Chapter 32: The Nubian King
The days bled into one another, a strange, feverish haze. State documents blurred before my eyes. The petitions of governors became a distant drone. All I could see was the obsidian gleam of Jabari’s throne room floor against my cheek. All I could feel was the searing, unfinished climax lodged in my gut like a shard of pottery. The memory was a ghost that touched me at odd moments—during a tax allocation meeting, tasting wine, listening to the harp—sending a hot, unwelcome jolt through my core.
It wasn’t pleasure I recalled. It was the failure. The lack of control. The way my body had been wielded against me, left simmering on a brink of its own making.
The shame had calcified into something harder: a ruthless, focused need. If that was to be a weapon used against me, I would master it. I would turn their vulgarity into my own skill.
I summoned them to my bathing chamber, where steam rose in lazy coils from the alabaster pool. Benedetta was pouring scented oil into the water, her movements serene. Marisa lounged on a divan, peeling a fig with a small knife, her eyes alert.
“I require instruction,” I said, my voice echoing flatly off the wet stone. I had not preambled it. The words simply fell.
Benedetta paused, the glass vial hovering. “Instruction, Majesty?”
“In the art of fellatio.” The clinical term sounded absurd in the humid air. I kept my gaze level. “I was… inadequate. I will not be again.”
A stunned silence. Then Marisa’s laugh, quick and delighted. She popped the fig into her mouth. “Now this is a lesson I’m thrilled to give.” She swung her legs down, all sly energy. “Theory or practice?”
Benedetta’s soft features tightened with concern. She set the vial down carefully. “Angela… what happened in that chamber? This isn’t like you. This is a reaction.”
“It is a strategic acquisition of knowledge,” I snapped, the empress in me flaring. Then I softened, seeing the genuine worry in her brown eyes. I stepped into the pool, the hot water embracing my hips. “They left me… wanting, Benedetta. They used my own desire as a cage. I need to understand the lock. I need to own the key.”
Marisa was already pacing, thinking. “Theory is useless. It’s about texture, response, taste. You need a subject. A passive one. For pure technique.”
Benedetta’s voice was low. “You wish to use a slave.”
“I wish to practice,” I corrected, though we all knew it was the same thing. “I do not want a person. I want a device. Silent. Compliant.”
Marisa nodded, a conspirator’s grin on her lips. “I’ll select one. Young, healthy, clean. No attachments. He’ll be told it is a divine honor to serve the Empress in this way. He’ll believe it.” She vanished through the curtain, her purpose a swift, cutting force.
Benedetta waded into the pool towards me. She didn’t speak. Her hands, slick and warm from the water, came to rest on my tense shoulders. Her thumbs began to work the knotted muscle at the base of my neck. “You are chasing the ghost of that room,” she murmured, her lips close to my ear. “You cannot capture it. You can only exorcise it.”
I leaned into her touch, closing my eyes. “This is the exorcism.”
He was brought at dusk. A Nubian youth, perhaps twenty, with smooth skin and wide, anxious eyes. He was beautiful in a generic way, like a well-crafted statue. Marisa had him bathed and anointed with plain oil. He stood trembling in the center of my private salon, where the carpets were deep and the light was low.
“Kneel,” Marisa instructed, not unkindly. He dropped to his knees.
I watched from my chair, robed in a simple sheath of linen. My heart was a steady, dull drum. No frantic pulse. This was study. This was dissection.
“The first rule,” Marisa said, standing beside him like a master sculptor beside a block of marble, “is that you are in control. Even when you are on your knees. Your mouth, your tongue, your hands—they are your tools. His body is the material. You command its responses.”
I rose and approached. The boy’s eyes were fixed on the floor, his breathing shallow. I could see the rapid flutter of his pulse in his throat.
“Look at me,” I said.
He obeyed, his dark eyes lifting. They held sheer terror. Good. Fear was predictable. It was simpler than desire.
I let my robe fall. His gaze flickered, then returned to my face, trained by someone—likely Marisa—to show that respect. I sank to my knees before him, the thick pile of the rug beneath my shins. The position was one of submission, but the silence in the room was one of absolute command.
“Begin,” Marisa said softly, from somewhere behind me.
I did not touch him yet. I studied the form, the shape. I pushed aside any thought of Jabari, of Neferti’s mocking laugh. This was geometry. This was physiology.
My first touch was clinical. My hand, to understand tension, temperature. He flinched, then grew still. I noted it. My first use of my mouth was hesitant, an experiment in pressure. Marisa’s voice came, calm and technical. “Less teeth. Always. Use the softness of your lips as a shield. The flat of your tongue here, see? That elicits that reaction.”
I followed instructions. I cataloged responses. The sharp intake of breath, the involuntary twitch of a muscle, the way his hands clenched and unclenched at his sides. I learned the taste of skin and salt, the subtle changes as he moved from fear towards a helpless, building urgency. I controlled that, too. Slowing when he began to thrust, pulling back to a mere whisper of touch when his breathing grew ragged.
Benedetta had not left. She sat watching from the divan, a silent, mournful presence. Her disapproval was a cold spot in the warm room.
I lost time. The world narrowed to technique, to cause and effect. My own need, that constant, humiliating throb, was silenced under the focus of pure execution. This was not pleasure. This was dominance through service. A complete inversion.
When his control finally shattered, when a broken sound escaped him and his body arched, I was ready. I turned my face away at the last possible second. The hot spill struck my collarbone, my shoulder.
I held my position, breathing steadily through my nose. I looked down at the evidence on my skin, then up at his horrified, euphoric face.
“Thank you,” I said, my voice perfectly steady, perfectly empty.
The words from Jabari’s chamber, given back to the world. But this time, they were not surrender. They were a verdict.
I stood. Marisa stepped forward with a damp cloth, her eyes shining with approval. I took it and cleaned myself with methodical strokes. “Have him fed and sent back to the quarters,” I told her. “With a bonus of honeyed wine.”
Benedetta finally stood. She came to me, took the cloth from my hand, and finished wiping a spot I’d missed on my shoulder. Her touch was gentle, her eyes full of a quiet, profound sorrow.
“Do you feel in control now, Angela?” she whispered.
I looked past her, to where the boy was being led out, his legs unsteady. I felt the ghost of a technique now mastered, a database of physical responses stored in my mind. The frantic, humiliated wanting in my belly was quiet, but it was not gone. It had been covered over, like a scar with a layer of gilt.
“I feel,” I said, turning to walk towards my bed, the weight of the crown already settling back onto my brow, “prepared.”