Page 17 of A Light So Blinding
But he didn’t... He didn’t know how to do that. He had no memory of pleasure, only pain. And it felt wrong to make sounds of pain when she was making sounds like that.
Perhaps one of his brothers understood that Bjorn simply wasn’t going to be able to make that noise. Another troll did it for him, groaning deep in an exaggerated fashion that was as ridiculous as it was embarrassing.
And then another troll wriggled their arm into the midst of them all and started smacking their thigh. Mimicking the sound of... of...
He was certain he turned a very deep shade of green. This was horrible. This wasn’t the first impression he wanted to give her of himself or his people. When he had first seen her in that room, he’d thought she looked like the kind of woman who could become a troll wife. She was made to be decorated in jewelry that had been created with careful hands, as only trolls could do.
But now, they were pretending to fuck so a king wouldn’t kill them, and this was just... all wrong.
His breathing escalated. The rage that always seemed to get him in trouble bubbled up again. He couldn’t breathe with bodies so close to him. The only thing he knew to do in situations like this was to kill. His claws suddenly ached, whispering that he could get out if he wanted. All he had to do was hack and slashat these bodies, it didn’t matter if they were trolls. He’d done it before. He could do it again.
But then she reached out and grabbed his clawed hand. He stared down at her pale little fingers, wrapped around his, avoiding his claws with such deft expertise. She squeezed his fingers, and he swore there wasn’t even a touch of magic in her grip, but he could feel his anger melting away.
Bit by bit, she eased the fear that threatened to burst inside him. All by just being there. With him.
He stared at her, watching her lips shape around the sounds of those moans, growing faster and more frequent until they stopped. The troll making noise for him let out an answering, deep guttural sound, and then someone had to press their hand over his mouth as he chuckled afterward.
Rabbit leaned forward, running clawed hands through her hair and messing it up. “That’s... No. One more thing.”
Bjorn growled under his breath as Rabbit hooked a claw beneath the delicate pearls at her shoulder and snipped them. They tumbled onto the ground, little pings that were all he could focus on. He hated that they were ruining her like this. Hated that her pretty things were now broken.
Rabbit turned to him next, tugging on his loin cloth and tilting it a little bit. Then he looked at his hair and sighed. Clearly he wanted to tussle that as well, but there wasn’t much worse it could get.
And then they all parted, revealing a mussed priestess who looked like she had just been unraveled by a troll. How had she made her cheeks so pink?
Oh, she was pinching them. She lifted her hands, and it looked like she was trying to cover her face so people couldn’t see her, but she was pinching her cheeks so hard they were getting redder and redder.
King James started clapping, and the entire stadium applauded what they thought was the rape of a priestess.
They applauded.
Snarling, Bjorn shook his head like an animal and chuffed out a loud exhale. “Open the doors, King. We are done here.”
For once, the human king didn’t mind the order.
Seven
Astrid
Astrid wasn’t sure what she had expected from these trolls who had spent years fighting in the labyrinth. Perhaps cruelty and enjoyment in harming others. Perhaps she had thought they enjoyed killing, as so many warriors ended up doing. But the trolls had helped her. They’d helped each other as well.
The humans? The remaining few alive were all knotted together in little groups. They watched her with hungry eyes, but she was no longer worried that they were a threat.
The troll dripping in blood beside her certainly made it far more difficult for those humans to lay a finger on her.
Clutching the threads that held her dress together at her shoulder, she kept herself covered while the doors opened. It seemed the warriors knew what to do as they turned as one and trudged out of the arena. Clearly, they were tired. It was like all of a sudden the fight just drained out of them. Shoulders hunched, energy gone, they moved listlessly through the open doors.
This was the part she had never seen from above. No one even looked at the arena after the fight was over. Those watching all turned to each other, talking as they always did about work or politics or new marriages. She hadn’t ever looked to see what happened with the bodies, or noticed that there were people coming out of the doors as well. Workers who were...
She gagged, turning her face away from the carnage as she realized those people were here to drag the bodies away. They looped their hands under armpits or gathered up lost limbs and just walked off with them.
“Do not look,” Bjorn said. He even lifted a massive hand and covered her face so she wouldn’t be able to see what they were doing.
But then all she could focus on was the blood coating his fingers that was starting to dry. Astrid tried to look anywhere else, but then she looked down at herself and saw all the red that stained her dress. Splatters of it had sprayed up during the fight or dripped off the trolls that had been looming over her.
Her head swam. Sparks floated in her vision, making it difficult for her to see what was around her. So much blood. So much pain. The injuries that were in this room were all mortal, it seemed, and many of them were caused by the troll she had tied herself to.
This was dangerous. Far more dangerous than she had thought.
