Beast Gacha System: All Mine-Chapter 102: Hot

"East...?"

Ah, her voice...

The warmth of Cecilia beside him and the solid, comforting presence of Arkai and Oathran nearby... it all dissolved like sugar in black water. The cold, hard truth rushed in to fill the void.

It had been a dream.

Such a cruel, beautiful, impossibly detailed fantasy spun by a mind broken by grief. Of course it was.

The reality, that Cecilia’s heart was torn out, her body lost, his own soul scoured raw with a bottomless, incandescent hatred... that was the only truth that made sense.

The other version, with its resurrected saintess and shared bonds and teasing breakfasts, was stranger than any dream. It couldn’t be real. The relief he’d felt was the cruelest trick of all. 𝑓𝘳𝘦𝑒𝑤𝑒𝘣𝘯ℴ𝘷𝘦𝓁.𝑐𝑜𝑚

"East, baby?"

Her voice... her beautiful, beautiful voice.

He stood in the storm-lit courtyard of his own palace. The air was electric with impending rain and his own suffocating rage. He stood before the modest, grim assembly. Hettor’s wary gaze, Qinryc’s calculating eyes, the mix of the grateful and the opportunistic all staring back at him.

He felt the phantom weight of the words in his throat, the declaration that would set a continent ablaze. Our Saintess... Cecilia Araceli, has passed.

What a living coal on his tongue. This was his reality. The planning, the recruitment, the warpath paved with his own agony. This was where he belonged. In the cold light of a revenge that would never be enough, not a warm bed surrounded by a family he had no right to claim.

"East, please wake up?"

GASP!

He woke a full-body flinch, his hand flying to grasp the woman beside him.

It was deep in the night. Still in the forest where they camped. Cecilia moaned in his arms, shocked and squeezed. "Ow... you’re crushing me..."

For one heart-stopping, disoriented moment, the nightmare held sway. The grief was fresh, the rage immediate. Then, he saw Cecilia’s glare, her scent of ozone and vanilla cutting through the phantom smell of rain and blood.

From beyond her, the steady, deep rhythm of Arkai’s breathing. Further still, the preternatural stillness of Oathran, a silent mountain in the dark.

The profound, almost unnatural silence of the forest was because of the two men sleeping nearby. Only thanks to the combined, formidable presence of the Dragon Lord and the Black Wolf King could Eastiel, a king himself, perpetually coiled for threat, allow sleep to take him so completely in the wild.

It defied all survival logic. After all, usually, in any group, at least one pair of eyes should have remained open, scanning the dark.

The reality, the impossible one, reassembled itself piece by tangible piece, more solid than the stone of the nightmare. But the terror of the fall lingered. How thin the line was, and how deep the abyss he’d almost lived in?

"East... did you have a nightmare?" Cecilia whispered.

Eastiel’s frown was instinctive. "Why are you still awake?"

He whispered back, deflecting her question. She should be the one resting deepest. Her vigilance felt like a personal failure.

"Baby, I think I need help," Cecilia whispered, her index finger tracing idle, distracting patterns over the planes of his chest. "Why are you upset?"

"Upset?" Eastiel hadn’t realized the tension was still etched so plainly on his face. Of course it was the nightmare, the terror of losing this impossible reality. But he couldn’t voice that, not here, not now.

"Am I the only one you call ’Baby’ here?" he deflected again, the question emerging rougher than he intended, laced with a possessive curiosity he couldn’t suppress.

Cecilia had to press her lips together to hide a smile, settling for a teasing pout. "Why? Don’t you like it?"

"What," he whispered back, "do you call the others?"

"I call Arkai ’Uncle’..."

"COUGH!"

A sudden, violently suppressed cough erupted from the other side of Cecilia. Arkai, who had been awake since the first whispered word, was failing spectacularly at his ’deeply asleep’ performance.

"PFFFFFFFF—"

From the other side, a choked, wheezing sound escaped Oathran, who was also clearly not asleep, his shoulders shaking with the effort of containing his laughter.

Cecilia’s eyes sparkled with mischief in the gloom. "Umm... for Oathran... I just call him ’Your Majesty’. Or ’my lord’."

"UNFAIR!" Oathran sat bolt upright, the pretense abandoned. "I also want to be called ’Baby’! Or ’Uncle’. That’s... hot."

"Huuuu..." Arkai, now fully exposed, scrunched his entire face into his palm, his body quaking with helpless laughter.

"Okay. Then, I’ll call you ’Daddy’, Oathran," Cecilia declared.

"..."

"..."

"..."

Three men turned to statues.

RIIIIIP—

The violent sound of tearing linen shattered the silence. Oathran, moving with a speed that defied his usual calm, had seized the front of his own tunic and wrenched it apart in a single, frantic motion.

Arkai was on his feet in an instant, his hands locking around Oathran’s arms from behind to restrain him. "Brother—brother, calm down! We are deep in the forest—the whole damn woods will hear you!"

"A bad girl," Oathran growled, "needs to be punished." His eyes, usually ancient and placid, glowed with an eerie, molten light in the grey half-dark.

His expression was a storm of something far more complex than anger. A strange wrath laced with personal offense. ’Baby’ he could have tolerated. ’Uncle’ was amusing. But ’Daddy’?

The word was a key, turning in a lock he’d forgotten existed. It awoke something deep, something tangled with a memory that now felt grotesque.

The day of the eight-year-old Saintess Cecilia’s coronation flashed behind his eyes, vivid and unwelcome. The child with solemn eyes, offering to bear the burden of his death.

At the time, a fleeting, paternal impulse had brushed his mind. The thought of adopting the clever, burdened girl, of sheltering her.

Now, that protective instinct curdled into something darkly inappropriate, colliding violently with the reality of the woman she had become—the woman in his bed, his mate.

If he hadn’t been marked for death, bound by his own oath to die by her hand... would he have...?

"Who’s your Daddy, huh?" he hissed, the words dripping with a dangerous, mocking heat. He strained against Arkai’s hold, his gaze pinning Cecilia where she lay. "I’m not your fucking Daddy. Your Daddy doesn’t fuck you until you pass out, you little slu—"

But, rather than being afraid, looking up at the wrathful god from the ground, two voices, Cecilia’s and Eastiel’s, whispered in unison...

"...fucking hot..."