The Curse That Wouldn’t Let Her Go
Out of nowhere, that night came back to her again. The mistake she’d thought she’d forgotten in the midst of that inexplicable frenzy kept rising to the surface, over and over, as if it refused to stay buried.
By the end of the day, Sylvia had remembered everything about that night — who had kissed whom first, the expression on his face when he stripped her naked, even how many times she had come apart before he finally spilled himself.
He’d swept back his long hair, teased her between her shamelessly parted legs, then pulled her hand down and made her touch him. Sylvia hadn’t fought him very hard. She’d already looked at his body, at that obscene pillar of flesh, and after that she’d grabbed hold of it and shaken it until her arm felt ready to fall off. Maybe, she’d thought, touching herself would be bearable.
But it hadn’t taken long for that to prove wrong. The moment her fingers brushed something slick and swollen between her drenched thighs, a moan slipped out of her on its own. Wrapped up in Owen’s rough fingers as she worked herself, the sensation only deepened into something strange and unbearable.
Just rub there properly and you can finish on your own. Like this — gently at first.
Just as Owen had told her in the past, Sylvia’s hand slipped through the soaked fabric and parted the tightly clenched flesh beneath it. It was wetter than she’d expected, so wet her fingers nearly slid right off. She didn’t even have time to feel guilty about touching herself for the first time in her room; pleasure simply overwhelmed her, and she moved her fingers the way he’d shown her. Slowly, she circled the spot he’d pointed out, and a spine-tingling rush shot through her.
Still lying face-down on the bed with her knees drawn together, Sylvia soon felt something lacking. The heat pooling in her body wasn’t centered on the bud she’d expected, but lower than that.
Should I try putting a finger in?
Her heart felt ready to burst. And yet, she’d already lost her virginity — why did she suddenly feel so prim and cautious now?
This is only natural.
Just as Owen had told her last night, when she’d tried to hold back her moans, maybe it really was.
Her reason already blurred, Sylvia slipped a finger into the tightly shut opening.
The sound of Owen’s breathing in her ear grew rougher too, as if it too were climbing toward release. Matching that sound, Sylvia moved her finger in and out of the opening exactly as Owen had done that night.
It was her own finger, and because everything was soaked there was little friction, so the sensation itself wasn’t especially strong. But her body heated all the same at the steady moans she’d been hearing from Owen — or from some hallucination of him, or whatever it was — and because it felt as if he were standing behind her, she couldn’t stop moving her hand.
“Haaah… ngh.”
At the sound of his suppressed moans and ragged breaths, Sylvia’s own breathing turned rough. As she rocked her hips, she felt like a thoroughly indecent woman.
Somewhere, there was a wet, smacking sound — but she couldn’t tell if it belonged to the vision in her mind or to the slick mess beneath her.
“Khh…”
Compared to before, the hallucinated Owen sounded even rougher now. Maybe because she’d grown bolder, Sylvia pushed two fingers into herself. Two was a little tight. Just as the foreignness of it began to outweigh the pleasure and she was on the verge of losing her excitement, a voice suddenly shattered the moment.
“Owen! What are you doing? Evening training’s starting!”
Bang, bang, bang! Someone pounded on the door, and for the first time, a voice other than Owen’s came through the haze.
After that, Owen’s response seemed to vanish completely, but it was already enough to freeze Sylvia solid.
No way.
The pleasure vanished as if it had been washed away, and the wetness between her thighs became nothing but discomfort. Sylvia pulled her fingers free, let out an irritated breath, and wiped them on the hem of her skirt.
“No way.”
Her voice trembled. Her head felt ready to split open.
“Don’t tell me that wasn’t a hallucination?”
She muttered to herself and stared blankly at the clock. She hadn’t been able to make out who the man calling Owen had been, but if he’d said evening training, then he was probably one of the knights in the order. Besides, the time matched well enough.
“So I really am cursed!”
Sylvia shouted, harsh and furious.
Owen had definitely done something strange to her body.
She didn’t know how he’d managed it, but nothing else could explain any of this.
It was true that bizarre things had started happening to her after she’d slept with Owen. The reason she’d heard his moans every time she got aroused hadn’t been that she’d fallen madly for him in a single night — it had been because that polished-faced bastard was a pervert who’d cursed her.
Sylvia clenched her fists and shook with betrayal. She regretted, in that moment, having felt even the slightest guilt toward Owen for running away that morning.
“What am I supposed to do?”
She’d been pounding her poor pillow in frustration when she suddenly lifted her head. Her overheated mind needed no further convincing; it insisted she go find Owen at once.
There was no way a man who’d laid such a filthy curse on a woman could possibly keep his mouth shut.
Before the rumor spread, she had to go and clamp that mouth of his shut herself.
She was only a Supporter, but Sylvia knew a few self-defense techniques. If she cast enhancement magic on herself and fought, she ought to be able to hold out against Owen for a few rounds. And even if she got caught trying to catch proof that he was a pervert, she could probably stay alive until someone arrived.
In the end, she washed herself clean, dressed tightly and properly, armed herself with a dagger and a self-defense magic scroll, and set out for the Imperial Palace.
Because she’d hurried the carriage driver along, it was still early evening when she arrived at the Knight Order.
The sounds of training rang out loudly. Sylvia pulled a thick cloak around herself and entered the old building used as the knights’ quarters.
Nobles like Sylvia and Heston, who had estates in the capital, didn’t live here. In truth, nobles with backgrounds like theirs were extremely rare in the 1st Knight Order, which fought monsters so often.
Thinking of Owen’s mana, Sylvia bit her fingertip and used blood to draw a magic circle on the back of her hand.
She hadn’t expected to use high-grade detection magic on something like this, but perhaps because her determination to catch him was so fierce, the spell activated almost at once.
A compass made of blood appeared over the back of her hand and pointed her in the right direction. Sylvia climbed the stairs quickly and opened door after door.
Since the magic circle only showed direction and not the path itself, she had to wander a little inside the building.
She was searching the second floor briskly when she found herself sweating at the sight of the compass still stubbornly pointing west. She kept moving down the corridor, scanning one room after another.
Then, from downstairs, she heard the sound of a crowd surging up the stairs.
“Are they insane?”
Male voices, snickering with laughter.
Training must have ended earlier than usual.
Sylvia whipped around and hurriedly began looking for a place to hide. If anyone found out she’d secretly snuck into the knights’ quarters dressed like this, she’d probably be shoved into marriage with some stranger that very day. There was a hidden staircase at the far eastern end, so she intended to run there first.
“Really?”
“Yeah. One minute he was grinning like a fool, the next he was pissed off. I’m telling you, he’s completely lost it.”
“Did he eat something bad or what? What does Summers even have to be angry about?”
“Two days ago, he was outright wailing in the training yard.”
“Something’s definitely off.”
If not for the fact that she’d heard Owen Summers’s name by chance.
Sylvia decided to cast a spell to erase her presence, press herself against the wall, and listen a little longer to what they were saying about Owen.
“Of course it’s off. You think that’s sane? The man’s gone mad from all the slaughtering.”
“Then Lockwood should’ve been the one to crack first.”
“Well, Lockwood’s got that Supporter, doesn’t he?”
But the conversation quickly slid somewhere less pleasant. Their voices sounded as though they were praising someone, but the mockery beneath it was impossible to miss.
Sylvia knew perfectly well the sort of things men like that always said.
“Still, if it’s Appleton, she’d probably risk her life to keep Lockwood’s head on straight.”
“And even that would still be like boiling porridge and handing it to a dog.”
“But seriously, why the hell did Lockwood get engaged to another woman when he already had someone like that? Appleton’s cute enough, isn’t she? And her body too… small, sure, but she’s got a pretty nice figure. I wouldn’t mind taking a shot at her myself.”
“You idiot. Do you want Lockwood to tear you apart? Don’t you know what happened to Tecker?”
“Exactly. Why keep other people from eating when he isn’t going to eat it himself?”
“The rich really are the worst.”
That sort of filthy talk didn’t bother her in the slightest. With an expressionless face, Sylvia kept the invisibility spell on and memorized their faces.
She held her breath and stayed where she was until the backs of the three men had disappeared completely up the stairs. Only then did she drop the spell.
Buckley, Gifael, Wilden.
As she tucked the names of the three men into her mind and turned her head, she heard a voice.
“What are you doing there?”
“Gah.”
An all-too-familiar face was looking down at her with clear disapproval.
The man leaning against the wall with his arms folded, standing there with that crooked posture, was none other than Owen Summers, the very reason she’d gritted her teeth and come running here.
“You—!”