Chapter 3: Caught Red-Handed
The door hit the wall hard enough to crack the plaster.
Klaus Mikaelson stood in the entrance of his own studio, and for a long moment he said nothing at all. He was tall, broad-shouldered, dressed in a dark shirt with the sleeves rolled, curls wild from sleep or from being awake and furious in the small hours. His eyes went first to the canvas. His canvas. The pristine one that had been waiting on the easel for three weeks while he decided what deserved to be born on it.
It was on the floor. It was ruined. It was, technically, magnificent.
Two bodies were printed into it in gold and red and blue, tangled at the centre, and one of those bodies was currently straddling his brother with a gold-painted hand still pressed wet into the corner, finishing the signature. The girl was tiny. Four foot nothing of freckles and red hair and neon-pink fabric crumpled somewhere across the room, paint streaked from throat to thigh, sitting on Kol's cock like a throne.
"You," Klaus said, and his voice came out low and rough, "are in my studio."
"Iris Potter." She twisted around at the waist without moving off Kol, which took a certain commitment, and looked up at the brother in the doorway with a smile that had never met a consequence it respected. Her chin was gold. Her nipples were gold. There was a smear of ultramarine across one cheekbone like a duelling scar. "And you must be the scowling one. Kol said you'd scowl. I told him that was a libel but here we are."
"Iris," Kol said lazily, hands still resting on her hips, entirely unbothered by the arrival of a hybrid who could level the building, "this is Niklaus. Niklaus, the masterpiece."
"Your brother has excellent taste in co-stars." Iris rocked her hips once, deliberately, and Kol's breath went ragged, and Klaus watched her do it and could not look away, and that was the first wrong thing. The second wrong thing was the shape of her face. He knew that face. He had never seen it before in a thousand years and he knew it the way you know a room you grew up in, and it went through him like a blade in water, this inexplicable sense of mine, and he hated it, and his eyes stayed on her anyway.
"You are desecrating my studio," Klaus said, stepping inside. His boots left prints in the splattered paint. "On my canvas. With my paint."
"Your paint is very good paint." She lifted her hand, the gold one, and admired it. "Expensive, too. I did check. Kol said you'd forgive anything in the name of art, and frankly, look at it." She gestured grandly at the canvas beneath them, the chaos of limbs, the smear where her face had pressed, the dark bloom at the centre of everything. "That's not vandalism, that's a masterpiece. We're geniuses. You should be thanking us."
Klaus crossed the room. Vampires could move quietly; he chose not to, and each step landed like a verdict. He stopped at the edge of the canvas and looked down at the two of them, at the gold handprint signed in the corner, at Kol sprawled and paint-slick and smirking up at the ceiling like a man who had won something.
"Get off my canvas, Kol," he said.
"You're welcome to join us," Kol said.
"I'd rather flay you."
"Family Christmas is going to be awkward either way, so."
Iris leaned back, bracing one gold hand on Kol's paint-streaked chest, and looked up at Klaus from below, which put her in the unfortunate position of having to look at his face at close range, and it was a very good face, all sharp angles and barely leashed violence, and something low in her stomach did not helpfully point that out. He was staring at her. Not at the canvas. At her. It wasn't the stare of a man angry about paint. It was the stare of a man doing arithmetic he refused to show his work on.
"What," she said, "are you looking at?"
"I don't know," Klaus said honestly, and it came out wrong, too quiet, almost to himself, and Kol's eyebrows went up.
Then the hybrid blinked, and the vulnerability was gone, sealed over with rage like a wound clotting. His hand closed around Iris's upper arm, paint-slick skin under a grip that would have bruised a human, and he pulled her off Kol and onto her feet in one motion. She came up short against his chest, all four foot ten of her, paint sliding between their bodies, and she had to tilt her head back at an absurd angle to glare up at him, and she did glare, gloriously, without a single ounce of fear in her.
"Oi," she said. "Hands."
"You put your hands all over my studio." His voice was very calm now, which Kol, watching from the floor, recognised as the worst possible register. "You screamed this house awake. You signed my canvas with an arse print."
"A technically brilliant arse print."
"There is," Klaus said, "a room in this house for exactly this sort of behaviour. I have collected a great many instruments over the centuries for the correction of disrespect. Witches, specifically, feature prominently in its history." His eyes flicked to Kol, still naked and gold on the ruined canvas. "And disobedient little brothers. Up. Both of you. We're going downstairs."
"Ohh," Kol said, and sat up on his elbows, delighted. "The room."
"What room?" Iris asked, interested despite herself. Klaus still hadn't let go of her arm and she hadn't actually tried to make him.
"The room," Kol repeated, with relish.
"Kol, what room?"
"You'll see, little storm cloud. Bring the paint. You'll want the paint."
Klaus dragged them both down three flights of stairs, through a corridor behind the kitchen that smelled of stone and old iron, and unlocked a door with a key he wore on a chain and never explained to guests. The room beyond was large, windowless, warm, lit by wall lamps that threw long shadows. There were hooks in the beams. There was a bench upholstered in dark leather, a frame of iron set into the floor, and along one wall, mounted like a museum collection, a thousand years of implements: floggers with worn handles, paddles, coils of soft leather rope, things with shapes that made their purpose unmistakable, a riding crop with silver mounts that looked older than most countries.
Iris stood in the doorway, still naked and painted, and took it all in with her mouth slowly curving.
"Kol," she said. "I think I'm in love with this house."
"Told you," Kol said, shrugging off the last of his dignity along with any pretence of remorse.
"I don't recall giving you a choice about coming down here," Klaus said. He shut the door behind them and turned the lock, and the click of it was very loud. He looked at Iris, at the gold and red and blue drying on her skin, at the insolent set of her chin, and the wrong feeling rose in him again, that unbearable familiarity, and he shoved it down where he kept everything he refused to examine. "You wanted to make art in my studio. Very well. We'll see how you feel about being part of the collection."
"Are you going to punish me, or just stare at me all night?" Iris asked. "Because one of those has a punchline and the other is just rude."
Something in Klaus's jaw shifted. He crossed to the wall, took down the coil of leather rope, and came back, and Iris watched him come with her pulse ticking up, green eyes bright, absolutely not afraid, which was its own kind of provocation.
"Wrists," he said.
"Make me."
"I fully intend to."
He caught her. She was quick, genuinely quick, and she got one hand up and a spark of green magic crackled off her palm, and Klaus took both her wrists in one hand anyway, hybrid strength like iron, and walked her backwards two steps into the frame of iron set in the floor. Overhead a hook waited with a ring. He bound her wrists in the soft leather with a speed that spoke of centuries of practice, threaded the line through the ring, and hauled, and Iris's arms rose over her head until she was stretched up on her toes, paint-slick, arched, utterly displayed.
"Charming," she panted, toes barely brushing the stone. "Very medieval. I've had worse from a broom cupboard."
"Have you." He picked up the flogger from the wall, an old one, falls of soft leather worn smooth by centuries of use. He stood behind her and let the falls drag slowly down her spine, through the gold, and she shivered, full-body, and he felt it like a hook behind his ribs. "Tell me, little witch. Do you know what happens to girls who defile my studio?"
"They get flogged by a man with anger management issues and excellent interior decorating?"
The first strike landed across her arse with a crack, and Iris cried out, and it was not a cry of pain, or it was, but it was also a moan, raw and shameless, and her whole body bowed into it. The second followed before she'd finished, red-gold skin flushing under the leather. The third. She was laughing by the fourth, breathless, hanging in the ropes, and Klaus struck her again and again and her arse went hot and pink under the paint and her moans filled the stone room and got filthier every time.
"Harder," she demanded, over her shoulder, hair sticking to her sweat-and-paint-slick neck. "Come on. I survived a war, you absolute drama queen, I want to feel it tomorrow."
"You want," Klaus said, and hit her harder, exactly as hard as she'd asked, and she screamed, and the scream turned into a laugh at the top, "to feel it tomorrow."
"See, you get me." She was wet, obviously, unmistakably, her thighs shining under the paint, and Kol, lounging against the wall with his arms crossed and not one item of clothing on, gave Klaus a look of profound smugness that said, told you she was the finest thing to happen to this city in a century. Klaus ignored him with difficulty.
He dropped the flogger and stepped in close behind her, pressed his body along her back, and she felt all of him, hard through his trousers, insistent against the burning heat of her arse, and his mouth came to her ear.
"Who," he said, "are you? Truly."
"Iris Potter," she gasped, "Girl Who Lived, chaos gremlin, currently a work of art, and you're pressing your cock against me, which I'm choosing to interpret as a formal apology."
He turned her in the ropes so she faced him, arms stretched overhead, and looked at her face again at close range, the green eyes, the shape of her, and that blade went through him a second time, cold and sure and impossible. Freckles. He had known someone with those freckles. The thought arrived and he put it in a box and locked it, the way he locked everything, and it did not stay locked, it sat there ticking.
"You look," he said slowly, "like someone."
"Everyone says I have one of those faces." She rolled her hips, blatant. "Are you going to fuck me or interrogate me? Pick one, we're on a schedule, I've got a swamp to release somewhere public."
Klaus looked at his brother. Kol pushed off the wall and came over unhurried, and Klaus caught the back of his neck and kissed him, hard, punitive, a thousand years of sibling war translated into teeth, and Kol kissed him back grinning, and then Klaus turned Kol's head by the hair to face the witch strung up between them.
"Your idea," Klaus said. "Your mess. You'll help me clean it up."
"With pleasure," Kol said, and dropped to his knees in front of Iris.
His mouth went to her throat first, then down, gold lips trailing paint across her collarbone, her sternum, licking a clean stripe through the colour, and then lower, and Iris's head fell back against her bound wrists and she swore in two languages. Kol's tongue found her clit and worked it with the patience of a man who had done this since before English existed, two fingers sliding into her at the same time, curling, and she pulled against the leather rope, thighs shaking, the flogged heat of her arse radiating against nothing.
"Oh, that's, fuck, Kol, that's cheating," she managed.
"It's punishment," Kol said against her, vibrating the word into her.
"It's terrible punishment. I'd like to file a complaint." Her breath broke off in a moan. "The complaint is that there isn't more of it."
Klaus moved behind her again. She heard his trousers come undone, felt the blunt heat of him press against her from behind while Kol's mouth was still on her from the front, and the sheer scale of it, being bracketed between two Original vampires in a room full of ancient instruments, made her clench around Kol's fingers and laugh, high and helpless.
"Both of you at once, on an hour's acquaintance," she said. "I love this city. I want to marry this city."
"You declined my proposal," Kol noted, lifting his head, chin gold, lips slick.
"You proposed at a café. This is much better ambience."
Then Klaus pushed into her, slow and relentless and enormous, and the laugh became a long broken sound, and there was no more wit for a while. He filled her inch by inch from behind while Kol's mouth worked her from the front, and the stretch was almost too much and exactly enough, and the burn on her arse flared every time his hips met it, and she came in under two minutes, shaking between them, screaming, the ropes creaking, paint smeared onto Klaus's shirt where her back pressed it.
He didn't stop. He set a pace, deep and punishing, and Kol added his fingers and his tongue in tandem, and the two brothers moved around her like a machine built over centuries of shared appetite, and Iris, hanging in the ropes, mindless, discovered she was capable of a third orgasm in an hour and then, disgracefully, a fourth, and by the fifth she was laughing and crying at the same time and begging without specifying for what.
"Please," she gasped, "please, I'm sorry about the canvas, I'm not sorry about the canvas, I'd do it again, I'll do it again, please."
"Contradictory," Klaus said, and it came out wrecked, his control fraying, the wrong feeling still ticking in the locked box of him, her face under his hands, her body around him like an answer to a question he'd never asked aloud.
The turn came when she twisted her head, sweat-soaked, green eyes gone dark, and said to Klaus, deliberately, sweetly: "Your turn. Come inside me. Both of you. I want to leave here a mess, like your studio."
Kol laughed, breathless against her thigh. Klaus's rhythm broke, and he drove in once, twice, and followed her over with a sound torn out of him, ancient and involuntary, spilling deep, and Kol wasn't far behind her stroking hand and mouth, groaning against her hip, and for a long moment the only sounds were the ropes and the gasping and the drip of something wet onto old stone.
Then Klaus reached up and cut the rope with a flick of his thumbnail and caught her as she folded, because her legs had entirely stopped being a going concern. He held her upright against his chest, paint transfer across his shirt, one arm under hers, and Iris tipped her head back against him, drunk and boneless and grinning at the ceiling.
"Best punishment ever," she slurred. "Ten out of ten. I'm going to vandalise something else tomorrow."
"Absolutely not," said Klaus, and then, before he could stop it, looking down at her spent, painted, wicked little face: "You will stay. For breakfast."
"We'll discuss it over the swamp," said Iris, already falling asleep against a stranger whose face she somehow knew.