Chapter 142 – The Edge of Ruin
Ronan
He wakes like a storm breaking inside a body. Quiet moans at first, then shivers, then the soft, insistent rub of his cock against my thigh.
“Alpha,” Eli whispers, wrecked already.
I don’t open my eyes yet. Allowing myself to feel him. Heat slicking my skin, breath stuttering against my throat, hips working in small, desperate arcs that drag his head along the side of my chest. The scent of him is summer gone feral. Salt, hunger, and the stubborn sweetness that ruins my discipline.
He nuzzles under my jaw, whimpering like a wolf pup who learned too late that the fire bites back. “Please.”
“You’re not ready to behave,” I murmur, still not looking. “You’re just ready to beg.”
He makes a strangled noise and presses harder, rutting shamelessly. His cock leaves a smear on my thigh and the bond lights up, crackling. I could roll and put him on his back, take him in one rough push, end the ache that’s been coiling him for days. I don’t. I hold still and make him feel the ugly geometry of our bargain.
“Look at me.” My fingers tighten in his hair. He lifts his face, eyes stormy, lips red from being bitten. The thin scar at his throat is almost gone. I’ve kissed that line until it stopped screaming in my nightmares.
“Why are you suffering, pretty thing?”
His lashes flutter. “Because you’re cruel,” he says, petulant, near tears. “Because you won’t let me-”
“Try again.” I drag his mouth up until our noses brush. “Why are you suffering?”
He swallows, throat working, and the sting of his pride is delicious. “Because I won’t stop poking the beast,” he whispers. “Because I want the beast to bite.”
“The truth, finally.” I kiss him once, mean and soft, all reprimand and very little sugar. “You wanted consequences. You got them.”
He rubs again. He can’t not. Hunger makes everything else evaporate. His hips move in helpless little circles and his breath breaks on a sob he tries to swallow. My cock is already hard. It’s been hard for days.
Denying him doesn’t mean denying myself, but I miss being inside him.
“Hands behind your back,” I say.
He obeys so fast the sheets tangle. I slide down his body, sit up against the headboard, and make a lap of my thighs. He straddles one leg and the gasp he makes almost ends this. The hair on my arms prickles with the rawness of it. He is so close to the cliff he could fall off by thinking the wrong verb.
I fix him there with a palm on his waist. “You know the rules.”
“Don’t come.” He nods, pupils blown. “Don’t… don’t move unless you tell me to.”
“And?” I tip his chin. Make him say it. Make him choke on it.
“Don’t brat,” he whispers, shame and glee mixing into a flavor I could drink for breakfast. “Don’t push for more.”
“Good boy.” The praise lands like a drug. His eyes shutter and open, dazed. I feel the bond bow with it, the way that one phrase reorganizes the shape of his bones.
I give him the smallest motion. A nudge with my thigh. He shudders. His cock drags along muscle and I feel the throb of him against my skin. He’s trying to be quiet. He hates being loud when it’s this out of his control. Hates it because he knows it turns me into something with teeth.
“Alpha,” he pleads, and my cock jerks because I’m a simple man and that word is a prayer when it’s in his mouth.
I hook an arm around his chest and pull him back until his spine rests to my front, his ass settling over my thigh. He rubs without orders, then freezes, horrified at himself.
“Do it,” I say, mouth at his ear. “Show me how desperate you are.”
He moves. Careful at first, controlled the way I trained him, then sloppy because he can’t keep the lines neat anymore. He’s drooling without knowing it, head tipped back to my shoulder, throat offered as if I’m going to take it. His slick smears my skin, hot and indecent, like wet lace tearing.
“Listen to yourself,” I growl. “That’s the noise you make for me. No one else gets to hear it. Not the prince. Not the elders. Only me.”
“Yours,” he gasps, and the word breaks. He tries to push his cock tighter into my leg, chasing the exact seam he likes. I let him find it and then move my thigh one inch left.
He sobs.
“Learn,” I say implacably. “Obedience isn’t a collar. It’s this. It’s staying where I put you even when it hurts.”
He claws at the sheet he trapped under his knees, fingers whitening. “Please,” he says again uselessly.. It’s gorgeous.
“You’re strung up because you wanted to be,” I remind him. “Because you kept baiting me in rooms full of wolves. Because you made jokes about a prince allowing you to finish.” My hand tightens in his hair. “Because you like it when the whole hall can smell you suffering.”
He whimpers. His hips stutter. He will argue later, as soon as his brain comes back from the cliff edge. He’ll say he hates humiliation. That I’m being cruel without reason.
“Alpha, I-” His voice cracks. “I need-”
“What do you need?”
“You.”
I deny him. “Wrong answer.” I hook two fingers under his jaw. “You need to be patient. To be sweet. To remember who decides how much you get.”
He tries to be sweet and the effort nearly kills me. “Please… sir.”
Better. The bond purrs like a cat in sunlight. I reward him with permission to move again and he rides my thigh in a helpless little saw until he’s keening under his breath. He’s going to cry. He doesn’t want to. He’ll pretend later he didn’t.
“I can’t,” he sobs.
“You can.” I wrap my other hand around his throat. “You’ll do exactly what I say.”
He falls apart without coming. It’s a skill set only he possesses. An erotic collapse that leaves him shaking and pliant while his cock stays aching and red. It turns something old in me into incense smoke.
“On your stomach,” I say, and flip him. He sprawls across my lap like a felled tree, breath ragged, ass rising into my palm instinctively. I palm him once and he moans like I reached inside him.
“Ronan,” he whispers, his voice small. “Please. Please, I’ll be good. I’ll stop pushing you. I won’t flirt-”
“You’ll brat again as soon as I let you come,” I say, amused despite the ache, “Because it’s who you are.” I push him forward until his chest hits the mattress and drag his hips higher. “But you’ll remember sunrise. You’ll remember what happens when you push your Alpha past the edge.”
“Will you… will you fuck me?” A tremor runs the length of him. He’s close to tears, and I’m so far gone for him that I have to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from giving him everything.
“No.” I spit into my palm, fist my cock, and settle along the seam of his ass, the place he wants me most. “You don’t get that. You get my weight. My mess.” I bend over him, caging him with my body, and the growl that finds my mouth is possession turned into sound. “You get to feel owned.”
He’s panting. “Yes.”
I slide my fingers into his mouth. He opens for me eagerly. “Bite and I stop. Suck and I keep going.”
He sucks. He sucks like he did the first night I made him, the same delirious devotion that says worship and filth can share a throat. His spit coats my knuckles, his tongue works along the sides, and I rut against the crease of him while he drools around my hand.
“Never mention Kieran touching you again,” I tell him, voice a blade. He moans around my fingers. I thrust my cock harder along him, grind at the base where he’s softest. “You do, and I’ll keep you like this for a week. Two. I will take you on your knees every night and leave you empty every time.”
He tries to nod with my hand in his mouth and nearly chokes himself. It’s beautiful. I push his face deeper into the mattress so his world is only my fingers, his ruined breath, the wet press of my cock.
He’s sobbing by the time I let myself break. I press him down, pinning his wrists to the bed, and rut in short, vicious snaps that turn my restraint into sparks. “Mine,” I say into his hair. “Say it.”
He tries; it’s garbled around my hand. It doesn’t matter. The bond sings it for him. Mine. Mine. Mine.
I come with my teeth against the hinge of his jaw and a noise I haven’t let out since the first time I took him. Raw, grateful, mosty feral.
I pull my fingers from his mouth and wipe them down his cheek possessively. He shudders. His cock kicks against the mattress once, twice, furious, pleading. I put a palm over his hip and hold him still while his breath rips at the seams.
“Please,” he whispers. Not bratty. Not cutting. The smallest voice he owns. “Ronan. Please, please.”
It almost undoes me. The wolf in me carves its claws along my ribs, howling for the mercy of finishing him, of sliding inside the place that makes both of us quiet. I could turn him, push into his ready, slicked-up hole and fill him the way he wants me to. The image sears my skull.
I close my eyes until the urge passes, and when I open them I am the law again.
“No,” I say gently.
He makes a broken sound. “Sadist.”
“Devoted,” I correct. I pull him up by the scruff of his neck and lay him on his side, curling in behind him, my chest to his back, my spent cock settling in the warm mess on his skin. I wrap an arm around his waist and pin his wrists low, a soft binding that feels like iron.
He mutters furious things into the pillow that would read like poetry if I write them down later. I press a kiss to his temple. He tries not to lean into me and fails abysmally. My hand strokes down his sternum once, carefully, and stops well shy of his cock.
“Breathe,” I tell him. “That’s the only thing you’re allowed right now.”
He obeys. It takes a minute. Then another. The tremors smooth. The hunger doesn’t. I want every wolf in the hall to smell how much he belongs to me. I want every pretty heir to choke on the proof.
“I hate you,” he lies, sounding foggy.
I tuck my mouth into the notch where his shoulder meets his neck and breathe him in until my wolf unclenches his teeth. “You think I’m not bleeding every time I leave you like this?”
He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t have to. His fingers uncurl and thread with mine, the smallest white flag.
“Learn,” I say into his skin, softer than the first time. “Learn not to piss off your Alpha.”
He snorts a tiny laugh, “No promises.”
“Then I’ll make you one.” I let my teeth scrape his shoulder, a hint, a promise. “Keep playing with him. Keep daring me in public. I will take my pound of flesh back in private.”
He shivers, which is assent, in our language.
I could fetch a cloth. I don’t. I like him wearing me when he walks into the hall.
Soon, I promise us both in the confines of my mind, hoping like hell it’s true.