The Duke's third son is handsome and charming, with striking grey eyes and a warm smile. His name is Prince Vir and the first time he stops her in the hallway to tell her she's beautiful, she thinks nothing of it, because he's well-known to have a habit of flirting with the staff and no one's ever rumoured it to be the dangerous kind.

"Flattery will get you nowhere, my lord," she says with a flash of a smile, and she keeps right on walking; the scroll tucked under her arm needs to be finished by morning and she doesn't have the time to indulge a nobleman's idle flirtation.

It's the second time, when he asks her name, that she starts to worry.

"...Nema, my lord," she says uncomfortably. "If you'll excuse me..."

He does let her go, with a smile, and only a moment's delay.

The third time, as they say, is the charm.

He stops her in the hallway, physically blocking her path. He holds out a jeweled necklace that she couldn't buy with a year's wages. Sapphires sparkle in the lamplight.

"Please, accept this gift," he says. His smile is fainter than usual; there is a hunger in his eyes. "I think it a fitting match for your resplendence."

"...I... my lord, I really couldn't," she says, half-consciously taking a step back. "It's—too much."

"I think of you all the time," he says in a low, urgent voice, stepping forward and making a small impatient gesture that sends the necklace spinning where it dangles from his hand. "You're the most beautiful woman I've ever met. I looked up your work, after I asked your name. You're such a gifted artist, it's a shame to waste you on prettying up the proclamations. I want to be your patron. I want—"

He cuts himself off before admitting to what else he wants. Sex? She doesn't doubt it. Marriage? ...not impossible, from the way he looks at her.

Does she want that?

Does she have a choice?

She feigns shyness, leaning on her real fear and uncertainty. "This is... very sudden, my lord," she says honestly. "If you please... may I have some time to think on it?"

He presses the necklace into her hand, closes her fingers around it. She laughs awkwardly and shakes her head. "My lord, I'm afraid that if I wear this, someone will think I've stolen it."

"I'll protect you," he declares passionately.

Oh dear.

The real trouble here is, this could be a very good deal indeed. Or it could be the end of her life as she knows it. Rumour has it he's always very sweet to the girls he flirts with, but rumour has not heard of him cornering them in the corridors and physically forcing them to accept wildly inappropriate gifts, so rumour has some gaps and they are not gaps she's comfortable walking into unguarded.

"...I'll keep it in my jewelry box," she concedes at last, "if you insist. If... if I decide to accept your patronage... then I suppose I won't mind wearing it openly."

His hands are still closed around hers. She trembles slightly as he raises them. His lips brush her knuckles and she flinches, and he squeezes her hands very tightly before he lets go. It feels like the necklace's delicate silver chain is permanently imprinted on her palms.

"I'll hold you to that," he says, regaining a little of his usual charming smile, despite the fact that she really hasn't promised him anything.

In the end, it's that last ill omen that tips the balance. If he starts out by holding her to imaginary agreements constructed on the thinnest of pretexts, with vague terms and no hint of recourse, where exactly will he end up?

She hesitates. She paces, that evening in her small apartment, fidgeting with the crumbs of her dinner roll until nothing remains of it but a fine dust of bread particles spread across her floor.

But the next morning, she walks briskly to the palace and immediately quits her job.

"You can't just do that!" the Archivist exclaims, throwing up his hands. "We need you! Very badly!"

"I'm caught up on all my work, and I'm not asking your permission," she says. "I quit. I'm leaving. Good luck without me."

"Why?!"

She shakes her head. "Personal business," she says firmly. "Goodbye."

He's still wailing as she turns and walks briskly back home again. She almost fancies she can hear him from her apartment.

The trouble is, quitting her job may be simple, but leaving the city is much less so. Oh, she could strike out into the wilderness by herself—but things get rapidly out of hand once you exit the ring of pastures and get out into the real wilds. Running away from her comfortable life under threat of nice comfortable thinly veiled enslavement to an infatuated prince, only to get thrown in the back of a wagon by common slavers, does not sound like her idea of a successful escape.

It takes her until late that evening to finish pawning everything she can't take with her, settling up on her rent, and packing for a long journey. Along the way she checks the docks for any boat with a spare berth and the market quarter for caravans, but the pickings are thin and she suspects half the people she inquires with think she's on the run from the law. She sleeps uneasily that night, hoping to find better prospects in the morning.

In the morning, she wakes to the first rays of sunshine peeking through her window, and Prince Vir standing threateningly over her bed.

"You tried to run," he snarls, and she leaps out of bed and bolts past him, aiming her blanket for the vicinity of his head as she throws it off. Naked as the day she was born and not caring in the slightest, she whirls down the narrow stair faster than she ever has in her life.

There's a ducal guard at the bottom, looking bored and confused. Her sudden appearance visibly startles him, and she takes advantage of this to bowl him over and keep going straight out the back door.

...where there are three more guards—what did he tell them?!—and these ones, alerted by their compatriot's baffled hollering ("She's getting naked! —away, I mean, she's getting away!"), are ready for her. She does her best to dodge past and her best is not enough.

The guards tie her ankles together and her hands behind her back, lift her bodily off the ground, and haul her back up the stairs like the world's most awkward piece of furniture. Prince Vir is waiting in her room. He seems to be... breathing hard? That can't be good.

"You leave me no choice," he says, and it's almost like he's talking more to himself than her. "I should have known. I should have—" He shakes his head sharply, cutting off the words. An imperious gesture to the guards has them scattering the contents of her neatly packed bags all over the floor, until they find the necklace.

Oh. So that's what he told them.

She starts laughing, soft and breathless and more than slightly crazed. The prince frowns at her, disturbed, then shakes his head again and stoops down to gather the tangled silver chains into his hand.

"Take her back to the palace," he says tiredly.

Nema has to bite her tongue to still her awful laughter. The guards pick up her discarded blanket to drape over her; one of them, awkwardly, tries to get a dress over her head, but without untying her hands it ends up bunched around her shoulders with the skirt hanging awkwardly and not at all decently to mid-thigh. She thinks of asking for her hands free so she can get dressed, then thinks better of it. After nearly letting her get away once, with the implication that she stole such a valuable item from the palace, they won't be eager to allow her any chance to try again.

In the palace dungeon she is fed a scant diet of bread and water. Sometimes the bread comes with a slice of cheese. Meals arrive twice a day, and though she tries her hardest to keep track, she loses count of the days somewhere between five and six.

When it has been something more than a week but probably less than two, the prince pays her a visit, late at night as she's trying to get comfortable on her heap of straw.

"I thought I would give you a chance to explain," he says.

Fuck. How does she play this? She sits up, smoothing down her dress (the same one they bundled her here in, and much the worse for the intervening week in a dungeon) and trying to look... lost and scared, lost and scared is probably the way to go.

"I'm sorry," she lies. "I was just... it was all so sudden, and so much... you frightened me. I wasn't thinking."

Prince Vir shakes his head disbelievingly. "You knocked a ducal guard flat on your way out. You were provisioned for a journey of weeks. I half thought you were taking the jewels downriver to sell."

"I panicked!" she protests. "I woke up with a strange man standing over me, of course I ran as hard and as fast as I could!"

"A strange man..." He shakes his head, grasping the bars in his powerful hands and staring through them. "Can't you see how good I could be to you?"

"...my lord, you locked me in a dungeon," she can't help pointing out.

It was the wrong thing to say. He scowls. "I think you were running off to sell the jewels. I think I was righter than I knew, to call you a thief." Letting go of the bars, he steps away and turns to leave.

"My lord, please..." she calls after him, soft and hesitant. He doesn't answer.

It's another week or more before she sees him again. This time, unaccountably, he is followed by a pair of strong men carrying a bulky shape that she can't quite see from within her cell. The visible end looks like some sort of box or chest.

"Leave it here and go," he tells them with a curt gesture. The box thumps to the floor. The heavy footsteps retreat.

Prince Vir turns to her, the hunger in his eyes wilder than ever.

"You cannot escape me now," he says. "Come here and put your hands through the bars."

"My lord, you're frightening me," she whispers, shaking her head and huddling back against the wall.

"Frightening you?" He laughs. "Nema, my love, I have not begun to frighten you. Come here and put your hands through the bars."

...when he puts it like that... her life is in his hands already. She stands, makes a futile attempt to straighten her dress, and takes the few steps across the cell to put her hands through the bars as he asks.

He shackles her there, wrists wrapped in manacles with a short chain between them. Does he mean to rape her? Does he really need this elaborate setup to rape her? Maybe if he's afraid she'll bolt again as soon as he opens the door...

He opens the door. The hinges screech awfully, and she winces, and when she opens her eyes again she sees the Prince wrestling the mysterious box into her cell. It barely fits, and by its dimensions it reminds her very distinctly and uncomfortably of a coffin. Not quite a big enough coffin for her, though, she doesn't think. A coffin made for a girl somewhat shorter than Nema.

She imagines him cutting off her feet to fit her inside, and has to stifle a hysterical giggle. Come on, Nema, this is serious. Her will is fully aligned with the effort to do whatever might get her through this situation intact—but what is that, exactly? This obsessive streak of his came out of nowhere. She knows nothing about this side of the affable prince.

Perhaps, as a last-ditch effort, the truth?

"My lord," she says over the sound of wood scuffing against stone, "I ran because I was afraid of you. I packed for a long journey because I didn't think it was safe to stay. I was afraid you would make me your concubine and call it a patronage. I was afraid to be so close to someone so powerful. But that's beyond me now. I don't value my freedom over my life. Whatever you'd have me do, I will do it."

He laughs, and huffs, and hauls on the box, having successfully crammed it into the cell.

"You're righter than you know," he says, and she hears the latch click open and the hinges creak, and then—

—everything—

She is engulfed in a warm slick softness that's like nothing she's ever felt. It feels startlingly, shockingly good—and then too good—and before she has time to so much as take a breath, the rushing tide of overwhelming sensation closes over her head, and she drowns in it.

It reaches everywhere, touches everything. It sweeps into and through her body. Parts of her she didn't know existed are feeling pleasure the likes of which she also did not know existed and, frankly, could have done without finding out.

...clothes, she realizes distantly, living clothes, that's what this is—

An affirmative pulse of heat/lust/thought, nonverbal, brimming with affection, trailing pure pleasure in its wake.

Her knees buckle with the force of it. The impact is jarring, intense, a concentrated burst of pain—and it leaves her moaning and writhing in desperate carnal need, or trying to. No sound escapes her throat, and her limbs stay still and steady.

"Master," her voice says without her input or approval, "what is your will?"

There is not a lot of Nema to spare, past the sensations wracking her body, but there's enough to grasp the shift in her circumstances.

Prince Vir, terrifying and unpredictable though he is, is no longer her primary concern. The living being who just took full control of her body, who clearly has a mind and a will of its own, very much is.

Ignoring the prince's reply, ignoring the shreds of her dress falling to the dirty floor around her, she focuses completely on reaching out to her new best friend across their burgeoning telepathic link. She tries to ask who are you, and what do you want. She tries to listen as hard as she can for the answer. Everything, now, depends on this. What's left of her life, a spider's thread of hope, dangles precariously from this frantic attempt to connect. If she can only find out how to appease this creature, maybe someday she will get to hold a pen in her own hand again. If she can't...

The creature purrs reward into her mind, and reaches, and explores. Fleeting impressions drift across the connection. Amazement at the strength of her will. Interest in the art of her pen.

Compassion, at the strength of her terror.

She'd cry with relief, if she could. She does her best to send back something coherent, but it all ends up a hopeless tangle of please I'll do anything I just want to live I just want to be free I just want to be me—

And then Prince Vir starts fucking her against the bars of her cell, and her whole world whites out into pain. It feels like being raped with a fencepost. But the pain just makes her want, and if she could move her own body she'd be begging him in tears to fuck her harder. Is this her own perversion, or something the suit is doing to her? She doesn't know; she's never been raped before. She hates not knowing. She hates enjoying her pain and violation, hates being trapped in her own body as it turns against her, hates her throbbing needy cunt for welcoming this monster of a prince so eagerly.

And then she feels her mind start to turn against her, a deep affection welling up for her royal rapist, and she hates that most of all.

Warmth. Reassurance. Fierce protective love. Affection. Desire.

A concept that's almost consolidated enough to be a word: mine.

Yours, she thinks back at the creature, lost and scared and uncertain and throwing herself wholeheartedly into this tenuous attempt at a relationship because it's her only hope of ever moving her own body again and being forced to love the prince against her will by rape and mind control makes her want to tear him into bloody chunks and eat him.

An approving mental murmur, and a tentacle sliding softly against her clit.

Her world whites out into pleasure.

Surreal flashes of sensation peek through the gaps in the unending chain of inhumanly intense orgasms. Her body is following the prince docilely through familiar corridors. Her body is embracing the prince. Her body is lying down in a soft bed next to the prince.

She loves the prince, she wants to stay with him forever—hate hate hate rip tear kill devour

shhhh

The intense overstimulating pleasure gradually subsides, and now her body feels warmly embraced, cuddled and squeezed and soothingly stroked.

She takes a minute to metaphorically catch her breath, though in fact her breathing is perfectly steady and has been this whole time.

Somewhat wryly, she reaches across the connection and tries to say, Hi, I'm Nema. What's your name?

??name??