Chapter 26

“Declan, he… by force, he…”

“I got it. Where did that asshole go?”

“……”

“Tell me. Huh? Where did he go?”

“……”

“I’ll be right back. Where did he go? Where?”

Strangely enough, the less she answered, the more affectionate his questions became. Soon, wiping the dirt from her cheek with his thumb, he glanced slowly around their surroundings.

Two pale blue eyes gleamed eerily in the moonlight. She thought they looked like a carefully sharpened blade. It felt as though he was going to hack Declan to pieces with that blade and kill him.

Then he would become a murderer. Because of a woman he met on the island… She shook her hate and grabbed Hayden’s wrists with both hands.

“I don’t want to be alone. I don’t want to be alone.”

The mere thought of him leaving her side made her feel like all the blood was draining from her body. They weren’t even that close, but right now, she needed him desperately.

“…I don’t want to be alone.”

“……”

He closed his mouth for a moment, as if at a loss for words. Even while thinking that this was the time to tear Declan apart and kill him, he seemed to melt at her childish, whimpering plea.

“Alright. I won’t go.”

A large hand stroked her cheek. Then it brushed against the back of her neck and came to a sudden halt.

“Why is your body so cold?”

Though cold sweat broke out on her forehead, her body itself seemed ice-cold. No, that wasn’t the issue right now. The aphrodisiac flower. She needed to throw up the aphrodisiac flower she had swallowed by the handful, and she needed to do it as soon as possible.

“Where’s the sea water? Hurry, I have to drink it and throw up.”

Isu blankly headed toward the tent in her bare feet. But that was only for a moment; he gently grabbed her wrist and stopped her in her tracks.

“Seawater, why?”

Soon, he picked up the slippers scattered one by one on the dirt floor and slipped them onto Isu’s feet. His gaze swept over the corners of her eyes, curious as to why she was looking for seawater.

She felt humiliated at the thought of confessing that Declan had fed her an aphrodisiac flower. She felt like she had been reduced to a pathetic creature whose only purpose was to serve as a tool for sexual gratification, and she was terrified that Hayden might view her the same way.

Yet hiding it wouldn’t do her any good. After all, running around looking for seawater while looking pale with panic wouldn’t seem in her right mind anyway.

Tugging at her hair in agony, Isu answered, “Russian, aphrodisiac, red flower… I ate it.”

“What?”

“A handful, Declan made me eat a whole handful.”

Hayden wore a strange expression, looking as though he were furious yet smiling at the same time. Perhaps it was because of the gloomy, predatory vibe he gave off, like a wolf or a wild canine.

She wondered what was lurking beneath that strangely calm face. Something dark and damp. Or perhaps hot and sticky. As she kept a sharp eye on his smooth face, he knelt right in front of her and said,

“Ah, open up.”

Right after, pouring seawater from the water bottle over his hands, he washed them. Then, as if to ease her tension, he scratched the nape of her neck.

His touch was as soft as petting a cat. Isu was torn. Half of her wanted to obey him meekly like a cat that had found its master, while the other half wanted to hide herself away in the darkness alone.

She hesitated, unable to make a clear decision. At that moment, acting as cautious as a butler tending to a startled cat’s mood, he spoke softly once more.

“Ah, open up. It’s alright.”

His gaze lingered on the small creature before him with considerable fondness. It lacked the depth of Declan’s eyes, which had been brimming with nothing but lust.

Looking into those eyes, she felt that it would be fine to bare everything. He was warm enough to embrace even the dirty, ugly, and painful parts of her.

As if spellbound, Isu relaxed the tension in her entire body. Right on cue, he pried open her lips with his index finger.

“If you drink enough seawater to throw up on an empty stomach, you’ll die of dehydration. Ah, open up.”

It was as if he were dealing with an animal that had snatched up a coin while its owner wasn’t looking. Even though that wasn’t the case, he persistently pushed his index finger forward, forcing Isu’s teeth apart.

Isu’s trembling pupils swept across his focused face. Against the backdrop of a desperate forest, the man was shining brilliantly.

She held her breath, wanting to see him just a little bit more clearly. At that moment, his index and middle fingers wedged past her lips and stroked her tongue.

Her tongue tickled. She flinched in her shoulders and stared intently into his eyes.

With his eyes half-closed in a deep, sultry gaze, he was inspecting the inside of her mouth. His expression was so dead serious that she couldn’t object and simply left her tongue at his mercy.

Hayden’s breath brushed against her cheek. Once, twice. For some reason, with each passing brush of his breath against her cheek, it grew rougher.

The long eyes that casually peered into the inside of her mouth had turned terribly seductive. Just what was he planning to do, groping her tongue like that…? Pulling her face back a fraction, Isu moved her lips.

“Ngh, th… th…”

She didn’t know what he was trying to achieve, but she tried to stop him. Just as her gaze, which had been fixed on his graceful face, faltered, his index finger pushed in deep, pressing hard against her uvula as if to say he had enjoyed all there was to enjoy.

Isu’s throat spasmed up and down. For a split second, she fought back the surging nausea, then jerked her head away and panted heavily for breath.

“Ugh, ugh!”

In an instant, her mouth was flooded with saliva, leaving her unable to even protest and ask what he thought he was doing. Tilting his body sideways to meet Isu’s eyes, he spoke to her as if soothing a child.

“Ah, do it again. I’ll make you throw up while causing as little damage as possible.”

So he meant to make her throw up by poking her uvula. If it was that simple, she could have done it herself.

“Ah, ugh, n-no. I can do it myself, so please go inside the quarters.”

“If you poke it wrong, you’ll hurt yourself.”

They bickered for a few minutes. In the end, she agreed to throw up at a distance from him, but since her stomach was completely empty, she couldn’t bring anything up.

Her throat was swollen and her insides felt oppressed. Thinking that the flower was probably already mixing with her stomach acid and digesting anyway, and wondering what the point of all this was, she simply went back inside the quarters.

She wrapped herself entirely in the shirt he had used as a pillow and sat in the corner. She had given him the rolled-up vest.

The night in the quarters was as dark and quiet as usual, but today even that felt uncomfortable. Feeling the lukewarm darkness stick viscously to her skin, she tightly bundled herself up in the shirt.

“You go to sleep first. I’ll sleep when I get tired.”

He watched the woman sitting curled up like a fetus in the corner with eyes full of amusement, then took a scented candle out from the fireplace. Right after, he used a gum wrapper and a battery to light the candle.

Whether it was consideration for the woman who would have to sweat out the effects of the aphrodisiac flower all night, or a scheme to atmospherically stimulate and break her down, there was no way of knowing.

The yellow light flickered softly. The fragrant scent of rosemary filled the room.

Looking like a frightened rabbit, Isu took a deep breath. Fortunately, the more she breathed in the scent of the candle, the more her mind calmed down.

Once she relaxed the tension, the nape of her neck, where Declan had grabbed her earlier, throbbed with pain. Figuring it would stiffen up by tomorrow if she left it as it was, she pressed down hard on it with her hand.

Everything still felt surreal. She had already guessed that Declan was a beast who thought with his lower half, but she hadn’t expected him to transform like that in mere seconds. If anything, she had thought Hayden was closer to a beast who thought with his lower half…

The man who had felt so dangerously charged the entire time was indifferently using the vest as a pillow and lying down on his side. On top of that, he was maintaining a distance so gentlemanly it was baffling.

Yet the night before last, he had writhed and pleasured himself with his contoured body. The next day, unable to control a body burning like a fireball, he had pressed against her, whispering so obscenely it brought shame…

“Then why did you pretend to be asleep? You pretended to be asleep because your lower half got so hot, afraid I’d notice your desire for me to cling to you like a dog and thrust into you wildly.”

“No, no…”

“No, I want you to change like that.”

Recalling that night’s voice made her cheeks burn. As the bizarre image of him grinding his fully erected lower half against her thighs and sucking on her breasts like a child became vivid in her mind’s eye, her whole body tingled.

The thought suddenly blossomed that she wanted to properly feel the pillar that had rubbed against her thighs with nowhere to go. Was Hayden rough when he held a woman? Or was he unexpectedly soft? The more she was swayed by the aphrodisiac flower melted into her bloodstream, the more quietly acute her senses became.

When she consciously clenched her inside, the sensation of being touched by those thick fingers the night before last came rushing back. Even while sitting quietly, she fell under the illusion that he was relentlessly tormenting her clitoris just like that day.

The more she twitched her thighs, the better it felt, but it was agonizing because it stopped right there. She wanted to spend some alone time right now. In a place with nobody around, she wanted to rub her clitoris just like he had touched her. Then she wanted to glide along his vaginal entrance and moan as if losing her breath.

If she just let her hands move while imagining being pierced roughly by a large, hard pillar, this agony would surely vanish…

With flushed eyes, she looked down at Hayden’s lower abdomen. Following his slanted iliac crest down with her gaze, she saw his thick, bulky core.

Even while thinking she shouldn’t keep craving him, she couldn’t stop. It was because of the aphrodisiac flower. Her nether regions were so hot and itchy she couldn’t stand it.

To hide it, she pulled her shirt tighter around herself. At that moment, a low-pitched voice deep enough to make her ears ring pierced her eardrums.

“You’re all bundled up tight, yet you can’t take your eyes off my body.”

“……”

“Is that a look that says I look tasty?”

She was hit right in the bullseye the moment she let her guard down. Startled and shrinking her shoulders, she heard him half-raise his upper body and say,

“Does it feel good, yet you hate it?”

To hide the messy thoughts she had been harboring toward Hayden, Isu buried her face in the collar of her shirt. His thought that it felt good yet she hated it coincided too exquisitely with her current situation, but she was too afraid of losing her composure to admit to it.

“I-It’s not like that. I’m planning to stay like this until the drug wears off, so you go to sleep.”

Hearing her answer, he pulled his trunks down to his pelvis temptingly and asked, “What are you going to do all night?”

Isu imagined herself climbing onto Hayden’s lower half. The more she pictured it, the more slickly wet she grew inside and the more delightfully her clitoris throbbed. At this rate, it was obvious she would spend all night defiling him in her head.

Wouldn’t it be better to just seduce him and actually climb onto his body instead? But she was only having these impulses because she had eaten the aphrodisiac flower; it couldn’t possibly be her true desire. She lowered her head.

“I-I’m just going to sit here.”

Blue eyes persistently scanned Isu’s face. She tried to look away belatedly, but it was already after her thoughts had been exposed.

“You have such a tormented and aggrieved look on your face.”