Marrick wasn’t exactly sure what the remaining doms were supposed to do if the lions decided to freak out.He’d felt the lions’ well-muscled bodies pressed against him, felt the barely restrained strength in them—and the whole time he’d been aware that they were being careful with him.
If they weren’t inclined to be careful, he doubted any four humans would be much of a challenge to them, doms or not.
Marrick looked up.The one he was pretty sure was called Blaine, the one who was fully dressed and more serious looking, had stopped pacing.He was staring across the room at Marrick, now.It had taken a hell of a lot of arguing and a lot of references to someone called Arslan for the lions to agree that they should await Arslan’s arrival on opposite sides of the room to Marrick.
Marrick held the lion’s gaze.Blaine tilted his head on the side, as if curious about something.The torn up one that was almost certainly called Luther stopped pacing, too.He looked over Blaine’s shoulder, following his gaze, and all of his attention focused in on Marrick.
The tension in the room doubled.One of the human dominants shuffled his feet—another stopped leaning against the wall by the door and started to take a more active kind of interest in the men he’d been ordered to watch.
Just as Blaine seemed to be about to take a step forward, a voice drifted through from the corridor outside.It was muffled by the wall between them, but Marrick still recognised it.He’d heard it at the lions’ den.Deep, rich and with an air of authority, it was hard to forget.Arslan was the guy who’d been in charge of the den.
The door swung open.The man who walked in suited the voice pretty well.Big guy, who looked kind of pissed off with the world.Another, smaller, guy stepped into the room in Arslan’s wake, but Marrick’s attention stayed on Arslan since he was the one who was freaking the other lions out so effectively.
The dom who was acting as the club’s dungeon monitor that night appeared in the doorway and nodded to the other human doms, calling them all out of the room.Marrick watched them go without a word.
He was pretty sure he should feel nervous about being left alone with four lions.It would have been a very sensible thing to feel.The room hummed with tension, and Marrick didn’t have a clue what was going on, but he felt that strange calm settle over him.Either some part of him felt safe with them, or all the blood rushing to his cock had starved his brain, and he just wasn’t processing things the way he should have been.
“What happened?”Arslan demanded as Luther and Blaine both turned to face him.
Luther and Blaine started talking at the same time, their words overlapping each other and quickly blurring together in a confusion of noise until a snarling roar from Arslan suddenly silenced them both.
The sound sent a shiver down Marrick’s spine, even while he was in a position to know it was nothing more than the kind of yell a frustrated babysitter might aim at a pair of tantrumming toddlers.He could just picture what the men outside the room would be imagining right then.
Marrick couldn’t keep his amusement back a second longer.A shout of laughter burst out of him, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it.He covered his mouth with his hand, but it did little to muffle the sound.
Every pair of eyes in the room turned towards him.For a few seconds, the lions just started at him in bemusement, as if only just remembering there was a human present.Then, all at once, three of them turned their attention back to each other.
The one that was almost certainly called Blaine took a deep breath and let it out very slowly—he really did have a bloody brilliant build…
Smiling wryly to himself, Marrick had to wonder if he was really focusing on the most pertinent details of the situation.But a glance over Luther and Blaine, and his cock hardened even further regardless.
“The other human was hurting him,” Luther said, with obviously forced calm
“You’ve both been stalking him ever since he was thrown to us,” Arslan shot back.
“He’s our human.We couldn’t just stand there and watch another man hurt our…” Blaine seemed to stumble over the right word for the occasion.“Our pet.”
“The word you’re probably looking for is sub—its short for submissive,” Marrick suggested—quite calmly, in his opinion, all things considered.
All attention swung back to him.“Humans are pets,” Blaine informed him, the way an adult might speak to a child who was a bit slow on the uptake.
“Yeah, well, I’m notthatsort of sub,” Marrick tossed back at him, in a pretty good imitation of Blaine’s tone if he did say so himself.
Blaine looked away from him, towards the fourth man in their group, the only one who had yet to say anything, as if he expected him to be able to somehow fix the situation.“Ryland?”
The young blond man offered Marrick a slightly embarrassed half-smile.He was smaller than the others.From what Marrick could see of his shape through his clothes, he was well built enough, but he didn’t have the same physique as the rest of the lions.
Marrick looked from Ryland to Arslan and back again.They stood quite close together, and Ryland’s posture screamed his submission just as loudly as Arslan’s screamed his dominance.The dots joined up inside Marrick’s head.He wasn’t actually the only human in a room full of lions, or the only sub in a room full of doms.
“No offense intended,” he offered.
Ryland dismissed any need for an apology with a shake of the head.And, by the time Marrick glanced back to the lions, the three of them were all arguing again, if a little more calmly and quietly this time around.
When Ryland stepped forward and crossed the room toward him, Luther and Blaine didn’t notice.They were far too absorbed in their defence of their actions to their…their leader?Marrick was pretty sure Arslan noticed through.Marrick couldn’t help but get the impression that there was nothing Ryland could do that Arslan would make the time to be intensely unaware of.
“You and him?”Marrick asked, nodding to Arslan as Ryland took a seat next to him on the small sofa, more for something to say than because he had any real doubts on the matter.
“Yes.”
