Page 19 of Zenith Court

“Help me now.”

Her fingers reached my collar and stopped. “Slowly?”

“Yes.”

“And the cuffs?”

“Last. I’ll tell you when.”

She started at the collar. The stud went to the washstand. “His?”

“His.”

The coat came next. She paused, and I nodded. “His. Cut from memory. The measurements were right.”

“I’m sure they were. Measuring you was always his best subject.” She draped the coat over the chair and worked down the waistcoat buttons slowly.

By the shirt she had stopped asking aloud, because my breathing answered ahead of me. Her knuckles followed the line of my chest as each button gave. The shirt joined the coat. Boots, trousers, everything else—until I stood on the cold boards in nothing but his metal.

She stepped back and looked at me. In the glass, I stood naked except for the cuffs. Without sleeves beneath them, the dark straps and silver clasps looked harsher than they had against formal black. Astra’s mouth tightened before she looked back at my face.

She stripped quickly and dropped her clothes over the Conclave coat. “He can hold my shirt,” she said. “Most useful he’s been all evening.”

Then she sat back in the chair, bare against the black wool, and held my gaze. “Kneel for me, if you want to.”

“I want to.” I knelt.

I put my mouth to the inside of her knee and worked upward while one hand rested loose in my hair. When her fingers tightened, I followed the pressure; when they loosened, I slowed. Her thighs were still cool from the pump; between them, she was warm, and her knees opened farther around my shoulders. Her breath shortened without restraint. I used my tongue flat and patient until her hips began to answer, then harder when her fist closed. She rode my mouth with her heels hooked on the chair rail, my wrists braced against her calves, the cold cuffs pressing crescents into her heated skin. She came with my name broken in her throat. I held her through the last tremor and stayed until her hand eased.

“Up,” she said when she had breath again, and stood from the chair steadier than I did.

She took my hands and turned them palms-up between us, her thumbs resting on the hasps. She did not open them. “Ask me.”

“Take them off me.” I held her eyes. “Please.”

The left hasp gave at her first try. She lifted the band away. Cool air touched the damp skin beneath it, and my hand shook once before I could stop it. She saw and waited, the open cuff in her palm, until I turned the other wrist toward her. The right came away more easily. She set both bands in their fitted bed, then wrapped her hands around my bare wrists, thumbs over my pulse, warming the skin the metal had covered.

“Good,” she said.

My father had said that word once, when I was nine, over a basin I had read correctly. Astra said it now with her hands warm around my wrists. The current at my wrist settled on her, and my pulse steadied beneath her thumbs.

“There you are,” she said. “Mine, if you still want that.”

“I do.”

She drew me by the wrists to the window seat and settled on its cushion, hips at the edge. The barred shutters pressed cold against my shoulders when I leaned over her. She placed my palms on the sill on either side of her and closed one hand around each wrist. “The pace is mine.”

“Show me.”

She took my cock in one hand and guided me against her, wet enough that the first contact made us both catch breath. Then she pulled me closer by the wrists, letting me enter her slowly, an inch at a time. I watched her face for any change, but she kept her eyes open and brought me deeper. When I was fully inside, she stopped us both and drew one long breath, her body tight around mine.

Her left hand tightened: slower. Both hands: deeper, then hold. When she pulled with her whole grip, I moved. The sill took my weight while she set the rhythm, her heels at the small of my back and the shutters ticking in their bars. Long strokes first, enough to make the chair legs scrape; then short ones that kept me deep while she moved against me. Whenever I began to hurry, her grip checked me. She held me still for a grinding pressure that brought her over the edge again. She clenched around me with her mouth open against my throat and stayed there afterward, breathing against my pulse.

“You smell like yourself again,” she said against my skin. “Marble and burnt sugar.”

Her grip tightened at both wrists, a full stop.

“Stay with me,” she said. “Now.”