Page 1 of Last Thrall of Asgard

Chapter one

The Master

OLI

You will want him desperately, but there is nothing you can do to ever make him want you the same way back.

Imight loathe that the most I could ever amount to in life was being a thrall to an unfairly luckier noble-born family, but at least I could feel like I had power while making their first-born son moan for a taste of me.

“Fuck, Oli. I need to be inside you.”

“Then take me,” I demanded.

Well, as much as any slave could demand and expect to be given what they wanted.

You are too beautiful to be a thrall, I’d been told. By others but often by Thorsten. Following the old beliefs, a slave was expected to be ugly, brutish, proven by some deformity cursed upon them by the gods that they deserved their predetermined class.

Horseshit. There were plenty of ugly nobles, and plentier still attractive free people and thralls. But nobles could take what they wanted, the beautiful among the lower classes included, ensuring attractive progeny through the people they claimed. They made the misconception true through brute force and luck of their own births.

Surely, the gods had nothing to do with it, if they ever even existed.

Thorsten thrust his hands up under my tunic. He had me hoisted on top of the altar. He’d already tossed aside my boots and torn away my belt, madly grinding our bulges together through the wool of our trousers. “Odin’s beard, you feel good,” he grunted.

We weren’t here for prayers or offerings, but the names of the old gods still had a chance to spill from our lips.

Thorsten crowded in closer, bringing our mouths near enough to share breath. I just wanted tofuckalready, but he liked to take his time, despite lamenting not yet being inside me.

I was lucky for a thrall. Being handsome and fit was the reason Thorsten chose me again and again over others, the reason Iwasn’t worked too hard but allowed gentler tasks to maintain my beauty for my masters to look upon.

And to indulge in.

I had been an indulgence for others over the years, but keeping Thorsten interested had cultivated a possessiveness in him that eventually made me his alone. It was better that way. Predictable. Safe.

Because if I hadn't been handsome and fit enough to secure that, my plight would have been worse.

I kept my stomach muscles taut as Thorsten divested me of my tunic. Leaning back meant my head rested against the tree. My tailbone was already sore from the altar’s stone surface, but a little discomfort was worth the coming burn of being filled. Of being wanted. Of having some—any—meaning to my life.

“Take me!” I bucked against him, as he loomed over me, pinning me to slab and tree. Defiling the altar as often as I tended to it was its own comfort, because if the gods existed and chose to give me this life…

Fuck them.

Fuck them all.

Hardly anyone worshiped the old gods anymore. Thorsten’s family went to a Christian church, yet they ordered their beautiful thrall Oli to tend to the altar in the wood, a stone slab beneath the eldest tree, with a trench around it, save the central path. Runes decorated the stone from generations of the same family line carving the names of the gods they worshiped. It was easy to see which were most venerated among the Aesir, the warlike and order driven gods like Thor and Odin; the Vanir, who communed more with nature, like Freyr and Freya; and the Jotun, who represented chaos, like Loki. But even those names hadn’t been re-carved by Thorsten’s ancestors in generations. I doubted he and his family even knew the stories.

I did. I didn’t believe, mind you, but besides a good fuck in the wood, stories were a thrall’s only comfort, and those about the gods were some of the most intriguing.

And disturbing.

“I will take you when I wish to,” Thorsten growled.

To Thorsten’s credit, he was one of the handsomer nobles. My same age of twenty-one, he was tall, strongly built, blue-eyed, and sported a short but well-groomed beard and blond top fringe with a shorn back and sides.

My ginger hair was similar but longer on top, enough to reach my shoulders if left free, though more often braided and tied back. Maintaining a beard was too much hassle for a slave, so I had but a dusting of reddish scruff amid a smattering of faint freckles. My eyes were like the brightest of blue-green dyes, like teal seawater on a sunny day—or so Thorsten had spouted the first time he’d bedded me. Now the best I got was, “I need your hole, Oli. Come,” and I obeyed.

How much more romantic he’d been when he didn’t know the divide between us. Age fixed that. Now Thorsten knew I was but property to be used, and use me he did. He could have had me unwilling, but I did want it. I wanted to be wanted, and because I wanted it, it felt more like my choice and less like something I had to endure.

Thorsten’s tunic strained with a heave of his breath, and he dove down to suck on my nipples. He kissed and licked a path to my navel while deft fingers untied my trousers in tandem to free my cock. Perhaps I did have some luck other than beauty. I was lucky Thorsten liked the taste of cock almost as much as he enjoyed spearing me with his.

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