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CHAPTER 25

B eatrix

I am even more shy to meet my family than I was to meet his, but I let myself be taken up to the wolves who have, as I understand it, been causing havoc in the village and surrounds. The first thing I see are three young men. They could be brothers. They look strong. They look like they’re trouble. I recognize the expression in their eyes as one that I’ve worn many times myself, and just like that a sense of belonging washes over me. It’s not that they look like me on the outside, though they do have strong features and dark hair, it’s that they feel like me in the room.

“Oh, my goodness!”

An elderly woman grabs me by the face, her hands clasped on my cheeks, looks into my eyes, and cries. She keeps saying something over and over. I don’t recognize it, because I don’t speak the language. It sounds old.

“She says you are the image of her little sister,” Volkov tells me. He’s here looking formal and together and respectable, when in truth he is every bit the snake I always thought he was.

“This is my aunt?” I ask him the question while I formulate a plan of what to do about him.

“This is your aunt’s cousin. Her little sister was your mother’s… I lost track of the connection. She’s a relation.”

“Excuse me,” I say to the woman, lifting a finger and moving back from her, sliding her hands from my face because I need to attend to something else. “I just have to do one thing. It’s very important. I’m so sorry. I just…”

I take a step up on a chair, so I can get the right kind of height, and I smack Volkov right in the face. He takes the blow with grace, or like a brick wall would. Either way, he takes it.

I see Armand out of the corner of my eye. He starts to make a move toward me, then decides against it. Good decision. I start my rant, to the laughter of the younger wolves.

“You were related to me, and you didn’t tell me. You were sitting right in front of me, pretending to be a fucking therapist, hearing all my thoughts, and you just… didn’t tell me. You could have told me the first day you were here. But you sat silently in a room, and…” I trail off, inadvertently giving him a chance to explain.

“I had to be sure of who you were. I didn’t know right away. Then you ran off to the city and killed some gendarmes and in addition to the man in the village, and then of course, the file.”

“The file.” I widen my eyes.

“I didn’t really know until you threw the evidence in my face. And by then I felt as though I had come too far. I am sorry to have deceived you.”

“You were such an asshole.”

“I am an asshole,” he says with a half-shrug. “I am the alpha of this pack, small as it is, and my ways are the old ones. You are also very difficult to handle, and Armand seemed to be struggling. I wanted to help.”

“Armand was not struggling. He has never struggled. He’s always been perfectly in control of everyone but me, and that is because I am an outlier.”

I want to hit him again, but he’s just a bit too sad to bother to hit, which is frustrating because I am suddenly feeling all sorts of surges of aggression.

“You weren’t even nice to me,” I add. “All the times I was in your office, what a fucking prick you were.”

There. There’s a reason. I smack him again. This time he catches my hand, stares at me with that icy blue gaze and I see violence in him, violence I am programmed to both draw out and meet with the same.

“Unhand me! How dare you touch me when I am trying to hit you!”

Armand loops an arm around my waist and pulls me away. “Now, dear,” he murmurs. “We don’t viciously attack the guests, or the men who pretended to be therapists so they could track you down and possibly kidnap you only to realize there was nowhere to take you after all.”

“I’m going to kick your ass,” I tell Volkov. “You’re the reason this was so difficult.”

“Blaming me isn’t going to change the fact you won’t tell your mate anything about yourself. You barely even told him you didn’t kill the detectives. You go along with things, hiding yourself, you make yourself small, and you let him be the arbiter of what you are, so he never really knows you. That’s not my fault. That’s your fault.”

It’s one thing to snipe back in an argument, it’s something else to take someone apart.

I lunge for his throat, taking my wolf form halfway through, becoming uncontrollable by Armand as my weight multiplies, my teeth become keen and long…

What ensues is an absolute dogpile of a fight. Volkov is forced to shift to avoid having his throat ripped out. Armand shifts too, in the effort to contain and control me. The three young Russian males drop their human pretenses and so do Armand’s men at arms. In a matter of seconds, the room is full of biting, snarling beasts attacking anything and everything in sight out of sheer blood lust and instinctual ferocity.

“ Enough! ”

Armand stands in the middle of us all. He is bloodied, but human, his voice imbued with enough authority to cut through the animal passion in the room. Even I stop with my teeth sinking into someone’s furred hide, and slide back into my human self, kneeling on the floor in the middle of it all.

“You will all take your human forms, you will all go get cleaned up, and you will present yourselves to dinner, where, if anybody so much as makes a snarl, I will throw you all into the dungeons. And yes, I do mean all. Even you.”

He fixes me with a heated silver stare that instantly turns me on.

I am in trouble, and he is in control, and neither one of us can wait for these others to shamefacedly shuffle out of the lounge and back to their rooms, tails between their legs.

“That was naughty, Trixie,” he growls at me. I am still kneeling where he was when he yelled at us all, entirely naked and not at all ashamed.

“That was hot, Armand,” I smile, too excited and invigorated to even begin to pretend to submit. The act of fighting, getting to tumble around and express my full self with others of my kind who aren’t victims or prey, but my equals was invigorating. And now I have him all to myself, gorgeous, naked, muscular, and dominant. He’s everything I ever dreamed of, and everything I’ll ever need.

He reaches out, slides his hand through my hair and pulls me close to him, my mouth at the right height for his cock to slide between my lips. I let him claim me, opening for him, lapping my tongue against the underside of his cock.

“Yes,” he growls, his hand fisted in my hair. “Yes, Trixie. Give me your mouth. Give me everything.”

He takes everything. He takes me all the way to the back of my throat, disciplining me with rough thrusts of his cock that fill me more and more as he swells with desire. I started this with my mouth, and he is going to finish inside my mouth, taking care to keep the rough knot of his cock outside my lips so I am not trapped on his dick when he comes down my throat, pulling me close, making me feel intimately, passionately used and punished.

This is what I need. This is what centers me, stills me, calms me. Others might see rough treatment and cruel domination, but what I feel is pure relief.

“You are not going to lean into the wildness of your ancestors,” he growls. “Not while I am in charge. You are going to lead them into civilization. You are going to show them that life is safe and good, and you are going to do it all with a very sore ass.”

He spanks my ass hard as he says that last part, hard enough to bring me up onto my toes. It might have been a mistake to reveal how much I enjoy him being the alpha, because he is every inch the dominant right now.

I see no more forgiveness without discipline in my future.

“Starting a brawl on their first day here? No, no, Trixie,” he says, marching me across to a couch and putting me over the back of it. He pulls off his belt, loops it in two, and proceeds to snap it against my ass over and over, hard cracks that make me gasp as the hot pain sears through my skin.

“We are not playing anymore, Trixie, not now I know what you really need.”

The belt lands again, across my thighs this time, punitive and intentional and enough to make me squeal.

He returns to spanking my ass with the belt, until it feels hot and tingly and almost numb. He doesn’t drop the belt until I am sniffling with hot tears in my eyes.

“These people are going to depend on us for structure. We might be younger than they are, but we are the alphas of this pack. So you are going to be held to high standards. You are going to be disciplined when you do not live up to them, and…” He steps in and thrusts his cock inside me, no warning, just the rough claiming of an alpha punishing his mate. “You will be fucked until you are sore if you fail me.”

I almost come there and then, my pussy gripping his cock with desperate arousal as his words and his demeanor and all the heat of the whipping combine to make me melt into orgasmic need.

He fucks me, comes in me, waits until the knot is big and thick inside my ravaged pussy, then starts to tease my nipples and my clit, forcing me through orgasms that don’t seem to subside until another one starts. He is playing my body as if it is an instrument that belongs to him, making me writhe on his cock as I completely lose control.

“Ow,” I whimper when he finally slides from my ravaged pussy and lets me stand up. I am unsteady on my feet, so he helps keep me balanced, his hands on my hips.

“Ow,” he agrees, tilting my face up toward him. “I bet that ass hurts, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, Ma?tre .” I never call him ma?tre , I’m not even sure how the word got into my brain, but there it is.

He smiles, pleased. “That sounds fucking hot coming from your punished mouth,” he growls. “I’m going to be sterner with you from now on, Trixie. I’m going to make things hurt when I think they should hurt. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I nod as he pats my bottom, not soothing, just claiming. “I understand that was hot.”

He nuzzles me and pulls me close, his seed slowly dripping from my legs as he lets me rest against him. “It was,” he says. “Now, are you ready to behave in a civilized fashion? Or do you need another round of whipping before dinner?”

“You wouldn’t,” I gasp.

“Pup, I would happily spank you from now until the dinner bell is rung if I thought it would make you behave. These people have been through a lot.”

“If only I knew how that felt.”

“I know you do, which is why you need to be a good influence.” His fingers drift down my stomach and find the hood of my clit, pressing on my mound so it pulls up, massaging just above my pussy, driving me crazy all over again, one finger tapping the super sensitive bud of my clit.

“If you’re not a good girl, I’ll spread you open and whip your pussy,” he says.

“Mnngghh,” I moan.

“Or maybe I’ll do it if you’re good,” he says, cocking his head to the side.

He perches me on the back of the couch and slides his fingers into my aching sex, drawing out our wetness and using it to lubricate my exposed clit, which he spanks with two fingers, tapping and swatting at my swollen sex.

“You really do like this,” he says as wetness drips from the core of me. “Exposed, punished, hot, sore, fucked, and you still want more.”

He slaps my spread pussy with a stern stroke, watching my expression as I flush and writhe. “Oh, it feels good, doesn’t it, right now everything that hurts feels good. You’re so horny, so wet, so in heat…”

He pushes two fingers inside me, finding me soaked.

His cock is starting to get hard again as he twists those digits inside me, and I know he’s going to mate me again. The look in his eyes makes my pussy being stretched wide an absolute inevitability.

This time, it is on hands and knees, on the floor, my face pressed to the rug, my hips high.

“Like the animal you are,” he growls, standing over me and lowering himself down, legs bent to dip his cock back inside my wet pussy, almost teasing me with the tip. I take the submissive animal pose and he masters my body and my mind, fucking me from a completely dominant position, which twists the both of us into positions not made for comfort, but for heat.

At some point, we tumble forward, his cock in my pussy, his hands on the floor behind my ass, his toes holding him up in a bridge position as he fucks me with my legs bent over my head. We are contorted, we are animal, we are coming apart and together, collapsing onto the floor in a tangle of pulsing sexes.

“What the fuck was that?” I ask the question when I regain the power of speech.

“A ravaging. While we’re young, and flexible, and that doesn’t put our backs out,” he grins. He is in a much better mood for having come twice and punished me thoroughly, and funnily enough, so am I.

* * *

Later…

I try to make polite dinner conversation with Armand’s cum sliding out of me. The entire pack has been assembled for dinner to welcome my family, our guests, complete strangers who somehow feel like home.

I look down the length of the table and I see Jenny smiling with a new, younger man. I barely recognize her at first because of how much happiness has transformed her. She no longer looks pale. She no longer seems to be apologizing for her existence with every breath. I feel a sense of satisfaction, knowing that the fight I started my first night here has led to her happiness.

Volkov is sitting opposite me. Armand is at the head of the table, to my left. To my right, one of the ladies who seems so overwhelmed every time she looks at me picks at her meal while hanging on my every word. Her name is Svetlana, and she tells me she has dreamed of finding the lost little ones of their pack.

“It wasn’t just me?”

“Six,” she says. “All the little children who were too small to shift were sent away, scattered across the world. We thought we would find them later, when the war ended. But the war didn’t end. We did. The pack now, the one Volkov leads, it is not really a pack. It’s a collection of strays held together by tragedy.” She speaks elegantly and with great depth and loss.

“I am sorry,” I tell her.

“I should be the one apologizing to you. I was one of the ones who failed you. I am sorry you grew up without a mother or father, without a pack, without anything but the hunger that hollows us all out if it is not sated. I am glad you were found. I am glad you have fed.”

She’s referring to my various crimes of vengeance and justice. There is no judgment besides approval in her tone. She does not have the same values that Armand does. Hers are the same as the ones that live in me.

“So, do you all kill people, or…”

“We have learned to tame our wilder instincts. We cannot survive a modern world with a hyper-violent approach. The civilized will not tolerate it. They hunt us down and eradicate us. We have to at least pretend to be good people.”

“Have you met people? Almost none of them are good. That’s why killing them is so moreish.”

Armand runs a warning hand over my shoulder.

“I mean, wrong,” I say, refinishing the sentence. “Deeply, deeply wrong.”

Svetlana smiles. “We are all beings in a changing world,” she says. “We must adapt, or die.”

I’ll take that as a yes. I sit among my people, feeling the coiled animal instincts in us all. Yes, even in Volkov. I am starting to think I hated him so much not because he didn’t feel like family, but perhaps because he did. Because I saw myself in him. Felt myself in him. Because his proximity made my yearning all the worse, ignited all the pain in me, and made me want to hide in a dungeon, kept like a monster, rather than feel any of it.

That’s gone now. The sadness, the angst. I feel belonging. I feel like I am home.