Both shafts aching, heavier, the cold of them both considerable, the court magic brightening in the silver through them. I wrap a hand around both and think about her at my Gathering in three weeks. Dark hair and tanned skin and blue eyes and the particular set of her jaw, and she'll be performing serenity in a room she's treating as a mission site, and the wanting hits me like something physical, a blow I feel at the base of both shafts simultaneously.
She'll try to manage it. She'll be very good at managing it for a while.
And then I'll take her hand.
The cold of my skin against hers, I think, working slowly. She won't expect the cold. She'll feel it go up her arm and she won't be able to file that away. I imagine her face doing the calculation—trying to find the operational logic, finding none.
You feel it.Quiet. Not a question.
She wouldn't answer.
I know you feel it.Closer. The cold of me everywhere near her.I can see you managing it. You've been managing it for an hour and you're very good at it.A pause. Let her hear the rest without saying it.You're not going to be able to manage it much longer.
Those pale eyes on me. Precise and furious and wet between her thighs and trying not to show any of it.
What are you running?she'd say. Because she'd know something was deliberate. She's too good not to know.
Something that was already true.I'd tell her.I'm not making you want this. I'm just not letting you pretend you don't.
I tighten my grip. The vibration in the upper shaft increases without my directing it—my body running ahead of me, responding to my own imagining. That hasn't happened in a very long time.
I think about the heat. Her body four days into it, past the point where managing it is possible, past the point where the spy exists at all. Just heat and need and the specific cold of my hands on her skin that her body has been craving since the boundary.
Please—Her voice, wrecked. The cover gone. Nothing between what she is and what she's asking for.Please, I need?—
Tell me what you need.I'd make her say it. Specifically. I have two cocks and she's going to ask for both by the end and I'm going to make her use the words.
Both—I need both —
Yes,I'd say.You do.
I come hard, spilling over my fist, both shafts pulsing in sequence—the upper first, the lower a breath after—the cool silver of my court magic in the release catching the firelight. I brace against the desk and breathe. The pleasure cracks through six centuries of careful temperature and then fades.
It's not enough.
It won't be enough until I have the real thing.
I clean up.I sit back down. I pull out a sheet of paper.
Here is what I do not need to do: arrange for Claire Whitmore to come to Mist Court. She is going to come on her own. The dead drop will reach her through the channel she monitors, the cipher will fall in four hours, and she will recognize the package as a trap and come anyway. She will come because of Rosalind. I know this because I have been watching the Whitmore file for six months and I know who she is.
What I need to do is make sure she stays.
An operative running an unofficial, self-initiated mission has no professional obligation to remain in the field. The moment she gets cold feet—the moment Mist Court magic starts doing what it does and she recognizes it and decides she'd rather be in control of herself than find out what happens next—she can leave. Nothing on her record. No consequences. Just: abort, return, file a brief report that says the cover didn't hold and the mission was not viable.
I need the full six weeks. The heat cycle runs three to five days within that window. I need her here long enough for the heat to happen, and I need her to have a professional reason to stay that isn't me.
So I contact a man named Aldric—Ministry consultant, believes himself more discreet than he is—and I give him the outline of an idea.
A —I write.The eastern intelligence gap we discussed. I've been thinking about the Mist Court angle. Nebulon has connections to three of the resistance networks in the occupied territories, possibly more. Someone with the right access and the right cover could do significant damage in six weeks. TheGathering is in autumn. Worth raising with your Ministry contact?—V
This will reach General Whitmore's desk within the week, arriving as his own insight through two more sets of hands. The General is a simple mechanism: cold, ambitious, daughters as assets not people. He'll match the brief to the Clara Merris cover in the service roster—good history on it, legitimate connections to three courts, the right tier for a six-week Gathering assignment—and he'll log it officially before she's even packed a bag.
He won't think about Claire at all. He never does.
But once the General logs it, Claire has a six-week sanctioned operation on the books. Leaving early becomes an unauthorized departure from a logged assignment. She won't do that. She values her record. She values the work. And she will stay the full six weeks because that's who she is, and who she is has been in my coat pocket since Thursday, and I know exactly what that stubbornness looks like from a surveillance photograph.
That's all the General is for.