My mouth watered as he shoved his riding pants down enough to free his thick cock and then as he fisted it roughly in his big hand. His face was savage in the dark and with desire as he planted a hand near my face and used the other to notch his dick at my entrance.
“You can scream all you’d like, bella, no one will come to your rescue,” he promised, and then he plunged straight to the end of my cunt.
I screamed, but this time it braided the edges of my torn lungs smooth and felt like honey coating my throat.
I screamed as he rutted into me in the middle of a wintry Scottish night, our combined heat melting the frost on the pine needles overhead so that they dripped over our bodies like a cleansing rain.
I screamed as he bent his head to take my nipples in his teeth, the pain cracking like a nut between his molars into divine pleasure, and I screamed even harder as he used the hand at my sex to slide another finger into my cunt beside his cock, and I became stuffed, deliciously overfull.
I did not scream as I came like a flood over his dick and thighs, as everything inside me that was not beautiful and pure expunged from me in exodus.
Instead, I breathed his name on a sigh and let terrorized mind find comfort in his discipline over my body.
Dimly, I was aware of the hot splash of his cum inside me as he climaxed, holding me close and tight so that I could feel the sharp tension of his arousal jerk then fall lax with satisfaction.
And then, I think, I passed out.
When I opened my eyes again, it was because Alexander was lifting me atop his horse. I blinked slowly when he didn’t mount it himself, instead turning to walk into the near distance.
I blinked again when I saw something hanging there from a tree.
It was the orange flash that caught my eye and pulled my submerged mind into the clear.
I recognized the colour of that hair from the corral, from the poor girl who had offered to share her hiding place with me.
She hung from a tree by the torn and knotted together length of her shift dress, her milk white body glazed in moonlight and speckled with mud as it swung in the cold wind.
There was blood blackening the inside of her thighs, and I had no doubt she’d been used and thrown aside for the third time in as many Hunts.
The third strike had proven too much for the girl with the dead eyes, and she’d succumbed to her demons by taking her own life.
My heart twisted up, bloody and used like an old tissue as I watched Alexander cut her down from the tree and gently lay her to rest under an old rowan tree. He smoothed by that carroty hair, crossed her arms over her chest and then bent his head over her prone form in silent prayer.
“They’re worse than beasts,” I murmured through the fog of my exhaustion when Alexander swung up behind me on the horse. “Because they know better, and they still act this way.”
“Yes,” Alexander agreed, wrapping me up tight and taking the reins as we began to navigate through the forest.
Random shouts still echoed through the dark, but less now since most of the girls already had been captured hours earlier. I knew Astor was scouting ahead and would probably alert Alexander to any incoming hunters, so I allowed myself to relax slightly against his warm body.
“Why do you do this with them?” I asked.
I had to know; my heart was turning into two, one dark and one light, one-part Alexander’s and one-part mine. I needed to know the intricacies of his atrocities before I could allow myself to sink deeper into the darkness.
“I told you, I was born into this and raised by their rules. It should be rote for me to be one of the Order’s disciples just as so many other things in my life are my born obligations.”
“Should be,” I tested as I tucked my head under his chin and pulled the jacket he had placed at some point over my shoulder, closer around me. “But isn’t.”
“I thought for years I was destined to be my father’s son, and I hated the idea of it. Then my mum died, and the man I’d always been unsure how to love when I hated his actions became the only person left in my family. It made the burden of being my father’s son and heir even harder to untangle myself from.”
“Maybe family isn’t everything,” I murmured, unaware of how my words could have applied to myself as I sank deeper into my exhaustion and began to fall asleep. “Maybe it isn’t enough to make decisions based on them. After all, you have to live for yourself.”