Chapter 50: Grander and Grander
Violet woke to sunlight on the sheets and a mouth at her throat.
Cassian's stubble scraped her jaw, his kiss slow and unhurried, the first of the morning. She kept her eyes closed and smiled. His hand slid warm over her hip, over the swell of it, and he hummed against her skin like a man tasting something expensive.
Then the weight shifted on her other side and Evander's beard brushed her temple. Second kiss. His were always quieter, pressed to the corner of her mouth, deliberate as a signature on a treaty.
Cassian came back for the third, proper this time, tilting her chin with two fingers and taking her mouth like he had all morning. He did have all morning. He always said so.
"Three," Violet rasped, when he let her breathe. "The minimum is met. I can sleep now."
"Not a chance." He kissed her again, fourth, and then Evander leaned across her and kissed Cassian over her shoulder, fifth by any honest count, and the bond in her chest lit up like a struck bell.
Gods. Fifty years. Fifty years of celibacy after Marcus, fifty years of her own hand and a locked door and telling herself it was simpler that way. She used to listen to Dawn complain about Magnus sleeping on her like a possessive boulder and feel nothing but a polite, distant envy. Mira used to describe what Aneara did to her and Violet would laugh and change the subject because there was nothing on her side of the ledger to trade.
Now she had a minimum.
"I'm getting up," she said, and neither of them moved, because she was pinned under two hundred and seventy stone of wolf-shifter and they both knew she was lying.
"You're not," Cassian said into her neck.
"She's not," Evander agreed, and his hand was already traveling, palm skimming the curve of her waist, the softness of her belly, down between her thighs where she was already warm and waking in a different way. He pressed one thick finger along her slit, found her wet, and made a low sound of satisfaction that she felt in her spine.
"This is a pattern," Violet managed. "Every morning. You have a system."
"We have a wife," Cassian said. "Systems are Evander's department."
Evander slid two fingers into her, slow, curling them, and her sentence died. He knew her body better now than she did, three weeks of study, ledger-reading fingers, and he played her like a problem to be solved, thumb finding her clit and circling with maddening patience. Cassian took her breast into his mouth, tongue laving her nipple, teeth grazing just enough to make her arch.
She came apart in under a minute, thighs shaking, one hand fisted in the sheets and the other buried in Cassian's dark hair. The bond pulsed through all three of them, her pleasure echoing back doubled, tripled, so that the kings groaned against her when she broke.
"There it is," Cassian murmured, kissing the sun rune on her left shoulder. Her mate marks flickered when she was aroused; she could feel them, gold and silver, glowing through her skin. "Best sound in the kingdom."
"We're keeping her," Evander said, deadpan, licking her wetness from his fingers while she watched, flushed and boneless.
"You can't keep a queen."
"We literally can. You're married to us. There's paperwork."
She laughed until Cassian kissed the laugh out of her.
Later, much later, Violet stood in the bathing room wrapping her hair, wearing nothing but the sun-moon comb, and felt the bond tug.
It was a strange thing, the tether. She'd learned its grammar over three weeks. Hunger felt like heat at the base of her spine. Cassian's temper felt like a low vibration behind her sternum. And when her husbands went to each other, when the two wolves found one another without her, it felt like warmth moving away and coming back, a tide she could track through the palace stone.
She felt it now. Cassian's warmth and Evander's warmth, converging somewhere in the east wing, away from her. Sneaking off together, the way they'd been doing more and more since they'd stopped holding back.
Before the wedding they'd been a hundred years estranged, two kings orbiting the same palace, communicating in requisitions and silences. Now the bond between all three of them had rekindled the old one, and her husbands had become, frankly, incapable of keeping their hands off each other.
Violet smiled at her reflection and let them have their privacy. She always did. It wasn't hers to watch unless they offered.
But gods, she loved knowing. She loved walking the corridor an hour later and finding Cassian's collar crooked and Evander's beard carrying the faint scent of him, and both kings looking faintly smug and refusing to explain. She loved that the bond told her, warm and shameless, my husbands are in love, twice over.
She found them at breakfast. Cassian had Evander's hand on the table and was absently rubbing his thumb over his knuckles, some old habit resurrected, and Evander was letting him, which from Evander was practically a public declaration. The steward had stopped commenting weeks ago. The staff had adapted to all of it, the kings sneaking off, the queen's3 audible mornings, Harn's earplugs.
"There's a thing," Cassian said, the moment she sat down.
"There's always a thing."
"Your wardrobe." He said it gently, which was how she knew it had been discussed. Everything gentle with them lately was pre-discussed. "We did an inventory for the coronation fittings. Half your dresses are gone."
"Gone where?"
"You burned them," Evander said. "Slowly. Over three weeks. Usually after we tore one off you."
Violet opened her mouth to object and closed it. There had been the green one, ruined against the anvil. The blue one with the honest neckline she'd loved, torn in the parlor. The grey one she'd taken off herself and, in a fit of something she hadn't examined, fed to the hearth fire with her morning tea in hand.
"That's not burning, that's culling," she said.
"It's a wardrobe crisis," Cassian said. "You have four dresses and one of them is court formal."
"I have the black one."
"You have the black one and it's held together by spite and a memory."
She looked down at her plate. This was the part she hated, the part where they saw through her to the girl who'd spent fifty years making herself small, who'd worn grey and loose cuts and stayed out of doorways. New dresses meant new silhouettes. New silhouettes meant being seen.
"We're not hiring a tailor behind your back," Evander said. "But we want you in this century's fashion. Or any century's. We want you dressed the way you actually look."
"Which is how?"
"Like a feast," Cassian said, at the same moment Evander said, "Like a queen," and they looked at each other and then at her, and the bond flushed warm through her whole chest.
Violet drank her tea and thought about it. Three weeks of kisses had taught her something about negotiation with wolves: they never wore her down with demands. They wore her down with devotion.
"Fine," she said. "Fine. I'll take a tailor. But I choose who. Nobody from your court, nobody who's going to drape me in sackcloth for modesty's sake, and nobody who flinches when they take my measurements."
"Deal," Cassian said instantly, too instantly.
"You already have someone in mind," she narrowed her eyes. "Don't you."
"Maybe," he said, grinning, and stole a kiss off her mouth across the table, her daily ration apparently unlimited now, "there's a witch in Gullhaven who does silk work for the albatross envoy. Mira mentioned her. Says she's blunt, expensive, and doesn't give a damn that you have curves."
"Mira mentioned her."
"Mira may have been suggesting it for weeks," Evander admitted. "Since the wedding, in fact. She said, and I'm quoting, 'Someone dress that woman before she hides in grey again.'"
Violet snorted. Traitor. Best friend. Traitor best friend.
"Write to her," she said, and surprised herself with how easily it came. "The Gullhaven witch. If she can work with me instead of around me, she's hired."
Cassian beamed like she'd approved a festival. Evander simply nodded and pulled a fresh sheet toward him, already drafting, and under the table his knee pressed against hers, and Cassian's hand found her thigh, and breakfast proceeded with the two of them touching her at both ends like she was something they'd won and were determined to keep.
She let them. She was learning to be kept.
That evening, walking back from the infirmary where she'd delivered Sera's bracelet, Violet felt the tide move again. Both her husbands, warm, converging. This time it pulled her off her path.
She told herself she was just passing by. The east gallery had good light. The fact that the bond grew warmer with every step had nothing to do with it.
She rounded the pillar by the tall window and stopped.
Cassian had Evander against the wall between two hangings, one fist in his collar, the other hand splayed on his jaw, and they were kissing like the century of silence was being paid back with interest. Evander's stern composure was gone, his head tipped back, one big hand gripping the back of Cassian's shirt hard enough to strain seams. Cassian's mouth moved to his throat and Evander made a sound, low, wrecked, that Violet had never heard from him and would now be thinking about for the rest of her immortal life.
The bond sang. Not hers, theirs, and it poured through the tether into her anyway, a shared current, and she stood in the gallery with her hand on the cold stone and her breath going unsteady, watching her husbands, not hiding, not leaving.
Evander's eyes opened over Cassian's shoulder. Blue, unfocused, then finding her.
She froze. Caught.
He didn't pull away. He didn't startle. He looked at her with his mouth still against Cassian's throat, and something in his gaze said come here, and Cassian, feeling the shift of it through their bond, turned his head and grinned at her with wet lips and not one shred of embarrassment.
"You always let us have privacy," he said.
"I do."
"You don't have to."
Violet crossed the gallery. Slowly, because her knees required it. When she reached them Cassian caught her hand and pulled her in, and the three of them fit together in the window light, her back against Evander's chest, his arms folding around her waist, Cassian's mouth finding hers while Evander's found her neck, and the bond doing what it always did, compounding, hunger feeding hunger, the floor becoming the ceiling becoming the floor again.
"New rule," she breathed, when she could. "You two stop sneaking off. Or at least stop being subtle about it. I like knowing."
Evander's chuckle moved through her back like a cat's purr made of gravel. "You like watching."
"I like watching," she admitted, and felt both of them go still and hot at the words. "Later. Right now I have a wardrobe to plan and a tailor to terrify, and two husbands who owe me dinner."
Cassian nipped her lower lip. "Dinner first?"
"Dinner first," Evander said against her hair, and she felt him smile there, rare and real. "But the evening's ours."
The evening was theirs. It usually was. And for a woman who'd spent fifty years with a locked door and a quiet bed, that was its own kind of crown.