A Sinless Betrayal - Cherie Benjamin (paper ebook reader .TXT) 📗

I have learned to speak your tongue. Now we can speak without the language barrier…we can talk about wine.)

Black Bear takes his glass, gulping uncomfortably before darting away.

I gasp. "Ku yi jira!" I cry after him. "Kada ka bar haka nan da sannu." (Wait! Do not leave so soon.)

He whirls around with fire in his eyes. "Ba na neman wata fashe hanci, Tiger Kambori," he hisses at me. "Idan sarki catches da mu, na ass za a skinned. Ba naku. Nice magana da kai." (I don't want another broken nose, Tiger Claw. If the king catches us, my ass will be skinned. Not yours. Nice talking to you.)

With that, Black Bear turns with his harsh words and strides out of the room. He's made it pretty clear to me to stay away from him. I sigh and rub my temples with the pads of my thumbs. Abigor's possession and dominance over me have scared most everyone from me. In some cases, it's a good thing but in other cases it makes me feel like a poison.

When I feel a semi-rough touch on my arm, I automatically assume it's Abigor, coming down to see to me because I've taken 'too long to get the wine' yet again. But when I turn around, it is not his smirking face that I see. It's Iron Coyote's.

I gasp in shock and reel back in horror. "Don't you touch me," I scold him. "Don't you dare."

He mock-pouts. "You are not happy to see me," he says. "I could change that in an instant. I smell how aroused you are, Tiger Claw. I could smell it from five doors down."

I suddenly realize that the arousal he smells was the arousal that came about when I pleasured Abigor in the bathtub. My eyes widen and I take the two glasses into my hand, preparing to march out of the kitchen.

He puts his arm out to stop me, the force of his hand knocking some of the wine out of the full goblets. It splatters in red blotches onto the floor. Iron Coyote makes me put the wine back down on the table before grabbing my hands in his tightly.

Wine drips down my fingers. I struggle in his grasp, but he is too strong for me. The barbarian prince had spent a great deal of time building his muscular strength up, but he would never match Abigor's stamina. He takes my finger into his mouth and twirls his tongue around the tip.

I shriek in disgust and pull away instantly, slapping him across the face. He stumbles towards the counter, grabbing onto one of the cabinets to steady himself. Instead of screaming a loud 'how dare you' sort of speech onto me, he laughs stupidly and stumbles forwards. "You are a ball of fire; my brother was right. I bet he enjoys fucking your pretty little ass."

Squinting my eyes at him, I notice the way his lids droop and how clumsily he stumbles around the room. I groan in disgust. "You're drunk," I state, watching as he grabs Abigor's goblet and takes a long gulp of wine.

He holds the goblet up into the air, a trail of red liquid dribbling down his lips. "Drunk and proud," he announces. I snatch the goblet out of his hand and move it far away from him.

Iron Coyote reaches out for me. I try to sidestep him, but I'm too slow. He gathers me into his arms and buries his face in my neck. "Oh, brother gets everythin'. Got 'de throne, father's love, 'de jewels, 'de credit…" He pulls back and looks me in the eye. "An' he got you."

I try to push him away from me but his grip is relentless. I start yelling when I see him beginning to untie his breechcloth and free his cock. I know he will rape me. "Stop! Iron Coyote, stop it!"

He does not listen to me. Instead, he keeps on mumbling. He jacks himself with his head lying against my breast and his free hand keeping mine firmly locked in place. His body is too heavy for me to even move. "It ain't fair," he moans. "I should get some too."

When I realize that pushing him away won't help, I decide to take a different approach. "What about Ivona? She loves you."

He looks up into my eyes and laughs. On his breath, I smell various types of fine wines, brandies, and beers. He has been drinking for a while. "I don' love her," Iron Coyote replies. "I'm tired of her. I want you."

His free hand lets go of my cock and before I can scream, he's opened my robe and stuck his hand up my skirts. His fingers stroke me there, and I scream so loud that he has no choice but to shut me up with his lips. Using a gut reaction, I grab his lip with my teeth.

"That's what I'm talking about," he begins to murmur. But I bite down—hard—and draw blood. He screams, pushing away from me and cradling his lip in his fingers. Blood spurts down his chin and trickles down his bare chest. "You kariya!"

And before I can move, he backhands me and I land on the cold floor. I don't fall to the ground right away so he does it again, this time using his other hand. I see black, but the spots slowly fade away. I spit out blood from my lip, pushing myself off of the ground. There's a newly-forming bruise on my cheek and my jaw aches like the seven hells.

I hear Abigor's voice over my dizziness and I hear him and his brother fighting away about me. I don't know who is winning the fight, but I can only hope it is Abigor. I blink out of the blurriness and see Abigor holding a knife to Iron Coyote's throat.

"If you ever touch her again, I cut you so bad that no one will ever look at your face again without vomiting in horror, you disgusting piece of shit." Abigor seethes through angry teeth.

Iron Coyote glances over at me. "Keep your bitch on a leash, Abigor. She came onto me!"

Abigor looks over at me sitting on the floor. I spit out a little bit of blood before glaring lethally at Iron Coyote. "You liar! He lies, my king. He does!"

Agitated with the whole situation, he turns back to his older brother. "If she came onto you, why is your lip bleeding and why is she over there beaten?"

"Your dirty whore nearly bit my lip clean off! She deserved every ounce of pain she received…ah!" He cries out when the tip of Abigor's dagger pierces the skin on his neck.

He ignores me when I call his name, his eyes focused on Iron Coyote. "Touch her and I'll kill you. Breathe her name and I'll kill you. Look at her and I'll kill you!" Abigor rants. "I'll cut out your heart just like I did Felix's and serve it to her on a golden dinner plate."

He pushes Iron Coyote out of the way and his older brother scurries down the hallway. "Ivona!" his booming voice echoes outs down the hallway.

Abigor wipes his nose before dropping the knife and rushing to my side. "Oh Gods," he whispers, examining my bloody nose and split lip. He touches a tender bruise on my cheek and I curl back in pain. His eyes are pools of sorrow and pity for what his brother has done to me. "I'm so sorry. I should've known better than to let you down here without me."

He presses his forehead to mine and kisses the space between my eyebrows. "I'm so sorry that this has happened to you," he murmurs. "Won't you say anything?"

I look up at him, desperately trying to catch my breath. I don't know what to say to him, so I just say the first thing that's on my mind. "Wine," I whisper. "He drank your wine."

He smiles slightly, not sure if it's the time for laughs. "Let's go back up to the room."

0o0o0o0o

"Oh Gods, I'm choking," I say, feeling the blood run down the back of my throat. I lean back against a pillow with a white handkerchief pressed to my nose. It's not broken, just bloody. And it hurts.

"Tilt your head forward," he instructs. I hold the bloody handkerchief to my nose having been unable to stop the bleeding for over fifteen minutes. I cough some more when some of the blood drips down the back of my throat.

I look at him funny. "Why? That'll just make it come out more."

He sits at the edge of the bed and watches me with worried eyes. "Exactly. The blood needs to go somewhere, honey." I look up at him in shock. Honey? That was such a name to be called, a name you'd call your beloved, not your personal whore. "Do you want it running down the back of your throat or onto the cloth?"

I cough violently again before sitting up and leaning my head into the cloth. The blood practically drains into the cloth.

"Good," he praises. "Leaning back can make the blood go to your windpipes or line your stomach. Then you'd retch. Trust me, I've had a lot of experience with bloody noses."

I believe him. The excess blood that had been running down my throat before now threatens to come back up my throat. I cough again, the blood dripping from my split lip spraying outwards, some of the droplets landing on his bare chest. "I'm sorry!" I quickly exclaim, almost forgetting who he is.

I reach out and wipe the blood from his skin before he can complain about its presence. He nods. "You're okay. Hold your nose just before your bridge to clot the blood. It should stop within five minutes or so."

I nod my head and do exactly what he tells me to do. "Thank you," I murmur. "For taking care of me."

Fifteen minutes earlier, he'd set about stripping me naked with no intention of using me in a sexual way but examining almost every inch of my ivory skin for bruises. Then he gave me a red silk robe to wear again and set me on the bed, giving me ice in a thin pouch of animal skin. I was to lay back against the pillows with it on my head. Apparently hitting the stone floor with your head hurts after a while…a lot.

The corner of Abigor's mouth pricks up into that beautifully handsome smile of his. "You're welcome, honey." There was that name again. It made her womanly bits flare with heat and lust. "I want to say thank you for biting my brother. Let's just say I've been looking for a good excuse to pound his ass for a while now…but I'm sorry you got hurt in the midst of it. He's one cunt-hungry bastard, and he sure does want everything I've got."

I nod my head. "Including me."

He frowns at that. "I know. Including you."

I try to bring more light into the conversation. "But he said I almost bit his lip off at least," I giggle softly like a child. "I got even."

"Yes," he says as he crawls up to where I sit near the pillows. "You paid him back like a true Hausa woman."

I lift the cloth away from my nose and examine it. There's dry blood, only dry, and no fresh blood. "I think it's stopped now," I say. "Where do I put this?"

He nods towards the fire. "Just throw it in there. I don't want it, and those stains will be hell for the maids to wash out."

"Alright," I say. I toss it into the fire. It lands short so I scamper out of bed and toss it into the fire the rest of the way. I stand there and watch it shrivel up and burn while being licked by the bright orange flames

I hear his body shift on the bed with the way the frames squeak. "Come back to me," he pleads. "It