100x Rebate Sharing System: Retired Incubus Wants to Marry & Have Kids-Chapter 383 - 382- Gwen’s Charging on Viktor

He stopped.

Stared at the door.

Then the corner of his mouth moved.

He pulled his shirt down. Straightened his jacket. Looked down at himself — presentable, mostly. A few things she would question if she was looking for things to question. He took the towel from the small wooden protrusion that the tree had grown for exactly this kind of purpose and wrapped it around his lower half, his trousers still in his hands.

He opened the door.

"Oh—" he said. "Gwen?"

She was standing outside the tree-room door with a bow in her hand — Bella had apparently returned it at some point, or Gwen had found a way to acquire it, and the bow was at her side now, held in her left fist with the particular grip of someone who had carried it so long it felt wrong not to.

Her hair was loose, slightly windswept from the garden.

Her green dress — still the travel-worn one, nobody had apparently gotten her a new one yet — was straight.

Her eyes went from his face to the towel.

To the tree door.

To the tree.

Then back to his face.

The expression she arrived at was one Viktor catalogued for future reference: not the cold anger she used as her primary mode, and not the architectural suspicion she deployed as a secondary. This was something more raw and less controlled — the expression of a person who has tracked something to its source and found the source to be worse than the tracking implied.

"Where is my mother," Gwen said.

Her voice was absolutely level. The specific level of something that has gone all the way through loud and come out the other side.

Viktor looked at her.

He thought about the system window. The bloodline notification. ’Elven perception unlocked: see the truth behind surface appearances.’ He looked at Gwen.

He saw: three months of running in the set of her jaw. Every arrow she’d shot at things that needed to stop moving. The specific posture of someone who had kept a person she loved alive through the sustained application of absolute vigilance and had gotten used to the permanent alertness of it. And underneath that, below the three months of combat-formation — the daughter. The person who needed the mother to be the mother and was terrified of the day that stopped being true.

He had not particularly thought about the daughter.

He was thinking about her now.

"She’s resting," Viktor said. "She’s safe. She’s with my wives."

Gwen stared at him.

"She’s with your ’wives,’" she repeated.

"She needed rest," Viktor said. His voice was entirely even. "She’s been running for three months and she has a compromised bloodline from the suppression and she was showing signs of elf-fatigue. The world tree’s vitality field has been helping, but sleep is better."

Every word of this was true.

Gwen looked at the tree.

Looked at him.

At the towel.

"Why," she said carefully, "are you holding your trousers."

"I was simply doing some chores."

Viktor looked down at the towel still clutched in his hand and the trousers hanging from the other, and delivered the words with the flat sincerity of a man who had decided that the most direct path through this particular moment was absolute commitment to the statement.

Gwen stared at him.

Then she exhaled.

Not a sigh — the specific exhalation of someone who has been holding their breath and running fast toward a question and arrived at an answer that made the run feel wasted. She pressed two fingers against her lips, squeezed her eyes shut for a moment.

She’d felt it the whole walk here. Even before she’d tracked the energy to its source — the warmth had been moving through the tower’s inner grounds like a tide, persistent, ’alive,’ the kind of emanation her bloodline knew in the same way a plant knows sunlight. You did not analyze it. You simply turned toward it.

She’d been following it before she realized she was moving.

Now she stood in the doorway of a tree that had not existed yesterday, in front of a man holding his trousers, trying to recalibrate.

"You grew a world tree," she said. Her voice was carefully flat.

"I did."

"Today."

"Also correct."

Her eyes moved over him.

She’d been trying not to do this. But the elven perception that ran in her blood didn’t ask permission — it simply ’saw,’ the way it always saw, the surface layer first and then the thing beneath it, the truth that sat under what people presented. And Viktor, standing there in the warm amber light of the tree’s interior, presented a great deal.

His face first. Which was — she would not think about his face.

She would acknowledge, efficiently and without dwelling, that it was the most constructed thing she had ever encountered on a living person. Like someone had sat down and decided ’exactly’ what a face should be and had not compromised at any step. Sharp jaw. Dark eyes that had depth in them that caught the light oddly. The particular geometry of a mouth that was doing nothing right now and was still distracting.

She looked away from his face.

His ’energy.’

That was the thing she’d come for, and now that she was close enough to feel it properly, it was — the word that arrived was ’pure.’ The elven nature aura around him had the quality of something that had been cultivated over generations, the concentrated bloodline warmth of a noble elf lineage at its apex, and it was coming from ’him,’ from a man who was demonstrably human in origin, which made exactly zero sense and was the entire reason she’d crossed the garden.

He was also ’attractive’ in a way that had nothing to do with his face, which she was already not thinking about. The elven bloodline in her responded to elven purity the way a compass needle responds to north. Involuntary. Biological. Completely out of her control and extremely inconvenient.

She looked at the floor instead.

Which was a mistake.

The vines had mostly retreated back into the tree walls, curling into the natural curves of the wood with the quiet tidiness of something that had finished its work. But the moss at the center of the room — the bed — was disturbed. The impression of a body in it still faintly visible.

And on the floor, at the root’s edge.

A puddle.

Faint. White. The kind of fluid that, when you were a young woman who had grown up among other young women and understood certain basic facts about living bodies—

She looked at the puddle for three seconds.

She looked at Viktor.

He was watching her with the particular patience of someone allowing her to complete her own investigation before providing any assistance.

"What," Gwen said, in a voice that was entirely even, "is that."

She pointed at the puddle.

Viktor looked at it.

He looked back at her.

"I was jerking off," he said.

She blinked.

"Thinking about you," he added.

The words entered the air of the tree room and sat there.

Gwen’s brain processed them in sequence — the first word, fine, the second word, fine, the third and fourth words, fine, and then the fifth word arrived and the entire sentence assembled itself and her face went from its normal color to the specific crimson that only happens when embarrassment and fury and something else entirely arrive at the same moment and cannot agree on who goes first.

Her bow came up.

It was in her hands before she’d consciously decided to reach for it — muscle memory, the reflex of three months of running and aiming at things that needed to stop existing — and she had it drawn and leveled at his head in a single fluid motion, the fletching at her cheek, the string taut.

Her face was fully, comprehensively crimson.

"’What in the world,’" she said, and her voice came out higher than intended, "are you ’talking about.’"

Viktor’s expression did not change.

He raised one hand.

"I’m sorry," he said. "I was kidding."

She kept the bow up.

He looked at it. Then at her face. The corner of his mouth moved in the direction of something she was not going to let become a smile while she was currently pointing a weapon at him.

"Lower the bow," he said.

"Tell me what’s actually on the floor."

"A bodily fluid."

"’Whose.’"

Viktor opened his mouth.

His tail — the black incubus appendage he’d been keeping carefully behind his thigh, tucked against the inside of his leg, invisible while he was standing — chose this exact moment to shift.

She didn’t see it move. She saw what the movement caused.

The towel, which had been secured around his waist by tucking it firmly against his hip, was nudged from behind by the motion of the tail correcting its position.

The tuck failed.

Gravity handled the rest.

The towel dropped.

Gwen’s eyes followed the sound.