Chapter Six

Neve was going to lose her God-given mind. This was worse than trying to take care of herself with the toys under her bed.

Every weekend Arcanium was open, that was three straight days of teasing, of tiny shocks to every cell in her body overloading her senses.

The hands became more grasping and groping as customers passed, but when darkness returned, they softened yet intensified their efforts, the fingers slipping under her skirt just short of her panties. No matter how she tried to dip, how she sometimes begged in a whisper for them to just touch her, stroke through her folds, rub her clit, fuck her pussy, they always stayed just short of what she needed. They obeyed Bell, not her, and they had only two directives—to drive her crazy and to keep anyone else from finishing what they started.

And people did try. No matter how desperate the hands made her, Neve was astonished that people would try. The arms lunged at boys and men who laughed at their own daring. The fingers curled into hooks, blunt nails tearing at exposed skin. The visitors would yank their offending hands back, as though they’d tried to pet the nice tiger in the zoo and were surprised they’d gotten scratched. A few of them had the nerve to call her ‘bitch’ for it. If the guests didn’t go on their own, the Gentleman came around the corner, his long arms and legs oddly graceful, to chase the lingerers off.

Then there were those who just stood there, staring—some slack-jawed, some with their hands in their pockets as though she wouldn’t know what they were doing when they moved like that. She felt forced into another man’s fantasy—an object, not even a participant. It was cheap, dirty, reductive in the way she’d always feared.

She’d tried telling a few of them to stop, but they never did. If anything, that made them more brazen. However, with the Gentleman’s help, none of the voyeurs stayed with her long enough for the sight of hands all over her to bring them to completion, and the subsequent horrors in the funhouse were hopefully enough to deflate what they’d managed to grow.

Even so, it was as though she was slowly being stripped away to a body alone. It resembled the way she’d felt when the strongman had touched her, except this was her own sexuality rather than incubus magic grating her down. It left her raw as a scraped knee by the time the hands released her at the end of her shift.

The hands had fallen off her dress after the first day in the collective. Now, when she left the funhouse, she tied up her hair and walked to the food court in just the jersey dress. More often than not, people didn’t make the connection unless they got a good look at her makeup. Sometimes they asked to take selfies with an off-duty circus performer, and she’d smile—tired but genuine, as long as they didn’t get grabby—but they usually left her alone when she was in civilian clothes.

And when they didn’t, the Gentleman would come out from the funhouse. He was even freakier outside it because he didn’t look any more normal under less atmospheric lighting. Or the chef would come out from his booth with a meat cleaver. Or Kitty would interfere, putting herself between Neve and any man who thought that she was available just because being touched was her job and she had cleavage for days.

Honestly, even though she was ready to have sex with just about anyone after her shift, she was so overstimulated and tired of hands on her, she wouldn’t have been able to stand most anyone actually touching her. The idea of some random Joe squeezing her tits like bike horns and shoving his dick in her wasn’t appealing at all.

Neve thought it was a good thing that just because her libido had been switched to high, she wasn’t willing to literally fuck anyone. Bell hadn’t made her some kind of unicorn—a living, breathing woman who would never say no. If she could still say no, she was still more or less herself.

Even so, she slept a lot when Arcanium was closed. The sex dreams were getting ridiculous—more and more graphic, more and more weird—but she slept as much as she could, until long after the sun had crossed the zenith of the sky.

While awake, she balanced on a blade’s edge of sexual explosion, fighting to keep from falling back into the infidelity that had drawn her into Arcanium. Tears gathered in her eyes like a river behind a dam. Most days she could hold it back, but the littlest thing could set it off—a girl holding her father’s hand, a happy couple staring at each other with that honeymoon gaze she remembered well, the rare old couple conversing with casual ease.

She usually only got like this after too many nights of not enough sleep. She’d had no idea how nonessential biological urges could have such a toxic effect on a person. It gave her a little empathy for her husband wanting to dissolve the marriage, but blue balls still didn’t excuse everything.

Neve found herself thinking more about her husband to pass the time, going over everything from courtship to cheating in sequence through the filter of new experience—weighing her unintentional crimes against his, weighing his needs and desires against her incompatibilities, searching for a way to make his infidelity make sense. She saw signs Maya might not have been the first, but if she were honest, those few incidents were far from unquestionably damning.

She kept thinking of her husband and what he’d done, what she’d done, in part because Lord Mikhail kept showing up in the food court after his evening performance. She was equally afraid of him and of herself when she started seeing him out of the corner of her eyes more often in the shadows, steam rising from his body and his breath catching the light. Sometimes steam was all she could see, but she’d know he was there. The iron needle inside her pointed to him every time, quivering the closer he came. He didn’t approach, but it was bad enough he haunted her periphery.

Then Neve caught sight of the fingerprints and handprints—large ones—in the dust on the edge of her trailer roof.

She closed the trailer door and stepped back. Christmas lights were strung on posts all around the caravan. The angle and quality of light gave her the perfect view of every smudge in the dust all around her trailer, densest around her bedroom window. He wouldn’t be able to see anything through the blinds, but just being there…things he might have heard her doing to herself…

Neve spun around, but no one else was there except Lennon having a smoke behind his trailers and Carlo walking with Misha. Both human men bore obvious erections, which may have been the reason they were walking as quickly as possible. Carlo got around just as fast as anyone else on his arms. At some points he outstripped Misha.

Neve blushed anew when she thought of why they might be so eager.

“I know you’re there.” She didn’t have to shout, and she didn’t want to call attention to herself from the rest of the cast. “Come out.”

Lord Mikhail emerged from around Troy’s trailer as though he hadn’t been hiding. His trousers contained his cock far better than Misha’s or Carlo’s—another point in the magic leather column.

Neve put her hands on her hips. “You need to stop this.”

“I’m well within the rules. I haven’t overstepped them once.” Lord Mikhail came closer, slow out of caution rather than deliberation. “I haven’t forced myself upon you, haven’t forced you into my bed, haven’t so much as touched you.”

“You’ve been stalking me. It was one thing when it was just in the food court. That’s a public space, and you have as much right to be there as me. But how often have you been on top of my trailer?”

His silence answered her question.

Neve covered her face with her hands. “Oh my God. Really, you need to stop. You need to stop following me, and you need to stop calling to me. You think I can’t tell? It’s like a rope around my spine pulling me to wherever you’re waiting. You might as well be whispering in my ear.”

He crossed his impressive arms. “If I were pulling you in, you’d be certain of it, because you wouldn’t be able to resist. But I’m not trying to call you, and you’re calling me.”

“Excuse me?”

“Do you think this has been any easier for me? To be told that there’s a woman who I can’t kill within my grasp, and then that woman won’t look at me because I assumed I would kill her?”

“Was I supposed to not be offended by that?”

“I was born ravenous, like the rest of my kind. There are so many who walk this world hungry, Neve. You haven’t the slightest idea what it is to be immortal and always hungry.”

When he tried to look her in the eye, his gaze wandered lower, almost tangible. Her body couldn’t hide under a dress the way he stared at her.

“Bell harnessed us perfectly, little girl,” he said, forcing himself to look away. “You’ve experienced my touch. I am in your skin, in fiber and bone. You cannot shake me off like water from your hair. I can’t stop calling to you any more than you can stop yourself from breathing. It’s my state of being, nothing conscious or deliberate.”

“You may not be able to help what you are,” she said, “but neither can I, and a victim will never be okay being a victim. And as your almost-victim, I’m not going to let you touch me ever again.”

His eyes were burning dark coals behind the curtain of his hair. “It is in a victim’s nature to die. You should have died that night. It would have freed you. Don’t look at me with such hatred. This torment doesn’t only ensnare you. Your death would have freed me as well—to move on, to form new attachments, to crave new bodies. But no matter where I go, no matter how I satisfy myself, as soon as I return to Arcanium, your scent permeates the circus. It calls to me wherever you are. The more you need sex, the more inexorable the call. I’m drawn to your scent as a starving man to cooking meat.”

She crossed her arms under her breasts, eyes narrowed slightly in suspicion. “If you can’t die, you can’t starve.”

“You know nothing of desire that carves its way through your belly like acid, lust that dries your mouth and brings your cock up hard to your abdomen without relief for months…years…an ache as deep as the mouth of hell. You think I enjoy the way the fire forged me? Neither Sasha nor I took well to the slaughter of seduction. Born from the same flame, we shared the same weakness, yet we still must feed. The Creature and the Gentleman may do so with impunity, but Sasha and I must abstain? Would Bell refuse his precious humans their food for weeks at a time without respite?”

He faced her again, opening his arms until there was nothing about his body that was hidden. “Then to bring you into the circus, calling to me like a banshee in a cave, even louder than the Spider, yet I am no longer permitted use my influence to convince you to let me into your bed.”

Neve wiped sweat from her temple, over her upper lip. She was surprised her nipples hadn’t poked holes through her dress. Every time she tried to tell him to back away, her tongue weighed heavy, arousal a hot stone between her thighs.

“I’m married,” she managed to whisper. As though he were like the other men who propositioned her in the food court and pretended to not see her ring.

“That didn’t stop you before. That hasn’t stopped you from being Bell’s good little girl, satisfying him with your subjugation. And that didn’t stop your man from submitting to Sasha’s magic, releasing himself deep within Bell’s woman instead of you.”

When someone else said it so baldly, Neve’s chest panged so hard she worried she was having a heart attack. “Stop talking.”

“Let me in, Neve. You torture us both.”

“You torture yourself. I’m not your spitted feast, your long pig, something you can discard the bones of when you’re done. I can’t have sex with just any man, knowing he doesn’t give a damn about anything but his own release, knowing he’d kill me a thousand times if he could, without hesitation.” Neve backed away. “You don’t even know me. You just want to fuck a hole. Well, find another one. And stop haunting my trailer. You’re making it difficult to sleep.”

“It’s an invitation that brought me to your bed in the first place, Neve, so don’t lose your temper with me. That was your trespass, not mine.”

“And I deserve death because you make it near impossible to resist? Does anyone say no when you do that?”

“Sometimes. But the ‘no’ always changes.”

The darkness in his eyes glowed dark red, almost imperceptible in the black. She didn’t know how he called darkness into his eye sockets, because the angle of the light didn’t support such shadows. She could only guess what the coal glow within meant. Born of fire, indeed.

“You called me out here,” he said. “I would have stayed in the shadows and continued to wait, as is my right. Because it’s a matter of time, woman. It’s only a matter of time. How much more frustration do you think you can withstand?”

“I’m saying no. You don’t get to have me.”

“Then why are you coming closer?” His deep voice had become a purr. “Why do you reach for me?”

She looked down. Somehow her feet had taken five steps forward without her knowing. And her hands were creeping forward in the air, fingers stretched to meet him.

“Stop,” Neve whispered. She fought to keep herself from touching him, stumbled backward and used that momentum to fall against her trailer, three arms’ lengths from him.

“I can’t,” he said, emphasizing each word. “I will always call to you, as you will always call to me, and the call will get stronger the closer we are. That is my nature as lure and yours as prey.”

He was a celestial body, drawing her into his orbit, gravity screaming at her to come closer, that he would finally satisfy. Angels and demons weren’t supposed to be too far off, one breaking off from the other—at least according to her religion’s theology, which didn’t account for jinn. Hers only had demons, angels, the Nephilim if you squinted. And if her theology was wrong about the origin of demons, about jinn, what else did it fail to account for?

He wasn’t just getting to her body. He was getting to her mind, and that she hadn’t expected. He’d been all charm at her bedroom window. Now he’d shed his charm and replaced it with substance—prickly and desperate, but substance nonetheless.

She hated when people assumed she wasn’t intelligent. She hadn’t assumed he wasn’t because of his looks but because of what he was. What need did an incubus have for intelligence? Yet despite the distraction he had to be experiencing, as keen as her own, he was keeping up with her. Given that men’s faculties tended to drop as their cock hardened, Neve wondered whether he’d surprise her even more when he wasn’t frustrated.

“You can tell me to go away,” Mikhail said, “but I’m not bound to your requests for greater proximity. I’ve been here much longer than you. I know my boundaries. Do you?”

“Fine.” She was vaguely aware she was scratching her arms like a dope fiend in withdrawal. Walking away from him and toward her trailer door was like walking away from a dealer. God, how pure what he offered was—in the sense that it wasn’t pure at all, in the sense she’d never felt dirtier, happy as swine to smear herself with the filthiness of every inch of his temptation. “But you can’t come in unless invited, right? Like vampires. Well, I can’t stop you from hovering like a lovesick psycho, but you can’t follow me in.”

She stepped up into the trailer, clutching the frame against the almost pain of turning her back on him.

“I do not know why your kind denies what it needs, especially when there is no danger to you. How much more peace could you have if you simply let yourself be, if you understood how pathological your need to control yourself is, when you were never meant for chains?” It was as though he spoke right next to her ear, but when she looked over her shoulder, he was still a respectable distance.

“Fine sentiments from someone who bound himself to Arcanium, where Bell starves you like an ascetic.” The sides of the door groaned under her grip. It made her think of mattress springs and rocking cars. Her legs shook so badly that she stepped back into the grass.

“That’s different. It’s not temptation I seek to avoid, but death. I can’t eliminate it, but it can be limited—reserved for those who trespass on this circus, performed as a function rather than a need.”

“I didn’t trespass. So why was I punished?” She wanted to strip off her dress, too tight, too constricting, the slight bit of skin still covered in desperate need of air.

“You were just in the wrong place at the wrong time,” he said quietly. “Or rather, Bell put you there. He set me free in your direction. He made you the perfect beacon. The women and some of the men of this circus scream for me every night, too. I can barely sleep for the clamor. But only Sasha can share my bed, and that doesn’t ease the ache. I followed the sound of your cries from afar, as piercing as any of the cast of this circus. You haven’t stopped calling me, Neve. You’re begging. You know what you want more than you’ll allow yourself to admit, or else you wouldn’t be backing up to me now. You wouldn’t want me to fill you deep, spread through your body, my pleasure coursing through your bloodstream, your pleasure bursting in your brain. I would take your words, little girl, and yield my own to you. No more talking when I can barely think. Grant both of us that grace.”

“Stop doing this.” Her feet rasped over dead grass. Breath came in short gasps that clouded the air in front of her. Tears threatened to burst through the dam. Everything on edge. Everything pulling her to him. She blamed him, but she was the one holding the rope and hauling herself backward.

“I can’t.” He sounded as though her rope had closed around his throat. “This isn’t me, little girl. This is you and me together, and I don’t think we can fight it…much…longer. It’s inevitable, Neve. Please. Please don’t make us suffer anymore. Just…let me…”

Her head fell back from a sharp wave of pleasure through her body and hit his chest.

The contact was electric, violent as sparks where they met. She slumped, boneless, against him and moaned, “Yes.”

Whether intended as permission or exclamation didn’t matter.

He smoothed massive hands down her shoulders, and with them, the straps of the dress. He exposed her shoulders, folded down the jersey until it slipped over her breasts and snapped back underneath them. She covered his knuckles as he palmed her breasts. An ever-shrinking part of her mind attempted to push him away, but his touch was magnetic. She thought she’d die if he stopped now, that he would tear skin away if he tried to remove his hands from her.

They could have been the cluster of humans from the haunted funhouse, surgically sewn limb to limb, or the aerialists cursed together. With their contact came clarity, primitive complexity in the drumbeat of their hearts pressed close, his chest to her back, his pulse in his palms over her breast.

Neve thought she heard other sounds, other shouts through the caravan area, some muffled through walls, but soon all she could hear was the rushing in her ears and the rumble of his moan when he dipped his head to kiss up her neck. Their legs tangled as they moved forward to the open door of her trailer. She stumbled but he kept her up, lifting her from the ground and holding her up against him by her breasts alone.

She slammed her hands against the sides of the door, but not to stop him. She ground back against the front of his trousers. God, she could feel his cock, larger than average but nowhere near as large as she knew it could become.

He snaked one hand down from her breast to her thighs, drawing the hem of her dress up as he ground right back. Mikhail cupped her through her underwear, rocking the heel of his palm against her clit but fingering her slit through her panties, dampened even more with fresh arousal. Bell had to have woven magic into her clothes as well, because the way she fought lust all day long, she should soak through anything she wore.

“Not here,” he groaned into her ear. “Inside. I take trespassers out in the open, and you’re not one of them. When we’re finished, you will be glad this was more private.”

He turned her around then lifted her up. She wrapped her arms around him, her head falling to his shoulder with a whimper as though she were in pain. He climbed into the trailer, slamming the door behind him.

The strongman was too big for the space she’d been provided. Really, the only place he’d fit was the bedroom. He had to move sideways through the aisle, lifting her, shifting her, and she adjusted her legs or arms as needed as she tasted the tattoos and salt on his shoulder, biting the flesh to reassure herself that he was real, solid, that he wasn’t just a man-suit over statue, the way he felt. Her teeth dented the skin.

They couldn’t make it to the bedroom. He hitched her up to bend her legs over his shoulders then fell to his knees, his feet in her bathroom and her back against the wall that made up her wardrobe.

“Now that you’ve invited me, we have all night, little girl. This will help.” He left the same dents in her soft inner thigh that she’d left on his shoulder.

He wasted no time pushing her dress up her hips then tearing her panties away. The elastic snapped against her skin like a switch.

Neve’s wails filled the small space as he closed his mouth over her clit. She rocked her hips, practically climbing the wall as she arched and pushed her clit against the tight, velvet heat. He wrapped his arms around her thighs so she couldn’t wriggle away, his dark, tanned skin seeming even more so against her blue-veined paleness. She held her forehead with one hand as though to keep herself upright. With her other hand, she threaded her fingers through his hair, locks of it tickling over her legs when he moved.

She groaned as he lifted his head from her clit with a wicked smile to stare up at her.

Neve struck his shoulder blade with her heel. “Don’t stop. You were begging me a minute ago.”

“You were saying no a minute ago,” he said. “Now I know I shall be satisfied. When first we met, I promised you that I could make love to you all night. Shall I show you?”

“If you make me wait all night before you let me come, I’m going to kill you with my bare hands. My nails aren’t as sharp as Lady Sasha’s, but I’m a desperate woman, and your eyes are right there.”

He smiled, the darkness of his sockets glowing again, but the tendons of his neck and shoulders were so much more relaxed than before. “Would you claw these pretty garnets just because I didn’t give you what you wanted immediately? I think someone needs to learn patience. Four weeks is nothing, Neve. You’ll have years of this. I’ve had a hundred and twenty-seven.”

“Fuck.” She didn’t think she’d ever said the word just as an expletive, but it felt good in her mouth, though not as good as him.

He dipped down to run his tongue between her folds, flicked the tip at her clit to make her twitch.

“When you swear, it doesn’t sound natural to you. I like it. Say ‘fuck’ again, and I’ll let you come, little girl.”

She banged the back of her head on the wall in frustration, screwing her face tightly against the nagging warning that she should tell him to leave and he’d have to go, invitation be damned. She could end this, fill herself with the tentacle toy until she bit through her pillow, go to sleep unsatisfied like she had the last four weeks, her still valid wedding ring digging a groove into her cheek.

But she’d asked him in, and although she should make him stop, she just didn’t want to anymore, not with every last sexual knot, like pebbles under her skin, loosening under his touch.

How many other people had come into the circus like this, knowing what they should and shouldn’t do, but giving in to it anyway when they realized there was no point in fighting? How long had it taken them? She didn’t think she got extra points for each week she’d resisted, given that she’d tied herself to the incubus before she’d even been brought in.

How had each of them eventually justified themselves? Maybe they’d decided that as long as they were in the company of bad men, bad demons, bad demigods, they should just embrace being bad themselves.

She felt sick. She’d been an analytical believer all her life, but she couldn’t remember the last time she’d encountered an ethical or moral dilemma quite this intense, and she’d voted in several election years. She wasn’t used to having no clear choice before her, wasn’t used to knowing that she wouldn’t be able to do what she thought was right, wasn’t used to wondering whether she’d ever been right at all.

But her body adhered to simpler principles on the hierarchy of needs. It wouldn’t let her say no, and she was inextricable from the meat sack in which she’d been born. She couldn’t tell her body that to cling to the incubus was to succumb to a fallen state rather than fight it. Fight it for what? For her soul, already caged in Arcanium and made to sing a song of pleasure rather than praise?

What was forgiveness when there was no sin? Sin was as much part of the design as salvation. To believe anything less was to ignore the beginning of creation.

Neve closed her eyes and shook her head, but her hips lifted as though to plead for Mikhail’s mouth once more. “Fuck. Don’t stop. Whatever I do, don’t stop.”

“I usually only take orders from Bell and Sasha. But that, love, is an order I like.”

He moaned as he closed his lips around her clit and the folds that cradled it, his tongue pressing, sucking, the vibrations and sensations combining into a devastating force that narrowed all her thoughts away from theology and morality to the nexus of her legs.

Everything became about the ever-tightening coil from her clit up her spine to her mind, where she could only keep shaking her head to keep it from exploding. She had no such luck where he sucked her pleasure from her. She pulled his hair, arched away from the wall until she was balanced on his shoulders while he kept a firm hold on her thighs. He didn’t let up, didn’t let her fall—except in her mind, where she fell like water over a cliff. Sweat dripped down her back, leaving cold, wet places on her dress. He kept the orgasm rolling, rapids over sharp rocks, as she rode his tongue.

Finally, Mikhail stood and tossed her onto her bed in the same motion. He stretched out an unnaturally long tongue to clean off anything she’d left on his trimmed moustache and beard.

“Take off the dress, little girl. You don’t need it anymore tonight.”

She pushed it over her hips rather than try to bring it over her head.

The lights were on in her bedroom, which meant that, quite unlike their first night, he could see all of her, and she could see almost all of him.

He could see how she wasn’t perfect like a succubus, her breasts larger because she was soft everywhere, her thighs and ass big and strong from softball games and strength training. Her family’s buried Irish heritage had returned full-throttle in her, which meant bright blue veins, pale freckles over her shoulders, nose and forearms. She had flesh folds, ivory stretch marks, bulges, colors to her translucent skin that women like Maya and Valorie never had to deal with. Kitty’s skin was golden underneath the chestnut, and the Spider’s own paleness was like matte porcelain, broken only by the ink of her tattoos and the occasional mole. Neve couldn’t even point to her hair as some bastion of ginger pride, given the mess it was at the moment. She couldn’t imagine any of it being anywhere near as sexy as the man who stood before her—sex personified, which was kind of the point.

Yet the strongman pulled his hair back, staring over her in the light as though he could eat her up from toes to hair roots. He stroked over the front of his leather trousers with a strangled groan.

“That didn’t almost kill me,” she said, sitting up on the comforter. “I couldn’t move the first time, could barely talk. You thought I was dead.”

“My mouth will flay, but it doesn’t have to kill. You came, but if I were to leave, you would discover yourself unsatisfied. You will not be truly satisfied until I come inside you. And if you were any other woman, that would kill you, no matter what I did to hold back.”

“That’s awfully penis-centric.”

The strongman actually laughed. “It’s simply how incubi feed from women.”

He crawled onto her bed, his gaze like heat on her breasts as their weight brought them down, still defying most gravity at this point but showing signs she wouldn’t be so lucky for much longer—except time seemed suspended here, with Kitty looking young even though she was supposed to have been in Arcanium for over twenty years.

Under Lord Mikhail’s devoted attention, Neve gathered her breasts in hands too small to contain them. Flesh plumped between her fingers, pressed together for cleavage that drove straight men crazy. Then she held them up by her nipples, rolling them between her fingers. They hadn’t needed help to become the hard buds they’d pretty much been from the moment the incubus had entered her bedroom four weeks ago, but there was an undeniable nerve connection between her nipples and her cunt that seemed to ache with pain as much as with pleasure.

It was strange to do all the things she’d done with Joseph—things she’d done because they were expected of her and because she’d thought he’d like them—and have them actually mean something for her. To understand that some of the things women did for their husbands were for themselves.

“Is it the same between incubi and other men?” she asked, curiosity returning with the brief respite provided by his mouth.

“I nearly killed a man from a hand job alone.”

He batted her fingers away from her breasts, humming with pleasure as they yielded to their weight again. He replaced her hands with his, massaging the hard, bright pink flesh, the areolae wrinkled from tightening. He pressed the tip of his tongue to one of his canines, dog-tooth sharper than the rest, as she automatically parted her legs to alleviate the sudden tension he brought there.

“Gay and bisexual men are more at risk with an incubus than women, because any contact with my cock or theirs makes them susceptible to my feed. Bisexual men and women are in the most danger from sex demons in general—far too many ways for both succubi and incubi to feed from them.”

“Who’s safest?”

“Lesbians. They won’t respond to an incubus, and there are really only two ways for succubi to kill them, and plenty of ways for them not to. There are succubi in relationships with women who have no idea what they are. The demons just refuse certain kinds of sex. It’s nothing to do with a moral or preferential hierarchy. A feed simply requires specific genital contact for it to satisfy the sex demon.”

“So as long as you keep your pants on, I’m safe.”

“You’re one of the few who is completely safe from my cock, love, and that makes you invaluable to me.”

For some reason, talk of killing her wasn’t as problematic as it had started out, perhaps because it truly seemed out of his hands and because she still wanted him so intensely that she felt hollowed out. But being called invaluable rankled in a way she couldn’t quite pin down with all of her blood pinking her nipples, flushing her cheeks and dilating as many blood vessels as it could in her cunt, her folds, her clit.

She covered his mouth with her hand, but she bit her lip as he nipped at her fingertips and crawled over her to make her lay back. If he just wouldn’t talk, she’d be able to get through this. She’d be able to sleep satisfied tonight, kick him out afterward, tear away everything that smelled of him, wash herself of his scent, slip between cold sheets and curl up with her legs against her belly to hold in the inevitable sickness of guilt, the cold of the platinum ring on her finger the coldest of all.

Mikhail made the built-in headboard groan when he closed his hand over it, leaning his hips forward to bring his leather placket against her breasts. The leather was so tight that he couldn’t exactly fuck them, but she gathered them in anyway, shivering. Even through the leather, the path of his cock tingled over her bare skin, as though each individual hair follicle could sense how close he was and reached for him.

“Open the leather.” That deep purr had returned, too tender to be a growl, too dark to be gentle. “Take out my cock, little girl. You invited me in, but if you need my cock, you must open the last door. I won’t have you pretending that the wicked demon took you against your will.”

Neve hated him a little as she brought her fingers to the front of his trousers, undoing the laces that held him in, unthreading them until the placket folded to the sides and she could reach in. Free him.

A whimper whined past her lips as he swelled to fill her hand with each stroke, his pre-cum alone enough to smooth the way. He pulled the trousers down his thighs. They peeled off the rest of the way seemingly on their own.

He surged when she raised herself up to take the head of his cock in her mouth, the glistening flesh impossible to resist, the musky scent and taste of him better than anything she’d ever had. When he pushed in, his cock slid over her tongue, hit the back of her mouth then slipped into her throat without any obstruction.

They groaned in tandem, and Mikhail grabbed Neve by her hair to push her down to take his whole giant cock. Her throat miraculously expanded to take him all the way. She could still breathe without effort, but when she touched her neck, she knew just where the head of his cock had reached. She’d cough, heave, struggle to breathe even though she could anyway, if it didn’t feel so freaking good to have him deep in her throat, almost as good as in her pussy.

She shouldn’t have been able to open her mouth wide enough, and her lips should have hurt to stretch. She should have bitten him. Instead, he growled like a beast at the way she licked, swallowed, rubbed her throat to caress the head through the flesh of her neck. He pulled his hips back to bring the head to her tongue before sliding himself down her throat again. With her free hand, she furiously stroked around her clit, more turned on by him fucking her mouth than she’d thought it was possible to be. The pleasure was like pain. It was impossible to conceive of it until it was experienced.

“No. No time. I want in your pussy, little girl. We have years for me to possess your mouth. I’ll entice it in other ways, I promise.” He withdrew completely, and now she gasped, now she coughed, her diaphragm heaving as though her body had only just realized what he’d been doing to it.

Mikhail laughed as he crawled back. He hooked his arms under her knees to spread her legs farther, testing the limits of her flexibility.

“God, I’ve wanted back in you for a month,” he groaned. “Your dreams stole into mine, your desires like a fog in my head, with nothing to show for it.”

His cock was at its full thickness and girth now, the head broad at her entrance, but he angled his mouth over hers to take it more gently, without the same distorting magic of his cock. It felt more like just a kiss in comparison, something that was made better from an incubus’ touch but not within the realm of the impossible. She much preferred the kiss, opened her mouth for him of her own volition, wrapped an arm around him to scratch over his hard muscles as he pushed his cock in.

She wallowed, grasped, reveled, stroked her clit and wrapped her legs around his. Nothing felt more right than when he stopped talking and she stopped thinking, when their bodies were flush together and he was inside her, when she surrounded him.

He didn’t make her wait. He didn’t make himself wait. He clutched the headboard with one hand and pulled himself in—tireless, relentless—his cock entering her over and over, pushing again and again into impossible places that nevertheless yielded to him. He kept going until she cried out, her back curving to bring her hips up against his, her cunt clutching as though milking him. He broke from their kiss, and his cock seemed to pulse and grow even bigger…as though it needed to, as though she could possibly take any more. But she did, digging her nails into his shoulder and keeping the pace on her clit to drive her orgasm through the heat that filled her where it shouldn’t have.

There it was again—the sense that something in her head stopped, that everything stopped, for a second or two, perhaps ten. She didn’t lose time so much as skip it entirely. He was still above her, still inside her, when she came back. She had no way to know for certain whether she’d been out and for how long—just a knowledge, a certainty, that something had been lost.

Neve panted, relinquishing the oversensitive pleasure of her clit to wrap her other arm around him. She fancied his tattoos had a texture, though everything about him was smooth over the inhuman hardness underneath.

And speaking of hardness…

Lord Mikhail stayed hard in her, opened his red-tinged black eyes to peer down at her with an indeterminable expression. He watched her until she blinked. Then he ran a crooked finger along her cheekbone, an impossibly gentle gesture for such a large, strong man.

“Hello, Neve. It’s good to see you again.”

He drew her up to meet him as he dipped down to kiss her again. She was still sluggish, emerging from whatever his feed had done. No longer a starving man consuming his first meal in weeks, he kissed her with slow, sweet deliciousness that warmed her all the way down to her toes. She twitched as though waking up when he moved inside her again, shallow thrusts that caressed her inside, caressed her outside with his skin a whisper against hers.

He slowly eased them over, with him on his back and her resting against his chest, straddling his hips. She felt like this had been a yoga pose at least once, her knees this close to her chest, but she was too comfortable on top of him to adjust to a more typical position.

“I’ve not begun to tire yet, little girl.”

Neve knew the moment he’d gathered magic against her again, because she suddenly stiffened, all tension returned, her folds pulsing, clit pulsing, cunt pulsing. The aching was back, desire everywhere she was soft, everywhere he was hard.

“Don’t you see how wonderful this can be?” he said. “Isn’t this tension so much better when you know it is fleeting?”

“Mikhail, please stop trying to make this okay. When you talk, it just makes it worse.” But as she raised herself up, it pushed her down to the base of his cock, and she choked on her words. She brushed his small, dark brown nipples with her fingertips, and when she tweaked them with her thumbs, he made a happy grunt that extended into a groan as she rolled her hips.

“I apologize. Speaking to women like this is not my forte.”

“Like this?”

“When women don’t know what I am, when they aren’t inclined to resist, I am the artist. It is part of my hunt to lure them in with pretty words. But Sasha is the only woman I’ve spoken with properly for over a hundred years, the only one I can speak with after sex. Even as the Arcanium strongman, I am not required to talk. For the longest time, all I ever had to say to women was everything I needed to get me into their bed. And that was all they ever wanted from me. What am I supposed to say?”

“How about nothing?” She licked the hollow of his clavicle, tasting salt and flesh, licked up his throat, kissed under his jaw. “Just stop. And if you’re going to make me feel like this, don’t keep it this strong. Fuck me, please.”

“Ride me.” He cradled the nape of her neck, but he didn’t guide her until she had kissed up his chin of her own accord. “Rise up and work your pussy all over my cock. Let me see you, Neve.”

She did as he told her, bracing herself on his abdomen instead of his chest to keep herself as upright as possible, as distant as she could be while still spitted on his cock. She breathed in his magic, swam in it, raised herself up and let gravity bring herself back down again. She sheathed him to the hilt every time, her wetness and his cum making an unbearably wet sound every time she took him in. But she couldn’t stop now, didn’t want the pleasure of his cock against her inner walls to stop, not when every stroke was as good as one of her old orgasms.

Her breasts shook and swung, not appreciating the violence with which she bounced over his cock, but she couldn’t care. She rolled her hips and ground down, took him as hard and deep as she pleased, until another cry ripped from her throat and another shared orgasm heated through her and left her boneless, a collapsed, dead-weight body over his, not that it fazed him.

“I promised you all night, Neve. I am unreliable in many things, but I keep my promises.”