His head came up as I let mine fall back against his chest, hearing his heartbeat. His lips met mine, allowing me to taste the metallic tang of my own blood. It was the strangest sensation, cradled between the two of them, bookended by two totally different kinds of strength, but it felt right.

Pritkin’s hands adjusted my hips, guiding me as my pleasure built toward a crescendo. I looked down my body and into his eyes, and somehow knew he understood. He didn’t say anything, even when I reached up and let my hand comb through his hair, spiky rough against my palm as I pulled him down to me. Like the stubble on his face, tickling me as he bent to kiss my stomach, making me laugh.

He made me laugh all the time, this dour, supposedly taciturn man; I wasn’t sure how. It wasn’t just the dry sense of humor that still surprised me, catching me off-guard at a tense moment, expressing itself in subtle ways—the quirk of a lip, the amused flash of an eye, the fondly exasperated sigh when he caught me doing… well, any number of things.

Because Pritkin seemed to find me endlessly hilarious.

I didn’t mind. He didn’t strike me as someone who had laughed all that much in his life, and whenever I managed to bring a smile to his lips, it lifted my spirits, too, and brought an answering smile to my face. I felt my lips stretch again now, laughing in spite of it all, because we’d been here before, so many times. In the middle of some crazy fight, with all the odds against us, and everything going straight to hell, yet laughing, laughing at the absurdity of it all, or at the fact that we weren’t dead yet, or at the way that fate seemed to rage all around us and yet kept missing the target.

I laughed now, felt Zeus feel it, felt his fury and the increase of his power, but it didn’t seem to matter. I caught Mircea’s Adam’s apple between my teeth, bit down and saw him throw his head back in pleasure. I arched up under Pritkin’s mouth, then pushed him back and sat up, taking him deeper inside me, gasping at the angle change. We fell into a rhythm, the man in front of me, thrusting up as I rode him; the man behind me, pressed against my back, hard and ready. And all of us moving in a sensual dance as old as time.

It was beautiful, with even the clouds overhead pulsing in time with our movements…

And, I noticed, getting obviously thinner.

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fourteen