Chapter Nineteen – Esme
Chapter Nineteen
Esme
I don’t let myself think. If I think, I might faint. So, I turn on my heel and run.
I rush down the stairs two at a time. I sprint down the hall, throw the front door open, and burst out into the evening light of Otheera.
The sun hangs low over the desert, the shadows of the black cliffs stretch long across the ground, but the day’s heat still presses down on my shoulders as I run.
My heart pounds against my ribs, my breath comes out in short bursts, and sweat soaks the back of my dress before I even clear the terrace.
But fear tips over into excitement, and a buzz spreads through my veins and pushes me faster instead of slowing me down.
I’m running from a Scorpius in rut. I’ve never felt so awake in my life.
I cut through the garden because I don’t know where else to go. The house falls behind me. The ground is uneven under my feet, stone beds and half-cleared paths, and heat rises off the rock and presses in from all sides until every breath burns going down.
Then I hear him.
The clicking is loud now, constant, and hungry. It rises and falls, dropping low, and every rise pushes me faster. I chance a look over my shoulder.
Osric is coming through the garden after me, closing the distance at a speed I can’t comprehend.
Nothing about him looks like the restrained male who’s kept me at a distance since he brought me into his home.
His black eyes are fixed on me, his tail rides high behind him, and his face holds nothing but want.
He looks feral and desperate, beautiful and terrifying, and I understand that I’m being hunted by a predator.
That I’m hopeless prey. I have no chance of getting away.
I run harder.
I push myself to my limit, arms pumping, feet finding ground I can barely see. I want him to catch me. I’ve never wanted anything the way I want him to catch me, but some primal instinct tells me to make him work for it, to give him a real chase, because the reward will be worth it.
The garden ends and rougher ground takes over – thornbushes, squat cacti, loose stones, and broken paths that crumble at the edges.
I slow down, because if I break an ankle out here, the hunt ends badly for both of us.
I weave between the thornbushes and search for a clear stretch of ground while the clicking swells behind me, closer and closer.
I find a clear path, but he’s already on me.
His weight hits me from behind. His arms wrap around me, and he takes us both down into the dust, twisting midair so he lands under me. Then he rolls us again, and I’m under him, panting, sweating, frightened, and aching for him so badly I could cry.
The clicking stops. The desert goes silent around us.
He looks down at me, chest heaving, dust in his black hair, and snarls one word.
“Mine.”
“Yours,” I whisper.
I think he’ll kiss me. He doesn’t. He grips the neckline of my dress and rips it open in one pull, from collar to hem. The evening air brushes over my heated skin. He tears at his own clothes until they come away in pieces, and he kneels naked above me.
I see him fully for the first time. He’s hard muscle under bluish gray shell, broad through the chest and shoulders, the plates shading into purple where they overlap, patterned like living armor across his ribs and forearms. The blue marks on his forehead stand out against his pale face.
His tail shifts behind him, thick at the base of his spine, narrowing toward the stinger.
And his cock stands hard against his stomach – thick, long, and deep purple, covered in shell that looks smoother and softer than the rest of him, wet at the tip. It should scare me more than it does.
He pushes my legs open.
“Please,” I whisper. “Please. Please.” I don’t know if I’m begging him to be careful or begging him to hurry.
I’m scared. This is my first time, and he’s deep in his rut. He’ll be rough. I press my head back into the dirt and brace for it.
He surprises me instead.
He moves down my body, drags my thighs over his shoulders, and puts his mouth on my pussy.
He licks me fast, messy, and hungry. Long strokes from bottom to top, his tongue spreading his saliva over my folds, my clit, inside me.
Wherever his mouth touches, looseness spreads under my skin.
My body softens. My thighs fall open wider on their own, my hips settle into the ground, and everything in me relaxes under him even as the need grows sharper.
I feel soothed and desperate in the same breath, melting into the dirt while my pussy throbs against his tongue.
I’ve never been touched there. I’ve never even touched myself, and now a Scorpius in rut is eating me in the open desert with my ruined dress spread under us. He drags his tongue up and circles my clit, and my hips buck against his face. He does it again, slower, and a whimper breaks out of me.
When he pushes his tongue inside me, the sound I make carries far past the thornbushes, and I don’t care.
His tongue is long and strong, it soothes the ache and makes me gush right into his mouth.
I shove my fingers into his hair and grip it tight, holding him exactly where I need him.
He growls against me and licks deeper. His growl vibrates into my flesh, my pussy clenches around his tongue and gushes more of my juices onto it, and he swallows and keeps going.
I’m so wet I can hear it, his saliva and my own slickness running together down between my cheeks and into the dust. The throb builds under his mouth, gathers low in my belly, winds tighter with every stroke of his tongue, and turns into one long pull that takes my whole body with it.
I come hard, loud, unrestrained, my back arching off the ground, my thighs clamping around his head. He doesn’t pull away. He swallows and works me through every wave, then lifts his head only when I go limp in the dirt, shaking, my fingers still tangled in his hair.
He climbs back over me, braces one arm beside my head, and lines his cock up against me. He pushes in.
I gasp and brace for pain, because pain is what I was promised. The married young women of Concord always whispered that the first night hurts, that a bride grits her teeth and endures it. There’s a stretch, a brief resistance, and then I give way and take him. There’s no pain at all.
His saliva changed something in me. It prepared me, opened me, made my body ready for his. The thought cuts clean through the pleasure: if his body can do that, then maybe his venom won’t kill me either.
Then he starts to move, and I stop thinking.
I wrap my legs around him as he fucks me into the ground.
He’s so thick inside me that I keep expecting him to split me in two.
Somehow, he doesn’t. I’m stretched around him and full, fuller than I knew my body could be, filled so deep that I feel him everywhere – in my belly, in my spine, in the backs of my knees where they grip his sides.
The shell over his cock drags against every part of me with each stroke, smooth and hard, and my pussy pulses around him.
He drives in, and my body slides against the dirt.
He drags back out, and I ache at the emptiness until he fills me again.
His body settles over mine, hard and heavy, and pins me to the ground so completely that I can’t move at all.
I don’t want to. Being held down under his weight while he takes me is its own pleasure.
My wrists, my hips, my thighs, everything is caught under him.
The most dangerous creature in this desert is wrapped around me, making me moan until I lose myself.
My breasts feel heavy, swollen and tight, my nipples drawn into hard, painful peaks that rub against his shell with every thrust. I’m flushed from my face down to my thighs, slick with sweat and dust, and I can’t stop the sounds spilling out of me.
Above his shoulder, his tail curls up and over his head.
The stinger hangs above me, aimed down at my body, drifting from my chest to my throat as if it’s searching for the right place to sink in.
Venom gathers at its sharp tip and drips onto me – on my chest, my neck, even my forehead – and where each drop lands, my skin goes cool, calm, and numb.
He’s numbing me. He’s numbing his prey before he devours it.
The danger of it, the stinger drifting over my skin while he fucks me, should terrify me. Instead, it makes me wetter. I realize that’s insane, but the realization changes nothing.
He drives into me, deep and steady, and I stare up into his black eyes. They’re black from edge to edge, shining. I can see my own face reflected inside them. I can’t look away.
There’s no going back from this, not from him, not from us. I’m the bride of a Scorpius, claimed in the dust of Otheera, with his venom cooling on my skin.
I tighten my arms and legs around him and hold on.