Chapter 28 #2
Even his cock seems different, harder, firmer, longer, bigger than he has been before.
The stretch of him is right at the edge of what I can take, and I feel the difference in him everywhere, the size, and the claws, and the black eyes, and the thing under the water moving to drive him up into me, and I’m wrapped around the whole of it—the man and the monster—and I take it.
I take all of it, because I’m too far gone now to do anything but.
“You feel different,” I gasp. “You’re…you feel—”
“Aye.” His mouth drags against my throat, and his teeth aren’t quite right there either, too many edges. “You’re in the deep with me now, lass. This is more of what I am than you’ve had on dry land. Can you take it?”
I nod, because the word yes has become lodged in my throat.
“Good girl.” The claws press. The thing below us surges. “Then take it.”
So I do.
And then the hands come back.
I feel them brush my ankles, my calves, rising again out of the dark, wanting.
I jerk against him and cry out in fright.
He feels it, and his head comes up, this time, when he speaks to them it’s not a bellow.
It’s lower, almost gentle, a long string of that old water-tongue poured down into the deep.
The hands go still on my skin, but they don’t pull.
They close around my ankles and my wrists and hold me steady, in place, the way you’d hold something for someone else to work on, and I understand with a lurch that he’s bent them to it; that the creatures that tried to drown me ten minutes ago, are holding me open for him now because he is told them to, and they obey him, his dead victims, his drowned women.
I’m caught in their cold grip and his clawed one at once, the whole loch’s worth of monstrousness around me, and I’m so far past being able to want anything but this.
“They’ll not take you,” he murmurs in that raw, animal voice, moving in me slow and deep now, the desperation banking into something darker and surer.
The black eyes don’t blink—they present me with that cold abyss, that cosmic void.
“They’ll hold you for me instead. That’s all they’re good for now. Holding what’s mine.”
And fucking hell, it lights me up, all of it.
The dead hands soft on my wrists, and the claws hard at my hip, him stretching me past what I can take, and the thing under the water working to drive him up into me.
The man, the horse, and the drowning thing all fused into one creature that has me surrounded and inside and held.
Iris, you’re one sick individual, I think. And I don’t run from it; don’t bat it away. I accept it, because it’s true. There’s something seriously fucking wrong with me if this—this—is turning me on like nothing else.
I think I’m okay with that.
In fact, I think I’m exactly who I was always meant to be.
And what I want, is to get off with this monster fucking me to kingdom come.
“More,” I beg through a gasp, feeling emboldened, “I can take it.”
And so he gives me more, pumping deepening, faster, the water thrashing around us from the violence of our fucking.
I come around him with the drowned women pinning me in place and his black depthless eyes fixed on my face, and it tears through me harder than anything ever has, the worst thing and the best thing welded into one, and I hate how good it is, and I don’t stop, I can’t stop, there’s nothing left of the woman who had any sense.
She’s gone, and I’m not sure she’ll ever be back.
He feels me let go, and something moves through him, relief and triumph and that ancient thing all at once. The last of the light dies out of the sky so there’s nothing left to see but the faint unearthly glow of his own eyes.
“One more,” he commands, his voice is barely a voice now. “I want you to come with me where I belong. Hold your breath, foxglove.”
He takes me under.
Earlier, the water closed over my head, and it was the worst terror I have ever known, my own body stolen, the dark dragging me down to die with the wives’ hands soft and final on my legs.
But now, the same dark closes over me and it isn’t terror at all.
He takes me down with his arms around me and himself still buried in deep and I go gladly, sinking into the black because it’s him, because somewhere in the last two weeks I have started to trust the creature that drowns women to drown me and bring me back.
The dead drift pale around us in the dark, held off, watching with their ruined faces.
My lungs start to burn but I don’t fight it, I embrace the pain.
I keep my eyes open and focused on his, the gleam of them reflecting the bruised sky above.
They no longer feel like falling into a black hole because the water around us is the black hole, and that glint in his eye is the only light there is, shining like a beacon to lead me home.
He holds me down in his own element on his own terms and fucks me through the burn, claws at my back, and teeth at my throat, the size of him nearly splitting me open.
Right at the edge of everything, life, death, right where the dark went soft and peaceful before, where I’d given up, I come again.
And where the wives’ version was death, this is its exact opposite—this is being more alive than I have ever been, down here in the deep with the beast.
Then he brings me up.
Into the sweet air, the indigo sky, and I drag in oxygen in great, tearing pulls and cling to him, and he holds me.
I feel the monstrousness ebb out of him by degrees.
First, the claws go blunt against my back, then his teeth are safe again when his mouth finds my temple, and the eyes, when I dare to look, are draining back from ink toward that bright ice blue.
The thing under the water is just his legs again, or near enough that I can pretend.
He’s just a man again.
But he’ll never be just a man again, not when I have made some peace in knowing the monster.
“There,” he says against my soaked hair, gentling now, the fear finally easing out of him, out of both of us. “There. You’re here. I have you.”
He carries me out of the bay, sets me down on a rock, and gathers my scattered clothes, draping them over me for warmth.
Then he wraps his strong arms around me and gently places his chin on my crown.
His hands keep returning to my face, my shoulders, the back of my neck, like he still has to keep proving I came back up with him.
I turn my head and glance over at the bay. So much blood and grief and fear in those waters, and somehow, we made something good out of it.
But if I wasn’t wary of the bay after seeing Sinclair get torn to pieces, I’m definitely wary now.
As the glow of the orgasms and the adrenaline of our near-death coupling fades, I realize I’m scared.
What the women did to me scared me. I felt the loch reach into me and take the wheel, and I felt my own hands undress me and my own feet walk me in to die, and I know now what I didn’t know an hour ago.
They want me.
And they can call me.
And I can’t say no.