The Flesh Cartel #5: Wins and Losses

“Hold on to me,” he whispered, like a lover, in Dougie’s ear.
Dougie, fingers trembling, fisted both hands around Nikolai’s restraining arm. For a moment, all was stillness, Nikolai’s warm breath on the nape of his neck, Nikolai’s strong steady heartbeat against his shoulder blade. And then there was only agony, and screaming, and tears, and the warm firm security of a solid body at his back and soothing hands at his front and a voice murmuring in his ear that everything was going to be all right.
He wanted so desperately to believe it that for a precious little while, he let it fool him.
    As much as Nikolai wanted to be lenient with the boy, consistency was, as always, key. Follow-through. So after a few long, lovely minutes rocking him and shushing him and kissing his hair, he sent him off to the bathroom with a kindly pat on the bottom.
    Then he chose a new plug for Douglas to wear, big as two cocks at its widest point but without the vibration capabilities of the last two. A small kindness, not that Douglas would appreciate it properly.
    The boy cried as it was being inserted, but, all manners, tearfully thanked Nikolai after. His progress today was heartening to say the least, although Nikolai wasn’t fool enough to think it would be a permanent change. Not yet.
    But for now, he’d let himself enjoy it. So when Douglas’s tears stopped, Nikolai had the boy kneel and take his master’s cock in that sweet pink mouth. Swallow Nikolai’s seed.
    Another breathless “thank you” followed, nearly melting Nikolai’s heart. He had to forcibly remind himself the boy was probably just grateful that Nikolai hadn’t made him swallow his urine, as well. He hated making threats like that; it tainted the purity and enjoyment of everything that came after. But sometimes threats were the best method for procuring the required results, and this one had certainly delivered. For all the boy’s apparent softness, he’d clearly learned a thing or two about toughness and pride from his brother. Not to mention his knowledge of the human mind. He was a tricky case indeed. A beautiful puzzle. A challenging one. One Nikolai was delighting in solving.
    The brother. The next step was severing the boy’s connection with his brother. Until that happened, Douglas would never truly be his.
    Fortunately, he knew precisely how to go about that.

    to be continued in the

flesh
    #6: b r o the rh oo d

cartel
    www.riptidepublishing.com/titles/flesh-cartel-6-brotherhood also by Bookended

heidi belleau
    With Violetta Vane:
Mark of the Gladiator
Galway Bound
The Druid Stone
The War at the End of the World
Hawaiian Gothic
“Salting the Earth,” a short story in the anthology Like It or Not Cruce de Caminos
Harm Reduction
The Saturnalia Effect
    also by

rachel haimowitz
    Power Play: Resistance, with Cat Grant Power Play: Awakening, with Cat Grant Master Class (Master Class, #1) Sublime: Collected Shorts (Master Class, #2) Counterpoint (Song of the Fallen, #1) Crescendo (Song of the Fallen, #2) Anchored (Belonging, #1)
Where He Belongs (Belonging, #2) Break and Enter, with Aleksandr Voinov
    about the

authors
    Heidi Belleau was born and raised in small town New Brunswick, Canada. She now lives in the rugged oil-patch frontier of Northern BC with her husband, an Irish ex-pat whose long work hours in the trades leave her plenty of quiet time to write. She has a degree in history from Simon Fraser University with a concentration in British and Irish studies; much of her work centred on popular culture, oral folklore, and sexuality, but she was known to perplex her professors with unironic papers on the historical roots of modern romance novel tropes. (Ask her about Highlanders!) When not writing, you might catch her trying to explain British television to her newborn daughter or standing in line at the local coffee shop, waiting on her caramel macchiato.
    You can find her tweeting as @HeidiBelleau, email her at [email protected], or visit her blog:
http://heidi-below-zero.blogspot.com.
    Rachel is an M/M erotic romance author, a freelance writer and editor, and the Managing Editor of Riptide Publishing. She’s also a sadist with a pesky conscience, shamelessly silly, and quite proudly pervish. Fortunately, all those things make writing a lot more fun for her . . . if not so much for her characters.
    When she’s not writing about hot guys getting it on (or just plain getting it; her characters rarely escape a story