I rut into her once, twice, thrice. I yank her hair aside and bite her throat. She groans in pure rapture. Her release chases my own, and my cock pulses inside her as stars streak across my vision. I growl into her hair, cupping her pussy and feeding her clit with the pad of my thumb. She moans in tandem with me, our bodies rolling as one, wringing every last drop of pleasure.
Time suspends as the aftershocks rearrange every atom in my body. I ensnare her mouth and kiss her back down to earth. A satiated sigh slips through her lips as she goes boneless in my grip.
“That was…I…holyfuck.”
“That was the complete opposite of holy,Petit Diable.”
“Good thing we’re in a satanic crypt.”
I chuckle, dusting a kiss over her drunken smile as I pull out and twist the plug back in. Pearlescent liquid slips past the toy, trailing down the backs of her thighs. I finger my spend, smear it over her weeping slit, grinning as she groans. I force myself to withdraw and buckle my belt, then secure her waistband back into place.
I can’t be greedy, not with her.
Poppy remains where she is, her palms on the sarcophagus, her chin skyward, and her eyes closed as she rests her head against my shoulder. I’ve never seen her this…relaxed. How long has it been since she felt so at ease?
Unwilling to disrupt her moment of peace, I kiss her temple before reassembling my gun atop St. Aurelius’s resting place. It’s laughably lavish for a sarcophagus designed to hold what I assume is the ashes of the man who was supposedly burned to death: dark bloodstone hewn into the shape of a slumbering angel, his wings broken, his hands folded over an inverted cross cut from a massive ruby in the center of his chest.
I was never devout, but the design seems odd.
Eyeing the deep viridian stone streaked with sinister red, I dig through decades of memory to find Mama as she taught me and my siblings everything she knew about her studies. “Bloodstone, the martyr’s stone. Supposedly formed by the blood of Christ mixing with jasper during crucifixion. Believed to protect the beholder against malignant forces.” I step closer and skim my fingers over the dusty inverted cross. “Ruby, also a crest of protection. Now why would a dead man need so much security in the afterlife, hm?”
Poppy shrugs, bemused. “Fear of the very thing he worshipped?”
“Fear of his secrets being found.”
I press the cross down. It clicks into its own little coffin. Metal audibly grinds from beneath, breaking the seal of the sarcophagus with a sudden hiss of air that startles Jezebel awake. Then itopens.
Poppy leaps back, her mini Glock poised to shoot. I snicker and grab a nearby torch. “What are you going to do? Kill him again?”
“Hai.If I must.”
I sigh, waving away the cloud of dust as I squint into the dark. Slowly, the dirt dissipates.
Poppy’s nose wrinkles. “Are those…stairs?”
“Would appear so.” I approach the descending steps leading down into a black abyss. “Think it’s the stairway to hell?”
“Only one way to find out. Your lead,mon ange.”
LEGACY
Poppy
Torch in hand, Brontë wordlessly leads us down the stairs hidden in St. Aurelius’s empty sarcophagus. Jezebel follows at my side, her snout never leaving the ground.
“No footprints.” My whisper is swallowed whole by the deafening silence. “No one has been here recently.”
“Stay on guard, and keep your sights ahead,” Brontë murmurs, his gun trained on the shadows below. “Wherever this leads, I don’t think anyone was meant to find it.”
Down and down into the dark, we venture. All I can hear is the rhythmic crunch of frosty stone beneath our feet and the unsteady breaths leaving our lips. The faint scent of rot sours the air as we pass skulls stacked in the earthen walls, their empty sockets crawling with plump rodents and insects with too many legs.
My calves are cramping by the time we finally step onto flat stone. Brontë’s torch pulses weakly as we slowly cross into an enclosed chamber of skulls in the walls and more tombs. Carved in the middle of the floor is a perfectly symmetrical pentagram.
My nose scrunches. “The fuck is this place?”
“It’s a necropolis.” Brontë lifts the torch high enough for us to see the hundreds of empty sockets staring down at us. “A city of bones.”
Shivers shake me from top to bottom. “Fucking creepy.”
