Damien felt his mother's palm press against his bare chest and was assaulted with a flash of hot desire. He saw it in her eyes, the way they burned with a momentary purple fire. 

This bitch....

She's trying to use her weird Sex Demon powers on her own son. Damien quickly quashed his smoldering desire to fuck her against the carriage door and slapped her. Hard. 

The woman didn't show any sign of pain. She just blinked in apparent astonishment. Damien then backhanded her. 

"--Son." His mother narrowed her eyes. Damien smiled at her. Then, without preamble, delivered an uppercut that sent her flying. Muriel flipped while in the air and landed on her feet without a single sign of anything but annoyance. 

"What the hell are you doing?!" She demanded. "I'm trying to seduce you, dammit!" 

Her words enraged and disturbed him. "I'm your son, you sick, twisted fuck!" He roared back. 

She frowned, folding her hands across her chest. "So?" she asked, as if genuinely curious. 

Okay, no, that was far more disturbing than the last thing.

"So back the fuck off of me." He ground his teeth. "Father might let his cock do his thinking when it comes to you, but it takes more than some psychotic slut batting her lashes to make me hard." 

Muriel's mouth formed an O. Her heart blazed with indignation at her son's statement. "Slut?!" She sputtered. "I'm the most desired woman in all the Thousand Worlds!" She shouted angrily."I've made emperors of entire realms grovel at my feet with but a glance!"

Damien snorted. "Don't confuse me with some pathetic losers who can't recognize spoiled goods when they see her."

"S-spoiled!" Muriel felt her self-esteem take a never-before-seen hit. "You dare talk about your own mother that way?!"

"I don't have such a crazed bitch of a mother," He replied, 

"If I'm not your mother, why are you against mating with me then?" She tilted her head. "It should be no problem, right?"

And she's back to trying to get in his pants. Jesus fuck, she's persistent.

"You don't stick your dick in crazy." 

Muriel felt hurt by his words. Denying her as his mother was bad enough, but he was also rejecting her as a woman? She'd even used her Charm on him....

Why wasn't he affected? All men were her's to do with as she pleased! And yet he was entirely unmoved. No, rather, he was affected but refused to submit. 

....It turned her on even more. 

She'd been right about him. He'd rather die than let himself be manipulated by her. 

His words were harsh, but the fact she couldn't control him even when using her succubus bloodline powers on him made her want to touch herself. 

She told herself to save that for another time. 

Muriel lost all anger. She laughed cheerfully and smiled at him blindingly. "You still need to learn how to control your powers now, son. I will slowly whittle you down into accepting me eventually, but first we should really teach you--"

"Fuck off." He interrupted her. "I'm not learning a damn thing from you." 

Her smile vanished. "Damien, you're an incubus." She told him slowly, carefully. "Do you have any idea what happens to  untrained Sex Demons in the wild?"

He rolled his eyes. "They probably get made into a whore or something, right? Yeah, big whoop. Oooh, a bunch of women are going to fuck my brains out." He mocked. "How scary!" A scoff. "Please, I'm not worried about getting raped. I just hate that finding a woman who actually loves me is going to be a lot harder now that they can't think beyond my cock." Damien shrugged "I'll figure it out. As for you," He sneered. "You can go back to your husband and tell him he can fuck off, too. "

Muriel stared at him as he opened the carriage door. Vera stood awkwardly by his side as he tried to usher her in, but she felt trapped. Muriel had shifted her gaze to the young girl and made her heart freeze.

"You care for that one quite a bit, don't you?" 

Damien felt something wrong in the air. "What?" He frowned. 

She didn't answer. in the next instant, Muriel disappeared. Damien hadn't even seen or heard her move. He only knew that in one moment Vera was by his side and the next his mother was holding the girl by her hair and had the tip of her forefinger pressed against her throat.

If you leave me, she dies." There was no threat in her tone. Only fact. 

Damien turned quiet. He met her gaze steadily. But there was something....eerie about the way he looked at Muriel. With a kind of dead calm that could steal the breath from all those watching.

"Do it, then." He spoke without a single hint of emotion. Not hate, anger, or even coldness. "But then you'd better kill me, too." 

He didn't make any threat or promise. He didn't need to. Muriel felt it.

He's serious, she thought. 

For the first time in her life, Muriel truly hesitated upon killing someone. It was not out of mercy, nor because she knew her son loved the girl. Nothing so boring. 

Instead, she hesitated because she could feel in her bones that if she were to take this girl's life....he'd make Muriel suffer. 

The how was vague and unanswered but that only made it worse. Muriel held her son's eyes for several long moments. In the end, she looked away first. She clicked her tongue. Tsk. If I knew it was going to be like this, I'd have killed her off ages ago. Mary could have other kids.

She threw the girl at him. "Well, I've always been soft on my baby boy." She put on a doting expression. It felt like defeat and stung more than if he'd stabbed her.

...But this, too, was a thrill. Something new and exciting.

"You go and enjoy yourself, then. I doubt you'd run into much trouble from simple humans anyway." She laughed. "Ah, but do be sure not to get any of them pregnant. Humans aren't capable of handling the birth of a higher species like ours, you see, " She lied.

"Will do," He promised, giving fuck-all whether she believed him or not. A bullshitter could spot another bullshitter. 

Damien moved Vera into the carriage. He spoke to her low and gentle, telling her that she'll be okay. The fear in her eyes still hadn't faded.

After that, he looked at Mary. "Her, too." 

Muriel frowned. "Hey, Mary is my personal attendant, you know?"

"If she chooses to go back to you, that's fine. But you don't deserve her, so she's mine."

Muriel this time was thoroughly enraged. Mary was her's. 

No one had the right to take the woman away from her. To order her around. Only Muriel was allowed this privilege. The fact the woman was currently out of favor with Muriel was secondary. Before everything, she belonged to the Okeanos family. And to Muriel specifically. Mary was her property, her possession.

Even if it was her own son, it was infuriating that someone wanted to take what belonged to her.

But there was that same look in her son's eyes. A kind of...madness. It was akin to Muriel's own, but there was something different about it that, like before, felt terrifying and kept her in check.

She calculated that keeping Mary wasn't worth a falling out with her son and promptly sent her to him. He caught her easily and carried her in his arms before setting her next to her daughter. 

"Don't blame me if she attacks you again."

Damien didn't bother to answer that. Instead, he took the reigns of the skittish horse at the front of the carriage and climbed up the seat. He looked down at his mother, the sower of such wanton destruction. 

He flexed his left hand where a certain ring, exquisite silver with a cloudy gem as if it contained a storm within, resided. It was some artifact he'd never seen before that Bea retreated into after her reveal of what his mother had done. 

So far, he hadn't heard a word from her again. But there was a deep loneliness that emanated from the ring, like a shroud over the heart. Damien didn't know when, or if, Bea would ever come out. 

He turned away from his mother and rode off. If he ever saw her again in his lifetime, it'd be too soon.