The Dead Dove Locker -- "I don't know what I expected."

[Mamorien]

Headless Over Heels, no time to think, looks like the whole world's out of sync...

The thief and the Verdugo returned to camp around the carriage. It was past midnight, but the moon was round and heavy in the sky and the ride was easy. Seth rode Draka; Lisa hadn’t complained or commented when he brought his own horse.

Tiago and Ofelia were already holed up in the carriage; the corpselamps had been put out. Seth unlaced his boots and placed them with the rest of his effects by his tent. He paused at the open flap and looked around for Lisa to say good night to. Where had she gone?

“Night,” he called, to the ambient dark, and crawled into his bedroll. Life on the road had mostly cured the insomniac spells he’d once struggled with; but something told him he’d find sleep elusive tonight. There was a hyperawareness to him; some part of the day left dog-eared and unlived.

A silhouette, framed in the silvery absinthe moonlight, resolved itself on the other side of the canvas. Obvious who it was—nobody else in camp was so tall or broad in the shoulders and the hips. Lisa clicked her tongue to the rhythm of her knuckles as they brushed the tent flap, to approximate the sound of a knocking door. “Seth.” The smile in her voice threaded through the whispered syllable like the graceful prow of a longship. “Can I come in?”

Seth sat up. Not in surprise—something about this had felt inevitable. “Are you sure you want to?”

“I will be chaste as St. Paima. Promise.”

He gathered up the quilt and the patched sheet the al Ydrises had given him and retreated into the corner of the tent, his back to a structural pole. “Okay. Come on in.”

The heavy zipper on the tent flap jingled. The canvas crackled aside to allow Lisa al Ydris passage. She was still wearing her tunic, untucked and wrinkled where her belts and baldricks had sat on it, and a pair of linen drawstring pants which would be baggy on almost anyone else, but which rounded out on her as they hugged her heavy, shapely thighs. The cloth was thin enough to show the bold blackwork of her tattoos. There was that dragon he’d admired on her right leg, its snout nudging her kneecap. On her left, a sun with a tranquil face looked over a minaret-crowned tower.

She sat cross-legged at the bottom of his bedroll. Her toes had the same chipped black polish as her fingers. Another discovery, another feminine flourish. He remembered the sound of that foot dislocating a cultist’s jaw last night.

A Bonus

“I want to talk about what we’re doing once we reach Fontana,” she said. “A bit of an itinerary.”

“Sure,” he said. “Why haven’t you changed back to Annalise?”

“Lisa is suitable for cities and the upper-crust twits. Annalise is far better at relating to the lovely little towns and the good, rustic, hardworking stock therein.”

“The hicks,” Seth suggested, and made her laugh again.

“So,” she said. “Would you like to hear it? My to-do list?”

He nodded.

“Tomorrow,” she said, “You and I will make it clear to our head thief that the jig is up, that we have all the proof we require with this circle and these strange seraph events and this Cabota Cazza customer. And his only hope is collaboration, or his head is mine. Which will be entirely the truth.”

“Right.”

“Then you and Tiago and Ofelia and I will find this Fontana chapter of the Dead Fuckwits Club, and finally retrieve my long-lost head. And we’ll find out who they are, and what they wanted with it, and take it back.”

“Simplicity itself.”

Her lips were clear in the gloom, dark as they were against her stark white skin. “With you at my hip, Seth il Gutierre, I am sure it will be. For all the ways you have complicated Annalise’s life, you have a delightful way of simplifying mine.”

“I, uh. I do my best.”

“I know you do. And with the head found, and your last indiscretion against me cured, the last debt in your column will be gone. And I think any reasonable person, Seth, would look at this ledger between us and conclude that your grateful Verdugo owes you big.”

She shifted her weight, from a cross-legged sit to lounging on her side. The front of her tunic was laced low tonight, and her motion conspired with the ripe roundness of her chest to steal Seth’s attention toward it. The plump semicircle of her cleavage, where gravity pressed one heavy piece of heaven against the next. The mole, right where he remembered it. And a raised circle against the dark fabric of her tunic. She was not wearing a bra.

His hands flexed into distressed fists at the imagining of how it would be to hold them. They were too large for his palms. They’d spill over his fingers.

Stop. You were in the middle of a conversation, you hound dog. What had she said? I owe you big.

“I don’t know about that,” he replied, belatedly.

She propped her elbow on the ground and cocked her head into her palm. The printed skin stretched taut over the girth of her amazonian arm. “When you signed on for this new career, I told you I wouldn’t put you in situations with seraphs. And yet those situations continually find you. And you keep being such a gentleman, taking these things on with nary so much as a well-deserved dirty look. Not to mention how you saved my kid.” She laughed. “Both my kids.”

“We, uh—” He was temporarily arrested by her tongue, poking out to wet her lower lip. Now it shone in the moonlight. “We all saved each other, I guess.”

“Where’s that daytime cockiness, Seth?” Her pearlescent teeth shone through the nighttime softness of her lips. “Do you know what I think? I think that once our Fontana business is done, you are wildly overdue a reward.”

“What kind of reward?”

“Well.” She folded one leg up. A crease in her linen. The fabric stretched tighter and he could see the shadow of her underclothes. “That’s why I’m here. That’s what I’m asking. What would you like, in exchange for returning the head you stole?”

A thong. She’s wearing a thong. A little black thong, with an ass like hers. Probably looks from the back like she’s wearing nothing at all.

He cleared his throat. “Are you offering me a bonus?”

She smiled. “I’m already offering you a bonus. I could make it a bigger bonus, if you’d like. Is that what you’d like? More money? That would be fine.”

“Do you, uh… have another proposal?”

“Yes.” She placed her palms on the ground and rose to her knees. “I do.” Her hips canted to one side, and then the next, as she crawled across the tent. Until she was right in front of him, looming so large above him that her shadow covered the moon. Until he was caged beneath the massive beauty of her thighs and arms on all sides of him. Her barely contained chest hung so close to his face he could feel the warmth radiating from her pumping heart.

She leaned her head down, past his shoulder. Her hair draped across his chest. The scent of it, of her, rammed against the ramparts of his brain. The full dark currants of her lips hovered right by his ear. Her throaty, alto whisper:

“Would you like me to suck your cock, Seth?”

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/173313...38-a-bonus
https://www.scribblehub.com/read/2385004...r/2438285/