Mastered By Love (3 page)

“
Well, boys, even the Demon
Kin couldn’t get those bitches to see reason.” King Grasos belched
loudly and grinned.

Dario said nothing, although his
thoughts flew to a certain petite Concordian princess.

Mateo stretched his long
legs in front of him. “Did you really expect Concordia to
capitulate?”

“
No.” Grasos took a long
gulp of wine. “And I hoped they wouldn’t.”

“
Why?” Mateo grinned. “More
slaves for us, with no bloodshed. Sounds like a winning proposition
to me.”

“
I like bloodshed,” Grasos
said. “Especially when the blood belongs to a bunch of harpies who
think they have cocks where their pussies should be.”

“
That wasn’t my
experience.” Dario took a sip from his goblet.

Grasos raised bushy black
eyebrows. “Oh? Did you manage to ride one of them?”

Dario regarded his uncle
with cool detachment. How this pig could be in any way related to
his father, he’d never been able to grasp. “I played with one,
yes.”

“
Played.” Grasos chortled,
slapping his thigh. “I like that. So how was she? Dried up like a
raisin?”

Mateo was watching Dario with a
speculative glitter in his eyes.

Dario met his brother’s
gaze calmly before shrugging. “Not like a raisin at all. She was
highly responsive.”

“
Was she indeed?” Grasos’s
smirk turned evil. The glow from the brazier lit his face from
beneath, making him look downright devilish. “I’d like to see that.
In fact, I plan to acquire a particular Concordian bitch for my own
kennel.”

He couldn’t prevent his
muscles from tightening for one telling instant. “Which one do you
have in mind?”

“
The little princess.
What’s her name? Tarlina? Tamisha?”

Dario shrugged again, trying to keep
his dismay off his face.

“
Tariza,” Mateo
said.

“
That’s it. Tariza. A
pretty name for such an uptight little martinet.”

“
Why her?” Dario said
carelessly. “There are thousands of others easier to get
to.”

“
Because it would kill
Queen Merita.” Grasos belched again. “Her little darling, the jewel
of Concordia, bound hand and foot, sucking on my cock while I crop
her pretty little ass. I plan to make a vid and send it to Her
Majesty as a gift.”

Dario forced his hands to remain open
and relaxed, when he wanted to pound his uncle to the
floor.

“
That’s – uh – very
inflammatory,” Mateo remarked. He took a sip of wine. “You sure you
want to take a step like that?”

“
Hell, yes. That little
Concordian scout we picked up last fall is completely broken now.
She’d spread her legs for my dog if I told her to. It’s
entertaining, but I need a new challenge. And I want to crush
Merita. She’ll be begging me to fuck her up the ass if I just let
her dear daughter go.” He laughed.

Dario knew the Concordian
scout to whom Grasos referred. The woman – Miri – had endured so
many brutal whippings that her back and thighs were covered in a
crisscross of scars. She whimpered and flinched whenever any male
lifted a hand near her. The thought of Tariza in similar condition
made his stomach turn so hard he thought he might vomit.

“
If you make a vid,” he
said with deceptive calm, “you’ll be letting everyone on Argelia
know we’re using that technology.” Which was illegal on this
planet.

His uncle snorted. “It’d be
worth it.”

“
To have the High King
digging around in our business?” Dario shook his head. “God knows
what he’d find. We might end up just as fucked as
Concordia.”

“
He’s right,” Mateo said.
“We don’t want the High King coming here.”

Grasos glared at each of
them in turn. “You two are a pain in the ass.”

“
We do our best.” Mateo
grinned.

“
All right. I suppose I can
give up the vid. But I’m still taking Princess Tariza. I’ve already
got some men working on it.”

Son of a bitch.
He didn’t have much time, then.

Out of the corner of his
eye, Dario saw Mateo watching him again. He must suspect Dario had
feelings for Tariza. He refused to look at his brother. He’d
already said too much; if he continued, Grasos might sense that
Dario had more than a passing interest in the princess.

He’d have to move fast if
he wanted to keep her from falling into his uncle’s hands. Grasos
enjoyed breaking women, especially women from outside Saturnios.
Women who weren’t accustomed to their ways and would fight him,
giving him an excuse to punish and humiliate them in imaginative
and brutal ways.

“
You might want to get a
space ready for her ahead of time,” Dario said with a forced smile.
“She’ll put up a fight for sure. It would be good to be
prepared.”

“
True. That’s a good idea.”
Grasos rubbed his scraggly beard, a hungry glow in his eyes. “I’ll
see to it personally.”

And Dario would be unable
to do the same. One, he didn’t have enough time. Two, he didn’t
want to tip off his uncle or his uncle’s spies. The instant Grasos
departed the encampment, however, he’d be on his way to a
pre-emptive kidnapping. He’d keep Tariza out here with him, far
away from the king and his sickening idea of fun.

“
By the way, Dario, I’m
pulling you out of the field,” Grasos added.

Dario stared at him.
“What?”

“
I want you back in
Saturnios before snow falls, and the way things feel tonight, that
won’t be long. You can leave Baso in charge here for the
winter.”

He opened his mouth to
argue, then shut it. The order made no sense, but Grasos was the
king and there was no arguing with him. Besides, arguing would only
rouse his uncle’s suspicions.

He nodded, a brief jerk of
his head. “As you wish, Uncle.”

“
You should be happy, lad.
You’ll be in town for all the winter parties. Plenty of women.
Concerts. It’ll be much more fun than being stuck out here in a
tent.”

“
We plan to have the roof
on the barracks finished by snowfall,” he said. “It won’t be so bad
up here.”

“
Still, town will be
better.”

He forced another smile.
“Yes, it will.” Damn. Protecting Tariza while under the same roof
as Grasos would not be easy. Better that than allowing his uncle to
have unfettered access to her, though.

Mateo nudged his foot.
“We’ll tear up Saturnios together.”

“
You’ll be in town as
well?”

His brother indicated their
uncle with a tilt of his head. “My orders.”

Dario couldn’t prevent a
faint frown from creasing his brow. “I see.”

Did Grasos want them in
town so he could keep an eye on them? He must not trust them as
much as he pretended to, not that the revelation came as a
surprise. There hadn’t been any love lost between Grasos and
Marcos, Dario and Mateo’s late father, and there wasn’t much
between uncle and nephews either. But they didn’t speak of it.
Mateo was Grasos’s heir, since he had produced no male children,
and the three of them went to some length to maintain a façade of
family loyalty.

Still, he and Mateo would
do well to watch their backs ... even more closely than they
already did.

Tariza roused
out of a deep slumber to find a large calloused
hand over her mouth. A male hand. She flung up her hands, only to
discover they were already bound and attached to her similarly
bound ankles. Hog-tied. She’d been hog-tied.

The hand lifted and a rag replaced it,
so swiftly she had no time to draw more than a breath to scream.
The scream never made it out of her mouth. The man stuffed the rag
between her teeth before she could make a sound.

He tied the gag in place with another
band of cloth. Her heart raced so furiously she felt dizzy as he
lifted her skull to tie the gag at the back of her head. A cold
sweat broke out all over her body. Who was this man? What did he
intend to do with her? And how had he gotten past her
guards?

He’d killed them,
obviously. It was the only explanation for how he’d gotten into her
tent undetected. He must have killed her guards.

An ache started in her
chest for the women she’d known, served with, joked and taken meals
alongside for years. They’d been more than fellow soldiers; they’d
been friends.

The man hoisted her up to his
shoulder. Tariza jackknifed her body, twisting first one way and
then the other. The man swore viciously under his breath as he
grabbed her with both arms to keep her on his shoulder.

“
Don’t do that,” he rasped,
his voice cold with anger. “Try it again and I’ll knock you out.
Got it?”

She couldn’t answer him
because of the gag. And she wasn’t going to let him know she’d
heard him or give any indication of cooperation. But she quit
fighting. She didn’t want to be clubbed over the head. Sometimes
people didn’t survive such a blow.

Her captor settled her over
his shoulders and slipped out of her tent. The campsite was utterly
black. No torches or fires were lit. They’d wanted to keep their
location secret from the enemy. Well, that had worked out
nicely.

He began to move swiftly
and silently through the ranks of tents toward the edge of the
encampment. She could smell blood and death on the ground – the
stench of her friends’ lives running out into the dirt.

He was going to take her
away from her friends and allies; once he got her far from the
encampment, he could do anything to her he liked and there would be
no-one to stop him. She had a locator chip – illicit Galactic
technology – implanted in the back of her neck, but it might take
days or even weeks for anyone to rescue her, and in that time
almost anything could happen.

She wrenched her body again, throwing
herself half off his shoulders. Another fierce twist and she was on
the ground, thumping her heels against the packed, summer-hard
earth.

“
Damn you,” the man
growled.

Tariza attempted to roll
herself over, to inch-worm her way from him – anything to get close
enough to one of the tents that she could attract someone’s
attention.

Then something hard crashed into her
skull and everything went black.

When she came to, she was
face down on the back of a horse. Her hands and feet were still
bound, but not to each other. She could smell the warm animal scent
of the horse and feel the rhythm of its movements, but couldn’t see
anything at all. It was too dark.

Something hard and warm,
covered in tightly-woven woolen fabric, brushed against her cheek
as her head bobbed in time to the horse’s gait. It must be his leg.
His thigh.
Him.
The barbarian dog who’d taken her.

There was something
familiar about him that she couldn’t quite put her finger on.
Strange she would think that, since she couldn’t even see
him.

Despair crashed over her in a black
wave, darker than the night around her. She was lost now. Lost.
This man could only be a Saturnian, and women captured by Saturnios
never came back. They were swallowed up and never seen
again.

Her mother’s words came
back to her, a bittersweet memory. “You play at soldiers, Tariza.
If you want to be queen, you must take your duties more seriously.
This isn’t a game. You must learn to fight and to govern. To learn
to be Queen.”

That was exactly what she’d
thought she was doing as a soldier. But she could never earn
Merita’s respect, never do enough to please her mother. And now she
never would.

Still, she was the heir to
the throne and she did her best to fulfill her duty. She’d thought
she was prepared for the consequences of that duty, but she hadn’t
been prepared for this.

***

Tariza staggered dizzily as
her captor and another man pulled her off the horse’s back. Three
hours draped belly down across a saddle had given her a monster of
a stomachache and a head that felt like it was going to burst open.
Her bound hands and feet, along with the rush of blood leaving her
head, made proper balance impossible.

She wobbled as the world around her
spun in broad circles.

Her Saturnian captor
grabbed her by the elbows before she fell on her face and yanked
her back against his hard warrior’s body. He smelled of clean
sweat. From somewhere close by came the acrid smell of wood
smoke.

“
Easy, there, woman.” His
voice was deep and rough, and sounded vaguely familiar.

Tariza shuddered at his
filthy touch. “Unhand me, Saturnian.”

He laughed and picked her up, carrying
her toward a small campfire burning at the foot of an enormous
boulder. The scent of his body caused a bizarrely misplaced jolt of
lust in her belly. Lust? How could she feel lust for this barbarian
animal? Maybe the blow to the head had addled her mind.

She had to resist, no
matter what the cost. Tariza twisted in his grip, struggling
against the stiff chill of his light leather armor. All her
strength, honed over a lifetime of training as a Concordian
warrior, merely earned her bruises on her arms and legs. The
barbarian’s grip seemed unbreakable.