“Yes,” she whispered fiercely. “Make me yours. Always yours.”
She gripped my forearms for balance and guided me backward toward a wide stone dais. Thick pelts covered the cold stone. I followed her lead, my hands sliding down the smooth curve of her back to grip her round hips. She pushed gently against my chest, urging me to sit on the edge of the furs. I complied and leaned back. My bulk could easily crush her, but like this… Like this, we could be together.
Medea stepped between my spread legs. Swinging one pale leg over my thighs, she knelt directly over my heavy, aching cock.
She reached down, her slick fingers guiding the blunt bronze tip to her swollen center. Then she lowered her hips with agonizing, deliberate slowness.
As her tight, searing wetness enveloped the head of my shaft, a profound groan ripped from my chest. I had been forged to withstand the destructive forces of the world, yet nothing could have prepared me for the devastating, gripping heat of her body. The solid, unyielding bronze stretched her soft, delicate flesh, filling her completely.
Gripping her narrow waist, I guided her first upward movement. When Medea sank down again, she took my entire rigid length deep inside her. Her soft thighs bracketed my hips. The slick friction dragged a beautiful, shattered cry from her throat. Medea threw her head back, her silver hair whipping wildly over her bare shoulders.
With every stroke, the slick heat of her inner muscles clamped down hard around me. My skin warmed to a near-molten temperature as she rode me.
I thrust upward, burying my heavy shaft deep into her wet core. She clung to my shoulders, anchoring herself against my chest as she took the brutal, stretching friction of my cock. The air grew thick with the heavy scent of our sex—hot skin, slick fluids, and the sharp tang of arousal.
“Aion!” she gasped out, leaning forward until her soft, sweat-slicked breasts pressed firmly against my chest. Burying her face in the crook of my neck, she ground her soaking center hard against the base of my shaft. “I can feel you… I can feel how deep you are.”
I wrapped my arms around her back, pulling her flush against me as I increased the brutal, driving pace. “I am yours,” I rumbled against her temple, thrusting up and bottoming out completely inside her tight heat. “Everything I am.”
My movements became urgent, driven by a primal, possessive lust that I had never known existed within me. Every slick slide of my cock stretching her tight walls drew out a new, aching levelof pleasure. I could feel the raw energy pooling in my center, seeking release in answer to the desperate sounds of the woman riding me. I had lived for so long without desire, but in this moment, I existed entirely to be inside her.
Medea’s grip on my shoulders tightened to the point of bruising. Her inner walls suddenly clamped down around me with an agonizing, vise-like grip. Her entire body began to tremble with a fine, uncontrollable vibration.
“Aion, now!” she cried out, her whole body convulsing as she climaxed around my shaft.
She arched her back, her spine snapping taut as the intense, rolling waves of her orgasm overtook her. At that exact moment, a massive pulse of pure, unadulterated power erupted from her core. It was a tidal wave of raw, untamed energy, pouring directly into my center as I chased my own shattering release.
And the screaming began.“Please! Mercy!”
Raw and terrified, the voice ripped straight through my mind.
“It burns! Gods, my skin!”
The agonizing cries slammed into my core. Dozens of them. Hundreds.
“I don’t want to die! I was only—”
A choking hiss of lungs turning to ash drowned out the pleading. The quiet, fragile space of my consciousness was suddenly crushed by a violently crowded room of dying men and women. They clawed at my awareness. They badgered the edges of my soul, weeping, gagging, begging for their lives.
It was Medea’s own power, I realized in despair. The death energy my own people worshipped her for, the potent magic accumulated under her skin after years of being forced to do her captor’s bidding. It hadn’t hurt me before. Why… why was it happening now?
I tried frantically to anchor myself to the rightness of our connection. I tried to focus on the staggering heat of her skin, on the pleasure we’d just given each other.
“Aion!” Medea’s frantic voice cut through the dark. But a terrified, rotting scream tore over her words, suffocating my own thoughts.
The dead were too loud. They piled on top of my single soul, burying me alive under the panicked noise of their stolen breath.
The searing heat of her body was suddenly ripped away. Her voice was swallowed whole by the screaming.
Everything went black.
7
A Finished Tapestry
Medea
It was a strange thing, how something as familiar to me as death could still hurt. After all the lives I had taken, all the people I’d destroyed as Jason’s weapon, I’d almost thought the horrors could no longer touch me.
