Claiming Crystal by Kayleen Knight

and started their surely eternal reign over every alcove of their territory. Despite the royal airs of her family, they had the harshness of a warrior people, conquering the previous dynasty from within by lying, cheating, and poisoning their way to the top. It was common enough with people who had ambitious blood. It was even more common with people who had the means and the shamelessness to enact them.
    Her father conquered the kingdom from its previous ruler in the exact moment that the ruler had lived far too long growing fat and stupid and happy. The one lesson Crystal could remember her father giving her personally as a very young child was to keep herself on her toes at all times, and stave off complacency with the fire that he believed burned inside her as strongly as it burned inside of him. The man might be marrying her off to ensure their family name survived, but his callousness partly came from his belief in her to accept what she must accept and thrive inside of whatever confines he deemed necessary for her to don for the sake of the family. This sense of obligation became the mantra of her family, in many ways, to stave off that inevitable fall by keeping themselves slightly at a distance from the spoils and riches around them to ensure they would not be similarly overtaken.
    Crystal did not know what the kingdom used to be like before, not entirely, but the servants and maids spoke many things about the changes done to the dungeon underneath the plot of garden that had been planted just outside the walls of Crystal's own confines. Her father never told her directly, and her mother was too modest to share, but some of the servants had silver tongues, and many of them could be encouraged into sharing with a night's bedding and sex. Crystal did not fuck her servants just because she was bored; she had found that they would do small and interesting favors for her, and in the stagnancy that was bequeathed upon all marriage objects such as her, any newness could be an excitement worthy of the effort.
    One young man in particular talked for hours about the rumors he had heard of cults gathering outside the bars to make orgies and titillations for the prisoners. The jailers, too, had their own rumors, and it mainly involved the many ways they were said to penetrate their prisoners. The young man had told Crystal earnestly that these titillations were not lewd, but actually a very strict part of the punishment that went on down here in the firelight.
    He said that it was its own torment to see the nubile bodies of young men and women from the prison floor while being powerlessly unable to touch them, unable to sate the hunger they grew and tended into a seething monster of lust. He said that only the most foolish of prisoners would dare to watch the ministrations of the many dancers and seducers and sex artists who came from the world over to partake in the decadence that was afforded only to royalty, which was precisely the shameless display of people cavorting before prisoners to torment them further.
    Crystal approached a cell where two men had been held together. They were sleeping, having lost track of the days without any sunlight to count time, and one rested his hand on the other's chest and his hand on the other's lap. A very wakeful cock probed against the fabric of the pants, searching for the touch that it desired to release itself, and Crystal wondered if the men had been given certain foods that were said to light their loins on fire. That was another thing she had seen the jailers do under the cover of the shadows and fire, stealing aphrodisiacs from the kitchen and then delighting in giving them to prisoners so that the men would find themselves hard and erect even in the middle of their whippings. ‘I think he likes it!’ Crystal had heard one of the jailers exclaim, his voice echoing down the corridor and up the stairs, and eventually finding its way into her room.
    She had shivered then; out of