Chapter 5: The Wedding Night
The heavy oak door closed with a solid, final thud, severing the cacophony of the hall from the sudden, oppressive quiet of the chamber. James released her waist, his hand dropping as if burned. He didn’t look at her. He walked to the hearth, poked at the struggling fire, and let out a long, slow breath that seemed to deflate him.
“I must return,” he said, his voice rough. “It would be an insult to leave my own feast so early. They will expect… bonhomie.”
Kate said nothing. She stood in the center of the room, a statue in crimson, still fighting for air.
“Your maid will attend you.” He turned, his eyes skimming over her without landing. “Rest.”
And then he was gone, the door opening and closing again, leaving her utterly alone in the gilded cage. The silence rang in her ears. With trembling, frantic fingers, she clawed at the back of her gown, seeking the laces, but they were knotted tight and high, Isobel’s cruel handiwork. A sob of pure frustration tore from her throat. She stumbled to the bell pull and yanked it hard.
The maid who arrived was young and Scottish, her eyes wide. It took a quarter of an hour of painful pulling and cutting to get Kate free. The silk pooled on the floor like shed blood. As the shift was pulled over her head, the maid gasped softly. Kate didn’t need to look; she could feel the angry, raised welts circling her torso, a map of Isobel’s malice. The cool linen was a relief, then an agony as it settled against the bruises.
She dismissed the maid, wanting no witness to her trembling. She poured water from the pitcher, drank, paced. The room was large, dominated by a canopied bed hung with heavy drapes. A royal bed. A marriage bed. She sat on its edge, the feather mattress sighing beneath her. Time stretched, thin and brittle. Distant laughter and music filtered through the stone, a taunting reminder of the world outside this room, where she was already a symbol, a treaty, a prize.
The fire had burned low to embers when the door finally opened again. James stood in the threshold, his silhouette broad and unsteady against the torchlight from the corridor. The scent of strong ale and peat smoke came in with him. He closed the door, more carefully this time, and leaned back against it. His doublet was unlaced at the throat, his copper hair disheveled.
He stared at her across the shadowed room. She hadn’t moved from the bed.
“You’re still awake,” he said. His words were deliberate, only slightly slurred.
“I was contemplating my new definition of sovereignty,” Kate replied. Her voice was calm, a stark contrast to the riot inside her.
He pushed off the door and walked toward her, his movements loose-limbed from drink. He stopped a foot away, his eyes dropping to the neckline of her shift, where the top of a livid bruise peeked out. A muscle twitched in his jaw.
“Isobel,” he stated, his voice dark.
“A most diligent lady-in-waiting. She ensured I was properly cinched for the slaughter.”
He reached out, his fingers surprisingly gentle as they hooked the fabric of her shift, pulling it down her shoulder an inch to reveal the full, ugly mark. His touch was calloused and warm. Kate flinched, but not away. A current, hot and dangerous, shot through her.
“I’ll have words with her,” he muttered.
“Don’t trouble yourself. It’s just the first of many bruises, I imagine.” She looked up at him, meeting his brown eyes directly. The liquid courage in him had stripped some layer of regal control away. She saw the warrior, the man beneath the prince. And she saw something else, a flicker of the same trapped feeling she knew so well.
She took a sharp breath. The confession tore itself from her, raw and unforgivable. “I have only known you for one day, and I’ve learned two things.” She held his gaze, her blue eyes fierce in the dim light. “I don’t like you, and I want you.”
The air left the room. For a heartbeat, there was only the crackle of the embers.
Then he moved.
It wasn’t a tender embrace. It was a conquest. His hand fisted in her dark hair, wrenching her head back. His mouth crashed down on hers, a hot, bruising invasion fueled by ale and a fury that mirrored her own. There was no sweetness in it, only a desperate, clashing hunger. She bit his lip, tasting iron, and he growled, swallowing the sound as he shoved her back onto the mattress.
This was not lovemaking. It was a battle for dominance, a physical scream against the fate that bound them. He yanked the thin shift up over her hips, the linen tearing at the neck. She struggled, not to get away, but to meet him force for force, her nails raking down his back through his shirt. He tore the garment off, his body a landscape of hard muscle and old scars, pale in the gloom.
“Turn over,” he commanded, his voice guttural.
She hesitated for a second, defiance blazing, before obeying. She pressed her face into the coverlet, the smell of wool and lavender filling her nose. He was on her in an instant, his weight immense and pinning. One hand gripped her hip, fingers digging into the bruise there, making her gasp. She heard the rustle of his breeches, the brief, crude sound of him spitting into his palm.
Then he was pushing into her, a blunt, unstoppable invasion. She cried out, the sound muffled by the bedding. She was unprepared, tight, the friction a brutal burn. He didn’t pause, didn’t gentle. He drove himself deep with a single, brutal thrust that stole the air from her lungs.
“Fuck,” he hissed, his body going rigid above her.
He began to move, a hard, punishing rhythm that shook the bedframe. Each slam of his hips drove her into the mattress, a visceral punctuation to their mutual resentment. Pain and a shocking, unwelcome heat coiled together low in her belly. Her fingers clutched at the covers, knuckles white. Tears of frustration and raw sensation welled in her eyes. This was what it was to be a vessel. This was the consummation.
But a fierce, rebellious pride flared in her chest. She would not just lie there and be taken. If this was to be her lot, she would claim something from it.
As he fucked into her with relentless, angry strokes, his breath hot and ragged against her neck, she slid her hand beneath her own body. She shifted, arching her spine just enough to give herself room. She found the slick, swollen nub between her legs, ignored the ache of his relentless penetration, and began to rub.
James froze.
His entire body went still, buried deep inside her. The only sound was their ragged breathing.
“What… are you doing?” he asked, his voice thick with shock and something else—awe, perhaps.
“What you cannot,” Kate spat into the covers, her fingers circling faster, the direct touch sending jolts of defiant pleasure through the discomfort. “I am taking what I want.”
A ragged groan tore from his throat. The shock melted into a feral kind of frenzy. He gripped both her hips now, his hold bordering on painful, and resumed his thrusts with renewed, chaotic intensity. His rhythm broke, becoming harder, faster, driven over the edge by her audacity.
“You wicked… impossible… woman,” he grunted, each word a hammer blow synced with his plunging cock.
The tension built, a storm at the base of her spine, fed by his furious fucking and her own frantic fingers. It wasn’t gentle or sweet. It was a sharp, crashing release that tore through her like a lightning strike, a clenching, paralyzing wave that made her scream into the mattress. Her climax pulsed around him, milking his length.
With a final, deep roar that was more anguish than triumph, he slammed into her one last time and spilled, his hot seed flooding her as his body shuddered violently against hers.
For a long moment, they stayed locked like that, a tangled, sweating, breathless heap of spent animosity and shocking intimacy. The only sound was their gasping breaths slowly settling.
Then, from the other side of the thick oak door, they heard it: a roar of male laughter, the thumping of cups on wood, a ragged, drunken chorus of cheering and approval. The lords had waited, listening. Their union, in its most raw and carnal form, had been a public performance after all.
James went rigid again, but this time with a different kind of tension. He withdrew from her slowly. The sudden emptiness was a cold shock. He rolled onto his back beside her, one arm flung over his eyes. The cheers from the hallway subsided into rumbling conversation and fading footsteps.
In the silence that followed, the reality of the wetness between her thighs, the throbbing ache, the echo of those cheers, settled over them both, heavier than any velvet coverlet.