Chapter 7: Manners
The chamber still smoked where the wards had burned. Vareth knelt in the shadow that Malakor had poured over him, yellow eyes dim, his light lattice reduced to guttering filaments that clung to the obsidian like dying moss. The altar stood scorched at its edges, the manacles broken into two dark crescents of iron on the floor.
Elara straightened her spectacles. Her thighs still shook from the ritual, from the climaxes she had turned into weapons, and her sex ached in a way that was not entirely unpleasant. She could still taste Malakor's fury on her tongue, borrowed through the bond, metallic and vast.
Vareth spat at the floor. "Savor it, mortal. When the Archivist's pages find their way to me again, I'll show you what a torn bond feels like."
Malakor's shadows draped over Vareth's mouth like a hand. The demon prince had not looked at him once since forcing him to his knees. Instead his molten gaze rested on Elara, and the warmth in it was the warmth of a fire before it eats the house.
"You deferred something," he said. "Three days ago, on the bridge. Do you remember?"
She remembered. His voice in front of Vareth, promising punishment. Her chest tightened, and she hated that the tightening was not only fear.
"You said you'd punish me in front of him," she said. "Then you never did."
"I never had the bond then. Punishment was crude, back then. Rope. Teeth. The ordinary cruelties." He crossed the chamber toward her, unhurried, his boots ringing on the obsidian. "Now I can reach something deeper. Now, little moth, I can reach you."
The shadows curled off his forearms like serpents scenting meat. They wound around her wrists, cool and silk-soft, and lifted her arms without her asking. She could have pulled against them, and they would have yielded, and both of them knew it, and that knowledge sat in the bond between them like a hot coal.
"Wait," she said, though her heart was hammering in a rhythm that had nothing to do with refusal.
He cupped her jaw. His thumb dragged across her bitten lip, the one he had broken in the throne room, and found the small scar of it. "Through the bond I can give you fear and pull back desire. I have done that since the beginning." His fangs had lengthened. His pupils had gone wide and black. "But now I can give you pain and pull back the same. Do you understand what that means?"
"It means you can't hurt me anymore," she said. "Not really."
"It means," he growled, "that when I hurt you, you will feel what I feel, and I feel worship."
The first shadow lash came without warning. It striped across her shoulders through the torn fabric of her blouse, a line of cold fire, and the bond flared open like a struck match. She felt the punishment from the inside: the sting translated into a flood of molten want that poured straight down through her belly and pooled between her thighs. She gasped, knees buckling, and the shadows held her upright by the wrists.
"Again," she heard herself say.
His laugh was low and obscene. "Look at you. The librarian who once apologized for swearing."
The second lash crossed the first. Her back arched. The bond was a live wire now, and through it she felt him, his cock hard behind the black of his trousers, his hunger sharpening on every strike, and his hunger came back into her doubled, so that the pain and the arousal fed each other in a rising spiral she had no way down from. She was wet enough that she felt it slicking the inside of her thigh, obscene in the cold chamber air.
"Malakor," she breathed. "I need."
"I know what you need." He tore her blouse open, buttons skittering across the obsidian, and bent his head to the welt on her shoulder. His tongue was rough, cat-rough, and where it touched the welt the sting bloomed again into pleasure so sharp she moaned out loud, the sound bouncing off the black walls. "You need to be marked. You need to be owned. And you need him," a flick of his eyes toward the kneeling Vareth, "to watch."
Vareth's muffled snarl came from behind the shadow gag. His fear bled through the bond's edges, sour and bright, and Elara turned her head and drank it in deliberately, the way Malakor had taught her fear could be tasted. It made her bolder. It made her wetter.
"Yes," she said. "Let him watch what a completed bond makes of us."
Malakor's claws shredded her skirt from hem to waist. He did not bother with her underwear; he pushed the sodden scrap aside and dragged two fingers through her slit, slow, deliberate, spreading her wetness up over her clit until her hips jerked after his hand like a woman starved.
"Fuck," she whispered, scandalized at herself, and he grinned with all his fangs.
"Say it again."
"Fuck me," she said. "Right here. In front of him. Make him watch your cock ruin what he tried to tear."
The growl that came out of him was not entirely a sound a human throat could make. His trousers vanished into shadow. He pressed the blunt head of his cock against her entrance, teasing, letting her feel the girth of him without giving her an inch, and through the bond she felt her own tight heat gripping around nothing, felt his restraint burning him alive.
"Beg properly," he said.
"Please." Her wrists pulled at the shadows, wanting to grab his horns, his hair, anything. "Please, Malakor, I want you inside me. I want you so deep I forget my own name. I want every thrust to remind me whose I am."
He drove into her in one long, merciless stroke that bottomed out against her cervix and dragged a scream out of her that had nothing of pain in it. Through the bond, the sensation doubled: her channel stretched and stuffed and fluttering around him, and his cock sheathed in her slick heat, both at once, a feedback loop of pleasure that made her vision spark white at the edges.
"Look at him," Malakor rasped against her ear as he began to move, hard and rhythmic, the slap of his hips against her thighs loud in the cavern. "Look at Vareth and tell him whose soul he came to steal."
She turned her head. Vareth's sickly yellow eyes were fixed on the place where Malakor's cock split her open, on the wet shine of her arousal coating him with every withdrawal, and his fear had curdled into something else, humiliation and hunger braided together. She fed on both.
"Mine stays where it is," she said. "Chained to a prince who fucks me like this."
Malakor's thrusts turned brutal. He hooked one arm under her thigh and hoisted it, changing the angle, and the head of his cock ground over that spot inside her with every stroke until she was sobbing, clenching, her orgasm building like the wards had built before they shattered. The shadows around her wrists tightened, holding her for him, and the bond poured everything back and forth, his pleasure in hers, hers in his, doubling and doubling again.
"Come for me, little moth," he snarled. "Come on my cock with his eyes on you. Then we hunt the ones who thought you were prey."
Her climax tore through her, the bond flaring so bright that the amber veins in the walls pulsed with it, and through the roaring in her ears she heard Vareth's muffled scream of rage. Malakor followed with a fanged groan, flooding her, and he did not let her down. He held her there, still buried, still shaking.
Then, quietly, his lips against her temple: "The herald first. Then the Archivist. And you will tell me, on the road, what the unread pages say about turning a bond."
He pulled out slow, and she felt the loss of him like grief.
"Not broken," she said, steadying herself against his chest. "Turned."
His amber eyes gleamed. "Then let's go teach the Court what we've turned into."
But he did not move toward the door.
His fingers slid back down her belly instead, through the mess he had made of her, and found her clit still swollen and raw from the ritual. He circled it once, featherlight, and her knees buckled all over again.
"Malakor." Her voice cracked. "You just. We just."
"I know." His breath fanned her ear, wicked and patient. "And you're going to give me one more. Then another. Until your legs forget how to hold you."
The first stroke of his fingertip was almost nothing, a ghost of pressure, and it was unbearable. Her oversensitive nerves screamed, the bond wide open, so she felt his cruel delight in her anguish as if it were her own. Her hips tried to jerk away. The shadows at her wrists held, and his free arm banded across her waist, pinning her back against his chest.
"Stay still," he murmured, "or I'll slow down."
"That's supposed to be a threat?"
"That's supposed to be a mercy. Choose."
She chose stillness. He drew another slow circle, the pad of his finger gliding over slick, aching flesh, and the pleasure crested so fast it felt like falling. White burst behind her eyelids, actual stars, streaking across her vision, and she heard herself moan a sound that belonged to someone far less dignified than a librarian.
"There," he breathed. "I can feel it from your side too. The way your brain goes quiet. I want to live there."
He did it again. And again. Each pass of his finger was lighter than the last, maddening, drawing her up the slope of another climax without ever giving her the hard friction she was sobbing for. Her clit throbbed against his touch, drenched, exposed, her release coiling tighter and tighter from almost nothing at all.
"Please," she gasped. "Harder. I need."
"No, you don't." His fangs grazed the shell of her ear. "You came hard five minutes ago and you're already soaked again. What you need is to be taken apart slowly, while he watches, so he understands that everything he tried to break is twice as strong now."
Behind them Vareth made a low sound through the shadow gag, rage or despair, and Elara fed on it, letting his humiliation sharpen her own hunger. She was learning to be greedy.
Malakor's fingertip caught her clit directly, one precise stroke, and the stars came again, a whole galaxy of them, her vision whiting out at the edges while her body clamped down around nothing and shuddered. He held her through it, hand splayed over her belly, feeling the spasms from inside the bond as well as out.
"One," he counted, vicious and gentle at once.
"That was more than one tonight."
"Tonight starts now. The last one was hunting."
She laughed, breathless, half-hysterical, and the laugh broke into a whimper when he started again. This time he used two fingers, spreading her open with a V around her clit so that every tiny movement of his wrist dragged the nerve through his fingertips without ever pressing down. It was torture engineered by a four-hundred-year-old sadist who knew exactly what he was doing.
"Malakor, I can't."
"You can. You broke his wards with your orgasms, little moth. You think three more will kill you?"
"Three?"
His grin against her neck was all teeth. "I said what I said."
The second one hit her while her thighs were still trembling from the first. It rolled up out of nowhere, a shallow fluttering wave that left her panting and blinking spots out of her eyes, and through the bond she felt him catalogue every second of it, hoarding it, the way she hoarded rare books.
"Two," he said.
"You're insufferable."
"I'm thorough. There's a difference." He tilted her chin back with wet fingers and kissed her, deep and filthy, tasting himself and her on her tongue, and while her mouth was occupied his fingers went back to work. This time he didn't tease. Two fingertips stroked directly over her clit, firm, rhythmic, relentless, and the overstimulation tipped over into something else entirely, pleasure with an edge of pain that the bond converted instantly into want.
"Oh, fuck, oh fuck," she chanted, head thrashing against his shoulder.
"That's it. Give me three."
The climax detonated. Her whole body seized, back bowing off his chest, and the amber veins in the obsidian walls flared with the bond's light. Stars, whole constellations of them, then a hot dark rush as her knees simply stopped existing. The shadows caught her weight and he caught her after them, lifting her like she weighed nothing, her legs dangling, utterly boneless.
"Three," he said softly, and there was real wonder in it. "You came three times from my fingers alone. Do you know how rare that is? How exquisite?"
She managed a wordless sound against his throat.
He carried her a step, turned, and set her on the edge of the scorched altar so she could sit. Her legs were jelly. Her spectacles had fogged. She pushed them up her nose and looked at Vareth, kneeling in the shadow puddle, yellow eyes wide with something close to awe, and she found she was not ashamed. She was proud.
"Four would be greedy," she said.
Malakor's brow arched. "Four is a prince's courtesy." His hand slid up her inner thigh, wet and warm, and she grabbed his wrist, laughing.
"Later. On the road. If you're good."
"If I'm good," he repeated, tasting the words like something foreign. A slow, dangerous smile spread across his face. "No one has said that to me in four centuries. I find I dislike it."
"You'll learn to like it. That's what turning is."
He went very still. Then he dipped his head and pressed his lips to her wrist, the one the shadows had held, an oddly courtly gesture from a monster with blood under his claws. "Then let us go to the Court," he said. "You will watch Kaelith's face when she sees her seam failed. And you will tell me, word for word, what the Archivist's unread pages promise."
He snapped his fingers and the shadows released Vareth's mouth, though not his knees.
"Fetch them nothing," Malakor told him. "Speak to no one. You will sit in this chamber and think about what a turned bond looks like, because when we return, we will want to know everything about your arrangement with the Archivist. And little moth," his amber eyes slid to her, molten and amused, "the road to the herald's door is long. Four is a prince's courtesy. I keep my promises."
Her clit throbbed at the words, traitorous, and his grin said he felt it.
"Lead the way, then," she said, and steadied her voice by force of will alone. "Before I change my mind about making you wait."