Chapter Thirty-Seven
Veyn
Ihave never been merciful.
Even before my isolation, I offered only what was deserved. Justice. I created balance.
But to be betrayed, to have my own brother attempt to kill me is a crime I will not allow. However, touching Lenora, hurting her, using her to hurt me…
I emerge from the mirrors over my chambers and fix my gaze on the dais. The scuffed and age worn altar that has stood at the helm of my power since the beginning.
It is interesting that they would be so stupid and brave. But this idea that they’ve patched together using their single brain cell certainly would fascinate me if they hadn’t put their filthy hands on my woman.
I start down the incline. My feet scuff along the steps one by one until I find myself at the table. Within, I feel its heart thrum. Still full from everything it’s been fed the last several days.
Lenora’s innocence.
The other human’s seed.
The blood and pain of the Duval family.
It has gorged itself on everything I have given it and still it hungers.
Perhaps, I will give it my brothers. There is little need for them now that they have proven themselves useless.
A cancer that requires immediate removal.
I indulged the fantasy of having others like me. Siblings like I’ve seen others have and enjoy. But mine continue to grow increasingly bold.
Impulsive.
Stupid.
“Rase. Dain.”
They arrive with the drip of blood. The rattle of chains. I hear them before my skin prickles with awareness. They shuffle from their hole with grudging glowers and hatred in their eyes.
And I begin to realize that they will never learn their lesson. That they will continue to push the limits I have set for them. Through it all, they continue to resist a life outside of their own suffering. And there is nothing I can do about it.
“Explain yourselves.”
Dain speaks.
Dain always speaks. Through blood stained teeth and bile.
“You are weak,” he spits with venom. “You pander to a human as if we are not gods to be worshipped. They bowed to us once. Now, you bow to them.”
“You are not a god,” I tell them slowly, with measured patience. “You are copies of me. A mimic. I can absorb you as easily as I created you and be free of your insolence.”
I straighten and turn my attention to Rase. The gray giant with the hollow eyes and tattered flesh remains eerily still. A statue with no actual thoughts of his own. No part of me believes him capable of masterminding anything.
Dain is a different story.
He has always had the ambitions of a real demon. The hunger to be more where he can’t while I still exist. A fact that has driven his fury for centuries. The very reason he wears his veins on the outside.
“Did you learn nothing from the last time? Was your punishment not enough?”
For the first time since entering the chamber, Dain no longer seems certain. All that bravado melts from the defiant slant of his shoulders. His weight rocks just enough for me to have my answer.
“Perhaps, you have grown used to the pain of all those raw, exposed nerves. Perhaps, you wish to experience something new…”
There is genuine fear in his eyes. A wild panic of a beaten dog. He scrambles back a step like I might rip his throat out … again.
“We want freedom,” he snarls at me with whatever tendrils of bravery he still possesses. “We don’t want to live in the hole anymore, feeding off your scraps. We are not pets you can keep chained and imprisoned—”
“You are when you get it in your head to try and overthrow me. You had freedom. You had power. You wasted it.”
“Let us go!” he shrieks, ignoring my logic.
“After what you both just pulled, why would I do that? Why would I unleash you from your cage? You touched my human. My human, who is with child. You put her in a position where you could have killed her.” My voice rises as my temper builds, as my vision turns a violent red and blood pools in my palms from the talons I sink into flesh. “You were told not to go near her.”
Dain is not listening.
His mind is a whirlpool of indignation and arrogance.
“We will do whatever it takes to be free of you. Even if that means ripping that spawn—”
I snap every tendon and vein in his body.
I expose his nerves to the dust and filth of the room.
I work my tendrils through the friseurs between each muscle and slice.
I rip his organs from his chest and let him watch as they explode before his eyes before I take those, too.
I step into the expanding pool of his blood while my brother lies at my feet, a shivering, howling husk of useless flesh.
His organs will return. His eyes. His tendons and muscles will heal.
But I keep his nerves out.
I leave them stripped and exposed. He will not be able to breathe without feeling the extent of my fury. He will remain in perpetual agony as a reminder to stay away from Lenora.
“If you go near her again, I will strip your meat and make you live the remainder of your miserable life as a pile of bones.” I lift my gaze to Rase. “Both of you. Return to your hole.”
I don’t wait to see them follow orders. I know Rase will drag Dain’s carcass through the void where he will huddle in the darkness, waiting for his body to heal.
One day, eventually, I may take pity and relieve his pain, but I doubt it.
This isn’t the first time they thought they could take my place.
It’s not even the second time. And still, I allow them to continue existing because …
they are my brothers. For good or bad, they are a part of me.
Even when they try to kill me. But Lenora is the final straw.
She is the hill I will kill them on. She is the line in the sand.
I will tear them apart with my bare hands to protect her.
I ignore the prodding voice insisting I should have killed them. The same one that says the same thing every time, and like before, I ignore it as I pass through the mirror.
The in-between place that divides the two worlds exists in a fractured reality of images.
Broken spaces, as if incomplete where there are no mirrors.
Even a small one is enough for me to slip through.
Not a reflection on a silver kettle. I require a mirror, that is a mirror that exists to be a mirror.
Usher House has many in various rooms. Rooms that no one inhabits.
Places no one goes anymore. Chambers with garbage, discarded furniture and empty crates.
I can move through all of them, except when Lenora needed me, I could not reach her.
The corridor.
The stairs.
The foyer below.
There isn’t another mirror along the main floor, except the washrooms and now her greenhouse.
That will not do. My brothers will learn of this disadvantage and use it.
But I also cannot live with that fear again.
That overpowering surge of desperation where she was in danger and I could not reach her.
I will not live with that gnawing numbness that consumed every shred of my sanity while I waited for that human to bring her back to me.
But it is a matter I will deal with once I am sure she’s unharmed.
So lost am I in my thoughts that I falter mid stride when I emerge from the mirror to find Lenora sitting up, back propped by dozens of pillows. Her pallor is milky, but her eyes light up when I arrive.
I circle the bed, ignoring the human on her other side and capture her face between my hands.
“How are you?”
“Tired,” she murmurs. “I feel like I’ve been running for hours.”
I perch gingerly on the mattress at her hip and search her eyes. “That will not happen again.”
She offers me the hint of a smile. “That’s good. The waking up in different places was beginning to scare me.”
The statement has me shooting a glance in the human’s direction. “This has happened before?”
“I thought it was just the baby or stress,” he counters, equally hostile.
“You were wrong. Losing time isn’t normal,” I bark. “You should have told me.”
“I don’t have to tell you shit,” he retorts. “She isn’t your concern.”
That same boiling inferno of rage I felt below when addressing Dain returns and I’m contemplating adorning every inch of his useless body with thousands of tiny cuts when small, cool fingers touch my cheek.
My face is physically turned away from the idiot on the bed with her to the tiny figure peering up at me with such gentle sweetness in her eyes.
“I’m fine. Thank you for taking care of it.”
I kiss her before my mouth can tell her that I would do anything for her. Kill any dragon for her. This small, fierce creature that confounds every logic I have.
When she sighs and pulls me closer, reclining deeper into the pillows, I don’t ask.
My hand glides over her precious bump. My perfect obsession obediently opens her thighs without prompting.
She offers me the thing that is already mine, and I claim all that sweet, naked heat while the human man watches.
I can feel his eyes on my hand as I pull apart her slick lips and brush her button.
“Like that?” I tease when she gasps into my mouth.
“Yes,” she breathes, heels digging into the mattress to arch her hips deeper into my palm.
I pause long enough to drag the leg nearest me over my hip, spreading her the way she is meant to be. The human learns quickly and follows on his side, opening her. But that isn’t where I want him.
“Lick her,” I tell him. “Taste her. Get her ready for my cock.”
He does not hesitate. His shoulders push between her thighs, and I hold her lips apart for the first sweep of his tongue.
Lenora groans in my mouth. Her fingers tighten in my hair, holding me close while shifting her hips into the human’s face.
“That’s it. Get nice and wet for me,” I urge. “Going to make your uncle watch as I stretch you again. Get your hole so fucking wide.”
Between her knees, the human groans and laps harder. He sucks her clit with an eagerness that makes me smirk. Makes me press a palm over the back of his head and guide him, urge him lower to spear her with his tongue.
Lenora whines, head falling back. Her thighs quiver but stay splayed.
I drag her top up the rest of the way, baring her full, heavy breasts. The swollen nipples tighten with the cradling of my palm. I pinch and roll, and groan at the tiny bead of white.
“Yes.” I hiss, snaking out a tongue and licking clean the sweet taste of cantaloupe. “Human.”
His head comes up from between her thighs, over her belly, and I cup her free breast. I suction my mouth to the one closest to me while squeezing and milking the other for him. There isn’t much, but enough to lure the other man out.
As expected, his eyes go dark. His nostrils flare. I smirk with her nipple between my teeth as he falls on the other one with a string of guttural French.
Lenora cries out as we suck, taking whatever little we can from her. As we squeeze her mounds for every drip and lick her nipples clean.
That cry turns into a beautiful wail when I send my hand between her legs and find his already there, two fingers deep.
“Oh please!” she begs when I add my two alongside his and we work in tandem filling her walls.
“Put her on my cock, human.”
He does not argue. Barely hesitates when he pushes to his knees.
Together, we pull Lenora over my hips. We guide her thighs in place with as much care as we can manage. I reach beneath her and grip my shaft, the throbbing member aching to feel her wrapped around me.
We make her straddle my erection. The human guides her over my head. His hands are urgent, placing her tiny opening over my enormous shaft.
“Take him, mon p’tit. All of him. I need to see you big and wide like you were for me last time,” he growls in French. “Hands on the frame. Fuck, good girl. More. All the way down.”
I’m still too big for her but he rubs her clit and whispers how perfect she is like this. How hard seeing her is making him. What a good girl she is for him.
I simply watch them. Watch her full body splay to take me to the hilt. She’s stretched so wide I know it hurts but she’s dripping around me. Her core is a needy cavern, hungry to be filled.
“He’s so big, Marcus,” she whines to the man straddling my thighs behind her.
He kisses her mouth and strokes her clit, keeping her on edge as she adjusts to me.
“I know. I know he is. Your pussy is so small. He has it stretched so wide, baby. God, I need to fuck you like this. To get you open bigger.”
“Marcus, please, I can’t.”
“I know.” He kisses her harder, hand fisted in her hair. “Have to be careful.” His other hand moves along the curve of her belly. Settles along the underside. “Ride him, Lenora. I want to watch you cum.”
She moans and rocks her hips over me. Struggling to adapt.
I could help.
I could make it easier but watching him guide her gives me a pleasure I never knew I needed. It’s a view that has me thickening and needing her all the more.
But he has her nearly halfway. It takes very little effort.
Lenora is soaked. She’s drenching me and growing slicker the deeper I invade her.
Her nails bite into my chest as she drives her hips over me in shallow gallops, and the sight of her has me digging my talons into her hips. Anchoring her. Dragging her deeper.
The human rolls her clit. Finger moving in a steady rhythm that has her head falling back against his shoulder. Her walls flex and flutter around me, a sucking sensation that collapses all sense of reason and I push up against her. Rising to meet her.
She makes the most haunting sound of pleasure as we send her over. I follow a moment later, our bodies moving in perfect harmony for that brief second.
I expect the human to claim her. But he gathers her off me with tender hands and bundles her in the blankets. His fingers smooth her hair as he tucks her in bed.
“Sleep,” he tells her, curling around her back. “We’ll be here.”
While him speaking for the both of us prickles my annoyance, he’s right. I will be here, and in the morning, I will make certain every corner of this damn house has a mirror.