Chapter 34: Belonging
Violet had stopped being a person somewhere around the third climax. She was a puddle now, a warm liquid thing spread across the furs in the candlelit cave, chest heaving, curls plastered to her damp temples, every muscle in her body gone soft as melted candle wax. The triad bond hummed through her like a plucked harp string, still ringing from the last round, and somewhere beyond the cave mouth the noon sun sat high and merciless while her new husbands showed no sign of stopping.
She had tried to crawl out from under them ten minutes ago. She'd gotten one knee on a pillow before Cassian's hand closed warm around her hip and pulled her back, and she'd gone down laughing, breathless, half a protest dying on her tongue.
"Where," she managed, "are you getting... all of this."
"Three hundred years of practice," Cassian said, kissing her shoulder, right over the sun rune. "Give or take."
"You've been married three hours."
"Feels longer." He grinned against her skin. "In the best way."
Evander was stretched along her other side, one massive hand palming her breast with a lazy, proprietary ease, his thumb circling her nipple until it peaked again, oversensitive and aching. She batted weakly at his wrist. He ignored her. His beard dragged across her collarbone when he bent to kiss the frosted moon rune on her neck, and the bond flared, heat pouring through the tether, and she felt it double: his want of her, Cassian's want of him, her own want echoing back into both of them, a loop with no bottom.
"Evander," she gasped. "I can't. I need... I need a minute. Or a year."
"A minute," he agreed, and his voice was that deep, calm rumble that never sounded like a joke even when it was one, and his hand kept moving anyway, sliding down the soft curve of her belly, through the damp curls between her thighs. She was swollen and slick and raw and her body, traitorous thing, arched into his palm anyway.
"See," Cassian murmured, watching his husband's hand between his wife's legs like it was the finest entertainment in the kingdom. "She says she needs a minute."
"Her body disagrees."
"Her body is very persuasive."
She wanted to tell them to rest. That was the thought, the one coherent thought she'd been assembling for the last hour like a woman stacking wet stones. They had the rest of their immortal lives together. Three hundred years, minimum, by their own promise. There was no reason to spend every drop of their wedding day wringing pleasure out of each other until they collapsed. She wanted to tell them to slow down, to sleep, to eat something, to go outside like functional beings.
She wanted to tell them they could call her anything. Any pet name at all. Sweetheart, love, mate, witch, mine. The word wife had been said so many times since sunset yesterday that it had begun to wear thin in her ears, polished smooth, like a coin rubbed between fingers for two centuries. She loved it. She was also, faintly, worried it would stop meaning anything if they said it ten thousand more times before dinner.
But who was she to correct two kings clearly delighted with their new vocabulary. And besides. Forming a full sentence was, at present, beyond her.
Evander's fingers found her entrance and pressed in, two of them, slow, and her back bowed off the furs. Her breath left her in a broken sound that wasn't a word.
"There she is," Cassian said softly.
"I hate you both," she whispered.
"No, you don't," they said together, and then looked at each other over her body and laughed, and the sound of both of them laughing, deep and real, did something to her chest that had nothing to do with her sex and everything to do with why she'd said yes.
Evander withdrew his fingers, unhurried, and licked them clean without breaking eye contact with her. The deliberate obscenity of it made her clench around nothing. Then he turned his head, and his ocean-blue eyes found his husband over the slope of Violet's hip.
"You," Evander said, "have been neglecting me all morning."
Cassian's eyebrows went up, delighted. "I have been busy christening my wife."
"You christened her twice. Three times, if we count the mouth."
"I keep thorough records."
Evander reached across Violet and took a fistful of Cassian's hair, not gentle, and Violet went still between them, suddenly very interested in being furniture. A century of estrangement had cracked open under that oak tree yesterday and now the two of them touched each other with a hungry certainty she could feel through the bond, a heat that wasn't hers and was, a second current running parallel to the first.
"Then be thorough with me," Evander said.
Cassian surged up and over Violet, kissing her once, hard and brief, on the mouth. "Don't go anywhere, wife."
"Wasn't... planning," she got out, "on moving. Ever."
She watched them over the ridge of her own body as Cassian caught Evander's jaw in one big hand and kissed him, and it was nothing like the careful kisses they'd given her, it was a fight, tongues and teeth, a century of absence being spent in a single breath. Evander's hand stayed fisted in Cassian's dark hair. Cassian's palm slid down the hard plane of Evander's chest, over his stomach, and closed around his cock, already hard and leaking, and Evander made a low sound into his mouth that Violet felt in her own throat through the bond.
Oh, she thought dazedly. This is my life now.
Cassian pushed him down onto the furs beside her. Evander went, broad back hitting the pillows, olive skin gleaming in the candlelight, and Cassian settled between his thighs like he'd done it ten thousand times and was furious with himself for missing a hundred years of it. He didn't rush. He ran his hands up Evander's flanks, thumbs tracing the grooves of muscle, and leaned down and took him into his mouth in one smooth, unhurried slide.
Evander's head tipped back. His hand found Cassian's hair again, not directing, just holding, and a string of low, wrecked sounds came out of that reserved, commanding mouth, and Violet lay on her side three feet away and watched her husband swallow her other husband whole.
The bond did its work. Every pull of Cassian's mouth came to her as a warm pull low in her belly. Every clench of Evander's jaw was a pulse against her clit. She wasn't touched, she wasn't moving, and she was gasping anyway, one hand pressed flat over her own stomach like she could hold herself together.
"You're beautiful," she blurted.
Cassian lifted his head, lips wet, golden eyes crinkling. "Both of us?"
"Both of you."
"Say it again," Evander rasped, "when you can breathe."
"I could say it... all day. If anyone gave me a day."
"They're not going to," Cassian said cheerfully, and went back down.
He worked him with his mouth and his hand, slow at first, then faster, and Evander's control came apart the way it only ever came apart here, in the dark, in the two places he let himself be undone, his hips driving up, his breath ragged, and when he came Cassian held him through it, throat working, and Violet felt the climax detonate through the bond like a struck bell, pleasure that wasn't hers rolling through her body, and she came too, sudden and shattering, crying out with no warning, shaking on the furs.
They both turned to look at her. She was face-down in a pillow now, boneless, hideously exposed, grinning into the fur.
"That's going to be a problem," she mumbled.
"That's going to be the best problem," Cassian said.
"I came watching. I came watching you two. That's... that's so embarrassing."
"It's the hottest thing that's ever happened to me," Cassian said, "and I have been alive for three hundred and forty-nine years."
"Three hundred and fifty," Evander corrected, breath still rough. "Last month."
"He's counting," Cassian stage-whispered to Violet. "He's been counting since the day we met."
"You were late to your own coronation. I was counting minutes then as well."
Cassian crawled up Evander's body and kissed him, and Violet watched the taste of Evander's climax pass between their mouths, and the bond hummed, sated for the moment, warm and slow as honey. She dragged herself backward a few inches on the furs, put her spine against the cool stone of the cave wall, and just breathed.
The cave glowed gold at midday, candlelight and the low sun angling through the mouth, catching the steam of their bodies. The furs were wrecked. The pillows were worse. Someone, Cassian, clearly, had stocked an entire hamper of bread and fruit and two bottles of wine, and it sat untouched by the wall like a reproach.
"Eat," she croaked, pointing at it.
"After," Cassian said.
"After what? After what, Cassian. What is there left to do to me."
"I meant after we rest."
"Oh."
Evander sat up, raked his dark hair back from his face, and looked at her, and his stern face had gone soft in that way she was learning to read, the way that meant affection was sitting in his chest too big to stay quiet. "You're shaking."
"I'm legendary. There's a difference."
He got up, crossed to the hamper, and came back with bread, a wedge of soft cheese, and a handful of dark cherries. He sat against the wall on her other side and put the bread to her mouth himself. She stared at him. He waited, patient as stone.
She ate it. It was the best bread of her entire life, and she told him so, and he said, "You said that about the cheese," and she said, "Everything's the best, everything's amazing, I'm having a religious experience via picnic," and Cassian laughed so hard he fell sideways across Evander's legs.
She fed him a cherry. He ate it from her fingers with a look that promised nothing good. She fed Evander one and he bit it neatly off the stem she held and said, "Thank you, wife," and there it was again, that word, wife, and she felt it land in her ears like a pebble dropped into a well already deep.
"Can I say something," she said.
"You just did," Cassian said. "Several times."
"Shut up. A real thing." She pulled her knees up, which hurt, everything hurt, a good hurt, a deep-muscle bruised-from-use hurt that made her feel owned in the best way. "You can call me other things. Any pet name you want. Sweetheart. Love. Anything. You don't have to say wife every time. You've said it about four hundred times since the ceremony and I love you for it but the word is starting to sound like furniture."
Cassian's grin faded into something warmer. "You're worried we'll wear it out."
"I'm worried it'll stop feeling like this." She touched the runes on her shoulders, one and then the other. "Like it did the first time. In the rain."
Evander was quiet a moment. Then: "Sweetheart, then."
Her whole face went hot. A hundred and fifty years of being composed in front of entire courts and one word from this man turned her into a strawberry.
"Oh, that worked," Cassian said, delighted. "Look at her."
"Sweetheart," Evander said again, deliberately, watching her burn, and Cassian leaned over her and kissed her flaming cheek and murmured, "love," against her ear, and she buried her face in her knees and made a small sound and both of them laughed, the bond carrying their joy into her chest like sunlight.
"Fine," she said into her knees. "That's fine. Do that forever."
"There she is," Cassian said again, softer this time.
She sat back against the wall between them and let herself recover. The bond pulsed slow and satisfied, three heartbeats braided into one rhythm. Cassian had an arm around her waist, his thumb making slow circles on her hip. Evander's shoulder pressed warm against hers. Outside, faintly, the festival horns sounded again, the second day's rites rolling on without them, and she thought about noon. It was well past noon. The sun was already tilting west.
"Everyone's wondering," she said. "Where their kings are."
"Everyone knows where their kings are," Cassian said. "We walked into a treeline last night with our bride and didn't come out. The whole festival is placing wagers."
"On what?"
"Whether we're still alive or merely exhausted."
"Mira's probably at lunch right now," Violet said, "smirking at the treeline. Making comments. Aneara's probably betting against her."
"She won a fair sum yesterday," Evander said, "on the timing of your yes."
"She what?"
"There were wagers," Evander said, with the tone of a man delivering a strategic briefing. "Aneara won on the yes coming before sunset. Mira lost, heavily, on you needing to be convinced first."
"Mira bet against me saying yes?"
"Mira bet that you would spiral for at least an hour before saying yes. You took eleven minutes."
"I did not spiral."
"You cried and listed the political fallout of marrying two kings," Evander said. "Then you said yes. Mira called it the fastest spiral in recorded history and is reportedly furious about it."
Violet started laughing and couldn't stop, and her husbands held her through it, and it hurt her ribs and she didn't care. When she caught her breath, Cassian had stolen the cheese and Evander had taken her hand, lacing his fingers through hers, and the cave was warm and still, and she thought, with a fullness that ached, that she had spent three hundred and forty-seven years afraid of exactly this and had never once imagined how it would actually feel.
"I have one more coherent thought in me," she announced. "Then I'm done for the day."
"Make it count," Cassian said.
"I love you. Both of you. I'd have waited three hundred more years for you without knowing I was waiting, and that's..." Her voice cracked and she steadied it. "That's my whole thought. That's the thought."
The bond flared, gold and frost together, and both kings went still, and she felt what it did to them, the wave of it, and nobody said wife. Nobody said anything. Cassian kissed her temple. Evander pressed his mouth to the top of her head, into her curls, and breathed in, jasmine and caramel, and let it out slow.
Then Cassian's stomach growled, loud enough to echo off the stone, and the solemnity died instantly.
"Right," Cassian said, reaching for the bread. "Recovery rations. And then, wife..."
"Ah," Violet said, lifting one warning finger.
"...love," he corrected smoothly, grin widening, "we are going back out there, and we are going to dance at the second day's rites, and everyone is going to see exactly how well you've been treated, because you are going to walk like a newborn foal and there is nothing either of us can do about it."
"I hate you," she said.
"You came watching us," Evander said. "You love us."
She had no rebuttal. She ate a cherry and glared at them and plotted, distantly, all the ways she was going to make them pay for it tonight, and the bond carried her plotting to both of them, and both of them smiled at her, and the noon light crept a slow inch further across the furs while the festival horns called and the three of them, at last, began to get dressed.