The Villainess Wants To Retire-Chapter 445: Curiosity

The casual mention of love didn’t hang in the air for long; it was smothered by a sudden, frantic resurgence of heat. Whatever exhaustion had plagued them moments ago was burned away by the friction of their bodies.

The heavy fur-lined blanket was kicked aside, discarded to the foot of the bed as things escalated with a desperate, familiar urgency.

Soren was no longer the composed scholar. His hands were everywhere, tracing the curves he had memorized but could not stop worshipping.

He moved down her body, his mouth leaving a trail of ice against the heated silk of her skin. He settled between her breasts, sucking and nipping at the soft flesh, his tongue swirling over the peaks until Eris was arching off the mattress, her fingers buried deep in his hair.

"I’m not done with you," he rasped against her skin, his voice a jagged edge of desire. "Not even close, Your Majesty." The title was respectful, but the way he said it... muffled against her breast, thick with intent... was utterly filthy.

Eris was a mess of tangled hair and flushed skin, her breath coming in jagged hitches. "Soren... " she gasped, her voice breaking as he moved lower.

He didn’t stop. He spread her legs, draping them over his shoulders as he brought her entire warmth into his focus. "You thought we were finished?" he asked, a wolfish grin flashing against the skin of her inner thigh.

He bit down gently, just enough to elicit a sharp cry from her, before soothing the mark with his tongue. "After one round?

"One round?!" Eris snapped, though her tone lacked any bite to it. "What about the other four times you—"

"You underestimate your husband, My Queen." Soren cut her off casually. "We are only just beginning."

He was reverent even as he destroyed her. He treated her body like a holy site he Intended to pillage, his tongue delving into her entrance with a rhythmic, torturous precision that made Eris’s world dissolve into white noise.

The air in the room grew thick, the temperature fluctuating between his frost and her flame. Soren shifted, lining himself up, his eyes locked onto hers with a searing, blue intensity. He waited until she met his gaze, until she was fully present in the moment of their union.

As he slipped inside her, filling the ache he had created, the world of the bedchamber faded into a heavy, pulsing dark.

Hours later, the storm in the room had finally settled. Eris was completely passed out, sprawled across the center of the bed in a state of total, blissful surrender. Her white hair was a chaotic halo against the navy blue silk pillows, and she was only partially covered by a stray sheet that had survived their movements. 𝗳𝗿𝐞𝕖𝘄𝗲𝕓𝗻𝚘𝚟𝕖𝐥.𝚌𝕠𝕞

Her skin was still flushed, marked here and there by the faint bruises of his possessiveness... bite marks on her neck and the curve of her shoulder that looked like a map of their afternoon. She was thoroughly loved, her breathing even and deep, her expression one of profound, satisfied peace.

Soren remained awake, propped up on one elbow as he watched her. The smug satisfaction of a man who had loved his wife to the point of collapse was evident in the tilt of his lips, but beneath that pride was a deep, quiet worship. She was perfect. Even in the messy, undignified aftermath of sex, she looked every bit the Empress she was.

But as the silence of the room deepened, the ghosts of their earlier conversation began to creep back.

Do you think you’re a dragon?

The question replayed in his mind, looping like a record that wouldn’t stop. He looked at Eris’s sleeping form and thought of his non-answer. He thought of the way his mana felt like a bottomless well, and the way he had seen the world crack more than once. The uncertainty he had suppressed with physical passion came roaring back, cold and insistent.

Soren extracted himself from the bed with surgical care. He moved with the silence of a shadow, ensuring the mattress didn’t shift enough to wake her. Eris didn’t even stir; she was too far gone, lost in the deep sleep of the exhausted.

He pulled on a pair of black trousers and a simple linen shirt, leaving it unbuttoned. He didn’t need the formality of his imperial robes tonight. He took one last look at his sleeping wife, wishing he could just lie back down and let the questions die, but his mind was a fever that wouldn’t break.

He walked to his private study, a room attached to the imperial wing that served as his true sanctuary. It was a space of organized chaos... walls lined with rare vellum scrolls, the desk buried under maps of the northern wastes and half-finished diagrams of magical matrices.

He lit a single lantern, the golden light illuminating years of his own secret work. He had folders dedicated to his own power: observations of his mana capacity, the rate at which his ice crystallized, and the sheer scale of the storms he could summon. The data was clear. He was an anomaly. Even compared to the records of his father, Soreth, Soren’s growth curve was a vertical line.

Most of this research hadn’t started with him. It had started with Vetra. She had studied him from the moment he was brought to her wing of the palace, observing him with the cold eye of a scientist. She had wanted to understand the source of his intimidating power, perhaps hoping to find a way to siphon it or control it.

He flipped through her notes, her elegant, sharp handwriting looking back at him. She had eventually concluded that it was simply a freak concentration of the Nivarre bloodline... like father, like son. But Soren, staring at the pages, knew she had been wrong. She had stopped searching because she couldn’t find a human explanation.

It disgusted him how much he was like her. They were both seekers, both obsessive scholars who couldn’t leave a mystery unsolved. He resented the fact that his stepmother had shaped his intellect even while she tried to break his spirit. But as he looked at the stacks of books on dragons and ancient myths, he couldn’t deny that the curiosity was the most permanent part of his identity.

He looked at all of it... his notes, Vetra’s observations, the genealogies of the Ice Emperors. There was no answer.

If he were part dragon, how would it even be possible? Soreth was human. His mother, the woman who had died trying to protect him, was human. Every ancestor for ten generations was recorded as human. Dragon blood didn’t just appear out of thin air.

He had read everything. He knew the legends of Aenithra, the Frostmother, and Pyronox, the Fire-Bringer. But the information was sparse, diluted by centuries of oral tradition. Most concrete knowledge had been lost when the dragons disappeared. The only person who might have the answers was Master Aldwin, the mentor who had taught both him and Vetra. But the old man was a hermit, exiled in the frozen peaks, and the letter Soren had sent weeks ago remained unanswered.

Soren leaned back, closing his eyes. He remembered the sound... the sound of reality tearing like wet silk. He had seen the crack more than once now. A jagged split in the air itself, revealing a void that felt wrong. It wasn’t just magic; it was an error in the world’s fabric. And something had been looking back.

It was all connected. The ice golems that should have been dormant were hunting. The Drogar... the massive ice bears that were usually peaceful... had attacked Eris’s party with a mindless, unnatural fury.

Everything was off. It was as if the laws of their nature were starting to warp. Pyronox, a god-like entity, was sealed in a human girl... something that shouldn’t be possible. Soren possessed mana that defied the laws of magical conservation. And the crack in the sky was growing.

Pyronox was accounted for. He was the fire in Eris’s blood. But Aenithra? The Frostmother had vanished at the same time. The scholars said she had died or left the realm, but Soren’s instinct told him otherwise.

If the dragons were the pillars of the world’s balance, and one was missing while the other was imprisoned, it could’ve possibly served an explanation of why reality was starting to tear at the seams.

His theory was dark: Aenithra’s disappearance wasn’t a choice. She was missing. And her absence could be a part of the world’s sickness.

He looked at the years of research on his desk, the endless questions without answers, and felt a surge of frustration so sharp it made the air in the room drop twenty degrees. He was tired of reading old books. He was tired of waiting for letters.

Soren stood up, his eyes hard and cold. He looked at the heavy iron key sitting on his desk... the key to the deepest levels of the palace dungeons.

"Maybe I should visit Vetra," he whispered to the empty room.