Drugged Into His Bed
Callie
I counted the twelve crystal flutes before walking in, their cold surfaces aching against my palms. It was the only way I knew how to enter a room where I didn’t belong.
The blood moon hung over the Thorne estate, casting its red glow across the great hall. Every chandelier was lit, and wolves dressed in expensive silk filled the room with laughter. The smell of roasted meat, perfume, and wet fur greeted me at the door. I wasn’t a guest. I was there to serve.
Bianca knew that and made sure I felt it. She turned in the middle of the hall, her gold gown sweeping across the marble floor. The dress hugged her hips and dipped low at her chest, drawing everyone’s attention. Mine too, except I had to admire her while carrying a tray of drinks.
“Callie.” Bianca called my name like she was summoning a dog, without even turning to look at me. “My glass is empty.” I walked past the dancers to refill it. Three of her friends stood around her, watching me with amused expressions.
“It actually came,” one of them said, looking at me with disgust. “Bianca, it actually came.”
“Someone has to serve,” Bianca replied, taking a sip before handing the glass back without looking at me. “Mother keeps the wolfless close. It reminds everyone that blood goes thin.” Her friends laughed while I kept my head lowered, refusing to give them the reaction they wanted.
Margaret found me beside the ice bucket a minute later and grabbed my arm so tightly it hurt. “You are furniture tonight,” she warned, keeping her voice low. “Furniture doesn’t speak. Furniture doesn’t get seen. Stay out of sight, or I’ll have you in the cellars before the second course.” I nodded, and she released me with a look of disgust. Just then, the horns sounded, silencing the entire hall.
Conversations stopped, and everyone turned toward the entrance. Even those holding drinks lowered their glasses as Dominic Thorne entered the hall alone.
I’d never seen Dominic this close. He stood tall in a black coat that fitted his broad shoulders, his dark hair pushed back from his handsome but intimidating face. He didn’t smile or greet anyone as he entered. The crowd immediately moved aside, and everyone bowed deeply with their hands at their sides. His presence alone was enough to command their respect.
“My cousin returns,” Bianca announced from somewhere behind me. Dominic didn’t acknowledge her or anyone else. He walked straight to a table at the far end of the hall, where he sat with a bottle of alcohol. His jaw tightened as he stared ahead, ignoring the attention he was receiving. Everyone continued watching him, but he seemed completely uninterested in their presence.
The women were no exception. Some tried approaching his table, laughing loudly and showing off their revealing dresses, but none dared get too close. Everyone in the pack knew about his curse. For ten years, any woman who touched him suffered terrible burns. I’d seen photographs in Margaret’s study showing blistered skin, painful wounds, and severe injuries caused by a single touch.
The women kept their distance, admiring him from across the hall. I watched from beside the ice bucket, remembering that I didn’t need photographs to understand how painful his curse could be.
I was fourteen when Dominic rescued me from a rogue wolf near the river. The creature had dragged me into the woods and was attacking my face when Dominic appeared and pulled it off me. He carried me all the way home without saying a word, even though my blood covered his hands. When he finally set me down at the gate, his palms were already covered in painful burns from touching me. He quickly slipped his hands into his pockets, trying to hide the injuries from me.
I never forgot how he’d hidden his burned hands in his pockets. “Here.” Bianca held out a glass of wine, smiling at me for the first time that night. The glass was already full, which was strange because I hadn’t served her. “You look half dead. Drink.”
“Bianca, I’m not…”
“Drink it, wolfless. It’s the first kindness you’ll be offered all year.” I took the glass and drank. The wine tasted unusually sweet, with a strange medicinal aftertaste. Bianca then told me to go upstairs and clear Elder Vane’s tray from his room on the second landing of the east wing. I agreed, but as I handed back the glass, the room began to spin.
Heat spread through my body, and my hands grew weak. I nearly dropped the tray as my vision blurred and the sounds around me became distant. I managed to place it on a nearby table before my knees threatened to give out.
I needed to get upstairs and out of sight before Margaret noticed something was wrong. Remembering her earlier warning, I forced myself toward the staircase.
The east staircase was covered in red carpet. I tried counting the landings, but my dizziness made it difficult to concentrate. I passed several closed doors before turning into an unfamiliar corridor. My skin burned, sweat covered my body, and I could barely walk. Whatever Bianca had put in my drink was affecting me badly.
At the end of the corridor, I noticed a door slightly open with light coming from inside. Unable to remain on my feet much longer, I pushed against it and stumbled into the room.
Dominic stood beside the window, holding a bottle that was almost empty. His shirt was open at the collar, revealing fresh scratches on his forearms. I knew he’d inflicted them on himself while fighting the pain of his curse, which became worse during a blood moon. He turned toward me, his expression darkening. “Out.”
I immediately tried to leave, mumbling an apology, but my heel caught in the carpet. As I fell, I instinctively grabbed Dominic’s wrist to support myself. He stiffened, his jaw tightening as he waited for the familiar burning pain. But nothing happened.
His skin felt hot beneath my fingers, and I could feel his pulse racing. He stared at my hand in disbelief before turning his wrist and wrapping his fingers around mine. He pressed his palm against my skin and waited, testing whether the curse would affect him.
Ten years of suffering, and suddenly, nothing happened. No burns. No pain. “Say something,” he demanded.
“Burned,” I whispered, struggling to think clearly. “You’re supposed to burn.” His expression changed, and for a moment, he seemed unable to believe what was happening. He released my wrist and stood, towering over me. He was clearly drunk, but the way he looked at me made my stomach tighten.
“What did they make you take?” he demanded.
“Nothing. I didn’t take…”
“You reek of it.” He crouched in front of me, his pupils unusually wide as he examined my face. “Bianca.” Hearing her name, I realized he already suspected what had happened. The drug had left me burning with an unbearable heat, and my body reacted in ways I couldn’t understand. I was sweating, aching, and struggling to remain upright.
His gaze dropped to my mouth before he stood and emptied the remaining alcohol onto the floor. The sudden action frightened me. “Elder Vane’s room,” he said, walking toward the door and unlocking it. “That’s where they sent you. Second landing. East wing.” He turned back toward me, his expression unreadable. My body was still burning from whatever Bianca had given me, and when he approached, he didn’t ask my permission.
Clothes are embarrassing when someone else is undressing you. He did it like he was dismantling something. No patience in his hands, no apology in his mouth. Then there was no floor under me at all, just his bed, black sheets, and the window full of red light. I couldn’t stop shaking, and I couldn’t say why. He stripped me open and went quiet over it. I heard him swear once, low, at nothing.
I was wet. God help me, I was wet, soaking down my thigh from the drug and the heat and the way he looked. I’d never once seen another woman do it on purpose. He touched me with two fingers, the flat of them dragging slowly from my ass crack up over my clit, through all the slick. I screamed and bucked. He pinned me by the hip with his whole hand, hard, bruising.
“Again,” he said, “and I’ll put my mouth there and you’ll scream with my tongue in you.”
I couldn’t see him from the angle. I only felt him settle between my legs, his thighs bracketing mine, the whole heavy weight of him crowding me down into the mattress. Then his hand came up over my hip, and his cock came with it. It hit me along the stomach like a slab of something alive. Thick, heavier than my wrist, longer up past my navel. The head was blunt and purple-dark and already beading. The whole shaft was roped with veins and twitching under my fingers when I put my hand on it and gasped at the sheer size. It was hot. It pulsed. My fingers barely met around it.
“How,” I said. I don’t know what I was asking. He was already lining the fat, wet head up with my entrance and dragging it down through my folds in one slow smear, spreading me open wider than I’d been opened in my life. I could feel it against my hole before he even pushed. Just the pressure of it, monstrous, and the heat of it radiating through me.
“Look at me.” I did. He pushed in.
It was not a pain I could name. It was fullness pushed so far past full it looped back around into hurting, a slow, thick splitting. I felt the exact place he reached inside me and then felt him go past it. My back came off the bed. My mouth opened, and nothing came out but a thin, awful sound. My hands found his shoulders and clawed. I remember thinking, with strange calm, that it wasn’t going to fit. Nothing was going to fit that. He didn’t stop. He just kept pushing, patient as a tide, and I was clamped around nothing and shaking. He was buried to the hilt with my hips still cocked off the mattress, holding himself there inside me, deep, while my body figured out what it had swallowed.
Then he let me feel his hand, and something clenched around him so hard I heard him grunt. He started moving.
Cruel is the only word I have. He pulled almost all the way out, almost, his dickhead dragging the sensitive ring of me raw, and then buried himself again with his fist in the sheet beside my head. My whole body went up on the bed with him and came back down. The bed slammed the wall in its own beat. It hurt. It hurt so much my eyes ran and my throat closed, and a hot wetness came from somewhere deep and made the sheets slick under me. I could feel every ridge of him, feel him hitting a place behind my belly that made my toes curl and my stomach clench against his. My tits bounced against his chest with every thrust, his nipples dragging raw over mine, his hands leaving red on my hips where he gripped me to hold me still.
“Stop,” I sobbed, and then, immediately, in a voice I didn’t own, “don’t stop.” He heard both. He did neither. He just went harder, and my neck went back, and I broke into a sound that wasn’t a word.
He was drinking me in as much as taking me, his teeth on my shoulder, one hand fisted in my hair and pulling my head back so he could get to my throat. His mouth opened on the tendon there. Every time I whimpered, he made a low animal noise against my skin and drove in like he was trying to reach something behind my ribs. It was too much. It wasn’t enough. Somewhere in the middle of it, the pain turned over into something worse than pain, hot and bright. I came apart with my legs locked around him and my nails down his back and my mouth on his collarbone, biting him to keep from screaming. I felt him swatting into my skin. Felt him go rigid. Felt him empty inside me in long hot spurts that I could feel in my stomach, filling me up with more than I thought I had room to hold.
He didn’t get off me for a long time. He lay on top of me, breathing hard, one heavy arm resting across my chest. It was only then that I realized he hadn’t let go of my hand once.
I didn’t know what time it was when I woke. The moon was gone, and the light outside the window was gray. My body ached in places I didn’t have names for, as if something inside me had been stitched back together wrong.
That’s what being used feels like, I thought. Being used and told it was a kindness.
Then I heard voices in the corridor. Bianca sounded quick and bright with excitement. Margaret’s voice was low, and there were two older men I didn’t recognize.
“I told you, the second landing. Elder Vane’s room,” Bianca said. “She would have knocked; he would have let her in, and there’s no excuse for a wolfless...”
A door opened, and Bianca went quiet. Then she said, very softly, “It’s empty.”
For a moment, nobody spoke.
Then a scream came from the far end of the hall. It was one of Bianca’s friends, the girl who had looked at me like a stain. Footsteps pounded toward her.
She was standing outside the Alpha’s door.
They had found my dress, torn to pieces, lying right outside his room.
