Chapter 2: Kneel
It took you four days to go to him, and he made you suffer for every one of them by behaving perfectly.
That was the cruelty of it. You'd braced for teasing. For him to lounge on the throne and say something unforgivable in front of the whole court, to toy with you through the thread, to make you pay for what he'd felt. Instead he was impeccable. He sat through the morning councils with his chin on his fist and listened to the grain reports from Vanaheim and the border disputes on Nidavellir, and he ruled on them sharply and well. He was courteous to the herald. He was gracious to the old lords who hated him. When you entered the hall he inclined his head to you exactly as far as protocol demanded, not a hair further, and called you Lady Mage in a voice so neutral it could have been carved from salt.
He did not mention the thread. He did not mention the night. He did not look at you for one breath longer than he looked at anyone else.
And at night, alone in your tower, the thread at your wrist hummed with what he felt, and he did nothing at all to hide it.
It wasn't words. He didn't speak to you again, not once. It was simpler and much worse. Lying in the dark, you felt him at the other end: restless, sleepless, wanting. You felt him think of you. You couldn't have said how you knew it was you, any more than you could have said how you knew your own hand was yours. But you knew. A long slow ache, patient and deliberate, like a hand resting against a door it had decided not to open until it was invited.
On the fourth night, you threw back your covers, wrapped yourself in a robe, and walked down two flights of stairs and across a moonlit bridge and up three more flights to the regent's chambers, and you didn't knock.
He was standing at the window with his back to you. No helm, no armor. Just a loose shirt of dark green silk and black trousers, his hair down around his shoulders, a goblet of wine forgotten in one hand. He didn't turn around.
"Lady Mage," he said. "How unexpected."
"Liar."
"Mm. Always." He set the goblet on the sill. "Did you come to tighten my leash?"
"I came to ask why you haven't used it." You stopped in the middle of the room. Your heart was pounding so hard you were sure he could feel it, and then realized of course he could. "You know what I felt. You've known for four days. You could have used it against me in front of the entire court and you didn't. Why?"
He turned then. In the candlelight his eyes were very green and very steady.
"Because," said Loki, "you'd have to want it."
The words dropped into the quiet between you like stones into a well.
"I've had a great many things in my life," he went on, softly, walking toward you. "Most of them I stole. Some I was given out of pity. A throne I didn't earn, a name that was never mine, a family that didn't know what I was." He stopped an arm's length away. "I find I don't want to steal you. And I'd sooner die than have you out of pity. So I waited."
"For what?"
"For you to walk through that door," he said, "without knocking."
You looked at him for a long moment, the god of lies with his hair down and his hands empty, the moonlight on his face. You felt the thread at your wrist, warm and humming, and down it the whole slow ache of his wanting, held back, carefully, behind a door.
You thought about the throne room. About the whole court holding its breath.
"Kneel," you said.
He went very still.
Then the corner of his mouth curved, slow and wicked, and his eyes went dark. And Loki of Asgard, who had stood on a German street and ordered a crowd of mortals to their knees, sank down in front of you onto the stone floor of his own chambers in one long graceful movement, until he was looking up at you through his lashes.
"Only for you," he murmured. "Don't tell anyone. It would ruin my reputation."
You put your hand in his hair. It was softer than you'd imagined, and you'd imagined it a great deal over the past four days. He tipped his head back into your palm and closed his eyes and you felt, through the thread, a bolt of something so fierce and grateful that it took your breath away.
"Is this what you want?" he asked, very quiet. "Say it plainly. I'll not guess."
"Yes." Your voice shook. "I want you. Here. Now."
His hands came up to the sash of your robe. He looked up at you, waiting, until you nodded. Then he drew the knot loose with one slow tug, and the silk slid open, and he made a low, rough sound at the back of his throat that you felt down the thread before you heard it.
He didn't rush. You'd thought he might, after four days, but he didn't. He pressed his mouth to your stomach, just below your navel, and stayed there, breathing. His hands were cool on the backs of your thighs. When they slid upward his fingertips left trails of faint frost on your skin that melted at once into warmth, and you shivered so hard your knees nearly gave.
"Cold?" he asked against your skin.
"No. Don't stop."
"I had no intention of stopping." He kissed lower, along the crease of your hip. "I intend to take a very long time."
He did.
He hooked one of your knees over his shoulder and held you steady with a hand flat against your back, and put his mouth on you, and the sound you made echoed off the stone. His tongue was slow and clever and utterly unhurried. He explored you as if you were a spell he was determined to learn by heart, every stroke deliberate, and the moment you gasped he went still and did it again, precisely, until your hand was fisted in his hair and your hips were moving against his mouth without your permission.
And the thread. Gods, the thread. It was blazing now, a band of heat around your wrist. You could feel him at the other end, feel what he felt: the taste of you, the heat of you against his tongue, the grip of your fingers in his hair, and how much he loved every bit of it. It came down the thread and met your own pleasure coming up, and the two of them tangled together until you couldn't tell which was yours. It was like standing between two mirrors. It doubled. It doubled again.
You came with his name torn out of you, both hands in his hair, your knee locked over his shoulder. He held you through it, his mouth gentling but never leaving you, and through the thread you felt him shudder too, a fierce answering wave of it, as though your pleasure had become his.
When you could see again he was looking up at you from the floor with his lips wet and his eyes black and an expression of such naked astonishment that it made your chest hurt.
"I felt that," he said hoarsely. "Norns. I felt all of that."
"So did I."
"Your pleasure. Mine. It went both ways." He laughed, unsteady, and pressed his forehead to your hip. "Mother, you sly old witch. You knew."
You pulled him up by his shirt. He came willingly, rising to his feet in one smooth motion, and you got the green silk over his head and threw it somewhere and put your mouth on his collarbone. He hissed. His skin was cool and smooth and when you scraped your teeth along it you felt the jolt of it echo down the thread into your own body, and you both groaned at the same time.
"Bed," you said.
"Yes, my lady." He was already walking you backward. "Anything you command."
He laid you down on the dark green coverlet and stripped out of his trousers while you watched, and you let yourself look, because he so clearly wanted you to. He was long and lean and pale as moonlight, a scatter of old scars along his ribs, and he was hard and flushed and very obviously, unashamedly wanting. He climbed onto the bed and settled between your thighs, braced on his forearms, his hair falling around your faces like a curtain.
"Tell me again," he said. "I want to hear it."
"I want you." You wrapped your legs around his hips. "All of you. Now, Loki."
He pushed into you slowly, watching your face, and you both stopped breathing.
Through the thread it was unbearable. You felt yourself stretch around him, the full slow ache of it, and at the same time you felt him feel it: the tight wet heat of you closing around him, the way your heels dug into the backs of his thighs. Two sets of sensation crashing into each other, until you weren't sure whose body was whose. He dropped his forehead to yours and swore, long and inventive, in a language you didn't recognize.
"Is it..." he gasped.
"Yes. It's too much. Don't stop."
He started to move.
Slow at first, deep and rolling, his hips grinding against yours on every stroke so that he hit something inside you that made your vision blur. You clawed at his back. He caught your wrists, the one with the thread and the one without, and pinned them above your head in one cool hand, and looked down at you with a question in his eyes. You arched up into him and said yes, and he groaned and pressed you down into the coverlet and fucked you harder.
The thread blazed between your joined hands. Frost crawled across the headboard in feathered patterns. The candles guttered all at once, then flared green. You heard yourself crying out, and you felt through the thread what it did to him to hear it, and that sent you higher, and that sent him higher, a spiral with no bottom.
You came first. He followed you into it with a ragged shout, buried deep, his face pressed into your neck and your name on his lips over and over, and the thread between you flared so bright for a second that it lit the whole room silver.
You woke a little before dawn with his arm heavy across your waist and the thread glowing softly on your wrist, warm and drowsy and content in a way you'd never felt it before.
You slipped out of the bed without waking him. You found your robe on the floor and wrapped it around yourself and padded out barefoot into the grey corridor, meaning to get back to your tower before the servants were up.
Lord Haldor was waiting for you at the end of the hall.
He was one of the old lords of the council, white-bearded, ring-heavy, who had sat at Odin's right hand for longer than you'd been alive. He looked at your bare feet and your mussed hair and the door you'd just come out of, and he didn't seem surprised in the least.
"Lady Mage," he said pleasantly. "A word, if you would. Walk with me."
You didn't move. "It's very early, my lord."
"It is. Which is why I've waited here half the night to catch you alone." He smiled. It didn't reach his eyes. "I don't think the queen ever told you, did she? What that binding is truly for."
The thread at your wrist went suddenly, horribly cold.
"It doesn't only stop his magic," said Lord Haldor, very softly. "Pull it hard enough, my dear, and it stops his heart. The Allfather made sure of that before he slept. And the council has decided it's very nearly time for you to pull."