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“Little enemy,” Skadi croaked. “You think to kill me?”

“I think to keep you alive with my blood,” I spat back, climbing up on the raft beside him. It didn’t even rock, the waves cooperating to help me aboard. “Good waves,” I praised.

“You cannot use your knife,” Lusca said with a grunt as he grabbed hold of the raft with his free hand. “It’s not safe.”

I stared at him. Why were the pretty ones so dense?

“He is correct. You must not give it your blood,” Skadi chimed in.

I rolled my eyes at all men, everywhere. “Thanks for the advice, but please take it back, shove it as far up your anal orifice as you can, and keep it there.” Both males swiveled their heads to me, their movements almost perfectly synchronized.

I set the dagger at my thumb and pricked it, while Lusca cursed. “When did you take that?”

“Thief, remember? I’m good at shit. Like stealing, poisoning, and making my own Goddess-damned decisions. I’ve been using this dagger to cut anything I wanted since I still had milk teeth. I’ve sliced myself with it more than once and haven’t suffered any ill effects.”

It had been a good long while since I’d cut myself with it, of course. I preferred my old stiletto knife.

I didn’t react when the blade slid deeper than I’d intended. It almost quivered, like it was eagerly lapping up the blood. My blade felt like it had changed in my absence. It had grown hungry.

Maybe the ass god had been right. I would die before I told him, though.

“Drink.” I stuck my bleeding thumb to Skadi’s lips, though he tightened them like a child trying not to eat bitter greens at dinner. A splash of my blood dripped into the raft.

Lusca sighed. “We might all die, beloved. Please do not cut yourself with it again.”

“Don’t waste it,” I scolded Skadi. “Open wide like a good icy boy.” When another droplet began to ooze down my hand, he hissed and opened, his tongue snaking out to gather it up just in time. He shuddered, closed his eyes, and swallowed.

There shouldn’t have been anything sexy about this moment, but the sucking feeling on my thumb had me squirming. A rush of liquid gathered in my core, and I became suddenly aware that I was naked. My nipples were beaded, but when a whisper of ice cold began to draw circles around them, they grew even tighter, achingly cold.

“Such a responsive little enemy,” Skadi slurred around my thumb, and sucked harder. A sliver of air wound down around my thighs and left cold trails to my center. “Consent, little spy. Let me taste you.”

I closed my eyes as I fought to control the rising wave of lust. He wasn’t touching me yet. It was just cold air. There was no tail, no tentacle. But I knew it was his power somehow.

“Taste me?” I repeated, confused. He was already tasting me. Drinking from the source, as it was.

I’d meant it as a question, but he replied, “Thank you for your consent, my little spy,” before the icy tendrils slipped in between my legs and circled my aching mound. His mouth drew on my bleeding thumb in the same rhythm that his ice squeezed my clit. In only a few breaths, I was teetering on the precipice of climax.

When I opened my eyes and saw both my monsters watching me tremble in pleasure, I fell over, the orgasm almost sending me into the water.

“She is very beautiful when she unravels,” Skadi rasped, lapping at my thumb again, each stroke of his tongue making my core clench as if I could come again instantly. “Smell her. Taste her, brother.”

“Beloved?” Lusca breathed. I squeaked, but I felt his mind dip into my thoughts, and the images he must have picked up had him smiling as he bent to do as Skadi had suggested. His tongue was far warmer than Skadi’s ice. He hummed as he sent waves of pleasure around my clit, and somehow inside me, through my veins. “You rule the ocean now, my Empress. I serve at your pleasure.”

Lusca’s words, murmured against my flesh along with a long hard draw on my thumb from Skadi, had me splintering into thousands of shards, ice and seawater churning around me.

The sky above peeked through the dissipating fogbank as a voice interrupted the last pulses of the orgasm. “Playing apothecary without me?” Lachlan had arrived at some point in the past few moments and was bobbing in human form alongside the raft, the bowl with the tonic I’d made held in one hand. “After I went to all the trouble to go to the market with your shopping list.”

I felt his humor and concern in our bond and sent him an image of Skadi “asking” for consent. “You’re ridiculous,” I muttered, but accepted the bowl and crawled over Skadi’s body until I could reach his mouth. I might have made a little more contact with his icy skin than absolutely necessary, each press of it on mine feeling like I’d laid freezing wintergreen on my body. “Drink up, Snowflake.”

When I held the edge of it to his lips, his icy blue eyes burned with a cold fire. “You tempt me, little spy. Be careful.”

“Careful? Where’s the fun in that?” I forced his lower lip open with one hand, tipping the mixture into his mouth.

This close, I could see every angle and plane of his face. His pale throat bobbing as he swallowed, his brows lowering, his glacier blue eyes going wide, the left one gleaming with a small pin dot of green. “Green?” I asked, peering at it and moving closer. What is that?

“Your tooth, little enemy,” he replied, as something icy curled around my bare waist. “The one you gave to me.”

“My hairpin? The one I stabbed you with?”