Page 12 of Taken (After the End #6)

Chapter Seven

Lacchus

The small owelay female is staring at my erection as if she’s never seen a cock before in her life.

I would worry that she hasn’t if she weren’t emitting the most intoxicating combination of pheromones.

Under the power of her scent markings, it is too easy to blot all other worries out.

Even the Vironai warriors scented it, though for us Mpo, the scent borders on maddening.

The other two Mpo are happily mated—one with a warrior female with us on this campaign.

Mated, they will be able to curb or slake their needs.

Unmated as I am, I could have chosen from another of the females willing to rut me, but I have not desired to rut in the Vironai way in a long time.

They like pain and degradation, but I don’t.

It makes no sense. I’m Mpo, one of the descendants of the successful experiments our ancestors conducted when the world was much harsher than this one.

It is a time our tribe’s memory has forgotten, but the results of those experiments have not been.

We are here, celebrated for our continued strength that has not faded with time but only become insatiable, more capable of violence.

Though we are members of the Vironai tribe, all three of us Mpo shifters are violent creatures.

The other two seem to relish the brutality they were born into much more than I do.

Still, I perform my duty to the tribe with claw and dagger, collecting piles and piles of the prizes they give me.

But I’ve never collected a flesh prize before.

She is the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen.

Small and perfect. And that was without scenting her.

Once I took in the flavor of her skin, however, all the rest was lost. I couldn’t shake it off.

It fueled the celebrations tonight like oil to a flame, stirring everyone to madness, including me, apparently.

Because I followed her scent when she was taken away—after I gave up my claim to her, thinking she’d be better off in the arms of a less violent male.

I should have known Jiral would not want her for a mate, but to rape.

The thought draws a dark screech from my chest now as I think back to her sounds of struggle.

She is from a lesser tribe. Jiral attempting to mate with her in the brutal Vironai way was abhorrent.

A Vironai female would have fought—would have been able to fight him off had she not wanted him—but this little owelay female is clearly from a lesser tribe, one who lived underground for a reason.

She is too weak for this world. Jiral knew that.

I had to stop him. I would have stopped him from raping any flesh prize from a weaker tribe, but that I willingly gave her to him made me even angrier.

I could have killed him. As it stands now, his wounds will be a reminder of his disgusting attempt, and though I will let him live, if I ever see him lurking near this owelay again, I will finish the job the frex-frex didn’t.

I haven’t felt that murderous impulse before and even now, kneeling over her, I feel my emotions spiking in my blood and in my bones more raucously than usual.

My spine tingles and sings. I feel hot and cold where she touches me, pain and pleasure both, but only because she touches me so fucking softly.

I’ve tried to pull away from her several times, but she’s so wildly beautiful I can’t look away.

I watch her take in the sight of my cock with rounded eyes.

She says a word in her language, before pushing on my shoulder, pushing me into a kneeling position.

I let her. And I let her move forward, naked as she is and fucking gleaming, as she drops forward onto her hands and knees to inspect me.

She runs her fingers up the length of my shaft, following the line of a blue vein pulsing beneath my brown skin.

I don’t dare fucking breathe. I am so close to pushing her onto her stomach and rutting into her like a beast, no better than Jiral.

I stay impossibly still while she tortures me, but when she thumbs the slit beneath the head of my erection where my latch will inflate, I hiss.

She glances up at me and I watch, spellbound, as she sticks out her pretty pink tongue and licks the seam just beneath the round head of my penis.

As an Mpo shifter, my cock is different from the other Vironai males of the tribe.

Mine is the first she will have ever seen.

Given her size, I’m not sure she can even take me.

When erect, my shaft is larger toward the base, as thick around as her upper arm. But when I seed, my latch opens, fanning out beneath the head of my cock and inflating the entire shaft so that it’s the same thickness all the way around, all the way up to the top, which flattens out.

Small ridges extend from the latch seam as well—six of them—and though they are round and smooth and release semen when they protract, they are also made of the same hard shell my Mpo form is covered in, and that I am still dusted in.

If I latch a female, and she tries to move while I am inside of her, she can tear, which is why I push the small owelay female away from me now.

I cannot explain any of this to her. I tip my three smallest fingers down, hoping that the sign for no is a universal gesture and that even gestures have not been lost in translation between our different tribes.

But she just reaches for me again and grips my cock harder, making me hiss and making my hips buck.

Encouraged by my reactions, she leans forward and licks my shaft again, all the way from base to tip.

Her tongue is unbearable. So soft. So gentle. So fucking decadent.

I’ll tear her for sure, and I refuse to ruin something this perfect.

I don’t even know why she’s doing this at all.

Maybe it’s her scent. Maybe she’s sex crazed.

Maybe she’s a lustful monster of some kind.

She could be a predator. That gives me pause for a lethal moment, because in that pause, I look down into her eyes and see brown sand and green paradise.

She’s so fucking pretty.

And she’s looking so expectantly up at me.

I pull her off my cock and lunge down to meet her waiting lips, wanting to give her what she seeks and help her sate some of the lust that orbits in her atmosphere.

Maybe if I can calm her with my lips, her scent will dissipate, and we will both be able to extract ourselves from this.

It doesn’t. Instead, our mouths clash with a violent urgency, and the scent of her need thickens.

She kisses me deeply, hungrily, like she wants me, needs me, but not to savage me as another female of my tribe might, but to love me.

The thought hurts. I have seen love before between members of our tribe, between parents and their children, between mates…

but I have never felt it, and I doubt that a sex crazed demon who seems specifically to have been raised from her underground crypt to torture me will be capable of something like love. She is carnivorous.

I should push her away but her scent muddles my thoughts, her tenderness, her wandering fingers and her swollen cheek. So vulnerable, she draws out the beastliness within me, making me want to do terrible things to be able to keep her safe and in my bed. To mate her. To keep her.

I’m going to have her, and I’m going to keep her forever. Love may not exist for me in this lifetime if I cannot pull back…and I cannot pull back.

The thought strikes, and I know it is her ruination.

Before the night is through, she will be my mate.

And with that thought planted in my mind like a frex-frex talon to the skull, I’m kissing her back, this time more deeply.

I try to mimic the way she kisses me tenderly, but every so often my fangs extend.

There are moments to spare before my mating urge overtakes me and I do not want to mate her here on the floor.

Surging up, I nearly stumble over her, clutching her bare body to me while my ankles tangle in my forgotten pants. Fuck my pants. I take another step and tear them completely in my urgency to reach the bed.

She’s breathing hard, her chest and cheeks flushed with color, her eyes ablaze.

Brown but with a little green fleck, a color I’ve only ever seen in the place we call Paradise on the mountain.

It is where we were headed before we spotted the mouth of her strange cavern peeking up out of the Barrens’ desert floor.

We had been intrigued and concerned—familiar with all tribes that roam this world, the Pikosa, the Kawashari, the Wickar—but we had never seen one like her before.

It had taken us some days to discover that she never traveled with anyone even though, in my sight, I’d seen her lips move.

She’d spoken, but only to herself. And she’d had food, rations, water—things we raided and pillaged.

We took so much. But we didn’t kill any of her tribesmen or women.

We left them in their strange crypts. She was the only flesh prize we salvaged.

And now, I cannot help but wonder if she is to be my treasure or my downfall.

I look into her eyes. I’ve never seen eyes like them. And I want them on me and on me alone. She will never look at another male again in this lifetime. Damn love. Damn the strange cave she came from. Damn everything. Damn me, most of all.