Page 57 of Meat

With a sweeping, downward motion of the blade, Jale split his opponent from his sternum to the top of his groin. Steaming entrails unspooled into the grass, filling the air with a pungent intestinal stench.

A collective gasp went up from the loose circle of onlookers.

The slain warrior began to drop, but Jale caught him by his greasy black hair. He stabbed the stone blade into the dead man’s neck and started to saw.

Alyx hid Cyrith’s face against her chest. She felt that she herself should look away too, but she couldn’t drag her eyes from the sight of her mate beheading his enemy.

It shouldn’t have excited her. It shouldn’t…

Jale’s knife made quick work of the butchery. The dead man’s head ripped free, and the body collapsed heavy and flaccid at Jale’s feet.

Jale held the severed head aloft like a lantern. He was yelling now. Roaring. His voice boomed across the prairie like thunder. His words were so distorted by his rage that Alyx couldn’t even begin to translate them.

But she got the message.

This is what happens. Try to take my woman from me, and this is what happens.

The other ukkur got the message too. Loud and clear. It was written all over their horror-stricken faces. There would be no more challengers today or ever again. Jale had just made damn sure of that.

He tossed the head disgustedly next to the body and strode toward where Alyx was standing, wedged protectively between Krogg and Ravnar. The cloud that had moved in front of the sun now passed, illuminating the field with sudden light.

The way Jale looked in that moment would stay with Alyx for the rest of her life.

Eyes blazing. Hands gloved in shocking red up to the elbows. Nostrils flared wide as he drank the air.

He was a beast. Her beast. One of three.

When Jale reached their group, he sheathed his knife, took Alyx’s face in his bloody hands, and pressed a kiss to her mouth. His lips were also flecked with blood. Alyx tasted it, salt and molten iron.

It tasted good.

CHAPTER 21

Alyx collapsed back into the rich, thick furs of her bed, panting and sweating. The air inside the dimness of the tent was warm and close, thick with the musk of her mates and the smell of sex.

Her lips were glazed with still-warm seed. She licked at it. Krogg’s flavor.

Alyx’s taste buds could sort them now. Jale’s seed was saltiest. Ravnar’s had a strong chlorinated scent to it. Krogg’s was the creamiest of the three and the one that Alyx liked the best. Sometimes she would hold it in her mouth for minutes at a time before she swallowed, savoring the rich flavor of her mate for as long as she could.

There were things she liked best about each of them. The slow, gentle way that Jale would to kiss her, his lips melting over hers like warm honey. Or the curve in Ravnar’s cock that caused his head to buff so perfectly against her tender spot when he fucked her face to face, hard and deep.

She loved them each in their own way. Jale’s youthful sweetness. Krogg’s unhurried confidence. The darkness in Ravnar that still frightened her sometimes. The look in his eye that said he still wasn’t completely convinced, even after all these months, that he didn’t want to eat her alive.

Right now, she was in the tent with Krogg and Jale. The Love Shack, Alyx called it.

Ravnar was outside playing with the little ones. There were nine of them now. Cyrith, the oldest, was already up and running about on his two feet, and he had even acquired a few words both in nith and in English. He was a holy terror, that one. And his eight little brothers were going to follow suit, Alyx could just tell.

Because there were so many of them now, and because they were getting older, it was necessary for one of her three ukkur mates to take them outside for playtime while the adults played a different game inside the Love Shack.

It had been ages since Alyx had been with all three of her mates together at the same time. She missed that, missed being dominated by three hard and brutal ukkur males at once.

Still, they managed to satisfy her needs two at a time.

Satisfy and then some.

Alyx sank deeper into the bed of warm furs and looked down at her ravaged body. Krogg and Jale had made a mess of her. Her skin was slick with sweat, reflecting the orange glow from the coals in the center of the tent. Her heaving breasts, full and pink-tipped, were striped with white ropes of seed. The trembling tendons of her inner thighs were slathered with her own thick secretions.

Krogg and Jale settled in with her, one on either side, their poles still hard and drooling. She gripped them, stroked them as they nipped and licked her like wolves.