Vashti Valant - Slave of the Goblin

The cock paused on its inward journey, even easing out somewhat. Akraz lifted himself up on his arms over her and searched her face.

“Laya?” he asked softly.

Laya bit her lip. She knew that if she cried out in pain, real pain, that he would stop. Even now. Not because there were archers outside, and not because she had the strength to stop him from taking whatever he wanted from her. Just because he would. And somehow that made her determined to continue.

“Akraz,” she whispered. That was all. She could not bring herself to beg for what she wanted. She did not even know what it was.

He drove his cock between her wide spread legs, piercing her and filling her. Laya squeezed her eyes shut against the sharp, sudden pain, which was soon subsumed beneath building pleasure as he moved in long, deliberate strokes inside her. Her climax this time differed from the previous waves of pleasure that he brought her, but it also convulsed her whole body in waves of bliss. At the same time, Akraz shut his eyes and roared a wordless howl of triumph.

Akraz came to his senses too slowly. He had collapsed on top of Laya, probably half suffocating the delicate elf maid. Wincing, he lifted himself off her. He was surprised that his animal bellow of pleasure had not drawn any hostile attention from the guards outside. Perhaps, he smiled wryly to himself, they assumed that she was torturing him.

He wanted to stretch, to pace off his sex haze, but the woody chains still twined his wrists and ankles, and that prevented him from leaving the vicinity of the stone. He eased away from Laya, who sprawled limply on the bed, her legs still spread wide and wanton.

Akraz frowned. Her thighs were stained red with blood. Her face was flushed nearly as red, stained with tears.

He froze in horror. He had never imagined, with all her talk of turning him into her sex toy, that she might be a virgin.

“Laya?” he said uncertainly.

She blinked up at him, her expression bleak. Then she rolled onto her side, covering her face with her arm. “Oh, gods,” she said in despair. “I am lost. I am damned.”

“Why did your people not stop this?” Akraz asked harshly. Anything to deny his own guilt, anything to deflect the blame, no matter how irrational. “Why did they leave you at my mercy? Why did you not cry out to them to kill me?”

“My people?” She laughed bitterly. She gestured to her bloodstained, naked body. “Do you think I would have them see me like this? Revealed as a goblin’s whore?”

His chest clenched. He was a fool. All the while he had convinced himself that this elf woman was different, that she knew the game, that she wanted him as much as he wanted her, he had only been deceiving himself. She hated and feared him as much as any beautiful woman would, as much as any of his prisoners had. Shame, not desire, had stifled her voice when he turned the tables on her. He had been too full of his own passion to see her lack of it. In the end, then, he had taken her as brutally as any other goblin would have taken a helpless virgin.

At least retribution was likely to be swift, he reflected. If she did not want him to be able to tell the others what he had done to her, she would kill him quickly.

Laya pulled herself off the bed. Loathing etched her face with pain. For him? For herself, for having been soiled by him? He did not know. She fled to the other side of the tree and hid from his view. Only her weeping drifted clearly across grotto.

Laya wept as she cleaned herself. Oh, gods, she kept thinking. Everything she had suspected about herself was true. She would never be able to find satisfaction with a genteel, chaste man like Lathaniel. Lathaniel’s platonic kisses had bored her. Hunter’s kiss had left her cold. It took the kisses of her worst enemy to move her to mindless ecstasy.

Her plan had been to conquer him, toy with him, then discard him to prove to herself how little he meant to her. Instead, he had conquered her, not with his brutality, but with his unexpected tenderness.

Oh, gods, she was damned.

She must have slept. Dawn awakened Laya the next morning. She prepared breakfast from the storage bins she had stored in the grotto near the tree. She also refilled her water vase with clear, cold liquid from the stream. She washed herself, wincing a bit at the soreness between her legs.

She would have to face him. If nothing else, she owed him breakfast.

With a sigh, Laya carried a platter of fruit, dried meat, nut mix and cheese to the rock where Akraz was bound.

It did not surprise Laya to see that he had already awakened, if indeed he had ever slept. He had no clothes, so he could not dress himself. Magnificently naked, he stood beside the stone slab, still shackled by branches, yet as untamed as ever.

Laya felt suddenly shy of him. He could have killed her the night before. He could have hurt her. He had done neither. She still did not know why.

She set the platter between them, and nudged it closer to him with her foot, so that she could stay well out of his reach. An ironic smile touched his lips as he noted her caution. However, the light in his eyes was strangely flat.

“Is this my last meal?” he asked.

“This is breakfast.”

“I assume,” he said, “That you intend to kill me this morning.”

“Kill you?”

He cast her an oblique glance. “For what I did to you.”

“Ah,” she said.

“You knew all along what I was,” he said harshly. “No matter what changes you made to my face, you knew my true nature must shine through.”

“I didn’t do anything to change your face,” Laya said, seizing on this issue to avoid discussing last night’s events. “All I did was undo the spells laid on you by Zathstragomal. This is your true face, not whatever he did to you in that fire he used to enslave you.”

Akraz frowned.

“Why is it so hard for you to accept your true face?” she asked.

“Because I do not know that man you showed me in the mirror. I know only what Zathstragomal made me to be. What you saw of me last night, that is what I really am.”

Laya blushed and wiggled her toes. “Perhaps what I saw was what I really am.”

“You are no goblin’s whore,” he said instantly.

“Perhaps it is what I want to be,” Laya said. She took a step closer. If he strained at the branches, he could reach her now.

“No.”

“When I was a girl, barely on the threshold of womanhood, I was almost taken by a goblin. Ever since then, I wondered if a part of me regretted escaping before he ravished me. That is why I captured you.” She took a step closer. “To see how I would react, if…”

“Don’t.” Pain contorted his face. “Please. Don’t say you brought me here to rape you.”

“I would have thought you would have been proud to have another conquest,” she said. She took a step closer. “Did all those other captive women you took dance in your arms as I did? Did all of them surrender as easily as I did?”

“There have been no others,” he said. “I was as much a virgin as you, Laya.”

She laughed. “You don’t have to lie to me, Akraz. You knew exactly what you were doing.”

“No doubt I have witnessed many more…couplings…than you have,” he said dryly. “I have probably embraced more women, elf, human, goblin, in my imagination than any man alive. I have been tormented by dreams that felt so real I awoke wet with my own passions. But I have never touched another woman as I touched you.”

“But all your captives, your booty.” Laya put her hands on her hips. “Don’t deny it.”

He shrugged. “Assume what you want, then.” He looked away. “Everyone else assumed as well. As a consequence, it was one area of my life where I could do as I wished, even if what I wished was to pretend that in one small way, I could choose what was right, and good and noble. Yes, scoff if you want. I know I am a dark thing, fashioned out of pain to serve a dark god. But I kept myself pure in that one way. I never forced a woman. Never.”