The fifth strike. The sixth. My hips were moving now. Bucking, slightly, on each strike, the heat and the wet and the wanting crashing together into a wave that built with each crack of his palm against my skin. I was making louder sounds. Whimpers. Moans. The kind of sounds I had not made in all those years, maybe ever, the kind of sounds that came from a place that had been dry and was now flooding.
He rested his palm between each.
“Five. Thank you for the fifth year.”
“Six. Thank you for the sixth year.”
The seventh strike landed across both cheeks, already flushed deep pink, already hot to the touch, and the sound I made was not a whimper. It was a cry. The orgasm was building. I could feel it—the tension coiling low in my belly, the clenching getting faster, the wet soaking the inside of my thighs and the shift where it pressed against me. My hips were bucking openly now. Grinding against his thigh. Seeking friction. Seeking him.
“Seven. Thank you for the seventh year.”
His voice was rougher. The control was still there—the discipline was still there—but I could feel the want, now, directly, lancing through the bond in sharp white hot threads and curling back through my chest and between my legs. The seventh strike lingered through my whole body; it made mybody arch, my toes curl, my voice come out in a desperate sound I made no effort to muffle.
The fire in the hearth pulsed in rhythm with the fire in my ass. The gold-and-red at my wrists sizzled, tight bands, glowing as if each strike was writing a fresh clause in through the skin. He waited for the heat to settle. He let his hand linger. He caressed, once, not soft but not harsh, the place he had just struck—a deliberate circling of the palm over the heat, as if to memorize the print he had left.
The eighth strike. And the ninth. The count went blurry. The world inside the chamber dropped to the heat and the sound and the wet grinding of my body on his lap, and the only thing above the surface of it was his voice, calling the year back to me, telling me it had always been mine, telling me I was worth every year I had spent hating myself for the fall. “Nine,” I said, or sobbed, or sang. “Thank you for the ninth year.”
And then I came.
I came on his knee, hard and true, no hiding from it, no apology. I came with the same full-body shake that had taken me on the wrong edge, except this was the right edge at last, and everything trapped inside me since Tokyo came out. The orgasm rang through the wet, through the heat, through the deep muscle of my thighs and the soft muscle of my stomach, up through my voice, and through my chest and out my mouth—
He caught it in his hand.
The hand that had disciplined, the hand that had held me steady, now wrapped fully around my waist and pinned me to his lap. I convulsed, shuddering on his knee, half-folded over, head buried in his thigh, the white shift gathering the wet between my legs as I rode out the crest and crash of the orgasm.
I would have fallen, if not for his hand. A keening, animal cry tore free. He stroked the small of my back. He waited. The aftershocks rolled out through my body, successive waves ofheat and relief and exhaustion, until, finally, I stilled. The wood of the chair was hard at the edge of my ribs. His thigh was warm against my pelvis. I lay still. He left me there.
Eventually, when I felt calm, he lifted me.
He lifted me without effort. One arm went under my knees and the other behind my shoulders, and the white shift gathered against me as he stood, the soaked silk between my legs cool now where the fire had begun to ebb, and my head fell, without my permission, against the bare skin at the open throat of his linen shirt. I lacked the strength to lift it back up. I wanted it there. The bond was singing the low warm tone I was learning meant safe.
He carried me through a door behind the chair.
He took me to another new place. The walls were dark wood again, deeper than the chair-chamber, the grain running in long old lines from floor to ceiling, and the floor was the dark heated stone, and the bedbwas set into a low alcove with no canopy.
He had brought no one here. I knew before the words came. The room knew it. The bond knew it.
He set me down on the edge of the bed.
He kept one hand at the small of my back, steady, the warmth of his palm meeting the place that was no longer sore but was something gentler, a banked heat, the kind that lives in a body that has been cared for thoroughly. He drew the soaked shift up over my head in a single smooth movement. I lifted my arms for him without thinking. He set the shift aside, out of sight. He turned to the foot of the bed and lifted from a low chest a folded thing of white silk that I had not seen, and he shook it out, and it was one of his shirts.
He dressed me in it.
He dressed me with the same certainty he had used on the boots, his fingers at my wrists working the cuffs, the long line of his shirt falling past my thighs and down to my knees becausehis body was so much larger than mine, the open throat of it gaping at my collarbone where it had closed at his. The silk was warm. It had been worn by him. I could smell him on it—cold water and clean stone and the faint sweet under-thing—and a breath caught in me when the smell hit, the involuntary recognition of the only safety my body had been offered since Tokyo.
He sat in the wide chair by the smaller hearth.
He drew me into his lap.
He arranged me—I had no agency in any of it and wanted none—across his thighs, my legs folded sideways, my cheek against the open silk of his shirt where the linen met the bare skin of his chest, the heel of my palm at the steady beat of him underneath. The bond hummed. The braid that had come down on the ice was loose around my shoulders. He took the tail of it in his hand and combed it out with his long fingers, careful not to startle. He smoothed it. He set it along the line of my shoulder. He left it down.
A cup appeared in his hand from somewhere beyond my sight. Pale, small, the kind you give a child. He held the rim to my mouth and tipped it carefully, as he had for the failing king below, and the water that came over the lip was cool and clean and tasted of stone, and he watched the swallow go down, and he tilted again. A small swallow. A pause. A small swallow more. He continued until the cup was empty. Then he set it on the floor beside the chair without looking at where it went.
His palm moved, then. Down the line of my back, over the silk, to the place where the heat still lived. He rested it there. Not a strike. The flat warm weight of the same hand, settling the banked fire of me into something kinder. The bond made the low singing tone, longer this time, a kettle nearing its whistle. I felt the soreness ease under his palm by measurable degrees, theheat turning from punishment into something held, something the body could keep.
He spoke, very low, into the top of my head.
“I have decided certain things, precious one. On the parapet, when you came up the stair behind me. In the gallery, when you put your mouth to the back of my hand. In the study, when you signed your name in your own blood under mine. Now, again, with you across my lap.”
