Page 12 of The Naga Lord's Pretty Little Mouse

"Sleep well, Seren," he murmurs, turning away.

I glare after him, my entire body burning with the unspoken war building between us.

This is not a cage, not yet.

But he is waiting for me to trap myself.

7

XIRATH

The jungle stirs beyond the cliffs, thick vines shifting in the midnight breeze, their luminous blue veins pulsing like veins beneath darkened skin. The sky above is fractured starlight, jagged remnants of a cosmic wound the gods left behind.

I don't pray to them. They have already cursed me enough.

I sit at the corner of the open balcony, my coils shifting over the carved stone as I watch the distant spires of Kario gleaming against the abyss. The city never sleeps. The naga don't rest.

Yet she does.

Seren.

She is not a restless thing, not tossing in fitful dreams, not gripping the sheets like a woman haunted by past terrors. She is still. Controlled, even in unconsciousness, as if daring the world to see her vulnerable.

A lie.

Her heartbeat never slows enough to surrender fully. Her body is poised, even beneath the illusion of sleep.

She is waiting.

For me to break her. For me to snap the chain I have left unfastened and remind her what she is, what she was purchased for.

I will not.

Not yet.

The thought sinks its fangs into my mind, burrowing deep, curling in my ribs like a whisper of something inevitable.

She is unlike the others.

The human women I tested before were soft, their spirits brittle beneath a thin veneer of defiance. They feared me. They feared the darkness of my people, the weight of my coils, the strength of my hands.

Seren doesn't fear me.

She fears what I will make her admit.

That is why she pushes. That is why she threw the chain at my feet, as if rejecting the very idea of ownership, as if willing me to prove that my claim over her is a lie.

Yet she did not run.

She could have. She should have.

Instead, she walked into this house, into my world, and stood before me like something untouchable.

Amusing.

She may think herself beyond control, but control is not about force. It is about patience.

It is about knowing precisely when to let the trap close.

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