My Scumbag System Chapter 693: The Best Punishment

She obeyed. For the first time in the entire month I’d known her, Maki obeyed an instruction without negotiation, complaint, or counter-offer. She just lay there, trembling under my hand, her tails pulsing with warmth against my palm.

I pulled her hips down to the edge of the bed. She let me position her without resistance. I knelt behind her and she made a small keening sound, her fingers twisting the sheets into knots. When my mouth found the pink marks left by my palm, pressing an open-mouthed kiss against the heated skin, Maki’s entire body convulsed.

"That’s not punishment," she protested weakly.

"Changed the rules."

"You can’t just change the rules."

"I’m the master. I make the rules."

Her comeback died in her throat when my tongue traced the border between unmarked skin and the flush of the handprint, and instead of words what came out was a sound that started as a purr and ended as something much less civilized. Her tails lashed against my shoulder, wrapping and unwrapping in spasms she couldn’t control.

My hands found her hips. Pulled her closer. My mouth traveled lower, and Maki abandoned all pretense of composure. Her face buried in the pillow, muffling sounds that would have brought Natalia through the wall like a wrecking ball. Her thighs shook. Her back arched so hard I thought her spine might snap. Lightning crawled across her skin in tiny, harmless arcs that danced over my lips and jaw and tasted like copper pennies.

When my tongue found her center, Maki bit through the pillowcase.

Feathers exploded.

"Maki."

"Sorry," she whimpered through a mouthful of ruined cotton. "Sorry, I’m sorry, don’t stop, please don’t stop, I’ll buy a new one."

"You don’t have money."

"I’ll steal one."

I pulled her hips closer, fingers sinking into the soft give of her flesh hard enough to dimple the skin, and buried my face between her thighs. Talking was over. Talking required a mouth, and mine had found a far more productive occupation.

Maki’s legs clamped around my head with enough force to crack a normal person’s skull. Her ankles locked behind my neck, heels digging into the space between my shoulder blades as if she were terrified I might pull away. I had no such intention. The Intermediate Pressure Points skill sang through my muscle memory like a second heartbeat—steady, certain, merciless. Every nerve cluster mapped along her inner thighs lit up under my tongue like waypoints on a chart I’d memorized in another life. The hollows where tendon met soft tissue. The delicate junction where her pulse hammered just beneath paper-thin skin. The cluster at the crease of her hip that, when pressed with the flat of my thumb, made her entire abdomen contract as though she’d been struck.

And beneath all that clinical precision, the Nectar of Devotion hummed through every point of contact like a current completing a circuit. Each press of my lips fed sensation back into me, and that sensation refined my instincts, sharpened my awareness of exactly where to linger and where to move on. A feedback loop with no ceiling. She felt more, so I felt more, so I gave her more, and the spiral tightened with every passing second until the air between us practically vibrated.

She came in under ninety seconds.

Not because I was rushing. Not because I was sloppy, or greedy, or cutting corners. Because Maki had been building toward this since the bathtub—maybe before the bathtub, maybe since the moment she’d materialized from my shadow and pressed her impossible body against mine and decided that this particular master was worth keeping. All that accumulated tension, all those hours of teasing and denial and wanting, had been stacking inside her like charges in a capacitor, and the dam didn’t so much break as detonate with all the subtlety of a bomb going off in a china shop.

Her body locked rigid. Every muscle frozen in a single, crystallized tableau of overwhelmed sensation—her spine a taut bow, her fingers fisted so tight in the sheets that the fabric tore, her jaw clenched shut around a scream that had nowhere to go. Lightning discharged from her skin in a single catastrophic burst that blew the desk lamp with a sharp, glassy pop, plunging the room into immediate darkness. The only illumination that remained was the blue-white crackling that raced across her body like a living thing, forking along the ridges of her ribs, leaping between her splayed fingers, dancing in her wild black hair until each strand stood on end like a corona of dark flame.

The sound she made was not human. Was not cat. Was something older and wilder and more primal than either—a noise dredged from whatever dimension Bakeneko originated from, where the rules of vocal cords didn’t apply and the architecture of throats had never been constrained by biology. It was pleasure expressing itself as raw electrical discharge, a keening harmonic that buzzed in my teeth and rattled the remaining lightbulb in the ceiling fixture until it, too, gave up the ghost with a faint, surrendering . The room plunged into total darkness, and in that darkness, Maki burned like a fallen star, every arc and tendril of wild lightning painting her sweat-slicked body in stuttering frames of blue and white and shadow.

I held her through it. Hands on her hips, mouth gentle now, easing her down from the peak instead of driving her higher. Her body unclenched in stages. The lightning faded to occasional sparks. Her tails went limp against the sheets. Her breathing settled from gasps to deep, shuddering draws of air.

"Oh," Maki said eventually, into the destroyed pillow. "Oh no."

"What?"

"That was the best punishment I’ve ever received." She turned her head. Her golden eyes were glazed, unfocused, her pupils blown to perfect circles for the first time I’d ever seen. She looked drunk. She looked devastated. She looked like someone had reached inside her chest and rearranged the furniture. "I’m going to be so much worse now."

I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and stood up.

"No," I said. "You’re going to be exactly as bad as you’ve always been, and you’re going to love every consequence, and you’re never going to threaten to tell Natalia anything ever again because we both know you don’t actually want to ruin what we have here."

Maki stared at me from the ruins of my pillow.

"You’re right," she admitted.

"I’m always right."

"You’re a scumbag and a liar and you taste like lightning." She closed her eyes and smiled, wide and genuine and without a single trace of performance. "I’m going to take a nap now. On your bed. Naked. And when I wake up you’re going to buy me tuna."

"I’m not buying you tuna."

"You are." She yawned, displaying every one of her fangs. "Because you love me and you feel guilty and also because I’m going to blackmail you with this."

"You just said you wouldn’t blackmail me."

"I said I wouldn’t tell Kuzmina about the bathtub." One golden eye cracked open. "I never said anything about telling her about this."

Three hundred years of survival instinct. The woman was an apex predator wearing the body of a pinup model.

I grabbed the spare blanket from the closet and tossed it over her, because even I had limits to how long I could look at a naked Maki before my brain stopped producing useful thoughts.

"Tuna," she murmured from beneath the blanket. "The fatty kind."

"Go to sleep."

"With paper wrapping."

"Maki."

But she was already out. The purring started three seconds later, deep and steady and strong enough that Bartholomew’s terrarium vibrated against the desk. The immortal snail continued his lettuce expedition without complaint. Maki’s tails poked out from under the blanket, one curled and one straight, twitching occasionally in whatever dreams three-hundred-year-old cat spirits had.