Yet before she could, Liuprand’s arms came around her. The suddenness of this movement made the book fall from her hands and thud to the ground. He gripped her tightly, one arm across her middle, theother over her breast and her bare shoulders, and his cheek brushed the column of her throat as he held her there against his chest.
His need pulsed from within him, like a second heartbeat. Agnes could feel it, thudding through her, heating her blood and the very marrow of her bones. She was made a hollow drum, his desire beating against her taut skin.
The sensation it provoked in her was almost beyond words. Her body remembered every moment of their coupling, the dragging thrusts of him, which were now echoed in the intangible aura of want. And so he ground herownneed into her—the ache between her legs terrible, as her channel clenched and clenched around empty air.
“Please,” he rasped, lips brushing the shell of her ear.
She could not move; she was bound to him as a martyr to her pyre. Her arms pressed tautly to her sides. Her throat was not similarly subjugated, yet she could not speak. The words only inked themselves into her mind.Call me by name, I beg of you, say Agnes, not lady, do not act as if we are strangers—
Somehow—perhaps she should not have been surprised—he perceived this need from her. He dipped his head lower until his lips grazed her nape, and he whispered, “Agnes. Agnes—”
Her head was not subdued, either; she could turn it, and she did. Slowly, so that their noses touched, and their mouths were so close she swore she tasted him already, and with her eyes shut, she could pretend for a moment that this was not the greatest and most faithless of treacheries.
Unaccountably, a prick of reason jabbed at her. Agnes opened her eyes and recoiled only slightly, as much as she could when she was so firmly bound against him. Liuprand flinched.
“We cannot do this,” she said brokenly.
“No, I cannot do without it.” Liuprand’s voice was low and rough, and it laid bare his pain. “There is not a single moment that is empty of my need for you.”
Her stomach contracted upon itself. Weakly, she said, “You must be a master of your body…”
Liuprand shook his head, which brushed his cheek against hers again. “It is not the desire of my earthly form that torments me. I would want you even if I could not touch you. I need your clever counsel. All your secret smiles. Your gentleness and sensibility…I need the one person in all the world who can tend to the feeble creature beneath the epithet.”
At last he had been marked with one. Liuprand the Just, he was called, after the news of what had transpired at the House of Blood made its way to the ears of peasants and nobles alike. It would not be penned into Drepane’s annals until he died—one could gain or lose an epithet over the course of one’s life—but for now men drank toasts to the prince who had proven patricide could not go unpunished, that such a savagery would be repaid a thousandfold. To the prince who promised a reign of brutal righteousness when finally he came into his crown.
Agnes could see very well the creature beneath the epithet. It was the epithet itself that gave the eye of her mind trouble. Justice meant violence, and this was incongruous with the character she knew, the one who held her now, the one who tended moths and preferred books to jousting or merrymaking, the one who had martyred his own pleasure for the health and longevity of Drepane while his father the king consumed whatever was in reach of his hands. But a man would not prostrate himself for Liuprand the Gentle, or Liuprand the Wise, or Liuprand the Learner. These virtues held no honor on Drepane.
It was certainly not Liuprand the Just who embraced her. This creature was perfidious, and so was Agnes.
“I would give you all you wish for,” she whispered, “if there were not half the world between us.”
His lips pressed to her ear again. “I feel nothing between us now.”
Agnes felt herself dripping for him. “You are reckless with your desire, and all my reason is undone by your mouth.”
He groaned softly and ground himself against her. Her legs were weak, and had Liuprand not been holding her, she might have dropped to the ground, a wobbly wreckage in purple silk. He was crumplingthe white flowers in her hair, and she did not care—she cared nothing until she felt his mouth fix to her throat, just barely grazing the necklace of teeth there.
This rocked the reason back into her. Agnes wrested herself free of him, breathing hard.
Liuprand’s chest was pumping, shoulders rising with each ragged, heavy inhale. His eyes still gleamed with desire, but as he regarded her, they shifted and grew matte with despair.
Though he opened his mouth to speak, Agnes’s tongue was quicker.
“You are the prince,” she said. Each word was wrung out from her painfully. “You are bound to another…to…” She shook her head. It was pure cowardice that she could not speak the name. “I will not be your ruination.”
“No,” Liuprand broke in, reaching for her. “You are the only thing that will save me.”
But Agnes could bear no more. She fled the library, fled the treachery of her desire, though her heart ached with love for him and she was still slick between her thighs.
III
Ninian
First came the bandages. She had boiled them, and they were clean again. White, pure, befitting her mistress’s faultless flesh. The princess was standing, though she should have been sitting, for her own sake and for Ninian’s. They were of a height, but in her heeled slippers, the princess Marozia was taller. And so Ninian had to push up onto her toes to wrap the bandages around her swollen breasts.
Marozia made no sound that indicated pain or pleasure. In fact she stared past Ninian, at nothing in particular at all. But her eyes were not glazed or listless. They were as sharp and cunning and bright as ever, and they were beautiful, an almost pure black, like obsidian beads polished to wear around the throat of a queen.
Perhaps she would like such a necklace,Ninian thought. The princess’s throat was bare. It was a form of protest. She would not replace that garish bauble of her inheritance, and its absence would remind all of what had been stolen from her.Stolen.The mere thought, the memory, made Ninian’s stomach form dark storm clouds of anger.
