Chapter 63: The Bath and the Hunt
The bath chamber steamed like a held breath. Violet had drawn the water herself, refusing Pell's help with a wave of the hand and a little flick of magic that turned both taps at once. The tub was carved from a single slab of pale stone, wide enough for four people and then some, and she lowered herself into it inch by inch, hissing as the heat found the sore places between her thighs.
Gods, she was sore. Shoulder to shoulder with bite marks, and deeper still where her husbands had spent the morning worshipping her within an inch of her life. Every muscle in her body had an opinion and every one of them was grateful.
She sank until the water lapped at her collarbone and her curls floated, darkening in the steam. Jasmine and caramel rose off her skin and mingled with the cedar oil she'd dotted into the water. Her whole cold-blooded body, warm for the first time in three centuries, went boneless.
Outside the door she could hear them. She didn't need wolf hearing to hear them; she needed it only to hear the words.
"He's pacing," Evander said, flat and amused, from the corridor.
"I am not pacing," Cassian said, pacing. "I'm patrolling. There's a difference. One is dignified."
"You've walked that same six feet eleven times."
"I'm giving her privacy. It's the policy. She bathes, we hunt, we re-scent her. Sacred customs, Evander. I don't make the rules."
"You absolutely make the rules. You made this one up three weeks ago."
"To honor our wife, yes."
Violet smiled into the steam and let them argue. She knew exactly what was happening beyond the door. Her kings, two immortal apex predators with three and a half centuries each of teeth and territory, were sitting outside a bathhouse like hounds outside a larder, waiting for the polite ritual that let them crowd her the moment she emerged.
She should let them. The compromise had been negotiated in good faith. She healed the marks, they reapplied them, they hunted and scented her. She'd agreed to it with her chin up, proud of herself for wanting it.
But sitting here in the heat with her sore body floating, she found she wanted something else. Not to be hunted. Not today. Today she wanted them where the water was.
She sat up. Water sheeted off her shoulders and she waded toward the door, hips complaining, and pulled it open.
The corridor went silent. Cassian stood mid-stride, one boot lifted. Evander leaned against the wall with his arms crossed, and both of them looked at her like she'd pulled a moon out of her pocket. She was wearing nothing but steam and wet skin and the marks they'd left on her.
"You'll catch your death," Cassian said, which was nonsense, because she was a witch and he was a wolf and neither of them caught anything but feelings.
"Come in," Violet said.
Both kings blinked.
"With me. In the water. Both of you." She stepped back from the doorway, leaving it open, and walked back to the tub with her hips swinging just enough to make Cassian make a low noise in his throat. "I don't want to be hunted today. I want you close. I want you where I can reach you."
Evander came in first, as he came into everything first, measured and deliberate. He closed the door behind them and started on the laces of his shirt without ceremony, and Violet leaned against the tub's warm rim and watched him undress the way she'd watched him negotiate treaties: with her whole attention. The shirt came off his shoulders and she made a small involuntary sound, because two hundred years of Cassian pining over those shoulders and she finally, finally understood.
"I heard that," Cassian said, shedding his own clothes in half the time, all grin and golden eyes. "Two hundred years, Evander. She sees it now."
"She has always seen it," Evander said. His voice was even but his ears had gone dark. "She was simply polite."
"I was never polite," Violet said. "I was repressed. It's different."
They laughed, and the sound filled the steam, and then they were naked and magnificent and stepping down into the water, and all the comedy went out of the room like a candle snuffed.
Cassian sank in with a groan that bordered on obscene, dark hair going flat, bronze shoulders breaking the surface. Evander settled on her other side, and the tub, built for abundance, held the three of them with room to spare and none of it mattered because they arranged themselves around her anyway, close, thighs against her hips, the bond humming under her skin like a struck bell.
"Hello," she said, a little breathless.
"Hello, wife," Cassian said. He caught one of her feet under the water and began working his thumb into her arch. She yelped and then melted. "Sore?"
"Sore everywhere. It's your fault. Both of yours."
"We're very proud of our work," Evander said, and his hand found her other foot, and Violet learned what it was to have four hands on her in warm water and no plan at all beyond staying.
They washed her slowly. That was the thing about her wolves; they could go from bickering boys to solemn as priests between one breath and the next. Cassian lathered her shoulders with cedar soap, working the knots out of her neck with fingers that could crush stone and never once pressed too hard. Evander washed her back, tracing each bite mark with a soaped fingertip, one by one, like a man counting coins he couldn't believe were his.
"You healed these," Evander said quietly. "Before the coronation. And we made a bargain."
"And I'll keep it. Tonight, tomorrow, whenever I bathe. Heal and reapply." She tilted her head back against his shoulder and looked up at him, upside down, into those winter-sea eyes. "But not tonight. Tonight I want to keep them a little longer. I want to look at them while they're still purple."
"Violet," Cassian murmured. It wasn't her name he was saying; it was the flower, and the way he said it made her thighs press together under the water.
"I've been thinking," she said. "All afternoon, floating here like a fat happy lake spirit. About what re-scenting means. In your culture."
Cassian's hands stilled on her shoulders.
"It means the pack smells of us and we smell of her," he said. "It means anyone who gets close knows she's mated, claimed, loved. It means she's not alone in a cold bed ever again." His voice had gone rough. "It means we'd tear the throat out of anything that tried."
"Yes. That's what I thought." She turned in the water, slow, water sloshing over the rim and nobody caring, until she knelt between them and could touch both. She laid a palm flat on each broad chest, over two hearts that beat too fast for two ancient kings. "So when you hunt me, when you scent me, when you cover me in your marks, that's not possession. Not only. It's the loudest love your people know how to say. And I've spent fifty years being taught that wanting to be wanted was shameful. That being claimed was losing." Her voice cracked and she pushed through it. "I'm done with that. I'm a marked wife. Two husbands. I'm going to act like it."
The bond flared, heat and hunger washing through the tether in both directions, and she felt them feel her: the certainty, the want, the last little fear dissolving like sugar in warm water.
"Come here," Cassian said, hoarse.
She went to him. Of course she went to him, and Evander's hands came with her, guiding her hips, so she ended up straddling Cassian's lap in the deep end of the tub, water streaming off both of them, his mouth finding hers like it had been waiting three months and three hundred years both.
He kissed her the way he did everything, generous and greedy at once, one big hand splayed across her back to hold her steady, the other rising to cup the weight of her breast, thumb brushing her nipple until it peaked and she gasped into his mouth. The gasp was all the permission he ever needed. He groaned low and kissed along her jaw, her throat, the tender hollow where pulse met collarbone, tasting jasmine and steam and her.
Evander pressed in behind her. She felt him before she saw him, that wall of heat, his chest against her back, his beard dragging across her shoulder as his lips found the first mark. He mouthed it, slow, and sensation zipped down her spine and pooled low in her belly. His hands wrapped around her from behind, palming her breasts fully, weighing them, rolling her nipples between finger and thumb until she was making sounds into Cassian's mouth that had no dignity in them at all.
"There she is," Cassian breathed against her lips. "Our blunt-mouthed queen. You don't have to be quiet in here, love. No one's behind that door but Pell, and Pell can suffer."
"Pell," she managed, "is going to need a new palace to work in."
Evander's low chuckle vibrated through her back. His mouth travelled lower, over the swell of her breast, and he took one aching nipple into his mouth, hot and wet and unhurried, and Violet's head fell back against his shoulder. Cassian watched her face while his husband worshipped her chest, and the look in his golden eyes was so nakedly adoring that it almost undid her more than the mouths did.
"You're so beautiful," Cassian said. "I know you know that now. I want to say it anyway. Every day. In front of court, if you'd let me."
"Cassian."
"I would. I'd announce it between the petitions."
She laughed and it broke into a moan, because Evander had switched to the other breast and one of his hands had slid down her soft belly, over the curve of her hip, beneath the water. His fingers found the curls at the apex of her thighs and then, with maddening patience, the slick heat beneath them. He stroked her slowly, once, twice, and her hips rolled after his hand like they belonged to it.
"Evander," she gasped. "Evander, please."
"Please what?" His voice against her ear, dark velvet, the negotiation voice, and she felt Cassian shudder under her at the sound of it too. "Tell me what my wife needs."
"Your fingers. Your mouth. Your cock. All of it. Everything." The words came out blunt and filthy and hers, and she felt both kings react, felt the bond sing with their answer: love, hunger, pride. "I've been polite for fifty years. I'm done."
"Gods," Cassian whispered. "Marry her again. Right now. Both of us."
"She's already ours," Evander said, and pushed two fingers into her.
The water made everything sliding and slow. His fingers curled up inside her and found the spot that made her see sparks, and he worked it with the same deliberate patience he brought to treaties and renovations, thumb circling her clit in time. Cassian held her steady against the flood, murmuring praise into her hair, sweet and filthy in equal measure. Good girl. Take what you need. Ride his hand, love, that's it, don't hold back on us.
She didn't. She rode his hand, hips rolling, water slopping over the tub's edge in waves that nobody cast a drying charm on. Her orgasm built slow and deep and rolled through her like the tide, and she came with her mouth open against Cassian's throat, moaning his name and Evander's both, her whole soft body clenching around Evander's fingers while he fucked her through it gently, gently, until she slumped between them, trembling, boneless, loved.
"There's our queen," Cassian said thickly.
She gathered herself enough to be greedy. She'd earned greedy. She reached back and found Evander hard against her lower back, thick and insistent, and wrapped her hand around him, and heard the calm, unshakeable King of Ironveil make a noise like a man gut-punched. Then she turned to Cassian, took him in her other hand, hard and heavy in her palm, and looked from one to the other.
"Both of you," she said. "However you want me. I'm not going anywhere and neither are you."
They arranged her with four hands and infinite care, the way they always did, like she was crown work, like she was the thing Ondrel kept under glass. Evander sat back against the tub's edge and drew her down onto his lap, and she sank onto him inch by inch, both of them groaning at the slick, hot, water-slow stretch of it, her walls fluttering around him as he filled her. Cassian moved behind her, chest to her back, and reached around to play with her clit while she took Evander deeper, deeper, until she was seated fully and could feel him in her guts and the water rocked gently around them all.
"Move," she begged. "Please move."
Evander's hands gripped her hips, fingers denting the soft flesh, and he did. Slow rolls at first, deep and reverent, his mouth pressed to the back of her shoulder over the marks. Cassian matched him, teasing her clit in the same rhythm, kissing whatever skin he could reach, whispering things that would have made a brothel madam blush. Violet abandoned herself to it. She moaned loud and unashamed, she told them what she wanted in words Marcus would have flinched from, she dug her nails into Evander's thighs and reached back to grip Cassian's hair, and the bond poured it all back into her doubled and doubled again until she was dizzy with it.
"Harder," she gasped. "Evander, please, harder, I won't break."
"She won't break," Cassian growled, delighted.
Evander's control snapped beautifully. He planted his feet in the tub and drove up into her, harder, the water surging around them, and Violet's orgasm crashed over her on the fourth stroke, sudden and blinding, her pussy clenching down around him as she wailed. He followed with a groan torn from the bottom of his chest, spilling hot inside her, holding her hips down to take every pulse of it.
She was still shaking when Cassian turned her. He lifted her like she weighed nothing, settling her on Evander's thighs facing him now, and slid into her spent, soaked, sensitive heat with a groan that went on and on. She cried out at the fullness, at the fresh angle, at the overstimulation edging into pleasure again because her kings were insatiable and she'd married them knowing it.
"Look at me," Cassian said. "Look at me, love."
She did. Golden eyes, steam, the gorgeous strain in his jaw, and she rode him with what strength she had left while Evander held her up from behind, hands spread over her belly, mouth at her shoulder, murmuring that she was perfect, that she was theirs, that she had never once been too much. Cassian's thumb found her clit again and she came a third time, smaller and deeper, a long shudder that wrung a sob out of her, and Cassian thrust up twice more and spent inside her with her name in his mouth like a prayer.
They stayed there. Steam softening, water cooling by degrees, three bodies slumped together in a tub built for abundance. Cassian kissed her freckles one by one. Evander's heartbeat thudded steady against her spine.
"The marks," she murmured, drowsy against Cassian's chest. "Tonight. Reapply them. I'll heal them in the morning and you can start over."
"Every week," Cassian said into her hair. "Forever."
"Forever," Evander agreed, and reached for the towels.