She was taking down her hair when he entered the room.

Combs and pins lay scattered about her on the table, on the floor. More than one of these he had given her—smoky dark sapphires dripping strands of diamond tears, blue-grey spinels wreathed in silver, to match the shade and luster of her eyes. It was obvious she preferred his selections, even to her husband’s. He insisted on giving her rubies set in gold, because these were the colors he himself liked best.

Hirokin’s lip curled. Taste never had been Sesshoumaru’s strong suit.

Kagome’s spine stiffened as though she could see his sardonic expression, even with her back turned and his reflection concealed by her own. Almost violently now, she ripped the brush through her long dark hair, forcing the subtle waves of it to smooth. Her eyes glared into the mirror before her, her nostrils flaring. Hirokin was vaguely surprised that the surface of the glass didn’t steam.

“This had better be good,” she said to him lowly.

Hirokin smiled, drawing closer despite her aura of menace. “My lady, you wound me. How often have I disappointed you?”

Kagome set down her brush with a thunderous crack. At the sound, her infant son stilled where he’d been tumbling about on the tatami beside her. His little claws froze around the comb he’d been chewing, arrested mid-growling bite. His wide golden eyes flicked warily between his mother and Hirokin, as Kagome turned to fix her withering look upon him in full.

This look of hers challenged him quite clearly as to whether this was the direction he wished for things to go. Hirokin considered. Yet, ultimately, he inclined his head.

“…Excepting that, of course,” he demurred.

“I don’t ‘except’ it,” Kagome shot back, picking up her brush again and brandishing it like a weapon. “I don’t except anything when it comes to you.”

Hirokin’s expression was mild. The simmer of his youki, however, was anything but. “Nor should I wish you to, my lady.”

The anger in her eyes darkened in a way that excited him further. It was when her mood steepened like this that he knew he’d set himself up for a night of the most exquisite torments. Yet, as he stepped closer to her once more, a pull on the leg of his hakama gave him pause. Hirokin glanced down. How the whelp had crawled over to him so quickly was a bit unsettling. But he was Sesshoumaru’s son after all. The same golden eyes peered up at him with the same imperious glint of expectation. Sensing that the boy wished to be held, Hirokin bore him up, fur and all, on a wisp of youki and settled him into the crook of his arm. Contentedly, Saitou wriggled and cooed, as Hirokin resumed his approach.

“He’s enamored with you,” Kagome observed, with an edge.

Hirokin looked down at the golden gaze that studied him in turn. “Your boy is too trusting.”

“He’ll learn,” she said crisply, turning away.

She was tearing the brush through her hair again, a few shining strands snapping as she went—poor victims all. With a tendril of youki, Hirokin spelled the bristles not to snag. Kagome scowled at this, seeming to miss the sting. Hirokin could understand.

Detaching Saitou’s claws from the beads of red coral that ringed his neck, Hirokin said, “I’ve brought you something, my lady.”

Kagome shook her head. “I don’t need any more useless trinkets.”

“This one has some utility,” Hirokin replied, his glittering eye catching hers in the glass. “I fashioned it myself.”

“Oh really? Well, in that case…” Kagome rolled her eyes, snorting.

But Hirokin was undeterred by her gross dismissal. “A story first,” he insisted placidly. Before she could refuse him even this much, he began, “It is one my lord father is fond of telling when he’s well into his cups. Something of an old family legend. I can’t attest to the veracity of this salacious tale, but here is how the legend goes.” Hirokin paused for only a beat; at the word ‘salacious’, Kagome’s seeming protests had died on her lips. Inwardly, he smirked. “Once, long ago, in some time immemorial, there was a great upheaval of the earth. Cracks were rent in the deep, opening paths that had been shut since ages past. Through one such sunken path, a subterranean Lake was discovered. It was a primeval place, wonderous and vast, abounding in riches untold.

“Yet it was also the lair of a fell monster. A primordial demoness, gigantic in power and proportion. Scarcely sentient, as those titanic ancients were. Craggy and foul and full of base malevolence. A thing belched from the black, miasmic depths of some eldritch abyss. One explorer after another met their bloody end under the crushing blows of this monster, whose rocky hide could not be pierced by blade or fang, nor dissolved by venom. Spells, too, deflected from its granitic carapace. Their virulence seemed only to rile the creature to even more brutish heights of rage.

“Now my ancestor was an adventurous fellow,” Hirokin said, plucking a lock of his silver hair from Saitou’s grasp as he made to gnaw upon it. “Stronger than most, and certainly slipperier. No doubt he would have dwarfed even my great father in size. Yet when he dared to breach the Lake, he saw that against this titan he was but a scaled worm. He saw too, at once, that he could not best this creature through force alone, as so many before him had tried to their peril. But he was clever, and swift, and shameless enough to dart through the stony trunks of the demoness’ limbs and flee into a fissure at the floor of the Lake.

“Enraged at the slip he’d given her, the demoness rampaged. But the Lakefloor was made of stonier stuff even than she. For all her seismic storming about, my ancestor remained safely entrenched in his hiding place, beyond reach of her crude deadly grasp. From this safe vantage, he could study his enemy for some point of weakness, or at the very least, beat a clean retreat when the opportunity presented.”

As Saitou reached again for his hair, Hirokin tossed the boy high into the air, catching him with a skein of mist before he could hit the floor. Kagome gave an angry start, but when Saitou only shrilled in delight, she relented with a glower. The boy giggled merrily all the more when Hirokin’s mists began to ferry him about the room in a smooth, sinuous orbit. The mists were Hirokin’s own coils, after all.

“But the creature possessed a certain low, dim cunning,” he said, picking up the thread of the tale as seamlessly as he’d set it down. “Instead of continuing to thrash in her blind, bestial rage, the demoness settled her impenetrable bulk over the fissure instead. With this, my ancestor was duly fucked. Unable to fight, unable to flee. Trapped indefinitely in the dark rift he’d slithered into. There was no outlet he could find. His only way out was through—yet this seemed impossible.

“His hopes diminished further as the demoness fell into a deep slumber. Who knew how long she might sleep undisturbed? In his despair, he failed to realize, at first, how the demoness stirred in her rest. Subtle, glacial shifts of her massive form. Seeing this at last, he felt some fresh hope that she might ease herself away from the entrance enough for him to wriggle free. But it was a fleeting thing. Day after day, he watched vainly from his prison, until the bleak view above him began to tunnel even more darkly. He suspected grimly that he was going mad from the monotony of his isolation. He reached out toward that looming darkness, if only to confirm that it was truly there—and felt his claws pass through black and empty space.

“It was an orifice,” Hirokin said, as Kagome’s eyes flared a reviled fraction. “A dark tunnel in truth. Eventually, my ancestor mustered the wherewithal to enter. He swam upwards to probe through those pliant, reeking depths, which were studded with fossilized remains. Soon, he found that the dark channel split. One path was so densely miasmic he dared not venture farther, for fear of being dissolved in the caustic, labyrinthine bowels of the beast. So he took the other route instead. This path seemed almost inviting by comparison, and it wasn’t long before my ancestor realized the passage in which he was swimming was in fact the demoness’ cunt.”

Kagome’s brow twitched. Smiling at this, Hirokin resumed, “Yet here too, he soon encountered another obstacle: a golden web of translucent flesh, membranous and brocaded with dark gritty veins of blood. It was a tough, tissuey net which spanned the whole circumference of the tunnel; there was no slipping past it. Touching his palm to it, he found that the flesh net was supple, yet steely. Only slightly did it yield beneath even the firmest press of his hand. It was the demoness’ maidenhead, you see—the foul bitch was a virgin, Kagome-sama. A spinster for the ages.” At her flat, repulsed look, Hirokin struggled not to laugh. “There was no choice for my ancestor—to burst his way through to the creature’s vulnerable insides, he would have to deflower her. Most savagely.”

Kagome swallowed as she averted her gaze, her complexion slightly green. Hirokin did chuckle then. In the background, Saitou was still gliding jubilant and heedless through the air on skeins of glimmering mist.

“Knowing it would surely rouse the bitch, my ancestor yet transformed within her cavernous cunt. In his true draconic form, he filled her passage snugly indeed. Her tough muscled walls bulged around him as he surged forward within her smoldering depths, ramming and tearing at her golden barrier with fang and claw and horn. At last it gave beneath his vicious assault, caving before him in a rank deluge of hot blood and shredded tissue. From beyond him, only dimly muted, there came a terrible roar of violation, a vicious quake as though all of existence were shaking upon its foundations. The demoness had awoken, and she was none too pleased to learn that she was being raped from within.

“But what could she do?” Hirokin asked, as if the question were not rhetorical. “Precious little, of course. She could only thrash and rage from without as my ancestor plunged forward into her hot squeezing canal unimpeded. Yet once again, the dragon’s way was soon barred: this time, at the gate of her loathsome womb, he found himself halted by a sealed plate that was as stony and implacable as her outer hide. My shrewd ancestor despaired for only a moment; he had come this far, and so, with no small amount of resolve, he steeled himself for what he must now do. He must make the bitch release to him.”

Kagome’s jaw was tight as she grit out, “…You’re kidding.”

Hirokin grinned. “Without hesitation, he began to writhe, to twist and undulate the great length of his hard, ribbed flesh in her hellish core, with all the finesse and adroitness he possessed. His very life depended on her coming, after all. At last, the quality of her roars began to change—no less furious, but more guttural in their vehemence. The foul bitch was on the verge of a pleasure she had never before known. One can only wonder if she felt some shred of gratitude for my ancestor in her barren husk of a soul.”

Kagome’s cheeks tinged faintly red. Hirokin gloated at the sight.

“Her roars had grown keening by the time her iron walls began to spasm. My ancestor barely had to propel himself forward, as her orgasmic shudders shot him straight toward the unsealed portal of her femininity. Having reached the vast, open center of her, he knew now his victory was assured. With all his strength gathered, he speared through her noxious innards, gored through her black, gristly heart, thrust his way to freedom through her gaping maw as she roared her last, and having felled her, claimed the mythic Lake and its treasure for himself and his progeny for all of time.”

“…Well,” Kagome muttered, still faintly flushed, “it’s not the worst story you’ve told.”

Hirokin feigned a wounded look. This seemed to please her. Her stiff shoulders relaxed. Her breath escaped her in a long, winded exhale, as though from exertion. Indeed, Hirokin could hear the heightened thrum of her pulse from where he stood. If she was dry between those primly folded legs of hers, he’d forsake his own name. Her glazed eyes finally flicked from him to her son, who was still sailing about the room, occasionally being tossed by one misty coil and caught by another.

“Don’t bandy him about like that,” she snapped at Hirokin, plucking Saitou from midair as he glided past. Snatched from his fun, the boy at once began to whine. “See, now he’s fussing.”

“Yes, my lady,” Hirokin blithely said. “Now that I’ve told you my story, would you like to see what I’ve brought?”

“All right,” Kagome groused as she stood with babe in arms. “But let me put him to bed first.”

Once the boy was settled in his crib of furs, she returned. Retracing her route to the vanity table, she stood before it with crossed arms, arching an expectant brow. Never one to dally, Hirokin reached into the neck of his haori and withdrew a gilded, glimmering mesh. From its slim shimmering chains, he held the net suspended, so that the phallic shape of it was revealed to her heated gaze. Lightly, Kagome laughed.

“Is this the reimagining of your sordid fable, Hirokin?” she asked wryly. “Let me guess—I’m the big monstrous cunt, and you’re the caged snake rearing to burst free?”

Hirokin’s mouth curved. “How apt of you, my lady. Your keen mind misses nothing.”

Kagome’s eyes narrowed. “Well,” she said, soft and dark, as she lowered herself to sit upon the table, roughly eye-level with his crotch, “put it on, then, and let’s see.”

Hirokin suppressed a shiver. He bit the inside of his cheek hard to prevent any further engorgement, especially as the rosy silk of her robe darkened where her nipples had leaked, after tightening into hard little peaks. Her dark arousal stirred his own. Knowing how she enjoyed it, he divested himself slowly of his clothes. She liked to watch him strip himself to her, expose himself to her scrutiny. As the layers of his haori peeled from his chest, her eyes grew dim with lust. Though he appreciated her body far less than she appreciated his, he appreciated that she desired him, different as he was in form from her lord husband. She had eclectic appetites, his mistress.

The silken ties of his hakama slipped like rivulets through his deft fingers. Soon, he was fully bare to her view. His sex was soft, limp and yielding. When she cracked her thighs open in response to his nakedness, when he saw the red, budding morsel of her hidden flesh revealed through the slit in her robes, he had to bite the inside of his cheek again to keep from rising.

The gilded mesh was still in his hand. Unclasping the thin chains, he linked it loosely between his thighs and around his hips. The soft cool links slid like liquid sin between the cleft in his cheeks, teasing his puckered hole just barely as he notched the slim pair of thongs to the back of the band at his waist. Then there was only the net itself to set. Sweat misted across his brow as he took himself in hand. After slipping the base ring behind his slack balls, it was all he could do not to stiffen as he fed his cock into the mouth of the pliant cage. Miniscule tines at the tip caught at the slit in his sex, making him shut his eyes briefly at the exquisite, punishing bite of them into the most sensitive flesh he possessed. The tines both locked him in and kept him prised. The whole spelled apparatus cinched taut around him at their setting, and he gave himself over with a voluptuous shudder to its stricture. But though hot, lusty blood surged unhindered into his cock, it could harden only slightly, and grow not much at all. Against the adamant gold mesh, his budding erection strove against its bonds in the most delicious, excruciating vain.

Truly, Hirokin thought hazily, this might be his finest work yet.

How often, during the course of constructing this cage, had he been forced to abandon the task and pleasure himself in his over-excitement? Resisting the impulse to test it beforehand had been near-insurmountable. But long-practiced in the art of self-denial, he dissuaded himself from indulging in this base urge. He knew if he could resist the temptation, that if he could experience the sordid novelty of it in time with her, it would be the height of ecstasy.

He had not been wrong. Hirokin felt a dizzying rush akin to orgasm, as he looked at the rapt expression in Kagome’s eyes. The jeweled pins she’d swept off the table glittered like so much cheap trash compared to the beguiling light that shone from her gaze. Her eyes, those were the true gems. Later, much later, he would try to capture in crystal their fiery, divine glow—only to torment himself with his failures.

“Well, my lady,” he asked, with the smoothest, falsest humility he could muster, “do you like it?”

It was perhaps the most needless question that had ever been put forth. Still, she answered.

“Yes, I like it,” she said huskily, too enthralled to be blusterous or snide. Wandering forth from her perch, she knelt a hairsbreadth from his shackled, straining sex. Her breath ghosted his vulnerable, sundered opening, dipping just inside with the most phantom of stings. “I like it very much.”

As her fingers bumped along the links that caged his stunted, purpling cock, Hirokin found himself rather at a loss. Her overblown contempt of him—or at least, the ruse of it—had become such a feature in their play that its lack left him feeling ill at ease. It was as though the rules of the game had changed without his knowledge or consent. Then, just as he was scrambling to find new footholds in the shifting landscape of her mad, mercurial lusts, she took him into her mouth, cock-cage and all.

Hirokin’s spine went rigid, his breath hissing out of him as he started in shock. The hot gliding clamp of her lips, the prying darts of her tongue—these were nothing short of agony on his throbbing, abused sex, his drawn and open slit. But it was the image of the act itself which cleaved at him most. The image of her on her knees servicing him—the perversity of it gutted him, a twisting and pitting of his insides that had his voice tearing out of him high and pleading like a child’s.

“Kagome, no!”

She ignored him, of course, to his deepening torment. A wretched groan knifed out of him when she gripped him by the backs of the thighs and took his sheathed, blunted length into her mouth to the hilt. Hirokin’s nails raked over his flushed face as it twisted. It was all he could do to submit to this inane, loathsome pleasuring, which in his mind both belittled and defiled her. A riot of emotions churned within him, anger not least among them. He felt quite incensed with her for turning woman on him now all of a sudden. Now, of all times…

With this infernal sucking, she was ruining the moment. No small part of him wanted to turn upon his heel and storm from the room. But as he was agonizing over this, her mouth broke from him at last. As she met his eye, her lips curved in a sly half-smile.

“Sorry,” she said, without the barest hint of remorse. “It just looked so damn pitiful I had to taste it.”

Hirokin’s shoulders fell slack, his own mouth twitching at the corners. A pity suck. The spectacle of his caged cock was so grotesquely pathetic she’d had to savor his debasement in the most primal of ways. The humiliating chafe of it made his balls swell painfully in their hold. The stretched orifice in his cockhead bled precum like tears. The wash of visceral relief he felt weakened his knees. He would have collapsed to them and kissed her square on her wicked little mouth, but the warning flash in her eyes kept him at bay.

She was fondling his wet and manacled cockhead once more, tracing the sharp little tip of her nail thoughtfully along the periphery of his prised slit, making his abdominal muscles clench. “Something’s missing here,” she mused aloud.

Hirokin smiled wanly. It was almost frightening at times, how perfect she was. With a wisp of youki, he extracted an object from the discarded heap of his haori and deposited it beside her. Wonderingly, Kagome picked it up. Gleaming as the cock-cage, it was a slender spine of pure gold, a few widths thicker than a large needle, flared elliptically at one end and tapering to a rounded point at the other. There was a slight, suggestive arc to it. A suggestion which was clearly not lost on a mind as beastly imaginative as hers.

Her glance flicked from the spine to him, fevered and bright. “You really do think of everything, don’t you?”

Hirokin preened at the praise. But inside his heart was pounding like mad. A paroxysm of dread and anticipation seized him. He had debated at length, as he was knitting the net, whether to stitch it shut at the tip or go this route of the pin and open seam. This would be a new brand of torture for him. Uncharted territory, to say the least. Yet ultimately, he’d resolved himself to it, as he resolved himself to it now. What was the point in leaving the cup half full? Might as well down the whole of it, or else not partake in the first place.

And so he grit his teeth sharply as Kagome licked the blunt point of the spine and threaded it through the splayed opening in his sex. He’d fashioned the pin such that its width and girth left him without the slimmest margin for reprieve. At its slow, grating penetration, his slender shaft distended. In this most intimate and untried of places, the pain was fiery, raw and relentless. Sheer agony, yet he forced himself to bear it. Not without complaint, however. A rumbling curse exploded from his throat as the spine’s hellish slide came to a close, its flared base snapping seamlessly into place along the length of his slit.

Fully caged at last, Hirokin unclenched his fists, his palms scattered with bloody crescents where his nails had bit through the flesh. His chest heaved, his marble skin slicked with sweat. He realized he was trembling, but the burning pain in his cock was yet too raw for him to suppress it. Hirokin had an appetite for pain, yet the flavor of this one was appallingly sharp. As it began at last to dull, however, the aftertaste of it was just as sweet. More than ever, his locked balls strained to burst, his muzzled cock flaming afresh with savage intensity.

“Hirokin,” Kagome observed, almost hesitantly, “you’re crying.”

Touching his fingertips to his cheek, Hirokin felt the unmistakable lines of tear-tracks, flowing freely. His lips curved in chagrin. When was the last time he’d shed a tear? Not since his mother had died, he was certain.

“So I am,” he said with a laugh.

Still kneeling before him, Kagome studied his rueful expression for a moment before she rose. Her fingers skimmed his caged cock as she stood, eliciting a fresh inward stab of pain. As Hirokin basked in its wake, her expression cooled.

“Down on your knees,” she said.

Hirokin sank down before her. Gods knew he needed the rest. Not that this was her being merciful, of course. The chill glitter in her eyes was nothing but cruel. Hirokin reveled in it. Dark anticipation pooled low in his belly, bloated his hobbled sex until it pulsed in anguish both from without and within. She circled around him where he knelt, the trailing whisper of her robe against his thigh more tantalizing than any lover’s caress. He wanted quite fiercely to fuck her then.

But the absurd, wanton notion fled him abruptly, as he felt her settle behind him. With the firm press of her palm, she bent him over so that he was properly humbled before her, his balls and rear entrance utterly exposed to her scathing eye. As her cool fingers skimmed his inflamed, bulging sack, Hirokin bit his tongue on the shameless moan that threatened to burst from him. But she wouldn’t let him squirm out of her hearing it. Idly, maddeningly, she traced the hot, delicate skin and the seething globes it encased. She fondled and pinched and tugged and rolled until he was moaning her name more raggedly and desperately than he’d ever begged anyone for anything. With a sharp parting slap, she relented.

“You’re very selfish, you know,” Kagome chided him, weighing his stinging balls almost tenderly in the cradle of her hand. “To bring me a gift that’s really intended for you. But then, that’s how you are about everything. You act like you’re such a selfless giver but it’s all just a sham. It’s self-love that motivates you, really. Your self-flagellation, all your supposed ‘sacrifice’—what a crock of bullshit. You’re the most self-serving creature I’ve ever known. Masturbatory and entitled to the core.

“You’ll never change, either. I’ll bet you haven’t changed since the day you were born. You’re so clever and beautiful you feel you ought to be exempt from suffering. The knowledge that you have suffered galls you to no end. You can’t forgive it. You have a vendetta against the gods you feel have wronged you, and you take it out on everyone who has the misfortune of crossing your path. You’re obsessed with suffering, with pain. Because there’s truth in it, hard truth. And to a liar like you, that seems like some sort of divine mystery.

“But there’s nothing really mysterious about it. You worship pain because you’re empty inside, and pain in the moment is all-consuming. The fact that you fancy a good, hard cock ramming into your ass is rather beside the point. Because you already feel fucked, and all you’re trying to do is recreate the sensation to nurse your own perverse grudges. But I’ll be your god of pain, Hirokin, if that’s what you want. You can rage against me all you like, and it’ll never amount to anything. And I’ll keep fucking you forever.”

Hirokin laughed, guttural and short. “Truly,” he gasped out, “truly you are mad…”

“Then that makes two of us,” Kagome said.

Reaching around him, she touched a finger to the flared end of the spine buried in his fettered cock, sent a jolt of reiki coursing down the length of it which made his rolling eyes flash and his serrated fangs distend. Viciously, Hirokin suppressed his demonic transformation, which threatened to amputate him at the root. A violent shudder wracked through him from the effort, his precum steaming out beneath the popped head of the pin. With disturbing calm, Kagome reset it.

“Well,” she asked, as though she hadn’t just subjected him to the most pernicious and invasive of tortures, “is that what you want, Hirokin? For me to be your god of pain?”

“You already are,” he confessed to her on a groan. “You have been for some time.”

“Have I?” Her voice was infuriatingly coy. Releasing her grip on his balls, her fingers traveled upward along the cleft in his cheeks, to where the twin gold chains lay lightly over his puckered, flinching hole. Parting them like he might part the delicate lips of her sex, she stroked him. “Do you love me, Hirokin?”

“Yes, I love you.” The words broke from him like the lancing of a wound, even as she lanced her fingertip into that taut, forbidden ring of flesh. There was catharsis in the admission, though it pained him. “You know that I love you, which is why you must punish me. You spit upon my love. You hate it. You despise me for loving you because it is not the love that you want. The only love you crave is Sesshoumaru’s love. You scorn all others’. You scorn his, too, but still you crave it. Because you idolize him—you would become him, if you could. But since you cannot, you must settle for his love instead.”

For a time, Kagome was silent. Silently, she probed him, shallowly and seemingly contemplatively, while he languished at her whim. Then to his dismay, her touch withdrew from him completely. He wondered then if he had gone too far. If he had dared reveal to her too much. Perhaps she was not yet circumspect enough to withstand it. Then, as he was considering how to remedy this misstep, how to bring her back to him, he felt her soft, naked thighs press to his own. He felt the feathery tickle of her nether fur brush between his cheeks as she lay atop him, her heavy breasts crushing full and slick to his back. Curled around him thus, she hooked her damp fingers back into his waiting ass—fingers that were damp with the moisture from her own teeming cunt.

“You’re wrong, Hirokin,” she murmured in lament, fucking him with her hand as she rocked against him. “I punish you because I love you, too.”

Hirokin’s breath caught in his chest. Beneath the slight weight of her body, he threatened to capsize. Her slender fingers seemed to fill him entirely. Only barely did they stroke his hungry inner gland, but it was enough. Enough for him to be undone, if only she would let him. But remarkably, it was her own pleasure which preoccupied him. He could feel the crush of her swollen clit near his tailbone, but was it enough? He could use his youki to rile her, of course. Yet somehow this felt wrong to him. If she wanted to play with him in this way, she’d already be plying him with her reiki.

“Fuck my face, Kagome-sama,” he heard himself beg her instead. “Let me take off this nonsense and give you my cock. I’ll plug you as many times as you’d like. I’ll do whatever you’d like…”

“Kill him, then,” she said ruthlessly. “Set me free.”

“Madness,” he hissed back, rearing at the stab of her touch as his balls began to boil over. “Vain madness, and you know it. You would kill yourself if he were dead, and so would I. For all your analysis of me you left out Sesshoumaru-sama, and this exposes the faults in your understanding. There is no life for me apart from him. The very roots of my existence are bound up with him. There is no extricating us. But you know this. You say it only to test me, only to infuriate me. And you have—you…”

Hirokin bit off as a wave of eviscerating pleasure wracked through him. The pressure in his stoppered cock was beyond reckoning. He needed her to pull the pin on it, to release him. Even now her fingers were at the cap, devilish in their delay.

“I know,” she breathed against his clammy nape. “Gods, Hirokin, but you can be such a buzzkill. It’s just dirty talk. Relax.”

Hirokin glared into the tatami. He wanted to retort that she flitted between fantasy and reality at a moment’s notice, that when he was on the verge of blowing his load he wasn’t at his most discerning. But these snide remarks died in his throat when her hips grew jerky against him, when her questing fingers began to plow into him with animalistic abandon. When she ripped the pin from his ravished frontal hole with such brusque, biting ferocity that the orgasm ripped through him in turn. More cum that he’d ever seen shot forth from his crippled cock, as though at least some part of him must make up the difference. Beneath her, he sagged, depleted.

“…Did you come?” he asked.

“Of course I did,” Kagome said.

Peeling off him, she scooted around. Holding her bent legs apart, she showed him just how much she’d gushed for him. The creamy white opacity of her cum betrayed that it’d been expelled from the very heart of her womb, and at the sight of it, Hirokin was satisfied. It was the very same hue of his thick, ejected seed. Whether coincidence or not, he took this to signify the depth of their illicit bond. The pent-up lust they harbored for one another alone.

“Run along now,” she said to him as she stood, the supple lines of her body exaggerated as she yawned and stretched. “I need to rest.”

“Yes, my lady.”

Her curt dismissal chafed him as it always did. But now that she was sober, she had remembered her strife. It would not do for him to linger now.

Besides, he had his own appointment to keep.

Without delay Hirokin set off, his spell transporting him far away to the East. Here, he had installed Kou indirectly into his sister’s household guard. Because of this, they’d been able to meet with much greater regularity. Late as he was, Hirokin had made it clear to his lover time and again to wait upon his sign. He gave it now, and in the interim, set about to make himself presentable.

Cleansed and dried, he turned his attention to the gilded cage which still girded his loins. There was not a question in Hirokin’s mind but to remove it. He had no desire to drag Kou down into the mire of his debauched fixations. Or perhaps, if he were being candid, it was simply a subject which Hirokin was loath to broach with him. Kou would not understand his games of pain-play with Kagome. At the best, he might simply be jealous of their intimacy. At the worst, he might try to incorporate such play into their own relationship. The latter outcome Hirokin wished most to prevent. For Kou could not possibly satisfy him in this way. In attempting to do so, he would only thwart Hirokin’s desire for him, which was its own separate entity.

In Hirokin’s heart and mind, these divisions were clear. And so, he must manage them himself. To this end, he took hold of the chains of his cage and applied his youki to unclasp them. His brow furrowed when they refused to give. More forcefully, he bent his mind to the purpose, only to feel his power deflect with piercing clarity.

“Fuck,” Hirokin realized aloud.

The mad witch had sealed him into the cage! It had been so subtly and skillfully done Hirokin had never suspected. Her powers had grown, he must concede. The pin she’d furtively withheld after their encounter must be the key to the seal. Hirokin glared West, his aura flaring. But there was no time to retrace his steps to Kagome. Already, he could sense Kou’s youki closing in.

Gods, but he loved her—and hated her.

As Kou landed, Hirokin was still glaring askance with clenched jaw and youki fuming. “Koi?”

Closing his eyes briefly for composure, Hirokin turned. “My love,” he said, approaching the dark-haired inuyoukai. Taking him about the shoulders with one hand, he drew Kou’s face down to his with the other. “How I have missed you…”

It was nothing short of the gods’ own truth. Another thing Kagome had failed to consider—the uncomplicated purity of the only mutual romantic love he’d ever known. As their lips met, Hirokin felt in Kou’s kiss the balm to all the obsessive lust Kagome inspired in him. She was like a consuming affliction, and Kou the abiding cure.

Perhaps Hirokin was as self-serving as Kagome accused him of being. But he did love Kou. He feared for Kou, and if fear was not the truest measure of love, then Hirokin knew nothing of it nor cared to. He gripped Kou hard as they kissed, tangled his fingers into his long dark hair. If only he could be bound up in him always, perhaps then he would finally be content.

But this could never be. Their meetings were doomed to be forever brief and clandestine and intermittent. Their parting was as inevitable and assured as the parting of their lips must be now.

“Let me pleasure you tonight,” Hirokin murmured as he sank to his knees before his lover in this secret bower of theirs. “Let me pleasure you alone.”

Kou sucked in a gruff breath, as Hirokin reached at once for the ties of his hakama. “Hirokin…”

“Give this to me, Kou.” With hooded eyes, Hirokin drew forth Kou’s huge hardened cock, grazed his lips along its veined, twitching length. “Please.”

In Kou’s misted gaze there was only love for him, ardent and pure. “There’s nothing I wouldn’t give you, Koi.”

Hirokin knew it. In his hakama, his caged cock gave a heavy, anguished throb.

---

Inuyasha © Rumiko Takahashi

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