Gwen, despite everything—despite her flushed face and her trembling ears and his hands still warm and heavy over her chest—laughed. It was a genuine laugh, surprised out of her, breathy and bright in the amber dark of the tent. She pressed her lips together immediately after, trying to smother it, but it was too late; it hung in the air between all three of them, warm and human and entirely incongruous with the situation.

Lira’s grip on his arm loosened fractionally.

Viktor exhaled slowly, something in his shoulders settling into a different kind of ease—not the ease of conquest but the ease of a man who was, perhaps for the first time today, simply warm and horizontal and surrounded by the specific gravity of people who had chosen, for complicated reasons of pride and stubbornness and something neither of them would name, to stay.

His thumb moved one more slow circle against Gwen’s chest through her shirt.

She let him.

Her breathing evened out by degrees, the flush on her ears cooling from burning to merely warm, her grip on his sleeve loosening without releasing. Her lashes rested against her cheeks, and she breathed out through her nose, slow and reluctant and settling.

Behind him, Lira did not move. But she did not leave.

The oil lamp guttered once in a draft from the tent seam, then steadied. The camp outside had gone quiet—the distant fire crackling low, the night insects layering their patient sound over everything. Somewhere far past the eastern wall, something small moved through the undergrowth and was still.

Viktor looked at the canvas ceiling of the tent in the near-dark.

His incubus mark pulsed once. Twice. Then held its glow at a low, contented warmth, the violet light barely visible through his shirt—the biological equivalent of a cat’s purr, soft and deep and entirely satisfied with the temperature of the room.

Gwen’s breathing had gone deep and genuine again, her weight settling fully against him, her fingers finally releasing his sleeve to lie open against the mattress.

Asleep. Actually, properly asleep, the tension of the day releasing in increments from the line of her shoulders.

Behind him, Lira’s breathing had slowed too, though it still had the controlled, deliberate quality of a woman who was choosing sleep as a strategic position.

Viktor’s tail curled once around his own calf. Settled.

He closed his eyes.

The last coherent thought he had before the warmth of the tent and the exhaustion of the day pulled him under was not about the Ktorian duchy, or the Viscount’s fractured territory, or the road to Redwood, or the housewife-type MILF auntie waiting in a too-big manor with too much weight on her soft, unprepared shoulders.

’!’

’Fuck... did they just gave me blue balls?!’

Viktor’s eyes snapped open in the dark.

The tent ceiling stared back at him, canvas swaying faintly with the night breeze coming off the forest. He lay perfectly still for three full seconds, cataloguing the situation with the grim, clinical awareness of a man who had just been handed a very specific and deeply unfair problem.

On his left: Gwen. Silver hair spread across the pillow like spilled moonlight, lips slightly parted, her chest rising and falling with the deep, slow rhythm of someone genuinely, completely, infuriatingly asleep. The borrowed shirt had ridden up slightly at her waist, exposing a pale strip of elven skin, and her pointed ears had relaxed fully in sleep, soft and pink at the tips. She made a small sound, shifted, pressed closer to him on instinct.

On his right: Lira. Facing away, red hair loose across the mattress, the full, firm curve of her hip rising under the blanket with each breath. Her shoulders had dropped from their battle-ready line into something genuinely unguarded.

Both of them. Asleep.

Viktor blinked.

He became aware, in the slow, clarifying way of a man whose body had been quietly compiling a complaint for the last hour and had now chosen to file it formally, that his cock was standing at full, indignant, unyielding attention. The pressure of the blanket against it was not helping. The warmth of two bodies on either side of him, the lingering scent of Gwen’s hair and the faint, female musk of Lira’s skin, the memory of Gwen’s soft, full weight yielding against his palms—none of it was helping.

He exhaled through his nose. Slowly.

He had, through the course of his marriage to Mira and Helena, developed a nightly rhythm with the consistency and dependency of breathing. There was not a single night in recent memory that he had gone horizontal without one of his wives enthusiastically rectifying the situation. His body had stopped treating sex as an event and started treating it as a biological requirement on par with water. And now two perfectly serviceable young women had collectively, efficiently, and completely unconsciously robbed him of the outlet and then fallen asleep against him like contented cats.

’Fuck,’ he thought, with genuine feeling. ’Did they just give me blue balls?’

He lay there for another two minutes, exercising patience that he did not particularly feel.

It didn’t help.

He considered Gwen. She was right there—soft and warm and already half-accustomed to his hands on her, his mouth on her ear, the weight of him against her spine. He could wake her slowly, carefully, could press his lips to the back of her neck and wait for the sleepy, reluctant thaw that he knew, with incubus certainty, was somewhere beneath her disciplined exterior—

She would create an absolute ruckus. In Lira’s tent. In Lira’s camp. At whatever hour this was. The children would hear it. Old Cobb would hear it. Every bandit woman who had already spent the day trying not to think about him would hear it through the canvas walls, and tomorrow morning would be completely unmanageable.

He looked at Lira’s sleeping back. The long line of her spine under her shirt. The way her hips flared out from her waist in the sharp, decisive curve of a woman who had spent years doing physical work, solid and real and present.

He assessed this option for exactly one second.

No. Not the right type. Not even close.

This was the core of the problem, and it was a problem that Viktor recognized with the weary self-knowledge of a man who had been thoroughly, irreversibly ruined by two specific women. Gwen was lean and elegant and infuriating. Lira was firm and fierce and interesting. Under normal circumstances, either one of them would have been more than sufficient. Under normal circumstances, he would have been delighted.

But his circumstances were not normal. His circumstances were Mira—spectacular, laughing, extravagant Mira, with her wide, heavy hips that clapped back against him like applause, her magnificent breasts bouncing and swaying with the particular physics of a woman built for exactly this, the deep, enveloping softness of her body that swallowed his hands and welcomed his weight with an enthusiasm that still, after everything, made his chest tighten. And Helena—quieter, steadier Helena, with that devastating hourglass architecture, the thick, plush curve of her thighs, the way her ass jiggled with each impact in slow, gorgeous ripples that he had spent considerable time studying.

His cock throbbed pointedly against the blanket.

He wanted something soft and thick and substantial and warm, and neither woman beside him was going to provide it tonight, and there was absolutely no point lying here marinating in the problem.

Viktor sat up.