Chapter 13: Blood Reign
His choked sound of shock was her new dominion. "My turn," she snarled, sweat and his own black blood glistening on her chin. She planted her palms flat on his ravaged chest, using her leverage to surge upright, grinding herself down onto the base of his cock with a brutal, circular twist of her hips.
The startled friction tore a ragged growl from him. "Try and take it back," she dared, her own voice a ragged triumph as she began to ride him in hard, punishing strokes, each downward plunge slamming the wet, swollen heart of her against his pelvis.
She felt his whole body coil beneath her like a spring, his hands flying up to seize her hips. "Do you think—" he began, his voice thick. She leaned forward, sinking her teeth into the meat of his wrist until the bitter, cold taste of him flooded her mouth again. "Do not," she spat around the flesh, the words guttural. "You watch."
His grip faltered, his stolen blood a second claim inside her as she worked him. The pressure in her core, wound tighter than a crossbow, needed only the relentless, upward jut of him to finally snap. "Is this your claim now, little flame?" she panted, her nails finding the raw tracks on his chest from before and digging in, reopening half-formed scabs. She rode the crest of her own climax with a choked scream, her inner muscles clamping around him in frantic, fluttering waves.
The glide of her blood against his was a shocking fusion she felt in the roots of her teeth as she rode him. His answering snarl shattered the rough rhythm she’d established. One fluid, violent twist of his hips and shoulders sent her careening backwards, her back slamming into the thick furs, the world a dizzying whirl of firelight and fury. His weight came down on her like a portcullis, knees pinning her splayed thighs wide open, his body a cage of chilled marble. He locked a hand on her jaw, fingers digging into her cheeks, and forced her mouth wide. With his free hand he dragged the ragged, weeping punctures on his wrist across her parted lips, smearing the cool, black blood over her tongue and teeth. "Swallow it," he commanded, his voice a dark promise gilded with madness. She choked, the taste a decaying echo of what he’d taken from her, but it flooded her throat at his insistence.
He reared back, his eyes reflecting the chaos he was brewing inside her. "I want to bathe in your blood as I fuck you to death, wife." He punctuated the obscenity with a brutal thrust, his cock spearing into her soaked, accepting cunt with a force that stole her breath and made her see stars. He began to piston into her, a relentless, deep-grinding rhythm that promised annihilation with every drive. His hand slid from her face to her wounded throat, his thumb finding the twin marks and pressing down, not to reopen them, but to feel the frantic pulse beneath. "This heartbeat," he rasped, fucking her harder, "is my tempo now. I will count it down to nothing." Her cries were raw things, ripped from a place of terror and a dark, blooming ecstasy that felt like falling from a great height.
Kael seized her hips, but she braced her hands on his chest, fingers sinking into the trenches her nails had carved through his skin and her own dried blood. "You can't make me beg twice." She sank down his entire length with a rough twist of her hips, feeling the unbearable scrape of his cock against a soft, desperate place inside her.
A flurry of small, broken sounds escaped her lips—gasps, curses, pathetic little protests. His stillness beneath her was a more profound threat than any thrust. His eyes, glittering and cold, tracked her with serene curiosity as she began to move, each frantic undulation fueled by hysteria. One of his hands, streaked with her cervical spit, spanned her throat. "Closer," he murmured, the command deceptively soft.
She bowed over him, her sweat-slicked breasts brushing his chilled chest.
His pale fingers tightened infinitesimally, constricting her air without closing it entirely, a constant threat of severance. Her rhythm faltered.
"Struggle doesn't suit you here," he whispered, his thumb stroking the artery hammering beneath her jaw.
She locked her gaze with his, defiant, drunk on her own impossible boldness, and reared back, the ruthless upward drag of her cunt milking him unforgivably as she gasped for air. Then she slammed back down, impaling herself with a force that jolted a ragged snarl from him. "Do you need the air more," she breathed, her voice shredded, "or more of this?"
He bucked beneath her, his hips meeting her next downward grind with an echoing, flesh-on-flesh crack that reverberated through the stone chamber, breaking his own vow of stillness.
All she asked of Kael was a harbor for spasms secured cruelly in gentle knuckles.
For the final interval.
His other hand flew to her throat, reinforcing the first. The chamber dissolved into a roar of static as the blissful fist clenched deep inside her womb unclenched, surged, and ignited. It detonated a continent. Eyes white-rolled upward, sanity snapped, the collapsing world fed to him. A war she didn't start issued him bolt. Without asking. Such trills of thunder unwound needfully their share; gleaming triumph dawned at the center of her frenzy awarded only one cue.
"KAEL!"
He stilled entirely, a predator holding his breath. The fire gasped in the hearth. Her own pulse hammered in her ears, a frantic, mortal drum against the unnatural silence of him.
“You beg for death,” he said, the words chillingly flat.
Her thighs trembled around his waist. “I beg for something real.”
A smile touched his lips, devoid of any warmth. “As you command.”
In a movement too swift to track, he rolled, pinning her beneath the crushing weight of his body. His fingers tangled in her sweat-damp hair, wrenching her head to the side, exposing the vulnerable line of her throat where her own blood had already dried in thin, crusted trails. “Look at me,” he ordered, his voice a low, resonant vibration against her skin.
She forced her eyes open, meeting the black, depthless pools of his. There was no cold control there now, only a ravenous, devouring hunger that mirrored the one clawing at her own core.
His lips parted.
His fangs, gleaming and impossibly sharp in the low light, sank into her throat. It was not the focused, brutal bite from before, but a deep, profound penetration that seemed to pierce her very soul. A sharp, exquisite burn flared, then dulled into a chilling, invasive pull. He drank. Not a taste, not a sip, but a deep, draining draught that pulled the warmth from her limbs and the light from the edges of her vision. The sound of his swallowing was obscenely loud in the quiet room, a wet, rhythmic gulping that echoed the slowing of her own heart.
The strength bled from her body, a languid, spreading cold that started at the puncture and flowed outward. The feel of him inside her cunt, still hard and thick, became a distant, ghostly sensation. Her vision tunneled, the firelight shrinking to a single, wavering point above Kael’s shoulder.
As the last, thready pulse of her life force traveled up his throat, he began to move again. His hips pistoned into her limp body with a brutal, driving rhythm, each thrust jarring her emptying shell. He fucked the last flickers of warmth from her, his cock a relentless piston in her cooling, slack cunt. The sensations blurred—the deep, internal friction, the chilling hollow of her veins, the final, shuddering convulsions of her body around his—all merging into one seamless act of annihilation.
Her final breath left her lips in a silent, frosty plume. Her eyes, fixed on his, saw nothing.
In the absolute stillness of her death, he emptied himself. His release flooded her depths, not with heat, but with a searing, necrotic cold that sparked through her dead tissues. He held himself there, buried to the hilt, as his own dark blood—the poisoned, animating ichor of his curse—flowed from his lips back into the ravaged veins of her throat. The exchange was complete: her life for his death, her mortality for his eternity.