Níðhöggr made a sound that may have been a laugh, and then his arms were around me again, filling my body with a second wave of heat as he yanked at the waistband of my pants. A low, thick rip echoed across the kitchen as the zipper pulled apart. He forced my pants over my hips, and the undeniable coil of arousal tightened deep inside me. I tried desperately to think of Vali, my husband, my love, but Níðhöggr’s hands forced my legs apart, and my hips surged forward to meet his.
“No,” I gasped. “Not—not in the kitchen.”
Níðhöggr laughed, low and thick in his throat. “We were never in a kitchen.”
CHAPTER THIRTY EIGHT
I opened my eyes wide and flinched. We were in the cave, of course. The ceiling and sides stretched away into darkness. Huge, thick candles guttered on the stone floor.
“Down,” he said, pushing on my breastbone. “Take off your shirt.”
I shivered, glancing around the cave. There were candles, thick, red pillars flickering in the gloom, but there didn’t seem to be a bed. Or even a blanket.
“Down,” Níðhöggr growled. His eyes burned.
I obeyed him, pulling off my shirt and sitting down hard on the cold stone floor. Rough pebbles jutted into my shoulder blades as I lay down and closed my eyes. I am not going to enjoy this, I told myself.
Níðhöggr’s long, elegant fingers closed around my ankle. I braced myself to have my hips rocked back with his thrust, but instead his lips fluttered against my ankle, kissing me so gently he barely brushed my skin. My eyes flew open and I stared at him, trying to make sense of his movements.
He was fully naked now, with the largest erection I’d ever seen erupting from a nest of thick, red hair between his legs. His strange, burning eyes were closed. He’d rocked back on his heels, his cheek pressed against my ankle, his lips moving softly over my skin.
He shifted as his lips moved up my calves, becoming more insistent. Now his teeth scraped against my skin, making me shiver and burn, although each flash of pleasure was followed by a wave of guilt. Níðhöggr’s eyes opened as he reached the underside of my knees, and he gave me a smile so wickedly handsome I moaned out loud.
“No,” I whimpered, trying desperately to remind myself that Níðhöggr was not my husband.
I shouldn’t enjoy this.
Níðhöggr’s lips danced along the inside of my thighs, followed by the drag of his teeth. I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from crying out, begging for more.
Then his lips found my sex, and my restraint evaporated. I screamed with need, reaching for his head and burying my fingers in his hair. My hips rocked against his mouth, demanding him, taking him. He moaned into me, his tongue buried deep inside me, and my body responded with wave after wave of ecstasy. The hard stone beneath me fell away, the guilt and shame fell away, and all that was left was the burning heat of his lips on my sex and his tongue inside me, filling me, devouring me.
My entire body arched under his touch, and my screams filled the cave as I came, hard, against his mouth. I moaned as he pulled away—
And he was on me again, clenching my hips as he forced my legs apart. Panic flared in my pleasure-clouded brain as I remembered the size of his massive erection, remembered his hard heat against my thighs, and then he was inside me, thrusting against me, and for a moment I felt I would be ripped apart. He was enormous, far too big to fit in my body. But somehow he did fit, although it burned as he stretched me almost to the breaking point. Then the burning ebbed, retreating before a tremendous surge of pleasure, and I was filled, completely and utterly filled.
Níðhöggr laughed above me, triumphant. His hips rippled against mine, moving his massive length inside me. I trembled, expecting pain, but the pain didn’t come. It didn’t. My entire body burned, aflame with the heat of desire and ecstasy, but there was no pain.
“No,” I gasped, trying to remember why I couldn’t enjoy this, why this was so wrong.
My own body ignored me as it pressed my hips up to meet Níðhöggr’s thrusts. Oh, damn, he felt good. It was as though his cock filled every part of me, my entire body, driving away anything that was not raw pleasure. I wanted it, some dim, distant part of my mind realized as my body matched Níðhöggr’s rhythm. I wanted him to fill me, to fuck me, to pound me into the ground and obliterate me.
My second orgasm took me by surprise, cresting before I fully realized what was happening. The climax forced the air from my lungs as my body stiffened against Níðhöggr’s, my hips smashing into him, my vision blurring and going dark as my mind flooded with dark heat.
He didn’t stop. I moaned and whimpered against his onslaught, his thrusts almost painful against my super-sensitive clit. Níðhöggr’s hips drove into mine mercilessly, forcing my body to respond, while he smiled coolly above me.
“I think you like this,” he said as I came again, my body crumbling, my voice moaning and crying out as another orgasm hurtled through my mind and body, destroying me.
I lost track of how many times I came against his hips, screaming into the oblivion of the cave, my naked body thrashing against the dirt and stones as he pounded me, steadily, rhythmically, his eyes watching mine with cool amusement. I forgot why I was there. I forgot who I was. The entire world narrowed to one cave, to one man. To the place where our bodies came together, sparking fire and oblivion.
And then, finally, after I’d lost all thought and rationality, all sense of myself, Níðhöggr’s expression shifted. His eyes flashed. The rhythm of his hips faltered and then sped up, and his breathing hitched. He thrust into me even harder. By then I was so swollen and sore I cried out, my voice as sharp and hard as the rocks beneath me.
He ignored me. His fingers tightened around my shoulder, grinding into my skin. His back arched, driving his cock so deep inside me it seemed to pierce the very core of my being, and he screamed something guttural and fierce in a language I did not recognize. The buried length of his cock thickened and jerked as he came inside me. The heat of his semen burned my abdomen.
His eyes met mine as he pulled out, panting. “It’s done,” he said. “You make a nice little whore.”
I took a deep, jagged breath. My entire body sang with pain. Scrapes burned on my hips and thighs and shoulders where my body had clenched and pounded against the stone. When I pushed myself up to sitting, I winced at the very deep ache between my legs.
“What now?” I asked. My voice was ragged from screaming.
Níðhöggr rocked back. She was a woman now, naked and gloriously perfect. “We’re done with you,” she said.
“But—” Tears stung the back of my eyelids. Some tiny, still-functional part of my brain realized what an absurd reaction that was.
Níðhöggr picked up her red shirt and came to her feet, towering over me. From this perspective, her perfectly round breasts looked enormous, their dark nipples almost red. She pulled the shirt over her head and turned away. For a horrible moment, I thought I had been entirely dismissed.
“Now you bear our child,” Níðhöggr said, without turning around. “When the time is right, the child will come to us. We have no further need for you.”
I wrapped my hands around my stomach. Somewhere deep inside me, the heat of Níðhöggr’s semen coursed toward my womb. I could almost picture it, thick and white, streaking through the inside of my body like a comet through the soft darkness of the night sky.
“The baby...” I whispered. “She won’t be human?”
Níðhöggr laughed. “As if you would have had human babies anyway. Look who you married!”
Married. My stomach lurched.
“You know, Vali’s mother was a goddess,” Níðhöggr said.
I nodded as a wave of nausea tore through my body.
“They imprisoned her, the Ӕsir. Killed her son in front of her and then stuck her in a cave with nothing but her bound and gagged husband and a venomous snake for company.”
Níðhöggr knelt next to me, her red shirt stretched tight across her ample
chest. She smelled good, somehow, like a dark, exotic flower. “And do you know what the real surprise is?” she asked.
I clenched my teeth and shook my head, dreading where this story was going.
“She stayed,” Níðhöggr whispered. “For one thousand years, Loki’s wife Sigyn stayed with her husband. Vali’s mother stood next to Vali’s father, catching poison from a snake in a bowl so it wouldn’t fall on her husband’s face.”
I felt Níðhöggr’s soft, warm fingers on my cheek, and I opened my eyes to meet her beautiful face. “Sigyn,” Níðhöggr said, softly. “To the mortals of Midgard, she was the goddess of fidelity. That’s the example your dear Vali has for a wife. That’s his standard.”
I rolled to my side and vomited onto the cold floor of the cave for a very long time.
CHAPTER THIRTY NINE
When I finally returned to my senses, I expected to be alone in the darkness, with my guilt burning hot and low in my gut. And my baby, some distant part of my mind chimed. My hands crept to my stomach, scraping across the stones like small, scared animals.
The cave slowly swam into focus. The candles were still guttering, casting a pale, shifting light across the rocky floor. Something dark sat in front of me, waiting patiently in the gloom of the cave.
Níðhöggr.
I flinched as the face came into focus. Níðhöggr wore the woman’s form. She sat cross-legged just past the dark pool of my vomit, watching me with a slightly bored expression. Our eyes met, and my stomach curled up and rolled over.
“Typically, we give our vessels a choice,” she said, as if we were continuing a pleasant conversation.
I wiped the back of my hand across my mouth, trying to comprehend what she was saying. “Choice?”
“What to do next. Where to go. Whom to see. That kind of thing.” She flicked her hair back, watching me with the same cold, distant expression Níðhöggr had worn as a man, while he fucked me, as my body came over and over again under his. I shivered. The motion made the dozens of raw scrapes across my back and legs sing with pain.
“We can, for example, send you back...” Níðhöggr’s voice trailed off.
“To Vali,” I whispered.
Níðhöggr brought her hands together in front of her full, rosy lips. “Ah, yes. Vali. The husband to whom you were so faithful. For almost twenty-four hours. Won’t he be delighted to find you with child, and not by him?”
My jaw clenched so tightly I felt my teeth might crack. “No. No, I can’t go home.”
“Good,” Níðhöggr said, brightly. “That’s ever so much easier for the child. Fewer attachments. Fewer complications.”
She clapped her hands. The room spun. For a second I thought I’d be sick again. Then the roar of breakers filled my ears, and a rocky beach came racing forward to meet my face.
EVERYTHING HURT.
My arms and legs lit with pain as shivers wracked my body. My throat hurt, my stomach hurt, the raw space between my legs hurt. Something deep inside my abdomen ached and throbbed. Even the sunlight hurt my eyes, making me curl over on my side. Rocks clattered and shifted beneath me as I struggled to make sense of what I was seeing.
Waves. Row after row of dark furrows, rippling beneath leaden skies before breaking against a rocky beach. I pushed myself to sitting and the headache hit me, the kind of sharp throbbing pain that comes after a very long crying fit.
Two revelations arrived alongside the stabbing pain of the headache. First, this was the beach where I’d found Vali shivering against the cliffs with Hrotti on his knees. And second, I was completely naked.
“Shit,” I said.
My voice echoed across the rocks, flowing out to sea and returning to me as a faint whisper. My legs looked strangely pale against the smooth gray-black rocks. My poor body, I though. The body I’ve tried so damn hard to keep in reasonable shape was now bashed and scraped, impregnated and then discarded on the beach like worn out garbage. Hot, red anger welled up from somewhere deep inside me, giving me a surge of energy. I staggered upright, my bare feet slipping on the cold stones.
“Naked?” I yelled at the ocean. “You left me naked!”
The ocean rumbled and fell over itself, ignoring me. Rage spilled out of me, coursing through my body like the dark twin of sexual arousal.
“Fuck you!” I screamed, and the echoes of my rage bounced back to me. “Fuck you, Níðhöggr!”
I stepped closer to the ocean, slipped, and crashed down on my knees. Pain shot through me. My vision blurred with a sudden explosion of white dots. I whimpered, rocking back onto the stones and pulling my knees to my chest. Scarlet blood welled out of fresh scrapes on both my knees, but nothing seemed to be broken.
What exactly would I have done if I had broken my kneecap? I shivered. The hot rush of angry energy seeped out of my body like water running into sand, replaced with a numb, cold dread. Those breakers seemed to be getting closer. Some distant part of my mind noted this must mean Asgard has tides. And a moon, to pull the oceans back and forth.
Asgard. Vali’s childhood home. Níðhöggr fucked me and dumped me here, in the former home of the husband I’d just hopelessly, irreversibly betrayed. And Níðhöggr left me buck-ass fucking naked to boot. At least there was nobody else around to see.
Someone coughed. I jumped, trying to cover everything at once and failing miserably.
Óðinn stood behind me, his one blue eye sparkling. He was staring openly at my naked back with a raised eyebrow.
“You’re looking a bit worse for the wear, my dear,” he said.
I tried to cover my breasts with my bloody knees. Óðinn sat down next to me on the rocks, leaned uncomfortably close to my neck, and inhaled deeply. My skin crawled.
“Ah, knocked up, too! And not by one of us! Well, that’s certainly interesting.”
I opened my mouth, but no words came out. Seagulls cried and dove into the waves as long, slow waves of shivers wracked my body.
“So, what are you doing here?” Óðinn asked conversationally, as if he found bloody, naked women on this beach every day.
“I...I don’t even know. I didn’t mean to... I mean, you can send me...” I stopped myself. Home, I’d almost said. As if that word still had any meaning.
“Fine.” Óðinn sighed heavily.
He shifted on the rocks, and for a second I was horribly convinced he was going to leave, just vanish into thin air like Loki. I hadn’t exactly been pleased to see him, but the thought of being left alone on this beach, naked, sent a bolt of pure panic through my exhausted body.
“No!” I gasped.
Óðinn raised his hand, waved it in a rapid, intricate pattern—
—And we were suddenly inside, sitting across from each other at a sturdy wooden table. Stubby candles flickered warmly between us. Behind Óðinn, a row of windows showed the same dark ocean, throwing itself against the shore beneath heavy skies.
I glanced down at my chest, worried I’d still be naked with my breasts totally on display. But no, I was wearing a soft green dress with long sleeves and a high neckline. Óðinn handed me a steaming mug filled with what smelled like coffee, which he had apparently conjured from thin air.
“Start at the beginning,” he said.
I hesitated as I wrapped my fingers around the warm mug. I had no reason to trust Óðinn; he was, after all, the one who imprisoned Vali. And Loki. My heart clenched like a hard, cold fist beneath my breastbone.
It wasn’t like I had much of a choice.
Óðinn listened to my story without a single change of expression as his pale blue eye focused somewhere just above my head. I glossed over the sex part, but blood rushed to my cheeks as I fumbled to find the right euphemism. When I finally finished my stammering, disjointed narrative, Óðinn leaned forward and stared at me, his face carefully neutral.
“So, you’re carrying Níðhöggr’s spawn. And the dragon sent you here,” he said.
“Pretty much.”
He laced his fingers carefully
in front of his chin. The gesture made him seem like an old man. “This puts me in a delicate position.”
Óðinn rocked back in his chair, his eye returning to the space above my head. Waves crashed outside the windows, and I realized it had grown quite dark while I talked. I wondered if Loki and Vali were back at my house, if they were perhaps making dinner in my kitchen, and my eyes stung with sudden tears. Suddenly, I wished Óðinn would say something. Anything.
Just as I opened my mouth to break the silence, Óðinn rocked forward, pressing his hands against the smooth wood of the table.
“Very well,” he said, as if we’d just reached some sort of agreement. “I can’t exactly shove you off on anyone else. And having you here will be helpful, in a way.”
“Helpful?” I croaked. Was he about to ask me to start scrubbing the floors? And would I be in any position to refuse?
Óðinn’s lips curled, although his smile didn’t reach his cold eye. “He’ll come looking for you, of course.”
“Vali?” My heart leapt as shame and hope flared somewhere deep inside me.
He laughed. “Vali? Are you kidding? He didn’t have enough talent to find the Bifröst, not even when the gate was wide open. No, that idiot isn’t going anywhere.”
Óðinn stood. He seemed very tall in small room.
“But Loki will come,” he whispered.
The air crackled and thickened, and Óðinn vanished. Candles on the table guttered as the air in the room swirled to fill the empty space where Óðinn had stood. I pushed away from the table and staggered to my feet, feeling numb and clumsy. The room was suddenly too hot, and the soft beeswax scent of the candles was cloying. I stumbled to the door and shoved it open. A fat gibbous moon hung heavy over the black waves. The thin, sweet perfume of wild roses wove with the briny tang of the ocean. The landscape before me was entirely dark, and entirely deserted; I may as well have been on the moon.
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