Chapter 13 #2
We move to the next cluster. And the next.
Each conversation a small campaign, each handshake a tiny territory claimed.
Ethan reads the room with that uncanny Empri perceptiveness, identifying who is open, who is guarded, who is one well-placed observation away from reconsidering their position.
I translate his reads into action, leveraging my family name, my training, the currency of my mother's reputation even as I work to establish my own.
We are complementary. His intelligence, my position. His insight, my access.
It is, I realize with a start that I bury beneath a smile at Councilwoman Prenn, the most effective I've ever been.
Ky finds me near the refreshment column, during the brief window when Ethan has been drawn into a side conversation with a junior intelligence officer who recognized his work and can't quite believe she's talking to him in person.
My brother looks beautiful, the way Ky always looks beautiful, with that particular Zalt bone structure softened by the warmth he got from our father's side of the family.
His suit is a deep wine color, elegant without being aggressive, which is Ky in a nutshell.
But his eyes give him away. The hazel irises have shifted toward a worried, storm-washed blue, the way they do when his half-Empri biology betrays what he's really feeling.
"We need to talk," he says, steering me toward a less populated stretch of wall with his hand on my elbow, gentle but insistent. "Now."
"You look like you swallowed a wasp."
"Mother's meeting with some of the old guard." He keeps his voice low, angled away from the crowd. "The ones from the Purist faction. Hargrove. Chen-Lao. Admiral Drace."
My stomach tightens. The Purist faction has been a marginal force in Consortium politics for years, a cluster of hardliners who want the Empri eliminated entirely, not controlled, not contained, but wiped out. They've always been too extreme for mainstream support. Too bloody in their rhetoric.
"And?" I say, keeping my voice level.
"She's using your marriage as an example." His eyes search my face, and I see the fear in them that he's working so hard to keep out of his voice. "Aura, she's selling it to them. Packaging it."
"As what?"
"How to control them." He swallows. "How to... domesticate them."
The word hits me like a slap. Not because it's cruel, though it is.
Because it's precise. It's exactly the framing my mother would use: clinical, detached, the language of a handler describing a successful intervention.
I see it immediately, the shape of the narrative she's constructing.
Aura Zalt, the Consortium's loyal daughter, who took an Empri husband and brought him to heel.
Proof of concept. A case study in species management.
My fingers close around the stem of my glass so tight I'm surprised it doesn't snap.
"I haven't domesticated anyone," I say, and the words come out colder than I intend.
"That's what she's telling them." Ky's expression is pained.
He knows. He's half-Empri himself, even if no one in this room besides me and our mother acknowledges it.
Every word of our mother's pitch is a knife aimed at something inside him, too.
"A successful case study in Empri containment. Her words, Aura. Not mine."
I look across the ballroom. Ethan is still talking to the intelligence officer, his posture relaxed, his expression animated. He's gesturing, explaining something with his hands, and the officer is laughing. He looks, in this moment, like the furthest thing from a threat that I can imagine.
And my mother is across the room selling him as a pet she's taught me to keep on a leash.
Something hot and sharp crystallizes behind my sternum. Not anger. Something more focused than anger. Something with teeth.
"Thank you," I tell Ky. I squeeze his arm once, firm. "I'm handling it."
"How?"
I don't answer. I'm already moving.
I find Ethan between conversations and take his hand. Not a request. A claim.
"Come with me."
He reads my face in half a second. His eyes shift, gold bleeding warm.
He doesn't ask questions. He falls into step beside me, and we move through the periphery of the ballroom, past the main clusters of conversation, past the dance floor where another couple is performing their obligatory display, past the ornamental columns that frame the eastern wall.
The alcoves are a poorly kept secret of Consortium ballroom design.
Semi-private recesses tucked behind heavy curtains, meant officially for quiet conversations and unofficial deal-making.
Everyone knows what actually happens in them.
The curtains are thick but not sealed. The risk is architectural, built in. A feature, not a flaw.
I pull him behind the nearest curtain. The fabric whispers shut behind us, muffling the music to a low, golden pulse. The alcove is small, barely wide enough for two people standing close. The wall behind him is cool, smooth stone.
His back hits it. His eyes don't leave mine.
"They're watching us like we're specimens," I say. My voice is tight. The anger is still there, sharp and crystalline beneath my ribs, and it needs somewhere to go.
"Let them watch." His voice is low. Steady. His hands come up to my waist, not pulling, just resting there. Waiting for my lead.
I kiss him and it's not gentle. My teeth catch his lower lip and he makes a sound, low in his throat, that I feel in my spine.
I press into him, the length of my body against his, the silk of my gown crushed between us.
His hands slide down to my hips and grip, and the pressure of his fingers through the thin fabric sends a wave of heat through my core that has nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with want.
This isn't about the people on the other side of the curtain.
This is about reclaiming something. My mother is selling him as a creature I've tamed, a dangerous animal I've learned to manage.
And the truth, the vicious, gorgeous truth, is that I haven't tamed him at all.
He is fire in my hands and I don't want him cooler. I don't want him less.
I want him like this. Wild and willing and mine in a way that has nothing to do with containment.
My hands find his belt. He hisses against my mouth.
"Aura." Half warning, half prayer.
"Quiet." I get the buckle open, get my hand inside, and wrap my fingers around the hard length of him. He's already there, already wanting me, and the knowledge of it sends a rush of power through my blood that is better than anything my mother's political games have ever given me.
His hips jerk. His head tips back against the stone wall, throat exposed, and I watch the muscles in his jaw clench as he fights for silence.
From beyond the curtain, I can hear conversation.
Laughter. The clink of crystal. Someone is telling a story about a trade dispute. Someone else is laughing too loud.
We are ten feet from the most powerful people in the sector, and I am stroking my husband's cock, and I have never felt more in control of anything in my life.
"Lift my dress," I tell him.
His eyes open. Gold, burning, pupils blown so wide there's barely any color left.
His hands find the slit of my gown and slide beneath, fingers trailing up my thigh, and when he reaches the apex and finds nothing but bare skin his breath catches audibly enough that I press my free hand over his mouth.
"I said quiet."
His eyes above my fingers are molten. He nods once, sharp, and then his hand is between my legs and two fingers slide inside me and I have to lock my jaw to keep my own silence.
He curls them, finding the spot that makes my vision white out at the edges, and I grip him harder in response.
We fall into a rhythm, his fingers inside me, my hand around him, both of us fighting the same battle against sound and time and the thin curtain that is all that separates us from ruin.
He pulls his fingers free and I feel the loss like a physical ache.
But his hands are at my thighs now, lifting, and I wrap my legs around his waist as he takes my weight against the wall.
The stone is cold against my shoulders through the open back of my gown.
His cock presses against me and I reach between us, guide him, and then he's inside me in a single thrust that fills me so completely I bite the inside of my cheek hard enough to taste copper.
His forehead drops against mine. We breathe the same air, hot and ragged, and I keep my hand over his mouth as he starts to move.
Each thrust pushes me up the wall and the friction of stone against silk against skin is another sensation layered over the fullness of him, the stretch, the way he angles himself to hit the place inside me that turns my thoughts to static.
I watch his face. The control it takes him to stay silent.
The way his eyes keep fluttering shut and then snapping open again, like he can't bear to stop looking at me.
His fingers dig into my thighs hard enough to bruise and I want the marks.
I want to see them tomorrow and remember this exact moment: the muffled music, the taste of blood in my mouth, the impossible pleasure of taking something back from the machine that tried to define us.
The orgasm builds from the base of my spine, a slow, devastating wave that I can't outrun and don't try to.
I come with my hand clamped over his mouth and my teeth sunk into my own lower lip, my whole body shaking in tight, silent convulsions that clench around him so hard he follows me over the edge three thrusts later.
I feel him spill inside me, the pulse of it, the way his whole body goes rigid and then releases like a bowstring cut.
His groan vibrates against my palm, felt rather than heard.