Chapter 375: Surreal Sensuality [2]

Misha turned onto her other side the way Thora had, searching in sleep for a weight that was not there, cheek pressing into the empty dent of the pillow.

White hair slid across bare skin.

The sheet stayed neat even in the motion, as if somewhere in the dream she was still ordering the world into columns.

Kane’s voice cracked the quiet room.

"What the fuck is happening?"

Misha woke at once.

No slow stretch.

Her eyes opened, golden and sharp, and she sat up with the sheet falling to her waist. Naked.

The same body he had held above flooding paths and under elven roofs: pale, precise, white hair falling forward over her shoulders and hiding her nipples until she pushed it back with an impatient hand.

"Leon..." Her voice was sleep-rough and already afraid.

"What happened?"

"Don’t call me that."

He shouted it.

The streamer body had no Rage to put under the words, only a thin indoor panic.

He moved along the walls: white, seamless, no door where a door should be, no vent strong enough to prove the air was real, no window, no seam.

Climate control hummed.

The red light at the edge of his vision blinked once, patient as a pit.

"Is this a sick game?" His palms hit the wall hard enough to sting.

"What—I lost, so I got stuck in this eternal loop? Thora, then you, then who—Firlia? Kessa? Sira? The whole board on rotation until I break?"

Misha was off the bed before he finished.

Soft feet on the white floor.

Her arms came around him from behind, cheek against his shoulder blade, bare breasts pressed to the soft streamer back that had never taken a Giant’s kick.

"Stop it. You’re scaring me."

Kane froze.

The hug was real. The fear in her voice was real.

He let out a breath that took half his anger with it and left the other half shaking in his hands.

"You... remember me?"

Misha’s hold didn’t loosen.

When she spoke, her mouth moved against his shirt.

"Of course. You’re my husband. The one who fought for me with my mother. The one who stood in the court and made the numbers bend."

He turned inside the circle of her arms and cupped her face.

Thumbs on her cheekbones.

Golden eyes too close.

Only a woman in a doorless white room who should have drowned in a red sea and had not.

"How can you recognise me? This face—this body—I’m not—"

"I can."

Misha’s mouth twitched.

Not quite a smile.

"My mother can too. You fucked her, didn’t you?"

The room’s light turned red.

Not a flicker.

On the white walls, or in front of them, or behind his eyes, images opened without permission: a chamber that smelled of wine and old power.

Misha’s mother with the bottle tipped, dark liquid running over full breasts and the plane of her stomach.

His mouth on her, ordered to lick.

The way he had held her after, full nelson, thighs spread, driving into her while she gasped court-language broken into something private.

The barbarian’s body.

The barbarian’s choices.

The game’s easy permissions.

"Misha... that’s—"

"I know, Leon."

She said the streamer name like a blade laid flat.

The red light caught her golden pupils and turned them into something that didn’t belong in a controlled box: too bright, too steady, the same family of wrong regard he had seen in yellow sockets and bruise-skies.

She smiled, and the smile was loving and terrible at once.

"You thought we were a game. So you did as you wanted. Not caring about any of us. Not about the courts. Not about the weak heart. Not about whose mother poured wine on herself and asked a barbarian to put his mouth on her because the numbers said the alliance would hold."

She took his wrist and set his hand on her breast.

The heartbeat under his palm was steady, stronger than the story he had been told in the other layer, or lying, or rewritten by whatever had built this room.

Her nipple tightened against his skin.

"I had a weak heart," Misha said quietly.

"You know it too. Yet you fucked me hard enough that the bedframes in Sylvander learned my name. Was that also because you thought you were in a game?"

Kane’s mouth was dry.

"It wasn’t—Misha, in there it was real. The blood was real. The water was real. You—"

"Then why does this body feel like the one that only watched screens?"

She pressed his hand harder against her chest.

"Why do you flinch when I say, Leon? Why did Thora have to put you in her mouth before you remembered you had hands?"

The red light pulsed.

Misha rose on her toes and kissed him.

A kiss with teeth and the taste of fear under it, her naked body flush to the streamer frame, free hand fisted in his shirt.

Kane made a broken sound into her mouth and kissed back because the alternative was the doorless white and the images of her mother still ghosting at the edge of the red.

Her leg hooked around his hip.

He could feel how wet she was against his thigh when she shifted.

"If this is a loop," she whispered against his lips, "then stop treating me like a checkpoint. Touch me like you meant the marriage. Or admit you never did."

He lifted her.

The streamer’s body strained.

She was still light enough, still the woman who had managed empires from a brief.

He put her back against the white wall because there was no headboard that felt safe, and her legs wrapped around him with the same decisive economy she used on schedules.

His cock, smaller than the barbarian’s, flushed and aching, slid along the slick heat of her.

She reached down and guided him.

The head notched against her.

"Misha—"

"Do it."

He pushed in.

"Yes—"

The light went full scarlet as walls behind her vanished.

Misha’s gasp cut off mid-breath as if someone had deleted the air.

Kane’s next thrust met nothing.

He was standing upright in a forest.