She offered them wings and fritters between strands, and refreshed drinks before anyone’s got low. The mulled wine shimmered with clove and orange, sweet and warm in her mouth, and every sip felt like Christmas.
The gold beads came next, long strands of them draped with care. Silas looped one over her head and tugged her close, brushing his mouth over hers with wine-flavored lips. Her heart tripped over itself. Her pussy clenched.
And his smug smile told her he was aware of both. Wolf hearing and wolf scent told her meneverything.
He winked and dropped the beads over a high branch, turning back to the ladder like he hadn’t just melted her from the inside out.
They saved the ornaments for last. Deep crimson and rich gold, velvet ribbons and gilded pinecones, hand-blown glass and old heirlooms tucked in soft tissue. She unwrapped each with careful awe. Boone favored the heavy ones, placing them deep into the sturdy branches. Kenny took the ones shaped like stars, positioning them high and outward-facing. Silas added anything with flair — glitter, twist, shine — and made sure they sparkled from every angle.
And Willow filled in all the empty places, so everywhere you looked, a bauble sparkled.
One of the boxes held a small photo ornament with a picture of dozens of pack members taken at some time before she’d met her men. They were on the hill behind the house with snow in their hair, and Silas holding a thermos aloft like a trophy. A moment of joy captured digitally and printed on paper. Their lives before she was in it.
She put it front and center on the tree and stepped back, chest full and aching in the best way at the thoughts of how all of those people had accepted her. Welcomed her.
The tree gleamed, and so did her eyes.
Silas turned off the overhead light, and the world shrank down to tree-glow and firelight. Kenny slid an arm around her waist. Boone pressed a warm hand to her back. Silas handed her a fresh fritter and kissed the top of her head.
No one spoke for a long moment.
And then Silas said, “Now for the upstairs tree. Gonna be a lot more fun.”
His words and the tone of his voice made her stomach flip in a slow somersault.
She followed the men up the steps, undressed at the armoire, walked into her bedroom, and just stared.
This tree was smaller, squat and fat, like it’d been chosen not for elegance but for mischief. Which, ofcourse, it had, becauseSilas had announced he’d handle all the planning for this tree, and Kenny had nodded at his declaration.
Unsurprisingly, she could see his fingerprints all over the scene the moment she stepped through the door.
The lights were colored, not soft and polite, but bold and bawdy — saturated reds and greens, seedy blues, nightclub purples. They blinked in uneven rhythms, as if the tree itself couldn’t decide whether to be festive or feral.
Flocked branches gave the illusion of snow-dusted pine, bare and glowing in the gaudy lights.
Boone opened the first box with a grunt of approval, digging through it with the care of a man who handles dangerous machinery by day and wasn’t about to let a glass plug slip from his hand at night. He held one up between two fingers and lifted his brows. “Does this go on the tree or in the fucktoy’s ass?”
Kenny smirked. “We can decorate her later. Tree first.”
Boone wound a green rubber band around the base a few times, put a metal hook on it, stepped forward, and hung it over a sturdy branch at shoulder height. He nodded in satisfaction and was smiling when he turned for the next.
Silas plucked a pair of small plastic floggers from the pile and held them up like earrings. “These go toward the top. Little buggers deserve a good view.”
He handed one to Kenny, who strung it carefully over a side branch, then adjusted it by a fraction until it sat just right. Willow realized with a flush that it was the floggers they used to beat her pussy and clit with, sometimes her nipples.
She remembered Kenny using clamps on chains wrapped around her thighs to hold her outer labia open while he beat her pussy raw that first week, and the memory lit her skin as if the tender flesh was still red and inflamed.
She looked in a box, saw Boone’s collection of silver speculums, blushed, but started putting them on the branches, too.
Boone worked methodically, loading the lower third of the tree with heft — short silver plugs, thick black dildos and plugs, a few ballgags in red and black, small leather restraints rolled and tied with glittery red ribbon.
Silas darted from branch to branch, chaotic and gleeful, peppering the tree with silver nipple clamps and miniature St. Andrew’s crosses in between swigs of cider and off-key carols. Kenny moved more slowly, choosing larger pieces and placing them with ritualistic care — a bondage collar here, a set of red floggers with knotted tails there, the black loopy Johnny he’d used on her when she’d backtalked Boone, strung across two branches like a banner of growth and surrender.
She caught sight of one of her tack bras — which she now wore under her dresses on errands because she’d insisted she couldn’t go out braless with some dresses — looped and clipped to a branch with silver cuffs. It looked festive. Horrifying. And okay, hilarious, too, even if shedidhate the damned things.
Her laughter bubbled up before she could stop it.
Silas grinned like he’d won something. “Told you it would work.”
