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“Don’t stop,” I pant, rolling my hips against his face. He slides his hands along my thighs like he’s going to rip me apart, and maybe he should. Maybe it would be better to just die like this, my death arriving at the same time as my orgasm.

Of course he doesn’t, though. He just tongue-fucks me and then scrapes his teeth against my clit, the pain sharp and jolting enough to make me shudder. When I do, he squeezes harder on my thighs, digging his long fingers into my flesh. That hurts too, but god, I love it.

“I’m gonna come,” I gasp, more to myself than to him. I know he knows. He can fucking hear it, probably, the way Hunters hear everything, and it’s just another unfair advantage he has, isn’t it? Not unfair to me, though. Unfair to human men.

The human men I say I want, but really, truly don’t.

“Harder,” I order, mashing his face against my cunt. He growls into me, nipping at my sensitive flesh to make me scream again, and I hook my leg up around the back of his neck like I might be able to sever his spine if I put enough force into my hip. He responds by attacking my clit with his tongue, lapping at it over and over again with a wet, rhythmic pulse that I know is going to make me come any⁠—

Damn—

Victor pulls away. It doesn’t matter how strong my grip or my thighs are. He’s stronger. I scream out my frustration and swipe at him, but he grabs my wrist and grins at me. There’s just enough light from my phone to see that the entire bottom half of his face is glistening with my arousal.

“Not yet,” he says.

Then he drags me down to the ground. Maybe it’s his full Hunter’s strength; maybe I let him. I don’t know anymore. But everything happens so quickly: I land hard on my hands and knees, the leaves and pine needles wet and cold against my palms and through my leggings. Somehow, he’s behind me immediately, his hands widening the rip in my leggings to give him full access to my cunt. He slides two fingers inside me and strokes my G-spot, sparking my orgasm back to existence⁠—

Only to pull away a second time.

“Fuck you!” I scream.

“Patience, my love.”

That fucking phrase again. It sparks in my clit this time as much as it does my chest.

“You’ll be fucking me soon enough,” he adds.

Then he grabs my hair and wrenches my head back so I’m looking up at the black branches of the trees spread against the cold, empty sky. No stars. Clouds must have come in.

“I can feel them.” Victor presses his chest to my back so he’s rasping into my ear, his breath warm against my cheek. His erection digs teasingly into my thigh. I stare up at the dark sky, and I know what he’s trying to show me. “Can’t you? Bringing us together?”

I dig my fingers into the dirt, grabbing clumps of the forest floor. I don’t want to answer. I don’t want to tell him that I felt the gods’ whispers in the snowstorm, and in the woods by his house, and that I think he might be right.

“Did they bring you Mary?” I snap instead, my voice cold and bitchy.

Victor yanks my hair, hard enough to hurt. I cry out, although it’s as much in pleasure as it is pain.

“No,” he whispers. “Only you.”

Then he wrenches my head to the side so he can capture my mouth in the same hungry, devouring kiss he used on my pussy. When he shoves his tongue in my mouth, I can taste my ecstasy—the ecstasy he keeps denying me. And maybe that’s why I kiss him back. Or maybe it’s because of what he said.

Only you.

“Look at the shadows,” he says when he finally breaks the kiss, our foreheads pressed together. “Look at our gods while I fuck you.”

I breathe out. I want to protest—they aren’t our gods because I’m not a Hunter—but when Victor drags my gaze back toward the sky again, pulling hard on my hair, I lose the words for it.

Because there is something there in that inky, starless expanse. I can’t see it, not exactly. It’s more that I see the absence it leaves behind. Like maybe it’s not clouds covering up the stars and blocking the light.

It’s them.

“Do you see?” Victor rasps.

“Yes,” I whisper, and my eyes feel damp with tears, and I don’t know if it’s from the pain in my scalp or from his breath on my skin or from this terrible, overwhelming feeling that I was always meant to find Victor, that we were always meant to interlock together.

“So do I,” he breathes.

And then he slides his cock into my pussy, one forceful thrust like a punctuation mark. I cry out at the fullness of him and slam my hips back, fucking him before he can fuck me. He lets go of my hair, only to slide his hand down around the side of my throat, his fingers pressed lightly against my trachea, a warning not to drop my gaze. I keep looking up at the darkness overhead as I slide back and forth on his cock, and he matches the rhythm of my movements until we’re fucking the way we always do.