"I promise I can acquire one just as nice with a nice topaz and half an hour."

"...Damn, I should get around to learning hexes past rank one. But I've been waiting on my textbook freebies until the normal learning slows down."

"And you're on the slow and steady path like me."

"Oh, you have to take double time as well?"

"Yep. Worth it, in the long run. I sometimes give a little odd advice to my awakened, but that one's complete and honest."

"I thought you were slanting things a little."

"Oh, I barely slanted things for you at all. You noticed, and that was more important than any advantage."

"But you still tried to distract me aggressively. And I didn't catch that there were awakeners who wouldn't charge favors."

"Well, that was just too much fun. Are you mad?"

"Hmmm, maybe a little annoyed. And, well, less than I was this morning."

"Oh?"

"Well, clearly now I'm paying all my favors back in bed. If I'm your favorite lover immediately, it's the only sensible explanation."

Tesera laughs. Even being slightly outmaneuvered is an amusing surprise.

"As long as you still do favors for the coven with all that alchemy skill, lovely, that just makes me like you more."

"This relationship is going to be fun, isn't it?"

"Looking more and more so every minute. Want to head back out looking very rumpled?"

"I'm not sure how well I can sell it - the cloak's hard to rumple and I can't exactly have more bedhead than usual."

"I'll settle for blushing and staring at me shyly."

"Why the stare?"

"Imagine you're a natural sub who just had a pretty domme explain what BDSM was to you while she shoved your face between her legs."

"Well, when you put it that way I'm not ready to get out of bed yet."

"Oh?"

"I think I want to show you how pretty a domme I can be..."

"Oh, ma'am. Show me. Please."

Basia found it amazing how quickly she got used to it. Meeting in secret most weeks, sex rituals about once a month, having enormously enjoyable sex with her awakener/coven mistress/co-conspirator, plotting how to set up Marco for failure while keeping everyone else confident they were safe and him totally ignorant. It wasn't like she'd ever been a huge plotter before; she'd kept secrets, some of them long-term, but never something that mattered.

She wondered whether she'd have accepted this without having had it broken to her shortly after having enormously hot sex at the end of an evening where she watched a bunch of hot people fuck alongside a bunch more fondling each other, in a room full of pheromones that made her horny for them. In terms of having intense desire to please a new, imposing, charismatic partner, that did seem like a risk factor. But she'd thought he was bad news already, and... okay, she trusted Tesera's judgment too easily. But she did check herself, on what he'd done, risks to the broader veil, general carelessness.

He needed to be dealt with, and if Tesera didn't think she could fix him, it was death or handing him to the ORCs. And the ORCs wouldn't be gentle on him. Hespatians took care of their own, in both senses. If Tesera wanted to stick to that... Basia didn't care enough to gainsay her.