of shadows in darkness that i used to own

ix. the throats of gods

She sampled the wine that soaked his tongue, as sanguine as his lips—latching like a vise, dripping sweetly from his open mouth.

Loki's bedchambers opened to them like a cave. This time, as she pulled him in, Sif took her time to look. The space suited him, with its sparse arrangement of fine woods and furs, giving way to an absurdity of books; though they littered the shelves, not a tome lay out of place. Arrays of ornate wooden statues neatly stood atop a nearby table. A few among them caught her eye: a fork-tongued serpent with scales like fish, the fat bulge of a bovid's hip, a raven's smart-curving claw.

"I see no goats here, for one who so loves them." She raised her brow to him and grinned.

(In response, his arms encircled and his tongue touched her neck; a flare of liquid pleasure coiled to her stomach, shooting rapture to her cunt.)

They scrambled for his bed without ceremony, between his low growls and her gasps; they tangled in the soft caress of silk and furs. Sif might have admired their richness, if not otherwise disposed.

Loki's body over her cast a shadow. Sif couldn't remember when her clothing left her head; only the way his naked form drove her to distraction. There was something beautiful and austere in his slender shape, the white-blue skin, the way it blossomed by her hands. In settling them down, Loki allowed her to pin and touch him, to look and taste; he drank her impatience, her worried fingers in the wefts of hair, the sticky seal of bruising lips.

(She bruised to keep, to steal, to suck the poison from his heart.)

From Loki's goblet poured the wine; after Sif drank, he shifted to lay her down, forging a space between her wanting legs. Loki pressed feathers into Sif's bare skin; expecting resistance, he clicked his tongue when she made a fist and shoved it not toward him, but into her own gasping mouth. The hand that remained grasped his hair like a plea, pulling him down into her water.

"You crave this," Loki murmured; he sucked magic with his teeth before she could retort.

Loki's tongue was braided silk, unblemished silver, gliding whisper-currents of impure bliss. A raw and languid provocation. Sif choked and whined, pulling his wrist from her breast to tend to the ache; Loki laughed like tinkling bells, his fingers blooming in her, nose grazing the sparse swirls of unspoiled hair.

(Gold, like her hair had been. So there were some places his wickedness couldn't reach.)

Sif scratched at his scalp, gripped as to crush; he knew, even as she swallowed him, the hot source of her want. From Loki's lips and fingers and tongue flowed magic; he pumped and sucked and soaked her release, again and again and again. He made sustenance of every scream.

(Sif didn't know and didn't trust whether this act was thrill or favor, no more than she knew how to conceal the bitter truth—that Loki, his darkness and his flaws entire, were exactly the things that she craved.)

When he surfaced to face her, she hooked him immediately. Dauntless, she fitted her legs around his waist. Her hair spilled into and between them, like leaves struck from a tree. Against them, Loki's cock trembled. She took it; angry and stiff, it wept by her hand.

Loki hissed at the slow pace, but felt himself taken by Sif's game even so. His eyes fell shut; her laughter shook through him.

"See how you like it," she mocked, her tone playful, breathless. "Which among us is the craven one?"

Like a raptor she swooped to take his lip between her teeth. It burned where their hips met, the angle, muscle and bone and the wet path his cock left to the unsullied skin. The awkward jut of her movements only made him more aroused; he throbbed to think of the haughty Sif so unversed. "You are a sublimely undisciplined lover," Loki whispered long and lethal to Sif's open mouth. "And you burn for me."

Sif sinking was a cataclysm; her darkness engulfed all of him. Loki filled her like hot fire, choking the limit of her light. Sif arched; her breasts swelled; Loki took his tongue to the sweat of her neck, pierced her with his needle teeth. She flexed up to him desperately, back to bowed limb, her shadow-wreath hair so fine in his hands. Sif bit love and defiance into Loki's mouth; her mutiny debased him, he who knew that even Gods could not change their fates.

Sif besieged him; he razed her. He drove into her endlessly. In Loki's labyrinth-bed, Sif bonded him to her; with self-sought fury, she laid him to waste. Her mouth scorched his face. Every inch of her sealed him. Everywhere, she labored—her breath, her hands at Loki's throat, her ankles beating into the drum of his spine.

The gods would forsake the Nine Realms to behold her as she moved.

(I will bind you to me), Loki breathed-not-breathed into Sif's drowning locks. (You will be mine and mine alone.)

Resistance, always. She pried herself up and slammed back again. Her flesh and warm swallowed him whole.

When Sif breathed (Loki), with not teeth but mind, he shot into her like a flood. It unraveled his tongue, so fine and fierce as she was, so drenched by his seed, her blood. It gleamed like a wink on a blade. Sif's fingers held tight to his windpipe, her face concealed by his throat. He dragged her up by the hair so that he could look as she came. The universe diminished to her alone.

When they returned to their bodies, Loki continued to fondle her hair. Too spent to fight, Sif imprinted moons in his skin. She buried herself in his silver and her shame.

(Before she fell to sleep, Sif swore she caught something metal and gleaming in the far corner of the room; but when she looked back, it had vanished.)

-   x   -

"Your supper," Sif barks, setting the chrome platter before his wanting eyes, releasing the restraints with an automatic ease.

Loki looks at her expectantly.

"Have you something to say?" she bites. Sif's posture is indecipherable, but there is comfort in her torrid face.

Loki says nothing, reveals nothing; but as he siphons the fire from Sif's eyes, his mind conjures the image of a fire-haired woman with whom he had once bartered, behind the glass walls of a prison not unlike this one.

(He disremembers the bit where the Widow had fooled him.)

"What blood we have drawn to these ledgers." Loki's tone drips venom. Sputtering his amusement, he laughs and laughs.

The fetter and cuffs fall from Sif's hands with a devastating clang. Blades snap to her palms faster than Loki can see.

"Love is for children, indeed," he spits. It's the last thing he says before the guards burst in.

Night falls. Far beyond the golden palace a young buck watches as a single star blinks its last breath and dies, fading soundlessly into the all-entrenching sky.