Chapter 4: Taken by Two
Eve woke to the sound of the front doors. Heavy oak, iron fittings, the particular groan they made when someone opened them without bothering to disguise their arrival. Only one person in the world came home like that.
Her father's heartbeat had changed above her. She felt it through the cushion under her cheek, a small quickening, and when she opened her eyes Klaus was already sitting up on the chaise, buttoning his shirt with unhurried fingers. His face betrayed nothing. His hands betrayed everything; the second button took him two tries.
"Elijah," he said, not as a question.
"You knew he was coming." She sat up, pulling the silk throw around her shoulders. The paddle marks on her ass stung against the velvet as she moved, a pleasant reminder. "Why didn't you say?"
"Because I wanted to see your face when you heard him." He smiled, and it was the real smile, the one without any teeth in it at all. "Go on, little wolf. Go greet your uncle."
She padded barefoot out of the Red Room, down the corridor where the footsteps had rustled earlier, and there he was in the entrance hall, setting down a leather valise. Elijah looked exactly as he always did, three-piece suit, every seam ironed, not a hair out of place, as though a thousand years of vampirism were merely a question of grooming. The travel dust on his shoes was the only concession.
"Eve." His whole face changed when he saw her. That was the thing about Elijah; the world got the diplomat, and she got the man underneath it. "There she is."
She crossed the marble to him the way she had crossed it a hundred times since she was small, arms around his waist, face tipped up. He bent without hesitation and she kissed him on the mouth, the family greeting, the one she had watched him exchange with her papa in this same hall for as long as she could remember. Lips pressed, a breath, done.
Except he didn't let it be done.
His hand came up to her jaw, holding her. His other arm banded across her back, and she felt the whole elegant architecture of him shift as he leaned in and opened his mouth against hers. His tongue swept through her, slow and thorough, tasting her the way she had only ever been tasted by one person in her life. She made a small sound into it, shock and something else, and her fingers curled into the lapels of his suit.
He kissed the way he did everything. Precisely. Completely. No hurry and no retreat.
When he finally lifted his mouth from hers, her lips were wet and her breath had gone somewhere and not come back. His thumb was still resting on her jaw, tracing the line of it like he was memorizing the bone.
"You taste of my brother," Elijah observed quietly.
"You kiss like him." Her voice came out lower than she meant it to. "I've watched you kiss him in this hall for years. I always wondered if it felt like that."
"And now you know." His eyes moved over her face, then lower, catching the silk throw slipping off her shoulder, the state of her, his brother's marks no doubt still visible on her skin where the towel had ended. He was an Original. His nose was more honest than any human's could be. Whatever he smelled, he did not step back. He stepped closer.
Behind her, the corridor. She heard Klaus's footsteps on the rug, unhurried, and his voice when it came was warm and utterly unreadable.
"Well, brother. That took you less time than I expected."
"Niklaus." Elijah did not release her jaw. His thumb kept its slow path along her cheekbone. "You said she'd be ready. I confess I doubted you."
"You doubted me about her?" Klaus laughed, and Eve felt the sound move through the floor. "I've never doubted her about anything. The question was whether you'd have the spine."
"She is my niece."
"She is a Mikaelson," Klaus said, coming to stand behind her, close enough that she felt the heat of him through the silk. "And you have wanted this since the day she turned eighteen and I told you what our family is. Don't insult us both with the litany. She hates lists."
"That's true," Eve said. "I do."
Elijah looked down at her, and she watched a thousand years of discipline argue with something older and hungrier and lose. His hand slid from her jaw into her hair, gathering it at the nape, not pulling, just holding, the way a man holds something he has decided to keep.
"Tell me if you want me to stop," he said, and it was not a question so much as a treaty, offered in perfect good faith.
"I don't want you to stop." She worked the first button of his waistcoat free while she said it, looking up at him. "I want to know what you taste like. Papa always says you're the sweet one. I don't believe him."
"He is not," Klaus said mildly, his mouth against her hair.
Eve pushed the waistcoat off his shoulders. It dropped onto the marble with a soft heavy sound, followed by the suit jacket, and then she was working on the shirt buttons, ivory ones, warm from his body. Elijah watched her fingers and did not help her and did not stop her. Under the shirt his chest was bare and smooth, paler than Klaus's, mapped with a few old scars so faint they might have been drawn in pencil. She pressed her mouth to one, just below his collarbone, and felt his breath catch.
"You've been bitten there," she said, tracing it with her tongue. "Someone fed from you."
"Your father. Centuries ago. It was a request, not an appetite."
"Was it good?"
"It was efficient," Elijah said, and then she bit him, human teeth, nothing, a tease of pressure over the old scar, and his hand tightened in her hair and the answer changed. "It was good."
Eve smiled against his skin and kept going, kissing down the plane of his chest, over his stomach, feeling the muscle jump under her lips. Behind her Klaus's hands settled on her hips, steadying her, and his voice came low beside her ear.
"There. You see, brother? She asked. She always asks. That's the whole of the rule in this house, and you break nothing by answering her."
Elijah's fingers combed through her hair, loosening it out of the silk tie she'd slept in, platinum spilling down her back. His expression had gone somewhere she had never once seen it go in eighteen years of watching him across dinner tables and ballrooms. Undone, or nearly.
"Eve," he said, and his voice was rougher than she had ever heard it. "What is it you want from me?"
She looked up at him from her knees on the cold marble, his shirt hanging open, his belt in her hands.
"Everything," she said. "Obviously."
She unbuckled the belt and drew it free of the loops in one long hissing pull.