I opened them.
He kept the rhythm slow, relentless, never stopping. When I trembled on the edge of release, he withdrew. The emptiness was a knife, so sharp I made a sound in my throat I had never heard before.
He watched in the mirror. He let me see myself, desperate, squirming on the bench.
“Not until you can keep your eyes open while you come.”
He started again.
He brought me to the edge a second time, and again he withdrew. The sound I made was less human this time, more animal.
He did it a third time, and I could see my whole body shudder, every muscle trying to remember how to be a person under that kind of attention.
The fourth time, he pushed me right to the brink and stopped.
I looked in the mirror.
I saw the woman there: red-cheeked, hair wild, sweat on her collarbones, wrists bound in silver, shoes still on, thighs spread, her own want a monument to everything she’d ever been told not to want.
She was beautiful.
She was me.
She was brilliant.
I kept my eyes on her, on me, as he brought me over the edge.
The orgasm was a detonation, not a wave. It started at the base of my spine and ran up, out, through every inch of me. The gold at my wrists went pure and hard and then flared white, the pain and the pleasure indistinguishable. I came with my eyes wide open, watching myself come apart, and the bond released its hold at the same instant.
I sobbed, a real sob, the sound of a person who has just been handed back the part of herself she thought was lost.
He gathered me up, then—untied the cord, wrapped his coat around my shoulders, lifted me from the bench and held me against his chest, rocking me the way a person rocks a child who has finally agreed to sleep.
The mirror door reappeared behind us.
He carried me out, and the last thing I saw in the silver wall was my own face, still wild, but no longer ashamed.
Hedidnottakeme back to my chamber.
He carried me, wrapped in the heat of his coat, down a series of unlit halls until we reached a room at the lowest, deepest level of the palace. It was the one room in the ArgentHalls with no windows, no mirrors, not even a shimmer on the walls to catch the light.
His room.
There was a fire in the grate, so wide and deep that you could have fit half a city’s worth of longing inside it. The walls were bare wood, stained the color of red wine. The bed was an honest bed: high, old, with a headboard carved by a hand that had not needed to impress anyone in centuries. The linens were heavy and pale, but the blanket across the foot of it was the color of stormclouds, thick enough to trap a body in sleep for a week.
He set me on the bed.
He went to a chest at the foot and drew out a shirt, dark, the collar gone soft with wear. He pulled it over my head with the same hands that had minutes ago commanded my whole body, but now he did it as if I was breakable.
He did not speak until I was covered, my wrists free, my hair smoothed away from my face.
He climbed into the bed and sat against the headboard. He opened his arms.
I crawled into his lap.
The need for words had gone out of me. I was emptied, bone-tired, a vessel that had been rung out to its last drop and was now resting in the echo. I put my head to his chest and let the silence fill me up.
He cradled me, arms around my back, hands cupped over my shoulder blades. I could feel the shift in his breathing, slow and deep, as if he too had been wrung out, and was only now remembering how to be a body with needs.
