Chapter 424: Chapter 423 – A Trap Setup or Just Taking the Chances

He stopped.

She nearly walked into him.

He was looking at something through the trees. She followed his line of sight and saw it — a small pond, maybe thirty feet across, tucked into a natural depression between two enormous oaks. The water was still and clear. Afternoon light came through the canopy in pale columns and lay across the surface in moving patches of gold. Mossy stone at the edges. A pair of dragonflies negotiating territory above the far end.

It was, objectively, quite beautiful.

“Want to bathe?” Viktor said.

“Absolutely not,” Gwen said.

His hands went to his shirt.

“Viktor—”

He pulled it over his head.

She turned away.

But not fast enough. The peripheral impression of his torso — broad, defined, the specific geometry of a man who had stopped being obese and arrived at the opposite extreme, the incubus mark pulsing soft purple-black at his lower abdomen — registered on her vision in the half-second before she managed to redirect her eyes to a tree.

She stared at the tree.

Behind her: boots hitting the ground. The particular sound of a belt.

“I am not bathing,” she said, to the tree, firmly. “I am completely dry and I intend to stay completely dry and we need to get to Redwood territory before—”

Hands.

Both of them. His hands found her waist — large, warm, entirely certain of their welcome — and before her body had processed the information they had lifted her.

“DON’T—”

He threw her.

Not hard. Not carelessly. But with the specific, accurate arc of a man who had calculated the distance, the depth of the near edge, and the least unpleasant landing trajectory, and had executed all three without apparent effort.

Gwen hit the water with the clean sound of a body meeting a surface that had not been consulted.

SPLASH.

The cold.

Not terrible cold — the pond was fed by a warm underground source, she could feel the relative warmth even in the shock of it — but the cold of sudden immersion, the full-body contact of being wet when she had been dry, her clothes going heavy and dense around her, her silver-blonde hair spreading across the surface before dragging down.

She came up sputtering.

Her bow.

She looked at the bank. He had moved it. It was propped against the oak, dry, out of splash range. Her quiver beside it.

He had moved her bow before he threw her.

She looked at him.

He was standing at the water’s edge. He had removed everything except the specific dignity of a man who had decided to be in a pond and had not decided to be embarrassed about it. His cock hung heavy between his thighs with the comfortable authority of something that was not thinking about the situation at all and was simply present.

His dark eyes found hers across the water.

“I will kill you,” Gwen said. Her hair was plastered across half her face. Her voice had a particular clarity that came from being wet when you had planned not to be. “If you touch me. If you come anywhere near— I will drown you. I will use you as a pool weight. I will tell Mira you said ’she was your favorite’ and let her do whatever she— Viktor— don’t you dare get in this—”

He stepped in.

The water took him to the hips. He waded forward three steps with the unhurried pace of a man with a destination, and sat down on a submerged stone shelf at the pond’s edge, elbows on his knees, looking across the water at her.

“Don’t,” Gwen said.

He looked at her.

Not at her chest — where her wet clothes were doing what wet clothes do, clinging with a dedication that fabric usually reserved for things it approved of. Not at her hips, or her legs, or the way her hair lay flat against her neck and collarbone.

At her face.

He looked at her face with those dark eyes that went briefly, briefly purple at the edge when something registered — and something registered — and he said:

“You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.”

The pond was very still.

Gwen’s ears came forward.

The words had arrived without preamble, without the usual scaffolding of Viktor’s humor or strategy or deliberate provocation. They had simply come out of him the way certain true things come out — not because he’d decided to say them, but because they were there and the distance across the water had happened to be the right distance for something that size to travel.

Her heart did something.

She was very aware of it doing something. The specific flutter of a heart that had been braced and had received warmth instead, the involuntary opening of a thing that had been holding itself shut.

She hated it.

“…Playboy bastard,” she said.

Her voice came out two notes lower than she’d intended, and two notes less furious, and three notes more something else.

Viktor looked at the water. His jaw settled into the patient line it settled into when he’d said what he meant and was not going to dress it up further. “Mm.”

“Don’t say things like that.”

“I’m stating a fact.”

“It is not a—” She pushed her hair from her face. The wet weight of it. Her pointed ears were pink to the tips. “You have six wives. You have ’pregnant’ wives. You don’t get to just— to a woman you ’threw in a pond’—”

“Seven,” Viktor said.

“What?”

“Six wives.” A pause. Something in the pause had a shape. “Possibly seven.”

Gwen pressed her lips together very firmly.

“That is not,” she said, with precision, “what I was asking about.”

Viktor leaned back slightly on his stone shelf, looking up at the canopy overhead. The light moved through it slowly. The dragonflies at the far end of the pond had resolved their territorial dispute and were doing something else. The whole forest had the quality of a place that was very old and had decided, long ago, that whatever happened inside it was its own business.

He looked comfortable.

He looked, specifically, like a man who had chosen this pond, chosen this moment, chosen this exact conversation and was sitting in it the way he sat in all his chosen positions — with the patience of someone who had already seen three moves ahead and was finding the current one interesting.

Gwen watched him with the narrowed-eye focus of someone who had worked out that the patience was not idleness.

“Why are you relaxed,” she said.

“I’m bathing.”

“You’re—” She looked around. At the trees. At the specific way the light came through the canopy. At the path they’d come in on, visible between two oaks, and the road beyond. “Viktor. What did you notice back at the road. When you were looking at the trees.”

He said nothing.

“Viktor.”

“Twelve,” he said.

The word was quiet and flat and entirely clear.

Gwen went still.

“…What.”

“Around the clearing. Twelve, give or take.” He continued looking at the canopy overhead. His voice was the voice of a man giving a weather report. “Been following since we left the forest junction. They moved ahead to set up while I took the detour.”

Gwen’s hand moved toward her bow. Fast, decisive, the archer’s reflex, the reaching for the only thing that made the math make sense—

His hand caught her wrist.

She hadn’t seen him move. He was simply there, suddenly, standing in the water beside her, his fingers wrapped around her wrist with the specific unhurried grip of a man who had planned for this reach and been waiting for it.

Her body hit his chest. The momentum of her lunge and his pull and the water resistance combined into a collision that pressed her fully against him — his chest against hers, her wet clothes between them, his arm coming to her back with the ease of a man catching something he’d already calculated the weight of.

The contact hit her in several places simultaneously.

“Don’t,” he said, softly. Directly into her ear. His breath was warm. “They have a position. High ground, northeast oak. Sniper-tier range. If you reach for the bow they’ll take the shot before you clear the draw.”

Gwen’s heart was going very fast. Some of it was the ambush.

Some of it was not the ambush.

“Teleport,” she said, quiet, urgent. “You can— Instant Recall— take us out—”

“I could.” He wasn’t moving away from her. His arm was still at her back. His chest was warm even in the pond. “I’d rather not.”

“You’d ’rather’—” She pulled back enough to look at his face. Close. Too close. The dark eyes were absolutely calm and slightly interested in a way that was not about the twelve men in the forest. “Why ’not?”

“Because,” Viktor said, and the patience in his voice had weight behind it, the specific weight of a man who had looked at this situation and found it useful, “I want to know who sent them.”

“Then we could—”

“And because,” he continued, over her, “we’re going to catch them instead of run from them.”

She looked at him. “How.”

He looked at her mouth.

Gwen became aware that his hand, which had been at her back, had moved. It was at her hip. Both of them. His palms on the wet cloth of her skirt over the curve of her hips, and the grip was warm and specific and entirely certain of itself.

“What are you—”

“Trap,” Viktor said.

He lifted her leg.

His hand slid to the back of her knee, drawing it up, and the motion pressed her against him fully, her hip against his hip, her chest against his chest, everything in between unavoidably present and warm and the incubus mark on his lower abdomen pulsing with a slow violet light against her stomach.

“Viktor—” His name came out too soft. She pressed her mouth together.

“They’re watching,” he said. His lips were very close to hers. She could feel the warmth of his breath. “Anyone in the trees sees two unarmed travelers. Bathing. No threat.” His eyes were dark and direct and doing the thing they did — that thing where the purple at the edge appeared when something registered — and something was registering. “Relaxed. Not expecting company.”

“That— that is not a—”

“They’ll get closer,” Viktor said. “Try to confirm identities. Move their sniper. When they reposition—”

“Viktor—”

“—we have a window.”

“This is not a real plan, you just want to—”

“Mmmnnnphhh~~!!!”

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