Chapter 412 - 411- Gwen was Left Alone
Gwen blinked.
The question punctured something. She stared at him, the whole scaffolding of her tirade suddenly without a clear target, the words she’d been building falling apart.
"What?"
"Your bow." Viktor nodded toward the building. "And the quiver. You’re coming with me to the capital. You should be armed."
A pause.
Something moved across Gwen’s face. Not quite softening — Gwen didn’t soften, she had architectural commitments to not-softening — but a shift, a recalibration, the look of someone who had been throwing punches at a wall and found a door instead. Her jaw closed. Her eyes narrowed.
"...Fine," she said, with the exact same weight her mother’s ’fine’ had carried three weeks ago, which Viktor had also stored for later. "I’ll go and come back now."
She turned on her heel and walked — swiftly, precisely, with the gait of a woman putting meaningful distance between herself and a situation she needed to think about — toward the mansion. Her bow was still in her hand. Her hair moved. Her hips, Viktor noted, moved with the particular decisive quality they always had.
He watched her go.
He turned back to his wives.
Vivian was still pressed against his back, arms loosened now but not gone, her face slightly pink. Mira was watching him with green eyes that had a very specific type of knowing in them. Helena was smiling. Bella’s tail was swishing. Kaida was looking at where Gwen had disappeared with an expression she would deny if asked about.
Viktor reached behind him and patted Vivian’s hand gently. She startled and let go.
"Right," he said.
He looked at Mira. The connection opened.
’Now.’
Her eyes glinted. She understood immediately, because she always understood immediately, it was the most useful and most dangerous thing about her.
The others understood a half-second later. Bella was already moving. Kaida’s hand found her own blade. Elara’s tail curled in anticipation.
Viktor took one last look at the garden. The green, obscene, perfect garden his wife had grown on the first floor of a dungeon tower in a border town in the middle of nowhere.
’I’ll be back before she delivers,’ he thought. ’I always keep that kind.’
He rolled his neck. Took a breath.
The amethyst slime and the pink slime swung wide around him, bouncing with sudden intensity, their glow brightening as the Instant Recall ability activated.
The marble walkway was empty in less than a breath.
Warm air settled where seven people had been standing. The garden below continued its quiet, indecent thriving. The flowers bloomed. The small stone paths curved. Birds that Helena had coaxed into residence called twice and went back to their business.
The tower breathed, as towers do.
Gwen came through the mansion door at a run, quiver over her shoulder, bow in hand. Her hair was still wild. Her cheeks were still flushed.
She stepped out onto the walkway.
She looked at the empty space where Viktor had been standing.
She looked at the spot where her mother had been.
She looked at the full, unbroken, silent emptiness of the upper floor, the only movement being the lazy bounce of morning light on the marble and the distant sway of Helena’s flowers in the garden below.
Her mouth opened.
Her bow arm dropped.
"..."
She turned in a full, slow circle, just to be thorough.
Empty. Empty. Empty. The railing. The stone. The garden.
The very particular silence of people who had been here and are not anymore.
’"Where,"’ she said, to the air, to the flowers, to no one and nothing,
’"did they all go?"’
’swoosh’
Just air.
"I-I HATE THESE GUYS!!"
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
"’Haahn~!!’ — Vik— Viktor— ’Young Master,’ the—’Anghh~!!’—"
Helena’s voice broke apart before it could finish itself. Her enormous breasts slapped the water’s surface with each thrust, sending ripples cascading toward the stone edge of the pond, and she gripped Viktor’s forearms with both hands as if the whole garden was tilting. Which, from where she stood — chest-deep water, his thick incubus tail buried to its hilt inside her soaked pussy from below the surface while his cock drove into Mira’s womb from behind — she probably felt like it was.
"’Hnn—!’" Mira’s jaw clenched. She had her hands braced against a flat pond rock at the waterline, knuckles white, dark wet hair plastered to the side of her face, and she was breathing through her teeth with the specific, furious dignity of a woman who had promised herself she would maintain ’some’ composure and was failing completely. Her soft belly — that gentle early round of pregnancy, barely a swell but unmistakably ’his’ — pressed against the smooth stone as Viktor’s hips pistoned into her from behind. The water churned white around their waists.
’Pah. Pah. PAH.’
The sound bounced off the stone walls of Helena’s garden floor, swallowed by the leaves and flower clusters Helena had coaxed into cascading overhead. The garden didn’t care. The flowers bloomed. The birds had long since found other trees.
"’Hngh~!! Ungh~!! HAAHN~!!’"
Viktor’s hands settled on Mira’s hips — not holding, not gripping. ’Claiming.’ His fingers pressed into the soft fat of her waist and he pulled her back onto him with the unhurried force of a man who had all morning and intended to use it, his dark eyes tracking the water where it sheeted off her back in thin rivers, tracking the way his incubus tail curled through the water and found Helena’s inner walls with the unerring instinct of something that had learned what she needed better than she had.
"’Young Master—’ I— the tail is—’Aahn—’" Helena’s eyes rolled back, briefly, her lashes wet. Her lactating nipples had already stiffened and were leaking pale white into the water, dissolving in seconds — absorbed, like everything his body produced, into the flesh of whoever received it. She pressed both palms flat against Viktor’s chest instead, steadying herself against him, her pregnant belly bumping his abs softly with each movement, and the touch of it — the warm firm round of it pressing against him — did something to Viktor’s jaw.
He rolled his neck once.
’His’ tail coiled tighter.
"’HAAHN~?!’"
At the pond’s stone lip, where moss clung to old rock and purple jasmine trailed into the water, the two slimes — Rusty and Rustina — had planted themselves like sentinels at a feast. Rusty, the amethyst slime, pulsed with deep lavender light in slow, rhythmic throbs, his mass swelling slightly with each discharge of sexual energy that rolled off the water in visible heat waves. Rustina, smaller, petal-crowned, bounced on the spot with eager little oscillations, her pink glow brightening every time a particularly dense wave hit her.
They were not doing anything. They were simply receiving.
The air around the pond smelled like warm amber and lightning.
"You started without us."
Bella’s voice came from the stone steps at the pond’s edge. She stood with one hand on her hip and her silver hair unbound and still dry, ears angled forward, tail swishing behind her with the slow beat of something that had already made a decision. Her golden cat-eyes took in the scene with the absolute shamelessness of a creature that had decided jealousy was a waste of a morning.
Beside her, Kaida. Arms crossed. Red hair damp at the tips from the steam rising off the water. Her crimson eyes went from Viktor’s back to where his hips met Mira’s ass to Helena’s face — that face that was currently doing something structurally unsound — and Kaida’s jaw worked once.
"Of course he did," Kaida said flatly.