“You kissed me!” I objected. “I’m not a vampire!” I didn’t like the way she had made it sound, as if I’d deliberately tried to leach power from her. There were cultivators who used the power of others in that way, like magic vampires, but the practice was illegal and very heavily frowned-upon. I wasn’t into exploiting people like that.

She smiled. “Oh, yeah. I did, didn’t I? But your ability is what drained my power and made yours stronger.” She grinned at me, and her gaze slipped from my eyes to my lips.

Was she considering kissing me again? She glanced away.

I had forgotten that moment when her kiss had given me new reserves of mana and increased the level of my Force Barrier spell. I hadn’t given it much thought since it happened, and at the time there had been too much else going on to consider it.

I opened my mouth to ask about it when she threw me completely off course with another question. “So, you fucked Kyrine?” she said, off-handedly. Did I detect a hint of jealousy in her voice?

I almost bit on my tongue. This beastkin woman definitely didn’t beat around the bush.

“Ah, yeah, I did, actually. We… made love, and completed our merging.” I said. “Did you and your agency know that was an essential part of the merging?”

Astrid laughed. “We knew, yeah, and we’d all been briefed. But no one ever got past the interview, so we didn’t think to mention it. I suppose giving you a heads-up would have been nice.”

I was about to say that a heads up about a lot of stuff would have been nice, but then I thought again about it. Would I even have believed them if they had told me?

“You know,” I said with a chuckle after considering it for a moment, “the surprise kinda made it that much better.”

“Really?” Astrid arched an eyebrow. “You must be into some really weird, kinky shit, Jeremy.”

“What can I say?” I said, shrugging and holding my hands up. “I enjoyed it.”

Astrid came much closer to me and leaned over to whisper in my ear. “You’re just saying that because she can hear you, aren’t you? I’m sorry, Jeremy. I wanted to tell you, but my superior made me swear to keep it a secret. Telling you would have made me lose my job.”

I looked at the beautiful beastkin woman as she leaned close to me. She seemed genuinely apologetic, except I didn’t care at all. Kyrine had been the most incredible woman I’d ever slept with. And I was probably one of only a handful of men who could say they’d fucked a dungeon core avatar.

“It’s honestly not a problem,” I whispered back. “Kyrine isn’t so bad. You shouldn’t be afraid of her.”