100x Rebate Sharing System: Retired Incubus Wants to Marry & Have Kids-Chapter 380 - 379 - Recharging using the Elf

From the natural curves of the wood where root and wall met — green and smooth, the living tendrils of the tree responding to a direction she couldn’t see being given.

They came slowly.

Not rushing, not violent, the patient deliberate movement of something guided rather than aggressive.

The first one found her right wrist.

The touch of it was warm — surprising, warm, not the cool dampness she’d expected, genuinely warm the way living wood is warm in sunlight. It circled her wrist once, twice, gentle, and then the other end of it found the carved protrusion in the bed frame and ’held.’

Vivian pulled.

The vine gave a centimeter. Then held.

"’Stop—’" Her left hand reached for the vine at her wrist and found itself caught by another one, equally warm, equally patient, securing her other arm to the opposite side of the bed with the same unhurried certainty.

She was on her back.

Both arms stretched wide and held, the living warmth of the vines around her wrists the specific kind of restraint that wasn’t cold metal or rough rope — was instead something alive, something that gave slightly with each pull and then returned, firm and warm and ’there.’

Her legs.

She felt the vine before she saw it — the smooth slide of it across her ankle, below the hem of her dress, and she pulled her knee up and it followed the motion and held her there, the leg bent, the vine anchored to the bed’s lower frame, and then the other leg, symmetrical, both feet secured.

She was completely open.

She stared at the ceiling — the vaulted living wood of it, amber-lit, the grain flowing upward in long natural arcs.

Viktor was standing at the foot of the bed.

"What," she said, her voice coming out too high, "are ’you doing.’"

He looked at her. The same level unhurried quality as everything else about him today — the greeting under the tree, the frankness in the hall, the hand on her wrist in the garden. The quality of someone who had considered this and arrived here rather than stumbling into it.

"Your daughter," he said, "doesn’t let you be a woman."

Vivian blinked.

"She keeps you in a specific role," Viktor continued. His hands went to his jacket. "Mother. Guardian. The one who holds everything together. The one who stays calm when she panics, the one who makes decisions when she’s paralyzed, the one who doesn’t get to—" He set the jacket aside. His shirt came next, the buttons undone with the same calm efficiency he did everything. "—fall apart. Or want something. Or be wrong. Or need." He looked at her. "She keeps you in the role and you stay in it because she needs it and you love her, and the woman underneath it is suffocating."

Vivian was staring at him.

Her hands were pulling at the vines. Not urgently — the pulls of someone going through the motions of resistance because the alternative was lying still and listening, and listening was more dangerous.

"That is not—" she started.

"I’m going to give you a child," Viktor said.

Her mouth closed.

"A second one," he said. "One who doesn’t have three months of running and killing as their earliest formative experience. One who grows up here, in this — " he gestured, briefly, at the tree walls around them, the living wood, the gold-lit warmth of it "— in something that isn’t fear." He looked at her face. "Your bloodline deserves to be carried somewhere safe."

"You cannot just—" Her voice had gone low, the flush on her cheeks deepened, her eyes bright. "You can’t just ’decide’ that, I have no say, I haven’t—’mmphhh—’"

The vine covered her mouth.

It arrived with the same patient warmth as the others — a smooth horizontal press across her lips, not tight, not painful, just ’there,’ firm and warm, the green smell of it close. Her words stopped existing as words and became shapes she couldn’t complete.

Above it, her eyes.

Wide. The deep emerald green of them, dilated, watching him over the living warmth of the vine at her lips with an expression that was — anger was in there, genuine, the flash of it — but underneath the anger, the thing she’d been looking at flowers to avoid thinking about all morning.

Viktor looked back at her.

He reached for his belt.

The tree breathed around them — the faint settling sound of living wood, the warmth of the vitality field close and present, the amber light unchanging. Through the resin window, the garden outside was quiet and green and entirely ordinary, the world proceeding without any awareness of what was happening inside a tree that had been a seed six hours ago.

Vivian’s chest rose and fell. Rose and fell.

Her wrists were warm in the vines. Her ankles warm. The moss beneath her was extraordinarily soft, and the warmth of the tree’s emanation was doing the thing it had done in the garden — reaching the elf bloodline under her skin that had been suppressed for three years of running, finding it, ’pulling’ it toward the surface.

Her eyes were still wide.

Still watching him.

Still not — under the anger, under the flush, under the tears that had gathered and not fallen since the garden — ’not’ afraid.

Viktor finished with his belt.

"Mmphhh—" The sound she made against the vine was not a word. It had the shape of one — the shape of his name, specifically, four letters, the attempt at them visible in the press of her lips against the vine — but the vine held and the word stayed in her throat and what escaped was just sound, warm and muffled and present, the sound of a woman who had spent all morning trying to be someone who did not want this and had just run entirely out of that performance.

The tree was warm.

The light was gold.

Viktor looked at her, spread and held in the living warmth of his own roots, silver-blonde hair across the moss, thick body pressed into the softness of it, the weight of her breasts visible in the rise and fall of her breath under the green fabric of her dress.

He climbed onto the bed.

"I promise this will be quick... as I need recharge, Vivian."