Chapter 6
VAELIS
She's been looking at my breeches for twenty minutes and pretending she hasn't.
Not continuously—she's too good for that.
A glance, dragged back, then the careful neutrality of the professional face, then three minutes of genuine focus on the sphere before it happens again.
I have watched people lie for six centuries.
Most of them are terrible at it. She is not terrible at it, which is the only reason this is interesting.
I'm hard against the cloth—both of them—and have been since she walked in, and she knows, and the knowing is sitting in every line of her body: the pressed thighs, the set of the jaw, the very deliberate way she's been holding her shoulders too high for the better part of an hour.
It takes more effort than most people realise, that kind of sustained performance.
Most people can hold a cover for ten minutes before something leaks.
She is at forty and the leak is just a glance. I am keeping a record.
I don't flatter myself that the interest is personal.
It is biological and inconvenient and she resents it deeply.
Six centuries gives one a certain eye for the distinction.
What interests me—what has made these lessons something I find myself looking forward to with an attention I'd rather not examine too closely—is what she does with it.
The precise, focused effort to remain a professional in a situation that is making professionalism increasingly untenable.
She came in here to learn about Mist Court magic.
She is learning something. It isn't what she came in for.
"Again," I say.
She puts her hand back on the sphere and says nothing.
I note the control in the gesture—no frustration, no resignation, just the steady attention of someone doing a difficult job—and stay where I am, just behind her left shoulder.
The cold of me reaches her from here, not enough to touch, just enough to register.
I've been doing this for five lessons and she's never stopped reacting to it.
She's stopped showing that she reacts to it, which is different.
I lean in slightly to observe the sphere.
Her breath catches. One small inhale, there and gone, and she corrects it in under a second with the ease of someone who has been practicing this correction all morning.
Her scent sharpens as I lean in—want and slick and the warm particular argument her biology has been making since day one—and both shafts pulse with it, a slow throb against the cloth I don't direct and don't bother to conceal.
I straighten without comment. I have been here before, or something like it, and the etiquette has never changed: you don't remark on the obvious.
You just let it sit in the room between you and watch what the other person does with it.
What she does with it is admirable. Genuinely. I don't say so because it would be condescending, and also because I am not ready to give her the satisfaction.
I move to the other side of the desk, unhurried, and look at the sphere from this angle.
She tracks me without appearing to track me—I catch the slight adjustment in her peripheral awareness, the subtle shift in how she's holding the back of her neck.
Truth-sight finds the seam of it easily, the thing she's managing underneath the performance: not just want, but the irritation of wanting, the specific dignity-wound of a woman who knows exactly what her body is doing and cannot make it stop.
I find this considerably more interesting than fear would be.
Fear is common. Wounded dignity with this particular flavour of stubborn—that's rarer.
"Tell me," I say, conversationally, "Miss Merris."
She looks up. Clara's face, attentive, professionally pleasant, not a crack in it.
"A woman of your background." I let my gaze move over her briefly, unhurried. "You've been to court before. Other courts."
"A few, my lord. In a trading capacity."
"Of course." I move around the desk slowly, watching her track me without appearing to. "And you've had occasion, I imagine. To meet all manner of people."
A slight pause—small enough that Clara might have taken it, so she takes it. "The work brings one into contact with a wide variety."
"Men," I say. "Human men, primarily. The trading circles your house moves in."
"Primarily, yes."
I stop beside her. Close—closer than the lesson strictly requires, which she knows, and which she will not acknowledge, because acknowledging it would require her to explain why it matters.
Her scent sharpens immediately, the pre-heat spiking with proximity, and I breathe it in with the patience of someone who has learned that patience costs nothing and impatience costs everything.
"I wonder," I say pleasantly, "if a woman like Miss Merris has ever found herself in the company of a Mist Court male."
The faintest stillness. Barely anything. She's very good. "I can't say that I have, my lord."
"No." I let that sit. "It's rather different, I'm told. From what a human man offers." I glance down, deliberate enough that she sees me do it. "Anatomically."
Her jaw tightens. Infinitesimally. I note it and continue.
"Two cocks," I say, in the tone one might use to discuss the weather—mild, faintly academic, as if this is simply information one shares with visitors.
"Both capable of independent vibration at a frequency I can choose and adjust at will.
The anatomical particularity of Mist Court males specifically.
" I tilt my head in polite curiosity. "I've often wondered whether a human woman could manage it.
The sensation alone—quite apart from the size—tends to be rather overwhelming.
I've had it described to me as losing the thread of one's own name.
Which strikes me as rather sad, when you think about it.
Or rather nice, depending on the woman."
The colour in her throat is extraordinary. She is managing it with a focus that would be heroic under other circumstances.
"I see," she says. Clara's voice, careful, neutral, the mild interest of a woman receiving information about foreign customs. "How interesting, my lord."
Six centuries of this and people still think the performance fools me. What is interesting is that she knows it doesn't, and she maintains it anyway, because what else is she going to do. I respect that. I do not say so.
"The Merris line—" I tilt my head as if trying to recall something from a ledger—"no omega blood, if I'm not mistaken.
Which is a shame, in certain respects. An omega takes to Mist Court anatomy very naturally.
The biology accommodates it. A human woman, though—" I let that trail off with a slight, regretful exhalation, the sound of a man gently closing a door on a room that doesn't exist. "The wanting would be there.
The body simply wouldn't be built for it. "
She looks at me. The performance is immaculate. Something underneath it has been screaming for some time and is now screaming slightly louder. I can see it in truth-sight the way you see heat rising from summer stone.
"I'm sure I couldn't say, my lord."
"No," I agree. "You couldn't." A pause. "Unless Miss Merris isn't entirely who she says she is."
She holds my gaze. The cover holds. I watch her hold it and feel a satisfaction that is less about winning than about watching something fine under pressure—the way you watch a very old mechanism still running cleanly despite everything time has done to it.
I have not been genuinely interested in a person in longer than I'd care to admit.
I am aware that this is information I should be careful with.
"I'm afraid I don't know what you mean," she says. Clara's voice. Smooth as still water.
"No," I say. "I don't suppose you do."
I move back to her side. The lesson. I set my hand beside hers on the sphere—not touching, the cold of me reaching her skin across the last centimetre of air—and watch the small muscles in her forearm tighten in response. Her pulse is visible in her throat. I watch it beat.
"Again," I say. "Don't push."
She breathes. She stares at the sphere. I have sat with worse silences in worse rooms and I can wait. Patience is not a virtue when you've had six centuries to practice it; it's just arithmetic.
Then I close my fingers over hers.
She goes very still. Her pulse jumps—one sharp spike in her throat—and she doesn't pull away, doesn't lean in, just holds herself in place with the performance intact and her jaw set.
I draw her hand from the sphere.
"Miss Merris." Quiet. Conversational.
She says nothing. A wise choice.
I press her palm flat against the front of my breeches, over the upper cock.
The warmth of her hand soaks through the cloth.
Both shafts throb with it. I watch her face and the cover cracks—two full seconds, unguarded, something behind Clara's pleasant expression going wide—and then I press her palm down further, so she feels the lower shaft as well, distinct and separate beneath, and her exhale breaks.
A real sound. Unmanaged. Her scent floods the room sharply enough that I feel it settle at the back of my throat.
Her fingers twitch against the cloth. She stops them.
"An omega," I say pleasantly, "would know exactly what to do with this."
She swallows. I watch it go down her throat.
"I'm sure I couldn't say, my lord." Clara's voice. Barely.
"No," I agree. "You couldn't."
I hold her there another moment—both shafts pulsing slow and hard against her palm, the upper running its involuntary vibration because I am wound up and not bothering to suppress it—and watch the fury in her jaw and the want she cannot extinguish and the specific self-loathing of a woman who came here to be professional and is failing at it in a way she will be thinking about at two in the morning.
I think: good. I want to be the thing that keeps her awake.
I stopped being overly concerned with kindness sometime in the fourth century and I am not going to start now on her account.
I release her hand and step away.
I find her extraordinary—that's the honest answer I have no intention of giving.
The way she holds the seam even now, her performance sitting thinner but intact, not a crack she'll let me see.
Most people fold. She has been folding for weeks without allowing herself to fall and I want her with an attention I am not accustomed to and don't particularly trust.
But I have time. The pre-heat is building. She keeps coming back.
"Your shoulders are too high," I say. "Breathe down."
The smallest pause. She needs it, and she takes it, and I let her have it without making anything of it.
She breathes down. Her scent fills the room and I breathe it in with my eyes on the sphere, and both shafts ache with the warmth she left on the cloth, and I let them ache because I am very old and very patient and this is going to end precisely one way and I am in no hurry to get there before she arrives.
That moment is coming. I can feel the shape of it the way I feel weather through the manor walls—still some days off but as certain as winter.
The pre-heat building, the magic running, the lessons pulling her back into this room where the proximity does its quiet accumulated work.
She will hold it until she can't and then she won't, and I intend to be paying close attention when it happens.
The sphere shimmers.
I lean close enough that my lips almost brush her hair and breathe her in—all of it, the want and the fury and the slick heat of her—and feel my cocks throb once, heavy and untouched, and say nothing.
"Good," I say. Quiet, close, right against her ear. "There it is."
I straighten and look at the sphere as though that's what I meant.
Neither of us mentions the rest of it.