I shuddered and obeyed, although it wasn't a choice but a simple matter of fact. I couldn't breathe with the grip on my throat, and it was just one less thing to think about. Vivid lights flashed in my eyes, illuminating Hunter's snarling expression and electric gaze on mine. There was a shocking splash of fluid between us and then a sudden flood of air as my back hit the mattress.
Hunter was on top of me, growling and rutting, my knees pushed to my chest and spread wide. My head tapped against the wall three times, and then his hand was there, either protecting me or holding me still so he could strike harder, deeper. We were sideways, I realized, Hunter's feet braced on the floor and his chest holding me down with all his strength and weight.
This is him, I realized. This was the orc Hunter hid behind fine clothes and human manners. He was exquisite. I stretched my knees farther aside, and he licked a stripe up my throat and right into my ear. His tempo was growing uneven, breaths almost panicked, and I reached over to stroke softly at his back.
"Yes, orc," I whispered in his ear, kissing the lobe and nibbling up to the sensitive tip. "Yes."
He gasped and stiffened, and then thrust almost cruelly against me, filling me with hot cum at every punishing strike. It seeped out between us, thick and warm and smelling of summer, and I came again with a surprising shudder that made Hunter howl into the mattress by my hair.
"Forgive me," he rasped, stealing my breath with his weight, nudging his hips more gently to mine, still spurting in small bursts. "Forgive me, little one."
I opened my mouth to tell him the truth. I owed him as much forgiveness and this was everything I'd wanted from him, but his lips found mine first with a deep and pleading kiss that seemed to show no sign of ending. Long after my breath was stolen and my head was dizzy and my body limp, Hunter moved us back to lying down, his cock still buried deep inside of me.
* * *
The chain scraped against the uneven floor, the ghostly voice of my father speaking through the metal clanks and scratches.
"You'll leave me."
"I won't, Pa."
"You will. Like her. Like your kind."
The words dragged down my back, made the tops of my ears throb and burn and itch. I carried the scorching bowl of broth in my outstretched hands, the chain hissing behind me with every step, cuff biting into my ankle.
"Don't leave me, Hazel." He was such a small figure on the bed in the corner, withering away, eyes huge and somehow empty too. I had the auburn hair I remembered from his youth, but now his was all grey and yellow.
"I won't leave, Pa," I repeated, my lips raw with the words.
"You will."
"I don't."The words snapped out, and the metal on my ankle scratched and tore at my flesh. I crumbled to the edge of the bed, and my father retreated into the wall at his back at my nearness. I never left, some hazy, wakeful part of my thought. You said I would, and I never did.
"You will."
"I can't, Pa." Tears were scratches of flames down my cheeks, and the spoon in my fingers burned my skin as I raised it to his lips. "Where would I go?"
* * *
I knew immediatelyupon waking that I was alone, not as though I might be able to lose Hunter in my tiny bedroom. I huddled under my blankets, peeking out from the sheet to find morning dim and bleeding hazily through my window. I reached down to my ankle, half expecting to find torn flesh, the joint still aching. But my skin was unmarred and the pain vanished as I touched the spot. Because I'd never really been chained. Not with anything so simple as metal cuffs and links. The dream had been a blurry mix of memory and nightmare.
I passed a hand over my hip next and found a few raised scratches from Hunter's claws, evidence of what had passed in the middle of the night. There was more evidence between my thighs, and I winced as I shifted and the mess grew obvious. The air was warmer than I'd expected as I pushed the covers back, the soft crackle and pop from the kitchen revealing that Hunter had lit a fire in the stove. My nightgown was wadded up around my waist, and I shifted slowly. I wasn't sore, but there was a pleasant sense of use in my body.
I stood on wobbling legs. Last night had been the first time in weeks that I'd had sex just because I'd wanted to. But that only reminded me of why I'd wanted to.
Beth.
I hissed as I washed myself with a small cloth and cold water from the day before, and then hurried to dress. Myra and Reddy would be back at the theater by the time I arrived. They needed to know what had happened.
Aside from the fire in the stove, which looked as though it had been burning for a few hours, there were no signs of Hunter's presence. Part of me wanted to take the time to think of the orc—had I offended him in the night, would he return to the theater even after we'd had sex, or move on to a different girl—but I had put off my real concern long enough.
I dressed in a rush, grabbing the last apple from the counter and damping down the fire in the stove. It would be cold when I returned later tonight, but I was used to this flat feeling more like a grave than a home. My eyes avoided the bed in the corner, the familiar nightmare too fresh in my thoughts.
The theater took up all my time now. At first, it had been a relief to have the freedom to leave the flat and wander the city, to not only care night and day for my father. Lately though, home was just the place I took a few hours each night to rest. The privacy was wonderful compared to backstage, but there was a downside I was reluctantly discovering.
Loneliness.
I ignored it for the moment, wrapping myself in a shawl and hurrying out the door.
I liked early morning in my neighborhood. The drunks had gone to bed or been rounded up, and the familiar faces I'd grown up with appeared, throwing open shop doors or leaving their stoops to go to work.
"Morning, Miss Nix, lovely as always," John Winsor, the butcher at the corner of Jamaica Street, called to me.
John was portly and sweet, and getting nearly old enough to turn his shop over to his son-in-law. When I was a little girl, he'd been a young man just taking the reins from his own father. As he stared at me and smiled, nodded as I waved, I wondered if he noticed it. Was it time for me to leave? Did John realize how old he'd grown and how young I still looked? Did he count the years in his head and question why a woman who was surely now a spinster, never mind also probably a whore, was still in her first bloom of youth?
Pa had wanted us to leave the neighborhood even before he'd died, but he'd been too weak to force the issue. A decade later, and I was pushing my luck.
I certainly was as I walked slowly down the block, approaching the door of Beth's apartment building. They'd cleared her body away by now, of course, but there was a police officer exiting the front door, whose glance I avoided, and a few more speaking with locals around the block. I wrapped my shawl tighter around my shoulders and hurried my steps to the corner.