Baited (Gladiators of the Gryn #2)

Blayn

BLAYN

T here is no light or dark here. A pale mist lifts me up, as if I’m up in the clouds, a soft spray of water on my face as my wings beat on and on, strongly. A wind caresses my skin.

I like it here, without the light and the dark, dark and the light. My heart hurts, but it’s not too bad. Something I can bear as long as this flight continues because I don’t recall a time I flew like this.

Only there is something tugging at my abdomen and a scent in my nostrils I want more of, so much more. A hiss creeps into my ears, pain in my body, wings no longer wanting to buoy me up.

“Hey, you’re awake.”

A face so beautiful looks down on me, I have to assume the fight is over and I have died, until some of my brain cells fire into life.

“Izzy?” I rasp her name, already hating my malfunctioning vocal cords.

“I’m so sorry, . I know you don’t want me touching you, but you wouldn’t settle if I wasn’t next to you and…”

My brow knits. I’m in a strange position because she is above me and I don’t understand.

“I’ll stop if you want me to. Your fever’s broken.”

There’s something cool on my forehead. I’m resting on something soft. My abdomen burns at me, and I attempt to flap a weak hand over it.

“Your wound was infected,” Izzy says. “Leave the bandage alone,” she adds as I attempt to scratch at the itchy thing on my stomach.

“How long?” My voice cracks.

“You’ve been out three nova-days. You couldn’t be moved, so you’re still here, at the pleasure house,” Izzy says. “I thought we were going to lose you.”

“Three nova-days?” I can’t comprehend being unconscious for so long. “Here, with you?”

“I couldn’t leave your side.” I see the tiredness in her eyes. “If I did, you’d pull out the medicine tube and thrash all over the place. The dome medic insisted I stay with you.”

Her scent is amazing, filling my senses up. I turn my head to snuffle into her clothing as surreptitiously as I can.

“You were talking when you had a fever,” she says. “Something about a family.”

I don’t remember talking and I don’t remember a family.

“Only the dark and the light.” I inhale deeply again, sucking her scent like a Gryn starved. “And my stomach hurts.”

“Your captain says you’ve done this before, got yourself hurt and refused treatment.” Her hand hovers over my forehead, then it darts in, and I see a cloth being removed. “Ending up in their infirmary.”

“I like pain,” I say. Because I do. “I like swords, and I like to kill.”

Somehow it doesn’t seem the same when I’m here with her.

“So, I can touch you with the point of a sword, but not with my hands?” Izzy says over the sound of water dripping.

“It’s...” I don’t know what it is. I don’t know why I hate to be touched, only that I do.

She slowly wipes the cloth over my forehead and down to my jaw, then repeats the action on the other side.

It feels amazing.

My cocks are hard, both of them, even my second cock which rarely does anything. They’re straining as if they need to be somewhere else, and it hurts worse than my abdomen.

“Is this okay?” she asks.

I mumble words.

“When you had the fever, you liked it when I touched your wings,” Izzy says.

“Wings,” I murmur

I’ve lost any real ability I had to string a sentence together. I can feel how weak I am. I can feel the tug of the medicine tube in my arm, which I dislike intensely.

Something touches the shoulder of my wing, going deep into my feathers. Rather than flinch away from it, I can’t because it’s instantly made me go limp.

With an effort, I turn my head to see Izzy has her fingers in my feathers.

I’m in her lap.

I’m in her bed.

She is touching me .

I groan under my breath as Izzy’s fingers go deeper. She’s wearing the necklace I found in the arena, the little sparkles dancing like the light in her eyes.

“Don’t…stop.”

She traces her other hand down the side of my face, smiling.

“If you’re sure.”

“I’m…Ah!” Without any warning, my hips jerk up and my cocks explode.

Bliss and terror and delight roll through me as I’m unable to stop my sudden, delicious emission.

All I can do is gaze up at Izzy, the cause of everything good which is happening to me.

“Did you…?” She glances down at my crotch area briefly.

“Yes,” I say, at once satisfied and pleased with myself. “My cocks have made a mess.”

She inclines her head to the side.

“Because?”

“You touched me.”

“Is this why you didn’t want to be touched?”

“No!” My cocks still throb, only now it’s with a need.

The need to…be inside my mate.

“No,” I repeat. “I don’t want to be touched because it feels like burning and I hate it, but with you…it’s different.”

“I can see that,” Izzy says. But she hasn’t stopped touching me and my cocks are already recovering from their sudden emission.

My heart pounds. The line running into the vein on my left arm tugs at me. I want her, I need her. I have to explode again, only this time sheathed in her warm heat.

And I don’t know what to do next.