In Case of a Last Supper
"......I'm exhausted, my lord."
The summit had run not for a single day but for ten straight days, every one of them seen through to the end. When it finally drew to a close, Dana slumped into her chair and dragged a hand down her worn face.
Talented as she was, she was still young. She hadn't yet weathered the countless experiences that seasoned a strategist, so among the brilliant military minds of each nation, even offering an opinion must have demanded exquisite care — she must have spent the whole affair walking on eggshells.
In any case, the crux of the talks, once all was said and done, was the defense of the Free Trade City.
The Empire and the Allied Kingdoms sat on opposite sides of the Barren Lands, so aside from passing through the Free Trade City, travel between them was difficult by default. Other routes existed, but nearly all of them skirted the Barren Lands — and if the Demon King's army were ever to return, so much as setting foot on those roads would be a risk in itself.
Which meant that, given any capacity for thought at all, the Demon King would surely move to seize the Free Trade City first and sever the nations' ties with one another. After that, he would breach the weak points one by one.
And it was precisely there that the truly irritating wrinkle lay: the Barren Lands were of no use to the Demon King whatsoever. When he died, the Demonic World Tree reverted to a sprout — which meant the threat of striking his home base directly carried no weight at all.
"You've worked hard."
I reached out to stroke Dana's limp, sagging hair, then thought better of it and settled for giving her shoulder a couple of light pats instead.
Back when we first swore our bond of lord and strategist, I hadn't fully understood the things she'd said to me. But now, with time having passed, I could faintly glimpse the feelings she'd kept buried beneath them.
She had been rescued from the very edge of despair — and yet she'd chosen to be taken on as a military asset, nothing more.
She meant to keep her distance, deliberately, so that no misplaced affection could take root.
......That was what she'd meant, surely.
After all, private sentiment had no place in the crafting of strategy.
So it was that, after a brief rest, I returned to the duchy alongside Dana — only to find the able-bodied men conscripted here already drilling under the knights' command.
The Free Trade City, by now, would have shuttered the Academy and begun repatriating its residents to their home nations. It was the calm before an utterly certain storm.
We still had a grace period of roughly five months — a grace period in name only, but even so, once the final preparations were underway, that time would bleed away in an instant.
Knock, knock.
'Hm?'
Who would come calling at this hour?
I had been watching the conscripts drill for a while when the knock reached my ears. I picked up the bell resting on my desk and gave it a ring of permission — and a moment later, the door burst open and in swept Lapis and Aria.
'Oh.'
Come to think of it — was today my birthday?
Recalling how they'd once told me to give some thought to whatever gift I might want, I smiled awkwardly.
Truthfully, I hadn't thought of anything at all. More precisely, I'd been so buried in work that my own birthday hadn't even registered.
"Judging by that look on your face, you only just figured it out."
"You have been so very busy. Still, for today alone, you really ought to allow yourself some rest......"
"Well? Have you thought of anything at least now?"
Asking me to conjure something on the spot — as if anything fitting would simply come to mind.
But then it occurred to me: an opportunity like this had landed squarely in my lap, so why not venture out brazenly, for once?
「 I'd like the three of us to share a bed tonight. Would that be too much to ask? 」
Aria snatched the paper straight from my hand and read it over, a snort of laughter caught in her throat.
"Lapis doesn't strike me as the type to agree."
"I'll be the judge of that...... Give it here, please."
From my hand to Aria's — and then the paper passed from Aria's hand into Lapis's.
The moment Lapis took in its contents, she froze on the spot, the color rising all the way to the tips of her ears.
"See? I told you, didn't I? With the crisis breathing down our necks, I suppose your breeding instinct has started ringing the alarm bell. You're not a man, you're a male. A male."
"Comparing your own husband to a beast, are we......"
"I compare you to a dog — it's you who treats your wives like bitches in heat."
Aria, cackling openly, seized the wrist of a still-flustered Lapis.
"Come along. If His Husbandship should decide he wants this as his last supper, just in case, then it's a wife's duty to see it prepared with the utmost care and devotion."
"I— I couldn't......!"
Lapis fluttered this way and that, her head swiveling in every direction — and yet, right to the end, she gave no true sign of refusing, allowing herself to be towed out of the room by Aria.
Honestly, it had been nothing more than a half-joking gambit on my part.
'......A last supper, just in case.'
Aria's parting words lingered at the edge of my hearing, and I sipped my tea in quiet amusement, an idiot grin on my face.
'Why not.'
Just as Lapis had said, it couldn't hurt to set my worries down for a single day and allow myself a little breathing room.
After all — it was a last supper, just in case.
With every preparation complete, Aria and Lapis waited demurely in Rohen's bedchamber.
The distance between the three of them had closed considerably over these past months — and yet this, still, was a scene in which awkwardness could not help but hang in the air.
"If this atmosphere keeps up, Rohen will probably just suggest we all sleep side by side and leave it at that."
Aria let out a sigh, loosened the cord binding her hair, and let her signature platinum waves tumble down in radiant disarray. Then she sidled up to Lapis, who sat obediently in place, and began softly fondling her breasts.
"Wh-what are you doing......"
"If we don't loosen this mood first, none of tonight will mean anything."
They were both women, after all — Aria understood, by basic instinct, which touches drew the deepest reaction.
She couldn't hope to discover Lapis's private sweet spots in an evening, but even without them, coaxing the easily mortified girl out of her shell was no difficult task.
"Ah— don't...... mmh!"
Aria slipped her hand inside the negligee, traced slow circles around the areola, and grazed the shell of Lapis's ear with her teeth. Then her fingers glided down — teasing along the flank, the small of the back — and she breathed hot against the hollow of her collarbone before pressing a featherlight kiss there.
Lapis had learned the sword under Duke Asis; subduing a woman like this would have cost her no effort at all.
That she did not — that, surely, meant she conceded Aria's point at least in part.
'Adorable.'
Was this how Rohen felt, when Lapis or Aria herself welcomed him to bed?
Watching Lapis come utterly undone at each fresh wave of stimulation, Aria felt a sadism she'd never known she possessed stirring to life.
Click.
At that moment, the door handle turned without a sound, and the door swung open.
Stepping inside, Rohen laid eyes on his wives entwined atop the bed, radiating a strange, fevered heat — and faltered, just a little.
But where Lapis turned her face away in shame, Aria met his gaze dead-on, a little demon's smile curling her lips.
"Unless you're going to sit in that chair right there and take care of yourself, stop standing there like a fool and get over here."
Aria had, at some point, ended up sprawled atop Lapis, resting her own chest comfortably down against the breasts pinned beneath her.
Where Lapis was fairly wound tight with nerves, not a trace of such hesitation could be found anywhere on Aria.
And so, perching on the edge of the bed as she'd commanded, Rohen found the sight before him laid utterly bare: Lapis beneath, legs spread wide; Aria above, presenting her hips — and the lingerie of both women on naked display.
It was the natural consequence of negligees sheer enough to show everything through them, cut scandalously short at the hem.
Wherever she had procured such underwear, its coverage was meager to the point of absurdity — the puckered rose and the mound between her legs barely, just barely concealed.
Worse still, what settled at her hips was not fabric but a thin cord, and pulling loose that single knot would let the whole lewd arrangement slip away on its own.
Sshk.
He swallowed hard, reached out, and untied the knots binding the panties at both women's hips —
and Aria's raised mound, with Lapis's hidden beneath her, stood exposed in shameless, unfiltered detail.
Was there any indulgence quite like this, for a man?
Rohen reached out and drew his palm lightly over both of their exposed sex, then shoved down his trousers and pressed his already aching length against them.
He did not plunge inside at once. Instead, he lowered Aria's body until she lay fully draped over Lapis, and ground himself, slow and lingering, through the seam where their two bodies met.
"Hyah......! I— I really can't......!"
Shame stripped Lapis of all composure, and she shook her head frantically, struggling to raise her upper body — but the embarrassment was Rohen's to share just as much, and Aria had no patience for such a cowardly attempt at escape. She simply covered Lapis's lips with her own.
"Mmph......!"
Two women whose beauty would have put the fabled courtesans of legend to shame, trading kiss after licentious kiss with no mind whatsoever for the husband watching them —
and Rohen, feeling absurdly left out, let out a wry laugh, seized Aria's hips in one broad hand, and wrenched them apart.
She flinched and strained against his grip with all her might — but the glistening pink pucker refused to close, slackening shamelessly instead.
By rights, it should have darkened by degrees, fading toward some duller shade.
It still held that delectable hue, and Aria's every reaction whenever he caught sight of it like this — it was because of this that Rohen could never quite bring himself to stop tormenting her from behind.
But that satisfaction, too, was short-lived. In the end, shame won out, and Aria shot him a glare as she climbed off Lapis.
She looked down at the girl sprawled and panting beneath her, ragged and utterly disheveled — then boldly took hold of the insistent cock pressing against her and brought it to the entrance of Lapis's core.
"Turns must be kept honestly. Wouldn't you say?"
"......"
Handling him with the brisk command of a groom managing a prized stallion, Aria looked — for one absurd instant — enough to make Rohen wonder whether what he was about to do was not lovemaking but mating.
Such pointless philosophizing didn't last long. No sooner had Aria stretched out her legs and pushed her hips back against his, sheathing him at last inside Lapis's trembling heat, than every stray thought scattered to the wind — and Rohen surrendered himself wholly to the worship of the flesh.
And beside them, Aria — who had been watching the two of them join — belatedly flushed crimson and kept sneaking sidelong glances.
The truth was, she had never watched a man and woman make love from this close before.
When she and Rohen shared a bed, she was too busy floundering between emotional communion and physical pleasure to spare a single moment for looking around.
Thrusting in and out, the grotesque cock veined and bulging made Lapis's lower belly squirm and shudder with every stroke.
"Nghhahh......!"
And each time he drove himself to the hilt and ground the head up against her deepest place, Lapis shrieked out one shameless cry after another, as though she'd forgotten she was even a person.
Rohen toyed roughly with her breasts as he moved, marking her with the traces of himself here and there.
There was, here and there, a glimmer of consideration threaded through their joining — and yet, to his own eyes, Lapis was nothing more than a single lewd female in heat.
Who would ever look at her and think: future Empress of the Empire?
Set a stranger before her — one who knew nothing of Lapis's face or her station — and he would take her, without fail, for some ill-fated noble daughter sold off to a brothel over some tangled family affair.