Chapter 3: Stormbound Memories
Ullan lay on his back in the vast silence of the imperial bed. Dolores was a warm, solid weight against his chest, her breathing deep and even in sleep. One of his hands rested on the smooth skin of her bare back, his fingers tracing absent, lazy circles. The other was pillowed behind his head.
Through the room’s single, towering viewport, the alien moon of Sorüm cast a bone-white light across the floor. It was a different silence here than on the ship. Older. Heavy with the ghosts of decisions made in these very chambers. The holographic murals along the walls—once depicting glorious battles and subjugated worlds—now cycled through serene, unfamiliar landscapes from Dolores’s memory: an oak tree, a field of sunflowers, a slow-moving river. Her touch was already rewriting his history.
His mind, unbidden, drifted back through the years, through the void, to the muddy, rain-sodden soil of a planet called Earth.
The pain had been a white-hot star in his side. Each breath drew shards of broken rib through his lung. The crash had been controlled, barely, a screaming glide through atmosphere that ended in a cataclysm of snapping pine trees. He’d triggered the auto-destruct from his pilot’s couch, the console sparking and dead under his hands. The explosion, when it came, was a deep whump that shook the forest floor, consuming every piece of technology that could betray him.
He’d crawled. Direction meant nothing. Survival was a blunt, animal impulse.
Then, light. A golden square in the suffocating black. And a shape, backlit, moving toward him through the sheeting rain.
She’d knelt in the mud without hesitation, her dress—some thin, flowered cotton—plastered to her body, outlining every generous curve. Her hands, trembling but sure, had pressed a bundle of cloth to the seeping wound in his side. He didn’t understand her words, but their cadence was a gentle, worried stream. A prayer. She got her arms under his shoulders and hauled. The agony was monstrous. He blacked out.
He woke in a bed that smelled of soap and dried herbs. The room was small, cluttered, alive with the patter of rain on a shingled roof. She was there, wiping his brow with a cool cloth. Her eyes were the color of rich soil, full of a concern so genuine it disarmed him completely. He, Emperor of the Slaya, conqueror of the Helix System, was utterly at the mercy of this soft, round-faced human.
Months passed. He learned. Language first, grunting and pointing. Then the rhythms of her life. How to mend a fence. How to plant seeds in neat rows. The names of birds. The comforting ritual of a shared meal at a scarred wooden table. He told her his name was Uli. She was Dolores.
He watched her. The way her hips swayed when she carried two buckets of water from the well. The way she’d chew her full lower lip while reading. The soft, delighted laugh that burst from her when her garden yielded its first tomatoes. By the end of that first year, the obsession was a physical ache in his chest, sharper than any wound. He was ensnared.
He employed every tactic of courtship he knew from a dozen different cultures. He brought her gifts: unusual stones, intricate carvings he whittled from firewood, the brightest wildflowers. He performed tasks before she could ask. He sought her opinion, listening with a intensity that made her blush. He positioned himself within her space, letting their arms brush, catching her scent—soap, sun, and something uniquely her.
She smiled. She thanked him. She treated him with a kind, sisterly affection that drove him to the brink of madness.
He noticed how she looked at him, though. When she thought he wasn’t watching. Her gaze would linger on the breadth of his shoulders as he chopped wood, shirtless and sweating. It would drop to his hands, then skitter away, a flush creeping up her neck. She felt it too. He was sure of it. Yet she did nothing. The frustration was a poison in his blood.
It culminated in the barn, on a sweltering afternoon thick with the smell of hay and dust. He’d been repairing a harness. She’d come in to fetch a tool. The moment the door swung shut behind her, he moved.
He cornered her between a stall and a tall stack of burlap sacks. He didn’t touch her, but his body caged hers, his arms braced on the wood behind her. The emperor, petulant and demanding, surfaced completely.
“Why?” he demanded, his voice low and rough.
She blinked up at him, genuinely startled. “Why what, Uli?”
“Why do you refuse me?” The words were foreign, clumsy with his anger. “I have done everything. I have given you signs. I have waited. You look at me with hunger in your eyes and then you turn away. What more must I do? What game is this?”
The confusion on her face melted into something else. Hurt. Shame. Her gaze fell to the dusty floorboards between them. Her voice, when it came, was so small it barely stirred the air. “I thought… I thought it was all in my head. I didn’t think you could actually be attracted to me. You are… you are so beautiful. But I… well…”
She made a vague, helpless gesture at her own body, her curvy hips, her soft stomach. The meaning was devastatingly clear.
A dam broke inside him. All the frustration evaporated, replaced by a furious, tender clarity. He cupped her face, forcing her to look at him. “You are blind,” he whispered, the anger gone, replaced by a awe. “You are the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.”
His mouth crashed down on hers.
It wasn’t gentle. It was a claiming. A correction. He kissed her until she was whimpering, until her hands gripped his forearms for balance. He walked her backward until her hips met the edge of a sturdy worktable. He yanked her simple dress up around her waist, his hands rough on the soft skin of her thighs. She wasn’t wearing anything underneath.
“See,” he growled against her mouth, his fingers finding her hot and already slick. “See how much you want me. You are dripping for me, Dolores.”
He freed himself from his trousers, the thick length of his erection springing free. He didn’t wait. He hitched her leg around his hip and drove into her in one brutal, deep stroke.
She cried out, a sharp sound swallowed by the hay-loft. Her nails dug into his arms. He was too big, the stretch was intense, but her body wept around him, pulling him deeper.
“This,” he panted, setting a relentless, pounding rhythm against the table, “is how beautiful you are.” Each thrust was a punctuation. “This heat.” Slam. “This tight, perfect cunt.” Slam. “Mine.”
She came quickly, violently, her inner muscles clamping around him like a fist, her head thrown back in silent ecstasy. He followed her over the edge, spilling into her with a guttural shout, his forehead pressed to her shoulder.
They slid to the hay-strewn floor, limbs tangled, breathing ragged. He kissed her again, softer now. Then he stood, pulling her up. “The kitchen,” he said, his voice hoarse.
“Uli, wait—”
He didn’t. He led her, dazed and half-dressed, into the farmhouse. He bent her over the sturdy kitchen table, scattering the day’s mail. He took her from behind, his grip possessive on her hips, his pace slower now, deeper, worshipful. He whispered filth in her ear in his own language, telling her how perfect her ass was, how he dreamed of her taste. He made her come again with his fingers while he was still inside her.
Finally, he carried her to her narrow bed in her small room. There, he laid her down and made love to her with a slow, devastating thoroughness that lasted hours. He explored every inch of her with his hands and mouth, learning the sounds she made, the places that made her gasp. He showed her, beyond any doubt, what she meant to him.
A feather-light touch dragged him from the past. Dolores’s finger was tracing the old, faded scar on his pectoral—the one from the crash, the one her hands had first stitched. Her eyes were open in the moonlight, watching him.
“You’re thinking about the barn,” she said softly. It wasn’t a question.
“I am thinking about everything,” he said.
Her finger stilled. “We need to talk.”
A cold filament of dread threaded through his gut. It was never good, when a conversation began with those words. “Talk.”
Dolores took a breath, her finger still resting on the ridge of old scar tissue. “About what we planned before coming here…” she began, her voice careful in the moonlit quiet. “I stopped taking the birth control. I think we should… pause, until things are more settled. We can’t bring a child into this when I don’t even know the culture here, and I don’t know what my role is in all of this.”
Ullan was silent for a long moment, his hand stilling on her back. “Your role is to be my wife,” he said finally, the words measured. “To put me in my place when I’m being an idiot, as you would say. To be the voice of reason when I can’t see past my own nose. To show me when I should use empathy. To be at my side.” He turned his head to look at her. “Basically, to keep being you. Like on the farm.”
“I won’t just be the one who warms your bed,” Dolores countered, her gaze firm.
“I would never disrespect you like that,” Ullan said, a sharp edge entering his tone. “To me, you are my wife. But your role is the one you want to have. Do you want to live quietly and do nothing? I will ensure it. Do you want to participate in politics? I will support you in everything.”
They fell silent. The disappointment was a cold, heavy stone in Ullan’s chest. He thought of what he’d imagined back on Earth: Dolores, round with his child, humming in the farmhouse kitchen. The vivid daydream now seemed to curdle in the sterile air of the imperial chamber.
He sighed, the sound rough. “I respect what you’re saying about a child. It’s just that the idea of having one with you… it fills me.”
Dolores smiled softly and gave him a kiss. “We’ll have one,” she whispered against his lips. “We’ll just wait a little longer.” After a pause, she laughed lightly. “God, in stories from Earth, an emperor is someone authoritarian, evil, obsessed with having an heir and continuing his legacy.” After a moment, she added, “And with many concubines.”
Ullan tensed. Every muscle in his body went rigid under her touch.
Dolores felt it. The easy warmth between them shattered.
The hell she had unwittingly summoned broke loose.
The hell she had unwittingly summoned broke loose.
Ullan’s entire body went cold, then hot. The arm beneath her turned to stone. She felt the shift like a seismic tremor through the mattress, a sudden, terrifying stillness where there had been warm relaxation. Dolores propped herself up on her elbow, looking at his profile etched sharp in the moonlight. His jaw was clenched so tight a muscle jumped.
“Ullan?” she said, her voice laced with doubt.
He didn’t look at her. He stared at the ceiling as if it held battle plans. His discomfort was a physical thing, a thick, wrong energy in the room. “Dolores,” he said, the word carefully measured. “It was before you.”
As soon as the words left his mouth, Dolores sat bolt upright, clutching the sheet to her chest. Her movement was swift, a shock in the stillness. “What was before me, Ullan?” The question was low, dangerous.
He finally turned his head. His eyes were shadows. “There were some treaties… and well…”
“How many?” The cut of her voice could have sliced crystal.
A beat of silence stretched, taut and screaming. “Seven.”
Dolores threw the sheets back and was on her feet, the fabric wrapped haphazardly around her body. “You had seven wives and you didn’t tell me anything!” Her whisper was a furious, husked thing, echoing off the silent walls.
Ullan rose from the bed, a tower of tense muscle and simmering fury. “They are not seven wives,” he corrected, his own voice dropping to a guttural register. “They are seven concubines. The only wife is you.”
“Wow!” she spat, a mocking, brittle laugh tearing from her throat. “That should make me feel better! They’re just seven women who waited for your return to occupy a place in your bed! Just a lineup of women available to you!”
“It was just the custom of the court!” he snapped, a flash of the emperor fracturing through the husband. “That’s how things are done!”
“That’s the court?” Her bitter laugh echoed now. “What does it say about the Empress, huh? Can she have a harem too? Should I start looking for concubines?”
The words hung in the air, a lethal, stupid challenge.
Before Dolores could blink, the world upended. A hard hand grabbed her ankle and yanked. The sheet tore from her grip as she fell backward onto the mattress, the breath knocked from her lungs. Ullan was on her in an instant, a weight of pure, dangerous fury pinning her down. He was naked, furious, and everywhere.
He trapped her wrists in one of his large hands, slamming them into the mattress above her head. The action arched her back, thrusting her breasts upward. “What did you say?” The question was a soft, venomous rasp against her lips.
She bucked and twisted, a wild, furious struggle. “Get off me, you liar!”
He used his knees, forcing her thighs apart with brutal efficiency, settling his hips between them. The hot, hard length of him pressed against her stomach, a blatant threat. “You think I would share you?” he growled, his breath hot on her face. He leaned into her captured wrists, his other hand gripping her jaw, not hard enough to hurt, but enough to force her to look at him. “You think I would let another man’s eyes even linger on you?”
“You had seven!” she screamed, her hips jerking uselessly.
“And they meant nothing!” he roared back, the sound raw in the cavernous room. He shifted his grip, pulling her arms higher, stretching her body taut beneath him. “I will get rid of them. They have no value to me. I will decapitate them personally if that satisfies you.” His voice dropped to a possessive, primal snarl. “But this cunt,” he ground his hips down, his cock sliding through her slickness, “is.Only. Mine.”
He slammed into her.
There was no preparation, no gentle breach. It was a single, punishing thrust that buried him to the hilt, tearing a ragged cry from her throat. She was wet—from anger, from the earlier intimacy, from the terrifying thrill of his rage—but the invasion was colossal, a stretch that bordered on pain. He didn’t wait for her to adjust.
He fucked her with a brutal, desperate rhythm, each drive of his hips a retaliation against her words, a physical reclaiming. His mouth left her lips and traveled down her neck to her breast. He took the peak into his mouth, sucking hard before sealing his teeth around the tender flesh in a sharp, claiming bite.
“Ullan!” she cried, a mix of pain and overwhelming sensation.
She tried to fight it, to cling to her righteous anger, but her body betrayed her utterly. The brutal fullness, the sharp sting of his teeth, the raw dominance of his possession ignited a fire in her core that her fury could not extinguish. A choked sob escaped her, then a broken moan. Her back arched, offering herself more completely to his mouth, her hips rising to meet his savage thrusts.
He released her breast, his lips glistening. “Mine,” he panted against her damp skin, punctuating the word with another deep, grinding stroke. “Every sound, every tremor, every fucking drop of come I put in you. Mine.”
Her resistance shattered. A second, more powerful orgasm ripped through her, wave after wave of shocking, debilitating pleasure that clamped her around him like a vice. Her cry was long and loud, echoing off the obsidian walls. The convulsions of her climax milked him, dragged a final, guttural shout from his chest as he poured into her, his own release a hot, pulsing flood deep inside.
He collapsed atop her, his weight crushing, his breath ragged gusts in her ear. Sweat glued their skin together. Slowly, he released her wrists. She didn’t move them. They lay there, a tangled, spent knot in the center of the vast bed, the only sound their ragged breathing softening into the moonlit quiet.
After a long time, Dolores murmured into the hollow of his shoulder, her voice hoarse. “You don’t have to decapitate them. Just get rid of them.”
Ullan let out a soft, breathless laugh. He turned his head, rubbing his cheek against hers in a gesture that was startlingly tender after the violence. “Whatever my Empress desires,” he whispered.
He shifted, rolling to his side and pulling her with him, keeping her tucked against his body, his softening cock still nestled inside her. He stroked her hair, his fingers gentle now. “I should have told you,” he said, the words quiet in the dark. “On Earth, they were a ghost story. Here, they are a political reality I was too cowardly to explain.”
Dolores was silent, listening to the strong, steady beat of his heart under her ear. The fury had burned out, leaving a hollowed-out calm. “What happens tomorrow?” she finally asked.
“Tomorrow,” he sighed, the word heavy with impending duty, “I introduce my wife to my court. And my wife,” he kissed the top of her head, “informs the Steward of the Household that the concubines are to be provided with generous pensions and relocated to estates of their choosing, far from the capital.”
“And if they object? If the court objects?”
She felt his smile against her hair. “Then I will remind them that my Empress has a merciful heart. But her Emperor does not.”