Grayling: Nocturnal Creatures Book 3 Read online

  “What of the wolves, my dear? What would they sacrifice to watch me give you this pleasure so easily? Would you like to hang from the scaffold or the cross before them while I torment you without even granting you my touch? Perhaps I should transform your mind so that pain is pleasure and pleasure is pain until you can no longer discern the difference.”

  Tears—not just salt, but tears—pricked at her eyes, then dripped down her cheeks through the fourth whole-body orgasm he forced through her.

  She bit at her fingertips where the dents of his teeth still dimpled the skin. She slammed herself down around him, but it was not enough, even when she angled her hips so he hit that place inside that sent sparks across the back of her eyelids.

  When that orgasm receded, she lifted herself off him and fell to the side, where the bed still roiled and sent her to and fro.

  “I am not through with you yet, Asha. Tell me, how much do you think he wants you?” He grabbed her hair and wrapped it around his hand, climbing over her while she was on her stomach. He tapped on the bed, an unspoken order that they understood.

  Silk-covered hands emerged between the cushions to fondle and caress her. He curled an arm around her and cupped her folds, tantalizing her, his erection nestled against her buttocks. Its wetness from being inside her briefly cooled against her skin, but not enough to counter the fever.

  “You made it all the way to his den during the full moon. You must have seen what he does with the new female recruits, sometimes the males if they intrigue him and submit as mates rather than rivals. Did that intrigue you? You certainly like what I do to you now. Would you like for me to take you as he would—all force, all fight, a battle of pleasure and resistance?”

  “I want him to take me like that,” she whispered into the silk.

  Covered fingers probed at her lips. When she sucked them in, the unseen man groaned, a sound that echoed around him. She thought several of the bed parts reached their completion at the same time. With the king pinning her down, power nonetheless rushed through her, followed swiftly by desire of her own rather than his doing.

  “But he will not, because I am queen, and he cannot overpower one given more power than he. It is nonsense,” she spat. “He will shove me against a wall, eat a throat from my hand, lick blood from my neck and mouth, but he will not fight to take me. I would leave marks of my own if he tried—he need not fear that. If I fought hard enough, would that make him want me enough to fight back? Does he not understand that to make me submit would not make me any less his queen, and yielding to me would not make him any less an alpha? How narrow his mind, if he believes our roles so tenuous that a kiss threatens to break them.”

  “He has only been alpha for a few decades,” the king said. “You must forgive his self-protection. We shall see about breaking down those specious assumptions about a wolf and a human woman. If he feeds from your hand, he has already shown submission.”

  “He waited until we were alone.” Asha could find no purchase on the bed. After grasping blindly, they finally managed to grab her hands through the blankets, interlocking fingers. “He always waits until we are alone.”

  “If that is what it takes.” The king worshiped her unwounded neck until she whimpered. “It would not be the first time I required him to meet me alone.”

  She tightened her grip on the bed’s hands as the fifth climactic wave swept through her to the fantasy of the captain pushing her face-down and claiming his dominance over her. Without the king’s cock inside and with his hands cupping but not stroking her folds, the orgasm was unlike anything she had experienced before—hollow and unbearable at the same time that self-awareness reached an unspeakably intense pitch.

  When the pleasure subsided again, Asha clambered from under the king, but he drew her up short with his hold on her hair.

  “Please, my lord, it is too much. I do not think—”

  “If you tell me to stop, little Ashling,” he murmured in her ear, “I always shall. But I think you can take one more. You might feel you have to be strong with all others, but you do not need to be strong with me. You would never be strong enough to conquer, and it is not your strength that conquers me. Show your monster how you trust him to take care of you. Do you wish me to stop?”

  Asha bit her lip, but though she knelt and clung to the black copper, she shook her head.

  “It is too much, but you are safe with me.” He loosened his hold on her hair and trailed his fingers down her spine. Then he took every last of his touch from her.

  She clung to the thorny rose vine, moaning helplessly as her hips bucked against nothing.

  “My lord—”

  “Hearing you call me your king and your lord and master is quite delicious, but now I crave my name on your lips. I do not believe it has ever passed them.”

  “Cyric.” Using the name rather than the honorific slid unfamiliarly over her tongue, a tongue from which most men had demanded honor rather than intimacy. The pleasure did not stop with his name, though, and she sank down against the bed, dampening the silk. “Cyric, please, I—”

  “What do you need, my love? You must tell me.”

  Asha slumped against the copper, nearly sobbing as the pleasure waned. She looked over her shoulder, wiping away the tears. “You delight in my suffering.”

  “Because it is exquisite.” He reclined against the writhing bed with his head propped up, his eyelids heavy as he peered over her body. “This suffering is much more preferable to what it once was, yes?”

  “How can you look upon me as you do? What is it you see, my lord?” She could pass her gaze over the same places as he, yet she found nothing to merit his intensity or the velvet of the darkness in his eyes that revealed heat his body could not produce.

  “What do you think I ought to see for me to look upon you as I do?”

  “Health, wealth, generosity, life… You have more of these things in your monster’s body than I have ever been able to offer. I understand how you might look upon me with favor for what I do, but I cannot understand how you stare now, what you stare at, what warrants such warmth when nothing I offer is generous or desirable. I give no more than what a Grayling can offer, and a Grayling like me is, by definition, undesirable.”

  “Do you believe the captain wants you solely for what you do, Asha of the Gray?” The king raised himself up and took his cock in hand. He used the remnants of her arousal that lingered against him to slick his palm. “What of Callina and Lysan? Do you think they are merely amused with you? Do you think they entertain you at my behest? I did not draw Callina aside and request that she educate you in my absence. I did not instruct Rafe either way on how to serve his queen. When he denied you from the den, when he kissed you against the wall, when he refused your bed, when he consumed human flesh and blood from your body, those were his choices.”

  His eyes fluttered shut for a moment when he tightened his grip along the shaft. But he met her gaze as he continued. “And when I looked upon you in the Gray, when I chose you, it was not because you were undesirable. None of the things that they believed made you ugly to their eyes makes you so to me. I do not believe it is simply because I am a monster and beasts comprise my guard. Even broken, my dear, you exceed anything the tawdry, empty people of the Tapestry could produce. The pious arrogance of their men and the gold-gilded misery of their women do not call to me as the charcoal scars in your gray skin. The coddled blue and green in their eyes is nothing to your stormy gray. Their ringlets and wigs compare not to the soot and ash of your hair. You are substance and destruction, my dear, and my eyes cannot drink enough of you, any more than my teeth would ever wish to be without you.”

  The king shifted close, crowding her against the copper and resting his chin on her shoulder. He aligned his legs with hers, pressed his chest to her back. He placed his hands on either side of her loose fists, but he did not pin her there, force her angle or position, push his erection into her cunt, nor kiss her or lick or bite. His words caressed
her now, subtle as the thrall that languidly stretched and entwined with her desire in reaction to his proximity.

  “If you question whether I think you beautiful, my answer is an unequivocal yes. I find your body eminently desirable, whether wrapped in red, gray, or black, in silk, velvet, or linen, bound in rope or adorned with nothing. I love watching pleasure shatter your control, and I love your timidity and temerity both. To see you stand straight with nobility you did not gain from birth, then for that rigid spine to loosen under my touch, for your eyes to darken and a blush to ghost across your face…each pleases me greatly. So much about you is beautiful, Asha. Do not let my accursed kingdom convince you that beauty is only in a woman’s useful uselessness, in her ability to accessorize a man. I value you as more than my wife, and insisting that you must be more than a wife is what makes you even lovelier to me, in all your clouded darkness. I would not have taken a queen that did not intrigue me.”

  “Unless she needed saving more than she needed to intrigue,” Asha said.

  The king kissed her jaw lightly. “I chose the Grayling before you to save her. I chose you to take you for myself. I was quite selfish, but it is a king’s prerogative to be selfish, and they were foolish enough to celebrate. Think no more of them. Anything of my kingdom that ever reaches for you again shall burst into your mouth in a font of sweet blood. I cannot make you see the beauty you hold, but you must remember that my kingdom considers me hideous, yet you mourn that you lost the monster.”

  This time he brought the arousal up slowly, though he gave her little more than his body against hers and his lips whispering promises along her cheek.

  Asha clutched behind her, grabbing his thigh and his hip and gasping at the steady intensifying of her lust. The places on her body he had played with hurt from his careful use, but the pleasure could not be fought or denied.

  “Now, my beautiful queen, shall we see how long you can last at the peak?”

  “I believed you wished to kill me later rather than sooner. Is it your intention to talk me sweetly to my demise, a gentle murder into a violent night?”

  “You have not so much as approached death, not even with your blood thinned.” He smiled into her neck. “I hear your heart—it pounds, races, but it does not yet struggle. You underestimate yourself as much as you underestimated me. One more. For no one else but you and me alone. Yes, sing for me, Asha.”

  Asha rested her head against his shoulder and screamed as he drew out the height of the arousal so keenly and sharply it was as though a blade entered her instead of his cock. But it made her drip with pleasure rather than pain, with the juices of her arousal rather than blood.

  He followed it with his erection, easing into her with deliberate, exquisite care. The soft groan in her ear was what undid her, the small indication that there was something he could not control, that being inside her was enough to wrest that one small weakness from him.

  She clenched around him as though to pull him in, rocked her hips, drew him against her until her rhythm became his own and his expressions of pleasures joined hers in a discordant chorus. If the bed still continued its undercover orgy, it could not compete with that of its monarchs.

  He plied her climax over and over, never letting up, rolling it through her like thunder repeating in the mountains, like images in multiple mirrors facing each other. He would not let it die. Her cunt fluttered, pulsed, gripped his cock as tightly as it could while dripping wet with nothing but her own arousal. She begged him without words to kiss her. He hovered his open mouth just out of her reach, his forehead furrowed as though he tortured himself as much as her.

  Finally, he gave in, sliding his tongue over hers before taking her mouth and rocking his hips at her insistent pace. He came with a stiffening of his spine and a jerk of his cock inside her, but he brought his claws back to her hair to stroke it as he kept her climax going still.

  Asha’s head fell forward. She closed her teeth over the slight flesh of her forearm. Animalistic groans and grunts wrested and strangled from her throat.

  He brought the climax back down as soon as blood spread thin across her tongue.

  When she slumped against the copper, he brought her back against him, down into the cushions and silk of the bed, heedless of any damage or dirtiness they had brought to it. He ran his long fingers over her body, contouring her, molding her, the way she had memorized his face.

  He smoothed his palms down between her thighs. “Leave the captain to me.”

  4

  After the hailstorm from the night before, servants labored to replace the damaged glass in the main greenhouse, but the winter rose house had somehow been spared, either through concerted efforts by the vines themselves or as part of the magic that suffused the castle.

  The entire spread of gardens and gravel had been packed tightly with gleaming ice that already melted under a cold, clearer sky, with the help of the still-burning greenhouse fires, but it was a slow process, oscillating between melting and freezing until it became a dense danger upon which to walk. Asha had to wear boots to tread to the winter rose house, where she sat surrounded by roses and the crackles and snaps of ice, enjoying the cold after her thoroughly broken fever. She did not anticipate a permanent recession, but she rejoiced in her ability to shiver. When once she had cursed the coming of winter, the king had taught her to love its frigid fingers, as he had taught her to love his own.

  Callina waited within the arched entrance to the gardens, less inclined to step out onto the ice in her bare feet. She leaned against the wall almost out of sight, for Asha to come in at her leisure.

  Asha could not say how long the wolf had been waiting, because Asha’s leisure among the king’s roses could extend for hours—and with the king returned, Rafe did not have to try to coax or insult her out for her own good. Her good now rested in the king’s hands, and he had no fear for her among his winter roses, nor any concern that death by any means but his own was her desire.

  “We have been given our orders,” Callina said, walking with Asha back into the old castle. “The male troops run after next full moon, female two weeks after to determine if we are with child.”

  “Did the last full moon bear no fruit?” Asha asked.

  Callina shook her head. “It is to be expected. A female never bearing a child is not unusual among wolf packs. I only tell you this because our time draws to a close—at least until my return, if you still desire my company then.”

  “When will you return?”

  “Four months. It seems like such a long time when I know you shall remain with the king no longer than another ten.”

  Asha stopped walking, drawing Callina short. “You already knew that my time here was short. We are all temporary queens. Why would you allow yourself to consider more than that?”

  “You chide me for my attachment? The king breaks his heart with many of the queens that he lets go, yet he does not protect that heart, knowing how much his wives need it. And you bloom for him, too, as much if not more than the others. You bleed for him like his winter roses, knowing that before the next Longest Night, he will cast you out with the rest to make room for the next, to give you a world beyond him. If my affection surprises you, why did you not stay cold against all of us—the king, Lysan, the captain…? Are we to only have this brief affair, Asha? Is that what this was from the beginning? A mere dalliance to warm your bed in the absence of the king?”

  “It was your pursuit that began it. When it occurred, I believed your interest little more than a dalliance to warm your bed in the absence of orders,” Asha said. “A distraction, a game—teaching the nervous, naïve human girl the heat of desire when the undead can only teach the cold.”

  Callina shoved her by the shoulder into the tapestry and slammed her hand next to Asha’s head. If she had hoped to make Asha jump, she did not succeed. Expressions of violence had been too commonplace for Asha to experience the same surprise as reliably as a less Gray woman.

  “I will not declar
e undying love to you, Your Majesty, but I have an entire pack from which to solicit a warmer bed, most whom I can depend upon to be there every night or whenever we return to the castle. I liked your scent. I liked when you stood against the captain. And I liked that you did not want the men of the master’s bed, but that when you enjoyed the sight of them, you did not resist out of principle.” Callina slowly stepped closer until her body was flush against Asha’s, warm despite the creeping cold from the garden entrance. “I told you time and again, the wolves rarely deal directly with the wives, and the wives rarely occupy themselves with the wolves.”

  “For this reason, I should think.” Asha tried not to move. When she did, she became more aware of the places Callina’s body pressed against hers. It was not Callina’s partially naked body, however, that stirred warmth as much as the nakedness in her eyes, nakedness Asha was not sure she was capable of herself.

  “Yes. This reason figures strongly in the separation between wolf and human in this castle,” Callina said. “But you also do not see the wolves dallying much with servants, do you, despite the imbalance of our packs? Nor do you see them playing with the furniture. We play among ourselves, and for most, there are enough of us to fulfill. I was adequately fulfilled when I approached you, Asha.” She shifted her hand from the wall to Asha’s thin neck, closing her hand around it, though Asha felt far from threatened. “But I will not be adequately fulfilled when you are no longer here.”

  “We still have time.” Asha fumbled over the leather of Callina’s trousers to find her other hand. She twisted her wrist to interlock their fingers. “I intend to take the whole year that the king gives me. You will return before then.”

  “Once. For one more month, if that. The only reason we stayed this long was because the king had to leave you behind. He will likely not have the same journey planned in the summer.”