Chapter 446 - 445- A Pure Unfiltered Bastard
His hands — still loosely cupping both women’s breasts on either side of him — stopped moving. Just rested. As if even his hands had paused to appreciate the specific heaven of the current arrangement.
Two warm bodies pressed against his sides, soft breasts against his ribs, their faces tucked against his neck, their wet hair against his jaw, their racing pulses hammering against his skin.
And Rihana’s throat around his cock in the water below.
He looked up at the sky.
"I’m going to impregnate all of you," he said, conversationally. To the moon, approximately. "And then leave for the Capital."
The words were delivered with the same register a man uses to announce travel plans.
"Get stronger."
Lira went rigid.
Not gradually — ’immediately’, spine locking, head coming up from his shoulder, the bandit captain’s composure snapping back into emergency configuration.
"What—" Her voice came out higher than she intended. She worked it back down. "’What?’"
He turned his head.
He looked at her.
And then he kissed her.
No transition. No warning. His mouth on hers, one hand coming up from her breast to the back of her neck — not gripping, just ’placing’, as if positioning something — and the kiss wasn’t gentle or exploratory. It was the kiss of a man making a point in a language he’s fluent in and she doesn’t have defenses against.
Lira’s hand came up to push him back.
His tail caught her wrist.
The length of it — she hadn’t even registered it approaching — curled around both her wrists with unhurried efficiency, binding them at the small of her back with a firmness that wasn’t painful and wasn’t escapable. Her hands pressed flat against each other behind her and simply ’stayed there.’
Her mouth was still being kissed.
Her protest was still technically happening inside her chest somewhere, underneath the kiss, pressing outward — but the tail had her wrists and his mouth had her breath and the purple air had been in her lungs for half an hour, and the cumulative effect of all three was a woman whose resistance had been systematically out-resourced.
She kissed back.
She was going to be angry about that later.
He pulled back.
Looked at her face. Her flushed, furious, entirely compromised face.
"In three months," he said, "you’ll give birth."
A beat.
"You’ll awaken after the birth." His eyes moved between her and Gwen. Then to Rihana below. "All three of you."
The silence cracked in three places at once.
Rihana made a soft sound around his cock — not protest. ’Agreement.’ The sound of someone who has already processed this information and arrived somewhere peaceful about it.
Lira opened her mouth.
Gwen opened her mouth.
What came out of both of them was a collision of outrage and disbelief and something else underneath both that neither of them would name — a ’what kind of bullshit’ that came out simultaneous and indignant and about forty percent as convincing as it needed to be.
"You can’t just—"
"That’s insane, you absolute—"
"—who do you think you—"
"—not a ’farm’, we’re not—"
Viktor waited.
He waited with the patience of something that has all night and knows it.
Then he looked at Gwen.
Only Gwen.
"You," he said, "are useless to me currently."
The words landed differently than Lira’s had. Lira’s had been outrage-fuel. These were something else — they hit a spot behind Gwen’s sternum that she hadn’t known existed and pressed on it.
"Either become useful." His voice was even. "Or leave."
The forest went quiet.
Gwen heard the night birds. The lap of the water. Rihana’s slow, wet rhythm below the surface.
She heard her own heartbeat doing something she couldn’t categorize.
’Leave.’
The word sat in her chest like a splinter. She turned it over. Tried to find the angle where it didn’t catch on anything.
She’d followed him from Millbrook. She’d followed her mother’s faith in him first, and then something of her own, something she’d been calling caution or practicality or common sense and which she now stood in a moonlit pond with soaked underwear recognizing as something considerably less rational than any of those things.
Her voice, when it came, was smaller than she intended.
"What?" A pause. Her throat worked. "You want me to ’leave?’"
Viktor looked at her with the expression of someone making an obvious point.
"If you won’t give me a child." Flat. Factual. "Yes."
Gwen’s face did several things in sequence.
Shock first. Then fury — genuine, hot, the kind that lives behind the eyes. Then something underneath the fury that was ’not’ fury and that she was not going to examine while he was watching.
"You ’bastard’—" She pointed at him, which required removing her hand from where it had been resting against his chest and she didn’t notice she’d done it. "You can’t just — how can you ’say’ that?! How can you just — I’ve been—"
He reached behind Rihana’s head.
Pulled her slowly up off his cock.
The shaft emerged from her throat with a sound that the clearing was too quiet not to broadcast — glistening, dark-flushed, fully rigid, the crimson head tight and rounded and ’present’ in the moonlight with an authority that interrupted Gwen’s sentence purely by existing.
She looked at it.
She looked away.
She looked back.
"I’m visiting the Hartfield mansion next," Viktor said. He was looking at the middle distance the way men look when they’re thinking about logistics. "Meeting the Mistress." His eyes came back. "Then the Capital."
His hand, still loose on her breast, squeezed once.
"Family. Or abandoned." He said it without cruelty. Which was somehow worse than cruelty. "Choose."
Rihana, kneeling in the water at his feet, had turned to look at Gwen.
Her dark eyes, still wet, were soft in a way that the word ’maternal’ didn’t fully cover but was the nearest available translation. She looked at Gwen the way women look at each other when one of them is about to make a decision she won’t be able to unmake.
Her lips moved. Barely.
’Don’t,’ her expression said. Not ’don’t choose him’. Just — ’don’t let him leave without you.’
Gwen looked at her.
At this thick, wrecked, glowing, thoroughly-bred woman kneeling in moonlit water who ninety minutes ago had been the quiet, covered woman who cooked at the camp and never looked anyone in the eye.
Who was now looking at Gwen with tears still on her face and Viktor’s seed still on her thighs and an expression that said: ’I know. I know. But look at him.’
Gwen looked at him.
The purple eyes. The easy, terrible confidence. The six-pack catch of moonlight across his stomach. The cock standing between Rihana’s knees like it had opinions about the conversation.
She thought about her mother.
The thought arrived sideways and she didn’t want it and she asked it anyway.
"Did you," she said, very quietly. "Did you sleep with my mother."
Viktor looked at her.
Something shifted in his face — not guilt, not surprise. The particular expression of a man who finds the timing of a question interesting.
Then he smiled.
"Yeah," he said. Simple. Easy. The smile widened slightly. "She was ’fucking delicious.’"
Gwen’s entire body went through three separate states simultaneously.
Something hot and humiliated flooded her face. Her hands balled. Her jaw locked.
’I knew it’, she thought, with the peculiar satisfaction of a suspicion confirmed. ’I knew. I knew from the way she watched him. I knew from the way she stopped looking at me when I asked if she was alright. I—’
"I ’knew’," she said out loud. Her voice cracked on the second word. "You absolute ’bastard.’"