Iris on her knees, worshipping my dick, is every fantasy I didn’t know I had. My hand twists into her dirty gold hair, holding her but letting her set the pace as she licks up my shaft, hollows her cheeks and sucks hard.
Her hands are rolling my balls, tugging in that way that’s distracting and hot and I want to cut all control and fuck into her mouth, until her lipstick is smeared on her face and my cock. Her tongue probes at my slit and I groan, a long low noise and fuck this.
I tug on her hair, a sharp yank that drags her eyes to mine.
“Wanna fuck you,” I whisper.
Her eyes go wide and she sucks hard once more, just enough to drag a hissed curse from me, and then she comes off my dick with a pop.
“Here or the bed?” she asks, and her voice is husky and fucked.
I want to hear her sound like that every day.
I want her to always sound like that, like she’s just sucked my dick and is so hungry for more that she’s almost shaking with want.
My bed is covered in shadows, and here is wrapped up in sunlight and the smell of something ancient.
There isn’t really a question.
“Here,” I whisper.
She smiles, a quick flash of teeth and then she’s tugging her sundress up over her head, and she stands there in her white tights and a bright blue bra with white lace. She’s pale and lightly freckled, and she’s grinning, still amused by something that I don’t know and can’t bring myself to ask.
I just want to see that smile there.
I tug her closer, shoving her pants down her hips and dragging her into my lap.
Her panties are white cotton boy shorts, simple and practical and unassuming.
And she’s the prettiest thing I’ve seen in a thousand years.
And she’s mine.
You’ll find me. Claim me. Kill and kill and kill.
I shake Del from my head and lean forward, kissing over Iris’ exposed throat and down to her breast, still cupped in that pretty bra. I tug it down impatiently and don’t even take time to admire her before I’m dragging my teeth over her pink nipple, and she moans, rocking into me, her hips riding my leg.
Iris is completely unabashed in her pleasure. Riding me and whispering dirty in my ear as her fingers yank at my hair, using me as she chases that elusive bit of friction that will push her over the edge.
I slip a hand between us and into her cotton panties, into the soft wet heat between her legs, and she screams, as I slide a slippery finger over her clit. Bucks against me, gasping and whimpering as I finger fuck her.
“Pollo,” she gasps, her eyes closed. And I want more.
Need more.
I need to taste her. Need to feel her wrapped around me and her legs dragging me closer as she writhes on my bed.
I need everything from this girl, and her bright eyes.
“Fuck, Apollo,” she gasps as I curve my fingers and fuck her harder.
She comes like that, her mouth hanging open and panting curses against my skin. Riding my fingers like they hold the secrets of the universe.
Her silky inner walls shuddering and shaking around my fingers.
Before it’s even over, I slip my hand free, and she catches it, drags it to her lips and sucks my fingers clean, her eyes closing and a groan slipping free.
Gods above.
“Wanna fuck you,” I say again, my voice hoarse and low.
She nods eagerly. “Please.”
I shove her boy shorts down and she crawls back into my lap, whimpering already over the loss of contact.
As she rises above me, positioning herself over my cock, teasing me with the wet heat, I grip her hips, hard. Until she looks at me and I lean forward, nip at her collar bone. “Go slow.”
A smirk twists up her lips, and then she’s sinking down on me and I can’t think of anything but the wet heat of her. Wrapping me up and feeling impossibly like home. I shudder and she moans, a long, drawn out noise that I recognize as my name.
My wrist aches. She rises up and then rocks back down, riding my cock as I drag her lips back down to collide with mine, rough and hungry and I feel her shivering, her hips rocking and rocking and “Fuck, Apollo, you’re so good,” she gasps.
Her rhythm is beginning to stutter, breaking apart as she gets close.
I can feel my own orgasm, building and I need her to come first. I need her to have everything I can give her.
Power explodes through me and she shrieks, grinding down and I come, hard, deep inside her and she screams again, clamping around me, her orgasm splashing through us both. It last forever.
It lasts a heartbeat.
It doesn’t really matter, how long it lasts, or how good it was—amazingly, the best sex I’ve ever had, incomparable.
What really matters is that when it’s over, and she’s slumped against me, a curled question that smells of coffee and sugar, everything is changed.
She’s changed me.
Maybe she didn’t mean it. Maybe I fought it for eons.
But it doesn’t change that we are both different.
Not all sex is about sex.
I wish I remembered that before I fucked Iris.
She smiles.
She always smiles.
It doesn’t matter that she shakes with fear or that she is loose and pliant, or even when she’s dancing and seductive, dragging me into her silky bed and riding me until I’m gasping and her vocabulary has been reduced to my name, a mindless chant.
It doesn’t matter if she is virgin or Madonna or whore. If she is wildly experienced or sweet and untouched, or even if she’s been married to the same man for twenty years.
When she takes me in her bed or I fuck her against the walls of my temple, and her prison, she smiles. She laughs and whispers my name and writhes against me.
A thousand girl all the same, and everyone impossibly different.
And every one of them mine.
“Take me,” she whispers, and it’s a plea and a promise, both.
Like she is offering something that I can’t name.
Maybe I just don’t want to name it.
But I take her. I take them all, an endless line of girls who bend for me, who I love and spoil, who are given every gift and who are cursed.
They smile, each one.
And they wake up, every time, screaming. Screaming and screaming, wrapped up in my arms, my body still pressed to theirs, aching and full and sated, and she would scream, as threads of possibilities spun out, all around us.
And I would blink, my vision clear, and my power pulsing.
Del screaming was my constant, my inevitable, my always. I wish I could give my girl everything without giving her the worst I had to offer.
She shakes, as I pull her into my arms, closer, and press a kiss into her hair and brush it back, letting the barest curl of my power slide out and wrap around her.
“It’s bright,” She-they-whisper. “There’s so much. Apollo,” she shudders, and shakes.
“It gets easier, love.” I murmur.
“Too much. Too much.” She repeats it, a long chant and then screams and my grip tightens over her, holding her steady as she shudders and screams, her eyes wide and sightless and staring.
She speaks, then.
They all speak.
I hold her close, and listen, and make sense of her words as my chosen girl speaks the prophecy that will kill her, parsing out the golden shining threads of future that will be true.
Speaking the endless possibilities and speaking the true one.
I hold her and whisper reassurance and wipe away her tears, and I wish like hell there was any other way to do this. To remain sane without driving my Del into the depths of madness.
My girl. My favorite, the girl I love more than any other.
And the one that I will use the worst, and break the most and always, always, come back to, despite knowing that I am killing her.
Until I walked away, my gift intact, and forsook the
Delphi. Until I chose to leave them all behind because I couldn’t bear to kill another.
Chapter 11.
I wake with the sun, with Iris wrapped around me in my bed. I don’t remember when we moved here. Sometime after the second time we fucked, but before the third.
She fell asleep after that, so I suppose it was good timing on our part.
The sun is creeping up, a sure wash of power spilling over me, filling the apartment. I can feel it like a wave, intoxicating and so fucking strong I could drown in it. For a moment, as it fills the room, I stretch, let it linger there, the power of the sun pushing against my skin like a lover’s kiss.
Del snarls softly, bites my earlobe and I laugh, low and free, and let my defenses down, let my power swell in, filling me until my skin tingles and glows and I am more gold-touched-god than I am man.
I shiver and I whisper soft, a low Greek greeting to the Sun.
Power swells again, and I smile, fondly.
Then I look at the girl sleeping at my side.
I didn’t expect this. This wild, laughing girl who smiled as she fucked me and moved over my body like worship. Who grinned like there was some secret joke that only she knew, and if I was very lucky she might share it with me.
I want to keep her and I know that I can’t.
But I can fix the things that break her. The brother who is dying that she would grieve. I press a quick kiss to her forehead and carefully extract myself from her, leaving her wrapped around a pillow, naked and lovely in my bed as I scoop Del up and retreat to the kitchen.
I start coffee and open a can of tuna for Del who watches me with disgusted impatience, too dignified to twine around my ankles as I prepare her breakfast. I run a single finger between her ears as I put her and the can on a different counter and she hisses softly, but arches into my touch, and then dismisses me completely as she turns to her food.
With one girl set, I hum softly and turn to make food for the one in my bed.
I have a few eggs and a little bit of rabbit that Artemis brought last time she visited, and a few vegetables that aren’t rotten. And a sharp white cheddar. It’s enough, I think, to make a quiche that she might enjoy.
Smiling, I set to work, slicing and sautéing some onions with the rabbit and dicing a few potatoes to add to the mix. Tomatoes and a few leaves of wilted spinach, then I’m tossing it all in the pan with the onion and rabbit. The oven dings, this ancient sound that tells me it’s starting too warm and I pause, pouring coffee and sidestepping Del as she mews grumpily at my feet, before she begins to groom herself.
Soon the quiche is assembled and I slide it into the oven. My coffee is empty and I’m hungry, so I slice a piece of bread and toast it, munching absently as I wander into the living room where my phone was discarded.
Five calls from my cousins and uncles, and two from Artemis.
And one text.
Come home, right now.
I frown. She worries too much about me. It’s been increasingly annoying but right this second—
My stomach plummets and I throw my power out, wild and searching as my hand clenches on my phone and the other on the deck of cards I’ve been ignoring for days.
There is nothing.
No threads of possibilities.
No golden shining.
Nothing.
I feel the world drop away and I sway.
And then I hear her scream.
I call my sister.
The nice thing about having a sister like Artie is that she is always there when I need someone to talk me off a ledge, and now, more than ever, I need that.
"Where the hell are you?" she asks, her voice sharp and furious.
"I needed some space," I answer. I kick my legs at the edge of the building and she huffs as I ponder what it would do if I jumped.
Logic kicks in: Nothing. I am a god, the Sun god. It would probably annoy my ankles for a few hours, and terrify the humans scurrying around, but in the long run, it would do nothing to me.
Nothing ever has.
"You need to get back here. The family is in fucking crisis, and--"
"I made a mistake." I say, and she goes quiet. "I didn't mean to."
And I still have no fucking clue how I did. I know how my power works. Even lost in the depths of insanity, I know how my power works. This isn't adding up.
"What do you mean? What did you do?" She asks, her voice very still.
Like she's being careful because she doesn't know where my head is and how her words will set me off.
Dammit, this is what I've reduced my sister to.
Handling me with care and kid gloves.
The disgusting thing. The part of all of this that keeps turning my stomach is that I know. I know exactly what I've been like for centuries. I know how fucking crazy I've been, and how much Artemis has been forced to care for me. I can look back and my memories are crystal clear.
The way she watched me with worry and disgust, exasperation and love and helplessness echoes through the ages.
"Why did you stay with me?" I ask, and she laughs, a sharp startled noise.
"What do you mean?"
"I was crazy, Artemis. I left Olympus. You didn't have to stay with me. You chose to. Why the hell did you stay with someone who was such a liability?"
"You're my brother, Pollo. I'm not going to run just because you crazy. You have your reasons for taking the gift from Delphi. And it's keeping us alive."
I go silent, watching the sun rising.
Below me, I can feel Iris, moving in the apartment, and her terror. I need to go to her. Explain what she's feeling and what the hell has happened, even if the truth is I don't actually know.
"Apollo, I know you don't want to be here, but we need you. You know why."
Because I am mad and I can See.
Something none of the other gods can do. Prophecy and seeing into the future is my gift, my right, my curse.
It's why my father will summon me and deal with me despite walking away from the family and my duties. Because he needs me.
"I'll be back later today, Artie."
She makes a satisfied sound in her throat, and then. "Are you well today?"
I laugh, and it sounds hysterical even in my ears.
"Yes, sister. I'm fucking wonderful.”
I hang up after I promise again that I'll be back at the new Olympus soon, and for a few minutes I stand there, basking in the sun and humming softly.
It doesn't last long. Curiosity and my power is tugging at me, yanking me back to the girl I left in my apartment.
After she woke up, screaming, Iris had stumbled into the bathroom and thrown herself in the shower, and refused to come out. Even when the water ran cold, she refused to be budged and I couldn't bring myself to force her. So I finished the breakfast that she wouldn't eat because I don't think any of my girls ate the day after I fucked up their lives, and then I retreated to the roof.
I told myself it was necessary.
But the simple truth was that I'm a fucking coward.
I'll own that shit.
I murmur her name as I step into the apartment. It smells like steam and the savory scent of eggs and meat. Like wild flowers and the hint of sour fear that I can almost taste. She's out of the shower, then.
I find Iris curled on my bed, sitting cross-legged, a blanket wrapped around her shoulders as she rocks back and forth, her eyes squeezed closed and her body shaking as she whispers to herself.
"Iris," I murmur, and she flinches. Her eyes clench closed even tighter.
Like if she closes them hard enough, long enough, she will not see the shining threads of prophecy.
"What's happening to me?" she asks, her voice hoarse.
She sounds like she's been screaming for hours, and I know I'm not that far off in my assessment.
"You..." I hesitate and then, sigh. "I need you to open your eyes and look at me.
She shakes her head. "Can't."
"Why, sweetheart?" I ask s
oftly, scooting closer to her.
"Bright. You're so bright." She shudders. "All golden heat. Like looking at the sun. Burn me up. Burn us all. You’ll burn us all." Her voice is going faster, the words tripping over themselves. "Sun light Apollo it's burning what the lights and threads why am I so hot I can’t stop make it stop, MAKE IT STOP."
I catch her in my arms and yank her close, into my arms, whispering soft nonsense into her hair and humming as she screams and shakes.
This is what I always hated. The fear and the shaking. The way they all fell apart, the way the insanity slammed into them, ripping away the girl I knew and loved and replacing it with a girl who looked the same, but wasn't.
I have always loved Del.
I have always wanted to protect her.
I have always hated that my curse is what breaks her.
It's why I stopped giving it to the girls. Why I took it from Del and never gave it to another, why I left Olympus. That and the fact that my gift would be the reason my family died and I couldn’t bear to make that prophecy come true.
But I didn't do this. I didn't mean to create a new Oracle.
I never intended this.
"Iris," I murmur.
"So bright, Pollo," she murmurs. She turns into me, and her head rubs against my chest, canting back and pressing a kiss into my throat. "Warm, too."
I sigh, and I give her what she wants. And if she keeps her eyes closed while I fuck her, I don't blame.
I can't blame her.
After, I let a trickle of power seep out of me and I send her to sleep. Because I can't allow a new Oracle to sit unattended. And I have to go back to new Olympus.
She slides under, soundless and sweet, and for a long moment, I stare at her, sleeping curled on her side in my bed, limbs tucked in, face soft and sweet in her sleep. Del jumps onto the bed, and sits next to me, watching the girl in silent curiosity.
"Did you know this would happen?" I ask.
She doesn't respond, but I don't really expect her to. For all that I know the kitten is more than the average house cat, but I don't expect it to start talking to me or anything ridiculous like that.
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