Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1856: Fierce Duel

"...Then restrain your instincts," she said, one full beat too late. "Or you’ll be supplying the woman you love with your sad little pills for eternity."

Black Fang rode Quinlan on the floor of the wrecked dawn dojo, his wrists pinned to the boards on either side of his head, and within a few heartbeats it became clear that she had brought a doctrine.

She fought sex the way she fought everything, as a discipline to be conquered, and she had spent one entire night gathering intelligence from a windowsill.

The opening sequence arrived exactly as drilled: a measured roll of the hips copied beat for beat from her sister’s counter-tempo, an angle she had watched him enjoy earlier in the night and now reproduced from memory with a genius combatant’s precision.

It worked for four beats.

"...Amazing," said Quinlan, with sincerity.

Being inside this precious woman was simply otherworldly.

*Creak.* Under her grip, his pinned right hand strained against the boards hard enough to make the wood complain, and the tremor of it arrived straight up her arm.

Her eyes logged both tells as direct hits, one from his mouth, one delivered into her own palm. She struck the same seam again, and her own body defected mid-stroke.

The stolen angle turned out to carry a second edge on her side of the blade.

It dragged across a place inside her that no surveillance had mapped, and her proud rhythm stumbled as her own hips answered him without authorization from anyone.

The first sound made it no further than her teeth. Strangled at the border. Her expression declared a clerical error and resumed operations.

She resumed at half speed, and the duel entered its research phase.

Her first experiments demanded her hands back within three strokes. She released his wrists one wary finger at a time, watching for rebellion, and the freed hands rose, considered their liberty, and returned to her thighs, exactly where she had left them. The ruling held.

She tested in increments. A centimeter of change per pass, a new angle every third stroke, pausing at each discovery to catalogue what it did to him and, with visibly mounting insult, what it did to her. She rode him, attentive, flinching at nothing, her brow knit in quiet strategy while her own nerves kept defecting to the enemy.

His hands helped where the law allowed. Steadying her hips through a wobble, warm thumbs smoothing along whatever trembled, adjustments so small they never once touched her precious tempo, and every time a tremor ran her thighs he read it and eased her through it without comment.

The second sound got further.

"...Hn."

Short, low, out the gate before the guard could close it. Her eyes widened a fraction at her own voice, betrayed by an instrument that had not failed her once in her life.

"Don’t," she said.

"I said nothing."

"Yet."

"I was merely enjoying this wonderful view. Far be it from me to mock you for also enjoying yourself."

"..."

She studied his face for the lie and could not locate it, which was worse, and went back to work with her ears faintly dark at the rims.

It was three discoveries later that she looked at him, really looked, and the ledger hit a page it could not turn.

He lay easy against the cushion, one palm warm on her thigh, the other on her waist, watching her. That was all.

And there was nothing in his face she had a file for, because she had surveilled this man for long months and knew his whole repertoire: the performer, the tactician, the patient sadist, the duelist who ate masterpiece strikes as a form of courtship. Technique, all of it, layered and running.

Nothing was running now. The man beneath her lay in the wreck of a conquered dojo with a virgin terror learning to ride him by trial and error, at her speed, under her rules, and he was comfortable. At ease in a way none of her surveillance had once recorded, and she could not explain it.

She was still staring at him when her rhythm drifted, and she caught herself planning.

Her eyes went distant in the firelight, three new approaches drafting themselves behind the violet, a war college of one convening on top of him, bare and wet-thighed and absolutely absorbed in strategy.

The war college adjourned almost immediately, having produced nothing.

All three approaches, held up to the light, turned out to be the same approach.

Move your butt faster.

Beneath her Quinlan stayed untroubled, openly enjoying her, and every instinct she owned read that ease as provocation, because a confident opponent in a battle of this weight demanded a better answer than the one she was giving.

So did she simply... ride him harder? Would that even help turn the tide?

She reached for the next technique and found nothing where it should have been. Her entire close-quarters arsenal was severely lacking against the opponent she was fighting, Black Fang realized.

Her rhythm wavered a second time.

She sat very straight on him, filled and going nowhere, gaze dropping to his face and bouncing away, and her hands opened and closed against his chest as if reloading a bow she did not have.

Quinlan watched the campaign stall from below.

He watched her run out of plan mid-stride, hips holding their stubborn drilled cadence because nothing had countermanded it yet, and when her eyes came down to his... He saw a truly incredible sight. The big bad terror, Miss Venomborne herself, the most badass woman on the continent, suddenly awfully resembled a...

’Lost kitten in full battle armor. How utterly adorable.’

Something behind Quinlan’s ribs went down without a fight. There was no counter in him, no read on her openings, no next move loading.

He loved this woman.

He wanted, with a want that outranked the duel, to make this simply good for her.

And there was no accomplishing that lying down.

She registered his hands only when the movement was already finished, palms sliding off her thigh and waist and taking her by the butt, both hands, the grip already set.

Terror went through her, real terror, colder than anything her capture or the ensuing torture sessions could ever have produced.

Four hundred years of sharpened instinct, and hands, moving far too slowly, had reached her body unseen, in close quarters, in the most important battle of her life.

She knew a billion counters for a grip like this and had time for none of them.

"Come here," he murmured, to a woman with nowhere closer to go.

He rose to a seated position, taking his time, nothing in it of the explosion she was expecting, and his eyes stayed on hers the whole way up.

Gravity took over, sliding her down the new angle and driving him deeper than any of her experiments had dared to go, and the third sound got out whole.

"...Ahn."

Low, short, unmistakable, and gone before she could kill it, straight into the finger’s width of air between their mouths.

His chest came against hers. One arm wrapped her waist, one hand spread between her shoulder blades, and the duel, whatever it had been until that second, changed shape inside his arms.

By the wall, a body stirred.