Chapter Six
My eyes opened. A whitewashed ceiling. Not my ceiling, I had a blue velvet canopy over my bed. I shoved up to sitting, groggy and disoriented, what the fuck had—right.
Fabian. Dead.
Benedict.
Benedict’s bedroom, and Benedict’s bed.
He hadn’t closed the curtains the night before, and the same subdued winter sunlight I’d expected flowed in through the room’s two large windows, but it illuminated a painfully austere room, all dark wood and bare surfaces rather than my own richly carved and upholstered furniture and plush rugs.
A soldier’s room, despite the fact that Lord Benedict Rathenas had never been a common soldier in his life.
Footsteps from beyond the open doorway had me tensing up, quickly shoving my hair out of my eyes—dark blond waves looked like a tangled, dirty mophead if slept on improperly, and I’d slept about as improperly as possible—and trying to blink the bleariness of sleep away.
Benedict strolled in a moment later, unfairly alert for someone who’d spent most of the night cleaning up a murder and the rest somewhere other than his own bed. He bore with him the faint scent of coffee, which might account for his sharp eyes and upright posture. Damn him anyway.
Damn him twice for not thinking to bring me any.
But if he’d been up long enough to have had his breakfast, and the sun had risen all the way…
“What time is it?” I asked, suddenly alert too despite his rude oversight. I had meetings this morning. An appointment with the Guildmaster for the Calatrian weavers and woolen cloth merchants. Possibly more fish-related documents.
And Benedict to bend over for. A tremor went through me.
“A few minutes past eight.” Oh, gods, I had my first meeting at half past. I flung the blankets back, and Benedict stepped forward, shaking his head. “And no, before you get frantic, I already informed your secretary that you’ll be keeping to your private quarters until noon. Or mine, as the case may be, but I didn’t bother informing him about that.”
I gaped up at him. “You had no right to take such a liberty! Why would I do that? Damn it, I spend every waking moment proving—” Fuck, I couldn’t say that I’m fit to rule . “—demonstrating my dedication to Calatria, and lounging about my bedchamber half the day simply isn’t, isn’t what I do,” I finished lamely. Going to impress anyone . I couldn’t say that either.
Benedict arched one thick brow at me. “I don’t know, Lucian. Your valet, who’d served your family since long before you were born, tragically dropped dead in front of you, and then you were up the rest of the night. Maybe you need a few hours to sleep. Or mourn. Or simply be alone with your thoughts. Besides, you’re the duke, you don’t need an excuse.”
“I don’t need—I need more of an excuse, not less, in fact. And of all the absurdities. Spend an entire morning grieving my valet?” I could only imagine Zettine’s pungent commentary on that kind of sentimental foolishness. And Benedict… “Didn’t you accuse me of having the vapors last night? Are you trying to make me look the fool to the entire court?”
Oh, gods. He was. I rolled the rest of the way out of bed, ready to fight my way out of the room if I needed to.
“You bastard,” I hissed. “All of that bullshit about not wanting the throne. You’re going to use ‘allying’ with me as your opportunity to—”
“Lucian, for the love of the gods, shut up!” Benedict’s voice cracked like a whip, and I stumbled back a step against the bed, nearly falling onto it again. He stared at me for a moment in silence, and then said, almost gently, “Do you really have no idea at all what people think of you? What they—don’t you remember what everyone said about you when you took your father’s seat in the council the day he died?”
I remembered very clearly what Benedict had said to my face, at least. His anger, and his contempt. And then he’d left.
“I had no choice. You damn well know I had no choice. If I’d waited even a few days, the vultures would’ve gathered. You probably would’ve ended up the duke after all, as you claim not to want.”
Benedict’s jaw worked, and he let out a hollow little laugh. “Believe me, I wouldn’t have allowed it. And I do know you had no choice. But you didn’t even bother to act like you gave a damn about Treviso’s death, and no one more than a step removed from the throne understood why you had to take control immediately without taking time to be a son, rather than a ruler. Everyone in Calatria thinks you’re arrogant, self-centered, and as cold as a fish. And possibly that you killed him yourself.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I snapped, the offensively accurate sting of his words heating my cheeks and sending an odd, twinging pain down under my ribs. Fabian had certainly thought I’d killed my father myself. And…a fish? A fucking fish ? He had to use that word of all the ones he could have chosen? “Of course I didn’t kill him and of course I gave a damn about his death. You were there. And—he was my father, of course I cared, but I had to maintain decorum!”
As I had last night when I’d stood and stared out the window as Fabian’s pathetic corpse was carried away by strangers, or when I’d forced down my nausea while my father ordered executions, standing by pale but otherwise unmoved.
All the moments I’d hidden myself away, desperate to appear as strong and capable and brave as…Benedict, for example.
“It’s required of me in my position to remain rational in a crisis,” I told him, lifting my chin and giving him my best disdainful down-the-nose stare. “I don’t expect you to be capable of comprehending it.”
“Yes,” he said. “That’s why they see you that way. Exactly that.”
“What? What’s what? Benedict, I need to—”
“What you need to do is relieve my curse as you agreed to do. Do I need to gag you?” he demanded. I choked out a denial, and he took a step closer, making all the skin on the front of me prickle with awareness. Gag me? He wouldn’t dare! But I found that I couldn’t keep talking and run the risk, either. “No? Good. You may not care what anyone thinks of you, but it won’t do your reputation any harm to be seen to care a tiny bit that a man you’ve known all your life is dead.”
I’d disliked Fabian intensely, but walking into my rooms and finding him absent would be a shock for a long time. Every night and every morning I’d be waiting for him, and I’d have that jolt of surprise and horror.
The thought of baring those feelings to anyone, let alone to Benedict, made me even sicker than his apparent confidence that everyone in Calatria hated me and thought I’d committed patricide—not only the ones who’d told me so to my face or tried to kill me.
Better to tackle the far less dangerous matter of Benedict’s curse. Standing here in the light of day, with the nightmarish quality of the previous evening beginning to fade, I could face this bargain of his head-on without flinching.
Relieve his curse. That was all. His talk of pleasure was just that, so much arrogant bragging talk. If he hoped I’d degrade myself by enjoying his use of me, he’d have to live with disappointment. And if I needed something to distract myself from my inevitable discomfort and disgust during the act, I could savor his thwarted annoyance.
How long had it been since anyone…Benedict’s voice rang through my mind: turned you inside out the way you probably don’t deserve?
Years. It had been three years, in fact, since a visit I’d made to my cousin Tavius’s estate in the north of Calatria, only a few months before my father’s death. We’d spent the days hunting with his friends, and the nights carousing, and Tavius had thrown me together with one friend in particular, a tall, handsome gentleman with wicked eyes and black hair. Actually, he bore a passing resemblance to Benedict. We’d spent a night together, and he’d fucked me drunkenly but thoroughly enough, leaving me sore but not quite sated.
Tavius had seemed disappointed that I didn’t want a more lasting arrangement with his friend, whom he’d tried to persuade me was just the man to make me happy, but causing a court scandal by coming home with a not-high-born-enough lover would hardly have been worth it for a man who hadn’t even finished me with his hand after he spent inside me.
Three years.
And now I stood cornered between Benedict and his bed.
He might be much more of an asshole than Tavius’s friend, but at least this time I’d be trying not to enjoy it, which might make succeeding a whole lot easier.
I lifted my chin. “Fine,” I said. “I’ll take the morning off. Or at least a small part of it. I can’t imagine you’d need more than a few minutes to do what you need to do.”
Benedict shook his head at me, eyes glittering. “Lucian, you really never learn, do you?”
And with that, he whipped his shirt over his head, tossing it carelessly aside onto the floor. His hands were busy with his trouser buttons before I could do more than blink. After all of his talk, I’d expected him to have a more practiced seduction routine. But he simply shoved the trousers down, kicking them off of his bare feet, and tugged the string of his drawers.
Those fell to the floor too.
My mouth dropped open, and I snapped it shut again.
No, he would definitely have made Clothurn squeal. I didn’t like my own odds, actually. Benedict’s broad torso tapered to narrow hips and a curly black thatch of hair surrounding a cock that explained his notoriety in the city’s brothels and perhaps made an additional seduction routine redundant. It had already begun to harden, and the thick head had taken on a purplish-rosy flush. Heavy balls hung beneath it. As he took a step toward me, they swayed and swung, almost hypnotizing. What would he do if I reached out and cupped them in my palm, tested their weight, tugged gently the way I liked when someone handled me?
Another step brought him close enough that I could have, if I’d had the courage. Or the desire to, gods damn it, I didn’t really want to touch him.
His cock grew under my scrutiny, filling out its length, growing thicker, the head darkening and lifting toward me as if seeking a target.
“My face is up here,” Benedict said, his voice low and amused—but with an underlying current of heat that lit me up on the inside, kindling a warmth in my belly that I didn’t want and didn’t know what to do with. “Or you can touch me. Do anything you want, Lucian.”
That startled me enough that I was able to tear my eyes away from the scourge of the dockside whores and look up to meet his.
Anything I wanted? “I don’t want to do anything,” I said, although my voice lacked a certain degree of conviction. I cleared my throat and tried again with, “You don’t seem like the kind of man to lie back and let someone else take charge in bed.”
Too late, I realized my mistake. Benedict grinned and took one last step, his cock almost brushing against my tunic. I fought the urge to shrink back. Our several inches of height difference didn’t matter nearly as much as his several inches of additional breadth, the way he loomed not only over me but to both sides.
“How much have you thought about what I’d be like in bed, hmm? And you cast me in the role of the aggressor, apparently. I can oblige. Tell me what you’ve thought ab—”
“I haven’t thought about anything!” I said, sounding only about half as harassed as I felt.
My whole body had flushed with heat, and I had nowhere to go, and my hands twitched restlessly because I couldn’t possibly touch him. And it didn’t matter how I tried to turn my head. If I looked down, there was that massive cock. If I looked up, Benedict’s mocking smile and gleaming gray eyes and chiseled jaw. Side to side, there were huge bare shoulders, biceps, a body that would effortlessly dominate mine when Benedict chose to use it.
“You’re probably always the aggressor because you’re more brawn than brain,” I added, hoping it would annoy him enough to make him stop fucking toying with me. “That’s nothing to do with me.”
A glance up through my lashes showed me raised eyebrows and lips pressed into a line.
Perfect.
When he caught me by the hips and spun me around to face the bed, I nearly fainted with relief. He’d pull my trousers down and fuck me hard and fast, and he’d stop…accusing me of things and trying to ferret out my secrets.
Benedict pressed up behind me, his cock digging into the small of my back. I let out a soft, betraying sound, my lungs hitching with each of my ragged breaths.
At least I hadn’t gotten hard. Maybe my lower abdomen had gone all melty and my knees rested against the side of Benedict’s mattress, not quite able to keep me stable without support.
But I hadn’t gotten hard, my nerves too tightly strung to allow it.
Benedict smoothed one big, warm hand up from my hip to spread it across my chest, tugging me back into his embrace as he wrapped the other arm around my waist, my arms pinned at my sides.
I squirmed, and his arm tightened: his cock a thick, heavy pressure against my back, his muscular thighs against my ass, Benedict surrounding me.
He slid his hand over and circled my right nipple with his fingertip. Lightly, almost too lightly for me to feel it through the wool of my tunic. But my nipple tightened and firmed all the same, goosebumps prickling all over my chest. My breath came faster and faster.
Benedict circled my nipple one more time and then brushed his finger across, an agonizing, barely-there tease. His hot breath tickled my ear as he bent his head down and nuzzled into my hair.
The muscles in my ass and my belly clenched, and my cock—damn it to hell—got very fucking hard, straining against the placket of my trousers.
I would not move my hips. I would not . No matter how much my thighs trembled with the effort of holding still, of not pushing back into the cradle of his body, of not thrusting against nothing to try to relieve the gathering ache between my legs.
Benedict pinched, and I writhed despite myself, the tiny sting arrowing straight down to my balls and making my cock twitch. My head fell back against his shoulder. Benedict leaned down further and pressed his parted lips to the side of my neck.
His tongue flicked out against my straining tendon. He pinched my nipple again, harder this time, enough to hurt.
My moan echoed off the rafters and the bare, unadorned walls of Benedict’s bedroom.
His arm tightened again almost painfully, and he ground his hips against me with a low sound of his own that vibrated my chest and made me clench all over again—and this time, I couldn’t help imagining what that big cock would feel like pushing inside me, and I thrust after all, the head of my cock rubbing over one of my trouser buttons and drawing out a gasp. Sweat heated my forehead and stuck my hair to my temples in tendrils, beaded along my spine, gathered at the backs of my knees. At least at this angle Benedict couldn’t see me all slack-mouthed and red-faced and damp, my eyes sliding shut despite how much I tried to keep my focus on the shaft of sunlight slanting along the opposite wall. It glinted off of the steel basket hilt of yet another of Benedict’s swords leaned up in the corner.
If I traced every curve with my gaze…no, it wasn’t enough. My eyes closed.
And that left me with nothing but sensation. Benedict pushing my trousers down at last, exposing the fact that I hadn’t bothered with drawers last night in my hurry to change out of the dressing gown.
Oh, gods, I hadn’t, and when he pulled up my tunic and pushed me forward, his thick cock slid between my thighs as if it belonged there.
Nudging up, toward the crease of my ass, like he meant to fuck me without any further ado.
My head spun. I wanted that, didn’t I? To get it over with.
His cock burned my skin like a brand and I wasn’t the only one shaking, the only one whose breath came ragged and uneven.
His curse. He’d been telling the truth when he said he could barely wait until morning. And his cock strained eagerly against me, the tip brushing my sensitive hole.
“Benedict, don’t,” I gasped, and as one big hand splayed across my back and pinned me down, I started to struggle in earnest. “You’ll tear me apart if you take me like this.”
But I couldn’t break his hold, and—
“Stop,” he said, and the echoing resonance in his tone vibrated through all of my limbs, humming in my chest.
I stopped as if he’d used…magic, damn him, hanging limp and frozen in his grasp, waiting for him to thrust inside and rip me in half.
But he didn’t, even though the hand gripping my hip had gone clawlike and rigid—with the effort of controlling the tainted magic raging through him, I had no doubt. Was he in pain? He’d never trust me enough to admit it.
“I won’t hurt you,” he said, voice too raspy to be reassuring. “I won’t—don’t be afraid of me.”
“You’re not impressive enough to be frightening.”
Benedict huffed a laugh, probably because my voice had come out thin and strained, hardly convincing.
“Spread your legs,” was his only answer.
I kicked my feet out of the constriction of my trousers and shuffled them apart, hating my own obedience but unable to muster the breath for further argument, my blood pounding in my ears.
Benedict’s hand slid down my spine, pushed my tunic up and away, and slipped between my cheeks. The hair on my legs and arms prickled as if I’d strayed too close to gathering lightning…but it was him causing that frisson in the air, whispering something I couldn’t quite hear that swirled his magic around us like crackling mist.
A cool, startling tingle rushed up into my body from where he touched me, starting at my hole and going…gods, so deep, deeper than any man had ever been inside me, and I jerked and cried out, my arms wobbling and nearly dropping me face-first into the bed.
“What the hell was—” I cut off in a moan as one of his fingers pressed inside, stretching me open. Slick. It was slick, oil dripping down my thighs and coating my rim. “Where did you get—oh gods,” because he twisted his finger and pushed deeper, all the way to the last knuckle.
“Summoned it from my dressing table,” he said, and pulled his finger out, drawing another moan out of me with it, and forced two back inside. “If I let you go and went to get it, you’d run. And then I’d have to—” He thrust hard with his fingers, twisting them and rubbing unerringly over the little nub behind my balls that Tavius’s friend had been completely incapable of finding. My deep, helpless groan drowned out half of what he said next, but I heard him finish with, “—pin you down on the floor when I catch you.”
Three fingers inside me now, and I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t even moan, splayed out with my elbows and forehead on the bedding and my ass up in the air like a whore.
Benedict’s whore. The same to him as one of the painted strumpets who took his gold and his cock on nights when he didn’t trouble to seduce one of my courtiers.
My hole clenched convulsively around his fingers, their uneven pressure in my soft insides nearly too much. I stifled a whimper in the blankets.
A moment later I was empty, clenching around nothing, Benedict spreading my cheeks with his hand and muttering something I couldn’t quite catch but that sounded like it contained a lot of profanities.
The head of his cock pushed against my hole—stretched, but not quite enough to prepare me for his girth, and the wet sound as he forced his way inside echoed obscenely in the quiet bedroom.
I could only push back on him, trying desperately to relieve the ache of it, as he thrust inexorably forward and impaled me. Benedict leaned down, letting his weight bury his cock even deeper inside me.
“That’s it,” he said, either to me or to himself, I wasn’t sure. “Gods. That’s right.”
No, it was wrong, wrong in every possible way: wrong that Benedict, my horrid stepbrother who might or might not be lying about wanting me dead, had his monstrous cock buried in me, that he’d started to thrust, tugging on my hole and then opening me again, tunneling into me. Wrong that I had to bite my lip and clutch the bedding in my fists to keep in the cries that bubbled up in my throat, that my hair stuck to my forehead and temples with sweat, that my own cock and balls throbbed, on the point of spilling everything I had, including my self-respect.
Benedict fucked me harder, driving me face-first into the mattress, the bed starting to creak. I spat out a mouthful of damp fabric, focusing on the scratch of a wool blanket against the front of my thighs to try to distract me from the heat and muscle of his legs flexing between them.
It didn’t work.
Nothing could distract me from the oncoming rush of spending my brains out on Benedict’s cock.
He’d lost control now, pounding me without mercy, every thrust hollowing me out and stuffing me impossibly full all at once, every inch of him hammering into that perfect spot inside me and ratcheting my tension higher, higher…
I couldn’t hold it in anymore, the muscles of my stomach clenched so tight they hurt. Gripping Benedict’s cock like a vise, balls tugging up, I spilled into the bedding, a few drops spattering onto my chest where my shirt had ridden up.
It turned me inside out exactly the way Benedict had threatened, everything going sideways and twisted around me.
I collapsed into a damp, whimpering, twitching heap, head spinning.
Benedict growled, caught my hips in his iron grip, and slammed me back onto his cock, like a rag doll with a wet hole he could use as he pleased.
“Lucian,” he said, voice rough with triumph—and thrust once more, transfixing me, making me cry out as he spent.
Wet heat suffused me. Benedict’s mark, his claim…his magic, gods, a sparking tickle deep within me that set off one more spasm in my balls and my exhausted cock.
My whole body quivered with aftershocks, sweat cooling on my skin, the bed feeling like it vibrated under me. Everything between my ribs and my thighs had been bruised and battered and pounded into jelly, and the sweet ache of it made me shudder with something horribly close to arousal, the echo of desire.
Desire. I’d never desired Benedict. I still didn’t, and the throbbing, trembling, melting warmth inside me had nothing to do with him.
His withdrawal made me shudder, every inch of him stretching me again on his way out and leaving me horribly empty.
When he let me go, my numbed toes hit the floor and almost couldn’t stop my undignified slide off the side of the bed. I hadn’t even noticed that he’d lifted me off the ground. I scrabbled at the blankets and shoved myself up onto my hands again, shakily making my way to standing. A hot trickle of Benedict’s come seeped out, slicking my thighs. My trousers lay in a crumpled heap on the floor, still caught around one foot. Bending over to get them would expose my glistening, well-fucked ass to Benedict as he stood there savoring the sight of me all disheveled and used.
Shame tightened my chest and left me breathless as reality began to filter back in again.
And not only the shame of my own disgust and regret.
Any whisper that I’d become Benedict’s latest toy would destroy any credibility I’d managed to gain among my courtiers and my subjects at large. It seemed so bloody unfair that Benedict could be the one to bear a curse that typically made twilight mages objects of fear and ridicule, and that he could be the one to know every whore in Calatria by name, but that I’d be the one mocked and despised for taking his cock. For submitting to this.
My eyes stung. My heavy head throbbed. Benedict moved around in the room behind me, dressing or washing. Watching me. Laughing at me, or gloating.
I needed to be alone or I’d lose my mind.
Fuck him anyway. I bent as quickly as I could and forced my other foot into the trousers, tugging them up and haphazardly getting a button through a buttonhole, any buttonhole. Enough to keep them on my hips.
When I turned, defiantly lifting my chin and ready to meet his sneer, I found him not paying any attention to me at all, his back to me as he splashed some water on his face from a basin on the washstand.
My fists clenched. What a fucking son of a bitch.
A completely unselfconscious and unashamed son of a bitch, powerful legs spread so that he could lean over the basin at his ease, heavy balls swinging, the muscles in his back and broad shoulders shifting as he rubbed at his face and ran his hands through that absurd hair of his.
Hatred boiled up from my churning belly, hot and vicious, choking and stifling me.
If I’d had magic, his back would’ve burst into flames. Maybe he’d given me some, when he spilled in me…but no, he didn’t even smolder, no matter how I glared. Damn it all.
Another hot ribbon of come wound its way down my leg, dampening my trousers. My abdomen shuddered oddly, half disgust and half…I swallowed hard.
“I presume that your curse is relieved for the time being,” I said, proud of how cold I sounded, how unmoved. The same skills I’d practiced for public appearances applied here, too. “I mean to bathe extremely thoroughly and then go about my duties, if you have no further objections.”
“None at all,” Benedict said, with a toss of his head and a final scrub of his face.
He turned and set his hands on his hips, looking me up and down with an expression I couldn’t parse. I’d resented his indifference. Now I wished he’d kept his back to me, because that piercing gray gaze and a fresh sight of his enormous cock had me flushing again.
“I’ve doubled the guard on the ducal apartments,” he went on. “I’ve left the men you chose and added some I trust most. One of each will stay at their posts, and when you leave, the other two will accompany you. And I won’t be far behind, but I have some business of my own first.” He bared his teeth at me in a flashing grin. “Bathing extremely thoroughly, to start with.”
Oh, that—I gritted my teeth together and drew a deep breath. How dare he insult me the same way I’d insulted him!
“At least you’re aware of your own stench,” I said, and moved for the door. Maybe I’d thought of a good retort, but I’d get the worst of this exchange if I stayed too long. “You’ve imparted it to me, and now we’re both vile. See that you’re less so by the time you wait upon me in my study.”
His low laughter followed me out of his bedroom, through his sitting room, and into the corridor. I slammed his door behind me, but it rang in my ears all the way to my own bedroom.
It was very hard to convince myself I’d had the last word.