He heard Calavia whimper at his back.
“Leave,” she commanded.
Astegur turned back toward her to see if it was he she spoke to. But her eyes were on her thralls. His own widened at the realization that she would choose to remain alone with him in such a state.
Even if she didn’t want to be alone with him, it wasn’t like she had a choice in the matter. If she hadn’t made the thralls leave, he would have with his blade, even if the pain in hurting them was excruciating and would render him immobile, if not kill him.
He heard the thralls turn away.
“Wait,” he growled, making sure he remained between them and Calavia’s deliriously wanton state. Images of their cocks still lingered in his skull.
“Why?” she asked.
“I cannot mate you knowing there’s a hundred horse cocks coming straight for you here. We will not waste precious time. Order them to make stakes out of the wood they had gathered then tell them to stay away from you tonight no matter what they may hear.”
She trembled under his gaze. “Do you plan to hurt me?”
“Tell them, or I will finish this in front of them.”
She looked past him and toward the thralls he shielded her from and gave them the order he directed of her. They left them alone soon after, cooling his need to rip off their erections.
Fiercely satisfied, he knelt at her side on one knee and breathed his smoke over the skin of her neck, her collarbone, and rubbed his nose and face into her breasts as she tensed beneath him, shying away. “Good female, you can trust me,” he cooed suddenly, startling her further.
“Astegur?”
He pushed his hoof between her knees and shoved one of her legs away. More sounds escaped her—his name on her lips—and he felt his cock tighten painfully. She clutched her bound wrist with her other hand.
“Never felt your essence gush before, female?” he cackled, low and pleased. “Not once, late at night, while your thoughts were wandering? You have never grown damp from the act or the thought of sex?”
She shook her head. “I have been damp before, after a long day of work.”
“That is not the same.”
“Please make it stop,” she whispered.
He tsked, disliking the command, but at the same time, wanting to roar with pride from her begging. His eyes fixated on her thick, feminine curls that caught her dew. “How old are you?”
“I don’t know, does that matter?”
“You said you have never been aroused.” His fingers inched up her legs. “You look young, and yet I have been told Prayer has always had a hag.”
She pressed her bound hands to her stomach. “Yes.”
“You?”
“Yes.”
He slid his hands up farther; they were large and scarred upon her clear skin, exciting him. The tips of his fingers brushed over the closest of her cunt hair. Astegur squeezed her flesh, and another wave of terrible possession filled him. “How?”
If Calavia was truly untouched, his horrid soul wanted to know before he ruined her innocence.
“I was conceived the day the town fell,” she whimpered, still shaking. “My mother was a witch. Her need to keep me safe protected the village from the hordes, but it did not protect us from the mist.”
“A black spot.” They were uncommon, but there were other places like Prayer. “Is that how you survived?” If he had been alive he could have helped her. Astegur groped her flesh again.If I had been here when it fell, she may still be fully human…
“I survived because of her and because I possess her same powers. When the townsfolk succumbed to hysteria, some fled, others killed themselves, many just...died, and everyone who remained became thralls. But I lived, having taken my first breath of the world filled with the curse and my mother’s protection.”
He reached up and pushed her hair out of her face. “And your mother?” He thought back to the woman he saw when he first arrived at Prayer. The one that looked exactly like Calavia, but deader and more haunted.
