Page 124 of Turncloak

She locked them, but there was still a small gap through which he might be able to wiggle a hand free.

“Tighter.”

Saffron raised a brow. “That sounds like a command,” she murmured, adjusting the manacles until they were flush against his wristbones. “You can’t cede control and issue orders. I can be quite punitive, when I want to be.”

Levan’s voice was coarse, his whole body aflame, as he lifted his bound wrists over his head and he said, “Punish me, then.”

For a moment, Saffron looked at him as though he was the most complicated mage in the world.

And then she got to work.

As he had done to her, her hands roved over the muscled lengths of his thighs, the veined column of his throat, the hard planes of his torso. Climbing on top to straddle him, she ran a palm over the peak in his trousers, and a ragged groan tore free from his throat. The weight of her on top of him and the tightness of the manacles compared to the perilously light touch…it made him throb.

Unbuckling his belt, she paused for an interminable second, perhaps remembering the rejection that had followed the last time she did this, and deciding to make him suffer for it. She ran a forefinger along the low ridges of his hips, lowering herself to plant tiny kisses right above his waistband, each of them punctuated with a tiny flick of her tongue.

When the belt finally came undone and his underwear came with it, the cold air of the bedroom was a fresh kind of torture.

“Silver,” he begged, knowing it would not work.

Plucking her wand from her own waistband—why was she still wearing so many clothes?—she ran the beech tip down the length of him, slowly, as though deliberating what to do next.

“Do you know how hot this is?” she whispered, moonlight pouring over her shoulder. “To dominate the indomitable?”

Saffron unbuttoned her trousers and, leaving them sagging loosely around her hips, slid a hand down into her underwear. The dome of it moved through her trousers as she kneaded herself, loosing several intoxicating little moans and sighs as she watched Levan grow harder beneath her. Levan’s belly clenched with want, his throat dry and his pulse pounding in his temples, between his legs.

“If you ever find yourself doubting whether or not I truly want you,” she murmured, shuddering and shivering, “think of this moment.”

When she came, it was a soft shattering, and Levan felt the reverberations of it through his thighs as she clamped her legs together around her hand.

With an airy expression, she removed her boots, her trousers, her perilously thin and lightly wet silk underwear. Perfect thick thighs trembling, she lowered herself onto him at last, and the pleasure was so rich, so complete, that Levan’s eyes rolled back in his head. She ground her hips, once, twice, and every part of him throbbed.

And then there was a knock on the door.

Instead of ignoring it, Saffron gave Levan a frankly evil look, climbed off him, tugged her trousers back on, and ambled over to answer it. The bed was only just out of eyeshot of whoever stood on the other side, and Levan flushed furiously and brought his manacled hands to between his legs—though if their visitor entered the room, there would be no preserving his modesty.

“Your stew, Mademe,” came an old, gruff male voice, deckled with a northern accent.

“Much appreciated.”

She took the tray and pushed the door closed with her foot, carrying the two steaming bowls and plate of crusty bread rolls over to a small desk by the window. Horrifyingly, she pulled out the crooked chair and sat, tearing into a bread roll and slathering it with butter.

“Silver,” Levan groaned. “Really?”

She shrugged.

“I’m hungry,” she said sweetly. “And in no particular rush.”

As Levan lay there and watched her eat, he thought that she was perhaps a twisted sort of genius—because he was no longer thinking about nightpoppy at all.

53

• • • •

Tiny Bat’s Arsehole

The day after Auria’s paid suspension ended, she found herself back on night shift, staking out the Whitewing drophouse on Fallow Grange as though nothing had happened, nothing had changed, except it had. Everything had, once again. Whenever she managed to find a foothold in the new order of her life, the ground beneath her shifted and cracked, sometimes almost imperceptibly, sometimes seismically.

That first rainy night, she sat at a small wooden table by the window—far enough back from the sill that while she could see out, her shadowed figure wouldn’t be obvious to anyone peering in from the street—and alternated between studying the drophouse and poring over Detective Alcabal’s handover notes. The accomplished Brewer had covered for Auria while she was out of action, and though they’d had a thorough debrief in person, Auria was now comparing Alcabal’s notes with her own, searching for patterns.