Contains explicit sexual content and themes of power imbalance.
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Everyone believed Tenebrarum didn't care for Aurelia.
But was that truly the case?
Yes, he had spoken cruel words—words that cut and dismissed and carved her open. But did that make him wicked?
Do actions alone define a person?
No.
Because after he left her—after he walked out while she stood bare and trembling in his chamber—he did not go to plan ,he when to forget her.
He descended into a private cellar, a windowless room hollowed deep beneath the palace.
Seven empty bottles of Vinum Daemonium lay around him—the wine said to intoxicate great creatures with a single drop.
He had finished them all.
The gold mask was still fastened to his face, but his tunic was gone, replaced only by a linen towel tied loosely at his waist. He sat slumped in the billowing steam, eyes half-lidded, seeing nothing and everything.
Three women moved around him, their bodies bare and glistening in the humid air. They danced with practiced grace, skin brushing his, scented oils blending with the haze. Their leader settled onto his thigh, her touch warm, her smile inviting.
She was beautiful.
The two courtesans kneeling beside him bent to his neck, their lips pressing hard against his skin, their hands roaming his chest with practiced hunger. They marked him with slow, sucking kisses—possessive, performative.
He did not move.
He did not lean into their touch or push them away.
His mind was somewhere else: in a room above, where a woman with violet eyes had stood bare before him, where he had called her nothing and walked away.
Their mouths moved, their breath hot, their bodies warm and willing.
But all he tasted in the steam-filled air was the ghost of her.
Their leader shifted before his eyes—skin stretching, bones elongating, a low growl rumbling in her throat. Her form blurred into something ancient and beast-like: fur rippling over her limbs, nails elongating into curved claws, canines gleaming sharp and long. She changed not out of threat, but display—a performance meant to captivate him.
Slowly, she drew the towel from his waist, letting it fall to the wet tiles. Then she pressed herself against him, her transformed body both strange and strangely beautiful.
He didn't resist.
But he didn't respond either.
His eyes stayed distant, fixed on the steam curling toward the ceiling—as if he could see through stone, through floors, to where Aurelia was, in the world above.
He did not respond to her movements—not even when she went faster, not when she drove deeper, not when she arched against him with feral insistence. He remained utterly still, no twitch of pleasure, no shift of breath.
One of the women snarled softly, nuzzling the line of his jaw. "Do you not feel anything, master?"
He closed his eyes.
"Only regret."
The leader stilled above him, her beast-form tense. "Do you truly care for her that much?" Her voice was low, almost wounded. "Tell me what you want. Name the desire, and I will give it. What… style of forgetting do you wish from us?"
"Do you want me to suck you, my lord?" the other whispered close to his ear, her breath warm and scented with myrrh. "It would be… transcendent. I can make you forget."
He didn't open his eyes.
In the dark behind his lids, he didn't see her, didn't hear her promise.
He saw violet eyes glowing in torchlight. He felt the tremor of a voice saying I love you. He remembered silk slipping from shoulders, marble beneath bare knees.
"No," he said, the word flat, final. "You cannot make me forget. No one can."
"Let me try, my lord."
The second woman shifted the leader aside, sending her gasping to the wet floor without him even stirring. The new supplicant bent low, her lips pressing to his tip before her tongue traced a slow, practiced path down his length. Her hand moved in rhythm, up and down, as though worshipping something sacred.
She sucked it slowly, her tongue doing its insidious work, tracing the length of him with a deliberate, almost reverent, exploration.
Then, her rhythm quickened, her mouth opening and closing with a desperate urgency, faster in and out, a desperate, primal dance. White liquid, thick and potent, spilled from her lips, a testament to the intensity of her focus, her almost primal need to possess him, to consume him.
He could feel it, the raw, desperate intensity of her desperate focus. It wasn't a shared passion, but a fierce, almost violent claim. His breath hitched—sharp, audible—and escaped in a hard, ragged rush, a sound torn from the depths of his being.
The other two, sensing his struggle, leaned in closer, their own desperation igniting. Each claimed a side of his mouth, their kisses overlapping, hungry, possessive. They tangled their tongues with his, their hands stroking his thighs, their bodies pressing against him, eager to drown him in their offerings, to claim him entirely.
They mistook his visceral reaction for pleasure.
They saw the tension in his thighs, the rigid rise of his chest, the strangled sounds torn from his throat—and believed they had won him, that their desperate hunger had finally sated his own.
But they did not know it was not them he felt.
It was her.
It was Aurelia's mouth, Aurelia's heat, Aurelia's violet eyes looking up at him even now, as if she were a phantom in his vision, as if she were the one claiming him, the one drawing his very essence from him. It was as if she were the one taking what he had tried to give to no one else.
Every choked gasp, every shudder that wracked his frame, was a ghost of her. A searing echo of her touch, her heat, her desperate need. A memory he could not drink away, could not fuck away, could not forget.
Their bodies were a distraction, a futile attempt to drown out the indelible imprint of Aurelia's presence, a presence that clung to him like a second skin, a haunting that permeated his very core.
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To be continued...