My thoughts wandered back to how she’d pushed me away at the tavern; her beautiful eyes filthed with the promise that she will never have affection for me. Something utterly inconsequential to a god, and it shouldn’t bother me so.

So why did it?

We’d come to an arrangement, hadn’t we? My little one had given me her vow to remain by my side, to always return to it. With loneliness banished, what else was there to want?

Nothing.

No, nothing.

Except, perhaps… her mouth straining on the thickness of my flesh, while my cock fucked the back of her throat until that cursed muscle gave.

“Open your mouth, little one.” Fist curling in her hair, I pushed her head down while taking myself out with the other hand. “Take me between your lips and suck. Mmm, yes… like that.”

Oh, what a dutiful little wife she proved to be, running her lips down my quickly hardening length, even as she shuffled for balance and arranged her limbs. Such a beautiful creature, the gulps and wet suckles coming from her lips nothing short of mesmerizing.

“Yes, ah, you do this so well, my precious wife,” I moaned, caressing her hair and the shell of her ear in the way that never failed to soften her. “Take me deeper. Mmm, so perfect.”

She swallowed my cock in greedy gulps, letting her lips run over the thick veins feeding my shaft, only for a new rush of blood to swell them further. My crown imprinted itself at the very end of her, a mere finger-width from a muscle that… would… not… give.

The way I gripped her hair tighter barely eased the heated itch around my knuckles as I pushed her head down, feeding her thrust after thrust of my hips. Little coughs tingled around my crown—more intense when her throat clenched—letting my testicles rise with my approaching release.

Gripping myself at the base, I pulled her mouth off me, watching how rope after rope of seed splattered onto her face. It caught on her lashes, painted her pink lips, and dripped down from the tip of her nose as I held her still.

Ada glanced up at me from glistening eyes. The harder her cunt throbbed, the more her diaphragm tightened. Nothing but a spreading extension of that knot in her neck, refusing her complete surrender to us. And what was it to me, a god? Was my wife not mine, married and oh-so perfectly marked with my seed?

“You did well.” A knuckle cracked as I eased my hand from her hair and pulled her up for a kiss, tasting myself on her lips. “Go to your room and clean yourself up. Choose a book while I wash in the spring, and I shall bring you release upon my return, then I shall read to you. Go!”

As she stumbled to her feet and then down the dais, I willed the muscle in her neck to surrender. I made what she failed to do on her own, what I could not inspire, the act leaving me dull and tired.

I shucked off my shirt, letting it drop to the dais as the leather around my legs turned to the finest powder waiting on my command, then headed toward the spring.

The moment I entered the cave, warm moisture settled on my cheeks, the air woven with traces of salt and minerals from the mountain in which the Pale Court sat. A welcome change to the staleness of ash clinging to my skin, which faded as I sunk into the hot water. It would return soon—it always did; a constant reminder of the pain I’d endured.

Sudden coldness gripped the surrounding stone as a familiar voice whispered, “Enosh…”

I might have been immortal, but even I shuddered when Eilam loomed over my shoulder. “Yarin had an excuse but, if I remember correctly, I owe you nothing.”

“Aside from an apology.” Eilam stripped from a threadbare tunic that must have been centuries old, slipped into the water, and tilted his head back to soak his eerily white hair. “You stole the mortal woman from underneath me, turning her final breath into one of many more to come.”

My muscles tightened. “What is it to you?”

“There ought to be—”

“Balance!” Yarin emerged from the corridor with the gutted corpse of a man shuffling beside him, wedging a sigh from me. “How blessed I am to arrive at such time where I can listen to Eilam’s awe-inspiring lecture on balance. On my word, it gets more exciting with each century he repeats… Oh, are we bathing? I love to bathe!”

My temples already ached at his grinding chatter, but they pounded when he slipped out of his boots. “I do not recall inviting either of you.”

Eilam stared at how pearls of water ran down his arm, my brother so wholly unaccustomed to his form, something so simple as water running down his skin eluded him. “Continue to tip the balance, Enosh, and I shall not be so lenient a second time.”

My molars ground together. “Are you threatening my wife?”

“Enosh!” Yarin gave an exasperated gasp. “I believe he just threatened your wife.”

“Death threatens your wife.” Eilam gave a lazy shrug. “She is only mortal, after all. Nothing but flesh and thought and breath. Insignificant.”

I gripped his hair and pushed his head underwater, letting the splash of droplets mingle with Yarin’s chortle. Bracing against the way Eilam struggled and fought, I hooked a leg around his, ripping him off balance, only to watch my brother drown. As equal as we were in strength, Eilam had the dexterous development of a child.

Only when he expelled his final breath and drifted seemingly lifeless on the surface did I let go. “Why are you here? Again?”

Yarin huffed. “Is that a way to welcome your favorite brother?”

“A thoroughly high-handed statement.”

“Considering that Eilam is currently drifting on the water, thinking he’s dead where he cannot die, I presume, gives me some leeway for said statement.” He slipped into the water uninvited, but at least he gestured for the corpse to stay back. “In any case, look what happened to my new toy.”

I didn’t so much see the man’s guts dangling from a gaping wound in his belly, but sense how it bounced and twisted with every shift in his balance. “You broke it.”

“I broke it,” he said, his tone void of any culpability over it. “Luckily, I happen to have a brother who can fix—”

“No.”

“—and I happen to know that I am his favorite, so he would never deny me this small favor.”

“No.”

“Your wife is quite right… What a bastard you are,” he said and leaned his head back against the edge, expelling a breath toward the gray stalactites looming above. “Let me tell you, Enosh, I am no man of casual infatuations, but I have grown quite fond of this one ever since Airensty.”

The corpse bowed, letting his bowels smack against his naked kneecaps. “Thank you, Master.”

“Yes, yes, yes, now hush your mouth and let the gods talk.” Yarin swatted the air until the man stepped back. “Please make him pretty again.”

I glanced over my shoulder at the corpse, naked aside from the thin gold chains decorating his cock. “Whatever do you want with this man?”

Yarin chuckled. “Brother, a god ought to have a preference, and mine is… none. I have no preference. You should try it some—”

Eilam kicked his legs and flailed his arms, heaving in a breath as he wiped his hair from his face, his pitch-black eyes boring into me. “You dare do this to my form?”

“Rude.” Yarin tsked. “Everyone keeps interrupting.”

“Mortals call this drowning,” I said. “One of the better ways to die from my experience, since I am the one bound to my form and all the pain it can endure. Come near my wife, and I shall call upon every bone in the ground until the earth shakes and the land cracks once more, raising an army that will raze kingdoms, continents, the entire world… killing everything that breathes.”

Eilam coughed up a final swell of water, his arms shaky from centuries of avoiding his form. “My brothers’ fondness for mortal bodies confounds me greatly.”

“Ah, yes, spoken like a true virgin who doesn’t know where to put his cock, mostly because he has yet to figure out just where it hangs.” Yarin tapped my shoulder, guiding my attention back to the corpse. “Here is a fantastic proposal from your favorite brother… na, na, na! Hear me out! Fix him, and I shall make your wife love you.”