Zara Between Castle Walls

I am Lucien Ash, thirty six years the lord of the Castle of Ash, and I had not meant to open the gate after dark. Zara Lee was twenty three, mortal, already carrying other claims on her blood and her name, and she stood in the wet late autumn of the Night Marches with a festival ribbon still knotted around her wrist, as if the cloth itself had chosen the road that led her here. The thorned ribbon and the missing true name, the one her fae marriage still required, had brought her to my gate. Household law forbade me to touch anyone claimed by dragon or by fae. I offered her a guest room because that was the decent sentence a host was expected to speak, and she stayed because neither of us believed a word of it.

I walked her myself along the gallery. The portraits watched from their varnish, their painted eyes following the wet hem of her coat as we passed. She kept a visitor’s half step behind me, and I could smell the other bonds on her, smoke and old thorn, and under them the warm salt I had no right to want. The fires burned low on purpose. A sealed castle teaches a visitor where not to go, and I had always been careful with that lesson.

“You keep the fires low,” she said, and then, because the talk had found the way the cloth hung against the stone, she let the rest of it run. “The tapestries fall as if they were meant to hide the doors, and the doors sit so a person would have to know the house to leave it in the dark, which I suppose is the point of a place like this, isn’t it?”

I answered that the west walk ended in a room with a lock that answered only from inside. She did not turn toward that corridor. Instead she stopped under the last portrait and looked at my mouth rather than at the painted one hanging above us.

“If I stay in that room I will still be thinking about this floor,” she said. “You knew that when you offered it, didn’t you?”

I set my hand at the small of her back. The law of the house moved through me like a closed door, a pressure I had lived with so long it felt like bone. She leaned into the touch anyway. I warned her that taking me would betray the mate and the husband already marked on her, and that refusing me would betray the hunger she had been carrying since the mountain. She turned toward me. Her fists closed in the front of my coat, and she put her mouth on mine as if she had already chosen which betrayal she could live with.

The kiss was not a guest’s kiss. I tasted rain and her, the cold of the courtyard still on her lips, and when she made a small sound against my teeth I went down with her onto the gallery stone, because standing had become an argument I was no longer interested in winning. Her coat opened under my hands. The ribbon on her wrist caught the firelight and would not come off, and I kissed the inside of that wrist once, a warning I did not keep. She pulled my mouth back to hers and hooked a knee around my hip with a certainty that stripped the last of the host from me.

I got her skirt up. She was wet already, the heat of her shocking against my fingers, and she pushed into my hand as if she had been waiting in the rain for exactly this indecency. I told her I was going to fuck her on my own floor before midnight, in a house that would call it treason. She said yes into my mouth, not sweetly, and reached between us to open my trousers with a haste that made my cock jump against her palm.

I notched against her. Then I drove in on a single long stroke that took the air out of both of us. She was tight, slick, gripping me as if her body had not been claimed by anyone, and the lie of that made me groan against her throat. The stone was cold under my knees. She was not. I fucked her in deep, unhurried thrusts that still sounded filthy in the long gallery, each one seating me to the root while her fingers dug into my shoulders through the coat I had not bothered to remove. She met every stroke. She lifted to take more, and when I changed the angle she gasped and said my name as if it were a dare.

“Harder,” she said, and then, quieter, “You can, can’t you?”

I gave her what she asked for. The portraits kept their painted silence while I held her hip and used her, and she used me back, her cunt clenching around my cock every time I bottomed out, her mouth open against my jaw. I could have come from the forbidden fact of it alone, from the knowledge that dragon and fae both had cause if anyone in this house opened a door. I held back. I meant to have her wrecked first, the guest performance gone, her choosing this with her eyes open.

When I pulled out she made a sound of protest that went straight to the base of my spine. I said I was not finished. I told her to stay on her back on my stone and let me look at what I was not allowed to have.

I put her thighs over my shoulders. The gallery air was cold on the wet of her, and she shivered, then pushed her hips up toward my mouth with a shamelessness that did not match the shy way she had walked behind me an hour earlier. I licked her open. She tasted of herself and of me, of the fuck we had already started, and I sealed my mouth over her cunt and sucked until her spine left the floor.

She tried to be quiet, because the house had ears. I did not let her be quiet. I worked her with my tongue in slow, filthy passes, then faster, two fingers sliding into her while I licked her clit, and she came the first time with her wrist over her mouth and the ribbon dark against her pulse. I kept going. I wanted her shaking. I wanted the sweetness she used on the world to crack.

When she was still clenching around my fingers I turned my face and set my mouth to the soft inside of her thigh, high enough that a dress would hide it and close enough to her cunt that she felt my breath. I looked up. She was watching me, and she did not look away.

“Do it,” she said. “You have been thinking about that since the stair, haven’t you?”

I bit her. The skin gave under my fangs with a bright, clean puncture, and her blood came hot and startlingly alive across my tongue while my mouth was still wet from her. She cried out and her hips jerked, not away, toward me, and I drank from the inner thigh while I licked her clit again, the two hungers braided until she came a second time with my teeth in her and my tongue on her, her blood and her wetness both in my mouth. I sealed the bite with a pass of my tongue. The mark would bruise dark by morning. I meant it to.

I rose over her, cock aching, her blood a fire already rewriting the edges of my patience. She reached for me. I said the gallery had seen enough of us, and that if I took her again it would be in my bed, where the law was even clearer and the betrayal would be complete.

My bedchamber sat above the west walk, hung in dark wool, the fire built up because I do not feel cold the way the living do and I had wanted her to. She stood inside the door and looked at the bed as if she were still deciding, which was a pretty fiction. Then she crossed the room, put her hands on my chest, and pushed me until the backs of my knees found the mattress.

“I am done being a guest,” she said. “You can stop offering me rooms now, can’t you?”

I laughed against her mouth, low, and let her strip the coat from my shoulders. We undressed without ceremony. I wanted her skin, the whole of it, the places the other claims had already written and the places they had not. When we were bare I sat on the edge of the bed and pulled her into my lap, her knees bracketing my hips, and she sank down onto my cock with a slow, shaking breath that I felt in my ribs.

She rode me. At first she was almost shy about the rhythm, as if her body still remembered being sweet, and then she found the angle she wanted and used it, grinding down so that every descent rubbed her clit against me. I held her ass and let her take what she had come into my house to take. The forbiddenness of it sat between us like a third person. I said so aloud. I told her that if we were found, dragon and fae both had cause, and that I was going to come in her anyway.

She took my wrist, turned it, and set her mouth to the pale skin over the vein. Her eyes asked. I nodded. I opened the vein myself with a thumbnail, a clean line, and she drank from me while she fucked herself on my cock, and the sweetness went out of her face as if someone had blown out a lamp. What replaced it was want, plain and adult and chosen. My blood in her mouth made her moan, made her cunt flutter around me, and I had to lock my jaw not to spill then.

She lifted her head. A smear of my blood was on her lower lip. She did not wipe it.

“I want the rest,” she said. “Not the careful version. You understood that, didn’t you?”

I understood. I rolled her onto her back in the wool and drove into her until the bedframe answered, and she took every stroke with her legs around me and her mouth open, no longer performing gratitude, no longer performing anything.

She put her hand in my hair and drew my mouth down to her throat. The pulse there was frantic, mortal, already altered by what she had swallowed. I kissed the place first because I am not a beast, or not only a beast, and because I wanted her to feel the choice in the second before the teeth.

“Bite me while you are inside me,” she said. “I am asking. That is not a guest asking, is it?”

I bit her throat. The puncture was deeper than the thigh, meant to feed, and her blood filled my mouth as I fucked her through it, my cock buried to the hilt, her body tightening around me in a spasm that was pain and pleasure so close together I could not have named the border. She held my head there. She wanted the feed. She wanted the claim written in the same moment as the thrust, and I gave her both, drinking while I moved in her, the wet sound of our bodies lost under the fire and her broken breathing.

I told her, against the open bite, that this was treason in my house and treason in hers. She said she knew. She said she was choosing it. I believed her because she kept her legs locked around me, because she tipped her chin to give me more of her throat, and because the ribbon on her wrist had taken on a darker stain, as if blood had found the cloth at last.

I fucked her through the feed until I was shaking with the need to finish. She came with my teeth in her neck, a long, helpless clench that dragged me with her, and I spilled into her in thick pulses while I drank, coming inside her cunt as her blood ran over my tongue, the two of us locked in the oldest and least allowed exchange this castle still remembered. I did not pull out. I stayed in her, still hard enough to feel every aftershock, and licked the bite until the bleeding slowed to a shine.

Near dawn the fire had gone to coals and she was still in my bed, my spend leaking from her, the throat bite open and dark. I had not slept. Vampires do not waste a night like that on sleep. I lay over her on one elbow and looked at the place I had written on her, and she looked back without flinching.

The true name the fae marriage still needed was not a word I had invented. It had been waiting in her blood, and the bite had made it legible. I set my mouth to the open wound and spoke it into the heat there, quietly, once, a sound that belonged to no language the household used. She shuddered as if the name had hands. I felt it take, felt the blood promise close around it like a ring that did not yet have a lock.

“That is mine now, and not only mine,” I said. “You felt it go in, didn’t you?”

She nodded. She did not ask me to repeat it. She put her fingers to my mouth and then to the bite, as if sealing a letter, and for a little while we were only two people in a bed, the humour coming back in the tired way it does after a night that has spent everything. I told her the west walk would be empty if she left before the household woke. She said she had noticed the way the outer stair took the wind, which was her way of saying she already knew the path.

I dressed her myself, slowly, because I wanted my hands on her once more without fucking her, and because tenderness after a feed is a kind of honesty. The ribbon would not come off. It had taken on smoke, thorn, blood, and something that would later be a brand, and it pulled toward a claim that was not in this castle. I kissed her mouth and tasted myself on her, and she kissed me back as if she were not already leaving.

She went before the first servant stirred. I stood at the gallery window and watched her cross the wet courtyard in the last of the dark, twenty three and no longer only mortal in the way that had let her walk away from the first two men. She had a true name in an open bite and a blood promise that would not hold by itself. If she did not bind it, the name would unmake her from the inside. The blood promise must be finished in a witch’s familiar ritual or it will come apart in her body.