Page 12 of What Hunts Inside the Shadows

Caldris smirked and raised his eyebrow, his gaze coming back to mine in a playful challenge. “Should I put it back on? Perhaps my mate would like to fuck a King?”

“You’re no King,” I said, dropping furious fingers to the laces of his tunic. I tore them open, lowering my grip to the place where the part of him I needed was tucked into his pants and yanking it out.

“Yet,” he said, the words hanging between us. I didn’t want to think of the implications of that statement as I pulled his tunic off over his head, dropping it to the rocks beside us. I leaned forward, capturing his mouth with mine once more. I wanted nothing more than to forget who he was for a time, to allow myself to feel something that wasn’t the agonizing grief that threatened to consume me.

Grief for Melian. Grief for the man I’d loved who had never existed at all.

His chest rumbled as he drove his tongue inside my mouth, a growl coming from the depths of his soul as he lowered me to my back upon the ground. The earth pressed into my spine as he followed, laying the weight of his lower body atop mine and tearing at the laces of my tunic. He yanked them free, sliding a hand inside to cup my breast beneath the fabric.

I lowered my hands to his trousers, frantically unknotting them with panicked fingers that couldn’t seem to function with the way his tongue plunged into my mouth over and over, or the feeling of him pinching my nipple and adding pain to the sensations washing over me.

As soon as his laces were untied, I reached inside and wrapped my hand around his length, pumping him from root to tip and taking immense satisfaction in the groan that came in response. He shoved his trousers down below his ass and reached between us to untie mine.

He deprived me of his mouth as he kissed his way down my body, his face trailing over the fabric over my stomach as he peeled the pants down my thighs. Pulling off my boots and the pants along with them, he tossed both to the side before he covered me with his weight once again.

The ground was cold beneath my ass, the dirt pressing into my skin like ice in contrast to the warmth of his body as he settled between my open thighs. Laying his body over mine, he claimed my mouth with his as I reached around to grab him by the ass. Without fabric separating us, the heat of his shaft was like a brand searing into me.

He groaned, pulling back from my mouth to stare down into my face as I looked down the narrow space between our bodies. Everything about him seemed more intimidating in this form; his body, larger and more defined, swallowing mine whole beneath him. Despite his nickname for me, he’d only made me feel little a few times in the weeks I’d known him.

I understood the nickname far more now that I had seen his true form. Any human would be small compared to him.

“Say the word and it all stops,” he said, even as his face twisted. There was no doubt that stopping would come at a cost for him, and the petty part of me wanted to make him pay it. Instead, I reached between our bodies and guided him to my entrance, pinching my lips together.

“I don’t want you to pretend to be sweet right now,” I said, the breath hissing out of me when he stared down at the space where his cock pressed against my pussy. One drive forward and he’d be inside of me, spearing me alive with the very thing I should hate more than anything. “You’re a God. So fuck me like one.”

He growled, shoving his hips forward until the tip pushed into me. My body fought to stretch around him, granting him entrance when it still seemed so impossible no matter how many times I’d done it. “A God is worshiped, min asteren,” he said, rolling to his back and holding me on top of him. He placed a hand on either side of my hips, pushing me to sit back on his length and take him a little deeper while a strangled gasp caught in my throat. “A God sits back and lets those beneath him pleasurehim. Not the other way around. Is that what you want? To serve me until I come?”

A growl built in my throat, my lips twisting with something feral that didn’t belong to me at all. Caldris smirked up at me, his point made. No matter how much I tried to convince myself this didn’t mean anything, I would never want to be like the women who’d come before me.

Because he was mine.

“You are the mate of a God,” he said, using his hands on my hips to lift me and then drop me further down on his cock. Over and over again, working me open bit by bit until I settled atop his thighs and he pressed against the end of me, filling me completely. “I am the one who worships you.”

He reached up, wrapping a hand around the back of my neck and pulling me toward him until his mouth captured mine again. He raised his hips in time with the movements he guided from me, filling me with every stroke, dominating me from the bottom. “Gods,” I groaned, wrapping my arms around him when he flipped me to my back once more and moved within me. The slow, methodical dance of his hips brought his length rubbing over the spot inside me that made me soar. I wrapped my legs around him, hooking my ankles together at the small of his back as he drove deep.

“That’s right, my star. I’m your fucking God,” he growled, the words a reminder of a moment of honesty I hadn’t understood. “And you, my mate, are Gods-damned perfect.”

He plunged into me, dropping a hand to the apex of my thighs and circling my clit. The words he didn’t say danced in my head, the phantom of a memory flashing through me as he stared down at me in another time, another place. “Now come for your God.”

My vision filled with myself, as he’d seen me that day, my face twisted in overwhelming pleasure. Now, my pussy spasmed around him, grasping onto his cock as I came and an animalistic groan filled my ears when he followed me over that edge and filled me with warmth.

My head dropped back to the ground beneath me, my breathing ragged as I struggled to remember my own damn name. I had a feeling I didn’t want to remember, because I’d come to regret everything I’d just very willingly participated in.

My life had been punctuated by many lows, but fucking my enemy was a new extreme.

5

ESTRELLA

Caldris never separated from me, his weight continuing to press down as moments passed between us. Suspended in time, lingering and waiting for reality to come crashing back, I fought to regain my senses.

His breath washed over the ink of my Mark, the vines seeming to writhe in response to his proximity.“Min asteren,”he sighed. The instinct rose within me to chase away his fears of how I would react, but I couldn’t.

I jolted when his mouth touched the mark, his lips moving over it in a smooth caress as if he knew it by heart and worshiped every line on my skin. “Get off of me,” I said, placing both hands between our bodies. The feel of my fingers brushing against his mark sent a tingle of awareness through me, a warning that came from somewhere deep inside of my soul.

That part of me wanted him close, wanted to draw his very essence into my lungs and hold him there, and yet I couldn’t stop the panic consuming me.

What had I done?

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