“You did fuck me.”
“You were—” He stopped. Breathed. The chain trembled in his fist. “And the shorts. I told you to dress appropriately. And you walked into a royal audience in—”
“Tailored shorts.”
“—in those.”
“They’re well-made shorts, Aeldryc. The hem is clean. The fit is perfect. I sewed them myself.”
“You sewed—” Something in his expression shifted, derailed for a moment by this information.
“Aren’t they cute?”
His eyes dropped to the shorts. To my thighs. To the exact point where the rolled hem ended and bare skin began. His hand on the chain tightened.
“Turn around,” he said. “You need discipline, and I can only think of one way to give it to you.”
Oh.
Oh.
“I knew this collar would make you fun.”
“Pip,” he barked.
I turned around. Slowly. Planted my hands flat on the marble wall, shoulder width apart, and arched my back, and presented my meticulously tailored short shorts to the Lord Commander of the Queen’s Grey Guard.
“I knew you wanted to continue what you started earlier.” I was deliberately taunting him at this point.
He grabbed the waistband of the shorts and tugged them up into my ass crack, and I couldn’t help myself, I moaned. He traced my bared ass cheek, his fingers gentle.
Then his palm, broad and hard and precise, cracked against the curve of my right cheek, and the sound ricocheted down the corridor like a gunshot. The sting was immediate—hot, blooming, spreading from the point of impact outward in a wave that made my knees buckle and my cock jump. I gasped and pressed my palms harder into the wall and the second strike came on the left side, symmetrical, punishing, and I heard myself moan and didn’t care that it echoed.
“You will not,” he said, and another strike, harder, “speak to the Queen”—another—“about what I do to you in the privacy of our bedchamber.”
Our bedchamber.“Got it,” I gasped. “But maybe you’d better spank me a few more times just to make sure I fully understood.” I arched my back further, giving him the access he needed.
His hand hooked into the waistband of the shorts and yanked them higher, pulling the fabric tight between my cheeks, the seam pressing hard against everything sensitive, and I choked on a groan. The exposed skin of both cheeks was burning now, and he kept going, each slap measured and deliberate.
The chain moved. I felt it before I understood it. The silver shifted against my throat, alive with his magic. The links loosened from where they hung and began to slide. Down my chest, through the open collar of my shirt, across my stomach. Warm, vibrating faintly, and I realized with a dizzy, electric thrill that he was controlling the chain with his magic while spanking me with his hand.
The chain reached my waistband. Slid under it. Slipped past the fabric and curled around my cock, which was so hard it hurt, and around my balls, snug and warm and humming with his power. The vibration was subtle and devastating, a constant buzz against my most sensitive skin. I cried out and pressed my forehead against the marble.
“Oh god, fuck. Baby, that feels too good,” I whimpered.
“And the shorts?” he said, and his voice was rough, wrecked, not remotely the voice of a man in control of a punishment. Another strike, and the silver tightened a fraction.
“I wear them for you,” I panted. “Only for you. I—oh fuck—So everyone will know I’m yours.”
The chain pulsed in a wave that ran through every link simultaneously, from my throat to my cock. His palm came down hard on my ass at the same moment, and the combination of the sharp sting from behind and the deep, resonant buzz from the silver wrapped around me sent me quickly over the edge.
I came with my hands on the wall and my back arched and his name on my tongue. The chain held me through it, tightening and loosening in pulses that matched the movements of my thrashing body, and his free hand pressed flat against my lower back, steadying me, anchoring me, as my legs shook and my vision went white and the pleasure crested and broke and left me gasping against the marble like a man who had been wrecked by a public hallway.
The chain loosened. Withdrew. Slid back up my body and settled against my chest, warm and spent and still faintly humming. My shorts were ruined—not structurally, but in the sense that I had just come in them spectacularly and the evidence was not subtle.
Aeldryc’s hand was still on my lower back. Warm. Heavy. His breathing was not steady.
“The corridor,” he said, after a moment, “was not the appropriate venue for that.”
