Chapter 207: Mailman Dog Energy

Every one of my girls has a smell. Not perfume, not soap, just her, the specific chemical signature that my tongue picks up before my brain even catches up and tells me who it belongs to.

Lyra smells like cash and hot pavement after rain, something electric underneath it that I think is just her being a cop, some leftover adrenaline baked into her skin that never fully goes away. I could find her blindfolded in a crowd of a thousand women. I could find her in the dark, underwater, on fire.

Doesn’t matter. That scent’s mine now, and I mean that in the way you’d say a gem is yours, something you found and polished and now keep somewhere safe where the light hits it right.

[System: Oi, don’t go calling the sheila a rock, mate, she’ll hear that and you’ll be single by lunch.]

Not calling her a rock. Calling her a- okay, actually, when I try to finish that thought, it does sound worse out loud than it does in my head, so maybe I just don’t finish it.

But it’s true though. Every girl I get close to, every scent I learn, every noise I manage to pull out of her, it all just sort of slots into a drawer somewhere in my head like a jewel going into a case. Not because I don’t care; I care an unreasonable, stupid, borderline unhealthy amount, but because caring and collecting apparently aren’t mutually exclusive when you’re a horny snake demon with commitment issues and unlimited free time.

Lyra’s the first stone in the collection. Deep red, kind of rough on the outside, cop-shaped, smells like thunderstorms. Cherry’s already in there. Pink diamond, dead obvious in retrospect, smells like cotton candy and leather in a combination that has absolutely no business working and yet is somehow the most accurate thing I’ve ever smelled. Shy on the outside, genuinely radioactive at the centre. I know that second part from experience.

And Channel, wherever the hell she lands on the spectrum of things I probably shouldn’t want, she’s going to be the one that looks pretty but bites, a stone shaped like a knife, my next jewel I don’t know but I can smell her on the horizon.

A whole hoard of them eventually. Different scents, different sounds, different ways they fall apart when I get my coils right. And me at the centre of it, some fat scaled dragon lying on a pile of soft, warm, spoken-for women, because apparently that is exactly the kind of monster my system decided to build. Not the acid breath kind. Not the diamond-fang kind. The kind that hoards affection like gold and sniffs his own treasure for fun.

[System: You do realise how deranged that sounded internally, right? Like, super unwell.]

Shut up, you don’t get a say in how I process my own harem, you drunk uncle simulator.

[System: Fair, fair. Carry on being a pervert then, mate. I’ll just be here, silently judging.]

Lyra’s still not moving, other than the occasional twitch of an ear, so I lean down and drag my tongue lightly along her collarbone, just enough to taste the salt and sweat baked into her skin overnight, and something low in my chest goes tight and warm and stupidly satisfied, like I just checked an item off some list I never wrote down. Smell confirmed. Taste confirmed. Mine, still mine, still very thoroughly mine.

She makes a noise like a startled cat and swats blindly in my direction, hand thudding uselessly against a wall of smoke.

"Stop that," she mumbles, not opening her eyes. "Since when did you want to smell me?"

"You smell good though."

"You remind me of a dog greeting the mailman."

"I’m a snake. Snakes taste the air; it’s biology, it’s science. You wouldn’t get it."

"Science," she repeats, flat, muffled by the pillow, clearly not buying a single word of it, and honestly, fair, because it isn’t really science so much as it is me being an unrepentant creep about the girl currently drooling on my sheets, except I’ve dressed it up in snake logic so it sounds less concerning.

[System: For the record, mate, that’s not even good snake logic. Real snakes don’t get sentimental about it. You’re just horny and clingy, and you’ve bolted a biology excuse onto it after the fact.]

Yeah, well, real snakes don’t have a harem system either, so maybe don’t lecture me on authenticity, Old Mate.

Lyra finally manages to roll fully onto her back, wincing like every muscle in her body is filing a formal complaint, and squints up at me through a curtain of messy hair. Her eyes are still a little glazed, pupils blown wide in a way that has nothing to do with sleep and everything to do with what I did to her a few hours ago, and something low and possessive uncoils in my gut just looking at her like that. Wrecked and smelling like me under all that leftover sweat.

"You’re staring," she says.

"I’m admiring."

"That’s the same."

"Damn right it is."

I settle down beside her, gravity finally catching up now that I’m not in the mood to keep fighting it, coiling loosely along the edge of the bed so my weight doesn’t crush her, but she can still feel me there, warm and solid and unmistakably present. She shifts without even seeming to think about it, curling in against the coil like it’s the most natural thing in the world, like my body’s just furniture that happens to also be dangerous.

"We open the casino tomorrow," she mumbles into my scales, voice already going soft and slurry again.

"Yeah."

"You nervous?"

"Nah."

A lie, technically, because there is a very small, very stupid part of me somewhere under all the confidence that’s absolutely nervous, mostly about Channel, mostly about what happens when she finds out exactly what kind of show she’s walking into. But I’m not about to say that out loud to the girl half-asleep on my ribs.