“Your wish,” Nyatrix replies, trailing the cords back over my breasts and pulling another alien sound from my mouth, “is my command.”
She teases me, brushing the tip of my breasts with the firm handle of the flail until I’m panting. The need between my legs is thunderous, damp and thick as the air just before a summer rain, though I don’t know precisely what my body wants. It seems, however, that Nyatrix does.
“I’ll stop,” she reminds me.
Anticipation sweeps through me, nearly as sweet as the pleasure she’s already summoned. She slides the cords down my belly, like sheknowswhere my desire lives, where it pants open-mouthed and needy. Quick as a wolf, Nyatrix moves, rising onto her knees and sliding one of her legs between mine.
She pauses, catching my gaze. I look up at her, an avenging goddess backlit by the sunset in a dead city, and nod my permission. She smiles then, a dangerous thing, slick and heady. Flipping the grip of the flail just as I’ve seen her do with a sword, she pulls the cords away from my body. I whimper at the sudden absence, but what comes next nearly destroys me.
With the leather handle, Nyatrix slides my shift up, exposing my twisted, marred leg.
“No!” I cry out softly. “No, stop.”
She does, sitting back before I even realize I’ve spoken the words aloud. “Are you all right?” she asks, not a stitch of frustration or anger on her face.
“Y-yes,” I say, my body throbbing for her. “I just. ..I just don’t want you to see my leg.” Shame creeps across my face, a different kind of heat.
“There is no part of you, little dove, that I would not find torturously beautiful,” the Lupa Nox assures me in a low, rough voice. “But, as I said, your wish is my command. Do you want me to stop entirely or just leave your shift where it is?”
The heedless resurrected thing inside my chest wants her to tear every stitch of clothing from my body, to bring her own bare skin to mine, to feel the undulations of her muscles as if they’remy own. But whatever it is, it’s newly born and young-blooded, and the older parts of me overwhelm its tender voice.
“Leave my shift,” I say, “but keep going.”
She grins, a monsoon of a smile, all wreckage and waves. Settling back over me, Nyatrix trails the cords down my belly again until she comes to the apex of my thighs.
“Spread your legs for me,” she murmurs, the heat of her flooding my skin.
I do what she asks without a second thought, constrained only by the edge of my shift’s skirts. She brings the handle of the flail to the apex of my thighs, gently sliding it against me until a cry falls from my lips. The noise barely sounds like me—wild and unrestrained, a sacrilege in this forgotten chapel.
“That’s perfect, Ophelia,” Nyatrix says, increasing the pressure as she rubs the flail’s handle against my tender, aching place.
“Nyatrix,” I whimper, and she pauses, looking up at me. “Please don’t stop.”
“I won’t,” she promises, one hand on the flail between my legs, the other flat on the ground beside my head, her body hovering above mine like sacred armor. Just slightly, she deepens the pressure. My back arches of its own accord, my hips moving against the flail, against her hand, my mind dipping to that dream back in Lumendei, of her as my bride, of our marital bed?—
“What a vision you are,” Nyatrix murmurs, her words nearly lost to my loudening moans, sounds I’ve never made in my entire life. “I wish you could see what I see. Your beautiful breasts, barely covered by that shift of yours. The way your hair is all around you like a golden halo. The soft hills of your perfect belly. Your thighs I’d die to bury my face between.”
Her name leaves my mouth, I think, like it’s more sacred than anything else I’ve ever known. For the first time in my life,I feel nothing but pleasure and wonder, so rich and thick that it’s like drowning in amber honey. A thunderous feeling builds in me, and I grind my hips against the flail handle, desperate for more. Her words only send my pulse racing quicker, keen as a hound.
“Am I giving you everything you want?” Nyatrix wants to know, her breath stirring my hair. Asphodels rush golden into my senses, and I gasp, tilting my chin to look at her.
“Yes,” I rasp, the word drawn out by another teetering moan as she yet again increases the pressure of the handle against me.
“Are you sure, little dove?”
Desire races through me, so many anni of unmet need, and I find the courage. “Take off my shift,” I whisper, casting my gaze down as I say the words, already tinged with self-consciousness.
Nyatrix slows her ministrations between my thighs. “If you change your mind,” she says, shifting back, “tell me. This is about you.”
I nod, I think, my chest heaving. With the handle of the flail—whose absence at the place where I’m damp and hot is deeply felt—she slides up my shift.
For the barest of moments, her gaze flits over my twisted stump of a leg, marred with corpse-white streaks. But there’s no horror, no disgust. “Each part of you is a new miracle,” Nyatrix breathes as she pulls my shift up over my hips, baring my underthings, and then over my shoulders and head, forgoing the buttons entirely. I’m entirely bare to her besides the smallclothes on my hips.
Her eyes sweep across my chest, pink with exertion, my heavy breasts, the nipples still tight and pebbled, the expanse of my belly, and then the curve of my generous thighs. “You are going to be my ruin,” the Lupa Nox growls, pitching her body back over mine. She slides the handle of the flail beneathmy underthings, the leather meeting the tangle of pale curls between my thighs, and then the delicate skin beneath.
Nyatrix grinds the flail against my dampness, and I cry out, my back arching, bare chest meeting the linen of her blouse. She hitches a breath and increases the pace, the thunderstorm feeling in my belly intensifying. My blood thrums and I am lost to her, to the Sepulchyre, to whatever this knight of death and darkness asks of me.
“Touch me,” I beg, half-mad, as if a creature as glorious as her wants to actually put her skin against mine.
