Imperius Ch. 02

Authors note: Thank you so much for all of the wonderful feedback on the first installment. It was extremely motivating. This chapter is going to involve more world building and elaboration of the political intrigue of the setting.

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Lilah awoke with the unmistakeable sense of being watched. Her lashes fluttered open, and there he was. He sat in the corner of the room, a slender electronic tablet in hand as though he had been in the midst of reading. But when her eyes met his, he stared back at her fixedly, and she felt certain he had been doing so for a while.

There was something of the surreal in the silence of that moment. Like standing in an empty city street during midday, or seeing a cat staring from the shadows with an inexplicable, unearthly intensity. She felt an impermeable stillness, as though her muscles had forgotten the feeling of movement. She knew it must be past dawn, yet the room was cast in shadow. The view screen that had looked out on the Imperial encampment the night before was dimmed now, revealing nothing of the sky beyond, or of the rolling, moss green Illythian hills.

He lowered the tablet onto his knee, and with that motion, broke the spell.

She moved her arms, the chains he had linked through the bars of the headboard clinking. He rose in one fluid motion and approached her. She attempted to maneuver to give him space when he sat on the bed beside her, but he seemed more interesting in closing the distance between them. "I regret the necessity of these," he said, his hand touching the chain and then her hand. "How do you feel?" he asked.

"I'm shackled to a bed, with a collar around my neck." She replied, her temper flaring somewhere deep and unexpected within her, "I've been better."

His phantom smile flickered across his face, "Far from the worst outcome for someone in your predicament. Many slaves find themselves sleeping in small cells, or mobile cages. You are a slave now, Lilah. My slave. Your body, your life, everything you are belongs to me. But I don't intend to mistreat or abuse you, Lilah, unless you force my hand. You must learn obedience, for your own sake as much as anything else. Do you understand?"

She met his gaze, and nodded reluctantly.

His hand found her throat, his thumb slowly, sensuously stroking her skin.

"Say it, Lilah," he murmured. "Tell me you belong to me." His grip tightened a fraction of a degree, "Now."

Her eyes dilated. She stared, transfixed by his eyes. For an instant, she seemed paralyzed on the threshold of indecision. Then, teeth slightly clenched, she said, "I'm yours."

He smiled, the softness of the expression not at all reassuring. "Someday, I'll hear you say that, and mean it," he said.

"In the meanwhile," he added, glancing downwards, "I'm content to make you say it in other ways." He lowered down, his hands running along her skin until his face was at her waist level. His lips touched the skin below her below button, and traced a path still lower.

All the while his eyes still gazed upwards, absorbing her dawning comprehension and near panic. "Wait, wait!" she said.

"You're so fond of that word," he remarked, sounding amused as he continued downward. Her legs closed instinctively as he did, but he merely shoved them back open. He began kissing the flesh of her inner thigh, tracing teasing little circles with his lips.

When she felt his tongue touch her most sensitive flesh, her back arched immediately and desperately. Her impulse was to writhe away, but he pinned her hips beneath him. "Stop fluttering, little dove," he admonished, and she felt her cheeks turn deeply pink as he watched her, relish in his eyes.

His hands holding her hips, he sampled her, his tongue brushing her petals. She gasped, breathless, wracked with unwanted pleasure. Her cries only invigorated his exploration, and the insistence of it. "You taste as sweet as you look, Lilah, and you're dripping for me," he told her, brushing his teeth against one of her lips. She struggled to bite back a whimper, and pressed her eyes shut. "Let's see how much more I can coax you into revealing," he said, and lowered his head again.

This time he didn't just taste: he devoured. He found the little nub within her and flicked at it feverishly with his tongue until her cries grew and grew like rising music. She was screaming and writhing in every way he wanted and her taste was like nectar on his lips. Her hips longed to rise with the rhythm of her pleasure, but he held her in place, his fingers digging into the lusciously soft flesh of her thighs until he felt her convulse, engulfed by her own euphoria. Heavenly wetness poured into his mouth, bathing his tongue like fine wine.

When she fell, dazed, back into the softness of the bed, he rose up to her and yanked his pants open, the iron stiffness of his cock mercifully free, and drove it into her. She gasped, torn from her euphoric languor. He could feel the contractions of her cunt, still reeling from orgasm as he pumped himself into her. He lifted her legs up, resting them against his shoulders and brought his face to hers, then buried his cock to it's hilt. She could barely catch her breath as she felt him ravage her, but the little sounds she made were splendor itself, as was the warm, wet tightness squeezing his cock.

Lilah felt his cock pierce her over and over, at what felt like an inhuman speed. She cried out in pain, pleasure, virtually indistinguishable in the moment.

He bit her lip just as he came, and felt her cry vibrate through him. He gushed into her, arching back with blinding pleasure of it. Then he lowered onto her, his face in her shoulder, luxuriating in the feeling of her beneath him.

Lilah could feel him still inside of her, softer now. She felt like she were made of liquid, the ripples of her pleasure still vibrating through her. His weight pinned her beneath him. It should have been overwhelming perhaps, but there was a strange comfort in it. In being so near to another person, after the fear and pain of the past several days. It was nearly a week since she had been captured by the enemy, along with so many others of the force that had once been the Illythian military, now fragmented into so many isolated, fleeing cells. She and the other captives had been stripped, washed with hoses, and given little more than scraps of fabric to wear. They had been transported in cages. Never before then had she mere longed for home, for her own bed, for her family, for her life as it had been.

There was a sudden, mad temptation to wrap her arms about his neck and succumb to tears.

But her pride rose up in her chest, and the resentment, the anger at what he was, filling her with shame for the impulse. A conqueror of her people, and a slaver—Her master, or so he instructed her to resign herself to—and she'd nearly allowed herself to cling to him for comfort.

She had been serving as a medic for the Illythian military through three long years of an impossible war, against an impossible enemy. The Imperius, a collection of city states had formed into a complex, growing empire with a regulated caste system. A caste system under which she was now identified as a slave, like all of their prisoners of war.

It wasn't permanent, as it was often rationalized by its supporters and apologists. No nation had endorsed inescapable slavery since long before the last great war, when the bombs shattered the world. It had taken centuries for civilizations to take real hold again, and when it did, it existed in a strange limbo between technological advancement and fixed agrarianism. Only in the past one hundred years had cities begun to rise to anything like their previous populations—had human dominance re-asserted itself on the landscape.

The capital city of the Imperius was one such place and the slaves there were permitted, even encouraged, to earn their freedom. Those who managed it—and proved their loyalty to the Imperius in the process—were held up as shining examples of exceptionalism, of everything Imperial citizens ought to be. In this way, they managed to present the Imperius as the perfect meritocracy, and the slavery within as a kind of apprenticeship into developing as a citizen. It was a testament to the efficiency of the imperial system that most former slaves did embrace their role as citizens. Not that they had much choice, since having been a slave in the first place generally meant their homes had been annihilated by the Imperius.

And Illythiel is next, Lilah thought, still looking towards her shackles in the headboard. The remaining free nations had sent them rations, troops, and weapons, in the hope that Illythiel could endure as a bastion against the Imperial onslaught. They had failed. And here she was, chained to the bed of an enemy general. A Praetor of the Imperius.

"...comfortable?" came his voice, penetrating her distraction. She hadn't caught much of what he said in her reverie. His was not a gaze she could hold for very long without her mind going numb. His eyes were storm dark, grey and deep as a fog drenched sky.

He lifted his head, treating himself to a long, languid kiss.

"Lilah," he breathed, his hand burying into her hair.

"How did you learn my name?" she asked with the tone of one trying to change the subject, finally meeting his gaze as she did so.

With a smile, he began to unlock her shackles for her. She moved to rub at her sore wrists but he claimed the task for himself, massaging each of them in turn, "I surely seemed uncomprehending at the time, but I recall a great deal of what was said around me during my warfront recuperation."

"I barely said anything," she replied.

He chuckled, and brought her inner wrist to his lips, kissing softly. Rebellious shivers raced along her skin.

"Your every word and expression tell me plenitudes about you, little dove. The way your eyes move when I touch you, wondering what I'll do next. The way your lashes lower when you let yourself enjoy it." He kissed her wrist once more, his breath tickling the skin. He watched her reaction with the unrelenting intensity she couldn't imagine ever growing used to. "Your accent alone is enough to tell me you're from the eastern coast of Illythiel—most probably one of the islands. Your hands tell me quite a lot as well. The fingers on your right bear the marks of a violinist, a strong enough impression in the flesh to indicate years of practice, but probably not professional application. And here-" He caressed a place at the base of the ring finger on her left hand, where the gradient of her skin lightened by a degree. "You've been engaged, but never married."

You wore it around your neck when I first saw you. A remarkably fine stone, it so happened," he arched a brow at her curiously, "a pale sapphire set in silver."

"You gathered all that while bleeding to death?" she asked, "Most men would be more preoccupied with trying to stay alive."

"Either I was going to survive or I wasn't. Nothing I could have done then would have changed that fact. All I knew was that if I did survive, I was going to find you."

Her throat suddenly felt uncomfortably dry and tight."You've been searching for me?"

He smiled dryly. "I instructed every loyal officer at my disposal to scour the enemy ranks for you. Nearly a year of searching...only to have someone else deliver you to my doorstep."

"The man you were walking with through the encampment."

"You noticed." He cupped her chin, lifting her eyes to his. "Dare I imagine you are as aware of me as I am of you?"

"The same way I'd be aware of a wolf circling me."

His eyes glittered with amusement. "Vero is unusually cunning. A clever man amongst simpletons. It will be a shame if I ever have to kill him."

before she could formulate a response to that startling pronouncement, he changed the subject. "Did Vero take it from you when you were caught? Your ring? Such items are usually kept with captive documentation."

"They didn't find it," she replied, her voice firm, "It's hidden away so they never will."

His hand found her hair, toying with the sunlight colored curls. "Your fiancé. Who was he?"

"He's dead," she said, staring at the view screen, "Please don't ask me."

"I could make you tell me," he replied, his tone mild.

She pushed then, with all her might, trying to wriggle away from his hold. A smile ghosted across his lips as he watched her attempt to move him. He let her go, watched her pace to another side of the room. "Please don't," she said again, quietly. The silence stretched between them and Lilah crossed her arms, warming herself with her hands.

She felt him approach, and stand behind her. "I saved your life," she said, barely aware she had planned to say it before the words were out of her mouth. "I didn't just help you. I saved you. This—what you've done." She inhaled, and the sound shivered with tremulous conviction. "This is wrong."

She felt his hands on hers, encircling her, and resisted the impulse to pull away. He stroked her arms gently, soothingly, turning her around to face him, and cradling her against his chest. "I know...I know," he murmured. There was something approaching apology in his voice, and she was draw to it like a moth to flame. The longing for comfort tempted her again, lowering her defenses. He lifted her chin again, and traced a finger over her cheek. "I don't care," he said, and kissed her.