Rihana’s lips parted.

Not from consciousness. From something older than consciousness — a deep-wired response her body had developed in the past twelve hours to the presence of his cock at her lips, opening automatically the way a flower opens to light.

He looked down at her.

"Lick it."

The last of her energy gathered itself.

Her tongue came out.

Slow. Heavy. The exhausted, dragging stroke of a woman working on pure instinct with nothing left in reserve — the flat of her tongue pressing against the cockhead and drawing back in a single, long, deliberate stripe.

The taste hit her.

His seed. Her own milk. The combined residue of twelve hours of every woman in this room. All of it concentrated on the tip of his cock, all of it landing on her tongue at once.

Her body responded.

Not gradually. Not subtly.

The restoration hit her like cold water on a burn — her stamina flooding back in a wave that started from her tongue and spread outward to her fingers and toes in the space of a single heartbeat, her eyes opening fully, her back arching slightly off the mat as the color returned to her face and the exhaustion retreated like a tide pulling back.

She blinked.

Stared up at him.

Her eyes filled.

"No." Her voice was wrecked but present. The Siren quality completely stripped by exhaustion, leaving only the raw, real woman underneath. "Please, master." Her hands came up to his thighs. Pressing. Not pushing away. Just — present, the gesture of a woman making contact. "Even with my body recovering." Her voice broke on the last word. "I can’t. I’m—"

"I know," he said.

She blinked again.

That was not the response she’d been prepared for.

"I want you to accompany me somewhere."

Silence.

The sounds of the hut: two women breathing in the loose, unconscious depth of the thoroughly spent. The last drip of seed from the floor. The distant, morning calls of birds outside who had no idea.

Rihana looked up at him.

Her POV.

Her angle.

From below — his cock across her tongue, the weight of it familiar now, the taste of him and her and everything indistinguishable from each other. Above the cock: the cut of his stomach. Six-pack in the morning light filtering through the hut’s single window, the muscle catching the pale gold and throwing shadow. Nail marks. Three sets, she could identify them — her own along the left side, Gwen’s slim-fingered scratches across the right, Lira’s deliberate, controlled half-moons at his hip. Bite marks on his collarbone, his shoulder. The wet shine of three different women’s arousal dried and fresh and layered across his skin in the complete, unambiguous record of what this night had been.

His chest. The slow, calm rise of it. The breadth of his shoulders.

His face.

Dark hair, the slight dishevelment of it. Purple eyes — still burning, still that solid inhuman violet — looking down at her with an expression she’d never seen on him before.

Not satisfied. Not commanding.

Waiting.

Genuinely waiting.

For her answer.

Her tongue was still against his cock and her breasts were pressed around his shaft and his seed was still warm inside her womb and she was looking up at the face of the thing that had just spent twelve hours making her understand exactly what her body had been built for — and he was asking her, with the specific, quiet patience of someone who expected yes but had chosen to ask anyway.

"Where?" she said.

The word came out around his cock.

Warm. Soft.

Entirely willing.

He looked at her for a moment.

The purple eyes carried something — something that hadn’t been there at the pond, or in the first hour, or even at the moment of the evolution. Something that had arrived quietly during twelve hours of her milk on his tongue and her arms around his back and her voice doing its Siren thing against his neck.

He didn’t name it.

He wasn’t built for naming those things.

But it was there.

"Hartfield Mansion," he said.

A pause.

"The Mistress of this county."

His thumb pressed her breast — gentle, for him. The nipple bead of milk forming at the press, warm against his skin.

"I need someone who knows how to walk into a room."

Rihana looked up at him.

Her Siren blood, even wrecked, even exhausted, understood exactly what that meant. The way a voice could enter a space before a body did. The way presence worked when it was genuine rather than performed.

"And you think that’s me." 𝒇𝙧𝙚𝓮𝔀𝓮𝒃𝙣𝓸𝒗𝒆𝒍.𝙘𝒐𝒎

"No," he said, "I learned thick women are better at manipulating a sexually frustrated woman inyo spreading her legs."

"Who?"

---

Hartfield County looked fine from a distance.

That was the trick of it.

From the mountain road coming down — where the pine trees thinned and the valley opened and the city spread below in the mid-morning light like something painted on a postcard — it looked like a prosperous, orderly county seat. Stone walls. Market squares. The ribbon of the main road cutting through neat rows of buildings toward the mansion on the hill at the city’s center.

Rihana pulled her commoner’s skirt straight.

Adjusted the fabric over the fullness of her hips and looked down at the city with the practiced, assessing eye of a woman who had spent years reading places before she entered them.

"It looks fine," she said.

Viktor walked beside her, dark-suited, hands in his pockets, those purple eyes doing their own reading.

"It always looks fine from far away," he said. "That’s how you know it isn’t."

They descended into it.

The city gates were manned but not seriously — two guards who had the specific, defeated posture of men who had stopped believing anyone was going to enforce their wages. One of them looked at Rihana. The look traveled from her face to her chest to the generous sway of her hips under the commoner skirt in a way that took approximately three seconds and contained exactly no subtlety.

Viktor looked at the guard.

The guard looked away.

They walked through.

The market district smelled of yesterday’s vegetables and today’s tension.

Stalls open but half-staffed. Prices marked in chalk that had been revised upward so many times the boards were more white than wood. A merchant argued with two city watch members in the language of a man who had argued this argument before and knew how it ended — he was going to pay, the only question was how much.

He paid.

Twice what the fine was.

The watch members tucked it away and walked on.

Rihana’s jaw tightened slightly.

"Corruption runs deep here," she murmured, not to Viktor particularly. Just — noting it.

"Deep and old," he agreed. "Her husband’s work."

Then the alley.

They heard it before they saw it — a woman’s voice, pitched in the register of someone trying very hard not to be heard begging while begging, the specific suppressed panic of please-don’t-make-a-scene layered over genuine terror.

Viktor’s pace didn’t change.

His eyes moved to the alley entrance.

Three guards.

City watch, by the badge — but the badges were crooked and the uniforms were wrinkled and one of them had a coin visible in his breast pocket that clinked softly when he moved.

The woman between them was perhaps thirty. Brown hair pulled partially loose from a braid. An apron still on, like they’d taken her mid-errand.

Marketwoman’s build — rounded, soft, the kind of full figure that her dress was clearly designed to contain modestly and currently failing to, because two sets of hands had been at the fabric.