Chapter 7 #2
The color in the sigils shot up my arm and across my chest, a flare of every shade at once, a peacocking, a pyrotechnic, an admission so total that for a split second I saw the colors out of the corners of my own eyes. The bond did not correct me. The bond applauded.
He put his bare hand over the lake.
He did it slow, with the gravity of a priest blessing a body.
The water went clouded, then black, then sealed, the liquid surface going matte and then solid, as though the room had closed its own eye to the rest of the world.
When he lifted his hand, the pool was gone, replaced by a slab of stone indistinguishable from the floor.
He had closed the lake.
He had cut off every connection to the other realms, every avenue of wanting, every hope of seeing anything else in the world except for what was already in this room.
The shimmer at his cheekbone stillled.
Only you, it said. Only ever you. He was solid now, anchored in himself, the watcher who had chosen to be seen.
“You can let go,” he said. “Of your want. You already own the book—you wrote it. She, Margot, owns nothing. The work now belongs to the readers, and—separate to the author, your work is touching people, moving them. It doesn’t matter who wrote it or whose name is on the cover.
The book, the work, it exists in the world on its own terms.” He took his arms. “I feel her heart, Baby, I feel her soul. Margot. I make you this promise. She is envious of you. She doesn’t feel as though she owns the book.
She doesn’t feel as though she deserves any of it. Darling, she is miserable.”
I felt the truth behind his words and then, for the first time, something beautiful. Not pity for Margot. Compassion.
“It’s time for you to let go,” he said, “of envy. You don’t need anything more, you already have it all.”
He was right.
I held him, folded my hands over the line of his jaw, and kissed him.
I put everything into it. He took it the way a dying man takes a breath. He let the colors of the bond run through him, into the hollow of his throat and down into the root of his tongue.
We knelt together at the rim of the sealed lake, holding each other in the dark, the only light in the room the color of the bond itself.
He carried me back to his chamber—not the room with the wood walls, but the true bedchamber, the one at the bottom of the palace, the one with the hearth so wide you could fall into it. The fire was up. It filled the room with a light as rich as blood.
He set me on my feet at the foot of the bed.
He looked up, and for the first time I saw that the ceiling was not stone at all, but a canopy veiled in dark silk.
The fabric was drawn taut across a frame, so that the bed below was cased in a gentle, diffused gloom.
He reached up and, with a single patient motion, drew the cloth aside.
Above us, the entire ceiling was a mirror.
Not a panel, not an oval, not even the pearled silver of the palace halls.
It was a single seamless surface, flawless as water, running the length of the canopy.
I saw, reflected there, the bed: wide as a king’s, dressed in a honey-colored coverlet, the dark shadow of the man standing at my side, the pale shadow of the girl in his shirt.
The air in the room went electric.
He knelt in front of me, at the end of the bed.
The black of his coat was a void at my knees, the shimmer at his cheekbone a gold that ran down and through his neck, his hands alive with the heat of his own want.
He reached for the hem of the shirt, unbuttoned it, one button at a time, slow.
At each undone button, he paused, as though there were a holy name written underneath, and then moved to the next.
At the top of the split, he drew his hands apart, peeling the two halves down from my shoulders and letting them drop to my elbows, then forearms, then wrists, then hands.
The shirt fell to the floor. My breasts went bare in the firelight.
He made a sound.
It was not human. It was not demon. It was the sound of an animal recognizing, at last, the scent of its mate.
He put his hands at the tops of my thighs and pulled me, gentle, toward him.
He pressed his mouth to my navel. He pressed his mouth to the underside of my left breast, then the right, then to the small white scar along the base of my ribcage, the one I had gotten from a fall in gym class.
He mouthed the bone, the bruise, the skin.
He said, “I want every part of you.”
He licked the underside of the left breast, ran the tip of his tongue up to the nipple, drew the nipple into his mouth and sucked, slow, until it went hard enough to hurt.
My knees almost gave out. He did it to the right breast, too, but this time he used his teeth.
He grazed the skin, just enough for the bond to respond, the flare running up my chest and into my mouth.
He lowered his head and tongued the hollow below my ribs, then my hipbone, then the soft inside of my thigh.
He looked up, the color at his cheekbone brighter than any gold I had seen on him. “Get on the bed,” he said.
I did.
I lay on my back, thighs open, hair a wild tangle on the pillow, and looked up.
The mirror took me.
The girl on the bed—her hair splayed like a star, her breasts high with fever, her thighs parted, her eyes alive—was not a girl I had seen before. She looked like a vision, or a creature summoned, or a queen left alone for the first time with her own body. She looked hungry.
He stood at the foot of the bed.
He kicked off his boots.
He unfastened the trousers, sliding them down over his hips and stepping out of them with a steadiness that bordered on the predatory.
He was naked.
He was all mercury-pale, the shimmer at his cheekbone running down the center of his chest and through the line of his belly to the base of his cock.
His thighs were lean and corded, the shimmer at the inside of them identical to the shimmer on his face.
His cock was long, heavy, flushed with silver at the head and gold at the shaft, the color of a secret kept in the dark for a century.
I made a sound.
It was the wet-animal sound I had made on the silver plain, but this time it was not hunger, not ache, not want. It was relief.
He climbed onto the bed, knees wide, the fire throwing his shadow up onto the mirrored ceiling, and then he lowered himself over me.
He put his mouth at my throat. He licked up the line of my carotid, slow, the tongue warm and alive, and then he bit, not hard, but with enough force that I felt the heat travel all the way down the line of my spine.
He sucked, kissed, then moved down, taking the right breast into his mouth again and this time holding it there, tonguing the nipple until the bond flared and I moaned for him.
He did the same to the left, but this time he slipped his hand between my legs, the bare palm flat against my mound.
He said, “You are allowed to want. You are. But you must know that you are already whole.”
He slid a finger between my folds and found the clit at once, drawing a lazy circle, then two, then three. The circles got smaller, more precise, each one dialing in to the precise place my body was most alive. He pressed, slow, then withdrew, then pressed again.
“Tell me what you want,” he said.
“Daddy, I want you,” I said.
He put a second finger inside.
He said, “Look up.”
I did.
The girl in the mirror was a riot of color. The gold in my skin ran down the center of my chest, out to my breasts, and into my throat. The bond at my wrist was blazing, the inside of my thighs slick with color, the arch of my back so clean and high that for a second I thought I would snap in half.
He pressed his mouth to the top of my thigh, just below the hipbone, and bit.
He said, “You watch, baby. You watch what you look like when Daddy makes you come.”
He went down on me.
He licked from the base of my cleft all the way up to my clit, then circled it with his tongue, then sucked, then let go, then licked again.
His hands held my thighs open, and each time I bucked against him he pressed me back, gentle but absolute.
He worked the clit with a precision that bordered on mathematical, every change in angle or pressure instantly detected and recalibrated.
When I was close, he knew, and drew back, letting the edge recede before starting again.
He did not speak.
He licked, he sucked, he fingered, and when I was ready to break he put his mouth to my clit and sucked, hard, and I came. I came with my eyes open, watching myself in the mirror, the color at my skin flaring so bright that for a second it went white.
He did not let up.
He fingered me through the first one, and when I started to come down he said, “Again, baby. Eyes on me.”
He sucked the clit again, this time slower, more deliberate, his hands under my ass holding me off the bed so that I could not squirm away.
He licked, slow, dragging the tip of his tongue across the hood, then inside, then back, never letting the rhythm stop.
When I started to shake, he pressed his tongue flat, the whole length of it, over my clit, and I lost the world.
The second orgasm hit harder than the first.
I screamed.
Not a human scream, not a demon scream, not even a scream a body was supposed to be able to make. It tore out of me and filled the room, ran up into the mirrored ceiling, and came back down in echoes.
In the mirror, the girl on the bed was a goddess.
Her mouth was open, her eyes were wild, the color in her skin alive with the fire of the bond. She looked like nothing so much as a thing that had been desired for a thousand years, and was now, at last, being worshiped in the way it had always deserved.
He licked me clean, then crawled up the bed and kissed me, the taste of myself on his tongue.
He held my face in both hands.
He said, “You are not allowed to look away.”