The Lady of Edo knelt before the weathered grave. Her weary joints protested the motion. Her head hung heavy as she bowed it to pray, her hair shot through with more silver than she warranted it should. She wasn’t quite yet forty, but it seemed to her that she had lived twice as long as that already. Perhaps it was her untethered soul which had aged her before her time, as the sun had bleached the stone bone-white before her, on this hill where no sheltering trees would grow.

Or perhaps it was only her regrets which had worn her down instead.

Unclasping her hands, she traced her fingertips over the faded characters. The rain and wind had smoothed them to the touch, as if all the forces of nature conspired to erase this name from the earth. Only in her memories did it remain sharply etched. A name, his name.

In her mind’s eye, she saw his face just as sharply. He would die with her, she knew, though he’d been lying in the ground for a quarter of a century now. It had taken her some years to understand this truth, but when no one was alive to remember you, that was when you were truly dead.

There were living wraiths too by that measure, she supposed. It was not a fate she would wish on anyone.

Bootsteps crunched up the gravel path. She knew that stride. She knew, too, that she heard it only because the owner wished her to. She turned with her hands clasped in her lap and gazed upon the frowning face of her lord husband. He cut as dark and imposing a figure as ever, in his black haori. Through the blood-red sash at his waist, a pair of sleek dark swords had been thrust. Whereas she had aged, he had remained somehow unchanged through the decades, clinging to his youth with bitter vehemence. As though he were holding himself out for something—

Or someone.

…

“Pining after the boy captain again, I see.”

Rin jumped. A few leafy herbs spilled over from the basket in her arms. As she bent down to pick them up, she shot a glare toward the fencepost where Ren was reclining.

“Mind your own business,” she said to him hotly.

Wolfishly, Ren sneered back at her.

By the time Rin straightened again, Kohaku and his patrol had passed her by completely.

Ren grinned outright as she glowered. The green straw he’d been chewing tumbled from his lips as his sharp white teeth sheared it through. He sauntered toward her across the yard, spitting out the last bit of chaff. Rin tensed, shooting him a fresh warning glare.

“Easy, little priestess,” the samurai said with a chuckle, raising his gauntleted hands in mock entreaty. “That look of yours could melt through stone.”

Rin lifted her chin to him. “Best heed it then and be on your way.”

Tucking the basket under her arm, she shouldered past him herself. Ren chuckled again, pursing her.

“Such a temper you’re in today, Rin-chan. Is it because your precious Kohaku-kun didn’t spare you so much as a glance? Perhaps his eyes are fixed elsewhere.”

Rin flushed. But she knew as well as he did that Kohaku’s line of sight had been glaring straight past her, toward the temple where he knew Kagome would be holding audience, this time of day. Even before Rin had spied him and stolen out here, she’d known where his sight would be trained. Yet she had put herself out here anyway, hoping.

Always hoping, just to catch his eye for a moment.

To have failed to do so was mortifying enough, without Ren as an audience to her shame. It angered her, the way he furthered her humiliation. He always insisted upon pouring salt into the wound. He was a lowdown scoundrel, and she hated him to the core.

Whirling upon him, she said, “Stop reading into things! I was only here gathering herbs, that’s all.”

The scathing look of false pity he gave her incensed her all the more. “How old are you now, Rin-chan—thirteen, fourteen…?”

“Fifteen,” she snapped, suspecting he knew that full well. “A woman grown.”

“Grown you may be.” Ren’s light eyes raked over her, a scrape of glance so pointed she could feel it through her clothes. His bootsteps made no sound in the grass as he padded toward her. “But you are still just a girl. A fool of a girl,” he added sneering, as she recoiled from him, “to set your sights on one who will never return your attentions. He would make a cold husband for you, Rin-chan, even should you manage to catch him.”

Rin bristled, sick of his unsolicited condescension. “I don’t recall asking for your opinion. What do you care, anyway?”

Ren laughed once more, but when he spoke it seemed some of the biting scorn in his voice had softened. “Isn’t it obvious, Rin-chan?” His tawny eyes sharpened upon her, glinting. “My sights are set on you.”

…

The Lady of Edo wasn’t a fool. She knew that her husband had never loved her. Not as she had loved him. And so it had fallen upon her to bear the crushing burden of his disinterest. Dutifully she had born it for her children’s sake. But now they were grown, the three of them—her daughter and her two sons. As she looked at Kohaku, she asked herself, who was she bearing it for now?

“I thought you might be here,” he said, crossing his arms at the chest. His voice was stern with disapproval. “Our daughter has been searching everywhere for you.”

She glanced aside, frowning as well. “Yet it’s you who’s come to fetch me, Kohaku-kun.”

“Because I didn’t want her to find you like this.”

“Like this?” Her gaze rose to his, cool and even. “Praying for the dead?”

“Praying for him.” Kohaku’s dark eyes flashed as he advanced another crunching step. “What would she think, if she found you here, kneeling in the dirt to pay your respects to some long-dead miscreant? She worries for you enough as it is. Remember yourself, Rin. You are her lady mother.”

“I remember,” she said, unable to keep the bitterness entirely from her tone. Coming from him, this veiled accusation of deceit was too much. “You have your ghosts, Kohaku-kun, and I have mine.” Before she could stop herself, her eyes flashed back at him. “At least mine stay in their graves where they should.”

Kohaku stared at her, as though for a moment he didn’t recognize her at all. She never spoke to him in such a way. Insolence aside, she never so much as alluded to Kagome. Nor did he. It was an unspoken rule between them. A forbidden subject, never to be broached. Yet for all that, her invisible presence loomed ever between them. He was continually resurrecting her, forever summoning her to his mind. What was truly forbidden was for his wife to draw attention to this fact. It was like laying bare a wound he wished both to nurse and conceal. A faint trace of red tinted the high fair bones of Kohaku’s cheeks. Then his dark gaze narrowed, hardened.

He turned upon his heel and strode away, leaving her glaring after him where she knelt. The Lady’s heart weighed heavy as she watched him go—

Another regret to add to the rest.

Her shoulders slumped. Her tired eyes strayed back to the stone behind her. In the dying light of day it seemed palely to glow. The cast of it was gloating to her. Mocking, even.

In her memories, she felt the burn of Ren’s phantom sneer.

…

It had been a horrible day.

Rin had been harassed by Ren, ignored by Kohaku, scolded by Kagome. One turn of misfortune after the next. But the last had been the harshest to endure. Before her own eyes, the lovely pearls Sesshoumaru had gifted her had been purified into dust.

Wretched and bereft, Rin had taken herself off into the twilit woods. By the side of a creek, she pulled her knees to her chest and wept. She had counted on the sound of the rushing current to muffle her sobs, even to her own ears.

But they had silenced his approach as well.

When at last Rin raised her puffy eyes and saw Ren looming over her, one elbow braced lazily against the same broad oak she’d tucked herself against, she scrambled away with an affronted gasp. One of her hands slid into the shallows. Her palm opened on a shard of slippery rock. Cold water seared into the slice. The samurai smiled sharply, as he pushed himself off the tree and reached after her.

“You’ve cut yourself, Rin-chan. Here, let me see.”

Rin snatched her wet, bleeding hand to her chest and glared at him through the gathering dark. “Go away! Please, just leave me alone.”

Ren tisked. Lithely, he crouched down beside her in the moss. His too-bright eyes swept over her, faintly glittering as he took in the tear tracks drying on her cheeks.

“What happened to your pretty necklace?” he asked with feigned remorse. “Did you lose it in the creek?” His mocking gaze met hers. “You shouldn’t be so careless with your treasures.”

Rin’s features crumpled, twisted. Wrathfully, she took him in—his rough roguish brown hair, his tawny eyes, his snide, wolfish grin. She hated wolves and brigands more than anything, and he was the worst of them all. She wanted to hit him. Her shaking hand struck out to do just that—but he caught her wrist easily, and used it to haul her to him instead.

Rin struggled against him, to no avail. His arm was like an iron bar around her waist, locking her in. She could only watch in helpless, squirming disgust as he turned her captured wrist toward him and rasped his tongue over the bloody gash in her palm. Rin paled, her stomach pitting. Against her raw nerves, his tongue scourged like fire.

“Stop it!” she screamed, thrashing in her distress. “Let me go!”

With a galling chuckle, he lowered her stinging hand from his mouth. “Even your blood tastes sweet,” he said with a leer.

Heart pounding wildly, Rin glared daggers into his laughing eyes. A shrewd look stole into them as he regarded her in turn. Rin felt a split-second of confusion at his sobering expression, before his mouth fell upon hers.

Rin’s eyes flared in shock. Her hands flew to his armored chest, fisted there fruitlessly in desperate outrage. Smooth and firm, his lips moved over hers, smug and unhurried in their hard, claiming slide. Her first kiss, Rin despaired. So brutally stolen from her. Hot angry tears welled in her eyes.

His sharp teeth nipped at her lower lip then. Her cry of pain was strangled, indignant. He growled at the sound, and she heard the hunger in it, even before he forced his way into her mouth. His tongue was rough against hers, broad and slick and possessing. It seemed to be everywhere, a presence inside her which was so utterly foreign and invasive. Briefly, she was bewildered by the shock of the sensation. Overwhelmed by it. The dark, flooding taste of him was impossible for her mind to describe.

He plundered her mouth like he was a drowning man, and only her stolen breath could save him.

She sweltered beneath it. Stifled beneath it. This was hot, messy, wet. Jarring to the bone every time his teeth clashed with hers. There was nothing chaste in it. Nothing like what she’d imagined a proper kiss would be. It was making her sweat, making her feel dizzy. It was turning her stomach into knots.

When his tongue withdrew only to thrust back in, white, wild panic flared within her. A formless animal fear that had her teeth clamping down. The taste of his blood was iron, black and bitter.

Ren gave a muffled swear, releasing her at last. As Rin shoved away from him and lurched to her feet, he spit red from his smirking mouth. The sight of that smirk incensed her.

“You—you thief!” she raged. Panting, she balled her shaking hands into fists. “How dare you?!”

Ren chuckled as he swiped at his bloody lips. “‘Thief‘—is that the worst you can do, kitten? How cute.” His jeering voice hounded after her as she stormed back through the woods toward town. “No other man will kiss you like that, Rin-chan—I swear it!”

…

Ren had been right.

The only other man she had ever kissed had been Kohaku. Chaste and proper was the kindest way to describe it. Cool and perfunctory would be the truest.

He kissed her as though it was a rite he must observe, not something he should take pleasure in. And so she had taken no pleasure in it either. Any attempt she made to deepen it would end as swiftly as she began it. It didn’t take her long to abandon these attempts altogether. Even when they slept together, they kissed like brother and sister, the merest brush of lips, shallow and platonic.

Passionless.

Sometimes, even when they slept together, they didn’t kiss at all. Even when he was sheathed inside her, she felt the ache of his absence. Even when he spilled his seed into her womb, there was no satisfaction in it. It wasn’t as though Kohaku pushed her aside so much as he showed no interest in pulling her to him.

All the advances between them had been hers. Mostly at the beginning, when she still hoped naively that she could find a way to please him, to bring him closer to her through repeated acts of union. Later, only rarely, when she would wish for a child to ease her loneliness. Or some fresh delusion would possess her that sleeping together after such a dearth of encounters would finally endear him to her. But no matter the frequency, the result was the same. Kohaku never denied her. But he never gave her what she hoped for either.

Only she knew the extent of his neglect.

On the surface, he was the perfect husband—noble, strong and respected. He was a good man, a good father; she knew that he loved their children. But even then, towards them, she felt an echo of the remoteness that he felt for her. It grieved her in her heart. But to her children, this was all they knew of him. All they had ever seen. They had no way of knowing themselves that he was not just a cold and distant person.

A mercy, she decided. A mercy that only she should know that he was capable of fierce love, only not for them.

These poor children born of a woman he didn’t love.

The wives of other warlords looked upon her with envy, because Kohaku had never taken so much as a mistress, let alone a concubine. She remained his first and only wife. But she would rather him have had a hundred other wives besides herself, if only he’d been willing to give a fraction of his heart to her.

But he kept all his passion to himself.

She had spied upon him once, early on in their marriage. He used to steal off strangely at times, and the suspicion that he had another woman kept away somewhere had burned her up inside until she’d mustered the nerve to follow after him. He was a difficult man to sneak up on, with his taijiya training. But the crash of the secluded waterfall swallowed up her quiet footsteps just as surely as it swallowed the sounds of his pleasured groaning.

Numbly, she had watched from her hiding place in the ferns, as his muscular arm had moved in that surreptitious, pumping rhythm. She had watched him as if in a trance, tantalized even more by the fact that she couldn’t see his submerged lower half. There was only the mirrored surface of the pool, the roar of the pounding falls. Only the beads of sweat snaking down his sculpted chest. Only the hard lines of concentration etched between his fine dark brows, the drenched splay of his long dark hair over his tensed shoulders as his pleasure peaked and he gasped out a name—

A name that she knew.

A name that was not her own.

Shamefully, miserably wet between the legs, she withdrew, gutted as though a blade had sliced her open down the middle. Back in the palace, she’d sobbed herself to sleep that night, knowing that Kagome’s ghost held more sway over her husband than flesh and blood ever could.

…

The Lady of Edo rose from the dirt. As she started to descend the barren hill, a rattling breath of wind made her pause. She glanced back toward the grave and the withered, skeletal husks of the trees that framed it.

A wild thought came to mind, which she dismissed.

But in hindsight, she saw herself retracing her steps. She saw herself taking up a shovel and excavating Ren’s ashes. A sacrilege, but he wouldn’t see it as such. She saw herself tucking his urn under her arm and taking off into the Western Lands with nothing more than the clothes on her back, as she had thought to do so many long years ago.

She saw herself in that moment as she used to be—all the weathering of time stripped away. A ward of a great demon lord, with limitless prospects outstretched before her.

…

But she returned to the castle instead.

After seeing to her worried daughter, whose own daughter had a stomachache which was nothing for her to soothe, her next thought was to make peace with her husband. But Kohaku was indisposed, the servants told her. She took this to mean that he was drunk. Feeling herself to blame for that, she withdrew to her own court and prepared for bed. She would make amends with him in the morning when he was himself again.

Her husband didn’t drink often, but when he did, she knew well enough to leave him alone. He could be vicious when he was drunk, as all men could be. She didn’t like to think what he might seek to vent upon her tonight.

Laying herself down in the bed that was hers alone, she tossed and turned for the longest time, unable to find rest. When she closed her eyes, she kept seeing the flinty hill, with its scraggly white trees and bleached gravestone. Ren’s ghost perched upon it, silvery and sneering.

She heard his voice in her mind, whispering scathingly to her, as surely as if he were in the room with her now. She tried to shut him out. But he would not leave her be. And so she did something she had never done before.

She let him in.

…

A miracle, that Kagome had at last awakened from her days-long coma. Not an hour had passed that Rin had not spent at her side. Kanako, either, for that matter. But now that Kagome had stirred, they had removed her to her home, where she could rest easier than in this cold and drafty shrine, with only the flickering lights of the sconces to warm it.

Not a day had passed where Kohaku had not visited her. He’d been so grave in his manner that Rin had been almost as concerned for him as for her unconscious mentor. A set of slashes glared from his cheek, as raw and red as the first time Rin had glanced them. But all her efforts to salve and bandage them had been brusquely waved aside.

“What happened?” she had asked him, trying to examine the slash marks.

“A cat scratch,” he’d said flatly, brushing her off yet again.

“If you don’t let me see to them, they’ll scar.”

But Kohaku hadn’t cared. It seemed almost as if he’d wanted them to remain, those marks upon his face. And so Rin had at last desisted—though if that was a cat that had made them, she’d never seen its like.

When she heard the heavy wooden shrine door slide back, her heart leapt at the thought that it might be Kohaku once again. But when she turned it was Ren she saw leaning in the threshold. His tawny eyes were glazed as he smiled indolently at her. In a glance she saw that he was very drunk. The knowledge immediately set her on edge, as he stalked toward her, leaving the door yawning open to the chill darkness beyond—

Before the backward flick of his cleaver of a sword caught the handle and slammed it shut behind him.

“Good little priestess,” the samurai drawled, closing the distance between them, “tending to her pretty candles and her pretty statues.”

With as much calm as she could muster, Rin fixed him with a stern look, as she might a belligerent child. “It’s late, Ren-heichou. You should be in bed.”

His lewd, sheening glance raked over her. “Put me to bed then, Rin-chan, if you dare.” Rin’s hackles rose at this. Drunkenly, Ren snickered. “That’s what I thought. Well then, you’ll just have to put up with me.”

With that, his arm lashed out. A stack of fine incense holders smashed smoking to the floor. Rin tensed, eyeing him warily. Nimble as a hawk, he swept himself up and sat down right upon the gilded altar he’d cleared. From this perch, he leered at her.

“Now, now, Rin-chan, don’t be alarmed. I’ve only come to make confession—” His face screwed up a bit as his features darkened. Balefully, he glanced around them, tugging at the collar of his haori. “Gods damn this stuffy place. It feels like I’m suffocating.”

Rin gave him a pointed look. “This is a sacred shrine,” she said, and when he only continued to peer at her in consternation, she elaborated, “You feel that way because of your demon blood.”

Ren stared at her, seeming truly at a loss. Then, abruptly, he exploded in raucous laughter. Rin paled, uncertain.

“So it’s true!” he exclaimed, laughing uproariously still. “I’m every bit the abomination they said I was. A monster.”

Having no idea who ‘they’ was, Rin said, carefully, “You’re no monster, Ren-heichou. Just a quarter-demon. An eighth, perhaps.”

Peering at him with all the spiritual sight she possessed, she still found it hard to tell what slim fraction he was. Ren’s half-smile was cutting.

“An eighth,” he mused aloud, his slurred voice dripping with scorn. “An eighth of a demon is still a demon. Well, what do you expect? Here is my first confession, Rin-chan: I don’t even know who my father was. He was some raping pirate—some demon of a raping pirate—who forced my lady mother to bear me. She was a princess. So beautiful, truly. A saint,” he sneered. “But he ruined her. And I was born in the aftermath of her ruin.”

Rin had no idea what to say to this. But it seemed there was no need for her to say anything. Swinging himself down from the altar, Ren approached her. The shattered offerings crushed to dust beneath his heel.

“There are no gods, Rin-chan,” he said, circling around her like a wolf on the prowl. “No gods that give a damn for us, at any rate. We are on our own in this life, as ships adrift on the open sea.”

Rin shook her head. “I don’t believe it.”

“Believe what you like,” Ren said. Pausing before her, he crooked a finger under her chin. “But that’s the truth. You are alone, as I am alone. We are alone here, together.” When Rin refused to meet his eye still, he smiled at her, slanting and steep. “Not an hour ago, I had a whore’s mouth drain me dry. I styled her to look like you.”

Rin jerked her chin away. “I don’t want to hear that kind of talk.”

“Marry me then, if you don’t want to hear it. Until then, I’ll keep spending myself in their throats. You should be grateful to them for sucking out that venom. Or else I’d be trying to spew it at you.”

Rin turned her back to him then. “Go away, Ren, or I will. I can’t listen to this filth. I won’t.”

Taking her by the shoulder, he turned her back. A rare frown was on his wolfish face.

“Forgive me,” he said, so solemnly she was tempted to believe him. “My dirty blood oft gets the best of me. But I would present you with a better image. Do you know it was your face I saw in a vision once, when I thought that I was dying? As clearly as I see you now.”

In the wake of this drunken rambling, he dropped to his knees before her. Rin went stock-still when his face crushed to her stomach. Something dark and primal bloomed within her as his hot mouth ventured lower, and lower still.

“There are no gods,” he murmured against her, again. “But I would worship you, Rin-chan. Let me worship you, I pray.”

Rin shivered as his ragged breath ghosted between her thighs, dampening the heavy fabric that clothed them. With both hands she shoved him back, glaring. Ren chuckled as he righted himself. His voice was gruff when he spoke.

“I have another confession,” he said. “I’m a killer.”

“That’s hardly a confession,” Rin shot back. “I could tell that just by looking at you.”

The samurai laughed again. “True, but listen to me, Rin-chan. Listen until the end. Will you listen? Do you promise me that you’ll listen?”

Taking a deep bracing breath, Rin nodded her head.

“I told you of my disgraced lady mother,” he said, and Rin felt a tendril of dread coil within her. “She loved her gods, oh she did. More than anything. More even than her only begotten son. I’ve told no other soul of this. But now that I think upon it, it was almost a kindness I did her, in the end, when I sent her on early to be with her beloved gods.”

The blood drained from Rin’s face as he said this. Shallowly, she swallowed against her mounting terror and revulsion. “Ren…”

From the altar beside them, he took up her small silver knife. A knife Sesshoumaru had given her, which she’d been using to trim incense before he’d intruded upon her. Placing the hilt in her hand, Ren guided its keen point to the side of his throat.

“Pierce me here, Rin-chan,” he said softly. “That is all you need to do to end me. Lean all your weight into running me through. I’m at your mercy.”

Rin’s hand trembled violently. The silver knife clattered to the floor. Ren took her in his arms then, tried to kiss her, though she pushed his face away. He was a vile fiend, and she didn’t want to kiss him. She didn’t even want to look at him, but he was forcing her to look with the grip he had on her nape. So she looked hard at him in profile as he slumped with her to the floor, and passed out in a sprawl. Rin extricated herself from him with a shudder.

Breathing heavily, she glared down at him. As the long hours of early morning passed, her glare began to dull. Finding a coarse blanket in a cabinet, she dragged it over him. Pillowed a heap of rags beneath his head.

In repose, his ever-present sneer was gone. His too-sharp features seemed to soften. Even with his shaggy brown hair splayed out beneath him, he looked almost regal, lying there. His lashes were long and nearly black. When he blinked them sluggishly open, Rin was gazing down at him still. Cockily, Ren smiled up at her, drowsy as he was.

“What a sweet surprise,” he said, with an earnestness that made her wonder if anyone had ever cared for him at all.

“You passed out drunk,” she said shortly. “Before you did, you told me some terrible things.”

“Did I? Well, from where I’m looking now, I can’t say I regret it. Do you know, Rin-chan,” he said huskily, taking her hand and pressing her fingertips to his lips, “if you’d spare me a kind word now and again, I could be whatever sort of man you’d like.”

Rin grimaced, somewhere between pity and disdain. She snatched her hand back from him.

…

Lying here now in her lonely bed, she remembered what she’d done not long after. She remembered how she’d gone to Kohaku. How she’d propositioned him like the very sort of woman she’d disparaged Ren for mentioning.

She remembered how Kohaku had drunkenly taken her. She remembered how very clear it had been to her that he was a man and not a boy. All the visions she’d had of them tentatively working through the details of the act had been quashed as he’d stripped her and dragged her beneath him. It had been abundantly clear to her that he’d done this before, as he’d buried himself into her with all the care he might have shown a whore.

There had been a sharp stabbing pain. Not long after, it was over. She lay there with the grime of the act seeping out to cool between her thighs. Kohaku had been fast asleep by then, uncaring whether she remained or not. Rin couldn’t have remained another second. She picked herself up and took herself off.

She was a woman now. But she didn’t feel the bitter truth of it until a few weeks later, when her monthly flow still hadn’t come.

By then, Kohaku had left Edo for good.

In the blinding rain, she went to Ren at his fortress. Seeing her there, he sent everyone else away in the midst of their revelry. Alone together, she stood still on the veranda. He went out to her. His wild hair slicked straight in the damp. His light eyes darkened in the gloom. In that moment, he looked handsome to her. It was this look of his that emboldened her, almost as much as the words Kanako had spoken to her.

“Rin-chan,” he asked, “are you well?”

She looked him square in the eye then. “I’ll marry you,” she said.

…

But their wedding day never came.

A few mere hours before the ceremony was to be held, Rin opened his throat with her little silver knife, after all—to spare Kagome’s life at his hands.

…

“You are my wife if I say you are.”

Ren had spoken these words to her, but did they make it so? Had she been his wife, before she killed him? Decades later, in her heart, she wondered still.

If so, it was not a betrayal, to summon him here to her now. She had a confession of her own to make to the spirit that hovered above her where she lay.

“I sought to cuckold you,” she said to Ren’s ghost. “I was carrying Kohaku’s child, even when I went to you to be your wife.”

Ren’s ghost seemed to smile mockingly down at her. “And twenty-five years later you are still paying for it.”

“Only for that?” she asked him. “Only for that, and not your death?”

“When I held your little knife to my throat, I made it clear to you that my life was yours. It’s only your deceitfulness I’ve held against you. But as I said,” he murmured, hovering closer, “twenty-five years of your precious Kohaku-kun has been penance enough. I forgive you, Rin-chan.”

Rin’s eyes filmed with tears. “Truly?” she asked.

“Truly,” Ren’s ghost seemed to say.

“Did you love me then?”

“Of course I loved you,” he said with a scoff. “I went to great lengths to have you, after all. But I was thwarted in the end, not so much by you as by Kagome-sama.”

“Would you have killed me, had you learned the truth?”

“Oh,” Ren’s ghost said, his icy lips brushing hers, “most certainly.”

Rin shivered against him. His spectral fingers traced her cheek.

“But let us not dwell upon such things now. I am dead, but I can still guide your hand. Open your legs to me, Rin-chan. Let me give you a taste of the pleasure we might have shared in life.”

Rin opened her legs. As Ren’s ghost guided her hand down between them, she found that she was very wet. Blood rushed to her face. She was ashamed, but he cooed to her and made her slip her fingers inside herself. She felt her tightness then, with a shade of awe. Above her, Ren’s light eyes glowed, feral and bright.

“How I would have loved you,” he said lowly, as he guided her fingers in and out. “How I would’ve fucked you, Rin-chan.”

She bit her lip at his vulgarity, and he chuckled. He loved to unsettle her, he always had. He brought her wet fingers against the nub of flesh at the apex of her thighs and rested them there as she throbbed.

“You were always such a good girl,” he said. “My good girl.”

“Yes,” she whimpered.

“Yes,” he said, causing her fingers to pluck and swirl. “You would’ve made a good man out of me. You would’ve tamed me. You knew that you could. You knew how I wanted to please you. I would have done anything for you. I would’ve laid the world at your feet. You were a true saint to me, Rin-chan. You were divine in my eyes.”

Her muscles were tense, her body was seizing on the verge of ecstasy. “Take me,” she said, spreading her legs wide to him. “Oh please, Ren, take me like you always meant to. Defile me. Devastate me. That’s what you really wanted, isn’t it?”

He sneered down at her, but she felt his desire. She felt him though he was only a ghost. She felt him at her entrance, felt the invasion of him there, pressing in, like he’d pressed into her virgin mouth. He was a villain, a demon. He was a wolf and rogue. But she wanted him, as he had wanted her.

The door to her room banged suddenly open. Rin sat up panting and aching in her empty bed.

From the dark threshold, she saw the outline of a familiar form. It was the figure of her husband. Kohaku’s glazed dark eyes seized hers with smoldering passion, and Ren and his ghost were banished in its blaze.

She smelled the sake on her husband’s breath as he brought his mouth down onto hers, but Rin didn’t care. She opened her arms to him, her legs to him. She took him into her with the hope that now, finally now, at long last, he had come to love her.

Her, and her alone.

---

Inuyasha © Rumiko Takahashi

Series Navigation

<< Love (Explicit)Mothers and Fathers >>