Raha found himself completely incapacitated, unable to so much as wiggle a single finger.
Consequently, he couldn’t offer any real resistance when Grey took it upon himself to personally cleanse his messy lower half.
Besides, Grey had explicitly stated that he would only feel comfortable if he took care of the aftercare himself.
Furthermore, given that Raha had already presented his bare backside and actively demonstrated inserting fingers into his own opening, having the man wipe his body down barely registered as a point of embarrassment anymore, so he simply remained still.
Exhausted to the point of near-collapse, Raha fought a losing battle to keep his heavy eyelids from fluttering shut, venting shallow, ragged breaths against the sheets.
‘How on earth did things end up like this?’
Watching a high-tier duke—a man who had likely never once cleaned his own body manually—meticulously and carefully wiping his skin with a warm, damp towel generated a bizarre sense of bewilderment.
The encounter had originated from a simple agreement to perform oral sex; how he had ended up under the man being thoroughly taken like he was under a spell left him utterly dazed.
Well, if one wanted to be technically accurate, it was actually Raha who had claimed Grey’s virginity.
Either way, he hadn’t possessed the slightest intention of sleeping with the five male leads so abruptly, making the current reality rather startling.
‘By the way… shouldn’t I inform Teore about what happened today?’
Since Teore was the person he was currently sharing a bed with, it felt only right to communicate the fact that he had suddenly accommodated another individual.
CRASH!!
It happened in that exact instant.
Accompanied by a terrifying, echoing roar, the bedroom door was violently blasted open.
To be more accurate, the term “blasted open” didn’t even do it justice; the heavy wood had been sheared entirely from its hinges, dropping vertically to the floor with a massive impact.
“Grey Augustus de Freod!”
The individual who had just kicked the door in was none other than the master of the bedroom himself, Teore.
Appearing genuinely, deeply incensed, he bellowed Grey’s full name as he marched into the room with wide, predatory strides.
Raha, who had been actively debating whether or not to disclose the encounter to Teore a mere second ago, startled violently at the explosive entrance, instinctively trying to bolt upright.
However, because Grey was still actively wiping the cleft of his buttocks with the damp towel, Raha was inadvertently pinned down, flopping right back face-down onto the mattress.
Simultaneously, Teore closed the distance to the bed with his long legs, reaching out to violently snag the collar of the loosely draped shirt Grey was wearing and hauling him to his feet.
“What do you think you are doing right now?!”
“…You are overly emotional, Teore.”
“Do you honestly think anyone in my position wouldn’t be?! How dare you use Space Isolation inside my own bedroom without my explicit permission! And to do it while taking my Raha?!”
“Your Raha?”
Grey countered, his face remarkably calm as he reached up to systematically detach Teore’s white-knuckled grip from his collar.
“He is the High Priest of us all.”
“What?”
Teore arched an eyebrow, his expression a mask of pure disbelief.
Grey simply tossed the soiled towel into an empty basin, reaching down to extract a fresh, warm cloth from the water, wringing it out with deliberate movements as he spoke.
“I said he is the High Priest of us all.”
“Ha! Since when?!”
Teore let out a sharp, mocking laugh, thoroughly disgusted by how smoothly the duke could spout such nonsense when, until very recently, he had viewed Raha as an absolute thorn in his side.
Maintaining his unbothered demeanor, Grey leaned over to gently wipe the slick fluids from between Raha’s thighs.
“It wasn’t that long ago that you yourself nearly murdered the High Priest.”
“Get your hands off my Raha! Where do you think you are touching?!”
Fuming at the mouth at the sight, Teore aggressively yanked Grey’s arm away.
He then planted his body like a shield in front of the bed, reaching down to pull the discarded blanket over Raha’s exposed, naked form.
“Did he force himself on you, Raha?”
At Teore’s sudden question, Raha’s eyes widened in surprise.
He had fully anticipated the Grand Duke to immediately start shrieking about slaughtering him for sleeping with another man, or to erupt into a terrifying rage directed at him.
Seeing this unexpectedly tender expression and hearing such a protective inquiry caught him completely off guard.
In his confusion, he could only offer a dim-witted response.
“Pardon?”
“I asked if that bastard used your treatment as an excuse to force himself onto you.”
Confronted with a question that diverged so radically from his expectations, Raha remained momentarily speechless.
“Using treatment as an excuse to take him… I hardly think those words carry weight coming from the mouth of the man who literally confined the High Priest within the Grand Ducal castle under that exact pretext,” Grey interjected, calmly fastening the buttons of his shirt.
As Teore leveled a murderous, lethal glare at the duke, Raha finally experienced a sharp jolt of awareness regarding his objective reality—specifically, the fact that he was, indeed, currently being held captive inside the Grand Ducal castle.
He reached up, awkwardly rubbing his nose.
Catching the sharp, intense gaze Teore was directing toward him, Raha offered a strained smile and shook his head a couple of times.
“Uh… it wasn’t forced. It just… sort of happened.”
He knew that admitting the encounter hadn’t been non-consensual might provoke Teore’s wrath, but the reality was that he could never belong exclusively to Teore.
Partly because the main character of this novel, Edrion, existed, but more fundamentally because as a High Priest tasked with the divine duty of stabilizing all five elemental masters, he could never allow himself to become the sole possession of a single individual.
Since various narrative and practical constraints dictated that he could never be Teore’s exclusive partner, Raha evaluated that it was best to establish that boundary clearly right here and now—especially if he wanted to ensure smooth sexual relations with the remaining masters down the line.
However, looking directly into Teore’s volatile eyes, he found himself entirely unable to voice such an irresponsible phrase as it just sort of happened.
Fortunately, Grey stepped in to alleviate the silence.
“I was the one who requested it. My elemental wavelengths were severely distorted, and I harbored a certain degree of bitterness toward the High Priest for choosing to flood the entire room with his light attribute during our previous session simply to avoid touching so much as a finger to my skin.”
Raha’s eyes snapped wide open as he stared at Grey in sheer disbelief.
‘Bitterness?’
To claim he felt bitter was utterly absurd.
Out of all five male leads, this duke was the one who had possessed the most violent aversion to physical contact with Raha.
While Edrion’s close friend, Teore, had certainly harbored his own brand of disgust toward physical intimacy, Grey’s aversion had operated on an entirely different wavelength.
Grey was a character who had looked down upon the very existence of Raha with absolute, unadulterated contempt.
To hear such words from his lips—that he had harbored a bitter, hurt feeling—moved past mere fluster and stepped squarely into the realm of the absurd.
Raha could only blink his eyes rapidly, staring blankly at Grey in utter disbelief.
In that silent beat, Teore’s hand abruptly clamped around Raha’s chin, firmly tilting his face away from the duke and toward himself.
Raha’s eyes widened as they collided with a pair of pitch-black orbs wavering with distinct, turbulent displeasure.
“Why do you keep looking at that bastard, Raha…? When I am right here.”
The latter half of his sentence emerged so softly it was nearly audible, carrying an undertone that felt remarkably like a sulking child.
Caught off guard by the unexpectedly soft display, Raha unconsciously reached his hand out, pressing his palm gently against Teore’s cheek.
The action was so entirely unprompted and instinctive that the absolute second his fingertips made contact with the skin, Raha’s shoulder flinched.
Realizing what he had just done, he immediately tried to draw his hand back.
However, Teore caught him by the wrist, pulling the retreating hand forward to firmly press it right back against his own cheek.
Left with no choice, Raha reflexively and carefully began to stroke the line of his jaw.
Instantly, the sour, brooding tension that had mapped itself across Teore’s features evaporated, replaced entirely by a warm, brilliantly radiant smile.
Feeling a sudden, ticklish flutter ripple through the lower chambers of his heart at the sheer warmth of that look, Raha gently bit down on the soft, inner flesh of his lip.
He found it entirely incomprehensible how a man could look at him with such profound affection when Raha had quite literally just finished receiving another man’s penis inside his body.
Perhaps Teore, too, internally recognized on some level that High Priest Raha was an entity that could never be monopolized or uniquely possessed by a single person.
Of course, a rational understanding of that boundary would never fully eradicate the grand duke’s fundamental, deep-seated possessiveness.
If he recalled the narrative trajectory of the original novel, Teore had possessed a stark awareness that Edrion routinely tumbled with the other four masters, yet he had never actively voiced objection to it; instead, his obsessive pathology had simply manifested as an urgent need to seek Edrion out multiple times a day.
