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“Take your trousers off,” she begged.

“You’re so impatient.” I plucked at her nipple again, firmer until it brightened, pinker in its rawness. “So greedy that you can't even wait to grind on me, huh?”

“It’s been too long. I need you,” she breathed, still tilting her hips back and forth. Her center poised against the muscle of my thigh, and she pressed heavier on me. Another moan slipped from her, and her eyes closed for a moment as she relished the pleasure. Heat pooled at her center and warmed my leg. Hel, it seemed she was going to make me explode before I could undress. Tension built too fast, and I couldn’t handle it.

I picked her up and sat her beside me before ripping my tunic over my head and unbuckling my trousers. She looked up at me, her lower lip halfway curled into her teeth and her face as flushed as pink as her nipples. Need swam in her eyes and I couldn’t get my fucking clothes off fast enough.

“Touch yourself,” I commanded. She poised on folded legs, keeping her eyes on me the entire time she obeyed me. She listened, but wasn’t fast enough. With two fingers swirling at her core, she spread her knees wider, and I needed to be between her legs. She pressed with a slow, thoughtful rhythm, but her half-lidded eyes revealed a need to be filled too.

“Let me suck on you,” she said between breaths as she bucked her hips back and forth, with nothing but her own hand to grind on.

I bit my lip hard enough that my focus shifted to the pain instead of the tension tightening in my cock. I was on the verge, and with a rush of desire came a surge of bloodlust—a need to tear at her throat and lick the blood that would flow. Fuck. This broken soul would haunt me forever, tormenting me with the choice to give up my life and become undead. At least the distraction kept me from coming in my clothes.

I blinked all memory of being a vampire away, and the need to be inside my wife flooded me. The second I was free of the bloodlust, desperation overcame me. My Skald looked too damn perfect in her flushed and needy state.

I yanked my trousers off, and when I freed my cock, her eyes fixed on it, wide and desperate. To hold back, I closed my eyes and focused on anything besides her. All that time in nonexistence I thought of nothing but Lux, and now I thought of the grey, the pain, the frustration. I thought of fighting off wolves from our farm in Old Skaldir. I pictured the shores of West Anglor when we stormed them to raid their seaside villages and make it known that we were not a people to mess with.

But nothing helped me hold back when she looked at me like that. I was still about to come, about to spray all over her perfect, blushing face.

“I want to taste you,” she said.

“No!” My eyes flew open. “I need your pussy to break on my cock.” She whimpered as she swirled her fingers in a faster rhythm. “Fuck, just…give…me.” I bit my lip again. It felt too good, and she wasn’t even touching me. Just watching her was too much. “Give me a second, I want to make you shatter on me.”

A breathless, pitchy moan came from deep within her. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

I dropped to my knees beside her, rushing to sit, unable to look away from her, ready and willing for her to be on top of me. “Keep going and turn around. I’ll take over for you.” She shifted to face away from me, the lithe muscles as tense and ready for release as I was. I buried my face in her hair and kissed the shell of her ear. “Straddle me, baby.”

From this angle, I had a full view of the perfect dimples across her thick ass and thighs. But I couldn’t get enough of her beauty by just looking at her; I needed to feel every inch of her soft skin, to grip her and leave my mark on her. She didn’t waste a second sinking onto my cock, and her warm, wet pussy only tightened as I stretched her open slowly, slowly. “Relax for me,” I commanded. “Let me all the way in so I can give you the bliss you deserve.”

I gripped her hip with one hand and snaked my other hand to her front. Guiding her rhythm, I played with her clit until she dropped all the way down on my cock. It was too much, too perfect. Ripples of pleasure flooded through me, and I couldn’t hold back.

We came together, my release sending her over the edge just seconds after me.

As we collapsed side-by-side, utterly spent, I drew her close, cherishing the gentle curve of her body against mine.

I peeled my lips open as I caressed her shoulder and hair. “We’re home, baby.”

She moaned. “Don’t tease me like that, Drak. We can’t stay here.”

“But we’ll come back, and I’ll build you a library here, in our old house.”

She said nothing for a while, but when she spoke again, sleepiness slowed her words and her joy added a cute little hum. “I can’t wait.”

Drak

By the time we crossed the border into Vylheim, tiny sprouts broke the surface of the softened earth, and I already longed to return to Old Skaldir. Cracks filled with mud, and the air was fresher than the brine clinging to the humidity in Mara. I planned to rebuild where the wasteland once stood, so that children born today would never have knowledge of it.

Erase the wasteland.

Erase the gods.

Except for Lux, of course.

First, we had to erase the vampires and their leader. Hel, I’d been exactly that—vampire and leader—only months ago, before I remembered who I really was. Our camp on the village outskirts wasn’t so different from when Kayn, Stasia, and Lux escaped me, though they had the Hall of the Gods as a refuge then. Now we curled up in our tight tents beneath the obscurity of shadows created by Soren, and ventured into the village only for necessities as we prepared a plan to face Silver.

We hid our faces with hoods and slunk toward Mara’s poorest market, far from the base of the Keep’s mountain. Soren took the lead.

“We need the exact numbers of her army,” I said. “How many vampires have remained loyal to Silver? Have any escaped? Who will stand with us in this fight?” I exchanged a look with Lux, who nodded. No longer a huntress, she now relied on us and the other inhabitants of Vylheim to unite with her and overthrow her sister’s army. While her godhood would give us an edge ‌in battle, even Odin occasionally needed Valkyries and his ravens, and the other gods.