Gloam (Monstrous, #4)

by Lily Mayne

What if there were beasties who could hear your thoughts or something? I decided to test it. Take your pants off, I projected down at him, staring at that weird cage. Show me your dick. I haven’t seen a dick except my own in so long, man. No one has to know. He didn’t react.

Moth had abandoned Ghost on a scouting trip, and damn, my boy could hold a fuckin’ grudge. He hadn’t let Moth forget for one second since that he wasn’t forgiven.

“Don’t tell me you’re as perverted as Ghost.” He gestured at the unmoving beastie. “You want to fuck it, you sick freak? Is that why you’re sitting up here gawking at it?”

“Yeah, alright. I’ll leave you alone to your sick thoughts about that thing down there.”

He’d never come right out and told Ghost that he was in love with him, but it was obvious. Painfully obvious. To everyone but Ghost, it seemed.

“You’ve been spending a lot of time up here. Watching.” I flushed, shrugging in an attempt to look nonchalant. “There’s finally something interesting to look at.”

He was too busy getting dicked down by a tall, black-eyed dude with wings and bird feet.

“But then I… I kind of… snuck out. To speak to him.” Lilac went very still. “You snuck out.” “I took my gun, and I didn’t get too close at first,” I said quickly, feeling my face get hot, wondering if Lilac thought I was a total brainless idiot. “At first,” he echoed in his flat voice.

I won’t hurt you, he scrawled. I’m sorry if I scare you.

“I’m not letting you do this.” Lilac cleared his throat. “You can’t actually stop him.” She glared at him. “Shut up, Lilac.”

No Lilac slander allowed

“Why do you fucking care so much, Rig?” “I don’t know.” My face was red. Other raiders were staring at us now. “Because no one else does? Because he—they deserve more than the life they currently have? Someone has to do something, Anchor. I can’t just leave them like that.”

I will protect you. I won’t let anything hurt you.

But the Matriarchs don’t carry the young. The males do. I stared at his words for a long moment. How does that work? We all have the same genitalia. It is the females, the Matriarchs, who impregnate the males.

The last telyths have been coming here for millennia to kill parasites that infect humanity, though not many are aware of them.

The last isdernuc wanders this world. I saw him recently, Gloam said. I had no idea what that was. And, of course, the rycke.

I fell asleep shockingly fast, lulled by the slow rise and fall of Gloam’s broad chest underneath me. That was how I started sleeping in the arms of a monster every night.

my beastie

MY

“I want to touch you so much, Gloam.” He let out a low rumble at my whispered words. “But it… It feels wrong when you’re like this. You’re enslaved.” Not by you, he wrote immediately.

Adam, Gloam scribbled immediately. I am telling you how I feel about you in the only way I can. Please don’t take that away from me by dismissing my words.

He was slick here. I supposed it made sense, if it was the males who were impregnated in his species—if this channel was designed for reproduction.

It almost felt ribbed in there, like those thick cables that snaked under his skin were also inside him. When I tried to imagine how it would feel around my dick, my knees went weak and I almost came in my pants.

I couldn’t picture what he might look like in there at all, but it didn’t matter. I didn’t care what he looked like. Despite my immediate attraction to him, looks had nothing to do with this.

“I wish I could kiss you.” My voice was hoarse with longing. “I wish I could see your face, just once. I’m so sorry I won’t get to free you, Gloam.”

I wished I was ruthless like Lilac. I wished I had it in me to find a big branch and sneak into her RV unexpectedly to bash her brains in.

His head was bent low, and it looked like he was just staring into the water. Then his shoulders heaved with a great, shuddering sob that sounded raspy and rough within the cage.

What is the Herald? I asked. What kind of monster? A salyik, Gloam told me. They are a repressed race, treated poorly by most. I imagine the Herald quickly realised they had a chance to gain power and adoration here that they never would in our world.

They did this to me. I choked on a breath, lifting my head to stare at him. My eyes took in the cage. Did he mean… Your brothers put that cage on you? Gloam’s head jerked in a tiny nod, and my breath left me in a rush.

Tell you what, when I get that cage off you, we’ll find somewhere to hide away for days, and you can suck my dick as much as you want.

“Such a shame I couldn’t get the rycke,” Mary was saying in the main room of the barn as I stayed pressed against the door. “But then it did have those hideous scars on its face. And the damaged wing. It wouldn’t have fit in with the rest of the collection.

>:(

My gaze met dozens of clustered eyes, blinking back at me sporadically from a shadowed corner of the room.

SERAPH?!

You are tired, my precious Adam. Let me look after you. Please.

“I don’t want to stop touching you to get our book, so I’ll just say now that I’m down for anything,” I croaked.

“Yeah,” I rasped, tilting his cock and arching my hips so it rubbed against mine. Fuck, those thick ridges felt incredible. “Do whatever you want with me, Gloam.”

His thick cock twitched, jutting straight out from his body over my stomach, drooling pre-cum into my navel.

He was riding me with hard, increasingly fast movements, fucking himself on my cock like he’d needed this for decades. Centuries. I could relate.

“I’m gonna get the cage off you, then you can ride my dick again just like this while you kiss me. Yeah? You’re gonna kiss me the whole time. We won’t even come up for air. I’ll suck on your tongue while you fuck yourself on my cock.”

“You gonna suck me off when your mouth is free?” I asked, staring at his cage as I sucked his pre-cum off my thumb. Gloam’s hips stuttered again, ass tightening around my dick, making me tremble. “Do you want to taste my cock? My cum?” His cage bobbed in a frantic nod. “Mmm.”

“Maybe I’ll make you suck me off before I bend you over the bed and fuck you. Would you like that?”

I raised my hand from his cock to my mouth and sucked his cum off my fingers, which tipped me over the edge. I moaned out a loud grunt as I came, shuddering and shooting into Gloam’s hot, slick body.

“I mean it,” I told him, squeezing his thighs. “I’m getting that cage off you, and then I’m not going to stop kissing you for hours. Days.”

Their instructions were clear on how to control the beast: a single, simple command that will eclipse all others. ‘Protect me from all danger.’ I say the words of power, his name, and then I say the command.

Seraph is screaming in his cage. No doubt because of the military. They will hear nothing over that. Seraph? Who was Seraph? That horrifying monster with too many eyes?

“I would never try and control you, Gloam. I promise. I won’t—I swear on my life I wouldn’t—” He shook his head again, a small smile touching his lips. I know you wouldn’t, my precious Adam.

Go and see what you can find, my love. I will be here. I bit down hard on my lip as I read his words—what he’d called me. As I scrambled to my feet and made my way through the quiet house back to the garage, a sweet, piercing pain speared through my chest. I did love him. I loved him so much it hurt.

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

He lifted that war hammer high into the air with both hands, and then he brought it down directly on Mary’s head.

“My Adam.” He brought his hands around to cup my face, big thumbs smoothing over my cheekbones. “I love you.”

“My little firebrand,” he rumbled, lifting a hand to smooth it over the back of my head. “You appeared and changed everything.”

“I am in your debt forever, Adam.” “No.” I trailed my fingertips across the back of his skull and over the sweet, tapered tops of his ears. “No debts. To anybody.”

“I did also think you might have been a cyclops under that cage, though, so…” Gloam laughed, a deep, rich sound that warmed my insides. “Are you disappointed?” “Of course not.” I pressed the pads of my thumbs gently to the sockets of his eyes, where the bone curved inward under his cabled brow. “Two eyes is fine too.”