I keep my mouth shut as long as I can, but the second the curtain falls behind us….

“Bride?” I ask it as he sets me onto the pillowy expanse of his bower.

Jack pauses, looking down at me with a confusion I wouldn’t expect from a god. “She didn’t tell you all the rules… or course she didn’t.”

He lays down beside me, plucking another chocolate egg from thin air. “She likes to bait her traps well.”

“What trap have I fallen into?”

“Not you, Lily. Me.” He nuzzles the spot behind my ear and I shiver at the sensations it drives through me.

His next words are a whisper. “You may not belong to me, but I am yours…. For however long you live.”

He doesn’t let me ask anymore questions. He doesn’t ask for any promises or confessions.

He distracts me with his tongue and teeth and cock.

I vaguely hear whispers, jokes, the words “like rabbits”. This may be Jack’s domain, but others pass through, observers of the industriousness of Jack’s quest to give me the Power I came here for.

I don’t know how much time passes.

I lose track of how many orgasms I have, of how many times I cry out his name.

But at some point, a door forms where once there was only darkness. Four letters scrawled in neon over top.

A tiny part of me no longer wants that exit. Heaven may exist here in this bed. In a pair of strong, furry arms.

“I don’t have to leave right away, do I?”

Jack stares at the doorway as though it will eat me if he lets me go. “You don’t have to leave at all.”

He’s wrong.

Ester will want her grandchild on the Valley’s throne.

“I can come back, right?”

“As often as you want.” He slips a necklace around my throat, the metal is cold and I shiver as it touches my skin. “Whenever you want it, all you have to do is press a kiss to this, and you will be collected.”

The pendant that rests where my collar bones meet is an egg. Delicate metal twined together to form the shape around a black gem.

I turn to him, needing to feel my fill of him one last time, and I relish this different kind of power. Because old god or no, he wants something only I can give him.

It’s over too soon.

Somehow, I know it always will be.

“Rule your kingdom, Lily.” He traces his fingers over my shoulder. “But come back to me when that time is up. So long as you’re here, you’ll never age… never die.”

“All that and hot sex too?”

“If an eternity pleasuring you means I never have to give you up again, I will happily oblige.”

He kisses me. It’s a soft sweet thing full of regret and longing.

“I’ll come back once I’m sure everything is settled out there.” I press another kiss to his lips, and realise… I’m not lying. I want to come back… to him.

Right to Rule