by Sara King
His son flushed red, fury starting to bubble within his green eyes. “I told you she was raped!”
Keene frowned and wiped a blemish from the edge of the glass. “Make the chain eight feet long.” He went back to his paperwork. “Oh, and stop allowing food to be brought to her room. If she wishes to eat, she will emerge and face the world.”
“She needs time to heal,” his son sputtered.
“You said yourself she’s had two months. And that there’s been no sign of recovery.”
“Yes, but she screams—”
Keene snorted. “I’ve raised four children. If I’ve learned one thing from the experience, it’s not to humor a child having a tantrum.” He motioned at the door. “Go see to it. She’s to wear her new slave until she overcomes her fears. However long it takes.”
In the silence that followed, Keene could feel his son staring at him. He looked up. “That’s a command, Matthias.”
“Some days, Father, I hate you.”
“Not surprising,” Keene said, returning to his figures. “Royalty isn’t allowed the luxury of familial endearments enjoyed by most commoners. It is one of the drawbacks to being royalty.”
Matthias whirled and stormed from the room, slamming the priceless door behind him.
Keene shook his head, amused, and dipped his quill for another calculation.
Victory sat in a corner of her bedroom, arms wrapped around her knees, shuddering at the sound of booted footsteps against stone in the hall outside.
Here he comes, she thought, trying to fight down the animal panic that was beginning to claw at her throat. Father was going to chain her to a man. For days, months… Oh gods oh gods…
Sure enough, the door opened and four Praetorian women stepped inside, a monstrously big man hobbled between them. He was easily six and a half feet tall—a hulking brute whose head almost hit the door jamb as he shuffled inside. His ebony hair had been shaved down to his scalp, and had an odd streak of white—scarring?—along his right temple. His muscles rippled when he moved.
He was naked.
When her eyes found that place between his legs, open and exposed, terror hit her like a surge of lightning. Victory whimpered and tried to crawl further into the wall, but the metal ring around her waist only ground into the marble.
Oh no, she thought, trembling, as the House Praetorian located her huddled in the corner of her room and moved closer. Oh no, no, no… Pulled between the four women, the man kept his eyes on the ground, away from her.
Knowing what they planned, knowing she had to stop it or it would kill her, Victory forced herself to her feet, her entire body trembling. “Praetorian, as the Adjudicator Potentiate, I order you not to do this.”
The women only hesitated a moment, glancing at each other nervously. Then one of the black-clad women uncoiled a heavy chain, and in horror, Victory realized that one end was already hanging from the man’s metal collar, dangling against his broad, brown native chest. Seeing that, it took every ounce of willpower Victory had to keep her voice steady. “I am the next Empress of this planet, and I’m commanding you to stop.”
“Sorry, milady,” the Praetorian said, sounding sincerely apologetic. “It was the Adjudicator’s orders.” When the Praetorian woman reached for the band of metal her father’s smiths had sealed around Victory’s waist, her nerves finally failed her. Letting out a terrified cry, she tried to bolt. Two of the four House Praetorian lunged and caught her, then held her easily as the woman fed the chain through the loop in her belt.
As the tether rattled against the titanium band encircling her hips, Victory felt the world shift, felt herself on a cold dirt floor, naked, hands bound painfully behind her back as a huge form grunted over her. A huge form much like the one standing before her, with similar brown, sun-darkened skin and long, lean face. Feeling the Praetorian retrieve the flash-welder from her pocket and start sealing the leash binding them together, Victory whimpered and clung to the women holding her, putting them between herself and the native. “Please don’t leave me with him,” she whimpered. “Please.” Her breath was starting to burn in her throat, and she couldn’t seem to get enough air.
“I’m sorry, Milady,” the Praetorian woman said. Her words sounded genuine, even anguished.
They’re going to leave me alone with him, she realized. With it, came a new wave of horrible sensations. She could feel their big bodies moving against hers, hunched over her, their fingers probing, penetrating. Their demonic faces were wet with sweat, her thighs wet with their remains. She felt her own anguish welling back up from within, her own terror choking her through the gag.
Shivering all over, Victory caught the man watching her.
It was only for a second, his deep blue eyes flickering across hers before he quickly dropped his gaze back to the floor, but it was enough to break what little hold Victory had on her body. She lunged and fought like a wild thing, biting and clawing, screaming curses as she tore at the House Praetorian that held her.
She might as well have been battering statues.
The women efficiently finished welding the chain in place, then released Victory, bowed, and turned to go.
Seeing them retreat, Victory went utterly still, her terror ratcheting up another notch. So terrified she couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, she managed, “Wait!” She found herself suddenly frozen in place, with the stranger between her and the door. “Please don’t…” she swallowed, hard, forcing out the words through bile, “leave me…with him.” Oh gods, please, no… She swallowed again, fighting a building animal terror that was clawing its way up from within. “Please.” It came out as a barely-controlled rasp, and she hated the way it sounded like begging.
One of the House Praetorian slowed and gave the huge slave an uncomfortable look. “Your father’s orders, Princess. The Adjudicator says at least a couple weeks.” The woman licked her lips, looking up at the slave’s massive frame. “Just endure for a couple weeks and I’m sure your father will tell us to take the brute back to the stables.”
A couple weeks? Victory’s startled mind screamed. She’d die. She couldn’t survive a day, let alone a week.
But then the woman bowed and followed her brethren from the room, passing by Victory’s scowling personal Praetorian on the way—four women wearing the symbol of the Phoenix-and-Egg, instead of the House Phoenix-and-Dragon—and bowed again before yanking the door shut, leaving Victory alone with the looming stranger.
Though she had spent the last five days preparing herself, only eight feet from his massive body, Victory sank against the wall in terror, her breath speeding up in her chest. Oh gods, she thought, drawing the chain tight as she tried to crawl backwards across the wall. Oh gods oh gods.
As soon as the chain went taut, and she got a feel of just how close the man would be to her, permanently, something within her snapped and Victory began scrambling like a wild thing, tugging and pulling, panting, screaming as her mind evaporated in terror.
The man stepped forward, loosening the chain.
Victory’s entire world narrowed to the line that had slackened between them.
“Stay back!” she screamed, clawing to get back to her feet, a hand up between them. “Stay back!” She started backing away, looking for some weapon, some tool.
“Sorry,” he whispered to the floor.
The sound of the native tongue drove a nail through Victory’s chest. She sank to the floor, remembering what happened when those sounds were made. She was once more chained to a post, exposed to the elements, begging for food or clothes, hoping the man who brought them didn’t want something in exchange. Whimpering, she drew her knees up to her chin and wrapped her arms around her shins and started to shiver.
“Please don’t hurt me,” she whimpered, watching the scene in her mind. “Please, please, please…”
To the Princess Bound
So this was why he had been taken from his home at gunpoint. They wanted him to serve a royal woman. N
aked, humiliated, Dragomir stared at the floor with bitter resignation as the black-clad Praetorian led him into the room. He knew what they would want him to do, and he despised the thought. He’d heard of similar things happening all over Mercy. The Imperials looked upon the Mercerians as little more than animals, and abducted them from their villages at a whim. It had probably been his size that had attracted Imperial attention. Most Mercerians were much smaller, care of cold winters and wartime malnutrition, and Dragomir had stood almost a head over most of the men in Sodstone. With the Imperials taking millions of slaves throughout Mercy each day, Dragomir might as well have painted a neon target on his back and danced through the front lines—sooner or later, they were going to find him.
Hopefully, the royal woman would grow tired of him and he could somehow find a way home. With the Imperial invasion in full force, there was much sickness in the Silversand Mountains. The village of Sodstone needed its healer.
Besides, as long as Life was going to stubbornly keep him alive despite his wishes, Dragomir wanted to get back to Sodstone to meet this soul that had been teasing him across the end of that massive link. A woman. In pain. It had been almost a month, now, and he felt no closer to meeting her than he had when the connection had knocked him out of his chair.
As they led him toward the woman huddled against the wall, he kept his eyes down, as he had been told to do between the beatings leading up to this. The man’s blazing green stare still haunted him. You will do exactly as she tells you, instantly, without hesitation.
But Dragomir had been close enough to feel the man, and his green-eyed tormentor had been in great anger and pain inside, so much of it leveled against Dragomir that it made no sense. In between lashings, he had snarled dire warnings of what would happen to him—and his village—if he hurt her in any way…
…and then he had told Dragomir to help her.
Dragomir was still bitterly puzzling through that when the Praetorian tugged him to a halt about six feet from the jewel-clad woman on the floor. As he stood there, tense, he blinked when he felt the fear feeling washing off of the royal woman in cold, rama-clenching waves.
…Fear?
Dragomir kept his head down, but frowned. She was afraid of the Praetorian? Her own royal guard?
Then she stood up, and in a commanding voice, said something in Imperial. The Praetorian responded with a polite bow and a few crisp words, then the room suddenly exploded in a blast of gut-wrenching terror. Dragomir choked on it, having to shield himself from the energy before he was washed away in it.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the royal woman try to bolt. The Praetorian caught her, and the fear in the room began to build, radiating from the robed woman like blood spilling from a severed limb thrust into a bath of water. Soon the room was awash with it, so thick Dragomir was having trouble breathing. He heard the woman whimper and babble in Imperial.
He had a sudden, strong vision of a man atop him, pinning him to the ground, grunting with the sounds of passion. His eyes flickered toward the woman in shock. She thinks I’m going to…?
Their eyes met, and her emerald eyes went wide. In that moment, Dragomir felt like he’d been hit by a sledgehammer. He knew this woman. He didn’t know from what time, or place, but he knew her. The feeling went all the way to his core. He felt a connection buried there, something very old…
No. His heart began to hammer like a sledge in his chest. The soul-link, made from across an entire planet, completely dormant, yet still radiating residual fear to him for an entire month… It was her?
A thousand questions pounded through Dragomir’s mind with each thunderous beat of his heart. Had the Imperials found some way to trap Emps? Was the woman a decoy? Was she faking her terror? How had they found him? How did they even know? Was she, too, an Emp? A royal Emp? Or a betrayer? An Emp seeking out other Emps, turning them over to the Imperials for land and money, forging connections with strangers to make it impossible for them to hide? Had she located him in trance, then sent her minions out to find him?
Dragomir was about to throw up a shield around himself and fight in earnest when the woman suddenly started screaming and battering at the Praetorian, wrenching him back to the present. Her terror amplified, slamming Dragomir out of his light trance, seeping into his au, its raw power threatening to overwhelm him.
Whatever the fear was, it was genuine. Not an Emp, then. A royal? One of the legendary brainiacs that the Imperials put on pedestals and worshipped as demigods? One of the mutant descendants from early cryogenic space travel who, using their increased brainpower, had wrested control of the Imperium from the other Gifted? That could explain its strength. And magnified by the dormant connection they shared…
Oh gods, he thought, when he realized that even his strongest shields weren’t going to be enough. The connection was so strong that it was impossible for him to hide from her emotions, there being a direct channel—however dormant—between himself and the woman for the energy to tumble down. In a moment or two, her fear was going to seep into him, and he was going to try and bolt.
If he did, it would probably earn him another week on the rack, enduring the green-eyed man’s fury. If they even let him live at all.
In desperation, Dragomir did what he did back in the village, when trying to determine the root cause of an illness. He opened himself fully to the terror. He threw each rama wide-open, so he could fully experience her emotions with her.
He grunted with the impact.
Men. Many of them. They suffocated him in a wash of pain, brutality, and horror. He heard their voices—in lies, in passion, in violence, in disdain. They told him they were going to kill him, that he was not worth the time it took for them to use his body, then took him anyway, violent and painful. They told him he was dirty, that he needed perfume. He felt the rotten fish on his back, chest, his knees. He felt the cold, the rain, the snow.
He whimpered, but somehow kept his feet steady, knowing that the visions were not his own.
Then whose are they? he wondered. The woman on the floor was dressed in the greatest gems and finery that Mercy could produce, and she smelled of perfume and flowers. Her bedroom was lavishly appointed with rugs, silks, furs, tapestries, curtains. She lived in a palace crafted of solid black marble, with gold and silver designs inlaid into the floor, ceiling, and walls. Thousands of Dragomir’s brethren had been enslaved to cater to her every need.
The Praetorian got up and left, and, when the woman tried unsuccessfully to stop them, more visions assaulted them. His body was bartered and sold. He was paraded by a metal collar around his neck, brought into roomful after roomful of lewd, dirty men, and was only allowed to eat his meager ration for the day after the last one had taken their fill of him. He saw his belly swell up, experienced the horror of an impassive old man reaching inside, pulling his baby out, dropping it into the trash. He felt a shot in the arm, was told it would never happen again.
Dragomir gasped and opened his eyes as the chain started yanking tight against the metal collar around his neck. Again and again, the princess slammed into it, screaming and wailing and thrashing like a wild thing.
He stepped forward, despite himself.
The woman on the other end froze, and he felt the terror of the room crack outward like a rifle retort. She screamed something at him in Imperial, holding her hand up between them. Then she was sliding backwards on the end of the chain connecting them…
…connecting them?
What is going on here? he thought, deeply disturbed upon seeing the metal belt encasing her waist, the loop in its center holding the chain linked to his collar. Why doesn’t she just take it off?
It took him a moment to realize that she couldn’t. The Praetorian had welded the chain in place.
He saw her scramble backwards, her panicked green eyes obviously searching for some weapon she could use against him.
“Sorry,” Dragomir whispered. He wanted to say more, but, even if he hadn’t been admonis
hed by the green-eyed man not to open his mouth, the spasm of terror that followed his voice was enough to stop him. He kept his eyes down, the healer in him trying to decide just what was happening. The connection was puzzling enough, but the horrible visions left him disturbed.
Bad dreams? Night terrors? Dragomir didn’t think the explanation was so simple. Perhaps the cause was deeper. Was she remembering some former life? Some horror-ridden existence on Mercy, many years ago? Or was she simply serving as the channel to another lonely woman, experiencing what the woman was going through? Perhaps this Imperial royal had a split-Gift—and the habit of forging connections with random strangers. Dragomir felt for a link to another woman, some sort of conduit that could be powering the visions, but found that every one of the woman’s energy centers were bound, if not completely closed. Most of her links to others had been cut off long ago by the closing of her heart-rama.
In fact, with the blockages stopping up her gi, he only found two connections. The first was withered, emaciated from years of disuse, but it still had loving emerald gi flowing down it, trying in vain to push past the clamped rama petals to feed the center’s malnourished core. It was a small, but steady trickle. Like a hand-pump or garden hose.
The second connection wound straight to his heart.
It was much larger, like a massive river-channel, but shadowy and inactive. Beside the tiny trickle of the emerald gi-link, Dragomir’s link to the princess was deep, a vast, empty canal. It had no flow of gi, but the potential was there, and its power breathtaking, strong enough for Dragomir’s heart to skip. The translucent, dormant link was an open connection just aching to be realized. He had no doubt that, the moment she relaxed enough to open her rama, the connection was going to knock him completely to his knees.
Oh no, Dragomir thought, feeling a welling of dread as he watched that massive, humming connection, just aching for its mate. I can’t do this. Not again. The way the link was vibrating in his mind’s eye, Dragomir knew that it was close, that any tiny trigger could set it off. He tried to shy away, to pull back.