CHAPTER 9 #3
"You're sick," he says as his thrusting picks up tempo. There's genuine revulsion in his voice. "We'll need to have a priest bless you. Clearly that beast twisted your mind." His thrusting is even quicker now. The sounds of bodies slapping together filling the room. “Disgusting… depraved… vile…”
And then he comes, barely two minutes into this travesty, his whole body going rigid as he spills inside me. He collapses on top of me, breathing hard, and I stare at the canopy above us, feeling absolutely nothing except a growing rage that threatens to consume me from the inside out.
After a moment, he rolls off and immediately puts his hand between my legs.
"Your turn," he says breathlessly, and starts rubbing at my clit with all the finesse of someone scrubbing a stain from fabric.
Hard, rhythmless, completely disconnected from any response my body might have.
Not that my body is responding. The only wetness that exists down there is his semen leaking out of me.
I try to guide his hand to where I need it most, but he bats me away.
“What are you doing? Ladies shouldn’t touch themselves… down… down there.” My body is a locked door, and this idiot doesn’t even know where to find the keyhole. It feels like he’s deliberately touching me everywhere except where I need it.
He rubs harder, like pressure alone will somehow conjure pleasure from nothing.
Like my body is a lamp he can polish into submission.
I lie there, staring at the canopy, feeling his fingers work at me with all the eroticism of a medical exam.
Maybe even less. At least physicians have some understanding of female anatomy.
“Are you close?” He asks, breathing hard from the effort.
“No.”
He makes a frustrated sound and changes tactics, moving his fingers in circles now.
Fast, too soft circles that accomplish absolutely nothing except making me want to kick him off the bed.
My dragon knew every inch of me. Knew exactly how much pressure, exactly what angle, exactly when to use his tongue or his fingers.
Even his cock with its ridges felt perfectly… perfectly made for me.
I feel tears prick my eyes. Tears of frustration. Tears of loss.
“What about now?” His voice is petulant, like I’m being difficult on purpose. My dragon would have told me to quit being a brat and let it happen. There’s nothing to happen now, though.
“No.” I say again.
He tries a new tactic. This one a sort of tapping motion that makes me wonder if he’s ever actually touched a woman before, or if he learned sex from some medieval medical manual written by monks who’d taken vows of celibacy.
Maybe that’s it? Maybe he thinks female pleasure is a myth, something women invented to make men feel inadequate?
Well. He should feel inadequate.
“You… you need to relax!” He whines. Irritation laces his words. “You’re too tense. That’s the problem here.”
Too… tense? Of course I’m tense! He’s performing some sort of vaginal Morse code on me after forcing me to have sex with him for the purpose of shooting out eight babies…
Eight! He thinks he owns me. Thinks my family has a right to promise him my womb like I’m livestock being traded at market.
Eight heirs. Eight times I’ll have to endure this fumbling, graceless rutting, this man who recoils from my desires while expecting me to come apart from his mediocre efforts.
The rage builds in my chest, hot and caustic. A century ago, I was a princess who smiled and curtsied and let men make decisions about my life. Then a dragon stole me away, and everyone assumed I was a victim. A damsel. A prize to be won.
He did kidnap me, but now that I’m living out the reality he aimed to protect me from, I can wholeheartedly say I would prefer my dragon to any misogynistic prince I may be promised to.
My dragon took from me, but never without my well-being in mind.
He always considered my comfort. My wants.
He learned my body like it was a sacred text, and he worshipped at the altar of my pleasure until I was the one begging, the one demanding, the one who couldn’t get enough.
In the end, he gave me power. Power over myself, over him, over the desire that burned between us like dragonfire.
He gave me a choice.
Benedict takes. He demands. He expects.
And he can’t even make me come.
“Actually… maybe if you touched yourself?” he suggests, pulling his hand away.
“Ladies don’t do that, but whores do… don’t they?
” His words sound vile. When my dragon would call me his whore, it was with love.
With lust and appreciation and want. They do not sound the same.
I roll my eyes so hard it actually hurts.
“Stop.” I murmur.
“But you haven’t—”
“STOP!” I sit up slowly, shoving him away. “Just… stop. I’m done.”
“You’re into depraved shit. Of course you couldn’t come. Something’s wrong with you.” He pulls the comforter over his body.
“I know.” Of course I know something is wrong with me.
I climb out of the bed, my legs unsteady, and grab the silk robe someone left draped over a chair.
Benedict is sputtering behind me, saying something about duty and gratitude and how I should be more appreciative, but I’m already walking away.
The door to the bathing chamber is heavy. I slam it behind me and turn the lock.
I lean against the door, breathing hard, and that’s when it hits me. The full weight of my life.
I'm free. I'm finally free of the dragon, free of the castle, free of my century-long captivity.
So why does it feel like I'm suffocating?
The bathing chamber is all marble and gold, a massive tub in the center that could fit six people. There are mirrors everywhere, reflecting my face back at me from a dozen angles. I look the same as I did a hundred years ago. Young. Unmarked. Perfect, by their standards.
I look like a stranger.
My hands are shaking. I press them against the cool marble of the sink and try to breathe, but all I can think about is him.
My dragon. The way I could feel that his wings would spread wide when he was inside me, creating a world that contained only us.
The way his hands, those massive hands tipped with obsidian claws, could hold me with such devastating gentleness.
The way his mouth knew every secret place on my body, his tongue doing things that made me scream with pleasure in my mind.
His kindness. God, his kindness. The way he'd read me thousands of books from raided libraries and his own library.
Books about romance and adventure and spells and fighting techniques and anything in between.
The way he'd sit and talk to me for hours about nothing and everything as he played with my hair, the way he'd curl his massive body around mine at night, his tail wrapping around my thigh, and his heavy wing draping over our bodies in a protective blanket.
The way his cock would fill me so completely that I could feel my body reshaping itself to accommodate him, that exquisite stretch and burn that somehow always transformed into pleasure so intense I'd forget my own name.
I press my hand to my lower belly, remembering. Missing it. Missing the way my insides would shift and adjust, the way I could feel him so deep it was like he was touching my soul. Benedict’s pathetic little dick barely registered. I felt nothing. Nothing except absence.
And there's something else. Something I've been trying to ignore since the prince dragged me away from the castle and haunted forest.
There's a sickness in my core. A wrongness.
It started as a faint nausea, easy to dismiss as stress or fear.
But it's been getting worse. Every hour away from him, it intensifies.
A hollow ache that's spreading through my chest, my limbs, my bones.
Like something vital has been severed, and I'm slowly bleeding out from a wound no one else can see.
The bond. It has to be the bond.
Dragons mate for life. I knew that. He told me that.
He told me that if I accepted him, truly accepted him, we would be bound together in ways that transcended flesh.
Soul-deep. Permanent. He had told me the story of how his parents met.
How they had soul-bonded early. That when his mother was killed centuries later his father fell into a depression and grew crazy being separated from his mate.
I thought it was a metaphor. Poetry. The kind of thing males say when they want to sound romantic.
But this feeling in my core, this wrongness that grows with every passing hour… this is real. This is physical. This is my body recognizing that it's been separated from its mate and slowly shutting down in protest.
Will it fade? Can I survive this? Or will I waste away in this golden cage, married to a prince who thinks I should be grateful, dying slowly from the absence of the only being who ever truly saw me?
I don't know. And that terrifies me more than anything.
I splash cold water on my face and force myself to breathe. I can't fall apart. Not yet. I have to be smart. I have to survive long enough to find him, to kill him... maybe. I'm not sure what I will do when I find my dragon. But staying in this castle with this prince is not an option I choose.
I do not belong here. I do not want to be here.
When I finally return to the bedchamber, Prince Benedict is asleep, sprawled across the bed like a child, snoring softly. Thank God. I can't endure any more of his attention tonight.
The bed is too soft, the pillows too numerous, the blankets too light. Everything about this place is too much and not enough simultaneously. I lie on my side, as far from the prince as possible, and close my eyes.
Sleep comes slowly, reluctantly. But when it finally takes me, I dream.
I dream of an impossibly tall figure with midnight-blue scales that shimmer like starlight.
I dream of wings that spread wide enough to block out the sky, then fold around me in a cocoon of safety.
I dream of a tail wrapping around my leg, anchoring me, claiming me.
I dream of obsidian eyes that see straight through to my soul and love what they find there.
I dream of home.
And when I wake, I will begin planning how to get back to it.