A nobleman in the Witcher universe has spent years building his reputation on one thing: his cock. He brags about it at feasts, in the baths, to anyone who'll listen. He's bedded a string of women—sorceresses, courtesans, married ladies—and made sure everyone heard about it, especially the ones he discarded. His endowment is his proof of worth, and he never lets anyone forget it. A redheaded sorceress hears him brag once too often. She doesn't confront him. She doesn't warn him. She plays along, lets him think he's won her over, and gets him alone in a private chamber—wine, candlelight, the whole seduction. He's already narrating his own prowess before anything's even begun. She kneels, takes him in her mouth, and lets him talk. He's mid-sentence, mid-brag, mid-thrust—and then he feels it. The heat of her mouth, and then something else. A shrinking. A vanishing. By the time she sits back, there's nothing left to hold. Her reaction is cold and clinical. She dabs her mouth—then speaks to him coldly about what happened with an amused mockery in her voice, and talks about his future plans. Then she leaves. The story goes on as he's in denial saying to himself its temporary. He tries to hide what happened from others, but eventually word gets out either througj an old lover or a servantgirl who entered his chambers at the wrong time.

Chapter 1: A Toast to the Cock

The fifth course had come and gone, leaving behind a battlefield of gnawed bones, puddled sauce, and overturned goblets that the servants were too intimidated to clear. The harvest feast had swelled past midnight, and Lord Casimir Velen was three sheets to the wind and three stories deep into his favorite subject.

Himself.

"——and I tell you, the woman could barely walk the next morning," Casimir announced, his voice carrying the length of the long oak table like a war horn. He leaned back in his chair, patting his stomach with both hands, and grinned at the assembled guests. "Had to be carried to her carriage. Begged me to visit her estate the following week. Begged, I say."

A ripple of laughter moved through the hall. Some of it genuine. Most of it the nervous kind that noblemen produce when they want to be seen laughing at the right moment.

Candlelight caught the sweat on Casimir's forehead and the gleam of his thick, carefully waxed mustache. He was a big man, broad in the shoulders and broader at the waist, dressed in a doublet of deep burgundy that strained at the seams. His face had the ruddy flush of a man who had spent four decades eating well, drinking better, and never once running farther than the length of his own stable yard.

He bit into the pheasant and chewed loudly.

At the far end of the table, a young baron's son exchanged a glance with his neighbor. The neighbor shrugged. They had heard this one before. Everyone had heard this one before. The sorceress in question had been a hedge-witch from the eastern provinces, and the story had grown teeth and a tail in the retelling, as Casimir's stories always did. He loved sex

the way he loved wine—best when it was shared in the form of tall tales afterward, with the details sharpened to a gleam and the less flattering facts trimmed away.

Ysolde Kray sat beside him, her emerald-green gown pooling around her like liquid shadow. The candlelight did not soften her sharp cheekbones or the faint scar running from temple to jawline—earned in childhood, she claimed, though no one dared ask how. Her red hair was caught up in a severe knot, threaded through with a single silver pin shaped like a serpent swallowing its own tail. The heat in the hall did nothing to loosen it.

Ysolde’s gaze remained fixed on Casimir, green eyes unblinking, as though weighing the precise caliber of his boast by the sweat on his brow. She took a slow sip of wine, the liquid leaving a flourish of color on her lips before she set the goblet down with the quiet finality of a verdict being pronounced.

Casimir noticed none of it. He was too busy patting his chest, where his royal doublet strained over his belly, to catch the way the sorceress’s fingers traced the rim of her glass—not drinking, merely thinking, the wine trembling faintly in her grasp.

“—and then, of course,” Casimir continued, “I left her in the tavern.

Had her own husband rolling in drunk by midnight, trying to find out where his wife had slipped off to. Purely hypothetical, you understand,” he added with a wink, “but let me tell you, the man’s jealousy was a sight to see.”

Ysolda

gave no outward reaction. Only her smile deepened by the thinnest fraction, sharp and knowing as cut crystal, before she reached across the salt cellar and refilled Casimir’s goblet with her own slender fingers—slow, deliberate, letting the rim brush the brim of his, just enough to send a single ruby bead of wine tracing down the outside of the silver and pooling in the hollow of his hand.

Casimir noticed her beauty immediatley

Of course he noticed her beauty—he noticed every woman’s beauty the way a starving man noticed bread, with a bite of anticipatory hunger. But her concentration felt different. Her focus was a blade honed to surgical precision, and he was suddenly acutely aware that he was the patient on the table rather than the surgeon.

“More wine, Your Lordship?” he asked with a waggle of his brows, stretching out the title like a silk rope, trying it on for size.

“Please,” she said, voice a low contralto, each consonant deliberate, each vowel carving space between them like a chisel. “I must remain sharp tonight.

The evening grows late,” Ysolde said, her words wrapping around the silence like silk drawn over a wound. :might you and I

share a private moment, so i can see this legendary gift for myself?

Casimir choked on his wine. The goblet slipped from his fingers, leaving a dark splotch on the white linen of the tablecloth like a spreading bruise. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, his face flushing from the wine into something closer to genuine excitement. “A private moment? With you, my lady?” His voice dropped to a lubricious murmur, rough yet laced with practiced charm. “I’d be delighted to give you a private demonstration.”

His hand slid across the table, fingers brushing the back of hers before she could withdraw.

They went to his bedchamber. And they drank wine there, glasses of it, from mismatched goblets—Casimir’s silver, Ysolde’s cut crystal—while the fire in the hearth burned low and the harvest moon spilled through the arched window like a pale, liquid witness.

Casimir was already loosening the laces of his doublet before the door clicked shut behind them. He did not bother to ask permission again; he never did. The boast in the banquet hall had been long rehearsed, and tonight was its final act. He shucked off the padded sleeves, letting the velvet fall limp to the floor, before turning to Ysolde with a grin that showed too many teeth.

He had a beer belly now—thick, soft, lounging over the waistband of his hose like a contented cat. But he still moved with the slow, deliberate swagger of a man who had once believed his body was all he needed to claim the world.

“No preliminary games,” he said, reaching for the clasp of his hose with eager fingers. “Just the truth laid out. You’ll see I didn’t exaggerate.”

Ysolde watched him undress without expression, one hand resting on the carved post of his four-poster. The bed was already turned down, the linen clean except for the faintest scent of lavender soap and older, fouler musk that lingered beneath it—Casimir’s own.

He peeled off his hose and let them slither to the floor, stepping out of them with the careless grace of a man who had never once considered that someone might find his nakedness anything less than a triumph. He turned to Ysolde, presenting himself like a prize boar at harvest fair, and winked. “Well? What do you think?”

She did not answer immediately. She merely sipped her wine, watching him over the rim of the goblet as though he were a curiosity in a cabinet rather than a human being. "Impressive ," she said, which could have been praise or medical assessment; there was no telling from her tone. "But words spoken in the hall are not the same as flesh witnessed in the dark. I want to feel it rather than hear it." She stripped off her gown to reveal her nakedness.

Her body was as lithesome as a willow sapling, smooth as polished river stone, the shadow of her ribs only a whisper beneath her skin. But it was her eyes that held him—the emerald gaze that cut through the firelight and pinned him like a moth to velvet." She strode over to him and got to her knees before him

, her fingers coming to rest on his thighs.

Casimir let out a breath that was half laugh, half drunk, half disbelief that his luck had held through another moment of his boast. He reached down automatically to touch her hair—that thick red cascade that smelled faintly of juniper and old parchment—but she caught his wrist and guided his hand instead to the small of her own back.

"Keep it to yourself," she murmured. "I don't need to be manhandled."

Her mouth found him first, not with the wet, eager enthusiasm he expected, but with a slow, deliberate precision—like a scholar poring over a text she already knows by heart.

She took him between her lips with the same focus she had used to refill his goblet, her tongue tracing a single wet line up the underside of him before circling once, twice, three times—the way a painter tests her brush against the canvas.

It was not the eager sucking he was used to from tavern girls or the half-hearted sloppiness of married ladies in dim corridors. It was methodical. Clinical, almost. As if she were studying the shape of him rather than worshipping it.

Ysolde did admit to herself he was huge- he truly was soo proud. Her tongue pressed firm against the heavy vein running down his shaft as she lifted her gaze upward to meet his eyes within the low firelight. Her lashes were short and copper-hued, gold catching the flame as her mouth descended in a slow and deliberate rhythm. She never looked away, never broke focus, and Casimir found himself unable to move, caught in the emerald-green trap of her gaze.

It was... alarming.

He had expected moans, demands, at least some sign of enthusiasm that wasn’t perfunctory. But Ysolde took him with the quiet concentration of a woman studying a map, or dissecting a corpse, or—worse—like a queen reviewing a particularly tedious dispatch.

Her mouth moved with the patient rhythm of a woman who had all the time in the world, and none of it to waste on him.

Casimir’s fingers curled into fists at his sides, nails biting into his palms. He had spent forty-three years listening to the compliments, the gasps, the whispered congratulations, and now, as her tongue dragged along the underside of him with the precision of a banker counting coins, he felt something unfamiliar coil in his gut—not lust, not quite pleasure, but the creeping, clawing certainty that this was not going right.

He tried to speak. His voice came out thick, half strangled.

“Ysolde, your t-technique is... exquisite.”

She did not pause. Did not smile. A single bead of wine trembled at the corner of her mouth, dark as a ruby tear, before it slipped between her lips and vanished. Her free hand rose from the small of her back and slid up his thigh, fingers cool and deliberate, testing the weight of muscle beneath the softness of aging flesh like a merchant appraising a cut of meat.

Ysolde now did what she planned

to do

She took him deeper, not with the eager bobbing motions of a serving girl practising her trade, but with the slow, unhurried glide of a woman who had spent years learning exactly how much of another person she could swallow without choking.

Casimir’s breath came in short, uneven bursts, his chest rising and falling like a bellows hooked to a dying fire. The wine he had drunk at the feast now sloshed uncomfortably in his stomach, and the firelight painted his skin in uneven gold and crimson, making him look less like a conquering lord and more like a boar trussed for roasting.

She channeled some magic into her throat, shed give him his lesson. That cock he was soo loud to boast about, wouldnt be soo praiseworthy