by Tanya Chris
“JT!” he yelled over his shoulder.
Another omega popped out from behind a curtain. This one was Eastern Pack, not as obviously pretty but crackling with a sexual energy that made me immediately certain this was the omega Tarek and Shade had doubled up on.
“Ooh, a customer. Hello, stranger.” He sauntered over to me with none of the instinctive fear the first one had shown and stuck out his hand in a very human gesture. “I’m JT. That’s Benjy. And this is our library-slash-coffee shop.”
“Donovan.” I shook hands with him, then gestured to the espresso machine. “Do you know how to run that thing?”
“I wish I did, but Benjy will figure it out. He’s got an instruction manual. And while you wait, you can look at the books.” JT swept his hand toward the bookcases stretching down both sides of the room. “What kind of books are you interested in?”
Last night I’d been determined that no one was going to keep me from learning how to cook, but today I was talking to a bouncy omega who might judge me. If courage was the defining trait of alphas, I needed to exercise some of it right now. I opened my mouth, reached deep down where my alpha voice was kept, and squeaked out cook in an unintelligible cackle.
I cleared my throat and tried again. “I want to learn how to cook.”
“All the food stuff is over there.” Benjy pointed to a bookcase near the back of the room. “I’ll help Alpha Donovan find a book,” he told JT. “You can make his express thingy.”
So that was all the reaction I was going to get, apparently. None.
“I’m learning to cook too,” Benjy told me as he came out from behind the counter, “so I can show you the best books to start with. And anyway, that coffee machine was JT’s idea. Why should I have to figure it out?”
“Because you look so cute in an apron,” JT answered, but he went behind the bar, leaving me and Benjy to poke through two shelves of food-related books together. After I confessed to last night’s debacle, Benjy picked out a book that looked like it’d been written for children, which I probably deserved. To that, he added one called Cooking with Coco that had a picture on the cover of a Western Pack beta with a spatula in one hand and a brace of rabbits in the other.
“This one’s especially for wolves. Nice, simple, meat-based recipes you can make with the kind of ingredients you’ll find in our marketplace. So if you want to borrow these, how it works is you keep them for as long as you need them and then bring them back.”
“That’s it?”
“Everything else we tried got too complicated, so now we just go with the honor system. If you’re not using the books, return them. If you’re using them, use them.”
“We have to be more strict with the porn,” JT said over a whoosh of steam I considered hopeful. “We don’t have enough of it for everyone to keep for as long as they’re using it, if you get what I mean.”
“Um.” I tried to pretend I didn’t get what he meant, but now that he’d said the word porn, my eye was drawn to the next bookshelf over where the spines were decorated with a mixture of wolves howling at the moon and near-naked humans. “You carry porn?”
“JT does,” Benjy said with a roll of his eyes. “He’s a walking porn bank.”
“I’m doing North Leland a service.” JT appeared at my side with a large mug, across the bottom of which was spread maybe a quarter inch of brown liquid. “Your espresso.”
The cup was wrong, but the aroma was right. I took a tentative sip then broke out in a smile. Maybe I could live in North Leland after all.
“The porn’s right over there,” JT mock-whispered before dragging Benjy behind the counter to show him what he’d done to the machine. I listened to the two of them canoodle and quarrel as I sipped my espresso and browsed around, pretending to be shopping for anything other than porn. But my circling steps kept bringing me closer to the bookshelf in question until eventually I stopped in front of it.
I expected exactly what my gaze first landed on—a lurid cover showing a frail person cowering in front of a bulkier one. Neither struck me as genuinely a shifter, but I could tell what the illustrator had been aiming for, and even if I couldn’t, the title told me. Omega’s Surrender. Of course. I’d seen a hundred variations of this cover over the course of my lifetime.
“Is that the kind of thing you go for?” JT asked, having suddenly appeared at my elbow.
“What else would I go for?” I put the book back in its spot, embarrassed at being caught with it in my hand even though probably every alpha in town had a library full of this stuff.
“We have it all,” he said, eyeing me as if he could tell my answer had been more defensive than genuine. “The whole gamut.”
“What, uh, what would the whole gamut be?”
“Ooh, I’m glad you asked.” He was wearing a sweater with sleeves that reached to his fingertips, as if he’d borrowed it from the alpha he apparently didn’t have, but he pushed the sleeves up to his elbows now. “See, I’ve got it organized by pairing. Where you started—that’s male alpha with female omega. Very popular. But here’s female alpha with male omega. Probably not your thing,” he said after considering me for a moment. “I’m guessing you go for men.”
I shrugged a half-hearted yes. My preference for men wasn’t hard to admit.
“Yeah, I saw how you were looking at my Benjy Boo. So, hmm. Male alpha with male omega? No, apparently not. Omega-omega? No, my jam, not yours.” He snapped his fingers. “Alpha-alpha, am I right?”
“What, um, I mean, how…?”
He laughed. “Your neck looks like someone’s been chewing on it. Someone with big bad alpha teeth all the better to eat you with.”
I slapped my hand against my neck. The wounds Tarek had left last night were mostly healed, but I could feel the remnants of the deeper punctures.
“And you’ve got bruises around your wrists, like maybe somebody enjoys being pinned down and ridden hard.”
I took a quick glance around the room. It was just me and him and Benjy, and Benjy seemed too absorbed in figuring out the coffee machine to pay attention.
“Don’t be shy,” JT said. “Think of me like a doctor. I can’t help you if you’re not honest with me. Plus, confidentiality is completely assured. I would never give away a patron’s taste in porn, but I will just mention that if alpha-alpha is your thing and if you’re wanting something on the rougher end of that genre, then you might direct your attention to that shelf right there.” He pointed to the highest shelf, which he would need a boost to reach but which was right at eye level for me. On the right side of it, a cluster of books and DVDs promised things like Alpha’s Destruction and The Taming of the Alpha.
“By the way,” he said before he walked away. “I didn’t stock those because I had the foresight to know you’d turn up one day. You’re not as alone as you think.”
I already knew about Tarek and Shade and Lars, but JT’s comment made me wonder how many more of us there could be. Of us. I’d never realized I was part of an us.
Tarek didn’t have a DVD player as far as I’d noticed, which was a shame because wow, some of those cases had my eyes popping. Chains and ropes, whips and paddles, nipple clamps and giant inflatable dildoes. And all those instruments of destruction were being applied to big, burly wolves bristling with muscles, their expressions registering aggression or pain or sometimes submission. Some of the models were even real shifters. Alpha wolves. Just like me.
“I can take some of this?” Days were long, and cooking could only fill so much of them.
“Knock yourself out,” JT answered. “Not literally though. Always remember that self-asphyxiation is dangerous, even for wolves.”
I had no idea whether I was into asphyxiation or not, but if I was, I probably didn’t have to do it to myself. Tarek had pushed me around—given me orders and smashed my face into the mattress, bit and clawed me to some powerful orgasms—but maybe I could ask for even more of what I wanted.
I pulled a few magazines from
the shelf and added them to the pile of cookbooks Benjy had assembled for me. I would leave the magazines out where Tarek could see them. And then… and then we’d see.
Chapter 15
Tonight’s dish was simpler but much better. Seared squirrel a la nothing. Salt, pepper, and squirrel—cooked just enough for a human palate, with a side of corn on the cob which even I couldn’t fuck up. Tarek grinned his way through the meal, full of praise that did a number on me. It was just squirrel.
I’d left one of those alpha porn magazines on the coffee table, one on the dresser in the bedroom, and one very obviously on the table where we were eating, just waiting for Tarek to pick it up and browse through it. But he only had eyes for me. As nervous as the idea of him learning more about my sexual tastes made me, the way he focused on me so intently made me even more nervous. People in North Leland had proven to be dangerously good at reading me.
I intentionally nudged the magazine with my wrist as I reached for the bottle of wine. It unfurled, rolling open to reveal a naked alpha chained to a brick wall by the wrists and ankles looking back over his shoulder with an expression that said do me hard, Daddy.
“Ooh, the latest episode of Big Boys Cry is out.” Tarek flicked open the cover and started paging through it. “Did you get this at the market?”
“The library.”
“Smart. Once you’ve fapped to a picture a few times, it loses its appeal. Just gotta, uh, keep the pages clean for the next customer, I guess.” He gave me a wink and flipped the cover shut, returning his attention to me and the meal I’d made.
“You’ve seen that magazine before?”
“Sure. Haven’t you?”
I shook my head. Magazines like that weren’t for sale in Southern Pack territory, at least not in the marketplace. “Alphas aren’t like that back home.”
“Yes they are. They’re just quieter about it. But wolves weren’t meant to be quiet.” He threw his head back and let out a howl that had me shivering. “If I’m going to fuck you, Donovan, I’m going to own up to it. I’m going to fucking brag about it.”
Ugh. I just didn’t know sometimes. I absolutely did not want people to know that about me, and also I did. It was sort of humiliating, sort of erotic, and sort of exactly what he’d said. Alphas weren’t meant to skulk around worrying about what people thought of them. Fuck their opinions.
“So there’s some rough stuff in here,” Tarek said with a tap on the cover of the magazine he’d closed.
“I like it.” The whole point in bringing home the magazines was to feel him out as to how far he was willing to go. Humans weren’t very strong, but they had implements to increase their impact. Wolf strength plus implements? Grr, yes.
“Then we should do it,” he said.
“You’d like to?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t tried. But I like the pictures, and I like making you come, especially when you come on my knot. I like seeing you all hard and desperate, and I like listening to you howl and moan. I’m guessing I’d like doing anything to you that would make those things happen, but let’s find out.”
“You don’t have to,” I said, embarrassed by the realization that my tastes ran darker than his. Up to this point, it’d been him leading me, as if everything we did he already knew how to do and had done before. Now we were talking about me leading him—dragging him further away from the norm to sate my own twisted tastes. It made me freshly aware of how abnormal I was.
“Stop that,” he ordered, throwing enough alpha voice into the command that I melted a little. Alpha voice shouldn’t have any effect on me, but his did. My body recognized his as sovereign.
“You found the courage to tell me what you wanted, albeit in a roundabout way. Don’t back down now. I’m pretty sure we’re going to be compatible, but we’ll go slowly and figure things out as they come up. So, just to clarify…”
Oh, Great Moon, he was going to clarify—make me say things out loud right there at the kitchen table. He grinned, knowing he had me squirming, and flipped the magazine open again.
“This,” he said, pointing to an advertisement for a contraption meant to be closed around a man’s cock to hold it prisoner. “Do you want me to put you in one of those?”
“Definitely not.” I liked my cock just fine.
“All right. Maybe this then.” Now he was pointing to a photo of an alpha whose balls had been dragged halfway down his thighs. The orbs peeping out beneath the wraps of rope pulling them downward were hard and red and much too far away from his body.
“Um.”
“So that’s a yes. I don’t have any rope on hand, but I can work something out manually.” He flexed a hand at me, showing off the tips of his claws and the sinewy strength of his forearm. The visual did its job. As I imagined him yanking, tugging, piercing, dragging my balls, my cock hardened.
Tarek took an appreciative sniff that had nothing to do with the remains of the squirrel. “A definite yes,” he said with a grin. “Ooh, I’m going to like that. Now, what do we have over here.” What we had over there was a back covered in slashes and the whip that’d done it. “Your skin looks beautiful in red,” he said thoughtfully as he turned the page. “Almost a shame it heals so quickly.”
I brought a hand to my neck, prodding at the few remaining puncture marks there, the ones that branded me his, for better or worse. “But you can always do it again,” I pointed out.
“I like the way you think.” He flipped the magazine shut. “Are we done eating? What needs to be put away?”
I didn’t care about the fucking leftovers, but he made me clean the entire kitchen, ordering me around like chores were foreplay. He kicked back in his chair while I worked, watching me as he stroked himself through the shorty shorts he hadn’t bothered to take off when he got home, making himself into an intentional temptation and an unspoken reward. His cock was an obscene bulge in the narrow strip of cloth covering it, and I wanted it.
“It’s good enough.” I tossed down the sponge I’d been using. Tarek’s house was no showplace.
“Someone’s being a brat,” he said like he appreciated it. “Come here.”
I came as commanded. He beckoned me closer and closer until I was standing between his parted legs.
“I think you know where you should be.” He waited while I struggled, torn between wanting to suck his cock and wanting him to make me. “All right. Remember you asked for this.” With that, he wrapped his hand around my balls and yanked them toward him.
Fuck, I really had asked for this—both by being rebellious and by showing him the magazine. My hips shot forward to lessen the pressure as pain raced through my body like a shot of pure adrenalin. My hands flexed at my sides, claws popping.
“On your knees,” he commanded, and I was ready to obey now, but as I lowered myself to the floor, my balls stayed right where he had them, every inch I lowered myself adding to the pain until my vision started to white out. He released his grip and my knees crashed hard to the floor. His cock was in my mouth so fast I must have inhaled it with the air I gulped, and I sucked him like his pleasure was the remedy to the throb in my own cock—like I could come by making him come.
He groaned, hands grappling through my hair. He was close, I could feel it. And then his claws sank into the back of my neck as he used them to pull me off his cock. He yanked me to my feet that way—nearly as painful as being jerked around by the balls—and I went where he steered me, crashing with him across the room and through the doorway into his bedroom.
It’d been closed up all day, so it was warm and fragrant, our combined scents infusing the bedding and the air. Home, my nose said. Tarek and North Leland, this undecorated bedroom—they were home. Tarek’s claws in my neck, his cock jammed up against mine, his tongue hot between my lips, his hair wild around us—all home.
He shoved me onto the bed, then pounced on top of me. He must’ve been holding back before, because he wasn’t holding back now. He scored me with his claws and fangs—n
ot light nips or gentle scratches but deep, possessive marks all over my body. We writhed together, rolling across the mattress as I alternately tried to escape his onslaught and reveled in it.
“Fight me,” he urged. “Show me what you’ve got.”
So I did. I tried to fling him off me but couldn’t. Then I tried to crawl out from under him and couldn’t do that either. His hips rode me, sapping my rebellion, so that I fought both him and myself, but I didn’t give in. I didn’t have to. Tarek wasn’t a frail human I had to pretend to submit to. If I damaged him, he’d heal. And I could fight him with everything I had and still lose.
I snapped my jaws at his chin and caught a piece of it, sinking my teeth deeper as I growled through them, the taste of his blood flooding my mouth. That was when he went for my balls again. I yowled, releasing his chin to give my voice full volume, and he flipped me face-down as if I were as light as one of the falling leaves I’d danced under yesterday. He dropped on top of me, using his weight to keep me pinned in place.
“Do you want to fight, or do you want prep?”
“Fight,” I answered without hesitation, but the click of a cap being shut told me he’d greased his cock at least.
“Then give it your best shot,” he said as he tossed the lube back on the floor.
I pressed into a push-up, raising him with me. He laughed, wrapping both arms around my belly and sinking his claws in deeper. I could shake and toss all I wanted, but I couldn’t get free. One of his hands inched up to latch on a nipple. The harder I thrashed, the tighter he pinched. I knew what his next move would be, so I bucked—kicking, shaking, anything to prevent him from doing exactly what he managed to do anyway: get his free hand on my balls.
Oh, I was going to regret bringing that magazine home. Yeah, I’d enjoyed a little ball torture with human partners before. Yeah, I’d figured it would be more intense with an actual shifter. Yeah, Tarek had teased me out in the kitchen earlier. But I was in no way prepared for the strength of the grasp he had on me now.