Sesshoumaru stared, all the coiled aggression stealing from him. Kagome’s mouth twisted.

“So, how about another then?” she demanded in scorn, stepping out of her fallen hakama as the folds of her haori gaped open wide. “Scraps of me are all you’re ever going to get.”

But whether her brother-in-law had really heard this or not was difficult to say. The moment she’d stepped free of her hakama, he’d starting shedding his own clothes and armor in a frenzy. It was such a predictable male response to her stripping that Kagome found it perversely hilarious, and might have found it objectively hilarious—if she didn’t loathe him to the core, and if he couldn’t snap her in half like a toothpick.

As it was, she watched him narrowly and contemptuously as he raked his eyes over her in turn. Stepping backward still, she shrugged out of both layers of haori, while Sesshoumaru stalked after her, already naked and shamelessly erect. Clothed only in her underwear and chest bindings, Kagome stopped as the backs of her thighs hit the edge of the work table behind her. Thanks to her rampages that morning, the normally cluttered surface was bare, and she pushed herself up onto it, not bothering to close her splayed, dangling legs.

Deep in his chest, Sesshoumaru growled, the roil of his aura as tempestuous as her own. She was offering herself up to him in a way she had refused to before. Freely and willingly, she placed herself in the path of his monstrous advance, held herself out and open to him—and the terrible significance of this was not lost on either of them.

“There was a time when I would have done this happily for you,” Kagome said, her voice a faint, bitter remnant of its usual inflection. “If you’d come to me instead of Mayuri, you could have done whatever you liked with me. I would’ve been happy to give myself over to you. I would have been happy to be your little slave. You could have fucked me to death, and I wouldn’t have cared. Because I wouldn’t have known any different—I wouldn’t have known that you were such a sick bastard, that I was just another busted corpse to be thrown away like all the rest.” Hollowly, she laughed. “I would have died thinking I was special to you.”

Sesshoumaru stopped, his expression far more stricken than it’d been when she’d slapped him. “You are.”

Kagome’s eyes screwed briefly closed. “Shut up, Sesshoumaru,” she said, cracking her legs open further, “and get over here.”

One of the last pairs of her modern panties, the threadbare fabric was almost transparent as it stretched to shield her mound and center. Through the paper-thinness of it, even Kagome could see the dark fringe of her curls, the curve of her outer lips. With his keen eyes and superior viewing angle, Sesshoumaru could doubtless see more definition than that—the tent of her clit just above the slim cotton crotch, the faint dent in the middle where her wetness had caved and adhered it.

She was tired of fighting her physical attraction to him. She was exhausted with punishing herself when the only one who should be punished here was him. Why shouldn’t I use him, then, she thought hotly, scoring her eyes over the various lengths of him. His good looks were perhaps his only redeeming quality. Leaning back on the heels of her hands, she exposed even more of the tilt of her sex to his view, and decided, To hell with it all.

He was almost upon her now, at any rate—drawn inexorably like he’d been to her open cunt, or to the cut in her palm. Drawn like the killer wolf in the fable she’d heard as a child, to the bloodied knife the huntsman had stuck out in the snow, which the beast had laved at unto death. In similar invitation, she let him come to stand between the spread of her knees, let the torrid heat of him wash over her as he wedged her thighs apart wider with his own, as he thrust his damp cock into the dip of her bare stomach and hooked a claw into the bandaged valley of her breasts—

“…Down,” she murmured, as though in a dream.

Inuyasha © Rumiko Takahashi