No woman had ever seen me like this. No woman had ever made me like this. Itzel climbed onto me, straddling my face as she took my cock in her hand. Her touch sent a pulse of pure desire through me, and a cry of anguish escaped my lips before she bent forward and slid the head of my cock between her slick lips. She licked the drops of cum from my tip, moaning as I raised my mouth to her opening to drink from her cunt again.
Sucking harder, she ran her tongue around my cock, then sank her mouth onto its length, pumping with her hand as her mouth sucked me off harder and harder. I found the same rhythm with my tongue, plunging it into her as her orgasm built. At last, she came against my lips, crying out around my cock. The sound of her pleasure pushed me over the edge, and I arched up, cum spurting into her mouth. She moaned and lapped it up as it ran down the bulging veins of my cock, still throbbing as it pulsed drops of cum every few seconds.
I sank back, finally satiated even if I hadn’t fucked her. Itzel smiled over her shoulder at me, then climbed off and lay down beside me. Our bodies mingled, our limbs tangling and the last flickers of the dying candles shimmering off our golden skin.
“Don’t fall asleep,” she whispered, running a fingernail gently along my jawline, sending a wonderful shiver of satisfaction through me. “I’m not done.”
It’s just a dream, I told myself as I drifted off. It’s okay. It was only a dream.
Twenty-Nine
Itzel
Princess, Ocelot Nation
I paced the room while he slept. I couldn’t sleep. I needed more. This was stronger even than the jaguar potion, less frantic but deeper, a need that ached in the marrow of my bones and the roots of my teeth. Yes, what Jetsun had done helped, and I knew even that much was wrong. But I needed more than fingers or a tongue inside me. I needed hard cocks and floods of cum.
I stopped pacing and looked at Jetsun sleeping there, his body long and lean and as absolutely perfect as the god he was. The dying candlelight flickered over his golden skin, the soft lines of muscle in his thighs, his chest and abdomen, and the perfect length of his delicious cock. My mouth watered, and the ache between my thighs throbbed painfully as even more wetness pooled there. I had an ocean inside me, enough to keep me wet for every man outside the doors. Maybe I could open them for just a bit, let them in. What did it matter if I knew them? I couldn’t remember why it had ever mattered.
I shook my head and pressed the heels of my hands to my eyes. What was I thinking? Was I really desperate enough to open the door and let every snow leopard in the nation gangbang me at once? With a groan, I sank to my knees on the stone floor.
How did Camila get through this?
I knew she locked herself in a room and only saw female servants. Did she take the pills to suppress the worst of it? Did they work for her? After all, her mother was the same as mine. She must have some of her magic. So how did she resist ordering her maidservant to bring her a man, or every man in the castle? Would it really be so bad to let the snow leopards have at me? It was better than fucking my own brother, even one I’d never met before, one I didn’t grow up with or think of in a brotherly way. He wasn’t even really a brother, just a half-brother of a dad I’d only just met. It wasn’t like he was a brother I’d been raised with, the son of King Ocelot, the man I’d always known as my father.
If only I didn’t know…
I pressed my palms against my temples and groaned. What was wrong with me? Was it just the heat, or were my morals really that loose?
No. No, I wouldn’t fuck my own brother. There had to be a line somewhere.
I went back to the glass wall, staring at it for a moment. How had I gotten through it? I laid my hand on the thick pane, as if I’d find it all an illusion. But it wasn’t an illusion. And Jetsun had thrown the key outside. So how had I walked through it?
I remembered the spirit world, and how I’d simply walked through a wall to find my mother, because that’s what I wanted to find. But this was here and real and very solid when I put pressure against it. The last candle sputtered and went out, plunging me into a darkness so complete that even my cat eyes could see nothing. Unsure what to do, I lay down on the floor outside the glass room and ignored the throbbing need growing inside me every moment, growing stronger and stronger, like a wildfire raging out of control, blown onwards by hot, relentless winds.
It had to give. I would wake up, and the fever would have broken in the night.
I dreamed Sir Kenosi was back, that he was fucking me into the bed in the cheetah tower, but the mattress was too hard. I kept telling him to turn me over, but he wouldn’t. I woke to the rocks grinding into my back as a stiff cock pounded into me. His honey-tinged breath was hot against my cheeks, his hand hooked under one knee as he drew it up and drove into me with deep, powerful thrusts. His cock was long and full, and each time he drove into me to the hilt, his swollen balls pressed against my ass and his pelvic bone ground against my aching clit.
I cried out in pleasure with each thrust, completely lost to the moment, to the man fucking me in the dark, in my sleep. And then a tiny flicker of consciousness found me, and I remembered. The heat. The glass. My brother.
“No,” I cried out, my eyes flying wide in the blind darkness, my palm flattening against his strong chest. “Jetsun, stop. I’m your sister.”
He caught my hand and pinned it beside my head, grinding deep and making my clit throb toward climax. “It’s just a dream,” he whispered.
He caught my other hand and held it down, pumping his cock deep inside me, moaning in pleasure as I struggled for another moment. My body tightened around him as I fought, but I was too slick to put up any resistance. My body wanted this, even if it was wrong in every possible way. Especially then.
“It’s just a dream,” he whispered again, lowering his beautiful lips to mine. “I’m whoever you want me to be.”
His full lips caressed mine, softly at first and then harder, as his cock glided into me effortlessly. Like a dream.
If it was a dream, it wasn’t real. My brother wasn’t pinning me to the stone floor and fucking me so good I could feel the orgasm slowly building inside me like a tidal wave. His lips weren’t caressing mine, teasing them open, his tongue tasting gently while his cock drove hard, grinding me into the ground.
If it was a dream, I could give in. I opened my lips and let his tongue in, let him taste my mouth. Our moans mingled as I arched up, rubbing my clit harder against him. I braced my feet on the floor and raised for every thrust, slamming my hips against his. He gripped my hands and pushed himself up so he had more leverage, pounding into me with bruising force as an orgasm gripped me.
It was like nothing I’d ever experienced, a tsunami instead of a wave. I screamed as he drove his bare cock deeper and deeper inside me. I slammed my body against his with helpless abandon, shredded his lip with my teeth, his hands with my claws. My cheetah was raging to come out, and I wrestled with her as Jetsun swore at my violence, meeting it with his own. He bit at my lip, and the taste of our mingled blood only fueled me. I was wild, possessed as the orgasm ravaged me, wiping out everything in its path.
It went on and on as I screamed and tore at him, and he tore back, snarling and biting and ripping at me as I did him. My claws raked through the skin on his back, and he roared in pain, arching up and driving his cock so deep into me that pain bloomed where he reached my depths, lifting my pleasure on the crest of the wave that never stopped breaking. I screamed, and he roared again, his cock jerking and swelling as hot streams of cum shot into me again and again. At last, I had his seed. His blood ran in rivulets down my hands, my arms, dripping with his sweat onto my chest. Screams of pleasure and horror wracked my body as I came again, and again, and again, until everything went black.
Thirty
Itzel
Princess, Ocelot Nation
“Come, my child.”
Sight came back to me, and I found myself standing in a room next to a pair of lovers. It was dark, but I could s
ee them locked together in the throes of passion. Her head was thrown back, her eyes closed and her mouth open in a cry of pleasure. Blood trickled down her hands, her arms, her tumbling waves of hair. The man held her, one hand under her back and one braced on the floor. His mouth was painted with her blood.
A pressure on my hand drew my attention to the person who had spoken. It was Lilith.
“What’s happening?” I asked, jerking my hand away. Had she tricked me, somehow lured me to fuck Jetsun so that I’d die again?
“It’s all right,” she said, taking my hand again. “Take a walk with me, child. The world will be just as you left it when you return.”
“How?” I asked. “Why are we frozen? Why am I outside my body?”
“You’ve stopped time.”
“I did?”
“Not you alone,” she said. “Both of you.”
That’s when I saw that on the other side of her, his hand clasped in hers, stood Gao Jetsun. Somehow, he was still in the room, his cum hot inside me, and also here outside himself, too.
“This is a rare thing,” Lilith said. “It takes great power to stop time. Only two of the most powerful beings in the world can do it by joining as you have.”
Jetsun glanced at our entwined bodies, looking both doubtful and utterly freaked out.
“What does that mean?” I demanded. “How am I one of the most powerful beings in the world?”
“I was the first High Priestess,” Lilith explained. “The power of creation came from me to every woman on earth. But when I went to the spirit world forever, I gave my power to one woman in the living world. The High Priestess. She carries more power than any other. She’s the living embodiment of life, of sex and fertility. The divine feminine, the divine mother.”
“My mother,” I said.
Lilith shook her head. “Not your mother, Itzel. You.”
I stared at her, not knowing how to react, how it could even be possible. “What?”
“You, my child,” she said. “Each time a High Priestess dies, she passes her power to someone in the living world. Sometimes it is her child, if she has the capacity for great magic like you do. If she’s childless, it’s someone else with the ability to contain such magic. Your mother’s magic didn’t follow her to the spirit world. It passed to you.”
“But… I’m human.”
“And so much more.”
“How?” I asked. “If I have this great power, how could I not know?”
“It was locked within you,” she said. “It should have been unleashed when you matured, but it seems your caretakers didn’t see to it that it was. It has been seeping from you since you discovered your sexuality. Haven’t you noticed how easily men fall to their knees for you? Haven’t you taken each man you mated as a True Mate? Who else would have such power?”
“I don’t even really know what a High Priestess is,” I protested.
“It is you,” she said, stroking my cheek gently. “The bindings on your magic have been loosening since your first sexual experience. Each time you reach climax, your magic is spent, but it is also recharged even stronger than before. With each lover you’ve taken, it has grown stronger, and more has been released. You may not have known you had this power, but you have great instincts. You have done exactly what I would have recommended, had I been there to coach you. You have taken many lovers and let them satisfy you often.”
I shook my head, backing away. “I… I don’t want to be some magical sex goddess who has to drag around a bunch of fuck boys.”
Lilith only smiled. “How you handle your magic is up to you. But it’s there, whether you chose it or not. When you went into heat, the last of the bindings were broken. Your full power has been realized. You are now the High Priestess of this world, Princess Itzel.”
My head was spinning with what she was saying. Lord Balam had said I wasn’t human, but I’d never imagined I was someone… Powerful. All those years I’d yearned and ached to be a shifter. Now, that seemed such a small magic.
“But… Tsewang said the High Priestess was a baby…”
“When you died, the power cannot follow you to the underworld,” she conceded. “But you were raised from the dead.”
“I got the power back?”
“Yes,” she said. “And… That child kept some as well. One day, she will take your place.”
“What… What does that mean?” I asked. “What do I have to do? What are my responsibilities? Will people know what I am? Am I like a queen to other priestesses?”
“No one can know who you are,” Jetsun said. “It’s too dangerous in our world. You’d be exploited for your magic.”
I turned to him, a funny twist in my belly. “Did you know?”
“I… Yes.” He nodded. “I realized it pretty quickly. The way you drew so many shifters to you so suddenly. The strength of your pheromones. Your effect on me, despite twenty years of discipline and control over my physical urges. Your allure is irresistible, Itzel.”
I released Lilith’s hand and reached for Jetsun. I wanted to say something meaningful, something profound, but I was too overwhelmed to express anything close to that.
“I’m sorry,” was all I managed.
Jetsun hesitated a moment, then slipped his hand into mine. “I would have told you.”
“I know.”
“Come,” Lilith said again, taking my free hand and tugging gently. “When you walk through time in this way, you may change it. What would you like to change? Would you go back and save your mother? Your father? Your True Mate?”
“What are the consequences?” I asked, though my heart swelled at the thought of bringing my mother back. Not as an undead ghost, but as she’d been.
“Does it matter?” Lilith asked. “Just a month would change if you brought back your lover.”
“But everything would change,” I said. “Everything that’s happened since then.”
“Is it really so much?” Lilith asked.
Suddenly, we weren’t in the dark room anymore. We were standing in a large clearing in the jungle with a helicopter behind us. On the ground at our feet lay a body—not Sir Kenosi’s but mine. Sir Kenosi stood over me, along with Shadow and Lord Balam. Sir Kenosi held a beautiful ruby cradled in his palm. A cry of protest caught in my throat. I wanted to tell him no, tell him not to do it.
“Would you save your True Mate from his fate?” Lilith asked. “What if you could have him back?”
“He gave his life to save me,” I said, my breath catching.
“Would you give it back?” Lilith asked.
I’d never have met Gao Jetsun. I’d live in the spirit world, knowing that I was his sister but unable to meet him. I’d have known what kind of monster my father really was, but I’d never have the chance to do anything about it. I’d never have seen the heartbreak I’d caused Tadeu. My sister would have gotten the tiger amulet, and she’d be on her way to get the snow leopard amulet, to negotiate it from Jetsun instead of seducing it from her own blood brother.
“But then you’d trade places with him,” Jetsun said quietly. “You’d never have left the spirit world.”
“I can’t undo that,” I whispered. “I can’t change what I did. I can’t let Camila have endured what I did. I can’t make my other mates lose me again.”
“Very well,” Lilith said. “And what about your other True Mate? Would you save him?”
“Who?” I asked, my heart stuttering in my chest. “Who died?”
“This one,” she said. She pulled at my hand, and suddenly we were in a brightly lit arena. Sickness rose in my throat. The stands were crowded but eerily silent, the spectators frozen around us, straining forward with fists raised and bloodthirst in their eyes. A tiger stood frozen, its huge head lowered, its striped pelt thick and glowing under the spotlight aimed at the floor. I turned, my heart hammering in my chest, and saw a man halfway shadowed by the tunnel from which he was emerging. His head was held high and proud, defiant against the death he
knew was his.
“No,” I whispered, my whole body shaking. Tadeu’s death had been the most horrific thing I’d ever witnessed. I’d lost my mother, but I hadn’t seen it. I’d never been forced to watch something so monstrous, and not merely because it was a gruesome way to die. I’d loved Tadeu. Maybe I always would. He was my first love, and nothing could change that, no matter who he’d become. I could stop it from happening. I could save him, and he’d still love me. We could get married quietly, the way we’d always planned. I would give myself to him, and he would never have to see me with Lord Balam just hours after he’d been killed.
But Lord Balam.
If I saved Tadeu, I’d never have been with Lord Balam. I’d never go on Camila’s Amulet Tour, never meet Shadow, never fall in love with his quiet intensity or Lord Balam’s unwavering loyalty. I’d never meet Sir Kenosi or save Prince Kwame. I’d never know the true terror of my father’s reign, never know he wasn’t my father at all. My True Mates would live their lives without meeting the person they were supposed to meet, the companion to their souls.
“It would save him and Sir Kenosi,” Lilith said. “You’d have the life you always wanted.”
Tears stung my eyes, and I wanted to sink to the ground, to let sorrow overtake me. Because I knew I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t change this most terrible betrayal. The truth was, I no longer wanted that quiet life. It was no longer enough. And that betrayal might have hurt Tadeu worse than this one. He thought I’d betrayed him before, but he’d been wrong. Now, he was right. I hadn’t ordered his execution then. But I wasn’t undoing it now. Because choosing him would mean betraying all my other mates. With a sob catching in my throat, I shook my head.
“One more chance,” Lilith said. “One more chance to save the ones you love, to change the past.”
She tugged at my hand, and together we walked out of the arena and into the street outside the palace, one I’d known all my life. I’d played here, run with human children, kissed the boy I loved, strolled with my sister, ran ahead of my mother yelling for her to come and see something unremarkable to anyone but a child.
Hunted Princess: A Paranormal Dark Romance (Feline Royals Book 3) Page 21
