But it made me pull my hand away.
He let the silence sit.
I looked at his face.
The shimmer along his cheekbone was the white-gold of the room. The rest of him was as I had come to expect: perfect, still, monastic, the hair at his temple barely tousled, the lips parted only to the degree required for oxygen and nothing more. If I had not felt the live heat of him everywhere our bodies touched, I would have assumed I was lying on a sculpture.
He looked at me and waited.
I cleared my throat.
“You mentioned court. What do I need to know for today?” I asked.
He sat us both up with a single clean motion. The shift put me in his lap, and my body, traitor, settled into the V of his thighs as if that was the only home it had ever known.
He did not release me.
“Yes. Court today,” he said. “Not the human idea of court—a ritual of standing before an indifferent authority and being judged by the weight of one’s sins. Ours is not like that.”
He brought his left hand, the bare one, up to my jaw and tilted my face to him.
“It is a market.”
He let me process it.
I thought of the other six brothers, the way he had listed them last night. Pride, Greed, Lust, Wrath, Gluttony, Sloth. Each one a hunger. Each one a market unto itself.
“The court is not for the damned, if that’s what you’re wondering,” he said. “It is for the native inhabitants of Infernum. Demons. Petitioners. Every one of them wants something they do not have. Each comes to plead for an increase in station.”
The word station landed with a familiar sting, a low-grade ache from the old world, the one with jobs and bosses and bills that never quite got paid on time. He saw it in my eyes.
“They will be watching the bond,” he said. “Not just the strength of it, but the fit. The fit is everything. If they sense a seam, a hesitation, a lack of certainty between us—”
He trailed off.
I said, “They’ll try to use it.”
He nodded, precise.
“Who sits on the dais with you?”
He smiled, a small and satisfied thing. “You do. Beside me.”
My heart stuttered.
“Not beside,” I corrected, half a joke, half a plea. “Behind? Or—”
“Beside.”
The word was not a suggestion.
The hand at my jaw kept me steady.
“You will sit to my right, on the bench. You will not stand below, or across. You will not be made to stand before the assembly. You are the Sovereign’s Kept. They will expect you to be silent, but when you speak, you must speak as yourself. There is nothing they hate more than a kept who echoes her Sovereign’s voice.”
I felt my throat tighten, the old reflex, the terror of saying something that would disappoint.
“If I embarrass you—”
