22 | Yaron
The Sea Witch
Something softly wakes me, a movement against my temple. But just as quickly as it comes, it retreats, leaving me restless. Consciousness comes upon me, though I rebel against it because awake now, I do not feel well. I do not feel well at all. My skin is hot and itchy and my scalp feels tight. I’m erect, like I’ve been stuck in a whorehouse all night and been told to watch but not allowed to touch anything. And in this nightmare, every fucking whore is Kiandah.
I reach for her instinctively, a desperation luring me towards the idea that she isn’t there, that she won’t be there, that she left in the night without me, but my hand comes down on warm, smooth flesh, an arm much thinner than mine but just as powerful. Maybe more so. I know I took her too roughly last night and shouldn’t take her again but I’m going to have to. Nothing could stop me.
I roll towards her and don’t bother opening my eyes. I lean into her mouth, finding it instinctively in the darkness behind my eyelids, and I kiss her roughly.
And I jerk back just as roughly.
The smell.
My eyes fly open and see her face. Her lips are mouthing words that look like my Lord, but I don’t give a fuck what she is trying to say to me.
The smell.
Not an unpleasant smell, to be sure, but one decadent and divine. Spices and wine mixed in with the natural aroma of her skin, a scent utterly incapable of being replicated by anyone else, but…she didn’t smell like this when we fell asleep last night.
She’s already speaking, but I speak over her, voice a dangerous and unsteady pitch, “Did you leave the room while I slept?”
She’s not wearing her corset, but she’s wearing her dress. My cloak and her shoes are not where they were cast wantonly last night, but lie situated before and folded over the back of the broken chair beneath the window, through which dewy morning air and the colors of a dreary daylight filter in lackadaisically, as if I’m not about to fucking die.
“My Lord, I need to speak with you about something very important…” Her lips are swollen with the memory of mine and close enough to scent. She’s blinking quickly, looking defenseless, entirely too vulnerable and so fuckable I can’t think straight. I want her mouth on me and I want to beg for it. I cut her off with a brutal kiss, which she tears away from me, gasping.
“Yaron…” She half laughs, then shakes her head and tries to push away from me. “It’s important. I’ve been trying to rouse you, but you were out cold and I wasn’t sure how to proceed…”
I don’t give a fuck about any of that. “Did you leave the room while I slept?” I repeat, yanking her onto her back and moving up onto my knees beneath her thighs. I throw her dress up to her chest, exposing her splayed legs and the black, glossy curls between them. I palm her core.
She gasps. “Yaron…I’m serious…”
“You’re swollen still from last night. If you tell me that you did not seduce me, fuck me and leave the bed shortly after I succumbed to sleep, then I will let your body rest. But if you tell me that you left the bed, betraying my trust, and ventured off into this dangerous inn unprotected, then I will punish you here and now and there will be no commanding me otherwise.”
Her lips part. Her pupils dilate. Her chest rises and falls rapidly. I yank down on the collar of her dress but she grabs my hand in both of hers and whispers, “Please don’t. I don’t have any others.”
Guilt and pride and rage and other emotions I don’t expect climb up from my heels, scraping their talons on the backs of my thighs and burying themselves in my balls and shaft and knot. It’s pulsing. My cock beads with precum. I lower it to her swollen lips, which are already wet enough for me to drive into her smoothly. I shouldn’t, but I will. Borne by panic and rage and feelings of betrayal, my need is all-consuming.
“Tell me. Tell me now, Kiandah.”
“I…”
“Don’t lie.”
She shakes her head, but is struggling to catch her breath, “I have something to tell you… Just please listen.”
“You left the room.” It’s not a question.
She fails the test.
I thrust forward, thighs slapping against the backs of hers. Her head tips back and all thoughts of whatever urgent thing she needed to tell me are lost as I take her to the edge, rutting her mercilessly until we are nothing more than a tangle of limbs cemented in sweat and slick, my knot once again fully inflated inside of her.
“Fuck, Yaron…the way you make me feel,” she cries, “like I’m flying…”
“Then, I should stop,” I say, with no intention of doing so.
She gasps, “Don’t you dare.”
I grab her jaw and squeeze her cheeks. I nip at them, struggling not to hurt her. The desire to cause pain fills my limbs — but not her pain. I don’t want that. And already she’s wincing, clearly uncomfortable. I should apologize but I can’t seem to do that, either. I feel heat feverishly wash up and over me. A tidal wave too powerful to stand through, it takes me down. I hang my head against her collar, the blanket snaked around our legs, constricting and binding us together.
“I am not pleased, Kiandah,” I say against her neck. “You do something like this again and I will punish you in earnest.” I palm her breast, careful to keep her dress intact as she requested. I want her again. The urgency is unforgiving and I feel a spike of genuine fear. It isn’t right. If I take her this roughly as many times as I’d like, I’ll break her for sure and I have no designs of rutting this Omega to death.
I want this Omega forever.
She’s breathing hard, the muscles in her neck stiff as she tries to look at me. She makes a face and I carefully gather her against me, my hand on her lower back. I can feel her inner thighs trembling and another wave of sick, sick lust washes away the guilt I feel. I lean down and my teeth rapidly latch onto the smooth skin between her shoulder and her neck.
She jolts. “Are you going to bond me, Yaron?”
“Yes,” I hiss, digging my toes into the bed and pushing my knot even further into her. “But not today. Naughty girls don’t get Berserker bonds.”
“I wasn’t unprotected, Yaron. Cyprus was with me.”
The words I had hoped she wouldn’t say come tumbling out of her mouth. I grab her by the neck and squeeze. My rage wants an outlet — to fuck her — but I just did that and now my unspent energy has nowhere to go. It rattles around in the cage of my bones, making me wild.
“I want you to tell me every single move you made, every step you took, every person with whom you spoke, and only then will I decide how long to hang Mara and your brother by their heels in my dungeons.”
She shoves my shoulders with both of her hands. They’re hot enough to cause my beast concern. His instincts war — to fight to protect us, but never to fight against her. I growl low in my throat. I know that to threaten her family so brazenly like this is to play with an open flame. I should have just kept my plans for her brother to myself.
“Don’t push me away.” I grab her forearm and slide my other hand around the small of her back. “You’ll hurt yourself, and right now, that’s my job.”
“You’re not listening.”
“You have my attention,” I say, but the words are aspirational as I press my knot further into her again. It still hasn’t deflated. I want to rut her with it, but I can’t. Fuck me. Fuck her. Fuck this.
“Then listen to me.” I can’t. “What I did isn’t important. What I discovered is. My Lord.” She grabs my face with both of her hands, pressing my cheeks. Her eyes bore into me. “Ruby City fell the night before last. Word reached Zenobia yesterday through sources she wouldnt divulge. Cyprus and I spoke to her last night while you slept. When I couldn’t rouse you, I…I acted in your stead.” Her gaze deflects. “I sent Mara and Cyprus back to the keep to convene with the other Crimson Riders. I also had letters sent in your name to all of the other Berserkers — Dark City, the Rookery, Hjiel, the Guild, Gold City, Glass Flats and the Town of Teeth — informing them of the attack. I’m so sorry, but I used your crest to seal the letters.” She points to my cloak while the shock wars with the lust running rampant through me.
Biting her lips again, she continues frantically, “Mara and Dorsten said that I should. I know I overstepped, but I didn’t write them to do anything. I just thought it was really important that the other cities know right away so they can defend themselves in case the Fates of Mirage City come for them next. And it was so confusing because Mara and the other Crimson Riders that she hailed kept calling me Shadow Lady, your Lady, and no one blinked or second guessed me when I made my suggestions. I just…I’m a peasant. It feels so wrong and I’m scared, Yaron, and I panicked. I didn’t know what to do. If you need to put me in the dungeons for it, I’ll understand…”
I kiss her hard to shut her up and also because my emotions are spiking again and my knot feels like it’s expanding even more, though that can’t be possible. My erection hasn’t faded in the slightest. My mind is a haze, my thoughts a snare. I’m fighting to care that one city has overtaken another and that both are our closest neighbors across the sea, that the undead army has grown that substantially, that the Fates have grown that bold.
I realize I’ve deepened the kiss when she whimpers slightly. At the same time, Kiandah pushes me away. The conflict does nothing but exacerbate my current state. If she had not pushed me, I’d never have been able to tear myself free from her.
“Yaron! I’m not joking.” Her voice is shrill and I’ve never heard it shrill before. She’s panting and her breasts brush against my chest on each inhale.
I shake my head, trying to drag my gaze away from the sight of her, trying to get my erection and my knot down through sheer force of will. “I didn’t think you were.”
“We need to get out of bed.”
I growl. My beast growls. I don’t restrain him. “I don’t…” Think I can. I can’t. Can’t. I have to stay here. We have to stay here. Gatamora be damned. Let the Fates have it…
Fuck.
I swallow and push away from her, a brush of cool air on my chest enough to rouse a very weak, very distant part of my consciousness telling me that I’m losing my mind. “How did you…come across this information?”
This is why Shadow Lords do not take Ladies. This was a terrible mistake. A decision I wouldn’t reverse for anything.
I blink rapidly and lift her hips as I move onto my knees, keeping her joined with me. She winces in pain and moans in rapture in a way that makes my blood surge through my body. Causing her this pleasure-pain is doing terrible things to me, because I feel exactly the same way she does. And the burn makes the ecstasy fucking exquisite.
I shake my head, forcing my beast forward, concentrating on animating my mane, my fangs, my snout one at a time and then retracting them with the same precision and care. The exercise helps clear my mind enough to start to feel my knot going down. I grip her hips, the claws on my thumbs creating dents in the soft skin between her hip bones.
“Yaron?”
“Do not speak.” My tone is harsher than I mean for it to be, but I don’t apologize and I don’t look at her.
I think of terrible, undead things as I feel my knot slowly, slowly recede, the ridges and bumps used to seal our connection and keep my seed within her body deflating into a single ring around the base of my erection, which I am able to then pull out of her tight, swollen heat. The cool air brushes the length of my penis and I growl, opening my eyes to the sight of white, syrupy seed gushing from her pretty brown lips.
My eager thumbs move down, massaging their way through her slick. She’s swollen and hot, her lips looking ravaged and delicious when I spread them. I want to suck them into my mouth, tasting my cum and her flavor on them. I want to transform into my beast just so I can stick the full length of my tongue deep into her body. Fuck.
“Command me to step away from you,” I bark just as my arms start to tremble.
“What?”
“Do it!”
Her foot stamps in the center of my chest. She kicks me hard and I topple backwards onto my ass. The surprise of it distracts me from my goal and I meet her gaze. She’s glaring at me firmly, fixedly. “Get off the bed, beast. Go sit in the chair in the corner and stay there until I tell you otherwise.”
“The chair is broken.”
“Then kneel.”
I’m moving before I know what’s hit me, her foot first, and then her command. My beast whimpers through my throat as I retreat from her and kneel beside the too-small chair. I yank my cloak from it and the buckle hits the floor with a heavy clunk. I fist it, letting the metal dig into my palms.
Kiandah sits up in the bed and pushes her dress down to cover herself. “Would you throw me a towel?” She gestures to the small table beside the chair and the copper basin atop it.
I toss her a damp cloth, wanting nothing more than to clean her myself, but I don’t have the strength to be close to her. My erection is still prominent and driving me mad. I fight past the sensations seeing her clean herself stirs and say, “How certain are you of Ruby City’s fall?”
“I wasn’t, at first. But after prompting her, Madame Zenobia confessed that a ship arrived at the ports yesterday afternoon with refugees from Ruby City. Madame Zenobia is housing them. We met with them — Cyprus, Mara and I — and then with Dorsten, Renard and Malik when they came later. Their story is too believable to be faked. We also made sure to speak with some of them separately and their stories aligned.”
“And how did they say Ruby City fell?”
“Apparently, the undead came in the night by the hundreds. They targeted the ports and the Ruby City fortress, overtaking both in a matter of hours.”
“The fortress is just that, it would not be so easy to overtake.”
“Apparently the Fates were with them. One of the boys said he saw one single Fate at the fortress. Soldiers were there, guards ready to defend Ruby City, but he said the ground opened up and the sands swallowed them whole. The Fate didn’t even need the undead. She just walked through.”
Adoqhina. The Earth Fate. Having seen her power in action, I can believe she was capable of this and more. “And what of Ruby City’s Berserker, N’dogo, and her Omega?”
She shakes her head slowly and, cleaned up, slides off of the bed. Her knees buckle momentarily and she catches herself on the headboard. I flinch, wanting to close the distance, but I’m afraid. Clarity is difficult to clutch in my claws and I am clearer now than I’ve been at any point in the lust-fueled haze of the past twelve hours. I must cling to it like salvation, because it might just be. If I fall, the Shadowlands may follow me.
“The refugees don’t know. Madame Zenobia is asking for payment from you to house them here. I told her we’d pay it.” She looks down quickly, shame in her gaze that I hate. “That you’d pay it. I’m sorry.”
“You apologize to me for nothing,” I say, recognizing immediately that that’s not correct. “No. You apologize for leaving our bed. You could have been killed.”
“You asked me to help you find out about Trash City and the Fates and the undead. I did.” The firm set of her jaw and the jutting of her lower lip cause me to narrow my gaze and curl my toes into the floorboards. I can feel my claws bore into the soft wood.
“Do not test me, Kiandah. I am not well enough for it.”
“You’re not well?” Her incensed outrage falls immediately, a rush of concern taking its place. She rushes forward. “What’s wrong?”
“Do not come near me,” I bark louder than I mean to. “I cannot be close to you.”
A look of hurt changes her expression once more, and though I want to correct her misunderstanding, I don’t. “Get dressed and gather your things. I want to meet with these refugees myself.”