Chapter 13
Pip
By the seventh day of my life as the Commander’s fucktoy pet, I had developed a routine.
I woke in Aeldryc’s bed, showered in Aeldryc’s shower, then fell to my knees and sucked Aeldryc’s cock while he washed himself, because I needed my morning cum and he needed to get his hard-on under control before we went anywhere public.
Usually he’d get me off, too, because we’d quickly discovered that Aeldryc tended to lose control of his decision-making abilities if I was left too horny for too long.
Then we’d eat breakfast in the officers’ kitchen while Aeldryc read reports and pretended not to watch me steal extra bread. After that, Aeldryc had responsibilities, and I had nothing to do but follow him to whatever meetings, briefings, or patrols the day required.
Then we’d have dinner, and we’d have sex that rearranged my understanding of the human nervous system before passing out in a sweaty heap.
On paper, it was the best routine I’d ever had: hot water, regular meals, spectacular orgasms, and a man who looked at me like I was both the most infuriating and most necessary thing in his world.
Compared to my life in San Jose, this was better by every metric.
The problem was the middle part: the hours between breakfast and sex, when Aeldryc was the Commander of the Queen’s Grey Guard and I was just a human accessory sitting on whatever surface was available. Today, I was perched on the wooden fence at the edge of the training grounds.
I had dressed for the occasion: my newest pair of shorts and a waistcoat that I’d turned into a crop top, showing a stripe of stomach between the hem and the waistband that showed off the chain, which I’d started looping around my waist like a body chain.
It went quite well with the silver beaded aetherwoven bracelet that was my favorite of the translation objects.
Aeldryc had given up on the leash concept by day two, because it was clear that I wasn’t about to voluntarily put any kind of substantial distance between myself and his cock.
I was particularly proud of this outfit, especially when Aeldryc hadn’t been able to let me out of his bedroom without a sound spanking, which had led to a very nice orgasm for me, which had led to him burying a load of cum deep inside me.
We were late for things quite often.
The training grounds were a wide, flat yard of packed earth behind the barracks.
For the first thirty minutes, it was pure, uncut, military-grade eye candy.
Aeldryc had stripped to a sleeveless undershirt that clung to his shoulders like I did, and his soldiers, all built on a scale that made professional athletes look small, moved with a beautiful, deadly precision.
They warmed up, stretched, and ran drills.
Then they ran the drills again.
And again.
My legs swung against the fence. The sun climbed higher.
I watched a bird land on the gallery railing, seemingly as bored as I was.
I tried to remember the words to a Dua Lipa song and got stuck on the bridge, feeling a sharp pang of missing my phone, of missing the easy answer to a stupid question.
Then Aeldryc yelled something, and my attention fixed on him, and I couldn’t think of any reason to want a phone more than I wanted him.
A shadow fell across me. I looked up to find a young fae man, not one of Aeldryc’s elite unit, but a lower-ranked guard, carrying a water bucket toward the field. He was maybe six-two, which was practically petite by fae standards, with light brown skin and brown hair pulled back in a loose knot.
“Morning,” he said, with a smile that suggested he was either brave or new. “You’re the human, right? Pip?”
“That’s me. The human. On the fence. Watching the thing.” I gestured at the training field with maximum enthusiasm. “Very exciting stuff.”
He laughed. It was a nice laugh.
“It gets a bit repetitive if you’re not in it. I’m Daeryn. Third Company. We train in the afternoons.”
“Daeryn. Hi. Do you also do the one-two-three-four thing?”
“Every day of my life.” He shifted the bucket to his other hand. “The lord high commander says if your feet can’t find the pattern in your sleep, they won’t find it when the blood is in your eyes.”
“That’s poetic and also gross.”
He grinned again, and I liked him immediately, the way I liked most people who laughed at my jokes and didn’t look at me like a specimen.
The chain tightened.
It was a subtle squeeze, like a hand closing on my hip.
Forty feet away, staff in hand, Aeldryc’s eyes were on me, not his sparring partner.
As I watched him, the chain cinched tighter.
The end of it, which had been tucked into my waistband, slid down inside my shorts, the cool metal snaking around my cock and balls to form a possessive ring.
It pulsed with his magic, and I started to harden.
Rynvael’s staff caught him clean across the face.
I heard it before I processed it—a crack that cut through the training yard like a whip. The wood connected with Aeldryc’s cheekbone and his head snapped to the side and there was a moment of absolute silence.
Then the training yard erupted.
With the exception of Vaelith, who found nearly everything funny, I had never heard fae soldiers laugh before, and it turned out they laughed the same way humans did when something was both shocking and hilarious: loudly, immediately, and without any regard for rank.
Thyren made a sound that was halfway between a bark and a wheeze.
Caelyndris had both hands over her mouth.
Vaelith was laughing so hard she was practically crying.
Rynvael, who had landed the hit, was standing motionless with his staff extended, and I could see him realize that he’d done something that was both technically correct and possibly fatal.
“Commander,” he said carefully. “I—”
Aeldryc straightened. There was a red mark blooming across his left cheekbone, and his jaw was set in a way that should have been terrifying but that I found extremely attractive.
“Again,” he said. His voice was quiet, and the training yard went quiet with him.
Daeryn had not moved. Watching the field with the wide eyes of someone who had just seen a decade’s worth of barrack gossip, he hefted the water bucket. “I should go.”
“Was that my fault?” I asked.
“Absolutely.” He left, just as Vaelith dropped onto the fence beside me.
She was six foot two of competitive, loud, grinning fae warrior, her black hair spilling over one shoulder and her green eyes bright with the kind of delight that only came from watching your commanding officer get publicly humiliated.
“Well,” she said. “That was new.”
“New?”
“Aeldryc the Ironstorm distracted?” She stretched her legs out, crossing them at the ankle.
“That does not happen. The man does not lose focus. Not even during the Ashenmoor skirmish, when a berserker broke through our line and Aeldryc had to fight on two fronts simultaneously while holding a collapsing shield formation.”
She looked at me. The grin was enormous.
“He did not lose focus,” she said, “when an ambush team set fire to the bridge he was standing on, and he held his ground until every one of his soldiers had crossed. So when I tell you that the Commander of the Queen’s Grey Guard took a staff to the face because he was looking at you, well, it’s worth noting. ”
“He never loses focus?” I asked.
“Nope. I have served under Aeldryc for three hundred and twelve years, and I have never seen him fail to block a training strike.”
“Three hundred and twelve years? How long has he served?”
“All his life,” she said. “He was born during the first of the Long Wars, and I doubt he’s ever done anything else.”
I looked towards Aeldryc, tilting my head. “It’s hard to imagine him as a baby. With parents! Are they still alive?”
Her grin tightened for a second. “He doesn’t talk about them. Nobody who’s seen that many wars and that much death does. You collect too many ghosts, you learn to keep the door shut.” She shrugged, the motion sharp. “Easier that way.”
“Oh,” I whispered.
She stared out at the ring for a moment. “Me, I figure laughing at life is better than mourning what we can’t have. Aeldryc, he has another way of forgetting. He throws himself into duty and honor and all that.”
I smiled at her. “I like the laughter approach, too. And sex.”
She cackled. “Can’t forget the sex. Don’t fuck it up, Crane. I am personally invested in this distraction. The whole Guard is. We have a betting pool on when you’ll get him to laugh in public. I’ve got three gold crowns on next Tuesday.”
I smirked at her. “Next Tuesday? No pressure.”
She burst out laughing and clapped me on the back, so hard I almost fell off the fence. “You got this, kid. Just keep making those tiny shorts. He can’t look away.”
On the field, Aeldryc moved.
The staff spun in his hands—a blur of dark wood, too fast to follow—and he closed the distance to Rynvael in two strides and the strikes came in a sequence that was nothing like the one-two-three-four.
This was cascading, layered, each blow arriving before the defense for the previous one was complete.
Rynvael was good. He blocked the first three hits, parried the fourth, and slipped the fifth.
Aeldryc pressed the attack, a relentless tide of wood and motion, until Rynvael’s defense faltered.
The staff cracked against his ribs and he staggered, and Aeldryc didn’t stop.
He launched another strike, low, sweeping Rynvael’s forward leg, and the guard went down to one knee, and Aeldryc reversed the staff and brought the butt of it to rest against Rynvael’s throat.
The training yard was quiet.
“Good,” Aeldryc said. He withdrew the staff, offered Rynvael his hand, and pulled him up. It was clean and professional and the point was definitely made.
“He’s still the best I’ve ever seen.”
I didn’t respond. I was too busy processing the fact that I was sitting on a fence in a crop-top waistcoat and silver collar, watching the most dangerous man I’d ever met put an elite soldier face-first in the dirt.
He’d done it because he was embarrassed that I’d made him look at me instead of the drill, and the primary emotion I was feeling was not fear, guilt, or concern.
It was horniness.
Which was going to be a problem. Because training was going to last another two hours, and I was already bored and now I was also desperately turned on, and the combination of boredom and arousal was, historically speaking, a Pip Crane disaster zone.
His chain shifted around my cock and balls, the links seeming to thicken as they held me. I tried to think of something unsexy, like tax returns or grocery lists.
None of it worked. Aeldryc was running another sequence, his undershirt dark with sweat, his arms flexing with each strike. I had two more hours of this, and nothing to do but watch and want and slowly lose my mind.
The chain around my waist pulsed once, a warm check-in. Aeldryc, on the field, didn’t look at me this time. He’d learned. I pressed my hand against the silver and felt his magic hum against my palm and knew something had to change.
On the field, Aeldryc disarmed Thyren in twelve moves, and Vaelith said, “Showing off for his boy.”
“Fuck, I need something else to do with my time,” I said.
Vaelith smirked, pushed off the fence, and took her turn in the ring.