Page 7

Chapter Seven

Balor

D ark glee wound through me as I watched my mortal scurry off into the night.

Good. I was hoping she’d make a break for it.

Eating prey after a good hunt was more fun.

Taking my time, I stretched to my feet. My grin melted from my features as soon as she was out of sight. Something unexpected had me balking.

It was a damn pity she’d be dead soon.

I’d waited eight hundred years for just a few minutes of sweet revenge. Tamping down the complex knot of emotions in my chest, I drew on the magical power in my eye and waited for the energy to seep into my body.

I held my hands out, waiting for them to grow.

The shift never came.

Confusion turned to molten anger as my fingers shot to feel the crack in my eye. Magical, glittering energy coiled around my fingers and evaporated into the night.

“Mallacht mo chait ort!” I cursed at the heavens, to no god in particular.

The cultist's bullet hadn't just shattered my curse. It had broken the seal keeping my magic bound. With the crack, my magical power was leaking out faster than I could produce it. I tried to shift again, concentrating harder on the spell than I'd ever needed to before.

My body began to swell, muscles and bones growing as they absorbed my magic. I was tall enough now that I could see over the rooftops, and beyond that, Maeve's blonde mop of curls bouncing around her shoulders as she bolted down the street.

I smiled smugly to myself, knowing I'd have Maeve screaming in the palm of my hand in mere seconds.

The grin on my face vanished as the sound of splitting stone rattled my ear. I shrunk back down to my mere eight feet and traced the crack, finding it bigger than before.

FECK.

I couldn't shift, not with my eye so damaged.

A roar of anguish rattled from my gut, and I launched into a full sprint after Maeve.

So much for my thought-out plan to drown her in giant’s cum.

I'd have to kill my beautiful human the boring way… by touching her.

My mind went wild. How would I touch her? Maybe with a kiss? It wasn't how I thought I'd end the bloodline that helped destroy my life and my people.

But I'd softened to the wee girl, and I couldn't explain why.

I was the king of the giants. Balor of the evil eye. Fiery death incarnate. Yet, something burrowed deep beneath my ribs, aching with a tenderness for Maeve I'd never felt for any mortal.

I still had to punish the girl. But I couldn't stop thinking about her lips, red and blistered beneath mine.

The thoughts pushed me to move faster, barrelling out of the alley and into the street.

I flipped my eyepatch down to lock some of the magic in.

It still leaked beneath the leather scrap, but kept enough power in to cast a spell that would make me invisible to any passersby.

Not that there were any this time of night. The streets were dead.

"Please, someone, help!" Maeve sobbed, her voice cracked and paper thin from fear and exhaustion.

My long legs caught up with her tiny ones in moments.

She didn't see me coming, but she heard the thunder of my big boots smacking the road and my barrelling breaths, growing louder as I closed in on my target.

"Leave me alone!" she screeched at me over her shoulder. " Please! "

Maeve knew that at any moment I'd reach out and snatch her into death's embrace.

I let her keep running for several seconds more, even though I was close enough to grab her. Everything about her was exhilarating. The rabid beat of her heart, her short and panicked breaths.

It would all be over.

Before I could change my mind, I stretched my arms out and banded them around her waist. A yelp of surprise and terror clawed up her throat, and I brought us both crashing to the ground.

I rolled her over so she was beneath me, laying on her back with my massive frame caging her against the cold ground.

Her mouth opened on a scream, but before sound could escape, I brought my lips down on hers in a brutal kiss.

She was so damn small. I could crush her skull if I wasn’t careful, not that it mattered. In seconds she’d be consumed in my flames. All because I couldn’t resist the temptation of her bare skin against mine.

It was the first time I’d touched a woman in ages. The simple kiss was almost enough to make my balls burst right there.

I drew back, expecting to see her blistered skin. Red and raw and burning.

Her chest heaved as she caught her breath. Her hair was a tangled halo around her head and shoulders.

And she was unscathed. Flustered, terrified out of her mind, and very much alive.

How could that be? I could control my fire with monsters, animals and inanimate objects, but humans had always burned at a fire giant’s touch.

“Yer immune to my flames.”

I could barely believe the words coming from my mouth.

She should be dead, nothing but a burnt husk. How was she alive? How was it that the only trace of flame on her was behind her eyes?

“I–Immune?” Her voice came out small, rife with relief and rage and something else I couldn’t put my thumb on. “Why?”

I bared my teeth, a snarl slipping out. Why? I didn’t fecking know why. This never happened before, not with a human. Giants could burn the shite out of one another, but it was said that when one came along with an immunity to the flames that it was the will of the gods that they should never part.

A fated pair.

I’d never heard of a giant and a human being fated. It was supposed to be physically impossible. The gods were arseholes, though. Binding me to the last surviving McCrum would be exactly the sort of thing they’d cook up as punishment for my defeat at the battle of Mag Tuired.

A low growl built in the back of my throat as my attention slipped down her body, admiring the way her tiny frame looked trapped beneath me.

I lifted a hand from the pavement, fingers brushing over her lips where I’d kissed her. My breath caught in my lungs as I waited to see if that first touch had been a fluke. The girl’s breath halted beneath my fingertips as she held hers too.

“Impossible…” I muttered as the back of my knuckles trailed down the smooth column of her neck.

My fingers cupped the base of her throat, and my cock twitched at the way her pulse fluttered against my palm. My hand wandered lower, skimming between her breasts over the shamrock logo on her sweater.

“No human has ever withstood my touch before. It’s been so long…” A delicious gasp tripped from her lips when my hand cupped her breast over her sweater. “Since I’ve touched a woman.”

My hand continued its journey down her body, feeling her curves, marveling how damn wee she was. My hand nearly swallowed her entire side as I gave her waist a squeeze.

“S—sto…p,” she huffed, the word not at all convincing while she was moaning and squirming beneath me. Even if it were, I couldn’t stop. Giants weren’t known for their restraint. Especially not when I’d gone eight blasted centuries without pleasure.

My fingers slipped beneath her sweater, skimming the soft flesh of her navel.

Her pulse lurched into overdrive. But she didn’t fight me. Because she knew there was no hope of fighting me off, or because she too felt the strange magnetic force drawing us together. It didn’t matter. I didn’t care.

My brain was in a roar.

Rut her.

Fuck her.

Claim her.

I palmed her bare breast, marveling again at the sheer size difference. Maybe I couldn’t burn her, but surely she’d still break if I indulged that dark little voice in the back of my brain telling me to fuck her right here in the street.

I gave her nipple a pinch, testing just how delicate she was.

She squirmed beneath me, face contorting with pain.

But I didn’t miss the way her entire body heated beneath me, or the feminine scent leaking from between her thighs.

It might have been ages since I’d been with a woman, but the aroma of an aroused female was unforgettable.

“You’re quite the little curio yourself, wee one,” I hummed, my attention slipping back to her sweater reading McCrum’s Curios and Antiques , enjoying the way her nipples peaked against the fabric.

Before the cultist’s bullet had broken my curse, I’d been drawn to Maeve. I’d written it off as an obsession, for ending her bloodline. For getting the peace I thought her death would bring.

Now that I had my body back, feeling her perfect skin against my own, I knew it was more than that.

It was more than the allure of touching another person after so many years of being trapped.

Especially when humans had meant nothing to me before.

Back in my old life, they’d been nothing but annoying little creatures whose bones I’d have to pick out of my toes like splitters when they’d gotten underfoot.

This was the work of the gods and their twisted sense of justice.

Maybe I couldn’t end the McCrum bloodline. But at least now, I could draw out Maeve’s punishment. Punishing her by making her little mortal pussy break around my cock would be far more entertaining.

“If you’re going to kill me, just get it over with you bastard,” she snapped in a moment of courage.

“Change of plans, wee one.” I flashed her a dark grin as I pushed her skirt up over her waist to expose the little cotton panties covering her center. I could still scent that pathetic male on her. Soon enough she’d smell like me. “It seems the gods have something else in store for us.”