Chapter 787 - 786 - Viktor’s Academic Way of Hunting

Chapter 787: Chapter 786 - Viktor’s Academic Way of Hunting

She looked like a child. Her eyes were wide, wet, blinking rapidly. Her hair was a mess. Her glasses were fogged. Her blouse had come untucked on one side. She was thirty-two years old, the headmistress of the Royal Academy, and she looked like a student who had just been told class was over and she still had questions.

"I only write when my mood is good," he said.

His hand went into his pocket. He turned the handle. The gesture was clear: an offer. A transaction. Not stated. Not demanded. Simply presented.

Vespera trembled. She swallowed. Her throat worked. Her eyes went from his face to the page to his face to the door.

"I — I can prepare a bath for you," she said.

The words came out before she could stop them. The academic, the headmistress, the woman who had sworn off romance and devoted her life to research — offering to run a bath for a man she’d met five minutes ago.

Because that man had just solved the unsolvable. Had shown her that her life’s work was not a dead end. Had given her hope — real, theoretical, mathematically proven hope — that the dead could be brought back.

Viktor looked at her. His violet eyes — glowing faintly, impossibly, beautifully — held hers for a long moment.

"Fine," he said. "Done."

Vespera moved. She didn’t walk — she fled. Out the door, down the stairs, her thick legs carrying her as fast as they could. Her skirt billowed. Her cardigan flapped. Her glasses bounced.

"PREPARE THE BATH NOW!" she yelled, her voice cutting through the sleeping house like a blade. The command of a headmistress, directed at servants, at full volume, at ten o’clock at night.

Downstairs, the servants jolted awake. The butler, who had been sleeping in the staff quarters, sat upright. The maids — who had been nodding at their posts — scrambled.

In the master bedroom, Count Aldric Thorne opened one eye. His wife, beside him, was already awake. She’d been awake since Vespera’s footsteps had pounded up the stairs.

"She’s yelling about a bath," the Count murmured.

The Countess chuckled. "Shut up. Sleep. Just kinky couples."

"Newlyweds," the Count agreed. He shifted. His arm went around his wife’s thick waist. "I was hard on you too, my dear wife."

She laughed. The sound was soft, warm, the laugh of a woman who had been married for thirty years and still found her husband charming. She hugged him.

Upstairs, Vespera prepared the bath. Not personally — she directed the servants with the frantic energy of a woman who had never prepared a bath for anyone but herself and was treating it like a research project. The tub was filled. The temperature was checked. Twice. Soaps were selected. Towels were arranged. Candles were lit.

She returned to the bedroom. Her chest was heaving — from the stairs, from the exertion, from the nervous energy that was making her hands shake.

"It is prepared," she said.

Viktor smiled. The expression was warm. Appreciative. And underneath it — beneath the surface, in the part of his mind that calculated and schemed and planned — there was something else. Something sharp. Something hungry.

"Bring that book," he said. He nodded toward the research journal on the desk. "I would write more while taking the bath."

Vespera smiled. Not the composed, professional smile of a headmistress. A real smile. The smile of a woman who had been given a gift she didn’t know she wanted. She moved — swiftly, eagerly, her thick hips swaying as she reached for the journal. Her skirt pulled tight across her ass as she bent to retrieve a fallen pen. The fabric stretched. The curve was visible.

She didn’t notice him watching.

But he was.

His eyes traced the line of her body — the wide hips, the thick thighs, the soft waist. The way her blouse pulled across her back when she bent. The way her hair fell forward, hiding her face. The way her fingers — ink-stained, calloused from writing — handled the journal with the reverence of a woman holding a sacred text.

’Caught you,’ he thought.

The smirk that crossed his face was not the smile of a fiancé, or a scholar, or a guest in a nobleman’s house.

It was the smirk of an incubus who had just found his next meal.

The bathroom was modest. Clean tile, a copper tub large enough for two, enchanted sconces providing warm amber light that reflected off the water’s surface. Steam rose in lazy curls, carrying the scent of lavender soap and warm mineral water. The window was frosted glass — privacy ensured — and the door was solid oak with a brass lock I had no intention of using.

I pulled the shirt over my head. The borrowed fabric — too tight across the shoulders, stretching at the seams — came free with a soft rip. I didn’t care. It wasn’t mine.

Vespera appeared in the doorway. She held the research journal against her chest like a shield, her ink-stained fingers gripping the leather cover. Her glasses were slightly less fogged than before, but her face — her face was a different matter entirely. The composure she’d rebuilt on the stairs, the headmistress mask she’d carefully reconstructed during the bath preparation, shattered the moment she saw my bare back.

"What are you doing, sir?" she said. Her voice came out strangled. Her hand went to her face, covering her eyes, then dropping, then covering again — the confused, repetitive gesture of a woman whose body wanted to look and whose mind was screaming at it not to. "I — I thought you were going to take a bath, I didn’t — I should—"

"I am taking a bath," I said. My hands went to the waistband of the borrowed trousers. I pushed them down. Stepped out of them. "Don’t you want to see the thesis?"

The word — thesis — hit her like a lightning bolt. Her hand dropped from her face. Her eyes, which had been squeezed shut, opened. Found me. Found my body. Found my cock.

She trembled.

"Yes," she whispered. "I do."

The maids — two of them, who had been arranging towels and soaps — kept their heads down. Professionally, efficiently, they exited the bathroom. The door closed behind them. We were alone.

I walked to the tub. The water was perfect — hot, not scalding, the temperature of someone who had checked it twice and then checked it again. I didn’t step in immediately. Instead, I sat on the copper edge, my legs in the water, my cock hanging between my thighs. The steam curled around my body. My tail — which I’d kept hidden since arriving at this house — flicked lazily behind me, the tip occasionally breaking the water’s surface.

Vespera stood by the door. Looking everywhere except at me. The ceiling. The tiles. The frosted window. Her own shoes. Anywhere.

"Bring the book here," I said.

She moved. Swiftly. Eagerly. The academic reflex overriding the social discomfort — she crossed the bathroom in four quick steps, her thick legs carrying her across the tile, and held the journal out to me. Her hand was shaking. Her fingers, ink-stained and calloused, gripped the leather so tightly that her knuckles were white.

I took it. Opened it to the last page — where I’d stopped writing. The formula stared back at me. The soul resonance harmonic. The containment matrix. The distributed network. All there, in her handwriting and mine, the two notations interleaved like a conversation.

I picked up the pen — her pen, the one she’d left on the desk, the nib slightly bent from years of use — and started writing.