Fifty--Two
Antonio
Micha’s fists vibrate from how hard she clenches them, and I’m hit with the memory of Siome’s rage. She told me to go to hel so many times. Cursed me, hated me. Then pushed me to be better.
To change the world to make it safe for her. For us.
For the little pups she carried. And look how bad I failed.
“Bring her back?”
Micha snarls, her words twisted with all of her pain – but still so minuscule compared to what’s inside of me. “You expect me to kiss your feet and thank you for this?” She lunges at me and grabs my shirt. Her empty eye sockets narrow as she trembles. “You killed her!”
“No,”
I say, wrapping both my hands around hers, and push down my memories of Siome. I stand, dragging her to her feet. “Sau killed her. I was just the gun she used to pull the trigger.”
“She was a baby!”
“A fetus,”
I reply flippantly. “Incapable of feeling pain until twenty-four weeks.”
“I felt it!”
she screams, her pulse beating so damn hard at the base of her neck.
“And I felt the death of my mate,”
I say. “You cry over a clump of cells that could not feel, while I mourn a mother who understood her babies had been murdered and she was dying. Who I couldn’t even comfort by telling her they were okay, and I would raise them in her absence. Sau killed her but only after she knew that pain.
“Yet, you only wonder how I could do such a thing as eat a baby?”
My words vibrate through my chest, choking the air from my lungs. Spat with such venom, with such fucking agony that I’m struggling to control it. “I ask you how you can kill an adult and claim it’s any different. If you take that same kid, and I kill him eighteen years later, would you see me as a monster then or just a soldier?”
I lift my head from her ear, but my grip on her body does not loosen. My fingers are tight, white-knuckled, the rage in my chest burning out from my soul. “What innocence we put on babies as if they are special,”
I sneer. “When dogs have more personality. Cows and pigs and all the animals we eat and beat and don’t give a damn about.”
“It’s different,” she says.
“Is it? Every living creature feels pain. A baby doesn’t even know to fear death. So what is it about them? Their potential? Our own hope that they can be better than us?”
I demand as I’m assaulted by the memory of my three pups.
They lie curled up in their placenta, their bodies bloody and ripped apart. I think about the life I could have had with them. The yipping laughter, the little tongue kisses that all pups do. Siome and I would’ve taught them how to hunt, to chase, to fucking live. Oh, yes, they had potential.
But so did Siome.
And I’m tired of defending why her loss hurts more.
She was my everything. My past, my present, my future. My reason for living. My reason for dying when the time comes. She is my everything, and she is gone, and that hole she’s left behind, filled only with the phantom chill of her loss, is all I have to remember her by.
So many lost moments. Lost dreams. Lost laughter and love and light, all made more bitter by the experience of once having had them.
I never had kids.
The ones with my last name aren’t mine. I was never able to bring myself to touch Mary – the wolf I took years after Siome died. Only taken once I believed Sau dead and her line gone. But Mary and I had only entered a pact for the good of the pack. She fucked who she wanted, and when she got pregnant, I gave her kids my name to uphold the illusion of solidarity to keep the witches and vampires from thinking us weak.
Because I lost the chance for kids when I lost Siome.
My throat closing, I shake my head. My thoughts always run too much when I smell fucking V.
I stare into Micha’s eye sockets, feeling as empty as them in my soul. Her whore of a mother-in-law carved out all I was, all I promised Siome to be, and she filled it with poison, turning me into someone I don’t even recognize, someone Siome would be ashamed to see.
“So you ask me how I could eat your baby,”
I say, needing to get out the fucking words, needing to get through to this bitch in my arms so I can ween her off her addiction for my own fucking sanity – the memories she’s dragging into the light too fucking bright. “It’s because your family made me eat my wife.”
June 29 1907, St. Augustine, Florida – Antonio
Siome jumps to her feet and kicks me in the chest. Her claws rake across my skin, and I stagger back so they don’t cut too deep. As my back slams into the door, she lunges for me, her arms outstretched. I catch her on muscle memory – as I’ve done so many times before.
Her knees thud into the wood behind me, cracking it and splintering the frame. For the slightest of seconds, with my hands on her ass and her legs around my waist and her face so close to mine, I feel like my love’s come home. My cock is swollen from the scent of her being in heat, and the feel of her body against mine is making it hard to think clearly.
But then the door swings open from the impact. It throws me off balance, and I lurch forward to stay upright, holding her tighter to keep her from falling off me.
Her teeth sink into my shoulder. Not a love nip. A full-on bite that tears through muscle and has her teeth nicking bone.
My head whips to the side, and I snap at the air around her elongated ear as I straighten. She growls low, and so do I. I know she can smell it. The pheromones I’m giving off – those of an alpha even if I’ll never take the title.
And I know she can feel it. The urge to obey even in her anger. Her need to mate with the strongest wolf around.
The smell of her arousal increases.
There is a second of hesitation
Of resistance.
And then we’re exploding into action, our bodies a slave to our needs. Her teeth release me. Her hands grab my cock. She licks her way up my neck, and my hands squeeze her ass. I try to reach between us to see if she’s wet enough, but she lifts her hips up and spears herself on me before I can.
I stumble forward on a growl, aiming for the sofa.
I collapse onto it with her beneath me, my knees weak, my cock aching.
She feels so fucking good, and I want to take her like the animals we are, but I don’t want to hurt her.
She snarls her frustration when I refuse to move, my body trembling as I struggle for control. She snaps her teeth in the air around my face. Shoves at my chest. Pulls at my hips. Even pokes me in the bite wound she gave me.
I bare my teeth, letting her know she’s gone too far, and she whimpers low before she starts to lick me. Her tongue is rough, not as pleasant as she thinks it is, but I don’t care. Because I saw it for a moment – that old her. My stubborn little helfire.
“Ugh! You are such a Mymecia pyiformis!”
She pushes down on my wrists as I grip her hips, keeping her from sinking down onto my cock. It’s the first time she’s gone into heat, and she’s too desperate to think clearly. I’d be lost too if it wasn’t for the stud of Artemis’ silver I’ve pierced my ear with, an attempt to use the pain to clear the fog in my brain.
“I’m not going to hurt you,”
I growl, my voice raspy, my whole body tense, feeling like it’s going to explode at any moment. My muscles shake as the head of my cock pushes into her virgin pussy. Holy fuck, I have died and gone to Elysium – the paradise of the Underworld.
“It’s supposed to hurt the first time,”
she snaps, wriggling her hips, trying to get the release she needs.
“No, it’s not.”
“Mary said –”
“Talk about anyone else right now,”
I bite out through clenched teeth, “and I’ll kill them.” I lower her down another inch.
She pants, and she whimpers. Her hands claw at me. Her nails dig into my skin, raking lines down my hairy chest.
My eyes fasten onto her face. On the half-lidded rubies begging me to fill her with my cum. On the parted lips I’m so desperate to taste again. On the flush of her cheeks. Then my gaze drops to her pussy as she sits on my lap and takes me another fucking inch.
My arms tremble so damn hard as I fight myself from yanking her down onto my cock and fucking her until she can’t even recall her name.
But the first time doesn’t have to hurt if I take it slow. If I get her ready and put her need above my own. The taste of her pussy is already all over my face, and I lick my lips in an attempt to ease my own feral need. It doesn’t help. I want her hard and fast and deep.
Gods, I want my cock swelling inside her as her own muscles lock around me, knotting us together.
“Don’t move,”
I rasp as I reach up to touch my earring. I pinch it between my fingers, letting the pain push through the mindless heat.
But Siome doesn’t fucking listen.
She just sits her ass down, taking in every inch of my cock. And if I thought I’d died and gone to paradise before – surely this is hel.
Because I can’t stop myself from rolling her beneath me and fucking her like a beast.
She growls, the same frustration she had during our first time bleeding out past her lips. But just like then, I refuse to hurt her. I haven’t done any foreplay; she can’t possibly be ready for this.
So I pin her arms above her head, and I take her slow. My teeth nuzzle her neck. I lick the side of her face. She snarls at me, wanting me to move faster, fuck her harder, but I am taking the time to relearn her body. Over eighty years we have been apart, and I’m going to erase every other male she’s been with.
The memories of the drug den come back to me, but I push them away. They don’t belong here. Whatever male she has fucked doesn’t matter. They only used her, degraded her. And I will remind her that she is loved. That someone wants her for who she is.
How can they ever compete with that?
So I take my time relearning the feel of her pussy, the scent of her heat, the feel of her body against mine. I rebuild those memories so they impregnate on my brain, never to be forgotten, there for the days when she is not.
The pain grows in my heart, the knowledge that this can’t last if I wish to protect her from my curse.
But I push that away too.
In this moment, she is mine, and that is all that matters.
I love you, little helfire.
Come back to me.
Her frustration turns into crying whimpers. An edging that threatens to spill my seed. But I keep moving slowly. Keep learning every inch of her as she takes every inch of me.
She starts to shiver beneath me. Her eyes close. Her lips part on frantic pants. She’s so close, and I stop to enjoy the feel of her pussy clenching around me. Stop to inhale the delicious scent of her heat.
She growls.
Snaps her teeth as she opens her eyes to glare at me.
She tries to wiggle her hips, but I hold her still in my hands, pinned between me and the sofa. Looking into her eyes, I lift myself up. Most of my weight is on my knees, and my stomach clenches tight as it holds the rest.
She gasps as my cock leaves her, ready for when it comes back to fill her.
But I don’t push in.
I just let the head of my cock rest between her lips.
She howls. Her hands swat at mine. She tries to tug me off her. Then tries to yank me down on top of her. She kicks her feet as I kneel between her legs and just watch her as she falls apart.
She always hated being edged.
It was always my favorite part.
My hands shaking, I hold myself away from her for a full minute.
Then I sink in with a groan.
She howls. I growl.
And we both come apart at the seams.
My cock swells inside her.
Her pussy locks around it, holding me deep.
And as my cum fills her, I bury my head in the crook of her shoulder and hold her tight in my arms.
We stay like that for a long moment, the silence lying thick around us. Until I hear her nose twitching. The giant inhales as she finally catches scent of the V I have hidden in my kitchen cupboards.
My heart breaking, I push myself off her, then roll to the floor and shift. She sits up, her head swinging back and forth as she tries to pinpoint where it’s coming from. I’ve hidden it under piles of dried fish, but her nose has always been sharp.
“You don’t need it,”
I say as I face her.
She doesn’t even look at me as she surges to her feet. I shove her back down, and she almost swings for me, but then she clocks that I’m in my human form, and there is some part inside her that doesn’t actually want to see me dead despite the bite she gave me. She growls as she flips over the back of the sofa, deciding to go around me instead of through. I dart around it and stand in the doorway to the kitchen.
“Siome, please! Just stop. You could be pregnant with our pups.”
She growls again, telling me to piss off. She needs the V. For whatever fucking reason, she wants to check out of this reality. I’m not enough to keep her in it.
“Then live for them! Don’t give a fuck about me, but you live for them!”
I press my hand to her belly, where our pups might already be growing, and I will her to be the fierce protector she once was. The one who defied the gods and ignored me if she thought listening would mean those she loved got hurt.
My stubborn little helfire.
Growling, she slaps my hand away, then drops to the floor to shift. She screams out her agony, and I barely hold in mine. Gasping through the pain, she staggers to her feet as soon as she’s able. I want to tell her to sit down and rest, but she wipes a hand between her thighs, scooping up my cum, and slaps it on my chest.
“You want me to think about the future with you? Now!”
She shrieks as she shoves me back, and I stumble through the cracked splinters of the door. “You don’t get that right! You don’t get that fucking right anymore! You left me! You passed me off to Jack, and you left me!”
“You know I couldn’t –”
I clench my teeth as I struggle to keep my voice level. She came from a broken home. She hates it when I yell. “The curse –”
“There is no curse!”
she shouts.
My eyes widen as I stare at her. My mouth drops open in disbelief. “How can you say that? I lost my entire family.”
“Over ninety years!”
She throws up her hands. “At war! You are at war!” She jabs me in the chest. “Name one single wolf in this fucking pack who hasn’t lost anyone!”
I open my mouth, then snap my teeth shut again.
Her eyes fill with so much pain, pain I know I caused. Not the drug. Not the V that’s been giving her an escape. Me. She took it to run from the pain of me.
Fuck, little helfire, I never wanted to hurt you. I stare at her, my throat too swollen to speak.
“You were supposed to ride after me.”
The words fall out of her mouth like a crumbling cliff into the sea. She starts to tremble as she stares at me, at all the hope she once put at my feet. “You were supposed to come for me!”
I flinch at the agony in her eyes. In her voice.
“I waited for you for over half a century –”
My throat tightens. Curse or not... “You deserved a better life.”
“I deserved you! I wanted you! But you never came!”
She clenches her fists as her lip wobbles. “You never came!”
I stare at her, wanting to mention the curse again. Tell her that I was doing what was best for her, but I cannot. Because I want so badly to believe that I can keep her this time. That once I fix her, I don’t have to send her on her way again.
But I can’t let myself think of that either. Because the gods have taken everything from me.
I am sun-touched.
I am supposed to live a life of misery.
Aren’t I?
She sniffles as she sees the warring decision in my eyes.
“You want to know why I don’t want to get better?”
she asks softly – a bitter pain to her words, a defeated sigh from someone who knows they’ll never win. “Because I know if I do, you’re just going to leave.” She swallows hard as tears flash behind her ruby-red eyes. “And I’d rather have you like this than not have you at all.”
Breaking on a cry, I try to reach for her, but she shoves past me to get to the V.