It served his father right, having to see the results of his actions each day. Perhaps someday he would believe his father’s suffering had accumulated sufficiently to compensate him for all he’d lost. But it hadn’t yet.
The king cleared his throat as he stood by the door, ready to escape. “Your bride has been certified fertile, and I cannot doubt her beauty will stir your loins. I expect she will produce you an heir some ten moons hence. Now I bid you good night.”
“Good night.” And good riddance, Arik thought when he heard the tower door close with a satisfying thud.
He wished he were as certain as his father that his bride would do her duty, not run screaming when she saw him in the concealing garments he wore whenever he had to venture from these rooms. He figured he would chance that, though, over the near certainty that seeing him naked would make her scream in horror. As forbidding as he looked in head-to-toe black leather, he looked worse when he revealed his ravaged flesh.
Drawing his robe around him to ward off the evening chill, he strode to the other window of his tower, which overlooked the community where Obsidion’s full-time residents lived.
Obsidion. The pleasure planet was his home and now his birthright. From his vantage point he could see all the city. Sex slave parlors and shops renowned throughout the galaxy twinkled with many-colored lights, though night had not yet cloaked the sky in darkness.
Arik turned toward the other side of the city that was cloaked in twilight. It bathed mansions and cottages alike in a haze of mottled pink and lavender. Arik stood, fingering the rough surface of his ruined cheek and idly rubbing a painful spot in his empty eye socket as he watched dusk fall on his last day as a free man.
He could not, would not, submit to the restorative surgeries Pak Song and a team of surgeons had recommended. His father had summoned the old Earthling exile to the palace along with a half-dozen plastic surgeons, soon after Arik returned from exile, and he hadn’t tried to hide his disappointment when Arik had refused his services.
Pak Song and his colleagues hadn’t understood, either, that Arik saw his ugliness as a source of well-deserved pain for his father. He wore his scars as a reminder to all who looked at him of the cruel fate that befell younger sons of kings who refused to bow to Obsidion’s laws and sacrifice their genitals to a surgeon’s knife.
His cock swelled against the sheer golden silk of his robe, as though in silent thanks to him for having spared it by fleeing his home rather than becoming a royal eunuch along with his four cousins, the sons of the half-brother of Arik’s father. The four had been at or approaching puberty that summer twelve years ago.
Now they served in the palace as royal eunuchs, well-fed and well cared for though deprived of their maleness and any chance to succeed to Obsidion’s monarchy. And he was back, the unquestioned heir to the Diamond Throne. However Arik might feel about his mating, he accepted that he must marry and provide an heir. Maybe I should be grateful that my father arranged this marriage to a woman considered among the most beautiful on the pleasure planet.
In one way he was. He yearned for a woman to share his bed, and despite what he had told the king, he hated feeling the curious eyes on him when he went to Romulus the Aurelionian’s finest sex emporium for satisfaction.
If only his princess would look past the scars that marred his body and see him for the man he was, not the monster who greeted him in the mirror each morning. If only she would look at him for himself, not for the king he would someday become. Arik fixed his gaze on a glittering star and made the two wishes, though he had no faith that either would come true.
No. He’d not leave this chamber without the mask and bodysuit that hid his ugliness, and he would never invite his mate to join him here. Better that she fear what she did not know than run in horror from the monster who was her husband.
* * * * *
“There. The man I’m looking at must be your bridegroom. Do you see him, framed in the highest window of the tower? Those who say a monster lies beneath the leather hood and suit he wears must have lost their minds. The man is gorgeous. What a face! What hair! What a body.” When Pearl handed over the handheld telescope, Emerald noticed the lascivious look in her sister’s eyes. “I tell you, Emerald, I have never seen such a magnificent cock. If only I were the eldest.”
Garnet moistened her deep-red lips. “Or I. When Arik becomes king, he will have even more wealth than the Aurelonian who owns all the sex slave emporiums on the Street of Pleasure, or so people say. What think you of your prince, Emerald?”
Emerald focused the eyepiece and gazed at the man who tomorrow would become her husband—her Master. She stifled a sigh, for it was obvious that her sisters were envious. No way would she spoil the pleasure of her royal mating by having Garnet and Pearl scrap over her prince. After all, her father had already decided the crown prince of Obsidion would be hers. Garnet and Pearl must not only wait for their own matings until their father accumulated the gold for their dowries, they must also satisfy themselves with the lesser males Meredith the matchmaker would choose for them.