Konstantin
Ikeep her waiting four minutes, which is three more than necessary and one less than cruel.
It's a thing I do, the waiting. It tells a person where they stand before either of us has said a word, and it spares me the tedium of explaining it later.
The severance is already drawn up. It sits in the drawer to my right, generous, signed, requiring only a name.
I'll be kind about it. I am capable of kindness the way I am capable of any other deliberate act.
I am in charge.
I don't look up when the door opens. I let her stand on the threshold of my study and absorb the size of the room, the dark, the man who hasn't bothered to lift his head for her. Let her understand the arrangement.
"Your Majesty," she says. "You wanted to see me?"
The voice is younger than I expected. Warmer. American.
"You're the girl my mother hired," I say to the papers. "Hazel."
"Yes, sir."
And I look up.
I have been told, by men who survived it, that there is a particular silence on a battlefield in the half-second after the round is fired and before anyone understands they've been hit. The body knows before the mind does. The body always knows first.
She is small and unremarkable and dressed in clothes that have been good once, a long time ago, on someone else.
Brown hair coming loose. A face with nothing arranged about it at all, no court training, no calculation, just a girl looking back at a man she's been taught to be afraid of and being afraid of him correctly and refusing, some stubborn flicker of her, to look away.
And the thing I have been certain for three years that I do not possess, the ability to love, comes awake in my chest all at once, fully formed, like it has been there the whole time, waiting, and only needed her to walk into the room and switch on the light.
But it isn't only my chest.
It's lower, and it's faster, and there is nothing civilised in it at all.
One look at this half-starved orphan in someone else's good clothes and I am hard behind the desk, so fast it leaves me light-headed, the whole animal of me voting before I've had a single thought I'd admit to.
Three years of nothing, and now this: instant, brutal, my hands already deciding what they'd do to her if the desk weren't in the way.
I want to put her over it and learn what sound she makes.
I want it with a violence that would empty the room if it ever reached my face.
Oh, I think. There it is.
I do not move. Forty-two years of governing my own face are worth something, and they are worth this — my expression gives away nothing.
I am grateful, distantly, for the heavy desk between us, because my face still obeys me and the rest of me has plainly stopped taking orders.
Every plan I walked into this room holding quietly dies, and I feel them go, one after another, the way you feel snow stop.
She doesn't know. How could she? She's still standing very straight, waiting to be dismissed, twisting the hem of her sleeve between two fingers.
"Sit," I say.
She sits.
I study her openly now, because everything in this house is mine to study, and I watch the colour come up her throat under the attention and I find I want to follow it with my hand.
The severance in the drawer has become an absurd object.
A document for a different man, who walked into this study an hour ago and is not coming back.
"My mother tells me the last three nannies were unsatisfactory," I say. “How would you be different?”
"I wouldn't know, sir. I only met your children three hours ago."
"And?"
A breath. Then, with a small lift of her chin, the steadiness winning out over the fear: "And your daughter is testing me to see how fast I'll leave, and your son climbed into my lap before I learned his name.
They're not difficult, Your Majesty. They're grieving.
There's a difference, and the last three probably couldn't tell. "
The room is very quiet.
No one speaks to me like this. No one has spoken to me like this in twenty years, plainly, as though I am a man in a room and not an institution with a pulse.
My mother sends me trained women who know which truths a Tsar is allowed to hear.
This girl has been in my house for only an afternoon and has already told me something true about my own children that I did not know and needed to.
Her insolence does something to me. Makes my blood like fire. Makes me hard.
I stand.
There's no hiding what she's done to me, and I don't try.
Let her see what she walked into. Her eyes drop — once, helpless, a single flick down the front of me to the unmistakable proof of what one look at her has done — and then snap back up to my face, colour flooding up her throat, mortified that she looked at all.
I take the small caught sound of her breath and put it somewhere safe, to bring out later.
She tenses as I come around the desk — good instinct — but she holds.
I cross to her. I don't hurry. Hurrying is for men who fear they'll be refused, and I have never in my life been refused, and I will not be refused this.
I stop close enough, I reach down, and I take the loose strand of hair that's fallen against her cheek between my finger and thumb. I tuck it back behind her ear.
My knuckle grazes her jaw on the way. Once. Slow.
She goes absolutely still. Her breath catches. I hear it, feel it, the small broken inhale, and her eyes come up to mine, enormous. I watch her body answer a question her mind hasn't even finished asking yet.
"You looked," I say. Low. "When I stood. Down, and then away."
The colour climbs higher in her face; her mouth opens and nothing comes out of it.
"Don't." I let her see I mean it. "I'm hard, Hazel.
Have been since you walked through that door, and I'm not going to insult either of us by pretending otherwise.
You felt it too — I watched you feel it.
The only shameful thing a person can do with a want this plain is lie about it.
" My thumb moves once along her jaw. "And I don't lie. "
She's scarlet now — all the way to the tips of her ears, the flush gone helpless and blotchy down the side of her throat.
She can't hold my eyes anymore; they drop, not to my body this time, just down, to the floor, to anywhere that isn't me.
When she finally finds her voice it's barely more than breath.
"I'm sorry," she whispers. "I shouldn't have looked. I didn't mean to—" The smallest swallow. "...Sir."
Sorry. As though wanting were something she'd done to me, instead of the first honest thing carried into this room in years. She apologises for the exact thing I intend to build the rest of her life around.
She doesn't know what she is yet. She will.
"You'll stay," I tell her. Quiet. Absolute. Not an offer.
Then I step back, and return to my desk, and pick up my pen as though nothing on this earth has shifted, and say without looking up, "That's all, Hazel. Go back to my children."
She goes. The door closes. Her footsteps are quick and uneven down the corridor, almost running, fleeing a thing she can't name and won't outrun.
I open the drawer. I look at the severance, signed, generous, meaningless.
I tear it in half, and then in half again, and I drop the pieces in the fire, and I watch a stranger's exit burn while the snow comes down past the window, patient as ever, in no hurry at all.
The door closes. Her footsteps fade.
I stand in the centre of the study for a long moment, listening to the quiet settle back into the walls.
The fire ticks. Snow brushes the window.
My cock is still so hard it aches, trapped against the heavy fabric of my trousers, throbbing with every heartbeat in a way I have not allowed myself to feel in years.
I lock the door.
Then I walk back to the desk, unbuckle my belt with deliberate hands, and free myself.
The first touch is almost enough. I am already wet at the tip, the head flushed dark and sensitive, and when I close my fist around the thick length of my cock a low sound escapes me. I lean forward, one hand braced on the desk, and start to stroke.
Slow at first. Tight. The way I would take her if she were still here—if I had bent her over this desk the way the animal in me wanted the second she walked through the door.
I picture it with brutal clarity: that secondhand dress shoved up over her hips, her small body braced against the wood, the soft, startled cry she would make when I pushed into her for the first time.
Virgin. I am certain of it.
The way she looked at me, the way her breath caught when I touched her jaw—she has never been touched properly. Never been opened. Never been filled.
I stroke harder.
In my mind I am already inside her, already fucking her through the shock of the stretch, already telling her to take it, to be quiet, to be good.
I can almost feel how tight she would be around me, how she would shake, how she would try not to make a sound and fail.
I work my fist in long, twisting pulls, thumb dragging over the head on every upstroke, spreading the slickness, imagining it is her instead—her cunt, her mouth, the soft hollow of her throat.
“Hazel,” I growl under my breath, and the name alone nearly finishes me.
I picture her on her knees in front of this desk. Looking up at me with those enormous eyes. Mouth open. Taking what I give her. I would be careful the first time, but the second time I would not.
The second time I would put her on her back on this very desk and breed her properly, hold her thighs open and drive into her until she came around me sobbing, until I poured everything I had into her and kept her full of it.
Breed her. .
My rhythm turns rough, almost punishing.
I brace both hands on the edge of the desk now, hips fucking into my fist the way they would fuck into her, the wet sound of it filthy in the quiet room.
Every stroke is a claim. Every drop of precome that slides over my knuckles is for her.
I am already deciding how I will take her—how many times, how deep, how thoroughly I will mark her before the night is over.
The orgasm builds low and brutal, a pressure that has nothing to do with relief and everything to do with possession.
When it breaks it nearly takes my knees out from under me.
I come hard, thick ropes spilling over my fist and onto the desk, onto the papers, onto the place where the severance used to sit.
I keep stroking through it, milking every pulse, eyes shut, jaw locked, her name still locked behind my teeth.
When it finally eases I stay bent over the desk for a long time, breathing hard, the evidence of what she has done to me cooling on my skin.
The new feeling in my chest is no longer quiet.
Mine, the new thing in my chest says, in a voice I've never heard before and already obey.
I don't argue with it. I've never been one to argue with the truth.