"Say it once more," he said against her mouth.
His voice had gone rough enough to scrape.
She knew what he meant.
Tomorrow. There. In front of Brineshell. No appendix language standing between the act and the witness of it.
She pulled back just enough to breathe him in, salt and oil and man, the maruk already warm in the room and the harder darker scent of his arousal cutting under it.
"I will come to you in the claim space," she said.
That did it.
Mavrek's eyes shut once, hard. Then he bent and caught her behind the thighs, lifted her outright, and set her on the chest as if she had no more weight than the ceremony brushes. The lid thudded softly against the wall. He stood between her knees and looked at her like a man seeing the world reordered into something he could finally touch without breaking his own vows.
"Aye," he said.
Only that. Then he dragged her to the edge and went back to her mouth with everything he had been holding.
The chest was too narrow for grace and she was grateful for it. Her boots knocked wood. His knee forced between her thighs. The laces at her dress caught in his impatient fingers and then tore free under a pull too strong for fabric to survive. He cursed once under his breath, not for the dress. For the delay of it. She laughed, wild and breathless, and bit his lower lip hard enough to taste iron-bright salt.
He growled at that and shoved his hand under her skirt, up the bare inside of her thigh, finding heat and dampness already there.
"Gods," he said, half to himself, and his forehead dropped to hers for one savage second. "You came here like this."
"You think I climbed those stairs for conversation?"
He put his mouth to her throat while his fingers slid higher and opened her. She arched against the chest, one heel braced on the edge, and nearly came from the first hard stroke because her body had been waiting since dawn and maybe before.
He worked her with ruthless skill, not slow now, not patient in the old careful sense, but with the exactness of a man who knew where she broke and meant to take her there before his own need could wait longer.
She caught his wrist. Not to stop him.
To pull it away.
Mavrek's head came up fast, breath rough.
For one startled heartbeat he thought he had misread her.
Then she twisted on the chest, reached past him to the linen cloth, and dipped two fingers into the warmed maruk oil.
The bowl held the heat of the small stone brazier beneath it. The oil coated her skin amber and fragrant, salt-sharp and floral and alive with the faint warming compound that would bloom properly on contact. She looked at him with her wet fingers poised between them and saw the exact instant understanding hit.
She touched his face first.
One stroke from cheekbone to jaw. Another over the arch of his upper lip, thumb catching the ring at his tusk and leaving it bright. Then down the side of his throat where his pulse kicked hard against her hand.
The private reversal of morning.
Not ceremony. Not witness. Hers.
Mavrek did not move while she did it. That stillness cost him. She could read the cost in the jump at the corner of his mouth, in the way his chest had gone almost painfully fixed under breath held too long. But he let her mark him at her own pace, eyes on her face and not once dropping lower though her dress was half-open and her thighs were still spread around him.
The warming compound woke under his skin. She felt it through her fingertips.
"I wanted this first," she said, voice low and unsteady and absolutely true.
His answer came out broken.