I don’t decide it. The tail lifts on its own, the stinger curving down, swaying above her, searching her body for the perfect place. Venom beads at the tip and drips onto her chest.
Esme sees it. She watches the stinger move above her, and fear shows on her face, plain and honest. Of course she’s scared.She knows what my venom does to humans, and she chose this anyway. But her face is flushed dark with lust, her lips are swollen from my mouth, her hips keep rolling up to meet mine, and her arms stay locked around my neck. She’s desperate, lust-drunk, and frightened. She doesn’t let go of me. She holds on harder.
I press my mouth to hers and kiss her, deep and slow, while my hips keep driving into her. Against her lips, I say:
“I’m sorry.”
“No. Don’t be.” Her voice shakes. “This is fate. It’s beyond us. It needs to happen.”
My voice breaks. “What if I kill you?”
“You won’t.”
She takes my face between her hands and makes me look at her. Her palms are hot against my skin. She doesn’t waver.
I hold her gaze as my stinger sinks into her side, between her ribs.
I feel it go in. I feel her skin give, feel the stinger seat itself deep, and then my venom pours out of me and into her in long, hot pulses that I can’t slow and can’t stop. Each pulse is pulled from me the same way my cum will soon be, and each one binds her closer to me.
Esme screams.
The sound goes through me, and I’m certain she’s dying while I’m still inside her. The thought almost pulls me out of the rut.
Then her pussy gushes around my cock.
She arches off the ground. Her cunt flutters and squeezes me in waves, wetness flooding between us. The scream breaks apart into moans as the orgasm tears through her body. She convulses under me, around me, her nails cutting into my shoulders. My name is somewhere inside the sounds spilling out of her.
I come hard. I bury myself as deep as our bodies allow it, and spill everything I have into her, my cock pulsing, my bodyemptying into hers in wave after wave, while her pussy milks every drop out of me. The release goes on and on, until my arms shake and the rut’s heat finally drains out of my blood.
The stinger slides out of her skin, and my tail sinks down behind me, spent, dragging in the dust.
We stay locked together, my cock still inside her, her legs still around me.
Esme trembles in my arms. Small, constant tremors run through her. Her skin has gone damp and cool under my hands, and I don’t know whether that’s the orgasm or the venom working through her blood. Her breathing is fast and shallow against my throat. She’s alive right now, and I don’t let myself think further ahead than that.
I gather her against my chest and cradle her there, careful, more careful than I’ve been with anything in my life. I’m terrified to move. I’m terrified to look at her side, at the wound between her ribs where my stinger went in, terrified of what the skin around it might look like. I’m terrified to find out whether fate saved her or doomed her.
I curl my body around hers, arms tight, my mouth pressed to her hair. I hold her in the dust as if she’s the most precious thing in the world, because to me, she is.
Chapter Twenty-One
Esme
The burning starts between my ribs, where his stinger went in, but it doesn’t stay there. It pours through my veins into my chest, down into my stomach, out along my arms and legs, up my throat, all the way into my fingertips. Every part of me throbs. My body shakes, and I can’t make it stop. I understand, from somewhere far away, that I’m not in charge anymore.
Osric is holding me. I know it because his arms are hard and warm under my back, and because his voice keeps reaching me and fading, reaching me and fading.
“Stay with me. Please. Stay with…”
A sob.
“Esme. Esme. Esme.”
The words reach me in pieces. My name turns into a sound that has lost its meaning.
Then the pain changes. It slips into a feeling I’ve never had before. A broad smile takes over my lips. I stare up at the sky with wide eyes while the world breaks open into color, heat, and light.
The desert is alive. The black cliffs rise and fall in a slow rhythm, breathing around me. The sky bends closer, low enough to touch, and the stars swim down through it toward my face. The dust on my skin glitters and burns cold, and I decide I’m covered in stars too.
