Chapter Ten – Osric
Chapter Ten
Osric
I turn the lock and rest my hand on the bolt.
The clicking won’t stop. It used to come in single bursts a cough could cover. Now it rolls up from my chest, over and over. I clamp my jaw and press my tongue against my teeth, but it pushes through anyway.
The hot flash hits me before I reach the bed.
It starts at the base of my spine, where my tail joins the shell, and spreads through my chest, arms, and my thighs.
I breathe in and out, in and out, hold it at the top.
My hands shake so badly that I have to curl them into fists and press them into my sides.
I keep the tincture vial on the shelf by the bed. Varys said five drops, seven at most if I really need a high dose. I pour water, count ten drops into the glass, and drink it down before I can think too hard about what Varys would have to say about this. The bitterness coats my tongue, and I wait.
The heat eases a little. The clicking drops to a low pull at the back of my throat. That’s all ten drops does for me, and I can already feel it fading.
I understand why. Varys measured the dosage for a male living alone in an empty house. Esme sleeps under my roof, her scent fills the air, and her voice carries down the corridors. The rut is out of my control. Her proximity speeds it up, and however much time I believed I had, now I have less.
I don’t blame the shaman. He’s never had to deal with such a situation before.
I make myself describe what’s happening to me. If I rationalize it, maybe it helps.
The rut isn’t desire. I can say no to desire.
The rut prepares my body to take her whether I agree or not. Whether she agrees or not.
The heat under my shell is only one side of it. Then the senses sharpen until they hurt. Her scent will become a signal at some point, something I’ll be laser-focused on. I’ll be able to find her anywhere without opening my eyes.
Even now, if I sit still and listen, I know when she moves from one room to another. At night, I know when she sleeps badly. I hear her everywhere: her steps, her breathing behind a closed door, the small sounds she makes when she huffs and pouts at something that frustrates her.
My body is learning her, but not out of love. It’s learning her for a hunt.
My instincts decided when I first saw her: she’s mine. My biology takes that as fact, and it doesn’t understand why I’m locked in my room when my mate is just within reach. My biology doesn’t care that she’s terrified, that she doesn’t know about the clicking and the mating ritual.
When the rut takes a male fully, his mate is supposed to run.
He gives her a head start, and that isn’t mercy, it’s part of the process.
He hunts her by scent, by sound, by the heat of her body in the night air.
He claims her where he catches her, on the ground, against stone, in the dust. At the peak of the claiming, he stings her.
For our females, none of that is violence. Scorpii women are built for the hunt. They’re fast, strong, and venom doesn’t harm them. The sting brings a female pleasure and seals the bond, and before the hunt is over, she usually puts her own stinger in her male.
In the ritual grounds, elders and family witness the start of the hunt and bless it. It’s a joyful thing among my kind. I used to imagine mine.
For Esme, the same ritual ends with her dead.
A Scorpius sting kills a human – that is the known truth.
The only exception is a true fated mate.
The shamans believe the bond may change the venom inside her blood, so it doesn’t stop her heart, but no shaman alive has watched it happen with a human woman, and there’s no safe way to test it. The only test is the sting itself.
There wouldn’t even be ritual grounds for my hunt. Haara doesn’t want me on its sacred paths. If the rut takes me, it takes me here, at the edge of the city, among the black rock, thornbrush, and dry washes behind my house. There would be no elders, no witnesses, and no one to pull me off her.
She’s a frail human who will get a head start that won’t help her at all, in a desert her kind can’t survive, running from a male built to catch anything that moves out here.
I sit on the edge of my bed and squeeze the glass so hard that it shatters. I don’t pick up the shards, because the enormity of what I’ve done finally sinks in.
I put her in this danger. Her parents would’ve saved her, had I let them. But I told myself I was saving her from an old man’s bed, and maybe I was, but I also brought her within reach of the most dangerous thing in Otheera – me.
Every kind thing I’ve done since, offering her the promise of freedom, buying her silk… I told myself it was to give her a reason not to fear me. But I kept her close while knowing the rut is inevitable. I’ve been fooling myself since the very beginning.
I should never have gone to the bride market. I should never have bought a human bride. I should have stayed home and accepted my fate. I’d already accepted my death and made my peace with it. Then I went ahead and risked her life for… nothing.
I need to make a new plan.
I won’t just let her leave. I told her twice, and it cost me nothing, because she has nowhere to go, and we both know it.
She can’t be here for another week. So, I’ll take her and Darina to any city in Alia Terra they name, I’ll give them money and make sure they don’t know the coordinates to come back.
I have savings I meant to die on. It’s enough to rent a house, buy food, enough for a whole new start.
Maybe Esme won’t even have to work. She won’t have to go back to Concord.
I can’t give her anything else she needs, but I can give her that.
The decision brings me no relief, and nothing else will either. Not tonight.
I can’t sleep. The tincture wears off, the heat climbs until I’m burning from the inside, and I pace my room in the dark from wall to wall, sweat gathering at the seams of my shell, the clicking constant now. I ache all over with predatory lust.
I try to take the edge off. I sit on the edge of the bed, open my pants, and take my cock in my hand.
I’ve been hard since I locked the door. The shell is softer than anywhere else on my body, smooth and giving under my fingers, deep purple from base to tip.
Slick pours from the tip at the first stroke.
My kind needs no oil; the rut makes its own.
My fist glides wet along the throbbing length.
I think about her. I can’t stop myself.
I know one thing about Esme’s body: the way her hand felt under mine at the silk stall, warm and soft. I build from that. I imagine that softness on her throat, her belly, the inside of her thighs. In my head, I lay her down on the bed and bury my face between her legs.
What would she taste like? Would she be wet for me?
I picture her pussy against my tongue, her thighs closing around my head, her hands pulling my hair instead of pushing me away while I lick her slow and deep.
My hands fill with her firm breasts, her nipples harden against my palms, and her back lifts off the bed.
When she’s undone, my cock sinks into her pussy, stretching her open while I watch her face and whisper to her how well she takes me.
As I get close, my tail moves on its own.
It curls up over my shoulder and hangs there with the stinger pointed down at my chest. Venom beads at the tip and drips on the plates over my heart.
My own venom can’t harm me. I watch, mesmerized, how it drenches me, how it flows in thin rivulets down my hard stomach.
I come hard, spilling over my fist. I’m panting, nearly breathless. Within seconds, the heat recedes, and I feel like I can think clearly again. I look at myself.
Disgusting. Weak.
I go into the bathroom and clean myself with a wet cloth, then return and drop onto the bed, closing my eyes, hoping sleep will come soon enough.
It doesn’t. Instead, the heat climbs back up, and before I know it, my hand wraps around my painfully hard cock, and I do it again, slower this time, dragging it out.
I picture Esme under me, her red hair spread across my pillow. I come a second time, my tail twitching above my shoulder, venom running down my throat and chest. The relief lasts no longer than the first.
The third time, near dawn, I’m nearly unconscious, but still hard and needy. I work my cock with my fist so slick that I’m drenched up to my wrist, and when I spill, it’s close to pain.
I can’t get release. I could empty myself into my own hand until I have nothing left, and it would change nothing. I don’t want my hand. I want her, running under the moon. I want her caught, claimed, stung, and bonded. I want Esme, and nothing else will do.
I can’t do this much longer.
When my control slips, the male who chases her won’t care that she’s terrified, won’t care that she doesn’t want it, and won’t pause to wonder whether his venom might kill her or not.
I’ll only know when it’s over, and she’ll either be alive or dead under me.
The light coming through the window turns gray, then gold. The house is quiet. The venom has dried on my chest in thin trails, and I tell myself I’ll get up and wash.
I tell myself I’ll go downstairs and tell Esme and Darina to pack their bags.
A wave of heat hits me again. I’m sweating, shaking, my stinger dripping venom while my cock weeps. I can’t walk out of the room like this, can’t see Esme when I’m nearly feral. I’ll have to wait it out. I reach for the tincture and pour a few drops right onto my tongue. I don’t count them.
I squeeze my eyes shut and hope.