Chapter 158 – The Tightest Leash
Eli
Ronan doesn’t speak when he locks the door.
He just watches me from across the room, eyes burning gold, arms loose at his sides like he hasn’t already decided what he’s going to do to me. Like he isn’t already halfway to doing it.
My skin prickles and I can feel the air shift.
“Clothes off. Kneel.”
It’s not the first time he’s said those words, but something’s different tonight. Something in the intensity of his gaze and the heat of his tone. In the way the firelight paints him in shades of command and restraint.
There’s no performance here. No audience. Just us, and what we are when there’s no one watching.
I undress slowly, not because I’m trying to tease him, well, not only because of that, but because I want to savor this, whatever it is. I want to taste it as it breaks over me.
The air bites at my skin as I bare it, and when I sink to my knees on the fur rug, the heat of the fire behind me is nothing compared to the way his eyes sear into me.
He doesn’t approach right away. Instead, he goes to the wooden chest near the bed. Opens it and takes his time rummaging through it.
When he turns around, he’s holding a thick black collar lined with sheepskin. The copper ring at the front is shaped into an infinity symbol.
My breath stutters, but I still manage to brat. “Bit dramatic, don’t you think?” I ask lightly. “I already let you fuck me whenever you want.”
He doesn’t dignify that with a response. Instead he walks behind me with his predatory grace, and then he’s kneeling too, the heat of his body sinking into my back.
“This isn’t about fucking,” he says, voice low. “It’s about ownership.”
The leather brushes my throat and my eyes flutter closed.
“This is for us,” he says. “Not for anyone else.”
His fingers wrap the collar around my neck and buckle it tight. He lingers there, palm pressed flat against the new weight at my throat.
“Now you know you’re mine,” he murmurs.
I exhale through my nose. “Should I crawl after you next? Or do you want to install a bell so you can hear me coming?”
He doesn’t take the bait. He just grabs me by the wrists and binds them together, pulling a length of rope from the chest and knotting it tight above my head.
Then he lays me down. Not gently. My back hits the rug and he looms over me, braced on his knees, staring like he’s trying to memorize the way I look bound and open.
“You kneel like a king,” he mutters. “Not a pet.”
I bare my teeth. “That’s because I am one.”
He laughs, dark and low, and then he’s on me. His mouth is vicious. Open, hungry, eager. He bites into the meat of my thigh hard enough to bruise and then soothes it with his tongue, his fingers already ghosting along my cock, not stroking, just reminding me he can.
I squirm. Moan. He’s barely touched me and I’m already aching for him.
“You want it,” he says.
“Yes.”
“You need it.”
“Yes.”
He growls like he’s pleased and then flips me over, rough and fast, pressing me down with a hand between my shoulder blades. I feel the head of his cock at my entrance, thick and hot, but he doesn’t move. He just holds me there, stretched and shaking.
“I want you to feel this for days,” he says gruffly.
He slams in with one punishing thrust and I cry out, spine bowing, the stretch almost too much. But gods, it’s perfect. He doesn’t pause to let me adjust. He wants me raw. Wants me wrecked. He fucks me like he means it.
Every thrust is a demand. He slams into me with brutal purpose, grinding his hips with just enough twist to drag cries out of me that I can’t swallow fast enough. My cock is pinned between me and the rug, leaking with every stroke, every scrape of the collar against my throat as he pushes me forward on each thrust.
“Say it,” he growls, bending low. “Say you’re mine.”
I snarl. “I’m yours.”
“Say it like you mean it.”
“I’m yours, Ronan!”
He grabs my hips and fucks me. Not just hard but deep, cock angling cruelly, perfectly, until I’m sobbing against the furs. My whole body feels like it’s shaking apart, nerve by nerve, stretched on a string between pain and worship.
He grips the collar as he slams into me and hauls me up onto my knees, still bound, still gagging on how full I am. His free hand wraps around my cock and strokes me hard, no rhythm, just brute possession.
The bond screams.
He’s in my head, in my lungs, in the bruise blooming behind my ribs where his name lives. His mouth is at my ear, teeth grazing the shell.
“Come for me.”
I do. I fucking do, because Ronan is my master, my mate, my equal, my everything.
I come with a hoarse, broken noise, cock spilling in thick, hot pulses across the furs as he slams in once more and empties himself inside me with a low growl that rattles through my bones.
But he doesn’t stop. He slides out and pushes me flat on my back again, spreading me open like a book he intends to re-read. I’m gasping, oversensitive, but he leans down and licks the slick from my hole, tongue dragging lazy, divine circles.
“Ronan…” I whimper, but there’s no strength behind it. No real protest.
He just hums and lifts my legs higher, mouth working lower again, then sucking a bruise into the inside of my thigh while his fingers push back in, two at once, curling deep. My body seizes, twitching as he rubs against my prostate.
I’m still leaking. Still clenching around nothing, greedy and ruined.
“You don’t get to pretend this isn’t what you crave,” he says into my skin. “You wear the collar, you take what comes with it.”
And what comes is him, again, cock dragging against swollen nerves as he enters slower this time, but just as deep. I claw at the rug, arms bound, mouth slack.
I’m being fucked back to life and broken all over again. And when I glance up, his eyes are locked on mine. He wants to see it happen.
Wants to watch the moment I give up any illusion that I’m not his completely.
“There you are,” he whispers. “My beautiful, impossible Omega.”
That’s what does it.
The second orgasm hits harder than the first, ripped out of me like a sob. I tremble beneath him, clenching and gasping as the world whites out.
He spills inside me again with a hiss, forehead pressed to mine, and this time he kisses me after. Sweet, wrecked, shaking.
He unties my wrists and gathers me up like I weigh nothing. Then he pulls me into his lap and holds me there, close and quiet. He kisses the curve of my shoulder. The sweat-damp nape of my neck. His voice is hoarse when he says, “I love you.”
I make a face. “You’re so fucking sappy.”
He chuckles. “You say that like you’re not wearing the damn thing like a crown.”
I smirk and tilt my head, fingering the ring at my throat.
I don’t take it off. Not when we go to sleep. Not the next morning when I get dressed. I wear it like armor. And no one gets to touch it but him.