Chapter 53: The Queen Comes Calling
Violet stood at the window of the Royal Wing, watching the training yard below where Cassian was sparring two guards at once, laughing between blows. The afternoon sun caught the sweat on his shoulders and she caught herself smiling like a girl at a festival.
Two and a half months.
She turned the thought over the way she turned crystals in her workshop. Two and a half months, and she wore her hair down. Two and a half months, and she had six love bites she counted in the mirror each morning like treasure instead of shame. Two and a half months, and she had lit a forge, designed a crown, commissioned a gown with hip slits and bare shoulders that would have sent the old Violet into a week of spiraling.
Marcus had had a full year. Twelve months of jokes that shaved pieces off her, of going quiet whenever she outshone him, until she'd learned to duck her own light so he'd stay warm. Fifty years of hiding after, folded small in a tower apartment, wearing gowns that pretended she had no shape at all.
These two had undone fifty years in ten weeks. Not by trying. By kissing her in galleries where anyone could see, by arguing over seating charts and then ruining them on the table, by telling her the bond's wanting compounds and watching her face like her appetite was a gift.
Violet looked down at the yard again. Cassian slammed one guard flat and offered him a hand up, grinning.
She wasn't thinking. That was the truth of it, later, when she tried to reconstruct the decision. There was no decision. There was an impulse, hot and specific, with an actual name on it.
Evander was in his office. He was always in his office. Ledgers, treaties, the Wintercourt delegation's grain schedules. The bond hummed low in her chest all afternoon, a banked fire, and somewhere between the window and the corridor she decided she was going to sit in that fire on purpose.
She took the servants' stair so she wouldn't pass the training yard. Her hips swayed without her permission. She felt them do it and let them.
The door to Evander's office was heavy oak, half open. He sat behind his desk with three ledgers fanned before him, reading spectacles low on his nose, quill scratching. Candlelight from the tall windows caught the silver frost threading his black hair. He didn't look up.
"Parlor mail is sorted," he said. "If you're looking for Cassian, he's killing Borem in the yard."
"I'm not looking for Cassian."
The quill paused for half a heartbeat, then continued. "Then you're here to lecture me about the granary figures. I've already corrected them."
Violet stepped inside and pushed the door shut with her heel. The lock clicked. Evander's head came up.
She crossed the room at an unhurried pace, watching him watch her, hazel eyes on ocean blue. She reached the desk, set one hand flat on the ledger he was writing in, and dragged it out from under his quill.
"Violet."
"Shh." She gripped the back of his chair and hauled it back from the desk, wheels groaning on the stone. He let himself be moved, which from Evander was practically an invitation. She swung a leg over his lap and settled her weight on his thighs, the skirt of her house gown riding up, her full bust level with his mouth.
He went very still. His hands hovered an inch off her waist, not touching, his jaw tight. "What's the special occasion?"
"No occasion." She slid her fingers into the hair at his nape and pulled, gentle, tilting his head back. "Do I need one?"
His breath left him slowly through his nose. "You woke before dawn. You forged. You had breakfast. You reviewed the Gullhaven correspondence." His voice was already rougher than it had been a minute ago. "I'm trying to find the pattern."
"Stop trying." She kissed him.
She kissed him the way she'd wanted to kiss people for fifty years and only recently learned she was allowed. Open-mouthed, greedy, her tongue sweeping past his lips, a low sound in her throat she didn't bother muffling. Evander made a noise back, something startled and then not startled at all, and his hands finally landed, one at her waist and one splayed wide across the small of her back, hauling her flush against him.
He tasted like tea and black pepper. She ground down against the hard ridge forming under his trousers and felt him shudder.
"Violet." He broke the kiss, chest heaving, spectacles knocked crooked. She took them off his face and tossed them on the desk. "The Wintercourt schedule. The delegation arrives in eleven days. I have the grain apportionment to finish and the envoy's seniority claim to refute, and if I don't have the precedent citations drafted by..."
She rolled her hips again, slow, deliberate, dragging her clit through the wool of his trousers, and watched the sentence die in his throat.
"...by dinner," he finished, hoarse.
"By dinner," she agreed sweetly. "So finish it."
He stared at her. She stared back, batting her lashes. Then she slid off his lap, stood between his knees, and smoothed her skirt down.
Evander's brows drew together. His hand shot out and caught her wrist. "Where are you going?"
"You said you have work." She pried his fingers off, one by one, kissing his knuckles as she went, cruelty wrapped in silk. "I wouldn't dream of keeping the Ironveil King from his ledgers. You look so handsome at that desk. I'll leave you to it."
She turned toward the door. Behind her, silence. She counted in her head. One. Two.
Three.
"Violet." His voice had dropped into the register that made whole council chambers sit up straighter. She didn't turn around. She put her hand on the latch.
"You work too much, baby." She flipped the lock open with a soft snick and looked back over her shoulder, curls spilling, the picture of wounded innocence. "Fine. If work is more important, I'll just go ride Cassian instead. He's done with sparring by now. He's always done with everything. He never makes me wait."
The chair crashed back. She had half a second to feel triumph before Evander's hand closed over the door above her head and slammed it shut. The lock clicked back over under his thumb.
He turned her around. He did it carefully, always careful, but fast, and then he had her back against the oak with his body pinning her, his eyes blazing that arctic blue gone dark.
"Say that again," he said quietly.
"Which part?" She was breathing hard now, Grinning. "The part where I go find your husband?"
"You've made your point."
"Have I?" She reached between them and palmed him through his trousers, hard and heavy and hot even through wool, and his whole body jolted. "Because you don't sound convinced. You sound like a king who chose a grain ledger over his wife."
"It wasn't a choice between..."
"It was." She squeezed him and hissed out a breath of her own at the feel of him. "Two and a half months, Evander. You've made me feel wanted every single day. Don't you dare pick up a quill while I'm wet for you."
His forehead dropped to hers. For a long moment there was only their breathing and the tick of the clock on his mantel and the bond purring between all three of them like a struck bell.
"I have never once," he said, low, "wanted the ledgers more than you. I went back to work because I thought you'd had your fill this morning."
Violet blinked. The thought landed sideways, wrong-footing her. This morning she'd woken to Cassian's mouth and Evander's fingers and she'd come twice before the sun cleared the wall, and afterward the kings had gone to their duties like men wrung out and satisfied.
"You thought I was done," she repeated.
"You asked us to stop holding back and we did. The bond compounds. I am not in the habit of taking what hasn't been offered."
"Oh, Evander." She laughed, breathless, and wrapped both arms around his neck. "I'm offering. Right now. In the middle of the day. I got wet in the window seat thinking about you and I walked the whole way here hoping you'd put the ledgers aside."
Something shifted in his face. The stern mask cracked, and underneath it she saw hunger, plain and enormous, the thing he'd walked the walls at midnight to starve for a hundred years before her.
"Then lock the door properly," he said, "and take off the gown."
She locked it. He watched her hands shake on the latch and liked it, she could tell, liked being the cause.
She undid the front of her gown slowly, buttons one by one, letting it fall open down her bodice, the swells of her bare breasts coming into the light. She hadn't worn a shift. She'd planned that in the corridor and lied to herself about planning it.
Evander pulled his own shirt over his head in one motion. The frost-dusted wolf on his shoulders was nowhere visible but she felt him anyway, the second nature humming under his skin, all the way down the bond. He stepped in and dragged the gown off her shoulders, down her arms, and it pooled at her feet on the stone.
He stepped back to look. He always looked. He looked the way scholars looked at rare texts, and under that gaze fifty years of shrinking reversed themselves.
"You're the most beautiful thing in this palace," he said, "and I include the throne room."
"Flatterer."
"Honest man." He guided her backward until her thighs hit the desk's edge. Papers scattered. She laughed and he swept the rest of the ledgers into a heap with one forearm, inkwell and all, because a blot of ink mattered less than her.
He lifted her onto the desk. The wood was cool under her bare thighs. He knelt.
"Oh," she said. "You're not going back to work first?"
"No." He pushed her knees apart, wide, and pinned them there with his broad hands, and she was spread open in the afternoon light in her husband's office with the door locked. "You interrupted my ledgers. I intend to interrupt you back. For as long as it takes."
The first stroke of his tongue made her cry out and slap a hand over her own mouth. He reached up, peeled the hand away, and pressed it flat to the desk beside her hip.
"None of that," he said against her. "This wing knows we're married. Let it know why."
Then he stopped talking, which was Evander's version of a great many vows, and worked her with his mouth. Slow at first, his tongue broad and deliberate, lapping through her folds and circling her clit until her hips jerked off the wood. He thought while he did it. She knew that now, knew his patterns the way she knew her forge, and thinking was exactly what he did. He found a rhythm and held it, maddening, testing, reading every twitch of her thighs like data.
"Evander, please."
"Please what?" He didn't lift his mouth. The words vibrated through her.
"Harder."
He gave her harder. Two fingers pushed into her, thick and curling, finding the spot that made her see white at the edges, and his mouth sealed over her clit and sucked. Violet's head thumped back against a shelf of correspondence. Her heels dug into his back. The pressure built fast and high and she rode his face, shameless, loud, saying his name like a prayer and then just swearing, "fuck, fuck, yes, there, don't you dare stop."
He didn't stop. He held her right at the crest, backed off a hair, held her again, and she understood he was doing the thing, the ledger thing, stretching her pleasure out while some corner of his relentless mind probably solved the envoy's seniority problem. She almost didn't mind.
"Come," he ordered, muffled, and she did.
It hit her like the forge's first heat. She arched, thighs clamping around his head, sobbing his name, and he held her through it with iron hands on her hips and kept licking until she pushed at his forehead, overwrought, laughing and shaking.
He stood. He wiped his beard with the back of his hand, deliberately, watching her watch him do it. Then he freed his cock from his trousers, thick and flush-dark and already slick at the tip, and stroked himself once, twice, looking at her spread on the wreck of his desk.
"How do you want me?" he asked.
"Like you're jealous," she said. "Like I really was walking out the door."
His eyes flared. He hauled her to the desk's edge, hooked one of her legs over his forearm, and drove into her in a single stroke to the hilt.
Violet shouted. There was no one to hear and she didn't care; the whole of Thornhold could hear for all she gave a damn. He filled her so deep the blunt head of him knocked against the end of her, and he set a pace that was nothing like his usual careful devotion, hard and fast, the desk creaking and skidding with every thrust, papers fluttering to the floor.
"This," he growled, low in his chest, and it wasn't quite his voice, it was the wolf under it, "is mine. This afternoon. Say it."
"It's yours," she gasped, clawing at his shoulders. "All of it, Evander, fuck, harder."
He gave her harder. One hand gripped her hip hard enough to bruise and she wanted the bruise, wanted it like she wanted the marks Cassian left, proof written on her skin in a language every shifter could read. Her other leg went up over his shoulder and the angle changed and she sobbed, the head of him dragging through her at a depth that scrambled her thoughts.
"You were going to find Cassian."
"Yes."
"And I was supposed to let you."
"You were supposed to chase me."
"I would have chased you to Gullhaven," he said, and thrust so hard the inkwell rolled off the desk and shattered on the stone and neither of them glanced at it. "I would have walked into Mira's parlor and carried you out over my shoulder in front of the album."
"Do it sometime," she panted. "Do it at the dinner. I dare you."
He laughed, actually laughed, that rare rough sound she got maybe twice a month, and bent over her, folding her nearly in half, and the new angle broke her open. His mouth found her throat and bit down, a fresh mark beside the six, and she came apart around him, clenching in wave after wave, her nails raking lines down his back that healed too fast to last and that he'd feel anyway.
"That's it," he groaned into her neck. "Again. I'm not finished. The bond compounds and I am not finished with you."
He straightened and kept going, fucking her through the aftershocks until she was building again, impossible and inevitable, the fire already climbing. Somewhere beneath the roar she felt the bond shiver, felt the far end of it where Cassian was, knew he'd felt them the way she always felt him and Evander, knew he was probably grinning in the yard with his sword half lowered. She'd explain later. She'd make Cassian watch next time. The thought tipped her over and she came a second time, milking him, and Evander thrust deep and held, spilling inside her with a groan that started in his chest and seemed to come from somewhere a hundred years deep.
For a while there was just breathing. The clock ticked. Ink spread in a black star on the flagstones.
Evander eased out of her and she felt the loss instantly, hollow and greedy. He tucked himself away, then gathered her off the desk like she weighed nothing and sat down in his ruined chair with her in his lap, her gown a crumpled ring around her waist, both of them wrecked.
"You realize," he said into her hair, "I now have to redo every document on that desk."
"From memory. You're the one who memorizes granary figures during sex."
"That was oral," he said primly. "This is different."
She laughed, deep in her belly, the loud pure laugh she'd buried for fifty years, and felt him go still with that quiet satisfaction he never announced. She tilted her head back to look at him.
"You thought I was done this morning," she said. "Never assume that again. The answer is no. It's never going to be no."
"Understood." He kissed the fresh bite on her throat, apologetic and proud at once. "For the record, you are terrifying when you threaten to ride my husband."
"Worked, though."
"Devastatingly." He gathered her closer. "Cassian felt all of it, incidentally. I can feel him now. He's pleased and he's coming up the west stair and he has roughly four minutes."
Violet grinned against Evander's neck and reached down to start on his belt again.
"Then we'd better be busy," she said, "when he opens that door."
The latch rattled before she even got it open. Evander locked it with a flick of two fingers, a trick of his that always made her want things, and the three-kiss minimum was already going to be breached before the hour was out. The ledgers stayed on the floor until well past dinner.