letting my natural shock at his girth filter through, because this guy was thick. I wrapped the man up in a self-fulfilling bubble of positive thoughts, making him oblivious to what was going on around him.
Fuck his face… The thought oozed out of me, not one I consciously came up with, but the suggestion dropped anyway. I didn’t think to correct it as Kazimir wrapped his massive hands around the other man’s skull, pulling him roughly down on his cock, over and over, ignoring the urk of Nero’s gag reflex and the stream of tears from his eyes. That’s right, I thought. Use him for your pleasure.
Nero tried to shove him away. He was struggling to catch his breath, to stop his stomach lurching, and I watched this with a perfectly clinical eye. Something niggled at the back of my mind, trying to remind me of an important detail, but I didn’t pay it too much attention. I was my thoughts, my mind, all the shitty things about this place fading away, and instead, I rode this—power. Kazimir used it to keep his lover at his feet, to reach for him again, ready to have all that molten hot softness engulfing him, and I controlled him.
But it wasn’t to last.
“Kazimir!” Nero said, pushing his hands away. “Kaz!”
At his sharp tone, it all came rushing back—the room, the men, the mess of Nero’s face, my grandmother’s words. I was slammed back into my body, and more aware of theirs. Kazimir’s hands faltered, his cock drooping when he realised what he had been doing, then he tucked it away and bent down to see to Nero.
“Hey…” He touched the lion shifter now with a kind of reverence that had been severely lacking. “I apologise, Nero. That was…unacceptable. Are you all right? I don’t know what came over me.”
I saw the tracks of tears on Nero’s face, his eyes flat, dark, and sparking with anger as he shoved the other man away and got to his feet. I saw it in the steps he took away from Kazimir, the other man following him, until he realised that wasn’t going to work. His hands fell limply at his side, at a loss now.
“I do,” I said, feeling like my body had been plunged into ice water. It all became clear now, what Nan had been getting at. The two men looked at me, one sharp eyed, one bleary. “It was me.”
“Talk us through it.”
I’d walked hurriedly back to my cage, back to Jai, wanting to get under the shower and wash what felt like grime off my skin. There wasn’t any, I looked. Jai found me curled up on the bed, staring at my hands, feeling them flex and move, but somehow, they didn’t belong to me.
“Babe…?”
I flinched back when Jai sat next to me, not wanting to touch him or our relationship with whatever the fuck that was. Power tripping, my mind supplied helpfully.
I didn’t get to reply, as the others clustered around the edges of our cage, respecting boundaries. That made me smile, a mirthless, dead thing. They seemed to innately know the limits, where obviously, I did not.
I waved them closer. We couldn’t broadcast this. I nodded when I saw the reluctance, the slow steps closer, then settling down on the floor around me.
“It works,” I whispered, to Jai, to all of them. I focussed back on my alien, ill-fitting hands, trying to will them back into being mine. “It was real easy. Nan always warned me to never even try it. I thought that was because it’d do something to me. It does, just not in the way I expected.” My eyes flicked up as I forced them to look at Kazimir and Nero, noting the considerable gap between them. “I’m sorry. I… That doesn’t seem like enough… That was a rape of sorts. I’m sorry, I got caught up, I didn’t expect… I didn’t think.” My voice broke on the words, my head sinking down to my hands.
“What happened?” Jai asked.
“She pushed Kazimir to do things he wouldn’t normally,” Nero said in quiet, clipped tones. “It wasn’t fun, and I don’t want a repeat.” My heart ached when I saw Kazimir’s downcast expression.
“Be mad at me, not him,” I said. “I was the one in the driver’s seat.”
“Can you make people do things they totally don’t want to do?” Nero asked.
“Well, no.” I sighed. “It’s like encouraging, distorting, and expanding something that’s already there.” Nero eyed the other man