The Wolf's Captive (11 page)

“You will tell me.”

Her mind dissolved into swirls of sensation, following the swirls of his finger. She bit her lip, sure that she drew blood, and felt the tension begin to build, felt everything in her being tighten around the pulsing point where he penetrated her.

She resisted until he began to twist a knuckle inside her, and then stopped.

“Yes!” she screamed, banging a fist on the ruined table. “I am a virgin! Please…”

He was stretching her out in preparation. She could hardly wait so long. It burned, it stung, when he stretched her, and she wanted it even more. She wanted to feel completely full of him.

“Why?” he asked, and slipped another finger in. She would need to answer his questions if she wanted to be rewarded. It was torture.

“I didn’t want anyone…that I…could have…”

“Keep going.”

“I wanted…Severille…”

Lucia couldn’t believe she’d admitted that, that she’d said it out loud, but then she felt his erection hard and huge against her own leg, even through his trousers, and knew she would admit much more for the chance to feel it inside her. She would debase herself, if he asked, she would throw herself at his feet. She raged against her body, and it was useless.

“Please…”

“Who did you want?”

He was merciless. The hand that had been holding her hip slid around her front and deftly slipped between her legs. He thrust a third finger inside her and rubbed her bud with gentle pressure at the same time.

“Tell me.”

As soon as she could form words, she did:

“You. You. At the Dance…I wished I were Summer…”

Lucia managed to look over her shoulder for just a moment, and there she saw the surprise, naked on his face. She would never know where she got the courage to say, “Take me the way you took Summer.”

His fingers left her body abruptly, leaving a gaping absence. She would have cried out in protest if it weren’t for the quick sound of laces, of leather, and the sudden feel of something hot and huge pressing against her folds. She felt his hand on her buttock, his thumb spreading her open, wide open, as wide as she would go, and then suddenly there was the tip pressing into her. She was still so tight, and her body resisted. He paused, and Lucia could tell he was about to speak, about to caution her, about to give her a moment’s doubt, and she could not bear it any longer.

“Please,” she whispered. “I want it to hurt.”

She didn’t know the truth of that until she’d said it, but there was no time to think before he was pushing the hard length of himself into her.

It did hurt, to be stretched so far, so fast; it tore at the edges of her, of all of her, inside and out, but then he was in. He was in, and she was overcome by it, by him. She was so full of him that there was no room for anything else.

It was the first time she’d ever felt bliss.

He began to move inside her, slowly at first, then faster, harder. The swirling sensations began to gather around her core, a tightness growing there, heightened by the pain of fullness. A begging noise simmered up from somewhere deep in her chest until it escaped as a long, slow wail, while her hips bucked backwards, all on their own, and her head dropped to the table, looking for any leverage to drive him in farther, as far as she could take him.

He smacked against her mound as he buried himself inside her, his strokes getting longer, harder, more demanding. He grabbed her hips and slammed into her and touched something deep inside her, obliterating all thought in a fuzzy shower of fizzling sparks that washed down the length of her body. Her muscles convulsed in spasms around him, triggering another roiling wave of pleasure, and he managed to catch her as her legs gave way beneath her.

Lucia’s mind simply shut down after that.

When she finally came back to herself, her lips prickling and her right leg twitching beneath her, she somehow managed to remember to feel embarrassed. She lifted her head from the table, and tried to move, but he was still hard inside her.

She didn’t know what to do. No one had ever seen her act like that, no one had ever seen her so desperate, so like an animal, and she was still impaled on his cock, imprisoned by strong hands on her hip and back.

“Lord Cesare,” she rasped.

“You can speak again,” he grunted. “Good.”

He grabbed her by the hips and pushed her farther up onto the table, his cock driving inside her, pulling out only enough to roll her over onto her back, and then plunging back into her. He planted strong arms on either side of her spread legs, knocking overturned cups and silverware to the ground, and leaned over her.

“Look at me,” he commanded, and thrust into her a little deeper, taking her chin in his hand and turning her face toward his. “Look.”

She did. She didn’t have the right words for what she saw there. Lord Cesare’s brow was furrowed, and his dark eyes glowed with a fervent light, his lips set in a grim line. Something struggled inside him. She could have been watching a mirror image of her own struggle, except for the power that radiated from him, the great capacity for violence bound up in his muscles, the animal need in his eyes. His jaw twitched. Bound up in all that strength and power, she suddenly thought she saw…fear? Not in spite of him—he was asking her to look at it. Asking her to see.

She touched his face with one hesitant hand, and he kissed her.

This time when he moved inside her it wasn’t just her own sensation that overwhelmed her; it was also his. They built what came next together, rocking each other slowly, softly, layering each touch, each stroke, one on top of the other, until they each overflowed with the other. Lucia came screaming, her arms around his shoulders, her teeth in his neck.

Lord Cesare slumped on top of her for a long time. She took his weight, glad for it at first, because it felt like she might float up to the ceiling otherwise.

But as she came down from her high, all the old fears returned, made stronger by her new circumstances.
Never show yourself. Keep yourself to yourself. Always be attractive.

She had shown him her deepest, darkest desires. What was wrong with her, that she wanted to be hurt? That her body could betray her mind so fully? This time her humiliation brought none of the thrill it had before. What must he think of her now? What must she now think of herself? What would happen to her?

What would happen to her father?

It was all too much, and all Lucia wanted was to be alone somewhere, to think things through and come back to herself and begin to feel steady and sure in her own skin again. Her panicked mind went into overdrive just as Lord Cesare raised himself up to look into her eyes. It seemed to Lucia that he didn’t like what he saw. His eyes narrowed and his brows came together, and he framed the sides of her face with his large, rough hands, and looked more deeply.

“What are you?” he asked, and she turned away, ashamed and unable to explain why. She closed her eyes against hot tears, but to little effect. They spilled out and ran down her temples onto the fine tablecloth. She only opened them when Lord Cesare began to shake against her, his body racked with something terrible.

Lord Cesare threw himself back from the table, his hand clutching at his sternum, his eyes desperate.

“What are you?” he shouted, and stumbled backwards, away from her. For one horrible instant Lucia wondered what she had done—what he had
seen
—and whether it meant that she and her family had to die. Before she could ask, Lord Cesare disappeared into the tunnel that had hidden his entrance to the chamber.

Lucia heard a door fly open, heard it bang shut. And heard the lock fall into place.

C
HAPTER 7

As a rule, Lord Cesare Lupin was not one to run away. Not from the barbarian Berkari tribes way up in the middle of some godsforsaken mountain range, not from assassins, and absolutely not from naked, vulnerable young women who had just given him the privilege of a life-altering orgasm. In fact, under normal circumstances, he might have been expected to run toward the naked, vulnerable young woman with the life-altering powers.

But nothing had been normal since the disaster of that last mountain raid. Since all those men had died, and Cesare had woken up changed.

He’d been fighting it, he realized now, in a constant struggle, even more so than he’d let himself believe. His only reprieve had been when Lucia had seemed to want him. Truthfully, it was when she had opened up to him, naked with her desire and her want of him. She had been a palliative. While he was inside her, it no longer felt like there was a terrible beast trying to claw its way out of his chest. Instead he could feel its strength coursing through him, its senses melding with his own, its desires sublimating to his. Everything had made
sense
.

And then she had pulled away, so suddenly, and for no reason that he could discern. And as she pulled away, it had felt like she was pulling the beast right out of him.

So he ran. That part Cesare wasn’t entirely ashamed of, since it had seemed the better part of valor to make sure that he didn’t kill them both. He was ashamed, now that he’d had some time to relive it all over again, of the words that he’d thrown in her face: “What are you?” He could have meant it about himself. Maybe he had.

After he’d torn himself away, he’d sat huddled in an old, dark catacomb, shaking and miserable, and fought tooth and nail until he felt like he had it back under control. It had taken him too long. Too long until he had been able to find a servant he could trust, too long until he had been able to arrange help for Lucia, to clothe her and feed her and bring her, in secret, to one Cesare’s own townhouses. And it had taken him too damn long to find his way down to his father’s dungeons, deep in the bowels of the Basiglia, where the most important prisoners were kept.

Much too long, because Vintner Lyselle was apparently already gone.

“Tell me again,” Cesare said. The jailer apparently didn’t spend much time above ground. He hadn’t recognized Cesare in the dull light, and, as such, hadn’t been inclined to be particularly helpful until Cesare had lifted him to his feet and reminded him of his oath of office.

“Well, my Lord, strictly speaking, he’s not here,” the little man said, jutting his chin out. He was used to being a virtual god here, in his own little wretched domain. Being outranked didn’t agree with him.

Cesare said, “Tell me who took him.”

The jailer sucked angrily on his teeth.

“I was told not to tell anyone, my Lord.”

It was one of the more paradoxical truths about ruling a city: the higher your rank, the less direct influence you had over the daily life of the average citizen. Cesare had no doubt that whomever had threatened the jailer would be back tomorrow, and that the jailer had every reason to believe that Cesare would never come back at all. Of course, in this particular situation, the jailer was very, very wrong.

“If you do not want to spend the rest of your life in this jail as an occupant, you will tell me what I want to know.” Cesare took another step forward, crowding the jailer into the rotted, seeping corner of his miserable office. He took another deep breath, and felt the beast building inside him. It was starting to feel very good, and that worried him. “You will tell me
now.
”

The little man cowered from him, as Cesare had expected. But behind the cowering was something else.

“My
Lord
,” the jailer said. “It was Rickle, my Lord. The Captain of the Duke’s Guard.”

Rickle
, Cesare thought.
Always Rickle.
It had been Rickle who’d arranged for a new company of riders for the last raid.

“I just do as I’m told,” the jailer continued, spitting those last words out. They disgusted him. Cesare saw that now, and he saw something else: the little jailer hated him. Pure hatred, distilled through a lifetime of being a small man in the power of others.

Cesare looked harder: he wasn’t just a small man—he was impeccably dressed in the fine clothing of the class-conscious, even in this filthy jail. Velvet doublet, shiny brass buttons. He had pretensions. He might describe them as ambitions, but it didn’t matter, in the end. He was a man who lived on pride more than bread or water. Pride of office, pride of power, pride of pedigree. Cesare knew all too well how cruel that could make a man.

He had a sickening thought.

“How many prisoners are under your guard, now that Vintner Lyselle is gone?” he asked.

“Just one on my level,” the jailer mumbled. He seemed to take it as another humiliation. Which did not bode well at all for that one prisoner.

I provoked this beast
, Cesare thought grimly.
It is my responsibility to make sure it doesn’t attack.
Tracking down Lyselle—assuming he was still alive—would have to wait a few moments.

“Take me to see that prisoner, please.”

The ‘please’ seemed to help. The jailer grunted, his lower lip still jutting out, but he rose and bowed his head before fumbling with his keys.

The heavy iron door creaked painfully, and the tunnel ahead was lit only by a single torch at the far end. Everything ahead was darkness. Wet, dark, and with the suggestion of little things scurrying about the edges of the dilapidated cells. Drops of liquid—not anything that could be called water, he was sure—fell onto the back of Cesare’s neck as he stepped through the threshold and into the Duke’s Dungeon proper.

The famed Basiglia prison was really a warren of different prisons, different sorts of Hells, each with their own master. It was the sort of place where men and women could be lost forever because of a bureaucratic oversight or a casual cruelty. The ancient, soot-black stone of the Basiglia rose high over the poorer sections of J’Amel as a constant sort of threat. Cesare hated it. He especially hated that the Duke had his own special corner of Hell to play in.