Chapter 66: Barebacked Benefits

Lucien grins like an absolute madman, both hands closing around her hips with all the strength his newly reclaimed body has to offer, fingers digging into muscle that could, in theory, snap him clean in half without much effort at all.

Her ears perk sharply at the grip, tail going stiff and straight behind her in response.

"I’ll be honored to give you a full tour," he says. "Fair warning... could take all night, easily. I take genuine pride in a thorough presentation."

She grins wide in return, blood-stained fangs bared, and leans down until her lips brush the shell of his ear, breath warm against his skin. "I doubt you’ll last ten whole minutes with me, mortal."

His grin only widens further at the challenge.

He leans in just as close, voice dropping low and creamy. "Challenging me in bed," he murmurs against her ear, "has never once, in either of my lives, been a good idea."

She tilts her head at that, confused for exactly half a second.

And then he moves, a blur too fast for her to properly track this time, grappling her clean off balance with a technical precision that has absolutely nothing to do with the raw brute strength she’d been expecting from him all night.

She yelps, high and genuinely startled, like something considerably smaller than a divine apex predator, claws scrambling uselessly at empty air as he flips her body, pins her flat to the ground, one of her own knees somehow folded up neatly against her own head before she’s even properly registered the change in position

The maneuver leaves her splayed open beneath him entirely, breath coming quick and shallow now, every instinct she’s spent millennia carefully honing momentarily, thoroughly overridden by something else entirely.

Her eyes go wide at the sensation.

Lucien hovers directly over her, muscles straining with the effort of keeping her pinned, sweat already tracing a slow line down one temple, face inches from hers now.

"Jujitsu champion," he says, grinning down at her, "in a previous life, as it so happens. I should warn you... things might get a little... messy from here."

Her eyes go wide and dreamy at that particular statement, and she licks him slow, from chin all the way to forehead in one long stroke. Then snaps her jaws shut an inch from his nose, a lust-drunk grin spreading wide across her face.

His entire body ignites in response. Energy crackling visibly under his skin, eyes flooding over with raw, unfiltered magical power, and a roar tears loose from somewhere deep in his chest that shudders every last tree in the clearing at once.

The Beast Mother goes completely slack beneath him as the sound rolls through her whole body, some ancient, animal part of her responding to it purely on instinct.

She stares up at him, eyes already glazing over properly now, and he leans in close, lips brushing directly against her ear.

"Welcome," he whispers, low and warm, "to the benefits program."

Then he slams into her, hard enough to crater the ground around them both in an instant, and the Beast Mother lets out a long, ear-splitting howl as he launches immediately into a frantic, relentless, soul-rattling rhythm, every magic-powered muscle straining with the effort of it.

Her howl cracks, slows, then melts steadily into something raw and desperate as she comes completely undone beneath him piece by piece, thrust by thrust, ears gone slack against the dirt, tail twitching wildly beside them both, thumping hard against the torn earth in a rhythm that has everything to do with the frenzied slamming against her thighs.

He doesn’t stop when her howls turn to soft, broken whimpers instead.

He doesn’t stop when she tears fresh grooves into the earth on either side of her, breath ragged, muscles losing every last ounce of control they’d had.

He doesn’t stop when her claws rake hard down his chest, four fresh lines joining the very first one, when she’s screaming openly for the gods who created her, voice cracking somewhere between genuine reverence and pure animal need.

He doesn’t stop when her whole body finally goes boneless beneath him, a wrecked, sweat-and-blood-soaked heap melting slowly into the grass, muscle by muscle giving up the fight entirely, one thrust at a time.

He only stops, slowly, when she shudders hard through her third orgasm, groaning his name softly into the open night air, barely more than a worn-out whimper.

Lucien leans back on his heels afterward, thoroughly admiring the wreckage laid out before him.

The Beast Mother flat on her back now, chest heaving hard, gasping for air in ragged pulls, muttering something entirely incoherent up at the scattered stars overhead, fur matted through with sweat and dirt and the drying blood of whatever unfortunate animal had met her earlier that evening.

The crater beneath her has widened considerably since they first started, the surrounding grass flattened out in a rough, wide circle.

He stands slowly, stretching, rolling one shoulder with a satisfied crack, entirely unbothered by the fresh claw marks striping his chest or the blood still drying steadily along both forearms.

"Didn’t have a stopwatch on me, unfortunately," he says, surveying his own handiwork with real satisfaction, "but I’m fairly confident I had you screaming my name in well under ten minutes. Might actually be some kind of record, honestly, considering the size difference involved."

She bites back a laugh, breathless still, chest heaving, snickering despite herself.

"You’re a monster, you know that."

"I have several nicknames in bed, as it happens," he says, entirely too pleased with himself, "I’ll make sure you learn every single one of them eventually. It’ll take time." He glances down at her, still boneless in the churned dirt, tail twitching faintly with the last of the aftershocks working through her.

"Right, hope you’re ready for the next presentation, then..."

Her eyes fly wide open. "You’re can’t seriously—"

He flips her before she can even finish the sentence properly, practiced and professional about the whole motion, her tail looping once around his forearm as he grips the base and slides into place inside her in one smooth, leisurely motion, like a man who has genuinely rehearsed this exact maneuver a hundred times before and simply never mentions it in polite company.

She hitches hard at the sensation, tries to protest, tries to tell him to wait a moment.

He just pats her back fondly instead, entirely unmoved by the objection. "We’ve got a lot more material to go through. Extensive coverage, this one." he says, wiggling into position as her breath hitches. "I’m afraid, you’ll simply need to keep up."

He starts slow this time around, deep, measured, deliberate about every motion, savoring it properly, and her eyes roll back as she melts entirely into the grass beneath her, claws no longer digging into the earth but instead curling loose and pliant against it, all resistance gone.

He keeps a steady, merry pace throughout, murmuring against her ear the entire time. How much she’s going to genuinely love the Ashlands once she sees it properly, how she really ought to come along with him when he eventually heads back that way, how he’ll introduce her properly to the Void Mother in person, how the three of them are bound to become the very best of friends before long. Business partners in the fullest, most literal sense of the phrase imaginable.

She whimpers out an agreement, nodding weakly, biting her lip hard as he shifts the angle of his hips just enough to steal whatever thought she’d been halfway to forming, her breath hitching sharply in time with every calculated, deliberate roll of his hips against hers.

Then he goes deeper still.

Deeper than she’d honestly thought physically possible for anything mortal, and her breath catches somewhere in her own throat entirely, forgetting outright how breathing is even supposed to work.

And he goes deeper again after that, past every boundary she’d quietly assumed her own body actually had, until it feels less like being touched at all anymore and more like being fully, completely occupied from the inside out, every last inch of her attention narrowing down hard to the single point of contact between them, deep inside her gut.

Her mind cracks clean under the pressure of it, and she lets out a groan so deep, so guttural, so genuinely earth-shaking in its intensity that it rumbles visibly through the entire surrounding clearing, loose stones shifting in the crater beneath them both, a nearby tree shedding half its remaining leaves in a slow, startled cascade around them.

Lucien pulls back slightly at that, biting down a chuckle of his own, chest still heaving hard from the sustained effort.

"Apologies." he says, not sounding unapologetic at all. "I get a little too... intoit sometimes. Communication’s key, in any good friends-with-benefits arrangement." He brushes a stray lock of sweat-damp hair gently off her face, surprising tenderness in the gesture given the circumstances surrounding it. "Let me know if I ever go too far for you, though. Please."

The Beast Mother, several thousand years old, apex predator of an entire continent, patron demigoddess of the whole tribelands, undisputed terror of every single living thing that has ever set foot in her domain across all that time... manages only a small, shaky nod in response, and a soft, helpless whimper alongside it, entirely undone in the end by a mortal with excellent bedside manners.