Page 8 of The Captive

“You are my captive, after all.” His voice dropped further. “I could pull this pretty gown to your waist and fuck you right here, at the trot, and you could do nothing at all. Would you like that, duchess?”

A whimper. Mine.

Tears stood in my eyes—from shame, I told myself, at his crudeness, at my helplessness, at the men riding within twenty feet of us.

Certainly it was from shame. Certainly the arousal soaking into my nightgown was some animal misfire, some treason of the flesh, endured only because I had traded myself for Juno and Hector and every person I’d left at that trampled campsite who looked to me for salvation.

You have never once in your life been this wet.

“Do you want that?” He squeezed my breast again, whole-handed, owning it. When I stayed silent he rolled the nipple harder, and his voice went cold. “Answer me.”

Two tears got loose and ran down my face where he couldn’t see them.

“Yes,” I whispered. “You can fuck me however you want, Volkov.”

The chuckle came from deep in his chest, dark as tar, and his mouth touched the rim of my ear.

“Dmitri, Augusta.” His warm breath caressed my skin. “When my cock is making you scream with pleasure, you will call me Dmitri.”

Then he took his hand off my breast, gathered the reins, and rode on as though nothing had happened.

Nothing except the hard ridge of his cock against my arse, which stayed there for the better part of the day, and which he made no attempt at all to hide.

We rode hard, stopping seldom—water for the horses, dried meat and hard bread handed round the column, a few minutes each halt for me to walk the ache out of my legs.

Each stop I went to my horses first. Each stop I found less to complain of. Juno’s lead rider had already learned her vanity and scratched the exact spot beneath her mane; someone had rubbed both animals down at the noon halt and checked their feet without being asked. Horse thieves they might be, but they cared for their—my—animals.

And the horse thieves cared for me with the same brisk competence—a full waterskin pressed on me before I asked, the softest of the bread, a blanket shaken out and folded onto the ground so I could sit clear of the burrs. If this was captivity, it was better staffed than certain house parties I had endured in Kent.

Exhaustion caught up with me in the afternoon. Fear is hard labor, and desire alongside it is harder, and I had done both since before dawn on little sleep.

The sun lay warm across my front, the little horse rocked on tirelessly, and the chest behind me had stopped being a threat and become the only solid thing on the whole vast plain.

I fell asleep against my captor. He tucked the fur around me at some point; I never felt him do it.

The singing woke me.

Men’s voices, many of them, carried on the flat evening air from somewhere ahead—deep parts stacked under high ones, a wild line rising over the top and falling away mournful, then the whole of it swinging joyful again with no warning at all. Under the voices ran a plucked instrument, bright and rippling, and a fiddle sawing away above.

I thought it all a dream, until I opened my eyes onto dusk and firelight.

The camp spread along a stream in a fold of the land, beside a stream: round felt tents, low and broad, and picket lines of horses, and one enormous fire at the center of everything with a whole sheep turning over it on a spit. Dogs came streaking out to meet the column. Then laughing children, then everyone.

The homecoming swallowed us. Riders swung down into embraces, sacks of plunder were thrown open, a woman in a red kerchief pulled Juno’s young handler down by the ear and kissed him on both cheeks. Somebody pressed a cup into every hand in reach. The singing never stopped—it swelled and rolled on across the dark steppe as though the grass itself needed entertaining.

Volkov rode through the middle of it, and the whole crowd turned toward him like a field turning toward the sun, cheering and waving and laughing.

He dismounted before his own tent—larger than the rest, its felt walls whitened, firelight leaking gold at the door seam—and lifted me down on legs that had forgotten their profession. He steadied me by the arms until they remembered, said something over my head that made several people move at once, and pushed the door-flap aside.

“Eat. Rest,” he told me in French. “I will come later.”

And he strode off into his own celebration and left me standing in his tent with the sound of my own thudding blood.

I had expected squalor; after all, he and his men were bandits and horse-thieves at the edge of civilization.

I have never been more wrong about a room in my life.

Rugs covered every inch of the floor, laid three and four deep—Persian rugs, Turkish, a wool one embroidered with poppies—so that walking was like crossing a series of beds. Brass lamps hung from the frame, throwing warm circles of light. There was a folding table set with glassware—cut crystal, absurdly fine, presumably stolen—and against the far wall stood an actual carved bedstead with a feather mattress and a heap of furs, looking as though it had been pilfered from some prince’s house.