Chapter 65: Empty Heads and Full Hearts
Violet took him into her mouth the way she'd wanted to since the watchtower: slowly, deliberately, with the patience of a witch who had lived three hundred and forty-seven years and denied herself this one specific pleasure for most of them.
Evander's cock was thick and heavy against her tongue, already hard, the head flushed dark. She sealed her lips around him and sank down an inch, then another, letting her tongue flatten and drag along the underside. He tasted like skin and salt and faintly of the scotch he'd been drinking, and the sound he made when she swallowed around him was worth fifty years of silence.
"Gods above," Evander breathed. His hand tightened in her curls. Not guiding. Just holding on, like a man gripping a ledge.
Cassian sat two armchairs away, his own glass forgotten on the side table, watching his wife suck his husband's cock with his jaw hanging loose and his eyes burning gold. He'd imagined this exact image perhaps a hundred times over the 5 years she attended them as their advisor, and not once had his imagination done it justice. Her curls spilled over Evander's thighs. Her full lips stretched around him. The wet, obscene sound of her mouth working.
"Look at her," Cassian said hoarsely. "Look at our wife, Ev. Look what she's doing to you."
Evander couldn't look at anything else. He'd spent three centuries keeping his mind ordered, catalogued, three moves ahead in every negotiation and every war council, and Violet's mouth was erasing it line by line. She pulled back until only the head rested on her tongue, circled it slowly, then sank down again, deeper, her throat relaxing around him inch by inch until her nose pressed into the dark hair at his base.
"Violet." His voice cracked on her name. The most composed king in the north, the man who had faced down the Clave emissaries without blinking, and he couldn't finish a sentence.
She hummed, low in her chest, and the vibration rolled through him. Her hands worked what her mouth couldn't, one fisted around his shaft, the other cupping him, rolling him gently, and Evander's hips bucked off the chair before he caught himself with a growl.
"Let me," she said, pulling off him with a wet pop, her lips shining, her hazel eyes glazed with drink and want. She licked a slow stripe from base to crown. "You've held still for everyone your whole life. Let me do the work."
"You're drunk," Evander managed.
"I'm honest," she corrected. "There's a difference. I've wanted this for so long I used to make up excuses to walk past your office." She took him back in, deeper this time, and moaned around him like he was the best thing she'd ever tasted, because he was close enough to it.
Cassian shifted in his chair and made a sound halfway between a laugh and a groan. "Wife, I need you to know I am dying over here. Absolutely perishing. Five years I've wanted to watch this and now I want to be him and I don't know which hunger is worse."
Evander's laugh came out broken, punched out of him when she swallowed him down again. "Then suffer," he said, threading his fingers deeper into her hair, "like a man."
"Oh, I am." Cassian palmed himself through his trousers without shame, without unfastening anything, just pressure, because this wasn't about him yet and he knew it. His golden eyes tracked every move of her head, every flex of her throat. "Sweetheart, the little sound you just made. Do that again or I'll lose my mind entirely."
She did it again, filthier, dragging her mouth up slow and sloppy, and Cassian swore like a soldier.
Evander was coming apart. She could feel it in the tension gathering in his thighs, the way his breath had gone ragged, the way the fingers in her hair trembled. This was the man who had taken her apart with two careful fingers in the morning and put her back together after; watching him lose his edges because of her mouth was the headiest thing she'd ever felt, stronger than the scotch, stronger than the frost-wine.
"I'm close," he warned, low, strained, always considerate even now, even wrecked. "Violet, I'm..."
She didn't pull off. She looked up at him through her lashes, took him to the back of her throat, and swallowed, and that was the end of him. Evander's head fell back against the chair, his spine arching, a long rough groan torn out of him as he spent himself in her mouth, pulsing against her tongue. She took everything, sucked him gently through it, milked every last shudder out of him until his hand went slack in her hair and his chest heaved.
Three hundred and fifty years of war and governance and carefully rationed feeling, and one witch on her knees had blanked him completely. Not one coherent thought in his skull. Just her. Just heat.
Violet sat back on her heels, wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist, and grinned. It was a devilish grin, drunk and satisfied and utterly shameless, the grin of a woman who had just undone a king with her tongue and knew it.
Then she turned it on Cassian.
"With one husband wrecked," she said, her voice rough from her throat, "it's only fair I treat you equally. It wouldn't be right to play favorites."
"Play favorites," Cassian said instantly. "Play favorites with him. I'll wait my turn like a saint."
"Liar," Evander said, still catching his breath, his hand now gently stroking her curls instead of gripping them. He sounded drunk in a way the scotch hadn't managed. Sated, soft, fond. "You've never waited for anything in your life."
"A hundred years, Ev. I waited one hundred years for you."
"That's not waiting, that's brooding."
"Shh." Cassian waved him off without taking his eyes off Violet, who had risen up onto her hands and knees and was now crawling across the parlor carpet toward him, her hips swaying, Evander's shirt riding up over her thighs, the fresh marks on her neck and shoulder dark against her pale skin. There was a menacing glint in her eye. Cassian's mouth went dry.
"You look like a wolf stalking a kill," he said.
"Mm." She reached his chair and pushed his knees apart, settling between them, looking up at him from under her curls. "Funny. Usually that's your line. 'I'll hunt you through the palace, little witch.' Isn't that what you said the second night?"
"I did say that." His voice had gone rough. His hands flexed on the armrests. "You remember."
"I remember everything you said those first few nights." Her fingers found his belt and unbuckled it with unhurried, wicked precision. "Every promise you made me. I've been keeping a list."
Evander, watching from his ruined chair with heavy-lidded blue eyes, poured himself a finger of scotch with a shaking hand and did not drink it. "Cassian. Advice."
"Yeah?"
"Don't brace. It's worse if you brace."
Cassian laughed, and the laugh broke into a groan when Violet freed him from his trousers and wrapped her hand around him. He was hard as iron, aching, nearly dripping, and one slow stroke of her fist made his thighs quake.
"Look at you," she murmured, dragging her thumb over his tip, spreading the wetness there. "All that mouth, all that swagger, and you're shaking like a boy."
"I'm three hundred and forty-nine years old, wife."
"Then hold still like one."
She licked him, base to tip, the same slow stripe she'd given Evander, and Cassian's head dropped back against the chair. She worked him with her mouth and both hands, messier than she'd been with Evander, hungrier, and he told her exactly that in a strangled voice.
"Greedy girl. Greedy, gorgeous Women." His hand found her cheek, thumb tracing her jaw as her lips stretched around him. "Ev. Evander. Look at her."
"I'm looking. I've been looking." There was something wonder-struck in Evander's voice, unguarded, the voice he only used in the dark and never in daylight. "She has a list."
"She has a list." Cassian panted a laugh. "Sweetheart, what's on the list? Should I be worried?"
Violet pulled off him, stroking him with her slick hand, and smiled up at him with her whole face. "You promised to court me properly, patient, before asking for marriage, and then you fucked me in a alcove. That's entry one."
"That was courting," Cassian protested weakly, and then she took him back in and ended the sentence for good.
She swallowed him deep, faster now, working him with the same ruthlessness she'd used on Evander, her hand and mouth in rhythm, and Cassian stopped being a king and became only a body under her hands. His heel drummed against the marble. His fingers found the armrest and the wood creaked under his grip. She felt the moment his control went, felt the shudder roll up his legs, and she pulled back just enough to speak against the head of him.
"Give it to me," she said. "Both of you. I've waited long enough for both of you."
That undid him. Cassian groaned her name, low and wrecked, and spent across her tongue, his whole body seizing, and she took it, swallowed, licked him clean with little kitten strokes that made him whimper, actually whimper, the golden-eyed charming king of the Goldenpine pack whimpering in his own parlor while his husband watched and his wife giggled around his softening cock.
She sat back, flushed, mascara of victory in her eyes, and looked between her two husbands with deep, deep satisfaction. Evander had finally drunk his scotch. Cassian looked like he'd survived something. The fire in the hearth had burned down to embers and neither of them had noticed.
"Well," Cassian said at last, hoarse. His trousers were still open. He made no move to fix that. "That's the first time in my life I've been fully silenced. I want it noted in the record."
"Noted," Evander said. He set his glass down and leaned forward, elbows on his knees, studying her with the intensity he usually saved for war maps. "You're proud of yourself."
"Enormously proud of myself."
"You should be." He stood, slow, rolling his shoulders, and crossed to her in two strides. He crouched, took her chin in his hand, tilted her face up. His thumb brushed the corner of her mouth. "You had something you wanted to say to me for months, and you said it with your mouth instead. I'd rather have heard it out loud."
"Evander Thorn, I have wanted to suck you stupid since my first day in your office." She said it clearly, looking him dead in the eye. "There. Out loud. There's more where that came from, I've got 5 years of it banked."
"Years." Cassian sat up with the grin spreading across his face, the wolfish one, the one that meant trouble. "Ev, she said years. Wife, you realize what you've just done. You've shown two bored immortal kings a treasure vault and told us there's more."
"I realize exactly what I've done."
"Do you?" Evander's voice had gone quiet and dark, the negotiation voice, and it rolled through her like heat. "Because I count three things you've said tonight. Three debts, we owe you and I don't forgive debts easy."
Cassian rose too, and suddenly she was between them again, both of them towering over her where she knelt on the carpet, and the scent of the triad bond thickened in the warm air, caramel and pine and smoke. Her heart kicked.
"That's not fair," she said. "I just gave you both everything."
"You did," Cassian agreed warmly, dropping to one knee beside her, his hand sliding into her hair. "Beautifully. World-class, really. I'm putting it in my memoirs."
"Then it's my turn to collect." Evander's other hand found the hem of his shirt on her body, the hem at her bare thigh, and gripped it. "You told us you'd act like a marked wife with two husbands. A marked wife with two husbands doesn't get to kneel there looking pleased with herself while her husbands are still dressed."
"She doesn't?" Violet's breath had gone shallow. The menace in her grin was softening into something hotter. "And what does she get instead?"
Cassian leaned in and kissed the shell of her ear, and his voice when it came was pure appetite. "Ruined."