Chapter 487: Chapter 486- Meeting with Leaders

They arrived one by one.

The warehouse on the eastern edge of Velmoor district — the old grain storage, disused since the Count’s death had collapsed the import contracts — had been emptied of everything except the smell of the old grain and the rats that had been working through it since.

Aaron’s men had put chairs in.

Nine chairs, arranged in a rough semicircle around a low table with a single candle on it, the furniture arrangement of people who understand that meetings work better when everyone can see everyone else’s hands.

The first to arrive was Castor Helling.

The man who ran the eastern dockworks — the smuggling corridor, the import-without-papers operation that had been feeding half the city’s illegal supply chain for three years. He was fat the way that men who eat well because they can are fat — the comfortable, established fat of someone who has not been physically threatened in long enough that the body has stopped preparing.

He came in, looked at the chairs, sat in the largest one.

Brought a chicken.

Was eating it when the second man arrived.

Dagger Lom came in with two women.

Both on chains — the thin, decorative chain of a man who has confused ownership with aesthetics, both women dressed in the , minimal way of people who belong to someone who makes decisions about how much fabric they need. One of them had marks on her wrist where the chain had been sitting too long.

Both women looked at the floor.

Dagger Lom sat. Put the chains over his knee. Looked at the room with the , territorial assessment of a man cataloguing exits.

He felt something.

Looked down.

At himself.

Frowned.

Looked at the women.

At the visual input that had always, without exception, produced the result he expected.

Nothing.

He looked at his hand.

Back at himself.

"Hm."

He assumed he was tired. Ignored it.

Seven more arrived in the following twenty minutes.

The man who controlled the western quarter’s protection racket — Orin Brass, gray-haired, narrow-eyed, the survivor’s economy of a man who had outlasted three regime changes by being exactly useful enough to keep and not interesting enough to fear.

The woman who ran the poison trade along the northern roads — Sedra Vane, the only woman in the room, compact and cold, who looked at everyone who entered with the , measuring quality of someone running calculations.

The men who controlled the grain hoarding. The illegal physician trade. The forged-document corridor. The child labor mines two miles south of the city.

All of them arriving. All of them finding the chairs. All of them looking at each other with the ally cautious assessment of people who know each other by reputation and power and have gathered in rooms like this before, always with the , low-grade awareness that these rooms sometimes end badly for someone.

All of them, within minutes of arriving, experiencing the same quiet confusion between their thighs.

Aaron Verhayan stood at the front.

Looked at them.

"Thank you for coming," he said.

He had the look of a man who has sent for nine powerful criminals and is now standing in front of them and knows something they don’t and is not comfortable about any dimension of the situation.

"Why have you called us here?" Castor asked, through a mouthful of chicken. "I was busy."

"Why are all my girls useless suddenly," Dagger Lom said. Not to anyone ally. Just — placing the observation in the room.

Several of the other men looked at him.

Then at themselves.

The , silent, communal acknowledgment of eight powerful men who have all been experiencing the same malfunction and have been individually attributing it to stress, tiredness, or bad breakfast.

The woman, Sedra Vane, said nothing.

Watched everyone.

Then they heard it.

The moan.

Soft at first. The compressed, pillow-muffled, ally familiar sound of a woman trying very hard not to be loud and not entirely succeeding.

Then louder.

"Hn~— aaahh~— please~— I can’t~—"

Every head in the room turned.

At the far end of the warehouse, someone had erected a curtain.

Thick, dark, draped from a ceiling beam to the floor — the , deliberate privacy screen of a person who has decided they want a degree of separation from a room without actually leaving it.

Behind it, clearly visible in silhouette —

A bed.

A large one. The shadow of it against the curtain in the lamplight behind it showing the full, comprehensive, actively-in-use reality of what was happening.

A man’s silhouette.

Broad shoulders. The , powerful geometry of someone who is not being gentle and is not trying to be.

A woman beneath him.

Her silhouette going from flat to arched to flat again with the rhythm of something being thoroughly driven into the mattress, her legs visible above the man’s shoulders, her arms thrown above her, the full, generous, ’visible’ jiggle of breasts moving with every thrust showing clearly against the lit curtain.

And the tail.

The thing behind the man’s back — not a belt, not a shadow artifact — the , curved, active tail of something that was not entirely human, visible as a separate, independent movement from behind his hips, its tip finding the woman from below with the frank, additional thoroughness of a secondary occupation.

The moans intensified.

"AAANGHH~!! TOO DEEP~!! PLEASE~!! I CAN’T~!!"

The silhouette of her breasts — heavy, full, the swing and ’slap’ of them against each other as his pace increased — threw moving shadows on the curtain.

And then something else.

The spray of it.

The fine, white, visible mist — from her nipples, from both of them, with the , ejecting pressure of milk being driven out by a body that has been thoroughly worked — catching the lamplight as it left her breasts and scattered in the air around them.

The curtain glowed slightly at those spots.

The room was silent.

Nine powerful, violent, city-controlling criminals sat in a semicircle watching the shadow-theater of something they had collectively never seen before and were currently unable to respond to in the physical way they would normally respond to it.

The limp between their thighs remained limp.

The silence remained silent.

"Is that—" Orin Brass started.

"A tail," Sedra Vane said.

Flat. Confirming. The voice of a woman who deals in poison and has therefore encountered a wider range of phenomena than most.

"A tail."

Dagger Lom looked at his two women.

Both of them were looking at the curtain.

Both of them had their mouths slightly open.

Both of them were, despite everything, pressing their thighs together.

"Hm," he said.

The rhythm behind the curtain changed.

The pace increasing — the shadow of him driving down harder, faster, the sound of flesh and the woman’s voice losing its shape and becoming something continuous and formless —

"AAAHH~!! HIIEEK~!! MASTERR~!! AAANGHH~!!"

PAH! PAH! PAH! PAH!

The milk spray visible. The bed frame’s shadow moving with the force of it.

Then —

The deep, low, single sound from the man behind the curtain.

Not loud. Just — ’present.’ The , satisfied, completely-in-control exhale of a man who has just finished exactly what he intended to finish.

The woman’s voice dissolved into the soft, wet, boneless sound of something that has been wrung out completely and is now lying in the result.

Silence.

The curtain moved.

The man stepped through it.

He came forward.

Slowly. The unhurried, completely-unconcerned pace of a man moving through a room full of nine dangerous people the way you move through your own kitchen.

His shirt was off.

The body under it — the , glistening, marked reality of a man who has been occupied for the last thirty minutes — carried the comprehensive evidence of it. Sweat across his chest and shoulders. Nail marks down his back — thin red lines, the , involuntary signature of a woman who had been grabbing something. The faint, white traces of the milk on his chest and collarbones.

His cock hung loose.

Still substantial. Still dark. The frank, casual presence of it, not tucked away, not adjusted — just there, carrying the warm, combined, obvious residue of everything the curtained bed had produced.

A tail behind him.

Moving with a slow, independent, unhurried rhythm of its own — the spade tip tracing small arcs in the air at hip height, carrying its own evidence.

His hair was damp.

He was pushing it back with one hand.

His eyes —

Purple.

Scanning the room with the , unhurried, completely-non-threatened quality of a man who has already decided how every scenario in this room ends and finds none of them concerning.

He looked at the nine of them.

They looked at him.

"I just need the officials," he said.

His voice was casual.

Like commenting on weather.

"Not the goons."