Chapter 9 - Playing the Fool

I’d made it around two corners before I was running, because walking naked through a warlock’s dungeon felt like asking to get caught. My lungs burned. The stone walls dripped with moisture, and the scent of incense mixed with the sting of blood, evil cultist edition. I held on to Mistress Ashara’s brooch, for it was the only sane thing I had left. My ears were out for guards, or worse, a pissed-off warlock. Instead, I ran headlong into a big-eyed, red-cheeked servant girl who made a very nice sound as I flattened her against the wall.

“Gods!” She looked more surprised than I’d ever been in my life, eyes wide, wine soaking through a thin shift as she grabbed for her tray. “You scared me!”

“Did I?” I was still grinning like a madman. I probably looked like one, bare everything but my boots glistening with pit slime. Her stare dropped to my cock, then jumped back to my face.

There was a moment of beautiful confusion. The spiced wine was the best thing I’d smelled all night. I smelled like the pit: something organic I preferred not to name and the singular bouquet of a man who had recently been in genuine trouble. She still hadn’t screamed. I chose to read that as an invitation.

I was breathing hard from more than the run. I took a step toward her, looked around to see if we had an audience. There were only shadows, deep and dark, and they got less terrifying by the second. Her hair was dark, catching a flicker of torchlight from down the passage. Her eyes flashed with something I hoped was interest and not a medical condition.

She wore a collar at her throat. She had braces on her wrists and cuffs on her ankles below the hem of that little linen thing she was wearing, all of it matching and clearly not decorative in any way I was choosing to think about right now. The linen was thin enough to be basically decorative as well, especially with the wine soaked through it, which I also noticed. Apparently this was how Malkor dressed his slave girls: his metalwork and a scrap of fabric that was doing its absolute best under difficult circumstances. I had opinions about that. Several of them were warm. I was in an evil warlock’s fortress. This was not the strangest thing I’d seen in the last hour.

Her gaze snagged on my face like she’d been waiting for it, then traveled down to linger on my shoulder where the scar ran diagonally down toward my groin. She wet her lips. Damn, this girl was doing all sorts of things to me, most of them pretty promising. Maybe my luck wasn’t so shitty after all. “Thought I was done for,” I said, sounding more pleased about it than I should. “They’re not easy to shake.”

“Who?” Her voice was breathy, bouncing off the dripping walls in all its girlish glory.

“All of them.” I meant it, from the tentacles to the soldiers to my previous arrangements with Maya and the harpy and that exceptionally keen shop girl. My face was close to hers. She didn’t back away. I put my hand on the wall, next to her head.

“What are you...” she asked, but the end of it didn’t sound too committed. She hadn’t picked up her tray.

“You don’t need all those cups, do you?” I said.

I held her eyes until she looked down, blushing, pretty much answering my question. She glanced around, nervous and maybe as reckless as I was. It made me want her like hell, right there on the wine-soaked floor.

She pressed against me and hissed, “This way!” grabbing my hand in one of hers and her tray in the other and dragging me toward a curtained doorway and through a dark hall. Her wet shift was stuck to her ass the whole way, and I’d have followed it anywhere. I barely had time to close my fist around my precious brooch before she shoved open a hidden door and pulled me through.

The room was small. It was a storeroom, probably, judging by the shelves along one wall, though someone had put a cot and a candle in it, which elevated the whole situation to “private.” Hot, still air hit my bare chest. The candle threw yellow light on the bare stone and on her. I set the brooch on the nearest shelf, carefully, and tried to look like I arrived in the dungeon naked on purpose.

She turned to face me and the candlelight caught the collar properly.

This time I took a good look at it. It was metal, fitted tight around her neck and made to stay on, not cheap market jewelry. The wrist braces were the same work, same maker, worn smooth at the edges. The ankle cuffs on her bare legs matched them exactly. I was guessing it was Malkor’s work, though I’d have guessed that even without the murder pit context. The girl rushing wine through these corridors was Malkor’s property, and somebody else had picked out every piece of her hardware.

I have a thing with locks. I see one, I want to open it. It’s an occupational hazard. My picks were lying on Malkor’s floor upstairs, but I’d opened worse with a fingernail and a decent moral argument, and I reached for the clasp on her wrist.

She grabbed my wrist.

She looked offended. I guessed it was because I’d reached for something of hers without asking. Her grip didn’t shake.

“I can pick these,” I said.

“Don’t.” She didn’t let go. “They’re... mine.” She said it low and certain. I had a thought about that, but she was still right there against me, barely dressed, and I lost the thread entirely.

The musk in my blood had been running my executive function since I’d fallen into the pit and it was not signing off on this detour. I filed the thought away. I have a long list.

She reached for the cord at her waist.

That little linen thing dropped. One thin cord had been holding it up, and it had been doing its best. Its best was not much, and I mean that as a compliment to everything underneath.

I want to say I handled what came next with grace and composure. I did not. The candlelight hit her all at once and she was dark-skinned and warm and everything the shift had been hiding had absolutely no right to look like that. Her breasts were perfect. I know that’s not a technical description but I’m telling you, objectively, as a man who has seen breasts, these were the standard by which all future breasts would be measured. The collar rested at her throat and the wrist braces circled her wrists. Against her bare skin the metal looked wrong, put on something it had no business touching.

Her waist curved down to hips every bit as good as the rest of her. The whole picture was unfair. I was nineteen years old and had recently survived a great deal, so I stood there and gawked.

She let me.

Look. I want to be very clear that I gave the situation the serious consideration it deserved. I considered it for approximately one full second, which is longer than it sounds when you’re post-tentacle and still carrying someone else’s musk dripping out your ass. At the end of that second, she smiled, slow and deliberate. She knew exactly what she’d done, and the consideration ended. I’m only human. Barely, at this point, but it still counts.

I’m a man who loves being alive, and being alive had recently gotten extremely complicated. Right here and right now there was a beautiful girl smiling at me in a small warm room, and the universe was not entirely awful. She had hardware on her that she hadn’t chosen, yet, she’d also chosen to pull me through that door herself and drop the shift herself. I told myself that distinction mattered. I was fairly sure I was right. Fairly.

She crossed to me and the ankle cuffs made a small sound with each step, metal on stone, almost musical. She put her hands on my chest, wrist braces cool against my skin, and looked up at me with those dark eyes, and they were dead steady.

“You shouldn’t be here,” she said. Her voice dropped lower, and her eyes were completely certain about something. “I’ve been watching you. Since they dragged you through the outer hall.” She had no reason to be watching me. I was not going to say that. “You’re different.”

I had no complaints about being watched. I have no complaints about a lot of things when the person watching looks like that. “You dragged me here,” I pointed out.

“Yes,” she said, and kissed me.

She tasted like spiced wine. She kissed like she’d been thinking about it since the corridor, urgent and a little desperate, hands at the back of my neck before I’d had time to participate, fingers tracing my ribs like she already knew where they went. I pulled her in by the back of her neck and my fingers grazed the collar’s lower edge, cool metal under my hand while she was warm everywhere else. She moaned against my mouth, and it rewrote my priorities for the evening.

The backs of my knees hit the cot. I sat, she came with me, and we sorted out the logistics from there.

She wrapped her hand around my cock, and I forgot whatever I’d been planning to say.

“Oh,” she said, quiet, grip tightening. “You’re already...”

“Yeah.” I was. Ripple’s musk had been keeping me half-hard since the pit, and her hand finishing the job was not helping my composure. “Long story.”

She didn’t ask for it. I’d spent so long in that tentacle pit being comprehensively dismantled by an ancient creature with no idea when to stop. By rights, I should have been done for the week. But the stuff was still threading through my blood like the world’s most committed houseguest, and apparently it had filed the paperwork to keep things operational before checking out. I owed it an apology and probably a fruit basket.

Her knees went either side of my hips. She rocked forward in a slow, deliberate grind, and I found out she was already wet before I had to ask. She was wet heat against me, and she’d been ready since the corridor, maybe since the moment I’d knocked spiced wine down her amazing breasts and she’d looked at me like I’d done her a favor. Some sensible corner of my brain pointed out that beautiful slave girls do not typically drag strangers off to evil warlocks’ dungeons unless something is very much going on. The rest of my brain agreed that something was clearly going on and it was, so far, excellent. She worked herself down onto my cock and the argument ended.

She was tighter than Lily and slicker than Ripple, and alive in a way I wasn’t prepared for. Her pussy grabbed me and pulled me in, firm and hot and clenching around me until my vision went white at the edges. I’ve had good. I’ve had great. Aeolin had ruined me for most women and I’d accepted that as the cost of doing business with a harpy. This girl was making a strong counterargument. She was the best I’d ever had. I know I say that. I know. But this time I meant it, and I’d have bet my last copper on it. “Gods,” I said.

She didn’t answer. She braced her palms on my chest, wrist braces cool and smooth against my skin, and rode me. The collar caught the candlelight above me each time she arched back. I watched it when I wasn’t watching her face, and her face was something worth watching: cheeks burning, eyes half-closed, lips parted.

She was tight and hot and completely intent, and then she put her mouth near my ear and said “please” like she’d been saving it up, low and breathless.

I had a thought about that. It didn’t finish.

I pulled her down harder. She made a sound that was going to get us both buried in the courtyard and grabbed the back of my neck and said it again.

I was running on whatever ancient biological nonsense Ripple had left in my blood, and there was a beautiful naked girl on top of me with her hands in my hair asking for more. The part of me that asks intelligent questions had gone to bed. The rest of me had exactly one opinion.

She leaned back, hands braced on my thighs, wrist braces warm now. Her dark hair swung forward. She was loud. I guessed somebody had spent a long time telling her not to be, and I didn’t want her to stop.

The ankle cuffs had a single loose link each, and they jingled with every thrust, a tiny bright sound against all the heavy breathing and the cot’s creaking. I liked it more than I should have.

I flipped her onto her back and she made that surprised sound, the one I was already a dedicated fan of. I grabbed her wrists on instinct and pinned them over her head.

She went liquid the second my hands closed on the braces. She made a sound I felt in my chest, a sound that means you’ve been waiting for something and it finally showed up. I didn’t know what to do with that.

She laughed.

It was a real laugh, bright and startled. Her eyes were wide and shining, and if I had to guess, what lit them up was relief. She was grinning at me with her wrists pinned and the braces under my palms.

“Yes,” she said, breathless and begging. “Like that. Tighter. Hold them tighter.”

I had no idea what was going on.

I pushed into her and she arched up to meet me and dragged her nails down my back and the cot creaked loudly and I did not slow down. She was a lot, this girl, more than she’d let on in the corridor and more than I’d expected. She wrapped her legs around me, ankle cuffs biting into the backs of my thighs hard enough to hurt, and said yes again.

We found a pace that made thinking impossible, which suited me fine. She was fierce under me, hips rising to match every thrust, sharp sounds she was only half-suppressing. She came hard, arching up off the cot, fingers digging into my arms. I followed her over about three seconds later with all the grace and dignity of a man falling off a roof. “Holy shit,” I said into her neck, once I had the lung capacity.

She said nothing. Her chest rose and fell against mine. Outside the room, up in the keep, the stones gave off a low, unhappy hum I hadn’t noticed until then. I decided that was a problem for a version of me wearing pants.

I lifted my head. She was still flushed, and her eyes were half-closed and gleaming. She looked like someone who had gotten exactly what they came for.

I thought that was about me.

“Cocky bastard,” she said.

I wasn’t sure if it was my persistence or my performance that she meant.

“You know it.”

“Dangerous game.”

“Always.”

She stretched, sly smile and bare skin, daring me to keep at it or give it up. “Better get out while you can.”

I probably should have. I’d arrived here stinking and barely coherent, and she’d been enthusiastic to the point of implausibility. Mistress Ashara had a word for situations that seemed too good to be true. I’d always assumed it didn’t apply to me.

But I didn’t leave yet.

I propped myself up on one elbow, reached for the wine tray she’d dropped by the cot, and tipped a goblet to my lips. She’d had me half-crazed with need and the pure thrill of not getting caught. I wanted to say something clever. But I drank instead, warm spiced honey dripping down my chin. Her eyes stayed on me, amused, and drifted once to the shelf where I’d set the brooch. She caught herself and smiled, not bothering to pretend she hadn’t. I thought: she really likes me.

I took a second swallow and looked down at her. She was sprawled beneath me, hair a disaster. Those breasts were even better from this angle, which I hadn’t thought possible. The collar lay against her throat and the wrist braces caught the candlelight. The whole picture was as unfair as it had been when her skimpy outfit dropped, except now I’d had her and she’d had me and I was still inside her, which made drinking wine seem like the most reasonable thing in the world. I was genuinely grateful to be alive.

The candle shadows had gotten interesting. Probably the wine.

Or probably me.

The third swallow was the one. The room went sideways. Three swallows shouldn’t have done that. My hand set the goblet down carefully on absolutely nothing, and I heard it hit the floor from a long way off. “Hey.” My tongue was half-asleep. “What’s...”

She was beside me. I hadn’t felt her slide out from under me. Her face was close, dark eyes steady.

“Shh,” she said.

I had a clever thing to say. It didn’t come. My back found the cot without me deciding to lie down. The ceiling was moving, and a second later I wasn’t sure which one of us was moving. The candle was doing something strange.

Her face was the last thing I had clearly. She put her hand on my cheek, and her touch was gentle. Those eyes were doing that certain thing again, the one I didn’t have the blood pressure left to figure out. I tried to ask. My mouth had already called it a night. She smiled down at me, and she had dimples. I thought it was a strange thing to notice.

A heartbeat after the dimples, the candlelight went out.