I stare at her for two long seconds, considering pulling away and not doing this. It’s probably a mistake, a bad an idea as any. I like Azalea, but sex complicates things, makes it difficult to make decisions when needed. Shit, sex can lead to other things I know I’m not prepared for. Am I prepared to face that? Am I prepared for any consequences?
I look down into Azalea’s sunset eyes and kiss her, a slow languid meeting that isn’t meant to hold so much emotion but somehow still does. We sink into each other, and when she reaches down to circle my length with her delicate fingers, I jerk.
“Careful,” I growl, and my voice is deeper than normal. I can feel my scales trailing along my body. I’m not shifting, but I can if I focus on the feeling for too long. “You may not mind the Crocodile, but things could get. . . complicated if I shift.”
“Fuck me already. You’re taking too long.” Her words come out a harsh moan, urging me onwards.
“What would you do if I walk away right now?” I tease, reaching between us to slide a finger through her wet folds. I nearly purr with her wetness there, flicking her clit and circling her entrance, alternating. Even if this is a bad idea, I’m still going to enjoy it. I’m too selfish not to tuck this away in one of my memories. Can’t I just have one good memory?
“I’d fucking rip you to shreds,” she promises, her face twisted with savagery even as she pants from pleasure.
I grin and line up with her entrance. I have no desire to pull away, to leave her so wanting, not when it’s what I want, too. It has certainly been a long time since I’ve been accepted by anyone enough to have sex with them. Here she is, stroking after my scales as they crawl along my skin and disappear completely, tracing my muscles with sharp fingers, her eyes meeting mine in an almost too intimate manner. I shove all my guilt aside and focus on her instead.
I can’t face the emotions there in her eyes, or the ones probably shining in my own, so instead, I ease into her, pressing my cock inside until I’m fully seated, until her core spasms around me, drawing a moan from my lips the same as hers.
And then I lose all control.
I begin to move, pressing Azalea’s legs back, bending her to give me a better angle, and when I hit something sensitive inside her and she cries out, I change my angle to hit it over and over again, bringing satisfying, desire-filled soft screams from her lips. Sweat coats my skin quickly as I fuck her, claim her, losing track of how long has passed, but I want her to remember me, even if I have to eventually leave, even if this is only sex to her. My teeth graze along the inside of her knee where it rests near my shoulders even as I savagely piston inside her, never slowing my pace. This is a claiming for my beast, but I’ll never tell her that. I’ll never claim another if they don’t want to be claimed. I shove all emotions aside in favor of the way her core clenches my length, the absolute pleasure of her nails dragging along the muscles of my back.
“Crocodile,” she cries, her hands clenching at anything she can reach: my hair, the sheets, my arms, digging in grooves I barely feel but amp up the pleasure.
I snarl. “Witch,” but then I feel it, the telltale signs of a shift. “Fuck.” I pause and move to pull out, to pull away before things get too dangerous, but her hands latch onto me, preventing me from doing just that. “I’m shifting,” I growl, trying to pull away.
“And?” Her eyes meet mine, swirling with those unnatural colors as much as mine are.
“It’s too dangerous.”
“Just fuck me. If it gets too wild, I’ll let you know,” she reassures me, her fingers touching along the scales that are spreading and staying.
I feel my face elongate, feel my bones shift, snap a little, but buried in her heat, I begin to move again. But I’m too big. Once shifted, I can easily crush her in this position. So I do the only thing I can think of. I swiftly pull out to the sound of her protests before flipping her over and pulled her ass higher into the air, stroking inside her a moment later. My fingers are nothing but claws as I gently curl them around her hips. As my shift completes, when I become the Crocodile she’s always been curious of, I begin to slam inside her in earnest, my control destroyed. I’m bigger in this form, more savage, but she doesn’t seem to care as she throws back her head and presses back against me.
Azalea’s cries echo around us in the small room as I fuck her like an animal. My cock, when shifted, is longer, more dangerous, and when we reach a certain point, a barb will shoot out and catch hold, preventing me from pulling out, but I don’t even care. I have a woman beneath me, one unafraid of the monster I carry inside me, and I have the sudden urge to claim her completely, properly. I want her to be mine.
I release her hip to thread my fingers through her hair, jerking her up until her back bows, curling my claws around her neck to keep her steady as my hips pump inside her.
“Is this what you wanted?” I growl savagely, using my other hand to grab a handful of her breast and squeeze. “Is this the monster you wanted in your bed?”
“Yes,” she breathes between her moans.
The urge to bite her slams into me but I can’t, not without causing real damage. I try to push some of the shift back, but it’s useless. My emotions are all over the place, preventing me from doing much more than going with the flow.
“Bane!” she cries when I reach down and hook her thigh backward over my hip, opening her wider for me.
My pace grows punishing, too rough, but she urges me on, pushing me to fuck her harder, taking everything I am and reveling in it. We fucked brutally, and when I near bursting, I squeeze her throat gently.
“Don’t be frightened,” I choke on a growl, feeling her core clench tightly around me, dragging me toward the edge with her.
“Don’t stop.” Her hands hold on to mine where they circle her throat and chest, her soft fingers running across my scaled skin. “Don’t fucking stop.”
I feel her body lock up beneath mine and her core clamps onto my cock, milking me as she explodes with a high keen. I feel myself swell, felt the barb shoot out, making her jerk and shake harder. It won’t hurt her, not as long as we don’t try to part before it recedes, but it’s probably a surprise. I spill inside her, the barb keeping me locked in place as we slowly come down together.
I move, carefully, until we’re both laying on our sides, my cock still buried inside her. I will myself to shift back, a slow process, but the barb stays even when I’m fully myself again. “It should disappear in a few minutes,” I reassure her, kissing her shoulder, holding her close. When she tilts her head back to look at me, I claim her lips, kissing her reverently.
“That was. . .” She doesn’t finish her sentence, but she grins.
I kiss her again. “You said you liked the color green,” I murmur, my voice husky, and I’m rewarded with her breathy chuckle.
The barb slips away and I pull from her core, just in time for her to turn and straddle me, stroking her hand down my abs and studying my cock between us. “I did,” she agrees. She traces her finger over the barb at rest, and then she grins and lifted herself, sinking down on my length. My muscles bunched with desire, but I hold still. “This time,” she murmurs, “let me be the one in control.”
So I do. She rides me, tracing the scales that spread and disappear along my skin, and I watch her beautiful green hair tumble around her shoulders, beautiful, as she uses me.
Something shifts in my chest, but I shove it away.
This is just sex, I tell myself again. I can handle just sex.
The lie tastes like ash even in my mind.
I will bring them down. I will destroy the Daughters as thoroughly as I’m destroying Neverland.
No, I don’t want to hurt Wendy. I don’t want to hurt Lily. But the Pixie Queen? Captain Hook? Fucking Peter Pan? I’m going to slaughter them all. They see me as the monster, well, I’m about to grow more monstrous. We’re all aging, and the more Neverland dies, the more power fills my body, as I’m a leech stealing it all from this world.
; Good. Let it all die. Let them sink into nothing. Let the world crumble into dust as it should.
But Wendy. But Lily.
My mind wars with itself, bouncing between human and beast, one side begging to just open the door and leave, to save my sister and the woman I want. But the other side says they all should die for their sins, for their cruelty in this horrible world.
Especially Peter Pan.
I want to see Pan die the most. When I get my chance, I’ll rip him to shreds with my claws and teeth, coat myself in his blood, and when I look upon Wendy as such a monster, she’ll love me then.
For I will have killed her captor. I will have killed the reason her brothers became my Lost. I will have earned her love my then.
Pretty, little bird. Such a pretty little bird she will be.
. . .Wendy Darling. . .
Chapter Eight
I’m in trouble.
Watching as Azalea throws ingredients into a small cauldron, I know I’m irrevocably in trouble. It isn’t supposed to be like this. I was never supposed to end up here. Shit, I should be dead. I’ve died twice over, been corrupted by a power too great for me, landed in a world of villains, and still, somehow, I’m alive, and staring at the pretty witch who hums as she adds ingredients to a potion.
I’m fucked.
I don’t know when it happened. It wasn’t a sudden rush of emotion after having sex, though it certainly helped. I think it started long before that, when she looked at me and said I was no monster. Either way, as I watch her hum and gather ingredients, carefully selecting only the best ones, I know.
I’m falling in love with the Wicked Witch of Oz.
Confusion wars with the emotion. I’d once thought I was in love with Wendy, but that obsession pales in comparison to what I’m starting to feel for Azalea. This careful domesticity we’ve cultivated between us, helping her gather supplies and watching her use them, cleaning up after fixing something to eat, it all feels too normal, too easy. Where I had wanted to claim Wendy by any means necessary, I’m perfectly happy watching the Wicked Witch dance around, flicking her fingers over bottles. I want to watch the way tendrils of her green hair fall from the messy bun on top of her head, the way she purses her lips as she measures out something delicate. And I could do so for hours.
“Oh, blast,” she grunts, drawing me from my musings. “I forgot the wart of toad.”
“Is it easy to get to?” I ask, setting aside the book I most definitely hadn’t been reading.
“It’s just a few minutes’ walk from here.” She wipes her hand on a towel and pulls off her apron. “If we hurry, we can be back before this burns.”
I take her hand when she comes around the table and we go out the door together. She doesn’t complain at the intimacy of me holding her hand and I don’t point out how comfortable it is. I grab the gathering basket on our way out, happy to be relegated to carrying it. Another important point. I think collecting things for potions boring, but with Azalea, they’re somehow anything but.
The ground is rumbling harder today and unease trickles down my spine as we move into the forest, but I follow Azalea through the trees, trusting her sense of direction. I expect it to be a quick little trip to grab whatever wart of toads are—probably some sort of plant—before we head back to the cottage. I certainly don’t expect to hear something rumble through the trees and the ground to shift beneath our feet.
“What—”
I grab Azalea and press her against a large tree, away from the rolling ground. I expect something bad to be happening, my time in Neverland making me anxious, but when the rolling stops and everything seems back to normal, I raise my brows.
“Well, that was anticlimactic,” I grunt, pulling away from Azalea, but her eyes widen a second later.
I turn, expecting something bad, and find exactly what had shock pulling at her expression.
Where we’d been travelling, the trees had disappeared, or not gone so much as taken over. Thorny vines curl around the trees and built up a wall higher than some of the trees. A barrier, an intentional one. I can just barely catch a climb of the dark rock on the other side of the thorny wall.
“Is that. . . a castle?” I tilt my head, studying the grey, crumbling stone that we can see through the vines. It’s rough, old, and something about it makes my instincts perk at attention. The urge to get away from it is strong, but something also makes me want to draw closer.
“It looks like it.” Azalea frowns. “How did it appear in the middle of the forest?”
I shake my head. “I don’t pretend to know how any thing works in any world. Not anymore.” Not after I killed one.
“The trees even look different,” she murmurs, touching her hand to the closest one before gasping. “There’s a sign here.”
I move to her side, studying the plaque that looks like it’s been stamped into the tree long ago. It’s aging, cracking, the tree growing around it, but the words are still legible. I read the inscription.
Let her sleep
For when she wakes
She will break worlds.
I grimace. That isn’t promising about what lies on the other side, at all.
“’She will break worlds,” Azalea repeats out loud, her eyes narrowing. “That sounds bad.”
“I don’t even want to know what it means,” I murmur, pulling her back away from the tree and the creepy castle. “We should get out of here.”
She stares at me in surprise. “Don’t you want to know what it is? Or who she is?”
“No,” I shake my head hard. “Hard no. Absolutely not. I’ve been in a broken world. You do not want the same thing to happen to yours. And whatever happens, if she’s a breaker of worlds, why risk releasing her?”
Azalea fights my pull for a moment before relenting and letting me lead her away from the vine wall. “You’re right. Yours may have been broken but it’s more than just your world that is being affected.” When I stare at her in confusion, she sighs. “The worlds are merging, or I gather that’s what’s happening. If whoever ‘she’ is woke, in theory, she’ll have access to every world that’s now connected.”
My eyes widen and I pull Azalea away from the castle quicker. It’s an even better reason to get away from it as fast as we can move. Dangerous, the castle is dangerous, and whatever sleep inside it will be worse. My instincts scream both to run and go toward her, but I’ve learned enough in my time as the Crocodile to know which one I should listen to. Run, get away, move as fast as possible.
We stumble away from the thorny vines and castle, leaving it to rest undisturbed in the darkness of the forest. As we slip away, I swear I hear something whisper my name, a woman, but when I look behind us, there’s no one there.
I pick up Azalea and begin to sprint through the trees, putting distance between us before I do something terrible, like release whatever is inside the castle, like destroy every world. I slam the door to the cottage and lock it when we return for good measure. I don’t know how much Azalea’s spells will keep out but I’m not taking any chances. I spray water over my face to get the last traces of the voice from my mind. The entire time, Azalea watches me, waiting for whatever reaction I’m having to be over. My skin ripples with scales before I calm my heart enough to meet her eyes.
“We stay away from the castle,” I rasp, my hands shaking. Just that little bit of time in it’s presence has me shaken up this bad; I don’t want to find out what will happen should I risk going inside. I don’t want to know what the woman who sleeps there will do is she’s released.
No. Not one bit. Hard no.
Chapter Nine
I glance from the corner of my eye for the thousandth time, watching the witch as she spins and hums under her breath, picking the berries from the bush as easily as she breathes. There’s no hesitation in her hands even with the two-inch-long thorns peppering the small shrub. Azalea spins as if she doesn’t have a care in the world, even with the clear danger that’s increasing every single day,
even with the castle haunting my nightmares off in the opposite direction of the forest.
I can’t stop staring at her.
She’s beautiful, passionate, and all I can think about is getting her back to the cottage and showing her exactly how I can be wicked, too. Dangerous. This is all getting too dangerous, emotions becoming involved, but I can’t seem to help myself. Azalea doesn’t care who I was before. She doesn’t care what I’ve done. She looks at me and sees me rather than the Crocodile. It has been so long since someone held me that I worry I’m only sticking around because of it. Am I desperate for attention so much that I could convince myself I’m falling in love with the witch? After Wendy, do I even know what love really is?
I’d watched as Wendy and Hook danced around each other for years, such obvious love in their eyes that they denied for too long. I saw Peter and Lily dance around each other, a toxic sort of love that Neverland twisted, and then her March Hare came along and was far different, even if he held the same darkness as Peter. Even Tink found love in the end. I could recognize it easily in them, but am I being an idiot here? I’m the villain. Am I using Azalea for my own gain? I don’t want to hurt her.
Perhaps, that’s the first sign of love, a voice whispers inside my head, my subconscious, but I can’t really trust it. The voice that used to tell me to hurt Wendy, to destroy Neverland, sounded exactly the same. I don’t feel like I’m under the influence of Neverland anymore, of the woman with sunrise eyes that somehow held echoes of Azalea and yet clearly isn’t her. But that could all be a trick. A fool is easily fooled, and I’m the biggest fool of all.
“Are you going to just stand there and stare at me or are you going to help pick the ingredients I need?” Her voice makes me jerk. I didn’t even realize I’ve been standing so still for long moments, staring at the pretty green of her hair or the way her fingers easily plucked the berries.
Monstrous as a Croc (Daughters of Neverland Book 4) Page 4
