⚔️ An Appropriate Level of Fear
L&W 11: Ares finds himself snagged in a dilemma.
Previously on 6 LITTLE SEEDS:
Ares’ body was like life-giving nectar to her hands. His ragged breathing was an intoxicant. The skin of his godhead felt like molten silk, yet beneath he was all vibrant, proud oak. In the Temple of Love, they sometimes called a god’s phallus his “wand of light” and now she understood. Mesmerized, she explored every line, every bulbous curve, the rippled plain of his belly, the calm seas of his buttocks. She delved into every hot nook in the forest of his crotch hair, and then back up to the aperture where the fount of him would anoint her.
He groaned and clamped fingers in her hair again. “Oh, fuck me.” His nose landed in her hair.
She grinned in breathless elation as she stroked him up and down. “We could arrange that.”
~From: Susceptible
—Start at the beginning
—Mature Content Warnings for this series. Obviously. 👆😜
Also. Nobody calls Persephone by her true name. They call her KORE, “the Maiden,” and it’s pronounced like “ko-ray” or “kora” not like “core of the planet.”
ARES, GOD OF WAR, LORD OF BLOOD-LUST…AND OTHER FORMS OF IT
💥⚔️💥
She’d turned him into a spinning warship, caught in the spiral of that maelstrom she wielded. It was inside her, all around her. Drawn in, he blessed her, cursed her—cursed himself as he yielded, crumbled, and fell nose-first into that rose-gold mane. So much heat in those tiny hands! And strength. As Kore stroked him off, he slid his fingers into her hair, clenched again. Hard. She gasped at the ferocity of it, then moaned out a sigh that stoked his blaze to an excruciating demand.
A stiff, unyielding demand. His lips found her throat. His other hand found her ass.
In every direction, his devotees chanted, “Ares! Ares! Ares!”
The rush of their worship blinded him for a second, then it tightened his focus. Tightened his sack. Just like when every warrior on either side of a battle paused to watch him in single combat, their cheers pumped vigor into his every movement. Their exultation made him roaring hard. And ready.
When one of her nails scraped up the under-side of his balls, tracing the seam, he saw red—the delicious kind. It was all delicious. His knees shuddered and he threw his head back. “Goddess, I would slaughter bulls for you—and I love bulls. Way more than I love mortals. Even my own ruthless fuckers.”
She flinched back with her face screwed up like his words were the oddest thing she’d ever heard. “I—um…” Shaking her head, she laughed and touched his cheek. “That’s…sweet, darling, but you don’t need to do that.”
“Not need. Want.” He pushed her hand back down to his crotch, then jerked himself off inside her grip. “Oh, fuck, I’d bathe you in their blood. Put you under the sacrificial grate. Shower it upon you and draw blessings all over you with my gory fingers.”
She chuckled and shook her head. “Save the bulls, Ares. I would rather find myself beneath you, and be bathed in your divine seed.”
A surprised noise came up his throat as he stared down at her.
That sounded pretty good, too.
Her head tipped back to offer up that vulnerable target of her throat. There was one tattooed rose there, just beneath the hollow. He liked her wearing the symbol of his Lady Love. It was white. Pure like Kore. Its vine trailed straight down into the valley that disappeared beneath her chiton. He dove in—could practically taste the girl’s ichor, just there beneath her skin. He wondered how sweet it was. He wanted to taste her everything.
Releasing her hands, he clamped covetous meathooks around her perfect meaty haunches. He yanked her against him so he could burrow his face inside the fragrant neckline of her dress, kissing, raking with his teeth.
She arched up to meet him, panting out her own need. One of her arms snaked around the back of his neck until her fingers reached the front of his throat. She used her nail again, tracing the sensitive hollow. Her leg twined around one of his like a vine and cinched tight. He had to shift his foot to keep his balance. She kept trying to rub him between the press of their bodies.
He kept trying to get his hands and mouth full of her. His fingers slid downward, onto the backs of her thighs. Through her short, silky chiton, he could feel how muscular she was. That surprised him. He never would have imagined that dancing and prancing in the flowers would be that much hard work. Whatever. I’ll take it.
He wondered how tightly those legs could hold onto his bucking hips. Wondered if they could choke him out, smother him, fuck! The way her ass tilted up into his grip, the way her breathing sped, he could feel what she needed. He reached inward across one of her inner thighs.
She clung to him harder. “Ares!” she sobbed, the sound of ecstatic release that needed and needed and needed to explode. It had to have been building over centuries, the way Earth Mama had kept her locked up in that big garden of theirs. The rawness of her voice and the ache that pumped out from her aura was as deft as a digger, undermining every wall he knew he should erect between himself and his blinded cravings.
Only one goddess had ever done him in like that. Everybody had said that the Bringer of Blossomtime’s beauty rivaled Aphrodite’s. Was it horrible that he was in complete agreement? Lady Love would probably tackle him down a mountain and try to take his head off for that.
Mmm. I’ll take that, too.
Kore’s whisper snaked through his hair along with her fingers. Yes, lover, yes! Join with me. We’ve waited too long. Take me as your own and offer yourself unto me. Let us become One for all time. Her black sea surged over him again. Her embrace tightened. “Oh, Ares. Oh, yes, at last!” Her scent was like one of Aphrodite’s potions, as if the Goddess of Love had tattooed those roses with her own diabolical hands. The skin he licked was an intoxicating brew. Undeniable. Lethal.
Permanent.
“Fuck!” He tore himself away and pushed her back. His palms stayed out front, a barrier to her advance. “Stop. We can’t do this.”
“What? Darling—”
His war spear materialized in his hand and he thrust it up under her chin. “Don’t.”
Her eyebrows raised. Then her gaze lowered to take it in. Unconcerned, she locked eyes with him, once again wearing that baffled twist to her features.
He huffed in stunned insult. “Are you too ignorant or too arrogant to feel an appropriate level of fear when the God of War shoves a weapon in your face?”
“Neither,” she murmured. “My valiant one, I know the devastation you could wreak with it, and how easily you could do so. But I also know that you never would.”
He pushed the tip up against her skin. “Pretty certain of yourself.”
“No.” She leaned in farther. “I’m certain of you. Of us. I trust you. We were given to each other by the Fates.”
He snorted. “They tell you that?”
“Yes. In every vibration of your voice. In every whiff of your scent. In every note of your song and in the harmonies we weave together, they told me that you are mine and I am yours.”
“Is that right.” His words shot out more bitterly than he’d wanted to show. He’d never liked the Fates. Three tittering bitches spinning one long, cruel jest of back-stabbery, with the most undeserving brutes perching on glittery thrones. Ares’ primary wish was to have the last laugh in their blood-nectar schemes. What else was there to do? Cry and whine about it?
His let out a tight-lipped, glowering sniff down his nose. “Well, the Fates can choke on my three sharpest spears if they think I’m gonna be happy about anything they wanna give me. Their gifts always demand too high a price, so I carve my own fuckin’ path and I take the gifts I want.”
“Then take me,” Kore said, draped in that moon-eyed swoon of the devotedly swindled. “I’m yours already.” Her delicate hands slid along the haft of his weapon and grasped. All he wanted was to replace it with the other. Her head shifted sideways. Her eyes glinted. Then her lips caressed the glinting spearhead. Her eyelids closed. Her mouth opened—
He yanked the spear away and hid it behind him. “Don’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“You know damn well why not.” Because you know I’ll cave.
Her eyes kept staring. Questioning. Delving. She blinked once and he realized—
Unholy damn.
She didn’t. She had no clue. She was so naive that she didn’t understand the full extent of what she was doing to him. There was nothing in her actions except instinctual desire, pumped by the bellows of his temple’s whispers. Those whispers were always the same. Now. There. Strike now. And so she did. There was no plotting, no strategy, no scheme to crumble his defenses. She just plain wanted him, and that was a thousand times more dangerous than any tactic or manipulation.
Aphrodite already leveled him with that shit on a constant basis. Roses, after all, were full of thorns. He did not need two of them doing it. With the stain of ill-fortune smeared all over his divine thread, they would probably team up against him. Which, now that he thought about it, sounded soooo, so hot. All right, maybe the Fates didn’t hate him after—
“Dammit!” His shook his head clear it, and pointed at the Flinger of Heart-Eating Blossoms. “No.”
Kore’s brows twitched. So did her bottom lip. Her gaze searched his, trying to find a way in. “I don’t understand. How can you not feel it?”
“Oh, I feel it, all right.” He could feel it from there—what it would be like to jam her down on his blade in front of his cheering, drooling entourage. To keep slamming her up and down on it until he broke her in half while she begged him to never stop. What it would feel like to be slammed onto the stones by the storm surge of her lust and—
“And no,” he said more emphatically.
She blinked those big eyes at him again, the thousand-year-old ingenue with a toddler's curiosity and a newborn’s uncontrolled hungers. “Why?”
That did almost break him.
About-facing, he squeezed his eyes shut. He clenched his hand into a fist to keep it from clenching her. His other fingers gripped so tightly around the haft of his spear that they glowed with ruddy light. He knew what would happen if he yielded. At best, she would halt him just when things were really starting to get good. She’d keep him suspended in ecstatic agony until he begged Demeter to bind him in the shackles of a marriage he could never faithfully fulfill.
At worst, Kore would let him ravish her right here—might even demand it herself—and that would bring the Sickle of Doom slicing down on his everything. He was pretty sure Zeus still had it, the adamantine weapon that could castrate a god, or take his head. Demeter’s blade could do the same. And then there was the weapon Kore wielded in her empty hands. If she could nearly drown him in one kiss of infatuation, he did not want to know what she would do once he disappointed her, because he was going to have to reject her.
Reject her or marry her.
That would be the worst thing that could ever happen, because he would then become his father, forever sneaking around as he tried to keep her from learning about his affairs. Forever promising her a bunch of lies while trying to escape her wrath—a thing he did not want to experience.
Except that he really, really did.
Blast me and skull-fuck me.
Even if he could acclimate to letting himself fall into Kore’s maelstrom, he had promised himself centuries ago that he would never follow in his father’s footsteps. He would never apologize or hide or make excuses or lie about pursuing his desires wherever, whenever, and however the fuck he wished. That’s why he and Aphrodite went so well together. She was the same.
Kore would never stand for it. He could taste it in her uncompromising kiss. Such a deep streak of Demeter in her. As rich and ample as the Earth. As possessive as creeper-vines, with lust like a battering ram. Explosive and relentless.
Single-directional.
Ares was more…well, he welcomed any and all challengers at any moment they wanted to throw down, so he forced himself to keep his back turned on the Bringer of Carnivorous Crape Myrtle. More like Creep Myrtle. Wading into the midst of his triumphal celebration, he chucked his spear into its slot on the wall. Over his shoulder, he growled, “Go home, Kore. Now. Before your mother finds you here.”
Or before my bulkheads break and your parents obliterate me.
Once at a safe distance, barricaded by his comrades, he set his jaw, crossed his arms and stared her down, hoping that his blazing aura would quell the girl from swirling up like one of the Underworld’s Furies to take his throat out.
How insane am I that I want her to come at me so badly? Because he knew exactly what they'd wind up doing if they clashed together, and then he truly would be fucked for eternity.
No need to worry. The girl had no idea the destructive power that dwelled within her, much less how to wield it. Even his temple couldn’t override everything that glowed so steadfastly in her sentimental little heart. For all her fangs and fire, she was made more from love than from the lava seams of her lust. They infiltrated every fertile stretch of her, scorching and brilliant.
But they were still only seams. Not her base makeup.
Confusion wrinkled her brow. She shot him a million baffled questions in one look. He hardened his stance—and his heart. A well-honed maneuver.
The hopeful glow in her face crumbled into bleak despair. After a few seconds, it melted down to deflate her ribcage. She turned and shuffled in a daze toward the exit, cutting a swath through the crowd of curious, sneering, and vindicated gawkers. Like every other one of her expressions, she didn’t try to hide her embarrassment, but that was nothing compared to her shock. Her sorrow smelled downright inconsolable.
Oh, damn-fuck.
There were times when being a cutthroat brute…
Well, when it cut both ways.
She looked back at him once and her eyes teared up—like a barb through the heart. It lodged in there more deeply than he would have admitted to anybody. He took a quick scan of his surroundings, expecting to find Eros fluttering on his cherub wings with a, “Tee-hee,” of glee, but only the Temple of War’s grisly court leered back.
Curse that boy. I should have never given him those arrows.
When some slurring drunkard stumbled into Kore, then tossed a lecherous advance at her back, she rounded on him. Her nostrils flared. Her eyes went that shadowy shade of green—so damn gorgeous. The temple drooled again and kissed her twinkly toes, so Ares yanked the carving knife from the roast boar and flung it between twenty-three milling bodies. It lodged in the base of the idiot’s skull. “Kore, wait,” he said, and crossed the fifty feet between them in less than a blink, transpiring over her shoulder.
As the corpse crumpled at the girl’s feet, she glared at him. “Ares!”
“What? He was destined to die in battle tomorrow anyway.”
Clutching her hands to her heart, she turned back to the lifeless body, drew in a shaky breath, squeaked out a heartbroken whimper. He rolled his eyes, wondering how in blazes such a wispy, sensitive thing had practically sucked his and Eris’ souls out through their faces. The rosy-cheeked cherub stood gawking at the heap of dead flesh and the shade slowly detaching from it. After a few curious blinks, she tilted her head and leaned in for a closer look. Her hand reached out. Her fingertips lit up.
“Kore!” Before she could touch the ghost, Ares snatched her and dragged her away, planting her in an out-of-the-way corner with her back to the corpse. “Just…wait here. Don’t talk to anyone. Don’t touch anything. Don’t eat any of my food or drink anything anybody offers you. And for my ass’s sake, don’t give my temple any more reason to corrupt you more than it already has. All right?”
Wordless and miserable, she lowered her head and nodded.
“Good.” A breath blasted out his mouth. He made himself ignore the huge, pleading eyes as he said, “All right. I’ll be right back. And I mean it. Don’t go anywhere. Just let me arrange an escort to see you home.”
Her head shot up and she stared at him in horror. He might have suggested that she hump Hephaistos’ lame leg as entertainment for the Olympian court. “N-no! I thank you, but that’s not necessary.”
“And I say it is. As much for the safety of my reputation as it is for yours.”
And for anyone foolish enough to tangle with you along the way when you’re drunk on my mouth and my greedy meathooks.
As he stalked through his grinning, back-clapping, worship-strewing court, he couldn’t help one more glance over his shoulder. Kore hadn’t moved, but she’d gone back to staring at that ghost.
UP NEXT: Much to Eros’ consternation, YOU CAN’T HURRY LOVE.
Curious to start at the first chapter now?
For your bookmarking ease of The 2nd Seed:
The entire playlist of songs that I listen to for inspiration while working on this series:
—On YouTube
—On Spotify
© 2015 Hartebeast