Kefir frowned.They never gave up on any of their stupid plans until they were caught.“Arslan hasn’t mentioned—”
Blaine made a distinctly unimpressed sound in the back of his throat.“Like he could have talked us out of it!”
Kefir kept diplomatically silent on the subject of exactly who would have won any argument with Arslan.
“You should have heard the temper tantrum Marrick threw when he heard about it.”Luther winced at the memory.
Kefir couldn’t keep the smile back.If there was one man who might be able to call them to heel even more easily than the leader of the pride…
“I still don’t like seeing you wear this,” Luther reached out and tugged gently at the lock on his collar.
Keeping everyone in the pride content was important, but not compared to keeping his future mate happy.Kefir shrugged.“You don’t need to like it.You’re not the lion he gave it to.”
“Ellery gave that to you?”
They all looked up as Marrick crossed the room.
Kefir nodded.
As Marrick knelt on the rug next to them, he stared at the collar as if he’d never seen anything like it before.He looked up then and met Kefir’s eyes.Whatever he saw there, it made him smile.“Congratulations.”
Luther looped his arm around Marrick’s waist and pulled him roughly back so he collapsed in a heap between his two mates.
“It’s not a good thing,” Blaine hissed in his ear.
“It means Ellery’s serious about you,” Marrick said, all his attention still on Kefir, despite his mates attempts to distract him.“There are two things everyone on the scene knows about him, Kef.He’s a good dom, and he doesn’t give out Velcro collars.If he put it on you, he means it to stay there for a long time.”
Kefir reached up and traced his fingertips along the silver links.He nodded.Serious.That sounded right.They were serious about each other, about what was going to happen between them.Serious.Kefir liked that word.
When he turned his attention back to the other three, all of Luther’s and Blaine’s attention had moved to Marrick’s neck.
“You have to have one.”
“You said they were a bad thing,” Marrick reminded him, in the mild tone he only ever used when he wanted to wind his lovers up.
“On lions,” Blaine hissed.“Not on humans—that’s different.”
The door leading to the hallway swung open.Kefir immediately looked up.As Ellery strode in, Luther and Blaine lurched to their feet and squared off against him.
When Kefir would have moved to stand between them, Marrick reached out and caught hold of his arm.
“Let Ellery handle them.”
Kefir looked back toward Marrick and hesitated.Marrick knew far more about human doms than he did.Reining in his instincts, Kefir subsided back to the rug, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to relax.He remained ready to leap up if he was needed, for whatever good it would do.
“They’d never have actually hurt him,” Marrick whispered.His grip tightened on Kefir’s arm, as if what he was saying was urgently important.“I know them, Kef.I know they’ve got big mouths, but they wouldn’t—they couldn’t hurt him.It’s not in them.Hell, it took me forever to convince them to even try to hurt a damn masochist!They just need to shout a bit and get it out of their systems.Ellery can handle them.”
Kefir turned back to the three men squaring off against each other.
Ellery was standing his ground.There was no trace of fear or submission in him.His spine was straight, his chin tilted up.He looked more like the leader of a neighbouring pride than a human who’d arrived in shackles just two weeks before.
He owned whichever room he occupied in much the same way Arslan did, and he was glorious.A human dominant equal to a feline leader…
“I can learn,” Kefir whispered.
“Kef?”
“I can learn how to be like a human submissive for him, how to be the kind of mate he wants.”Tearing his eyes away from the men in the centre of the room, Kefir turned his full attention to Marrick.“I’m learning,” Kefir promised.“He’s teaching me about what kind of submissive he wants to own, and I’m learning.”
