“Sure.” He wasn’t going to argue with him over this. “Rest assured, once we’re through here, I’ll be cutting it out.”
“Try.” Pavel draped his body over his and breathed against the curve of his neck. “Try, bashert. The more you run from me, the more desperate to own you I become. Today, I’ll mark you up all over. I’m going to leave physical, irrefutable proof of who you belong to. You can try to stop me, but you can’t. I’ve hit my limits. I have you where I want you, captured, naked, and alone. You’re mine to do with as I please, no matter how loudly you protest.”
Zane held still beneath him, not wanting to give him the satisfaction of a struggle so early on. “If that’s the case, the jokes on you. I’ve always been alone, Pav. You didn’t have to wait so long.”
“Kazimir would say otherwise,” he drawled. “And Lyra? How many times have you fucked her? How many times,” he eased off enough to slip a hand between them, tracing a line down Zane’s spine, “did you let her put her disgusting hands on this delectable body?”
“I didn’t let her touch me any more than I’m letting you do so now.”
Pavel paused, and Zane realized his mistake too late. “Is that so?”
He inhaled slowly. “Pav, please. Remove the blindfold. Let’s talk.”
“Talking gets us nowhere.”
“Talking is how I get to know you,” he corrected. “I have to know you to know whether or not I want to marry you. Last night was nice. Wasn’t it?”
“It was, but so is this. Talking right now isn’t necessary. Your wants don’t matter here, baby. Only mine do. And I want you. I want you so badly it hurts.” His hand pinched Zane’s ass and he moaned when that caused Zane to jerk beneath him. “If I did remove the blindfold, you’d be frightened. Be glad I’m leaving it on.”
“Frightened…why?”
“My eyes are glowing.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time I’ve seen them do that.”
“Yes, well, this time it’s happening because I’m losing myself a little. If I were a better man, I’d free you and tell you to lock yourself in a room away from me. But I’m not a good person, and there was never a chance of you escaping this.”
Zane thought about all the information he’d gathered on the Yurn and D’vitar. “You don’t have a heat or a rut cycle, but being close to your bashert when turned on can cause your mind to fracture, right?”
“It’s more like I lose self-control,” he said. “And I’m also not the one who needs to be turned on for it to happen. It’s you. It’s when you’re turned on that my natural instincts kick in like this. The need to satisfy you. To breed you and complete a mating bond. That’s what clouds my judgment and causes me to go a bit insane. You were sporting morning wood, baby. I tried not to notice, but clearly, I failed. It’s not the first time you’ve made me lose my mind.”
“Like in the pool?” He’d touched Zane and Zane had gotten hard for him, he wasn’t above admitting that. It wasn’t like either of them didn’t know the truth.
It’s not like either of them believed he wasn’t turned on right now, pinned under him, forced to take whatever he wanted to give.
But that was just what Zane was into. He’d gotten hard for Kazimir and Lyra whenever they’d dominated him as well. It wasn’t real. It didn’t mean anything, and it certainly didn’t mean he was better off choosing to marry Pavel over the Imperial Heir or any random stranger off the street.
Which was an option.
There were plenty of people who would kill to sign a contract with him, one that allowed them to get married and divorced within a certain timeframe. Lyra would grow bored of this whole thing within six months, a year at best. Zane could find someone easy to control, to manipulate, and have them—
Pavel gripped him by the hair and yanked hard enough to pull a few strands free. “I have no idea where your mind just wandered off to, gorgeous, but I’m warning you, whatever it is you think you’ve schemed up, let it go before I find out what it is and get really angry. I might be genetically programmed to want to take care of your sexual needs, but there’s nothing keeping me from making you suffer in the process. I can make it hurt. I like delivering pain. I’ve only been holding myself back all this while for you.”
“I want to see you,” Zane said, pushing those thoughts about other possibilities aside for now.
“You want to come,” he corrected, sliding back down Zane’s body until he felt his breath warm against the globe of his ass. “Too bad for you, I’m not done playing yet. Thanks to someone sleeping the morning away, I skipped breakfast, and you? You’re the main course, gorgeous.”
His tongue dipped into Zane’s needy hole and Zane gasped, wiggling as best he could when Pavel’s hands settled on his lower back to keep him still. He lapped at him languidly,as though that comment insinuating he was hungry hadn’t been made.
That skilled tongue would push past his ring of muscle, but stop before jabbing too deep, pulling back out to lick around the area instead. Over and over again. Frustration began to build, and it wasn’t long before Zane was making whimpers of protest and trying desperately to angle his hips for better penetration.
“Am I being too soft on you, gorgeous?” Pavel teased, moving to run the flat of his tongue across Zane’s taint. He spread Zane wider and planted an almost chaste kiss on his balls that had Zane growling.
“Yes.” He didn’t care that he was playing in to the other man’s hands. If there was one thing Zane had always hated, it was edging. Lyra did it whenever she was cross with him. It was her personal way of putting him in his place, of reminding him where he belonged in the social hierarchy.
Beneath her.
But he wasn’t beneath Pavel. His position was higher and once he became the Royal Doctor he’d have even more power.
