Lynx Northern Shifters 3

he walked to the cross and turned his back on the crowd. Even its
cool surface couldn’t snuff the furious blaze beneath his skin. Lexa’s soft hands trailed down his spine. She
pushed his legs farther apart, a finger ghosting between his ass cheeks, and knelt to bind his ankles. His
wrists followed, the leather straps cinched tight.
“May I start in with my crop?” Ben asked.
Tau tut-tutted. “So impatient. We must whet his appetite.”
Another set of hands, coarser and wider, smeared wetness from the nape of Adam’s neck to his heels.
Within a heartbeat, the heat of his anger seemed glacial. True fire raged along the length of his body, first
across his flesh and then beneath it. His bones became live coals.
Tau’s voice grated in his ear. “How does it feel?”
Adam cried out mutely, jerking against his restraints. How much had Tau used? Two, three times
what he had used on Ben?
Tau seized his plumage. “Is that how you answer your betters?”
“It feels good.”
Tau spanked him once, hard, and Adam’s hips knocked against the cross. Despite the flare of pain, he
longed to rock them. “Say it properly,” Tau snarled.
The room spun. The cross undulated beneath Adam as a lover would.
Tau’s fists slammed into his shoulder blades. As if from a distance, Adam heard himself scream, the
sound familiar somehow.
“Call him sir,” Ben urged desperately.
Just like on the slave ship.
“Sir,” Adam mumbled. “It feels good, sir.” The word tasted of blood. Already his mouth had begun to
swell from where it had connected with the cross.
Tau stepped away and in the next moment Ben was there, a silent presence at his back. Adam moaned
aloud, straining towards him. Candle flames leapt. When he squeezed shut his eyes, their light continued to
dance behind his lids. It grew brighter, sparks whirling.
Sparks. They rained down about Ben, falling from the gauntlet held aloft on Adam’s own wrist. Ben
crouched on his hands and knees at Adam’s feet, legs wide, ass turned up for another blow. “Oh fuck,” Adam muttered, even as the vision claimed him. His symbiot thrashed. “I’ll try not to hurt you,” Ben whispered in his thoughts, but both the sentence and the instrument
changing hands behind his back were meaningless compared to his fantasy. As if they had nothing to do
with him, Adam felt the sudden rush of air over his skin, heard the low whistle. The whip cracked across
his shoulders and his body screamed loud and long.
Diatribes of longing and lust echoed in the chamber. He had not known that he had such words for
Ben. He knew only that no matter how hard he hit, Ben remained stubbornly silent, refusing to tell Adam
how much he wanted this.
The lash snapped across his skin a second time. Adam arched into it, arms knotted beneath his
shackles. The pain paled in comparison to the electricity sizzling in his fist.
Red bloomed across Ben’s back, mocking him. “Tell me, tell me, call my name—”
    The whip licked over his spine, and Adam pulled wildly on his bindings.
“Wonderful,” Tau said, so far away. “Absolutely wonderful.”
“Isn’t he?” Ben asked. In Adam’s ears, Ben’s voice was amused. In Adam’s mind, Ben was ice
    against fire, as immobile and cold as a glacier.
No. Ben had to burn.
Adam’s eyes rolled back in his head as the world exploded in a crimson supernova. Again the lash. At Adam’s ankle a strap came free, then at his wrist. “Mas…” Adam began, brokenly,
but that wasn’t right.
    The whip sliced deeper still, and blood poured down his back. “Mas…” he tried again, but still the word would not come. He couldn’t say it again, not now, not ever. He was only meant to hear it.
With a sudden wrench the last of the bindings gave. Adam whirled.
Ben stumbled back, eyes wide, and the whip fell from his fingers.
Adam leapt.
Ben was the one who would beg to be mastered now.

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