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“What I do is not magic. I have a couple of tools given to me to best navigate this world.”
“And me? What do I get?”
“You get to survive.”
That was an unsatisfactory answer, but Hail was not certain Bryn had ever given her a satisfactory one in all the time she had known him. His big hands lifted the last of the net from her.
She was free!
She wasted no time in rushing for the front door with escape uppermost on her mind, but when she reached it, she found that not only would it not open, it no longer seemed as though it could open. It was simply part of the wall, and the wall was part of a general textured smoothness. The intricacies she was used to were not there anymore. Everything looked big and blocky, without natural detail.
“Bryn!” Her voice was panicky.
“It hasn’t rendered because you’re not supposed to be there.” Bryn’s hands pulled her back gently. She blinked, and the door looked normal again.
“You’re so corrupted, you’re breaking the world around you,” he said. “I need to return you to your previous state.”
“And how do you do that? Some kind of weird magic…”
“Actually, I do it by bringing you back into line.”
“I’ve never been in your rooms before,” she said, ignoring what he said for some vague threat. Bryn had often talked about making her obedient in the past. She assumed this was more of the same talk. She looked around at the space that was uniquely his, and noticed just how many special and indeed, legendary items he seemed to have accumulated. There was a wall of swords, no two of which were in the same style. Some were elegantly carved. Others glowed with power. Some were one-handed rapiers. Others, two-handed broadswords.
“Look at all of this. You would be rich if you sold any part of this.”
“There’s no merchant with enough gold,” Bryn replied, his voice somewhat distant as if he were looking for something. “Ah, here it is.”
She turned in time to see him pull a long leather whip from the depths of one of his chests. It looked like a belt, the end of which had been cut into three tongues.
He swished it through the air, testing it. She had the chance to see him anew. Bryn had always been her master. He had always been the alpha of all the lyrakin whelps. But the whelps had found new homes and now he was an alpha without omega.
He looked at her and she felt a bolt of electricity pass through her. Maybe it was what had happened with the Dark that changed her. Or maybe she’d always seen him through the eyes of a petulant child, and not of a fully realized woman. Either way, she suddenly understood on a visceral and completely unfettered level that Bryn. Was. Hot.
He was tall. He was broad shouldered. His hair was shaggy and rough because he didn’t give a shit about it. It fell in a mane around his shoulders. He hadn’t shaved in a few days, and rough stubble around his chin and cheeks was starting to turn soft the way beard hair did. She had changed since being taken by the Dark, but it seemed to Hail that he had too.
“I am going to whip you, and then I am going to bathe you.”
“You are going to do neither.” Hail resisted because resistance was all she had. The Dark had made her powerful, and as far as she could tell, Bryn immediately wanted to make her weak. He wanted to punish her like a brat. He wanted to bathe her like a baby. Bryn was never happy except when she was small.
“No.” Of course she refused. The Dark could take her against her will, push itself inside her and make her cry out in pain and pleasure at the same time. But Bryn would have to gain her compliance. He was not going to force…
“Bend over the bed.”
“No.”
“Hail, it is not like it was before. I am not going to let you run amok. I am going to punish you, see if I cannot drive some of the corruption from your soul. I can do that with your submission, or without it.”
“No.”
She found herself over the bed, as if she had not spoken. As if she had no will of her own. She lost the thread of her thought as Bryn grabbed her and tossed her down on the coverlet. The lash was already in the air. It bit across her rear almost immediately with a searing, all too physical sting.
The Dark was not a real thing. Bryn was. He was flesh and he was heat and he was the harsh leather lash whipping across her barely clad body, which became less clad the longer the punishment went on. The garment had barely existed when she had been captured. It had clung to her body with filth and sheer tenacity. Now it failed right at the moment she needed it most and was ripped from her ruby red cheeks with each successive slap of the lash.
