"Please." My thighs are shaking. "Please knot me. Both. I need both?—"
Both knots swell.
The expansion in two places at once—the upper knot pressing out inside my arse, the lower filling every space in my cunt—and the knots are vibrating too, both of them, pressing against every wall I have simultaneously, and the sound I make carries out over the court and it is not a word.
He doesn't turn the vibration down.
"The whole court can hear you," he says. Not quietly. Deliberately not quietly. "Let them."
Both cocks, both knots, both vibrating. I lose what is happening below the railing. I lose the balcony. My legs stop working and I would fall if not for his arms around me and the iron under my hands, and I am shaking and making sounds I have never made in my life and I cannot stop.
"I've got you," he says. Both arms bracing around me. "I've got all of you."
I come again. The orgasm doesn't break—it keeps going because he won't let it stop, both knots still fully seated and the vibration still at full pitch, wave after wave cresting and not ending. My eyes go back. I am crying. Actual tears in the cold morning air. I can hear myself and I cannot manage it and he is not going to let me manage it.
"You're mine," he says. Against my ear. Low and certain and loud enough to carry over the grounds. "This is what mine looks like."
"Yours—" Barely a word. Barely sound. "I'm yours, I'm yours?—"
"Yes," he says. "You are. The whole court can know it."
He puts his hands over mine on the railing.
Cold over hot. He holds them in place and I feel his grip and both knots still inside me and the vibration at full pitch, andI come again, gripping the railing inside his hands—and I feelhimshudder, through the bond, through the cold of him at my back. A real shudder. The groan that comes out of him is low and rough and it goes into my hair and knowing I'm doing that to him—knowing he is not made of nothing, is not cold all the way down, that whatever this is runs through both of us—tips me over one last time.
Silence.
My breathing. The mist. My own heartbeat.
He holds the vibration at its lowest. A hum. Almost nothing. Enough that my body knows it could climb again if he chose.
I am limp against the railing. The light has changed. The amber lanterns are out. The morning is later than I thought—the mist lifting, the court more visible below us. Figures on the paths. Anyone at a window overlooking this balcony could have seen us. He knew this. He did not move us inside.
Part of me is horrified.
Part of me is not.
Both knots release slowly. I feel both cocks withdraw and then the cold morning air and my own body again, separate, returned to itself. He wraps around me from behind. Cold everywhere. Both arms across my chest. His mouth against my hair.
The court spreads out below us.
I look at the grounds.
I look at the gate.
I look at the amber lanterns going dark one by one as the morning takes over.
"I'm still here," I say. To the mist. To myself. I don't know why I need to say it out loud. I just do.
His arms tighten around me.
I came here as a spy with a cover story I'd had ready for a week. I walked through his gates with Lena's last messageburning in the grate behind me and a mission brief and the specific confidence of someone who had never yet lost control of a situation they'd prepared for. I spent eight weeks assembling a picture and the picture found my best friend and I handed it across his desk and I glowed at his approval, and then I came back from three days in a boarding house room and saidno magic, you be real, I'll be realand I meant it and I still mean it this morning.
Lena would sayClaire.Both syllables. The first one meaning she saw the shape of this before I did.
She was right. She was always right. I am going to carry that and the grief together for the rest of my life and that is what it is.
Rosalind is about to have a baby. I am going to be an aunt within weeks. My own daughter is already there in my body, has been there since the night of the claiming, this permanent quiet fact that changes the weight of every morning I wake up.