She mumbles something about needing flour and heads out of the back door shouting for Gregor to take her to the store.
I carry Mia up the stairs. Past the library with the reading table that I never did restack with books because every time I look at it, I think about her on the edge of it in the lamplight, and I prefer the memory to the organisation.
I carry her into my room. Our room. It became ours somewhere around night three when she stopped pretending she was going to sleep in the guest room and I stopped pretending I wanted her to.
I set her down on the bed. She looks up at me.
"Hi," she says.
"Hi."
I lie down beside her. She turns into me. My hand finds her stomach. Flat. Nothing to feel yet. But it's there. Something we made. Something that exists because she walked to my club on a Friday night with blood in her hair, and I decided to open a door I told myself I wouldn't open, and she told me to stop deciding for her.
She puts her hand over mine.
"Scared?" she asks.
"No."
"Liar."
I look at her. She looks at me.
"Terrified," I admit.
She smiles. Presses closer.
"Good," she says. "Me too."
Outside, the early summer sun is still rising over the grounds. The lake is silver in the morning light.
The mandate is met. The deadline is passed. The family is intact. The empire continues.
And the woman in my arms shifts against me, presses her cold feet against my shins the way she does every morning, and says, "How nice is the ring?"
"It's nice."
"How nice?"
"Obscenely nice."
"Good," she says. "I've earned obscene and obscene suits me." She begins unbuttoning my shirt.
Mia
I work the buttons open slowly. Not because I'm being seductive. I'm being seductive by accident. Mostly I'm just enjoying the way his stomach tightens under my fingers as I reach the lower ones, the way his breathing changes, the way his jaw sets like he's trying very hard to let me lead when every instinct in his body wants to take over.
Five months, and that hasn't changed. The control. The restraint. The way he holds himself back until I give him permission not to.
I like giving him permission.
I push the shirt off his shoulders. It falls behind him on the bed. He's propped up on the pillows, watching me with those dark eyes, and I'm straddling his thighs in nothing but another of his shirts that I'm now pulling over my head.
His gaze drops. It always does. Every time I undress in front of this man, his eyes do the same thing, they track downward with a kind of focused hunger that still makes my skin prickle, even after all these months. Like he's seeing me for the first time. Like the novelty hasn't worn off.
It hasn't worn off for me either.
"Come here," he says. Low.
