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Nope.

I shoved the thought into the same mental abyss where I'd hidden my dignity, common sense, and every other inconvenient emotion my wife insisted on awakening.

With a heavy sigh, I unbuttoned my trousers and fisted my cock, shifting against the balustrade until the timber pressed into my back. I closed my eyes and reached for the turquoise bond coiled around my heart, pushing through the haze she had drawn across it.

Slipping into her mind uninvited had become almost insultingly easy.

Adorable, really, that she still believed I didn’t know every crack, every weakness, every hidden way through the bond.

By the time my wife remembered to lock me out, I was already inside.

Fragments met me first. Pleasure. Sensations. Lust. So much fucking desire that it made my throat constrict.

Fuck.

I stroked myself, thumb dragging firmly over the studs pierced through my cock, the pressure sending a sharp pulse of pleasure through me that blended in with hers.

Her lips parted on a breathless moan that echoed through my mind, and whatever restraint I'd been clinging to promptly burnt to a crisp. My grip tightened around my shaft, my other hand dropping lower to squeeze my balls.

My movements unconsciously fell into the same desperate rhythm, chasing sensations that were never truly mine.

My breathing roughened, every pulse through the bond tightening something inside me until restraint became little more than a memory.

Then the fragments shifted.

Love.

For a moment, I imagined her heart swelled like that for me. That I was tangled in those sheets with them, buried inside her alongside her monster. That the love bleeding through the bond belonged to me, too.

Pressure gathered low and vicious, tightening until every feverish stroke dragged me closer. My hips punched upwards into my fist as pleasure coiled through me, sharpened by every fractured sensation I stole through the bond.

It snapped.

Release tore through me hard enough to wrench a broken groan from my throat, my body locking as wave after wave pulsed through me.

My cum spilled across my thighs in hot, forceful pulses. For those few stolen seconds, the bond blurred the edges of reality until I could almost believe I was there.

Almost.

Until my eyes opened to darkness.

My breath came in short, shallow bursts. I looked down at the cum glistening across my white button-down before tipping my head back against the wood, a little too hard for a sane person.

Shame crept in as I withdrew from Lyra's mind, leaving behind the warmth that had never been mine to take.

My wife was below deck, wrapped in her monster's arms, while I sat alone beneath the blood moon with my cock in my hand, pretending for a few pathetic moments that she had chosen me too.

I tucked myself back in my trousers, a dark smirk playing at the corners of my mouth.

The Throne of Gods was broken, and I thought I finally knew what might stitch its severed divine threads back together.

Sacrifice.

Whatever Maraveth had done, she hadn't simply broken the throne. She had stolen its power and damned every kingdom to a slow death. Perhaps that stolen divinity was what allowed her soul to escape death itself, reincarnating again and again when it should have returned to the Nether.

Perhaps Rythos’ curse was tangled within it too.

I didn’t understand it, and it had troubled me since the first time I had felt him kill her.