Pure Requiem - Aja James Page 0,41

and voracious desire incarnate. Never has she unleashed all of her aggression upon me.

Except the once.

But it was not love that drove her then. It was poisonous hate and vengeance.

Now, everything is different. We are different.

I want to know all of her. I want to be free with her, just as I want her to be free with me.

“Then break me,” I reply. “Perhaps if you break my broken pieces and put me back together again, I will finally make sense.”

“And we can be whole,” she says, understanding me implicitly. “Together.”

“Yes,” I murmur against her lips, brushing across her mouth with mine over and over, fanning the fires of her passion, inviting her to take what she wants.

She turns her face away from mine, dipping her head, her clawed nails gently raking down my torso, leaving fiery, stinging paths in their wake, but not hard enough to break the skin.

“Have I told you how much I love your body, Tal? Now even more so than when we first met, when I first knew that I’d love you until the end of time and beyond.”

One nail traces around my navel, drawing a path toward my groin. She stops at the waistband of my trousers and digs her claws between the material and my skin.

And then, so fast I barely feel it, she demonstrates the lethal sharpness of those claws by slicing the fabric entirely away, the material falling to my feet in ribbons.

“Do you know why?” she murmurs, planting a soft kiss on my throat.

Then, another kiss on my sternum, each of my pecs, and the deep groove between them. She kisses her way down the ridges of my abdomen, going to her knees before me, flicking her tongue into my navel, then lapping at the shallow indentation repeatedly. Over and over, she laps and thrusts her tongue, while her clawed hands dig into my hips on either side.

I brace my legs wider apart at her onslaught, naked and trembling in her hands. But the shivers are not from cold.

There’s a strange alchemy of sensations and emotions churning and warring within me. Physically, it’s as if my navel is attached directly to my cock, the way every thrust of her tongue makes it thicken and throb. She ignores it, however, though it stands hard and leaking, jutting past my navel, bouncing against the drum of my stomach beside her jaw.

Psychologically, I am…both excited and afraid. The dark side of me craves the pain she’s shown through her actions just now that she can, and wishes to, inflict.

The sane part of me recoils in horror. My body obviously wants this, but shouldn’t I not want pain? Isn’t this more proof that Medusa has made a monster of me? Ruined me?

Finally, she stops tormenting my belly button and scratches the veins on either side of my lower abdomen with the tips of her fangs, this time drawing thin lines of blood into the skin.

“I love your body more now than before because you’ve lived in it. You’ve suffered in it. But you’ve also triumphed in it and honed it into a big, mean, fighting machine.”

I huff a surprised breath.

“Is that another one of those modern phrases you adopted from Sophia?”

“Indeed,” she answers. “I quote Sophia directly. Though I might have hissed and growled at her immediately after she made the comment, because I do not countenance other females coveting my male.”

A tremor of suppressed laughter courses through me, relaxing my body by degrees.

“Ishtar…”

“Don’t you Ishtar me,” she counters before I can say anything. “I know that there was nothing between you when she was Ninti and you were the General, but I am still jealous that she was by your side for two decades fighting the war, while I was not. I am jealous of the time she had with you, however platonic. And it’s clear as daylight that she finds you excessively attractive in her current incarnation as well.”

“Sophia is in love with Da—”

“Not that I blame her,” Ishtar goes on, talking over me, her claws winding behind me to dig into my gluteus maximus with enough force to make me jolt forward, pressing my erection directly into her face.

Obligingly, she sucks and licks the thick root while mumbling more words.

“You are exceedingly magnificent, after all. Beautiful and strong. So strong…”

Without warning, she sinks the tips of her fangs into my base, startling me with the sharp, stinging pain.

But gradually, the venom in her saliva soothes the hurt with addictive pleasure, made