Chapter 370: Chapter 369- I have become a Perverted Man After All

“So you lied,” Gwen said. The words were clipped. Not explosive — Gwen’s real anger never exploded, it went cold, like water finding the shape of whatever contained it. “You pretended to be a disgruntled commoner. Fed us information. Made sure we were appropriately scared of the Ktorian knights. Made sure we had nowhere to go.” A pause. “And now we’re here.”

“You’re not wrong,” Viktor said.

“That’s not an apology.”

“It’s not meant to be.”

“Why would you—” Gwen’s voice caught for a single moment, something cracking under the ice of it and then sealing over immediately. “Why would you do all of that instead of just saying what you wanted? You could have just — we were starving, we would have listened to a reasonable offer—”

“You had a nocked arrow pointed at my face within thirty seconds of meeting me.”

A silence.

“That was after you caught us,” Gwen said, and there was something in her voice that wasn’t quite an admission but functioned like one. “Before that I hadn’t decided yet.”

Something in Viktor’s jaw must have shifted — Vivian couldn’t see his face but she could feel the change in his body, the slight movement of his chest above her. Not quite a laugh. Something more genuine and less performed than that.

“Fair point,” he said.

He was moving now.

Not obviously — not in a way that would translate upward into visible motion, not the kind of thing that would ripple the sheet or register as rhythm to someone watching from the doorway.

But the subtle cant of his hips had begun, the small controlled roll of them, pushing deeper and then pulling back by degrees so small they could be measured in millimeters.

Vivian’s nose pressed briefly against the base of him. Her throat took what it was given.

Her eyes watered.

She kept them open. She didn’t know why.

’Don’t make a sound. Don’t. He’s still talking to her. She’s still in the room. You are a grown woman, a mother, you have survived—’

His cock hit the back of her throat.

Her fingers, which had been flat against the floor, curled against the wood until she could feel the grain of it under her nails.

“What about leaving,” Gwen said. “Practically. Since you said we could.”

“You could,” Viktor said.

“Where would we go.”

A pause. Viktor seemed to be considering this genuinely — or performing the consideration of it, and Vivian no longer had confidence she could distinguish between the two when it came to him.

“The Ktorian contingent passed through yesterday,” he said. “Moved east. They’re not in range anymore.”

“So we go east—”

“They rotate. They’ll be back in roughly in one day and they’ll cover the main roads.” A pause. “You have no coin, no weapons, no papers of travel, and no elf-friendly settlements within a three-day walk in any direction.”

Gwen was quiet.

“So we’re not leaving,” she said. Flat. Acknowledging a mathematical fact.

“Not safely.”

“And you’d prefer we stay.”

“I’d prefer everyone in this house to be safe. The numbers work out better when people are inside the perimeter.”

A long silence. Vivian heard her daughter moving again — not leaving, pacing. Two steps one way, two steps back. The particular tight pattern of Gwen thinking through something she couldn’t find a clean edge on.

“Your blanket is moving,” Gwen said.

’!’

’N-NOOO—!?’

Everything in Vivian stopped.

Her tongue. Her throat. Her lungs. The slight curl of her fingers against the floor. All of it halted simultaneously, the entire system going offline in the space between one heartbeat and the next.

Viktor’s hand in her hair didn’t tighten. Didn’t move at all.

“Is it,” he said.

His voice was the voice of a man who has just been informed there is a cloud outside. Mild interest. No additional texture.

“Yes,” Gwen said. Her voice had sharpened with suspicion again, the warmth of the argument gone, something practical and watchful sliding back into place. “It’s been doing it for a while. I thought I was imagining it.”

“Old house,” Viktor said. “The pipes run under the floor. Hot water pushes air when the boiler’s running and—”

“It’s not the floor, it’s the ’bed,’” Gwen said. Her voice had gone very quiet. The dangerous quiet. “The sheet, specifically. It’s—” A pause. “’Is someone under there.’”

Viktor exhaled, slow and even.

Vivian was going to die. She was going to die in this bedroom on her knees and when they found her it was going to be very difficult for anyone to explain and there would be no satisfying conclusion to her story.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Viktor said.

“It just moved ’again,’” Gwen said.

“The window—”

“The window is closed.”

“Gwen.” Viktor’s voice dropped, carrying something warm in it, the particular tone of a reasonable authority patiently handling an unreasonable concern. “Come here, if you’re so worried—”

“I’m not coming ’near’ you—”

“Then trust the pipe explanation—”

“That explanation was insane—”

“You asked for an explanation, I provided one—”

Under the sheet, Viktor’s hips rolled once, deliberately, and the sound Vivian made was so quiet it was barely air passing over her teeth, a breath with shape to it, too small to carry — but the tears that had been building behind her eyes finally moved, tracking down her face in the dark, and she was laughing or crying, genuinely couldn’t determine which, her whole body shaking with the contained enormity of the situation and the pressure at the back of her throat and the sound of her daughter three feet away trying to solve a mystery whose answer was going to destroy her forever.

“He’s a man, after all,” Bella’s voice drifted up from below, muffled through the floor. Apparently she had been listening, or had simply arrived at a conclusion independently through some feline instinct for disaster. “It happens!”

A pause.

Gwen’s feet on the floor, still.

“…What does that mean,” Gwen said.

“She means,” Viktor said, and his voice was so entirely unbothered it was almost beautiful, “that men who live alone sometimes have habits. That require privacy. And that asking questions is generally considered impolite.”

The silence that followed was the specific silence of someone’s brain reorganizing itself around new information it found deeply unpleasant.

“You’re— ’now?’ While we’re talking?”

“I said some habits require privacy,” Viktor said. “You’re still here.”

“I—” Gwen’s voice had gone strangled. “You are a ’pervert.’”

“I mentioned that, in the alley. You seemed skeptical.”

“’I should have shot you.’”

“You did shoot at me. It’s a known quantity now.”

Vivian felt him beginning to swell. The telling thickness of it, the way the pulses came closer together, and she understood with the clarity of someone running out of time that she had approximately thirty seconds before this was going to become a different kind of problem than containment.

She worked. Faster than before.

As quiet as she’d ever been in her life, quieter than she’d thought possible, her hands moving from the floor to his thighs, gripping the muscle, and his hand in her hair tightened finally, fully, the grip of a man at the edge of his composure — and she felt his thighs lock under her palms, the whole of him going taut.

“I’m leaving,” Gwen announced. Disgust crisping every consonant. “I’m leaving and I’m going to ’pretend’ this didn’t happen—”

“Good idea,” Viktor said. His voice had a slightly rougher edge now, barely perceptible. An observer wouldn’t notice. Vivian noticed. She catalogued it the same way she’d catalogued his heartbeat, because this is what she’d apparently become.

“’Bella,’” Gwen called, sharp, already moving toward the door, and Vivian heard her daughter’s footsteps — the swift, purposeful stride of someone exiting a situation at speed while maintaining dignity — crossing the room, and the sound of the door catching, and—

Viktor’s hips rolled forward.

Vivian took everything.

The pulse of it arrived deep, the flood of warmth she recognized now, the thick wet heat of him releasing against the back of her throat in rolling waves while she stayed absolutely motionless, absolutely silent, her fingers white against his thighs, her eyes squeezed shut in the dark under the sheet.

PAH.

The quietest possible PAH. The PAH of a man exercising every muscle in his body to produce a single contained sound that would not carry.

“’Ugh,’” Gwen said, from the door. “He’s—”

“He’s a ’man,’” Bella called again, from somewhere below, with the breezy certainty of someone who considers this a complete and satisfying explanation. “Gwen-san, the arrow, I was telling you—”

The door closed.

The sheet lifted.

Viktor drew it back with the unhurried quality of someone opening curtains in the morning. The light of the room came back in and Vivian blinked against it, on her knees on the floor between his thighs, her face wet — tears, not anything else, she was choosing that accounting — and her hair thoroughly destroyed and her mouth swollen and the particular expression of a woman who has just survived something by the thinnest possible margin and is not yet sure she’s glad about it.

She looked up at him.

He looked down at her.

His breathing was the most even she’d ever heard it, which meant it wasn’t even at all, which meant he’d been managing it and had only just released the management.

His eyes were dark and warm, the purple quality more pronounced with the low light, and there was something in his face that had been there since the kitchen and that she still didn’t have a word for.

He looked at her like that for a long moment.

Then, quietly, he said:

“Your daughter hates me.”

“’Yes,’” Vivian said. Her voice came out rough and slightly broken. “She does.”

“Mm.” He reached down and pushed her hair back from her face with two fingers, slow, tucking it behind her ear with a carefulness that made no sense given everything. His thumb stayed against her cheek for a moment. “I’ll work on it.”

“You should work on—” She stopped. Pressed her lips together. The taste of him still on her tongue and her daughter’s voice still echoing in the corridor and absolutely nothing about this was going to be easy to examine later. “You should work on ’many’ things.”

Viktor’s mouth moved.

“Sigh,” he said, quietly. Not dramatic. Just the word, the way people say it when they mean it.

He looked at the closed door, at the thin line of light under it where the corridor beyond still held the sounds of the house — Bella’s voice starting up again, animated, and Gwen’s response, reluctant and clipped and present.

He looked back down at her.

“I have become a perverted man after all,” he said.

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