"If I sent the sex demon to the queen."

Belial turned very slowly.

"...What."

"Hypothetically." Drevian was still looking at the portrait. "If the sex demon were redirected. Rather than killed. If he were made to understand the terms." A pause. "The queen would be—"

"You want another man to fuck the queen," Belial said, "so that you can watch."

"That is not—"

"Because you cannot."

"That is absolutely NOT—" Drevian turned. His face was purple in a way that had nothing to do with demonic energy. "The king has already been between those thighs. Repeatedly. For years. I have no’ emotional ’attachment. I simply want to— to experience, at least vicariously, once—"

"You want to watch."

"I want to TASTE— I want—" He stopped. Pressed his fingers to his eyes. "I just want to taste her body. Once. That’s all. Even through the crystal."

The crystal, behind them, chose this moment to produce:

"AHN~— MASTER~— PLEASE~— DON’T STOP~—"

Drevian made a sound that was not human and did not bear repeating.

Belial sighed.

The long, patient sigh of a demon who has served humans for long enough to have developed opinions about them.

"You have become impotent," he said, with the flat, clinical frankness of someone delivering a medical fact. "You cannot feel anything. The sex demon’s energy field during synchronization caused a backlash through the crystal when you were tracking the succubus. Your—" he looked at the relevant area, "—situation is a direct consequence."

"I’m aware," Drevian said, through his teeth.

"And you are currently rubbing yourself while watching the man who caused that situation breed three women."

"I am AWARE."

"And you want to use that same man to—"

"SEND THE MAGES," Drevian said. "Send the mages and the assassins to the hut. And— and consider the queen question separately. As a secondary objective. Just— consider it."

Belial considered it.

With the expression of a demon who has considered considerably worse things in considerably longer careers.

"Fine," he said. "But first." He turned toward the door. "Prince Leo’s letter."

Drevian froze.

His hand went to his forehead.

"The letter."

"Which arrived four days ago."

"Which I forgot."

"Which arrived four days ago," Belial confirmed, again, with patience.

Drevian crossed to his desk. Found the letter under a stack of astronomical charts. Read the first three lines.

His expression moved through several stations and arrived at ’resigned.’

He moved to the window.

The capital spread below him — dark towers and lamp-lit streets, the distant gleam of the academy’s spires on the eastern horizon — and he extended his hand.

The spell gathered at his fingertips. Dark, precise, with the specific density of a man who has been casting for forty years and does it the way breathing works — automatically, without performance.

A crow assembled itself from shadow.

Not a real crow. A magical construct. Black-feathered, red-eyed, built to carry letters through weather and wards and arrive reliably at the hand it was sent to.

He pressed the letter against it.

The crow sealed it in its beak.

Drevian looked at it for a moment.

"To Prince Leo," he said. "Academy wing. Western dormitory."

The crow launched.

Through the window. Into the night.

THE ACADEMY — WESTERN DORMITORY

Three Hours Later

The room was private.

That was the first thing Mira had noticed when they’d brought her here — the deliberate, careful privacy of it. A single lamp. No connecting doors. A bed with posts that had iron rings set into them at the head and foot, which she had not understood until the rope was already around her wrists.

She understood now.

Her wrists were tied above her head.

Her ankles spread and secured to the lower posts, her legs open in a position her body produced heat at and her mind kept trying to close against. Her dress — the good one, the one she’d worn for the engagement dinner — had been pushed up around her hips with a carelessness that was somehow worse than anything rough.

Four men stood at the room’s edges.

Dark gloves. Academy insignia removed from their collars. The specific, blankly professional posture of people who had been paid enough to be here and enough more to not be here afterward.

She looked at the ceiling.

Cried.

Leo sat at the foot of the bed.

He was twenty-three. Handsome in the way that people raised on portraits of themselves become handsome — as if his face had been coaching itself toward an aesthetic since childhood. Blonde hair, cut close. The easy posture of someone who had never been told no with conviction.

His cock was in his hand.

He wasn’t rushing.

He had, in fact, been not rushing for the past twenty minutes, with the leisurely patience of a man who owned the schedule.

He looked at her.

Her face was wet. Her dress was ruined. Her hands pulled against the ropes when the fear spiked and accomplished nothing.

He looked at her chest. The way the dress pulled tight across it, pushed up but not fully removed, the fabric strained over the shape of her.

"Small," he said.

She flinched.

"Your tits are small." He said it like a man reviewing inventory. Not cruel. Just — assessing. "Your face is average."

She was shaking.

"However." His eyes went down. To where her thighs spread, the rope holding them where they’d been placed, the fabric of her underdress bunched up and moved aside. "I knew the pussy of a Marquis’s daughter would be delicious."

"PLEASE—" Her voice cracked. "Please, I’m engaged— I’m going to be married next month— please, you— you don’t have to—"

"I know I don’t have to," Leo said pleasantly.

He positioned himself.

"That’s what makes it fun, specially after your father decided to leave royal faction."

The crow arrived at the window.

The letter in its beak cast a faint magical light against the glass — the seal glowing, the urgency of the spell evident — and Leo’s eyes cut toward it.

He looked at the window.

He looked at the girl.

He picked up the letter.

Read it.

The girl watched his face. Watched the content of the letter move through his expression. Watched something that might have been displeasure and something that might have been relief do brief battle.

She breathed.

’He’s going to stop.’

She watched his face settle.

Something forming there — a slow, private smile that had nothing to do with her and everything to do with whatever the letter contained.

"Now," he said, to himself. "That’s a good relief."

She started to say something.

He looked at her.

She stopped.

He folded the letter. Set it on the bedside table. Reached forward and found her breast through the fabric — not gently, the way you take hold of something you’ve decided to have — and ’squeezed.’

"Small," he said again. "But the face doesn’t matter in this position."

She screamed at him to stop.

He put his cock against her entrance.

She screamed louder.

He looked at the four men at the edges of the room. Their expressions hadn’t changed.

He looked at the girl.

Her eyes were everything his lifestyle had never offered him — ’real,’ in the specific way that theater and performance and court functions and bought company couldn’t produce. Genuine terror. Genuine desperation. The particular, irreducible realness of someone for whom this was not a game.

He found that interesting.

He pressed forward.

The scream that tore from her throat when he entered her was not a sound the room was built to hold.

It came out anyway.

PAHH!

"AAANGGHHH~~!!! It HURTS!! HIEEEK~~!!"