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Everything from the attack on the fold is hazy to her.
Ivan had slowed her heart, she remembers. They were concerned firstly and most importantly about— about her. No one else had mattered. They were collateral.
The others had gotten away? Maybe? It’s hard to recall, her brain seemingly rolling in her skull as the carriage jolts across the ground.
The… the carriage! Yes! They’d promised to let the others escape — Mal and the three kidnappers — if she lit the way back to Kribirsk for the Darkling’s contingent.
Then Ivan had slowed her heart and she’d been bundled away.
She tries to open her eyes, but they stubbornly refuse. A tiny grunt escapes her, more a huff of air than anything, but Ivan must catch the sound. Within mere moments, she’s sinking back into the depths of her dreams.
Sinking, sinking—
Sunk
“My Alina.”
A finger strokes down her cheek, and for a second she considers leaning in towards it. The warmth is intoxicating. Her body feels so numb, cold down to her fingers and toes. If he only touched her a little more—
Then she remembers who he is. The Darkling, the man who put a collar around her throat and tried to make her his next weapon. Her shoulders shake as a shudder runs down her spine, and he lets out a small laugh. Petulantly, she refuses to open her eyes.
Underneath her, there is something soft. Not a carriage bench then. They must’ve already arrived back at the Little Palace. He will keep her here now, locked behind the ornate walls while Oprichniki and heartrenders watch from a few feet away at all times. She will be the bug pinned up by its wings, always under observation.
So she doesn’t bother to open her eyes, knowing that to do so will offer no respite. It won’t do her any good to begin this phase of her life any earlier than necessary.
Impatient, his finger starts tracing something else.
Her eyes fly open, realizing for the first time why the air on her skin feels so cold. She’s— she’s—
She’s naked. In a bed that is not her own. The decor around her certainly isn’t that of the vezda suite.
It’s not his room either, and yet he sits beside her on the bed, a lazy finger running around her pebbled nipple. Circling, circling...
Against her wishes, a warmth fills her center, spreading through her far too quickly. In the army, she’d tumbled a few times out of curiosity more than real passion, but they had been fine.
This is different.
Even with Mal, after years of wanting him, she has never felt such a keen need to let his touch linger a little longer.
Is it the amplifier doing this? That humming beneath her skin that makes her light want to leap from every pore in her body? Or is it just him? Just the sheer magnitude of him, this man who remains everyone’s enigma?
This man who everyone fears, who everyone wants. He wants her.
She stares up at him, blank faced and wide eyed. Does she like it? Does she want more too?
Then, gaze flicking down to her body, she remembers that he’d stripped her down while she was unconscious. He might’ve done any number of things while Ivan kept her under his influence. What is to say that these touches are the first?
He’s brought her here under duress. He’s stripped her out of her clothing — her protection. He stands before her in his kefta, armor of a different sort, while she is defenseless.
Of course she doesn’t want this. She just needs to let her head get clear of the fog that he’s put her under.
But she’d wanted it so badly the night of the winter fête. She’d been unimaginably close before Baghra had interrupted things.
It had been for the best, of course. He was a murderer. But—
She gasps as his fingers pinch at her nipple, giving it a small twist.
But she had wanted it anyway. She still does, even if it’s wrong.
“Where am I?” She asks, voice hoarse. She doesn’t bother to clear it. Nothing about this conversation should be made palatable for him.
His eyebrow quirks, like she’s an especially funny little creature. “Of all things, that’s your first question?”
“This isn’t my room.”
She tries to move her hands, but of course they’ve been immobilized above her head.
To keep her from summoning. To keep her from stopping his touch.
Just to keep her.
“It’s the room next to mine. Your new room.”
“Why?” The word comes out breathier than she is proud of, pulled further into the sensations when he uses his whole hand to palm her breast. It seems to engulf her, making it hard to remember why she’s meant to be livid. Enraged. Furi— fuck, furious.
Her jaw clenches, trying to fight the feelings he’s raising in her. They could’ve had this. They could’ve had it all.
Now it seems he’s content to take it if she’s no longer offering.
She shifts her hips, and he chuckles under his breath. A joke to him. She’s a joke.
Even when he’s forcing himself on her, she still can’t help but want it. There is something wrong with her. Baghra had been right — she’s a stupid girl who never learns.
“I like to keep you close, Alina. You’re very important to me.”
His hand skates down her stomach, heading lower. She wants him to stop.
She wants him to never, never stop.
He cups her cunt possessively. “I’m not going to lose you again.”
“You mean you’re not— you’re not going to let me go. I’m your prisoner.”
A finger teases the smallest of caresses on her clit, and she jerks closer. “If that’s how you’d like to think of yourself. You could always come willingly, Alinochka. There’s an easy way and a hard way to keep you. You aren’t without options.”
“Not the options I want.”
He smiles patronizingly. “Alas, we don’t always get what we want. Perhaps you should consider changing your perspective about your own desires, hm?” His index finger traces through her wet folds before slipping into her body. A noise escapes her, but she presses her lips together before it can turn into a moan. “Good girl. You can let yourself have what you truly desire.”
“I don’t want this.”
“Oh?” The digit pumps in and out at a leisurely pace, thumb still tracing circles on her clit. “You’re so resigned to being miserable, pet. Why is that?”
“I’m not your pet,” she insists. In an effort to fight against the pleasure coursing through her from his ministrations, she would probably argue with just about anything he says. If he told her the sky is blue, she would say it’s orange just to be contrary. Just to keep herself from giving in entirely. She needs the anchor that a fight provides.
“You could be. My sweet little pet, so good and obedient. I can make that happen if you don’t come willingly.”
“Where are my clothes?”
He lets his finger brush across that place inside her, and her hips roll in an effort not to let him go. More— she needs more.
“They were my clothes, if you’ll remember. I gifted them to you for the journey through the fold, and then you betrayed me, so I decided you would have to earn the right to have them back.” He leans forward, taking her nipple into his mouth. A quick tongue swipe before he bites. She whimpers at the sting. “Don’t worry, pet. I undressed you myself. No one else saw.” He places a kiss to the tender bud before sucking it into his mouth and soothing the bite with his tongue. “And I was very, very gentle with you.”
In the back of her mind, washed away under a dark fog of half-formed memories, she can almost remember the feeling of him stripping away her garments. A shoe lost; a kiss to the top of her foot. Her stays removed; a kiss to the swell of her breast over her remaining clothes. Stockings pulled away; a kiss to each knee as he spread them open before him, a feast of temptation. Her shift tugged off; kisses all over her nipples, her breasts, her collarbone, her stomach.
And then suddenly she was naked on the bedcovers.
She can’t quite decide if it’s a memory or a fantasy, but the image starts to solidify in her mind.
“I don’t want this,” she repeats, unable to think of anything else as he adds a second finger. “I don’t want you to touch me.”
“That’s not true, pet. You’re soaked. I can feel how much you want me, how desperate you are. You need this as much as I do.”
A dry sob breaks free from her throat. “I want to go home. I want Mal.”
He withdraws his fingers from her leaking cunt, letting them tease along her folds again. Despite her words, her body tries to follow him, desperate to have a part of him inside her again. He tsks.
“Mal is gone. The Ketterdam rats are gone. You gave them the chance to run and they took it without looking back.” He pets along her thigh, and she keens in need for him to move back to where she wants him. She can feel how messy she’s become, her skin covered in her own arousal. “They left you to me.”
She takes a harsh breath before whispering, “I’m not yours.”
The words have no effect on him at first. Then, a slow smile spreads across his face, like he was hoping she would say that. “Don’t worry, solnishka. You will be.”
He pulls away from her entirely, standing up from his place on the bed to watch her from against the wall. The warmth of him pressed to her naked skin disappears, and she tries to shift in her bindings to bring him back.
But she won’t ask. She won’t degrade herself enough to ask.
“You see, Alina, I’ve realized I don’t need to fight you. Though your ornery spirit is cute, it’s also a hindrance to me. So I’ve decided to remake you into something more docile. My little pet. My little wife.”
Her breathing is ragged as she shifts more and more, trying to find any purchase against the silk sheets. “Wife?” She asks, forcing the word out.
“The Tsar is dead. The tsarevich and his little pup of a brother are soon to follow. And you, my sweet, will be my good little wife. Ravka’s tsaritsa brought to heel.”
“I will never obey you.”
“You don’t know the meaning of words like never and always, Alinochka. I can burrow into your mind so easily. In other cases, I might say it would take at least a lifetime to bring you around to my beliefs, but no longer. I’ve found a much quicker way. You’ll be my obedient little creature in a few weeks at most.”
“A quicker—” Her voice breaks, and she swallows before trying again. “Quicker way?”
He spreads his hands, letting the shadows drip from them like ink. They skirt across the floor racing to see which tendril can get to her first. Her eyes track them the whole way, unsure and afraid.
“I learned something interesting from my heartrenders. You see, there’s a special kind of way to manipulate the body that most corporalki never learn to master. Their teachers instruct them to focus on the heart, the lungs, the blood. But the brain… some of the very best of the corporalki advance to the brain.”
The first of the shadows finds her bare hip and begins to circle her thigh, snaking closer and closer to her pussy. Another meanders towards her breasts, and a third goes to her mouth.
“You see, there’s so little we know about brains. They are the center of everything, and yet the best Ravkan doctors and even Grisha healers can only tell you a limited amount about how it all works. The corporalki can sometimes sense the rush of sensations happening there, can pinpoint a few of them to their corresponding emotions even, but it’s difficult to isolate or replicate them.”
The first tendril feels surprisingly solid, and she grunts with shock as it pushes itself inside her like his fingers.
Like his cock. His cock would feel like this inside her, wouldn’t it? Punishing and terrible and divine in equal measure.
He watches it with rapturous attention, like he wishes in part that it truly was his cock, not his shadows, forcing her open. That he might feel her warmth and be surrounded by her.
Does she want it too? It’s hard to remember. It’s hard to think of anything else except—
The shadows at her breasts begin to constrict around them. Though they were never very large in the first place, it makes them stick up lewly from her chest like two swollen balls. Red, red— swollen and painful and red.
The tails of the shadows relentlessly tease her distended nipples, and she cries out at the sensation. They’ve never been so sensitive before, simultaneously feeling all possible pains and all possible pleasures.
“Stop,” she chokes. “Stop, oh fuck— stop. Sto—”
One of the shadows plugs her mouth, teasing her tongue until she’s forced to suck on it. A muffled cry escapes her, but it sounds ridiculous.
The shadow in her cunt pumps in and out of her relentlessly, and another part curls off so that it might draw tiny circles on her clit. Over and over and over until she’s screaming into the dark mass in her mouth, tears forming at the corners of her eyes.
Without warning, her muscles lock up as her back bows on the bed. No matter how she thrashes, the shadows follow her, playing her body until she’s sobbing through an orgasm.
“Uhhhh, leeees aaaaah.” She can’t even beg him to stop any more, the words incomprehensible.
He looks entirely unbothered from his spot watching her, clothes not even wrinkled while she writhes in agony, in pleasure. He doesn’t have his kefta on, as if to throw in her face that she is no longer a threat to him. No longer his adversary. Only a plaything. Only something to watch and enjoy until she submits to him.
If there’s any consolation though, it’s that she can see the outline of his cock through his riding pants. Try as he might to seem aloof, his body gives him away.
Is it better that he wants her? Is it humiliating for him somehow — an acknowledgement of her own power over him? An admission that he too can be brought low by his own body’s traitorous needs?
Or is it worse? Is it a sign that soon he will take her whether she wants it or not? That her life will be in service to his cock until it’s all she knows in the world.
And yet…. does she not want that? Can she truly tell him no if he tries to force it?
Pained thoughts circle through her head, repeating themselves in a litany until she can hear nothing else beyond the questions and the thick rushing of blood through her ears.
Her body trembles as her orgasm finally dies away, sensitive and shaken from all that he’s done to her.
The shadows slow for a moment, and she feels relief. There is only so much she can bear.
He grins wickedly at her, and with a flick of his hand, they start again.
A cry tears itself from her sore throat, but the shadow in her mouth mutes the sound until she sounds no better than a wild creature.
A pet. His pet, he’d said. Is that what he expects she will become from this?
“My sweet girl,” he says, watching with rapt attention as his powers send her into the throws of another orgasm. Her body spasms uncontrollably, and only the bindings keep her from falling off the bed. “You don’t even know yet what I can do to you.”
This time, he doesn’t bother to let his ministrations slow in between. They just keep moving, in and out and in again, caressing her thighs and her breasts and her sensitive stomach.
More of them emerge, too, targeting the curve of her ear, the nape of her neck, the crooks of her elbows, the backs of her knees. They are cold, like little ice kisses against her that she can’t escape. So much of her body is covered by his darkness that she is barely naked anymore.
The touches to her nipples switch to a sucking feeling, the shadows pulling at her skin like his mouth might.
It’s— it’s mind shattering. She can’t think. She can’t breath she can’t think she can’t—
Fuck, she can’t think. She can hardly even hear him when he starts speaking again.
“You know, Ivan is a very talented heartrender. He could’ve done this for me without a single touch to your skin. In your mind, he could’ve plucked on every nerve receptor until you were screaming in pleasure, begging him to stop.
“But I wanted to do it this way instead. I wanted you to live with the memory of being fucked by me. Taken by my power until there’s nothing left of your mind. Taken everywhere at once. Turned into something mindless, something that only recognizes her own shameful need.”
Something pushes at that tight furl between her legs, and she makes a wild plea into her gag begging him to stop. Nothing’s ever touched her there before.
Mercifully, the tendril is thinner than the others, no bigger than perhaps a pinky finger. She is grateful, because it pushes in anyway in spite of her protests.
“I want you to remember this, although truthfully pet, I’m not sure you will. You see, there’s a lot happening in your little head right now. Those same feelings and buttons that Ivan could press are now being pressed by me. You’re releasing signals that make you feel trusting, and loving, and sleepy. The more I play with you, the more you will feel all these things for me.”
She crests over the edge again, hands clenching in her shackles as though she might finally break free of them as her whole body tries to escape itself. She can’t do it anymore. It’s too much, it’s too—
There’s too much to feel everywhere at once. He is melting her brain out of her ears and she can’t do a single thing to stop him. Her sweaty hair sticks to her forehead, and an errant tendril brushes it back. Delicate, so delicate.
It makes her eyes water, confused and frightened by the relief that fills her at his little kindness. Even as his shadows fuck into her body, she is still grateful for that one. That small showing of humanity.
“But you don’t want me to stop. Not really, solnishka. You want me to make you feel pleasure again and again, until your sleepy little head takes you all the way under. Until my voice is all that you recognize. Until my orders are all that you know. You will obey me, and love me, and trust me.”
She makes another aborted attempt to speak around the intruder in her mouth, and he laughs.
“You think I’m foolish for telling you my plan, don’t you? But that’s the thing about your brain, sweet girl. It doesn’t stop behaving a certain way just because you’re aware you’re doing it. Your sleepy, and loving, and trusting anyway. It’s going to keep building up in you even if you don’t want it to. Knowing that it’s coming and there’s nothing you can do about it will only make it worse.”
The one in her ass expands slowly, inflating more and more within her. It presses against the shadow in her cunt until they’re teasing each other, moving in opposite directions so that she can think of nothing else but the fullness, the drag.
“It might not happen during the first dozen orgasms. Maybe not even the first hundred. But we have all night, Alinochka. And every day after this as well.”
He steps forward again, letting the backs of her fingers brush over her cheek. She stares up at him through blurry eyes, her mouth stretched wide.
It should be stretched around his cock.
It should, right?
It would feel so much nicer to run her tongue along the ridges of his cock instead of the smooth shadow. He might even fill her parched mouth with his spend after.
Her eyes roll back in her head as her cunt pulses, tightening around the shadowcock until her stomach aches from the convulsions.
“We have forever, darling. And I have always been a patient man.”