CHAPTER 3

COLD NIPS AT my toes and I huddle for my blankets. My palm swipes over a hirsute tuft of fur. The warmth beckons me toward it, my fingers running through then clenching the long hair.

“Morning,” a voice rumbles from the depths of hell.

With a jerk, my eyes fly open. My fingers are buried in a mound of ebony fur. I blink in confusion at where I am, who I am, and what’s going on—then a hand cups over mine. It’s got gray skin wrapped around massive fingers with jet-black claws. Veins throb below the hard flesh that doesn’t just dwarf my hand but swallows it whole.

I scurry back in a panic, forgetting to unclench my fingers. Hair tears from the pallid flesh. A low, earth-shaking grunt erupts from the monster. I wrench my arm to my chest and keep scooting across a bed bigger than my bedroom. As I crawl across it to escape him, the monster lowers his feet to the floor and stands.

The bed bucks, hurling me like a trampoline. I yelp as I fly into the air, missing the shadowed stranger in his floor-length cloak. The hood is still pulled up, disguising whatever’s beneath. He moves like an iceberg—steady, slow, and as if he’s hiding so much more than what I can see.

I blink in the low light of the room. There’s a hint of white peeking through the edge of a window frame, but heavy curtains hang in front of it. All I can make out in the shadows is the strange creature shuffling to a dark corner of the room. Wood creaks with a painful strain, and I realize he’s sat down. To do what?

From deep inside the hood, red eyes ignite right at me.

A man staring at me in bed sets off an explosion of self-consciousness. I wrap my arms up over my chest without thinking and remember the stupid thin nightie I never put on. Shame turns to anger. “What the hell is this?” I snarl and wad up a blanket to try to cover myself. Warm tawny fur wraps over my chest as I try to glare menacingly at the eight-foot-tall demon in the corner.

“Not much for pleasantries, I see.” I know I heard a few words before, but the full sentence wrenches my head around. So it’s a giant, furry, talking monster. Great.

“You kidnapped me!” I shout, staring around a bedroom that is not mine. I certainly don’t remember my bed being large enough to sleep a baseball team. But as I try to piece together the last few hours, pain tears up my brain. The memories aren’t coming and thinking about them hurts. In a plaintive cry, I beg, “Right?”

Steam puffs from his nose. “In a way.”

“What other way is there? You took me. Grabbed me, threw me on your huge…” Muscular. Bulging. “…shoulders, and took me.”

A deep chuckle shakes from him. He leans forward, the chair crying out. “Would you have preferred to remain where I found you?”

Chains. There were chains around my… I touch my wrist only for pain to bite up my arm. A yelp slips free and the creature shifts in his chair. “Don’t!” I cry out, my heart beating faster than before. Tears prick in my eyes, but I don’t want him to see. “Just stay there! Don’t move!”

Gray palms raise from the darkness, open to appear nonthreatening. The claws cause me to gulp. Those things look razor-sharp. Not the kind of guy you want getting anywhere near your pussy unless he files them down to nubs.

And why the hell did I think about getting finger-banged by a giant, clawed monster?

A memory invades of warmth gliding up my body like a hand tracing my spine. No, not a hand. A…

He had his… And that thing was…

Did I almost…?

My buttocks clench—maybe out of fear, maybe out of trying to remember that huge shaft that pressed between them. Feeling more self-conscious than before, I yank the fur up higher to try to bury myself. The tanned leather on the backside catches on my nipples and I can’t stop the gasp of both pain and pleasure.

A guttural moan answers me.

I fight through the darkness to see him properly. His hands are still up, but the red eyes are closed. Just how hard is he right now? My palm flexes as if it wants to go check, and I slap it down.

“Who are you? Why did you kidnap me? Where are we?” The questions shoot out rapid fire, my brain drowning out my trauma-induced libido. But as I stare across his arms and flash to those biceps that’d been pinned against my back, I ask with quaking breath, “What are you…?”

His head shifts, the hood folding oddly at the top like he’s wearing a crown underneath it. “Which should I answer first?”

Where am I? Why am I here? What happened? One second I was chained up in a creepy man’s mansion, the next I’m rolling around on some Viking bed with a man dressed like an animal. It’s not all a total dealbreaker, but I’d like to know what’s going on first.

The slow clop I’d heard while hanging from my wrists echoes around the room. My pitiful eyes are drawn to movement. As I peel through the shadows, I reach the end of his robe where a hoof nervously bounces against the floor. “What are you?” tumbles from me.

He chuckles in a baritone so deep my body collapses into shivers. “That is answered by who I am.”

“And that is…?”

He pauses a while. His eyes drift up and down me. At this point, I’m a furry blob under all the blankets, but he’s seen me in this thin lingerie. Touched me. Held me against his chest while his cock slid up my bare skin.

“What may I call you?” he asks, deflecting my question.

“Amaya,” I say. “Now it’s your turn.”

“Tell me something, Amaya, do you believe?”

“Believe?” I scoff. “Like…in God or Jesus?” Holy shit, was I rescued by some Viking Mormon in a fur suit?

The chair squeaks, the wood threatening to split, as he stands to his feet. I gulp, realizing I have to lift my chin almost all the way up to see his head near the ceiling. His glowing eyes never leave mine as he peers down at me.

“Do you believe in suffering? In pain?”

My jaw drops. I try to swallow, but can’t remember, saliva building in my throat like acid. Air can’t come in as I stare at the man with forearms bigger than my calves.

A hint of light pierces through the shadows of his hood. I can just make out his lips, gray as fireplace dust. They tick up with a devious smile as he asks in his wall-shaking baritone, “In punishment?”

He wields that word not like a weapon but a tool. Instead of a sword for cleaving heads, it’s a switch to tan buttocks. I glance at his hand which could cup my whole head and gulp. He doesn’t need a switch to do that. One hard spank would have me believing in whatever he wants.

Mouth hanging, I try to stare up into his eyes. A hint of his face lurks below, but I can’t make out much. Do I really want to sign up for punishment from a man I can’t even see?

“Yes?” slips out of me. As it does, my lungs plummet, reminding me how to breathe. I suck the air in hard, but it comes back out in spurts. He stares down at me, a calm hand raised as if he’s about to cup my chin.

Before he touches me, he leans back. Those hooves stomp on the floor as he turns and walks back toward the darkness. On the edge of shadow and light, he pauses. “That’s who I am,” he says. “I’m punishment.”

The robe plummets from his body, and my jaw goes with it.

Gray, glistening skin. So many muscles. A line of black fur curving over the top of his ass. That ass! A tail covered in the same fur. The end swishes, revealing gold hoops pierced through the white tip. I try to watch, but my eyes keep going back to his ass. Oh fuck me, it’s so round but also defined. I could bounce a steel safe off of that thing, and it’d bean me in the head.

Just as I’m trying to figure out how to climb over and take a bite of his apple bottom, he pivots his head. Nearly everything is left in the shadows, but I catch the tip of his nose. His eye glows from the side as he declares, “But most know me as…” He grins wickedly and his tongue curls out. Then it keeps going and going, and… Holy shit!

With a nimble twelve-inches wagging in the air, he declares, “Krampus.”

My body shuts down as the monster, this Krampus, throws open the door and walks away. All the while, he swishes his tail, the gold hoops jangling like a soft carol of bells.