Inside the cave, the air was a freezing, damp weight, thick with the suffocating stench of ancient mold.
Rurik Brandt, his face still burning with the phantom heat of his agonizing mistake, silently took his post at the cave entrance. He gripped his axe, his massive back looming like a stone wall, blocking the group from the lurking horrors of the forest.
Deeper inside, Daniel hastily erected a small, single-person tent in a dry alcove. The knight's movements were sharp, overly practiced. His eyes darted restlessly, rigidly avoiding the filthy, knowing grin plastered across Kaspar's face.
Kaspar sat casually by the newly kindled campfire. He lazily whittled a piece of rot-wood with a hunting knife, his sharp brown eyes tracking the knight's every twitch. He knew exactly how hot Daniel's blood was boiling. The bodyguard's suffocating, unspoken jealousy was premium entertainment.
Helene didn't say a single word. The microsecond Daniel hammered the final peg into the stone, she moved. She slipped into the tent like a hunted shadow and yanked the canvas flap shut, barricading herself as if fleeing from reality itself.
Her frantic haste made Daniel freeze. He frowned, his jaw working as he opened his mouth, but he swallowed the words down. Silently, he turned, sat heavily across from Kaspar, and rested his steel-gauntleted hands on the pommel of his Oathblade. A silent, lethal standoff.
Inside the tent, stifling darkness swallowed the cramped space.
Only the faint, dying orange glow of the campfire bled through the thick canvas, casting restless, distorted shadows across the walls.
Helene's chest heaved. Her breathing was a ragged, panicked rasp. With trembling fingers, she ripped open the heavy metal clasp of her cloak. The wafer-thin linen tunic followed instantly, pooling at her ankles.
She stood completely naked in the dark.
She was burning.
Her skin radiated a feverish, unnatural heat—a brutal, agonizing contrast to the glacial ice magic she commanded. Between her pale thighs, the indigo-blue serpent mark stood out with terrifying clarity. It writhed and throbbed beneath her flesh, behaving like a starved, rabid beast clawing against its cage.
The archaic bloodline of House Auen granted her devastating beauty and catastrophic magical power. But it carried a parasitic curse—a dark secret known only to her husband. To control the magic, Helene needed carnal release. She had to be pushed over the absolute precipice of orgasm. Years ago, once a month had been enough.
But this cursed forest had shattered her limits. The raw, corrupted magic in the air had sent her bloodline into a frenzy. She needed release now. If she failed, there would be no saving Thomas. There would be no surviving the night.
She remembered the agonizing months Thomas had been away at the border. Out of aristocratic pride, she had tried to starve the craving. That was when she learned the lethal truth of her existence: The unspent magic turned parasitic. The serpent mark had crawled up her torso, attempting to devour the star mark on her breast. The temperature in her veins had plummeted until her own heart's blood began to crystallize. Had Thomas not returned to brutally fuck the cold out of her... she would be nothing but a shattered ice statue today.
The Frost Death.
Helene collapsed heavily onto the soft fur rug, her long, pale thighs spreading wide on pure instinct. The damp cave air settled over her feverish skin like a sticky film, torturing her hypersensitive nerve endings.
Her right hand trembled as she brought it up, her fingers cupping her own left breast. Right over the glowing star mark. Exactly where the phantom weight of Rurik's massive, calloused paw still burned like a brand into her flesh.
She kneaded her own soft weight, her thumb dragging demandingly over the stiff, aching peak of her nipple. She squeezed her eyes shut, desperately fighting to purge the sinful, violating image of the giant mercenary from her brain. Frantically, she summoned Thomas's face—her noble, handsome husband. The only hero she had ever loved.
Her left hand drifted down her flat stomach, finding her thoroughly soaked slit. Clear, scalding juices had already gushed from her core, leaving the swollen pink folds slick and yielding. She pressed two fingers flat against her throbbing clit, sliding them in a rapid, urgent, overly familiar rhythm.
"Thomas…"
She whispered his name into the dark, a desperate, broken prayer.
Her hand pumped faster, more relentlessly. She needed it. She needed a devastating, mind-shattering climax to sate the magical serpent and force it back into hibernation.
But… the dark theater of her mind remained terrifyingly hollow.
The flawless, noble image of Thomas blurred. It fractured into a thousand useless pieces, like a reflection in a pond shattered by a thrown stone. The harder she clung to the memory of her husband's touch, the faster her body dried up. The heat began to recede.
Instead, filthy, depraved ghosts hijacked her mind.
Kaspar's sly, abyssal eyes, dark with greedy hunger, mentally stripping her bare. The shocking, heavy physical crush of Rurik's rough, scarred fingers engulfing her unprotected breast. Daniel's bloodshot, manic eyes, brimming with obsessive, suppressed lust.
"No..."
Helene moaned aloud.
She tossed her head frantically against the furs, hot tears of absolute frustration leaking from the corners of her eyes.
She locked every muscle in her body, weaponizing her magical willpower to concentrate. She ground her fingers against her swollen clit even harder, entirely merciless, until the delicate flesh began to burn with raw friction. She wanted Thomas. She only loved Thomas!
Yet, her own body committed the ultimate, most humiliating betrayal.
Every single time Kaspar's lecherous grin or the phantom crush of Rurik's grip flashed behind her eyelids, a forbidden, scorching bolt of liquid pleasure detonated straight through her cunt. Her pale hips bucked off the furs. It was entirely involuntary—a completely feral reaction, like a bitch in heat begging to be mounted by the closest predator.
But the microsecond she forced Thomas's aristocratic face back into her mind, the burning lust crashed. It died instantly, suffocated like wet ash.
The saving release slipped through her fingers.
Helene's eyes snapped open in the dark.
Her body was drenched in cold sweat. Her heavy breasts heaved in panicked, shallow gasps. Her fingers lay motionless between her spread thighs, coated thick in her own slick juices, but the heavy, agonizing ache remained. No release. No climax.
Between her legs, the indigo-blue serpent mark began to writhe with lethal intent. The magical lines bled into an angry, glowing crimson. It crawled over her mound like a starved parasite, tearing her apart from the inside out.
And then, it started. A terrifying, sub-zero chill began to seep into her fingertips.
The Frost Death was coming.
The panic that seized her was infinitely more abysmal than the fear of dying. Because in the suffocating dark of the tent, she was forced to face a degrading, horrifying truth:
She could no longer reach orgasm by thinking of her own husband.
The three men sitting just outside the thin canvas—three filthy, baseborn bastards she had merely bought with gold—had infected her subconscious like an incurable rot. They had utterly defiled the sacred, pure sanctuary of her marriage. Her corrupted bloodline didn't want nobility. It craved their raw, dirty, aggressive lust.
Helene pulled her bare knees to her chest, resting her forehead against them. Her slender shoulders shook in the dark.
She had to force this rampant magic out of her system, or the Frost Death would freeze her heart solid before dawn.
But how the hell was she supposed to survive the night, when her own treacherous, starving body now only responded to the filthy hands of the monsters guarding her door?