Chapter 4: The Stables at Dusk
The stone corridors of the keep felt colder than usual as Jen walked them, the memory of Cedric’s chamber door clicking shut behind her a constant, echoing whisper in her skull.Three days. Three days of him avoiding the great hall at meals, of his shadow disappearing around corners, of silence where there had been groping passion in dark alcoves.
She found him, finally, where she should have looked first: the stable.
It was a vast, vaulted space at the rear of the keep, sacred in its way. Golden late-afternoon light bled through high, cracked skylights, cutting beams through the floating dust and hay-mote. The air was thick and warm, humming with the rhythmic shuffle of heavy hooves on stone, the soft snorts and blows of powerful animals. The smell was a rich tapestry: sweet hay, old leather, horse sweat, and underneath it all, the sharp, honest tang of manure.
Cedric stood in a stall, his back to her, brushing his black stallion, Aethelred, with long, steady strokes. The beast was a mirror of his owner: tall, broad, muscles shifting like liquid shadow under a sleek coat. Cedric worked in silence, his movements economical, his focus absolute. He wore simple linen trousers and a leather vest, his hair tied back, exposing the severe lines of his profile.
Jen leaned against the stall door, the wood rough under her palms.“So this is where you hide.”
He didn’t turn. The brush whispered through Aethelred’s flank.
“You’ve been avoiding me,” she continued, her voice tighter than she intended.“After everything. After you used your belt on me. You just… shut down and walk away.”
“I told you to go,” he said, his voice low and drained.“You went.”
“That’s it? That’s all this was?” A hot knot of frustration tightened in her chest.It felt dangerously close to hurt. “A quick fuck and a dismissal? I thought we had an understanding.”
Cedric paused, his hand resting on the stallion’s neck. Aethelred turned a dark, intelligent eye towards Jen.“We had an arrangement. Arrangements end.”
“They end when both people say they end.”
Finally, he turned. The fading light caught the bleakness in his emerald eyes, the shadows under them.He looked older than thirty-two.He looked carved from stone and regret. “What do you want from me, Jen?More whispered filth in corridors? More bruises on your wrists?You got what you asked for. Now leave me to my horse.”
The dismissal, the coldness—it was a spark to tinder. She pushed off the stall door and stepped into the space, the straw crunching under her boots. She moved in front of him, close enough to smell the sweat on his skin, the soap on his hands.
“I want you to look at me,” she said, her voice dropping to a fierce whisper. “I want you to stop pretending you’re fucking me for my benefit.You do it to forget her. You do it to feel something that isn’t pain.And I let you.I take it. So don’t you dare treat me like some tavern wench you’ve tired of.”
His jaw tightened.A muscle ticked there.He looked past her, through her. “Get out.”
“No.”
In a surge of impulsive anger, she reached out and grabbed the hard bulge in his trousers. She squeezed, not with invitation, but with challenge, her fingers digging into the rigid shape of him through the linen.“See?You’re not done. Your body isn’t done.You’re just a coward.”
The reaction was instantaneous, volcanic. His hand flew up and locked around her wrist, yanking her grip away with brutal force. A raw, animal sound ripped from his throat—not passion, but rage.Pure, unadulterated rage. He spun her around so fast the world blurred, the sweet-rotten smell of hay and horse flooding her senses. He shoved her forward, bending her roughly over a low bale of hay just outside the stall, her torso slamming onto the prickly, bundled straw.
“You want it?” he growled, his voice ragged in her ear.“You want the thing I am now?Here. Have it.”
One of his big hands planted between her shoulder blades, pinning her down. The other yanked at the laces of her leggings, tearing them down her hips in one savage jerk. The cool stable air hit her exposed skin. She heard the rustle of his own trousers being pushed down, the sharp intake of his breath.Then, a wet sound. He spat onto his palm, a coarse, dismissive act.She heard him slick himself, the crude, quick strokes. There was no preparation, no care.He drove into her in one vicious, unforgiving thrust.
Jen cried out, a sharp, punched-out gasp lost in the straw. He was huge, and she wasn’t ready, the entry a bright burst of pain that rapidly melted into a deep, stretching fullness. Aethelred, startled, stamped and snorted in his stall, the sound echoing Cedric’s own ragged breathing.He didn’t wait for her to adjust. He set a relentless, punishing rhythm, each forward snap of his hips slamming her into the rough bale. The hay scratched her cheeks, her breasts pressed flat against it. One of his hands moved from her back and clamped over her mouth, his callused fingers digging into her skin, stifling any sound beyond a muted groan. His other hand gripped the curve of her hip, his thumb pressing into the bone hard enough she knew it would leave a bruise in the shape of his fingerprint.
This wasn’t the controlled dominance of the belt.This was feral.This was annihilation.
He fucked her with a single-minded intensity that erased everything: the stable, the watching horse, the past, the future. There was only the slap of his thighs against her ass, the wet, obscene sound of their joining, the grinding pressure deep inside her.He wasn’t seeking her pleasure, he was exorcising a demon. His grip on her mouth tightened. Tears, unbidden, leaked from her eyes, soaking into the dry hay.“This what you wanted?” he hissed, his breath hot against her ear. “To be a hole I use? A warm, tight cunt to pump my rage into?”
The words were blades.They carved through the physical sensation, leaving a cold hollow in her gut. Yet, her body, traitorous and desperate, began to respond. The raw friction, the sheer force of him, the helplessness—it ignited a shocking, shameful coil of heat low in her belly.A choked sob turned into a moan against his palm.He felt it. He felt her walls flutter and clamp around him. With a guttural curse, he fucked into her harder, faster, the bale scraping across the stone floor with each thrust. The climax, when it ripped through her, was violent and unwelcome, a seizure of pleasure that felt like a betrayal of her own spirit.She convulsed around him, her screams muffled completely by his hand.
It triggered his own end.With a final, deep plunge, he stilled, buried to the hilt. He pulled his hand from her mouth, and a raw, broken groan escaped his lips as he jerked himself out of her. Hot streaks of his come splashed across the small of her back, a shocking, intimate claim that felt utterly impersonal.
For a few heartbeats, there was only the sound of their harsh breathing and Aethelred’s quiet shuffling.Then, the weight lifted. The warmth of him vanished. She heard the soft rustle of cloth as he pulled his trousers back up, the buckle of his belt clicking neatly into place.
Jen stayed bent over the bale, her leggings around her thighs, his release cooling on her skin.She couldn’t move. She heard his boots on the stone, steady and deliberate, walking away.He didn’t look back. He didn’t speak. He simply left her there, used and empty, in the golden, dusty light of the stable, with only the patient, dark-eyed horse as witness to what they had become.