Villain's Breeding System: Evolving 999+ Harem into an SSS-Rank Legion-Chapter 311 - Running to Clean Herself

She did not move for a very long time.

Both hands still on the pillar. Her face still turned toward where his voice had last come from. The warmth on her jacket, on the back of her hand, on her collarbone — it sat there.

Slow and thick and running, and she stood inside the sensation of it and assembled it the way she assembled everything, through what it was, through what it felt like, through what her thirty-one years of living fully inside the world of sensation told her it was.

Warm.

Thick.

Slow-moving.

Not water. Not any product she knew from domestic life. The viscosity was wrong for that. Too dense. Too — present. The kind of warmth that announced itself not just as temperature but as something biological, something that had been inside something else recently and had arrived on her from a direction she had not chosen or anticipated.

Her hand left the pillar.

It moved, slowly, toward her collarbone. Two fingers finding the substance there — the wet, slick, slow-moving quality of it between her fingertips. She pressed her fingers together. Felt the texture pull apart slightly, the faint, drawing quality of something between surfaces.

Her mouth went dry.

The color rose in her face all at once, the way color rises when the body receives a conclusion the brain has been resisting — the sudden, full, from-the-chest-upward rush of it, the heat arriving in her cheeks and her throat and the tips of her ears simultaneously.

Her hand flew to her face.

The involuntary, full-palm-to-cheek quality of it, the kind of gesture a woman makes when she needs to cover something, though she was blind and there was nothing to cover from and she did it anyway, an instinct older than reason.

It transferred.

The slickness from her fingertips transferred to the back of her hand where it pressed against her cheek, and she felt it against the side of her face, warm and slow and unmistakably, overwhelmingly present.

"I—"

The word came out and did not continue.

She took one step back from the pillar. Her heel found the hall floor, and she stood there, both hands now at her face, one pressed to her cheek and one somewhere near her mouth, her face absolutely crimson from jaw to hairline.

She did not say what it was.

She did not name it.

The knowledge lived in her body, not in her voice, and she was keeping them rigidly separate.

"I need," she said. Her voice — changed. The careful, controlled, let-me-find-the-right-register quality of it entirely gone, replaced by something thinner, something working much harder to maintain altitude. "I need to wash. I need — I will wash it. I will wash—"

She turned.

Her hands going out ahead of her — the instinctive, blind-woman’s navigation movement, both palms finding air and then finding the wall and then moving along the wall as she walked away from the pillar with the brisk, I-need-to-be-away-from-here quality of someone who does not run only because running in an unfamiliar space is a practical impossibility.

She moved fast.

Faster than she had moved in this building since she arrived. Her hand tracking the wall, her feet reading the floor, her face still crimson and still covered by the other hand that was still pressed to her cheek and the collarbone.

"Miss Müller—"

Raven.

The warm, pleasant quality of his voice from somewhere behind her, and then she felt rather than heard him move, the change in the air pressure of the hall as he came toward her at a pace she could not match.

His hand landed on her shoulder.

She moved out from under it immediately. The sharp, full-body, do-not-touch-me quality of the movement — not violent, not rude, but absolute. Her shoulder pulling away from his hand with the precise, I-will-not-be-held quality of a woman who needed to be somewhere else and was not going to be detained.

"I will wash it," she said again. Not to him. More to the wall her hand was following, the general direction of away.

She had no idea where the bathroom was.

She had been in this house for approximately twenty minutes.

Her hand found a door frame, and she stopped, reading it with her palm, trying to determine from the architecture of it what was on the other side. Nothing the door frame communicated was helpful. She took a breath. Her face was still the color of something that had been set on fire.

Then the door opened.

Not by her.

She heard the handle, felt the change in air as the door swung inward, the specific, cool, tiled quality of air from a different room type coming through the opening.

"Here," Raven said.

She stood for a single moment.

The full, I-would-like-to-express-objection quality of the pause — a pause that said several things none of which she was going to say out loud while the substance of his orgasm was still on her collarbone.

"Thank you," she said tightly, and walked through.

She heard him follow her in.

The quiet footfall of him behind her, the door closing behind both of them, the small, contained quality of the bathroom air closing around her. Her hand found the towel rail, then the vanity edge, then the tap. Cold water. She turned it on with more force than necessary and brought both hands under it.

A pause.

Then, from somewhere near the door, the quiet, amused quality of something — not a sound exactly, more like the presence of someone who found this enjoyable.

"Are you—" she started.

She stopped.

She turned her face toward where she thought he was.

"Is anyone here?"

Silence.

The water running. The small, tiled-room quality of the silence.

She waited.

Nothing.

Not a breath. Not a footstep. Not the minor displacement of air that a human body produces simply by existing in a room.

She exhaled. Turned back to the sink.

Brought the cold water up to her face with both hands, pressing it against her cheeks, against the heated skin of her collarbone, working to clean the warmth away.

The slickness of the water mixing with the slickness of what she was cleaning, the soap she found by feel and applied with the methodical, let-me-be-thorough quality of a woman who needed to be clean and was going to accomplish that without drama or acknowledgment of what she was cleaning.

It smelled.

The water and the soap were not fully masking it, and she knew it and her face did something complicated and private about it. The warm, musky, close quality of the smell. Not unpleasant, which was its own problem. Not the smell of something she wanted to categorize as unpleasant, which was a bigger problem than the smell itself.

"It smells strange," she said.

She said it to the bathroom, to nobody, the involuntary quality of a thought that becomes audible before the speaker clears it for release.

She leaned closer to the tap. Pressed more water to her face. The cool quality of it against the ongoing heat of her cheeks.

Then something touched her lips.

Not a hand. Not a finger. The faint, gentle quality of — something. Faint enough that she almost catalogued it as imaginary, as the trace of the water running down from her face.

But not water.

Her tongue moved.