Chapter 2: The Lady's Maid
The ducal quarters in Hollows Keep were not kind. They were a statement: high-ceilinged, drafty, furnished with heavy dark wood that seemed to swallow the light from the hearth. The blankets were thick, the tapestry on the wall depicted some obscure, bloody battle, and the air carried the perpetual damp of the river. But the door had a stout iron lock.
Agatha turned from it, the final metallic click a period at the end of the day’s relentless sentence. The silence it created was profound, muffling the distant clatter of the Keep, the occasional shouted order from the courtyard below.
Rio stood in the center of the rug, still in her travel-stained leathers, looking less like a lady-in-waiting and more like a wolf in a pen. The confidence she wore on the road was there, but beneath it ran a current of something else—a focused intensity. The playful smirk was gone, replaced by a watchful stillness.
“My Lady,” Rio began, the formality of the title feeling strange in the private silence.
“Stop.” Agatha’s voice was not loud, but it filled the space. It was the voice she used to settle disputes between tenant farmers, low and utterly final. She crossed the room, the heavy velvet of her own robe whispering against the rushes. “The servants are quartered in the east wing. Damp. Crowded. Full of whispers.”
She stopped a hand’s breadth from Rio. She could smell the day on her—horse, cold metal, the faint, clean sweat of vigilance. Beneath it, the rosemary she used to wash her hair.
“You are not sleeping there tonight.”
Rio’s eyes, the colour of old whisky in the firelight, didn’t waver. “Where would you have me sleep, my lady?”
Agatha reached out. Not with the delicate grace of a duchess, but with the deliberate intent of a woman claiming something. Her fingers curled into the laces of Rio’s bodice, where the leather criss-crossed over the linen shirt beneath. The calluses on her own palms caught on the material.
“You’re sleeping in my bed.” Agatha’s gaze dropped to Rio’s mouth, then back to her eyes. “And before you sleep, you are going to put that clever tongue of yours to use. You are going to taste me. You are going to lick my cunt until I can’t remember the names of the scheming bastards downstairs, or the weight of this fucking crown everyone seems to think I want. Until I forget my own name.”
Rio’s breath left her in a slow, controlled exhale. A flush spread from her throat up to her cheekbones. Her hands, which had been held loosely at her sides, came up to cover Agatha’s where they twisted in her laces.
“Sixty buttons was tedious,” Rio said, her voice now a rough scrape. “This is simpler.”
She didn’t unpick the laces. She pulled, hard. The leather cord, tough as it was, snapped with a series of sharp pops. The bodice gaped open. Agatha felt a thrill that was pure fire—it was destruction, it was necessity. It was real.
They didn’t make it to the bed with any ceremony. The momentum of the broken laces carried them back against the heavy post of the four-poster. Agatha’s robe was pushed from her shoulders, a pool of expensive fabric at her feet. Rio’s mouth was on her neck, her jaw, a hot, hungry path downwards that was all teeth and blunt demand. This was not the courtly love of ballads. This was appetite.
Agatha arched into it, her head thudding back against the carved wood. Her fingers scrambled in Rio’s unruly hair, gripping, pulling. “Don’t be gentle,” she snarled, the command ripped from some raw, hidden place. “I am so tired of gentle.”
Rio complied. She sank to her knees on the rug, her hands dragging down Agatha’s thighs, pushing them apart. She looked up, her face a mask of fierce devotion in the shadowy light. “Then don’t think,” she said. “Just feel.”
Her mouth was on her then, and Agatha cried out, a short, punched sound. There was no gentle preamble. Rio’s tongue was a broad, flat stroke against her, a claiming. She licked into her with a deep, savoring rhythm that made Agatha’s knees buckle. Only the post and Rio’s strong hands on her hips kept her upright.
“Fuck,” Agatha gasped, the obscenity wonderfully foul in the stately room. “Just like that.”
Rio groaned against her, the vibration a blinding shock of pleasure. She used her tongue like a weapon, like a sculptor’s tool, circling the hard, aching centre of her need before plunging deep again. She was merciless, thorough, drinking from her as if parched. The wet, filthy sounds filled the chamber, a rhythm utterly divorced from the measured tick of the clock on the mantel.
Agatha surrendered to it. The tension of the journey, the calculating glances across the supper table, the cold weight of the kingdom’s future—it all melted under this brutal, exquisite attention. Her thoughts shattered. She was a column of sensation, built and rebuilt with each lap of Rio’s tongue, each suck, each ragged breath against her skin.
She came violently, her body seizing, a ragged scream torn from her throat as she ground herself against Rio’s face, losing all grace, all dignity. Rio held her through it, relentless, until the last shiver subsided and Agatha sagged, boneless and spent.
For a long moment, there was only the sound of their breathing, the crackle of the fire. Rio rested her forehead against Agatha’s trembling thigh, her own breath hot.
Slowly, Rio stood. Her face was glistening. She kissed Agatha, deep and slow, letting her taste herself on Rio’s tongue. It was primitive, a marking.
“Do you remember your name?” Rio whispered against her lips.
Agatha laughed, a breathless, broken sound. “No.”
“Good.”
They did make it to the bed eventually. The linen sheets were cold, but they warmed quickly. Agatha traced the line of Rio’s shoulder, the old scar from a long-ago skirmish near the northern border. The frantic energy had shifted into something slower, more profound.
“When we were in the carriage,” Agatha said, her voice hoarse. “You said we’d find a nest here. You were right.”
Rio turned onto her side, propping her head on her hand. “What kind of nest?”
“The kind with spiders. Lord Lannister cornered me after the receiving line. Offered a marriage alliance. His idiot son for my ‘claim and my moors,’ as he put it.”
Rio’s eyes turned flinty. “What did you say?”
“I told him his son was more suited to managing a kennel than a duchy.” Agatha smiled, a thin, sharp thing. “He didn’t take it well. He mentioned… contingencies.”
The word hung between them. Contingencies. Assassins. Blackmail. War.
Rio’s hand found Agatha’s under the covers, their fingers intertwining. “So we stick our hand in deeper. We find the webs before they find us.”
“Tomorrow,” Agatha murmured, exhaustion finally leaching into her bones, but a new, crystalline clarity with it. “Tomorrow, we start.”
Outside, the bell of the Sanctum tolled the midnight watch. The fog had thickened, pressing against the window like a blind, white eye. In the dark warmth of the bed, two women clung to each other, an island of heat and resolve in a cold, scheming sea. The game was no longer approaching. It had begun. And they were both players, now.