100x Rebate Sharing System: Retired Incubus Wants to Marry & Have Kids-Chapter 384 - 383- Bella’s Priorities

It had been approximately forty-eight hours since she’d been in proximity to any person in a state of undress.

She had spent those forty-eight hours largely on high alert, weapons in hand, focused on threat assessment.

She was a practical young woman from a practical community and she had a working understanding of anatomy that was neither naïve nor morbid.

None of this prepared her for Viktor.

What she was looking at was — Viktor, freshly finished from whatever he’d been doing, which meant ’limp,’ theoretically relaxed, the natural resting state of a man simply standing there — and it was ’still’ the most confronting physical fact she had encountered in her twenty-two years of life.

Thick in the specific way of something dense rather than just long, hanging with the comfortable weight of something that owned the space it occupied.

Her brain provided a completely unwanted mental image.

She locked it in a room and threw the room into a lake.

Viktor’s dark eyes dropped, following her gaze, confirming what had happened.

He looked back up at her.

Then he looked at the image in his head. His cock, which had been quietly cooling off from its previous activities, received a mental briefing on who was currently standing in front of him. The briefing included: the thick-bodied elven archer with the silver-blonde hair and the flush that was now running from her cheeks all the way down her throat, whose dress had been tailored for a woman slightly less curvy than she currently was and was therefore communicating information through fabric tension that Viktor found extremely interesting.

The briefing was efficient.

His cock, being what it was, stood up.

Slowly.

Deliberately.

With the specific upward arc of something that had made a decision and was committed to it.

Gwen was still holding the bow.

The arrow she was pointing at his head had not moved.

But now there was a second thing pointing at her, at approximately the same height, from below, red-tipped and fully committed and entirely unashamed.

For a moment, the two of them stood exactly like that.

Both pointing.

Gwen’s crimson face went to a color that didn’t have a name yet.

"’You bastard,’" she said.

Her arrow relocated.

She aimed.

Viktor’s brain, which was faster than most things, processed the trajectory in the time it takes to blink.

"’Stop—’"

PAH.

The arrow ’flew.’

Bella came through the garden door at speed.

She had been on the other side of the tower grounds, sitting with the intentional casualness of someone keeping surveillance while pretending to examine flowers, her silver cat ears tracking every sound through the tree walls with the acute feline hearing that Viktor kept forgetting was operational at all times.

She had heard — with perfect clarity, through living wood and ambient garden noise — the ’specific quality’ of Viktor’s voice saying ’stop.’

In the three months since she’d come to this manor, Bella had heard Viktor say stop exactly twice. Both times had been in the context of ’stop, I need to actually eat before round three.’

She had never heard him say it like ’that.’

She came through the door.

The arrow was still in flight.

What happened in the next half-second was the product of three months of combat training, the reflexes of a catgirl’s nervous system, and the specific territorial fury of someone who has decided, with the total conviction of a person who does not do things halfway, that a thing belongs to her.

Her hand came up.

She caught the arrow.

The shaft slapped her palm with enough force to sting — she felt the fletching bite across her fingers, felt the impact travel up her forearm — and her fist closed around it.

She held it.

Then she looked at Gwen.

Gwen was standing there with a drawn bow and an empty string and an expression that was rotating through shock, alarm, and a third thing she hadn’t named yet as she stared at the girl who had just materialized and ’caught her arrow.’

Bella’s golden cat-eyes had gone flat.

Her tail was not swishing.

When Bella’s tail went still, it meant something specific to everyone who knew her. Mira had once described it as ’the calm before the part where she destroys something.’

"’How dare you,’" Bella said.

Her voice was extremely quiet.

She dropped the arrow.

"’How dare you touch my husband.’"

And she ’moved.’

Bella moved in the way of a catgirl who had spent three months learning from Kaida and a lifetime before that surviving in places where being fast was the difference between coming back and not. She crossed the room in two steps and hit Gwen with the flat of her forearm, a driving check aimed at Gwen’s center mass with the full weight of her petite body behind it.

The impact was not proportional to the body that delivered it.

Gwen went back.

Through the interior of the tree room — her shoulder hit the wooden wall, which had the property of ’grown wood’ rather than constructed material, dense and unyielding — and she went through it. Not ’through’ — the wood cracked, not shattered, a spiderweb fracture spreading from the impact point, and Gwen hit the floor past it with a heavy landing that drove the air from her chest.

She coughed.

Once, hard, the specific cough of someone whose ribs have just registered strong feelings about the immediate past.

Then she was still.

Bella was standing at the breach in the wood.

Her eyes were wet.

This was the part that Viktor, who had moved the moment Bella moved, was only now seeing as he arrived at the right angle to see her face — Bella’s eyes had filled with the specific tears of someone who had been very afraid and had not had time to be afraid before they were angry, and now both things were happening simultaneously, and Bella, who expressed everything at full volume, was doing both of those at once.

"’How dare she,’" Bella said again, and the tears had started running now, tracking down the fine bones of her cheeks while her fists were still clenched at her sides. "How dare she try to hurt you. How dare she try to hurt my— my ’precious—’"

Viktor grabbed her from behind.

He caught her midway through her forward momentum, both arms wrapping around her petite frame, lifting her entirely off the ground as she lunged toward the gap in the wall with the single-pointed focus of someone who had identified a target and was not interested in obstacles.

She was ’small’ in his arms. He always forgot this until he was holding her — the way her compact body fit entirely into the circle of his arms, her back against his chest, her feet several inches off the floor. Her tail was ’still’ not swishing, which was bad, and her hands were clawing at his forearms to get loose.

"Hey," Viktor said.

"’Let me go—’"

"Hey." He tightened his arms.

"’She tried to hurt you, she tried to hurt my—’" Bella’s voice broke in the middle of the sentence, the break of someone whose anger has a crack in it that leads directly to something much more raw underneath. "’Let me go, master, I’ll kill her, I swear I will kill that—’"

"Bella."

His mouth found her ear.

He bit it.

"—’Hahn~—’"

She went rigid.

The forward momentum stopped. Not completely — her hands were still on his forearms, her tail ’still’ not swishing — but the bite of his teeth on the curved cartilage of her cat ear produced a response in her nervous system that interrupted the current program with a fairly urgent other program.

Viktor kept his teeth there. Light. Just there.

Bella’s hands had stopped clawing. Her fingers were now gripping rather than scratching, holding on rather than pulling away. Her breath came in shallow, agitated pulls through her nose.

"Precious thing," Viktor said, against her ear, very quietly.

She shivered.

"Are you talking about me?"

"’Master—’" Her voice was split down the middle, half fury and half the thing the ear-bite had awakened. "’Let me go, that woman tried to—she aimed at your—’"

His hand moved.

One arm stayed around her waist, holding her off the ground. The other came up along her sternum, fingers spread, and pressed flat against her chest. The contact was warm and direct and entirely deliberate.

Bella made a sound.

"’—Mngh~—’"

"Or my cock—’"