Page 97 of Purchased

“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.

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