such poignant beauty grazes

rips through skin like paper

but the madness dwells deep within


Thin brows, strong chin, the hard lines of his jaw, brushing against her throat and down to her chest.

The elegant crane of the neck, like a dancer's; three dark stars hide behind his heavy curls, just beneath his ear, and her mouth traces a path to them, but she loses her way, regardless. Drowns on his pale skin, drowns beneath every dip and dive he does. Her hand slides down the tail of his spine, ending from the hip. A birthmark, she searches, desperately, there should be . . .

Kagewaki locks himself between her thighs; a hot steady friction. It makes her skin melt, sticking, meeting with his, until her hackles rise, and he plunges in.

There, she sighs.

The intimate sound is sharp, reverberating like a wet slap of leather.

However this one is flesh against flesh.

Silken lips brush on her neck, teeth grazing to meet skin, to sink onto it, until her throat hangs open for him and her voice bleeds between the obscene rhythm of bodies and breaths and soft murmurs of wood underneath them. It is good. It is strange. It is wretched. The feeling; the euphoria of completeness, of a man buried deep within her.

And yet this is a monster, too. A horrible monster wearing her husband's beautiful face

It—he smiles. Tsubomi wants to claw it out, but she does not have the heart to scar Kagewaki's lips. Lips that meld against hers, tongue that slides in and robs her of revenge. Gentleness, softness, sweetness; all lies, thick as spoilt honey.

Though the heat is not.

When he takes her, he does. He rolls his hips and thrusts. Making love appears distant in the manner he moves inside of her, unaffected, sensual, purely indulgent; as if they are rutting, unchaste without restraint, like common harlots in a closed brothel.

But they are husband and wife, master and mistress of a clan, paragons of nobility, above the vices of carnal pleasures. Yet he fucks her, until her knees give in and she can hardly make sense of the world outside these sheets and the midnight curtain of his hair. She aches a shameful ache; it fills her to the brim that she feels she is about to burst, break beneath his weight—and would he not desire for that?

Her voice cracks a little over a heavy pant. His name becomes fragments on her lips. "—waki . . . please," stop. He pushes in, deeply. "Ah, I, mm—" he seals her mouth with his own, cauterizing them in silence. The touch sears still.

His eyes like red embers burn when they gaze at her, down to the swell of her lower lip and the lewd sight of his palms groping her breasts. "Tsubomi," he murmurs, placing a wet kiss on the place between them, "if only you can see yourself now, so disheveled," the creature talks this time, taunts sweetly, "it becomes you, wife."

He goes on and on. Faster. "This," his chest is a wall of ice, but even his voice holds some semblance of warmth. Something dark and stifling, like woodsmoke. "Do you want this?"

His thumbs flick, rubbing on the rosy peaks of her chest. Flushed, erect. Seeking his—and he grants one with a slow lap of his tongue. Tsubomi closes her eyes. Stop. "Kagewaki," he sucks, tasting, tugging with teeth. Her back arches for him. "Kagewaki. . ." she bites her tongue, hoping it bleeds and makes her mute.

"Y . . . yes," her hands rove on his hair, fingers coiling and wrenching. Her hips tense. Her body shakes. "Yes," and so she cries; the high exquisite, and it twists her inside. She writhes too, in her shame. Her warmth spills, weeps, staining the side of her thigh, leaving its memory on her bed. Make it stop, she thinks.

Her hands dive down in search until her nails rake the skin of his back. He does not cease, but he stares at her, finally. It is intense and feral, as it looms over her bearings, stirring her erratic chest and shooting down to the heat of her quim. It rattles from her walls, to the tips of her toes, behind her eyelids; her release is so near. He understands this; he feels it, her need. And he pleasures her—he knows this now, torments her for it.

However there is a chuckle in the dark. Footfalls and raindrops thrumming in the room as with her own heartbeat—quick, maddened, like the beat of wild wings. Lightning strikes, thunder rumbles, and white light streaks in a flash of a face, of fanged lips, of the ogumo. As she screams out from the paper walls, reached her pinnacle in a hot blaze, she finds the newfound strength to topple him down and straddle him between her legs. Their thighs are stuck together, smeared and slick still. Even if her knees quiver and his length remains wedged inside of her, she does not hesitate clasping her hands taut around his throat.

Kagewaki does not attempt to stop her actions, but he rasps out: "Have you gone mad?"

Her mouth crooks bitterly. "I must have. I know you are not him. This is his face, his hands. . ." a weak chortle leaves her lips, breaking into a quiet sob. Her hold tightens. "But is he still there? Tell me what you are lest I strangle you for it."

"Tsubomi," he feigns a plead. His breath does not struggle. "Please."

"Don't lie," She hisses, clenching her teeth because her lips tremble at the sight of him, seeing a faint glimpse of her husband in those eyes; like this, framed with dark lashes and a fragility she cradles close to her chest. "Don't lie." Weakness overcomes her, as her face presses to his cold chest, blue-black hair falling on her eyes and splaying onto the slopes of his shoulders.

He makes a soft noise from his throat. "Shh," a hand glides up to the back of her scalp, threading her locks through his fingers. He jolts his hips up, making her gasp.

"Hush now," he whispers, voice like snaring silk. He then grapples her hips firmly in place with his hands when she attempts to slip away from him. He grinds into her, and the heat treacherously spreads up to her abdomen. "Let me make you feel better."

Repressing a moan, Tsubomi shudders out a breath. "Stop," he does not. His thumb flit by those lips, teasing, tracing a stripe, until it slides in, slowly up, and prods. It burns, so so much, "stop . . . I'll claw out your heart, I swear."

This earns her an amused chuckle, a lapse of character. He stops, but everything he has left trickle down the crevice between them. "Tsubomi, would you truly end your own husband?"

She glares down on him. "And what remains of him but skin and rot?"

His smirk is poisonous. "Am I not convincing, my love? Ah . . . am I not better?"

In this rain and revelation, a cold fury wreathes onto her soul. Her nails rip at his skin. "How dare you."

Her hands remain wound on his neck, the force bruising and livid, though he rises from his position with ease, unhindered by Kagewaki's sickly constitution. An unnatural strength dwells within him; muscles like wrought iron, beneath skin as soft and pliant as satin. Even with such strength, he does not detach himself from her grasp.

He only leans in, caresses the side of her bare thigh. "You never seem to resist when I touch you," he tells her this, letting their chests merge, fall and rise together, complete the other intimately. A lock of his hair clings to her throat; the taste of his sigh latches on her mouth. He does not release her and she does the same. He thrusts in. Her eyes pulse wide, bemused and indignant and agitated.

A venomous delight slithers across his features. Again and again, his hips move, sating a void, an emptiness, that cruelly pushes in something similar to fullness, oh decadent bliss. Her body meets this satisfaction, invites it, beckons—because it is her husband's flesh, the scent of his sweat, the palms of his hands. "Do you not see yourself keening," but the creature reminds her once more, a brush of dark lips against her ear, "needing me, wanting me . . . give in, wife," so much forceful persuasion, from his tongue, from his fingers underneath, "I can make you ache for it."

"I ache for him," Tsubomi declares, heaving out pants, gripping, "only him, only my lord."

A hand then lifts her chin up, fingertips tracing over her jaw. "Look at me," he tells her. "Is this not the rest of him?"

There is an unpleasant churn at the pit of her gut, dread washing her whole, fracturing her delusion, her sanity. Her fears grapple her through its long spidery arms. "No," she breathes out, "no. It can't . . . where is he," her voice breaks, tears veining within its cracks, "where is he, you foul creature," and then she quivers, muttering under her breath, "you murderer."

"Here," he says, remorseless. "With you, inside of you."