Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1855: At Long Last

’...Huh,’ thought Quinlan, leaving his hands exactly where they had been filed.

She truly believed it mattered. That was the shape arriving to him while she stripped herself above him with border-guard discipline. The pace was not a preference to her, not a style. Somewhere in that beautiful, lethal head of hers, it was the entire war. If she surrendered one piece of it, one sleeve, one knot, one decision, she would not be the Venomborne Terror.

’So I can’t even help her undress, huh,’ he mused.

His hands found her thighs instead.

Softly. Just resting there, thumbs drawing two idle arcs along the muscle and the gorgeous purple tattoos, a presence rather than a grip. Her gaze dropped to them and her eyes narrowed.

”Surely this much is legal.” He smiled up at her. ”I’m letting you prepare everything you need. You do realize I could be on the attack right now, don’t you?”

The narrow eyes narrowed further, and then further than that, because against her tailbone, warm and patient and unmoved by any ruling she had issued tonight, rested the full hard length of him, throbbing on its own unbothered schedule.

She elected not to dignify it.

The last silk came off her shoulders, and the firelight slid over what four hundred years had refused to touch.

Pale skin without a single scar’s error. The serpent tattoos winding up both arms, still for the moment. A body built and kept like the weapon it was, and low on her belly, small and crimson, the mark that had made her his family without ever once making her his.

Quinlan drank her in, slow and thorough, top to bottom, and the want that rose up in him had months of patience behind it and nowhere left to wait.

And below the mark, where she knelt open above him, the firelight found what she had not audited: her most sacred part... Was not dry.

It wasn’t an Ayame-style overflooded flower garden for sure, but neither would it be correct to call it a barren wasteland.

Quinlan had eyes. He used them.

’Hoh...’

And then he said nothing at all. No widening of the grin, no commentary, not one syllable of the teasing that lesser evidence earned by the bucket.

It gleamed there, admissible and damning, and the most shameless man alive granted the witness full immunity, because a real man does not embarrass the woman he loves on her first night.

’I’ll just have to make her see reality herself,’ he thought, comfortable on his pillow, and kept his counsel.

One preparation remained.

Black Fang took up the discarded under-robe, found its hem, and tore.

*Rrrip.*

A single strip of black silk came away along the grain, clean as a field dressing. She set it between her teeth.

Then, with her eyes locked on the man beneath her, both arms rose, and she gathered the loose spill of her hair off her shoulders in long handfuls and swept it high.

The pose gave him everything: her bare armpits, chest lifted, bared throat catching the firelight, the serpents flexing along both raised arms while she wound the tail through itself, took the silk from her teeth, and bound it all off in a high, tight ponytail with a soldier’s knot.

Not one second of it was hurried, and not one second of it released his eyes.

The Venomborne Terror sat astride him, bare, and truly battle ready at last.

”...Now that,” said Quinlan from the floor, with deep respect, ”is how you declare a war.”

”I already told you,” replied Black Fang slowly. ”Stop speaking nonsense.”

She rose up on her knees, reached down, grabbed his length with zero tenderness, and set him against herself.

”Black Fang.”

Quinlan’s voice stopped her at the exact point of contact. The amusement had gone out of it. She looked down and found him serious for the second time that night, and underneath the seriousness, warm.

”Are you sure about this? I’m not a decision you can take back.”

She held his eyes.

Then she answered him, without a speech, without an oath, without a single decoration.

She sank.

She took him in one slow, unflinching descent, and only two things in the world betrayed what it cost her: a single hitch of breath through her nose, and her hand, which shot down and closed around his forearm with crushing force, no caress anywhere in it, just the exact grip she had used once before, in a freezing cell, holding the only railing in reach.

Heat swallowed him, scalding and tight, a slow pulse he could count her heartbeat by, and the discovery of how warm she ran on the inside, this woman who greeted the world by pouring cold into it, emptied his head of every thought he owned.

Only one came back.

He was inside Black Fang.

Months of pursuing this breathtaking, unique woman, the wager, every wall she had ever raised between them, all of it had led to this: she had chosen him herself, climbed on, and taken him in. No victory on a bloody battlefield could ever compare to what he was feeling right now.

’Finally,’ he thought, from the very bottom of his soul. ’Finally.’

Yet despite his joy, Quinlan was completely still beneath her.

He did not thrust, did not tease, did not say one word about the vise on his forearm. He just lay there, patient as bedrock, and let her arrive at her own pace, and the only movement in him was his free hand, which came to rest, light as snowfall, on her knuckle.

Black Fang stared down at him. Her eyes closed once, slowly, opened again, and the wariness at the very bottom of them had thawed by a degree.

Then Quinlan’s gaze dropped to where their bodies joined, and stopped there.

A thin line of red was working its way down. Her first blood, four hundred years signing its own certificate, and at the sight of it every trace of the spectator left his face. Concern surfaced instead, plain and unhidden, and his lips parted.

The word never got out. Black Fang let go of his forearm, leaned down over him, and pinned both his wrists to the floor on either side of his head, her weight arriving through straight arms, her eyes one hand-span above his and forbidding the subject.

He did not test the hold even once, but... ”Does it hurt?” he asked anyway.

The scoff came out flat as ever, but on the way to it her teeth caught her lower lip for half a heartbeat, there and gone.

”Stop treating me like a fragile maiden. This is nothing.” Her fingers flexed on his wrists. ”And we are in the middle of a duel of great importance. Have you forgotten?”

Her face was perfectly grave about it.

”Isn’t it natural to be concerned for the woman I love?” Quinlan asked from the floor, making no bid for his hands back. ”I can’t help myself. It’s instinctive.”

For a long moment nothing in her moved, and then the fingers around his wrists lost a fraction of their pressure without her permission.

She had a counter ready for every weapon he had shown all night, yet she had nothing for that sentence. So she answered with the only thing she owned: her hands crushed back down on his wrists, her weight came forward, and she began to move.

”...Then restrain your instincts,” she said, one full beat too late. ”Or you’ll be supplying the woman you love with your sad little pills for eternity.”

...

Author: Apologies for cutting things off in the ’act’. I prefer to deliver the cultured Chapters in one go so no one is left dissatisfied, but this scene is not only too big but too important to rush or summarize as well. Very important stuff is happening in the tarnished dojo. Hopefully it’s still enjoyable.

And if you’re left dissatisfied, well... The Kaelira and Sera scene has been recreated, 45 images, all captioned, on Patreon.

Hehe.

Thanks for reading!