Skulduggery 10: Building a Criminal Empire

by Logan Jacobs

  “Can you blame me?” Wade leaned down and kissed my cheek. “Did you ever think that one day, you would be about to take flight on the back of a dragon with a common human thief?”

  “I might not have known you were a king then,” I said, “but I definitely knew that you were more than just a common human thief.”

  I went up onto my tiptoes to kiss him, but almost as soon as my lips met his, I felt Azure nuzzle his nose against both of our sides.

  “I think someone feels a little left out,” I laughed and then rocked back on my heels.

  “How about it, Azure?” Wade grinned. “Do you think you can take both of us up into the air for a little night flight?”

  Azure’s massive tail whipped back and forth, and he instantly tucked his wings against his sides so that we could climb onto his back.

  “I’ll take that as a yes,” Wade said.

  After he helped me onto Azure’s back, he climbed up behind me and wrapped his arms around my waist. As we settled into position to make sure that we would be secure, I found that our dragon was surprisingly comfortable. His back was shaped a lot like the back of a horse, but we just sat a little further forward, so Azure could spread his wings wide as he prepared to take off.

  “Ready?” Wade whispered into my ear.

  “Wade,” I murmured as I nestled back into his arms, “with you, I’m ready for anything.”

  “Then let’s see what we can spot from the sky,” he said and then pulled me a little tighter against himself.

  I felt his feet gently nudge Azure forward, and then Wade tightened the grip of his thighs around the dragon to help keep us both in place. Azure trotted forward a few steps before he started to gallop down the path to get a running start.

  It was a little bouncy, but the moment that Azure crouched down and launched up into the air, our ride became as smooth as goddamn silk. We were above the treetops in less than a second, and it only took a few more seconds after that for Azure to climb so high that the lights of our city looked like little more than specks far below.

  “Holy shit!” I gasped as I glanced down.

  “Too high?” Wade asked.

  “No,” I said immediately. “It’s just beautiful.”

  He tightened his arms around me again as Azure leveled out and started to just soar forward instead of further up into the night sky. The wind rushed against my face and blew loose wisps of my red hair all around my face, and I was glad that Ava had braided my hair for war, or else I wouldn’t have been able to see anything. Each gust of wind was colder than the last one, so my skin prickled in response, but I didn’t mind the chill.

  The view was more than worth it.

  The stars above us all seemed brighter than I had ever seen them, and I thought they might even be brighter now than the lights of the Capital below. It was dark, but the moon gave off more light than I would have expected, so I could see the milky ribbon-like river below us, and for miles in every direction, I could see the faint outline of hills and valleys, along with smaller creeks and bigger forests.

  I had no idea that the empire was this beautiful.

  I had no idea that Wade’s kingdom would be this beautiful.

  I felt Wade nudge Azure with his legs to direct the dragon which direction we wanted to go, and as we dipped and soared over the landscape below, I felt a swell of pride that I got to be part of this new kingdom. But it wasn’t just that I got to be part of this new world that Wade wanted to build.

  It was that I got to be right by his side as he built it.

  In all my wildest dreams when I first met Wade, I had never imagined that he would literally take me to see the world. I never thought that I would leave the Capital, much less travel to every city in the empire through a series of magic portals.

  Plus, I had certainly never imagined that I would one day carry his child. That was almost more unbelievable to me than anything else, simply because I had never thought that I would meet a man like Wade. He was generous and kind, but he was also firm and just, and he would do whatever it took to protect me, to protect our child, and to protect our future together.

  It should have felt like a perfect ending for me. I had lost my whole family, but then, somehow, I had managed to find a new one with Wade and all our friends. I had a man who loved me, and in just a few months, I would also give him a child, and by then, the entire kingdom should be under the control of the new human king, and I would be right by his side, just as I always had been.

  But even though maybe it should have felt like some sort of ending, it didn’t feel like that at all to me. Instead, it just felt like the beginning of everything, and all I could think about were the endless possibilities that my future with Wade and the other women I thought of as my sisters might hold.

  “Look,” Wade called out as he pointed to something down below in the distance.

  There was a ring of lights up ahead, but it was hard to tell from this far away how many of them there were. The lights formed a neat circle on the ground, but there were rows and columns of other lights inside it, and as we swooped a little closer, I tried to think of what city was so close to the Capital that we had already reached it.

  “What city is that?” I asked, but as soon as I asked it out loud, I knew the answer to my question. “Shit… that’s not a city, is it?”

  “No, I don’t believe it is,” Wade replied. “It’s too close, and we haven’t been flying long enough to get to any of the empire’s other cities.”

  “So that must mean it’s a wilderness fort, right?” I asked. “It must be the closest one to the Capital.”

  “And it definitely wasn’t listed on the map,” Wade said. “Let’s get a little closer, shall we?”

  “Is it safe?” I murmured.

  “Azure here won’t let anything happen to us,” Wade said with a grin. “Will you, boy?”

  The blue-scaled dragon just snorted and shook his head, so Wade nudged him down to get a closer look at the fort. It might have been safer to stay up high, where we would have been out of sight of the elves below, but since neither of us would have been able to see from that high up, we would just have to take a risk and fly lower.

  Besides, if shit really went badly, Azure could always light them up with a blast of fire. Sure, it would be better to keep him as a surprise for the elves later, especially once we were able to grow him to his full size, but it was pretty goddamn reassuring to know that if we needed help, Azure could breathe fire and roast a whole squadron of elves like pigs on a spit.

  When Wade guided Azure a little lower, I spotted movement on the ground even before we got closer to the fort. There were half a dozen figures down below, and they all rode horses that trotted toward the fort with military precision in their steps. The moonlight glinted off the ends of their spears, and their skin looked pale blue even from high up in the air.

  “Elven patrol,” Wade muttered. “They must be returning to the fort for the night.”

  “Will they see us?” I asked.

  “Not if we move fast enough,” Wade said, and then he urged Azure to climb a little higher into the air before any of the night elves looked up.

  We flew high in the air for another minute or two before Azure dropped back down as we approached the fort. Now that we were closer, it was clear that the lights were from torches and street lamps inside the wilderness fort, but I was also able to see that the walls of the fort seemed to be built from wood instead of stone. A ring of wooden spikes surrounded the wooden walls, and all the buildings inside the fort also looked like they were made from wood.

  “Are you sure we don’t want to just go ahead and light it up?” I called back to Wade. “It looks like it’s all made of wood, so it might just go right up in smoke.”

  “And it might not,” Wade said as he guided our dragon a little higher before we veered off to the side to avoid the fort. “It rained recently, so everything’s a little damp… plus, there’s too many unknown factors.”

&nbs
p; “I know,” I sighed. “I just thought it was worth a shot.”

  As Azure wheeled away from the fort and started to fly back in the opposite direction, the elven patrol on horseback all glanced up, so Wade instantly took us up into the clouds. We were so high that I was almost dizzy, but I just leaned back against Wade and felt secure as he tightened his arms around me.

  When we flew through the cloud, it felt like mist against my face, but just a few seconds later, we dropped back down below the level of the clouds so we could survey the landscape below again. We flew high over the heads of another elven patrol, but this one was on foot, so we just kept going in the opposite direction.

  We passed over the Capital itself before we kept going, and it was helpful to see the size of our hometown in comparison to the size of the wilderness fort. The fort wasn’t as big as our city, but even though I guessed that it might be about half the size, it was still large enough to hold a fuck-ton of elven soldiers. And if even half of them were cavalry, then we were about to have one tough fight on our hands.

  After we flew past the Capital, we just continued to fly forward and keep our eyes open for anything that might help us in the landscape below. The fact that we already knew the location of one fort, on top of the ones that were actually listed on the map, was a great start, but I knew that Wade wanted to find out as much as possible, so we would keep flying until we couldn’t anymore.

  When the Capital disappeared behind us, the countryside below started to get more and more wild. The forests became impossible to see through, the hills became more like small mountains, and the mountains themselves looked impossible to find any kind of path through. No wonder it could take so long to travel from one city to the next without the help of a little magic.

  There was movement and a small fire at the foot of one especially big mountain, so we swooped down a little closer until we saw that it was a cluster of wild orcs. They were all gathered around a small bonfire, and they were ripping into the flesh of something they’d just killed.

  I wondered if it was human or animal.

  Wade nudged Azure to fly higher before any of the orcs spotted us, and then we just kept going. As we crossed more and more ground, I felt myself start to grow tired, but I didn’t know if that was from the altitude or from the fact that I had just helped conquer two cities with my king earlier that day. Maybe it was a combination, but either way, I began to sag a little bit in Wade’s arms, and he shifted to make sure he had a tight grip on me.

  I didn’t know how long we had flown, but at some point after we left a chain of mountains behind us, another ring of lights appeared on the horizon up ahead. When Azure took us closer, it had the same appearance as the last wilderness fort that we’d seen, but I was disoriented enough now that I couldn’t quite picture where this one should be on the map.

  “Do you know where we are?” I demanded. “Or where this fort is?”

  “Yeah, I’ve got a good idea where it belongs on the map,” Wade replied. “I know we’ve been up here for a while, so how are you doing? Are you still feeling okay?”

  “Yeah,” I said but then yawned. “Just a little… sleepy.”

  “I’m gonna head back now,” Wade said. “We’ve been in the air for a long time, and I don’t want to wear you or Azure out.”

  “Whatever you think is best, Wade,” I said. “I just…”

  “Just sleep,” Wade murmured in my ear. “I’ll wake you when we land.”

  “I would try to argue with you,” I sighed, “but I am… growing a human… life, you know…”

  And then I was out.

  I knew that it would take us a while to get back to the woods by Adrian’s cottage, but when Wade gently shook me awake some time after I fell asleep, it seemed like it had only been a few minutes. I must have been more tired than I realized, but at least when I woke up again, I felt more restored and ready for whatever came next.

  Azure made a beeline for the ground, and it looked for a minute like we were about to crash straight into the dirt path through Falrion Forest. The blue dragon pulled up at the last second to rein himself in, so instead, he glided down to the forest floor with as much grace as a swan when it landed on the still waters of a lake.

  Then Azure just trotted forward, slowed down to a walk, and finally came to a complete stop with Adrian’s cottage off in the distance. After he folded his wings down to his sides, he dropped his stomach to the ground so it would be easier for us to slide off his back.

  Wade hopped down first before he helped me off the dragon’s back, and then we both praised and stroked Azure to let him know what a good job he had done.

  “Belis must have really been tasty,” I said. “He certainly seemed to give Azure a lot of energy, anyway.”

  “Just imagine when we feed him something really magical,” Wade said with a grin. “Like the elven priests and priestesses.”

  “He’ll be unstoppable,” I said, “and so will we.”

  “Damn right, my love,” Wade said and squeezed my hand. “But for right now, I think we need to head back to the city and get a little bit of sleep before tomorrow.”

  I glanced at the sky above us. It was still dark, but the stars had shifted enough that I knew we had been in the air for hours. It was probably well past midnight by now, so there were only a few hours between now and sunrise, and once the sun came up, there would be plenty to do. So we might as well get some more sleep while we still could.

  “Which city?” I asked.

  “Oh, we’ll just stay here tonight,” Wade replied. “Our warehouse distillery should be empty, so we can sleep there undisturbed for tonight.”

  “Sounds good to me,” I sighed, and then I gave Azure a final scratch under his chin.

  “Be good, boy,” Wade told the dragon. “We’ll be back for you soon, and then we’ll make sure you grow up nice and big.”

  Azure made a sound between a growl and a purr, and then he trotted off into the trees. Once he’d disappeared, Wade took my hand, helped me up into the front of the wagon, and started to drive us back toward the Capital.

  When we finally passed back into the city and through the dwarven district, I saw that Wade was absolutely right about the warehouse. For the moment, there was no one in our distillery since we were all a little busy with the revolution, so it would allow us to have a little bit of privacy before the sun came up.

  As soon as we had locked the door, put away the wagon, and gave the horse some hay to munch on, we moved toward the bed in the corner of the warehouse. We had set it up some time ago, so anyone who was on whiskey duty would have a place to sleep, and right now, I thought that I’d never seen anything that looked better.

  I helped Wade out of all his armor, and then we both stripped down to just a simple tunic and pants. I pulled my red hair out of its long braids to let it hang loose down my back, and I took off Wade’s crown to set it down on the warehouse floor, along with all the rest of our clothes.

  Once we were out of our battle gear, we crashed onto the bed together, but the moment I laid down beside Wade, I suddenly wasn’t sleepy anymore. My back was to him, so his arms were still wrapped around me like they had been when we flew over the empire on Azure’s back. He felt warm against me, and as I started to push my body back up against his, all I could think about was how much I wanted him to be inside of me.

  I loved when we had threesomes and even foursomes together, and I loved that the king’s other women appreciated him and loved him as much as I did. But sometimes, I still wanted him all to myself, and after everything that I had seen him do today, all I could think about was how powerful he looked during battle, and how much I wanted to feel that same power here with him now.

  As I pressed my ass up against him, I slowly started to grind my pelvis back against his. Instantly, I felt his cock respond to my touch, and as it hardened inside his pants, I pushed myself up against him a little more and then reached back with one hand to graze his hard shaft.

 
“Not sleepy anymore?” Wade teased.

  “How could I be sleepy when I feel you all pressed up against me?” I asked. “I’ve been thinking about this since… well, since the last time you were inside me.”

  “You mean last night?” the king asked.

  “Oh, shit, that was last night, wasn’t it?” I laughed. “It feels like it’s been a week since we had sex with Ava and Clodia in the Blood City, but I guess that wasn’t really that long ago, after all.”

  “Not that I mind if you want to go again,” Wade said as he skimmed one hand up my stomach until he cupped my heavy tits. “You’re fucking beautiful, Penny.”

  “Even though I’m starting to show?” I asked as I laid one hand on my belly.

  “Especially because you’re starting to show,” Wade replied and then kissed the side of my neck. “If I could put a baby in you all over again, I would do it in a heartbeat.”

  “I wish you could,” I groaned, “but we’ll have to wait until this little one comes out first.”

  “That sure as hell won’t stop us from having fun in the meantime,” Wade murmured as he nibbled on my ear. “Not if you’re up for it, anyway.”

  “Oh, I’m always up for it,” I said and then flipped over on the bed to face him. “I always want you, Wade. I always have, and I always will.”

  “Even when I was just a skinny teenager who first came to the Thief’s Guild?” Wade smirked.

  “Even then,” I sighed, “but if you tell Dar I said that, I’ll deny it. He’ll be way too smug about the fact that he was right all along, and that he always knew I had a thing for you.”

  “Well, Dar already knows that I had my eyes on you from the first day that I showed up at the guild,” Wade said with a grin. “You know, other than Dar, you’re the person that I’ve known the longest.”

  “In the city?” I asked.

  “No, I mean anywhere,” Wade replied. “My family is all dead, so they don’t count, and other than them, you and Dar are my oldest friends.”