Iris had nodded like he’d given her a great comfort. Anything was sufferable if she would be present to suffer again. “As long as you keep them, I am not close to death.” She said, meaning the antlers. They weren’t hard to keep alive, so neither was she. The documents that had come with his purchase would inform as much. A cup of water on the sill, with a drop of his blood once a week, would be enough to keep her little branches supple and the tangling flesh of their vines fragrant. Like the rest of her, the antlers smelled of fruit sugars. “Not close to a permanent death,” she corrected herself, because she could die for him a hundred times if he asked. She was not human, so her heartbeat was as much an aesthetic element as it was vital. His blood would crawl her capillary vines, tinging her sap, regardless of a rhythm in her chest.<br/><br/>She squirmed when he implored her blushing folds, and they were only reluctant to give into him because of the eagerness he’d stirred. Like she might pour out what she had to offer from any place he might choose to look. Iris shook her head, gasping, and the verdant waves of her hair floated like dandelion seeds on the air. She was a woman, he’d find, as it pleased him, and a nymph as it might please him more. If there had ever been a body that hungered, her very cells seemed frenzied for his touch. She shivered around him, and her desire left glistening trails on his palm as she leaned in to his anointing with their shared blood.<br/><br/>She had opened her eyes when he took his hand away, the bloodied one, and her lips parted as she watched him take her into his mouth. “Do you love this?” she asked him, a cautious echo of his own query. If he had meant to own her with the words, she offered only submission. And so lewdly, too, tongue sliding across her lower lip like she’d not brought herself even to swallow in the wake of this first encounter. The sun-gold skin could blush like any other girl, pink and swollen lips that had been crafted for his liking.<br/><br/>She seemed equally discontent, if less aggressively so, when Greta came to find them.<br/><br/>Iris watched Kedrick the entire time, curiosity as his blood heated and hissed inside her. She understood he was dissatisfied, and hugged his coat tighter around her. She wanted to fix his unhappiness. When he spoke to her, she was nodding before he finished. “Please.” She said. “Nothing would make me happier.” She glanced at Greta, and it was an odd expression. The little nymph moved to her Master’s side, bare feet and his jacket hanging over her, one antler scabbing and mutilated. From the places where her nerves had been battered and her blood had dripped, small green buds clustered and peaked. Spring after winter’s cruel. The antler would not grow back, only flower; but the horns had been meant to be pruned. She would remove them and give them to him herself, if he did not break them free when they reached home.