by Aja James
“But the crowd cheered,” Valerius whispered, tears of bewilderment and frustration and anguish filling his eyes, “they approved.”
“To what end!” the master thundered. “It is all a game! And. You. Sabotaged. My. Hand!” The master punctuated each screech with a swinging fist against Valerius’ head.
Then he bent down to the slave boy’s level until his bloated visage was not one inch from Valerius’ face.
“You stupid, stupid little shit,” the master spat, practically foaming at the mouth like a mad dog. “If you let your pater die like we planned, the profits would have been enough to free you both, and your pathetic womenfolk. But now, oh no, now you’re going to PAY!” the master shouted with quivering vengeance.
“I’m going to sell your ass to the highest bidder, and I don’t care if they use you for a potty urn. I’m going to whore your mother and sister out. They can kiss their peaceful little farm life goodbye.”
Valerius struggled anew and tried to break free, but the pressure on his arms behind his back was unrelenting, forcing him to stay on the ground.
The master inhaled deeply and straightened, appearing to find some small semblance of calm, his rage somewhat subsiding.
“Take him to the dungeons,” he ordered the guards, “and see that he’s in too much pain to even think of getting free.”
The guards dragged Valerius away, chained him to the wall of a square, corner cell and proceeded to rain pain upon his weakened body, with their fists, their boots, their daggers. They knew what they were doing, for they left him no mortal wounds, just enough to put him out of commission for a time.
Now, Valerius leaned his head back and closed his eyes. He knew his father would never have agreed to his own death. He had too much fight left in him, too much life yet to live. And he loved his wife too much to leave her. Loved his daughter. His son.
Valerius blocked out his anguish and tried to focus on the immediate future. He must break free before the master acted upon his threats against Valerius’ family.
He must protect them at all cost.
A sennight, perhaps more, passed while Valerius bided his time and rebuilt his strength in his windowless cell. His keepers kept him alive on broth, stale bread, and occasionally, moldy cheese and half rotted fruit, the rubbish that the servants threw out at the end of the day. But he ate everything they tossed at him and worked to store up a reserve, forcing his body to absorb every last morsel.
During this time, the master brought various people to look him over, staying true to his words to sell Valerius to the highest bidder.
There were slave traders who poked and prodded him, but deemed him too scrawny to get much hard labor out of. He was still a boy growing into his own body, his lanky frame and long limbs dangling awkwardly from the chains.
There were more polished versions of the traders who procured personal slaves for wealthy patrician households. But they reared back in aversion when he bared his teeth and emitted threatening animalistic growls. Too unrefined and feral to be a personal slave, they decided.
With every failed showing, Valerius received a vicious beating for denying the master the payment he felt due. And so Valerius bided his time, plotting his escape, teaching the bones of his hands and feet through repeated, painful exercise to bend and contort in ways they never had before.
Then one day, just as he was almost able to wriggle loose of one manacle, the heavy wooden door to his cell opened with a bang. In marched the master with a team of four heavily muscled and armed guards.
This was new, Valerius thought with a tilt of his head. Usually the entourage of brutes and the shower of meaty fists followed visits from prospective buyers, not before.
And then the guards parted to reveal a man and a woman, both expensively dressed in the finest patrician robes.
Valerius could see in the dim light afforded by the torches in the prison hall that the woman was tall and blonde, the man of an equal height, but dark and stocky. They seemed to glide above the bloodstained dirt ground as they stepped lightly forward, their calculating eyes riveted on his person.
“So this is the boy,” the master all but spat out in disgust, “you can try him out before you pay if that’ll seal the deal.”
Valerius raised his head, alerted to the malicious tone in the master’s voice.
The woman stepped closer to her quarry and gestured for one of the guards to bring forth a torch. When the firelight illuminated Valerius’ face, she gasped with delight, “Oh my, but I do believe this one has promise beneath all that grime, my husband.”
The man moved closer as well and gazed upon Valerius with the same avaricious gleam in his eyes, “You may be quite right, my dear, you have a discerning eye indeed.”
Valerius bared his teeth and growled his most ferocious growl, but the woman only laughed behind her hand.
“Oh he has spirit, this young one, how fun he’ll be to break.”
The man nodded in agreement and smiled slyly at his partner. “Shall we give him a trial run and see if he lives up to his promise?”
The woman seemed to enjoy that idea immensely, for she gave the man a wet, smacking kiss on the mouth.
A bead of sweat trailed down Valerius’ spine as deadly foreboding descended upon him. But he had little time to dwell on that sharp stab of fear before a wide belt wrapped around his throat and cut off all the air.
When he came to, he found himself laid flat on his back on a wooden bench, his legs spread apart on either side, bent at the knees, his feet flat upon the ground. He was held down by a guard at each shoulder and a third at his head, holding it to the bench with the belt that was still clenched around his neck.
And he was naked. Completely and utterly vulnerable.
Valerius began to struggle with everything he had, but the guards held fast and the cinch around his neck weakened him the more he fought. Breathing heavily, he could only watch, helpless, from the corner of his eye as the woman approached him with a jar of something pungent in her hands.
She sat upon the bench just below the juncture of his thighs and proceeded to spread the slimy stuff she spooned from the jar over his genitals.
Valerius was mortified. What was she doing? Why was she touching him there? He’d only discovered what his penis was capable of at the age of twelve when it stood straight up from his groin one hot morning. He’d tended to it shyly and furtively since then, but his small pleasures were painfully private, though he suspected his father knew what he was doing when he stayed too long in the bath hall.
This woman had no right to touch him there. He’d rather be gutted with a spatha than bear her hands on him. Valerius struggled anew and tried to kick out at her, but the choke hold on his throat grew tighter and his efforts quickly faded with exhaustion.
She held his penis with both hands and began to stroke and squeeze its entire length, harder and faster until the thing grew enormous and swollen and painfully erect.
Valerius could barely countenance what was happening.
He didn’t want this!
But his body betrayed him. The ointment she’d rubbed over his genitals was stinging like a fiery rash, but it made his penis elongate and swell despite the horror that froze his mind.
“Look at that,” he heard the man say as the patrician stepped closer to view his wife’s progress. “Praise the gods but he’s a fine young stallion. Have you ever seen the like?”
“Happily, I have not, my love,” the woman tittered in response, “I can’t wait to try him out.”
Valerius heard a throat clearing just beyond his personal hell.
“Just remember, you break him, you pay double,” the master put in, then abruptly silenced when the man threw him a pouch of coins.
“For the trial use,” the patrician said, then turned back to his wife, now gathering up the folds of her stola and positioning herself above Valerius, “this one is worth it.”
As she grabbed his penis and rubbed it against her nether
region, Valerius felt sick at the fluids that seeped from her body onto his. Before he could brace himself, she came down fully astride him, taking his length deep within her body.
“Aaaahhh,” she cried, then awkwardly rammed her hips against his as if to get a better seat. “He’s so large he barely fits. Just… Just a little more. Oh gods, I can’t even take all of him inside!” She laughed hysterically, overjoyed.
After a few more bungling attempts, she seemed to find her stride, though Valerius could feel the tip of his penis bending at an agonizing angle within her. Every movement she made hurt him terribly.
She groaned in ecstasy and began to ride upon him, squeezing his flesh and slapping her moist thighs jarringly against his hips, moving up and down, forward and back.
Valerius felt his throat close around the tears that threatened and struggled to breathe even as he wished for death to blot out the misery and humiliation.
After a long, bruising ride, she stiffened suddenly and let out a keening wail, her inner muscles clenching painfully around his erection.
Was it over? Valerius dared to hope. He breathed more easily as she clambered inelegantly off of him, straightening her robes in the process.
“Well,” she said shakily, “that was certainly worth every last dinar in that pouch.” She smoothed her hair away from her face, the knot at her nape having come loose from her jaunty ride.
“My turn, then, my love,” her partner said in a covetous voice, as he threw a second bag of coins to the master’s awaiting hands.
Valerius was pulled up by his hair and shoved roughly to face the wall where he had been chained for the duration of his imprisonment. He could barely hold himself upright much less try to fight off the guards’ restraining hands. His knees buckled and he would have fallen if not for the manacles they secured once again around his wrists, holding him up in a half stance.
Again, heavy hands held him in place flush against the dungeon wall. His legs were kicked apart and his ankles secured, until he stood spread like a virgin sacrifice before the gates of Tartarus. There was some rustling and jangling and what sounded like a coin belt falling to the ground. And then Valerius felt the man’s hands clamp upon his hips a moment before something blunt and hard stabbed into his body.
Valerius bit down hard on his tongue to keep the whimper of pain from escaping. He would not let them see him break, he vowed.
He would never give them the satisfaction of knowing his pain!
The stabbing continued at a steady pace, harder, deeper, faster. The man’s rutting hips pushed Valerius into the wall, the force of his movements scraping Valerius’ naked torso against the rough, jagged bricks, leaving scratches, cuts and bruises on the boy’s chest, stomach, thighs, and even his still swollen erection.
After what seemed like an interminable period of time, when Valerius had grown numb and disoriented from the abuse, the man heaved one final push and bellowed his release. Stomach acid gurgled up Valerius’ esophagus as he felt the man’s filthy cum jettison into him.
Amidst the heavy panting and the woman’s fervent whispers, the master threw down his demand, “Five hundred gold pieces, and you can use him to your little black hearts’ content. He’s young, just over fourteen. He’s got a long useful life ahead of him.”
“Done,” the man said without hesitation. “Shall we retire to your receiving chambers to sort out the details of the transaction?”
“Come right this way. And while you’re here, I’d like to show you a few other morsels…” The master’s voice faded away, along with the footsteps of the guards and the Roman nobles.
Valerius dangled lifelessly from his chains, his head bowed, his breathing coming and going in broken gasps. Blood and fluids trickled down his inner thighs, as the tears he’d held back so bravely leaked out of the corners of his eyes.
Silently he sobbed out his pain and degradation. Though he tried to be the man his father taught him to be, though he fought against their breaking of him, right this moment he wanted to curl into a small ball and hug his brutalized body to himself.
Just for this moment, he allowed himself to mourn.
For his murdered father. For his unprotected mother and sister. And for the innocence he would never reclaim.
Chapter Six
New York City, NY.
Seth Tremaine followed two strikingly attractive females in form-fitting white tuxedos through a hidden corridor leading to a high-security elevator that could have blended completely into the interior walls of the Chrysler Building had one not known it was there.
Entering the narrow space with his two accompaniments, Seth looked neither to his left nor to his right, keeping his gaze straight ahead. He did notice, however, that there were no buttons and no floor signals on the inside of the elevator, just shiny, unmarked steel casing surrounding the passengers on all sides with three overhead halogen lights. And no one had made any movement or sound, yet the elevator began climbing up as soon as the single sliding door closed before its three occupants.
As the reinforced steel box rose upwards, Seth did not need floor indicators to tell him they were rising from the sixty-sixth floor towards the no-public-access Chrysler Crown.
Back in the mid nineteen hundreds, there used to be a snazzy Cloud Club that occupied three floors from the sixty-sixth to the sixty-eighth, but it closed down in nineteen seventy-nine due to various reasons, not the least of which was that the upper-most floors of the building had never been designed architecturally for luxury and entertainment. There were some half-hearted attempts to revive the establishment or something like it, but all met failure mysteriously. There also used to be a viewing gallery on the seventy-first floor, but that too closed to the public in nineteen forty-five.
Seth had a feeling that the destination of this elevator was going to exceed all expectations.
Soon enough, the polished metal door slid open soundlessly and revealed a breathtaking view. A magnificently opulent, gigantic Great Hall rose thirty feet from the floor to meet at the intricately decorated point of a vaulted dome, surrounded on all sides by floor to ceiling triangular windows, alternating with ribbed and riveted stainless-steel cladding, radiating outwards in the world-famous sunburst pattern.
Someone, Seth suspected his host, had managed to combine the vertical space of three floors into one and spruced the place up with an ingenious interior decorator without anyone the wiser. That someone, he also suspected, was the true owner of the Chrysler Building, though public records assigned that honor to the Abu Dhabi Investment Council—ninety percent of the ownership, anyway.
The two female adornments at his side closely escorted him into the massive, brightly lit hall, and he noticed that the floor beneath his feet was made of Italian marble. There was no clutter of ostentatious statues, fountains or paintings to distract from the elegant beauty of the architecture itself, but what embellishments were there were of the highest quality and taste.
As they approached the far end of the hall, he could see his host sitting on a well-appointed throne, Chinese in style, but not in construction. Pure gold furniture would surely clash with the rest of the cool, modern décor. Around the throne sat a wide circle of lounges and deep-seated sofas, all black and white with splashes of red in the silk pillows or detailing. Lying, sitting on, loosely standing by and reclining on the floor before those luxurious pieces of furniture were a dozen or so scantily clad, highly sexualized, outrageously good-looking young men and women.
His host was holding court, apparently.
Or perhaps it was just another day in the life of a one-thousand-eight-hundred-year-old Vampire Queen.
His escorts brought him into the circle of dissolute blood-suckers, stopping a few feet before their queen. Seth could feel a dozen pairs of curious black eyes roaming up and down his body, as if to strip him bare to their voracious view. He could also sense the heightened state of their sexual arousal, as well as hear it, when a couple of females and even a male, began to to
uch themselves and moan loudly.
“Silence,” the regal Vampire Queen commanded in a soft voice that instantly muted all sounds from her court.
Then she regarded her visitor without words, casually sitting back in her throne, a wine glass dangling precariously from her fingertips. Red wine, of course.
But Seth wouldn’t bet it was actually of the grape variety.
The Consul returned the vampire’s steady gaze and conducted a thorough assessment of his own. No one would argue that Jade Cicada, as she was known since her rebirth, was not a sublimely beautiful woman. To every race, to every breed, human and non-humans alike, she was spell-binding.
Her large, almond-shaped eyes tilted slightly at the corners in that mysterious Asian way, long, straight lashes fringing both upper and lower lids, delicate frames for the startling deep blue irises and large black pupils within. She had a classic oval face, with high cheekbones and a pointy little chin. Wisps of reddish-black hair caressed her temples and beside her small ears while the rest of the thick, silky mass was gathered intricately into braids on top of her head, most of the length falling freely down her shoulders and back.
If his knowledge of Chinese history served him well, Seth guessed that her coiffure dated back to third century China, late Eastern Han or Three Kingdoms period.
Like Seth’s twin escorts, Jade was also dressed in a body-hugging ensemble, though the slightly transparent silk flowed over her skin in caressing folds. She was covered from head to toe by the simple long black dress, yet Seth felt his breath quicken as if she were lounging before him entirely naked.
The semi-transparent silk slid teasingly over her curves, and though she was slender in her limbs and waist, her breasts, hips and buttocks were generously round. She wore nothing beneath the delicate black sheath.
He could see the pointed tips of her high breasts, the aureoles large and dark. He could see the tantalizing groove that bisected her taut, but infinitely flexible torso as she sat with her upper body curved to one side, her lower body curved to the other in a voluptuous S.
