Chapter 5 #3
He set the stylus down.
He waited before looking at me.
I lifted my face.
I lifted my face by degrees. I made my shoulders go back, answering the deep wine red of my second clause.
I made my chin come up, as on the long opening glide of a program.
I made my eyes find his and kept them from slipping into a small apologetic half-look at the air a few inches above his shoulder. I looked at his face. I looked at him.
His eyes gave that long pulse again.
“Good girl.”
“My Lord.”
“Tell me what else you want, baby.”
The hand around him kept moving. The bond carried his pleasure up my arm.
The cold marble was under me and the deep wine-purple of his sky was in the window and the contract was glowing on the table beside us in two colors, and the thing I wanted came up out of me without going through the long careful chain of editing it would have, in any year before this one, gone through.
“I want to call you Daddy.”
The sigil on my wrist ignited prismatic and the colors played over his beautiful face.
He closed his eyes.
“Yes, baby. You should call me Daddy. It is right.”
I leaned across the small cold distance of the marble.
I bent my head over the long lambent line of him.
I put my mouth, very lightly, at the head of his cock, and I kissed the bead of precum that had pooled there, and I licked it, lingering, the salt-and-gold of him on my tongue, the bond at my wrist flaring at the same beat.
He said my name.
Once. Quiet. Wrecked.
“Maria.”
“Yes, Daddy.”
“You do something to me. Something outrageous.”
I took him in my mouth.
I took as much of him as I could fit, which was not, in any honest accounting, much.
The width of him stretched my jaw beyond anything before.
I closed my mouth around the head of him and the upper inch of the shaft and sucked in a measured pull, following the bond’s instruction. The bond knew exactly what he wanted.
He shuddered.
The whole long line of him shuddered against my mouth, the involuntary lock-and-release of someone perhaps never touched like this before, and the cracks down his sternum opened in a new place, and the deep wine-purple of the room lit from the inside of him for a count of three.
He inhaled.
“The mechanics,” he said.
The voice was wrecked. He was holding on by the smallest measure of an old discipline.
“You must understand. Before we sign.”
I drew my mouth off the head of him by a fraction. I let my tongue sit against the underside. I looked up at him through the loose strands of the braid that had come down. I waited.
“If you break a clause,” he said—the voice low, broken, his long sentences coming in shorter pieces now because his body was being asked to do two things at once—“I will discipline you. I will use my hand, with your consent, on your bare bottom. I will make it red, but you will learn from it, you will enjoy it.”
I felt myself pulse with lust, and closed my mouth around him again.
He shuddered again.
“You will understand,” he said. Quietly. “Trust me, baby. Trust me to teach you.”
“Yes, Daddy.”
The word came out of me around the heat of him in my mouth.
The bond ignited again. The sigils tightened on my arm in a band of heat that was not painful this time, that was something else, that was the band a thing wears when it has been claimed.
He drew me off him.
He did it gently. The long fingers at the back of my neck lifted my head with care, and he held my face for a count, his gaze very low, and he said—
“Now. We sign.”
He reached, on the marble, for a small object I had not noticed. It was a thin pale-bone needle, set in a wooden rest beside the stylus. He lifted it. He took my left hand in his right—the hand with the iron ring, the hand with the cracks at the back of it—and he turned my palm up.
“Your blood,” he said. “On your name.”
“Yes, my Lord.”
He pricked the soft pad of my left thumb. It was a small bright clean pain, almost nothing. A bead of dark red welled up.
He set the stylus into my right hand.
He guided my left thumb to the parchment at the foot of the page, below the long bright run of clauses. I pressed the bead of my blood to the dark page. It absorbed. I took the stylus and dipped it into the blood, then I wrote my name.
Maria Price.
Pride drew the stylus to himself.
The needle was unnecessary for him. He lifted his right hand—the one with the iron ring and the cracks at the back—and turned the palm up. With a small movement of his own will, he opened a new fissure across its heart.
The gold ran.
Not the living gold of his veins. Molten.
The gold of a thing being given, not the gold of a thing being spilled.
He let it pool in the cup of his palm for a count, and then he tipped his hand over the foot of the page, and the molten gold ran down into the parchment beside my name, and over the pool of it he wrote, with the bone-and-gold stylus, in his own long measured hand—
A word.
A long word, the long characters of a name in an unknown language I had never been meant to read, the true name of him, the name he had not used in any hall in any age, the name that had been waiting for the woman who was his opposite to be the first one to see it written.
It was on us.
Up my right wrist where the old sigils had been, the new ones braided in white-gold and deep wine red, the two of them threaded as blood and gold had braided at the foot of the page. Up his right wrist, in the same braid, the deep red of me threading through the cracked gold of him.
He inhaled.
He said my name.
I leaned in.
I leaned to take him back in my mouth, because the want had been climbing the whole length of the signing and the want had hit its ceiling and the ceiling was, as far as I could tell, the only thing left in the room—
He stopped me.
The long fingers at the back of my neck came up, gentle, firm, the sovereign restraint of one bound, in the first clause of his side of the parchment, not to perform and, in the unspoken understanding under all the rest, not to take what he could not yet keep.
“Not until the binding, baby.”
The voice was wrecked. He was holding himself by the same thin line he had held himself by an hour ago in the gallery, the same line, the one that was getting thinner.
“I will not take what I cannot yet keep. The ceremony first. Then everything. Then everything you want and everything I want and everything the contract just wrote into both of us. I swear it. On the new sigils. On my true name. I swear it.”
He lifted my left wrist.
He brought it to his mouth and turned the inside up.
He laid his mouth, very softly, over the new braid of sigils at the pulse, and kissed it—long, reverent, the press of someone just given the only thing he had ever asked for and, by the discipline of his own first clause, declining to take it before the time.
He stayed there.