He walked naked down the hallway.

Not with the self-conscious deliberateness of someone making a point. Just — walked.

The way a man walks through his own kitchen in the morning, the way you move through space when you’ve stopped organizing your behavior around what spaces expect from you.

His shoulders rolled with each stride, unhurried, one hand grazing the wallpaper as he turned the corner past the portrait of some dead Westing ancestor who looked profoundly unprepared for Viktor’s existence.

Behind him, Rihana followed.

Her bare feet on the stone floor. Her breasts — completely free, completely present, the full, milk-warm weight of them swaying with each step in that deep, heavy rhythm that had absolutely nothing to do with performance and everything to do with architecture — moved in soft counterpoint to her hips.

She was watching the back of his head.

Specifically the particular set of his jaw that meant he was thinking about something he hadn’t said yet.

"Master."

He didn’t slow. "Mm."

"What happened in there?"

A pause. The hallway turned. Morning light from the east window caught them both — him pale and marked, her darker and fuller and carrying the warm glow of a body that had been thoroughly used and thoroughly fed in the past twelve hours.

He chuckled.

It came from somewhere low. Not unkind. The sound of a man who finds something genuinely amusing about himself.

"Nothing."

"You promised her," Rihana said, with the flat, assessing tone of a woman who was present and remembers conversations accurately. "That if she slept with you, you would not look at other women."

Another pause.

His mouth curved.

"And you really think that’s going to happen."

She looked at him.

He looked back.

He reached over — one hand, sideways, no break in his stride — found her ass and ’grabbed.’ The full, generous palm-spread of his hand on her cheek, the squeeze producing a sound she made involuntarily and the specific, undignified forward-lean of a woman whose center of gravity has been briefly interfered with.

"Mhn~—"

"That’s what I thought," he said pleasantly.

She straightened. 𝑓𝘳𝑒𝑒𝓌𝘦𝘣𝘯ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝑚

Readjusted her footing.

Gave him the look of a woman who has been grabbed like that enough times to have developed a look for it and deploys it with precision.

"By the way," he said, changing direction entirely, which was a habit of his she was learning to track. "The tail."

She blinked.

"What?"

"How have you been hiding it."

Rihana looked down.

His tail — which had been present and accounted for in various memorable ways for the past twelve hours — was gone. Not retracted, not curled. Simply ’absent’ from visible reality, the space behind him unoccupied where it should have been.

She had done this. She had been doing it since they entered the mansion’s gates. She hadn’t thought about it consciously — it was the kind of thing that ran below thought, the way your tongue runs across your teeth without announcing itself.

"Cow bloodline camouflage," she said. "It’s a trait. I can conceal — biological irregularities. Things that would attract the wrong attention.’ Your ’tail, for instance."

"Yours as well?"

"When I choose."

Viktor was quiet for a moment.

His expression: the specific, turned-inward look of a man running a calculation.

He stopped walking.

His eyes went — somewhere. Not at the wall, not at her. At the space in front of him, at a thing only he could see.

The ’System’ opened.

Not a notification — a full display. The kind that only arrives when something significant has been triggered, the data scrolling in that faint purple light that only he could read, line after line of accumulated ability, every woman he had touched and everything they had given him in the exchange:

’Gwen — Elf Lineage: Nature Sight, Forest Step, Pact Weaving’

’Lira — Bandit Bloodline: Sword Domain, Absolute Sword Dance, Terrain Reading’

’Rihana — Siren-Cow Hybrid: Voice Absolute [Lower Entities], Camouflage [Biological], Milk Restoration Loop, Siren Harmonic [Involuntary]’

’Marta — Human [Senior]: Pain Tolerance [Veteran], Household Absolute Authority [Local Domain]’

Line after line. The abilities stacking — a hundred percent rebate on everything, the incubus evolution’s specific, obscene gift, the thing that made him not just a man who had spent a very productive night but something that had consumed an entire taxonomy of human capability and made it his.

Sword dance.

Voice absolute.

Camouflage.

Material manifestation.

Craftsman’s threading.

He read it the way a man reads a ledger he’s been building for a year and is now reviewing for the first time all at once.

His expression didn’t change.

But his tail — invisible until now — curled once behind him, slow, the motion of something deeply satisfied.

He tested it.

His hips moved.

One sideways snap — not at Rihana specifically, just ’at’ the air, the motion of a man checking that his body does what he thinks it does.

The sound it would have made against a thigh would have been a ’crack.’

Rihana stepped back one inch.

Pure reflex.

"That was not directed at you," he said.

"I know." She pressed her lips together. "I just remember what that sounds like."

He looked at her.

She looked back.

A moment passed between them that had no good name.

Then he turned his back to her.

The air around him changed — a subtle thing, the way pressure changes before weather — and the threads came. Literally. A fine, spiraling ’pull’ of ambient material, the moisture in the air, the fiber-memory of old fabrics in nearby rooms, something that craftsman ability was doing at the molecular level that the human eye read as: ’clothes appearing from nothing.’

The shirt first. Dark, fine-woven, settling across his shoulders and closing down his chest with the neat, unconscious precision of a tailor who is also the garment.

The trousers. The belt. The shoes last, which always seemed the most absurd and somehow the most impressive.

He stood in the hallway, fully dressed, looking exactly like a man who had always been dressed.

Rihana stared.

"That is," she said, carefully, "extremely unfair."

"I know."

He turned.

Looked at her.

His purple eyes had the specific quality they got when he had already made a decision and was now informing the relevant parties.

"I’m going to clean the city," he said. "The corruption, the guards, the bought officials. The underground network her husband left."

"That’s—" She thought about the scope of it. "That will take time."

"Afternoon."

She stared at him.

He looked completely serious.

"While I’m gone," he said, "I need you to work on the Mistress."

"Work on her."

"Manipulate her. Into spreading her legs." He said it with the flat pragmatism of a man assigning a logistics task. "Emotionally. The guilt is already open. Use it."

Rihana was quiet for a moment.

"And if she resists?"

"Then use the bath." He paused. "She’s been sitting in it."

A beat.

Rihana’s expression shifted into something that was, after a moment, recognition.

"The seed in the water."

"It’s already working."

She looked at the hallway. At the direction of the bathhouse.

At the specific, patient architecture of what he’d done — not just the seed, but the guilt, the manipulation, the emotional scaffolding he’d built in twenty minutes of bathhouse conversation — and felt the specific, complicated sensation of a woman who is both impressed and deeply aware that she herself had been subjected to a version of this.