Chapter 97: 15.1.1 x
The coffee was bitter, but Koen drank it anyway, leaning against the warped kitchen counter as Gabriel watched him with a gaze that felt like a physical touch. It had been a long morning—Koen’s head still ached from a gnome’s surprisingly effective club two days prior—and the caffeine was a welcome burn.
“You’re staring,” Koen grunted, setting the chipped mug down.
“I’m appreciating,” Gabriel corrected, his voice a smooth, amused ripple. He hadn’t touched his own tea. His wings were absent, but his presence still filled the small, low-ceilinged room, making the fire in the hearth seem dimmer.
“Appreciating what? I look like shit.” Koen ran a hand through his ashen hair, his orange eyes tired. The freckles across his nose stood out against his tan skin.
“That’s a matter of perspective,” Gabriel said, and there was a new, unfamiliar weight to his smile.
Koen shrugged, a demonic mannerism that was all loose-limbed indifference, and moved to the hearth to check the fire. That’s when the first wave hit him.
It wasn’t a thought. It was a pure, seismic shift in his blood. Heat, sudden and devastating, bloomed low in his gut and radiated outward, turning his skin feverish. His breath hitched. The simple motion of kneeling sent a jolt of sensation straight to his cock, which hardened so fast it was painful, straining against the rough fabric of his trousers. He gripped the stone mantelpiece, knuckles white.
“Gabriel?” His voice was tighter than he intended.
“Hmm?” The archangel’s tone was all innocence, but when Koen turned his head, he saw the look on Gabriel’s face—the parted lips, the intense, focused blue of his eyes. It was the look he got when a complex celestial puzzle slid into place. A predatory kind of satisfaction.
“Something’s… wrong.” Koen tried to stand, but his legs were liquid. The heat was everywhere now, a prickling, insistent demand under his skin. Every pulse of his heart sent a fresh, throbbing rush of need between his legs. His mind, never fast to begin with, was drowning in a soup of raw sensation. He could smell the pine resin in the fire, the damp wool of his own socks, Gabriel’s clean, ozone scent from across the room. Each one was an assault, a promise. He felt his canines lengthen, a helpless demonic response.
“Wrong?” Gabriel finally pushed off from the counter and walked toward him. The floorboards didn’t creak. He moved with a supernatural quiet that made Koen’s hair stand on end. “Describe it.”
“I’m… hot. It’s like my blood’s on fire.” Koen panted, struggling to form words. “And I’m… fuck, Gabriel, I’m so hard it hurts.” The confession was ripped from him, shame swallowed by a much larger, more urgent hunger. He clutched at his own crotch, a crude, instinctive gesture, and a broken sound escaped him at the contact.
Gabriel was in front of him now. He crouched, bringing them eye to eye. His flawless features were a mask of feigned concern, but his eyes were blazing. “Really? That is a problem.” He reached out and brushed the back of his knuckles against Koen’s flushed cheek. The touch was electric. Koen jerked as if scalded, a full-body shiver wracking him.
“Did you… do something?” Koen gasped, the question dawning through the fog. He remembered the coffee. The unusual bitterness. “The coffee. You put something in it.”
“A little encouragement,” Gabriel murmured, his hand sliding down to cup the side of Koen’s neck, his thumb stroking the frantic pulse there. “I’ve been patient, darling. So very patient. But watching you bumble around, all that strength and no idea what to do with it… it’s been excruciating. I decided to help the process along.”
“You fucking… bastard,” Koen snarled, but the anger had no force. It melted into a whimper as Gabriel’s thumb pressed harder. His hips bucked involuntarily, seeking friction against nothing. “What was it?”
“A simple tincture. Meant to… stir desire. It seems your demonic metabolism has amplified it somewhat. A delightful miscalculation.” Gabriel’s other hand came to rest on Koen’s thigh, high up, and squeezed. The pressure was torture. “You’re burning up with it, aren’t you? Can’t think of anything but the ache in your cock. The empty, fucking need.”
Koen could only nod, shuddering. Tears of frustration and overwhelming sensation pricked at his eyes. He was a creature of action, of clear problems he could shoot or pummel. This was an enemy inside his own skin.
“Tell me what you want,” Gabriel commanded, his voice dropping, shedding all pretense of amusement. It was pure, dark authority.
“I don’t… I don’t know,” Koen choked out.
“You do. Say it.”
“You.” The word was a ragged surrender. “I want you. Please.”
“Please what?” Gabriel’s hand moved from his thigh to the laces of Koen’s trousers, fingers deftly pulling them loose. The rough-spun fabric fell away. Koen’s cock sprang free, fully erect, flushed dark and leaking at the tip. Gabriel’s breath caught, a rare, genuine flicker of awe in his eyes. “Look at you. So desperate. So beautiful.”
He didn’t use magic. He used his hands. One wrapped around Koen’s length, a firm, shocking grip that made Koen cry out, his head thumping back against the stones. The other hand fisted in Koen’s hair, holding him still. Gabriel’s touch was not gentle. It was claiming.
“You’ve never done this, have you?” Gabriel rasped, leaning close, his lips brushing Koen’s ear as his hand began to pump him, a rough, perfect rhythm. “Never had anyone touch you here. Never been inside anyone.”
“No,” Koen sobbed, his hips fucking up into that relentless grip. “Never, fuck, never, I’m—“
“A virgin.” Gabriel bit the word into his skin. “I knew you were dense, koekje, but this…” He laughed, a dark, thrilled sound. “This is a gift. All this pure, fucking hunger, and it’s mine.”
He released Koen’s hair and his cock in the same moment, leaving Koen gasping and bereft. With a fluid motion, Gabriel stood and shed his own clothes, the fine linen and velvet pooling on the dusty floor. His body was sculpted perfection, pale and radiant. And he was just as hard, his cock thick and demanding.
“On your hands and knees,” Gabriel said, his voice leaving no room for debate.
The aphrodisiac owned Koen’s will. He scrambled to obey, the rough-hewn floorboards biting into his palms and knees. He heard Gabriel move behind him, felt the archangel’s hands grip his hips, fingers digging in hard enough to bruise. A normal man would have been marked for days. Koen would heal in hours. The thought was distant, chased away by the slick, cool sensation of Gabriel spitting into his palm, then pressing a wet finger against him.
Koen tensed, a bolt of panic slicing through the haze.
“Relax,” Gabriel commanded, but his voice was strained, his own control fraying. The finger pushed inward, a tight, burning intrusion. Koen buried his face in his arms, a low growl rumbling in his chest. It burned, but the drug in his system twisted the pain, made it a sharp counterpoint to the throbbing need in his front. A second finger joined the first, scissoring, stretching. The stretch was sharper, a bright white pain that made Koen see stars.
“Gabriel… now. Do it now,” he begged, his voice ragged. He couldn’t wait. The emptiness inside him was a howling void.
Gabriel withdrew his fingers. Koen felt the blunt, hot head of his cock press where the fingers had been. There was no more preparation.
“This will hurt,” Gabriel warned, but there was no mercy in the words, only a dark promise.
He pushed in.
The pain was immediate and absolute. Koen screamed, a raw, tearing sound as his body was forced open. It felt like being split in two. His claws scrabbled on the wood, gouging splinters. Gabriel didn’t stop. He sheathed himself in one long, brutal, relentless thrust, until his hips were flush against Koen’s ass.
“Fuck,” Gabriel gasped above him, his body trembling. “You’re so fucking tight. Clenching around me like a vice.” He didn’t move for a long moment, letting Koen adjust, or simply savoring the feeling. Sweat dripped from his chin onto Koen’s back.
The pain began to recede, not gone, but submerged beneath the returning tidal wave of the aphrodisiac. The feeling of being full, so impossibly full, began to morph. The stretch became a devastating friction. Koen pushed back against him, a weak, instinctive movement.
It was all the invitation Gabriel needed.
He pulled back and slammed home. The rhythm he set was punishing, each thrust jarring Koen forward on the floor, a symphony of skin slapping against skin, of ragged breaths and shattered groans. Gabriel’s grip on his hips was iron, sure to leave fingerprints in the shape of a claim.
“Is this what you needed?” Gabriel grunted, bending over him, his chest plastered to Koen’s sweat-slicked back. “This crude, filthy fuck? Your brilliant hunter’s mind wiped clean, just a body for me to use?”
“Yes!” Koen howled, the humiliation and the pleasure twisting together into something unbearable. He was drooling, tears and sweat mingling on the floor beneath him. With every drive of Gabriel’s hips, his own cock, trapped and neglected between his belly and the floor, rubbed against the wood, a secondary, maddening torment. “Don’t stop, please, don’t fucking stop!”
Gabriel changed his angle, and on the next thrust, he hit something deep inside Koen that detonated white light behind his eyes. Koen shrieked, his back arching violently.
“There it is,” Gabriel hissed, triumphant, and aimed for that spot again, and again, a relentless, precision assault. The pain was a memory. All that existed was the shocking, coil-tightening pleasure radiating from that point, with each deep, grinding push.
Koen felt his climax gathering, a tsunami at the base of his spine. He was babbling, a stream of filth and pleas. “Gabe, I’m gonna… I can’t… fuck me, fuck me harder, I’m gonna cum—”
“Cum,” Gabriel snarled, his own rhythm becoming erratic, frantic. “Cum all over the floor like the animal you are.”
The command broke him. Koen’s orgasm ripped through him with a violence that felt physical, seizing every muscle. He spurted onto the floorboards beneath him, stripes of white painting the dirty wood, his cry a shattered, broken thing. The convulsions of his body clamped down around Gabriel, who shouted, a raw, celestial sound, and followed him over the edge.
Koen felt the hot, wet flood inside him, filling the space Gabriel had carved out. The archangel slumped over him, his weight heavy, both of them heaving for air in the suddenly silent cottage. The only sounds were the crackle of the fire and their ragged breathing.
Slowly, carefully, Gabriel pulled out. The sensation made Koen flinch, oversensitive and raw. He collapsed onto his side, trembling, staring at the mess on the floor inches from his face. The heat of the drug was finally, blissfully receding, leaving a bone-deep exhaustion and a clarity that felt like a cold shower.
Gabriel moved first. He fetched a damp cloth from the basin and returned, kneeling beside him. His expression was unreadable. With a surprising tenderness, he began to clean Koen’s stomach, his thighs. The rough cloth was gentle.
Koen couldn’t look at him. Shame, hot and acidic, rose in his throat, far worse than any physical discomfort. He’d been reduced to a begging, mindless thing. He’d loved every second of it.
“Look at me,” Gabriel said quietly. It wasn’t a command this time. It was a request.
Koen forced his orange eyes up. Gabriel’s face was serious, the arrogance gone, replaced by something wary and complex.
“I underestimated the dosage,” Gabriel said, his thumb tracing the line of Koen’s jaw. “That was… more than I intended. Are you hurt?”
“I’ll heal,” Koen muttered, his voice hoarse. “You knew. You knew I didn’t know what I was doing.”
“I suspected.” Gabriel admitted. He tossed the cloth aside. “I didn’t care. I wanted you. I have for a long time.” He paused. “Do you regret it?”
Koen closed his eyes. The memory of the pain was sharp. The memory of the crushing pleasure was sharper. He thought of the patience he hadn’t recognized, the restless looks he’d been too dense to understand.
“No,” he said finally, the word definitive. He opened his eyes. “But you don’t ever do that again. You ask.”
A slow, real smile touched Gabriel’s lips, one that reached his light blue eyes. It was the smile he reserved for private moments, for genuine care. He leaned down and pressed a soft, closed-mouth kiss to Koen’s sweaty forehead.
“Alright,” he whispered against his skin. “Next time, I’ll ask.”
Outside, the wind picked up, making the rusty swing on the porch creak on its chains. Inside, by the dying fire, they stayed on the floor, the aftermath settling around them, heavy with the scent of sex and spent power and a new, fragile understanding.
Koen’s body had already knit itself back together, the raw sting fading to a phantom memory deep in his muscles. The true ache was in his mind, a tangled knot of shame and a relentless, echoing hunger that the aphrodisiac had carved into him. He finally sat up, wincing at the sticky chill on his skin.
“You’re a prick,” Koen said, the words lacking heat. He dragged the back of his hand across his mouth.
“I am,” Gabriel agreed from where he lay sprawled like a fallen monument, a strange softness in his admission. He watched Koen stand, those blue eyes tracking the play of firelight over the demon’s quick-healing skin. “And you’re surprisingly resilient. Most virgins weep or vow vengeance.”
“I’m not most.” Koen found his trousers and yanked them on, the rough fabric a welcome irritation. He avoided looking at the damp spot on the floor. “I need a bath.”
“The pump outside is freezing,” Gabriel offered, still not moving.
“Good.” Koen stalked out the back door, letting it slam.
The cold water was a shock, a brutal clarity that scoured the last chemical haze from his blood. He gasped, head bowed under the icy stream, muscles seizing. His mind, however, refused to be cleansed. It replayed the sensations on a loop: the devastating fullness, the precise angle of that final thrust, the sound Gabriel made when he came. Koen’s own body betrayed him, stirring again despite the cold. He punched the wooden siding beside the pump, splintering it.
Days blurred into a new pattern. Koen would wake, the memory of Gabriel’s hands on his hips as vivid as the dawn light through their warped window. He’d make coffee, his own this time, carefully watched. His body had healed in hours, as it always did. His mind remained stuck in that moment on the floor.
He’d find himself staring at Gabriel’s hands while the archangel sorted celestial correspondence, those elegant fingers tracing lines of holy script. His own thoughts would spiral, unbidden. He’d imagine those fingers in his mouth, or wrapped around his throat, or doing something else, something darker he couldn’t name. The heat would rush back, a phantom of the drug, and he’d have to shift in his chair.
“You’re grinding your teeth again,” Gabriel remarked one afternoon, not looking up from a shimmering parchment. A faint, knowing smirk played on his lips.
“Am not,” Koen muttered, forcing his jaw to relax. He was supposed to be cleaning his revolvers. The oil rag was clenched in his fist. He’d been imagining the cold press of a barrel against his skin, but not from his gun. A different, more intimate metal. The thought was so vivid and sudden he dropped a spring.
“See?” Gabriel said, the smirk deepening. He flicked his wrist, and the errant spring floated through the air back to the table. “Distracted.”
“Shut up,” Koen said, but there was no force behind it. He was distracted. It was everywhere.
Chopping wood for the fire, the solid thunk of the axe would morph in his mind. He’d see the swing of Gabriel’s hips instead, that same brutal, driving rhythm. The sweat on his own back felt like the sweat from that afternoon. He’d return to the cottage with a neat stack of wood and a racing heart, his trousers feeling too tight.
Gabriel would be at the table, brewing tea. “Work hard?” he’d ask, his eyes flicking down and back up with lazy appreciation.
“Yeah,” Koen would grunt, dumping the wood by the hearth. He couldn’t meet that gaze. He knew Gabriel saw it all—the flush, the restless energy. The archangel did nothing. He just watched, a silent, infuriating curator of Koen’s frustration.
The fantasies began to color his work. Tracking a debt collector through the muddy outskirts of town, Koen’s mind supplied an image of the man pinned not by a bullet, but by Gabriel, held down and taken right there in the grimy alley. The violence of the hunt and the violence of the fantasy bled together, leaving him shaken. He collected the bounty in a foul mood, snapping at the guild clerk.
At night was the worst. Lying in their shared bed, listening to Gabriel’s steady breath, the space between them felt charged. Koen would replay it, but his mind would edit, extend, corrupt. He thought of Gabriel’s wings manifesting, vast and blinding, pinning him beneath their weight. He imagined being forced to kneel for hours, until his knees ached, just for the promise of touch. He fantasized about begging, really begging, in ways that made his face burn in the dark.
One evening, he broke. Gabriel was reading by candlelight, looking soft and untouchable. Koen, mending a leather strap, felt the words claw up his throat.
“Are we just not doing that again?” The question came out too loud.
Gabriel lowered his parchment. The candlelight danced in his blue eyes. “Doing what?”
“You know what,” Koen hissed, the needle piercing his thumb. He ignored the bead of blood that welled and vanished. “Since that… time.”
“Oh.” Gabriel set the pages down. He leaned back, the picture of composed indifference. “I thought you said I had to ask.”
Koen stared. “So ask.”
“I don’t want to.” Gabriel’s smile was a slow, deliberate provocation. “Not yet. You’re thinking about it, though. Constantly. I can practically hear the gears smoking.”
The admission was a trap. Koen felt his ears grow hot, the telltale fluster rising. He looked back at the leather, jabbing the needle through it. “Whatever.”
“It’s not ‘whatever,’ koekje.” Gabriel’s voice was a low, intimate drawl from across the room. “It’s written all over you. You smell of want. It’s in the way you move, the way you watch my hands. It’s adorable.”
The word ‘adorable’ was a spark on tinder. Koen’s head snapped up, his orange eyes flashing in the dim light. “I’m not adorable.”
“You are,” Gabriel insisted, his tone light but his gaze heavy. “A big, deadly creature, all tangled up in a need he doesn’t know how to voice. You just grunt and glare and hope I’ll solve it for you.” He stood then, stretching, and the casual display of his form was its own kind of cruelty. “Maybe I will. When I feel like it.”
He extinguished the candle with a thought, plunging the room into moonlit shadows. “Goodnight, Koen.”
Koen sat in the dark, the unmended leather in his hands. The fantasy that rose then was sharper, more detailed. It involved the leather strap. It involved Gabriel’s flawless skin marked not by a weapon, but by Koen’s teeth. It involved ownership, a reversal of their dynamic so complete it stole his breath.
He didn’t sleep. He lay rigid, listening, the depraved screenplay running behind his eyes on a loop, each iteration more desperate than the last. The wanting had become a cage. Gabriel held the key, and he was clearly in no rush to turn it.