“How you were ever found worthy of my mistress is a question for the ages,” Alexios said under his breath. “How could you have imagined you deserved her?”
His words threw me back into a memory.
“Let’s try, Ratter,” I whispered, my lips numb from kissing her in the locked corridor of Wargate Hall. I’d kissed every part of her for the past few hours, begging her to let me take her to a bedroom in the castle, but the closest we’d come was here, in the treasury that she’d somehow managed to open, sitting on the old warlord’s elaborate, gold-chased throne. She looked like a satisfied queen as she sprawled on the edge, her trousers tossed over a stack of swords to one side, her cloak neatly laid over an arm of the throne. Torchlight flickered far down the hallway, and we sat in near darkness, but her eyes gleamed with satisfaction and mischief.
“Try making me come on top of the old warlord’s stash of goldani?”
“Don’t tease. I want to lay you down on blankets and pillows and feast for days,” I pleaded. “I want to enter you and be one with you, my little goddess.Ma bohinya.”
“You really wanna fuck?” She tapped her chin with one finger, considering. “I mean, I’m game. But are you sure the actual Goddess will find you worthy to enter my personal treasury?”
“Uh…” I said eloquently. Had she just agreed to lie with me? Where had my poetry gone?
“Beds are overrated, or so I hear.” She giggled, her gaze darting to the enormous vases filled with thousands of coins. “I’ll dump those out. I’ve been wondering what it would feel like to have sex on actual coins. Cold, maybe? Let’s find out.” She hopped off the throne, standing in only her shirt in front of me. She was so small compared to me, the top of her head coming only to my chest. I reached down to pick her up, but she’d pulleda stiletto knife out of nowhere and held it to the base of my throat. “No picking up without permission, remember?”
“Woman! Where’d you hide that knife?” I tried not to laugh, since that might end up with my bleeding out. She’d stabbed me enough times now for me to know it was never an idle threat.
She winked. “I’m always armed with something. Never forget it.” She put the knife away and crossed to the coins, dumping them out one by one. “Plenty to make a bed for a small dragon,” she said to herself when she’d finished and dropped to her knees, moving the coins around with her hands on the floor. Then she tossed her shirt off and lay down, naked. “Pay attention, ancestors. I’m the interim Warqueen, and I claim this treasure as mine.” She scowled at some of the paintings of the old warlord’s ancestors that hung on the walls on both sides.
My mouth went dry. I had to remind myself this was my treasury now, and he wouldn’t charge in and have me flayed for desecrating his family’s estate. Then my mouth went ever drier as Ratter slid a hand between her thighs and touched herself, her gaze fixed on me.
“Strip,” she purred. I obeyed at once, stitches in my shirt ripping as I tore it off. When I was nude a few seconds later, she licked her lips. “Yum.”
My cock nodded to her, like it thought that was a very good idea. She’d licked me before, though, and I’d almost wept at how quickly I’d finished between her lips. I groaned at the memory, grabbing the base of my already leaking cock, and the room was flooded with a rush of mint and fresh rain.
She took a deep breath, then let it out. “All right. Let’s try.”
“Try?” My head spun.
“Let’s find out if you’re worthy.”
In the next moment, I was on my hands and knees, coins sticking to my skin as I notched the head of my cock to her slickentrance. “I love you, my Warqueen,” I whispered as I thrust forward, then froze.
“Uh… is it in yet?” She chewed at her lip. “I mean, it can’t be, right? I would’ve felt something.”
I’d said I wasn’t worthy of her, to her face, more than once. But deep down, I’d been convinced that we were meant to be. That she was my destiny.
I still felt that, but I knew without a doubt that the Goddess did not agree. I could feel it, at the head of my cock, a silent, inescapable denial.
“What can I do?” I rasped and forced myself to look up into her face. I had to know if she was disappointed in me, or enraged or…
“Sacrifice,” she whispered, her face glowing in the dim room. A flickering kind of moonlight played over the coins closest to her, and I held my breath.
“My love?”
Flecks of gold swam in her silver irises, like coins that had been dropped into a stormy sea. “Build a ladder of warriors for her. You must sacrifice for her, if you want to keep her.”
I pulled out and lowered myself to my knees as Ratter scrambled to sit, cursing. “I hate it when She does that,” she groaned, holding her head in both hands. “Guess She doesn’t think you’ve passed whatever damned tests She has for you. What’d She say?”
“You don’t remember?” She shook her head, so I repeated what I’d heard.
“Huh. A warrior’s ladder? Do you know what that is?”
I felt the blood rush away from my head as I finally remembered to breathe. “It is an unusual… ah…” My tongue grew thick, and my cock far less so, as I tried to speak of it. I’d heard stories of warrior’s ladders before. I’d seen one a few years ago in the baths, a series of five slender goldbars impaling the skin of an older Alpha’s cock. His cock had been about six inches long, and the bars had been rather close together when he was soft.
“You gotta get one for every inch if you want it to be a proper warrior’s ladder,” he’d bragged.
Haltingly, I told her what it meant. Her eyes grew wider, her jaw dropped, and her cheeks blazed a bright pink by the time I’d finished. “Still think we oughta knock boots?” she grumbled, looking for hers behind a stack of rolled-up maps. “You’d have to get nine gold bars, it sounds like.” She snorted. “Got plenty of gold down here to use for them, I guess.”
