Chapter 12
CLAIRE
Iwake up and I'm myself again.
Not gradually—all at once, present and thinking and mine.
The heat is gone. I know before I open my eyes because for five days I haven't woken up as myself first and today I do, and the difference is the same as the difference between being underwater and not being underwater.
My thoughts are my own. My decisions are mine.
I exist again as a person who makes them.
I open my eyes.
His rooms. Morning light through the tall windows, grey and flat.
The fire long dead. I'm in his bed—I knew that—and the state of it is something I am going to look at practically: I have been in heat for five days.
The evidence is present on the sheets and on my skin and I am a professional intelligence operative who has survived worse field conditions, and I am going to take stock.
What do I know. Where am I. What happened.
What happened is written on my skin.
The claiming marks are at my throat, my collarbone, my shoulders—mist-patterns in silver, shifting slightly when I touch them, like the grounds outside. Permanent. I know what that means. I put my hand down.
There is a warmth in my chest that has a direction. I can feel him in the room without looking. I'm going to have to learn to live with that, apparently.
I have five days I can't fully account for.
I have fragments: his hands, the cold of him, his voice at my ear, and my own voice saying yours—at least four times that I can piece together.
Four times of saying yours and meaning it with everything I had, and every time I locate another one in the frayed record of the last five days I feel the shame of it fresh.
Yours. Into his throat. Through tears. While he was between my thighs and I had forgotten my own name.
A professional intelligence operative in the field with a claimed mark on her throat and approximately no memory of deciding any of it.
There is also the memory—vivid, specific, mortifying—of begging him to put his mouth on me again while he had both cocks inside me and I was crying and didn't care. I locate this memory at around day three. I put it with the others.
The professional part of me would like to begin an after-action review. What I have to review is: I asked an enemy lord to go down on me while I was being knotted and cried about it. This is not a review with a satisfactory conclusion.
I look.
He's at the window with a report he isn't reading.
He turns before I move—truth-sight, or the bond, I'm going to have to work out which.
He sets the report on the ledge and looks at me across the room.
Dark brown skin, dozens of silver braids over one shoulder, the particular quality of his stillness I spent thirty-eight days trying to read.
Nothing on his face that tells me anything. He's been waiting for me to wake up.
He crosses to the chair on the far side of the room. Not the bed. Not closer. He sits and puts his hands on his knees and does not reach toward me.
He's being careful about distance. He wants me to see him being careful about it.
"The heat broke two hours ago," he says. "You've been sleeping since."
My voice comes out rough. "How long total."
"Five days."
Five days. I sit with that. Five days the spy was gone and someone else was there in her place—someone who said yours and meant it, someone who said please and more with every professional instinct stripped out.
I can still hear myself. I can still feel what I meant when I said it.
I don't know what to do with that yet so I am putting it in a drawer for later, next to the begging, next to the crying, next to the memory of his mouth on my clit at two in the morning and the sound I made that I will never tell anyone about.
The drawer is getting full.
He gets up. Goes to the side table and sets a cup of tea at the far edge, nearest to me, and returns to his chair without coming close. The distance is deliberate. I keep noting it.
I pick up the tea. It's the right temperature. I don't examine how he knew that.
Something is off—something underneath my professional instincts, which should be firing on all cylinders right now, pulling threads, asking questions.
The instinct is there, I can feel it starting, and then it settles back, like a wave that doesn't quite break.
As though a door swings shut before I can get through it.
I note this carefully. I hold onto it. I don't know what it is yet.
"The marks," I say. "What do they do."
"Permanent. The patterns respond to proximity—more active in the first months, then they settle."
"The bond."
"Emotional transmission. What I feel reaches you and vice versa. Not thoughts. The quality of a state."
"Does it change over time."
"It becomes more specific. In the first months it runs warmer. You'll learn to distinguish it."
I look at him. "The warmth right now. Is that the bond or something else."
A short pause. "Both."
"What's the something else."
"The magic. It runs through the court. It's been running since before you arrived."
He is not going to tell me more than I ask. He never has. I have a specific question and I am going to ask it directly.
"Has the magic been manipulating my feelings," I say.
"It amplifies what's already present." His voice is completely even. "It doesn't create what isn't there."
I sit with this. Amplifies what's already present.
I know exactly how his magic works—I spent nine days at a brass sphere being taught the principle: find what's already present in a thing and make it larger.
I know what it would mean if that principle applied to every feeling I've had in this court for six weeks.
I know what it would mean and I am putting that in the drawer too because the drawer is the only reason I am currently functional.
"Your intelligence archive," I say. "I want to work."
Something moves in his face. Small and gone. That was not what he expected.
Good.
And also—I notice, and hate that I notice—I want him to put his mouth on me again.
Right now. While I'm sitting here trying to conduct a professional conversation and assemble my sense of self from the pieces, some part of me that did not get the briefing is thinking about the specific way he settled between my thighs like he had all the time in the world, and the sound he made against me that I felt in my spine.
I locate this want, label it, and put it in the drawer.
The drawer is now structurally unsound but it is holding.
I drink my tea.
He takes me to the workroom and doesn't follow me in.
My notebook is on the desk exactly where I left it. The pen where I put it. The cipher I was working on five days ago is folded at the corner exactly as I left it. He knew where everything was and left it all untouched.
I sit down. Open the file I'd been working through—the eastern intelligence networks, the communication chains between his court and three others, the coded correspondence I'd been mapping.
The work I was actually here to do, before the heat took everything else.
Before yours and please and the memory of his braids falling forward over his shoulder while he—
I open to page one.
The work is the work. I was trained for this. I am good at this. I read the first line and something settles in my chest.
I do not have a word for what settles. I'm going to call it: myself. Myself settles.
I work for three hours. He doesn't come in.
Around midmorning a steward brings food and I eat without looking up.
I make notes. I find gaps in the documentation—the secondary communication records aren't in the archive he gave me access to, which means another conversation, which means asking for something—and I make a note and keep reading.
The door opens around noon.
He stands in the doorway without coming in. The cold of him reaches me across the room, and the bond warms at proximity the way he said it would, and my body has an opinion about his proximity that I am firmly not acting on. I look up from the file.
"You need the secondary communication logs," he says.
"I was going to ask."
"I'll pull them." A pause. "I'm glad you're working."
He says it the way he says everything—flat and certain.
And the warmth that arrives in my chest at those words is immediate and involuntary and exactly what the intelligence briefing on omega bond dynamics warned me it would be.
The approval response. Your handler says well done and it goes in your bones.
Except he is not my handler and this is not approval and I know exactly what it is and it still works.
"That warmth," I say. "The one I'm feeling right now. That's the bond, isn’t it? The one that makes me dependent on you.”
"Yes."
"Can you turn it off?”
"No."
"Can I?”
"No." He meets my eyes. "It runs in both directions. It's not a lever I hold."
I look at him for a long moment. I believe him. I don't know yet if I should.
"The secondary logs," I say. "Today."
"Today."
He goes.
That night I don't go to his rooms.
I sleep in my own room for the first time in I don't know how many days. The bond pulls—low and constant, from his direction, not painful, just present—and I lie on my back in the dark and breathe and think.
Amplifies what's already present. Find what's in a thing and make it larger.
The sphere shimmered twice before I did anything, and I kept my face neutral and filed it, and I have been thinking about what that means ever since.
If his magic works on feelings the way it works on everything else—and I have no reason to believe it doesn't—then everything I felt for six weeks was mine.
Made larger, made unavoidable, the edges sharpened. But mine.
This is the question I've been not-asking since I put everything in the drawer.
Because if the wanting was mine, then yours was mine.
And please was mine. And the begging was mine.
And the crying was mine. And the memory of his mouth between my thighs that I have visited six times today without intending to—that hunger is mine.
It was mine before he amplified it and it is still mine now that the heat is gone, which means the heat wasn't the point, the heat was just the moment I ran out of ways to pretend my body isn’t meant for his.
I have been a spy in his court for thirty-eight days.
I have been his since before I crossed the boundary.
I don't know what to do with that yet. The drawer is closed. I'm going to go back to the files tomorrow and do the work I came here to do and I'm going to let myself have the answer in pieces rather than all at once, because all at once would finish me.
I know what I am.
I am still a spy.
I am still here.
I am also, at two in the morning, thinking about his mouth on me and pressing my thighs together and hating myself for it, and the hatred doesn't stop the wanting, and probably nothing ever will, and this is information.
I close my eyes. I breathe. I let the bond pull and the marks settle warm at my throat.
In the morning I get up and go back to the workroom and I do not look at his door as I pass it.
I take note that I want to.