My Scumbag System Chapter 692: The Touch of a Star

Those two words hit her harder than my hand did. Her back arched deeper and her hips pushed higher and a whimper leaked through her clenched teeth that contained no language at all, just raw, animal need. The Nectar of Devotion pulsed through our contact point, and I felt her pleasure spike so hard it nearly buckled my own knees.

The second strike landed on the right side. Symmetry mattered.

"Two!" Louder this time. Her voice cracked on the vowel and her tails wrapped around my wrist again, holding my hand against her skin where the impact still burned hot. She didn’t want me to pull away. She wanted me to stay. To touch. To mark.

"What are you being punished for?"

"Blackmail," she panted into the pillow.

"And?"

"And sitting on Master’s lap without permission."

"And?"

She turned her head, one golden eye peering up at me through a curtain of dark hair that had fallen across her face in a mess of silky black strands. Her fangs showed in a grin that was pure feline mischief, sharp and white and utterly unrepentant. "And I’d do it again."

The third strike was harder than the first two combined.

Maki screamed into the pillow. Not from pain—from something far more primal than that. Her body language was a billboard of arousal that even a blind man could read. Her skin flushed from her shoulders all the way down to her thighs, a deep rose blooming across the pale canvas, darkest where the handprint I’d left on her ass was already starting to show in vivid crimson. Her twin tails lashed the air behind her like whips, sparking with tiny arcs of blue lightning that crawled across my arm in crackling veins and dissolved into a pleasant static tingle that made the hair on my forearms stand on end. She was leaking onto my sheets—a wet spot spreading beneath her hips that she made no effort to hide or control. She was panting hard enough that her shoulders shook with each ragged breath, her ribcage expanding and contracting in an uneven rhythm.

"Three," she whimpered, and the word came out like a prayer offered at an altar of sin.

I leaned down slowly, deliberately. Pressed my lips against the shell of her ear, close enough that she could feel the heat of my breath ghosting across her skin. She went completely still. Every muscle locked. Every nerve firing on high alert as if her entire existence had condensed down to that single point of contact.

"Are you going to tell Natalia about the bathtub?"

"No."

"Are you going to threaten me with blackmail again?"

A pause. A long one.

"Maki."

"I might," she admitted in a small voice, "if the punishment is this good."

I laughed. Genuinely laughed. The sound seemed to surprise her, because she twisted to look at me with those wide, luminous eyes, and something shifted in her expression. Something that went deeper than lust or submission or the game we played.

"You’re different," she said quietly.

"Different how?"

"Before you went into the chamber, touching you felt like touching a furnace. Hot and constant and a little dangerous." She pressed her cheek against the mattress, her gaze steady on mine. "Now it feels like touching a star. The heat is the same but everything behind it has changed. You’re bigger inside. More real."

I sat on the edge of the bed beside her. Her tails immediately curled around my thigh, possessive and warm.

"Does it scare you?"

"Nothing scares me," she said automatically, which was a lie so transparent it didn’t even deserve acknowledgment. Then, softer, "But it makes me want to stay closer. The Fox feels it too. Soomin could barely look at you in the hallway. The blue girl’s healing aura went haywire when you hugged her. And Kuzmina." Maki’s pupils contracted. "Kuzmina looks at you like you’re already gone and she’s memorizing your face in case you don’t come back."

That landed somewhere deep and unexpected.

"She’s not losing me."

"No," Maki agreed. "But she thinks she might. Women who love scumbags always think that." She stretched, long and slow and deliberately provocative, her spine undulating in a way that no human body could replicate. "More."

"More what?"

"More punishment." She wiggled again. The handprints on her skin glowed faintly pink, already fading thanks to her supernatural constitution. "I’ve been very, very bad and I haven’t learned my lesson."

I looked at this creature sprawled beneath me. This ancient, ridiculous, beautiful disaster of a being who’d been sold to me through a cosmic lottery run by a sun god with a gambling addiction and questionable ethics. She’d murdered her last master out of sheer, petulant boredom—fried him to ash when his cruelty stopped being entertaining. She could level entire city blocks with lightning if the mood struck her. She possessed nine lives, each one a cosmic middle finger to the concept of consequence. She had the moral compass of a hungry cat stalking a wounded bird, and a body specifically designed by whatever cruel deity crafted Bakeneko to short-circuit every higher brain function a man possessed.

And she was mine.

Completely, irrevocably, mine.

I pushed her back down flat against the mattress, my palm pressed between her shoulder blades.

She went willingly. Eagerly, even. Her body melted into the sheets with that boneless, liquid surrender that only a feline could achieve, her arms folding beneath her chin like an obedient pet, her hips still elevated and presented because I hadn’t told her to lower them. Maki followed the last instruction given until explicitly overwritten—it was a quirk of her nature, this strange blend of chaos and servitude.

I ran my hand down the entire length of her spine. Slow. Deliberate. Feeling every individual vertebra beneath the silk of her skin, the supernatural warmth that radiated from her body like banked coals, the subtle vibration thrumming through her frame that told me she was purring even in this human form. My fingers traced the graceful curve of her lower back, the pronounced swell of her rear, before following the twin tails where they emerged from the base of her spine—supernatural appendages made tangible through ancient yokai magic.

When I wrapped my hand around both of them and squeezed—not hard, just firmly, with unmistakable intent—Maki made a noise that I’d never heard come out of her before.

It was small. Vulnerable. The sound of something wild being held with unexpected gentleness and not knowing how to process the contradiction.

"Master," she whispered.

"Quiet