Chapter 97 Stars, Hide Your Fires
Stars, Hide Your Fires
LYRA
I don’t want to take the time to breathe if it means one second without him. I can’t… I don’t think I could do that again. Lose him. Be separated from him. I don’t know how he became so integral, so necessary to my happiness, so fast.
But he is.
Hades goes to drag me onto his lap, but the chains at his wrists and feet clank and strain. With an impatient sound, he breaks them in an instant.
“Those weren’t exactly useful, were they?” I tease with a grin.
Only to have his mouth crash down on mine. He kisses me like I’m the oxygen he needs to breathe. “It really is you,” he groans against my lips.
But he doesn’t stop kissing me, so I can’t ask how he knows.
He makes desperate sounds in the back of his throat as he successfully drags me onto his lap, and then cool air hits my skin, and I open my eyes to find we’re in his room in Erebos.
Closing my eyes again with a smile, I kiss him back. Just as frantic. Just as desperate.
This coming together isn’t like our first time, which was all slow touches and Hades in total control.
Or like any of the times before I went to Tartarus, which were like love songs, excited about our future together.
Or even the time while I was in Tartarus, which was like a dream in the middle of a nightmare.
This is…deliverance.
Relief so stark, so wild, so acute that our bodies can’t hold it in, and so we are sharing it together in a violent unburdening.
I can’t get enough of his mouth on mine. Gods, he tastes like the bitter dark chocolate that I smell on him. And when he sucks on my lower lip, I whimper as pleasure draws through me with each suck.
For me, our love has been a whirlwind, even with my extra time in Tartarus.
For Hades…our love has been thousands of years of waiting.
He’s loved me for his whole life. And now I’ll love him for the whole of my immortality.
Eager fingers aren’t gentle as he hurries me out of my clothes. The rasp of fabric tearing comes with the tiniest bite of pain at my hip. Pain that I welcome as he rips my panties off and lays me bare.
He doesn’t pause to look his fill like usual, though.
He’s too far gone. Too over the edge.
Hades scoops me up and pins me against the wall, and I’m vaguely aware of something falling to the floor. A weapon, probably, knowing this room.
But who gives a shit when he lines himself up at my entrance, grunting when he finds me already slick for him, then drives into me.
We both moan hard.
Then his hands are at my hips in a punishing grip that, if I was still human, would definitely leave marks for weeks.
I welcome that bite of pain, too. Because his hands are also shaking.
He was this terrified for me, that I’d be trapped down there forever, separated from him forever.
My god of death, my King of the Underworld, who has never needed anyone. Not really.
He needs me this much.
As much as I need him. I think it’s the first time I’ve truly seen that. That my need is not, and has never been, more intense or impactful than his.
Gods, I need him. Everything about him.
I take every brutal, rough, out-of-control thrust of his body into mine. This isn’t punishment. It’s a reclaiming.
It’s what savage joy feels like.
I spear my fingers through his hair and tug hard, and he throws his head back to look at me, his pupils blown out black so that the silver is a mere sliver around the circumference, like an eclipse.
“You told me you’d get yourself out of any trouble.”
“And I did.” I smile.
“They wanted to bury you.”
I hold on to him tighter. “I figured out what you were doing. I knew you’d resist the prophecy.”
“I wasn’t okay without you,” he groans to the rhythm of his thrusts.
He says it with such stark honesty, such shock in his face, that I finally let myself feel all the emotions that I stuffed way down deep in order to survive.
“Me, either.”
A sob tears loose inside my throat, and he grabs me by the back of the head, crashing our mouths together, taking my sorrow and fears and loss, replacing them with incandescent elation in the knowledge that those fears and that loss weren’t for forever.
“We’re together now,” he snarls against my lips as he grinds his cock into me.
“Yes. Gods yes.”
He lifts me and flings us both around to land in the bed, still connected. And as soon as we settle, he’s thrusting again. Pounding.
He lifts up on his elbow so that he can see my face, bending my knees around his waist and adjusting the depth he reaches inside me. Then he’s lacing our fingers together, his grip so hard it hurts.
And I love it.
I take in the beauty that is my god of death, the form of him, the power of him, the intensity of him. I take it into myself.
I’ll give him everything he needs. Even if it kills me.
“Harder,” I whisper harshly. “Punish me.”
He jerks still for a single, harsh breath, eyes flaring, and then something wicked—something menacing, even—crosses his features before he rears back and slams in hard, hard enough it hurts. A pain I welcome.
Then again. And again. Slower now, though not slow.
Who the fuck knew I’d get off on this kind of sex?
But because it’s him, because it’s us, because of what we’ve gone through, what I had to put him through, my body responds as if each thrust is flint and I am tinder ready to combust. The tension inside me builds and heats and writhes with every slam of our bodies.
“I can take it,” I tell him. “Harder.”
“Gods damn it.” His hand comes up around my throat and squeezes. “You left me.”
“I know.” I’m not afraid. I know he won’t hurt me. If anything, I love it. Except for the way my heart breaks for him. Maybe we both need this.
He squeezes harder, enough that my vision narrows, but my pleasure takes on a new edge.
“You knew exactly what you were doing, going to Tartarus, and you fucking left me, Lyra.”
Only once I was in there, but I wouldn’t change it. Not after I promised Rhea.
“I know. You’re right.” I can hardly get the words out.
I’ll tell him everything later.
His face spasms. “You made me put you through that farce of deadly trials, and then you let me lose you inside the worst hell. You told me to—”
He chokes on the next word and slams me even harder before grinding his hips, hitting every fucking nerve ending I have.
“It was my fault,” I whisper, the sound hardly a rasp through the cage of his fingers on my throat.
His grip tightens. “Yes, my star,” he snarls. “It was.”
I start to see those very stars thanks to lack of oxygen, but I also feel release coming. Like his smoke and fire that slammed its way into Tartarus, gathering heat and barreling at me.
He leans down, mouth to my ear. “And now you’re going to scream for me.”
Then he bites into the curve of my neck. Hard.
And I scream.
I scream as my orgasm explodes through me in a rush of violence. I thrash and moan as he sucks on that bite mark through every obliterating pulse of pleasure so intense I think I might black out.
Not for long.
Because when I come back to myself, it’s to the feel of his lips pressing to that spot—so soft that a fresh round of tears wells in my eyes.
“Mother goddess, Lyra, you scared the shit out of me.” His voice breaks.
Then he gathers me in his arms and showers kisses over my eyes, my cheeks, before returning to my lips.
He’s still hard inside me, still unfinished, and he starts to move, but now it’s like our first time. As if now that he’s punished me, the tenor can change to something heartbreakingly tender.
No more thunderstorm. No lightning. Instead, a gentle rain that might be my undoing.
I trail my fingertips over every part of him that I can reach, tracing every ridge, every dip, and returning when a particular spot makes him moan or shiver.
I smile every time he does. Contentment is a funny sort of place to be when he’s loving my body, when he’s moving his hips and building the pleasure for me again.
But that’s what this is.
This hazy, cloudy, perfect place with Hades.
In his arms, I’ll always find contentment. I hope I am the same escape for him.
I keep touching him, kissing him, moving under him, giving him back pleasure for pleasure. Feeling him swell within me, feeling as the urgency starts to grip him tighter, make him move with resolve and then abandoning control.
We’re both breathing hard, and he tears his mouth from mine to bury his face in my neck even as he continues to move. Faster. Faster. He groans and swells even thicker, stretching me. “Fuck, Lyra.”
A second release starts to gather in my core, tingling in the base of my spine and pulling in tighter and tighter with every stroke. But I can also feel him holding back, straining to wait for me.
But I’m already here. I’ll always be here with him.
“I’ll always be your star,” I whisper in his ear, then press a soft kiss to the spot just under it. “I love you too damned much to be anything else. And I’m never leaving you again.”
It’s like the relief of hearing those words unleashes something inside him.
Hades rears up and grinds his hips into mine, and we both leap into the abyss together, holding on to our sweat-slicked, trembling, shuddering bodies as we find each other in a different kind of oblivion. The closest thing to Elysium outside of that heaven.
And we don’t come back until we’re both spent.
Wrapped up and in and around each other. I’m tracing lazy circles over his back as he runs his hand through my now-long hair.
“Say it again,” he whispers.