Kagome’s brow furrowed. When had she ever called out his name…? Whether her memory was failing her, or Sesshoumaru was simply starting to say wild things, she couldn’t decide. She didn’t have the luxury to dwell upon it, at any rate, with the way he was plucking and rolling her nipple between his knuckles, as if trying to polish it raw.

“What a fine little bitch you are,” he laughed, the sound growlsome and hair-raising in its dark reverberations. “So soft, yet so resilient.”

The friction was perfectly excruciating. Kagome tossed her head back against his unyielding chest, cursing under her breath. Unable to retreat from him, she lifted the arm not pinned beneath his, and snatched at his wrist instead.

“Stop it, Sesshoumaru,” she hissed out, setting her sparking nails against him, “this isn’t funny!”

But with all the effort of subduing an angry cat, he prized off her smoking, twitching fingers and bent her arm back behind her. For a paralyzing, rage-inducing second, Kagome thought he was guiding her hand back to his cock. Half daring him to, she furled her nails afresh, but Sesshoumaru just chuckled and pressed her wrist to the middle of her back. Her elbow jutted awkwardly. Her shoulder trembled with strain. Sesshoumaru’s fingers threaded through hers, front to back, and the perverted intimacy of the touch was almost as unbearable to her as the maddening abrasion of her breast.

For all the while he’d kept at it, each pinch and scrape against her overwrought nipple sending a frisson of torment careening straight to her sex. She couldn’t escape him now—not without causing a scene. He knew this, of course, knew she wouldn’t risk that kind of fallout. He’d trapped her to him knowing full well that she wouldn’t. Even the rosary was useless to her; speaking the word of subjugation would only send them both crashing down through the floorboards.

Chest heaving, Kagome thrashed in place. She rampaged internally, hating him with every fiber of her being. She hated him so desperately, so intensely, that after a small eternity of heated stewing, she began to grow delirious with it, began almost to savor it, even—this dizzying animosity toward him that she felt.

It was darkly blissful, this sensation. As she luxuriated in it, her body grew lax to the point of abandon. The very boundaries of her flesh seemed to blur and dissolve, to become formless and vast. As if in giving herself over to the base desires of her heart, she had stepped beyond the trappings of priestesshood, of womanhood, even of humanity. She was a creature only of spirit—spirit and primal feeling.

Her damp bangs adhered to her brow. Her eyes were glazed over, as if with fever. But her muscles were languid. Her breathing was level and easy. In her state of surreal detachment, she experienced all that was happening to her as if it were happening outside of herself. Even her boiling lust had softened to a simmer. Radiating out from her belly, it suffused her with a heady warmth she’d never found at the bottom of any bottle. The strokes of Sesshoumaru’s claws over her breast sent only the most muted, tranquil waves of desire rippling through her.

Or maybe it was just that his handling of her had softened in turn. Kagome didn’t know. She didn’t care. In this moment of dazed surrender, she was beyond caring.

She only wanted to feel.

When his claws slit through the sash of her robe, all she felt was relief. When they trailed down toward the splay of her legs, all she felt was the most exquisite dread.

Her breath caught in her throat, all her greatest fears realized in the instant when he touched his claws to the outer fringes of her sex.

Inuyasha © Rumiko Takahashi