I like challenge.
“You wear only what I allow,” I rasp out. “Who were you with?”
Her hands find her hips. That small, brave tilt makes the lion under my ribs purr.
“Stop screaming in my face,” she snaps. “You don’t own the air I walk through.”
For a heartbeat, I am astonished at her nerve. Then coldness blankets my rage like a winter cloak. Punishment is a blunt instrument. There are sharper, sweeter arts. I will teach her. I will turn obedience into an all-encompassing act of worship.
“You broke your word,” I say softly. The sound is worse than a roar; it is the hush before a storm. “You will learn to obey.” I do not shout. My cold authority has teeth.
She takes me in, and I see the flash—her mind racing, the old distrust fracturing into something dangerously like calculation. She opens her mouth; I taste it.
She will not be easily tamed.
Good.
“You will beg to serve me,” I promise and seeing the responding fury in her eyes warms my chest like a flame lit in a dark place.
“Never,” she spits and kicks. One sharp blow lands against my wing. A clever, dangerous blow that sings through my bones. I laugh because the heat that surges through me isn’t anger at all.
It’s hunger. She is back, and she ismine.
I sweep her up in a single motion, secure and practiced, one arm securely around her middle so she cannot slip free. She always fights. I think I love the sound of her resistance. She’s soalive in my hands. She writhes and struggles and curses, and my hunger swells with every heartbeat.
“You will learn your manners,” I tell her, not cruelly, but with the firmness of a man who keeps promises. “And you will learn to obey—as a consort ought.”
“Ha!” she hisses. “No man will ever make me small again!”
“Then prove it,” I say. “Show me you can be both defiant and still crave all that I offer you.” The paradox delights me. If she can master it, the devotion she offers afterward will be sweeter than any conquest.
I take wing with her in my arms, and the Great Hall blurs. She screeches as we fly up the stairway, my wings beating the cold air into a hush. She kicks at me again—a small, furious thing—and I relish the spark that flash-burns across my hide.
When we reach the bedchamber, I drop her down on the fresh furs I laid out earlier and watch as she bounces, enraged.
“Don’t manhandle me!” she screams. The fire in her eyes only lights me up more inside.
I move like a shadow and flip her gently, but with purpose, so that she lies face down. Her face presses into the soft fur, and the sight of her little backside twitching with anger as she tries to scramble away is unbearable and holy all at once.
I use my wings and knees to pin her, and she keeps kicking and fighting for purchase.
“I am no man,” I say, each word a vow. “I am monster.”
She keeps wriggling like a wildcat until I tie braided strips of soft cloth—not too tight—around each ankle and wrist, and then knot them to the bedposts.
When her limbs are secure, she raises her head and spits over her shoulder at me, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” But I can hear the tremor beneath the words that speaks of something else entirely. The craving I spoke of earlier—she is feeling it. I see it in her eyes. Ismellher lusting scent in the air.
I step back and uncover the whip I fetched before I came for her: not the torture implement from my dungeon woven with nettles and cold metal, but a subtler instrument—a supple, leather short-lash, braided and featherlight compared to the dungeon instruments.
For her, I have a sweeter discipline planned.
“You will learn to obey,” I tell her again, and this time there is no threat in it; only intent. “This is training, beloved. Consent is our covenant. If you refuse at any point, say the word, and I will stop. Will you trust me enough to learn?”
She looks at me then in a way that makes something in me crack open—not like a wound, but like a seed opening to light. She is furious, stunned, and proud.
But beneath that is a small, fierce creature who wants to beknown. Who wants to experience and see and feel everything that this world—and all the worlds beyond she never knew about until she met me—might possibly have in store for her.
She swallows, and finally, I get an answer in words.
