Chapter 21
Cat
So uh. When Tor said I wouldn’t be able to walk, he wasn’t lying. I winced the next morning, trying not to walk bow-legged as I carried a shadow-pail of water to Fuzzball.
“You couldn’t have walked your ass to the river?
” I huffed, gesturing at the silver water that wound like a serpent through the hills we’d spent all morning riding through.
It was the first chance I’d had to wash, the scents of Miz and Tor clinging to me.
Their cum clinging to me, decorating my skin in a way that felt both dirty and claiming.
I was glad to be clean, but the dark glare Miz fired at me made my stomach tangle.
Not with fear, not even nerves. Anticipation, I realised, of when he’d replace his scent on my body, of when he’d next fill me with so much cum it oozed out.
Just thinking about it made my face burn, but I ducked my head and pretended to focus on Fuzzball, jumping hard when Madde appeared without warning, throwing his arms around me from behind.
He nuzzled the sensitive slope of my neck and groaned.
“You smell so good. So clean. Makes me want to get you all filthy again.”
The reminder that Pain, Madde, and Death had been able to smell the others on me stole my voice, embarrassment holding me in place as Madde hugged me. That, and it felt good to be held.
“Are you, uh—” I began, and even Fuzzball gave me a look that called me foolish. These men were my husbands. We were married. I could ask a straightforward question, even if it made the tip of my nose tingle. “Are you okay with what happened?”
“No, I’m horribly jealous,” he sighed theatrically. “I’m afraid the only way you could possibly heal the hurt in my heart is to sit on my face.”
A laugh barked from me, surprise lightening the tightness from my chest. “Madde,” I chided with a familiarity that told me I’d said his name in that tone often.
“We have to find a coil of iron, and—there are people around,” I whispered, shooting a glance at where everyone else sat sprawled on the hill close enough to overhear.
They’d been discussing places we could find iron, specifically a coil of it as the list called for, but now they were conspicuously silent.
“What? Miz and Tor got to make you come last night. Now it’s my turn.”
“It’s definitely not,” Pain argued.
My eyes slid shut for a moment, and I wasn’t sure why I was embarrassed. When I opened them again, Madde was in the process of laying in the dark, fog-bathed grass at my feet. He patted his shoulders and said, “Climb on, my lioness. Ride me like a horse.”
I groaned.
“You can hold onto my hair and pretend it’s reins,” he suggested.
“I’m not going to sit on your face in the open like this,” I complained, shooting a glance around as if a group of spirits would wander over the hills.
“Why not?” Madde’s bottom lip pushed out, his sapphire eyes big and full of pleading light.
“Because—” Because of a dozen different reasons I couldn’t actually think of.
“We’re gods, my salvation,” Madde said, the light in his eyes shifting to something softer, warmer. “No one will see you unless we let them.”
I swallowed, scrambled around for a reason. “Pain’s right, you already—”
“Made you come so hard your legs shook?” Madde offered when I didn’t finish.
“Yes,” I agreed. “That.”
“No problemo.” Madde scrambled off the floor and beamed at me. Gods, he was pretty. And utterly crazy, and sweet, and loyal and—okay, fine, I liked my husband. “That’s an easy fix.”
He kissed the top of my head and manoeuvred me across to the hill where Pain sat. I didn’t fight, mostly because I was amused by Madde’s antics, and because it made me forget about the black hole of missing memories.
“Lie back,” Madde told Pain.
“You don’t have to,” I said quickly, meeting Pain’s eyes before I remembered how useless that was. I reached for a tendril of power and sent it across the small distance between us, brushing his arm. “Madde can’t tell you to do anything you don’t want to.”
Pain’s laugh was quiet. Rolling. A thunderous sound that made my breath hitch.
“Do you know how much effort it takes me, every minute, to not touch you? To not grab you close and never let go, so I know you’re safe, and you didn’t leave me?
I would kill to feel your heartbeat, to feel your pulse against my fingers, to feel the warmth of your breath so I know that monster did not take you from me.
And you think I don’t want you closer? Cat, I need you as close as I can get you.
Ride my face, ride my cock, take anything you want. I’m desperate.”
“I didn’t know,” I breathed, struck by his confession, by the emotion in his words. “Pain, I’m sorry. I should have realised.” The memory of him masked, so lonely, tugged at my chest.
Pain’s expression morphed into something mischievous. “Make it better by letting me eat your pussy?”
“Not you, too,” I groaned, peering down at him, draped so prettily over the hill in a flowing black shirt and trousers that would be far too easily to untie. “Madde’s corrupted you.”
“Hey, he was like this before I ever touched him. Not that I’ve touched him like that,” Madde added, ducking closer to kiss my head. “Unless you want to… I’m not opposed to kissing pretty boys, and our lioness would like to watch, I’m sure.”
“Leave me out of this,” I protested, my cheeks stained with heat. I would have said something else, but shadows grasped my ankles, wound up my thighs, and when they tugged, I found myself astride Pain.
“We need to find iron,” I protested, but my fingers sank into Pain’s curls as a clever shadow pulled at the seam of my pants, unravelling the stitching until I was bared to him. “We can’t keep delaying.”
“Five minutes, darling woe,” Pain murmured, making my breath catch with a kiss to my inner thigh, the area so sensitive that I shivered, nudging my pussy closer to his mouth. “Maybe ten,” he amended with a kiss to my other thigh, dragging a deep breath of my scent into his chest. “Fifteen, tops.”
“Pain.” Now I was here, fingers in his hair, his breath teasing my most sensitive spots, all my protests fell away.
They weren’t real anyway; I was just self-conscious of how badly I needed these men I hadn’t even known days ago.
But I had known them, and it was time to stop denying it.
And to stop denying what I wanted. Needed.
The second Pain’s kisses found my pussy, I rolled my hips and rode his face, his tongue lapping against my clit until I was moaning, uncaring that my other husbands watched. No, their eyes on me heightened every sensation until I was floating, flying.
I reached out my hand to Death, the few steps between us making my heart scrunch up tight.
Instead of binding our fingers together, he dropped to his knees beside me and kissed me.
The taste of him was a homecoming, the feel of his impassioned, fervent kisses something I’d been searching for without knowing.
I climaxed like that, with the taste of sugar and aniseed in my mouth and Pain wrapping me in ropes of magic so he could taste me, consume me, drown himself in me. And I didn’t feel the empty void of my memories for one second. For once, I felt whole.