The Blond Guard Walked Him Like a Dog

The gray light of dawn slipped through the tall windows of the Great Hall like an inquisitor’s fingers, without warmth, without mercy. The air smelled of cold ash, stale sweat, and the dry sting of the disinfectant the Healer had used on him hours earlier. It was not the smell of a sleeping castle. It was the smell of a castle that never truly let itself rest.

Rodrigo hung from the Black Pillar, suspended in his thick leather harness. His skin, once brown, now had the grayish texture of someone who had gone too many hours without blood or movement. He breathed with difficulty. Every gasp was a dry rasp climbing up his raw throat. The steel belt imprisoning his crotch glimmered faintly in the first light, and the metal catheter inserted inside his cock was a constant presence, a dull fire that never went out. Beneath the metal, his swollen balls hung purple, trapped by a narrow ring that separated them from the rest and kept them on display, exposed like a ripe fruit ready to burst.

On the dark velvet sofa in the corner, the guard Cira slept with her mouth slightly open and her hand still resting on the hilt of her dagger. The exhaustion of the night had defeated her.

The bolts thundered.

The doors of the Great Hall swung open wide and Queen Leonora entered the way winter enters: without haste, without needing to announce itself, changing the room’s temperature by her mere presence. She wore a maroon velvet dress, the golden embroidery blazing over her chest, the hand-sewn pearls catching the light of the torches still flickering in the corridors. It was a gown designed to crush. Nothing about her was accidental.

But her feet told another story.

Beneath all that magnificence, Leonora wore flat ocher leather sandals, open at the toes, worn until the material had learned the exact shape of her sole. Her nails showed through, painted a bright red that matched the dress. It was a strange choice for a queen. Not for Leonora. She tamed her sandals the same way she tamed her kingdom: with patience and with weight, until the leather yielded and surrendered completely.

One step behind her came Valeria.

It was impossible not to look at her. She was the kind of beauty that unsettles, that forces you to blink twice. Her blond mane, tied in a high ponytail, swung with mathematical precision in time with her steps. Her hardened leather armor was tight, tactical, with silver studs on the shoulders and a worked neckline that showed the upper curve of high, firm breasts, compressed by the bodice into two half-moons of tanned skin. Her gladiator sandals climbed to mid-thigh, dark leather straps crossing over flawless bronzed skin. The platforms added five centimeters of height and rang on the stone with the cadence of a military metronome.

In her left hand, carefully coiled, hung a black braided leather whip.

The noise woke Cira. The guard’s eyes snapped open. It took her a second to understand where she was, and in that second Leonora was already looking at her.

—Negligence —said the queen, in a voice so soft it was more threatening than a shout— is the first step toward treason. Do you think my halls are watched with closed eyes?

Cira sprang to her feet, smoothing her wrinkled uniform, unable to hold the queen’s gaze beyond the worn sandals of her sovereign.

—Forgive me, my queen. The night was long, the slave’s purging…

—Silence.

Leonora raised a hand. That was enough.

—I want breakfast here. Southern grapes, ripe figs, fresh cheese and warm bread. The reserve wine from the Arén cellars. If you take longer than necessary, next time you sleep you’ll do it hanging beside our pet, with an iron dildo shoved up your ass to the hilt. Have I made myself clear?

Cira went pale, made a deep bow, and left the hall at almost a run, her boots echoing urgently down the stone corridor.

***

Leonora turned toward the back of the room. Rodrigo hung motionless, his eyelids closed, his breathing broken.

—He’s sedated by exhaustion —murmured the queen, with the clinical coldness of someone assessing a tool—. Wake him, Valeria. The fever needs fluids or the kidneys fail and the fun ends too soon. Hydrate him. But do it according to our customs.

Valeria nodded with a slight smile, almost kind, that never reached her eyes. She walked toward the Black Pillar with slow, confident steps. The contrast was brutal: the blond woman’s luminous perfection against Rodrigo’s damaged flesh, bruised and crusted with dry salt. With precise movements she removed the weight hanging from the chastity belt, loosened the collar by a finger’s breadth, and unfastened the harness straps one by one.

Without support, Rodrigo fell.

The impact on the flagstones was dry and final. Knees first, then shoulder. The blow jolted the chastity device against his own pelvis and sent the vibration through the metal catheter inserted in his cock. A flash of sharp pain tore from his groin to his throat. The sound that came out of him was an animal scream, rasped raw, almost unrecognizable.

He lay curled on the floor, shaking. His muscles had forgotten how to work. His mouth was a desert.

Valeria went to the carved stone fountain that decorated one side of the hall. She took a silver chalice inlaid with garnets, dipped it into the crystal water, and filled it to the brim. Then she walked back and stopped right in front of Rodrigo’s face, which was pressed against the floor.

Her gladiator sandals halted a few centimeters from the slave’s mouth.

—Water, beast —she said, in a crystal voice—. Drink.

Rodrigo tried to lift his head toward the chalice. Valeria tilted it. Not toward the slave’s cracked mouth, but over her own right foot. The icy water cascaded in a shining sheet over her bare instep, slid between the dark leather straps of the sandal, caressed her flawless toes, and dripped slowly onto the cold stone.

Rodrigo understood at once.

Thirst was stronger than dignity. It always was. With a groan that mixed instinct and humiliation, he lunged forward and began licking Valeria’s instep. He extended his whole tongue, flat, thirsty, and dragged it over her bronzed skin like a dog scraping an empty bowl. He caught the drops running down her skin, slurped the water trapped between the leather straps, sucked every trace of moisture with the desperation of someone who had gone hours without drinking. He pushed his tongue between the warrior’s perfect toes, one by one, licking the folds, nibbling with parted lips, swallowing the water with wet, obscene sounds that echoed in the silence of the hall. He sucked the arch of the foot, the heel, all the way to the ankle, following every wet leather strap upward, sucking the leather as if it had milk.

The cold of the water against the fire in his throat was such a violent relief that it brought tears to his eyes. He became what they wanted him to be: a thirsty dog, licking his mistress’s feet, grateful for the crumbs that slipped between the fingers of a woman who did not even look at him. And beneath the steel cage, against his will, against all logic, his cock tried to harden. The metal would not let it. The flesh swelled inside the box, pressing against the bars, and the catheter driven into his urethra turned that impossible erection into a white stab of agony that made him moan with his mouth still pressed to Valeria’s foot.

She noticed. She lowered her gaze, saw the tremor between his thighs, the red flesh showing through the cage slats, and laughed very softly.

—Look at that —she murmured, without raising her voice—. The beast gets hard licking my feet. So predictable.

She tilted her foot and pressed the sole of the sandal against Rodrigo’s lips, forcing his face down until it was smashed against the floor and his mouth was open beneath the leather. She let the last drops from the chalice fall there. Rodrigo drank them with his tongue trapped beneath the sandal, swallowing dust, sweat and water in equal measure, thanking her with muffled whimpers.

Valeria did not move again. She watched him from above with the same distant expression she would have worn looking at rain.

***

The doors of the hall opened again. Cira came in pushing a wooden cart loaded with gleaming silver trays. The aroma of freshly baked bread, sweet figs and spiced wine flooded the air at once. Rodrigo’s stomach growled in an involuntary spasm.

—Good —murmured Leonora, moving toward the center of the room—. Take off his handcuffs, Valeria. I don’t want the metal scratching the furniture. And put him in position. The throne is comfortable, but an informal breakfast requires a more practical support for my guest.

Valeria took a small key from her belt and unlocked the handcuffs with a contemptuous twist. When Rodrigo’s shoulders were freed, the bones cracked with a painful crunch. Blood rushed back into his numb fingers like boiling water through an ice-cold pipe.

—On all fours —ordered Valeria—. Beside the low table.

She didn’t use the whip. The sound of leather brushing his hip was enough.

Rodrigo crawled on his palms and raw knees until he was parallel to the oak table where Cira was setting out breakfast. He kept his head down, the collar weighing on his neck, the steel cage hanging between his thighs dangerously close to the floor.

Leonora sat on her throne with the slow majesty of someone who knows the world will wait. She crossed her legs. One of her ocher sandals hovered in the air, swaying with arrogance. Beneath the dress skirt, amid the folds of maroon velvet, a bare, firm thigh could be glimpsed, and higher still, a shadow that none of those present dared to look at twice.

Valeria approached Rodrigo without a word. She turned her back and sat on his spine with the light grace of someone taking a familiar stool.

The initial impact drew a muffled gasp. The weight of the armor, the silver studs, the weapons, all concentrated over his lumbar vertebrae. Valeria was not a heavy woman, but the hardened leather multiplied the pressure in ways the flesh recognized without needing the brain to process it. She adjusted her legs, planted the soles of her gladiator sandals on the stone floor, and distributed her weight until Rodrigo became a perfectly stable seat.

This was not the pain of hot iron. It was not the fire of disinfectant. It was something different and, in a way, worse. It was total objectification. The transformation of a body into an object without anyone naming it, without anyone even looking at it.

Leonora and Valeria began to talk.

They talked about the quality of the wine, the taxes of the eastern provinces, the new armor she had commissioned for the palace guard. They cut figs, spread cheese on warm bread, and clinked their silver cups in occasional toasts. Their voices floated through the hall like something completely alien to the human being bearing their weight from below.

And Rodrigo had to remain absolutely still.

His arms trembled from the constant isometric strain. Cold sweat beaded on his forehead. His stomach growled at the aroma of bread that was not for him. Every time his elbows gave a millimeter, his back arched. And every time his back arched, Valeria adjusted herself. She shifted her weight from one hip to the other, crossed her legs, corrected her posture with total naturalness.

Halfway through breakfast, Leonora leaned over the table and said something to Valeria in a low voice, with a brief, wicked smile. The warrior nodded. She stood for a moment, only to sit down again differently. This time she turned her body, pulled up the leather skirt of her armor to her waist, and sat astride Rodrigo’s lower back, legs open and high boots planted on either side of his ribs. Valeria’s bare cunt, shaved and hot, came to rest without barrier against the slave’s lumbar vertebrae.

Rodrigo felt the wetness all at once. A damp, viscous heat, marking the skin of his back like a seal. The warrior’s inner lips parted against his spine, and with each small movement she made to cut a fig or raise the cup to her mouth, her cunt slid back and forth over his sweat-drenched skin, leaving a sticky trail. Valeria was wet. Not because of him. Because of power itself. Because of the certainty that she could use a man as a stool and rub herself over him while she ate breakfast, and no one would say a word.

—How the beast sweats —she murmured, biting into a fig—. It mixes with mine. Almost disgusting.

Leonora laughed, a deep, throaty laugh.

—Let him get used to it. It’s the only thing he’ll ever taste of your cunt in his whole life, Valeria. Just enough to know it exists and that it isn’t for him.

Rodrigo closed his eyes. The humiliation was worse than the weight. Valeria’s cunt was centimeters from his skin, soaked, and he was locked inside a steel cage with a catheter driven into his cock, unable even to fantasize about a touch. Every time she moved, a warm trickle slid down his side and dripped to the floor. The warrior was leaking a little, tiny waves of unnamable pleasure, every time the weight of her ass crushed the slave’s buttocks against the cold stone. And he had to keep being furniture. Steady. Silent. A sweat-soaked bench under someone else’s cunt that would never consider him a man.

That was the true hell.

Every movement of Valeria on his back transmitted in waves to his pelvis. Gravity made the lock and base of the chastity device sway. That tiny, invisible motion to anyone looking from outside was enough for the metal catheter to slide a fraction inside his already inflamed urethra. The steel ridges against raw tissue produced an electric stab that climbed from his groin to his throat. His balls, pinched by the ring, swung with every tremor, swollen and sensitive, brushing the cold steel each time he moved.

Rodrigo bit the inside of his cheeks to keep from making a sound.

A moan, a whimper, would ruin his lady’s breakfast. And he knew for certain that the punishment for that would be back to the Black Pillar, or worse still, Cira bringing back the lead weight he had worn hanging all the previous night. So he stayed still. Absorbing the weight. Enduring the fire. Feeling someone else’s cunt sliding over his back. Being the piece of furniture they wanted him to be.

Leonora slowly chewed a frosted grape, took a sip of dark wine, and rested her eyes on the composition before her. As a monarch obsessed with the aesthetics of power, the scene fascinated her.

Valeria’s radiant perfection: her golden hair catching the morning light, her upright posture atop silver armor, the breasts half spilling from the bodice and moving only slightly with each breath, the almost unbearable beauty of her figure riding a broken man as if he were a domesticated stallion. And beneath, serving as a seat for so much magnificence, Rodrigo’s shattered body: bruised skin, neck trapped by black iron, muscles trembling with the silent effort of staying upright, cock locked inside the polished steel cage and purple balls hanging between his thighs. Divinity resting on misery without even registering it. For Leonora, that was the image of power in its purest form. Not screams or blood. This: beauty dripping over the back of someone’s absolute defeat, someone who no longer deserved even to be looked at.

The queen adjusted herself on the throne as well. She spread her legs a little more than was proper, letting the skirt of the dress open to mid-thigh, and slid her free hand beneath the velvet. No one made any comment. Cira, posted by the door, kept her eyes fixed on the floor. Valeria continued cutting cheese as if nothing were happening. But the air in the hall filled with a barely audible wet rhythm, the faint click of royal fingers working their own cunt while they watched the human pet beneath their guest.

Leonora came without changing expression. Just a small sigh, a flicker in her eyelids, and her hand reappeared on the arm of the throne, wet and shining. She brought it to her lips and slowly sucked one of her own fingers, her eyes fixed on Rodrigo.

—Good stool —she said, to no one in particular—. The best moans are the ones that never get out.

***

Breakfast lasted an agonizing hour.

When Leonora wiped her crimson-stained lips with the linen napkin and nodded in silence, Cira hurried to clear the trays. Valeria got up from Rodrigo’s back with the same grace with which she had sat down. As the weight disappeared, the slave’s spine cracked with a crunch audible throughout the hall. Painful relief ran through his entire back, immediately followed by the familiar tug of the chastity cage settling again under gravity. He collapsed with his arms stretched out on the stone, unable to hold any other posture. Across his back remained, shining in the gray light, the wet, perfectly outlined stain of Valeria’s cunt, drying slowly in the air.

The warrior looked down, saw the mark, and smiled.

—My signature —she said to herself—. Let it stick to him.

Before withdrawing, she bent down, grabbed Rodrigo by the hair, and lifted his head. With the other hand she cupped her cunt, still shining, and ran two fingers across her own wet lips. Then she brought them to the slave’s mouth.

—Open.

Rodrigo opened his mouth without thinking. Valeria pushed the two soaked fingers all the way in, pressing his tongue against his palate. The taste hit him at once: salty, acidic, thick, the hot taste of a woman’s cunt that did not belong to him and never would.

—Suck —she ordered, without tenderness—. You’re going to know what you’ll never have.

Rodrigo closed his lips around Valeria’s fingers and sucked with the desperation of a condemned man. He licked them top and bottom, slurped the sticky fluid, swallowed spit and juice mixed together. His cock, inside the cage, tried to swell for the umpteenth time, and the catheter answered with a white jolt that made him cry without sound, without stopping sucking.

Valeria pulled her fingers out with a pop, wiped them on the slave’s tangled hair, and stood up.

Leonora rose from the throne. The maroon velvet dragged over the flagstones with an opulent whisper.

—Take him for a walk through the inner corridors, Valeria —the queen decreed, adjusting the square neckline of her dress—. Let the muscles move a little. I need them fit tonight. And remind him where he belongs.

Valeria turned toward Rodrigo. A dazzling smile, white and perfect, slowly spread across her face. It was not a smile for him. It was a smile for herself, for the private pleasure of what she was about to do.

She gathered the steel chain hanging from Rodrigo’s collar. She wound two links around her gloved hand and yanked upward with a dry, authoritative motion.

The collar’s teeth pressed into his throat. Rodrigo tried to stand. A downward jerk from Valeria stopped him halfway.

—On all fours, beast —she said calmly—. The queen’s dogs don’t walk on two legs.

And the walk began.

Valeria advanced toward the double doors connecting the Great Hall to the palace’s maze of corridors. Her step was assured, rhythmic, marking time with the precise clack, clack of her heels on stone. The sound repeated without mercy, a metronome of a sentence with no visible end. Rodrigo crawled behind her, palms and knees scraping over the cold mosaics, panting so he wouldn’t fall behind, his naked ass raised and the cage swinging between his legs for all to see.

The mechanics of crawling were a torment designed with exactness for his condition. Every time he moved one knee forward, his hips tilted. That continuous motion shook the chastity device. The ridged catheter kept rubbing against inflamed tissue, already bathed in acid the previous night. A dull, constant burn that accompanied him across every meter, every cold tile passing under his hands. His balls, hanging heavy between his thighs, struck rhythmically against the inner face of the steel box. Every small impact was a dull jolt that climbed up his lower belly.

If he lagged even a second, if pain made him shorten his pace, the chain tightened at once. The inertia of Valeria’s body pulled on the collar and drove the metal teeth into his windpipe, cutting off his air. He was forced to speed up, ignoring the fire in his groin, panting with his mouth open to keep slack in the chain and be able to breathe.

The corridors were not empty.

Maidservants with laundry baskets, armored patrol guards, cupbearers, and lower-ranking slaves pressed themselves against the walls when they saw Valeria approaching. They lowered their eyes in respect. But their gazes inevitably slid toward the creature crawling behind her.

They saw Rodrigo naked, covered in bruises, with his knees bloody, the spiked collar at his throat and the steel cage displayed between his thighs, purple balls swinging in plain view, his ass open to the air. They saw the drool hanging from his mouth from the effort of breathing, the submission etched into every line of his defeated body, the stain of Valeria’s cunt still shining on the lower part of his back like a mark of ownership. One of the youngest maidservants brought a hand to her mouth to smother a laugh; another, older and less restrained, spat on the floor just as Rodrigo passed her, and the slave had to drag his hand through the warm spit to keep pace. A guard openly squeezed his cock over the leather of his leggings at the sight. No one said anything. Everyone watched.

He was not being walked like a prisoner of war. He was not being displayed like a punished man. He was being led exactly as they had taught him to be: a broken, docile pet crawling behind a woman who paid him no more attention than was necessary not to lose the rhythm of her own heels.

And somewhere between pain and exhaustion, between the burn of metal and the cold of stone, between the taste of Valeria’s cunt still clinging to his palate and the stain drying on his back, Rodrigo understood that this was exactly what Queen Leonora wanted him to understand. Not that she hated him. Not that she feared him. That, simply, for her and for everyone who lived in that castle, he was no longer a person deserving to be looked at directly. He was a useful object kept in the Black Pillar when not needed and taken out when convenient, just as one takes a stool out of a closet or walks an animal when the queen wants it to get some air.

The clack, clack, clack of Valeria’s heels kept marking time through the stone corridors. Indifferent. Perfect. Implacable.