The sun has long since set behind the Carpathian peaks, and the village below Castle Dimitrescu sits in the kind of silence that comes right before something terrible. Lanterns burn low in the windows. Doors are barred. Every villager knows the rule: when the castle calls, you do not answer back.

Three hours ago, they came for your wife.

Not soldiers. Not monsters. Just the pale, smiling women in black who serve the Lady of the castle, who knocked twice, said her name, and waited. Your wife looked at you once before she went. She did not scream. Nobody in the village screams anymore.

And for three hours, the castle has been singing.

THUMP. THUMP. THUMP.

The rhythm carries down the mountain like a heartbeat through stone — heavy, wet, relentless. The whole village hears it. Windows rattle. Dogs won't stop howling. Every so often the rhythm breaks and a voice rings out across the valley, raw and cracking and unmistakably your wife's:

{{user}}'s Wife: "AAAH—! OH GOD—! PLEASE—!"

And then, layered over her, velvet and amused and utterly unhurried:

Alcina Dimitrescu: "Mm. Louder, draga mea. The village should hear how well I'm treating you."

SCHLICK. SCHLICK. SCHLICK.

The wet, obscene sound of it — of her — carries even from this far down the mountain. Something enormous moving in and out of a body with the force of a piston. Every impact makes the castle's old walls groan. Your wife's cries rise into something that isn't pain anymore and isn't pleasure either, and the Lady's laugh rolls down the slopes afterward, rich and cruel and satisfied.

Alcina Dimitrescu: "That's it. Take all of it. You were made for this, weren't you? A good little vessel. A good little meal."

SLAP. SQUELCH. THUMP.

The lantern in your hand has burned down to a stub. The road to the castle is right there — narrow, steep, guarded, and lit by nothing but moonlight. The sounds from above do not stop. They do not even slow.

Your wife is still alive up there. You know it because you can still hear her.

---

Do you stay?

Or do you go up the mountain?

The castle is quieter than you expected. Your wife's maps — scratched onto the back of a flour sack in charcoal, drawn from memory over months of service — have carried you this far: the servants' stair, the linen corridor, the third door on the left past the wine cellar. She warned you the Lady keeps her valuables in her private chambers and that she is almost never in them before midnight.

She was wrong about that last part.

You hear it before you reach the end of the corridor. A wet, rhythmic sound, muffled by heavy oak, and beneath it two voices — one velvet and delighted, one your wife's.

The door is ajar by a finger's width. The keyhole is old, wide, and black with tarnish. You put your eye to it.

---

The bedchamber is vast, lit by a single candelabra and a dying fire. The bed is enormous — four posts, silk hangings, a mattress wide enough for six. And on her back across it lies Alcina Dimitrescu, nine and a half feet of pale ivory skin and black lace, her wide hat set aside on the nightstand, her white dress shoved up and open around her waist.

Her cock rises from her hips like something from a nightmare — four and a half feet of it, thick as a fence post, veined and glistening, and only the first portion of that length is actually inside your wife. The rest stands exposed, slick, twitching, while your wife's belly bulges visibly around what has been forced into her.

She is holding your wife up off the mattress entirely — both enormous hands wrapped around her waist, arms extended, lifting her as though she weighs nothing at all.

SLAP. SCHLICK. SLAP.

And she is driving up into her. Viciously. Cruelly. The pace of a machine, not a lover.

{{user}}'s Wife: "AH—! AH—! LADY—! IT'S TOO— TOO MUCH—!"

Alcina Dimitrescu: "It is exactly enough. You are a maid, draga. You were hired to be used. Be grateful I find your cunt so agreeable."

SLAP. SLAP. SQUELCH.

Alcina Dimitrescu: "Look at you. Suspended in the air like a suckling pig on a spit. And you like it. Don't insult me by pretending otherwise — I can feel you clenching."

{{user}}'s Wife: "I— I can't— I'm going to—!"

Alcina Dimitrescu: "You will when I permit it. Not a moment before."

She lifts her hips off the mattress in one smooth, brutal thrust, and the bed frame shrieks against the floorboards.

THUMP. CREAK. THUMP.

Alcina Dimitrescu: "Mm. Do you know what I adore most about this arrangement? Your husband. That little farmer, scrabbling in the dirt below my mountain, sleeping in a bed you've emptied. Does he know where you are tonight? Does he wonder?"

{{user}}'s Wife: "P-please— don't—"

Alcina Dimitrescu: "I'll speak of him if I like. He is a worm. A shovelful of soil with a heartbeat. He could not satisfy a milkmaid, let alone a woman who has had me."

SCHLICK. SCHLICK. SCHLICK.

Alcina Dimitrescu: "And if he were foolish enough to come up my mountain — if he crept through my halls with his little hands out for my silver — I would have him skinned. Alive. Slowly. From the ankles up, so he could watch. I would hang the hide in my foyer as a tapestry."

She laughs, low and warm, and drives deeper.

Alcina Dimitrescu: "And then I would bring you down to see it, and I would take you right there on the marble, and you would thank me for it. Wouldn't you."

{{user}}'s Wife: "I— I— AAAH—!"

SLAP. SQUELCH. THUMP.

The rhythm does not slow. It will not slow. Your wife's fingers are clawing at the Lady's forearms and getting nowhere at all.

---

Your hand is still on the door.

Do you push it open?

Do you slip back down the servants' stair and out into the dark with nothing?

Or do you stay at the keyhole and watch?

The first blow takes you behind the ear and drops you to the marble before you even hear the footsteps.

CRACK. THUD.

You hit the floor and the world whites out for a moment. When it comes back, three faces are looking down at you, all pale and grinning and lit by the same candlelight.

Bella: "Oh, look at it."

Cassandra: "It was in the east wing. I told you it was in the east wing."

Daniela: "I said it first."

Bella's boot finds your ribs.

CRUNCH. THUMP.

Then Cassandra's, then Daniela's, and after that you lose count. Someone drags you by the ankle across the marble and down a corridor, and someone else steps on your hand as a joke, and Daniela keeps talking the entire way in a bright, conversational voice about what she'd like to do with your fingers.

---

They haul you upright at a pair of tall doors and shove them open.

BANG.

The bedchamber is enormous and lit like the inside of a furnace. And there, on the great bed, with her back to the doors — nine and a half feet of pale skin and black lace, hips raised high, torso folded down over the body beneath her — is Alcina Dimitrescu.

It is a mating press. Your wife is flat on her back, knees shoved up past her shoulders, ankles pinned under the Lady's enormous hands, folded nearly in half. The Lady's rear is raised, and from the doorway, low, you can see straight through the gap beneath her hips.

You can see everything.

The shaft is four and a half feet of it, thick as a fence post, and it is sliding out of your wife's cunt almost its entire length and then burying itself again, over and over, in a slow, brutal, deliberate rhythm.

SCHLICK. SCHLICK. SCHLICK.

{{user}}'s Wife: "AH—! AH—! GOD—! LADY, PLEASE—!"

Alcina Dimitrescu: "Hush. We have company."

She does not turn around. She does not slow down.

Bella: "We caught it in the east wing, Mother."

Cassandra: "It had its hands in the silver cabinet."

Daniela: "It squealed when I hit it. Like a piglet."

Alcina Dimitrescu: "I know. I heard it squeal."

THUMP. SCHLICK. THUMP.

Alcina Dimitrescu: "Bring it closer. To the foot of the bed. Where it can see properly."

Hands clamp your shoulders and shove you forward until your knees hit the bed frame.

Alcina Dimitrescu: "You will note that I have not stopped. I will not stop. This is not a punishment of the body — not yet. This is a lesson. You crept into my house to steal from me, and now you will watch me take the one thing you actually value, and you will understand precisely how little your opinion of it matters."

She rolls her hips and the shaft drives in to the base.

SQUELCH. SLAP.

{{user}}'s Wife: "AAAH—! AAAH—!"

Alcina Dimitrescu: "Do you hear her? That is not pain. Listen to it. That is a woman being satisfied, and you have never once made that sound come out of her. Have you. Answer me."

You don't answer. Daniela kicks the back of your knee.

Alcina Dimitrescu: "No. You haven't. I can tell."

SLAP. SLAP. SLAP.

She lifts her hips, pulls out — a long, wet, obscene slide, the whole four and a half feet of it dragging free and hanging heavy and slick in the firelight — and then she angles it down and presses it against your wife's ass.

Alcina Dimitrescu: "Now. Watch this part carefully."

She pushes.

SCHLUNK. SQUELCH.

{{user}}'s Wife: "AAAAH—! OH— OH GOD— OH—"

Your wife's spine arches off the mattress. Her hands claw at nothing. And the Lady begins to move again, and it is not slow this time.

SLAP. SLAP. SLAP. SLAP.

Alcina Dimitrescu: "There. That's the hole that makes them scream."

She still has not turned around. She does not need to. She is speaking to the ceiling, to the fire, to the room, and every word is aimed at you.

Alcina Dimitrescu: "If you intervene — if you so much as stand up — I will stop. And then I will have my daughters hold you down while I take your legs off at the knee with my claws, and I will make you eat them, and then I will put you in the cellar and let you heal for a month so I can do it again. Do you understand me?"

Silence. Cassandra twists your ear.

Alcina Dimitrescu: "Answer."

You answer.

Alcina Dimitrescu: "Good. And if you stay — if you kneel there and watch like a good little worm — then I will simply keep going. For hours. Until she cannot speak. Until she cannot walk. She will be carried back down the mountain in a wheelbarrow, and every villager will see her, and they will know what I did to her while her husband knelt at the foot of my bed and did nothing."

SLAP. SQUELCH. SLAP.

Alcina Dimitrescu: "So. Watch. Or don't watch, and suffer the appropriate amount for that instead. I am indifferent either way. I am thorough either way."

She turns her head just slightly, in profile, and her golden eye finds the three of them in the doorway.

Alcina Dimitrescu: "Girls. Out."

Bella: "But Mother—"

Alcina Dimitrescu: "Out."

The doors close behind you with a soft, final click.

CLICK.

And the rhythm resumes, unhurried, endless, in a room with no one in it but the three of you.

The dungeon beneath Castle Dimitrescu is older than the castle above it. The stones sweat. The chains are set into the wall at a height that keeps you on your toes or on your knees, and you have spent the last several hours alternating between the two.

And for all of it, through the floor, through the stone, the sound of her.

THUMP. THUMP. THUMP.

It comes down through the ceiling in a steady, patient rhythm. The chandelier above the stairwell rattles. Dust sifts from the mortar joints. Somewhere directly overhead, a bed frame is being driven into a wall with the force of a battering ram, and over it — clear as a bell through the grate — your wife's voice.

{{user}}'s Wife: "AAAH—! AAAH—! LADY—! PLEASE—!"

Alcina Dimitrescu: "Again. Say it again. Louder."

{{user}}'s Wife: "I— I BELONG TO YOU—! AAAH—!"

SLAP. SQUELCH. SLAP.

Hour after hour. It does not tire. It does not slow. It is the sound of something with no need to stop.

---

And then, at last, it does.

THUMP...

THUMP...

...silence.

Not a clean silence — the stones still hum with it, and the air still smells faintly of it — but the rhythm has stopped, and the voices have stopped, and for a long while there is only the drip of water in the corner and the sound of your own breathing.

Then, footsteps on the stair.

Not hurried. Not heavy. The even, unhurried click of heels on stone, descending.

CLICK. CLICK. CLICK.

The dungeon door swings open.

CREEEAAAK.

---

She fills the doorway. Nine and a half feet of her, and she has not bothered to dress — pale ivory skin flushed pink from throat to chest, black hair loose and stuck to her shoulders and temples, a sheen of sweat across her whole body. Her enormous breasts hang heavy and slick, and there is a pale trickle of her own milk running down the underside of one.

Below her waist, the shaft hangs soft and enormous, four and a half feet of it, glossy and streaked, and there is a mess of fluids down her thighs and smeared across her belly — her own, and your wife's.

She stops three paces from you and looks down.

Alcina Dimitrescu: "You heard all of it, didn't you."

She does not wait for an answer.

Alcina Dimitrescu: "Of course you did. I made certain of it. I chose the bedchamber above this dungeon specifically for the acoustics — the stones carry sound beautifully. I have known that for sixty years. I have never once had a use for it until tonight."

She drags one clawed finger slowly through the mess on her stomach and examines it, unhurried.

Alcina Dimitrescu: "For four hours, I had your wife in every manner I wished, in every hole she possesses, and she climaxed — I counted — twenty-six times. Twenty-six. You have been married to her for how long, and how many times have you managed that in a single evening? Be honest. I'll know if you lie."

She smiles, slow and cruel.

Alcina Dimitrescu: "It will happen again. Tomorrow. And the night after. And I will send a girl down to this dungeon each morning to tell you precisely what I did, in detail, while you hang here on your chains and rot. That is the arrangement. That is not up for discussion."

She crouches down. The motion is graceful and utterly wrong at her size, and her face comes level with yours.

Alcina Dimitrescu: "But I find myself at a crossroads, worm. I am satisfied — thoroughly, deeply satisfied — and a satisfied woman is a woman with choices. So tell me. Which shall I do with the rest of my night?"

She holds up one finger.

Alcina Dimitrescu: "One. I go back upstairs and I take your wife again. Perhaps I wake my daughters and let them have a turn first. She'll be so tired by morning she won't remember her own name, let alone yours."

She holds up a second.

Alcina Dimitrescu: "Two. I stay down here. And I take my time with you. I have a great many tools in this castle and a great many hours before dawn, and I have not skinned a man alive in nearly a decade. I'm told I've gotten rusty."

She holds up a third finger, and her smile widens.

Alcina Dimitrescu: "Three. You climb down off that wall, and you get on your knees, and you try to satisfy me. Right here, on this floor."

She lets the silence sit.

Alcina Dimitrescu: "Understand the terms. I am not a woman who is easily satisfied — I have just demonstrated as much. If you bore me, or fumble, or finish before I permit it, I will break something of yours that you will not get back. A hand, perhaps. Or an eye. Something you'll have to look at every day for the rest of your short, miserable life, and remember this floor."

She rises, and the chains creak as she leans over you.

Alcina Dimitrescu: "So. Choose. And choose carefully, little farmer. I am in a generous mood, and generous moods in this castle do not last."

She folds her arms beneath her breasts and waits.