Mavrek bent over her, one hand flattening her wrists to the table now, the other sliding under her blouse to palm her breast. He bit lightly at the side of her neck and then sucked hard enough that she knew there would be a mark there.
"Mavrek--"
"You came back in daylight," he said against her ear. "Do not hide from it now."
She came with a cry strangled into the crook of her own elbow, cunt clamping down on him so hard he cursed and drove into her twice more before spilling. This time he came with his teeth at her shoulder and one hand bruising her wrist against the table, cock jerking inside her while heat flooded her again in thick pulses that made her knees nearly give.
He held her upright through the aftershocks.
For a few breaths neither of them moved. Outside, somewhere on the walkway, someone laughed. A gull screamed over the inner water. The world had not even had the decency to pause.
When he finally eased out, his seed followed at once in a slow hot slide down her inner thigh. Iva shut her eyes and swore softly.
"Aye," he said, sounding half-destroyed himself.
"Do not agree with me when I am suffering."
The laugh he gave against her shoulder was brief and real. Then he reached for the clean cloth stack and handed her one without comment.
She wiped between her legs with rough practicality, then went straight to the basin. The woman in the small waveringmirror above it looked indecently alive. Cheeks flushed. Mouth swollen. A darkening mark low on the side of her neck. Amber oil on both wrists and one forearm where he'd held her down. Evidence in legible locations.
She scrubbed fast. Soap cut the shine on her wrists and left the scent underneath. Water took the pigment at the collarbone but not the mouth-mark on her neck. Nothing fixed the heat between her thighs or the wet soreness that made her stand with her legs slightly apart.
When she lifted her head from the basin Mavrek was watching her in the mirror.
No apology in him. No smugness either. Just the same terrible attention.
"You should have stayed away," she said to the basin.
"Aye," he said.
"That is not helpful."
"Nay."
She almost laughed, which would have been fatal, so she snatched up her pack instead.
The walkfrom the workshop to the scaffold took less than four minutes. It lasted a year.
She went by the main route because choosing the longer path now would have been its own confession. Chin up. Pace even. Collar tugged as high as the blouse allowed. Her whole inside still felt loose and hot and sore, each step reminding her exactly what had been done to her body in full morning light while the bright panes faced the world.
The first person to read it was the same woman from two days before.
She stood at the bread-table turn with a basket of split rush under one arm. Her eyes went first to Iva's neck this time, then down to the wrist where the scrubbing had only made the skin redder around the faint amber trace. The nod she gave was different from the first. Not merely acknowledgment now. Almost a formal updating of record. Then she looked away on purpose and let Iva pass.
Fetch waited on the waterway steps like an ambush arranged by a cheerful god with poor taste.
He had one boot on a lower post, a fish spear over one shoulder, and a grin so immediate she saw it from twenty paces out and considered, sincerely, pushing him into the inner water.
"Morning, restorer," he called.
"Die carefully," she said without breaking stride.
Fetch laughed outright. His gaze flicked to her neck, to the oil-scrubbed wrist, then back to her face with no effort whatsoever to pretend he had not read all of it and enjoyed doing so.
"I plan to live forever out of spite," he said. "But I appreciate the blessing."
By then Iva's whole body was one sustained internal blaze. Nausea and arousal and shame and some harder fiercer thing that might eventually become pride if she lived long enough to identify it. She kept walking. That was the only available dignity now: the keeping-walking.