Page 5 of The Bone King and the Starling
he murmurs.
“Choose another.”
“No.”
His other hand shifts up my back to apply gentle pressure at the nape of my neck. His hand fits fully around my throat. He bends down, inhaling as his nose drags up behind my ear to my hair. The smell of him, sweet bread and wine and leather, is pleasing to me in ways I’m unfamiliar with. My thighs are trembling where his hand is locked between them and I feel and unfamiliar heat pooling at their juncture.
“I promise you, my king, I do not know what I’m doing…in this…”
“And I promise, little bird, you need not worry about that.”
His hand crawls higher up my legs. He will reach their juncture soon and I choke, afraid by the surprising pang of pleasure I feel. I don’t understand it. “Please.”
I grab his forearm.
He presses our foreheads together, a new and sudden urgency in his touch. “You fear me, little bird?”
“Yes, my king.”
“I understand why, and I am sorry for it. There will be time for me to reassure you,”
he snarls against the side of my face. “But not tonight. I cannot and I will not wait.”
He proceeds with none of the gentle caution he did before, allowing me the chance to seek his mouth with my own. This time, his lips swoop in and gather mine up like a prize left out in the grass, so ripe for the taking.
He crushes his warm, dry lips to mine, angling his face so that he can devour me fully. His tongue licks the seam of my mouth and I gasp, surprised at the startling sensation. His tongue slips between my lips, past my teeth and gently strokes the roof of my mouth, my tongue — anywhere he can taste. At the same time, his hand shoves up my dress to where my thighs come together and he touches me there where no man has touched me before. The feeling is dangerous and scary and I feel humiliated anew at both the fact that he intends to rut me here and the fact that I no longer am pretending when I release a wild and needy mewl. My head falls back on my neck and I gasp for air.
“Fuck,”
he curses, separating our mouths as he catches me. His hand kneads my mound through my dress and all I can think to do is spread my legs for him to grant him further access. It feels…too much and not enough. I am going to cry out of need and frustration, for I do not understand this, how to make him stop or how to make him give me more of it.
He comes for my mouth again, kissing me ruthlessly at the same time that he stops his ministrations on my mons. He removes his hand and I twitch violently, panting against his mouth, my wine-laced breath mingling with his.
“Come,”
he grunts against my lips.
Before I understand what he means, he lifts me up in a cradle hold and I’m distantly aware of the sound of his warriors — and then everyone in the entire great hall — cheering as he carries me away to the room behind the throne where the chief and Lady Rosalind ordinarily sleep.
I’m clutching his leathers for dear life while he hugs my body high on his chest. He kisses me feverishly, cupping the back of my head. I part my lips, allowing him entry as I pretend that this is real and that he truly wants me, not just another receptacle for his seed as he’s known to take as he passes through all of Wrath’s villages. As I saw tonight, there is no shortage of females available to him.
He bites my bottom lip and a crazed energy compels me to want to match his violence. Or at least, to try. I move my lips around his upper one, nip at it with my teeth and, when he releases a strangled groan and pauses, I stick my tongue into his mouth to taste him like he tasted me.
He breaks our kiss and staggers into Chief Olec’s chambers. He leans heavily on the wooden posts lining the threshold and tilts his face up again to the thatch again. My face is hot with embarrassment that leaves my body in a rush when he pants, “I thought you said you’d never been with a man before.”
“I haven’t, my king. I’ve never even kissed one before. I would not lie to you, I promise.”
He shudders and whispers, “Mercy,”
before looking down at me with a startlingly dark expression. Like he’s debating not whether, but how, he intends to kill me. “Then how is it that you feel as if you’ve practiced on a thousand men before with the express intent to learn how to kiss me?”
He rubs his thumb roughly across my mouth, punishingly, as he takes another step. “You taste made for me by the gods.”
A warm pressure fills my chest and it is enough to distract me as he sets me down on shaky legs and moves behind me. He pushes me forward and my hands fly out to support myself and catch a support beam in the center of the space. There is a large bed in the nook to my right, a small eating area to my left. There are two more rooms branching off of the eating nook, but I cannot see what they hold as they are covered by drapes.
I glance towards the bed, wondering if I should move towards it, when the king suddenly grabs the back of my dress and yanks hard on it. I gasp and shiver all over at the brush of cool air against my spine and realize in the jerky way he moves that he’s cutting my dress in two. A fleeting despair at the thought of no longer having clothing is replaced when I feel his warm, heavy hand alight on the center of my back.
He makes a choking sound and for a moment, doesn’t move. Doesn’t say more.
“M-my king?”
I nervously breathe after a moment has gone by, in which he’s pushed my dress down my arms and then shoved it down over my hips so that I stand facing away from him, hands braced on the beam, naked all over with my clothing pooled at my feet. He must not be pleased with my body…I think, and flush.
His fingers skim my spine and then move back up to the nape of my neck. His hands start to trace patterns and I realize what’s troubling him a moment before he says, “You’ve been beaten?”
I exhale, glad that is all that’s concerning him. I nod.
“With what?”
“A whip.”
“Made of what?”
“Wire.”
His fingertips trace some of the marks. They should be fairly pale — I haven’t been struck in a while — but I also haven’t taken the time to look at them in a long time, either.
“I’m sorry if they offend you, my king.”
He hisses and then I jump when his body suddenly comes up behind me. Right behind me. So close, his heat is pressed against me from neck to heel. He brackets my feet with his boots and I know that if he were to make a misstep in his shoes, he’d likely break my now bare toes. Everything about this feels so dangerous for me. Pretending not to be frightened takes more work as I inhale shallowly.
“You do not apologize to me, little bird. Least of all for this. You do not apologize to me even when you do something wrong.”
He pulls on my hair, tilting my head back until I can see his eyes looming over me. “Do you understand?”
Tears come to my eyes at the pressure, the overwhelmed way I feel. Truthfully this time, I shake my head. “No, my king.”
He reaches around my body and cups my left breast. I gasp when he pinches my nipple. “It is alright.”
He kisses my forehead. “You will soon.”
His hands move over my body, touching me everywhere, starting at my breasts and chest before moving down my stomach to the flare of my hips. As he removes his hands from my body, I hear the unmistakable sound of the clasps on his leathers being unbuckled and I shudder. I know I should offer to help him, but my hands shake too badly.
“You are,”
his low voice rumbles, and I worry about what he will say next. How could his assessment of my nudity be favorable when he is used to bedding highborn women? Women afforded baths every week, if not every day, those who don’t bear dirt smudges on their forearms, fading bruises on their legs, filth caked beneath their fingernails because they don’t do and have never done manual labor.
“Exquisite,”
he exhales deeply, his entire chest rising and falling against my back.
His bare chest.
I open my mouth to thank him, but no words come out.
I see leather pieces fall to the floor. His vambraces, his chest pieces, his remaining furs. When his arms wrap around me next, I see that they are fully exposed. And when he presses his body against mine again, I can feel his beastliness outlined in every ridge of his pectorals, every hard line of his abdomen, his massive rounded shoulders, his impossibly hard, thick thighs when he finally unlaces his boots and trousers and steps out of them.
I gasp as his erection presses against my back and he moans. I shudder, shivering in earnest now. “Shh,”
he says in my ear. “I know you are nervous.”
His assurance does nothing for me. I continue to quiver, proud of myself that I manage to remain upright at all as he rubs his length slowly along my back, bending his knees considerably to lower his erection to my buttocks and sliding the rock-hard, yet deliriously smooth appendage in between the crease.
“Have you seen a man bare before?”
he says, his voice thicker than it was.
I nod. Of course I’ve seen men bare before down at the river. It’s where the thrall’s wash.
He makes a ticking sound in the back of his throat and grabs mine, offering it a squeeze. “Who?”
I can’t speak and am ashamed of my reaction. Females are bedded by males all the time. This is not a Davral ritual. I am not to be flayed alive. And if I leave here injured, I can and will survive. “Just the um…the…”
I can’t speak, can’t think, not with the way he spreads my ass cheeks apart with his hand and prods the head of his cock at my other entrance. Does he plan to…rut me there? I wasn’t even aware that was something males did to females.
“I grant you leniency because I know that you are afraid, that you are a thrall, that I have done this all wrong, but when your king asks you a question, little bird, I expect an answer.”
He is reprimanding me and I shudder as his cock withdraws and one of his fingers moves between my ass cheeks and presses at my tight, tight entrance. I suck in a hard breath as he breaches my tight opening, sparking tears in my eyes. It feels…so strange. His other hand drops from my neck between my breasts, over my belly, moving around my front to cup my mound and when he burrows his fingertips into my curls, he finds a section of very, very soft skin and so, so gently, strokes it.
I make a terrible, embarrassing sound as my skin — all of my skin — alights in sensation. My knees don’t want to hold me up anymore and I all but wail, “Just other servants, my king. We bathe in the river together.”
My voice is hitching and unstable.
“Good girl.”
Abruptly he kicks my feet apart while his mouth comes down to my shoulder. He bites me hard enough to make me cry out. “I will bathe you…”
He grunts between kisses strung between my shoulder blades. He’s rubbing his whole body up against mine like a beast in rut, meanwhile I can scarcely catch my breath. “After.”
And then his hands are everywhere — roaming across my breasts, squeezing them hard, passing over my stomach, roughly cupping my buttocks. And then I feel him working at something. His huge arm wraps beneath my stomach and he lifts my feet clear off of the floor in order to notch the head of his penis at the entrance of my vagina.
“My king,”
I gasp, shocked at how quickly he’s accelerated things, and I brace, terrified, my fingers clutching the pole, my legs dangling uselessly beneath me. He starts to shove against my body, but I’m not able to take him. I’m a little damp, but the friction is painful as his erection drags against my lower lips, probing at my mound. It hurts and I release a desperate wail.
He surprises me when he withdraws and pants into my ear. He places my feet back on the floor and his meaty fingers delve between my folds to find my center. His other hand spans the width of my stomach and I can feel his fingertips digging into my skin as I wince again and clutch the pole, holding onto it as if it were my sanity.
His finger delves past my mound, spreading my lips wide to find the heat of my body. He slides a single finger into my core. I tense. I can feel my legs shaking and wish he would let me fall. I wish he would let me go, but I think we’re past that.
His large digit swirls inside of me, pressing deep into my core, touching places that no fingers have ever reached. And then he stills with one finger inside of my body, the other now in my hair. He gives it a slight tug and I realize he wants me to look back at him.
Carefully, I open my eyes and I’m surprised to see the expression on his face. His cheeks and mouth are both blood red. “You are a virgin,”
he says, and chokes. “Much tighter than I expected.”
I nod rapidly, surprised by his confusion — I told him this before, didn’t I? And I imagine that he’s bedded his fair share of virgins before. He hisses, sliding his finger further inside of me. He attempts to add another but I push up onto my tiptoes. The pressure is too much. “Please, your highness, it stings.”
“Calai,”
he corrects me. “You will call me by my name.”
He kisses my temple then, in a surprise show of I don’t know what, because it cannot be affection, before dropping his mouth to mine. I jerk back, though I don’t mean to, but instead of rising to anger, he whispers, “The gods are testing me.”
He slowly slips his fingers free of me and I sag, the wine cleared from my mind. I try to stand on my own, but the king is crowding me. He turns me to face him, pinches my chin and pushes me down. I don’t understand what he wants of me until I’m already on my knees, looking up at his face past his enormous erection.
I gasp at the sight of the appendage between his legs knowing that it cannot possibly go where I think it will. His penis is stiff and pulsing, pale skin flushed an angry color. The enormous erection he boasts looks more like a weapon than the swords he wore on his belt. I wonder how many females he’s raped in raids, how many whores and mistresses he keeps in Ithanuir. I imagine it would take an entire stable of females working all hours of day and night to keep that thing sated. And right now, all he has is me.
He presses the purpling head of his cock to my lips. It tastes salty. There’s a slight stickiness coming from the slit. My tongue passes over it as I close my lips and he makes a choking sound in the back of his throat. I look up at him as his hand keeps working his length.
His words are choppy as he grunts, “Just one kiss.”
The head is bloated and the veins are pronounced against his shaft as he passes his hand over it once, twice, and then faster. His testicles, covered in a light dusting of red hair, are clenched tight against his body. He reaches out to touch my hair and has to bend his knees significantly to be able to brush his penis over my face. I don’t expect the skin to be so soft or so hot as it touches my cheek like a caress.
I don’t know what I’m doing, having never kissed a mouth before, let alone this, but I mimic the motion he made against my own lips and lead with my tongue as I press my parted mouth to the slit along the top of his penis, kissing it like he asked.
He makes a snarling sound and I jerk back, worried I’ve hurt him, but his hand on my hair keeps me close. “Again. Please,”
he says. He begs.
Feeling strangely…powerful…I lick his cock from tip to base, finding that I enjoy the way he seems to struggle. He has ahold of the post in the center of the room and looks, from this angle, just as shaky as I felt when I was leaning upon it.
I lick him all the way down to his testicles and, in a daring attempt, I pass my lips over those, peppering them with kisses. He starts to pant harder, his chest heaving. “Please. Put it in your mouth. I need to feel you surrounding me.”
I open my mouth as wide as I can and feed his head towards the back of my throat. The moment I close my mouth around his erection, laving the underside with my tongue, King Calai cries out. He rips his cock from between my lips and I start as ropes of murky white fluid gush from the bloated head all over my cheeks and forehead and lips.
The surprising liquid pours from my forehead into my eyes, causing me to blink rapidly before I close them altogether and I can only feel from then on as more of the liquid comes to cover my bare chest. I didn’t realize it, but I’d reached up to brace myself on his thighs. My nails curl into them now while his tight, almost pained-sounding groans loosen. I can hear his heavy breath and I know that he’s dropped down to crouch in some way before me when I feel a wall of heat come against my front, and then the pressure of the hand that follows after.
He drags his fingers through the fluid he’s sprayed over my sternum, bringing it down and ringing it around one nipple, then the other. I arch back, surprised by how pleasurable that feels. And then I whimper audibly — loudly — when he replaces that finger with his mouth. The hot, sucking pressure of his mouth cleaning away the fluid he just decorated my nipples with is scandalous, but he does not stop.
He cleans one of my breasts with his mouth before moving to the other, sucking as much of my breast as he can get into his large mouth. Nerves dance across my heart, never having been handled this way before. It’s rough, but the sensations… My chin tips back and I reach for him blindly, grabbing and clinging to his shoulders as my back arches and I thrust my breasts further into his mouth.
“Augh,”
he moans as he pulls back. I reach up to try to clear away the cream in my eyes, but he catches my wrist. “I worry I am not strong enough to pass this test,”
he whispers. A cloth of some kind moves over my eyelids one at a time, but he uses his finger to clear the rest from my forehead. “Open your mouth.”
I open my eyes and my lips part automatically. I watch as he moves his cream-covered finger towards my mouth and feel it glide against my lips and taste the strange musky flavor on my tongue. I suck on instinct.
He hisses and withdraws his hand completely, then sweeps in and kisses me, holding my face between his enormous hands before he just as abruptly wrenches back and picks me up. In a cradle hold, he carries me to the room behind the right curtain, and I am surprised to find that it holds a very large bathtub full of steaming water that smells of rich bath salts and oils.
The king nuzzles against my temple. “I will seed you tonight. I am sorry, but I will not be able to stop myself.”
His voice is shaky and his words perplex me. I had thought that was what he brought me here for, but I don’t question him as he takes me to the gorgeous wooden bathtub in the center of the room.
Candles are lit all around the chamber and the water is hot as he sets me inside of it. I jump. The temperature is heavenly, but I am unused to it and I grip the edges of the bathtub when he releases me, as if in fear of an underwater monster rising up from the black bottom of the basin and swallowing me whole.
Though I suppose the only one likely to do that tonight is him, I think to myself as he sloshes into the tub and sits heavily against the basin across from me, taking up any and all space that was left. He’s holding onto the edges of the tub as well, but his eyes are honed on me like I’ve captured him with wicked sorcery. Like he’s trying not to attack.
He stares at me. I do not know where to look. His red hair turns dark in the water as he dunks his head. Wiping his face, he gestures at me with two fingers. “Come.”
There is nowhere for me to go, but when I don’t move, he sits forward and grabs my left arm. He yanks me towards him, turning me around, and my back lands against his chest. Tension threads the liquid surrounding us as he slowly begins to work soap over my skin. He kneads my shoulders, my back and then picks up a soft cloth and washes my face, my arms, my stomach, my feet. He takes particular time cleaning the undersides of my fingernails with a small pick and then using a fresh cloth to clean me there, between my legs.
“Sit forward.”
He then takes time washing my hair. He uses a blunter pick to comb the knots out of all of my curls. It takes some time. “Your hair is beautiful.”
My stomach clenches and I hold onto my knees, not complaining at all as he combs oil through my hair and, on the next pass of his fingers, they drag through clean. My eyes feel hot. It’s been…a long time since I’ve been able to pull my fingers through my curls like this and the delicate way he worked…I could pretend easily that he cared.
“Thank you, my king,”
I whisper.
“Calai.”
I only nod. I couldn’t get the word out if I tried.
Finished, the king hauls me against him, draping one arm over my shoulder and using that hand to squeeze my opposite breast. I arch again on instinct and King Calai groans, “I do not know where you came from, but if I had never found you, I would have missed you.”
The king slips his other hand between my legs. I squeeze my knees together, but his hips scoop mine and he presses his knees between my own and spreads them to either side of the basin, leaving me fully open and exposed.
He starts to massage my core, where I am most sensitive, and I do not know whether to enjoy the sensation or retreat from it. It feels deeply vulnerable and intimate. But his hand is on my breast again, flicking my nipple and he is biting and kissing and suckling the side of my neck. My hands are gripping the edges of the bathtub, holding on for dear life as my excitement starts to build and I start to gyrate against the cock beneath my ass.
He bites my ear and I surprise myself when I turn my face to the side, my lips seeking. He is so responsive and immediately ensnares my kiss with an even more demanding kiss of his own. Meanwhile, his hand picks up speed between my legs, flicking that patch of exceedingly soft skin between my curls until I cannot bear it.
“King,”
I shout, afraid. My whole body is feverish. I start to thrash. “What is…”
“Shh… Do not fight this. Surrender to me.”
I do not know what he means until it happens to me for the very first time. I become wild. I try to keep quiet, but it’s difficult as my breathing picks up and my stomach muscles spasm. My legs squeeze the outsides of King Calai’s, losing a battle I didn’t know I was fighting. I’m trembling, gasping, my hips are jerking and I’m suddenly submerged in pleasure. My whole body bucks, curling up, no longer terrified but purely elated as an intense wave of pleasure adorns me and takes me away.
“That’s it, Starling, come for me.”
He calls me by my name and yet, I’m so enrapt, so lost to the feeling of his hands on my body that I don’t even notice until hours, perhaps days later.
I scream and my body spasms one final time. I jerk as the wave I’ve been riding finally crests, making it possible for me to access reality in a way I couldn’t the moment previous. All at once, the pressure of his fingers in my curls is too much. The oversensitivity of my skin is painful. I pull away, but there’s nowhere for me to go and I whimper.
“You did beautifully,”
King Calai says, his hand traveling lower, away from my sensitive skin that sings. He reaches my mound, spreads my lips and presses a finger inside of me, then two… The pressure is bearable in a way it wasn’t before, his fingers sliding in and out of me easily, pleasantly…more than pleasantly. I start to feel the fever pitch coursing through my entire body build anew.
“K-King Calai,” I moan.
“If you keep making those sounds, I will lose myself to this,”
he grunts in my ear as his fingers slip out of my body.
I mewl, surprised by my own disappointment at the loss and, before I can censor the lewd, unladylike words that slip from my mouth, I whisper, “I don’t understand it, my king…but I don’t want you to stop.”
“Fuck.”
His big hands shove me forward until my legs are straight beneath me and my body is bent over them. I reach out and catch myself on the edge of the tub’s heavy basin. The wood is warm beneath my fingers, the steam creating droplets on the wood that disperse beneath my hands. The candles billow in the wind my body makes as I am maneuvered wherever the king intends. I feel my shaky lower half held up by arms stronger than the steel that had been strapped onto his belt.
And then I feel the pressure of something much larger than his fingers at the entrance of my core once more. My mound pulses, feeling hot and slightly swollen even though he’s barely touched me yet at all. I’m panting and he’s grunting as he lines his erection up with my core a second time and, without warning, thrusts forward.
I gasp as he successfully breaches the barrier of my body that had been too tight, too dry for him to enter before. It helps that I’m soaking wet in a way I know has nothing to do with the bathwater. My body’s natural lubricant eases his entry but still, the enormous erection that he shoves into me meets resistance. I don’t feel pain, but the pressure borders on it. I feel unholy sensations zinging through my core, through my soul, and I don’t know how to interpret any of them. Tears prick the backs of my eyes and my arms threaten to give out on me. I shake, but he holds me steady.
“Look at me,”
he says as he presses his penis inside of me another inch.
I look back, straining to see him over my shoulder. It’s frightening, meeting his gaze. He is grimacing, clenching himself together very tightly. His chest, dusted in red curls, bulges and flexes with each of his movements, no matter how slight. His palm slaps my outer hip before he takes it in a rough grip.
“You’re tighter than I believed possible… Tighter than anything I’ve ever heard stories about.”
He moans loud and beastly.
And I am just as loud as I respond to him in whimpers and gasps, breathy moans and deeper, more animalistic sounds. He pushes into me even more, more, the pressure so huge, the feel of his cock so damning, claiming. His erection is long, bigger than I knew a man’s could be, and I worry that he hasn’t entered me fully yet. He groans. I groan. His hand is on my shoulder, the other on my hip, keeping me from collapsing.
“Do you feel pain?”