Chapter 6

Pet ownership could be soinconvenient.

Reed was proving that point in the most spectacular fashion. He hurled a second fifteen-pound hand weight at me, and I dodged to the side, the soles of my black dress shoes scuffing the wooden gym floor.

"It's just a leg raise," I said with a grin, glancing down at the physical therapy recommendations on my phone. "You need to do two sets of thirty today, according to Ben. And he says to make sure to take your time and do them slowly."

Reed growled at me, and I had to admit the snarl on his face was delicious. It really did good things for those curvy pink lips. He had a sexy new scar above his right eye that had healed nicely and made him look just as dangerous as he happened to be, and he had a full set of teeth once again. During his recovery, I'd been letting him work out for several hours a day here in my home gym—because I liked to live dangerously and look at beautiful things—but he'd been ignoring the work he needed to do for his knee.

Sculpted muscles wouldn't help him murder me if he couldn't catch me to do it.

So, here I was, being helpful. And this was the thanks I got for being generous with my time.

"You try it! It fucking hurts!" he said, nearly yelling. The muscles in his wide shoulders strained, distracting me. His attitude might need an adjustment, but his anatomy would make a great muse for any artist.

Irritation flickered through me. Danger was fun, but there were limits to what I could allow him to do. As much as I liked to push limits, now that he was feeling better I needed to be careful. Casually, I walked toward him, and his shoulders hulked with his rapid breaths, but I was satisfied at the wariness that crossed his face. He tensed as I squatted down to look at his knee. The angry pink scars were smaller than I'd thought they would be. I watched his body movement, ready to roll away if necessary, but he didn't take the bait of my close proximity. Standing, I studied his furious green eyes.

"You will do what Ben recommended. He's a five-star therapist," I said quietly.

"Will I?" he asked with a smirk. He shifted toward me, but when I didn't flinch, he took a step back, as if sizing me up.

"Do the exercises." I took the calculated risk of turning my back on him as I left the sunny room. The pain that smashed through my shoulder had me sucking in a deep breath, but the one-pound weight that clattered to the floor behind me wasn't enough to take me out. The spot throbbed, and I turned to glare at Reed. His eyes were wide, as if he hadn't expected to land the blow. The pain sent my body screaming into action, and I picked the weight up and walked toward him.

He went so tense I thought he might fall apart, which made his pecs stand out underneath his sweat-soaked white tank top and his thighs strain against his black workout shorts. I lifted his hand and set the weight in it.

"Do the exercises," I said quietly.

He studied me, and I turned once more, taunting him and sending my adrenaline spiking through the roof. This time I listened carefully for any shift in his movement behind me, but he hadn't done anything shocking by the time I'd left the room. Smiling as I nearly skipped to my office next to my bedroom, I began to spin plans.

Things had been dull—beyond boring—while Reed recuperated, but now he seemed to be springing back to life, a criminal renaissance packed into two hundred pounds of lean, cranky muscles, and I would need to keep on my toes.

My phone rang in my suit pocket, and I hissed as I moved my arm to tug it out and answer it. Fuck, that was a solid blow I'd taken.

"Hello, Oisín's Meat Locker. We serve frozen hotdogs for everyday use. You must sign a liability waiver." I bit my lip.

Sloan sighed deeply on the other end.

"Sorry, Boss. I didn't realize it was you," I said, spinning as I danced my way into my office and went to the closet. I took a box off a shelf and tossed it on my desk, then opened the flaps.

"Hmm." That was all he said. Boo. I liked it when I won a little chuckle out of him.

"Did you need me for a job?" I asked in my best annoying tone.

"I want a gift for Grady Maher, and it must be extravagant. Impressive," Sloan said in that sexy, snarly timbre of his that said someone else had pissed him off before he'd called me. I shivered. God, if Conall hadn't snagged him.... Well, who didn't occasionally jerk off to Sloan Killough? I knew I did. If I didn't think Conall would claw my eyes out, I might've slid into Sloan's bed at some point in the last couple of years, ass lubed and ready to go.

"Were you thinking fabulously famous for this present? Because those kinds of gifts require some plotting and time." I took the shock collar I'd purchased for Reed out of the box and held it up, staring at the green leather. It was pretty, perfect for my beast. It would make his eyes stand out. I even thought Sloan would approve—if he didn't still want Reed dead at the bottom of the Hudson, that is.

"If possible."

God, sometimes it was like pulling bones out of a fresh corpse. Why couldn't he just tell me what he wanted? "When?" I asked, frowning at the latch on the back of the waterproof collar. It locked, but Reed could probably break it. I shrugged. If he did, I would buy another.

"Three weeks."

Freezing in my tracks, I stared around the room, then at the reproduction of Starry Nights on the wall in front of my desk. "But Boss.... The plotting and the planning! That isn't much time for something like that."

"If you can't do it, I'm sure I can find someone else who can," he said, a hint of amusement in his tone now.

I bristled. The smooth bastard. He always knew how to get what he wanted out of me, and here I was taking the bait from those sexy fucking hands. Oh well. I shrugged and laughed. "You're really doing this to me? You're going to toy with my pride? I thought you liked me."

"Is that what I'm doing?" He chuckled, a low velvety sound. "Three weeks." The call ended.

Snorting, I tucked my phone back into my pocket. Well, that was nearly zero information to go on. Sloan was either trying to impress Grady Maher for some reason or lull him into a false sense of security. And I had to get some personal info on Grady before I even decided what was worth stealing on that crunched timeline.

This was why I worked for Sloan. I wouldn't have put it past the crafty jerk to sit on the request just because he knew I loved a challenge. Frowning, I examined the small control that had come with the collar and tucked it into my pocket. Yes, Sloan was the best boss. I whistled, the notes echoing off the walls as I wandered back toward the exercise room, giving Reed plenty of time to decide to ambush me. Rolling my achy shoulder, I winced. Maybe I should be more careful, but God, I loved the game. I took my time, moseying onward.

"Oh no, help! A beast has me!" I said in a mock falsetto, practicing what I would say whenever Reed caught me. My stomach warmed. I was so happy we were moving away from his healing time.

Stopping in front of the door to the home gym, I stared straight ahead. Excitement had me wriggling my hips, and I let out a long breath. Adrenaline pelted through my gut, and my cock tingled. Reed wasn't anywhere directly ahead of me. I got another fun little toy out of my pocket—a mini stun gun in a green that matched the collar.

At the exact moment I stepped into the room, thick arms closed around me from the right side, and fuck, it took about three seconds for the air to be knocked out of my lungs. Cobras struck slower than he did. He was warm, just the right amount of sweaty, and smelled so fucking masculine—which was the only combo that would ever bring me willingly to my knees. I spun the stun gun until it was pressed into his snackerific abs and smashed the button with my thumb.

His body stiffened and he groaned, but he didn't let go, so I twisted in his embrace, already knowing I would be bruised later, and glared into his wide eyes.

"Just so we're clear," I said as he dragged air into his lungs and held it. "You don't have the advantage here. I will go for your knee. The body part that hurts so much you don't want to do PT exercises will get my heel ground directly into it. I was born without a conscience."

He narrowed his eyes at me and pursed his lips but stepped back. Shame was clear on his face; although, I doubted it was for disobeying me, as nice as the thought was. No, it was probably because he hadn't bashed my head in and left my brains on the floor.

"Why didn't you take one of those weights to my skull?" I asked.

He wrinkled his nose and glanced away.

"Aw, are we friends now?" I flashed him a wide smile.

My beast growled deep in his throat. "Fuck off with that shit." He crossed his arms. "You always fucking fight dirty," he said, scowl slipping into pout territory, which I normally wouldn't enjoy, but with him, it only amused me further. He slid a hand down to rub his abs. His tank top was singed slightly and there was a hole in it, but he didn't seem to notice. Messed up was a good look for him. His gaze dipped and he stared at the nubs of his sliced fingers for a moment, eyebrows furrowed as though it had slipped his mind that they'd been chopped off. They were healed and easy to forget about until he saw them again, apparently.

I zapped him without warning, and he grunted, shuffling back a step.

"Why did you do that?" he bellowed, glaring at me. The idiot managed to act as if I'd hurt his feelings.

"I wanted to see if I could make a hole big enough to see your abs." I shrugged a shoulder—the one that didn't hurt like a son of a bitch.

"You keep saying this isn't a sex thing." He sounded almost scared and his jaw ticked. Odd.

"It isn't." I grinned up at him. "Now, come here. I bought you a pretty present, and you didn't even put any real effort into killing me." I sighed and dangled the collar on the tip of my fingers right in front of his nose. "Society has gotten so rude these days."

Reed gave me a look like he thought I was crazy, and honestly, he wasn't wrong. My wiring had been crossed at birth, and I was happier than a pig in shit just the way I was.

"There's not a chance in hell you're putting that thing on me." He bared his teeth, a scared beast.

"Don't make me chase you." I pushed the button on the stun gun and it crackled and hurt my ears.

He tensed and stared. "I don't run," he said quietly.

"Not on that knee, you don't. I have it on pretty good authority you ran like a little bitch from Aspen Kavanagh, however." I flashed a smirk at him designed to drive him directly out of his mind, and I was very satisfied when he launched himself at me.

I stepped aside and tugged hard on his tank top to throw him off balance, and with his bum knee, he went down. I sucked in a breath because he caught himself on his arms like he was doing pushups, and I had a split second to jump onto his back and drive him to the floor. He groaned, and I figured I'd probably made him bang up his knee, but by the time he tried to elbow me, I already had the collar around his neck and latched. He rolled to his back and began to pull on the leather while I scrambled away from him. I took my phone out of my pocket and opened the app that controlled the collar—it offered a wider range of settings than the remote. Then, I gave him a simple training shock designed to get his attention.

He gasped and stared at me with his mouth hanging open.

"It can do that or it can really hurt," I said, staring at his prone muscled body. He had some wood, probably from fighting with me, and a tiny frisson of need zipped through me and quickly became a pulsing desire for more. I'd been spending a lot of time working from home because of Reed, and he'd been taking up a lot of my "personal" schedule as well with all this recovering crap.

"Get up," I said.

He sent me a nasty glare. "You won't always have your phone on you, dickhead."

Smirking, I gave him a real shock. The jolt was a step above the training setting—one on a scale of fifteen—and it also wasn't truly designed to injure him.

He moaned, which sent a strange tension slinging through my body, and then he slapped a hand to his crotch, looking down with wide eyes.

"Oh, Beastie likes the zappy zap." I laughed like the asshole I am. "Or at least, your monster likes it?"

He gave me the sourest glare I'd ever received, and I actually felt slightly bad.

"It's okay, everyone likes different things." I rolled my fucked-up shoulder, and the ache made my cock stiff. "I like a little pain. It's like drizzling hot sauce on a burrito. It's good alone, but the spice really kicks things up, you know? We're going back to your cage," I said, hovering my finger over my phone screen. "But I really hope you disagree." I winked, anticipating that he would give me a good reason to shock him again, but he scowled and pulled himself upright before limping toward the door.

I followed him to our room and rubbed my trapped dick as I stared at his round, muscular ass in those shorts. Oh, fuck yeah. The last time I'd had a man over, Reed had pissed on him, and hadn't that been fucking sexy? God. The memories we already had together. I bit my bottom lip.

When we got back to my room, I pointed at the cage while wriggling around the phone. He crawled in and got comfortable. I'd made the cage slightly bigger to accommodate him and had added a better doggy bed. So, he couldn't say he was mistreated, and I didn't have to feel like a bad beast owner. I locked the cage, and he flashed me the finger.

Tapping the training shock setting again made him sit up straighter. I knocked on the top of the cage. "Oh yeah, I can punish you now when you're a shit in there. Want to rethink some of your strategies?" I asked, then pressed a kiss to the glass and winked.

His hand slid down his abs toward the thick cock in his shorts, but when he noticed me watching, he flopped his head back on the doggy bed. "Can you fuck off?"

"Sure," I said, then went over to the bed. I set down the phone and removed my suit jacket and button-down.

"What are you doing?" he asked, voice breathy.

I ignored him and stripped away my under shirt. After a few minutes of sorting dick candidates in my mind, I messaged a local guy who'd been sniffing around after my ass for a while. I was pretty sure he was from one of the other mobs and was trying to get info on me, which wouldn't ever work out for him, but if he wanted to swing his dick into his job life, that was something I was fully willing to take directly into my hole.

Oisín

I want to get fucked.

There, that was clear communication. I added a winky-faced emoji.

Jaska

I can be at your place in ten minutes.

I smirked. Being under surveillance sure was useful. I should probably tell Sloan about him soon or kill him myself, but for now, I simply removed my shoes, socks, and pants.

Oisín

The front door is unlocked.

I used my phone to tap the auto locks on the front door, then stripped off my boxers.

"What...?"

I didn't look at Reed. He had that ragged, turned-on sound in his voice, and I moaned a little as I grabbed the lube off my nightstand. I got my fingers slick and wasted zero seconds leaning over the bed and driving them into my asshole. I spent the time waiting for my on-call dick making sure he wouldn't tear me up because I was under no illusions that this would be a romantic occasion.

When Jaska filled the doorway with his broad shoulders, I had three fingers and a quarter of a bottle of lube worked into my ass. He was worse than I remembered, with a crooked nose from fighting too much and a mean glint in his gray eyes that wasn't exciting, just dull and stupid—the opposite of my beast. His lips were too thin to be attractive and his muscles were boxy, like he only worked out enough to get pumped and wouldn't know what to do with the strength.

"Oh, this is for me?" he asked with a grin. "I thought you would be a slut. I could tell. There's just something about you." He shed his clothes as he walked across the room so that by the time he was at the bed, he was naked with his stubby cock in his hand.

There was a thud from the cage. "You're not doing this," Reed growled. "Not with me here. Not again."

"It's my room. I do whatever I want." Glancing at Reed gave me a delicious thrill. His hands were pressed against the glass and his cock was so hard it was a clear outline in those shorts.

Jaska's gaze briefly landed on the cage, and in that moment of complete unsurprise from him, I knew I should probably start sweeping my house for surveillance. A rush rocketed through me. Oh, fuck, I needed to tell Sloan about this one, but first?—

"There are condoms in the drawer," I said, nodding at the bedside table.

"Not doing that," he said with a smarmy grin. "Kills the sensation."

"Fine. I'm on PrEP, but if I find out you gave me something else, I'll cut your dick off and feed it to you." Before I could slide my fingers out of my ass, he was on me, and I gasped as he jammed his thumb hard into my shoulder in a spot that sent lightning into my brain.

"Looks like your pet isn't trained. He hurt you. Do you let him fuck this hole, too?" Jaska asked. "I'm not used to going second after animals."

Slinging back an elbow, I realized I'd fucked up bad because he hit that spot that hurt again, hard, then clamped a hand around the back of my neck and pushed my face into the mattress. I had trouble breathing and panicked for a second, which gave him the time he needed to push my legs apart and shove all the way into me up to the hilt. I was pissed, which wasn't necessarily a turnoff, and I tried to wriggle off his bare cock, but he slammed in again.

A steady thumping sound in the corner would've had me trying to figure out what my pet was up to, but then Jaska put more pressure on me and started to fuck hard and fast. I'd invited him for this, so I wasn't necessarily upset about the swift turn of events.

Clamping my hand over his wrist, I twisted it until he grunted and let go of my neck, and I turned my head so I could breathe, but he drove a fist into my cheek. Dazed, this took a turn I wasn't expecting—a bad one—and I noticed a gun in his pants pocket on the floor.

Shit, I'd fucked up.

He ground his hips hard against mine and said something I didn't understand, probably in Russian. Well, I miscalculated occasionally, but this time it might really nail me. I began to snicker at my own joke, even as he landed another blow on my cheek.

"So, which bratva do you work for? You know I'm just Sloan's gift service, right? I don't know anything important." I rolled my eyes as my head spun.

"We'll find out about that," he said sweetly into my ear.

I threw an elbow back and caught him in the solar plexus, but he only punched me again and started fucking fast. The hell of it was he was hammering my prostate, and my toes began to curl as pleasure twisted in my gut.

"I'm going to torture you until you look worse than your toy over there," he said, then moaned and drove himself so deep it did hurt a little, despite my careful lube job.

Something that sounded like a bomb exploding finally made him stop drilling me, and Reed dragged himself out of the cage. I had no idea what exactly he'd done to ruin the door of his cage, but he flew across the room and punched Jaska in the face, then threw him into a wall. I rolled to my back, still processing the abrupt emptiness in my body, mesmerized by the display of strength and the bulging muscles. Holy Jesus, was Reed still hard?

Licking my lips, I watched as he beat the man unconscious, then turned toward me with blood on his knuckles and splattered across his face. I groped blindly for my phone, but he rushed over and shoved it off the bed to the floor. I tried to roll off the bed, but I was slow after taking a few shots to the skull and having my ass pounded with zero consideration. He grabbed my shoulders and shoved me onto my back, and I closed my eyes, bracing for death while chuckling.

The sounds in the room stopped.

"Why are you laughing?" Reed asked, voice low and deadly.

"Someone's going to have to come find my body, and when they do, they're gonna be like, Oisín finally fucking found a kink that killed him, and they'll tell everyone else about it. I mean, I'll be dead, but I'll be a fucking legend." I raised my fist into the air. "Legendary."

He grabbed my thighs—which was weird because I mostly expected him to just choke me to death—and spread them. I cracked an eye and gasped at the thick, long cock waving around in front of him. Oh, holy Mother Mary, he didn't just have a weapon, he had a whole arsenal. His shorts were gone. The look he gave me sent shivers of dread and need dancing down my spine.

"Is this what you were trying to get from me?" he asked, voice like rocks pounding together. "Is this why you've been jerking off at night while I'm in the cage with nothing to do but watch you? Why you walked in here naked from the shower?"

"I think you overestimate the amount of actual planning that goes into most parts of my life," I said with a grin I couldn't have held in, even with a gun pointed at me—and there was an impressive one waving around right there.

He grabbed my hips and dragged me to the edge of the bed while staring into my eyes.

"My beast is strong," I mumbled, feeling like I was high. Maybe the hamster that ran on the wheel in my brain had been shaken loose.

"You want to let dirt like that fuck you?" he asked, and the outrage in his tone sent goose bumps racing over my skin. "That tattoo on his neck is from the Nevsky Bratva."

"I'm ready to be fucked right now," I said, hooking my foot behind his muscled thigh in the hopes of coaxing him closer. "And I promise you, I don't care who does it."

"After this, you will," he growled, then lifted my hips so that my ass was in the air rather than bending down to get into a better position. He dragged me onto his cock, muscles bulging, and I nearly fainted at the sight.

"Jesus, go easy on us mere mortals, Beastie."

When he smashed directly into my prostate with that monster he hadn't been able to hide from me, my eyes rolled back in my head, and the floaty feeling that washed over me probably wasn't from a concussion—I hoped.

"Fuck, that's tight." He gasped, sounding as if he'd actually been surprised.

I squeezed around him, and his muscles trembled.

"Everything with me is better," I said, forcing my eyes open so I could wink at him.

"Well, at least you got an Irish cock in you now," he snarked, which shook a small laugh out of me.

"Oh, now you want to claim the Irish parts, huh?"

There was no more talking after that. He just fucked, and I held on for the ride.