Kagome knew. She knew it as surely as she felt his cock stirring to life against her. At the sensation, she was alert, intent.

No, there was no going back from this paradigm shift that had transpired between them, this twisted perversion of the familial bond she’d once believed they’d shared. When exactly it had occurred Kagome was less certain. She hesitated to look too far back, for fear her despair at some past discovery might overwhelm her.

So she fixed her mind instead upon what came to her first.

“Sometimes I wonder,” she mused aloud, “what might have happened if you’d come upon me instead of Mayuri. Would you have been very angry, if you’d discovered me there at the castle, instead of at home like you’d thought?”

“Of course I would have been angry,” Sesshoumaru said, his thumb tracing along the taut seam of her shoulder and chest. “I am always angry when you defy me.”

He said this with no particular inflection, just his usual tone of cool self-assurance. Despite herself, Kagome admired it. She had always admired how he spoke, even when they were enemies. There was a dark lustrous quality to his speech. Edged like fine steel or finished like polished leather, his voice could be as hard as flint or as supple as a lash. But that strength of command was there beneath it, always.

It drew one’s attention. It demanded respect. Not that she respected him anymore, not really.

But he drew her all the same.

“Tell me what you would have done,” Kagome murmured, “if you’d found me that night.”

“Dragged you back here by the heels, without question.”

Whether he meant this figuratively or not was difficult to tell. But Kagome liked the image. Minutely, she shifted against him, and felt his cock twitch in response.

“That’s all?” she prompted.

“It would have depended on how contrite you were,” he replied, now shaping the curve of his thumb more fully to her breast, and digging in his claw. “But even if you did seem penitent enough, you still would not have found me so easy to appease. Tearful apologies have never moved me much.”

Well, she could certainly feel him moving now: he was growing hotter and thicker by the second. “I guess the sight of me on my knees would have been a good start.”

“Only if you were naked and looking to oblige me to the fullest.”

“Well, I think that goes without saying,” Kagome replied. Her voice was breathy, her cheeks heating purely because of the fact that he’d said it. “But you have to remember, I’d have had no idea what I was in for yet with you.”

“And I would have relished you being daunted by the prospect of servicing me,” he faintly rumbled, hauling her back against him in earnest when she shied away from the punishing arc of his shaft. “But does it seem such an impossible task to you now?”

“I don’t know,” Kagome said honestly, biting her lip at the pain that radiated from her aching tailbone. “I’ve never taken a cock as big as yours, but I would’ve put on a brave face, at least.”

Sesshoumaru chuckled, and the sound was so drenched in sex that Kagome felt positively dry by comparison. “A brave face is all that’s required.”

She laughed a little huskily herself. “Is my mouth really all you’d have wanted? Seems like a waste to me. Of all the ways a woman can yield herself to a man, that one’s the shallowest…”

“I am not a man,” he reminded her unnecessarily, as his youki rose to cloak her from throat to thigh. “But you are right—I would’ve wanted more from you. Rather, I would have needed it—the sort of convincing that only tearing my way into your tight little cunt could provide. Then I would have known that you were fully chastised. Fully yielded.”

She was throbbing now between her legs just as shamelessly as he was. Reiki sizzled along her skin, faintly sparking wherever his aura brushed hers.

But there was a deeper ache in her that this fantasy had aroused. Probing at its edges elicited the most exquisite agony, and between retreat and surrender, Kagome found herself hopelessly torn.

Inuyasha © Rumiko Takahashi