BOUND TO THE AVERNUS FAMILY

Chapter 4: The Brothers — Davion

I am walking down the second-floor corridor when the heavy grandfather clock in the distant foyer strikes noon.

Exactly on the hour, the air in the hallway shifts. The sudden, metallic density I felt yesterday returns in a violent rush, pressing against my lungs like a physical weight. It is the midday mist surge Abaddon warned me about this morning. My body recognizes the poison instantly, my skin beginning to prickle with a familiar, dangerous heat.

A heavy oak door opens to my left.

Davion Avernus steps into the hall. He is twenty-one, the youngest of my mother's three new stepsons, with bright amber eyes and an easy, fluid grace. He wasn't waiting at my door like the others. He was simply moving through the estate and intersected with my path at the exact second the biological requirement hit.

I stare at him, my analytical brain immediately trying to calculate the odds of the encounter.

Davion's first words are not a greeting. "You're already thinking about whether the timing was intentional," he says.

His voice is entirely too warm, too cheerful for the oppressive, suffocating atmosphere. I look at him, my breathing already growing shallow.

He smiles, a bright, dangerous flash of teeth. "Come with me."

I follow him into his chambers. I have been in this estate for less than forty-eight hours, and I have already learned that the architecture here is infrastructure. Every room serves a specific biological function.

I understand Davion's room's function immediately.

There are mirrors on every vertical surface. The closet doors, the walls, and a massive, seamless pane of reflective glass bolted directly above the center of the sprawling bed.

I step further into the room and stop.

The air around him is physically hot. It is not the ambient warmth of a fireplace; it is structural. As I step closer, the temperature rises sharply. It is like standing next to a stone baked in the high-desert sun.

"Dragon physiology," Davion says, casually pulling his dark shirt over his head. "My baseline runs several degrees above human normal."

When his hot hands grip my waist, the sensation is entirely new. I didn't have a word for someone's body temperature acting as a distinct, physical texture. It is a fever that doesn't burn, a heavy, radiating warmth that immediately sinks into my tense muscles.

He doesn't push me onto my back. He guides me to the edge of the mattress and drops to his knees between my thighs.

He parts my legs and uses his mouth.

The technique is startling. It is not a clumsy rush; it is a focused, agonizingly precise swiping pressure against my swollen cl*t. My hips involuntarily arch off the mattress. He is extracting a wet, desperate response that I am fiercely trying to analyze, but the blistering heat of his tongue is melting my clinical detachment into a sl*ck, liquid mess.

He stands, his amber eyes bright with genuine fascination. He pulls me up to my feet, turning me around so I am facing the massive mirrored wall, and presses my chest against the cool glass.

He enters me from behind in one smooth, hot glide.

"Look at yourself," Davion murmurs.

His chest is pressed flush against my spine, the heat of his skin searing into my back. He isn't commanding me with Abaddon's cold authority. He is observing. He is narrating the scene with the specific delight of someone who has been thinking about this exact moment and is pleased to find the reality matches the theory.

"Look at how beautifully you take it," he whispers, his hips snapping forward, driving his thick c*ck deep into my soaking p*ssy.

I look. I am surrounded by reflections of our bodies sliding together. I am surprised by what I see—not the obscene visual of the act itself, but myself within it. I have already stopped hesitating in the small, rigid ways I hesitated this morning with Sven.

Davion's friction is relentless. He talks through every thrust, praising the flush spreading across my chest, the way my internal muscles grip his rigid length.

The heavy, suffocating mist pressure coils tight at the base of my spine, intersecting violently with the blistering heat of his body.

I shatter against the glass, a broken cry tearing from my throat as a violent *rgasm rips through me.

The stark, silver-blue light projects from my eyes. I watch it happen in the mirrors. The glow bounces off nine reflective surfaces simultaneously, illuminating the dark room in a blinding, luminescent flash.

Davion groans heavily, his hot c*m flooding my womb as the mist processes, washing my system with that addictive, freezing relief.

But he doesn't stop.

His recovery time is impossibly fast. Before the silver-blue glow can fully fade from the mirrors, he is already completely rigid again inside me.

"Again," Davion breathes, his hands gripping my hips as he pulls me back and drives forward into a second, immediate cycle.

His body produces mist at a rate that cycles faster than the other two. I add this to my mental calculations as the intense, building pleasure drags me under once more. The mist purges a second time, the glow flaring even brighter. I am surrounded by my own glowing reflection, and this time, I do not look away.

Thirty minutes later, my legs are trembling violently as I walk into the ground-floor medical suite.

I am not in physical distress. The midday mist has been entirely eradicated from my system. I am here because I am hunting data.

Dr. Eshan is standing by a steel counter. He is in his mid-fifties, sharp-eyed and impeccably efficient. He moves with the precise, methodical care of a man who manages his internal guilt through extreme thoroughness.

"My bloodwork," I say, bypassing a greeting entirely and sitting on the edge of the examination table. "Abaddon knew exactly what I was. How?"

Dr. Eshan pauses, methodically wiping down a steel surgical tray with a white cloth. He doesn't look surprised by the question.

"Three years of monitoring," the doctor answers quietly. "Annual physicals. Your regular physician forwarded your blood samples here to the estate without your knowledge."

My analytical brain clicks the terrifying pieces together. Three years. Someone was watching me before my mother even met Abaddon Avernus.

"Who ordered the monitoring?" I ask.

One full beat of heavy silence passes in the sterile room. Dr. Eshan stops wiping the tray. He looks up, meeting my gaze directly. He is loyal to Abaddon, but I am learning quickly that he is honest with me by his own personal choice.

"An institution," Dr. Eshan says, his voice dropping to a low murmur. "The Vael Commission."

Vael Commission. It is an ancient name. Cold, sharp vowels. I repeat it back to him, tasting the syllables on my tongue. It sounds like the beginning of something much larger, much more dangerous, than one remote estate and three men with a biological problem.

Dr. Eshan does not elaborate, and I do not push him. Not yet. I have the data point I needed.

I leave the medical suite and navigate the silent, shadowed halls back to my assigned bedroom on the second floor. My mind is spinning with efficiency hierarchies, dragon heat, and three years of stolen bloodwork.

I open the heavy wooden door, intending to sit on the bed and process the afternoon's terrifying revelations.

I stop dead at the foot of the mattress.

Sitting dead center on my perfectly made pillow is a small, folded piece of thick cream paper.

There is no name written on the outside.

I stare at it, the residual coolness of the mist humming in my veins. I have been in this estate for less than two days, and someone is already leaving me messages.