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Attolia’s new husband arrives with an awkward fanfare and a belated announcement from her attendants. The queen turns from where she’s been sitting, watching the lights of the town below against the deepening twilight. It’s taken longer than she’d anticipated.
She waits until he’s shut the door behind him to speak. “Took you long enough.”
Eugenides smirks at her. “I had some negotiating to do with my attendants,” he says with a shrug. “We came to the mutual conclusion that I wouldn’t change after all.”
Attolia raises an eyebrow. He’s still dressed in the cream and ivory suit that was his wedding outfit and it’s positively radiant in the lamplight against the olive brown of his skin. Very regal, she thinks, with the gold circlet of king-consort pulling his hair away from his face and the single long earring glinting at his jawline. Appropriate for the march through the halls that he’d organised, from his quarters on the far side of the royal wing to hers, but rather impractical for the rest of his wedding night.
Attolia’s wedding costume had been elaborate enough that her attendants had removed the many layers before she’d settled in to sit and wait for her new husband. Full skirts in pale gold, lilies embroidered almost invisibly around the hem, a necklace of coins that hung from her throat to her navel. The wrapped veil with matching coins had been her least favorite, clanking too close to her face every time she turned her head and tugging at her throat with the weight of it hanging over her shoulders.
The robe she wears now is no less fine— it even has the same coins sewn into the embroidery, symbols of luck and prosperity, wishing this union to a joyful future— but it feels a great deal less like armor than the heavy brocade of earlier. This gown has been designed to be easy to remove.
Eugenides looks at her as if she is encrusted from head to foot in pearls. His face softens. “It’s good to see you.”
“You saw me at our wedding. And the feast after.” Her chest hurts, just beneath her sternum.
“That hardly counts. We barely spoke to each other.”
Technically he’s correct. For all that they’d spent most of the day side by side, Eugenides had hardly looked at her and Irene had stared stone-faced ahead through the ceremonies. They might as well have been in different kingdoms entirely.
He cocks one hip to perch on her desk and heaves a large sigh, looking around as if he’s never seen her rooms before. Monstrous little beast. It makes her want to kick him. His grin is nearly manic when he turns it back to her. “So, what happens next?”
“You need to ask?” Attolia presses her lips together. The urge to kick is not going away.
“Well, we could talk again about you reducing the Guard by half—”
Thank goodness her desk is so conveniently located. Attolia snatches up the first thing she can reach and throws it at his head, furious.
He ducks. The ink jar hits the wall behind him and shatters. Ink splatters across the wall, across his fine white coat, across the carpet. As it begins to run down the wall in streaks, the door bursts open and Imenia comes rushing in, two guards flanking her, four more behind. One of the king’s attendants peeks his head in a moment later.
“My queen?” Imenia gasps, looking around in horror.
“Out!” Attolia snaps.
She’d meant the intruding attendants and guards, but Eugenides beats all of them to the punch. “Fine!” he snaps, flinging his arms down and shedding a few stray ink droplets from the open sleeves of his coat. “Fine!”
Without another word he shoves his way through the guards and into the attendant’s waiting room, then presumably out of her suite entirely, swearing and collecting his gaggle of attendants on his way.
There is a great deal of noise that follows him out.
Attolia breathes deeply through her nose, casting about wildly for something sensible to say. “Thank you, Imenia,” she manages, sharp as glass. “You may go.” She can’t muster anything else through the ringing in her ears.
“Yes, my queen,” Imenia says, sinking into a curtsey. Her attention is on the ink still dripping down the wall, black as pitch on the carved wood panel. Attolia tips her chin, daring her to question it, but Imenia just turns to roust the guards out. There seems to be a bottleneck in the doorway, guards still trying to come in as the ones inside attempt to leave. If she’d needed a blatant illustration of what too many guards looks like, this is certainly one of them.
“I beg your pardon, my queen," Imenia manages when the whole passel of them has been extricated from her rooms, “Rest well.”
The doors click shut.
The queen’s wedding night is proceeding in fine form.
Irene closes her eyes, breathing deeply. Then she snorts, loudly, and covers her mouth with her hand to hold in the sounds of laughter. It takes some effort to regain control and then she waits, mustering extraordinary patience. There is a careful knock on her door, Phresine brings her water with lemon. Attolia resents her for a brief and vicious moment, then thanks her generously and waves her away again.
The water is nice. She sips it, letting the tartness linger on her tongue. Outside the night has grown deeper and darker, blue velvet sweeping over the town of Attolia.
A soft noise makes her turn before he speaks. “I take it you don’t want to discuss the Guard then?” Eugenides tips his head to the side, questioningly. “Because I have some more arguments I think are very convincing—”
“I have more ink jars,” Attolia says acerbically. They’ve had this argument too many times for him to bring it up now. “Not. Tonight."
“You had other plans then, for tonight?” His voice is deeper than usual, a husky note to it— he’s dropped a portion of his Attolian accent, leaving the hidden burrs of his Eddisian one to roll over her skin. He steps in close enough that Irene can feel the warmth of him against her back through her robe. She clears her throat, suddenly thick with tension, and takes another sip of lemon water to hide it, sweet and tart on her tongue.
“Will that be the only time I ever see you pass through my chamber doors properly?” she asks. Creeping out of her walls like a spectre hardly counts.
Eugenides laughs, mischief in his blood. “Possibly. It will certainly be the only time they see me pass through those doors for a good long while. I’ve no need for them to know our business.” He pulls her heavy black braid out of the way and kisses the side of her neck, then her shoulder. Shivers course through her. He has not kissed her since Pricas Spring— the night of the ambush— when Eugenides had come into her tent to kiss her good-bye. That’s what she assumes now, at least. Maybe he’d kissed her to prove he owned her, even for only that one rainy night, but she has seen enough by now not to warrant the thought.
“You will have to face it someday,” Attolia reminds him, ignoring his levity and advances. She looks over her shoulder at him. “You are Attolis now.”
Eugenides, her newly crowned king of Attolia, goes to his knees by her side and puts a finger to her lips, silencing her. “Not tonight,” he repeats, hushed. “Tonight I am your husband and nothing more.” The ache in his voice threatens to hollow her out until she reminds herself that he not only wanted this marriage, but had threatened to drown her if he couldn’t have it. Perhaps they do deserve each other. He’d won the war, won her, and lost everything else.
“You are beautiful, Irene,” he says with the same gravity as when he’d once said, I want you to know that I love you. Attolia can look him in the eyes now and see the truth of it.
“You are still covered in ink,” she tells him.
He laughs. There is joy in his eyes, his smile, the dimples in his cheeks. Irene can’t remember the last time someone looked at her like this, radiating joy. Eugenides extends a hand and waits for her to take it.
She takes it.
The skirt of her robes falls heavily around her ankles as he pulls her to her feet. Eugenides guides her away from the window like he’d escorted her to the dance floor under the vicious stares of her entire court and the Eddisian diplomatic party. They are alone now. The tightness of Irene’s chest is twice as constricting with them alone. At the foot of her bed he tips his chin up and kisses her on the lips.
His lips are warm and dry and papery soft. The smell of his skin, his breath, so close to her cheeks is far more overwhelming. She can feel his smile. Irene cannot stop the heavy swallow that clogs her throat. She presses her lips together like she can preserve that feeling, as a violet is pressed between the pages of a book, and sits, knees weak.
Eugenides’ prosthetic hand is useless in the efforts to undress himself. Wearing Attolian wedding colors of Eddisian design, the coat has an indecent number of gold frogs down the front of the fitted doublet to keep it closed over the many-layered skirts of his tunic, and while the ink-spattered sleeves are slitted, billowing open at the elbows, they are pinned at his wrists. He tries a few different things and then bites the fastener on his left cuff.
Irene can’t watch this. “You didn’t think to have your attendants undress you?” She holds on desperately to the evenness of her voice as nausea rises in her. It’s remarkable the way her monstrous crimes haunt her, threatening to overwhelm her senses at any given moment. One day she might discover what recompense there is for cutting off the hand of the man she came to love. Not tonight.
“I didn’t want to wait any longer,” Eugenides says, using his wooden fingers to try and pin the fabric in place. It hurts to look at.
Eugenides must never know the courage it takes for Irene to touch his false hand, brushing it out of her way along with his flesh one so that she can reach the frogs herself.
“How long has it been,” her new husband asks as she fumbles her way down, marvelling at the effort that her attendants have never shown, “since you undressed someone other than yourself? Have you ever?”
Rich, coming from a literal child. The rumors of Eddis and her Thief consorting are bitter on the back of Irene’s tongue, flown across the countryside on the wings of prurient gossip. If only Eugenides could have seen her when she’d heard the news, the destruction she’d wrought on unsuspecting pottery— he’d probably be delighted to know of it. He never will.
She stares him down until he’s the one swallowing heavily, his eyes wide and dark.
No, she had never made it to this stage with her first husband. Her marriage to Kallicertes’ son had ended in conquest, not consummation, when she’d poisoned him at their wedding feast.
Consummation. Attolia shapes the word in her own head, turning the consonants over and over. This might not be her first wedding, but it is her first wedding night. Her body is as tense as a drawn bowstring, a confusing mess of signals roiling through her. It is decidedly not helpful as she struggles through the last of the fasteners.
The way Eugenides’ breath catches in his throat as she pulls his wrists up, real hand and wooden one, to undo the pins at his cuffs is almost enough to make her snap.
She makes no comment as she feels two knives within the lining of the coat as it slides from his shoulders. He would have taken them out if he didn’t want her to find them. “Can you manage from there?” Attolia has control over her voice again; it does not waver.
“I’d rather you do it,” Eugenides says, smug, breaking her mood insistently, the little viper.
“Impertinent,” Attolia accuses, but he only grins at her winningly, eyes twinkling.
Irene reaches for the buckle of his belt and it wipes the shameless grin from his face. Leather slips through her fingers, then she unwraps the sash around his hips, jangling with familiar coins. She raises an eyebrow as she raises the small knife that had been hidden in the twists of her hair earlier that evening, newly discovered neatly tucked within the cloth folds of Eugenides’ sash. He kisses her, pressing the smile on his lips against hers until she can’t resist meeting it with her own. Their teeth click, smiles unsuited to kissing. The decorative sword he’d worn to the wedding ceremonies is long gone. There is a tie at his throat that holds his tunic closed, which Irene pulls and finds her gaze caught by the hollow between his collarbones.
Eugenides interrupts her fascination by raising the sleeve of the coat and sniffing it. “Is this walnut ink?”
Attolia is without words. She has no idea.
“It might still wash out,” he says, wrinkling his nose. The image strikes a chord in Irene’s chest, that little wrinkle.
The rest of her is baffled. “Why?” Irene asks incredulously. “What do you imagine you’ll be doing with an Eddisian wedding outfit a second time? Marrying someone else?” He would never. Fury tears through her like a rabid dog.
Eugenides laughs. “You never know,” he crows, adding fuel to the flames inside her, “Someday my son might want to wear it!” Then he hears what he said and his laughter cuts off abruptly.
They are both silent, breathing the thick air between them. Heirs have been a matter of political leverage and maneuvering up till this point. Heirs are a necessity, nothing more than another tool to strike out at her barons with, to hold onto her kingdom and keep the Medes at bay. The actual creating of them has not yet been reviewed in any detail yet.
The bed looming behind her commands every corner of her attention not already fixated on the delicate hollow of Eudenides’ throat.
Eugenides drops the coat and leans in to kiss her fiercely. Shock lances through her. This is not the soft press from earlier, sweet and simple, nor the one flavored with the taste of blood and rain from the first time, under extreme circumstances. This has more of that energy though, a sudden desperation that Attolia can feel transferring to her like a contagion. She opens her mouth, unsure of what else to do and lets his tongue slide between her teeth.
Conceptually, this idea has always been mildly disgusting to her.
In reality, she is disquieted, perhaps ambivalent, until she pushes back at his clumsy, insistent probing and feels him shiver. Her hand cups the back of his neck where his hair had been recently shorn and Eugenides’ weight tips in toward her, like his knees have gone out from under him. He makes a noise, soft and hungry, into her mouth and Irene very suddenly finds something she did not know she had been looking for. Eugenides tips his head back when she presses, shoving herself into his space, forcing him to give way. Irene tastes another muffled sound as she presses her tongue into his hot, eager mouth. His lips close over her tongue, his teeth drag along the underside of it, and Irene is filled to the brim with heat and something angry, furious, demanding.
Eugenides gasps and they move apart, a slick strand of saliva stretching and then breaking on a breath. His mouth is wet. Hers tastes of him. She licks her lips and he shudders to see it.
Eugenides asks, barely breathing into the space between them, “How does this go?”
“How do you want it to go?”
“I will do anything,” he says, a fervor in his voice. His accent is even stronger now, very little of his Attolian facade left behind. “Anything for you, anything you ask of me. I’m yours.” It’s barely a whisper and it rings through Irene like a thunderclap.
Her country. Her sovereignty. Her throne. All of them signed away in the marriage treaty to Eugenides, her Eddisian king. Yet if he is hers, all of the others are hers by extension.
She needs him to be king. She needs his strength and the stability a strong king will offer, the unshakeable foundation they will rely on to keep her barons at bay.
She had not thought there was more the world could teach her. She has never once considered needing him like this.
Attolia kisses him again, carefully tempering that surging, raging creature inside her that is threatening to burst free, trying to find the balance between hunger and control. Eugenides moves so easily with her movements, following her commands. He pushes forward when she retreats, too eager for more to restrain himself, but easily swaying when she wrestles control back from him. It’s intoxicating.
“Finish undressing,” she commands, “and come to bed with me.” Her robe slips so easily off her shoulders. Her chemise joins it. Eugenides’ eyes are wide and fixed as she moves onto the bed, mouth dropped open in wonder.
Irene settles herself, fighting the urge to cover her bare skin with her hands. There is no such thing as privacy among royalty; she is used to being nude before her women, but this is different. She watches as Eugenides stumbles to strip his tunic, his boots, the pointed hose that covers his legs. When he’s naked as well, he hesitates. He is scarred, pale marks against his skin. His good wrist, his knees— his collarbone, where the sword of one of her soldiers impaled him. The straps of his cuff latch tightly to his skin just above his elbow on the maimed side, dimpling his upper arm. The wooden hand is finely carved, an exquisite piece of workmanship, and varnished a reddish brown the color of sun-warmed rocks in the Seperchia. It looks like a decent attempt to match his skintone, now that Irene looks at it like this, albeit too dark and too saturated by far.
In his vanity, Eugenides seems to prefer the hand over the hook, but of all the prosthetic options Attolia has seen him with, the hook looks to be his most useful. She considers the idea of commissioning a new hand for him, with all the strength and grace of his remaining one, and mentally tables it, thinking that blending in has never been Eugenides’ predisposition, despite his occupation.
The moment passes quicker than she realises, lost in thought. Eugenides has made his decision and crawls onto the bed with the prosthetic still attached, unwilling, it seems, to demonstrate to her the extent of her monstrosity on their wedding night. That’s fine. Irene knows exactly how deep the rot goes, how cruel and strange she has become in her pursuit as queen. It never fails to amaze her that Eugenides could love her after all she has done. He is the only one who could, and the very last person alive who should.
“Tell me what you want. I want to do everything,” Eugenides says, pressing his forehead to hers, hovering over her very carefully. He kept the earring in, a single pearl in a cage of gold wire, and it shines in his dark hair. His one hand traces shapes behind her ear, sinking into the base of her braid. If he weren’t touching her she might shatter apart, his touch is so overwhelming. “Everything you like, everything you desire. I want to please you,” he finishes, a whisper over her lips. What cocky assurance he’d had earlier has fallen away, leaving behind this strange, obsessive need to please.
Please her it may, but Attolia has only as much of an idea of what happens next as what she has learned from listening to her attendants gossip, her father’s courtesans, the cruel and vicious whispers that her last fiancé’s lovers had bandied about behind her back. She can’t even remember the last time someone touched her without the clipped professionalism of an attendant or a servant. She knows her body, true, but she doesn’t particularly know what a man can do to please her.
“So please me,” she says, and dislikes the feeling of it being a defensive volley.
“I don’t know how,” Eugenides says, blunt and earnest. He doesn’t even seem to think to hide the information from her.
Irene blinks at him. Eddis must have been remarkably relieved when he’d ventured away from her in pursuit of Attolia, if he is truly that ignorant.
“I’ve never done this,” he adds, which just confuses her more.
She doesn’t know what to do. “I thought—” Irene is off balance, she finishes with, “Eddis,” and can say no more.
“Eddis?” Eugenides looks nonplussed, as though he has heard of neither the country nor the queen. “Wh– Helen? What about Helen?”
“You were having an affair,” Attolia says crisply, disliking very much the off-kilter feeling of being lost in her own bed. She is not a silly girl; she has no business being like this. She straightens, pulling her stone shell around herself again— even if she cannot be clothed it does not mean she has to be naked.
First Eugenides blanches. The scar on his cheek looks dark in comparison. Then he goes so red in the face Attolia thinks he may have just had an embolism. Then he starts cackling, wheezing for breath, and collapses over her to muffle his laughter into her pillow. Irene raises her eyes to the ceiling and waits, temper mounting.
“My Lord, Attolis,” Attolia snaps. This is undignified, lying beneath the laughing boy. His skin is incredibly warm and smooth where they touch, despite the scars that pepper his body.
Still laughing, Eugenides lifts his head. “I beg your pardon, my queen,” he says. There his voice goes again, that burr of his own accent, which is absolutely featureless in front of her court. Warmth puddles in Irene’s belly, rippling. “There was no affair. It was all a show.”
That doesn’t make any sense. “For whom?”
“For you.” Eugenides kisses her on the lips, startling her out of her rising indignation. “We were at war.”
“I will start another one,” Attolia says, feeling herself flushing from head to toe. To be made a fool of— on her own wedding night—
But Eugenides kisses her again, softer, deeper, and lets her bite him viciously on the lip with nothing more than a whimper and a sag of his weight into her lap. “No need,” he says huskily when she releases her teeth. “I’m here. I’m yours. I will never, ever leave you.”
Irene’s breath is painful in her chest. He has said that before, and she believed him. But that doesn’t make her instincts any less strangling, honed by years of betrayal.
She swallows. If the Thief of Eddis had not been carrying out a torrid affair with his queen, then he is not the experienced lover she had expected, and he is just a boy. In her bed. It’s as if she’d forgotten how young he is. He is a man, truly, but he is a young man and it’s only been a few years since he’d been small and bloody and filthy at her feet, begging her for a mercy that she had not granted.
Her stomach curdles, bile stinging her throat. Attolia wills it down, not showing anything on her face but the practiced calm that she carries with her everywhere, everywhere she needs a mask.
He’s grown so much in that time. He’s taller, broader. The line of his chin is sharper, the strength of his body is astonishing. He is handsome, and if Attolia doesn’t know what to do with a handsome boy in her bed, at least she knows what to do with herself.
“Like this,” she says and reaches between her own legs.
He looks. And rattles like a ship in a storm, his breath gusting out of him. Irene freezes for a moment, as still as a statue. Eugenides drops to his elbows between her thighs, laid flat out on her bed. He looks up at her, wonder on his face. “Can I? Show me.”
So she shows him. Her fingers move through her own slick folds— she has never been so wet, the hair on her thighs is soaked— and Eugenides follows, barely touching her. She can only feel him by his trembling.
“Harder,” she demands as the sensation turns from a ghost of a touch to an unpleasant tickle. She takes his hand in hers, fingers already sticky, and slips two of them inside her.
They both jolt as if struck by lightning. Irene’s body goes tight, which only highlights how his fingers are broader than hers— she hadn’t expected that. Eugenides drops his face to her thigh and shudders. She can see his hips press against the counterpane, the muscles in his backside flexing with astonishing definition.
“You’re so soft, so warm,” Eugenides croaks, “like the heart of a volcano. Gods.”
“Curl your fingers,” Irene says, blustering through, “no, up—?” She jerks again, thighs snapping shut to squeeze him out. She clocks him in the ear with her knee and sits bolt upright.
“Did I hurt you?” The devastation on his face is only there for an instant before it smooths out, hidden like it had never been. Irene has seen it though and her chest seizes. It’s suddenly impossible to breathe.
His hand withdraws. She snatches it back. Their fingers are both sticky now, smeared with her wetness, the smell of salt between them.
Irene doesn’t know what’s on her face but she knows how hard it is to swallow and her chin is trembling
Their fingers curl together, locked around each other. Eugenides ducks his head, breathing out shakily before he leans back in to kiss her again, a new tentativeness making his movements very careful. The passion has gone out of him. She has ruined this, being so sensitive.
“Did I hurt you?” Eugenides asks again, lifting their linked hands to kiss her sticky fingers. “I’m sorry.”
It had hurt. Irene is not sure what he’d done, only that it had hurt and that there is a tight sensation in her throat, a heat in her eyes. She uses her other hand to card her fingers through his hair, the thick dark waves that curl about his temples. It’s soft. She’s so used to the texture of her own curls, coarse and tightly coiled. Whose hair has she ever stroked like this? Who has ever tipped their head into her hand, lips finding the center of her palm, which she had never known could be so sensitive. He kisses the turn of her wrist too, and her pulsepoint, steady beneath her skin. It had felt so good for it to pound with something other than terror for a moment.
“Do it again,” Irene murmurs, her jaw moving against the side of his head. “Better this time.”
Eugenides snorts.
Irene presses her lips together.
Their hands move together, more carefully this time. He uses one finger first, slipping it back between her folds and moving gently to curl up as she’d asked. Her fingers are locked around his wrist, feeling the flex of his tendons as he finds the textured patch on her inner walls that lights her up inside, that makes every motion ring through her senses. Eugenides strokes it softly, making her sigh, and her fingers spasm around his wrist. “There?” he asks, doing it again. He studies her with strange intensity, as if memorising her reactions.
“There,” she breathes, letting go of a fraction of her tension. It eases the way further and lets her sink a little more. The sharp pain of earlier has faded to an ache and then just an awareness, an unfocused knowledge that he is inside her. Her body is like a musical instrument, a lyre, playing on his fingers. Eugenides’ careful probing takes a more purposeful turn, wrist turning in her grip, and “Good,” slips from her throat without her foreknowledge like a song.
The way it brings Eugenides to life is something to make note of when Irene has the wherewithal to spare the attention. At the moment, her thighs are starting to quake.
“It’s good?” Eugenides presses a little more firmly, rocking his wrist so that every touch draws a soft noise from her throat that strangles before it leaves her mouth.
“It’s good,” she echoes. She should have known. After a rocky start he is damned quick study, and the cessation of pain has brought a wondrous relief that expands into everything else. Her thighs spread of their own accord until the muscles pull taut and a burn runs through her pelvis, but it only ratchets the feelings inside her higher, everything coiling tight like a spring.
Irene struggles to pay attention as Eugenides starts speaking again. “What else? What more?”
What else? This is all she does usually, and now she has the freedom to move her hands over her skin, shimmering with sensation. Her own palms have never felt so good on the soft swell of her lower belly, on the skin of her breasts, her nipples creased and standing tall. She feels like she is sharing his energy, the frantic, almost delirious joy he takes in touching her. What else?
“You smell amazing,” Eugenides continues breathlessly between her thighs. “Can I put my mouth on you? Do you want that?”
The crack in his voice tells her he might just die if she doesn’t let him, but he will do whatever she says.
“Yes,” she hisses, and then nearly cries out at the molten touch of his tongue. He finds her clitoris, that stunning bundle of nerves at the apex of her thighs, so sensitive that sometimes even she can’t touch it and has to work around. Eugenides has no such restraint nor a single reservation. His tongue moves like their kisses, a little clumsy perhaps, but who is she to tell? He is insistent, tonguing at the hard nub of her clitoris and down to where his fingers pierce her very core. He moves his hand away to taste her. Irene’s back leaves the bedcovers as his tongue slides inside her, as hot as herself, plunging deep. He moves his thumb to her clit and moans, muffled, directly into her cunt.
Irene clenches down on his tongue, spasms, and the feelings inside her bloom into an overwhelming cascade of heat and pleasure. Her muscles burn, her cunt throbbing with her pulse, contracting again and again on Eugenides’ tongue until she collapses. She has to shove his head away when the feelings tick over abruptly from pleasure to a tingling sort of pain.
Catching her breath and feeling a strange cool rigidity on her side, Irene leans up on her elbows and freezes. Eugenides has slid his maimed arm beneath her thigh, the polished wood of his prosthetic pressing against her flank. Self disgust nearly makes her sick, but she’s distracted by the way his head is bowed and the way his hips rut, nearly frantic, against the bed. His breath is desperate in his throat, noises spilling from him like water over a fall.
Humping the bed like a boy. It should cement how young her new, inexperienced husband is, and instead it sends a thrill through her. She is what makes him so desperate.
“Don’t,” someone says. Eugenides freezes and Irene realises it was her. He lifts his head, staring at her with bright, glassy eyes and flushed, swollen cheeks. His mouth is red and wet, almost bruise-purple. She’s never seen such an enticing sight. “Don’t come,” she demands, “not yet. You have a duty to fulfil, my king.”
Eugenides whines. He is perhaps the least kingly that she has ever seen him and she has never seen him look so beautiful.
Irene guides him up the bed, kissing him on his messy lips and cheeks. She can taste herself, she realises. She can smell it on his cheeks. Illicit thrills race down her spine. She draws his clever tongue into her mouth again.
He goes so willingly when she presses him down to her bed, spread out beneath her. He leaves himself vulnerable on purpose. Irene feels the weight of that responsibility in her bones, but the trust in his face when he tips up his chin, baring his throat to her, silences whatever tumultuous thoughts run through her mind.
His cock stands straight in the air between them, plummy and red and leaking steadily from the tip. Her hope had been that she could face his arm as well, unfasten the buckles and see the pain and destruction she had wrought, but he moves it away.
“Not tonight,” Irene mutters beneath her breath.
Eugenides shakes his head. Not tonight.
Irene’s hips are sore already, her thighs twinging like she’s done something to the muscles, but she straddles him anyway. She looks down between her thighs, her cunt hovering over the tip of his cock. Eugenides makes a strangled noise. “Please,” he begs, and that begging is the boost that Irene needs to sink down, taking him into her.
This hurts. She should have waited, an agonized little voice tells her, should have given herself more time after her climax. She always goes tight and tender after one, but alone she can roll over and sink into her dreams, whereas now—
Eugenides’ eyes are slammed shut, the look on his face twisted in exquisite pleasure. He has his fingers twisted into her pillows, his false hand shoved beneath, neither hand even attempting to reach out and touch her or move her in any way. Hissing through her teeth as quietly as she can, Irene drops herself a little further, then a little more. What's most satisfying is the look on her husband’s face as he pries his eyes back open to gaze at her as if she were the moon itself. Awe and wonder. She feels invincible.
Her hips settle, the ache deep inside of her sharp and all-consuming. Her clit throbs, a tingling sting as she shifts and her mons rubs against his pelvic bone. They both shudder and Eugenides’ expression goes all the way to desperate. “Please,” he says again in a hoarse, voiceless gasp, “please, my queen, my love— please.”
Who is Attolia to deny her favorite subject? She lifts herself, the ache easing; she sinks, and it sharpens. It blurs eventually into something that is so close to pleasure she can’t tell where the pain begins, and either way the rhythm is too good, too satisfying, the slap of skin on skin and the heady jolts of pleasure through her bones.
She cries out, startled, when she comes again, blindsided. Shudders wrack her, her body contorting as her muscles tighten, clenching down on his cock like a vise. Pleasure snaps hard across her nerves, so sharp that it’s painful, so good that she almost wants to do it again, the well of warmth and satisfaction in her belly so deep that she could drown in it. It spills from her like the hot rush of liquid that soaks her thighs, dripping over his hips, smacking wetly between them as she finishes riding him to her completion.
Eugenides can’t catch his breath to beg again and all Irene has is breath, chest heaving like a bellows. She leans down, panting into his mouth like she could offer hers to him, and says “Yes, yes, my king.”
She can feel the heat of his climax. It pulses hot inside her, wet and filling as his cock thickens, growing impossibly harder for the final moments. He is trembling, trying so very hard to hold still for her, while Irene rolls her hips, seeking out the edges of this feeling, how it soothes the ravenous need inside her and makes the pain in her hips sharpen in equal measure.
It takes him a few attempts to muster the coordination to kiss her, releasing her pillow to catch the curls that have fallen from her braid and coil them around his fingers. His touch is so careful and his cock is still inside her. All very strange, all very wondrous. Irene kisses his face, his nose, his fluttering eyelids, lined with such long dark lashes they tickle his cheeks.
When she raises herself up, letting his cock slip from her body to plop wetly against the crease of his thigh, there is a moment when the absurdity of the whole thing makes her pause, and then makes her laugh. The whole scenario is sticky and messy and frankly a little disgusting.
Irene smiles, thinking to share it with him, and is astonished to see tears in his eyes. They gleam, sparkling in the lamplight, spilling down over his cheeks.
Eugenides sobs once, the sound bursting out of him helplessly, and he rolls away between her thighs to bury his face in her pillow.
She is frozen. There’s something in her chest that surges to see him in tears, thrashing at her ribcage. Everything of the last day, the last several months of marriage negotiation and peace treaty hammering out, the years of war— all of it culminating in this, today, this night with her new husband who is crying in her bed. The feeling swells inside her.
Her young and beautiful husband. Her young and beautiful king.
Eugenides jumps when she lays a hand on his shoulder, twitching into a tighter ball, but Irene only presses herself along his back, curling around him. Her knees hook behind his, her breasts intimately caught between them. She wraps her arms around his lean, muscular torso and feels it shake.
Eventually, Irene realises that Eugenides is speaking between his heaving breaths. “I love you,” he pants out, “so much. I love you so much I can’t breathe, I can’t think, I can’t live— Gods.” He breaks off to moan in distress and Irene squeezes him tighter, unsure of what she’s attempting to do but knowing that she will kill the first person who tries to take Eugenides away from her. Her own weeping is silent, tears running down her nose and collecting on her eyelashes before they fall into his hair.
“I never knew it could hurt so much, to love someone so badly,” Eugenides whispers. His left hand finds hers and then there is the awkward clunk of dull wood on her knuckles as he forgets not to use his right hand, which he does not have.
“I did,” Irene whispers back. It had hurt something like this to love her mother. “I swore I never would again.” She holds him tighter, vowing to herself that she will never let him go. Then she says the same to him, both a promise and a threat. “I love you,” she says to the vulnerable skin on the back of his neck. “I will never let you leave.”
Irene is shocked, in a detached quarter of her mind, by how easy it is to touch him like this, skin to skin. Their months of negotiation had been strategic, secret rendezvous to discuss their own plans and needs out of the eye of the court and advisors. Eugenides had insisted. Yet even then, they had held some things in reserve, hearts opening tentatively but bodies kept separate. The most they’d touched before tonight had been her hand on his chin, forcing his head up. Something dark slithers through her stomach at the realisation that she liked looking down at him looking up at her— him kneeling, her standing. He knelt so easily for her earlier, so willingly, she hadn’t even asked for it. She buries her forehead between his shoulderblades, pushing the image away of asking for it next time and seeing what he does.
She tightens her arms when Eugenides speaks again, softly, half-muffled in the pillow. She’d just about decided he’d fallen asleep as his shaking subsided, and was considering whether or not she’d be able to follow him. Irene hardly sleeps well alone and has never slept with someone else in her bed.
“What was that?” she asks, stroking the hair away from his face.
Cheeks tear-stained and ruddy, Eugenides turns his head and presses a kiss to her fingertips. “I’d like to reopen the discussion about the Guards—”
Irene smacks him. Hard, on the side of his hip. Eugenides jumps and makes a startled, intrigued noise. “I told you—” Irene starts.
“It’s past midnight,” he interrupts, leaning back and pinning her beneath him. “It’s tomorrow, my queen.”
“I’ll tell you what, my king,” Irene says, pinching him, “I’m not talking about this again. You know my reasoning.” He opens his mouth to argue and Irene cuts him off, "However, I will allow you to do anything you want with the Guard, as soon as you convince my Captain to let you.”
Eugenides sits bolt upright, staring at her in horror. “Teleus? I’ll have better luck arguing with the godsdamned mountain. Have you ever seen a man pick a fight with a boulder and win?”
Irene raises an eyebrow at him silently. She’s seen a man win a fight with a river.
He scoffs, and then schools his face into the kind of determination that had him taking her stronghold with five men and a handful of wooden cannons. Impossible odds are his specialty— if he wants it, he’ll do it. “Fine,” he says, snappish.
“Fine,” Irene concedes, wondering why she hadn’t come to this idea three arguments ago. Relius had pulled something similar on her— and Relius has been the other one harping at her about the size of the Guard for years. They finally have something in common, her king and her secretary.
Eugenides huffs, still offended, and lays back down with a thump in the pillows, facing away from her again. He’s laying on her arm, and he wriggles to give her more room so that his shoulder does not cut off her circulation.
Then his arm comes, hand open and grasping, reaching for something. Irene blinks.
She takes his hand and he curls it around his side, wrapping himself entirely up in her embrace. They are once again pressed front to back as if the bed were a quarter of its true size, the sticky remains of their sex and their tears both still between them.
Irene indulges herself in a smile just for her, a deep, encompassing satisfaction in her bones. She kisses him on the shoulder blade and holds him tighter.
It takes less time than she thinks for her to fall asleep. In fact, she does not notice she has until she wakes with the bird watch, her husband still in her bed and watching her with an impossible smile.
“My queen,” he whispers, pushing a curl away from her eyes.
Irene replies, just as softly, “My husband.”