Primordial Villain with a Slave Harem

Chapter 1472  Unhinged Baddie

He was working, working toward achieving his goal.

Black Fang hadn’t noticed any of it. Her world had narrowed to the man beneath her, the man who was still touching her face with one hand while offering to throw away many months of safety margin.

“One month,” she repeated.

The words were flat. Measured. Her fingers hadn’t loosened.

“One month,” Quinlan confirmed, grinning up at her as if she wasn’t currently in a position to kill him a hundred different ways.

Her gaze shifted.

It moved off Quinlan’s face for the first time since she’d pinned him. It traveled across the courtyard, past the girls, past the companions, and landed on the maids.

Clarisse.

Emily.

The others.

The look Black Fang gave them could have frozen lava. It was a simple look. A calculating one. A look that said, very clearly: ‘if he won’t give me what I want, they will.’

Emily took a step back. Clarisse didn’t, but her knuckles went white around the serving tray she was still holding.

Quinlan’s hand moved.

His fingers, still resting against Black Fang’s jaw, angled her head back down. Somehow, she let him.

That, in itself, was remarkable. The Venomborne Terror did not let people move her. She did not allow hands near her throat, her face, her head.

Their eyes met again.

And the man looking up at her was different.

The playful grin was gone. The lazy confidence, the casual charm, the self-aware humor that treated everything like a game he’d already won. All of it had vanished like smoke.

The eyes staring up at her were full of danger. The pupils had narrowed to vertical slits, and the irises burned with a light that had nothing to do with warmth. A faint, demonic energy pulsed behind them, ancient and vast, and for the first time since she’d pinned him to the ground, Black Fang felt the presence of the thing beneath the man.

The Primordial Villain.

Now upgraded, ascended, and supported by the Primordial Demon herself. He was no longer the same boy Black Fang once knew.

This was a man who could fight back, should he decide to.

“But as part of the deal,” Quinlan continued, and his voice had dropped to match her ice-cold tone. “You are forbidden from trying to gain the pills any other way.”

His thumb no longer felt tender on her chin.

“If you dare hurt them…”

He let the sentence hang.

Black Fang’s fingers tightened on his throat, compressing harder than before. Hard enough that the tendons in his neck pressed against her palms.

“If I dare hurt them…?”

“I will kill you.”

The courtyard went silent.

The girls who had been grinning moments ago weren’t grinning anymore. They knew that voice.

They’d heard it before, and they knew what it meant. When Quinlan Elysiar spoke like that, he wasn’t making threats. He was informing you of a consequence.

Black Fang stared down at him.

The fury was still there. The killing intent was still there, pressing against everyone in the courtyard like a physical weight. Her fingers were still wrapped around his throat, her thighs still locked against his ribs, every line of her body coiled to strike.

But behind the fury, behind the four hundred years of violence and survival and isolation, behind the eyes of a woman who had educated herself in the speech of humans by listening through forest undergrowth because no one had ever thought to teach her…

Recognition.

She knew this language.

She had known it before she’d ever learned words. Before grammar, before syntax, before she could name the sounds that left her own mouth. This was the language of the forest. The language of territory, of dominance, of lines drawn in blood and enforced without hesitation. The universal tongue. The one that even animals understood.

Touch what is mine, and I will end you.

Every creature alive knew that sentence. It didn’t need translation.

And the man beneath her, the one with the easy smile and the wandering hands and the insufferable charm, had just spoken it fluently.

Her fingers stayed on his throat for a long time.

Neither of them blinked.

Then, slowly, by fractions of an inch, the pressure eased. “One month,” Black Fang said.

Her voice was quiet.

“One month,” Quinlan nodded.

The slits softened back into round pupils. The grin returned, easy and warm, as if the real Primordial Villain had never surfaced at all.

His thumb brushed her chin one last time.

“Pleasure doing business with you, Miss Terror.”

Black Fang looked down at him for another beat. Her expression gave away nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Her features softened.

It was subtle. A loosening of the muscles around her eyes, a fraction of tension leaving her jaw. For a woman whose face had been carved from fury and killing intent for the past minute, the shift was jarring. She looked, for a brief and disarming moment, peaceful.

Quinlan blinked.

Then her hands clamped down on his throat.

Hard. Fast. The terrifying strength of a level-capped assassin compressing his windpipe with zero warning, and Quinlan’s eyes went wide. Genuinely wide. His hand dropped from her jaw, and his body tensed beneath her, every instinct screaming at once.

The courtyard erupted. Blossom lunged. Vex drew steel. Ayame was already mid-stride.

Black Fang released him.

Just like that. One second of absolute lethality, then nothing. Her palms lifted from his neck, and she straightened her posture above him, still straddling his chest, looking down at the man who was now coughing and sucking air through a bruised throat.

“What the hell was that…?” Quinlan managed between coughs.

Black Fang stared down at him.

And smiled.

It was the most unhinged expression he had ever seen on a human face. Wild and wide and absolutely manic, her purple eyes lit with a feverish glow that had nothing to do with killing intent. Her lips pulled back to show teeth, and the grin stretched across her features like something that belonged on a predator mid-hunt. Beautiful and completely, certifiably insane.

“I wanted to see such an expression on your face for a long time…”

She tilted her head, dark hair spilling over one shoulder.

Following her declaration, her fingers moved from his throat to his chin. The same hold he’d used on her moments ago, thumb resting against his jaw, fingertips curling along the side of his face. The touch was gentle, a mirror of his own gesture thrown back at him with the confidence of a woman who had never once in four hundred years doubted herself.

“Your mothers were right…” Black Fang murmured, looking down at him with that bewitching, lunatic grin. “You can be an adorable boy at times.”

She released his chin.

She stood.

And she walked away.

Her stride was unhurried. Long, confident steps that carried her across the courtyard without a single glance back, her dark hair swaying against her lower back, her posture as straight and commanding as if she hadn’t just spent the last minute threatening to kill a man in front of his entire household.

The courtyard watched her go in stunned silence.

Quinlan lay on his back, staring at the sky, one hand resting on his bruised throat.

Ayame appeared above him. She looked down at his sprawled form, katana already sheathed, and raised an eyebrow.

“Are you okay?”

Quinlan turned his head and watched Black Fang’s retreating figure. The way she moved, each step languid, hips swaying with the casual authority of a woman who owned every room she entered and every forest she stalked through. Even her exit was a power play.

He sighed.

“I really need to stop courting unhinged baddies who can kill me at a moment’s notice.”

“Will you?” Ayame asked.

“You kidding me? I’d rather die.”

Ayame giggled. So did the rest of his girls.

Several hands reached down to pull him to his feet. He dusted himself off, rubbed his throat one more time, and looked around at the courtyard full of women who had just watched him get choked, threatened, and flirted with by a four-hundred-year-old serial killer.

Business as usual.

He clapped his hands together, shamelessly pretending nothing happened.

“It’s time we check how the rest of the world has been behaving while we were away, wouldn’t you agree?”

Ignoring the judgmental gazes he received from many women due to what had just happened, Quinlan began walking.