She comes the second time with her whole body. Her cunt and her arse clench around both my cocks simultaneously and I feel every pulse of it. I keep my rhythm through it. I work her through every wave until she is shaking against my chest.
"The knot," she says against my jaw. Barely there. "Both. Please."
I let both knots swell.
The soft expansion filling every space—and her whole body shudders and she says my name. Just my name. I say hers back and mean it in every direction it goes.
Release in two waves. The cool silver first, my court magic flooding through both cocks—and I feel her feel it, through the bond, the cold of it inside her—and she exhales sharply against my throat. Then the breeding heat after, hotter, filling the spaces the silver left. She holds on.
I hold her.
The bond runs between us and what comes through it is not simple and is not managed and is entirely hers.
We stay. The knot holding. The bond quiet.
"Still angry," she says, eventually.
"Yes," I say.
"Good. Don't let me pretend I'm not."
Her hand finds my chest. Not my shirt—I have no shirt on, she removed it. The gesture her body makes without her deciding on it. Her fingers curl around nothing and hold it.
I put my hand in her hair.
"Midnight," I say.
She lifts her head and looks at the mirror on the far wall.
The mirror ripples.
She goes still. She knows about Oberon—she knows the bond mechanics, she has read what Rosalind would have told her—but she has not seen him before. I watch her watch the image steady. Silver eyes. The ancient stillness. The voice that arrives from no particular direction.
"The fifth bond broke," Oberon says. "And remade."
"Yes," I say.
He looks at her. She looks at him.
Neither of them looks away.
"The fourth broke because he stopped lying," he says. "Yours broke because she stopped believing his." A pause—the silence of something very old considering its arithmetic. "She chose back in. Clear eyes. Full knowledge." He looks at me. "That is what the fifth bond contributes. Not the claiming. The remaking."
He begins to fade.
"She didn't forgive me," I say.
"No." Almost gone. "She chose anyway."
The mirror is just a mirror.
I look at her.
She is looking at the mirror with the spy's expression—collecting, cataloguing, deciding what to do with what she has just received.
"What did he say about the child?" she says.
"He didn't mention the child."