Viktor said nothing.
She glared at him.
He looked back with the patience of a man who has said the incendiary thing and is now simply waiting for it to finish burning.
And then Gwen did the thing she couldn't explain and didn't try to.
She leaned forward.
Her face found the side of his jaw — the angle between his jaw and his neck — and she pressed her cheek against it and stayed there, trembling slightly, her hands coming up between them in a gesture that was half-push and half-grip and fully neither.
"You're such a bastard," she said, muffled against his neck. Her voice had gone thick.
He said nothing. His hand on her breast resumed its slow, thorough work.
She made a sound she would also be denying indefinitely.
Viktor stood.
It happened without preamble — his body simply 'rising' — and both women registered it through the movement of his chest against their faces, the shift of the body they'd been pressed against.
Lira, wrists still caught by his tail, was 'lifted.'
