Gloam (Monstrous, #4)

by Lily Mayne

Was it wrong of me to be staring at a monster’s ass? I was pretty sure the answer to that, if I asked anyone in this camp, would be a resounding yes. Maybe a hell yes. Probably a what the fuck is wrong with you, dude?

Lilac practically embraced awkward moments. Like it was a game to see how uncomfortable he could make people with his silent presence.

I sat up immediately and practically flung myself out of bed to get away. Nope. No, thank you. I would have lived a very happy life without knowing what my best friend sounded like in the throes of monster-induced passion, but it was too late for that now. That knowledge had already burned itself into my brain, and I had to find a way to live with it.

Ghost wasn’t perverted. Aury wasn’t a freak or a thing. Neither was the beastie chained to Mary’s RV. They were just different. And different was good, in my opinion. Different was great.

Was this what happened to some humans when they were left without true guidance for long enough? When everything around them crumbled and their carefully crafted world and belief systems turned to dust? Were they so desperate for some form of structure, to be told what to do and how to act, that they would willingly sink to these levels?

“I love you,” I told him, before I carefully enclosed his head back in the cage.

“Don’t make me get a boner while I’m kneeling in blood. Who knows what kind of kink could spawn from that.”

“You are my Androcles.” I grinned shakily even as I asked, “Who?” He chuckled. “The slave who pulled the thorn from the lion’s paw.” “Oh.” I had only vague recollections of the story, but I still flushed with pleasure. “And like the lion,”—Gloam reached out and cupped my chin—“I will be loyal to you always, my Adam. I will never leave your side.”

“I wish you’d never been through any of it,” I whispered into his neck, feeling him turn his face and nuzzle my cheek. His sweet little horn brushed against my wet hair. “But at least I got to meet you.” Gloam rumbled, kissing my cheek. “Not just meet me, little firebrand. You’re stuck with me now. You are my everything.” I flushed with unbridled joy. I’d never really been anyone’s anything before, aside from Ghost’s goofy best friend and the guy who was alright at fixing stuff. “Is your bedroom at the camp large enough for a big, beastly aytorin?” Gloam asked with a smile in his voice. I snorted. “You’re, like, the most refined person I know. Not beastly at all. And yes, there’s room. If it’s too small for you, I’ll knock down a wall and we can double up.” He chuckled. “Won’t the other raiders have something to say about that?” “As if I give a shit what they think.” I kissed his neck, all the way up to his sweet ear, my stomach warming when Gloam sighed with pleasure. “I’ll give you anything you want. If that’s a bigger room, I’ll make it happen.”

“I am your lion,” he said, his deep voice low, his words just for me. “Loyal to you until the end.”

I had already told Lilac he’d be coming with us to make a new camp if sentiment changed among the other raiders. He’d simply quirked a brow, which I took to mean a big, fat yes in Lilac speak. I was pretty sure, anyway. I liked to go for the more positive outlook.

He still called me Gloam, which was what I had always gone by, but sometimes when we were wrapped around each other in the dark, he would whisper my true name to me just to remind me that he would never forget it.

“There are people approaching the camp,” he said in his flat voice, green eyes calm but alert. “One of them is big. And purple.”