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Whispers often followed the Dark Lord around his castle, trailing blood in their wake of those who had the misfortune of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time in front of the wrong audience. The king had a keen ear for them, as well as a watchful eye that noticed all the right signs separating idle gossip from insidious plots of treason.
Truth be told, he enjoyed the chatter of palace staff and courtiers. There was a fond nostalgia in sitting among townspeople. A forgotten luxury to talk techniques and innovations with blacksmiths who believed him to be little more than an apprentice far from home, eager to learn and willing to try for criminally low wages. But playacting commoner domesticity was never as fulfilling as absolute power. Sauron has been perfecting it for centuries. Now known as Halbrand, he was considered a fair but firm king. Few publicly questioned his rule and instead praised his prosperous kingdom. Fewer knew of the orcs beneath the castle.
“I heard they’ve had to lock the poor dear in the towers. The wailing could be heard throughout the entire east wing.”
“Lucette said the girl snuck out last night and the guards found her in the Black Lake, near freezing half to death.”
Silence fell when Halbrand entered the private dining hall. The two culprits, kitchen servants who attended to his meals, lowered their heads with rosy-cheeked deference.
While many kings lavished in excess and indulgence, bountiful tables of food gone to waste, goblets of wine at the ready with nary a drop spilled, Halbrand kept his private dining humble. No false grandeur and impressive displays of wealth void of reason. These were the frivolities of mortals, the exposed cracks of tenuous control.
“Who is she? The girl you were speaking of?”
Aelin stepped forward, the tea tray wobbling in her hands. “It’s nothing, sir. A representative from Lindon has fallen ill. They are set to depart at week’s end.”
“Lindon? She’s an elf, then.”
The servant’s head bobbed nervously.
“Elves do not get sick.”
“It’s just what we’ve heard, sir,” the elder handmaid answered quickly. She pulled her counterpart closer, away from the fathomless dark that she had the misfortune of glimpsing once.
“The tower in the east wing, is it?”
ooo
Finding the girl was the most adventure Halbrand had experienced in some time. She was not, in fact, sequestered away in any of the eastern towers. Nor was she hidden in his wing on the west, though he expected she wouldn’t be, as his quarters were very carefully guarded. Aelin said the girl had been found at the lake, but he checked there, too, and there was no trace of her. She mustn’t be that poorly if she had the strength to roam about the vast grounds.
Perhaps this was all a wild goose chase. A shameful waste of time and worse, he could not castigate anyone for it lest he reveal he was heeding palace gossip.
Vexed, cold, and damp with snowfall, Halbrand trudged back and considered spending the remainder of the dreary afternoon in front of a fire where he would ignore his duties and make up for it by behaving particularly heinous tomorrow. He’d all but decided on it when a scent caught his nostrils–a flare of delicious heat on the wind that was unlike anything he’d experienced before. A sea salt musk tickled with ripe pomegranate ambrosia, brandy-soaked and set aflame. Mouth-watering and heady. Halbrand's thoughts swirl in his head as though they were plucked from the vines and left to scatter. And yet he knew, as he turned on his heels and hunted the scent like a wild dog, he knew this was merely a taste of the real thing.
His body was alight with sensation. A searing heat in his belly cramped painfully when he turned the wrong way. His leg muscles spasmed with desire to break out in a sprint, nevermind the soft fresh snow. His head pounded a primal roar that shook his mental cages in demand of release.
But none of those things frightened him, not a being as old and as powerful as Sauron. He was filled with intrigue at the loss of bodily autonomy. No, the feeling closest to concern crept in when his cock stiffened to a near-excruciating degree. It was as though it became a sentient being itself, leading him the final trek across the field and into the stables where– there.
Home .
No pleasantries, no introductions. The sound of her whimpers and cries became clearer, and he felt the instincts shift in him as natural and grounding as the Anduin. There was no time to make sense of who she was, for he knew what she needed just as surely as he knew he was the only one who could provide. Deep in the marrow of old bones, Halbrand recognized his mating call.
She’d buried herself in a swallow of hay. Steam wafted from her fevered body in great plumes, and she was damp with sweat or snow, he did not know. In little more than a thin nightgown, any mere mortal would have been dead from either the ailment or the cold, but as he placed his arms around the woman to lift her so kindly, tenderly, Halbrand felt she’d never been more alive.
Her eyes snapped open, bright blue and searing into him. Had he ever seen a creature more exquisite? Nothing had ever smelled so divine, and now that he was here, holding her, the essence of her carried on the wind to him was but a tease. He inhaled long and slow through nose and mouth to breathe her in as deeply as his lungs could get their fill, then more. More and more until his face was buried between her breasts and he was licking the droplets off her skin.
The cadence of her moan was the sweetest sound he’d heard in all of his eternity. He should like to hear it again, in every octave, every pitch, every crescendo he could pull from her mouth.
Her mouth. That plump bottom lip wobbling with fear and pain was his for the taking, and Halbrand was never one for asking. His tongue plundered, licking at every crevice that held even a morsel of her scent. Here she was sweet and ripe like dark cherry, but invading his nostrils once more was that salt air complexity of heat pooling between her legs. He wanted to taste them both, mix the two mouthfuls for the most decadent meal he'd ever had, but there would be time to savor later. He could feel the light in her guttering out as the seconds ticked by.
“Shhh, sweet one. Look how frightened you are. I can take it away. I am the only one who can give you what you need. Shhh, hush now. Open your legs. Open them wide for me.”
He worked as quickly as he could to remove his many layers and attempted to soothe her writhing with a gloved hand rubbing circles on her stomach. It hindered his progress, however, and she sobbed with mounting desperation.
“I know, love. But it will be better skin to skin, I promise.”
The elf bucked her hips in the air, and the movement accidentally led to his fingers skimming her swollen, soaked sex.
Halbrand froze, almost doubling over with a painfully hard cock. With more force than necessary, he ripped the rest of his clothing away and shred her linen gown off her body before sinking into her with one fluid thrust.
What should have been agony for her was only bliss, if her squeals of affirmation were anything to go by. She begged for more–pleaded for Halbrand to move harder, faster, but she was so impossibly small and with her cunt fluttering around his length, stretched to her limits. In a first for him, Halbrand had to work his length deeper, and his eyes never left her face while he searched for any sign of discomfort. Not that he could stop himself anyway.
“I could hurt you,” he gritted between clenched teeth as he attempted to slow down.
Beneath him, she wriggled for any inch his body could spare, but his size was too overbearing for her small and delicate frame.
“Break me,” she moaned. “I don’t care. Just make it go away. Please. ”
With a rough grunt, Halbrand pushed her knees up and held them pressed to her bouncing breasts while he fucked her into the bed of hay poking mercilessly into her back. He thrust against the flood of slick that had nowhere to go because there was no way he was pulling out of her now. He could feel it coming, feel the swell in his cock that was imperative to both of their baser needs.
Her eyes were screwed shut; her breath left her body in uneven pants as the coil drew tighter between them. He could see the poor girl tipping into panic as their climax approached.
Halbrand had never been in such unfamiliar territory, but he responded instinctively.
“You’re such a brave girl,” he cooed. “A good little omega, taking me so beautifully.”
The words fell from his lips and could have been gibberish for all he knew, but the effect on her was instant. He felt her body go supple and pliant beneath his.
“You’re mine now. You’ll be mine forever. Alpha will always take care of you. My good, sweet girl.”
A smile quirked her pretty lips. She was ecstasy incarnate.
Halbrand bent his head and lapped at her exposed nipples, laying kisses and quick bites across her breasts as he moved from one to the other. Another surge of wet heat spilled from her cunt on the downstroke.
“Are you ready to take my knot, little omega?”
She nodded–then shook her head–and nodded again.
“Please make it stop. Make it go away. Make it better, Alpha.” She reached up despite her exhaustion and wrapped her arms around his neck, drawing him closer. Clinging to him, her legs hooked around his back and held on as his cock bottomed out inside her.
Buried inside her Halbrand could only rut into her, but the result was the perfect rhythm for her clit. She never saw it coming, never knew he could give this to her–not just his knot and his seed, the biological needs that made them who there were, but this purely selfish jolt of pleasure just for her. He bestowed it on her like a gift for finding her mate. It was her scent that brought him here to her. It was her escape, her persistence, that led him to find her.
Halbrand planted kisses all over her face in admiration. “That’s a good girl. My good omega. Sweet, brave girl in her first heat.”
She came with a scream that he just barely swallowed in time. After pushing the air back into her depleted lungs, the king came with a roar so mighty it shook the earth beneath them. Her cunt pulsed in time to the ropes of spend he released over and over, milking him for every drop, because now it was her turn to take. He gave it greedily, wishing he could glimpse their creamy fluids coating his cock and gushing out of her. Promising himself he would reposition them for the next round so he could see her dripping.
“What…happens now?” she asked. If possible, she sounded sweeter once sated.
He could not find the strength to remain hovering above her but locked inside her for the next however long--he'd heard up to an hour--Halbrand rolled them over gingerly, cupping her head on the flip and quickly settling her nervous body to rest on top of his. He reached for remnants of their clothing as makeshift cover. She was still hot to the touch, and he hoped she remained that way as the sun dipped below the horizon.
“We will stay like this until your heat starts again, and then we will go again, as often as you require, until your body has moved past its first heat. It’s an ancient magic–one I don’t quite understand, so I cannot tell you how I came to know this. I just…do.”
“I trust you.”
It was the omega talking. A post-orgasmic haze between heat flares that made her delirious and submissive to her alpha. If Halbrand was a better person, he would see her through her first heat and immediately send her away, where she would be infinitely safer from him. But even in his private council, the beast protested violently–the idea of leaving her so painful, he felt his soul perforate. A warning that being without his mate would tear him in two, and for once, the Dark Lord wouldn’t survive it.