apparent that Ethan would like to kill him and that Lucian was helping him in this quest. I soon also ascertained that Ethan was the Controller of an Omega whom Erison was threatening. Her name was Lilly, and she was some sort of doctor. I softened toward him a little as I arrived at this understanding. I had heard Controllers took their protection seriously. It sounded romantic even. Had I been a gifted Omega, I would have been allocated a Controller who would make sure I was safe.

  A Beta arrived with some drinks and interrupted the conversation. I bristled and growled when she got near to Lucian, but she placed it on the table between the two couches at arm's length.

  Barely had they started talking again before the floor manager interrupted. “Ryker Sherwin is on his way up.”

  “I’m going to fucking kill him,” Ethan growled, and this time, I thought it might have been another genuine death threat.

  The door opened a moment later, and an Alpha entered the room. He wasn’t as tall as Lucian, but he was built, and so pretty, I did a double-take. His smile was all charm as he collapsed on the couch beside Ethan.

  “What the fuck are you doing here?” Ethan demanded. “Who the fuck is watching Lilly?”

  “I’ve locked her in,” the newcomer, whom I presumed to be Ryker said, although he was staring at me. He gestured in my direction. “What’s with the pet?”

  Even they knew I was a pet! Lucian growled.

  Ryker’s charming smile remained firmly in place as he held up both hands. “Fine, don’t tell me. I’m not fucking interested. I’ve got enough trouble in my life with a fucking high-maintenance doctor.”

  Was that the same doctor Ethan was worried about?

  “You’ve normally got two or three Betas crawling over you…I didn’t know you were into single digits…or pets.”

  I growled. Ryker chuckled. Lucian rested his big hand on the back of my neck.

  Ethan thumped Ryker’s arm. It wasn’t a playful thump. Ryker barely noticed and gestured at me. “Does she have a name?”

  “Pet,” Lucian said, his voice rougher than usual. My breath caught when I noticed the way he glared at Ryker. He glanced at me and stroked my hair before cupping my chin. “Would you like to get on my lap?”

  Nodding, I climbed onto his lap and rested my head against his chest, where I could watch and listen with surreptitious interest.

  “Ryker, what the fuck are you doing here?” Ethan asked again.

  “Oh, yes. Almost forgot, I was thrown in a loop by Lucian’s pussy-whipped transformation.” Ryker pointed in our direction, and Lucian’s body locked with tension under me. Ryker, for all his charming facade, liked pushing buttons. “Lilly was asking for your belt.”

  Belt? My eyes darted between the two of them. They couldn’t both be her Controllers, could they?

  Ethan scowled at Ryker. “I seriously doubt it.”

  “She’s been lying and disobedient…and very fucking defiant.”

  Ethan suddenly smirked. “I like her defiance—it gives me an excuse to spank her. Did you have any influence on her other two failings?”

  Yes, I thought that they might both be her Controllers!

  “I might have,” Ryker admitted. “She’ll pretty much do anything under the threat of your punishment with
a belt.”

  The word ‘anything’ hung ominously. What kind of monster would make such a threat? Ryker must have been coercing this poor Omega to do terrible things—Lucian started chuckling.

  “How long has this been going on?” Ethan asked. He had gone deathly still, and I braced for the fallout.

  Ryker shrugged in a shifty way. “I’m not sure how many days,” he finally said in a way that smacked of avoidance. I didn’t like the sound of whatever games he had been playing, so I was hoping Ethan might thump him again.

  “How about you tell me when it started,” Ethan said, not taking his eyes from Ryker.

  Ryker scratched his head—I had the feeling he had backed himself into a corner. “Ah…Tolis…When I picked her up…While I was in the vehicle, actually. I couldn’t help myself. Seriously, she folds with even a vague insinuation I might report her behavior to you. It’s way more fun than forcing her to do it some other way. I’m amazed she lasted this long before she called my bluff. Must be really scared of your belt.”

  One minute Ethan was sitting beside Ryker. The next, the couch was knocked over, and Ryker was on his back with Ethan on top of him with his hands around his throat.

  I thought I screamed. It all became a little blurry since Lucian moved so fast, and I found myself away from the fray with the wall of Lucian’s body in between. When I peeped around, the two Alphas were still on the floor. They scuffled, feet kicking against the floor. Ryker’s face was turning red such that I thought the other Alpha might be about to strangle him before my eyes.

  At Lucian’s indication, the two floor managers, along with a third man who had entered the room while I had been distracted, dragged Ethan off.

  “You’re not suitable,” Ethan growled straining against the hold of the three thick-necked Betas—I had a strong impression he could throw them off if he had a mind to. “I thought I could deal with your bullshit, but I don’t know if I can. If you were capable of feeling anything, you would walk the fuck away. This is all some fucked up game to you, isn’t it?”