Surprise and no small amount of trepidation filled her when Sari stepped further into the room, revealing the male who had stood behind her in the shadowed corridor.
General Gorzo was as odd-looking as she remembered. His appearance was so different from the other umbrose that if it wasn’t for the basics, like wings, gray skin and horns, he could be a different species.
His face did not have the sublime handsomeness of the other males. Though some of that could be because of the scars—a strange enough sight on an umbrose—it also had to do with the arrangement of his features. His lips were thin, his nose crooked and almost flat, as if it had been broken and never reset properly. His brow was heavy and hooded his deep-set eyes so they remained in shadow. He had much larger fangs than the other males and even when his mouth was closed they were visible. When the Diakonos had preached of demons, this umbrose’s face was the image their words had evoked.
Yet, his expression was thoughtful, his demeanor relaxed and peaceful. He seemed less filled with tension than most of the males Stacia had seen in Sanctuary, especially Balfor, whose emotional stability had been sketchy even from the moment she’d met him in the Royal Room that first day.
Stacia broke her fascinated stare away from Gorzo and glanced at Sari for an explanation.
Sari looked nervous as she quickly set the tray on the table. Her gaze slipped away from Stacia’s as she spoke. “General Gorzo believes that Balfor will never regain control of his primal without your help.”
Both fear and relief warred within Stacia at that news. She was scared for Balfor, but relieved that someone was finally willing to look for a solution to help him. “Yes! Please tell me what I need to do!” She folded her hands together in front of her—only belatedly recognizing it as a praying gesture.
Sari hadn’t even finished translating when Gorzo answered in a smooth baritone voice that was not as deep as most of the umbrose males she’d heard but was far more attractive than his face. It was a surprise to hear it come from such a beastly-looking umbrose.
“You have to go to the undertunnels,” Sari translated, her voice reluctant as she twisted her hands together in front of her.
Stacia didn’t hesitate. “I’ll do it.”
Sari opened her mouth to translate, but Gorzo’s voice cut her off.
Sari translated his response. “He says he will take you as far as he can but must leave you before you enter the territory the prince’s primal has staked out, or the presence of another male will set the primal off.”
Gorzo said something more. Sari’s eyes widened as she translated. “He said that you must not fight the prince, at all, no matter what he does. You must be willing to yield to him in everything while he is under the influence of his primal. If you resist, he will view it as a challenge and will hurt or kill you.”
Gorzo allowed Sari to finish translating before he added another comment. His tone sounded severe. Sari translated word-for-word. “I will not take you to him if you are not capable of complete submissiveness. You must be gentle and not fight, no matter how rough he becomes. Like all the other Sanctuary males, his primal is insane from being chained within him. It can no longer discriminate between the enemy and those he cares about. All it knows is threat and non-threat. You must remain a non-threat.”
Here was a male who could fully explain the primal to her, but she had no time to ask him. She was too desperate to help Balfor and didn’t want to let another moment pass. Nor did she want her questions to cause Gorzo to doubt she was willing to help. Though his words unnerved her, and Sari’s body language suggested that she was very afraid for Stacia, Stacia would agree to Gorzo’s terms. She could be submissive, though she couldn’t remember a time when she’d ever managed it before. Even when the PKs had her under interrogation, she had fought back and cursed them all to the Nine Hells.
This was too important to screw up though, not just because it meant he would kill her, but because it meant he would never recover. I swore I’d never again change for a man. Yet this situation was different from the one with Jack. In fact, compared to the way she felt about Balfor, her infatuation with the Commemoro colonel seemed like an immature obsession rather than real love.
Sometimes you have to be willing to bend. Her mother had said those words many times to her when she was an independent and precocious child demanding all or nothing of life with the stark and unambiguous viewpoint of youth. It was one of the few things she’d remembered clearly about her mother.
“I swear that I will be completely submissive.”
Gorzo spoke. Sari translated. “It must not be an act. He will see through the falsehood to the aggression beneath. You must truly give in, or you will not survive.” Gorzo shrugged, his thin lips twisting into a sardonic smile. “You still may not survive. There is no guarantee he will not kill you on sight. He may even smell my scent on you and respond to that with rage.” His hooded stare pinned Stacia. “Are you still willing to take the risk?”
Stacia nodded as Sari translated. “I am. Let’s do this.”
Gorzo’s smile was grim and ugly, twisting the scars on his face out of their beautiful designs and into a mesh of damaged flesh. “Then let us waste no more time.”
“My Lady, I must protest this!” Sari grabbed her arm to stop her from leaving the room on Gorzo’s trail. “The general’s plan is madness! The prince’s primal will kill you!”
“Is the general right, Sari? Is there a real threat that he won’t regain control of his primal?”
Sari’s gaze dropped to the floor in response.
Stacia gently dislodged Sari’s hand from her arm. “Then I have no choice. I brought this upon all of us, especially him. I owe it to everyone to take the risk necessary to correct it.”
When Sari met Stacia’s eyes, hers were wet with unshed tears. “Please, be careful. Do exactly what General Gorzo has told you. He is the only adult male in Sanctuary who has not chained his primal, yet he never loses control of it.” She spoke in a whisper, because Gorzo had paused in the doorway to wait for Stacia. Though he shouldn’t understand DC Common, Stacia got the feeling that it wasn’t all just meaningless babble to him.
She wanted to ask follow-up questions, but left it for another time because he was waiting.
Gorzo—true to his word—took her to the Abyss. He carried her in flight, and it felt extremely awkward to be in the arms of another male umbrose. It felt wrong to her, and she missed Balfor even more as they flew. Gorzo’s scent was a nice woodsy musk, but it wasn’t the one that sent desire shooting through her. He didn’t speak to her, which would have been pointless, as she didn’t understand him anyway.
They were brought up short above the Abyss, where Gorzo hovered with Stacia in his arms, facing the three male umbrose who blocked their path. Ranove hovered in the center, scowling at them as his massive wings flapped to keep him aloft.
A flurry of umbrose conversation took place between Ranove and Gorzo, and by the end of it, both were practically growling. Ranove’s muscles bulged with tension. Gorzo’s chest was tight against her back, his arms like bands of steel around her. She could feel the twitching muscles as if he was barely restraining himself from striking out at the duke.
Instead of fearful, the display simply made her impatient. She just wanted to get to Balfor. She needed to see him again. She needed to know what condition he was in. If Ranove managed to back Gorzo down, she would kill him herself to get into that Abyss.
To her surprise and relief, the duke was the one to back down. With a last comment in a bitter tone, he ascended, followed by the two other males who’d accompanied him. He didn’t spare a word or a glance for Stacia as he left her to her fate. From the corner of her eye, she saw that the confrontation had gathered another crowd. She was growing tired of these public dramas.
When the way was open, Gorzo dived into the Abyss, plunging them into profound darkness. The flight seemed to take forever. Stacia’s eyes adjusted, but there was very little light fr
om a few glowing quartz spears so she still didn’t see much. When they reached bottom and flew into a tunnel, passing a guard who appeared to have been anticipating them, the light increased, and also changed from the blue-green bioluminescence to the orange-red of lava.
Heat filled the tunnel and sweat dripped from her skin, but she didn’t care. A brief sting of grief struck her as she recalled the last time she’d been in this area. Those moments with Balfor now seemed distant and dreamlike.
Gorzo finally landed at the end of a tunnel opening and set Stacia on her feet, taking a step away from her. He gestured to the tunnel and said something incomprehensible. There was a pile of skulls from animals Stacia couldn’t even identify on one side of the tunnel entrance. Deep claw marks tore through the stone on both sides of the opening. Blood and viscera spattered the floor, and drag marks of blood led into the tunnel. None of the blood was umbrose black.
Stacia glanced from the dark opening to Gorzo. He nodded, pointing into that maw of darkness where a reek of death wafted out. Then he reached inside his chest plate and removed a small quartz globe, glowing with fungi. He handed it to her and then stepped away with a few final words. His tone suggested that he was bidding her farewell, or perhaps good-luck. It was so frustrating not to know exactly what he meant. The shadows were too deep for her to get a good read on his expression, but his body language was alert, his wings slightly spread, his arms loose, his head turning from side to side watchfully. She thought she even heard him sniffing the air.
Since it smelled foul, she didn’t know why he bothered, but the umbrose had a better developed sense of smell than humans. Perhaps he smelled Balfor beneath the stench that made it difficult for Stacia to even breathe.
Then he turned and strode away, leaving her alone with her single meager light globe and the mouth of one of the Nine Hells to face. She turned to the tunnel entrance, her gaze skittering over the animal bones and blood, and claw marks that were probably Balfor’s. Then she squared her shoulders, took a deep breath, and reminded herself that this time, she couldn’t march into battle expecting victory. Her life depended on her full surrender.
Chapter 19
As Stacia took the first few hesitant steps into the darkness, with only the globe of light providing a meager illumination to light her way, she regretted not asking more questions. She’d been so impatient to see Balfor again, and see for herself what his condition was, that she’d forgotten all of her training. Now she didn’t have enough information to do any type of assessment of the situation she was walking into. All she knew was that she had to remain submissive.
As vulnerable as she was in her brocade dress and slippers, with nothing but a veil to cover her face, she might as well be nude. Of course, a suit of Peace Keeper nano-technology armor would not necessarily have helped her. In fact, if what Gorzo said was true, any sign of aggression —like wearing armor or carrying a weapon—would only provoke Balfor into killing her. She couldn’t defeat him, even with a weapon in hand. The umbrose, like the adurians, were simply overpowered in comparison to humans. Not that she could bear the thought of having to shoot him.
Her unnerving thoughts haunted her as she made her way deeper into the fetid tunnel. She shuddered as entrails squished beneath her soles. The rock grew slippery with spilled blood, hopefully all from animals. At least she probably didn’t have to worry about whatever creatures normally made this place home. Balfor had likely either scared them off or killed them all.
Then the tunnel opened up into a small cavern. By now, her eyes had adjusted to the dimmer light, so she could see the ceiling of the cavern stretching overhead, jagged with spears of sparkling gray-black crystal. In fact, the entire cavern looked like the inside of a giant geode, except that there was a pool of water off to one side that had leaked in from a crack in the ceiling and formed beneath a long stalactite that continuously dripped into it. Most of the remainder of the cavern floor had been cleared of crystals, but now lay littered with stripped animal bones.
The smell in the cavern was disgusting. Blood, entrails, and spilled bowels combined with the strong musk of an unwashed beast. The musk was familiar enough that it made Stacia’s heart ache. This was where Balfor had been living for the last five days, in these terrible, bleak, gruesome conditions.
He wasn’t in the cavern now, but she suspected he would return, so decided that here was where she would wait. The pool looked like the most promising spot. It was a mineral spring and the smell of hot minerals was strong enough that it helped to alleviate the other odors in the cavern. As she approached the pool, a large shadow dropped from the black crystals on the ceiling. She’d been wrong. Balfor was here, and she’d walked right underneath him without noticing him.
He must have been hanging upside down, his black wings curled around him so he blended in among the shadows and the crystals. When he dropped soundlessly to his feet, Stacia stumbled back with a scream of surprise. A long bone rolled under her heel, and she fell onto her backside. When she flung her hands out to break her fall, the globe rolled away and plopped into the milky water, turning it a glowing blue but deepening the shadows in the rest of the cavern around the illuminated pool.
Her voice choked off abruptly as he gripped her throat with the talons of his foot. Her immediate instinct was to grab his talons with desperate fingers and twist them away from her neck. Instead— remembering Gorzo’s warnings—she willed her entire body to relax and held still, keeping her hands flat against the rocky ground to support her.
Balfor seemed surprised by her reaction. His talons loosened for a moment, allowing her a little breathing space. Her chest rose with her grateful breath.
With a suddenness that took her completely off-guard, his talons dropped from her throat to tear away the dress from her upper body, exposing her breasts. Again, she had to resist all her instincts to fight or run. Her heartbeat throbbed in her throat so hard it was almost painful. She’d been terrified when she’d had her jaw torn away, but that had happened so fast she hadn’t the time to worry about it. This was different. This would have to play out for as long as it took to reach Balfor.
His foot pressed on her chest as he towered over her in a menacing shadow. Stacia immediately relented, lying back with a wince as the cool ground touched her bared back. His growl in response to that sounded curious, rather than threatening, but it still raised whatever hair Stacia hadn’t had permanently removed from her body.
She didn’t have long to wonder what he would do next. He bent to his knees and crawled over her, bringing his face and body into full view of the light emanating from the globe in the water beside her. She avoided meeting his eyes after the first glance. He looked insane, beastly. His face was still twisted into a snarl. There was blood covering his teeth and mouth. Streaks of blood darkened the light gray skin of his body. He smelled like the iron-stench of it. Beneath it all, she could still smell the musk of him that she liked so much. In fact it was stronger now than it ever had been. It was clear he hadn’t bathed in the time he’d been here.
Balfor sniffed her body, beginning at her face, snapping the ties on her veil and tearing it away. Then he moved down her neck and along her breasts. The heat of his breath caused her nipples to harden even though she was scared. Stacia remained still during all of this, though her body trembled with tension she couldn’t relax, no matter how much willpower she put into the command to do so.
When he tore away her skirt, she didn’t struggle, though her arms twitched at her sides. He lifted his head from where he sniffed at her navel. His snarl had faded during his exploration, but it returned at even that slight movement. The hand that wasn’t ripping at her skirt fell upon her waist and pinned her against the stone floor.
He growled at her. It was low, deep, and completely animalistic. There was nothing of the smooth and cultured prince she’d come to know and love in the sound. Her heart broke that he could so completely lose himself to this creature that lay within him. That reminder gave her
the strength to relax and lie motionless as she pressed her palms against the rough rock to keep her arms still. I love him, and I’ll do whatever it takes to reach him. It was the only mantra that kept her from panicking.
After a moment’s pause, he resumed shredding her skirt to ribbons with his claws. Then he cast the expensive brocaded fabric aside and lowered his head to continue sniffing her. He licked along the scars on either side of her belly button. Then he pressed his face against her mound and inhaled, which nearly had her jerking away from him until she could regain control of herself. It was terrifying to be vulnerable like this with no clue what would happen next. She wasn’t certain whether he would screw her or eat her as he nuzzled at her most intimate place. Balfor had tasted her before, many times, but he’d never sniffed at her like this, audibly inhaling her scent. If he didn’t smell so strongly himself, she might have been embarrassed by the attention. At least she had bathed that morning.
His hands gripped her upper thighs painfully and shoved them further apart. Then he started licking her between her legs. This time it was not the deliberate caresses over her clit intended to titillate her. It appeared to be solely for his own benefit as he tasted her, delving his tongue into her slit which had grown wet despite the harrowing situation. He started growling again, a low rumble in his chest as his tongue stroked inside her, licking the sides of her passage, then thrusting as deep as it could go.
Now, Stacia was trembling with an entirely different reaction. She’d never felt anything like this. Her lovers had always just focused on the sweet spot, her sensitive nub. Though they may have licked her slit, no one had ever licked inside her.
She moaned, and Balfor lifted his head, watching her like a predator watching prey. She wanted to scream at him not to stop what he was doing, but kept her mouth shut, pressing her eyes closed as she tried to regulate her breathing. Being submissive was hell.
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