Dark Lord Seduction System: Taming Wives, Daughters, Aunts, and CEOs novel Chapter 1108

Chapter 1108: SNAP

SNAP.

A single note, crystalline as a struck chalice, rang once across the entire breadth of the Chasm — before it was gone, swallowed by its own elegance, the way a kept secret is swallowed by the throat that holds it.

The estate did not flinch nor did the crystal veins in the walls did not flicker. The sound passed through the morning like a hot blade through tofu so fine the tofu did not yet know it had been cut.

Inside the walk-in closet — that absurd cathedral of tailoring that had served, in the previous half-hour, as the altar of considerably less reverent rites — Peter rose from the from the ground with the indolent grace of a sovereign who has been generously plundered by his own subject and intends to be plundered again before the day’s first negotiations.

The bite mark on his shoulder still hummed its small heretical hymn.

He stretched. He smiled and reached for the suit rack with the easy, faintly proprietorial air of a man for whom linen was no longer a fabric but a vassal.

Behind him, sprawled across the floor like a votive offering some hungrier god had already partly consumed, was Anastasia.

Naked and flushed in patches the colour of crushed pomegranate. Her dark hair fanned in lavish disorder around her shoulders, the tips clinging in damp coils to the alabaster slope of her back where his mouth had lingered.

The remains of her morning costume lay scattered around her like the survivors of some small, exquisite war: a silk robe. She gathered the lace between long, lacquered fingers with the long-suffering dignity like she was collecting evidence to be entered into the official record of her grievances.

Her grey eyes lifted. Lazy. Mouth still bruised plump from his sins.

"At this rate," she said her voice turne into a small accusation, "we shall become uselessly lazy. The house, it cleans. The house, it folds. The house, perhaps, soon also will wipe your mouth after you have eaten of me, da? We are little aristocrats now. We are insufferable."

"Speak for yourself," Peter murmured, fingers trailing the shoulder of a charcoal jacket. "I tip the staff exquisitely."

"There is no staff."

"Which is precisely what makes my generosity so legendary."

She laughed — that throaty, a half-grudging laugh — and balled the ruined lace in her fist like preserving a relic for canonisation.

He turned toward the rack.

He paused.

His head tilted, perhaps half a degree—

"Did you," he said, the smile thinning into something curious, almost amused, "hear that?"

Anastasia, mid-rise from the carpet, froze with the artful self-consciousness of a woman exquisitely aware that she was, at this precise moment in the morning of the world, very naked and being looked at by the most dangerous man on the continent.

She drew the ruined lace up over the divine architecture between her thighs as if the lace, in its final hour of usefulness, had one duty left to render unto its maker.

"Hear what?"

"That... sound."

"What sound?"

"Like —" He frowned at the air between them, as if the air had personally insulted his ancestors. "Like a string going. Like glass breaking. A loud SNAP?"

She narrowed those grey eyes, she took a single, theatrical step backward, the lace clutched before her like the last fig leaf of a fallen pantheon.

"Peter Carter," she said, and the sound of his full name on her lips carried the gravity of a formal accusation. "If this is some invention. If this is another display of your cunning, your shameless trick to ask for a fifth time before breakfast — God help me —"

She crossed herself with the casual piety. "I will bite you, Eros. I will bite you in places you have not yet been bitten. Where there is simply no room left. I am exhausted. I am ruined. My body has filed for separation from this empire and is demanding custody of what little dignity remains.

"You are a beast. A beautiful, ruinous, gilded beast — and I am leaving this room before you interpret my protests as another invitation."

He looked at her.

If anything had truly gone wrong — if the air had split or reality had faltered — ARIA would already be at the door, sharp and radiant, questioning whether he planned to die in charcoal or something more suitable for a shroud.

"Charcoal," he said, with the measured tone of a man deciding affairs of state, "or the navy?"

"The navy is power."

Four kilometres east of the closet — above the impossibly lush green lawn that looked more like a statement than mere grass — ARIA halted sharply in mid-air.

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