Page 30 of Ma Petite Mort
I find him where the shadows burn deepest behind the altar. Kneeling, silent, soaked in red like he’s been born again from it. His eyes are closed, mouth moving in whispers—Old Norse prayers that sound like violence shaped into music.
“Pretty little thing like you shouldn’t sneak up on monsters,” he murmurs without opening his eyes.
I drop to my knees in front of him, giggling. “Monsters don’t kneel, my god. They devour.”
He opens his eyes. And gods, they look like war.
“You came to worship?” he asks.
I nod, smearing someone else’s blood across my thighs like paint. “Came to offer myself.”
“To the gods?”
“No,” I whisper. “To you.”
He surges forward like a beast unchained. His hands tangle in my hair. His mouth crashes to mine, not soft, not sweet—claiming. I taste ash and copper and divinity.
He pulls away just enough to growl, “Then offer yourself properly, ma petite mort.”
I crawl backward, still laughing, until my back hits the blood-warmed altar stone. I lay myself bare. Open. Legs parted, arms out like a sacrifice laid for slaughter.
“My life for yours,” I whisper, voice breathy and cracked. “My soul for your teeth. My body for your use.”
Bjorn stands, looming, silent.
Then he grabs a handful of blood from the altar basin and drips it over my chest. It trails between my breasts, down my belly, into the heat between my legs.
“I accept,” he growls.
And then he’s on me.
His mouth is at my throat. His fingers bruising my hips. He slides between my thighs like a sword sheathed in flesh and I scream his name into the air like a fucking hymn.
He doesn’t start slow.
He doesn’t start gentle.
First, he tears me open.
Not skin—clothes.
The leather crisscrossing my hips is shredded in his hands, torn away like parchment under fire. He rips the buckles, yanks the fabric aside, and tosses it to the blood-drenched ground. I gasp as the cool air kisses my exposed skin, as he forces me back onto the altar, bare and ready and shaking.
Not from fear.
From need.
He looks down at me like he’s about to carve a rune into my soul. His chest is streaked with red, his fingers still sticky from his last offering. That blood is on me now, too—smeared across my thighs as he pushes them apart and settles between them, dragging two fingers through my slick heat.
“Already soaked,” he murmurs. “You liked watching me kill him.”
I giggle through a moan, eyes half-lidded. “I came when you cracked his ribs open.”
He grunts. Not in disapproval—in pride.
His fingers move deeper, curling, stretching. I buck against them, needy and wicked, a living prayer writhed in sin. But it’s not enough. He knows it. I know it.
And then?—
