How can something so sweet be so sinful?
—ASHáN
One moment, Sage is looking up at her with desperation and longing. The next, my spine straightens, and I’m driving this body.
My voice drops a few octaves.
“Hello, ash’kaela.”
Eden’s eyes go wide, her hands freezing against my chest. “You sound different.”
“Because I am different.”
“Ashán?” she whispers.
I tilt my head, my skeletal hand sliding slowly down the delicate curve of her spine.
“Say it again.”
“Say what again?”
“My name.”
The water runs cold between us, but I cannot feel it. I feel only her weight sinking down over my thighs, and her breath washing over the vorí bone of my jaw.
“Ashán,” she murmurs.
Eight days of listening to her voice like a message handed under a door, and now she’s right here giving it willingly.
“Again,” I demand.
“Ashán.” Her small, warm fingers trace over the bone of my cheek—entirely unafraid.
“Enough,” I groan, my throat tight. “Enough, or I will not be able to be gentle with you.”
“Then don’t be.”
I laugh. A raspy sound like gravel dragged across a coffin. It is nothing like his calming voice. And yet, she smiles up at me.
“You should be frightened of me,” I tell her.
“Why?”
“Because I have been watching you for eight days.” My fingers spread wide across her back.
“I watched you sleep. I watched you eat peaches with your fingers like a little savage. I watched him touch you and I—” The word will not come.
I have never had to find it before. “I wanted. I did not know I was permitted to want anything. I did not know a thing like me could.”
“Ashán—”
“And every night I have gone back into the dark and waited for morning just so I could watch you again.” My grip tightens. “That is what you have in your lap, ash’kaela. Not a gentle male. Something that has spent every hour of its entire existence hungry for one woman.”
“Ashán—”
“I have had to break the tips of my fingers to stop from touching you the last three nights while you slept peacefully next to him.”
“You can,” she whispers against my mouth. “You can touch me whenever you want. Especially while I’m asleep.”
I study her face in silence. How can something so sweet be so sinful?
Because half of her was made for me, Sage murmurs inside our head. And half of her was made for you.
“Do you know the difference between Sage and me, mí’maru?” (My little relic)
Her head tilts. “I know the difference in what I feel from each of you.”
“Mm.” I tuck a damp curl behind her ear. “Sage is the fertility half of our soul. The life in our blood. He’s what makes things grow and bloom. He is beautiful.”
I lean in, the tip of my nose brushing against hers, letting her feel the cold contrast of my face.
“I am the death in our blood. The reaper half of our soul. I’m what happens when you’re being threatened… like the night in the meadow with the four Horsemen.”
She places a single finger over my lips to quiet me. “Sage is beautiful,” she agrees. “Do you know what I think is just as beautiful?”
My eyes fall to the shower floor, unable to hold her gaze under the weight of what I am.
She doesn’t let me hide. She leans forward and presses a soft kiss to my skull, and then, one by one, presses her warm lips to every single one of my skelva.
I wrap my hand around the back of her neck, fingers sinking deep into her wet copper hair. I drag her down until her forehead rests against mine, my void-eye flaring.
“You are a terrifyingly foolish little creature,” I rasp, my voice trembling with a reverence so thick it threatens to tear Sage’s throat apart. “To look at a grave and call it beautiful.”
“It’s not a grave,” she whispers against my cold lips. “It’s you.”
Something snaps inside our shared soul. My hands lock around her waist, lifting her clean off my thighs, and I drive all the way up inside of her.
“Can you switch it?” she whimpers against my neck.
“Hm?”
“I want the other one, Ashán.”
“The other what, mí’vaela?” (My mortal soul)
“This.” She grinds against his length. “This is Sage’s… but I want yours. I want you to know that I accept both of you.”
Vresh. Vresh. Vresh.
“While I’m inside?” I murmur. “We are not the same size.”
“I don’t care.”
“You will care.” My hands tighten on her hips. “He is longer. I am… considerably thicker. And I do not come with the same soft parts he does, ash’kaela. What I have is not gentle to look at.”
“Ashán.” She takes my face in both hands, holding my gaze until I cannot look away. “Stop trying to talk me out of you. I want your vorí cock inside of me. Now.”
Let her, Sage says. She is asking you for the truth of yourself. Do not make her ask again.
It doesn’t happen quickly. The shift moves through us like frost spreading across a window. Sage’s length recedes, and my girth swells in its place, spreading her open from inside, without leaving her heat for a single second.
Eden makes a sound I have never heard a living thing make.
“Ohhh—” Her nails tear down my chest. Her thighs lock around my hips. “Ashán, you’re—oh my god. You’re getting—”
“I know.” My voice is barely holding together. “Breathe out for me. Let it in. The venya is already working. (Venom) Feel it? Do not fight the stretch, sweet girl—”
The skal emerges.
It blooms around my shaft in segments—rib after rib after rib, rising through my length, each one settling into place against her inner walls.
“What is that?” she sobs, her forehead crashing into my shoulder.
“My skal.” I breathe, my hand shaking so violently against her hip that I’m afraid I will bruise her. “It is called a skal. Are you hurt? Tell me the truth or I will pull out of you right now—”
“No!” Her hand clamps around my wrist. “Don’t you dare. It’s not—it doesn’t—”
The ribs flex. They roll, one after another, in a slow wave from base to crown, working her open. She shrieks against my throat and clenches down so hard I see white.
“I did not do that,” I rasp.
“W-what?”
“I did not tell it to move. It is not listening to me, ash’kaela. It is listening to you. The more you want, the more it—”
The wave comes again, faster and deeper.
She sobs my name.
She is hot. She is unbearably, impossibly hot around me.
“Do not move,” I rasp into her hair. “Please. Do not move yet.”
She holds herself absolutely motionless above me while the freezing water pours down her spine and her thighs tremble around my hips. She gives me the one thing I have never had in my entire existence.
Time.
I press my forehead into the wet slope of her shoulder and I breathe her in—peonies, honey, and the salt of her skin. Something shameful moves up through our shared chest and I realize with a shock that my eye is wet.
Ashán, Sage says quietly. It’s alright.
I did not know it would feel like being alive.
I know, he pauses. Now you do. She gave that to both of us.
Her small fingers slide into my hair, holding my skull against her collarbone.
“Take your time,” she whispers. “I’m not going anywhere.”
I lift my head, my eye flaring possessively.
“I am going to ruin you, ash’kaela.”
She smiles and runs her fingers through my hair. “I’m waiting.”
What an odd little creature. This small, impossibly warm thing sitting split open on top of me, saying I’m waiting like I have offered her a cup of tea.
I lift her an inch or two and let her sink back down onto every rib of me.
And gods, the sound she makes. I do it again.
And again. Watching her face the entire time, hunting for the exact moment pain would show, and finding none—finding only her mouth falling open, her copper lashes fluttering and that gorgeous ruined little furrow between her brows.
“Look at me,” I command.
She blinks slowly, her green eyes glassy and blown wide.
“Do you see what you’re taking?” I lift her again, higher this time, dragging every segment of the skal against her walls on the way out. She keens, and I pull her back down onto me in one heavy stroke. “Say it.”
“Y-yours—”
“Say what it is.”
“Your cock—” Her nails carve down my chest. “Your—ughhh, Ashán. It’s moving again.”
“Because you want it to,” I groan against her pulse. “Because you’re dripping and shaking and my cage knows what your body needs before you do.”
“You’re so big.” Her head tips back.
The corner of my lip pulls up in a dark, skeletal smirk.
“Do you know the best part, ash’kaela?” I press a kiss to her throat. “Every segment of my cage secretes venya. Which is why you’re so comfortable right now. But any second now—when the numbness wears off and the heat kicks in—you’re going to feel very, very high on me.”
On cue, heat pours out of me and into her, filling her, and the effect is instant. Her eyes go unfocused. Her mouth goes slack. The keening turns into something wordless and desperate, and she starts fucking herself down onto me faster than my hands are guiding her.
“There she is,” I breathe. “There is my greedy little sinner.”
“More. Ashán, more—”
My hand slides between us, over the soft swell of her belly, down to where she is stretched wide around me, and I press the cool pad of one bone finger against her swollen clit.
She cries out.
“A bit sensitive this morning, aren’t we, ash’kaela?
” I circle it slowly, savoring the way her thighs jerk, watching the shadows churn faster inside me where our bodies join.
“Do you know what I have watched him do to this sweet little kísh the last few days? Do you know how many times I memorized the way you fall apart, and thought—when it is my turn, I will do it better?”
“Ashán—”
“He worships you like a garden. Soft and patient.” My other hand, Sage’s hand, closes over her breast, rolling her peaked nipple between his soft fingers.
Her spine arches into my palm. I lean in, my fangs grazing the shell of her ear.
“I am going to worship you like a grave, mí’maru. Thoroughly. Six feet deep. Forever.”
Her walls clamp down around every rib of me.
“Oh, you liked that.” The smirk pulls across our shared mouth. “My little sinner likes being buried.”
“I’m—Ashán, I’m close.”
“I know, sweet girl.” The skal senses it, rolling harder, faster, the wave-rhythm entirely hers now, venya seeping into her with every flex.
“Give it to me. Not to him. Not to both of us.” My finger presses firm circles against her clit, my hand tightens on her breast and I drive up into her like a beast. “This one is mine. Come all over my cock, ash’kaela.
Let me feel what I have only ever watched. ”
Her legs tremble around my hips, the strength draining from her thighs as the pleasure builds to an unbearable peak. She tries to keep moving, but her muscles give out completely. Her body goes slack against me. She lets out a whimper as she realizes she can’t finish what she started.
My hands grip her hips, fingers digging into the soft flesh as I take complete control. I slam her down onto my cock as I drive up into her at the same time.
“It’s okay,” I growl against her throat. “Let me do it. Let me fuck you through it.”
“Sooo close,” she whimpers.
Her head falls back, mouth open in a silent scream as I piston her up and down my length. Each slam forces her walls to flutter and clench around me. All I can focus on is the wet slap of her body meeting mine and the way her breasts bounce with every brutal thrust.
“Let me fill this pretty little grave you made for me, ash’kaela,” I growl. “It is the only one I ever want to lie in.”
She comes screaming my name—my name—her whole body seizing, her walls clenching around my cage in waves that mirror its own, and the sight of her, wrecked and soaked, snaps the last thread of whatever I was before this morning.
“Eden—”
I bury my face in her throat and follow her over.
The release tears through our shared body like nothing I have ever felt.
Venya floods out of me in one concentrated gush, filling her with the strongest dose I have, and she sobs and clenches, coming again, dragged over a second time by my come itself.
She shakes in my arms while I empty everything I am into the only place that has ever wanted me.
My cock keeps pulsing long after I expect it to stop.
Each heavy throb pushes another thick rope of venom into her.
Her belly presses tighter against my stomach with every surge.
The skin there grows taut, rounding outward, stretching to hold what I’m giving her.
My hands slide down her sides and settle over the swell.
“Ashán,” she slurs. “I feel so full.”
I can’t look away. My come has nowhere else to go; her body is forced to expand around the sheer volume. The sight is hypnotic. Every fresh spurt makes the swell jump slightly beneath my hands. The pressure must be immense, yet she only moans and rocks her hips, milking me more.
I stay buried inside her, unwilling to pull out and lose even a drop. My come keeps flowing in slow, powerful waves, and the swell continues to grow until her belly is unmistakably rounded. I trace over her skin with reverent fingers, fascinated by how much of myself she now carries.
“I want you to stay like this,” I rasp.
“On top of you?” she mumbles.
“Well yes. You’re not going anywhere. But that’s not what I mean,” I rasp, spreading my hand over the swell.
“Like this. Full of us. I have never made anything before, ash’kaela.
Nothing in this world has my mark on it.
But this—” my palm presses gently, “this is the first thing I have ever put into the world that it wanted to keep.”
She rubs her thumb gently over my cheek.
“I find that I want you carrying something of ours far longer than a few days.”
She settles deeper into me, her lips finding the hollow of my throat. “I know. I’m an empath, remember?” she whispers as her hand slides from my skull and rests over the swell, on top of mine.