"I can do whatever I want with you," he says. "And I think you like that. Am I right? Tell me."

"I - yes," she whimpers, leaning back against his chest. "I like that I'm helpless in your power, I like that you terrify me, I like that you're taller and stronger and the Emperor of Nenassa and at your whim I could be eaten by crows or gang-raped or tortured to death. You're so beautiful and you feel so good inside me and I want you so badly, I think about it all the time, I sit by this window and pull up my skirts and touch myself thinking about how much I want you to rape me."

He wraps his arms around her waist, kisses the top of her head, rests his cheek against her hair.

"Go on," he murmurs.

"I like it when you grab my hair and haul me around. I liked choking on your cock and I liked being fucked to pieces against a wall and I like being held in your lap. I like when you hurt me. I think about you torturing me. I've thought about you raping me with a branding iron and I wanted it. I want you to rape me in ways I've never even dreamed of. I want you to tie me to your bed and make me beg for your cock. I want you to hold me down and fuck me while I scream and cry and try to get away. I want you to rip me apart and heal me and do it all over again."

She's squirming in his lap, now - not at all trying to escape, rather the opposite in fact.

"I like that you want these things," he says. "I like it very much. My lovely Niamira. Maybe next time I'll drag you naked through the halls by your hair all the way to my bedroom and then give you everything you ask me for."

"Ohhhhh please my lord," she moans, reaching a hand between her legs.

He catches her wrist and squeezes, cracking it. "Tell me how much you want me again. Tell me all the awful things you want me to do to you."

"I - I like that you own me - I like that you can do whatever you want with me - I want you to beat me, I want you to break every bone in my body, I want you to violate me with a spiked club and then fuck my shredded bleeding cunt -"

At that, he makes a soft encouraging sound and reaches his hand between her legs, with just a little lifecraft to sweeten the touch.

She shrieks with pleasure, arching, writhing, clenching around him like a fist.

He holds her like that and fucks her until he finishes, then stands and lets her tumble from his lap onto the floor. As he walks away, he wraps himself in illusory clothing, light and air turning to silk and linen.

He does not heal her broken wrist.

There is only so far the junior clerk can cover for her, and a scribe with a broken wrist can't make up lost work by staying up late. He's apologetic about it, but he passes her along to the overseer, who arranges for a healing and a whipping in that order, to discourage further carelessness.

She does not want to be dragged through the halls by her hair.

She finds a small courtyard just a few turns away from the Emperor's bedchamber. There is a tiny fir tree in a little round pot set in a bed of round white pebbles, and a bench in the shade of two palace walls where she can sit and write. Her back aches under its bandages. She wonders if the Emperor will like her whip-marks. She wonders if he'll be annoyed that she's working so close to his rooms. He seemed to think it was cute when she stopped wearing underwear so he couldn't destroy it. (She is still in fact not wearing underwear. It's a little distracting, but the courtyard is not quite private enough for her to consider indulging her distraction.)

And the second day after -

"Clever girl," he says, stepping into the courtyard. "Nothing's stopping me from dragging you naked through every hall in this palace, you know."

"I know, my lord. But at least now you'll only do it if you want to and not because it happened to be convenient."

"Maybe I'll just tear off all your clothes and make you walk through the palace naked if you ever want to leave my bedchamber again," he says, crossing the courtyard to grab her by the hair and lift her off her bench. "Are you still leaving off your loin-wraps so I can't I destroy them? Let's find out."

He pulls up her skirts one-handed as she dangles above the ground, and when he finds the answer to his question, he shoves her against the wall and starts fucking her with his fingers. His left hand lets go of her hair and wraps around her throat instead.

She whimpers when her back hits the wall, and then his hand is around her neck and she can no longer whimper, which is a good thing because if she could scream with pleasure she would be. She wants to beg him to fuck her, or just to keep doing this - is it magic, some trick of elven lifecraft, that makes the touch of his hand feel so good, or is it just that she's so sexually obsessed with her depraved rapist Emperor that anything he does to her is the best thing she's ever felt -

She's gorgeous when she's lost in pleasure like this.

He keeps his hand on her neck for longer than he meant to.

Her twitching and wriggling and tiny muffled sounds get weaker and weaker until finally she goes limp in his arms.

Well.

He carries her to his rooms. He tears off her clothes and fucks her, and when he's done and she still hasn't woken up, he heals her in case he did more damage than he thought. Then he leaves her in his bed and goes off to do boring imperial things for an hour.

She wakes up. Naked, in the Emperor's bed, with the Emperor's seed drying stickily between her thighs.

She looks around for a bath. There is a bath. She takes a bath. It's the most stunningly decadent experience she has had in her life.

She goes back to the Emperor's bed. The remains of her dress are on the floor beside it. If she had needle and thread and a day to work on them she could probably salvage something wearable out of the mess. She folds it all up tidily but leaves it where it is.

He broke her wrist last time she tried to touch herself in his presence - but he likes that she wants him and he likes it when she does slightly audacious things. And he choked her until she passed out and then fucked her and left her lying in his bed and she wants him very very badly right now and he's not here -

She climbs into bed and thinks about him fucking her while she was unconscious, what it would have been like if she'd felt it, his cock moving inside her while she lay limp and helpless. She closes her eyes and imagines him touching her.

Just as she's beginning to relax afterward, in the moment before she opens her eyes, the Emperor puts his hand on her throat.

Her eyes fly open. Suddenly she is simultaneously much less sure this was a good idea and much more glad she did it.

"I will have to think of a way to punish you for your presumption," he says. "Later."

He squeezes her throat once, then lets go.

"Right now, I want to hold you down and fuck you while you struggle to get away. Don't be shy about trying; I want you to know exactly how helpless you are."

Well, if that's what he wants...

She immediately leaps out of bed and bolts for the door.

An illusory panel of stone flashes into existence in the doorway, sealing it shut.