Vinnie would not have it.
It was unwise to expend the energy she’d taken from him, but necessary to make her point.
She fell backward, dragging him on top of her, swinging her legs up and wrapping them around his waist.
Brief triumph flashed across his face but vanished as she squeezed the breath from his chest with the grip of her thighs. He coughed once, twice. His fingers worked at her long, lean muscles. As much as it pained her, she pushed him backward, out of her.
“What are you doing?” he rasped.
She squeezed hard enough to hear something pop. “Keep your cock until you’ve dried your tears, Junior.”
*****
Crixus looked into Vinnie’s blazing emerald eyes and felt the strange displacement of meeting an unexpected mirror. That split second of recognition before the mind acknowledges the face it belongs to. She reflected back to him a fierceness and brutality he had never seen outside the battlefield. A warrior’s lust.
Parting his flesh from hers came with a physical pain. And not just the crushing sensation in his ribs.
This was new.
And disconcerting.
At that moment, he would have mortgaged his soul—assuming he had one—if it meant he could take every breath with his cock inside Lavinia’s body. The entire world could have rolled in ecstasy at his feet, and still he wanted to be only here. With her.
The corners of her mouth curved upward. Not so much a smile as a challenge.
What now, Snookums?
She had invaded his head.
Thoughts arose. Plans. Ideas. But Vinnie’s voice was there, batting them away as quickly as they arrived. She picked through his mind like a landfill, discarding most of what she found.
Try again.
That the best you’ve got?
Give me a break.
Please tell me you can do better than that.
He felt her pleasure growing in equal proportion with his irritation. Blood burned below his skin, throwing up a red wall that blocked any remaining thought. Adrenaline replaced it. His muscles flooded by the drug of lower animals.
Crixus surged forward with Vinnie’s legs still clasped about him.
The shock was enough to distract her busy brain for the instant required to impale her. He did not intend to give her the time required to come up with a counter-attack.
Quite the opposite.
He intended to fuck her witless.
Vinnie had awoken the old madness with her skillful touch and unleashed it with her words. Now it drove him into her like a doomed man to his gallows. And he was doomed. He had sealed his own fate millennia ago by binding himself to her.
To this.
Her fingernails scored his back and rounded over his buttocks, allowing him no other option than to plunge into her with reckless abandon. She would take nothing less.
She drank everything he could give and still demanded more.
She demanded all.
He could feel it moving away from him as her body tensed. The unbearable tightness of her. The sway of her breasts. The wildfire of her hair spreading through the grass.
Past and future both paled in comparison to the rhythmic pulling of her core around him.
“Teacht, bean!” A command in her native language. Come, woman.
Her reply was nothing less than he should have expected. “Tá tú ar dtús, daor.”
You first, slave.
The terrible pressure building within him detonated and he spilled into her. Control escaped him along with the grasp of all human language as bliss rushed through him in a riotous wave.
And another.
And another.
Vinnie’s hand closed over his throat as another part of her contracted around him. Her thumb grazed over his throbbing jugular vein as her fingertips traced his lips. “I’m not finished with you.”
She used the leverage to throw him off balance, rolling his body under her. Her hips moved, or the world did. Crixus couldn’t be sure. The friction tossed a new spark on the already smoldering pyre between them.
Vinnie hauled him up by his hair, pressing his face into her breasts.
“Suck me,” she ordered.
This was one command Crixus had neither the will nor the desire to disobey.
She was velvet and cream in his mouth and molten around his cock. He risked whatever punishment she might have stored up for him, pushing upward, into her, toward a sky pinwheeling with stars.
He felt the disbelief on his own face as the warm swell of another tide found him and he was coming again. Her carnal cry was a hymn under the vault of heaven and he worshipped there as long as she let him.
Vinnie collapsed over him in wordless exhaustion. Their hearts beat against each other in one of the many patterns that would fill the long watches of this night.
“Was that…how that felt…is it because we’re soul mates?” Crixus asked.
“Yes.” She nodded lazily against his chest. “So is this.”
And his head exploded.
Chapter Nine
Hades’s head—which to Crixus’s knowledge had never exploded—did something else he suspected it had never done: thumped repeatedly on his desk. The action was more appropriate to a corporate underling in the twelfth hour of an investigative audit than to the Lord of the Underworld, keeper of the dead and bargainer of souls. It was even more impressive in the triple vision Crixus couldn’t condense into one consistent figure.
When Hades lifted his eyes, he revealed a round, red spot that had formed in the center of his forehead. The indentation of a paperclip had pressed itself between his brows like the marking of a tribe whose ancestral gods had sprung from an office supply store.
“Let me see if I can accurately reconstruct the events of this evening.” His voice was calm. Dangerously calm. Surface of the lake before a hockey-masked murderer leapt up toward the dock calm.
“That’s really not necessary. I remember plenty well.” Crixus struggled to his feet and tried to figure out which of the three swaying chairs in front of him was real enough to hold his weight. He got it right on the second try. Not a great average, but at least Calliope wasn’t there to abuse him in triplicate.
“Forgive me for doubting the capacity of recollection within a mind that has been blown to smithereens four. Fucking. Times.”
“Technically only twice,” Crixus said. “The other times—”
“I don’t give a flying fuck about the other times.” Books rattled on their shelves as the candle flames danced in the sudden breeze. “You had weakened Lavinia to the point of starvation. She couldn’t read your thoughts. Couldn’t fight you. Couldn’t run. Victory was within your grasp. And what do you do?”
Crixus looked at his lap and tried not to think of Vinnie in it. When Hades didn’t continue, he glanced up into the uncomfortable silence. “That was a rhetorical question, right? You don’t actually want me to—”
“You fuck her! That’s what.” Hades came out of his chair and planted his hands on the desk between them. “You allow her to drain your energy until she’s not only not incapacitated, she’s twice as powerful as she was before!”
“The twice as powerful thing was more of an accident, really. You see—”
“An accident?” The Dark Lord’s laugh conveyed more in the way of orphans’ tears and kicked puppies than actual levity. “Do tell. I am positively ravenous for this explanation.” He eased back into his chair with much more grace than Crixus himself had brought to the task.
“It happened a long time ago. I mean, I was just a kid, really. I didn’t know any better. There was this Saturnalia festival, and tits and ass were flying at me from all directions, and in that kind of chaos you can’t really—”
“Spit it out!” Hades slapped down an open palm. The sound filled the room like a gunshot.
“I soulmated her.”
“You did what?”
“I know, right?” Crixus leaned his elbows on the desk l
ike it was a bar, and this exchange nothing more than a lusty tale shared in the spirit of alcohol-induced fraternal solidarity. “Who even knew soulmating was a thing?”
“I knew,” Hades said, nudging Crixus’s elbow off his desk. “And Lavinia knew. And there’s an undead rat living in my portmanteau and I would wager that he knows as well. In fact, there’s a decent chance the undead rat relieves himself of scat that’s smarter than you.”
Mixed hungers warred for control of Crixus’s mind. On the one hand, he dearly wanted to grab one of the candles from their fancy silver holders and shove the lit end up Hades’s ass. On the other hand, Hades could in all likelihood curse him to an eternity of the same. With bigger candles.
He resorted to the tactic that had always served him well—arrogance. Leaning back in his chair, Crixus a boot directly in front of Hades’s face.
“I got to be honest with you, bro. I feel like you might be insulting my intelligence right now.”
Hades pressed two fingers into his temple and rubbed a slow circle. “You are your father’s son.”
“Leave him out of this.”
“I’d like to, but you don’t present me with much choice. I offered this contract to you with the hopes that it could be mutually beneficial. Failure may be an option for you, but it isn’t for me. Three new bodies have been discovered in Rome. Calliope is there now. The Fates are bellowing for blood. My willingness to intercede with them on Matilda’s behalf was dependent upon your ability to deliver my price.”
“Was?” Three letters. One small word capable of delivering infinite despair.
“Matilda is approaching the time for her labor, even as we speak. Once it begins—” he shrugged “—I am powerless to affect the outcome.”
“I have work to do.” The chair tipped over as Crixus shoved out of it and strode toward the door. Hades’s voice stopped him before he reached it.
“Perhaps I haven’t been clear.” He walked around his desk and placed himself directly in the demigod’s path. He was one of the few beings whose size could still be described as imposing in Crixus’s presence. “This time is the last time.”
Crixus nodded, the knowledge of where he must go next solid in his mind. “Understood.”
*****
Las Vegas boasted thousands of places open at 2:00 a.m. Only one of them was a psychologist’s office. The odd hours were due in most part to the odd clientele, a result of Crixus’s own involvement in the life of Dr. Matilda Schmidt, Paranormal Psychologist.
When he had first met her, she had been uptight, in her early thirties, still a virgin, and locked into a life whose most exciting component was a weekly trip to the dessert aisle at Whole Foods.
Under his tutelage, Matilda had thawed out, loosened up, and learned a little about pleasure. Then chosen to give hers to another man—Liam. Crixus couldn’t even think the name without a craving for violence.
Only fair, considering violence was Liam’s stock in trade. He was a hit man. And the father of Matilda’s soon-to-be delivered offspring.
Crixus stood outside her door, listening to her thoughts as Vinnie had so easily listened to his.
Her baby.
Her husband.
Her next client.
Chocolate-dipped potato chips and onion dip.
He guessed the last items on the list had everything to do with the first. His name was conspicuously absent from them, a fact that both pleased and tormented him in equal measure.
In previous days, he would have replied to her thoughts directly, letting his voice echo inside her head uninvited. He’d recently gained a new appreciation for how that pretty much sucked ass.
Still, the temptation lingered as a bittersweet ache. Her mind had been like the well-ordered parlor of a vacation home he would have loved to live in but could only visit in dreams. A place not unlike the tidy shelves of books he knew he would find on the other side of this door.
What he did instead was as unprecedented for him as finding a soulmate and having his head blown off by her several times in a row.
He knocked.
“Coming,” Matilda’s familiar voice sang.
He wished.
The door swung open, and there she stood. Matilda Schmidt with a sweet, expectant smile frozen on her face. A face that was rounder than Crixus remembered, and flushed with the rosy glow of the heavily knocked-up.
But she didn’t look knocked-up. Not to Crixus.
With her ballooning belly and swelling breasts, she looked…ripe.
Her hazel eyes blinked at him from behind the black-rimmed cat-eye glasses that never ceased to make him want to fog them over.
“Crixus?”
It had been long enough that his name had become a question. What he would have given to hear her ask it over and over again.
Matilda tucked a stray chestnut lock back into the knot at the nape of her neck and smoothed a button-up maternity blouse over the globe of her belly. Nervous gestures Crixus found endearing to the point of madness. “What are you doing here?”
What was he doing here?
He had asked himself the same question at least a dozen times while his knuckles hovered mid-knock outside the door.
His feet answered for him.
He shuffled past her to the same leather couch where he had deposited so many rogue supernaturals in need of a mental goosing and flopped onto it.
Face down.
“Bad day?” she asked.
Crixus pulled one of the many decorative pillows over his head and grunted.
This was why he had come. To see her face. To know she was still alive. To believe he hadn’t yet failed. And having done so, to fall apart in the safety of that cool, clinical voice.
Her hand pressed against his shoulder blade. “What’s wrong?”
“I think I’m in love.” His admission was muffled by the leather cushion pressed against his cheek, and Crixus was glad Matilda could not see his face. Were he less exhausted, shock might have been written there. He would not have been capable of confessing this to any creature save the woman had loved and lost. Matilda alone could absolve him of the growing feelings he had not yet acknowledged to himself.
“Crixus—”
“No.” There had been pity in the way she spoke his name, and he couldn’t bear to hear her finish the remainder of that sentence. He could not abide another admonition against his coming uninvited to Matilda’s door. “That’s not why I came here. Her name’s Lavinia. She’s a succubus. She kills people.”
“You make that sound like a bad thing.”
Not Matilda’s voice. Crixus looked out from under his pillow like a rattlesnake under a rock.
Liam. The hit man. Matilda’s husband, paper bags in hand.
Even amid husbandly errands, the man looked anything but domesticated. Crixus had secretly been hoping for the development of a wedded bliss-induced paunch or some indication of a receding hairline. No such luck.
They had traded more than words in their mutual pursuit of Matilda, and Crixus knew from experience that Liam was lean and uncommonly strong beneath his tailored black suit, possessed of a confidence not just resulting from the Smith & Wesson 1911 concealed in a holster under his arm.
He would have made a worthy opponent in the gladiatorial ring.
“Chocolate-dipped potato chips and onion dip?” Crixus asked.
“Yeah.” Liam set the bags down on Matilda’s desk and opened them, carefully setting out the containers. “Who’s killing people?”
“Lavinia,” Matilda answered. “The succubus Crixus thinks he may be in love with.”
Clever of her, Crixus thought, sharing the piece of information that would let her husband know he was no longer a threat.
“You’re either in love or you aren’t,” Liam said, presenting the food to his wife. “There’s no maybe about it.”
“What makes you think you’re in love, specifically?” Matilda scraped a chocolate-dipped potato chip across the tub of dip and pop
ped it into her mouth.
Bastard that he was, this only served to remind him of other things that mouth had done.
“My hands won’t stop sweating. My head is spinning. My heart pounds every time I think of her. Though, to be fair, all those things could be because she’s killed me four times in the last twenty-four hours.”
“Or syphilis.” Liam came around behind Matilda’s chair and squeezed her shoulders.
Matilda sat bolt upright and gasped, her hand flying to her middle.
Crixus witnessed the hit man’s instincts slide into high alert. “You okay, Lady? Is it—”
“No.” She shook her head. “I’m not in labor. But someone just sucker-punched my bladder.” Matilda guided Liam’s hand down to a bump moving alien-like across the swell of her belly. “You feel that?”
Liam’s face was still for a moment, then lit up in a moment of unguarded, boyish joy. “He has my reflexes.”
Crixus ceased to exist in that moment. For Matilda, whose inner eye was focused on the lambent new life within her. For Liam, bending to plant a kiss atop his wife’s head as their son moved beneath his palm.
For himself, intruder that he was, invading a moment as intimate as the one that had brought this life into existence. Long years had granted him no shortage of contact with gravid women. They had only been of interest to him before or after they had delivered their young. Never during.
Radical tenderness swept through him, banishing any lingering traces of jealousy. A taste of the miraculous in the everyday world.
He had never taken the time to think about the bravery required to voluntarily give your body over for the benefit of another life. A decision that in Matilda’s case, could prove fatal. A decision that would prove fatal if he failed.
In days past, he would have used this as an opportunity to wrench the focus back onto himself, to make sure they both knew all he had sacrificed, all he had suffered for their benefit.
Now, dividing the burden of his knowledge between them was not an option. He could no more steal the happiness of this moment than he could disperse the growing well of loneliness flooding his chest. If he succeeded, neither Matilda nor Liam would ever know what he knew.
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