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“This would be the right time to ask,” he says, expression playful, for he holds a winning hand, one I do not know how to counter.
“Ask what?” My scattered mind sinks toward outright panic. I shake my head, trying to rouse myself.
He smirks. “The price for me to keep your secret.”
My lips tremble as I acknowledge that I’m standing on the precipice of a very slippery slope. “What is the price?”
“You,” he says—the noose tightens. “In any way I want.”
A passing orc guard sees us and barks orders to Trent.
Trent sneers at me before he strides away. “Be seeing to you later, lass,” he calls over his shoulder.
I sag against the wall. I have been given a respite, but he will be back. Somehow, I continue on to the seamstress and exchange my mending. But my mind is whirling with all that Trent has just said and what might happen next.
I could tell Doug, but then what? We will never be safe from Trent unless he were gone. I swallow. Dead. Would Doug do that? Kill a man? If he thought the threat serious, he might. He has killed before.
How do I even feel about that? Horrified, for certain, and yet that look in Trent’s eyes tells me he well enjoyed wielding his power and will not let this go.
I don’t want to be responsible for a man’s death.
But I also don’t want Trent’s hands upon me.
Doug killed a man who raped a woman, and she was not even his mate. My heart tells me he will not stand by.
Only I can’t be sure what would happen to him. Would Doug be punished? Whipped?
Would he be sent away?
And what if Trent has told someone else? What if others are part of his game, waiting to step in should Trent fall?
The possibilities are endless, and harrowing. Every one of them fills me with dread.
I don’t know what to do. I should talk to Doug, but I’m also afraid. Common sense tells me Trent will hold this over me forever and a day. He wants me. He will use me. And, even if I accede to his demands, one day, if it suits him, he is like enough to betray me anyway.
And what of me and Doug? What of those moments of happiness that I find in his arms? I cannot bear the thought of another touching me; not when I have my white orc who is a prince in both ways and deeds.
It is now, when I am on the precipice of this looming disaster, that I acknowledge that I love Doug: that I would do anything to save him from a whipping; that the thought of him being taken away or, worse, hung for protecting me, is more than I can bear.
ChapterFour
Doug
All my life, people have had a misconception that I’m stupid because I cannot talk. For much of my childhood, I suffered abuse because of my differences in not talking, in being white, in being the bastard of an alpha shifter. It is survival of the fittest among the Blighten, but especially for an orc abandoned by his mother. The surgeon, a cruel and wicked orc, was given too much power and leeway to subject children to torture under the guise of purging them of imaginary ailments. The sick bastard thought I would talk and turn a natural orc color if only he could cut my knot from me.
I enjoyed feeding him his own cock and watching his eyes bulge as he choked on it. I consider it a blessing to the many abandoned whelps he still had access to at the time.
Despite being white and a half-shifter bastard, I’ve every reason to believe I could have risen through the ranks of the Blighten were I not mute. It is the way of the world. I’m not bitter about it. I’m a simple male with simple needs. That they have allowed me to claim Jasmine as my bond mate has been the source of my greatest joy.
Yet, through Jasmine, I see the Blighten and their ways through increasingly jaundiced eyes. When she speaks, as she does on occasion, of her past life, it is of somewhere wondrous and free from the monstrous control.
Where once I existed to do my master’s bidding without question, now I wonder whether there is a better way to live.
Humans are tricky and quarrelsome, but they are tenacious and loving. As I would know now I’m intimately acquainted with one who is obsessed with my cock, and who I’m already making concessions for because my greatest joy is to make her happy.
She has seen my scars, and she did not run screaming—she even kissed me there.
But it is not Jasmine or her mischief regarding my cock that occupies my mind as I enter the barracks, where we are called for a meeting to discuss the day’s orders. It is on the slimy bastard Trent, who has grown increasingly full of his own importance and who is rumored to be given his freedom soon.
