The other part of me, that beast inside me that prowled around and looked so tempting, wanted him. It wanted to taste him, to take from him, to pull sounds of pleasure from him until I was strong and well fed.
I’d have done it before, but a flash of Hera in my head made my stomach clench. I really didn’t want to… I didn’t want to sully myself like this, to give in to what I knew would cause me to hate myself even more. I wanted to be better for Hera.
“I want to see the sky,” I said. “I want to stare up at the stars and stretch out and just watch the night sky.”
He slid his hand up my arm before he rose from his seat. He was taller than I was, more muscular. Of course, that didn’t mean much when comparing a human to a shade. Even as an incubus, I had more strength than any human. “I wish I could take you out there. I bet you’d look good in the moonlight,” he whispered.
The pretty words made me sick. I heard them all the time, people who saw no deeper than my body, than my use to them, than the feelings I could give to them. They never saw who I was, didn’t see the bad sides of me, the difficult ones, the ugly parts of me. No, I was just a pretty face and an orgasm dispenser to them.
Even people I cared about saw me as little more. Why did Brax agree to let me do this? Because he knew that it was all I could do, that selling myself for information was the only way I could contribute.
Again, Hera’s face flashed in my head, the way she’d rolled me the bottle of water when I’d been starving, the way she’d given me pleasure, something I’d never experienced before.
Why? Why did she have to do that? Why had she made me recognize and face what I really wanted, so now the rest of this felt so much worse?
I sighed softly when the guard’s hand drifted below my shirt, when his fingers touched my abs, when they traced the line of my sweats. “I can’t get you outside. They track that and only let them out for work.”
“What about the roof?” I asked, knowing he was too drunk with lust to think carefully, to guess that my question might be strange or suspicious.
He shook his head. “Only the Warden and her assistant have keys to the roof.”
“I was so looking forward to that,” I whispered, like a lover pouting.
He groaned before reaching his hand into my sweats. I hated myself all the more for my body reacting, for how when he cupped my groin, I was hard no matter how much I didn’t want any of this. I felt no pleasure, no desire, nothing but my incubus, as if it laughed happily over it.
Then again, it didn’t give a damn where we fed from. It didn’t care how I felt or what I wanted, so long as it could devour, so long as it could get what it craved.
“Maybe I can see,” he whispered as he pressed his lips to my throat. “The Warden wouldn’t hand one over, but her assistant? She might be willing to…”
That made me frown as I recalled the assistant, Nisha, the woman who had come on to me just the other day.
The day when Hera had knocked her over for me. I still hadn’t mentioned it to Hera, not sure how to approach it. I wasn’t used to people looking out for me other than Brax. Why had she done that? Why risk herself for me?
It wasn’t as if she’d even tasted what I could offer… That thought almost shamed me. I’d let her get on her knees for me, had let her give me something that special, and what had I done for her? I’d turned her down every time she tried to get closer to me.
The guard scraped his teeth over my pulse to get me in the mood.
Who was I kidding? He didn’t give a damn about my mood—if I enjoyed it, if I wanted it. He only cared about getting what he’d come for, only wanted to use me.
He drowned in lust, and my incubus all but purred, ready to drop to my knees, to become whatever he wanted. It was part of what I was, the ability to sense what my partner craved and to become that.
At the start, I’d had fun as an object of desire, but now? I hated it. I hated how I shifted and changed. This man was more submissive, which meant I felt myself rising to that occasion, to become rougher, more dominant, to turn into the perfect lover for him.
But I wanted to beme.Whoever that was, I didn’t want to throw it away for the whims of someone else.
So instead of giving in, I wrapped my hand around the man’s throat and pushed him backward, against the wall. He moaned and shuddered at the rough treatment, his eyes clouded, completely taken over by my pheromones.
I could have pushed this more, could have bent him over, could have given him exactly what he wanted and fed off it all. The image of Hera in my head made me hesitate.
Instead, I allowed myself to feed from him. The sexual energy wasn’t ripe, wasn’t from orgasm, from that climax of sensation, so it was like eating greenbananas. I could consume it, but it wasn’t the same, it wasn’t as good, was difficult to get down. I kept pulling it from him until his eyes fluttered closed, until he gasped and groaned in ecstasy and went limp.
I lowered his body to the floor carefully. He’d wake up in a few minutes with no real memory of what had happened, would just assume the sex with me had been so great he’d passed out. I rarely did it this way because it didn’t do much to feed me and could even make me sick. In the past, it had always been better to just give in, to gorge myself on the energy no matter how much I hated myself afterward, but I couldn’t bring myself to do so today.
I stared down at him, my stomach churning as I recalled the touch of his lips on my skin, his hand on my cock, the un-ripe feeling of his energy twisting inside me.
I wanted to see the person whose face had kept appearing to me. My incubus went quiet at that, as if it didn’t like its denied meal or the idea of seeing Hera.
But I couldn’t bring myself to do so, not after that man had touched me, not when I’d allowed it, when I felt as if he’d stained me.