Grayling: Nocturnal Creatures Book 3 Page 30

  It was as though she became the crimson mist herself, and her mind, for a brief moment, ceased.

  All that was left was sensation. Of being stretched, yet welcome to the intrusion. The possessiveness of the captain’s claws over her hips. The bruising blows of his hipbones against her thighs. The slap of his scrotum against her. The agonizing brush of hair and fur and flesh when he ground and rocked against her. Ropes all around her, tight against the movement of her blood, the pressure of them. The protest even in her relaxed muscles at the unnatural position. The blunt push of the king’s cock in her mouth. The taste of his blood and precome. The way both men seemed to impale her. The gentle massage of the king’s claws over her neck to counter the captain’s violence.

  “Now, my love,” he said with some strain, attempting to sound in control, “Drink of me.”

  He withdrew enough to give her both blood and seed to taste as she drank from him, mindless and hungry for everything he could offer. The king gave a raspy shout at the intensity and let loose thick thread after thread of his pleasure over her tongue to join his blood.

  She milked him for everything he was worth, craving beyond his capacity. He had to ease from her mouth with a groan when she did not stop. She whimpered when he took himself from her.

  The king fell to his knees, pressed a kiss to her forehead, hovered his mouth over hers but resisted his own craving with clear effort—especially when the captain howled at the ceiling, tearing his claws down her hips as he pounded into her without the king to distract. Her whole body jolted with every thrust. The king held her head again to save her neck the protest.

  “What do you desire, Ashling? I will give you everything.”

  The force of the captain’s fucking broke her creature’s scream, but she made one word clear as she sent the full measure of her thrall toward the one still inside her. “Harder.”

  But the wolf was not enough, despite the stinging pain that sang through her. She still needed more. She needed both. She needed the king inside her, more intimate than his cock in her mouth or her cunt. She needed him inside completely.

  “Bite me.”

  The king grabbed her by her loose hair, jerked her head to the side, and plunged his teeth into her neck. Asha made the whole scaffold shake from her trembling alone. She lost grip on her own thrall under the influence of his. Whatever happened to hers must have been just as powerful, though, because the captain clutched at the ropes that held her arms and surged forward to take her breast between his teeth, breaking the skin even as he tendered the stone-hard nipple with his rough tongue.

  The change in her position brought the king up on his knees, brought all three closer to each other. The hungry, wet sounds from the men as they feasted in new ways surrounded her, the gasps and moans amplified in the dense air around them. Her body seized and clamped down around the captain’s swelling cock. She shook through her thunderstorm of an orgasm—lightning and thunder contained under the thin, strong barrier of her skin—and the captain froze as he came inside her, great hot pulses she could feel with the breaking of her own fever.

  The king stroked her damp brow and continued to drink from her until her veins had almost emptied and he forced himself away, with all the reluctance he would have had if she had still held human blood within her vessels. Hunger of a more prosaic variety returned, but she did not fear starvation.

  The captain remained within her, absorbing every twitch and ripple of her cunt through the aftermath. The teeth digging into her breast became less sharp. He rested his head between her breasts, panted hot breath against her cooling abdomen. His weight on top of her made the scaffold creak.

  The king stroked the captain’s tangled mane, kissed Asha’s neck through its healing, long after the last bit of blood had been licked from her. Asha used his shoulder to rest her head, he and the ropes support for her body and the captain’s.

  Eventually, the king tapped the captain’s shoulder. “Wake up. Take her in your arms while I unravel the rope.”

  The captain knelt between her legs and brought his arms under her back as the rope unknotted and unwove with the king’s magic. She could have caught herself, but she was too absent in her own body, and the captain was more than strong enough to catch her when the ropes no longer kept her aloft.

  The captain drew her from the last of the ropes. Holding her in his arms, he stood and carried her to the bed while the king tended to the scaffold. Once the rope had been wrapped and tidied, the king shed the last of his clothing, hooded gaze upon them.

  The captain retrieved the wolfskin from the foot of her bed. She had not needed it since the king had left. The captain wrapped her in it now. Before the transformation, she could not have known how musky, clinging, and intoxicating the scent could be.

  “If I cannot have you as pack, I would still have the scent of wolf upon you.” He breathed her in at the nape of her neck. “Close enough for a dream. No more of this useless attempt to cleanse your scent from your skin, little girl. You are too wild for such domestic pastimes.”

  “And if I bathe in human blood instead?” she asked over her shoulder.

  “Do not tempt me to find you victims, my queen.” He found the places on her neck that the king had ravaged—healed already, but still with the memory of the king’s touch to amplify that of the captain’s. He wrapped her in his arms as tightly as the wolfskin, taking possession of whatever fistfuls of her he could find until he had the wolfskin spread beneath her and her bare to him, tucked against his body with his cock awake again and sliding against her skin.

  “With the arrival of the full moon, should you not control yourself, enchain your need for the moon’s release? Should you not be taking your frustration out on your queen and pack alike?” She licked her longest teeth in relish as he forced his fingers between her thighs, drawing them apart with deep strokes through her folds.

  “Not this moon,” he murmured roughly, unwilling to move his mouth from her flesh for one moment. “They need release, not restraint. I would not deny them.”

  “Them, or yourself?”

  He bit at her shoulder, used the lubrication of his semen dripping from her cunt to ease his way back in with dexterous, dangerous fingers. “Would you rid yourself of me?”

  Asha found herself responding to his fervor and heat with her own, as though the last fever had not truly broken. “I would chain you to the bed myself if you thought to deny me.”

  “I could use you all night if given the chance. If you believe that you and the king have depleted me, you are gravely mistaken.”

  “I should hope so.” The king climbed onto the bed to join them, first kissing Asha’s navel, then the curve of her ribs, the captain’s sternum, his lips, hers. “I have not finished with either of you. It is for me to decide when your chastisement shall cease. Now, release her, Rafe, and turn onto your stomach. She will watch you taken. No more will you deny what you need from me, nor what you desire. If you want my cock, beg for my cock. If you want my teeth, fall to your knees in passionate plea. Understood?”

  Asha propped her head up on the wolfskin, the scent of wolf flesh and fur mingling with the steel from underneath her pillows and the arousal of beast and monster. Her head spun from the king’s theft of blood from her veins, but she could always take his or the captain’s if she needed.

  The wolf was a bloody, briefly satiated mess on the quilts when the king rose from his prone body and turned his gaze to Asha.

  They came together in the same moment, without clash or hesitation. He sank into her with his kiss, his cock sliding between her thighs but not taking her.

  She stroked his hair away from his face, broke from the kiss as he finally entered her.

  “Not all the roses died,” she said.

  The king paused, sheathed completely and in shadows above her.

  Asha turned her head toward the balcony window. The curtains were still partially pulled back. Moonlight struck the table in front of the window, catching
the pure frosted white of the five roses he had picked for her.

  He could not look away from the roses for so long, still as a statue within her, though he remained hard and awake.

  When he turned back, he trapped her in his black eyes, stealing her into the stars and more that she found there. Lust and thrall joined to strangle her, prick her, dig thorns so deeply within that she could never retrieve them all.

  “Rarest, you are my rose.”

  EPILOGUE

  Upon the wolf guards ushering them in, the kingdom representatives were greeted with the sight of their king on his knees before the throne, his face buried between the queen’s thighs.

  The captain sat upon the king’s throne instead, thrusting his cock into the queen’s cunt from beneath. She held herself up on her knees, braced on the arms of the throne, her head fallen back with her hair loose and twisted with the captain’s. The men and women arrived just as the combination of the captain’s cock and her husband’s wickedly talented tongue brought her close to climax.

  Asha rode them both, goaded them on, though with an audience, she found herself reluctant to express the sounds granted to her lovers in privacy.

  The captain had no such reservations, his growl an endless thunder through the stone and through her body. With all three of them clothed for company, however, he kept his teeth and claws retracted. The skirt of her gown had been lifted to her hips, draped over the chair on either side of them, her pale, thin legs exposed to give the king room to feast and for onlookers to view the captain’s cock splitting her folds, the glisten of arousal on her thighs, the scars once inflicted.

  She allowed herself one moan to signal her release, if the twitching of her muscles and the rock of her hips were not sufficient. The captain completed himself inside her like the beast he was, groaning into her back and testing the skin with his human teeth.

  The king brought her to the other side of her orgasm, then lowered his mouth to clean and consume both her lust and the captain’s once it trickled from her. He showed no shame or hesitation before his visitors, doing something in their presence that had been relegated to other women in a paid room within his kingdom.

  Once finished, king, queen, and captain took a linen to themselves and composed their appearances within seconds, as though they had never been caught in the act. Asha adjusted her skirt to become the queen, perched upon the arm of the throne while the captain kept the seat in his slouching way. To do so was not insubordinate; there was no question in the room who was king.

  “Have you no sense of decency?” The man who spoke had Grayling blood, with his dark hair and pale features, but his courage and posture suggested he hailed from the Midland instead. He stood a few steps before the others, which meant they had already chosen their voice.

  “I have a profound sense of decency,” the king replied serenely. “But I imagine mine differs from yours. Do any of you hunger or thirst? You are welcome to the feast.” He gestured to the banquet table—a table proper now, with wooden legs holding it up rather than men.

  “You feast while—”

  “I have many servants and subjects whom you in the kingdom never see. My entire army recovers from the battle, and they have massive appetites while they heal.”

  Callina laughed low in her throat from the floor at the foot of the throne. She rested on her back, her hair mostly covering her harnessed bare breasts. The wound across her belly had healed, yes, but the twist and discoloration of flesh in its place meant she would never heal as Asha healed, without a trace. The wound and the damage beneath still struggled to heal itself completely, and Callina could attest to a heightened appetite, although the captain would not let her indulge in other sorts until her hunger for meat died down.

  But Asha had kissed her. The simplicity of Asha’s gratitude for Callina’s life had been clear, and the captain had accepted Callina’s request to serve the castle rather than return to the traveling army, at least for a while.

  At the very least, the shift of Callina near the throne caught the Midlander’s eye to trap the rejoinder in his throat. Some of the representatives inched toward the feast at the end of the table set for human consumption. To accept the invitation, they had to cross paths with the warriors who lounged on the benches and over the tablecloth, and they had to approach the king and the throne’s platform.

  “All the dragons are gone,” the king continued. “There is no chance that any more of their kind shall spring from my line. The woman’s sired sons are ash, and she killed the rest of my kin. The only one left is Asha herself, and I intend to keep her satisfied rather than starved.”

  The leader followed in the footsteps of his fellow representatives, but he refused food and wine, leveling paranoid glances at the indulgence a Tapestry man would not have second-guessed.

  “How can you be sure there are no others to fall upon the kingdom once more?” he asked.

  “I can only speak to my line. I am not the only one, few though we are. It is not in our best interest to procreate so freely. No one else would be so foolish.”

  “And if they do come after us? You had a responsibility to protect us in exchange for our sacrifice.” After he spoke, the Midlander palmed a knife from one of the trays. Asha flashed back to her own dinner knife collection with some amusement. The Midlander appeared less comfortable than she holding it as a weapon.

  “A king can fail.”

  “If a king can fail so spectacularly, is it fit for him to remain king?” the Midlander asked.

  With the wolf warriors in the room, silence was nearly impossible, yet it followed the Midlander’s question.

  The king smiled, a charming gentleman in the face of controlled antagonism. He stepped down from the platform. “I admire your courage, sir. What do they call you?”

  “Gram.” The Midlander held his ground, but the king’s stare unnerved him as much as his smile.

  “Gram.” He lingered on the name. “Because I kept myself so distant from my own kingdom, I understand your belief that your king has done nothing for you, that he became as complacent and decadent and lazy as your Tapestry elders. I and my army kept ourselves concealed, shadows in the dark, to protect you when you did not realize the danger. The elders were responsible for peacekeeping within the kingdom borders, but my warriors prowled the edges, that no outside malevolent force could enter. Beyond the mountains, my army thundered through other kingdoms, toppling all other armies who sought to bring our prosperous kingdom to its knees. Not once did a foreign soldier step foot within the borders of our lands. These monsters and beasts kept you safe from all human threat, such that you never knew how much they protected you. Even the merchants traveling the paths beyond the kingdom barely caught more than a glimpse.”

  Gram squared his shoulders. “But when it mattered, my lord? When the dragons descended upon the kingdom at your allowance? For what did you sacrifice my kith and kin? For what did you sacrifice the men of Tapestry and Gray alike? For one woman, who might prove the same threat as the one who destroyed us?”

  “We never expected Murial and what she brought to this kingdom. We shall be prepared hereafter, with weapons and strategy now at our disposal, for which you may thank your queen—the very woman who the kingdom sacrificed without a thought. Think of that when you choose to pass judgment upon me.” The king pointed an obsidian claw straight between the man’s eyes. “You and your people climbed into bed with the devil for far too long for you to become righteous with me now. This kingdom has suffered. Many of my people died, both within the borders of the kingdom and within the borders of this castle. It was one of many failures that I will not repeat again.”

  The king hooked the representatives upon his every word, even the Midlander who stood his ground. He spoke with authority laced with both menace and respect—menace in his anger but respect in allowing them to question him at all.

  “Look around you. Look upon the soldiers in my army.”

  While the men and women had been
entranced by the king, other wolves had entered in all their feral splendor, with their leather and harnesses and talismans and knives.

  “See before you beasts who you would have gladly hewn to pieces if they had made themselves known to you before. My wolves have conquered armies for you, brought other kings to their knees to ensure diplomatic relations, yet still those kings were permitted to reign by their people…most of the time. If you consider me and my warriors unfit for rule, sir, you and yours are more than welcome to attempt to depose me. But even if you managed to reach me, you would then have myself or my wife with whom to contend, and I am afraid there are few within the race of man with the skill to challenge us.”

  “Your whore?” the Midlander asked.

  Asha raised herself from the throne’s arm and crossed the distance before the king could strike the man. She lowered the king’s wrist and stepped in front of him, the whisper of her skirts louder than her feet upon the stone.

  “How tired this insult is by now,” she said. “I will not have it anymore. If it is a sin to be a whore, then I am full of sin. The Gray chose at least one prostitute as their representative, and why not? A woman has to be strong to survive men like you. Whores survived the dragons, while elders were the first to fall.”

  She released the king’s hand and took a step toward Gram. “A man’s passion does not need to destroy a woman, and a woman satisfying her passion—or his—should not be branded by the very desire that created her. Within the kingdom, the laws were clear—all women were whores, either selling themselves into matrimony or refused from its security to serve men’s baser needs. It ends now. No more dowries. No more forced prostitution. My husband will judge the criminals, but every last woman in the kingdom may come to me with grievance if any treat her as less by virtue of what man has touched her.”