I didn’t want to acknowledge the other, darker reason–that in truth, I now craved the pain.
Xumi’s eyes had the glazed look of extreme lust, but for her, it wasn’t just about my anguish. And her sons had yet to understand that for the victim, pain was merely a matter of endurance.
The true secret to my dissolution waslinking it to pleasure. Their mother was a master at hooking into my soul. And shredding it.
It took her, and me, to a level that her sons would never reach.
The Dragona panted, rubbing her breasts against my chest and grinding her damp heat back and forth along my thigh as her sons pulled off the last few scales. Her hands stroked quivering flesh that grew more rigid with every pulse of agony. I fought, but my beast was clawing at me to be set free, and I couldn’t hold it back much longer. Xumi assessed me and her eyes gleamed with triumph. She rubbed her hand over my face—it reeked of pheromones, and of her. Leaning close, her taloned fingers cupped me, and then a razor-sharp tip drifted across my burgeoning flesh, and sliced.
The pain surged, and a grunting, rumbling growl tore past my clenched teeth as my beast broke free.
I wished for just three seconds of my Dragon in her presence, but a large part of my battle was to stop what she drove me to. And each time, I wondered why I didn’t just let it happen. Embrace my end just as poor Kevit had his.
Haki had always called me stubborn. Perhaps it was as simple as that.
But whatever it was, as my wings burst free from my shoulders, I ground my lengthening teeth together and held myself to only that. My muscles and bones writhed in protest as I battled, and by the time they resettled into my human self, I was panting hard.
Well, panting and hard.
The blood had already stopped dripping, but now Xumi gestured to her sons. My arms were stretched between chains and my talons bound in wyvern hide, so I beat at the bronze Dragon shifters with my wings as they grabbed at me. But they were half-transformed and powerful as they hovered in the air, laughing at my efforts. They attached the wicked hooks on chains to my wings at the joints and along the bones, piercing the membranes to do so. Soon my wings ran as red as my body.
I gritted my teeth as Xumi reeled in the chains until I hung suspended over thirty feet in the air. It was excruciating.
And humiliating.
Because my shaft jutted out before me, rigid and leaking with lust. I used to pretend it was only the pheromones, but I knew better now. Xumi had created me in her own image—I was addicted to thepain. It surged through me, tightening my entire body until it was eager, so eager for anything, or anyone, tohurt me.
I panted with the power of it, and with the knowledge that soon, soon, she would take me there.
It warred with everything I’d envisioned myself as. Eroded me, taunted me. Every session took me one step closer to the abyss.
Now in a highly excited state, her sons returned to their victim, dragging him to a new apparatus and strapping him in. They’d finish him now. And it wouldn’t be a pleasant death.
I did my best to block the sounds, trying to forgive myself for being relieved that this time, they would find sadistic culmination in the suffering of another.
Their mother was another matter. Her eyes glowed with her own beast’s lust as her wings erupted from her shoulders. She launched into the air and wrapped herself around me.
Her weight widened the wounds in my wings, and I gasped as the extra agony brought me right to the very edge. Her eyes were almost incandescent as she teased me, hovering her warmth right over my quivering flesh, lowering until the swollen head slipped just barely into her, and then out again.
I couldn’t help the groan that slid from between my clenched teeth as my world dissolved into a maelstrom of pain and twisted pleasure.
As it threatened to erase everything that I was, and ever had been.
20
Sebastian
It be a pretty sorry-looking group that reported for shifted obstacle training. I hadn’t intended to run them so hard, but I had.
Neil, Ryan, and Alex be ground crew for this venture, while Tyrez would be overhead, watching for problems. Kitani and Cody—with their children in tow—would send off the teams. I noticed they had Anna’s dog on a string.
Neil leaned close to me. “Krisk, dude,” he said. “I think you ran their legs right off.”
“I set a brisk pace today,” I agreed. I didn’t know what had possessed me. Or rather, I sardding well did know. But that I’d let it affect me called my suitability as an instructor into question.
These recruits be raw, and not yet ready to be pushed like that. I knew it. Yet I’d done it anyway.
“It’s good for them,” argued Alex. “They won’t learn anything if we’re too easy on them.”
