Outside the cave entrance, darkness dropped over the Blackthorn Forest like a suffocating, velvet shroud.
The air was dense, heavy with humidity that settled over the skin like a sticky film. It soaked mercilessly through Helene's heavy wool cloak.
Every icy drop of dew condensing on her pale skin made her hypersensitive. The exhausting battles of the past few days had thrown the magical currents in her body into chaos, causing the hidden bloodline of House Auen to stir with violent, demanding erraticism. The deeper they pushed into the cursed woods, the fiercer the craving clawed at her insides.
Kaspar hadn't lied. She was starving for rough, masculine friction.
Three months had passed since Thomas marched to war. In that time, she had only relied on her own fingers to feed the bloodline's ritualistic hunger. But that was like drinking seawater to cure a deadly thirst. It offered a fleeting second of relief, only to ignite an infinitely wilder, more desperate heat immediately after.
Helene shuddered in the mist.
Beneath the heavy cloak, her slender thighs clamped together involuntarily. She shifted, her knees rubbing against each other through the damp linen of her tunic. It was a desperate, subtle attempt to generate enough friction to quiet the throbbing, wet ache deep between her legs.
But it was a terrible mistake.
The harder she pressed, the hotter the friction burned. The rough, damp linen didn't soothe the itch—it was gasoline on an open flame. The raw, carnal hunger flared violently, sinking its teeth into every nerve ending in her body.
Helene's lips pressed together in a bloodless line. She swallowed hard, violently choking back a soft, wet moan that threatened to tear from her throat. Her toes curled tightly inside her leather boots, her entire body locking up in a painfully suppressed spasm of pure lust.
And the sheer proximity of Rurik Brandt, standing mere steps away, only made the torture worse.
The giant mercenary leaned his broad back against a rotting tree trunk. His harsh, aggressively masculine scent—a mix of old sweat, leather, and iron—drifted over the damp air. It acted as a forbidden catalyst, scrambling Helene's usually razor-sharp mind.
Rurik stood motionless, his predator's eyes scanning the dark tree line. But the massive muscles of his arms and neck were trembling.
In the dead silence of the forest, a veteran warrior's hearing was his greatest weapon. He didn't need to turn his head to know exactly what was happening in the shadows behind him.
He heard every agonizing detail.
The soft, rhythmic shhh-shhh of fine, wet fabric rubbing together between a woman's thighs. The shallow, fractured breaths she was desperately trying to swallow. Those tiny, wet, suffocated sounds were shredding his self-control faster than any monster's roar.
Rurik's breathing grew ragged and unnaturally deep. His coarse, scarred hands gripped the wooden shaft of his battle-axe so violently the veins on his forearms bulged. He was fighting a bloody, losing war against the primal instinct screaming at him to turn around, throw the haughty aristocrat into the mud, and fuck her senseless right then and there.
Helene felt the sudden, dangerous shift in the air.
The steady, controlled rhythm of the giant's breathing had shattered. Panic spiked through the haze of her arousal, a bucket of ice water down her spine. What the hell am I doing?
Humiliation hit her like a physical blow. Her cheeks burned fiercely in the dark. She had to bury this immediately, before the mercenary fully realized she was practically dry-humping the damp air right behind him.
Helene hastily stepped her feet apart, clearing her throat with a soft, forced cough. She desperately scrambled for words to cut through the suffocating fog of lust. Anything. Banal conversation to cool her boiling blood.
"How long have you known Kaspar?"
Despite her iron will, her voice betrayed her. It echoed in the quiet, carrying the undeniable, husky rasp of unquenched desire.
"You two seem entirely opposite in nature."
Rurik jerked as if struck by lightning. He whirled around, the movement unnaturally stiff and jarring. His massive hands clamped onto his axe haft like a drowning man holding a lifeline. He stared fixedly at a spot on the tree trunk beside her head, not daring to meet her emerald eyes.
"Three years. On an expedition out east."
Rurik answered. His voice was a subterranean, gravelly rumble. He swallowed heavily, visibly forcing his mind onto the cold, bloody memory to smother his erection.
"I was seconds away from dying under a demon bear's claws. Kaspar put an arrow through its eye. We've usually run together since."
He finally lowered his gaze, staring intensely at the cold iron of his axe head.
"My Lady... don't judge him too harshly for his godless mouth. Beneath the filth, Kaspar is a good man."
Helene gave a slow, genuine nod of surprise. The brutal, towering mercenary was actually defending the honor of a lecherous street rat. The cold, grounded reality of human connection felt like a lifeline. It anchored her, reminding her she was an Imperial Countess, not just a slave in heat.
"And you? Are you a good man as well?"
Rurik gave an instinctual nod, then immediately shook his massive head in stark confusion. How the hell was he supposed to know what "good" meant to the high nobility? The only thing currently raging through his skull was a violent, filthy urge to bury his face between her thighs.
Helene smiled—a rare, fragile expression that illuminated her freezing, flawless features.
"Then why... did you accept this suicide mission?"
Rurik went silent. The cold wind hissed through the blackthorns for a long moment before he answered.
"My little sister."
Rurik's voice ground out like two millstones crushing rocks. It was his ultimate anchor to reality.
"Poisoned by a swamp terror. The Church of Light demands a king's ransom for the purification ritual."
Helene's hand unconsciously tightened into a fist beneath her cloak. The Church of Light held monopolies on miracles, and their price for divine salvation was never paid in mere prayers.
"I swear it upon my honor."
Helene stepped forward. She looked Rurik directly in the eyes—fearless, commanding, the absolute embodiment of the ruling class.
"I will pay your agreed sum to the final copper, and I will add a personal bounty more than enough to save your sister. Once we walk out of this forest alive."
Rurik's head snapped up. His eyes, usually deadened by years of slaughter, softened. A spark of raw, desperate gratitude flared in the depths. The suffocating, horny tension between them finally shattered, replaced by a profound, heavy respect. For a fleeting second, the heat was defeated.
"Thank you, My Lady. I swear on my life that I will—"
SNAP.
A sharp, violent crack of timber echoed from the dense brush. It was no wind.
A veteran's survival instinct bypassed conscious thought entirely. The cold, rational respect vanished in a microsecond. Rurik's muscles detonated. He lunged forward, his right hand bringing the heavy battle-axe up in a lethal arc, while his left hand shot blindly backward to shove Helene behind him, out of the strike zone.
"Down!"
But in the chaotic explosion of movement, the angle and his own blind instinct betrayed him completely.
The giant's massive, calloused hand didn't hit her shoulder. It didn't catch her arm.
It slammed with unrestrained, brutal force directly into the center of Helene's left breast.
The kinetic impact from a man of Rurik's monstrous strength was devastating. Through the wafer-thin, sweat-dampened linen tunic, the mercenary's enormous hand completely engulfed the soft, heavy weight of her breast.
There was no corset. No armor. Helene's nipple—already painfully hard, peaking from the moisture and the torment of her own earlier touches—ground directly into his rough, scarred palm through the thin fabric.
Helene turned into a pillar of salt. Her mind went completely blank.
The force of the blow sent her staggering backward until her spine slammed hard against the rough bark of the tree trunk.
Rurik froze internally.
He felt the impossible, heavy softness of aristocratic flesh filling his coarse palm. It was an agonizingly clear sensation. He felt the fleshy weight yield to his grip, and most devastating of all, he felt the tight, hardened bud of her nipple trembling excitedly under the thin linen against his calloused skin.
Every instinct of a sane man screamed at him to yank his hand back in absolute panic.
But a dark, depraved corner of his brain—the animalistic lust they had both just barely managed to bury—resurrected with twice the violence. For one long, agonizing heartbeat, he let the "protective" shove linger. His fingers twitched, unconsciously pressing a fraction of a millimeter tighter into the soft flesh.
Helene's heart hammered against her ribs like a trapped bird. The aggressive, physical contact shot straight down her spine like a lightning bolt. The raw sensation of a massive, violent man possessively crushing his filthy hand over her most sensitive flesh... it stole the oxygen from her lungs. Her face burned with aristocratic humiliation, but deep down, in her corrupted, aching core... the magic flared into white-hot arousal.
At that exact second, a murderous, guttural snarl ripped from the cavern entrance.
"Rurik. What the fuck are you doing?"
Rurik ripped his hand away as if he had just grabbed forged iron. He stumbled back two heavy steps in blind panic, dropping his chin to his chest. Thick, cold beads of sweat instantly erupted across his forehead.
Daniel stood at the cave mouth. Massive, fully armored, and radiating absolute death. Leaning casually against the rock beside him, arms crossed and wearing a filthy, knowing smirk, was Kaspar.
Daniel had just stepped out of the cave. In the pale moonlight, the knight had walked straight into the sinful, violating scene.
Daniel's jaw locked so hard the bone popped. His teeth ground together audibly. His steel-gauntleted hand was crushing the hilt of his Oathblade, the leather grip creaking under the white-knuckled pressure.
The knight's eyes were blood-red. He looked seconds away from roaring, charging forward blind, and severing Rurik's arm at the shoulder.
But Helene coldly, ruthlessly preempted the bloodbath. Her voice sliced through the tension, razor-sharp and dripping with absolute command.
"It was merely a slip. Rurik was catching my fall."
She smoothly adjusted the heavy lapels of her cloak, burying the aggressively heaving, tingling breast from view. With her chin held high and her spine straight, she glided past Daniel's murderous, blazing glare without offering a single word of justification.
"What is the status of the cave? Is it secure?"
Daniel inhaled with a sharp, ragged hiss, his heavy breastplate groaning against the strain of his lungs. Running on the very last fumes of his willpower, he choked down the acid-burn of his rage. He closed his eyes in pure agony, forcing out the dead, hollow tone of an obedient subordinate.
"Secure. We swept the perimeter thoroughly. No trace of aberrations whatsoever."
Kaspar stood there, arms crossed, chuckling a low, filthy sound in his throat. His dark, sly eyes dragged over the sweating Rurik with perverse, mocking complicity.
"Clean as the Emperor's bedchamber. Step right in, My Lady. Tonight, we can all sleep deep and sound."
Helene walked into the dark without another word.
Rurik followed, his head bowed, staring rigidly at the dirt. Daniel formed the grim rearguard. His hate-filled eyes bored into the back of Rurik's neck, burning with enough intensity to melt a hole straight through the giant's skull.
One by one, they stepped into the ink-black belly of the cavern—walking blindly into the "absolute safety" that Daniel and Kaspar had just so confidently guaranteed.