Chapter 125: Grateful*

I woke up the next morning in an empty bed.

Lily’s side was cold. There was a folded note on her pillow, written in her neat, round handwriting, with a little star drawn in the corner.

Went for a jog! Back soon. There’s tea in the pot. Don’t run off anywhere! ? Lily

I read it twice and sighed.

I’d spent the whole of yesterday trying to have that grown-up conversation with her. However, the palace had sent investigators to question everyone in the cast, and Lily had been stuck in a classroom answering questions until long after dark. By the time she got back to our room, she was so exhausted that she fell asleep in the middle of taking off her shoes. In other words, I still hadn’t talked to her, and now she’d gone jogging.

I stretched until my back popped, rolled out of bed, and poured myself a cup of the tea she’d left.

I was wearing what I always slept in, which was a thin, pale pink camisole that ended a good three inches above my belly button, and a pair of matching shorts that were really more of a suggestion than actual shorts. My tail was sticking straight out the back of them. My hair was a disaster, and my bandaged arm was resting on top of my head while I yawned.

Someone knocked on the door.

"Coming!" I shuffled over with my tea, still yawning, and pulled the door open. "Lily, did you forget your key ag..."

It was Hexilia Frostfall.

She was out of uniform, wearing a dark blue shirt and riding boots, with a fresh bandage on her left forearm. She looked at me. Then she looked down, very slowly, all the way to my bare feet, and back up again.

"Good morning, fox~"

"H-HEX!!!" I slapped my free arm across my chest, which did basically nothing. "Wh-What are you doing here!?"

"Visiting the hero of the realm, obviously." She walked right past me into the room, sat down on the edge of my bed, and patted the spot beside her. "Come sit. I have news, and you’ll want to hear it sitting down."

I closed the door and sat. I kept my teacup in front of my chest like a shield.

"The palace spent all of yesterday tearing Pryce’s life apart," Hex said. "His office, his rooms, his house in the city, everything. They went through every drawer and every book he owned."

"And?"

"And there was nothing." She shook her head. "His fireplace was full of ash. Every letter, every ledger, every list of names he ever kept, he burned the night before the play. His servants say he spent the whole evening alone in his study with the door locked. He knew he might not come back from that box, and he made sure that if he didn’t, nobody could follow the trail to whoever sent him."

"The Church sent him," I said, randomly. "I mean... The sheath had the Church’s mark on it."

"The Church says it was stolen from one of their reliquaries years ago, and they’re absolutely shocked that a thief would do such a thing." Hex rolled her eyes. "Without a name or a letter, there’s nothing the Crown can prove. So, as of right now, Secretary Anselm Pryce was a lonely man who went mad and acted completely on his own."

My mind went straight back to the crypt in the Recollection, with the hooded official in gray robes handing Pryce that bundle across a stone table. I knew exactly where that knife had come from. I just had no way of proving it.

[... Can I just tell her, or will that be too much?]

I pictured myself explaining it to her.

Well, Hex, I have this magic skill that lets me watch the past, and I spent ten points to see Pryce get the knife in a cathedral basement eleven years ago. So, yeah, it was absolutely the church.

Then I pictured her face.

[That’s way too much. Maybe later.]

"Anyway," Hex said. "That’s the official story. The unofficial story is that a fox in a maid dress saved the Queen with a cake knife, and the entire Queen’s Guard wants to buy you a drink."

She leaned over and bumped my shoulder with hers. Then she didn’t lean away again.

"Thank you, Kohaku," she said quietly. "I mean it. I would have died up there."

"You’re welcome..."

Her hand found my tail, the same way it had at the festival, and stroked down it slowly from the base to the tip. My whole body shivered. Then her hand moved off my tail and settled on my bare thigh, right below the hem of my shorts.

"Hex..." My voice came out much higher than usual. "Um. Didn’t you say, last time, that it was a good answer when I ran away?"

"I did." Hex smiled. "Before, I was doing this as a test of your loyalty. I wanted to know whether the fox my sister writes two pages a week about would jump at the first pretty girl who offered."

"And I passed!"

"You passed beautifully." She slid off the edge of the bed and knelt down on the floor in front of me, between my knees, and looked up at me with her silver hair falling over her shoulders. "Now, though..."

Her fingers hooked into the waistband of my shorts.

"Well." She winked. "Don’t tell my sister, okay?"

[Serena is going to kill me twice for this.]

Hex tugged my shorts down, and my cock sprang free right in front of her face.

[...But, wow, she is SO hot.]

Hex smiled up at me, leaned in, and opened her mouth.

Hex took me into her mouth, and every thought I had left the building at once.

She was very, very good at this, and she went straight for it. She wrapped one hand around the base of my cock, took the rest of me deep in one smooth slide, and hummed like she was tasting a fine wine. I grabbed the edge of the bed with both hands so hard that my bandage pulled.

"Hex!" I gasped. "H-Hex, your arm! You’re injured!"

She pulled off with a wet sound and looked up at me, completely amused.

"It’s my left arm, fox. I’m using my right." She gave me a slow stroke to prove it. "Relax. This isn’t a love confession. Nobody’s getting married. I’m just saying thank you, the fun way."

Then she went right back down.

Her tongue was warm and flat and pressed against the underside of my cock every time she slid down, and her free hand found the base of my tail and squeezed in rhythm with her mouth. My hips jerked up on their own. She just pinned them back down to the bed with her forearm and kept going, and I made a sound that I had never made in either of my lives.

[This is Serena’s big sister! What am I doing!?]

Right before I came, she stopped.

"Not yet," Hex said cheerfully. She stood up, kicked off her boots, and unbuttoned her trousers. "I have a schedule, you know. I’m due back at the palace by noon."

She stripped out of everything below the waist in about four seconds, pushed me flat on my back on the bed, and climbed on top of me. Her thighs were strong and warm on either side of my hips. She reached down, lined me up, and sank down onto me in one long, slow motion, all the way to the base.

We both groaned at the same time.

She was hot and wet and squeezed so tight that my vision went white around the edges. For a second, she just sat there with both hands braced on my stomach, catching her breath. Then she grinned down at me and started to ride.

She rode me the way she did everything else, which was loudly, confidently, and with a big smile on her face. She rolled her hips in long, deep circles. She laughed when the bed frame banged against the wall. She grabbed my good hand and put it on her breast, and when I squeezed, she threw her head back and moaned.

"See?" she panted. "Isn’t this much more fun than running away?"

I couldn’t answer. My whole body was tightening up.

Hex sped up, bouncing harder, and the bed creaked so loudly I was sure the whole dorm could hear it. She came first, shuddering and clenching around me, with a loud, satisfied cry. A moment later, I came too, with my back arched and my tail lashing against the sheets.

Hex stayed on top of me for a few seconds, breathing hard. Then she patted my chest twice, the way someone would pat a good horse.

"Thank you, Kohaku," she said, climbing off. "That was lovely."

She was dressed, booted, and out the door in under two minutes. On her way out, she leaned back into the room and winked.

"Remember. Not a word to my pup."

The door clicked shut.

An hour later, I’d washed my face, put on my uniform, and made the bed so that it looked like nothing had happened in it. I was halfway down the stairs to breakfast when I turned the corner on the second-floor landing and nearly walked straight into Serena.

She was standing there with her arms folded, as if she’d been waiting.

"Kohaku." Her voice was quiet. She wasn’t glaring at all, which was somehow much worse. "I want to talk to you."

Her nose twitched once.

"Sure!" I smiled as wide as I could. "Talk! I love talking! What about?"

[Okay... Now, Kohaku, all you need to do is act like you did NOT just have sex with her sister. Simple. Easy, really.]