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And that might have been the craziest thing I had done all night.

Oh my God. Aunt Delphine, you knew about the goddamn kitsune? Didn’t you?

Chapter six

Four Hungers

Yoichi

🎧 Chapter 6 Soundtrack:

Gabby smelled like rain striking hot cobblestones in a quarter I had never walked—steam rising from stones laid by enslaved hands. Beneath it flowed the vibrant river of her magic, powerful enough to make the most ancient parts of me lower their heads and thirst.

Then came that fragrance of cane sugar surrendering to a hot pan, melting into liquid brown.

I gritted my teeth, forcing myself to not lick her face.

And my mate’s scent did not stop there. It continued to rise with more sensory experiences.

Bourbon I had never tasted.

Shea butter warmed in the hollow of her throat. And underneath it all lingered that rich mineral bite of graveyard earth—the sacred ground that had shaped her power and called to me across oceans.

That was how my mate smelled.

Like a history I had never lived but somehow remembered.

Like a homeland that was not mine, yet recognized me as soon as I breathed her in.

Like every beautiful thing the centuries had denied me had taken the form of one soft, trembling Black woman and settled against my chest.

I will never let her out of my sight. She is mine for now and forever, and even much longer after that.

I tightened my arms around her as the car pulled away from the rain-soaked Kyoto street.

I had survived gods, curses, wars, and centuries of unbearable, menacing solitude.

Yet, with that luxurious scent gripping every cell of my body. . .I was not sure I would survive this drive.

Because Gabby’s heat was deepening, her sweet slick perfuming the enclosed car, and every savage form inside me knew what her body had begun preparing to receive.

Me.

My cock hardened until it ached. And the knot at its base began to finally rise for the first time, swelling, and throbbing against the fabric of my pants.

The new addition to my cock—this vibrating band of flesh around it that would lock our bodies together—was something a kitsune could only grow for its mate. For all these centuries, my other forgotten lovers had never experienced it, because none of them were her.

And she was here now.

Warm.

Shivering.

Soaked with rain and slick.

And there was something else my bond could feel that her body did not yet know it was doing.

At the back of her neck, beneath the wet spill of her twisted dreadlocks, a small gland had begun to form. My alpha impulses could feel it the way I could feel my own pulse.