Chapter 429 - 428- Let me Help a Bit
The laughter rippled outward like a stone dropped in still water, warm and chaotic and human. Some of the older women were doubled over, clutching each other’s shoulders for support.
A veteran with thick forearms and a gap-toothed grin wheezed so hard she knocked over a bucket. Even the two terrified men who had drawn their swords were sheathing them with sheepish grins, shoulders shaking.
Viktor looked around at all of it with mild, appreciative patience.
"Yeah, people," he said, raising his voice over the dying laughter, one hand still casually tucked in his pocket, his incubus mark pulsing with a faint, satisfied violet warmth. "I am exactly that."
"Shut up!"
A hand shot out, fingers closing like a vice around his wrist. Viktor blinked. Lira had apparently regained consciousness sometime in the last thirty seconds with the specific, humiliated fury of a woman who had woken up to find herself the punchline of her own camp’s best story in years. Her face was still crimson from her hairline to her collarbone, the dried, faint evidence of the pond incident still visible on the edge of her jaw.
She yanked him forward with surprising strength. "There are children here, you absolute idiot!"
And she pulled him, striding at a furious pace across the camp toward a larger tent near the cliff face, hauling him along like laundry.
Viktor went without protest, watching her back with calm, dark eyes, the corner of his mouth tilted just slightly upward.
Gwen, who had been crouched with the children—silver hair fanning forward as a little girl tried to braid it—shot upright immediately. Her violet eyes tracked Lira’s aggressive march with Viktor in tow. "Hey!" She jogged forward, catching up in several graceful strides. "Stop. Where are you taking him?!"
Lira didn’t answer, shoving the tent flap aside.
What followed was entirely predictable.
Across the camp, the surviving bandits exchanged loaded glances. An older woman pressed her lips together very firmly, hiding a smile. Two younger women flushed simultaneously. The freckled archer from the forest earlier turned to the woman beside her and whispered something that made both of them go scarlet, their gazes darting to the tent before they looked very aggressively at the ground.
The understanding spread like wildfire through the camp in the span of about four seconds.
Their leader—their fierce, battle-hardened bandit queen—had just dragged a man who declared himself a sex demon into her private tent. With the elf following.
One by one, looking deeply embarrassed on Lira’s behalf, everyone in the camp turned around and found something extremely urgent to attend to. Fires were stoked. Pots were stirred. A man suddenly needed to re-nail a perfectly stable plank. The women scattered with the specific, dignified haste of people respecting privacy they were absolutely dying to violate.
Inside the tent, Lira released Viktor’s wrist and spun to face him. The space was small but functional—a cot against one wall, a battered table stacked with parchment maps and rough tallies, weapons hanging on a wooden rack, a single oil lamp casting everything in amber.
She planted her fists on her hips and opened her mouth.
Then stopped.
Her hazel eyes darted to the tent entrance. Then back to Viktor. Then to the entrance again. The sound of people not-quite-naturally going about their business filtered through the canvas walls.
"Wait," she said slowly. "Did I just create a misunderstanding?"
Viktor sat down on the edge of her table, casually displacing a stack of parchment, and crossed his arms over his chest. His expression was entirely tranquil. "Yes," he said pleasantly. "Of course you did, you misidiot."
Lira’s eye twitched violently. "I will kill you, bastard!"
"—you’re welcome to try after you answer my questions—"
"I will gut you and feed you to the—" She stopped. Something in her own words snagged in her brain. Her eyes narrowed slowly, processing. "Wait."
"Hm."
"Did you..." She pointed at him. "Did you actually say earlier that you are a sex demon?"
He blinked at her with infinite patience. "Of course I did."
The implication sat between them, warm and dense as bread fresh from a fire.
Lira straightened up, hands clasping behind her back in the instinctive posture of a commander regrouping. She cleared her throat. "Then. I will need to protect the women of my tribe from the... lust. Of yours."
Viktor looked at her for a long moment. Then he looked around the tent. Then, unhurriedly, he looked back out through the tent flap at the camp, where somewhere between fifteen and twenty women of varying ages and builds were loudly performing tasks. He watched a particularly robust older woman—easily forty-five, thick-waisted, with spectacular, matronly hips that swayed with an unconscious, pendulous authority as she carried a heavy water jug—walk past the tent entrance.
"Do you really," Viktor said, his voice perfectly calm, "think I would lust over anyone in this tribe?"
He paused, eyes tracking one of the two camp men as he walked past.
"Men."
Lira’s mouth twitched.
She stared at him. She crossed the three steps between them in a single stride and grabbed his collar with both hands, hauling him off the table toward her face. His dark eyes were suddenly very close. "You bastard," she hissed, voice dropping to a controlled fury. "How dare you say that. Do you really think you’re some handsome hunk? You—you arrogant, perverted, tail-having—"
She was trying to rattle him. She could feel herself doing it, the deliberate strategy of chipping at his ego, finding the crack in that infuriatingly calm exterior. She yanked him closer for emphasis.
But the words stopped.
Viktor didn’t flinch. He didn’t react with ego or defensiveness. He simply looked at her with those dark eyes, still half-lidded, the purple at their edges pulsing once with his heartbeat.
Lira’s focus fractured.
Her gaze, against her absolute will, dropped to his eyes properly. Then the line of his jaw. The unhurried, knowing curve of his lips. The specific angle of his smirk, worn with the ease of a man who had long since stopped needing external confirmation of anything. Her fingers were twisted in his collar and she could feel the warmth of his chest through the fabric and the memory from the pond—the full, vivid, pornographic clarity of his cock standing erect and glistening in the open air, the weight and heat of him pressed flush against her—hit her brain like a thrown stone hitting glass.
Her sentence broke apart completely.
"You... you are just..." Her voice lost its heat, her fingers slackening slightly on the collar. "You’re... not even..."
Her eyes dropped to his lips involuntarily.
’No. Stop that.’
"You idiot," she managed finally, the word coming out entirely without the fury she intended, landing instead with the exhausted softness of a woman who had just lost a fight she hadn’t planned on entering. She released his collar, shoving him back slightly.
"Don’t leave this camp," she said, voice clipped and hard and covering something entirely else. "I mean it. Stay visible. I don’t want to explain a missing sex demon to anyone."
She turned on her heel and walked out of the tent.
Viktor rose smoothly, tucking in his shirt where her grip had rumpled it, and followed, three steps behind.
"Why are you following me," Lira said flatly, not turning around.
"Come on," Viktor said, his eyes doing a single, lazy sweep of the camp. "Let me help a bit."
She stopped walking. Turned halfway. "What?"
"You heard me."