Wolves of Black Veil

Chapter 2: Welcome to Hell

Tires squealed. Rocks lashed the SUV with a stream of blasphemy from its mangled wheels. It wasn’t a house; it was a monster of some kind, hunched and snarling, the Gothic arches a gash of razor-sharp teeth wide open and hungry in the evening light. The iron gates clanged shut with death rattles that shook the choking silence.

Vera didn’t flinch. She’d stared into the eyes of far greater evil than this place or its master. She’d built it from the ground up, after all. But the collar was new, a brand of fire hot against her throat and a cruel thing to her sensitive skin. Iron and fear, with the metallic taste of blood against her tongue.

The front door flew open, and Rael was there. No words. Just those eyes, obsidian pools with a heat of their own that devoured and dissected her at once. He was measuring her for his rope. Finding that sweet moment when his patience could no longer hold, when he could finally break her and claim what was his. He smelled of woodsmoke and something else. Something predatory and dark, like a controlled rage just barely at bay.

She walked to the door, chin up, Marchelli pride a blazing star in the pit of her chest, even though her heart galloped in terrified staccato against her ribs. The SUV growled away, the engine spitting guttural, the monster sated.

The house stank of blood. Thick and sweet, mixed with the earthy scent of moss and an older, deeper stink of the wild and the unknown. She retched and it wasn’t just disgust. It was fear. Bone-deep and dark and winding itself through her innards like a coiled viper.

Heat pooled in her belly. A sly little flame, for all its loathing and revulsion and confusion and shame, starting a wildfire deep in her thighs. She resisted it, angered and disgusted a bitter bile in her throat, but he knew. He knew. She could see it in his smirk and feel it in the heat of his step as he crossed the great room. He knew she was hard. He could see it in the small tremor of her fingers. The hitch of her breath. He knew. Always. Always.

The grand room was an inky cathedral, a church built of shadows and sleek polished stone, candlelight flickering in greasy pools of light over a forest of furs and the pallid shine of bone artifacts scattered between them. A wall of Rael’s pack, all but his lovers, stalked the staircase, icicle eyes and hungry faces watching and judging and waiting with patient, feral grace.

He didn’t even introduce her to them, instead pulling her arm, fingers cool but firm against her wrist, the silence between them so thick it seemed to smother her, and hauling her down a corridor that split like a convoluted intestine of depravity, her heels clicking an angry counter-rhythm against the marbled floor. She did not have to ask where they were. She already knew it was a one-way trip, straight to her own destruction.

The door clicked open to a scene fit for a palace. A gilded cage, the five-star jail Vera didn’t know she was being sentenced to. Silk sheets piled high like an arctic mountain, fur piled high as a cloud cover and gilded, gilt-flecked everything to a noxious pitch, everything from art to furniture to God alone new what else. All watched, unblinking, from their hidden corners, by the little black boxes in the ceiling. Surveillance cameras, dozens of them, staring at malevolent black dots, the windows to Rael’s eyes.

“This is yours,” he said, voice a slow drag of velvet that rasped and grated on her like the bite of salt on open flesh. “Until I say otherwise.”

“Generous for a kidnapper,” she said, sneering wide and brittle as broken glass, her voice not quite steady, like porcelain balanced precariously on its edge. “Did you get everything you wanted, or did you throw in some real bargains as an afterthought?”

“I’m not your kidnapper, princess,” he told her, voice a throaty rumble that melted in her ears, his fingers ghosting against the collar, rough shag rubbing up and down along her jaw, the heat of his body a visible wave washing through the room. “I’m your Alpha.” He tugged on it, slowly, just enough to make the collar hum and vibrate against her skin, like a pack of invisible Bassetts taking to her thighs. “And this…” He leaned in, brushing her mouth with hot, hard venom. “… Is your leash.”

“You’re a monster,” she said, and the word was hoarse and thin in her throat.

“Probably.” He smiled, a slow, dark smile of secrets that curled around her stomach like an ice knife. “Dinner in two hours. Don’t make me come get you.”

The door clicked. The lock disengaged with a sickening snap and click of finality.

Alone, the silk sheets felt like the heat of a noose. Rage blazed in Vera’s chest like burning oil, and she hurled a vase, its porcelain splintering into a constellation of tiny shards in sympathy with her shattered self-righteousness and false courage. In the deafening silence, she felt for the collar, the wound of heat against her throat, the shameful dampness of arousal against her inner thigh, a reality check against the futility of rebellion. But it was the settling cold in her bones that hurt worse than the flesh and the burning in her blood.