My Scumbag System Chapter 691: Grooming is a Sign of Respect

I looked at Maki.

Maki looked at me.

Bartholomew continued his lettuce pilgrimage across the terrarium glass, unbothered by the hostage negotiation unfolding three feet from his castle.

"Let me make sure I understand," I said, keeping my voice level. "You’re threatening to tell Natalia about an incident that did not happen the way you’re going to describe it, unless I provide you with fish."

Maki’s golden eyes dilated. Her pupils contracted to vertical slits, which was her version of a poker tell. It meant she was either about to lie, about to pounce, or both.

"Premium tuna," she corrected, her twin tails unwinding from my wrist and swaying behind her with lazy, predatory rhythm. "The fatty kind. From the market in the harbor district. The one with the old man who wraps it in actual paper instead of plastic."

"That’s a forty-minute round trip."

"I’m worth it."

"You tried to lick my chest in a bathtub while my girlfriend was downstairs."

"I was cleaning you." She said this with the absolute conviction of someone who genuinely believed the distinction mattered. "Grooming is a sign of respect in my culture."

"Your culture is murder and naps."

"And grooming," Maki insisted, her lower lip pushing out in what she clearly thought was an adorable pout but which, given her fangs, resembled something closer to a threat display. "Master is being unreasonable."

I stood from the bed.

Maki tracked my movement with that boneless feline alertness, her body going still even as her tails picked up speed. She remained sprawled across my sheets wearing nothing at all, because Maki’s relationship with clothing existed somewhere between philosophical objection and active warfare. Her dark hair fanned across my pillow. Her skin caught the lamplight in ways that made shadows pool in interesting places. She was objectively, devastatingly beautiful. She was also three hundred years old, had murdered her previous master for boring her, and possessed the emotional regulation of a toddler who’d been handed a flamethrower.

"Here’s what’s going to happen," I said.

Maki’s ears twitched. The human-shaped ones, since she’d dismissed her feline features earlier. But the ghost of them remained in the way her body oriented toward my voice, every fiber of her attention suddenly locked on like a targeting system.

"You are not going to tell Natalia anything."

"Or?"

"Or I’m going to remind you what happens when you try to blackmail me."

Something shifted in Maki’s expression. The pout dissolved. Her lips parted, revealing the tips of her canines, and her breathing changed. Just barely. Just enough that I caught the elevation in her heart rate through the bond we shared as master and familiar.

"Is that," she said, very slowly, "a threat?"

"It’s a promise."

"Oh." She swallowed. "Oh, I see."

The thing about Maki was that she responded to exactly two forms of communication. Violence and affection. Words bounced off her like rain off stone. Logic was a foreign language she refused to learn. But physical consequences? Those she understood with three centuries of accumulated experience.

I crossed to the bed in two steps and grabbed her ankle.

Maki yelped. Not from pain. From surprise. Three hundred years old and she still hadn’t learned to expect the grab. I pulled her toward the edge of the mattress, her body sliding across the sheets with zero resistance because Maki’s reflexes, when she wanted them to kick in, were faster than mine. She let me pull her. That was the tell. That was the admission she’d never make out loud.

"Master," she breathed, and the word dripped with so much innuendo it should have required a license.

"You licked me in a bathtub."

"Yes."

"Without permission."

"I was helping."

"You sat on my lap naked."

"I’m always naked."

"You purred."

"That’s involuntary."

I leaned down over her, one hand still wrapped around her ankle, the other planted on the mattress beside her head. This close, I could smell her. Lightning and something sweet, like ozone and warm milk. Her golden eyes were enormous, the vertical pupils blown wide, her chest rising and falling with breaths that had abandoned any pretense of normalcy. Her tails wrapped around my forearm with desperate pressure, pulling rather than pushing.

"You tried to blackmail your master," I said, low enough that it wouldn’t carry through the walls.

Maki nodded. Rapidly. Enthusiastically.

"That’s a punishable offense."

"Yes," she agreed, far too quickly. "Very punishable. The most punishable. I’ve been very bad."

I released her ankle and straightened up.

"Roll over."

Maki moved so fast she blurred. One second she was on her back looking up at me with those luminous golden eyes, and the next she was face down on the mattress with her hips elevated and her tails high, presenting herself with a shamelessness that would have made Aphrodite blush. Her dark hair cascaded across the sheets in a silk curtain. The arch of her spine was inhuman in its flexibility, her waist impossibly narrow before flaring out into the full curve of her rear, which she wiggled once in what she clearly considered an invitation.

"Maki."

"Mm?"

"Stop wiggling."

She stopped. Barely.

I placed my hand flat against the small of her back, and the touch alone made her shudder from scalp to tailbone. The Nectar hummed between us, amplified by the familiar bond, and I felt the feedback loop of her arousal crash into my own like a wave hitting a seawall. She was already wet. Already trembling. Three centuries of existence and she responded to a palm on her spine like a virgin being touched for the first time.

"Count," I told her.

"Count what?"

The first smack landed on her left cheek with a sound that cracked through the quiet room like a gunshot.

Maki’s whole body jolted. Her fingers clawed the sheets. A sound tore out of her throat that was half moan and half yowl, distinctly feline and entirely inappropriate for a creature pretending to be human. Her tails went rigid behind her, the fur bristling with static electricity that made the hair on my arms stand up.

"One," she gasped.

"Good girl."