I hadn’t been expecting the growl that rumbled in his chest, making it shudder against the flat of my palm on his skin. I pressed my soapy

hand into the slashes on his torso, gently washing away the blood and gore from his injury. I focused my attention on my job of getting it clean before it could heal, my heart thumping in my chest uncontrollably.

I looked back up at him through my lashes, finding him staring down at my face, watching me. He didn’t move, didn’t so much as twitch, even as I cleaned the wound that must have been incredibly painful.

A human wouldn’t have survived without being sewn closed, but already the signs of his flesh knitting back together were evident. Pink skin formed over the very edges of the wounds, healing while I cleaned him.

His dark eyes sparkled with the light of a thousand stars enrobed in the shadows of the night, his gaze heavy lidded and jaw clenched. “Are you afraid, Little One?” he asked, something deeper echoing in his voice. An element that tasted like power coated my skin, making my flesh pebble as if the cold of a winter’s storm brushed over me.

“I’m not afraid of you,” I murmured gently, feeling the truth in those words. At least physically; I had no doubt that my body was safe with Caelum. He would never hurt me, never allow anything to harm me. He’d been willing to sacrifice himself to a cave beast to buy me the time to get away to safety.

If I’d doubted his confession of love before, could there ever be any doubt after that?

His answer was quiet, the words hanging in the air with gentle menace. “You should be.”

I swallowed down my nerves and finished cleaning his wounds, shifting my attention to the blood on the rest of his skin and trying to ignore the threat that seemed to hang between us.

No matter what he said in the moments after his battle, I couldn’t bring myself to heed the warning.

He tipped himself back, lowering his hair into the water so I could run my fingers through it and wash it free of the creature’s blood. When he was finally clean, he gleamed like new gold. Something about him seemed stronger, better, after the battle with the monster who would have made a meal out of him.

As if he danced on the edge between something human and something…not.

“When I put my hand between your pretty thighs, will I find you already slick for me?” Caelum asked, the words more a growl than his true voice. I glanced around, my nerves rekindling as I realized that the majority of people who remained in the room watched us intently.

I couldn’t fault them, not with the energy rolling off of Caelum. I couldn’t decide if I was about to be part of a sexual exhibition or a sacrifice.

If he’d fuck me or bleed me.

If I hadn’t trusted him not to hurt me, I might have run, but as it was, I couldn’t make my legs move away. I worried my bottom lip, reconsidering my choice to touch him in the first place.

There were too many eyes, too many witnesses, and I realized with horror that more people had filtered into the bathing cavern as I’d washed him. “You had your chance to walk away,” Caelum said, touching a gentle hand to my cheek. He brushed my hair behind my ear, taking a single step closer until his body pressed against the front of mine.

He was already hard, his length teasing the flesh of my stomach. “But you haven’t answered my question, Estrella. Are you wet for me? Does the idea of them watching me fuck you turn you on as much as it does me?”

“I didn’t think you wanted them to see me,” I whispered, trying to align his desire with his possessiveness. It didn’t make sense, leaving me with the distinct feeling that I was missing something very vital.

“I don’t want them to see you, but I have no qualms with them seeing you take my cock like you were made for me,” he growled, glancing up at

the men who watched. His gaze paused, snagging on someone as I turned to follow it. Jensen stood at the edge of the bath, watching intently while I gulped. His nose was a crooked mess, the skin around his eyes blackening. “Because by the time I’m done with you, they’ll know exactly who you belong to.”

Caelum’s hand brushed over my mark, drawing a startled gasp from me that he swallowed when he crashed his mouth onto mine. He tilted me to where he wanted me, maneuvering me while I struggled to breathe against the force of his assault.

His lips were bruising mine. His fingers were harsh where he gripped the back of my neck in a controlling hold that left me no argument. No place to run, no escape from him.

His hand drifted between my thighs, shoving them wide enough for him to feel me. He took the answer I hadn’t been ready to voice, the distinct slickness of me coating his fingers as he shoved them inside of me and worked my pussy open for the cock that would tear me in two.

He growled into my mouth, the sound resonating through him and into my chest as he walked me backward to the edge of the bathing pool. He lifted me, setting me on the ledge as he had the night he fucked me for the first time. There was no patience in his movements as water sloshed onto the cave floor around me, his hand shoving me until my back struck against the stone floor.

My nipples pebbled with the shock of cooler air, my attention straying as the feeling of eyes on my body threatened to overwhelm me. I squeezed my legs shut, moving to sit up as Caelum’s hand shifted from where he’d pushed me into position to gripping my entire breast in his hand and kneading it.

A strangled moan came from me as I fought to sit up, that punishing grip pressing down firmly enough to keep me rooted to the spot. Pinned in place and on display.

“Show me my fucking cunt,” he ordered, slapping his free hand down on the outside of my thigh when I didn’t immediately relent. “Show them what they will never have.”

I sank my teeth into the inside of my cheek, biting down sharply and squeezing my eyes closed as I slowly spread my legs to Caelum’s invasive stare. He stared down at me, at the space between my legs, and touched gentle fingers to my core that were so at odds with the predatory way he

watched me. “Good girl,” he said, sliding those fingers inside of me. He leaned forward, burying his face into me without pretense.

My back arched, my breasts shoving high toward the ceiling as he devoured me. A low keening sound filled the room, and it took me far too long to realize it came from me. He fucked me with those fingers so relentlessly as he licked my clit, I was rushing toward the precipice of an orgasm immediately.

“Caelum,” I gasped, thrusting a hand into his hair and holding onto him. My hips moved, rising and falling with the motions of his tongue, riding his face as he brought me to pleasure. He nipped at the flesh around the bundle of nerves that he owned, making the skin sting for just a moment before he groaned into me.

My orgasm came like a siege, stealing the breath from my lungs and taking everything from me. All conscious thought was gone as my legs tightened around his head, a scream tearing from my throat as he sucked at my clit and made my climax seem to last forever.

“Mine,” he growled, pulling his face out of my pussy. His golden skin gleamed with my essence, his lips flushed and swollen as he reached rough hands beneath my ass and flipped me in place. My breasts rubbed against the rock as he grasped me around the hips, his fingers digging into my skin in a way that I knew would bruise, had my body not healed faster.

He lifted me off the stone and pulled me toward him, barely allowing my front to touch the stone as my legs slid back into the water. Lower and lower he pulled me, positioning me as he went so that his cock pressed against my entrance.

He left me there, hanging suspended from the ledge with only his hands on my hips to support my weight. He curled his chest over my back, finding my ear with his mouth. “This is the part where you should be afraid, my star.”

I turned to look at him over my shoulder, our eyes connecting for just a brief moment before he thrust forward sharply and pulled my body down at the same time. He impaled me on his cock, filling me so suddenly that I screamed, hanging my head forward.

There was no slow adjustment like he’d given me the night before, just sharp thrusts of his hips as he forced my body to part for him.

I clung to the ledge, grappling for purchase along the rocks as my body jolted with every one of his drives inside me. “Fucking Gods!” I

whimpered, my body squeezed between him and the rock at the edge of the pool. He pressed me flush against it with his brutality, his hands at my hips tipping my ass back to let him get deeper.

Driving between my slightly spread thighs, he fucked me into the wall. One of his hands left my hip, raised to gather my hair in a fist and tip my head to the side and back, so that he could lean in and lick a path up the Mark on my neck and flaunt the bite mark he’d given me there.

“Do you see them watching you?” he asked, murmuring in my ear with a soft, mocking voice that tormented me. His cock stroked in and out of me, battering at my pussy with speed that seemed inhuman.

Uncontrolled. Wild.

I glanced around what little I could, forcing my attention to focus on the people loitering around the room. “Yes,” I whispered hoarsely, unable to force more sound from my throat. It felt scraped raw, as if I’d been screaming for hours and hadn’t even noticed.

“Tonight, when we’re in bed and I’ve got my cock between your legs again, they’ll be lying in their bed, jerking their cocks to the memory of me fucking you. They’ll be wishing they were able to make you scream the way I do, and do you know what I’ll do?” he asked, punctuating the words with a sharp drive against the end of me. “I’ll fill you with so much of my cum that they can smell it on you tomorrow and remember exactly who you belong to.”

I gasped as he shifted the hand that held me around my waist toward my clit, stroking the swollen flesh until I whimpered in his arms, “Gods.”

“If I’m a God, then you have to give me a gift. Those are the rules,” he said, teasing as he moved more slowly inside me. His strokes were still rough, battering hard enough he would likely bruise me, but he moved slowly, giving my body time to build toward a second orgasm that might make me forget my own name. “Do you know what I want?”

I couldn’t form the words to give him a response, couldn’t shift my focus off the heat building inside of me.

“I want you to come. I want you to clench that tight little pussy around my cock and milk the cum from my balls until it’s dripping down your thighs. That’s the only gift I want,” he said, pinching the sensitive skin of my clit and rolling it between his fingers.

I came, my body twitching in his arms as my throat clenched around a silent scream. Caelum groaned, shoving deep inside of me and letting my

orgasm do its job, giving him the gift he’d asked for. Heat filled me as he followed me into bliss, his release coating my insides as he brushed a gentle kiss against my cheekbone.

I swallowed, trying to catch my breath. My eyes stayed closed, pushing away the reality of our audience that would make me undoubtedly regret what I’d allowed to happen, and then reveled in.

Caelum seemed to sense that I needed to retreat, as, in the wake of my orgasm, the eyes watching me were too much. “Come, my star,” Caelum murmured, pulling out of me and drawing away. I followed at his heels, keeping my eyes down as I strode up the steps from the bath.

People stared and a woman handed me a towel but kept her eyes averted from where Caelum’s cock hung down his thigh.

She nodded to me as she helped me wrap the cloth around my body. Caelum stared intently at the inside of my thighs and the mix of water and cum that dripped down my skin until it disappeared from view. He wrapped another towel around his waist, hiding himself from view.

“I’ll have a spare set of clothes brought to your room for each of you,” the woman said, smiling kindly. She was the same one who’d handed me soap when we came in covered in blood. “Go on then. Let the rest of us deal with the storm you’ve created,” she said with a smile, stepping away from me and walking toward one of the men in the room.

He caught her by the waist, bunching the fabric of her dress and tearing it off over her head.

We left, the first sounds of the woman’s moans coming from behind us, accompanied by male grunts of pleasure.