And that was just the start.
Chapter Forty-Nine
They madeit up the stairs. She didn’t know when, let alone how.
All Petra knew was the twitching of her muscles and the exquisite soreness between her legs and the monster who laid her down on the bed, spread her thighs, and slid inside her like he belonged there.
He was a horrific sight to behold. Wreathed in shadow, he was little more than a hulking mass of muscle with a crown of twisted horns. His eyes were the only discernible feature in the blank mask of his face. They were two glowing disks of bronze in an oval of nothingness, like one of those moretta masks she’d heard people wore to masquerades. Sometimes, she caught the faint impression of a jagged, animalistic mouth, but it was a fleeting thing.
Mostly she saw it when a great, serpentine tongue slipped out to lick their release from her abused cunt — and then force another orgasm while he was at it. Sometimes it came out when he wished to drive it down her throat, or, if he was giving her a break, to lick a trail down her spine that inevitably ended between her thighs.
If he wasn’t impaling her on his cock, he had his head buried there. He was utterly insatiable, and after a while she stopped trying to keep track of silly things like time, meals, sleep, or how often he demanded she give him another orgasm. Her sense of self and her place in the wider world became distorted as she was pushed far past her limits and sleep became a luxury.
She didn’t have the instincts driving her to forget about anything other than sex, but she didn’t need to when Silas demanded she give him everything anyway. Nothing else existed except him, which was probably exactly what he was going for.
Petra thought she understood the basics of the rut, and she supposed shehad,but living through it was another matter altogether.
Silas didn’t stop. He didn’t flag. He didn’t need breaks or time to recuperate.
It was endless.
Petra knew she must have slept. She had vague memories of waking up to him nipping her breasts or dragging her to the edge of the bed so he could push her knees up to her ears and fuck her standing. She supposed she ate and drank. Water was forced down her throat, but not as often as his cock was. Food must have happened, too, but the impressions of meals were dominated by his orders to sit on his cock while he fed her, bite by bite, from one hand as he lazily guided her up and down with the other on her hip.
There were impressions of showers, but even those memories were dominated by the eye-watering stretch of his shadow-sheathed cock. Time, memory, any perception of the outside world — none of it mattered. Silas didn’tletit matter. He dominated her body and her mind until she existed solely to receive pleasure.
And there was so very much of it to receive.
Petra drank her fill of it and yet there was always more. Silas had a thousand hands and tongues and cocks at his disposal. He could fuck her in any way that pleased him and he did so relentlessly. Some part of her was always full of him or his shadows, and she never got completely clean of his release, no matter how many showers they might’ve taken.
He controlled her even when he allowed her the freedom to touch him, or to guide him using his horns. Always, she understood that he was the predator and she was his plaything. If he gave her power, it was because it pleased him to do so, and he would take it away just as quickly as he gave it if she disobeyed an order.
Petra had never felt so free in her life.
In Silas’s bedroom, there was no Temple. No murder. No Ardeo. No red boxes or doctor’s journal or mysterious plots.
There was just him and them and the raw, perfect sort of sense they made when they came together.
She had no idea how many days had passed, but when she pried her eyes open one morning to find Silas passed out beside her, his human face squashed into a pillow, she got the sense that it’d been a good long while since that first brutal fuck in the entryway.
Petra squinted at the narrow beam of sunlight that streaked across the bed. It bisected the powerful form of Silas’s back, bathing a razor-thin strip of his pale skin in golden light. The rest of the room was cast in deep violet shadows. She wasn’t sure what exactly had changed, but the sense of urgency that had driven them had finally dissipated.
Peering groggily at the blanket Silas had apparently thrown over the curtain rod — gods only knew when he’d done that — she took stock of her body. Petra immediately winced.
A quick inspection revealed that her hair was a dry rat’s nest, her body was covered in a mosaic of lovebites and shallowbruises, and her muscles felt like each individual strand had been plucked. To top it all off, her stomach let out a low, demanding growl.
No wonder injured people are warned off of doing this,she thought, flinching when she inadvertently rubbed her thighs together.I’m surprised anyone survives the rut!
Biting back a groan, Petra summoned the will to sit up. Slowly.Veryslowly.
She glanced over at Silas expectantly, primed to feel a heavy hand closing around her wrist or his shadows locked around her waist, pinning her in place, but he was undisturbed. Her stomach fluttered at the sight of him finally at ease.
She couldn’t recall any clear memories of him sleeping. Hemusthave, but probably a lot less than her. If she felt like roadkill, then she wouldn’t have been surprised if Silas slept for three days straight.
Not wanting to rouse him from his much needed slumber but unable to help herself, Petra ignored the soreness of her abdominal muscles to lean over and press a soft kiss to his temple.My demon,she thought, brushing his curls aside to inspect the tiny brand at the base of his horn.
He’d pushed her to her limits again and again. He’d caused her pain, denied her pleasure, bent her into impossible shapes, stretched her cunt until she was pretty sure she’d never walk right again, but never, not once, had she felt threatened. Even when she’d been at her most desperate, she was acutely aware of the fact that she could end it at any time, with just a simple touch to her necklace. But she hadn’t.
Petra trusted him even when he was at his wildest and he hadn’t let her down. Everything they’d done, all those limits they’d pushed, were things she’d never regret. In fact, she was eager to repeat most of them.
