Page 71 of Patron of Mercy

His own patience shattered, and he lifted Thanatos up. With one hand, he steadied his cock. Thanatos’s arms twined around his neck for balance, and he sank onto Lach steadily.

They moved slowly, bent as they were and curled around each other. There wasn’t much space, but Lach could hardly lament that it forced him to stay buried in the man he loved. It was a gentle rock, and Lach kissed everywhere he could reach—Thanatos’s sharp cheeks, the line of his jaw, his fluttering eyelids. When Thanatos gripped his shoulders hard, arching his back, it changed the angle of Lach’s thrust. The sound Thanatos made when he cried out—Lach couldn’t imagine ever wanting to hear anything else.

“Lean back,” Lach said, pressing a hand to the center of his chest. Biting his lip, Thanatos did as Lach asked. He had to hold himself up on his hands, braced on either side of Lach’s calves on the mattress, with his legs bent beside Lach’s chest. Like that, he was completely open to Lach, all smooth, gorgeous skin. Unable to help himself, he glanced down to watch his dick sink into Thanatos. He thrust deeper, gratified at the low rumble of a moan. “You’re so beautiful,” Lach breathed, catching his eye again as Thanatos worried his bottom lip with his teeth.

With Thanatos over him, covered in a thin sheen of sweat that looked as gold as his eyes in the light and trapped prone by the effort of holding himself like that, Lach was lost. He reached out to wrap his hand around Thanatos’s dick. He stroked in time with his thrusts, losing himself in that tight, clenching heat until Thanatos cried out, spilling over his hand and dragging Lach over the edge with him.

His arms shuddered and gave out, and Thanatos collapsed, panting, on top of his legs. Lach grinned. It was an enormous ego boost to think he could wear out a god, even if it was only because Thanatos let him.

He shimmied out from under Thanatos only to curl around his side and bury his head in the god’s shoulder. His arm looped around Thanatos’s waist, and he pressed a short kiss against the corner of his jaw. The mess could wait; the world could wait. All Lach needed was right there in his arms.

Like Jaws

It was not a surprise that Lach slept quickly. Even with Gaia’s intervention, he’d lost a lot of blood. And been stabbed.

Some small part of Thanatos wanted to blame the mess on himself—to say that if he hadn’t been there, Lach wouldn’t have gotten into trouble. It simply wasn’t true though. Lach was good at getting himself into trouble, and it was likely that even without Thanatos, he’d have found himself on Palea Kameni.

But if they hadn’t spent the last few weeks together, if Lach hadn’t thought he could reach out to Thanatos... That didn’t bear thinking about. He shivered and pulled Lach closer, as though to warm him.

He was almost angelic in his sleep. Gold-tipped brown lashes so long they rested against his cheeks, no tightness around his eyes or mouth to show the tension he constantly carried inside. No anger or fear or worry, as he’d cycled through over the last few weeks. He let out a little snore, then snuffled and buried his face against Thanatos’s chest.

Thanatos ran a hand through his hair absentmindedly. It was probably socially unacceptable to lie there and watch his lover sleep, but considering his night, what he’d almost lost, he thought he’d earned a bit of a pass. It wasn’t as though Lach would be offended.

He spent hours like that, holding Lach and thinking about what had happened and how it all could have gone wrong. Sometime in the middle of the night, his thoughts turned into something else. They turned to what came next. What he and Lach could do together.

There were so many places they could visit, things they could do, gods he could introduce to Lach. Charon would have to come first, and it would take some careful work to do that. His brother was going to go protective, no doubt, given how it had gone the last time they had spoken on the subject of Lach.

Charon would get over it. He would have to.

Then there was Hebe. It wasn’t that the goddess of youth needed to convince Lach about the merits of a smartphone—though she did—there was the matter of Lach getting injured twice in less than a week. Thanatos couldn’t live with that kind of fear, and for the first time in his existence, he was going to be completely selfish about something.

He was going to ask Lach to give up Elysium forever. Well, he could visit, as Thanatos did. But once one partook of ambrosia, they forever gave up mortality and its benefits. Even though Lach had expressed disinterest in the afterlife, part of Thanatos felt as though he were asking for too much. Lach would laugh and roll his eyes, but it wasn’t simply immortality. It was forever.

Not much could truly kill a god, and for those few who had died, no one knew if anything came after. Thanatos doubted it. They had come from nothing, and it seemed reasonable that they would return to nothing when they faded or were killed.

He would have to make all of that crystal clear to Lach, not that he’d listen. He’d wave it away and tell Thanatos he was worrying too much. It was possible; Thanatos did that. But there was still a big difference between a few thousand years and forever.

That didn’t matter, in the end. Thanatos was going to offer, because he wanted Lach forever. After that, it was all up to Lach.

In the gray hour before dawn, there was a soft tap on the door.

Thanatos carefully peeled himself away from Lach, jostling him as little as possible. He took the pillow he’d been resting his head on and slipped it into Lach’s arms. Lach squeezed it, then grumbled something unintelligible but vaguely displeased. He didn’t sit up, though, so Thanatos slipped into his pants and tiptoed over to the door. The lock clicked loudly when he slid it open, but there wasn’t much he could do about that.

He opened the door to find a manic-looking Hermes, bouncing on the balls of his feet as though he could barely contain himself.

“I take it the, um... cultists are all in custody? They are some kind of cult, right?”

Hermes gave a sharp nod. “Sure are. And I think I got them. At least most of them.”

Thanatos narrowed his eyes in the other god’s direction. “Most of them? You realize what they were trying—”

“I don’t think they got away,” Hermes corrected. “Just a couple of them got to their boat and gunned it for the island.”

He brought a hand up in front of himself like he was a toddler playing with toy vehicles. He zoomed one along in front of himself as though it were a fast boat. Thanatos half expected him to make a little “vroom” noise.

“Then the weirdest thing happened.”

With his other hand, Hermes mimed something coming up from beneath the imaginary waterline and smashing into the first. “It was wicked cool, likeJawsor something,” he exclaimed, like an excited child. “But the thing is, the boat capsized, and I have no idea what happened to the dudes. Water is so not my element. They might be dead. Can humans swim for miles?”

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