Chapter 7: The Maid's Bed
The anger did not cool. It settled in Leonid’s bones like a low-grade fever, a corrosive heat that made the straw of his pallet feel like needles. The memory of Taehyung’s smug face, the king’s applause, the splintering wood—it played behind his eyes every time he closed them. But sharper, more painful, was the clean, chemical smell of Jennie’s suppressants as she walked away, a wall she built between them in public. Her love was a room he was only allowed to enter when she unlocked the door. Her protection was a leash.
He couldn’t sleep. The phantom ache of the planned ‘accident’ for tomorrow was already a throb in his wrist. Another performance. Another lie. He rose from the pallet, his movements silent, and slid out into the stone corridor of the servants’ quarters. The palace was a different beast at this hour, breathing with the sounds of settling timber and distant drafts. He moved on instinct, the part of him that was still a hunter taking over.
The smell found him first. Not the cloying, complicated perfume of royalty, but something simple and sweet. An omega in repose. Honey and warm linen. It came from a half-open door at the end of a narrow stair, leading to an attic storeroom.
He pushed the door open. The space was cramped, lit by a single tallow candle. Shelves lined with moth-eaten linens created narrow canyons. In the center, kneeling by a battered trunk, was a young maid. She was mending a tear in a tablecloth, her small hands moving with practiced ease. She jumped when his shadow fell over her, her head snapping up.
Her eyes were wide, dark. Her scent spiked with surprise, then, as she took in his size, his bare chest, the lingering bruise on his jaw, with a flicker of fear. It was clean, unadulterated. Real.
“M-my lord?” she stammered, using the title reflexively for any alpha of imposing bearing.
Leonid didn’t answer. He stepped inside and closed the door behind him. The click of the latch was final. He saw her throat work as she swallowed.
“You’re… you’re the queen’s,” she whispered, her voice barely audible.
“Not right now,” he said, and the sound of his own voice was a stranger’s, flat and dark.
He crossed the space in two strides. She scrambled back on her knees, but there was nowhere to go. The trunk was at her back. He didn’t touch her face. He didn’t speak sweet words. He grabbed the coarse fabric of her dress at her shoulders and turned her, pushing her forward until her hands slammed against the cold stone of the wall for support. She let out a sharp gasp.
“Please—” she started.
He bunched the skirts of her dress and her shift in one fist, yanking them up to her waist. The air in the attic was cool on her exposed skin. Her thighs were pale, trembling. The sweet, inviting scent of her omega slick bloomed in the confined space, a direct, primal contrast to the chemical sterility he’d endured all day. It smelled like truth. It smelled like something he could defile.
He fumbled with the laces of his trousers, his fingers unfeeling. His cock was already hard, thick and heavy, an angry pulse that had nothing to do with desire and everything to do with the need to claim, to dirty, to feel something other than helpless rage. He spat into his palm, a crude lubricant, and slicked himself roughly. He positioned the blunt head at her entrance, hot and wet against him.
“Hold still,” he grunted, not a request, an order from the alpha he was forced to suppress.
She whimpered, a small, broken sound, but her body obeyed its base programming. She arched her back, presenting. The submission fueled the fire in him. He hated it. He hated her for it. He hated Jennie for making him hate it.
He pushed into her with one brutal, unyielding thrust. She cried out, a muffled shove of sound against her arm. She was tight, virginally so, and her inner muscles clenched around him in shocked protest before reluctantly giving way. He didn’t pause. He didn’t gentle. He set a punishing rhythm immediately, fucking into her with hard, deep strokes that shoved her against the wall with each impact. The wooden shelves rattled. The candle flame guttered.
It was mechanical. It was violence wearing the skin of sex. He gripped her hip bone so hard he’d leave bruises, using her for leverage. His other hand braced against the wall beside her head, his knuckles white. Her skin was slick with sweat under his palm. Her little cries had morphed into ragged, rhythmic sobs with each inward plunge. The wet, filthy sound of their joining filled the attic, a stark counterpoint to the silence of the palace below.
He was thinking of the splintered sword. Of the marble floor. Of Jennie’s white knuckles and her subsequent, perfect laugh. He drove into the maid—Mira—as if he could fuck the memory out of his own skull. As if he could imprint this raw, ugly power onto the world that saw him as a passive thing.
“Fuck,” he hissed, the word ripped from him. “Take it.”
She did. Her body was accommodating him, her slick making the brutal slide easier, her omega nature compelling her to accept the alpha’s rough use. It made him sick. It made him harder. He felt his balls tighten, a coil of pleasure building from sheer physical friction, detached from any emotion but spite. He chased it, his pace becoming erratic, desperate.
He came with a raw, guttural groan, slamming into her to the hilt, his release pumping into her in hot, jagged pulses. For a few seconds, the world was nothing but the smell of sex and sweat and her muffled weeping, the animal relief of the orgasm, and the immediate, crushing flood of shame.
He pulled out. The sound was lewd. He staggered back a step, his breath sawing in his lungs. He looked at her. She was slumped against the wall, her dress still rucked up around her waist, her thighs shining with a mix of her slick and his spend. She was shaking. She didn’t look back at him.
He said nothing. No apology, no blessing, no warning. He tucked his softening cock back into his trousers, laced them with fingers that felt numb. The taste in his mouth was indeed bitter, metallic, like blood and failure.
He turned and left the attic, descending the narrow stairs. As he reached the bottom, he saw a scullery maid frozen in the cross-corridor, a bucket in her hand, her eyes wide as saucers. She’d heard. She’d smelled. She’d seen him emerge.
Leonid met her gaze for one cold second, then walked past her, back towards his cell. Let her talk. Let the whispers slither through the servants’ passages, under doors, into the gilded halls. Let it reach the queen’s ears. Let her smell another omega on him. Let her choke on it.
The performance tomorrow would be a convincing injury. But tonight’s was the real wound, and he had been the one to wield the blade, against a target who did not deserve it. The pallet in his cell felt no different, but he lay down on it anyway, staring at the blackness, the scent of honey and warm linen and his own violent release clinging to his skin, a confession no suppressant could ever erase.