Wolves of Black Veil

Chapter 4: The Alpha’s Domain

Morning in Black Veil didn’t come with the sunrise. It came with a slow, painful bleeding of color. Thick, gray fog curled through the pines, and it wet Vera’s hair with a chill so penetrating it made her bones ache. The scent of damp soil, metallic blood, and something ancient and primeval merged into something dead and rotten. Standing on her balcony, a wrought iron cage of the night behind her, Vera felt the hum of her collar deep in her flesh. Neutral was the vibration. Not pain, not pleasure, but both. The threat of both.

The door behind her hissed open. No warning, no knock, no polite inquiry. Rael. She did not turn. “Taking me on a tour of the kingdom, are we?” she said, her voice brittle as nails scraping slate. “A pair of heads before breakfast?”

He stepped toward her, closing the distance between them with predatory intention. The heat of his body was a literal wave, crashing over her, as it always did. Threat, yes. Promise. No boundaries anymore between threat and promise. “If I wanted to scare you,” he murmured into her ear, his voice a gruff, deep rumble, “you’d already be on your knees.”

Vera turned on her heel to face him, eyes blazing daggers. “You want me on my knees.”

His gaze was predatory and measured, drinking her up as it trailed from her lips down her throat to her chest, down, lower still, to the exposed skin of her thighs, bare beneath the shortness of the dress he had provided her that morning. His dress. His look at her was nothing if not pure, feral, animal. “Someday,” he said, and she felt the vileness of the promise, curling around her like a strike from a venomous snake.

This, of course, was his idea. Ride through the kingdom side by side, her mere presence at his side, her wearing the leash and collar. The Black Veil territory spread out below them, green and silver and gunmetal, a shadowed quilt of impossibly dense forests, whispers in the leaves, silver threads of river weaving between the rot and bloom of moss-hung ruins older than any monarchy.

Beauty and brutality, entwined like the weft and warp of his soul.

“Don’t fall behind,” he ordered, voice a silk caress.

“Or what?” she retorted, defiance brittle as old bone. “Are you going to spank me?”

He leaned in, eyes alight with dark mirth. “I would very much enjoy that.”

The collar against her throat hummed and then burned, a lash of hot white heat across her throat, taking her breath with it.

The utter, complete, malicious truth of his words writhed in her gut like a living, breathing evil.

The training grounds came into view before them – a gruesome dance of young wolves, white-knuckled on the reins of their leash.

Claws digging, shredding flesh, white teeth bared in snarling, feral madness. Graceless. Merciless. The bloody ballet of predators at play.

The pit. Not a metaphor. Two packmates at each other’s throats, one already a fleshy red ruin, ribs shattered like kindling, another a white-toothed beast, dripping the wet of his companion’s vitals from every ragged, blood-soaked fang. The throng shrieked, ravenous, blood-hungry. High above them on a crude wooden stage, the chastised hung – a man and a woman. Bare to the waist, hands bound behind their backs, their bodies a canvas of raw, bleeding wounds. They shuddered, but it was not the pain. Vera knew.

It was the terrible, desperate repression of the sting of the whip, the sting of the claw, and the exquisite, festering agony of unbridled need.

Her breath caught. Rael’s eyes were black ice on her back. “Did you see that?” he hissed in her ear.

“Their punishment?”

He was silent, eyes still raking over her like he was searching for dirt. “They broke their leash. Hid their heat from their Alpha. From each other.”

“And this … this is what? A public … kink dungeon?” she whispered, the taste of ashes on her tongue.

“No,” he said, voice a velvet growl. “This is how we keep things in order. Pain when it’s deserved. Pleasure when it’s earned.”

She couldn’t take her eyes off the woman’s thighs clenching and the man’s ragged moan was not a whip or a claw, but a simple, human hand brushed down the line of his spine. They were being punished. They were hurt. And they were aroused. She felt the heat coil low in her belly, shame wresting warily with a foul, delicious frisson.

Rael leaned into her, a warm breath ghosting across her ear. “Does it frighten you?”

“No.”

The collar bit like a branding iron, white-hot against her skin. She flinched and Rael’s lips twisted in a cruel, cruel smile. “Try again.”

She ground her teeth against the want of a scream, the lie crystallizing in her mind, in her soul, turning to steel. “It turns me on.”

This time, the collar thrummed deep in her flesh, different. Warm, pulsing like a lover’s tongue against her neck. The lie tasted like truth.

“Good girl.” Two words. The branding iron of his mouth against her. The world smelled of pine and damp loam and smoke, but now iron was on her tongue, too, and she swallowed her shock, and the taste of blood, her blood, she was certain, feeling phantom bites between her legs. Her breath was a hitched sob that morphed into the sigh of need. She hated him. God, how she hated him. She could taste the bile in her throat, and a hard twist in her gullet, choking as the bile refused to come. But her veins were alive with flame, with the taste of him on her tongue and the phantom pressure of his weight against her, his hands on her shoulders, on her thighs, holding her to him. To this. She wanted to lunge up and claw out his eyes. But instead, another image overwhelmed her, uncontainable: herself, sprawled out on the forest floor, hand on the hem of his cloak, fingers tangled in the rich, heavy fabric as her legs wrapped around his waist, and she squeezed, squeezed like her life depended on it because it did. Squeezed like she could never, ever, let him leave her. She wanted to scream his name. One long, brutal, bestial howl that would echo through this dark, unforgiving place.

“Come on. More to see.” Rael’s voice was a growl in her ear, a shudder in the saddle that bucked her off-balance. His gait was a cruel metronome, thumping against her bruised flesh. She glanced over her shoulder, riding. The woman, ankles shackled together behind her back, her face a mask of pain, of shock… something else. Relief? Triumph? Satisfaction? It was a look Vera had seared into her memory, a smile curled against the woman’s bloodied lips like the fang of a viper.

That night she awakens; sheets soaked with sweat and the tang of ash and iron coagulating on her tongue. Her heart is frantic, stuttering against her ribs, and she can only hear the echo of screams, both of agony and… release. Groans, yes. Groans of pain. But they were moans, too, wracked from her throat in a savage, unbridled symphony of dark obscene pleasure. She traces the bite of leather across her throat, feels the imprint of the collar still burning into her skin, into her very soul. Her bones thrum with electricity, not only from his touch but with the revelation of something fermenting at the base of her spine, something foul and terrible and utterly… hers. And a part of her, a feral and delicious part of her, revels in it. Revels in him. Revels in the loss of herself that comes in the storm of his need.