Chapter 9 #2
"How do I know." He slides both hands from my hips up my sides, cold palms spreading across my ribs.
"Because I have her grid reference." His hands find my breasts and cup them, cold and certain, and my nipples harden against his palms so sharply I make a sound.
"My people have known about her since October.
" He squeezes—slow and deliberate—and the whimper that comes out of me is broken and furious and real.
His thumbs find my nipples, work slow circles, and I am shaking, hands barely keeping purchase on the stone.
"She went quiet because she got close to something. Went deep. Not burned. Just careful."
"You've been—" I try to think. Extremely difficult. His thumbs on my nipples and his cocks rocking slow against my soaked entrance and the vibration running through everything, and thinking is simply not available right now. "Watching her."
"Watching everyone of interest." His mouth drops to the back of my neck—cold lips, then teeth, a slow drag along my nape—and heat floods down through my belly and my pussy clenches desperately around nothing while his hips roll forward.
"You set up the drop to warn her. Get out if you need to.
" His teeth close slightly and I gasp. "You think I wouldn't read it before it arrived? "
"I burned it—"
"After." He bites down on the curve of my neck, and both cocks rock forward, and the upper cock presses an inch inside me—cold, vibration starting immediately—and I cry out into the floor.
Then gone. Both cocks, both hands, his mouth.
The cold air is everywhere and my pussy is clenching around nothing again and I make a sound that shames me completely and I cannot stop it.
"Tell me your name," he says. Behind me. Calm as weather.
"I told you—"
His hand wraps in my hair. One sharp pull, my head wrenched back, his mouth cold against my ear.
"I won't fuck Clara." Low. Certain. "Clara Merris doesn't exist. I have spent thirty-five days in a room with you and I know exactly who is kneeling on this floor and it is not her." Both cocks press against my lower back, hard and present, the weight of them a specific promise. "Say your name."
The heat. His cold breath against my ear.
Eight days of a blank stone and Lena's name in his keeping and thirty-five days of being someone else in every room I've walked into.
I am so tired. I am so tired of all of it, and his cock was inside me forty minutes ago and I left, and my clit is aching and my nipples are raw and my body has been trying to tell me something for five weeks and I am done arguing with it.
"Claire," I say. Barely sound. "Claire Whitmore."
He is still for a moment.
Then he presses forward again—both cocks back between my thighs, the slick running freely now, soaking the insides of my legs—and he takes his time with it, slow and rolling, the upper cock dragging through my pussy on every stroke, the lower one pressing thick and heavy against the seam of me just below.
I can feel the difference between them: the upper curved, finding angles that make my toes curl against the stone; the lower thick enough that I feel it everywhere it presses even without it inside me.
I am whimpering with every breath, short and broken and continuous, my hips straining back against his hands and his hands holding them still and my clit catching against the upper shaft on every roll and it is not enough and my body knows it and I know it and he knows it.
"Rosalind," he says, against my ear. His chest almost touching my back.
"She's better than she's been in years." He rocks forward and the head of the upper cock presses inside one inch—the cold of him, the vibration—and I cry out into the floor.
Then gone. Cold air. "She's not performing.
Not for me, not for this court, not for anyone.
The bond didn't take her apart. It took the performance away.
What's underneath is entirely hers." His hands slide back to my breasts, squeezing slowly while he talks, his thumbs on my nipples, and the compound sensation of his hands and his cocks pressing and withdrawing is a kind of specific torture I have no defenses for.
"She told me about you. She misses you."
"Please—"
"Please what." The upper cock presses in again—two inches, maybe three—vibration humming right there, his thumbs working my nipples simultaneously—and everything stacks until I cannot think past it.
"Please more? Please tell you she's happy?
" His hips rock and the upper cock finds the angle and I moan, the sound going up off the walls.
"She is. She wants you to know she chose this.
" He withdraws. All of him. Both cocks, both hands, everything at once—and I am left shaking on the cold stone with nowhere to put any of it, clenching around nothing, furious and desperate and well past caring that he can see all of it.
"Tell me what you want," he says. Behind me. Calm.
"I need—" I am beyond everything. Beyond strategy, beyond Clara, beyond three years of field training and a cover that has taken five weeks to crack.
My clit is throbbing and my nipples ache and my pussy is clenching around nothing and there is no professional version of this sentence. "I need you to—"
"I know what you need." His lips brush my ear, the cold of them sending a shiver all the way down.
"I'm going to give it to you." His voice drops to something that lives at the base of my spine.
"Both cocks. Deep. My knot inside you until you can't move and you won't want to. " A pause. "But you're going to ask."
He wraps my hair in his fist and turns my head.
"Ask me. Your real name. What you want. All of it."
The heat decides.
"Claire Whitmore," I say, my voice completely wrecked and I do not care, not even slightly, not anymore. "I want you to fuck me. Both. I want your knot, I want—" My voice breaks apart on the wanting. "Please. Please."
Silence.
Then he steps back.
His hands work both shafts—I can hear it, the slick sounds of it, fast and purposeful, all the patience stripped out—and the release comes in two waves exactly as he told me it would.
The silver first: cool and bright, striping across my lower back, pooling in the small of it, running warm down over my arse and the backs of my soaked thighs.
Then the second wave—hotter, the seed—and he groans above me, low and genuine, and I feel it land heavier, spreading warm across my skin.
I stay on my hands and knees on the cold stone and breathe.
He crouches behind me.
Both hands on my arse—cold palms spreading, feeling the warmth of his release on my skin—and he doesn't hurry.
He smooths his hands slowly through it, working it across my skin, down over my thighs, and then down through my pussy, and the sensation of his cold hands and the warmth of his seed together is something I was not prepared for.
Not the act—the response: the slick that floods out of me, the surge of want that goes through my whole body when his hands work his seed against my skin, like my body has filed this under his, claimed, done and is responding with complete sincerity.
The professional part of me would like to register an objection. The professional part of me is no longer seated at the table.
"There," he says, behind me. Conversational. His thumbs press into the crease of my arse and spread, and the warmth of his release runs down through my pussy, and I moan against the floor. "Look at that."
"Don't—"
"You're absolutely soaked." His thumb presses through my entrance, just the pad of it, and I grip the stone.
"My release on your skin and you're wetter than you were.
" He presses a little harder and I whimper.
"Three years in the field, Claire Whitmore.
" The name deliberate. His thumb circles my entrance, not entering, just the pressure.
"Soaking through her underthings because an alpha spent on her arse. "
He pushes one finger inside—cold and slow—his palm pressing his seed against me from the outside while his finger works from the inside, and the combination obliterates whatever I was going to say.
"You're clenching around my finger." He adds a second and I cry out, muffled against my arm. "There you are."
He works both fingers slowly, his thumb against my clit from the outside, the slick running freely, and I am shaking and gripping the floor and making sounds I cannot stop.
My clit is throbbing against his palm with every stroke, everything in me reduced to the sensation of his fingers and his hands and his seed warm on my skin.
"Thirty-five days," he says, his fingers finding the angle and holding it—the specific angle that makes my legs want to close, which they cannot, because he is between them.
"My release on your skin is what does it.
" He sounds genuinely pleased, the way he sounds when the sphere shimmers.
"Your body has very clear opinions about who you belong to. "
"I don't—" The sentence evaporates. He crooks his fingers, his thumb working in circles against my clit where his seed has pooled warm, and the orgasm hits—sudden and total, cresting on the compound sensation of all of it at once.
I shudder through it on my hands and knees on the cold stone floor and the sound I make is nothing any professional would claim.
He holds his fingers still and lets me finish.
When the shaking slows, he withdraws—slow, deliberate, feeling every flutter—and wipes his hand on my ruined skirts.
"Turn around," he says.
I turn around.
He's crouched in front of me, both cocks at eye level.
The upper flushed dark and curved, silver cooling along the shaft.
The lower cock thick and straight beneath it, heavier, his seed at the base.
The smell of him from here—warm and cold at once, court magic underneath—hits me in the throat and fresh slick floods between my thighs. My body is embarrassingly legible.
His expression is the one I have never fully named. Patient and certain and something underneath both.
"Clean them up," he says.
I should refuse. I have a notebook on the sill and three years of training and I am kneeling on a cold stone floor at half past one in the morning because he told me to, and I should refuse.
I lean forward and open my mouth over the head of the upper cock.
The taste lands all at once—cool silver first, faintly metallic, running cold over my tongue even as the flesh beneath it is warm.
I run my tongue up the underside of the shaft, working through the release, and he makes a sound above me.
Low and controlled. His hand comes into my hair, fingers spreading against my scalp, the weight of his palm settling there without pushing.
I work my way to the base and back, and the cock thickens slightly under my tongue as I go. He feels me feel it. His fingers tighten once.
"Good," he says. Quiet. "All of it."
I take the head back into my mouth and the taste shifts—the silver fading, the warmth of him underneath, something that is just him. I stay longer than I need to. I know it. He knows it. Neither of us says so.
"Now the other," he says.
The lower cock opens my jaw wider immediately—the stretch against the corners of my mouth—and his hand in my hair tightens. He likes that. I can feel him like it. I run my tongue along the underside, tasting the seed concentrated here, heavier and warmer, and work slowly toward the head.
"Look at me," he says.
I look up.
His eyes are on my face. Dark and steady and completely attentive, watching every flicker of expression I can't control from here—my stretched jaw, the flush in my own cheeks, the way my hands have come up to hold the base of both shafts without me deciding to.
His thumb traces my jaw where it's working around him, slow and deliberate.
"Claire Whitmore," he says. My name, the way he says everything—certain, like he's owned it longer than he's had permission to use it.
"Three years in the field." His fingers curl in my hair.
"On your knees in the dark." His thumb presses gently against my stretched jaw. "And your thighs are soaked."
I can't answer. My mouth is full and he knows it.
"I can smell it from here," he says. "How much you want this." His hand tightens just slightly—not cruel, just present, inescapable. "Thirty-five days of hating yourself for wanting it." His eyes stay on my face. "Here you are anyway."
I sit back on my heels. Both cocks clean. His seed gone, just the cold of his skin and his taste in my mouth and my jaw aching.
"Good girl," he says.
Two words. They land somewhere below my sternum and settle there like something that was always going to be put down in exactly that spot, and I hate how much I want to hear them again, and he knows that too, the way he knows everything. I have run out of things to hide.
He stands. Reaches down and gets one arm under my knees and one behind my back and lifts me like I weigh nothing, and the cold of his chest against my side and the heat going absolute at the contact, and I don't fight it. I am done fighting things that have already been decided.
"My skirts," I say. Still pushed up to my waist. His seed drying on the backs of my thighs.
"Yes," he says. Doesn't touch them.
He carries me out of the room.
The east corridor. The main corridor. The grand staircase.
He doesn't hurry and he doesn't hide it—my skirts bunched at my waist, my thighs bare, the state of me visible to anyone awake in this manor.
He carries me the way he does everything: like the outcome was never in question.
I press my face against his chest and breathe his scent and let the heat take what it wants, which is this, which I think has always been this, and I think maybe I have known that since before I crossed the boundary.
His chambers. The door. The dark room with the fire burned low.
He sets me on the bed.
Looks at me.
"Claire," he says. My name. Not Clara.
The heat breaks completely.
I reach for him.