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“I cannot… make it… smaller,” Skadi gasped as he fucked me, more desperately by the second.

“Beloved?” Lusca’s concern was evident.

I shook my head wildly. “More. I need… I need his knots. I need… my mates.” I wasn’t altogether certain what I said then. Words tumbled over each other like snow in a blizzard. “Mine,” I growled at last, grabbing Skadi’s arm.

Something shifted beneath the skin, along the top of his bicep. My poisons? I wrapped my fingers around it and pulled.

What slid from under a clever pocket of scales there wasn’t a vial of poison or bundle of herbs. It was a stone tube, and when it fell into my hand, a very familiar knife slid out, landing in my palm like it had come home. In an instant, I had it at Skadi’s throat. Lusca stopped breathing below me.

“My dagger? Where did you get this?”

“I stole it from the throat of my brother,” Skadi replied, swallowing. The dagger’s blade rested on his scaled neck, though I was careful not to press too hard.

“Stole it? Why?”

“No one steals from my little enemy but me,” he hissed. “No one takes what is yours.” His cock throbbed inside me, but otherwise, he was as still as a mountain.

“What is mine?” I slid the knife back into the sheath, setting it aside. “You’re mine, are you not? My ice god. My mate.”

His eyes blazed with something I couldn’t name. “Do you know what you do? Pretty mortal, you are claiming me.” Skadi’s voice was intense. He shifted slightly, pressing his second knot against my walls. “If you do this, you will be mine forever.”

I felt Lusca’s approval in our bond. Felt Goran and Kellin and Lachlan deeper still, their awareness far quieter, but present. I sensed something else, too. An ache, like a missing tooth or an old wound flaring in winter.

I smiled. “Damnit, Snowflake. Yes, I’m yours. And you’re mine.” I leaned to the side, sinking my teeth deep into his skin. I felt the surface give, heard the slight crackling like an icicle falling to the frozen earth, tasted the icy wintergreen liquid that filled my mouth. Swallowed him at the same moment that Lusca pulled out, and Skadi thrust deeply, his first knot moving past my entrance, and his second knot… “Ah!”

Mine. His voice echoed in my mind as he thrust forward, the swollen knot expanding, locking us together. It pressed against my inner walls and set off a cascade of pleasure to counteract the pain of the intrusion. The pain of his second knot filling me, not with seed, but with absolute power. Mine forever. We will fly through the storms of this world, wrapped in each other, from now until the stars burn out. My little enemy. My goddess.

Mine.

Above us, the sky exploded into auroras, green and blue and purple streaks sliding over the sky as pleasure slid through me. Pleasure and cold, to the bone, an ice that balanced the fire inside me for a long moment.

And then my heat truly began.

SKADI

The moon sailed tirelessly over my glacier home, marking the seventh day of my mate’s heat cycle. “Mate,” Rada gasped as Lusca tended to her, his tentacles cushioning her from the hard ice below. “Need. More.”

Lusca’s gaze met mine. Even with both of us filling her in every combination possible, she’d begun crying out for more. Clawing at the pendant on her neck.

Lusca and I both knew what she needed. Her mates. All of them, here, to see her through her first, long-delayed heat. She writhed even now, with Lusca’s knot buried inside her, and begged for more. “Please… It still burns.”

She didn’t mean with desire.

Rage filled me. My brother had done this to her. With my claim on her, and my power connecting us so that I could read her every thought, she should be invulnerable. Not a deity herself, but as close as any human could come. Yet I could feel the agony she suffered, as if it were burning me as well.

I clutched my chest as a wave of it hit again. Edan had poisoned her with his unquenchable fire, and none of the potions I’d stolen from her and carried under my scales could help her. Not even the power I’d shared with her could balance the harm he’d done.

The worst of it was the heartbreak. For the first time in my long life, I felt helpless. I could not bring the Beta she loved back to life, even if I could match his fire with my ice. And I wanted nothing more than to soothe her. To restore her to the sharp-tongued woman who’d caught my eye with her needle-tooth and stabbed so deeply, she had reached a part of me I’d thought invulnerable. My heart.

Rada came again with a piercing cry and fell into the half-sleep between fuckings, still murmuring, “More.”

“We must give her what she needs,” I said at last. “She needs her other mates.” We’d put this off for as long as we could. Our physical forms had been the only ones of all her chosen males who could bear the intense heat of her body, and she was ours to protect. Which meant protecting the ones she loved, even if they were small and weak, nowhere near worthy of…

I cringed at the memory of what had occurred one week before, of my own apparent unworthiness. And the sacrifice I’d agreed to, in order to be with my little spy.

“A sacrifice?” I wondered aloud, my cock throbbing with something close to pain as I held still. She lay open to me, her snow-soft thighs wide, her silver eyes glowing with desire. But the entrance to my little spy’s core was… closed to me.

To me, a god.