He growled, shoving his hips forward until the tip pushed into me. My body fought to stretch around him, granting him entrance when it still seemed so impossible no matter how many times I’d done it. “A God is worshiped, min asteren,” he said, rolling to his back and holding me on top of him. He placed a hand on either side of my hips, pushing me to sit back on his length and take him a little deeper while a strangled gasp caught in my throat. “A God sits back and lets those beneath him pleasure him. Not the other way around. Is that what you want? To serve me until I come?”
A growl built in my throat, my lips twisting with something feral that didn’t belong to me at all. Caldris smirked up at me, his point made. No matter how much I tried to convince myself this didn’t mean anything, I would never want to be like the women who’d come before me.
Because he was mine.
“You are the mate of a God,” he said, using his hands on my hips to lift me and then drop me further down on his cock. Over and over again, working me open bit by bit until I settled atop his thighs and he pressed against the end of me, filling me completely. “I am the one who worships you.”
He reached up, wrapping a hand around the back of my neck and pulling me toward him until his mouth captured mine again. He raised his hips in time with the movements he guided from me, filling me with every stroke, dominating me from the bottom. “Gods,” I groaned, wrapping my arms around him when he flipped me to my back once more and moved within me. The slow, methodical dance of his hips brought his length rubbing over the spot inside me that made me soar. I wrapped my legs around him, hooking my ankles together at the small of his back as he drove deep.
“That’s right, my star. I’m your fucking God,” he growled, the words a reminder of a moment of honesty I hadn’t understood. “And you, my mate, are Gods-damned perfect.”
He plunged into me, dropping a hand to the apex of my thighs and circling my clit. The words he didn’t say danced in my head, the phantom of a memory flashing through me as he stared down at me in another time, another place. “Now come for your God.”
My vision filled with myself, as he’d seen me that day, my face twisted in overwhelming pleasure. Now, my pussy spasmed around him, grasping onto his cock as I came and an animalistic groan filled my ears when he followed me over that edge and filled me with warmth.
My head dropped back to the ground beneath me, my breathing ragged as I struggled to remember my own damn name. I had a feeling I didn’t want to remember, because I’d come to regret everything I’d just very willingly participated in.
My life had been punctuated by many lows, but fucking my enemy was a new extreme.
5
ESTRELLA
Caldris never separated from me, his weight continuing to press down as moments passed between us. Suspended in time, lingering and waiting for reality to come crashing back, I fought to regain my senses.
His breath washed over the ink of my Mark, the vines seeming to writhe in response to his proximity. “Min asteren,” he sighed. The instinct rose within me to chase away his fears of how I would react, but I couldn’t.
I jolted when his mouth touched the mark, his lips moving over it in a smooth caress as if he knew it by heart and worshiped every line on my skin. “Get off of me,” I said, placing both hands between our bodies. The feel of my fingers brushing against his mark sent a tingle of awareness through me, a warning that came from somewhere deep inside of my soul.
That part of me wanted him close, wanted to draw his very essence into my lungs and hold him there, and yet I couldn’t stop the panic consuming me.
What had I done?
“Don’t,” he said quietly, pulling back to stare down at me. He cupped my neck with his hand, his gaze soft as those unfamiliar eyes studied me from within a face that I didn’t wholly recognize. “It is natural to seek comfort in the arms of your mate. Don’t carve this into something ugly.”
“This could never be anything but ugly,” I said, my throat clenching around the sob that tried to escape. “I let you…”
“You are grieving, my star. The loss of someone you were growing to admire, the loss of the man you thought I was and the human life we could share. You will do whatever it takes to chase away that well of numbness that exists inside of you, even if that drives you into my arms,” he said, the words striking me in the chest. They were too knowing, too similar to what I referred to as the hollow inside of me that threatened to swallow me whole.
With every day, with every revelation, it grew into a widening chasm I would never escape if I fell into it. There was only the gleaming of stars in the sky to look up at from a well surrounded by shadows.
“Don’t talk to me as if you know anything about me,” I said, shaking my head to rid myself of the comfort that came from someone understanding what existed inside of me. Something alive had been there before the fall of the Veil, watching and waiting, as if it were alive and tangible, knowing it's time would come soon enough.
“We are the same. I spent centuries chasing away that void within me before you were born to your first life, taking small comforts wherever I could find them. I do not know what it is within us that leads us to that empty well, only that nothing good can come of falling in,” he said, touching his forehead to mine. The show of gentle affection made the rebellion within me wither and die, the tears that burned my throat finally reaching my eyes as I pinched them closed.
“I need you to get off of me, Caelum,” I said, pulling my hands from his chest, awkwardly gesturing to our hips where we remained joined. Where the God of the Dead was still inside of me.
“Please,” I whispered, the quiet word sounding more like an admission than I wanted. He could have my rage and my anger, my betrayal. But he couldn’t have my pain.
He was silent as he withdrew from me, finally slipping free as my body seemed to mourn the loss of him. It was so at odds with the relief in my mind, the panic worrying at the edges fading when he rose to stand between my feet. His footsteps scuffled over the rubble-laden street as he moved away from me, leaving me to slowly open my eyes and push up to a sitting position. Wrapping my arms across my chest and fighting back the sudden chill in my body, I curled my knees up and tried to slow my panicked breaths.
Fae Fucker.
The words rang in my ears, knowing that while I might have been able to claim ignorance all the other times I’d allowed him to touch me, this time I’d known exactly what I was doing.
I rested my cheek against my knees for a moment, staring in the opposite direction of where Caelum stood. I was all too aware of his presence by my side, my body feeling his closeness even if I hadn’t heard his quiet footsteps as he moved. Fabric rending finally forced me to turn my attention toward him, resting my other, wet cheek against my knees.
He held a scrap of cloth in his hand, torn from the hem of his shirt. He dropped it back to the ground next to him in a pile of the clothing he’d gathered. Holding out his other hand to help me up, he raised a brow as if it was as innocent a gesture as any, but nothing he did was harmless, everything served a purpose.
I wanted nothing to do with any of it.
I set my hands on the ground beside me, pushing myself to stand on shaking legs. They wanted to buckle beneath me—to give into the bone-deep weariness that radiated from within. I swayed slightly as I forced myself to stand before the God of the Dead with my chin high. Shaking off the vulnerable girl who’d tried to huddle in on herself with shame for what she’d done, I stared into the dark eyes of a monster and refused to cower.