“Say it again,” he whispered.
“Liuprand.” She brushed her thumb over his bottom lip. “Liuprand. Liuprand—”
He grasped her around the shoulders, pulling her into his chest. Then he lifted her from the tub. Water streamed down her naked body; she rose from it, like a naiad cresting the waves. One of his arms braced around her hip, the other around the backs of her thighs, holding her so that their eyes were level. Her own chest heaved against his. Her breaths were shallow and her blood was hot.
He kissed her, fiercely, desperately, without contrition. Her fingers scrabbled for a moment then found purchase in his hair, the golden hair that was somehow softer than she had imagined it would be—and she had imagined it, imagined this, in flashes of shameful desire that made her skin prickle and her stomach twist with longing.
Yet she had never dared to imagine this: his lips trailing along her jaw, down her throat, as her head fell back and stars clustered behind her eyes. She felt fragile in his arms, but there was no fear in that. If anything she felt a surging of relief, the knowledge that shecouldfall apart, and he would hold her and not let her break. He would hold even the broken pieces of her, she knew. This epiphany was so powerful that it encompassed her soul itself, and her whole body ached with love for him.
Liuprand carried her across the room with great ease and then laidher down gently upon the bed. She was bare before him, long, damp hair spreading out across the coverlet.
Even the reaching shadows could not disguise them: her scars. His gaze ran over the raised white lines, from the words inscribed across her rib cage to the etched flowers on her stomach, down to the instruction, the warning that spoiled and defaced her mound. She would not have been surprised to see his face twist in disgust.
Yet no repulsed grimace ever came. His eyes only gleamed, both dark and luminous at once, that night-ocean blue.
“You are more beautiful than even my imagination could conjure,” he said at last.
“Youimagined this?” she asked.
“Yes.” The word was so low, so deep in his throat, it was almost a growl. “And this.”
Then he surged forward, onto the bed, his lips on her lips and his arms sliding under her still-wet body. When he pressed against her, it made his clothes wet, too, and it made the blood look new again, but she did not care—she could not care about anything, not when his mouth trailed down her throat and found her breast.
Agnes was barely able to stifle a moan; it hardly even occurred to her that she should. She knew the guards were posted at the door and that they might hear, but Liuprand was reckless with his desire and all her reason was undone by his mouth. His tongue worked her nipple gently, and the pulse of longing between her legs was so powerful it was almost painful, and she wanted to tell him, to beg him to attend to that part of her, too.
She did not have to. His mouth left her breast, swollen now, and laved its way down her stomach, over her scars, which flared like signal fires at his touch.
He kissed her center just as he had kissed her lips, his tongue caressing her, his teeth grazing that hard nub that made her gasp and arch into him. Her fingers tangled in his hair, urging him closer, yet his palm pressed flat against her stomach, pinning her down onto the bed sothat she could not see him; she could only writhe there among the sheets as he visited pleasure upon her again and again and again.
Agnes cried out, and she clapped a hand over her mouth to muffle the sound. Her vision flashed with white.
Then Liuprand rose over her, his hair mussed, his lips and chin glossy with her spend. He breathed hard and so did she, their chests pressed together so their hearts pulsed in tandem, beat for beat, as if they were linked by some invisible cord. With infinite tenderness, Liuprand swept back the hair from her face. His fingers trailed through it, from root to end.
“I dreamed of seeing it like this,” he said. “Of seeing you like this, undone. It pained me some days, to keep from touching you. And even when the agony of it did not leave me sleepless, you invaded all my dreams.”
“Did I speak?” she asked him. “In your dreams?”
He shook his head. “No. But you moaned, when I did this.”
And then he stroked a hand between her legs, so expertly that she moaned indeed, hips straining upward into his touch. Her mind was so broken down by this onslaught, her limbs quivering like saplings in the wind, though she still had just barely enough sense within her for the question to come tumbling from her lips.
“Does Drepane’s golden prince have a hundred secret lovers?” she managed.
He laughed, pausing for a moment his ministrations and leaving Agnes suddenly, horribly bereft. “Not even one. I did not even know what it meant to want until I first laid eyes on you.”
Her chest tightened with fondness. She cupped his chin in her hand, and he stroked her again, making her writhe and abruptly grasp at his face, fingernails digging into his cheek. She swiftly took her hand away and hoped she had not hurt him.
Whatshewanted then was to please him in the same manner, to seehimundone at her touch. He had endured so many weeks of restraint, and even now, she could tell he ached from it. She ran her fingers down his chest, feeling the damp and bloodied fabric of his doublet(an unforgivable oversight that he wore it still) until she reached the swelling in his breeches.
She did no more than brush against the cloth there and he groaned, with relief and with need.
Agnes pried the buttons loose and freed him. Her heart skipped—he was large, larger even than she had expected, given the sheer size of his body, the Seraphine build and its pulsing power. But he quivered under her touch like a supplicant before God.
The taste of him was salt and skin, and apostasy. Whatever obedience, whatever duty was left within Agnes fell away from her, crumbled, as a pedestal beneath a statue that had become too fragile to shoulder the weight of its idol. She was no ascetic, no scrupulous, shrinking virgin, no longer slave to the posthumous existence of Adele-Blanche. Her grandmother’s cold and sepulchral power had been diminished. Dissolved into nothing. It vanished like mist in the summer morning, expunged by the stunning light of day.
Liuprand’s fingers tangled in her hair, and then he wrested himself free. His chest was heaving, the enormous length of him throbbing and taut with blood.
“Lady Agnes,” he said, between breaths, “will you have all of me?”
