I tighten my left hand and hold that. The specific yielding of it. The fullness of the lower cock pressing into her cunt, the vibration starting immediately from inside, the pre-heat meeting the magic and amplifying both. She'd make a sound she didn't intend to make.
Clara wouldn't make that sound.
I'd give her a moment. Let her feel it—the width of me, the cold, the vibration feeding directly into the want that's been running in her for three days. Her hands flat against the wall, her breathing controlled and controlled and controlled.
Then I'd press the upper cock against her arse.
My lord—sharper. Clara cracking at the edges.That's—I can't —
You can.Quiet. Certain.Your body already knows you can.
I'd work in slowly, the upper cock curved and filling her there while the lower was already seated in her cunt—both of them, both places, the impossible fullness of it, the wall between the two shafts impossibly thin. My balls heavy against her, the weight of them flush to her with both shafts buried to the hilt.
I work both hands together and think about moving. The drive of my hips forward, both shafts going in together, the sounds she'd make with each thrust that she couldn't swallow fast enough. Clara's voice gone. Just her breathing, just the wet sounds of it, just the slap of my dark skin against hers every time I drove forward.
She'd be past the calculations by then. Past managing it. Her forehead against the wall and both hands braced and still—I know her, I've been watching her for three days—still that jaw tight, still something in her refusing to completely let go.
Tell me your name,I'd say against her throat. Both cocks moving.Your real one.
Her jaw would tighten harder.
I'd change the frequency on the upper cock. Drive deeper. Feel the knot beginning to build at the base of both shafts—the soft fog-shift of it forming, filling her in two places at once.
My lord—not Clara, not a performance, just her voice, stripped down and shocked—you're—both of them —
Yes.Both knots seated. Both of us locked. Nowhere to go, nowhere to manage it to, no cover left because her body was too full of me to remember it.
And then she'd say it. Not because I made her. Because there was nothing left. Her dark hair against the wall, her tanned skin flushed from throat to collarbone, those blue eyes finally unguarded for the first time in three days.
Claire,she'd say.My name is Claire.
I come hard against my own hands—both shafts pulsing, the upper first, cool silver in the firelight, then the lower with the heat of the seed behind it—and I breathe through it with the image of her still behind my eyes and the specific hollow of what I don't have yet landing immediately after.
No knot. Just my hands. Just the fantasy.
Not enough. It has not been enough for three days.
I clean up.Sit down. The reports are there.
The magic is at sixty. I consider it. She is in her room right now with an elevated heart rate and wet underthings and that precise mind cataloguing everything it cannot explain. The pre-heat is feeding steadily. Eight more days. Perhaps seven.
Seven days of this instead of the real thing.
I turn the magic to sixty-five.
I pick up the first report. Read three lines. Set it down. Look at the photograph.
I have been running intelligence operations since before this city existed. I know what a mission looks like—the satisfaction of pieces fitting, a timeline running on schedule. I have done this for six centuries. I have not, in six centuries, spent three months looking at a photograph.
Not for operational reference. I know her face. I memorised it in the first hour, the way you memorise anything you're going to need—completely, without attachment, the relevant details filed and accessible. I look at it because the intelligence file and the photograph are showing me two different things, and I have been trying to name the difference since the Thursday the photograph arrived.
The file shows a professional. Twenty-one years old. Three years field work. Handler notes:holds covers well even under extended pressure; displays unusual resistance to approval-based motivation; difficult to predict under emotional variables.A woman who has never once, in three years of documented field work, let anyone see her not know something.
She is not going to let me see her not know something either.
This is exactly the problem. It is also, I notice, exactly what I want.
The clarity of that wanting has been available to me since the photograph arrived. I have been filing it in the operational column. It has been declining to stay there with any consistency.