The Taming

by Imogen Keeper

  “The first time I summoned my men as the new regio, it was not to impress them with my ability to lead them.” His voice rose to an angry hiss. “It was to beg them to help me find my fucking wife. Only to have her come tripping up the cliffside with another man.”

  She let her eyelids drift slowly shut, even as her chest tightened at the word wife. Usually, when alone, they spoke in Argenti, and he’d always used the Vestigi word selissa. She wasn’t even sure what the shift meant to him, but it sliced through her chest like a knife.

  A vein on his forehead bulged. “A man,” he continued, “who has sworn vengeance on the whole of the Roq.”

  Sanger had sworn vengeance? Why?

  She glanced helplessly around the hall, at the groups of men pretending not to look at them. Had they been laughing at Tor? It was hard to imagine. And yet there was something about the way they looked at him with her.

  “I didn’t know. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  He touched her for the first time, catching her chin between his finger and his thumb. “Women were attacked. There were fires. Two men were stabbed. Looting. We found a man with a handful of golden hair.”

  “It will grow back.”

  He drew in a long, slow breath, and his shoulders eased. “I thought you were dead.”

  She forced a smile. “I’m not.”

  “Were you hurt?”

  “Not seriously.”

  Finally, he took her chin in his hand, tilting her face back and forth in the light, studying her as if he expected to see her bruised and broken. “The man is dead. The one who took your hair.”

  She tried to feel sad about that and failed. “Are the people angry about that?”

  “Yes.” His mouth tightened. “But it would have been worse to let him live and have them think they can assault the selissa.”

  She didn’t know what to say. She’d made a mess. A massive one. “I’m sorry.”

  With a curse, he pulled her toward him. His hard body pressed against hers, and it felt good and warm and strong. Just as she knew it would. And he smelled so good it made her head spin and a stab of liquid heat build between her thighs, because whatever it was that made him smell that way, it made her whole body sing.

  He pulled her up to the tips of her toes, and her eyes prickled at all that big, warm Tor safety. Finally.

  He buried his nose in her neck, breathing in deeply… and froze. “You washed off my mark.” He dropped her to the floor so hard she winced as her raw feet met hard stone. Hard fingers wrapped around her wrists, pulling them from around his neck.

  He shook her hands away and stepped back. “Up the stairs, Klym.”

  What happened to amiera? Abellina? She put her hand on the banister and took a few steps up, but he didn’t follow.

  “Now.” His eyes narrowed to points. “Before anyone smells you.”

  “Alone?”

  He was already gone.

  SHE WOKE WITH A LURCH to find him standing by the door, dressed in a dark togata, armored plates over his chest, calves and forearms. Holsters clung on each of his shoulders, sword and ax and knife on a low belt across his hips. His hair was back in a tight bun.

  Pale light slanted across the room, and he was dressed for war.

  There was no depression on the pillow beside hers. She’d come up and bandaged her feet and fallen promptly to sleep, but never heard him come in.

  She bolted upright. “Where did you sleep?”

  “I didn’t. I spent the night in the city with the armies, cleaning up after the riot. Go back to sleep, Klymeni.”

  She swallowed. “You never call me that. Why now? What happened to amiera?”

  He shifted, and his leather creaked. “Go back to sleep, amiera.”

  She wrapped her arms around her knees. It wasn’t the right amiera. The inflection was off, the purr on the r was missing. Instead it was hard. Like it had been back on the ship on Araa-Ara, and he was saying it like she was useless and stupid again. “Where are you going?”

  “After yesterday, the armies need to see me fight. I’ll be gone for a couple days.” He yanked open the door.

  She threw herself off the bed and yelped, because her feet hurt, but got her palm in the flat, broad face of the door and slammed it shut. “You can’t leave.”

  “I can. I am.”

  “But… but…” She looked around desperately. “Y-y-you need to mark me. You had three rules by the way. Not two. Three. And that was one of them.”

  He made an ugly sound in his throat. “And yet you broke that one too.”

  “But I don’t want to break it again.”

  In the pale morning light, the pearly orbs in his dark eyes honed in on her. “So now you want me to mark you.”

  She swallowed thickly. Of course, the minute she wanted something from him, he’d resist. “I do.”

  He shoved the door shut and took a step toward her, his boots scuffing on the peachstone floor.

  She licked her lips. “Are you going to spank me?”

  He threw his duffel, and it landed with a dull, metallic thud. “Do you want that?”

  Normally, he was head and shoulders taller than her, but today, in his boots, fully dressed, with all his armor and weapons, and she in nothing but the bandages on her feet, he positively dwarfed her. A massive hand closed around her throat, backing her up to the wall. His callused thumb traced up and down.

  “Would it make you stop being angry?” she asked.

  The dimple flashed. Not a happy dimple. Not a happy dimple at all. “No. Get on your knees.”

  Heart pounding in her throat, she dropped down to the floor. No spanking, then.

  The scent of machine oil and leather and Tor rose around her like a spell. Birds chirped on the terrace, but they were drowned out by the frenetic pounding of her own heart.

  Moving at half-speed, staring at her with dark, gleaming eyes, he touched the pad of his thumb to her mouth. Dragging down until her lower lip dropped open, he stroked along the wet inside of her lip, and she tasted the salt of his skin. “I’m not going to spank you, Klym.”

  She lifted heavy lids to find his eyes and sucked his thumb into her mouth, traced her tongue along the hard striations of his fingerprint.

  He inhaled long and sharp—maybe she smelled like heaven to him too. Down here, so close to his shaft, it was stronger, the woody, spicy musk that called to the fibers of her bones and made her burn.

  The shadows at the corners of his mouth deepened. The pads of his fingers tightened on the back of her scalp, and he pressed his thumb deeper, dragging it along her tongue.

  She may be inexperienced, but there was nothing wrong with her imagination, and she’d imagined him doing that very thing with his cock, understood on some deep, primal level that he wanted to do it too. He may not spank her, but there were hundreds of other things he could do.

  Liquid heat pooled between her thighs. He didn’t push back hard enough to make her gag, but he came close, his thumb stretching back, and she opened for him, just stared back at him, trusting him, willing to let him take whatever he wanted.

  “You broke the terms of our deal, Klymeni.” His voice was raw and rough. In that moment, he was exactly like her first image of him. As cold and hard as the ancient carved statues. “By your own agreement, I could fuck you now and never let you go.”

  She nodded. She’d awaited it all last night, in a potent mixture of dread and hope.

  His thumb still stroking up and down her tongue, her heart pounding so hard she nearly rocked on her knees, she rested her shaking hands on his bare thighs, slid them up hard muscles, over crinkly hair, to the bare skin of his sack.

  He dropped his head back and groaned, pulling at the togata, tucking it into his belt and out of the way. She palmed the heavy weight of his shaft in her hand, stroked its silky-smooth surface.

  His eyes were unreadable, his shoulders were heaving. She moved up, wanting to take him in her mouth, feel him on her tongue, but he held her sti
ll with that thumb in her mouth, his fingers shaking against her cheeks, and pushed her hand away.

  “Do you want me?”

  She couldn’t speak, not just because his thumb was at the back of her throat, but because she didn’t know what to say. Yes, yes, I want you. Yes, I want you to fuck me and never let me go and keep me forever, but not just because my existence infuriates your enemies, not because you feel duty-bound to protect me. I want you to tell me why you took me, the real reason, and I want it to be because you love me.

  He sighed, and maybe he misunderstood her expression. His mouth hardened, and he closed his fist around the length, and she waited, worrying and wondering.

  Maybe he’d hold it to her lips, slide the broad, wet head over her tongue as he’d just done with his thumb, or maybe he’d do as he said. Fuck her, claim her, and keep her.

  In that moment, she’d have let him.

  In that moment, she wanted him to.

  But he didn’t. Stroking her tongue with his thumb, he beat out a quick, utilitarian rhythm with his other hand.

  Yet, there was something so impersonal about it, except for the twin connection of his eyes, the pearl orbs gleaming in the dark, locked on hers, and his thumb gliding along her tongue, mimicking in the motion of his fist.

  His hand tightened on her face, she stroked her tongue along his thumb, and because everything in her body demanded it, she pressed a finger between her thighs and touched her burning flesh.

  His face contorted, his breathing grew more ragged, and his motions faster. With a grunt, he came, his hips bucking an erratic tempo, and wet heat sprayed across her chest in thick spurts.

  He pulled his thumb from her mouth and dragged a finger through the fluid pooling in her collarbones and dripping down her sternum between her breasts. “Rub it in.”

  “M-m-me?” She lifted her hands to her neck, ignoring the need pulsing between her thighs, and rubbed it all in, up her neck and behind her ears just as he’d done before.

  He hissed out a long, low curse. “Is that what you wanted?”

  She wasn’t sure what to say. “Not really.”

  He touched his finger to her lower lip, and he didn’t have to ask. She knew what he wanted. She opened her lips to suck his finger inside, lapped at it with her tongue, tasting salt again, but not from his skin this time. She groaned, loving the flavor of him.

  His mouth hardened, and that angry dimple flickered on his cheek in the cool morning air.

  The finger left her lips. “When I come back, make your choice, Klym. I’m done playing games. If you want to go, you’re free to.”

  He backed away, adjusting his clothes, picked up his bag and left her there, on her knees, with his taste on her tongue.

  32

  Science serum

  “I KNOW YOU REPORT to your mother.” Klym made the most queenly face she could manage and stared at Janna where she sat at the breakfast table.

  Janna’s mouth dropped. “I-I—”

  “Don’t deny it. It ends now.” She put a hand on her hip, trying to look stern despite having to lean against a chair to remove some of the pressure from her raw feet. “Where’s Staria?”

  “She’s in the dungeon. Tor had her put there as soon as she came back. She’s lucky that’s all he did.” Janna glanced around the room and leaned across the table toward Klym, dropping her voice to a whisper. “There hasn’t been anything to report, except the thing about the mark. Which I didn’t tell her anyway. She figured that out on her own.”

  “What thing about the mark?”

  Janna leaned across the table. “Everyone knows that he marks you the old way.”

  Klym frowned. “What does that mean?”

  “You’re not actually married, are you?”

  “What constitutes marriage on Vesta?”

  Janna inhaled and glanced around the room. “You haven’t consummated it.”

  Klym’s face heated. “I thought the mark made it clear that we had.”

  “It just confuses the issue. Centuries ago, when Tamminia had nine regios and Primes fought in the streets for felanas, the mark was meant as a signal. If a Prime’s woman was violated, there’d be a reckoning. But now…” She made a face.

  Klym fiddled with the bottom of her shirt. “Just how keen are your noses?”

  “I can smell the ointments on your feet. And I can smell that he must have marked you again this morning. But I can also tell that you didn’t make love last night.”

  “How can you…” Klym trailed off.

  “Directional scenting.” Janna lifted a shoulder.

  “You mean you can smell my…?” Her mouth dropped in mortification, imagining the last time she’d spoken to Tor’s brothers, or mother, or anyone. She grabbed a napkin from the table and held it in front of herself like an apron.

  Janna’s face was untroubled. “It’s normal to us. We don’t remark on it generally or even think of it. It’s just like hearing. Or seeing.”

  “So you do have some manners and customs?”

  Her brows wrinkled. “Of course we do.”

  “But if it just washes off, then why bother with the mark?”

  Janna leaned back in her chair. “I’m guessing because the alternative would be to take you by force.”

  Klym sat back. “So, everyone just assumes that I’ve been rejecting him all this time.”

  “Haven’t you?”

  She brought her hand to her mouth. He must have been so humiliated. All this time. And he’d never said anything. Never pushed for her to end that. He’d just given her time to get used to him. Time to accept him. Time to want him. The freedom to make her own choice. To choose him.

  Janna was silent for a long moment. “People say he was beguiled by a foreign woman into rejecting our ways.”

  “We only mate once in Argentus,” Klym said into her hand, ideas just beginning to formulate. She had to undo this. She had to make it right. Prove to his people that she hadn’t beguiled him or rejected him. “Just to one person.”

  “And you don’t want him?”

  Klym looked around the room, at all these women who did want him. How easy his life would have been if he’d taken them. If not for her, he could have. “I don’t understand him.”

  Janna was quiet for a long time, staring at her. “Then no one does, because since he came home, his own people surely don’t.”

  The loneliness of that statement robbed Klym of breath. She looked around the room at the felanas sitting in their clusters, with women they’d befriended, shared a life with, made a family with. Women who would be forced apart soon. She looked at Janna, waiting to be told that her brother had betrothed her to some distant and unknown Prime.

  At his mother in the corner of the room, mourning a husband and a son.

  She thought about her father, and the woman he’d never been able to forget, to whom he’d devoted his whole life.

  Of Spiro, bleeding on the floor.

  Of Agammo and Malina, Bonded now, and her non-existent life back on Argentus.

  And Tor, who’d run away from here ten years ago to be a bounty hunter, free to do as he’d pleased whenever he wanted, only to be handed the weight of a kingdom, for a people who didn’t understand him.

  Maybe that was how she could help, because in a weird way, she did understand him.

  She thought about the look in his eyes as he’d told her to make up her mind when he got back.

  And she knew the answer.

  She’d made up her mind. And she knew exactly what she was going to do with all the holo-vid she’d been taking since they’d left Spiro.

  “I need to find Staria, Monna and Sylese,” she whispered.

  Janna made a face. “Monna and Sylese have been sent to their fathers.”

  Guilt sat heavy in Klym’s stomach at that. “Will they be allowed to come home?”

  Janna cocked her head to the side. “This isn’t their home anymore. They are home. And as to Staria, you shouldn’t trust her.”
>
  Klym tossed her napkin across the table. She’d have to figure out about Monna and Sylese later. “She said the same thing about you.”

  THE DUNGEON could hardly be called pleasant. The air carried the sort of cold and damp that settled into the bones. And the darkness. There were twenty cells, ten stretching in each direction, each dimly lit with the same horrible flickering bulbs that only stayed on for a minute after motion.

  She’d sent Janna in search of a steward with keys, so now here she was, alone in a place she’d hesitate to see her worst enemy. She walked cautiously, on her freshly bandaged feet.

  A person down here would need to stay in constant motion or be swallowed up by darkness.

  Klym wasn’t sure what she’d expected, but certainly something more modern than this medieval dungeon.

  “Staria?” Her voice came out as little more than a whisper.

  The darkness could drive a person mad. “Staria?” she tried again. “Staria, are you down here?”

  “Selissa?”

  “Call me Klym.”

  Staria’s arm jutted through a set of bars at the back of the dungeon. Her bony fingers wrapped around them.

  “Have you been harmed?” Klym stopped before the bars and couldn’t stop the twinge of pity. The cell was far from hospitable.

  “No.” She looked so tired, shadows below her eyes, making Klym wonder if she’d slept at all. A glance around the dungeon was enough to make Klym assume she hadn’t. It would have been impossible for her to sleep down here.

  “Did you do it on purpose?”

  “What?”

  “Get me lost down there?”

  “No.” Dark eyes met hers. “Though, I did consider trying to get you to wear something ugly.”

  Klym couldn’t pretend to be surprised. She glanced around the darkened corners of the dungeon. Argentus had rats and giant centipedes in dank places like this. She shuddered to imagine what Vesta might have. “Are there any animals down here?”

  “I’ve heard things, but seen nothing.”

  The stones gave off a magnetic pull of their own, ebbing darkly. Klym paced a quick line to ensure the lights didn’t turn off. “Is the outfit I chose ugly?”