Chapter 14
Gerard
Sweat clung to Gerard’s skin like a second uniform, the stale air of the inn was thick with the scent of cheap ale and rutting as he shoved a man face- down against the creaky bed.
The bastard’s eager breaths came fast, his ass grinding against Gerard’s crotch, all lean muscle and dog-like submission.
Good enough to fuck away the hours in this shit-stained village.
Grayhallow had been a week of nothing but waiting, his soldiers pissing away time in the mud-choked streets while he refused to drag them up those goddamn mountains into Al’tera’s hostile grip.
The ring had burned the entire way north.
A relentless heat that never cooled fully, never let him forget how close she was.
Thorn wanted her dragged back, not an international clusterfuck carved into the mountainside.
So Gerard waited. Elora would come south eventually, slinking out of enemy lands like the prey she was.
For now, though, meat like this kept his dick from going soft with boredom. The man— Joffrey? Whatever the hell his name was—had spread his legs readily enough, eyes wide with that mix of fear and desperation Gerard knew so well, his skinny body trembling under Gerard’s grip.
Gerard’s cock throbbed painfully, his balls tight with need as he gripped the man’s ass cheeks hard enough to bruise. The filthy little whore was panting like a bitch in heat, his hole already slick with oil.
“Gonna fuck you raw,” Gerard growled, his free hand fumbling with the laces of his breeches. “Split you open like—”
A goddamn knock hammered the door, cutting through his lust. “Fuck!” Gerard snarled, his fingers digging bruises into the man’s skinny hips.
The pathetic shit tried squirming away, but Gerard shoved him face-first into the stained mattress before stalking to the door, his wet cock still jutting out like an accusation.
He yanked the door open, not bothering to cover himself.
“What the fuck do you want?”
Malvin stood there, eyes darting down then quickly away from Gerard’s nakedness, his face splotchy and sweating under the piss-yellow lantern light. “Captain, you need to see this. Out the window.”
Gerard narrowed his eyes, sizing up the guard’s urgency, but he moved to the grimy pane beside the door, the one overlooking the muddied village square below.
There, weaving through the sparse crowd of pig-faced farmers and two-bit traders, was a boy—no more than eighteen by the look of him—clad in the telltale robes of a first-year Empire alchemist apprentice, the fabric mud-splattered but unmistakably imperial weave.
He straightened, the ring’s burn flaring hotter against his skin, a familiar itch crawling up his spine.
“You remember what Elora looks like, don’t you, Malvin?
I’m sure you do—back at The Institute, you were practically jizzing yourself whenever she walked by, desperate to shove your pathetic dick up those skirts. ”
Malvin flushed, his jaw tightening as he averted his eyes, the denial spilling out too quickly.
“That’s not—I wasn’t—that’s not how it was, Captain.
” He swallowed hard, then nodded toward the window again.
“But that kid down there? I recognize him. He’s one of the apprentices we were told got slaughtered in the pirate raid on the transport.
If he’s strutting around alive, means the others might’ve survived too.
Means there are more loose ends out here.
Targets Thorn would love to be taken out. ”
Gerard’s smirk deepened, the ring on his finger pulsing hotter as he watched the boy disappear into a side alley.
Loose ends, indeed. Thorn’s orders had been clear: retrieve Elora.
But this? This was opportunity wrapped in imperial robes, a chance to ram himself deeper into Thorn’s good graces and watch the bastards bleed.
The boy’s survival should have been a simple matter—track him, gut him like a fish, and leave his shit-stained corpse for the crows.
But as Gerard stared down at the empty square, a sly whisper of possibility slithered into his mind.
If this scrawny apprentice had clawed his way out of that pirate mess, then maybe Symond had too, that scarred little bastard with his fuck-you glare and that spine Gerard had never fully managed to break.
He glanced back over his shoulder at the whore sprawled on the bed with the sheets twisted around his hips, that desperate gaze locked on Gerard, pleading for him to return, to finish what they’d started.
Pathetic, that hunger, like a mangy dog whimpering for table scraps.
Too damn eager, too fucking soft. Gerard narrowed his gaze, his mind replacing that worthless flesh—imagining instead Symond’s tousled blond hair, those scars crisscrossing a body hardened by beatings rather than this unmarked, useless meat.
Symond, pinned down and finally broken, all that hate in his eyes while Gerard rammed into him, turning all that defiance into something he could use, something he could own.
He turned to Malvin, voice dropping low and commanding.
“Keep eyes on that apprentice. Tail him discreetly. No confrontation, not yet. He might lead us straight to the nest that the rest of those rats are holed up in. But remember, Elora’s the prize.
We follow her trail.” A flicker of hope stirred in his gut, unbidden but sharp; with any luck, they’d all be in the same shithole, making his job a goddamn feast to dump at Thorn’s feet.
Malvin nodded and scurried off like the ball-less wonder he was.
Gerard shut the door and turned back to the bed where his bitch lay spread-eagled, ass still slick and waiting.
The pathetic fuck hadn’t moved an inch. The man’s breath hitched, anticipation lighting his face, but Gerard’s dick had gone half-soft, his mind churning with better prey.
The mountains looming north, the ring’s insistent burn guiding him toward Elora, and now this tantalizing thread of Symond, alive perhaps, and waiting to be broken open.
He gripped the whore’s chin, yanking it up hard enough to make him wince. “You’ll do for now, cocksucker,” he grunted, but his mind was already elsewhere, plotting the hunt that would actually make this adventure worth it for him.