Given the nature of the Jungle's clientele, the club had a mask policy. Everybody wore one, including the staff, with the only exceptions the owner and two men with the authority to act on the owner's behalf. Ares, Alexa's friend and the man who had conducted her entrance interview, was one of those unmasked three. When he'd met her at the entrance, he'd handed her a domino that concealed the upper half of her face. The mask depicted the stylized features of a lioness. Maybe under different circumstances she would've risen to the challenge, become a confident sex kitten. Tonight, not so much.
As she followed Ares into the heart of the club, she tried to regain her center. There was nothing more dangerous than going into a scene with your head in the wrong place.
Except tigers.
Tigers were more dangerous.
Lily stopped walking as an orange-furred beast leapt across the path in front of her. The large animal was chasing a woman, a real woman with two legs-not a shifter that she could tell-and she couldn't help but wonder what the tiger would do when he caught his prey.
Ares paused and turned back, wearing the sort of patient, expectant expression perfected by every dominant man worth his salt. She had questions, but as she met his eyes, she realized she didn't want to stop to ask them. She didn't want to think, period, so she composed her features behind her mask and picked up the pace.
During her pre-entry interview with Ares, they'd discussed what sorts of scenarios she wanted to explore as well as her limits, so it was easy to put herself in his expert hands and let go of the mental noise. As they made their way deeper into the club, the rhythms of the tribal music seemed to suppress the natural pace of her pulse. With the atmosphere as foreplay, she was more than ready by the time Ares finished binding her to a whipping post and handed her over to some faceless man with a strong arm, just as she'd requested.
The first clue that she'd made the wrong choice came to her as she waited in tense anticipation of the initial lash. Not knowing what her top looked like left a mental void that Jude's face quickly filled. In her mind's eye, he stood in front of her with a leather whip in hand, studying her with hooded gaze and hot, lustful intent. Just the look of him sent a wet flood to her pussy, filling her with a longing that went far deeper than flesh.
The second clue came from the anonymous man behind her. As he landed his first stroke, sending a lick of fire into the muscle of her hip, her nerve endings shrieked and her entire body locked up in objection. Her eyes flew open and Jude's image disintegrated. As it did, she fell back into the thick green jungle setting. The man at her back struck again, catching her inner thigh with the very tip of a leather tail. The fiery lash landed so close to her sex that her thoughts scattered and her body took over. Damn the clues, her core seemed to say as it clenched eagerly. This is what you need.
* * *
Jude grimly stalked through the club, contemptuously cutting through the lust-drunk crowd. Human and shifter alike wallowed in pleasures that dulled the senses, rendering them oblivious to the violence in their midst. It was good that they were blind. The fewer people who knew about the latest attack, the better, but at the same time, he knew-he fucking knew-that the sexual haze was what appealed to the bastard. Only a suicidal fool would strike in the midst of a high concentration of sharp, alert shifters.
Beasts drugged by their mating urges were another matter. There was a reason the Kings had created the Jungle. Several reasons, among them protecting individual shifters from danger while at their most vulnerable, while also protecting the shifter population from one person's screw up.
There had always been risks. Gathering as a crowd meant someone of a mind to take out a large group would have ample opportunity, for one thing, but the benefits had balanced the dangers. So far, the pluses still won, but how long would they?
He passed a semi-private grotto where a voluptuous, dark-haired woman knelt on all fours with the bulky figure of a bear shifter sniffing at her ass and his gut twisted. The sudden burn of adrenaline, the instinct to attack that surged through him answered that question.
Lily had begun coming to the Jungle. Nothing outweighed the danger, not anymore, not with his queen in the middle of the target zone.
The woman in the grotto wasn't her, but that knowledge didn't settle his lion. The big cat stalked inside him, eyes burning, muscles rippling with its desire to tear the world down in order to get to its mate. Jude located one of the hidden doors that gave access to staff areas and ducked into an empty corridor, where he followed the baseboard lights to a sub-level containment room kept for the sole purpose of dealing with shifters who violated the Jungle's laws.