Chapter 61: The Morning Ritual
Violet woke to warmth on both sides and a mouth at her throat.
Sunlight had crept under the green drapery of the eight-post bed, striping the carved wolves on the posts with gold. The furs smelled of pine and smoke and the two men bracketing her, and her body, for once, was not cold. It never was anymore. That was still the part that undid her, some mornings, the simple animal fact of being warm.
Cassian kissed her jaw first. "Morning, wife."
"That's the one," Evander said from her other side, his beard brushing her temple before his lips followed.
The ritual was three kisses each. It had been three kisses each for months. It had never once, in all those months, actually stopped at three.
Cassian's second kiss landed at the corner of her mouth, slow and deliberate, his stubble catching her freckled cheek. Evander's second was lower, at the curve of her neck where the furs had slipped, and Violet felt her skin flush under his mouth the way it always did, heat blooming from the inside now instead of being coaxed. Her cold-blooded witch's body had been rewired by two wolves and a bond. She'd stopped apologizing for it around week six.
The third kiss was where the ritual always died a dignified death.
Cassian took her mouth fully, one big bronze hand sliding up her ribs to cup the weight of her breast through the thin sleep-shift she'd worn to bed. His thumb dragged over her nipple and it stiffened instantly, and he made a low, pleased sound against her lips, the smug sound of a man who had been doing this long enough to know exactly what his hands did to her.
"She's awake," he murmured.
"She's been awake," Evander said. His hand was already at her hip, gathering the shift's hem upward, palm sliding over the soft curve of her thigh. "Her breathing changed before you even opened your eyes."
"You breathe at her?"
"I pay attention. There's a difference."
Violet, pinned between two three-hundred-and-fifty-year-old kings arguing about who was better at listening to her lungs, did the only sensible thing. She reached down and took both of them through their sleep trousers, one cock in each hand, and felt the twin jolts go through the bond like struck bells.
The argument stopped.
"Oh," Cassian said, voice dropping half an octave. "That's how the morning's going to be."
"Seems so," Evander said, very level, which was how he always sounded right before he stopped being level at all.
Violet stroked them slowly, lazy, unhurried, feeling both of them harden and swell in her grip. Cassian ran hot as ever, his cock thickening against her palm until she had to adjust her fingers around him. Evander's was heavier in her hand, and he exhaled through his nose, controlled, one muscle in his jaw ticking as she dragged her thumb over his crown.
Then Evander moved. That was the thing about him, the thing that had shocked her in the beginning: the stillness was never passivity. It was patience. He pushed the shift up over her hips, baring her to the morning light, and then he simply looked, ocean-blue eyes traveling down the full, soft expanse of her, the wide hips and the thick thighs and the belly Marcus had taught her to hide for forty-five years.
"Stop staring," she said, breathless.
"No," he said.
"He's not going to," Cassian agreed, mouth moving down her sternum. "I'm not either. Get used to it, sweetheart. We had a hundred years to learn patience and we're spending all of it on you."
Cassian pushed the shift up further, over her bust, and bent to take her nipple into his mouth. The heat of it made her gasp, her back arching off the mattress, and Evander chose that exact moment to slide his hand between her thighs.
She was already wet. She knew she would be, had known from the first kiss, and Evander's fingers found it and spread it without ceremony, one thick finger slipping through her folds and pressing up into her, slow, knuckle by knuckle.
"Oh," Violet said, and her voice came out wrecked already. It was embarrassing. It had been embarrassing for three months and neither of them had ever once let her be embarrassed about it.
"Lift your knee," Evander said quietly.
She did. It opened her to him, and he took advantage immediately, adding a second finger, curling them against the front wall of her and finding the spot that made her hips jerk. His other arm hooked under her thigh and held it there, firm, unhurried, a man settling in for work he intended to do thoroughly. His thumb found her clit and pressed, and Violet's hand went slack around both their cocks.
"Don't stop on our account," Cassian said against her breast, grinning. She could feel the grin. The menace of it.
She got her grip back, and she made it punishing, because if she was going to fall apart between them she was going to take them down with her. She worked Cassian fast and rough the way he liked, twisting her wrist at the top, and he groaned into her tit, his hips starting a slow thrust into her fist. With Evander she went slow and deep, her thumb circling his head, and the bond hummed with his rising heat, a low tide of want she could feel as clearly as her own.
"Gods," Cassian muttered. "She's going to make me come before breakfast."
"You came before breakfast Tuesday," Evander said, fingers still working her in that steady, ruthless rhythm. "Keep up."
"Tuesday was a triumph and I'll hear no slander."
Violet laughed, and the laugh broke apart halfway out because Evander curled his fingers and pressed his thumb down at the same time and her whole body clenched. The sound she made was loud and shameless in the sun-warmed room, and both wolves answered it, a double growl she felt through the mattress, through the bond, through her skin.
"There she is," Cassian said softly, all the teasing gone out of his voice for one moment. He kissed the freckles between her breasts. "There's our girl."
Evander's fingers kept going. He had a way of watching her when he did this, propped on one elbow, eyes on her face while his hand worked between her thighs, and it was obscene how much it added. Cassian had told her once, laughing, that Evander studied her the way he studied battle maps. She believed it. Every twitch of her hips, every caught breath, he catalogued and then used, adjusting pressure, adjusting angle, until her thigh was shaking in his grip and the heat was coiling tight and low.
"Evan," she gasped. "Evan, I'm..."
"Go on," he said. "Cassian, hold her."
Cassian's arm came around her shoulders, anchoring her against his chest, and Evander pressed his fingers deep and ground his thumb in slow circles, and Violet came apart between them, crying out, her back bowing, her hand convulsing around both their cocks. The bond drank it in and poured it back doubled; she felt her own release echoed in them, feelers of it, hunger sharpening on both sides of her like a blade being whetted.
She lay panting in the sun, boneless, marked shoulder to shoulder with love bites new and old, and for one glorious minute she thought that might be it. The ritual, expanded. A warm lazy morning.
Then Cassian kissed her ear and said, "Now we fuck her," in the bright conversational tone of a man proposing a walk.
"Cassian," she managed.
"He's right," Evander said, withdrawing his fingers from her, which made her whimper at the loss, and bringing them to his mouth. He cleaned them off without breaking eye contact with her, which made the whimper worse. "The plateaus early if we ration. Dawn was very clear."
"She cited research."
"Dawn," Violet said, "is an Empress, not a physician."
"Dawn is both," Cassian said, already pushing his trousers down, "and she'd tell you herself. Arms around my neck, wife. Up you come."
He arranged her over his lap with insulting ease, her knees bracketing his hips, her soft belly pressed to his hard one, his cock sliding through her soaked folds without entering. The new angle put her full weight on him and he groaned like she was a gift, hands spreading over her hips and the wide swell of her ass, gripping, pulling her against him.
Behind her, the furs shifted. Evander moved up onto his knees, and she felt his hands on her back, pushing the shift up off her shoulders entirely, baring her completely in the striped gold light. Cool air on her skin, two hot bodies at her front and back. One of them, she knew, was about to be inside her, and her whole body clenched around nothing at the thought.
"Please," she said. It came out small.
Both wolves growled at it, the good growl, the one that meant mate, yes, anything, and Cassian tilted his hips up and pressed into her.
He went slow. He always went slow on the first push, no matter how worked up he was, his thick cock splitting her inch by inch while he watched her face with those molten golden eyes, his teeth bared, holding himself back by sheer centuries of discipline. Violet's head dropped against his shoulder. The stretch of it never stopped being overwhelming, the fullness bottoming out against her cervix, her body opening around him because her body had learned him, had learned both of them, wanted them with an animal single-mindedness that would have horrified her old self.
"Fuck," Cassian breathed when he was seated to the hilt, her ass against his thighs. "Every time. Every single time, she gets tighter."
"Move," Violet said into his neck.
"She gives orders now," Cassian said, delighted, and moved.
He fucked her in long, deep strokes, her whole body rising and falling on him, her heavy breasts dragging against his chest with every thrust. The friction on her clit was merciless. Behind her, Evander's hand settled between her shoulder blades, pressing her down against Cassian, holding her in place, and she heard the sound of him working his own cock, the wet obscene slide of his fist.
"Evander," she gasped, turning her head, trying to look back at him.
"I'm here," he said, calm as ever, which was a lie because the bond was thrumming like a struck wire. "Cassian. Hold still."
Cassian stilled, buried in her, and Evander's oiled fingers, when they came, were careful and thorough and maddening, working her slowly open from behind while Cassian filled her from the front, and Violet buried her face in Cassian's throat and swore, a string of filth she'd learned from him, that made Cassian laugh low in his chest.
"That's my girl," he said. "Say it again."
"Later," Evander said. "Breathe, love."
And then he pressed in.
The burn was familiar now, the triple-fullness, Cassian deep in her pussy and Evander's cock working into her ass above him, the two wolves grunting against her back, against her front, holding still once he was sheathed to the root, all three of them locked together and trembling. The bond flared white-hot. She could feel both of them, their hunger compounding through the tether, feeding hers, an endless loop of wanting that Dawn had promised would take years to plateau.
Violet had stopped resisting somewhere around the second month. She stopped pretending she wanted to resist around the third.
"Move," she said again, and this time her voice didn't shake. "Both of you. Please."
They moved.
They had a rhythm, worked out over three months of nights, Cassian's strokes deep and rolling from below while Evander drove in long and measured from behind, and between them she was nothing but sensation, stuffed and stroked and claimed from both sides, the slap of hips and the wet sounds of her body taking them both filling the sunlit room. The carved wolves on the bedposts seemed to run faster for it. Somewhere distantly she registered that thought as ridiculous and then Evander's hand fisted in her hair and turned her head and he kissed her over her shoulder, deep and filthy, his tongue in her mouth while his cock was in her ass, and the ridiculous thought died of natural causes.
"Ours," Cassian said against her breast, taking her nipple back into his mouth.
"Ours," Evander echoed against her lips.
"Mine," Violet said, and felt both of them shudder.
They broke her rhythm apart in the end. They always did. Cassian lost his patience first, hips snapping up harder, faster, his control shredding, and Evander matched him without being asked, and the two wolves fucked her in tandem like a storm, like the thing they were, until her orgasm crested without warning and broke over her in a long, rolling wave, her cunt clenching around Cassian, her body seizing between them.
Cassian came first, a shout torn out of him, buried deep, his cock pulsing inside her, and the heat of it pushed Evander over the edge behind her a dozen strokes later, his grip bruising on her hips, his forehead dropping to her shoulder, a groan torn out of him that was almost her name.
They collapsed together in the furs, three bodies tangled, the bond humming like a struck bell slowly settling. Violet lay sprawled across Cassian's chest with Evander's weight along her back and both of them still inside her and she was fairly sure she could not move a single limb.
Which was, of course, the moment she remembered the correspondence.
It arrived as a small, guilty flutter. The ducal petitions on the eastern water rights. The Wintercourt seating confirmation that Ondrel's rings had better be finished for. Her advisor salary ledger that no longer needed sorting but which she still, out of two hundred years of habit, sorted anyway. It was mid-morning. The stacks would not sort themselves.
Very slowly, holding her breath, Violet began to slide herself off Cassian's chest.
She got one leg off the bed.
A hand closed around her ankle.
"Not," Cassian said, eyes still closed, voice lazy as a river, "a chance."
"I have correspondence," Violet said, with as much dignity as a woman could manage when she was naked, dripping, and being pulled backward by one foot.
"You have husbands."
"The petitions..."
"Can be set on fire." Evander's arm came around her waist and she was hauled back into the warm ruin of the furs, her back against his chest, Cassian rolling over to cage her in from the front. Two walls of muscle and smugness. "Wintercourt is a week away. The water rights have waited a century."
"A century and a half," Cassian said. "I checked."
"You did not check."
"I did last night while she was asleep. A century and a half. We've survived it. It'll survive one more day." He caught her chin and kissed the end of her nose. "Here's the deal, sweetheart. Today you don't leave this bed. Not for the ledger, not for the letters, not for lunch, which we're having brought up. Sun out, food out, doors locked. Just us."
"That's not a negotiation, that's a sentencing."
"It's a gift," Evander said into her hair, "and you're allowed to accept gifts. You're practicing that. We discussed it."
Violet opened her mouth to argue and Cassian kissed her instead, unhurried, thorough, and by the time he let her breathe she'd lost the thread of the petitions entirely, which she suspected had been the entire point.
"Food first," Evander said. "Then we run her a bath in the big tub, and then we start the day properly."
"You've made a schedule," Violet said faintly.
"We're kings. Scheduling is the family talent." Cassian reached over her to the side table and rang the bell for the footman with the cheerful shamelessness of a man who had just fucked his wife and intended to announce it to the palace by ordering two breakfasts and a jug of water. "Pell can knock."
"He's going to know," Violet said, pulling a fur over her head.
"Everyone always knows," Cassian said. "That's half the fun."
Under the fur, warm and smellsaturated and thoroughly sentenced, Violet laughed, and the laugh turned into a yelp when Evander's hand found her hip under the covers and Cassian's found her breast, because the schedule, it turned out, had a great deal of properly in it, and the day had barely started.