Belok's Bride

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Belok's Bride

  Copyright ã 2003 Reese Gabriel

  ISBN: 1-55410-052-6

  Cover art and design by Jane Sommers

  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher.

  Published by eXtasy Books, a division of Zumaya Publications, 2003

  Look for us online at:

  www.zumayapublications.com

  www.Extasybooks.com

  Dedication:

  To those who believed in me since the beginning, most especially my spouse, who taught me never to be afraid to be myself no matter what.

  Chapter One

  Dr. Merritt Fisher was both aroused and disgusted by the scene at the Zuravian national airport. The young couple was directly in front of her in the customs queue. They were speaking Italian, a language Merritt knew quite well, though she was trying hard not to eavesdrop. The boy was lean and muscular. He wore faded jeans and a gray, sleeveless t-shirt. His boots were black, as was his slicked-back hair.

  The girl was pretty and wore her hair in a short, frisky pageboy. Her own jeans were very low cut, slung on her hips to reveal a tiny glimpse of candy-red thongs. Her flat, sculpted belly was bare, revealing a pierced navel. She had full breasts, natural and braless under a skimpy red halter. Even with her platform shoes, the boyfriend was six or seven inches taller and must have outweighed her by a hundred pounds.

  They were arguing about their destination. The girl wasn’t happy staying here and wanted to get a connecting flight to Vienna. She was pointing her finger at his chest, while he was gesturing with his hands, talking over her about how they couldn’t afford to go anywhere else until they got some more money. Finally, in utter disgust, she muttered a curse and turned as if to leave. The boy seized her arm, holding her fast. She said something rude that made him scowl. With his free hand, he reached round her slim waist and smacked her shapely arse. Hard.

  The Italian girl gasped, her eyes wide with shock. She told him to let go, but the hand stayed exactly where it had landed. For a few moments, she continued to squirm, but as he moved in to seize a kiss, she grew soft and pliant. There was no need to translate the meaning of the tiny feminine moan as she molded her body against his.

  The rough treatment was turning her on.

  “I need you,” she whispered fiercely, her hands reaching everywhere at once.

  He pulled her hair back, stilling her at once. “Later.”

  Her eyes were moist and hot. “Yes…sir.”

  She stood beside him meekly as they continued waiting in line. Just as they finished getting their passports stamped, the young man turned and caught sight of Merritt. Giving her a leering wink, he steered his girlfriend through the exit gate, his hand possessively placed on those pretty cheeks.

  “What is purpose of visit to Zuravia?” The agent asked Merritt gruffly in English.

  Merritt cleared her throat. Her cheeks were flush and she was damp between her legs, the way she always got when she saw a woman submitting to a man.

  “I am a professor of history, here to study at the Cultural Heritage Institute,” she responded in perfect Zuravian.

  The agent glared at her across the high metal counter embossed with the seal of the new republic. He was a bloated man with thick jowls that hung over the stiff, high collar of his blue uniform jacket. From the look on his face, Merritt was fairly certain he was familiar with the particular place to which she’d been invited to complete her sabbatical.

  “You mean the Belok Institute,” he sneered. “What do you expect to see there? Vampires?”

  Merritt, slender and blonde, and sensibly attired in a skirt suit, medium heeled pumps and pearls straightened herself to her full five-foot-three-inch height. “If you please, sir, I am a credentialed historian, not a seeker of fantasies and ghost tales.”

  The agent snorted, hog-like. “Laslo, come and see.”

  A rail thin man ambled over, his uniform hanging like the costume of a scarecrow.

  A brief exchange followed during which the men laughed heartily at the foolishness of females, particularly American ones. Others were coming up now, too, creating precisely the sort of spectacle the shy academician had been trying so hard to avoid.

  “Look at me,” said Laslo, his moon-like eyes brightening as he stuck out his incisors in an imitation of fangs. “I am Belok! Let me drink your blood.”

  “No,” roared another, putting his white-gloved hands up like claws. “I am Belok! See?”

  “What is the meaning of this?” demanded a new voice.

  The customs officers turned at once, the smiles evaporating from their faces as they beheld the small, pinch-nosed man in the antiquated black suit.

  The jowled agent turned pale. “Forgive us, sir. We were momentarily taken off guard.”

  “Let me see these.” The little man snatched up Merritt’s passport, visa and letter of introduction from the smoothly polished surface. He’d come out of nowhere, flanked by a pair of nasty looking paratroopers with black berets and machine guns.

  “Someone is supposed to be here to greet me,” Merritt explained, wondering what the young couple would be doing the rest of the day. Walking hand in hand through the city, perhaps, or having sex in some alcove or in the stall of a public bathroom. She pictured the dark haired boy telling the young woman what he wanted. Making her lift her dress, and pull down her panties so he could take her over the sink or against a wall. Then again, maybe he would put her down on her knees so she could please him with her mouth.

  She might be doing that at this very moment, kneeling in a men’s lavatory, sucking him obediently, her pouty lips wrapped around him as she sought desperately to appease him for her outburst earlier. He would be angry still, and she would have to work very hard to get back in his good graces. By nightfall she would have learned a valuable lesson. She was female and her boyfriend was male, each having their distinct place and role.

  Merritt did not like to have thoughts of this sort because they tended to make her feel very weak and not in control. It was for this reason she had never had sex before, preferring to live her life in the past with long dead and completely safe men such as Belok, the Dark Prince of Zuravia.

  The little man frowned. “You must come with us, miss. These papers are not in order.”

  “There must be some mistake. Someone is supposed to be here from the Institute.” Merritt heard her own voice as if through a tunnel. The stony faced soldiers were paying her no heed as they stepped forward on either side of her, relieving her of her suitcase and purse.

  Her heart thumped in her chest. Every eye was on her, suspicious. Was she a smuggler? A drug dealer? Some kind of international terrorist? Merritt could almost hear the voice of Lena, her colleague at Cal State Raburn and her only friend, drumming in her brain.

  “I told you, Merry, going to Zuravia was a screwy idea. Isn’t it bad enough you did your doctoral thesis on Belok? Do you have to tie down your whole academic career with this kind of superstitious baggage? You’ll ne
ver get tenure this way, and you know it. Besides, the country’s a powder keg. Any day now, the right wing is going to stage a coup, if the resurgent communists don’t get around to it first.”

  Merritt was led into an interrogation room at the end of a long, sealed off corridor. She tried to keep from panicking, but it was a known fact that people used to disappear in Zuravia under just these sorts of circumstances.

  “Please, doctor,” he offered one of two chairs at a plain wooden table in the windowless, gray walled room.

  Merritt stood rigid. “I wish to contact my embassy at once.”

  “Leave us,” he snapped to the soldiers.

  Crisply, they turned on their heels, the polished boots rotating a hundred and eighty degrees precisely. Merritt started just a bit as she heard the heavy door seal shut.

  “You should accept my invitation to sit down,” he advised. “Unless you have something to hide.”

  Merritt complied, reluctantly.

  “Cigarette?” he pulled a crumpled pack of menthols from the inner pocket of his suit jacket.

  Merritt could feel his eyes on her stocking clad legs. “I don’t smoke,” she shifted awkwardly, the wood scratching at her thighs below the hem of the too short skirt as she attempted to shift into a more discrete position.

  “Pity.” He lit one for himself, taking the seat across from her. She tried to make herself relax a little as the man took a pair of deep, leisurely puffs. Her father, the famed ghost hunter and iconoclast Roger Fisher had smoked. She’d always known that whenever he was deep into a cigarette he would be calmer, the demons in his head sated for the moment.

  “Who are you?” she demanded to know.

  He laughed mildly. “A simple public servant. What you might call an intelligence operative. First under the communists. Now the republicans. Maybe tomorrow, it will be somebody else again. You see that corner there?”

  She eyed the space warily.

  “In the old days, a young woman like you with good legs and breasts would be made to stand over there and strip off all her clothes. Then she’d answer our questions naked. And no covering herself, either. Hands on the head at all times, not on the vagina or breasts.”

  Merritt’s pulse quickened as she tried to imagine a girl being treated that way. “Sir, I don’t know what you think you are doing here, but I assure you my government will not be pleased.”

  “And yet you are aroused right now, between your legs, you’re ready for a man, aren’t you?”

  Merritt squeezed her thighs, fighting back the heat. It was the Italian girl who was doing this to her, she and her lover, together playing out the ancient game of master and slave. Was there a mark, Merritt wondered, a handprint where he’d spanked her? Unwittingly, she squirmed on the seat, giving away far more than she dared in the presence of her dark eyed interrogator.

  Quick as a cobra the man seized her wrist, his eyes lit with an eerie light. “Do you know what I could do to you right this moment? Do you, my sweet foreign angel?”

  The cigarette hovered an inch above her soft flesh, the glowing tip pointing straight down over her palm. “Please,” she whimpered, “I’ll do whatever you want. I’ll take my clothes off and…and stand how you tell me to.”

  “I want nothing from you doctor. You’re a historian, so you should know the history of where you are sitting. The girls I spoke of were raped over this very table. Their backsides exposed, the full, pretty tits pressed down on the wood. Or else we’d lay them on their backs, legs held wide apart, the scent of their female juices thick in the air. One man after the other parting the delicate little sex lips, plunging his hard cock, ramming mercilessly till he spilled himself inside her, yielding to the next in line, on and on, until…”

  The torturer let his words trail into the air like the fading crack of a whip, a teasing desirous strand of lust, snake-like and irresistible.

  “Until…what?” Merritt breathed, mesmerized, desperate. Her voice was a hot fierce whisper, her body poised on the edge of the seat, filled with an anticipation she’d never known.

  The man studied her for a moment and then, just as abruptly, released her. “As I said, that was long ago.”

  Merritt wilted. In her mind, he’d nearly put her over that table herself, forcing her to juice obediently for her savage lovers.

  “Ahh, how I do miss the old days,” he shook his head.

  “Are you quite finished with me?” she asked indignantly, struggling to keep her identity, her sense of will.

  He took a deep drag, working the cigarette down to the nub. “No, not quite. One more message: don’t meddle in things you don’t understand. To you outsiders, Belok is a freak, a joke. But in our country, life and death ride on that old legend. Right now, there are men—powerful men—who would use the story of the bloodthirsty prince to build a new order.”

  “I am a scholar concerned with debunking myths. I have no interest in politics or—”

  He slammed the table with his fist. “Don’t lecture me, damn it! Do you know what your Belok did in his lifetime to our country? Do you even have a clue?”

  Merritt regarded him, a mouse in the presence of a suddenly enraged cat. She knew as much as anyone about the legendary Dark Prince, the supposed historical basis of the vampire legends, but she knew this was not the time to show off her knowledge.

  “He impaled thousands, burned whole villages, and the women, by god, he made slaves of them all. Would you like to have been one of his victims, doctor? Raped and stretched on the rack, caged and abused for the pleasure of a mad man? Your neck encircled in iron, your back forever burning with fresh welts?”

  Merritt’s breasts strained against the satin cups of her bra. It was the underwire type with a rigid line under both of her generous mounds. As best she could, she hid these signs of her femininity. In the academic world, a woman with a shapely body and blonde hair was considered a tasty treat for after hours, not a serious colleague. With her groundbreaking work on Belok, she hoped to shatter that myth along with the ones about the man having been a blood-sucking ghoul.

  Merritt moved to rise. “I think I’ve heard enough…history. May I go now, or must I begin screaming for help?”

  The little torturer was completely calm again, as though nothing had happened. “I have no wish to detain you. Although there is something I wish to show you first.” He reached into his pocket, retrieving a small coin, which he laid upon the table.

  Merritt recognized it instantly as a gold ducat, minted by the prince’s own treasury. Its value was beyond comprehension. “There are only two of these known to exist,” she gasped in awe.

  “Go on, pick it up. You will find it is more than a mere relic.”

  Merritt’s fingers trembled as she retrieved the hammered gold piece emblazoned with the profile of the Dark Prince. How many times had it traded hands? What adventures could it speak of if it had a voice?

  “Do not be shy, doctor.” The little man leaned forward, clenching her hand in his.

  “It’s hot,” she protested as he pressed the coin into her palm.

  “For some, yes.”

  A fire was burning into her skin and racing up her arm. Panic set in. She was choking. Her head was spinning. Like the time once as a girl she’d inhaled too much smoke at a campfire. Opening her mouth she tried to say something. Nothing was coming out. The little man’s image was blurring. She was going down, slipping into unconsciousness.

  ***

  Merritt awoke in Belok’s world. She was wearing a long gown of green velvet. Her hair was done up elaborately on her head, with flakes of gold and delicate strands of ivy interwoven. Gold slippers were on her feet, finely woven. Soldiers were conveying her down a hallway of marble with huge arches of stone, ten, twelve feet high. Their boots tramped on the floor, leather decorated in chain link. These were not the modern paratroopers, but swordsmen, men with helmets and armor, their long weapons hanging from their thick belts, pressing against her feminine hips.

 
Merritt tried to move her hands, but they were behind her back, bound in chains, a thick, smooth set of links that bit into her flesh and dangled down her back.

  “You’re hurting me,” she said, but they paid no heed, their mail gloved hands digging cruelly into the bare flesh of her upper arms.

  Where are you taking me? she wanted to ask, but in her heart, she knew. There was no mistaking the sounds from the end of the great corridor. The cries of females in peril. The laughter of the males. The odd, sickening mix of reveling pipes and horns and the slicing hiss of leather, breaking through the air, impacting on helpless bodies.

  It could only be the throne room of Belok. She was being conveyed to the dark lord himself, as if they were of the same time and place, as if she were some comely medieval maiden to be plucked from the vine for his pleasure.

  “I am only hallucinating this,” she said for her own satisfaction.

  “Silence, bitch,” snarled one of her captors, making her stop in front of the last pair of marble pillars. Merritt did not want to look beyond the vaulted entrance into the great room itself. Hands were on her cheeks, forcing her eyes forward. She cried out in protest, but they fixed the device on her face without regard for her own desires.

  It was a leather gag, with a cone-like tube that fit into her mouth, holding it open and rendering her speechless. At the same time, because of the opening, she could not prevent anything being poured in. There were straps that fit under her chin and round her head. It was a fine joke, worthy of one such as Belok, to take a finely garbed lady and submit her to the trappings of slave bondage.

  She tried to close her eyes, because already she could see too much. Girls being used and violated, their silhouettes in the distance.

  “Hold still,” snarled the guard who was trying now to put the harness over her torso.

  “I’ll fix you, bitch.” The other yanked back her hair, rendering her more docile.