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“Sweetling, you are the closest thing to the divine I’ve ever witnessed.

I don’t think I truly believed in the gods until you stumbled into my home.

” Mavros hooked his claws under my knees and spread my legs further.

“Let me…” His voice shuddered as one hand descended to the pulsing heat at the apex of my thighs.

“Let me show you the strength of my worship. Let me give you everything you need.”

“Yes,” I sighed.

“What do you need?” he urged for an answer.

“You.” He bowed over me, falling on me with a devilish snarl. One moment he was too far, too separated, and the next his remaining clothes were gone, and we were bare to one another. Supple skin flush with soft, warm fur. He was heavy and hot and hard, and I needed all of him.

On an animal level, I understood the anatomy of a male.

I understood the act of mating. Though I knew this moment was different.

It was more. It was spiritual, magical, it was an irrevocable ritual.

But what Mavros had was hard and heavy and throbbing.

It wasn’t like anything I could have anticipated.

Not dark like his long black hair or charcoal fur, but girthy and purple.

“I need you so badly, Astoria.” He stroked himself and I swallowed a lump in my throat.

My heart faltered. He must have seen my expression, because his rumbling growl morphed into a soothing purr.

“I want… but that won’t… how are we… it’s—”

“You’re so adorable. So sweet.” Mavros placed a hand on my chest and flattened me into the dirt. “It’ll fit. You’re going to be so good for me, aren’t you?”

“Yes, please.” He drifted lower, kissing and gingerly biting down my body. “Please.”

I looked down at horns and burning eyes between my thighs.

His hungry gaze absorbed every intimate detail of me as greedily as a starving man in front of a feast. A replica of my dreams, and I wondered how my mind had conjured images so close to reality.

Were they visions of the future intent on keeping me awake at night and drawing me further into the beast’s web?

“It’ll fit,” he reassured, panting against the slick center of me. He muttered so low I almost missed it. “You’ll see. I’ve ensured it.”

“What—ah!” My heart leapt into my throat and a golden thrill zipped through my core.

His tongue—oh, gods—that tongue. He flattened it over my sex, licking through the wet folds and targeting the bundle at the top I’d tried experimenting with a few times.

None of my hesitant touches compared to his tongue licking and circling, drawing bliss from me until my back arched, and I cried at the top of my lungs.

“Gods… oh, gods. You taste so good. I want to consume every morsel of you.” His tongue writhed over me, drinking up my arousal.

The noises he made as he lapped my core were absurdly wanton.

He flicked the tip in rapid sweeps before strumming me into a vicious storm of want.

“This pretty pussy tastes so good for me. All for me, sweetling. Look at that pretty clit, so swollen and hard for me.”

He sucked and licked, and my hips bucked into his mouth.

I reached for him, and there was something hauntingly lovely about reaching for a monster in a moment of vulnerability and passion.

Mavros was an Inferni demon, and baring myself open wide for him was risking sharp claws and a lethal bite.

For him, for pleasure and connection, I embraced the fear and denied revulsion.

In turn, he was deathly determined, but astoundingly delicate.

I thrashed in the dirt, hair tangling in fallen leaves and petals, skin smearing with damp soil.

My dreams were a mockery of this feeling, this euphoria.

Then he retracted the claws on his two central fingers and probed my entrance.

I yelped as he eased them within me, stretching the vulnerable inner walls of my body.

“Such a fucking tight cunt—Gods!” I swore I felt his knuckles slamming together as I clamped down on the intrusion. His fingers were too thick, too long. I would be plundered and ripped apart if he lapsed control of his claws.

But it felt so good—no, wonderful. Like the night in the library. Amazing. Delicious.

His tongue assaulted my clit. His fingers curled in my pussy.

Working in tandem and stroking the ember in my belly.

He stirred me up from within into a sizzling frenzy.

Sparks flew behind my eyes with each thrust of his hand, and I rose to meet him.

I held tight to his horns and rode his face in search of oblivion.

No earthly pleasure in my long life had ever come close to the rapture building inside me.

It was heaven and hell, earth and sea, sun and stars, gentle and violent.

Too much, too fast, swelling and expanding.

He drove faster, harder, deeper, propelling me into a fiery culmination of sweet, erupting release.

“AH!” Merciless seizures swept through my body. I quaked and clenched, breath straining and muscles flexing. He carried me through the storm, letting me ride it out on his fingers and tongue. But I think he just wanted to savor every drop, every second of what he had wrung out of me.

“The way you shake when you come drives me wild.” Mavros sucked his fingers into his mouth, sucking off the creamy evidence of my climax. A smaller shudder rolled through me at the sight. “You come so prettily I could eat you all night long.”

“Mavros.” His name fell off my tongue, more a whine than a coherent plea. His growing smirk proved he recognized I wanted more.

“Oh, don’t worry. I’m not done with you yet.” He licked a path up my inner thigh to my hip. He bit the sensitive bone before dragging his tongue over my stomach to my breasts. The beast crawled over me, moving as slow and sensual as a predator.

Mavros paused over my heart, feeling the swift staccato on his lips. He hovered, eyes fluttering as he inhaled. Then he dragged his mouth across my chest and up to my throat. His tusks pressed into the pulse at my neck, and I swallowed.

“One day I might eat you, Astoria,” he admitted.

My ribs clenched, and my heart rattled with a rush of fleeting fear.

“You won’t.” I grabbed his face, urging his mouth to mine.

He nipped at my bottom lip, and I moaned.

“I might.” He kissed and nipped at my jaw while settling his body in the cradle of my thighs. “It won’t be because I’ve stopped wanting you, stopped needing you. It’ll be because my want of you will have consumed me to the brink of madness. It’s in my nature, sweetling. I’m a demon.”

“Yes, I know.” I was a novice, but I kissed him anyway.

Mavros shuddered above me. “I would eat you so carefully. You wouldn’t even notice as I swallowed you. You would simply melt into me and warm the ice in my veins.” He kissed me and kissed me and kissed me. And I wondered if he would eat me right there and then.

“Take your fill of me and sate your hunger.” I curved my arms around his neck and pulled him closer. Chest to chest, beating heart to heart, close enough to imagine his ribs cracking open to pull me inside the meat of his body to covet me there.

“You are the flesh monsters adore.” He sounded agonized, trembling with the fracturing vestiges of restraint.

“Then adore me, Mavros.”

A savage, brutal groan erupted from him. He prayed at the altar of my throat, roamed the relic of my body, and slipped inside me like a blade thrust to the hilt in the heart of a saint. The brunt of his devotion, his desire, tore me asunder. Stretching, tearing, thrusting—

Fucking. Like wild animals in the cold, dark earth.

It was pain, and it was pleasure, and it was a holy consumption. Mavros was my ruination and my salvation. My cage and my freedom. My life and, someday, my death.

“Gods—fuck, I’ve never… it’s so tight.” His claws pricked at my hips and tears built in the corners of my eyes. “So tight, and wet, and perfect. Al l mine. Made just for me.”

Mavros pulled out and slammed back in. A scream tore from my lips.

“Too much… oh, it’s too much. Mavros, please.” I squirmed beneath him, fingers locked in his fur, caught between shoving him away and pulling him closer.

“I can’t stop. It’s too late to stop. It feels so good. You… you feel so good.” His growling, babbling words spiraled through the storm in my mind.

“It’s—ah!—I can’t take it,” I sobbed.

“I know, sweetling. I know.” The beast snapped his hips into mine, driving whimpering grunts from my lips between broken sobs.

“Mavros, please, I can’t—”

“You’re so pretty when you cry. Fuck.” He grabbed my hips and pounded harder, spearing through me and rearranging my insides. The wet sounds of his cock claiming me filled the garden, along with the musky scent of sex. “You said you wanted it. You begged for this. Don’t be so whiny now.”

The threat of claws as he rubbed up and down my stomach sent a tight shiver up my spine.

“I know it hurts. Oh, I know.” His placating hum was almost as condescending as it was soothing. “Be good for me. Oh, fuck. So good for me. Feels so good. Just be good for me, keep taking my cock so well. I’ll make it good for you. Just keep taking me.”

Tremors wracked my body and the profound sensations in my cunt warped my reality.

The monster prince was far too large, yet my hips rolled to seek his severe girth each time he withdrew.

My pussy wanted his cock even when it hurt, even when it threatened to tear me in two.

I was eager for it, digging at his shoulders and crying his name like a deranged mantra.

My pussy gripped him, fluttering along his length as if intent on pulling him deep and keeping him there.

The beast was willing to oblige the subtle requests of my body.

He rolled his hips in a way that stimulated me from within and at the apex of my thighs.

It was ruthless and chaotic, a nightmare painted in pastels.

Yet my soul screamed that it wasn’t enough.