Chapter 21

Squatch.

We spent the night on the lowest level of the Chattanooga Rolling Thunder compound, in a room designed to hold the officers during lockdown. It’s impenetrable from even the hallway, and anyone coming at us would have to get through three levels of my brothers before they reached the hallway.

It’s also soundproof, and I was certain my kitten needed me to calm her down the old-fashioned way.

I locked and barred the door, sat on the edge of a bed, and told her, “Clothes off and on your knees, Kitten. We need to talk.”

She stripped and draped her clothing over a desk chair without hesitating, and my cock swelled at her casual undressing. She took her clothes off on stage for a living, but this wasn’t a show. This was practical. I got to see what the audience would never see.

My heart wanted to reach out to her, and my fingers itched to touch her, but I sat with my hands on my thighs. Waiting.

She went to her knees gracefully, and quickly found her balance and poise. Breasts poking out. Back arched. Hands holding her elbows behind her back. Ass resting on her heels.

“I won’t punish you for leaving me. I understand your fear. I’m having a hard time with the fact you went to someone else to protect you, but I don’t think I can punish you for it.” I took a breath. “I need you to promise me you’ll come to me so we can work out a solution together, in the future. This doesn’t mean you can’t run to Brooke or your king or even Kirsten in an emergency, but it does mean you pull me in as soon as possible.”

She looked at my feet. “You want us to be a team. Partners. Together. I want that too, but I didn’t think it was possible. I’m sorry I scared you. I wouldn’t blame you for punishing me. I hurt you.”

“Correct on both counts. You scared me and you hurt me. I won’t decree a punishment, but if you want to volunteer for one, I think it will clear the air for us.”

“You once told me you wouldn’t punish me for the things that might break us up. That we had to talk about that stuff.”

Not exactly, but close enough. “We’re talking about it.”

“And if I think I deserve to be punished, you’ll... what? I mean, what if what I suggest isn’t enough? Will that just cause more resentment on your part? What if I think I deserve more than you’d have ever given me? Do you refuse to do that much, or do you do it anyway?”

“Punishment in this case should serve a couple of functions. It should give you a clear conscience — a way to wipe the slate clean. It should also give us both a sense of fairness. Closure. And finally, it should bring us closer together when it’s over. I think discussing what the punishment will or won’t be is kind of a negotiation.”

“If you could decree it, what would you want to do to me?”

I sat back and rubbed my jaw. I thought of a dozen possibilities but none felt right.

“Nothing feels right, Kitten. If it’s up to me, there won’t be a punishment.”

She was silent, and I let her work through it. I let my wolf take over enough so I’d sit still. Any fidgeting on my part might pull her out of her thoughts.

After at least four or five minutes, she looked up, her eyes glassy. “I think I need you to belt me, Sir. I hurt you. It doesn’t feel as if I should get away with it.”

“How many licks?”

“I don’t know. Fifteen minutes? Until I’m crying? Until you think you’ve hurt me as much as I hurt you?”

At fifteen minutes, a slow pace of three strikes per minutes would be forty-five strikes. If I sped it up and tore into her, it could easily be well over one hundred and twenty strikes.

“Is it your intention for me to beat you until you have to change to heal?”

“Yes, Sir.”

“Do you have whatever is needed to dye your hair afterward?”

“I do, Sir.”

I shook my head. “It’d been my intention to get rough with you tonight, but it would’ve just been sex.”

She lowered her gaze to my feet. I didn’t fuss.

“What do you feed your tiger?” She was offering to let me see her tiger after I punished her. I’d take that over anything else I’d planned.

“Usually a couple of chickens, sometimes fifteen or twenty pounds of beef or venison. A fat pig every once in a while. She’s also a fan of rabbit meat.”

I found Duke’s contact info on my phone and called him. “I’m going to need to feed a tiger. Fifteen to twenty pounds. What do you have thawed out that I can buy?”

“Easiest would be fresh hamburger meat from the restaurant. If we have an hour, we can defrost venison or bison.”

“Fresh hamburger or thawed venison?” I asked Kitty.

“My tiger will always prefer fresh to thawed, Sir.”

* * * *

Kitty Squatch says he doesn’t expect me to stay in place for punishment, but that means I have to be restrained. He went somewhere and returned with rope and zip-ties, and bound my wrists to the metal headboard of a bed, and my ankles to the metal footboard. I assumed these beds were designed to hold shapeshifters, so I didn’t bother checking to see how strong the metal was. I could also tell by the thickness that these were the heavy-duty zip-ties. I could possibly pull hard enough to break one, but when he put a second one on the first wrist, I knew I wasn’t going anywhere.

A triangle shaped hard cushion went under my hips so my butt stuck in the air.

It’s so hard to lie still and let someone restrain you, knowing they’re going to hurt you. I tried to blank my mind, so I didn’t have to think of what was coming. My body knew, though. I was feeling equal parts arousal and fear — mostly fear — but I knew we had to do this.

I’d hurt Squatch. I’d meant to leave him. I hadn’t trusted him to help me find a solution. I hadn’t even given him a chance.

He waited until I was secure to tell me, “I won’t go over fifteen minutes. I don’t know if it will take two minutes, five minutes, ten, or the entire fifteen. I assume you’ll be crying, but I’m not making promises about that.” He leaned in and kissed my cheek, my lips, the tip of my nose. “I love you, Kitten.”

“I love you, too.”

He turned to his luggage and walked to me with one of the huge butt plugs. The stem of this one was as big around as my wrist. The bulb on the inside was as big as my fist. I heard myself whimper, but I didn’t ask him not to.

I’d figured out, at some point, that butt plugs equated to ownership with him. I almost always wore one to the store, and to the clubhouse, and I always got the energy off of him that my wearing a plug he’d stuffed into my ass was somehow proof that I was his. Proof to both of us. Not just him.

Perhaps it was how it made me feel, and I was imprinting that feeling onto him, but I didn’t think so.

He wasn’t gentle this time, putting it in. It stretched and burned and hurt more than I could handle. I screamed. I begged for a respite, for more lube, but he kept pushing. It took muscle for him to push it into me, to force my bottom hole wide enough for it to go in, but it finally sank into me, stretching me a little less, once it was in.

But still, I screamed and begged. “It hurts! It’s too much!”

Instead of helping me work through the pain, he stepped back and gave me the first strike with the belt.

And then the second.

The third.

The first three strikes hit one after another, and I was frantic. My heart raced and I gasped for air. Three lines of fire across cold skin. Pain splintered in my mind. My bottom hole spasmed around the horrible plug, and there was nothing I could do to relieve the fire from the belt. I fought my bonds. He’d used four zip-ties per limb, when two would have been enough. The harsh, unforgiving plastic rubbed and bit into my wrists and ankles. Rope wound around the bed and held me down at the small of my back and over the backs of my knees. I wasn’t going anywhere, and I couldn’t move my bottom more than a couple of inches, but damn, I tried.

The belt came again. Four strikes this time, one after another without pause, and they slammed into me like four bolts of lightning. My screams filled the room and came back to me.

I was out of my mind from the pain and heat, screaming and thrashing, but he didn’t help me with it. No hand to my back. No voice in my ear. I was on my own to deal with it, but I didn’t beg for relief.

The belt landed five times all at once the next time. The punishing leather no longer crashed on cold skin, but now it landed on already abused fleshed. Heat piling on top of heat. My wrists were red under the cruel plastic. My breathing was ragged. My heart raced.

This time, he didn’t give me long at all before he added six strikes without pause — faster than before, and harder. Heated coal lashing supersensitive, fiery nerve endings.

At first, I could only scream like a wounded animal, but eventually, I heard myself begging. Not for him to stop. No. I didn’t want him to stop until I’d had enough, but I needed his voice. His touch.

“Help me, Sir! Please! It’s too much.”

The warmth of his hand touched between my shoulders. Rested there. I sucked air into my lungs. A deep breath between sobs. His mouth came close to my ear. “Of course it’s too much, Kitten. It has to be. I’m right here, going through it with you. This is for both of us, yes? Do you want me to stop before it’s finished?”

I shook my head. “No, Sir! I just need your touch. Please!”

“Then you’ll have it.”

And I did. He’d pull his hand away while he gave me each sequence, but then he was right back beside me, the heat of his hand on my back. I needed the connection. I can’t explain why.

When he made it to ten strikes at once, somehow, I thought that would finish it. It took me longer to deal with the pain afterward, but I was more relaxed because I thought we were finished.

When he stepped away, I assumed it was to get scissors to cut me loose, but then I heard the belt flying through the air a split second before my bottom exploded in pain again. Eleven times this round, and my screams once again echoed around the room. My throat hurt.

When I could form words, I screamed, “Eugene! Please! I can’t!”