Chapter 43

Heavy. And suffocating.

What is this.

Drenched in the thick mire of sleep, Lino struggled to reboot his sluggish brain. His body felt completely paralyzed, as if tightly bound. What’s happening…? His lethargic mind failed to process the urgency of evaluating the situation.

However, unlike his sluggish brain, his physical instincts screamed at him to wake up. He hadn’t lived a particularly long life, but the vast majority of his existence had been defined by confinement and desperate escapes; those finely honed survival instincts blared a deafening alarm.

Yet, a massive hand was slowly, rhythmically massaging his stomach. A deep, resonant voice drifted down from the crown of his head, trickling into his ear like dark honey.

“Sleep a while longer; it is still early dawn.”

It was a terrifyingly familiar voice. No matter how waterlogged his brain felt, he instantly identified its owner.

“…Your Highness?”

When Lino called out to the Duke with a sleep-slurred slur, a sharp click of the tongue sounded from behind him. Tsk. The sharp sound caused Lino’s shoulders to flinch instinctively.

Why is he displeased? Is it because I made noise when I should have stayed quiet? Answering his own internal panic, Lino immediately clamped his lips together, rolling them inward and stifling his breathing entirely. His half-asleep brain clung exclusively to the most horrifying fragment of the conversation between Erin and Grondil at the restaurant: ‘Should I slice his stomach open to check for the mark?’ Because it was the most traumatic detail, it had cemented itself at the forefront of his consciousness.

“Are you afraid of me?”

Am I afraid? Of course I’m fucking afraid! You literally talked about slicing a man’s stomach open! Who wouldn’t be terrified?! However, explicitly confirming that fear felt equally dangerous. Yet, upon further reflection, claiming he wasn’t afraid felt like a terrible lie. Whether he answered yes or no, the Duke would undoubtedly find a way to twist the response into a trap.

Therefore, Lino weaponized silence as his answer. Please interpret this favorably. Better yet, just assume I fell back asleep.

“I honestly do not understand why you are trembling. Where else would you find an employer this incredibly magnanimous?”

“……?”

Grondil had accurately interpreted Lino’s silence as fear. Fortunately, he didn’t seem offended by it, but he immediately began spouting utterly incomprehensible nonsense.

“You are a fraud who should have been handed over to the imperial authorities immediately, yet I have graciously pardoned you by allowing you to serve my personal punishment instead, have I not?”

“Ugh… Yes. That is true.”

Lino had fully intended to remain silent, but the crushing pressure demanding he acknowledge the Duke’s warped logic forced a reluctant agreement from his lips.

“Can we honestly call that a punishment?” Grondil purred. “You were leaking deliciously from both ends, practically begging for it.”

“Ah, that was…”

“What’s wrong? Surely you aren’t going to claim you despised it?”

“W-well, I wouldn’t say I despised it, but…”

Lino couldn’t definitively claim he hated it, because in the end, exactly as Grondil noted, he had felt so intensely good that he had lost complete control. What was I leaking? He had leaked tears, sweat, and a humiliating amount of pearlescent pre-cum that he was too mortified to vocalize. And was leaking all he did? He had received it internally as well. The searing memory of an unimaginably vast quantity of fluid flooding his insides—

“You clearly enjoyed it immensely, did you not?”

“Excuse me…? What are you implying?”

“Are you feigning ignorance when you are already standing at rigid attention?”

“What is stand… Hnnk?! Ah!”

Before Lino could even finish his confused question, Grondil’s hand dove ruthlessly into his trousers. Simultaneously, a thick, muscular leg wedged itself forcefully between Lino’s clamped thighs from behind. A hand violating his front, a leg prying apart his back—his body was being manhandled with terrifying ease.

His sluggish brain was electrocuted into absolute, blinding clarity. In the blink of an eye, Grondil had stripped away Lino’s trousers and underwear, his large hand aggressively kneading the half-erect member. Though flushed with heat, the dry skin of his foreskin chafed painfully as Grondil rubbed it relentlessly.

“Ugh, it hurts. Your Highness… ngh.”

“I did prepare lubricant, but since we are in a hurry, we will start with this. Open your mouth and say ‘ah’.”

“Pardon? Urk. Mmph!”

Confused as to why he was being ordered to open his mouth when there was no food present, Lino’s brief syllable of questioning allowed Grondil’s fingers to invade violently. The sudden intrusion triggered a harsh gag reflex.

“Did my joke at Is terrify you that deeply?” Grondil asked casually.

“Hah, eh? No, urk, hrrk…”

Lino desperately wanted to deny it, but with three long, thick fingers ruthlessly plundering his oral cavity, he could only produce choked, gagging wet sounds. He ultimately decided it was safer not to answer, considering he truly had been terrified.

“I spent over a month verifying whether Sir Disson bore the mark on his body, yet I never once touched him, penetrated him, stroked him, or climaxed inside him like this.”

“Guh… what does— mmph, urk, hhhk!”

Lino shuddered violently as the fingers scraped against his uvula, plunging even deeper down his throat. He checked Yuneria for the mark but never touched him sexually? Does that mean he treats me differently than Yuneria?

But… what does that have to do with me?

“Mmmph…!”

Grondil’s fingers scraped sadistically against the roof of his mouth as they withdrew, only to plunge back in with brutal force. When the neatly filed nails dragged across his hard palate, every single hair on the back of Lino’s neck stood on end. Urk, hrrk— The sickening gag reflex abruptly transformed into a high, nasal whine of pleasure. Completely unconsciously, Lino flexed his thighs, clamping down hard.

“I barely scraped the roof of your mouth, and you’re already twisting your legs together. How incredibly obscene.”

Only then did Lino realize he had trapped Grondil’s intrusive leg between his own thighs, squeezing it in a vice grip. Crushing shame and humiliation instantly scorched his skin, painting his neck and earlobes a violent crimson.

Grondil chuckled darkly, his teeth lightly nipping at Lino’s soft earlobe. ‘You taste sweet,’ he whispered directly into Lino’s ear, before trailing his lips down to gnaw viciously at the nape of his neck. A stinging pain blossomed across the skin, but it was instantaneously obliterated by the intense, crushing pressure applied directly to his perineum—the slick, sensitive expanse of flesh between his genitals and anus.

Grondil meticulously and agonizingly monitored Lino’s every reaction. The fingers violating his mouth ruthlessly scraped the palate before pressing down hard on the slick, sensitive frenulum beneath his tongue, dragging it forward. The heavy arm pinning Lino’s upper body to prevent his thrashing smoothly slithered under his shirt the moment Lino began to vocalize his pleasure from the dual assault on his mouth and perineum.

“I haven’t even touched this yet, and it is already standing at attention?”

“Ngh, n-no… hah…”

“No? It is so stiff it’s tenting the fabric of your shirt.”

Grondil splayed his massive hand, capturing Lino’s entire left pectoral. He pinched the rigidly erect nipple between his index and middle fingers, twisting it brutally. Instantly, the pressure of Lino’s thighs clamping around Grondil’s leg intensified. With every desperate squeeze, Grondil thrusted his leg upward, aggressively grinding against the perineum. He isn’t even touching my cock or my hole, so why is this happening? Oblivious to the saliva trailing messily from the corner of his violated mouth, Lino whimpered pathetically.

He found himself desperately wishing Grondil would just touch him directly. He had never imagined that having the neutral zone between his genitals and anus ground against could be this agonizingly tantalizing. The ambiguous, edging pleasure caused his cock to swell painfully, while his entrance pulsed and twitched with desperate hunger. Perhaps it was a mercy that it was merely Grondil’s knee applying the pressure; had the Duke used his hand, he would have instantly felt the humiliating, desperate twitching of Lino’s hole.

“Ngh, hah, Your Highness, please… move your leg… I can’t… ahh…”

Grondil finally withdrew his slick fingers from Lino’s mouth. Though technically fingers, he had shoved four of them inside, stretching Lino’s lips to their absolute breaking point; the corners of his mouth were swollen and raw red. However, ignoring the stinging pain in his lips, Lino practically begged Grondil to stop the maddening, ambiguous friction against his perineum.

“Lino, please try to make sense.”

“Hah… excuse me?”

Grondil lowered his saliva-drenched hand and violently seized Lino’s fully erect member. Hiiik! When the hand—cooled rapidly by the ambient air—clamped around his scorching hot flesh, Lino’s spine arched off the bed in a violent spasm.

“Were you genuinely unaware that you have been actively grinding yourself against my leg this entire time?”

“I-I did?”

Lino’s eyes widened in sheer disbelief. He opened his mouth to vehemently deny the accusation, to insist it was impossible, but Grondil stroked his member with a crushing, agonizingly tight grip.

“Hnngh!”

“Haha. Lino… you are literally grinding against my leg right now.”

“Ah, hah… What? I-I am?”

Lino’s voice cracked pitifully on the question. No. That’s impossible. He shook his head frantically, but as the crushing stroke repeated, he was horrified to realize his own hips were unconsciously thrusting backward, desperately trying to maximize the friction of his perineum against Grondil’s thigh.

“That… I-I wasn’t doing it on purpose— ah, ah! Your Highness, Your Highness… please stop… haa… ah, ah, hah!”

While begging Grondil to remove his leg, Lino was entirely oblivious to the fact that his own thighs were locked in a death grip, actively preventing the Duke from withdrawing. He thrust his hips back further, violently grinding his swollen perineum, the base of his testicles, and the very rim of his hole against Grondil’s rock-hard thigh, helpless moans spilling from his lips.

The sound of Grondil’s hand stroking Lino’s member grew increasingly, obscenely wet. While Grondil had initially used the saliva coating his fingers as lubrication, the sickeningly slick sounds currently filling the room were produced by the sheer volume of pre-cum continuously erupting from Lino’s urethra. The deep purple glans gleamed brilliantly, as if meticulously glazed in melted sugar. Had it not been for the relentless, pulsing geyser of pre-cum, one could easily mistake the breathtakingly beautiful member for an exquisite sugar sculpture.

“Every time I stroke your cock, your hips twitch wildly. Rather than asking me to remove my leg, wouldn’t it be more accurate to beg me to take my hand off your cock?”

“Ah, ah! T-then your hand… your h… ngh, haa…”

“My hand? You want me to stroke you harder?”

“No, n-no…! Hnnngh.”

Lino shook his head violently in denial. Apparently finding the resistance irritating, Grondil intensified the brutal pinching and tugging on Lino’s nipple, wrapping his other arm tightly around the knight’s torso and crushing him backward against his own chest, locking him in place.

Grondil, too, was aggressively grinding his fully erect member right into the cleft of Lino’s buttocks. Intermittently, he would thrust his hips forward, slamming brutally into Lino’s rear. Unlike Lino, who was naked from the waist down and wearing only a shirt, Grondil was shirtless but still fully clothed in his trousers. The Duke was visibly displeased that a thin layer of fabric prevented him from feeling the escort knight trapped in his arms with absolute, skin-to-skin clarity.

He accelerated the brutal stroking of Lino’s member. Using his thumb, he aggressively capped the urethra leaking pre-cum, swirling over the slit before using his nail to viciously scrape up the sensitive frenulum beneath the glans. As the dense cluster of nerve endings was crushed beneath the hard nail, Lino reached his climax, capable of producing only a faint, broken wheeze. The sound of his copious ejaculation violently splattering against the bedsheets was louder than his pathetic gasps.

Before Lino could even process the afterglow of his climax, Grondil, who had been plastered against his back, abruptly rose. Lifting Lino as effortlessly as a ragdoll, he flipped the knight onto his back. Spreading Lino’s thighs wide to fully expose his inner flesh, Grondil wedged his massive frame between them. Having caught a portion of Lino’s semen in his palm, Grondil slowly, sadistically licked it clean while staring down at the hyperventilating knight.

“Ah…”

Lino felt as though Grondil’s gaze alone had physically paralyzed him. He had always likened the Duke’s eyes to the heavy, storm-laden clouds of Isberg. But right now, they didn’t resemble clouds at all; they looked like colossal, ancient glaciers. And deep within that frozen ice, a brilliant, terrifying blue flame was roaring to life.

His entire body was being crushed beneath the weight of that glacier, while his core was being scorched by the blue flame, melting his sanity. That was exactly why his fingertips tingled and his entrance ached with an agonizing itch while watching the Duke engage in such a depraved, obscene act.

Lino desperately rationalized his own degrading desires, blaming the Duke for the terrifying realization that he wanted Grondil to touch him again, to subject him to acts even more depraved than what had just occurred. It was the only way he could justify the bizarre, horrifying reality that his hole was currently weeping an unidentified fluid, desperately hungering for the Duke’s cock.

Having licked Lino’s semen from his hand until not a single drop remained, Grondil reached down and violently tore his own trousers open with a single hand. The high-quality, incredibly durable fabric ripped more easily than wet tissue paper, falling away to the sides.

Huh?

For a split second, Lino blinked rapidly in shock, convinced his eyes were severely malfunctioning. However, no matter how many times he blinked or rubbed his eyes, the thick, ash-gray fur that had suddenly sprouted across the back of Grondil’s hand remained.

“Your… Highness…? Your hand is…”