Chapter 324- First Zone’s Zone Master
"It is what it is." She looked at the floor. "It is what we are. We take energy. We don’t — we don’t make things. We don’t carry things."
"I can impregnate you," he said.
She looked up.
He met her eyes.
"If you want."
The silence lasted seven seconds.
Her eyes moved to Soha’s belly — the full pregnant dome of it, pressing warm between them, the tight skin of the pregnancy catching the lamplight.
Her hand moved.
Involuntarily.
Reaching forward and pressing flat against the side of Soha’s belly — the palm contact of a woman reaching for something she thought she understood and is now uncertain about.
"Just like this woman," she said quietly.
"Ah." He shifted. "No. Not exactly like her."
The succubus looked at him.
"She’s not pregnant in the conventional sense." He pressed his palm against Soha’s belly beside the succubus’s hand. "The child is an energy manifestation. It formed in the pocket cell from ambient energy and the synthesis ability." He looked at Soha. "A conceived soul looking for a body."
Soha looked at his hand on her belly.
She said nothing.
"I thought so," the succubus said.
Her hand still on the belly.
"Her hymen was intact." She looked at Soha’s face. "A normally pregnant woman wouldn’t — it wouldn’t be."
Soha’s jaw moved.
"Thank you for that observation," she said.
The succubus smiled.
Small. Genuine.
Her other hand — the one not on Soha’s belly — moved instinctively.
Found his cock.
Not performing it. Not the deliberate seduction movement of the last several hours. The absent, comfortable movement of a woman reaching for something that has established itself as nearby and relevant, her fingers wrapping around the shaft and beginning a slow, lazy stroke.
Soha looked down.
Then her own hand moved.
Wrapped around the shaft below the succubus’s hand.
Both of them stroking him. Their hands finding a rhythm without discussing it, the succubus’s long elegant fingers and Soha’s smaller darker hand working the shaft in alternating strokes, their knuckles occasionally brushing each other.
He looked down at this.
Then up at the ceiling.
Then he laughed.
The genuine, chest-deep laugh of a man who finds a situation comprehensively funny — the warm laugh that both women had heard in fragments but not at this length.
"What," Soha said.
"Nothing."
"What—"
"You’re both doing it," he said, still laughing. "You know that?"
They both looked at their hands on his cock.
Both of their expressions cycled rapidly through several stages.
Neither of them stopped.
He stopped laughing.
"By the way."
He looked at the succubus.
His hands still on both their boobs, their hands still on his cock. The domestic intimacy of the arrangement almost aggressively incongruous with the room’s decor.
"Who is the zone master here."
The succubus’s hand froze on his shaft.
Her body went stiff.
Not the arousal-stiff of the last several hours — the other kind. The cold-spined stiffness of a name arriving in a context it wasn’t expected.
Her lips pressed together.
"His name," she said.
Her voice had gone flat again. The Throne Bishop flat, the voice that carried rank.
"Is Vekar."
He said nothing.
Waited.
Her jaw moved once.
"He was — he found the prison eight years ago." Her tail had gone completely still, lying flat against the floor beside his foot. "Awakened ability. Zone manipulation." She looked at the wall. "He made himself lord of the ice floor. Controls the village. The people."
"And you," he said.
She didn’t answer immediately.
"Was he the man," he said quietly, "who fucked you and discarded you?"
Her body trembled.
Once. Full. The long shudder of a Throne Bishop demon trembling at a question, her wings pressing tight against her back, her enormous boobs pressing forward from the motion.
Then she looked at him.
"What now," she said. Her voice was very controlled. "You want to throw me away too? You’re done now so—"
"Of course not."
She stopped.
"I’m going to cuck him," he said.
She blinked.
"He shouldn’t have touched a woman as beautiful as you." His thumb pressed her nipple. "He must have fucked you quite hard."
Her breath came out shaky.
"Yeah," she said.
Her voice was small.
"He’s a bastard."
He nodded.
He looked at the window.
At the dark outside. At the frost.
’’’
Far from the apartment — across the ice floor, past the village’s outer edge, down the street where the lamps flickered and the cold pressed against everything — seven men were moving.
The sound of them came first.
Bats dragging against the ground. Spiked boots on stone. The loose, confident noise of men who have been given permission by someone with power and are using it fully.
Seven of them.
Moving in a loose formation toward a small house at the edge of the residential district, the one with the orange lamp in the window and the blue door that was about to stop being blue.
At the center of them — not walking, sitting, being ’carried’ — was the man.
Fat.
The specific fat of a man who has not done physical work in many years and has eaten well on other people’s labor for all of them — the round belly pressing against the front of his coat, the thick fingers wrapped around a glass that one of his men was holding for him as the chair carried forward.
His face was the face of a man who has decided that the world exists for his convenience and has found no significant evidence to contradict this position.
His name was Vekar.
Zone master of the ice floor.
He set down the glass.
Stood — the effort of it visible in the hinge of his joints, the creak of a body too fat for its own knees.
The door came off its hinges before the knock.
Two of his men through it first, the space filling with their bodies and their bats and the smell of unwashed men in heavy coats.
She was inside.
Standing against the far wall — young, eighteen years ago exactly by the ice floor’s warped calendar, her hair dark and tangled around a face that was the face of a girl who had grown up in the village and had been brought to this moment by the specific cruelty of having been noticed by the wrong person.
She was trembling.
Her clothes were the clothes of a girl who had been grabbed on the way home from something normal and had not been given time to put on anything better.
"Please—" Her voice hit the room and bounced. Small. Genuine. "Please, I don’t — where is my mother? Why have I been brought here?"
Vekar came through the door.
His fat belly preceding him. His fingers adjusting his coat. His eyes finding her against the wall with the eyes of a man who has done this before and has stopped finding any part of the finding remarkable.
He looked at her.
At the trembling. At the pressed-together thighs. At the young face with the tears already starting.
He looked at the man who had brought her.
"What is this bitch?"
The man who had brought her — broad, scarred at the jaw, his bat resting on his shoulder — ignored the girl entirely.
"Today is her birthday," he said.
He said it the way a man presents a gift he’s pleased with.
"She’s eighteen." He turned to look at her the way you look at an object. "Naturally—" The smile spread. "Wouldn’t it be fun if we made her a woman today?"
The room erupted.
The six men around them — all of them, the full circle of them — burst with the laughter of men who have been promised something and have just been told they’re getting it, the loud, scraped, comprehensive laugh of a room full of people who have never been told no.
The sound bounced off the walls.
She pressed herself harder against the wall.
Her hands flat against the stone behind her. Her knees pressing together. Her face turning sideways as if not looking at them would make them less real.
They unzipped.
One by one — not quickly, not in a hurry, with the lazy confidence of men who have no reason to rush — the sound of it moving around the room in sequence.
Cocks came out.
Six of them, and then the seventh as Vekar’s fat fingers worked his own zip — various sizes, all of them softening in the cold air and then hardening as the room’s specific energy reached them, the hair of each man’s groin unkempt and coarse, the balls of each man hanging heavy.
Hairy. Stinking of work and unwash. The smell of seven men’s groins mixing in the small room with the cold and the lamp smoke and her fear.