She didn’t know what to do with that.
He looked at the succubus and said, "This is a prison cell." Not a question.
She straightened. "More like a world." Her voice settling back to its informational register, the demon retreating behind the domestic. "The ice floor — everyone thrown into the Villainika lands here first. There is a village nearby. People with awakened abilities, trapped for years."
"Time." He nodded. "Different here."
"Ten years here," she said, "is ten days outside."
Soha’s breath caught.
He felt it — the small sharp intake against his chest.
"Ten years," she said quietly. Against his shirt. Her voice very small.
"The ones thrown in earliest," the succubus continued, her eyes on Soha with something that was not quite sympathy but was in the same neighborhood, "stopped being criminals generations ago. Their descendants were born here. Grew up here. Some of them have never seen the outside." A pause. "It becomes — native."
Silence.
He stood.
Soha came up with him — still in his arms, the blanket wrapping around her as he lifted, her pregnant belly visible where the wool parted at the front.
"Can we go to our room?" he said.
The succubus blinked.
Looked around her apartment with the expression of someone suddenly remembering the logistics.
"Yes. There." She gestured toward the door on the left. "But you will need to move out tomorrow. I cannot actually have someone in my house."
"What if we give you payment?"
She looked at him.
"Payment." The word came out flat with disbelief. "What could you possibly give me? You arrived through a bathroom wall naked."
He smiled.
"If I let you," he said, "suck the sex energy from us."
The apartment went very quiet.
She looked at him.
Her eyes moving over his face with the specific attention of a being who has just heard something that should not be possible to know and is recalibrating everything she understood about the situation since they arrived.
"Oh," she said.
Her voice had dropped entirely.
"So you know too much about me."
"Of course I do."
Their eyes held.
Soha looked between them again — her brow fully furrowed now, her dark eyes moving from his face to the succubus’s face and back, the specific suspicious look of a woman watching two people whose dynamic she cannot classify and doesn’t entirely trust.
’Is this a scam.’
The thought formed cleanly. ’Is this entire situation a scam. Did he know she was here before he came in. Did he arrange this.’
She was still processing that possibility when the succubus moved.
The wings came first.
The dress fabric shifted — a dramatic, sudden billow as both wings erupted from her back simultaneously, spreading wide in the small apartment with a sound like a large flag catching wind, the golden membranes catching the lamplight as they unfurled to their full span.
Enormous. Yellow-gold, the veining visible through the membrane, the leading edges darker, the texture of expensive parchment stretched over elegant bone-work. They filled the room’s width almost completely, the tips brushing the walls on either side.
Her horns brightened.
Ivory to gold — the color rising through them from the base upward, a slow illumination, the tips glowing warm in the lamp-lit room.
She smiled.
The smile of a succubus being herself, finally, after the domestic performance of the last hour — the specific smile of something old and very comfortable with what it is.
"Fine then," she said.
Her eyes dropped to Soha’s legs where they hung from his arms, the blanket parted, the freshly clean skin of Soha’s inner thighs visible from the succubus’s angle.
"Fuck her."
She tilted her head.
"She seems too horny for you."
Soha’s entire body went rigid.
"I am NOT—"
"Indeed," he said.
He looked down at Soha.
She looked up at him.
Her eyes were doing the thing — the furious, exposed, completely undefended thing they’d been doing since the warehouse, the thing she couldn’t make stop happening no matter how many times she organized her face against it.
He leaned down.
His mouth found hers.
Not soft. Not gradual. The full, immediate press of a kiss that has made its decision, his lips opening over hers, his tongue pushing in before she’d finished the "no" that her body had started forming, his teeth finding her lower lip and pulling gently, the specific drag of it sending a sound out of her throat that she pressed her eyes shut against.
Her eyes filled.
Again. Still. The tears that kept coming back regardless of how many times she classified them as finished.
She opened them — to look at him, because she needed to be looking at something real while this was happening, and found instead the succubus over his shoulder.
Watching.
Her enormous golden wings folded slightly behind her, her arms crossed under her spectacular boobs, her expression warm and amused and carrying the specific satisfaction of a being whose nature has just been officially sanctioned.
She winked.
Soha’s eyes rolled up.
His tongue moved against hers, deep and slow and completely unbothered by the audience, his arms tightening around her, the pregnant belly pressing between them and his cock hardening against the blanket and the succubus’s golden light filling the warm apartment around them.
’Where,’ Soha thought.
The thought formed in the wreckage of everything else — behind the kiss and the tears and the wings and the ten-years-is-ten-days and the ’family’ and the ’got you’ and the razor and the shower and the warehouse floor.
’Where have I gotten myself.’
The kiss hadn’t paused.
It had deepened — the way a tide doesn’t pause between waves, just pulls back and comes in harder, his mouth working against hers with unhurried intensity of a man who has made a decision and is not reconsidering it.
Her tears were falling.
Not silently — she could hear herself, the small wet sounds of breathing through a nose that had been crying for longer than she’d admitted, her chest hitching between his tongue strokes in broken rhythm of someone trying to breathe and kiss and cry simultaneously and managing none of the three particularly well.
"Mm — mmh — mhngh—"
His hand moved.
Under the blanket — past her ribs, past the curve of her side — to the underside of her breast. His palm flat against the warm weight there, pressing upward from beneath in a slow, full lift, the flesh yielding under the grip and then bouncing back when his palm eased, the motion sending the whole warm weight rocking once.
"Hnnh—"
The sound came out against his mouth, muffled and immediate.
His thumb found her nipple.
Pressed down.
Not pinching — just pressing, the flat of his thumb against the stiff dark tip, rolling it slowly in a small circle against the soft resistance of the flesh surrounding it.
"Hhhng — mmph—"
Her whole body twitched.
The involuntary full-body shudder of a nerve system that has received a stimulus it has no defense against — her spine curling inward, her shoulders rolling forward, her pregnant belly pressing harder against his abs with the motion.
The swell of the pregnancy rubbing against him — warm and taut and present, the stretched skin of it dragging against his lower stomach with each of her involuntary movements, the baby inside entirely unbothered, her body doing its own complicated thing around the life it was carrying.
His mouth pulled from hers for one half-second.
Just long enough for her to breathe.
"Haaah — wai—"
He kissed her again.
Deeper. His tongue pushing in immediately, not giving the ’wait’ space to become a sentence, his hand kneading her breast in the full slow rhythm that he’d established in the bathtub, the nipple rolling under his thumb with each pass.
She made a sound into his mouth.
Not a word. A sound — the long, cracked, humiliatingly honest sound of a woman whose body has stopped consulting her about its responses and is simply producing them, the sound built somewhere in her lower chest and coming out shaped like "uuhnnngh—" and landing in the warm apartment air with nowhere to hide.
Her eyes were open.
Wet. Looking sideways.
At the succubus.
Who had folded her enormous golden wings behind her and taken a seat in the armchair across the room with the posture of someone settling in for something they’ve been anticipating, her massive boobs resting in her folded arms, the golden lamplight catching her horns.
She was smiling.
"Come on," she said.
Her voice was warm and entirely without apology.
"Fuck her."