I opened my eyes wide and flinched. We were in the cave, of course. The ceiling and sides stretched away into darkness. Huge, thick candles guttered on the stone floor.

“Down,” he said, pushing on my breastbone. “Take off your shirt.”

I shivered, glancing around the cave. There were candles, thick, red pillars flickering in the gloom, but there didn’t seem to be a bed. Or even a blanket.

“Down,”  Níðhöggr growled. His eyes burned.

I obeyed him, pulling off my shirt and sitting down hard on the cold stone floor. Rough pebbles jutted into my shoulder blades as I lay down and closed my eyes. I am not going to enjoy this, I told myself.

Níðhöggr’s long, elegant fingers closed around my ankle. I braced myself to have my hips rocked back with his thrust, but instead his lips fluttered against my ankle, kissing me so gently he barely brushed my skin. My eyes flew open and I stared at him, trying to make sense of his movements.

He was fully naked now, with the largest erection I’d ever seen erupting from a nest of thick, red hair between his legs. His strange, burning eyes were closed. He’d rocked back on his heels, his cheek pressed against my ankle, his lips moving softly over my skin.

He shifted as his lips moved up my calves, becoming more insistent. Now his teeth scraped against my skin, making me shiver and burn, although each flash of pleasure was followed by a wave of guilt.  Níðhöggr’s eyes opened as he reached the underside of my knees, and he gave me a smile so wickedly handsome I moaned out loud.

“No,” I whimpered, trying desperately to remind myself that Níðhöggr was not my husband.

I shouldn’t enjoy this.

Níðhöggr’s lips danced along the inside of my thighs, followed by the drag of his teeth. I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from crying out, begging for more.

Then his lips found my sex, and my restraint evaporated. I screamed with need, reaching for his head and burying my fingers in his hair. My hips rocked against his mouth, demanding him, taking him. He moaned into me, his tongue buried deep inside me, and my body responded with wave after wave of ecstasy. The hard stone beneath me fell away, the guilt and shame fell away, and all that was left was the burning heat of his lips on my sex and his tongue inside me, filling me, devouring me.

My entire body arched under his touch, and my screams filled the cave as I came, hard, against his mouth. I moaned as he pulled away—

And he was on me again, clenching my hips as he forced my legs apart. Panic flared in my pleasure-clouded brain as I remembered the size of his massive erection, remembered his hard heat against my thighs, and then he was inside me, thrusting against me, and for a moment I felt I would be ripped apart. He was enormous, far too big to fit in my body. But somehow he did fit, although it burned as he stretched me almost to the breaking point. Then the burning ebbed, retreating before a tremendous surge of pleasure, and I was filled, completely and utterly filled.

Níðhöggr laughed above me, triumphant. His hips rippled against mine, moving his massive length inside me. I trembled, expecting pain, but the pain didn’t come. It didn’t. My entire body burned, aflame with the heat of desire and ecstasy, but there was no pain.

“No,” I gasped, trying to remember why I couldn’t enjoy this, why this was so wrong.

My own body ignored me as it pressed my hips up to meet Níðhöggr’s thrusts. Oh, damn, he felt good. It was as though his cock filled every part of me, my entire body, driving away anything that was not raw pleasure. I wanted it, some dim, distant part of my mind realized as my body matched Níðhöggr’s rhythm. I wanted him to fill me, to fuck me, to pound me into the ground and obliterate me.

My second orgasm took me by surprise, cresting before I fully realized what was happening. The climax forced the air from my lungs as my body stiffened against Níðhöggr’s, my hips smashing into him, my vision blurring and going dark as my mind flooded with dark heat.

He didn’t stop. I moaned and whimpered against his onslaught, his thrusts almost painful against my super-sensitive clit. Níðhöggr’s hips drove into mine mercilessly, forcing my body to respond, while he smiled coolly above me.

“I think you like this,” he said as I came again, my body crumbling, my voice moaning and crying out as another orgasm hurtled through my mind and body, destroying me.

I lost track of how many times I came against his hips, screaming into the oblivion of the cave, my naked body thrashing against the dirt and stones as he pounded me, steadily, rhythmically, his eyes watching mine with cool amusement. I forgot why I was there. I forgot who I was. The entire world narrowed to one cave, to one man. To the place where our bodies came together, sparking fire and oblivion.

And then, finally, after I’d lost all thought and rationality, all sense of myself, Níðhöggr’s expression shifted. His eyes flashed. The rhythm of his hips faltered and then sped up, and his breathing hitched. He thrust into me even harder. By then I was so swollen and sore I cried out, my voice as sharp and hard as the rocks beneath me.

He ignored me. His fingers tightened around my shoulder, grinding into my skin. His back arched, driving his cock so deep inside me it seemed to pierce the very core of my being, and he screamed something guttural and fierce in a language I did not recognize. The buried length of his cock thickened and jerked as he came inside me. The heat of his semen burned my abdomen.

His eyes met mine as he pulled out, panting. “It’s done,” he said. “You make a nice little whore.”

I took a deep, jagged breath. My entire body sang with pain. Scrapes burned on my hips and thighs and shoulders where my body had clenched and pounded against the stone. When I pushed myself up to sitting, I winced at the very deep ache between my legs.

“What now?” I asked. My voice was ragged from screaming.

Níðhöggr rocked back. She was a woman now, naked and gloriously perfect. “We’re done with you,” she said.

“But—” Tears stung the back of my eyelids. Some tiny, still-functional part of my brain realized what an absurd reaction that was.

Níðhöggr picked up her red shirt and came to her feet, towering over me. From this perspective, her perfectly round breasts looked enormous, their dark nipples almost red. She pulled the shirt over her head and turned away. For a horrible moment, I thought I had been entirely dismissed.

“Now you bear our child,” Níðhöggr said, without turning around. “When the time is right, the child will come to us. We have no further need for you.”

I wrapped my hands around my stomach. Somewhere deep inside me, the heat of Níðhöggr’s semen coursed toward my womb. I could almost picture it, thick and white, streaking through the inside of my body like a comet through the soft darkness of the night sky.

“The baby...” I whispered. “She won’t be human?”

Níðhöggr laughed. “As if you would have had human babies anyway. Look who you married!”

Married. My stomach lurched.

“You know, Vali’s mother was a goddess,” Níðhöggr said.

I nodded as a wave of nausea tore through my body.

“They imprisoned her, the Ӕsir. Killed her son in front of her and then stuck her in a cave with nothing but her bound and gagged husband and a venomous snake for company.”

Níðhöggr knelt next to me, her red shirt stretched tight across her ample chest. She smelled good, somehow, like a dark, exotic flower. “And do you know what the real surprise is?” she asked.

I clenched my teeth and shook my head, dreading where this story was going.

“She stayed,” Níðhöggr whispered. “For one thousand years, Loki’s wife Sigyn stayed with her husband. Vali’s mother stood next to Vali’s father, catching poison from a snake in a bowl so it wouldn’t fall on her husband’s face.”

I felt Níðhöggr’s soft, warm fingers on my cheek, and I opened my eyes to meet her beautiful face. “Sigyn,” Níðhöggr said, softly. “To the mortals of Midgard, she was the goddess of fidelity. That’s the example your dear Vali has for a wife. That’s his standard.”

I rolled to my side and vomited onto the cold floor of the cave for a very long time.