Claimed by the Alpha Handler

The leash came first, before he ever touched me.

It lay coiled on the steel table when Niko walked me in, a thin black lead with a clasp at the end, and I told myself I would not look at it. I looked at it. My eyes went straight to that little silver clasp and stayed there, and something low in my belly pulled tight, and I hated the pull more than I hated the room.

I was twenty nine years old. I ran my own books, I owned the loft on Kestrel Street, I had walked into his world to collect a debt that his family owed mine, and now I stood in the basement of his house with my wrists zip tied behind me and a wet heat already gathering between my legs that had no business being there.

“Sit,” Niko said.

Not a question. He never asked. He pointed at the low bench against the wall, and his voice stayed flat and easy, the way you talk to an animal you have all the time in the world to break.

I did not sit. The part of me that still owned the loft on Kestrel Street planted my feet and lifted my chin and stared at him, because that woman did not take orders from a man with blood under his rings. My thighs pressed together anyway. The contradiction made my face burn.

He noticed. Of course he noticed. He was paid by men far worse than him to notice exactly this.

“You’re thinking it’s a choice,” Niko said. He came around the table slow, unhurried, rolling his sleeves to the elbow. “It isn’t. Your mouth says one thing. The rest of you already told me the truth.”

“You don’t know anything about me.”

“I know you crossed your legs when you saw the lead.” He stopped in front of me. He was a head taller and he smelled like cedar and gun oil, and I kept my eyes on his collarbone because his face was worse. “Pretty girls who fight always start by crossing their legs.”

Heat flooded up my throat. I wanted to spit at him. I wanted him to do something so I would stop standing here drowning in the want of it.

“Sit, Mara.”

My name in his mouth undid something. My knees bent before I told them to, and I dropped onto the bench, and the small obedient click of it ran through me like a current I could feel in my teeth. I hated that I had moved. I hated more that moving felt like relief, like setting down a weight I had been carrying since I walked through his door, and a thin frantic voice in the back of my skull was already whispering that if I just kept the right side of my brain shut I could pretend my body did this on its own.

He crouched. He took my chin in two fingers and turned my face to the light, studying me the way a man studies a horse he might buy, and the boredom in his eyes was the cruelest thing about him. I was nothing he hadn’t handled before. I was a job.

“Here’s how it goes,” he said. “You’re going to stay in this house until your brother pays what he owes. That could be a week. Could be a month. Your brother is not a fast man with money.” His thumb dragged across my lower lip and my mouth opened for it, traitor, slut, and I clamped it shut a half second too late. He smiled like he’d won a small bet with himself. “While you’re here, you belong to me. Not to the family. To me. I train the things they bring in. By the time you leave you’ll crawl when I tell you to crawl and you’ll thank me when I let you up.”

“I will never,” I said, and my voice cracked in the middle of the word, ruining it.

“No,” he agreed. “Not tonight. Tonight you’ll just sit there and get wet and be furious about it. We have time.”

He stood. He picked up the leash.

I should have screamed. The loft woman would have screamed, would have driven her heel into his knee and run for the stair. I sat with my thighs trembling and my cunt soaked through the thin cotton I’d dressed in for a business meeting, watching him uncoil that black lead, and the worst thought I have ever had about myself slid clean and quiet into my mind: that I was not afraid he would put it on me, I was afraid he would change his mind and walk out and leave me wanting it.

He cut the zip tie at my wrists. The blood rushed back into my hands and I gasped, and before I could use them he had a wide leather collar around my throat, buckled snug, the leather warm like it had been waiting on his body. His knuckles brushed the hollow of my throat as he set it. My pulse slammed against his fingers. He felt it. He had to feel it.

“There,” Niko said softly. “Look at that.”

He clipped the lead to the ring at the front of the collar. The little metal click was the loudest sound in the world. Then he gave it the smallest tug, just an ounce of pressure, just enough to tip my chin up toward him, and a sound came out of me that I had never made in my life, low and broken and needy, and my eyes filled hot with shame because he had pulled it out of me with a quarter inch of leather.

“Good,” he said. “That’s the first true thing you’ve said since you got here.”

I wanted to die. I wanted him to do it again.

“Stand up.”

I stood. The lead ran from his fist to my throat and I could feel every shift of his hand through it, and I was wet to the tops of my thighs now, embarrassingly, the slick of it cooling on my skin, and he was looking at my face and not down there so at least he didn’t, no, he knew, he could smell it, men like him always know.

“Closer.”

I stepped in. The leash gave me no room to do otherwise, and some sick grateful part of me leaned on that, on having no choice, on the collar deciding for me. He looked down at me with those flat dark eyes and brushed my hair back from my face, almost tender, and the tenderness was worse than a slap because it made my eyes sting.

“You feel that,” he murmured. It wasn’t a question either. His free hand came to rest flat against my belly, low, his fingers spread wide, the heel of his palm just above where I was burning. “That heat. That’s not me doing anything to you. I haven’t done anything yet. That’s all you, Mara. You walked in here a hard little businesswoman and underneath it you’ve been begging for somebody to take the wheel for years.”

“That’s not true.” My breath came fast and shallow. His hand was so warm. I could feel my own heartbeat in my clit, pounding, obscene.

“Then step back.”

The leash was loose. He’d given me the slack on purpose. One step and I’d break his hold, prove him wrong, walk myself to the far wall and stand there cold and right and alone.

I didn’t move. My feet stayed planted on the concrete and my whole face crumpled with the humiliation of it, and a tear actually slipped down my cheek, not from fear, from the unbearable wanting, and his thumb caught it before it reached my jaw.

“There she is,” he said, and for the first time something flickered behind the boredom, something hungry and patient and certain. “Knees, kitten.”

The word landed in my spine. Kitten. I hated it. It was demeaning, it was nothing, it reduced me to a soft warm thing kept on a lead, and my knees were already folding, already lowering me to the cold floor in front of him with the leash sliding through his fist to keep pace, and the relief of going down was so enormous I had to bite my lip bloody to keep from sobbing out loud.

The concrete was hard and cold under my bare knees. He looked down at me from his full height, the lead taut now, my chin tipped up because he held it up, and he reached down and ran his thumb across my wet open mouth.

“Now,” Niko said. “Let’s see what you sound like when you stop lying.”

His hand left my mouth. It went to his belt.

And I knelt there on the floor of a killer’s basement with a collar buckled to my throat and his lead in his fist, my whole body shaking, my cunt clenching on nothing, every proud thing I had ever believed about myself running out of me like water, and I opened my mouth before he even told me to.