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In the end, he might just have been too sure of himself and his so-called destiny. It was just the obvious thing, after all, for him to slay Oyun in single combat and claim the title of Foreman.
It was what everything had been leading up to. Never mind that Oyun had held that title against all comers for longer than Artemy had been alive. Age had made him slow, surely. Overconfident.
A few deft seconds of dodging seemed to bear out that theory. He even managed to get in a decent blow, lashing his knife in a long arc across Oyun’s ribs.
Then Oyun’s fist plunged into his solar plexus, and the world, the way he’d been sure this story was supposed to go, exploded.
The world pitched black and backwards. What breath and confidence he didn’t lose on first impact burst from him as he hit the wall, and he collapsed to the floor of the ritual combat chamber like a doll flung away by a bored child.
He tried to push himself up. Of course he did, tried like hell, but his body seized on the shock, his lungs on their own emptiness. He bucked weakly, the best he could manage before Oyun was on him, seizing him by the shoulders and pinning him purposefully to the floor.
Artemy twisted flat and pitifully against his grip, still less in fear than frustration. This couldn’t be the way it ended. For everyone’s sake, it couldn’t. If there was anything left of the resolve that had seen him that far, through all of Oyun’s trials-
Oyun’s lip curled back from blunt white teeth. He pulled his fist back for another curt punch, emptying Artemy’s lungs of what little breath he’d started wheezing back into them.
Along with what little fight he’d had left in him. Frustration wasn’t fuel enough for his abused body – it fell limp under Oyun, who sneered down at him as if deciding whether to deal out the killing blow he lay waiting for.
“Your father would have been shamed by your weakness. It is a mercy that he did not live to see it.”
Artemy fuelled another lunge with that. Feeble, but this was the man who had killed his father. Who was surely about to wipe out the last of the Burakh line. Fighting him was the last and only worthy thing Artemy could hope to do.
Even if it was only in those faltering throes. Why was Oyun holding back? Just to gloat, to watch him play out the last of his strength before finishing him off? The sneer had fallen from his face, but the fierce consideration that filled his yellow eyes in its place seemed no safer.
“Yet there could be use even for one as weak as you,” he said. “And to waste when we have just lost so much would be a crime. I have decided – I will give you a chance to not let your father’s bloodline end in such pitiful disgrace.”
Artemy didn’t have time to ask what he meant by that, or to spit in his face, before that fist came down again. He didn’t quite lose consciousness when it did, but his mind went as slack as his body, dimming its lights, pathetically desperate to do anything that might keep it from being hit again.
Oyun’s hands jostled around and under that dark daze. Lifted him from the stone floor, slung him over a muscular shoulder like a sack of grain. He wheezed soundlessly as it pressed into his brutalized gut, couldn’t breathe, watching through a thickening, grey, faraway haze as his arms swung against Oyun’s back.
Hands hanging loose and empty. His last thought before his consciousness took its leave after all was to wonder where he had dropped his knife.
#
Coming back was no kinder than losing consciousness had been. The first thing he knew to be more than a dream – all dreams of drowning – was that breathing hurt like probing a bruise. All dreams of struggling to breathe.
The second was that he was lying on something soft enough to at least not make it worse. Softer than his bedroll in the Lair – something that smelled, he now knew from close contact, like Oyun.
The third came with a rattle and clunk as he tried to pull his hands under himself, to teeter up on hands and knees. A tension around his wrists. His hands were bound, and warm air was wandering freely across his skin.
That sudden revelation of nakedness was like a spur dug into his side. His legs lashed out straight, something scraping at his right knee, something close, his eyes snapped open, hands jerked and grasped, all senses trying, together, to make sense of where and how he was lying and why part of him couldn’t move.
He lay with his nose almost pressed against a stone pillar, wider, by maybe half a metre, than his arms could fit around. The sullen, smoky smell, taste of blood and torchlight told him he was still in the Abattoir, and what the warm air against his skin had told him was indeed true – he wore not a stitch of the sturdy, reliable clothing he had before. The closest he had left were the leather cuffs around his wrists, soft, thick, gentle hide, attached to a chain which ran around the pillar. He lay facing it, not quite embracing it – not only was the pillar too wide for his hands to meet on its far side, the chain was too short for him to pull them to his sides instead.
To touch anything but the pillar. The full stretch of his arms left only inches between him and it; he pulled at the chain, mindless, powerless panic, rage, Oyun had left him this way, and that could only mean the old Foreman meant to take advantage of his helplessness somehow.
He tried to hoist himself up to kneel, at least, and his hands wouldn’t follow him. The chain seemed to be secured to something on the far side of the pillar, a hook or ring practically level with the floor, neatly pinning any hopes he might have had of climbing to and slipping it over the pillar’s broken top, some three metres above.
Or even of gaining his feet. A sort of stooping kneel with his cheek pressed to the pillar was the best he could manage, and trying for more sent a ripple of outrage through every muscle from his diaphragm outwards, hunching shoulders, curling toes.
He turned his head against the pillar to find his stomach mottled with every ugly shade of bruising. Black brimming up to greyish, beaten purple under his ribs – yet Oyun had gone to some care, it seemed, not to break any of those.
To keep him practically intact. That panic tried to clamber and claw its way up over his rational thoughts again, given handholds aplenty by the sound of footsteps behind him.
He couldn’t turn away from the pillar. Couldn’t even circle around it to change his view, thanks to whatever was restraining the chain on the other side. The behaviour of the air, breath of the mountain, told him there was a passage at his back, but craning his neck chin-to-shoulder wasn’t enough to let him see it.
Those heavy steps. Not clumsy stomping, but implacable weight. Panic clutched high around his throat as what could only have been Oyun’s shadow fell over him.
No comfort in knowing the Foreman most likely didn’t mean to kill him. Wouldn’t have gone to this trouble if he did. Whatever he had in mind instead, Artemy had no doubt it would be worse somehow.
“You are awake,” Oyun observed, in a tone that said Artemy had taken his sweet time with it. “Have you had time to understand what is meant for you now?”
Panic tried to hold him perfectly still, as if that could protect him from Oyun’s sight and intentions. He swallowed through it.
“What’s happening outside?” he asked. Wasn’t in any place to demand, but- “The Pest, the general-”
“That is no concern of yours now,” Oyun snapped, a thunder crack echoed by those heavy steps. Around into Artemy’s sight, and then as quickly behind the pillar, stooping to where that chain was secured. “You have proven yourself too weak to play any part in shaping or guiding that world. You will leave it, and your worthless body, in better hands.”
A click and rattle, and he lifted the chain from where it had been pinned near the floor. Not far – Artemy barely had time to pull back against it, to try to yank it from his grip, before another click, level with his head while kneeling, locked it in place again.
Another hook or ring, restraining his arms at a level where both standing and lying down would be impossible. Where kneeling was his only comfortable option. He jerked and fought against that as he had against being pinned to the floor, and just as futilely, while Oyun circled back behind him.
“Do you know what purpose will be yours now?” the Foreman asked again.
Artemy’s thoughts wouldn’t mass into the orderly lines that would let him try to come to a conclusion. They scattered from every useless jerk and twist against his restraints, from Oyun’s shadow over him, from the creaking, settling leather sounds of Oyun sinking down to kneel behind him.
Artemy’s nakedness and their respective positions collided in his mind, trying to scatter in intersecting directions. “No. No, you can’t be-”
“You are still of very little use the way you are now. But you-”
Artemy tried to kick back at him, but only managed to rumple his bedding. No room, no force he could bring to bear against Oyun, but he tried, rocking and pulling until it seemed his wrists would have to snap or slip free, teeth clenched, twisting, but still-
Oyun wrapped an easy arm around his waist, curling it, him, in nice and close. Artemy pulled against it, clinging to the pain of doing so as proof that he wasn’t beaten yet.
Oyun spread a hand over his gut like ownership, stroking it in smugly tender circles. Artemy’s struggles stilled as a new possibility, impossibility, bloomed like a bruise in his mind.
“You realize I’m a beta, don’t you?” he wheezed. If it was procreation the old Foreman had in mind, he’d have just as productive a time fucking a knot on a tree.
And what a relief it would be to die rather than suffer that fate. But Oyun’s mocking tenderness went on undeterred.
“Of course,” he acknowledged. “You manage to be useless even in that way. But you left us to be a student of medicine, didn’t you? Did they not teach you that some of those who seem infertile have the parts in them that could be fruitful, and will be, if only they are given strong encouragement?”
Artemy’s stomach seemed to plummet under Oyun’s hand. Of course he had heard the stories, rare cases, curiosities. Men who comfortably assumed themselves to be betas, who were betas, by every practical measure, until something – usually excessive, close-quarters proximity, or even intimacy, with alphas – flipped the hormonal switch that had always been waiting in them.
Setting reproductive parts to work in them that they might never have realized they had otherwise. Those stories weren’t the only reason Artemy had avoided any sort of close relationship with an alpha – most of them seemed bred to be not his type – but they had stuck in his head long after the class had moved on from them. The idea that something as simple as spending too much time around those perpetually smug, possessive assholes could twist his nature to suit theirs...
“I might not even have those parts,” he pointed out, too much of a high hurry in his voice, too close to a plea. “Even if I-”
“If so, if you fail at even this, then there will be time to kill you later.” Oyun took rougher hold of him, too close to all that bruising. “But first, I will give you this chance to still be of some use to your people. To not have the Burakh line end with such a last whimper. Children of your bloodline and mine will revive and reforge the Kin. If you prove capable, I will have as many of them as you can give.”
Of course Artemy struggled. Couldn’t breathe around that hand, but bucked and twisted, anything but that. Anything but this man who had killed his father, who led the Kin with a hand around their throat.
Anything but being changed that way. Fucked relentlessly until his body either became the receptacle Oyun wanted or proved that it couldn’t. Used, either way, to be used again and again forever or to be discarded once there turned out to be no use in him.
Leather and his wrists creaked with failing to break free. That pillar must have been meant for more mundane punishment, not this, but it would serve just as well for Oyun’s purposes.
For keeping Artemy in place, almost like a willing partner, while Oyun tended to his business behind. The sounds Artemy couldn’t turn to see told him everything he didn’t want to know – the rattle and slithering leather of a loosened belt, the uncorking of a bottle. Slick, rhythmic, the sound of Oyun stroking himself hard.
Artemy should have saved his strength. Struggling against the chain and stone was a useless show of resistance, and he had practically wasted himself on it by the time Oyun took a firmer hold above his hips.
One hand slick with an amberish substance that streaked and glistened against Artemy’s skin. Artemy couldn’t pull his own hands close enough to claw at those, couldn’t pull away, push himself up to stand stooping against the pillar, anything with Oyun’s grip snug as a corset under his ribs. Trying boiled his vision into a breathless grey haze; his arms trembled, his thighs, his weight sinking back onto the rude, huge nudge of Oyun’s cock.
He tried to bolt upright, as far from it as kneeling would let him. But Oyun wouldn’t give him an inch – those hands sweltering against his sides curled tight enough to tease the edges of the bruise, and rocked him back and forth, practically playing with him, working that ruinously large-feeling erection into the cleft of his ass.
There had to be a way out of this. Part of him, the hero of the story, was still sure of it. There had to be some heroic struggle he could make, something, still, that would stop him being fucked there by his father’s murderer-
A yelp burst from him, high and hurt and boyish, as Oyun made his entrance much too quickly. Every muscle Artemy hadn’t already wrung out rallied against that intrusion, outraged by its sudden size and stretch inside him, but their struggle was as useless as all the rest. Oyun pulled him down and pushed up into him in punishing sync, and his next yelp stretched to a wail, senseless with panic, scratching at the pillar, fingernails ragged on stone.
Too much, too damn much. It burned in the pit of his stomach, the size of it, every thrust, burying itself deeper in him against every spasm of denial. It sparked his nerves like steel dragged across granite, stoking that burn in his gut to a fitful, pinching blaze. His muscles bore down on it, trying, they had to still be trying to force it out, but-
“You wriggle and scream like a child,” Oyun taunted him over his shoulder. “Have you never been had by a man before?”
Had and been had. Other betas, omegas, in university, quietly, under the deafening din of the common culture that had said alphas on top, omegas below, betas somewhere else. But none of it had ever felt like this – like being impaled by blunt inches, stretched to bursting, while the various territories of his body gave up on their resistance one by one. He’d never been had in a way that was taken, and he’d never tried and failed to pull away from the bare edge of a partner’s snarl rubbing against the side of his neck, marking him with their scent.
His mind went slack then, as it had when there had been nothing left for him to do but be hit. He knew the acrid stench of Oyun’s sweat, the same that was on the bedroll now rucked up under their knees, but not the nuances of whatever had just been rubbed on his skin. Alphas and omegas both had told him he was missing a whole world of subtle social context they breathed in every day.
Nothing subtle about this. He couldn’t smell it, but he knew mine when its grip was on his shoulders. Its grunting in his ear, coming faster as Oyun barrelled his way single-mindedly towards climax.
Artemy rocked like a doll against the pillar with each thrust. That swollen, battered, forced-open feeling had become a brutal constant, the raw white noise that filled the body when it realized its pain was going to be ignored.
Nothing was going to stop this. He hung loose in Oyun’s grip, in that pain that had given up on being answered, until it rallied itself for another cry.
He echoed that cry as Oyun’s next attempt to rock back brought him tautly with it. The cock that had already been lodged as tight in him as it could be, he’d thought, pulled at his insides as if it were trying to unravel him.
Oyun ground out another growl, and slammed it in to the hilt. Artemy’s forehead struck the pillar and bounced. Blinking through stars, spitting blood from a bit tongue, he was seconds slow in recognizing the feeling Oyun was now holding stationary inside him.
Swelling. The sense that, whatever space he’d thought was already taken up and beaten to hell in him, he was about to have to make more. He panted, shallow, dry mouth, scrabbling, scratching at the stone again, as that feeling steadily pushed aside everything in him that tried to be in its way.
As Oyun’s knot swelled in him. Like a new organ forced into his body, more than it already had been, and, as it passed the point where he had been sure he would burst, he screamed at the broken top of the pillar.
He realized what that scream had been laced with, more than pain, only when his body slumped into a new warm-wax limpness, lolling his gaze down to the pearly string of come that was just starting to ooze down the pillar. The aftershock tremors of orgasm could only pluck twitches from his wrung-out muscles; he didn’t even have the breath to curse as the first hot spurt of Oyun’s come doused him inside.
Followed by another, and another, joining into what seemed like a constant stream. A flood trying to fill him to the level of organs he could only hope he didn’t have.
If he didn’t, at least Oyun would lose interest and kill him eventually. Better than a lifetime of this, and what was supposed to come after.
Oyun reached around him to take hold of his softening cock. That huge, calloused hand enveloped it completely, squeezing it to a weak moan in which Artemy hardly recognized his own voice.
“It grows smaller sometimes, when the body is too busy bearing children to have any need of it,” Oyun reminded him of what university had already taught him. “I will teach your body to have need only of mine.”
“Fuck you,” Artemy barely had the breath to wheeze at him.
Hot breath, blunt teeth bared in a grin against his shoulder. That heat still pulsed deeper in him than anything had ever touched, searching him, marking him, flooding him taut.
“This was painful for you, wasn’t it?” Oyun could hardly need to ask. “A man bearing children for the Kin would deserve more gentleness. I will teach you, too, to need that. You are already weak – you at least ought to be soft and pleasurable for a man, and useful.”
He closed his grip too tight on Artemy’s cock for any retort. Artemy bit off a yelp, blood on his chin, beating his fist against the pillar. The ceiling mocked his voice back to him; Oyun’s chuckling circled the dark like steel on granite throwing sparks. By the time his knot finally started to loosen, the pressure inside had pitched Artemy’s voice up to a wail, and that rough hand, the hand that had killed his father, had squeezed another shameful, painful orgasm from him.
#
Oyun left him lying there afterwards, chained to the lowest ring again, leaking what seemed like a never-ending stream of come onto the stone. He’d tucked the bedroll aside, at least, so that Artemy didn’t soil it while doing what felt so much like bleeding out.
Could he hope that was what it was? He hadn’t strained himself around to look at what was trickling out of him. Something could have torn – it would be a pathetic death, but better than any life he could look forward to.
What would his father have thought? That question could almost have killed him on its own. Lying in it, in a puddle of Oyun’s come, he didn’t notice at first that he was no longer alone.
Footsteps too light to be Oyun’s. Two shadows flickered and bent over him in the waning torchlight.
Rescue? With the state he’d left the town in, he couldn’t hope for it. Fucked halfway to what felt like death, he couldn’t raise his head to look for it.
Movement passed him, circling the pillar. A shadow, a step, then out of sight. The chain rattled.
Raised. One of the newcomers had freed it from the ring and was tugging it upwards, urging him from the half-curled position Oyun had spilled him into.
The thought repeated itself with a more optimistic ring – rescue? He tried to roll himself towards it, up to kneel, and every muscle from his jaw to his toes snarled at him for it.
Hands on his shoulders. The other newcomer caught him as he would have slumped back, propping him up to sit. Tugging him, trying, in place of his brutalized muscles, to pull him up to stand.
Artemy’s legs unfolded like rickety wooden ladders. He teetered on them, trickling down the inside of his thighs, and the person behind the pillar hooked the chain to a ring high enough that he wouldn’t be able to fall from them.
Not rescue. A man and woman of the Kin with matching bland expressions and steel buckets, staring at him like a job to be done.
Still, “Please,” he tried, pulling against the cuffs as best he could without losing what little balance he had. “The Foreman locked me up here. You have to...”
The man bent to set his bucket on the stone floor. It brimmed with soapy water and licks of steam; he wrung out one of the ragged cloths that had been floating like river-borne offal in it, and passed it to the woman.
She had set down her bucket as well, out of Artemy’s sight, and moved with practical assurance, no bashfulness, to start scrubbing him down. It had been days since he’d had anything to do with hot water, or soap, aside from bartering it. Too busy, and the sweet heat still dripping from the cloth could have been heaven.
If he hadn’t still been chained to a pillar, sore inside and out with being fucked against his will. The man set to him with the other cloth, scrubbing away what had run down his thighs as if what it was meant nothing to him.
“He’s got me here against my will,” Artemy tried again, stepping away from that latest warmth, trying to disrupt their blase execution of duty enough that his words might break through the cracks. “He- I’m Artemy Burakh. Isidor Burakh was my father. Listen – you have to help me escape. I have to get back to the town, to...”
His voice ran out on the longer pleas, like a nub of charcoal spent on rough paper. The musical sound of the woman wringing out her cloth, thready trickles racing back into the bucket, reminded his throat how long it had been dry.
His stomach, of course, chimed in with that reminder. Much too long since he’d eaten, as well, and no wonder he could hardly stay on his feet. He craned his neck, trying to confirm his hopes about the woman’s bucket, but she’d placed it squarely behind him, as if not to distract him from his bath.
His skin flushed a raw, soft, clean pink under their combined ministrations. The evidence of what Oyun had done to him, all but the bruise, disappeared. When the woman took her sopping rag to his head, squeezing his hair as close as possible to clean, he caught what trickles of the soap-bitter water he could in his open mouth.
Just enough to take the pain from speaking. “Would you at least tell me what’s happening outside?”
Apparently not. They must have been under orders- or, more likely, under threat- not to talk to him. They traded glances like words, but wouldn’t speak even to each other, it seemed, in his presence.
As if the only words he was supposed to hear in that state of maybe-becoming were Oyun’s. He pulled at the pillar again, at that, and hunger flung dizziness like a net from his stomach over his dripping head.
Too weak. Too long. His forehead came to rest against the pillar, eyes closed to keep the room still, and something rattled, glass against steel, at his side.
He dared to crack an eye open, and the man brandished a bottle at him. Heavy with tan, by the looks of it, more of a meal on its own than Artemy had had in days. His mouth spent what moisture it had left on desperate saliva.
The man studied him as if to make sure he was going to behave for it, and Artemy showed every sign he could that he would. Pathetic, maybe, standing mannerly and hopeful for the people who had clearly been charged with keeping him clean and healthy for his captor, but it had been so damn long since he’d eaten, and he would be as useless to himself as to everyone else if he didn’t seize this chance to do so.
The man must have been satisfied with his manners. Out came the cork, and Artemy’s senses, sharpened to a brittle point by hunger, leapt on the faint, sweet scent of tan. He opened his mouth obediently, taking the bottle’s rim against his lips as the man set it there, and let that cool sweetness drown the moan he wouldn’t otherwise have been able to hold back, of helpless relief.
Whoever had made that batch must not have cursed at it quite hard enough. The taste that started sweet lingered bitter, but he drank to the bottle’s dregs, and still had hunger enough to turn like a compass needle to the smell of smoked meat as the woman offered it on his other side.
Soft, rich, salty beef, all but melting as he took it bite by bite from her hand. The bread she retrieved from the bucket next stuck on his tongue, clotted in his throat, and the man was there with a bottle of clean water for him to wash it down.
He swayed on his feet, dazed for lack of pain. For being full and comfortable after so long, for...
Hell. There had been something in the tan, hadn’t there?
That bitter aftertaste. The woman took her turn stepping behind the pillar, and the chain tugged down, trying to lead Artemy to where they had wiped the floor clean and spread out the bedroll. He locked his knees, damn them, but the man’s hands on his shoulders were more weight than his legs could take. He clung to the pillar, to lower himself down slowly as the only alternative to falling. Tried for kneeling, and the man pushed him down to lie on his side.
Down to where the woman must have hooked him to the lowest ring again. The one that wouldn’t let him so much as kneel without hugging the pillar. She stepped back into sight with that same look still on her face, as if she were bored but resigned to tending to livestock.
The man set one of the empty buckets where Artemy couldn’t help but see it, and raised an eyebrow the same. I don’t need to tell you what to do with this, do I? he may as well have asked aloud.
Then they weren’t going to leave him to soil himself or the floor. Being the son of Isidor Burakh, or Oyun’s prospective breeding stock, bought him at least that much dignity. That, and his reflection in the bucket’s curved face, seemed almost funny from the haze he lay in. Dignity? No, one way or another, he’d had the last of that.
They left him there, that way, without a single word spoken start to finish. He lay on what felt like a thin pane of ice over sleep’s black depths, without the strength to rise or break through. If he hadn’t taken it on such an empty stomach, maybe whatever they’d put in the tan would just have left him pliable.
Maybe it would next time, if he were fool enough to drink it again. He curled his fist, trying for resolve and just finding the movement fascinating. The flex of fingers and jut of knuckles. He was still at it when Oyun returned a hazy while later to haul him up to his knees and fuck him again.
#
The same pair who had cleaned and fed and drugged him returned in what he wanted to call late evening of the same day. The constant torchlight and whatever had been in the tan made it difficult to keep any grip on time, though – he only knew that he’d recovered enough from the drugs and Oyun to crouch over the bucket when nature called, and to confirm, with every careful twist and calculated jerk he could, that there was no hope of freeing his hands from those cuffs. Soft as they were, designed, clearly, to be as gentle as possible on his skin, they were also uncompromisingly tight.
He stayed stubbornly on his knees as the woman tried to pull him up by the chain. With that blandly raised brow, the man moved to join her, and their combined strength reduced Artemy’s choices to standing of his own will or being dragged up against the pillar.
He chose the former, and to not fight them as they bathed him, at least. Not if it was a choice between that and staying crusted with Oyun’s come, Oyun’s scent presumably rank on his skin.
When the man produced another bottle brimming with tan, however, Artemy turned his head away. When the bottle’s open lip nudged the corner of his, he tucked his chin to his shoulder.
The woman stood with the same fare she had fed him before, and no intention, apparently, of giving it to him. No word spoken, but the message was clear – he was to drink before he ate.
Then he would do neither. He stood that way, like a fussy child, while the man spent another minute trying to turn him towards the bottle. When that failed, the two shared one of their glances-good-as-words and a shrug, and stored both food and tan away to finish the rest of their business. Wiping the floor and pillar clean, collecting the waste bucket and replacing it with one of those they had brought.
Artemy braced himself for them to try to fight him back down to the floor, but, with that perfunctory tidying complete, they left him bound standing and in the same silence as before. Perhaps they expected it to be a punishment soon enough, for him to not be able to rest his feet.
Perhaps it would be. But it felt like a victory, at least for the moment, to stand lucid when they would have had him lie docile. There were still ways he could push back against what was being done to him.
There had to be. Why was he still there, otherwise? He’d returned to that town to take up his purpose. To become what he was meant to be, and this wasn’t it.
The story wasn’t over yet. He glanced over his shoulder as far as he could to be sure they were gone, then began testing the cuffs and chain again from that position of greater leverage.
#
Even that soft leather had started to chafe his wrists by the time Oyun returned again. The Foreman’s heavy tread in the tunnel behind him lit fear up his spine, nerves cringing tight in anticipation of heavier hands and all they would hold him still for.
He jerked against the rawness of his wrists. As much flaunting his undrugged, defiant state as trying to escape – Oyun wouldn’t beat him, wouldn’t break him that easily.
The chain scraped and sawed dully against the pillar. No progress in trying to escape, aside from the damage he’d done to his wrists. Oyun’s eyes simmered with intent as he stepped behind the pillar to silence the chain in his fist and pull it down.
So abruptly, so irresistibly, Artemy’s rigid determination to keep his feet pitched forward into a head-first collision with the pillar. The same raw pain that circled his wrists opened on his forehead, and the world dimmed like a dying bulb, coming back bright to find him slumped on his knees.
Bound so that he couldn’t fall further. He groaned, and the sound seemed to echo through his head for miles.
“Do you think, because you are being made into something that will need tender care, there will be no punishment for your childish contempt?”
As did Oyun’s voice. Buckle and leather, familiar undressing sounds – two times prior had taught them well to Artemy’s body, like heavy footsteps. Something to brace for, the sound of pain to come. Struggling wouldn’t save him from that, but, like standing hungry instead of lying docile, at least it felt like not giving up.
Oyun seemed in no hurry to kneel behind him this time. He stood bare as the stone of the Abattoir, as craggy and compounded by age. For the first time, Artemy got a good look at the outlandishly large cock that had been forced into him twice before, and every muscle from his thighs to his shoulders tensed with sympathetic pain for his past and dread for his future.
Oyun stroked himself steadily, unhurriedly, letting Artemy take in the sight. Pride burned high in his yellow eyes.
As if he had won already, just by being the titanic specimen, head to toe, that he was. As if he wanted to watch Artemy realize it.
“I won’t be your pet,” Artemy said. Wouldn’t give him that satisfaction. “If that’s the only way you’ll keep me alive, better if you save both of us the trouble and kill me now.”
A sneer peeled Oyun’s lips back from his teeth. His grip on himself quickened, setting the bull-heavy balls that had beaten against Artemy’s thighs before to swaying.
“It is not for you to decide what you will be,” he informed Artemy. “You gave up that right when you failed so utterly to take up your father’s mantle. You are broken, a discarded thing that should be grateful to be spared from the refuse heap and reshaped.”
His nostrils flared, his cock flushed and hardened as he said it. Of course it would put his blood on a high boil to stand there scoffing down at Isidor’s son, beaten and bound and soon to be made his.
“Is this what you really wanted from my father?” Artemy gave the cuffs an indicative tug. “I’m sure he never felt anything but disgust for you. Do you fuck me from behind so you can try to pretend that I’m him?”
Oyun ground his teeth so that Artemy could hear the granite-millstone sound of it from where he knelt. If being killed by him, bringing his rage to such a boil that he wouldn’t be able to resist it, was the only escape Artemy could still fight for, it would still be better than this.
Better than being broken by that thing Oyun was pumping all the quicker in his fist. “You wish me to take you face-to-face?” he challenged Artemy. “Very well. I can surely make you open your mouth to sustenance where they failed.”
The implications took a second, a stroke of the shaft, to reach Artemy where he knelt. He looked from it to Oyun’s piss-yellow, hate-hungry eyes, and bolted as close as he could to standing with his hands still shackled at kneeling height.
Stooped, his head swelling with a low grey note, near-faint, with the knock it had just taken and the change in elevation. He stumbled, pressing his forehead to the pillar again, and Oyun’s hand on his shoulder shoved him back to his knees.
The space between Artemy and the pillar, tugged as taut and great as he could make it, was still a matter of inches. It couldn’t be enough for Oyun, but that didn’t stop the supposedly bull-bred Foreman from stepping over his arm and into it, filling it, so that Artemy had no choice but to hug his thighs.
To press against them, as if he were begging for what Oyun brandished just above his head. His mouth was dry with panting, with refusing the tan and the water that would have followed it, and the sweat-leather-quarried-stone smell of Oyun’s bare skin seemed to clot in it, filling that space so he could only snug his face to one thigh or the other. No slack left in his arms or the chain for him to pull back or turn away.
Oyun’s hand closed under his jaw from the side, the only way it could fit. Lifted him up, pulling him by the clench of his teeth from kneeling to a half-stoop that pressed that hot red erection against his cheek.
As long as he kept his teeth clenched, it couldn’t happen. As long as he fought, as long as he wouldn’t let this happen, wouldn’t be this-
Oyun worked a thumb into the corner of his mouth, prying his jaws open by a snarl. Artemy tried to bring his teeth down on it all the tighter, but Oyun’s other hand had snarled in his hair, pulling his head back to the point where he could only try and fail to click his teeth weakly together.
“I will teach you to behave,” Oyun said like a vow. “When you learn to properly fear punishment, you will learn as well to love the hand that doesn’t deal it out. The fear must come first.”
And it was fear, at that moment. The claustrophobia of only dark, open, uncertain, unfriendly space at his back, arms full of smothering flesh he couldn’t release. Gagging on the angle of his own throat, pulled back too far to swallow. Then forced forward, closing his eyes against the certainty that his head was about to strike something solid again-
A cough stopped short in his throat. Stopped up, he gagged again, trying to expel what came so close to blocking his airway. But the bound closeness of their bodies, and Oyun’s hand on the back of his head, made it impossible for him to push or pull away from the cock now choking him as deep as it could fit. His mouth swam with the taste of it, sweat and leather again and its own unmistakable musk. His tongue pressed helplessly against it, pushing what saliva he’d been able to muster after all from the corner of his mouth, a warm trickle down his chin.
Hindbrain inspiration told him again to bite down. Make Oyun pay for putting his dick between the teeth of someone who would still kill him if given the chance. He tried, thighs already burning with the awkward stoop that thing was keeping him in, like a hook in a fish’s mouth. He tried, but the old bastard had chosen his moment well – the base of his cock was already starting to swell, like a jack prying Artemy’s jaws wide. He couldn’t close his teeth over it as anything more than a twitch, another clogged cough. Couldn’t break the skin, much less bite down with the force it deserved.
Couldn’t spit it out. Panic squirmed madly in his chest, his jaw creaked, his head hummed above even the deepest breaths he could take. He tried again to push Oyun’s cock out with his tongue, ended up doing not much more than fondling its tip, and a flesh-warm, slick gout of semen stung the back of his throat.
His body threw itself into coughing, trying, wringing him out like bones in a dishrag. Couldn’t properly cough, couldn’t vomit, couldn’t breathe with his body trying to send everything back up the other way. Only when the back of his throat had flooded gurgling-deep did swallowing finally win out, forcing down a hard gulp of Oyun’s come for the air that came with it. More air, eyes stinging and streaming with tears, a wet, messy suck of breath through his nostrils before the next pump of semen forced him back to swallowing. Drink it all down like the tan, just so he wouldn’t drown. Try to calm his roiling stomach, to keep it there – if it did all come back up, he would choke to death on Oyun’s knot and his own vomit.
Oyun’s hand, large enough to have snapped his neck with a merciful twist, was stroking loose circles through his hair. Petting him like a well-behaved dog, while he took his punishment in place of a meal.
The tears needling his eyes did so hotter with shame. He had to swallow promptly and fully, with something almost like eagerness, if he wanted space to breathe. He had to lean into Oyun’s thighs, because his own were hot and flaccid with exhaustion, trembling too much to hold him. It was all just what survival looked like right now.
What else would survival look like, if he couldn’t convince Oyun to kill him or else take the matter into his own hands? He could stop fighting his way through to those desperate snatches of breath. He could at least try to die there, but his body insisted on swallowing its way through to air. His will, too broken to insist on living with dignity or else not broken enough yet to die, kept snatching at minutes and seconds, reminding him that this couldn’t last. Twenty minutes, half an hour – just keep breathing, and anything would end eventually.
Even if it felt more like half a lifetime. Even if his stomach was taut and nauseous by what felt like it must almost be the end, but it wasn’t, his throat was a raw, sticky passage that threatened to collapse with each swallow, but it wasn’t, his mind was a flickering brownout, not worth the precious air it would take to keep the lights on, but still, but still...
Oyun’s hands under his arms had been taking his weight for a lifetime. He hardly knew it when they lifted him free – when the gape of his mouth was suddenly slack and empty, his body wracked by a real, unblocked, hoarse and sticky cough.
When those hands released them, he fell as far as the chain would allow. His legs wouldn’t have it any other way – they folded him down half to sitting, half to hanging from the cuffs as Oyun stepped from between his arms.
He could vomit now. He tried to tell his body, tried to order it – it could force out what had been forced on it now. But it had made an uneasy peace with its meal, gurgling as it considered what it could digest from Oyun’s come for its own good.
That thought almost convinced it otherwise. He heaved dry and weakly at the floor, and fell the rest of the way to it as Oyun lowered the chain.
“Better if you eat what they bring you,” Oyun advised him from somewhere far and hazy above, a sneer bared as clearly in his voice as it would have been in teeth. “If you don’t, this will be your next meal as well. I am happy to feed you this way, but I am sure you would prefer to have milk and bread.”
#
Would it have been easier or worse if he’d had a way to count the days?
He could try to divide the number of times he’d been bathed and meals he’d been fed by two. But that assumed the silent man and woman visited him once every morning and evening, and he had no proof of that except that it seemed a reasonable thing for them to do. He had tried to ask them what day it was, what was going on outside, again and again, but they only ever spoke to him, at most, in raised brows and hands moving his body so they could clean it more easily.
He had tried to ask Oyun, even, but the answer was always the same – it wasn’t his concern anymore. All he had to do was eat, sleep, submit, and change.
Whatever end the town or the Pest had come to, it had surely come and gone. Had Dankovsky found the persuasive proof he’d ranted about? Had Clara performed her miracle? It couldn’t be a wasteland out there, surely, scoured by disease or the army’s cannon, or where would they have gotten the food they kept giving him in plenty?
He’d only made a fuss about eating once more. The result had been the same as the first time.
He tried to move however he could in whatever position they bound him, to keep his body from forgetting how, but there was no denying that he had started to lose muscle tone. His arms put up less with pulling against the chain, and his stomach seemed softer, just slightly, under a bruise that had faded to just subtle, sallow discoloration. Weeks, then? Staring at that goddamn pillar day in and out made it seem much longer, while the torchlight kept high and constant created the contrary illusion that it had all been one impossibly drawn-out day. Something Block’s troops- or Dankovsky, with a revolver and a snide comment- might still save him from.
Could he at least hope they had survived somehow? And in circumstances better than his? Chained low enough that he could only lie down or bow, as usual when he was left alone, on the sort of makeshift thin bedding that would better suit a dog than a menkhu. They changed it out now and again when they came to feed and bathe him, but it never stopped smelling like Oyun. Sweat and leather and...
He frowned. It had been long enough since they’d last drugged him that his thoughts could move under their own power, but he never felt quite clear-headed. As if his thoughts, even moving on their own, were fumbling blind at the soft walls of his mind, trying to grasp what seemed different about the smell.
More pungent, somehow. Harder to ignore. He drew in a deeper breath of it, and held it tight to his chest as those heavy, familiar footsteps echoed up the passage at his back.
He wouldn’t cringe into himself. Wouldn’t show Oyun a whipped dog’s fear. But his thoughts all froze in their fumbling, every muscle wound tight around its moorings at the sound, bearing down, of yet another time. Dozens already, it had to be, that he had yelped and squirmed on Oyun’s knot.
It started, most times, with the chain yanked up to kneeling or standing height. Kneeling this time, pulling him up into a convenient, submissive posture whether he resisted or not, so he didn’t. He saved his strength, though he couldn’t have said for what anymore.
Then came the hands. Heavy, calloused hands, grasping and roughing their way across his skin, which was going soft with gentle soap and no sunlight, no rough use aside from Oyun’s. Squeezing his arms where they had started to go softer under the skin as well, his sides, his thighs, and he did all he could to stop it, which was nothing.
Not even with Oyun’s face buried in the side of his neck. He’d tried turning on him once then, snapping and snarling like the dog he was being treated as. It had earned him a hard cuff across the temple and a reminder that, if he wanted better treatment, all he had to do was produce.
Oyun breathed deep against his neck. Artemy’s skin flushed under the heat of it, nerve endings ignorant of why this man was nothing they wanted.
Oyun lingered, longer than he normally would on that stage of the examination. Another noisy, considering breath.
One hand splayed across Artemy’s chest, while the other groped lower. Artemy still shrank from it as far as he could, but by instinct, not because he saw any way to stop it from doing as it wanted.
Oyun had never fucked him dry, even as punishment. Had never risked harming him that way, spoiling him as potential breeding stock. But his broad, blunt fingers seemed to be questing that way now, worming their way into the crack of Artemy’s ass. He tried to squirm away further still, and the pillar was there to stop him, and one of those fingers was forcing its way past his sphincter with far less pain than he would have expected. A rough stretch, but not-
He bit off a yelp as that finger dug and curled. His thighs pulled up as if tied to the tightening muscles of his stomach, but there was still no pain, so Oyun must have-
He must have taken a few spare seconds to lubricate that finger, though the hand to which it was attached hadn’t left Artemy’s body for a moment between dry groping and what it was doing now. He must have, or-
“You are slow to learn, but it seems even a stubborn young mule can be taught.” Oyun grinned against his ear. “Look at you – you play at resistance, at pride, but your body drips with need for me.”
No. Artemy couldn’t grind it out between his teeth, the taut clench of muscle from his throat to his thighs. No, his body couldn’t, wouldn’t have betrayed him that way, to their worst enemy. Oyun must have slicked his own finger, he was a clever old bastard, he could have found a moment for it. This was just the latest way he had found to torment Artemy, making him think the war he’d never had a chance of winning was already lost.
But that finger curled in again, striking his nerves like flint, and he could feel how his body betrayed him to answer it. From a low, thorough clench in his gut, like a cramp calling on each muscle in turn, to more of the warm wetness that had already been oozing around Oyun’s finger.
Exuding from, trickling out from Artemy’s body. A feeling almost like incontinence, messy and shameful and gathering slick in the crack of his ass. He tried to draw breath for some flavour of damn you, and nearly clipped his tongue with his teeth as Oyun continued ransacking him. Digging at that point of nerve-twitch sensitivity in him, which had never felt so raw, tied by such short cords to every reaction, a leg kicking out and a helpless yelp. He had never felt-
He had felt that cramping, though, hadn’t he? An uneasiness in his gut for an unmarked amount of time, intermittent and surly. If he’d thought anything of it, it was that the rich diet and mostly-immobile lifestyle were starting to disagree with him more stridently. Just a few minutes ago, he’d been thinking about the smell of Oyun-
His chin clipped the pillar as he kicked away the last of his balance. His cheek, chest pressed to it, his fingers curled to claws against it, scratching helplessly as Oyun stretched him around a second finger.
There was nothing but noise after that. Kicking and clawing and the sounds he couldn’t help making with each breath, broken bits of yelp and wail. Nothing but that gaping intrusion, its movement, and those it forced from him. Orgasm was just another throe – he only knew it had happened by how the will and air started draining from his struggles afterwards. He half-lay in messy embrace of the pillar, his forehead scraped raw again where he had fought it and lost. His leg tugged feebly up into a last twitch as Oyun pulled his fingers free.
And wiped them, wet almost to dripping, against Artemy’s side. “You should rejoice,” he said. “There is still a reason for you to be alive.”
And with just that, he left Artemy there. Still chained so he couldn’t slump properly to the floor, panting back the breath he had lost, air that smelled of more than it had even a day or two before.
Still wet down the back of his thighs, and cramping in warm, slow waves, like a second heart starting to beat inside of him.
#
Once he had caught his breath and hauled himself back to his knees, Artemy started, for the first time in what could have been days or weeks, to struggle in earnest.
He’d been sure he would fail to give Oyun what he wanted in the end. And it would be a miserable last failure, it would make those days or weeks nothing but a protracted death, but compared to a possible lifetime spent serving the Foreman as a ready womb...
He’d been sure he didn’t have anything like those parts waiting dormant in him. An ordinary man might and not know it, but he’d spent years honing his knowledge of the body. He should have sensed it somehow.
Before this, somehow, this dull, surly, unmistakable ache in his gut. It didn’t keep a heart’s regular time, but twinged with his movement and just often enough, when he stopped for breath, to keep him from forgetting it. Woken by Oyun’s touch, it seemed, the way the smell of seared meat woke hunger.
If Oyun actually got what he wanted out of that mad scheme...
Why couldn’t Artemy convince himself it would be better to die than to let that happen? He could have cracked his head against the pillar at any time, put a stop to it all. Was it really heroic determination that had kept him hoping for a better outcome?
Could he even call it naive optimism? Or was he really just so afraid of dying that life as Oyun’s broodmare was a more attractive prospect?
He sank back against the pillar when his flagging stamina gave him no other choice. So long since he’d been able to look squarely at anything but it. Since he’d smelled fresh air or seen the sun. If Oyun got what he wanted, would he let him go outside?
The thought was so pathetically hopeful, Artemy had to struggle for a minute longer just to prove to himself he hadn’t sunk that low.
That twinge in his gut stopped him before his flagging breath could. An organ coming out of dormancy for the first time in decades would feel that way, weak and clumsy, at first, in its connections with the rest of the body. The air he gasped at still smelled of sweat and leather, living cattle and blood, but there was a pungency, an intricacy, underneath that he had no words for. No alpha or omega had ever seemed satisfied with how they tried to describe it to him.
His eyes stung. He could have tried to blame it on whatever hormonal outrage his body was surely in the throes of. But it was time to stop lying to himself, wasn’t it?
His eyes stung because it was time to stop lying to himself. Time to stop hoping. That ache low in his gut was a womb his body had just never had the incentive to use, and if it was as healthy and active as it felt, properly attached to his senses and that trickling down his thighs, he knew exactly what it was going to do to him soon.
Back in university, he’d always tried to ignore the sounds from the rooms set aside for students in heat. Alley-cat wails and sobbing, begging, sometimes, begging through the walls for someone to do what would make it stop. He’d known the voices, sometimes, but not how the frantic things in the rooms used them. Like wild animals with the voices of his fellow students and friends. If it overcame him, broke him that completely...
He wouldn’t beg. Call it heroic determination, naive optimism, but he wouldn’t. It couldn’t change him enough to make him beg for what Oyun would do to him either way.
He wouldn’t. He knelt repeating it to himself, gripping the pillar like an altar to pray to, while his eyes stung and his lungs soaked themselves again and again in that intimate scent and his heart kept beating the hapless, steady drum of change.
#
They came and cleaned and fed him as always, without comment. But with one difference – the tan tasted sweet all the way through, and his mind stayed unmuddled after drinking it.
Maybe they had decided the damage was done. Maybe they expected that what was happening to him would keep him under more than enough control.
An unmarked, unmuddled amount of time later, they came back and did it again. And that, too, was new – there had never been two of their visits without at least one of Oyun’s in between. If they came twice a day, so did he, at least. More, sometimes, on the days when he seemed especially, viciously energetic.
Artemy didn’t ask them what was keeping the Foreman. Wouldn’t. Even if he’d had any hope they would answer him, he wouldn’t admit to missing those visits. He didn’t.
He didn’t. It just left a hell of a lot of time silent and empty between meals, and staying still was difficult when his insides wouldn’t do so. Low, insistent cramps, all the time now, and always more of that slick, which they wiped away without a word.
He stood as still as he could, aside from how they moved him to make him easier to clean. The soft heat of their cloths slithered hypnotically across his skin, raising his nerves like spring grass to rain. There was a raw feeling to it, not painful, but so sensitive to touch, he almost expected their perfunctory handling of his limbs to leave bruises.
His nose stung, so sensitive as well, with the cakey sweetness of the soap. It clung to his skin, crowded, baffled, but couldn’t overpower the lingering scent of Oyun. That still filled all the space and breath the sweetness couldn’t.
Of course he knew all this was something to resist. This was his body marching with purpose towards their mutual downfall, but he couldn’t turn off his senses. Couldn’t tune out the silky sensitivity of his skin. Couldn’t will the blood out of his cock, which had started to swell and rise, surrounded and teased as it was by heat and hands.
Though its interest felt halfhearted compared to the hot, wriggling impatience that challenged his will to stay still. That damned wetness filling the crack of his ass again, when they had only just finished cleaning it. He stared straight ahead at the pillar, trying his best to breathe as if none of it were happening.
They acted that way, at least. As if nothing had changed, chaining him low and packing up their buckets to leave. He’d been too distracted by the effort of playing at normalcy to even think of fighting to stay on his feet.
This had to be how it started. If he’d still been a student, he would have been handing himself over to the eternally bored-looking monitor who watched over those locked rooms.
Yet still, even with his new commitment to the truth, he couldn’t bring himself to name what it was he’d become. Couldn’t accept that he’d been dragged to a place he might not be able to come back from. He’d never heard of this sort of metamorphosis being reversed, but that didn’t mean it was impossible.
He could still be just a beta with a problem. The same way Dankovsky could still be rallying the troops at that moment to save him.
He chuckled bitterly against the bedroll. And time passed, and still Oyun didn’t come.
#
Though Artemy dreamed he had. Hot breath and hands prying him open, his body soft and pliable and parting willingly. He woke slick with sweat and worse, hot as fever and sore to the pit of his stomach.
Not sick – better if he’d felt sick. This felt like smothering in his own skin, like the real him was some frantic tangle of blood and nerves inside it. Something a pair of strong hands could tear free.
If only they’d left him the use of his. Being in flames that way and unable to touch it, to even try to put himself out, was torturous. It was torture, it had to be, leaving him to lie lucid and ruined that way. How long had it been? Days? He could guess how torture like that would end, but he wouldn’t hope for it.
He wouldn’t.
#
“Where is Oyun?”
But he did ask. The next time they came to feed and bathe him, and tried like hell not to sound plaintive about it.
Not that it mattered. He could have sobbed and begged and their reaction would have been the same – a raised brow, then on with their work. He tried to absorb all he could of their touch, to find some satiation in it, but it wasn’t enough, of course.
#
It couldn’t touch what was twisting so desperately inside of him. He tried, wrestled with his shackles not for freedom, for once, but his hands stayed locked to cold stone, warm only where they clung, while the rest of him writhed with heat.
It didn’t hurt. But it was something so much like pain, neither his mind nor nerves could tell the difference. The single-minded need for it to end was the same, something, please, douse it, kill it, before it could kill him.
He pulled himself up against the pillar, as close to kneeling as he could. Panting, smelling soap over his own sick, needful scent and hardly Oyun at all now, he pressed himself to the stone, all of himself he could. Trying, just, fuck, trying to chafe it away, to reach it at all, rubbing himself against the pillar because there needed to be something on his skin and there was nothing else-
But his skin wasn’t the problem, of course. That burned inside of him, pulling him into cramps like compressing the bellows of a forge. Rutting against the pillar was just friction, more heat, more pointless struggle, failing to reach relief the way he had failed at everything else.
Sweat ran between him and the stone. Skin long since worn raw and scabbed and healed on his wrists rubbed through to the nerves again. He clenched his teeth, and it might not have been just sweat running down his cheeks, and he tried...
His burnt-out thighs dropped him in frustration long before the wailing in his mind could grow hoarse. He collapsed against the pillar, not rutting clumsily, but in a sob that echoing, trembling, past the reach of the torchlight.
It had to stop. It would kill him if it didn’t, somehow. He would unravel, he would find some way to break, in mind if not in body. Jam whatever cogs turned his thoughts, just so he wouldn’t have to be aware of this piteous, writhing need wearing his skin.
He heaved out a moan from the pit of his stomach. It came closer to touching the twisting inside than his attack on the pillar had, so he did it again, putting every shred of air and muscle into the sound.
The same sort of sound he’d heard muffled through dormitory walls. He was vocalizing like an omega, and he knew it, and knowing it didn’t give him the power to stop. He was flooded above the level of his will and reason, and this was the only thing that had provided even a trickle of release.
He drew breath to open the floodgates again, and the sound of heavy footsteps moved behind him.
A chill ransacked his skin. He held himself utterly still, not so much as panting, even as his head started to hum and his limbs tightened with an eagerness to turn him over, as far as he could, to see who he knew to be behind him.
He closed his eyes, ransacking himself differently, desperately, for anything left like will. For anything but aching relief.
The chain rattled. His legs fell into place under him, clumsy and automatic, bracing him like a newborn calf as Oyun bound him to stand.
The slick that had gathered warm in the crack of his ass seeped down the back of his thighs. Being hauled upright had jarred his breath loose, and he could smell him, smell Oyun again, so close, laced around the pillar and his own rank, maddening need.
Trying to hold his breath again only broke it into gasps, teetering on the edge of hyperventilation. Everything he’d held tight started to tremble.
Oyun circled behind him. Without a word, but the sheer weight of his presence was practically a shout.
“Don’t,” Artemy wheezed, almost inaudible beneath it. “Don’t you dare.”
If Oyun had set him free at that moment, he might not have been able to put up more of a fight than that. Everything that had been smothered and struggling in his skin felt on the verge of melting now, trembling, semi-liquid with anticipation. His voice was the only part of it he could still wield, and even it was weak, wavering over those heady breaths.
Oyun laid a hand on his shoulder and let gravity lead it down to his hip. A shudder chased it under Artemy’s skin.
Don’t. The word was clenched between his teeth, too tight for him to pry it free. Oyun’s hand turned to cup one side of his ass, and his vision started to grey out around the edges of a breath finally caught and held.
In anticipation. He couldn’t pretend it wasn’t. All he could do was press his forehead to the pillar and at least not beg for it to happen faster.
And even that was almost too much of a trial when Oyun’s familiar girth nudged against him. He gripped the pillar by his fingernails, so single-mindedly intent on not thrusting his ass out to meet the touch and beg for more, he forgot to keep his voice in check when more came.
When Oyun’s cock slid into him, overlarge as ever, but the way was slick and warm and welcoming for it. A sob of nothing but relief wrenched itself from Artemy’s lungs.
That emptiness was what his body had been going to pieces over. He knew it only then, in that moment when it was finally filled. Like a half-made tincture, churning bitter and poisonous until some tempering agent was poured in to cool and calm it. In that moment, he was nothing but finally complete.
Then Oyun took steadying hold of his shoulders, and he remembered who it was who was filling him, and why. Horror tried to rise in him, churning disgust, but Oyun’s next thrust drove it up to a whimper, like the breaking of a fever.
A thrill crawling electric through the clench of his gut, up to effervesce in his lungs. His head lolled with it, his gaze ceilingward as everything that had been writhing and raving with hunger in him began to transmute into sweet, pure heat.
Never, in anyone’s arms, had he felt his entire being click into place that way. Aligned and transfigured and whole, and if a rational horror in the back of his mind still knew it all to be wrong, it was a shout lost in the roaring celestial wreckage of a thunderstorm. He rocked against the pillar, washed back and forth in the storm’s tropic-sweet throes, warm in Oyun’s breath on his shoulder.
He had only a dizzy second to be confused by Oyun’s mouth closing over his shoulder. Snug at the base of his neck, wet heat, blunt teeth, before those teeth closed with blunt force enough to break the skin and rip a wail from him.
His fingernails cracked and frayed against the pillar. The pain beat over him like a hammer’s blows against a bruise, Oyun’s growl thrummed directly into muscle, and the fullness that had already been pillaging Artemy like heaven’s own army became even more so, swelling to take up even the space he hadn’t had to give.
He was still wailing. Or the echo was still crashing in around him, his hands bloody and wild against the pillar, as that scarring, violating pain and Oyun’s knot filling him solid pushed him over the peak into a climax made all of claws on stone and clenched teeth and hot, writhing, senseless animal flesh.
He came down from it like waking from a faint. His forehead rested against the pillar, the rest of his body in Oyun’s embrace. Blood trickled down into the seam where Oyun’s arm crossed his chest, and the steady, tautening flood of Oyun’s come pumped into him where they were knotted tight together below.
He hung against Oyun’s arms like a shattered limb in a sling. The implications of what had just happened, was still happening, drifted somewhere far above the sweet haze in his head.
Oyun slid a hand down, slick with blood, everything was, to stroke circles around Artemy’s stomach. An ever-evolving spiral of blood; Artemy’s gaze hung down towards it, dully entranced.
“Soon, you will be fat with my child,” Oyun gloated. “It might be almost as blissful for you as this.”
Those implications settled slowly, cold on Artemy through the haze. He had lost. He had from the start, really, but this was the killing blow. Nothing he could say would deflect it. Nothing he could do.
“I will keep you well now,” Oyun assured him, with a victor’s smug, easy magnanimity. “Not as a broken, failed usurper, but a good dam of the Kin. If you prove yourself obedient, I may even let you live freely among them.”
How broken would he have to be before Oyun allowed him that sort of freedom? Among the Kin...somehow, then, at least some of them had survived. More than the taciturn two he’d seen. He’d hoped, he’d thought it had to be so, given the supplies they kept bringing him, but...
“What about the town?” he asked, a hoarse, tiny echo of old purpose.
Oyun’s chuckle was warm and excruciating against his bitten shoulder.
“It will never be your concern again. Your purpose is here. Can’t you feel it filling you as we speak?”
He could, and would have been sick if that could have rid him of it. He would have. Never mind that his body had remembered how to relax for the first time in days, gone limp with it, or-
He gasped up onto his toes as Oyun pinched at his hip. Bringing himself closer to those bloodstained teeth, a nip at his ear, and his thoughts, which had been just starting to harden into shame, went liquid again. He floated on them, on Oyun’s touch, until the man who had murdered his father had filled him taut to aching in a different, sated way and finally, with a grunt, withdrew from him.
Oyun’s come first trickled, then practically poured down the back of his legs. His stomach pinched with something like desperation, losing that full feeling all at once, and the truth fell cold on him again. This wasn’t any kind of ending. He was still in heat, and would be, however many times he submitted himself to Oyun, until his body decided on its own that it had had its fill.
Long after the damage was done, most likely. He tried to picture himself the way Oyun wanted, and the image came with sickening ease.
The rattle of chain roused him from it. Oyun was reaching around him again, this time to take hold of the cuff around his right wrist.
For all it had helped ruin his life, whatever buckle or clasp held it in place must have been simple. It fell away practically at Oyun’s touch, to reveal the rough, reddish ring of skin it had chafed away for all those weeks.
Should Artemy have fought? Could he have? The possibility paralyzed him, and Oyun was still looming over him, around him, reaching to release the other cuff. This time, to replace it with the encompassing, potentially shattering grip of his hand.
“We will set this right,” he said. “We will soothe and mend it, so that you are soft and unmarked. You will forget this time soon.”
And he pressed an unlikely kiss, untrustworthy tenderness, to Artemy’s temple. Just the way he had said it would be – an omega deserved tenderness, as long as they remembered their place.
Artemy’s shoulders sank as the name settled on them. He didn’t struggle against Oyun’s grip – he’d had no chance against this man when he’d been armed and strong and fighting for his town. Naked and unsteady with weeks of muscle atrophy, with half his will still trying to melt into the Foreman’s arms, what could he hope to do aside from earn himself another bruise?
He would have to wait. Bide his time, watch for his moment, he told himself, but it didn’t feel like the truth.
Oyun’s grip did, leading him away from the pillar at last. Still looming behind him, herding him gently towards one of the firelit passages and nothing like freedom. He could tell himself he was just waiting for the Foreman to slip up, to give him a chance to strike back, but it felt far more like he was letting go of his own grip, slowly, finally, on what he had always thought his story would be.