The Lustful Villain: Every Milfs and Gilfs are Mine!

By the time the training session finally wound down, Iris had constructed a fragile fortress of denial around herself. She had convinced herself that the morning had simply been an off day, the kind of ordinary, human lapse in performance that happened to every soldier eventually.

She told herself the dizziness, the distraction, the weakness—it was all just exhaustion, nothing more.

She nearly succeeded in believing her own lie. She almost made it out of the hall, her mind already shifting toward the practicalities of her next duty, until she took the shortcut past the training hall’s side entrance.

Then, the fortress crumbled.

There they were again. This time, there was no audience of recruits or guards to perform for.

The alcove was shadowed and secluded, bathed in a soft, amber light that seemed to isolate them from the rest of the world. Diana’s back was pressed against the rough stone wall, and Rex was close—impossibly close.

His forehead rested against hers in a gesture of such profound intimacy that Iris felt like she was trespassing on something sacred.

They were speaking in that low, private register, the kind of hushed murmur reserved for words that mattered less than the simple, shared oxygen between two people.

’Keep walking, Iris,’ her mind screamed, a desperate plea for survival. ’Turn around...’

’Walk away before you see something that kills what little is left of you...’

She should have kept walking. She should have retreated into the safety of her own solitude.

Instead, she stopped. Her boots felt like they had fused to the stone floor.

She hovered just past the edge of the doorway’s threshold, hidden in the shadows where neither of them would notice her presence. She was a ghost haunting her own life, watching a scene she had no right to witness.

She watched as Rex’s hand settled at Diana’s waist not with the bruising grip he had used on Iris but with a possessive gentleness that made Iris’s stomach twist.

She watched Diana’s fingers curl into the fabric of his shirt, seeking purchase, seeking connection. And then she watched the kiss.

It wasn’t a performance. There was no aggression in it, no demand for surrender.

It was an unhurried, simple act of wanting a quiet acknowledgment of each other’s existence. It was devastating.

Something in Iris’s chest twisted violently, a sharp, serrated blade of emotion that sliced through her carefully maintained composure. The pain wasn’t physical this time; it was something far more corrosive.

The pretense shattered completely, leaving only the raw, bleeding truth beneath.

She was jealous.

The realization didn’t come as a surprise; it came as a condemnation. She wasn’t just jealous of Diana; though the thought of Diana receiving Rex’s tenderness felt like swallowing broken glass, she was jealous of the certainty between them.

She was jealous of the way Rex looked at Diana as if she were his anchor, a stark contrast to how he had looked at Iris: as though she were merely prey to be broken, a vessel to be used and discarded.

’Why her?’ the question thundered in the silence of Iris’s mind. ’Why does she get the man who protects, while I get the monster who destroys?’

She was jealous of the ease of it all. She was jealous of the casual, constant physical affection that seemed to exist between them without either of them having to bleed for it, without having to barter their souls or endure the humiliation of a midnight violation.

Diana was wanted plainly, consistently, and safely. Diana was seen.

Iris stood frozen in the shadows, watching the two lovers, feeling the hollow ache in her own body intensify.

She realized then that she didn’t just want Rex’s touch; she wanted the version of him that Diana had, the version that didn’t leave her feeling like she had been gutted from the inside out.

She wanted to be wanted without being destroyed.

Iris turned away abruptly, her boots striking the stone with a hollow sound that seemed to echo too loudly in her own ears. She fled the alcove, her pulse hammering a frantic rhythm against her ribs, each beat a reminder of the vulnerability she had just exposed to herself.

She had not let herself want that simple, terrifying openness from anyone since Veylor died. In the raw, bleeding weeks following the funeral, when the grief had been so thick it felt like drowning, she had made a vow.

She had told herself that wanting connection again would be its own kind of betrayal, a desecration of the memory of what they had shared.

So, she had built it: a quiet, disciplined wall around that particular hunger, a fortress of solitude designed to keep desire at bay.

For years, she had mostly succeeded in not even noticing the wound was still there.

But watching Rex and Diana in that doorway, the wall did not feel disciplined anymore. It felt like a crumbling ruin, something she had been holding up out of habit rather than conviction.

The pressure of what she saw, the tenderness she craved and could never have, was cracking the foundation, letting the cold air of reality rush in to freeze her bones.

’Coward,’ she hissed at herself as she reached the main corridor. ’Pathetic...’

’You’re supposed to be a weapon, not some starving girl watching scraps fall from another’s table...’

She walked away before either of them could notice her presence, before Rex could turn his head and catch her fleeing like a thief in the night.

She spent the rest of the afternoon submerged in paperwork and equipment maintenance, telling herself, without much success, that the feeling would pass.

She convinced herself it was a temporary glitch, a momentary lapse in her emotional armor that would dissipate if she simply ignored it long enough.

It did not pass.

If anything, the ache sharpened over the following two days, transforming from a dull throb into a serrated edge that cut deeper with every passing hour.

Her senses had become hyperattuned to them, her mind involuntarily cataloging every minute display of affection between Rex and Diana, details she used to register with clinical indifference but now found impossible to ignore.

The torment was in the details.

It was the way Rex would find Diana at the end of every training session, without fail. He would cross the courtyard with that predator’s stride, and before a single word was exchanged between them, he would pull her in against him for one brief, grounding moment.

Iris would watch from across the yard, her jaw tightening until it hurt, feeling the phantom ache of her own body remembering the way his hands could grip her.

It was the way Diana would reach for his hand while they walked through the halls, an entirely unconscious, effortless gesture that neither of them seemed to think twice about.

It was so casual, so natural, that it made Iris feel like she was watching a foreign language she could never learn.

And then there was the quality of Rex’s attention. When Diana entered a room, Rex’s focus shifted like a compass needle finding north.

Even when he was speaking to a commander or instructing a recruit, his awareness remained anchored to her. His eyes would track her movement, his body would subtly angle toward her, a silent, constant tether that spoke of a devotion Iris had never dreamed possible.

Iris found herself trapped in a cycle of self-loathing. More than once, she would catch herself standing at the periphery of a room, frozen, watching the two of them share some ordinary moment of connection.

Her heart would race, her breathing would shallow, and she would have to physically jerk herself away, redirecting her attention to a map, a blade, or a weapon before someone noticed her staring like a starved animal.

’Stop it, Iris... Stop looking...’

’Stop wanting it...!’ The command echoed in her mind like a death sentence.

She was furious with herself, a cold, simmering anger that she directed inward because there was no one else to blame. She was angry in that specific, quiet way she was angry about most things she could not immediately fix through discipline, training, or violence.

Her entire adult life had been built on the bedrock of control: the control of her blade, the control of her mission, and most importantly, the control of her own desires.

She had trained herself never to want anything badly enough that its absence could be used as leverage against her.

And yet, here she was. An assassin with years of hard-won, lethal composure, utterly undone.

Her entire identity was fracturing, all because of the sight of a man’s hand resting at another woman’s waist.