by Raven Dark
Pretty Boy’s fingers traced my lips, nose, and eyebrows. He looked at me with something akin to wonder. “Love is for fools and dreamers. Love doesn’t live here in the Grotto, baby.”
But I didn’t believe him. I didn’t think he believed his words either. We stared at one another, and I swore my heart swelled with feeling. I was falling for this blue-eyed, blond-haired dark angel of mine. This dark angel who, every day, showed me more and more of his light.
“What’s your real name?” I asked him softly.
His eyes widened a little, then grew soft. “Why, Princess, look at you, trying to get information out of me. Are you trying to take advantage of your master’s inebriated state?” He grabbed my ass cheeks and squeezed, then shoved me down so that I lay splayed on my back. I squealed in delight.
“No, I’m not, Master, honest. I really want to know. Will you….oh—”
All thoughts fled from my mind when his teeth gripped my thin, silk pants and ripped them open. His fingers found my naked mound and his mouth covered it, sucking and licking until my head dropped back.
“Oh sweet Maker, Master…yes…”
He hummed in agreement and sucked me into his mouth. The pressure was too much, and I began to rut into his face, rocking my hips, craving more.
On the floor, Cherry and Crash were still at it, their slow, greedy sex making me hotter. Release came, washing over me until my whole body shook. I’d barely come down when Pretty Boy sat up between my legs. He undid his pants, readying himself for me. He took my wrists in one of his and placed them above my head, then lifted my hips with his other hand and thrust into me. Maker, his cock felt so good inside me.
“Fuck, Princess, you don’t know what you do to me. I can’t get enough of you,” he groaned, his expression lost in lust. “I want to be inside you every fucking minute of every fucking day.”
I could only mewl in agreement. His thrusts were deep, his thighs slamming into mine. I cried out when he let go of my wrists and grabbed my hips, lifting and pumping into me. After a long while, when I was dizzy with need, and release tore me apart again, he spilled inside me on a low, deep moan.
By the time we were done, Cherry and Crash were sprawled out on the floor cushions, looking sated and half asleep in each other’s arms. I’d never seen Cherry look so peaceful.
Sweaty and out of breath, Pretty Boy and I held each other until Steel found us a few minutes later. The club had filled with a haze of smoke that had a woodsy, pleasant smell. I couldn’t help but inhale it, and it made my thoughts foggy.
“There you are. Come on, you two. I’m hot, and I want a bath.” Steel had both hands on his hips, looking like a vengeful mountain god. The sight sent me into peals of laughter.
“Maker’s Tits, PB, did you let her smoke that crazy shit?”
Pretty Boy burst out laughing with me.
Steel grunted and grabbed me, throwing me over his shoulder as Pretty Boy stood up to buckle up his pants.
“Master, my backside is showing!” I cried out, kicking and giggling.
“Petal, shut up, you’re drunk. And I like your ass showing.” He gave said ass a quick swat, then we left the club house in search of a bath.
My masters had their way with me again and again, and we didn’t leave the bath until morning. They took me like men possessed.
Like pirates.
Like savages, and I loved every moment of it.
I’d changed, and the knowledge settled on me, deep and irreversible. No longer was I the prim and proper slave into which Damien had groomed me. There was no denying it anymore. If my men were savages, then so was I.
Chapter 10
A Spy’s Penance
I spent the next morning feeling like someone was trying to split my head in two with an axe. Pretty Boy and Steel had left early for work in the mines, but the two of them had left a few parting gifts.
On the bedside table, toast with jelly and a mug of hot, spiced cider with corran-root stood on a tray, along with a purple rose nearly as dark as my eyes. I smiled and inhaled the heady scent of the rose, my heart swelling. I drank down the corran-root, the same thing Pretty Boy had given me last night to settle my stomach, and almost immediately, my headache dulled. I poured iris root powder into the cup and added water from the pitcher left on the tray, then finished my toast. Soon, I was feeling much better.
I dressed for the day and found T-Man waiting on the couch in Pretty Boy’s living room. My masters still wouldn’t allow me to be anywhere alone and had set him on guard duty. I didn’t know whether to be annoyed or if I adored them for it.
T-Man escorted me to the slave’s quarters for my first day back to work since being kidnapped by Talak’s men. I’d dressed in a deep scarlet cadris, leaving the jewelry back at the room to avoid it getting in the way while I worked.
“You work with Cherry then?” T-Man asked as we made our way toward the women gathered at the laundering pool.
“Yes. Why?”
He scowled. “I should have had someone else escort you.”
“Why?”
He glanced at me, seeming to fight some internal battle.
I gave him a teasing smile. “You aren’t afraid of Cherry, are you?”
His scowl deepened, and I thought I saw something in his eyes, but then it vanished. As we reached the entrance to the slave quarters, Cherry came out of the tunnel, an unlikely smile on her pretty face.
“Morning, Cherry. Where’s Crash?” I didn’t see the cook anywhere.
“I—” She froze, her gaze falling on T-Man’s large, tanned frame behind me.
Every drop of color left her face.
Three times, her mouth opened, then closed, and her hands gripped her snow-colored slave frock with white knuckles. I looked back at T-Man. His pale grey eyes were on Cherry, but the glare of the sun behind him reduced him to a shadow, so I couldn’t read his expression.
“Morning, Cherry,” he said in a low whisper. There was a meaning in it, an implication that raised gooseflesh on my arms, but I didn’t understand it.
“Morning, sir.” She barely muttered the words.
Sir? She almost never called anyone that, and she wouldn’t look at him.
T-Man shook his head, and even without seeing his expression, I thought I picked up on something like anger there.
“Pretty Boy or Steel will pick you up here after they finish work,” he told me with a nod. He looked at Cherry again, muttered something I couldn’t hear, and then departed, his shoulders stiff, his fists tight.
When I looked at Cherry again, I distinctly saw her throat work, hard. She shook herself and her hands unclenched her frock. “Let’s go,” she snapped, her voice hard and shaken. “Lots of laundry to do today.”
I stared at her back as she retreated into the slave tunnels, following her in a daze as the realization made its way into my sluggish brain. I’d joked about the big bad Executioner being afraid of the head of the slaves, but I couldn’t be more wrong. T-Man wasn’t afraid of Cherry, but Cherry was absolutely, positively, terrified of T-Man.
As soon as we had the laundry ready, Cherry and I headed back out to the laundering hole, chatting as we went.
“Look, there’s twice as much laundry,” I said with a teasing smile, carrying one basket on my hip while she carried the other. “You can’t pawn all the carrying off on me this time.”
Cherry didn’t give her usual smart comeback, and her face looked clouded with worry. Was this about T-Man or something else? My mind spun with questions, but I wouldn’t ask them in front of the other slaves gathered about the pool.
“Ladies, move over and make room,” Cherry said, directing me to take a spot on the grass between Gretl, an older woman who always seemed closer to Cherry than the others, and a young blonde girl.
Everyone moved over, but several of the women looked back at me with disapproval. Gazes traveled over my fancy clothes and darkened with dislike. Maker, I understood those looks.
Most of the
se women thought the way the majority of the world did toward Violets, that women like me were hard and cold and cruel, seeing themselves as better than anyone else because of their greater monetary worth and increased fertility. I knew what those looks were about. They thought I’d dressed fancy as a mark of my superiority over them.
Squeezing in on my knees between Gretl and the blonde girl, I tried for a reassuring, friendly smile.
“Nice clothes. Which one of your masters gave you those?” A dark-haired girl across from me asked. A small earring in her nose gleamed in the sunlight. “She has four, you know,” she told the others. “They say she’s even managed to charm the General into taking her as his.”
Oh, Maker. This was the same line of thinking I’d finally managed to overcome with Cherry.
“Tanya, knock it off. None of us get to choose what we wear, you know that,” Cherry said.
“You’re defending her now?” Gretl muttered in a quiet voice. “Since when?”
I kept my head down, unsure whether I was glad Cherry had stepped in, or wished she hadn’t. Cherry ignored her.
“No, but she’s probably done a good job of weaseling her masters into letting her wear that stuff,” Tanya said.
I opened my mouth, but then closed it. Nothing I said right now would make things better.
“You want to say something?” Tanya hissed when Cherry turned her back and started talking to another slave.
“What would I say that would make you believe I’m not here to make your lives miserable?”
“Oooh. Smart Violet, this one,” Tanya sneered. The other women snickered. All except Gretl, who just watched me with an odd, calculating look.
I set to work on my basket full of laundry and could hardly hide my relief when Cherry took me to start delivering the freshly sewn and cleaned clothes around to the men.
“Are you going to tell me why you’re moping, then?” I asked Cherry as we climbed up the ladder to the upper caves at the center of the Grotto, our backpacks full of laundry bags. I couldn’t bring myself to ask the other question burning a hole in my brain—why in heck she was afraid of T-Man.
“I’m not moping. I don’t have time to mope.” Cherry helped me up onto the high walkway and took off her pack, taking out two bags of clothing. I did the same.
“Of course you don’t. Is it about Crash?” I walked one way, hanging Horse’s and Dig’s clothing inside the entrances to their caves. Cherry went the other way, delivering her two bags.
Cherry fired a look at me on her way back. “You’re nosy this morning, Violet. It’s annoying.” Her cheeks were red, and a light I hadn’t seen since she saw T-Man earlier flashed in her eyes.
I grinned. “So, is it?”
“None of your business.” We climbed down the ladder to the second level walk. “Tell me something, Violet.”
“Oh, Maker, I hate being this high.” I closed my eyes, forcing myself not to look down at the ground, three stories below. “Yeah? What is it?”
“If…well. If I wanted to make it a thing. You know, with…someone…”
“Someone whose name isn’t Crash.”
“Shut up.” She jumped down to the walk and I followed, each of us taking off our packs. “Anyway. If we wanted to make it official. Would it be weird if…you know, if it was only us? Only me and him?”
I’d been headed for two caves belonging to the men whose clothing bags I held, but turned, walking backward so I could raise a brow at her in fascination. “You mean, if you were only with one man?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, years ago, people did it all the time. It’d be different, but weird? No.”
“But it’s frowned upon.”
“Yeah, in other zones, but is it here?”
“Nope. The Dark Legion has its own fucking laws.” She wouldn’t look at me.
“Well.” I hung the bags inside the right caves. “Which one of you wants it that way? One on one.”
“Him.”
“Crash.”
She shrugged. “Well, but I think I do, too. Sometimes it’s hard for me, you know. Hard to let myself be with someone when I look the way I do.”
She meant the scars, but I didn’t dare say that now, out here.
“You can’t bring yourself to trust anyone else.”
“Yes.” She hung her own bags. “Crash is…different. He doesn’t want me to be with anyone else. It’s how he’s wired. You know, same as if he liked other guys. But me, I just…can’t bring myself to trust anyone else enough to be with more than one guy.”
“Do you like that he wants you all to himself?”
She twisted her hands and nodded, looking out over the laundering hole below us where the women still worked. “Yeah, I do,” she said after a long moment. “It’s kinda hot.”
I grinned from ear to ear. “It is hot. And so is what I saw last night.”
She glared at me. “You watched us?”
I shrugged.
“Violet’s a fucking pervert.”
“It was still hot.”
She snickered. Then she looked at the women again. “They’ll come around, you know.”
“I don’t think so. But I’ll fix it. Somehow.”
“How? Violet, you can’t fix everything.”
I squeezed her shoulder. “Yes, I can. You watch me.”
As I said this, I lifted my eyes up, and my gaze rested on a distant mountain. The mountain, where unless I missed my guess, a yellow-eyed Yantu warrior was sitting alone, shutting out the world.
“Speaking of fixing things, Cherry, I need to leave for lunch.”
“Sure, but where?” She looked over her shoulder at me, then followed my gaze to the mountain. “Oh. Is he still up there sulking like a dumbass?”
“I have to talk to him, Cherry.”
“He won’t let you in. Not until he’s done up there.”
“He’s been up there for days. I’m worried about him.” I patted the railing of the walk with my palm, determined. “I’m going to talk to him. I’ll be back when lunch is over.”
“You’re wasting your time, Violet. Getting Hawk to open up is like trying to make a snail run. It just doesn’t happen.”
“I’ll find a way.”
She called out to me, but I ignored her and went to find T-Man while I tried to think of a way to convince him to take me up that mountain.
It turned out Cherry had been right about Hawk.
Not only would he not talk to me, he wouldn’t even let me near him.
T-Man begrudgingly took me up the long, winding path that traveled up to what he called Hawk’s meditation hole, but when we arrived at the entrance, it immediately became clear he didn’t want anyone there.
Hawk had moved a large rock in front of the entrance, one that was obviously too heavy for anyone but Steel to have moved. How he got the stone there to begin with, I didn’t know, but when I called to him, there was no answer.
“He’s not going to let you in, let’s go. I have to get back to work soon.”
“T-Man, sir, just…please wait.” Worry for Hawk wouldn’t let me give up so quickly. Since we’d returned, he’d only come down for the execution. Steel had told me he’d even used the days off he never took so that he hadn’t even been in the mines. I’d asked around. No one had seen him show up to even eat or drink, and I didn’t know if he had either with him in that cave. He could have been dead, for all I knew.
T-Man sighed but waited.
“Hawk? Master Hawk? Are you in there?”
Still, he didn’t reply.
“Master, please, I need to know you’re okay.”
“You make a very odd slave.” T-Man’s tone, a mix of irritation and fascination, made me turn to him. “If Master doesn’t want his slave bothering him, she should leave him alone.” But his scolding lacked real force, and I swore I saw amusement in his eyes.
Ignoring T-Man’s advice, I called out a few more times.
Nothing.
I drop
ped my shoulders. “I need to talk to Sheriff about this. What if there’s something wrong with him?”
“There is nothing wrong with him.”
“How do you know, sir?”
“Steel and Pretty Boy should have warned me babysitting their slave would mean chaperoning her around the entire Grotto. Fuck.” He puffed on that pipe of his, smoke playing around his mouth.
“T-Man, please. I won’t bother you again.”
“Fine.” He gestured irritably for me to follow him back down the path. “You want to annoy the General, be my guest. It’s your ass that’ll get whipped.”
The words sent the memory of Sheriff’s belt stinging my backside across my thoughts, and my ass cheeks clenched, but I followed him, determined. If there was something going on with Hawk, it would be worth the pain to help him.
We arrived at Sheriff’s office a short time later, only he wasn’t there. Gore, the guard usually posted to watch the office, was just locking up the room when we walked in. Gore agreed to take me to Sheriff’s rooms himself, and T-Man departed.
At the heavy oak doors that led to Sheriff’s rooms, Gore knocked for me.
“Gore, if that’s you, just leave the files on the bed.” Sheriff’s deep voice called, sounding distant.
“Can you leave me alone with him, Gore?” I asked before he could reply.
“Yeah. I guess no one’s going to jump out and kidnap you from in there.”
He left, and I went inside.
Right inside the doors, a large living room stretched to another set of oak doors. Where most of the Grotto’s caves had roughly-hewn stone walls embedded with glittering jewels, and stone floors laden with thick carpets and throw rugs to pad the feet, Sheriff’s rooms were fully finished with cedar and oak paneling, hardwood and marble flooring, and thick, rich carpets thrown down here and there. I passed a small room with a water wheel. He had his own personal water system. I stared around in wonder. I’d been here once before, but that time, I hadn’t had a chance to take everything in.
The General lived in a kind of quiet wealth, not showy or flashy like Pretty Boy, or garish and lavish like Damien, but masculine and rustic, like a rich hunter. I didn’t see him anywhere, though.
