Imperius Ch. 06

There was movement around her, items shuffled and the sound of pouring liquid. She began to imagine she might be spared prompt attention, that the tension in her muscles could begin to melt away, when she heard his voice at last, and her heart stuttered in panic.

When he spoke, the voice was terrible and familiar, and the heavy thing in her chest tightened in fear.

"Take it off," he said.

The hood was pulled off her head and then she was blinking in the golden lamplight. Steadily, three figures came into focus in a darkened tent—one with only two lamps. The first lit Magnus' war table, upon which he leaned with his arms across his chest. In the corners, where the shadows dominated, she could see both Saphir and Daegon. The former stood only a few paces away, wearing a thin, flexible armor she had never seen him in before. The second lamp hovered above on Lilah's other side, bathing her in light, while putting the shadows at Saphir's back and throwing his vivid blue eyes into stark relief. She exhaled, and wryly marveled at their capacity for drama.

Daegon loomed from within the darkest edges of the tent, with his own arms crossed over a bare chest, an ugly flesh wound visible near his shoulder and a total lack of concern on his face. He stood as though he didn't even feel it.

These two, however, were minor observations next to the Praetor opposite her.

His eyes were shadowed, almost tired, but he was looking at her with that enigmatic, hard focus that made her muscles tighten. He wore his full ballistic armor, black as midnight and fitted to his form. His crimson cloak lay casually on the table behind him. He looked both lethal and unnaturally still, as though he would rather be pacing like a tiger, but he forced himself into a relaxed posture. He was calculation and discipline in human form.

How had she ever looked down at this man on a battlefield and thought him vulnerable?

Saphir was closer to her, close enough that it was a wonder she hadn't noticed him first, but once she did her eyes were still immediately drawn back to Magnus, pulled back to him the way a spiral pattern pulls the eye to its center. Perhaps not such a mystery after all.

He straightened and moved around the table. She forced herself not to watch him as he moved, as she heard him pour a liquid. To force her gaze forward and her expression neutral.

"You thought to flee," he remarked, and she felt the weight of his direct focus, his conversational tone with her. It felt to Lilah like expecting a blow from the side, but instead feeling the ground beneath you shift and send you plunging into deep water.

He might have been talking about the weather, for all the feeling in his voice.

He stood before her now, close enough that she could see some part of him no matter how much she tried not to look. He lifted a glass of water to her lips, watching her with inscrutable and unsettling grey eyes as he guided her head to swallow until she had drained the cup.

He watched her for a moment longer before he handed the glass off to Saphir, who walked it back to the table and set it there.

Magnus drew a knife with fluid precision, and smoothly cut away her uniform. He did it ruthlessly, calmly, starting at one shoulder and pulling at the fabric until her front was bare. He treated himself to such a languorous study of her breasts, that when his eyes lifted to hers heat pooled in her core, and the muscles inside of her flexed in alarm and terrible anticipation. He returned his eyes to hers frequently, between each precise cut.

It wasn't until she was naked before him that he stepped back, his eyes roaming over her with an intensity that was too hard and brooding to be purely sexual. He seemed to need to drink her presence in, to be reassured that all parts of her were entirely within his reach.

Daegon and Saphir were still there, still watching silently and with so little expression, it made her want to beg them to look away.

"Tell me," he said, angling her face so that no flicker of emotion could be hidden from him. "When your cavalry arrived. Did you hesitate for even a moment before running from me?"

Her heart was beating as fast as a bird's wings.

There was a brief pause, and she realized that within her terror some part of her was grasping for how to please him, to soften the terrible intensity of his focus.

"Yes," she said.

His eyes narrowed in a way that made her feel a sensation she imagined a rabbit must feel if it senses a wolf or hawk catch sight of it.

"Are you attempting to lie to me?" He asked, sounding only a little angered by the idea. More than angry, he seemed fascinated, almost awed by the idea of her daring to try.

There was nothing, no sound, the outside world of the tent and the noise it produced shifted into something of perfect distance, so far removed from this moment, and from her own fear that it might have never been, so far as Lilah knew.

His hands burrowed deeper into her hair.

"You see us as grasping tyrants," he said. "-but you know very well that the Imperius offered Illythiel a chance for friendship."

"'Offer.'" she repeatedly scornfully, straining against his hold. "It is not an offer of friendship if destruction is the only alternative."

His arms were a cage around her, immovable as steel, and yet unnecessary. He held her captive with his gaze, as he always did.

"'Destruction' you call it," he whispered, his eyes glinting. "Yet even now we do not wantonly slaughter. We do not destroy more than that which you place in our way, even when you hurl your behemoths to crush us. We are not murderous, nor so covetous of your culture and myths that we force you to destroy them, or to reshape them in our image." His teeth grazed her earlobe and she shivered. His voice turned lower, more sultry, and the words came slowly as he continued to play his breath against her skin, "You could keep it all if you'd only allow us this one...small...evil."

He bit, lightly, and she flinched away, only to feel his hand caress the place between her thighs. She strained helplessly against the sensation of his fingertips tracing her folds.

His eyes cut to hers and he continued to trace the little patterns of her quim. Her breath came short in the face of his focus and his certainty. He made a sound of awe.

"Lilah," he said, so close she felt his breath on her lips when he spoke, "You're wet for me, Lilah...even now."

She lifted her chin, "My body is preparing itself," she said, her voice a desperate murmur.

"Oh, is that all?" he asked. Three of his fingers had been pressed to her quim, and he took that moment to thrust two inside of her, startling her into a frantic gasp. The pain shocked her, body and spirit. He had played with her before, but never with such brazen willingness to make it hurt. His eyes bored into hers, as he stilled the motion, allowing her to acclimate herself to the sensation and watching her closely. She looked away in fear and frustration—He was toying with her. He responded by drawing his two fingers out and shoving them, plus a third, back in—so forcefully that she whimpered.

God, he wants to see my defiance, she thought to herself. He wants to draw it out of me so me so he can burn it away and reshape me as he sees fit.

Well, why not? There wasn't any chance anymore, was there? One does not find the opportunity to escape the Imperius twice. There could be nothing for her to gain either way.

If she could not serve her nation further, what would be the point of enraging him past tolerance? Until he grew bored of resistance and sold her or sent her to the mines? What if he even killed her in his fury?

He was watching her face, and she realized it was as though he watched the thoughts pass through her very eyes. His expression was gentle, almost pitying. But it was a hard, uncompromising pity. It was the pity of someone who watched a butterfly bat it's wings against a net, but who still refused to release the creature.

With a tilt of his head and the ghost of a humorless smile in his eyes, he began fucking her with his fingers, a rough hand pumping into the folds of her wet quim. They were callused and precise, those fingers, seeking inside of her until he found the spot that made her mewl the most. She tried to close her eyes, and he allowed it, but it felt too much like closing her eyes in the face of a predator, and she opened them again.

She was hot and flushed under the lamp heat and the awful potency of being fucked by his hand in front of his men. While he stood before her, pristine in full praetorial armor.

Her shoulders drooped as she broke down, overwhelmed by sensation and broken hopes. Tears blurred her vision.

He reacted, pulling her even closer, taking her weight from her. His hand gripped and lifted her buttocks until all there was for her to do was writhe, gasping, against his touch. She could feel the chill surface of his black chest guard against her nipples. His scent was everywhere around her.

Everything centered on him, around some shared rhythm of spirit, some strange synchronization between them. Her sense of his anger and greed for her every reaction was dizzying.

And of course, as though he knew her exact thoughts in that exact moment, he increased the pace of each thrust until she bobbed against him, saturated by feeling. It was like lightning was coursing through her, painful and fierce to the point that it allowed nothing else, nothing at all except for her own deep, trembling pleasure.

She mewled, and strained from him, and he only held her tighter. Until the feeling built, and built, and he watched her with the same angry, ravenous greed all the while.

"Please, I..."

"You'll do as I wish," he said, cutting off her soft pleading with a voice like steel, "And right now, that means coming all over my fingers like a good toy."

She cried, her cheeks hot with shame, and her head fell back as her body rose on the wave of her arousal. She had some distant sense that she was moving with him now. Her will washed away as her body clenched and then turned liquid, repeating again and again. She came for him, her sex clenching around his fingers, her arousal coating his hand and her own thighs. Her hair was damp against her cheeks and forehead, and he smoothed the wet curls back with his dry hand, before bringing the fingers of his other hand to her lips. He pushed those fingers inside, invading her mouth and forcing her to taste her own juices.

She slumped with exhaustion, the taste filling her senses, but he forced her eyes to his.

"You think you've faced the worst of me?" he asked softly, his eyes searching her face with crushing intimacy. "You don't know even half of it, little dove. I'll fuck the memory of your Illythiel from your mind. I'll keep you tied to me by your wrists in the day and bound to my bed in the night. And as for your country—"

He cut himself off, and laughed. A short, scoffing sound filled with enough cruelty that she felt like a child again, hiding from a terrifying punishment.

"—When the High Praetor was here and in command," he continued, "we were utterly bound to our nonviolent ideals," he said, "We fought with lethal means only when absolutely necessary. They wanted to keep your people alive. To enslave you, yes, and then to congratulate themselves for giving you medical treatments and educating you in their style, and then, only when you had proven that you could serve and please them exceptionally well, they would award you with citizenship, that you may serve and please them even more grandly.

"Your leaders thought they knew enough to put up a semblance of resistance, but what your people don't realize-," he paused, brushing his lips against her temple and against her brow, "-is that with him gone, I hold all the power here. All that stands between them and violent ruin is my self-control."

He trailed his fingers down her cheek, leaving behind traces of her own arousal in his wake. Shivers raced from that spot all the way to her fingertips. "The moment I decide to lose that control," he said, "every inch of land you think is yours will be reaped and razed until it's nothing but a barren waste."

She was weeping again now, and he only watched her, as calm and well-kempt as she was a quaking mess. He turned her face to suit him, to allow his lips to brush her cheek. Perhaps it shouldn't have surprised her when he touched his tongue to the same place, sampling her tears, but it did. Her breath caught, and he made a sound of his impatience before bringing her lips to his. There was such a spontaneous urgency to the kiss, it surprised her. It seemed as though he had been resisting the urge. He laughed against her mouth, surprising her again.

"I had been planning to wait until I had thoroughly punished you before I gave you a kiss, that you might only associate them with pleasure." He gripped one of her breasts in his hand, and squeezed until he drew a small cry from her lips. He kept her in place with his hands, and there was casual cruelty in his voice when he asked, "I suppose I shall have to harden myself to the impulse if I'm to train you, aren't I?"

Lilah resisted the urge to cower away from him.

But then he moved away from her, and she heard him pouring the water again. It was only a moment before he had touched the brim of his cup back to her lips, and guided her into taking a lengthy swallow.

"There," he said, as he ran a hand gently over her hair, smoothing it away from her face, "You'll need this before we're finished."

Lilah looked up at him. He was staring back down at her, his expression opaque. He pushed two fingers back into her quim, and held her eyes. "This body is mine," he said. He began to work her again with his fingers, fucking her in rhythm with her breath and casually handed off the cup to Saphir once more, who looked at her as he took it. Daegon hadn't moved from the dark tent's edge, but his alertness was clear in posture and eyes.

"Please," Lilah whispered, "I'm sorry."

Magnus touched his brow to hers, almost tender. "Not sorry enough, Lilah," he whispered. "But in the end you won't have to be. You'll simply have to learn that you're mine."

He quickened his pace then, and this time she had no struggle left in her. Every motion of her body was in answer to each thrust of his fingers. It was only when she moaned that he added a third finger again.

"Most slaves are whipped for running, or placed on some diabolical little device designed to humiliate them in front of a crowd. Most are forced to crawl like dogs while trainers berate them. Is this not better?"

He seemed to wait for an answer, and Lilah couldn't bear to give the appropriate lie. Not yet.

"You could be more than better," she whispered, and gasped at a particularly rough thrust of his fingers.

"Say it louder, Lilah," Magnus scolded. "What would I need to do to be 'more than better'?"

"You could be good," she said, her voice short of breath. "You could help us."

"Hmm," he said. His fingers continued to toy with her, alternating between rough and gentle motions. She dropped her head, moaning against her will. The pace built, and she began to crest toward orgasm once more.

"Perhaps I could help some of your people, Lilah. Perhaps I may have even been planning to—before you fled me."

His hand became faster and more insistent, guiding her toward the peak. "Now that you've done so, you're going to have to work very hard, and be a very very good girl, if you want any such accord between us."

He pulled her head back, so that her face was lifted to the light. "Once you learn that every part of you, your pleasure, your pain, your sweet little cunt—it's all mine."

She couldn't think, could barely listen. His fingers pumped into her cruelly, sparing no part of her tender flesh. She couldn't bear it.

"Stop fighting it," he growled, his voice like velvet and gravel. "Come for me."

She wasn't fighting, some part of her insisted, but every other sense cried out at the sound of his command, and wrung out a second long, keening cry. Her muscles flexed around his hand fiercely, and she felt like her cheeks were on fire. How could she come for him so readily?

"There," he said, his tone satisfied.

She wanted to crumple. To crawl into a corner and collapse there. Her arms were still bound above her head, and this was the only thing that kept her upright. She felt out of place, and distant, like her own spirit looked down on her from above.

He touched her cheek tenderly. "You're so pink, little dove. Forget your shame, it's useless to you. Just think of obeying me, and you'll earn your rest."

When his fingers found her still damp folds a third time, she jerked.

"No," she begged, "Please, please no more. I'm too tired. I can't...please."

"Lilah, Lilah," he said, stroking her cheek. He was cruel enough to make his touch tender, and she hated him. "You can. You will. You're mine, and you'll do whatever I want."

"I'm not—I'm not," she said, desperate with impotent rebellion, she struggled against him pitifully.

"You are," he said, and fucked her slowly, coaxing her quim back to it's senses yet again. She had never felt so sore, so tired, but he was patient. He worked her up slowly, even as she moaned in resistance and helpless pleasure. It took longer this time, and her eyes fluttered in exhausted arousal. Sometimes she whimpered before she even knew she would.

"You are," he said again, as she came and all the world blurred before her.

~*~

Authors note: My warmest thanks to HarbingerSovereign and Karaline for their work editing this story.