Chapter 15 Braze
brAZE
Sexual agony had become a country that Braze now inhabited. His entire world was reduced to the flesh of his cock, and the maddening, rhythmic friction being applied to it.
Kaitlyn’s hand—her small, elegant fingers—were wrapped around his shaft beneath the cover of her gown and the slit in her panties.
She wasn't just holding him still anymore.
She was stroking him—a slow, absent-minded, up-and-down motion, her palm cupping the head on each upstroke, and her thumb brushing the sensitive slit, now leaking a constant stream of pre-cum that made the motion slick and effortless.
It was like she’d forgotten she was doing it. The touch had a reflexive, almost unconscious quality to it, as if her body—independent of her mind—had decided this was a necessary action.
Braze wondered, through the haze of need, if it had anything to do with the amount of that spicy smelling wine he’d seen the servants pouring into her goblet with relentless frequency.
Her posture had softened, and her words had grown looser and more candid with the woman beside her called Aria.
At this point, he was pretty sure Kaitlyn was no longer sober—not even close.
But either way, what she was doing was driving him to the brink of sanity.
Each stroke was a sweet, torturous promise that went nowhere, thanks to the unyielding ring at his base.
His hips wanted to buck—to thrust up into her hand.
Even more, he longed to drive himself up into her tight, hot channel—to fill her pussy to the hilt.
It would be easy enough—she’d gotten plenty of his precum on and in herself earlier when she’d been rubbing his cock against her inner fold—so she would be more than able to take him.
With one hard thrust, he could be knot-deep inside her, plundering her sweet little pussy and making her moan his name, Braze thought hungrily.
And then he would be working his knot into that tight little cunt of hers…
stretching her open so he could fill her with his seed and Bond her to him forever…
Wait—what was he thinking? He couldn’t take advantage of his charge that way—and he certainly couldn’t Bond her to him. They were already breaking all kinds of rules and protocols sitting this way and being so intimate—he was supposed to be her Protector, not her love-toy or her mate.
Get it together—if you’re not careful you’re going to fuck everything up!
he mentally shouted at himself. If she wants to touch you, you just have to take it.
She’s the Mistress in this situation, after all.
And you know Mistress Lovelyone put you through worse.
It’s just been a long time since you were in the submissive role—you’ve forgotten how to act.
So in spite of the way Kaitlyn continued to stroke and tease his cock, he held himself still by sheer force of will. His muscles were coiled like steel springs and a low, continuous growl came vibrating up from his chest but it was lost in the noise of the hall.
But even as he grappled for control, Braze was drowning in sensation. Every nerve ending was focused on that one point of contact…on the slide of his Mistress’s skin against his…on the damp heat he could feel radiating from her soft little pussy, just millimeters away.
Then the lights changed.
The sudden flash and the subsequent violent strobing cut through his pleasure-daze like a blade. Instinct and the warrior’s hyper-vigilance that never fully slept, kicked in.
He sat up a little straighter in the reclined chair, his eyes narrowing as he looked over Kaitlyn’s shoulder.
The crowd’s attention shifted as one—a wave of excited murmuring rising.
A single, brilliant spotlight speared down from the darkness of the vaulted ceiling, illuminating the center of the U-shaped tables—a circle of stark white light on the polished stone floor.
Into that circle stepped a figure.
He was tall and painfully thin, with skin like translucent blue ice, through which darker blue veins and the faint shadow of bones were visible.
Perched precariously on his head was a tall, conical hat of vibrant pink.
A long, crimson cape flowed from his shoulders, pooling around his thigh-high boots.
He moved with a theatrical, exaggerated grace, sweeping into a deep, flourishing bow towards the assembled women.
“Ladies of Salimba Prime!” His voice was a reedy tenor, amplified somehow to fill the vast space. “Tonight you will be mesmerized and hypnotized—awed and amazed!”
All around the hall, women clapped and cheered. The men seated beneath them remained utterly silent statues of flesh.
We’re just furniture here, Braze thought grimly. You don’t expect the furniture to applaud.
“All the way from the misty moors of New Grovenshire,” the trainer continued, straightening up and spreading his arms wide, the red cape flaring like wings made of blood, “I have brought you a beast so fearsome, so magnificent, you won’t believe your eyes!
Yes—it is a Kriver! The most feared and fearsome predator in the entire known Universe! ”
Another round of applause, more eager this time, followed his words. The trainer bowed again, a smirk playing around his thin, blue lips.
“Please stay very still in your seats, for we don’t wish to upset her. She’s in heat at the moment, which makes her a bit… testy.” He paused, letting his gaze sweep over the audience of women. “A fact I’m sure you can all identify with.”
The line drew predictable giggles and knowing laughs.
Braze’s jaw tightened. This was a fucking circus—a grotesque, dangerous circus.
He had a bad feeling about this beast—this Kriver.
He had never seen one but their bloodthirsty reputation for ferocity was well known.
It didn’t seem likely that this male had actually trained one—they weren’t supposed to be trainable at all.
But no one else in the crowd or at the Empress’s table seemed in the least bit worried. They were all leaning forward, their eyes fixed eagerly on the spotlight, waiting for the beast to appear.
They didn’t have to wait for long.
“And now,” the trainer intoned, his voice dropping to a dramatic whisper that still carried, “For your viewing pleasure… the Kriver!”
From within his cape, he produced a long, black whip. He snapped it once in the air and the crack was like a gunshot, sharp and final.
The response was immediate.
A deafening roar filled with pure, primal power, shook the very air. It was a sound that bypassed the ears and vibrated directly in the center of Braze’s body. From a dark archway across the hall, the beast bounded into the circle of light.
Braze’s breath caught and every muscle in his body tensed. Every instinct he possessed screamed DANGER!!!!
The Kriver was a nightmare fusion of evolutionary horrors.
It stood on four powerful legs that ended in paws like a grizzly bear’s—each claw a curved, black sickle longer than Braze’s hand.
Its torso was massive and barrel-chested—covered in a short, sleek pelt of iridescent black fur that shimmered with hints of deep purple and green as it moved.
But where a bear or big cat would have a neck and head, the Kriver’s body surged upward into a cluster of thick, muscular tentacles—eight of them—each as long as a man was tall, writhing and coiling around its central mass like furious serpents.
At the tip of each tentacle was not a sucker, but a snapping, beak-like mouth filled with needle-sharp, rotating teeth.
And in the very center of this whipping nest of appendages was a single, massive eye—glowing with malevolent, intelligent amber light.
It roared again—a multitude of sounds coming from the snapping beaks at the end of its tentacles—and its stench reached Braze’s nose. This living nightmare smelled of wet fur, raw meat, and fresh blood—not a comforting combination.
Braze stared at it in horror. It was a predator built for utter devastation. And there was nothing—no cage, no force field, not even a rope—between it and the front row of tables.
The trainer, however, seemed utterly at ease. He paced around the perimeter of the light, his whip held loosely in one long-fingered hand.
“Observe, ladies, the precision of the Kriver! Its tentacles are not mere limbs—they are independent hunters—each with a mind of its own, yet they obey my mind!”
He stopped and pointed his whip at his own ridiculous pink hat.
“For my first demonstration, I shall ask my sweet pet to remove my hat. Not with violence, but with the delicacy of a maiden plucking a flower!”
He stood perfectly still and stared at the beast. Did he have some kind of mental control over it, Braze wondered? How was he making his orders known?
However he was doing it, it seemed to be working. The Kriver’s central eye fixed on the hat and suddenly, there was a blur of motion too fast to follow. One tentacle lashed out and retracted in the same instant.
Braze saw that the beak-mouth at its end had plucked the pink cone-hat from the trainer’s head and now held it aloft, waving it gently before tossing it aside with a contemptuous flick.
The audience gasped in unison, then broke into delighted applause at the Kriver’s terrifying precision.
“You see?” the trainer cried, bowing as if he had done the trick himself. “Control! Now, witness her balance and grace—traits previously unseen in a creature of such raw power!”
He gestured to an attendant, who rolled a large, polished crystal sphere into the light.
“She will walk the sphere—a dance of perfect equilibrium!” he cried.
With a series of sharp clicks of his tongue and flicks of his whip, he directed the Kriver and then stared at it for a long moment.
The beast seemed to understand. It hunkered down, its great muscles bunching. Then, with a fluidity that belied its size, it placed both massive front paws onto the rolling sphere.
A collective inhale swept the room as the Kriver pushed forward, walking the sphere in a slow, deliberate circle around the trainer. Its tentacles waved in the air like the legs of a grotesque, upside-down insect, maintaining a perfect, impossible balance.
“Fucking hell,” Braze growled under his breath.
The sight of such destructive potential harnessed to such a frivolous trick was somehow deeply unsettling. The applause this time was more hesitant—tinged with awe.
“And for my final display…” The trainer spread his arms wide, his red cape hanging like a curtain. “I will place myself at her mercy. I shall stand within the Cage of Flesh, surrounded by her hunting limbs, trusting completely in our bond!”
He gave a sharp, guttural shout. The Kriver’s tentacles, all eight of them, shot outwards and downwards with a sound like cracking whips.
The beak-mouths snapped shut a hair’s breadth from the stone floor, forming a perfect, impenetrable prison of pulsating muscle around the trainer.
He stood in the center, a smile frozen on his blue lips, as the tentacles began to rotate around him—a living, swirling vortex of muscle and snapping teeth that could reduce him to pulp in a heartbeat.
The hall fell into a dead, breathless silence and it seemed to Braze that the entire audience was mesmerized by the trainer’s reckless flirting with a bloody, horrible death.
Throughout it all, he remained on a knife’s edge of alertness—his senses cataloging every twitch of the beast, every shift in the crowd’s energy. His body was a live wire, ready to explode into motion if he needed to because he did not trust this situation at all.
And yet, beneath the primal thrum of danger, a part of him was still achingly, maddeningly aware of the soft, steady, oblivious stroking of Kaitlyn’s hand on his cock—a persistent and exquisite counterpoint to the threat happening in the center of the room.
The two sensations—mortal peril and desperate, restrained pleasure—were twisted together into a single unbearable tension, and Braze was trapped, utterly, between them.
Fuck, he thought. When is this going to end?