‘Like a puppy with its tail on fire.’

In truth, Iberis was hardly at ease herself. Even if Lionel, a man she found entertaining to provoke, was the first, the fact that she truly had to tumble around like a beast starting now was absurd and staggering.

When she had been receiving the blunt Oracle information, that not a single drop was to spill and all of it had to be absorbed inside her, she had been so breathless she could hardly stand it. Whether from the curse or from the content itself, she had ended up retching a surge of dark red blood.

She had barely managed to calm a horrified Sirak and waited for nightfall. She had washed herself and put on the thin garment meant to entice a man, and she could not count how many hollow breaths she had let out in the process.

But that brief composure did not last.

‘Damned curse.’

No amount of cursing would be enough for the curse that was eating away at her. The contact with the four men had been nothing more than a few drops of rain falling on cracked, parched earth.

She was in agony and parched with thirst. She lay awake through the nights or slept like a corpse, too deeply. Thinking was difficult, and getting through the day had become a struggle. Her skin cracked and burned. Headaches split her skull and her eyes felt ready to burst from their sockets.

And the remedy for all of it was right before her eyes now.

He was staring at her with an expression that was taut with tension, wary and on guard.

“Lionel, are you ready to tumble around like a beast?”

Suppressing her wounded pride with a smirk, Iberis deliberately said whatever came to mind. The sight of the man shooting back a look that blazed and seethed made her forget the situation entirely and genuinely want to laugh.

‘Ah, really.’

The man with the dreadful temper who had accepted his invitation to the social season and come up to the capital in plain sight.

The one who had deliberately thrown fuel to the nobles whispering about whether it was a reconciliation between the emperor and the Grand Duke.

The shamelessness of it, that seeing someone who disliked her even more openly than she disliked him made her want to laugh, with his palpable hatred and discomfort so vivid she could almost touch it.

‘Daring to act this way toward the emperor.’

Grand Duke or not, he was a truly arrogant man.

“Lionel.”

“Don’t call my name like we’re close.”

Why did he have to scowl like that?

Surely, if a person were facing someone they truly despised in a situation like this, the normal response would be to feel some base thrill. The chance to have the emperor beneath him had arrived.

And yet no matter how much he scowled, it was no use. This was her nest, and that man was the prey that had walked into it.

Iberis reached out her hand.

She seized the collar of the man who was properly dressed from head to toe, unlike herself in her thin garment.

“Lionel, you need to undress.”

She licked her lips as she watched his face, which looked ready to hurl curses at her. The pain was growing worse by the moment.

Enduring all of it, Iberis pulled the man further down toward her. The sight of him coming along obediently despite the look of revulsion on his face was funny all over again.

“We made a contract.”

She took her time appreciating the handsome face with its bold features. Disagreeable and hostile as their relationship was, the deep blue eyes, the pale skin, the solid, rock-like body, and the dark blue-black hair as deep as a night sky were quite beautiful.

If she could not avoid it, she might as well enjoy it.

Iberis wound her arms around the man’s thick neck. Their bodies pressed close, nearly an embrace. With her fingertips she teased and coaxed, tickling the bobbing line of his throat.

“Still haven’t made up your mind?”

“I never hesitated.”

“Never?”

She fixed her gaze on the man clenching his teeth as though holding something back and tugged at the cumbersome clothing.

“Ugh.”

The Grand Duke’s proper garments, which had covered him up to the throat, tore away under her brute force like they were paper.

The man, stripped bare in an instant, clenched his teeth. She made a point of extending her foot and pushing up the hem of his trousers. At that unhurried motion, her wrist was seized hard.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

“Were you planning to stay dressed the whole time? I only undressed you first because you looked uncomfortable.”

“Iberis!”

The iron grip felt like he was going to war. She made a show of pulling the seized wrist and drawing it toward her, and the man crumpled and fell.

She landed on the bed and pulled one corner of her lips up. The Grand Duke’s jaw trembled as he clenched his teeth. And then.

“I have no intention of being gentle.”

A large hand seized her chest without hesitation, or more precisely, seized the thin chemise. And just as Iberis had done, he tore that dragonfly-wing fabric apart with a ripping sound.

The bare skin that had shown through the translucent cloth was laid fully bare before the man’s eyes. Lionel stared at the skin that seemed to glow under the white moonlight, then seized her with those large, rough hands.

“This is nothing but treatment.”

The soft, full, white br*asts yielded in the Grand Duke’s grip.

“Nothing changes.”

He held her gaze with a look that seemed ready to devour her whole as she flinched and furrowed her brow, and moved his hands. The motion of kneading both br*asts as though to crush them was unmistakably rough. Nothing that could be called a caress.

At the sensation and pain of her soft flesh being worked over so roughly, Iberis’s lips twisted.

Every time her n*pples caught against his calloused palms, a strange sensation bloomed.

D*mn it all, even this treatment had heat rising in her. She licked her red lips.

“Just as I wanted, Grand Duke.”

Not stopping there, she extended her smooth legs and placed her foot on the man’s back, where he had still not properly undressed. She worked her foot through the gap in his clothing and dragged her toes along the grain of his firm muscles.

A sharp sound came with the noise of teeth grinding. Lionel’s chest heaved roughly as he kneaded the br*asts of the one he hated, and seized the white ankle teasing his bare skin.

She could not say who had started it first, with that crushing grip. Lionel pulled first on the ankle in his hand. The white leg was lifted up and spread wide, shameless and unresisting.

“……Heh.”

A shallow laugh sounded, and the doll-like graceful arms reached toward the man before her as well. Black hair rippled, and when she came back to herself, it was Lionel who was lying on the bed.

Still feeling the tingling sensation in her ankle, Iberis pulled at her lips. She sat astride the man’s firm stomach, thighs spread carelessly.

“You’re slow, Lionel. Well then, are you going to properly strip me bare or not.”

She deliberately ground her core against him, the heat there already beginning to rise.

“Iberis! You, you shameless.”

“What use is shame?”

Iberis laughed loudly.

“I’m about to die from this curse, so do I really have to tell you to get hard and come at me?”

“……”

“Hmm? Lionel. Like last time, are you still finding your courage? In that case.”

“You.”

“I don’t mind tasting you first.”

She lowered her head. She buried her face in the skin of the one who had been swaying before her eyes and tempting her all this while. She opened her mouth wide and sank her teeth into the firm, smooth muscle. A vivid sound of flesh tearing rang out. Drops of blood flew.

Gulp, gulp.

The sturdy body beneath her convulsed. A fierce heat coursed through her core as it pressed against his stomach muscles.

“You, you’re insane.”

With a sound mixed with pain, the man’s hand seized her hair. Iberis lifted her face obediently, and trailed her hand down after the drops of blood running freely. The vivid red against the white of her chest was enough to make someone’s head spin.

Crack. Something snapped in the blue eyes of the one grinding his teeth.

“Don’t come crying to me about being rough.”

With those words, they flipped again. The man, veins standing out, bit into her white throat without restraint. He sucked at the snow-white, fine skin without holding back.

“Mm, ngh.”

At the sound of a m*an that said it felt good, the force of his sucking grew stronger. Lionel sucked with genuine hunger. He clung like a beast, like he had never been reluctant or guarded at all.

“Ha, Li, onel.”

Within the sensation of the curse’s pain rapidly dissolving, Iberis trembled in her legs the way an ordinary person who had never awakened might.

An unbearable flush spread lewdly across her skin. The Grand Duke’s rough hands traveled along her body. He seized her br*asts painfully again. He moved in circles, then ground the n*pples that caught against his palm.

“Haa.”

It was not unpleasant. Her pride, which had been savagely crushed, quietly began to lift its head again.

After sucking hard at her nape and leaving traces of saliva in his wake, she seized the back of the man’s head firmly as he trailed lower.

His firm nose tickled her collarbone and he buried his face in her full br*asts. With a motion that felt entirely natural, he took a mouthful of her br*ast and sucked.

He sucked and swallowed roughly, pulling the stiffening n*pple in his mouth down into his throat whole.

“Hng, Li, onel!”

Knowing the man would be displeased at having his name called, Iberis cried out anyway, convulsing. She seized the hair of the one pressed against her chest with both hands, straining not to grip too hard.

The hands tearing away what remained of each other’s clothing were fierce. A sound like flesh being ripped came with it.

“Haa, ha.”

It was impossible to tell whose ragged breath was whose. It was as frenzied as the coupling of beasts.

Every time the hot tongue stimulated her n*pple, her lips clenched shut. The pleasure was unmistakable. She was in heat, panting breaths she could not conceal.

“Haa, mm.”

Pinned beneath him, pressed flat against the man lying over her, the heat of his center was clearly, vividly felt.

Iberis’s expression shifted between something like a smile and something like a grimace, and she surrendered to all of it. The man’s large hands roamed freely across her white skin.

“Ngh……!”

To call Lionel gentle would be a lie. Everything was rough, reminding her not to forget that she was someone he hated.

The way his mouth sucked at her br*ast to tear it off was the same, and the hands gripping the full flesh in his palms were the same.