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Byakko did not understand what “fucking” was.
While he knew there were Beasts and Elementals who found Mates and birthed offspring naturally, he’d never taken a Mate for himself. He was too devoted to his Master to divide his attention elsewhere. He’d never felt the need.
Nevertheless, he understood that while his Master had been engaged in an intimate act with a male, he betrayed her. He growled in sympathy, wanting to punish the vermin for her. Wanting to tear the assassin limb from limb with his claws and teeth.
She sat back to look him in the eyes, her own blazing and swirling with an indiscernible color.
“Well, I had the last laugh. I killed him first. I want to kill everyone! Destroy everything! I’m tired of these games! Tired of being target practice for the other gods!”
She hid her face in her own palms and shuddered with her whole body once. Just once. She was too strong to indulge in weakness.
“So tired of being alone,” she murmured so softly in her mind he almost didn’t hear.
“You are not alone,” Byakko reminded her, licking his rough tongue over a smooth, tender patch of skin.
For all her apparent invincibility, she was also unexpectedly fragile.
“You have your sister. You have me,” he told her. “And all of your creations. We are loyal. We are true. We would never hurt you.”
She lowered her hands from her face and gazed solemnly at him, her swirling eyes peering directly and intensely into him.
“But you could never be a true partner to me,” she said, regret and wistfulness in her tone.
“Beasts and Elementals do not feel as we do. Do notneedas we do. You have no arms to hold me with, no lips to kiss me. It is not the same.”
“It is not enough.”
Byakko did not know how gods felt. He had never seen the Twin Goddesses laugh or cry. Nor any of the other gods.
In his opinion, Beasts felt more for their offspring and clans than the gods did for their own. None of the goddesses’ creations tried to kill each other, for example. They existed in harmony, roaming the earth, commanding the skies, and flowing with the seas. They fought for their Masters but never each other.
They felt the good things, like loyalty and affection. Unlike the gods, they did not know jealousy or deception. Byakko considered this an advantage.
His Master was silently gazing out the entrance to his cave now, lost in thought as she watched the sky flood with the colors of dusk. A bleakness he’d never seen before was etched into the familiar lines of her face, making her features appear sharper, making her eyes dim.
Byakko felt the wrongness of it to the depths of his being. The Bright One should never dim.
“If I could partner you, I would,” he offered.
“I would hold you when you are lonely. Kiss you when you are sad. I do not know how to do these things, but I would gladly learn for you.”
“Teach me.”
Slowly, she turned to him, her eyes unfocused at first, as if she had numbed herself to feeling. Then, a spark ignited within her irises—
A thought.
An idea.
She speared those twin flames into him, entrancing him.
As her lips curled gradually in an enigmatic smile…
Ben awoke with a start, jackknifing in bed so fast he almost had to lie back down from dizziness.
Was it a memory or a dream? It had been so vivid a moment ago, but now it was completely gone. Unlike the memories of the past life he purposely suppressed whenever they came to the surface, these dreams he could never remember no matter how he tried.
They felt so real. Theymust bereal.
