Grayling: Nocturnal Creatures Book 3 Read online

  She brought her forearm to her mouth and ran her tongue over the blood as she had his upon the blade, flaunting her injury the way whores flaunted their breasts over a low bodice.

  The captain rubbed his knuckles—the same ones that had struck her cheek—over his mouth, burning gaze fixed upon where her tongue traced the scratches.

  “Is this what you want, captain?” She barely recognized the huskiness in her own voice. “Do you want your teeth in my flesh, as his was? As you want his teeth in yours?”

  He roared as he leaped again, but this time, his roar called to the same wildness in her that it always had, and she screamed, not in pain but from the overwhelming need in her tightened chest to be uncaged, unleashed, unhinged, to run until her soles were bloody, to close her teeth around raw flesh and rend it from the bone. The roar conjured memory of the blood that had spread through her mouth, of the man’s throat between her teeth and the satisfaction that had accompanied tearing the man’s scream from him, holding it in her mouth as his warm blood had flooded her face.

  They clashed in the air. Even with his roar still ringing in her no longer broken bones, and though she plunged her blades into his shoulders, he bowled her over, gripping her arms and digging his claws in as he kept her from freefalling. He eased her onto the ground. It was not a display of gentleness but of mastery.

  She yanked her blades from his shoulders. His blood fell like warm summer rain onto her nightgown.

  He barely noticed how she had wounded him but stared intently at the continued blooming of red over the thin white. The fabric stuck to her skin wherever the blood struck.

  He crouched, a massive creature as he rested her upon the carpet, his shadow covering her as though it were his body. The sight of her soiled gown drew his fingers to the nipples the king had made tight and hard and which had not since changed, aroused as her body had remained under the effects of fear and desire.

  His hands trembled, and her breathing shallowed more, dizzying her head. She struggled to keep her eyes open and upon his, because to close her eyes would be to yield, and she was not ready.

  She tore through the leather covering his thigh.

  He reeled back, a growl rolling through his shout like thunder. Blood darkened the leather. The captain grasped the ribbons left by her blades and jerked them away, yanking until his erection fell from the opening, bobbing under its weight yet struggling to stay upright from need. It was as aggressive and intimidating as when she had first caught a glimpse of it—thick and flushed dark red, veined, the foreskin completely pulled away from the glistening head. His erection was as frightening as his bared teeth, and his crazed fury as terrible as his feral cruelty.

  Lust, pure and wild in the aftershock of his roar, coursed between her legs and lifted her hips, though she scrambled away. Her heels slipped over the carpet as she struggled backward. Keeping her hands in fists to hold the blades meant she did not have the dexterity or balance on them she might have had otherwise.

  He crawled toward her, stalking her again, and this time she knew she would not escape.

  Asha kicked at his face, but he caught her ankle and twisted, forcing her onto her stomach to avoid breaking more bones. He kicked her legs apart, pinned her gown to the carpet with his knees. His heavy cock rested against her buttocks, seeming larger and thicker when she could only feel it.

  The captain’s growl purred over her spine like hot water, but she elbowed his ribs. He grunted yet did not budge. She scratched at his hips and his outer thighs with one hand, the other bracing herself against his weight. He grabbed her wrist, then pinned it to the stone so hard that the tiny bones ground against each other.

  “Let them go,” he insisted.

  But she shook her head and struggled harder against his hold, trying to pull herself out from under him by digging her other blades into the carpet. The thin fabric of her skirt tore away from his knees, and she wriggled forward a few seconds.

  He grabbed the back of her gown. The entire room resounded with the sound as he rent it from neck to past her waist. She froze, he froze, and cotton fell to either side of her back from her panting.

  The captain stroked over the expanse of skin unbroken by gown or wound, only the scars from the executioner’s favorite whippings. Then he released his hold on her wrist to take both sides of her torn gown, yanking it all the way down to the hem of the already damaged skirts. He threw what he could of the remnants away and snatched both wrists just as she tried to rear back and claw at him. He pulled her up onto her knees in front of him, bent her arms to press them between her breasts. He clenched her against his oppressive heat, all the more oppressive with her fever returned in full force at the promise of his presence.

  “You fought well, frail breed. Now give in to me,” he growled against her hair.

  She struggled against his hold, knowing well how fruitless it was.

  He shifted his grip so that one hand contained both wrists, then smoothed his touch down her bare abdomen. He hesitated when his fingertips brushed against the hair just before the juncture of her thighs.

  His chest heaved, growls spilling from his mouth with each deep breath. Then he sank his fingers between her legs.

  Both of them moaned—she to have touch over her folds and stroking through where the fever had focused itself; he to have his fingers come away wet. Her hips moved to keep him against her, especially when he found that place just below her mound that quickened her pleasure so easily.

  He forced her wrists down to the carpet again. Though he let her go, he promptly grabbed her by the back of the neck and shoved her face down. Her swollen cheek pressed against the carpet. She swung her hands out, but the angle was difficult, and by the time she had figured out how to bend her arms in order to reach him, he had her shuddering from his persistent, relentless strokes, making her writhe for reasons other than a fight. And every time she did struggle, it forced her buttocks higher in the air like an animal’s call to mate, and his grip on her neck tightened.

  “This is what you wanted, little girl,” he said through gritted teeth.

  “You denied me, wolf.” She managed to slice his hip just as he rubbed harder over her folds.

  Her cry at such harsh pleasure climbed into one mingled with pain, and he brought the head of his cock to her cunt. He did not hesitate now but stretched her wide, keeping her face pressed to the ground. He grunted, his hair tickling her back, his forehead between her shoulder blades as he buried himself within her.

  Asha stopped struggling, her mouth open against the carpet weave, her body narrowed to the part of her wrapped—tight, soft, wet, clinging—around him, and where he pressed the pads of his fingers, though he had stopped stroking.

  He nearly fell forward, his hand slipping from her neck. He slammed it to the carpet next to her face and pushed his hips forward to take her completely.

  She did not know why she was different for him, that he would stalk, hunt, resist, give in and lose control within her, that he would go through all the trouble and energy when he had been inside so many more. She did not understand his motivations or what about her could possibly merit his trembling and the fist he made by her face, claws digging into his palms and drawing his own blood.

  But he was one of few for her, each of the four special to her, because she had unlocked the five hundred padlocks she had hooked into her skin to let them in. And she could compare him inside her to nothing else.

  “You fucking bitch.” The words wrenched from his chest as though spoken from the stone. He pushed himself up, pulling back, the bloody fist taken from her sight. Then he twisted his dripping hand into her hair, mashing her face into the carpet as he shoved back into her.

  She screwed her eyes shut, turning her head just enough to almost hide them as she wailed, salt prickling behind her eyelids. She scrabbled the blades over the carpet, tearing it—she doubted the servants would be able to do anything more now than discard it—but not to escape.

  He could n
ot grab her right hand with his fist in her hair, but he took the left, grinding the bones of the wrist as he began to fuck her.

  “Let them go.” He punctuated his command with the slow glide of his cock back into her, finishing it with a harsh thrust.

  Asha’s fingers creaked as she loosened them from around the specialized handle. The blades fell silver and bright against the red carpet.

  He released her wrist to swipe at them, knocking them out of her reach.

  His erection inside her kept her grounded to him as he hitched her hips farther up. The change in position dragged her legs back to align with his, and he held her face just above the carpet, so that even when she sagged, her weight was in his fist. She could not just let her head hang, could not hide her face from him anymore.

  “You have a hand free now. Touch yourself, little girl. If you do not come before me, I shall be most displeased. I barely had any resistance entering you. You cannot deny how you wanted me, how you melt to think of me. He may have bound himself to you in marriage, but how you have wanted this, if just having me force myself within you brings you so close.”

  “We will see who succumbs first, wolf,” Asha said through clenched teeth, but she brought her free hand between her legs to stroke where he had abandoned.

  “This is not a suggestion, spoiled kitten. I tell you to come before me, so you will exert every effort to do…as…you…are…told.” Now that he had a solid grip on her hair and her hip, he moved in earnest, each thrust a declaration, a command, an exclamation, a possession.

  The sounds, oh God, the sounds—of his legs and his hips striking her thighs and buttocks, the rolling vibration of his bestial growls, the clicking of his teeth like flint. The heat from him and the heat inside her fed upon each other, until everywhere his skin touched her burned. Her hair was damp at the nape and around her forehead, beads sprouting from dry skin as though it were the middle of summer and she knelt before a stove while a storm prepared to strike—that thick, oppressive air before the rain washed it away. But the oppression was in her throat like an obstruction, stealing her air before her gasps could make use of it.

  His shaft passed through her fingers at every downstroke. He drew out the wetness of her arousal, passed it from her fingers to her folds, until everything happening between her legs became one complicated machine—moving parts, mechanical motion, slick as oil, hot as a forge’s fire—and its production their pleasure together. He grew so hard and hot inside her, it was just short of painful, because his erection had no give. But she was pliable enough for the both of them, her spine like liquid instead of bone.

  “Damn it,” he snarled. He bent down, twisting her head for access to her ear. “Come now. After everything you have done to me, I am nowhere near through with you.”

  The captain closed his teeth over her lobe, his growl turned soft—but not tender—as though he told her as a wolf what he needed from her. And as his roar had called the wild in her, so did that soft growl spilling into her mind. She tore four massive lines down the carpet, scraping against the stone, as fire exploded behind her closed eyes. His growl turned into a terrible groan when her cunt undulated thin and strong around him and a new wave of hot arousal squeezed out of her, unable to fit with him inside.

  “Keep going, little girl. How long can you grip me with your cunt? I already know you are capable of tormenting me, but how long can you manage this particular torture?”

  He bit her cheek, her jaw, kissed and scraped his teeth over her neck, thrusting through her orgasm. This was just another fight, one that had him panting against her and her bearing down on him until she could not hold her breath anymore and gasped out completion.

  She reached out with her filthy hand to brace herself on the carpet, but just when she had found her equilibrium again, he yanked her upright, his body flushed against hers. She could not balance herself against anything, reached everywhere and found nothing to ground her—only his body when she fumbled behind her, her right blades scratching at his outer thigh.

  The captain shouted, the edges of it laced with a roar that had her cunt clenching in aftershocks. His cock throbbed and swelled thicker, stretching her already stretched thin flesh. He flooded her with his heat, indistinguishable from her own desire in the way her body responded to it, tendrils curling to their greatest tension, thorns digging deep to draw lust instead of blood, and the winter heat of him meeting hers. His seed, far more potent and heated than the king’s own, seeped down her thigh as he continued to thrust. Like the king, a single spending seemed not to thwart or flag his desire in the slightest.

  He slapped her thigh hard once, twice, three, four times as his hips jerked through the last pulses. She whimpered from the power behind his blows. Though she flinched, Asha would have wanted him to continue, but it lasted only through the final throes of his orgasm.

  Then he took her unbladed, grasping hand in his, overlapping her fingers before sliding them through to hold her hand in the same possessive way he contained her body. Her hands appeared skeletal in comparison, so pale against his darkened, rough skin. He was giant against her, more than twice her size and more than ten times her strength, burning and furious. Though he had gentled his touch, the edge of his teeth still scraped against her neck as he kissed the healing and newly wounded places left behind by the king, tasting the salt of blood and sweat where it dripped down her neck and chest.

  “How dare you.”

  The bitterness in the captain’s quiet, clipped words made her sweat turn cold.

  He withdrew his erection from her, undulated his hips to smear his come and her wetness over her buttocks and back, shifting her to mark her in more ways and in different angles. His cock branded wherever it touched. With her cunt gaping as it adjusted to the sudden emptiness, his cock seemed bigger still when it was against her body but she could not see it, touch it, take it in hand.

  He kept his grip on one hand and clawed her forearm when she tried to use her bladed hand to feel him for herself.

  “How dare you not be wolf,” he said softly, his mouth to her ear. “How dare you be his. I was barred from ever walking the paths that would have brought me to you. We cannot step within the kingdom except to enter the castle. We cannot mingle with his subjects, for we are too inhuman. I could never have met you, marked you, bitten you with the wolf’s teeth to make you one of mine.”

  He abruptly slid his free hand around her neck. His wrist and fingers flexed, but though she was light-headed, her vision did not go dark.

  “Instead, you walk around with his mark, his scent, his thrall like incense emanating from your skin and your blood. Yet your body attunes to mine even when you do not know I watch over you, as though every move intends to enflame my lust, even when I no longer abstain and should not fly to flame so quickly. You should not need steel to fight me, and you should not have had to climb walls to enter my den. How dare you belong to any flesh but mine, when you could have been so much more vicious. Your wildness could have had teeth and claws to rend and tear and bleed the men that condemned you. We could have shared their bodies rather than just the man’s throat torn into your mouth and held in your hand for me to feed upon.”

  He jerked her thighs open to enter her again. She bit her lip. Did he just keep growing and growing, or had she become more sensitive? The fluids that he had not smeared on her smoothed his way, his heat too great for them to have cooled, thickened, or dried.

  “When your gravestone graces the cemetery, you will be gone, forever out of my reach, and all of this will have been for nothing. Damn you, Cyric. She should have been mine.”

  The king said not a word in response, and Asha could not bring herself to turn to him when her mind and body was filled with his captain.

  Her second set of blades clattered on the stone. She reached behind her to knot her fingers through his mane. The captain licked and kissed her palm, then jerked her head back to take her mouth. Everything about him was carnal, wet, filthy, wicked, feral
. She did not know how he had enough within him to speak coherence. When her brittle nails tore his scalp, he caught her lip between his teeth, sending his growls down her throat as though she swallowed them.

  The captain lifted her off his cock by her throat, dangled her in the air with her legs trailing on the carpet, then shook her like a master to a cur until she went limp. He spun her around to face him before throwing her farther down the carpet, nearer but not yet to her bed, if he ever intended getting her into it at all.

  His body creaked with his effort to keep himself from changing as he stalked her once more. She winced as she pushed herself up, but in a matter of moments, he was upon her, staring straight into her eyes, his face as contorted as when he had accepted her challenge to fight.

  But though he took her throat in his grip again, he did not lay a hand upon her in anger. He kissed her as he had in the passage room, with no effort at controlling his passions, frustration and need mingling until it was all the same grasping, clutching, coveting desire that had him guiding her onto her back. When she brought her hands above her head in remembrance, he caught them with his other hand again, and brought his hips to hers.

  She spread her legs, wrapped them around him with all the strength and conviction she could not show with her arms, and urged him forward to claim her for the third, fifth, hundredth time. She had lost count of his claims, small as most of them had been in hindsight—each one a reluctance, each one another terrible, angry cut that he had hidden within his eyes, cold crystalline pieces of ice glinting in his wolfish irises, and as subtly painful to him as they had been to her.

  He kept her pinned by her neck and hands as he wrenched up to toss his mane and howl at the ceiling with a harsher, more bestial release. He pounded into her without regard for the bruises he had created or was creating, yet she kept her legs wrapped as tightly around him as she could, rough moans joining his howl. It made her rise to meet him, rise to release with him, an alpha she had chosen rather than one that demanded her allegiance.