Page 55 of Savagely Mated

She narrows her eyes at me, but it’s not as convincing this time. I can smell her arousal. It’s instant. This girl likes to be punished. She likes it when I’m more than stern. She likes it when I’m rough.

“I’m not going, in that case.”

Darcy

He gets up, walks around the table, and grabs me by the back of my shirt, scruffing me up out of the chair like I weigh nothing.

“I’m getting a little tired of having to manhandle you every time you need to do something,” he growls at me. Suddenly, I very much feel the absence of Rafe and Kirin. There’s nobody here to moderate Einar now. Maybe I shouldn’t have mouthed off quite so much. The guy is rough as hell, and he has a temper when he’s pushed. We’ve been doing nothing but pushing him. I pushedhim just now, said something I knew would wind him up. Now, hanging in his fist, I’m really not sure why the hell I did that.

“You’re going to the academy, and you’re going to become a model student, and you’re going to be assigned to the palace…”

“And I’m going to kill the king for you?”

“Yes,” he growls. “You’re going to kill for me, just as I tell you to, because you have been raised as a soldier. That is what you are, and it is what I expect you to be. Understand?” He gives me a little shake.

His words are stern, but it’s the way that he says them that gets my attention and twists my gut. I’m going to kill for him? The memory of the dead guard flashes through my brain and reminds me how I felt when this all started. I’m not a killer. I’m not cut out for the primary function the academy trains us for, and there’s nothing I can do about it. That’s one of the reasons why I started skipping out in the first place, along with the fact that most people spend a few years in the academy, and I have spent my entire conscious life there. What I don’t yet know, they can’t teach me.

I say none of this to the man holding me up like a kitten. He clearly doesn’t care what I think, or what I want. He’s just made it abundantly clear that I am a means to an end for him, and he expects me to be the perfect little soldier everybody else at the academy is smart enough to know I will never be.

“Yeah,” I say. “I understand.”

“Good.” He puts me back down on my feet. “There’s a uniform up in the room that’s going to be yours. One across from mine. Go put it on.”

“I haven’t worn a uniform for years. They stopped bothering to try to make me wear one.”

“You’re going to start again.”

I open my mouth to complain, but I decide against it.

We drive to the academy in a car. I sit in the passenger seat and I wear my seatbelt and breathe in strained silence that I know wouldn’t exist if we had the others here.

“Where are Rafe and Kirin?”

“Busy,” he says.

“Did you kill Kirin?”

He snorts, looking actually amused for the first time in a while. “No, Darcy, I did not.”

I think I believe him. Probably.

Anyway, I soon have more problems to worry about. When we get to the academy, Einar doesn’t send me off to class. Instead, he takes me to his office. They’ve given him one of the nice ones that looks out over the training courtyard. They’ve also given him a big wood desk and a… cane?

He picks it up just as I see it.

“Pants down and bend over the desk,” he says, tapping the wood with the tip of the cane.

“What? No! Why?”

“Do it, Darcy.”

“Ugh. Fine.”

I do as he says, because I know there will be hell to pay if I don’t. Einar always gets his way. I used to always get my way too. It felt good. Wish it could happen for me again.

I lower my pants and bend over the desk. It’s a humiliating position, but that’s the point, I guess. He wants me to feel like a naughty schoolgirl being punished in an old-fashioned way—and it’s working.

Crack!

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