“This is my study,” he said. His low voice reached me at half the volume the hall had needed. “I do not bring beings here. I have not, in the long age of my reign, brought any being here. You are the first.”
I had no idea what to do with that. I looked at the table. I looked at the parchment. My eyes stayed off him.
It struck me that there was nothing on display here, no record of magnificence of any kind.
“The contract,” he said.
“Yes, my Lord.”
“It cannot be written clothed.”
I looked up.
He was already moving. He had crossed to the table. He stood beside it with his right hand resting on the marble edge, the iron ring catching no light, and his gaze found my face and held it.
“The binding takes only what is brought to it bare,” he said. “Anything concealed from the parchment is void. A thing half-hidden is a thing the brothers can argue. It is the rule I have lived by in the gallery and the rule I live by in this room. I hide nothing I have been given. I will hide nothing I give you.”
He paused.
“I will disrobe first.”
He began before I could nod.
He lifted his hands to the fastenings at the throat of the white-and-gold tunic. He did it without ceremony, as a sovereign does a necessary thing—the long fingers working the small clasps, the fabric falling open at the line of his collarbone, and then the tunic itself coming off across the shoulders in one measured movement that made the room smaller by a measurable amount.
The under-shirt followed.
He folded both. He set them on a low chest along the wall I had not noticed. Then the dark trousers, the soft leather of the boots, every piece set down with his usual precise care, until there was nothing on him at all.
I had no preparation.
His body was not the body of a human, and the body of a being like him in the low deep wine-purple light of his own private room, standing without ceremony three paces from me, was a thing I had not been given any vocabulary for.
He was sculpted. The chest was broad and the long lines of his stomach ran clean down into the cut of his hips, the lambent skin catching the low light at every plane, the cracks at the back of his right hand bleeding a faint hairline of raw white into the dim. The legs were long. The thighs were thick from standing without rest for a long age. And —
And.
His cock.
He was hard.
He was hard and he was thick and he was heavy and the size of him was, frankly, not a size I could fit in the small careful arithmetic my body had been doing since Tokyo. The width of him at the base. The length of him standing up against the line of his stomach. I had a wild moment, very small, very honest, of thinking—he means to put that in me. He means to have me with that. How?
I felt the heat climb my face. I felt the heat climb everything else, too, lower, in a way I had not felt in years, in a way I had perhaps never felt with quite this completeness, and the bond on my wrist made the new high bright tone again, and the wetness between my legs was immediate and embarrassing.
He let me look.
He let me look for a long count. He remained motionless, neither shifting his weight nor holding himself for me as a man at his most magnificent might have done. He simply stood, bare, with the same easy sovereign settledness, and let me see.
“Now you, baby.”
The voice was very low.
My hands went to the belt of the robe. They were not steady. I undid the belt. The robe parted. The shift was underneath, the long pale unseamed shift I had woken in, and I lifted it over my head in a single movement, as I had lifted competition costumes throughout my career, with the small efficient practicality of a body that knew the geometry of getting out of fabric quickly.
I stood bare in front of him.
He shook his head. Once.
