As Rex’s laughter died down, his predatory instincts flared. He felt a presence. A gaze. A warmth that didn’t belong to the sleeping couple.
His head turned slowly, his sharp, intelligent eyes cutting through the darkness toward the heavy velvet curtains of the alcove. He saw in it a flicker of movent, the unmistakable shape of a woman’s silhouette, and the wide, terrified eyes of Mireya peeking through the gap.
For a heartbeat, they locked eyes. Mireya stood there, her face flushed, her chest heaving, her eyes brimming with a mixture of holy terror and carnal hunger. She looked like a deer caught in the headlights of a predator.
Rex didn’t move to hide. He didn’t act ashad.
Instead, he leaned back, a wicked, knowing smirk spreading across his face. He let his gaze roam over her, making it clear that he knew exactly what she had been watching and exactly how much she had enjoyed it.
Mireya gasped, a tiny, choked sound of pure panic. Realizing she had been caught in the most scandalous act of her life, she spun around and bolted.
She ran into the darkness of the hallway, her footsteps frantic and uneven, her heart hamring against her ribs as she fled the scene of her own awakening lust.
Rex watched her go, his laughter erupting again, louder and more derisive this ti. It wasn’t a laugh of surprise but a laugh of absolute dominance.
He had conquered the wife, he had planted the seed, and now, he had seen the hunger in the eyes of the next prize.
"Run, little bird!" Rex called out softly, his voice a dark promise that echoed in the silent corridor. "Run all you want... but you can’t run from the truth!"
He settled back against the headboard, looking down at his handiwork with the satisfied grin of a man who knew that the world was finally starting to bend to his will.
...
Several hours later, the household had settled into the specific quality of late evening, the light turning amber through the east-facing windows and the city’s ambient noise dropping to the register of a place winding down.
Rex was already dressed and standing at the sitting room window, his system interface open in the way that only he could see it, and the numbers that had assembled during the past several hours were sitting there with the particular clarity of a reward for a sequence of correctly executed decisions.
[ALIA BRIGHTSOUL — MAXIMUM BOND REACHED: 100/100]
[FIRST MAXIMUM BOND BONUS: 1000 ENERGY POINTS]
[PREGNANCY CONFIRD — Free Skill Selection available. No cost. No prerequisites.]
’There we go... let’s just fucking get it right away.’
He opened the skill catalog and went directly to the entry he had been looking at earlier.
[PEAK SUPER HUMAN PHYSIQUE — FULL POTENTIAL — FREE SELECTION]
[ALL PHYSICAL ATTRIBUTES ELEVATED TO THEORETICAL HUMAN MAXIMUM ACROSS EVERY DOMAIN. COMBAT POWER, MAGICAL OUTPUT EFFICIENCY, ELENTAL AFFINITY RANGE, MOVENT SPEED, SENSORY ACUITY, REGENERATIVE CAPACITY. PHYSICAL STRIKES PRODUCE FORCE APPROPRIATE TO STRUCTURAL LIMITS OF TARGET, NOT STRIKER. SYNERGIZES WITH ALL EXISTING COMBAT SKILLS. ELEVATES FLIGHT CAPABILITY VIA TELEKINESIS TO MAXIMUM VELOCITY.]
[PASSIVE ACTIVATION — ALWAYS ACTIVE.]
He selected it right away without second thinking. "Yeah, let’s fucking go."
The integration was different from skill purchases, which settled into place with the asured clarity of an addition to an existing structure. This was more like a recalibration of the base layer, every physical system adjusting to a new baseline simultaneously, and the process took about ten seconds and felt like nothing in particular, which was how the most significant changes tended to arrive.
He closed the interface and looked at the window.
The amber light was very clear, and the Convergence Waters were visible at the far edge of the city’s roofline, and Rex stood with the specific stillness of soone who has finished one phase of sothing and is preparing for the next.
[Current Energy Balance: 3,150 points]
He heard a sound from the hallway and turned.
Mireya was standing in the sitting room doorway.
She had clearly been heading sowhere specific and had encountered Rex’s presence in this room as an unexpected obstacle. Her expression went through the sequence he had watched it go through before, quick, layered, and ending at the composed neutrality she maintained as a professional default.
But under the neutrality was sothing else, the specific quality of a person who has been sitting in the front room for the past several hours and who has heard certain things that had not been intended for them to hear.
He looked at her.
She looked at him, and then she looked at the door behind him, and then she looked at him again with the expression of soone making a calculation about whether to walk away imdiately or say sothing first.
She did not walk away.
’In the end... she’s still curious about it, huh?’ Rex thought. ’Even after she saw the whole thing that her boyfriend’s mother is being impregnated by .’
"He fell asleep," she said, which was about Apollo.
Her voice was flat and even in the way she made it flat and even when she was managing sothing. "He said he was tired from the date and he’d rest for a while, and I said that was fine, and so now..."
"I’m..." She stopped.
"Standing in a doorway," Rex offered. "Hearing what and Apollo’s mother doing, right?"
"Yes..." she said.
He looked at her with the patient, level attention he gave to situations that had interesting potential.
"Co in," he said. "Or go back to the front room."
She ca in.
She sat down on the far side of the room from him with the deliberate distance of soone establishing a parater and intending to hold it. He sat in the chair beside the window, and the amber light ca through it and put warm color on the side of his face, and neither of them said anything for a mont.
"He always does that," she said. "He falls asleep whenever he’s having fun in a date."
"He’s probably been tired since the ring suppression," Rex said. "The residual effects take weeks to clear fully."
"I know," she said. "Apollo told ."
She was looking at the floor, but her hands were relaxed in her lap, which Rex noted as different from the tense, managed quality they usually had in his presence.
"We were going to have a quiet afternoon," she said. "We had a plan for it..."
"I’m hoping that... there’s nothing complicated."
"But?"
"He fell asleep," she said again.
And then, after a pause that had a different quality from the others, "We almost—" She stopped.
Rex said nothing.
"I didn’t get the chance to say it," Mireya said, and her voice was controlled and even, the voice she used when she was reporting rather than feeling, and underneath it was the distinct texture of sothing that had been building up pressure for several weeks. "And then he fell asleep."
The sitting room was quiet. The amber light had moved further along the wall.
"He fucking does that?" Rex said.
"Yes," she said. "He does."
Rex then laughed. "Hahahahahaha! What a fucking virgin!"
She looked up at him, and her expression had the specific quality of soone who had arrived at the edge of a position they had been defending and was standing there rather than inside it. The defenses were still there, but she was looking out from behind them rather than maintaining them with full force.
"I don’t know who I am lately," she said, and it ca out smaller than everything else she had said, a quieter register entirely.
"In the expedition, I knew..."
"I knew exactly what I thought and what I needed to say..."
"I had a position... I held it and I said it out loud." She was looking at the floor again.
"And since then I’ve been apologizing for it and recanting and—" She stopped. "I don’t know what I’m doing."
Rex looked at her.
He reached over and touched her jaw lightly, turning her face toward him with the small gesture of soone who wants a person to actually look at them rather than at the floor.
She let him do that.
Her eyes, when she t his, had the particular quality of soone who has been exhausted for longer than they realized and has stopped pretending they aren’t.
"Let fucking guess... You’re feeling frustrated," Rex said. "Since you’ve watched us breeding like wild animals."
"Yes," she said.
"With Apollo?"
"With everything," she said. "Especially... with myself mostly."
"Oh my fucking lust..." Rex laughed at her. "You really are a hopeless bitch... even though back then you were acting tough like an ice queen who tries to take down with all your stupid... fucking... naive... snitches."
He then held her gaze with the steady attention of soone who was entirely present and patient. "Are you sure you really want that?"
"Please," she said, and her voice was very quiet. "Help ..."
"I can’t feel my old self anymore."
The amber light ca through the window, and the household settled around them, and sowhere in the front room Apollo was sleeping, and Rex looked at Mireya Snowlith with the specific calm of soone who knew exactly what was going to happen next.
"I know," he said. "In the end... you can’t even forget that kind of feeling about , huh?"
"Ugh... I hate it... but still... my body is trying to fight it..."
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