Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1857: Conditions

Ayame surfaced one sense at a time, face down in ruined ritual silk, and the first report her body delivered was that everything ached in the specific way that meant everything had been wonderful.

She groaned and rolled off her front, flopping onto her side, one cheek against the cool boards, and her mouth had already begun loading a complaint about being stored on the floor like luggage when her nose came back online.

The hall was thick with it. Sex, hours deep, layered like incense in a shrine to something deeply disreputable.

’...Oh. Right.’ The memory arrived in one warm flood. The sacred duel. The forfeit.

Quin had destroyed her, thoroughly and with ceremony, and her body was a signed confession that she had loved every second of it. She let her eyes slide shut again, at total peace with her ruin.

Then her ears caught up.

Wet, rhythmic, unhurried, and close. And riding over the top of them, a woman’s breathing.

Ayame’s eyes opened.

’That... the smell I can explain, but this... cannot be me.’ She was right here. Doing none of that.

She turned her head slowly, careful not to let hope get ahead of her.

Her sister was making love in the firelight.

Being made love to. The distinction could wait.

Black Fang, the Venomborne Terror, the undefeated poker face of the Vesper Consortium, sat wrapped around Quinlan in the middle of the floor, bare, her high ponytail swaying with their rhythm, moving with him chest to chest while he rose into her from below. And on her upturned face, unguarded in the red light, lived an expression no bounty notice had ever managed to render.

Ayame’s eyes went wide.

The commentary rose in her by pure reflex, a lifetime’s arsenal of it, the teasing, the deductions, the celebration, the extortion material being minted by the second, all of it surging for the exit at once.

But then all of it stood down.

She pushed herself up on unsteady arms, dragged the silk around her shoulders, and slid backward until her spine found the wall. There she settled, knees drawn loosely up, wrapped in wrecked ceremony, and watched her big sister’s first time with the biggest, softest grin her face had ever produced, and said nothing at all.

The couple in the firelight had a dispute in progress.

"You are not..." The words came apart between strokes and had to be reassembled. "...taking this seriously."

"But I am very serious."

"This is a duel." Her palms pushed at his shoulders. "Fight me with sincerity."

He stopped.

Hips and hands and breath went still together, for the first time since he had risen off the cushion, and the stillness went off in her nerves like an alarm.

Her body misread it and primed for a strike.

He looked at her instead, from one inch away, and she looked back, because meeting a threat’s eyes was as natural to her as breathing.

It was a mistake.

She had spent a lifetime reading opponents at a glance, and she had never once failed to find the bottom of a man.

She found no bottom. The look went down and down, past want, past worship, into some black vault of devotion with no walls she could locate, and every fathom of it was pointed at her.

And the deep old animal in her, the one that had kept her alive through four centuries of poison and steel, finally identified the trap.

She had climbed, of her own will, into the arms of an immortal monster, and the monster’s weapon was adoration.

Her body had shrugged off every toxin this continent had ever brewed, but against this attack it offered no resistance at all.

Then he smiled, so close the violet was the only color left in his world, and the smile changed nothing underneath.

"I am as sincere as I ever could be."

He kissed her.

She went rigid inside his arms, both hands locked on his shoulders, every doctrine she owned scrambling for a protocol on a front no enemy had ever opened. None came.

So she fought the kiss.

For three full seconds the most feared mouth on the continent stayed sealed shut, eyes open, glaring at him from a range of zero, and he stayed, patient as weather, kissing the locked gate of her.

Her glare lost focus first.

Then her eyes closed, both traitors in the same instant, and her breath went next, surrendering through her nose in one long shiver, and last of all her mouth, the final garrison, opened under his and answered, unpracticed.

Her fingers slid up into his hair without any order being issued anywhere in her.

His state of being, his emotions, arrived through the seal of their mouths like heat through steel plate, sincerity at a dose nothing in her body knew how to neutralize, and she had nowhere at all to put this.

And it just kept coming!

Somewhere behind her ribs a rampart shifted on its foundations, and she made a sound into his mouth that no torturer had ever pulled out of her.

Then his arms moved, and the last distance died.

The duel, as far as Quinlan was concerned, had already concluded. Or, to be more accurate, had never existed.

The woman in his arms belonged to him now, at a depth no wager could reach, his to hold and guard and cherish for as long as forever ran, and every gram of pressure in his hold was telling her so, gently, one heartbeat at a time. He would level kingdoms over this woman.

The man holding her naked body was a terrible psychopath, a possessive calamity no mortal should ever have tried to duel, she realized.

The kiss broke by a millimeter, her breath undone in the space between their mouths.

"...Monster," she got out.

"Yeah." The agreement came immediate, warm, untroubled, his lips still touching hers. "I know."

What followed was tender, and it was a slaughter.

He moved into her unhurried and thorough, sure of every second, one hand splayed at the small of her back to steer the angle, the other cradling the back of her head, working her through each tremor instead of past it.

When a wave rocked her he rode it with her and eased her down its far side. When her breathing snagged he slowed until it found itself. He fought nothing. He simply attended, with all of himself, to the woman coming apart in increments against his chest.

*Pap. Pap. Pap.*

The sounds of them had gone soft and wet and regular, and her voice was surfacing between them now whether she permitted it or not, low broken pieces of it, "...ah. ...Hah. ...nn," each one arriving whole and being disowned on arrival.

"You don’t need to hold back. I swear I won’t ridicule you," Quinlan mentioned against her neck, biting and kissing all at once.

"Silence."

He did just as she hissed.

But her body kept climbing, and that was the front her doctrine had no page for. Each wave crested higher than the last, gathering toward an edge she had no name for, and at the top of every crest, right where it should have paid out, it went hollow instead.

The wave collapsed unpaid, the climb restarted from a higher floor, and her fingers dug deeper into his shoulders each time with mounting, furious confusion.

Quinlan felt it happen. He felt her reach the edge and get robbed at it, three times running, and a lesser man would have taken it for a review of his work.

He read the fine tremble in her thighs instead, the bafflement rising behind the violet, the body wound one turn past what any body should hold.

"Remind me," he breathed at her ear, never slowing. "When you win. What do I owe you?"

"The pills." Instant, even wrecked. "Every three days. For..."

"Mm. And you win when, exactly?"

Silence, of a very specific density.

Her rhythm stumbled.

’Wait... Conditions...’ Her heart began climbing.

’What were the conditions?!’

Behind her eyes, at speed, the night’s negotiation replayed itself in full: the standoff, the calculations, the syllogism, the undressing, every clause of it turned over twice in half a second.

"I forgot to set the conditions..." she realized with a low, disbelieving gasp.

The woman who did not enter a room without an exit, let alone a wager without conditions, had stripped, mounted the opposing party, and impaled herself upon him without once defining how the duel could be won.