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“You can touch me,” I say. “Here.”

His palms cover my breasts. He holds them for a minute, then his thumbs rub over my nipples, slow and careful. I push into his hands.

“That’s it. Just like that. Harder. You won’t break me.”

He closes his fingers and pinches my nipples. I groan and gush around him. I squeeze his cock, so he feels what he’s doing to me. With him, less is more. The fact that he’s being so considerate and hesitant turns me on to the point of desperation.

I feel it first where we’re joined – a hum where his cock is buried in me. I feel his breathing change under my hands, deepening. Behind the grille, his lips are moving again, different than before.

“You’re singing,” I say.

The hum spreads up through me, into my belly, my chest, my throat. My pussy pulses with it, as if taking on the rhythm of the song I can’t hear. I was already wet, already close, and now I’m wild with it. I can’t keep the slow pace. I lift and drop on him faster, my hands press hard into his chest to feel the vibration there. I can feel his song in my cunt.

“Don’t stop singing,” I say. “Whatever you’re doing, don’t stop.”

I let out a long, almost pained moan. I fuck him with my whole body, my hips slamming down, my breasts bouncing in his hands, my clit grinding against him every time I bottom out. The vibration of his song is in my belly, my thighs, my heart, my head… until I can’t tell it from my own pleasure.

“I’m going to come on your cock,” I tell him. “I want you to feel it. I want you to come inside me.”

None of the men at the Lyric House ever did this to me. They couldn’t have. They weren’t literal gods.

“Mordred,” I say his name again and again.

I come so hard that my body locks around him and my vision goes white at the edges.

I feel his hips lift off the bed under me. He moves his hands from my breasts and grips my hips tight. He holds me down and pushes up into me. I feel him come inside me, pulse after pulse, pumping me full until his cum runs out of me and onto the sheets.

I collapse onto his chest. He wraps his arms around me, gathers me against him, and holds me there, with his cock still inside me. He spreads his hands across my back and brushes over my shoulder blades and my spine. I feel his chest rise and fall under my cheek. I can tell he stopped singing.

Tomorrow, I have to leave. But right now, this is where I want to be. I close my eyes and fall asleep like that, on top of him.

Chapter Seventeen

Aveline

I wake up in Mordred’s bed with my arm stretched across the place he left empty. The sheets are cold. I lie still and let my eyes settle on the black curtains of the canopy. I remember what needs to happen today. Nothing about last night changed my decision. With a deep breath, I push the covers back.

I don’t find him in the living room. I cross to my door and go through my bedroom to the bathing chamber at the back. I wash in the warm spring water without hurrying. When I pass the mirror on my way out, I look at myself without hesitation. My skin is flushed, my pale hair falls down my back in waves, and my eyes are bright with possibility. Soon, I’ll be above ground. I will start a new life, and that’s a thought that excites and scares me at the same time.

I pick a gown that Mordred would’ve never laid out for Prima. I go through the racks until I find something simple, a wool dress in a dark color, with sleeves I can move in and a neckline that doesn’t reach my chin. Because I don’t need to hide anymore. The wool is thick, which is good, because it’s almost winter above ground. I find a sturdy pair of boots that fit if I lace them tight, then I pull out a cloak from the back of the wardrobe. It’s old but sound, with a clasp at the throat. I put it on, and I take nothing else. Nothing in this room was ever mine to take.

When I come out of my room, Mordred still isn’t in the house. I go out the front door and down the path to the dock. I see him there, bent over the boat, getting it ready. The lamp at the front is lit. He straightens and turns before I reach the bottom step.

He takes in my appearance, then he holds out his hand. I accept it, step into the boat, and sit where I always sit. He lets go of my fingers and signs:

“I will take you to the tunnel now.”

“Thank you,” I say.

He unties the rope and pushes off from the dock. He turns the boat away from the island in a direction I’ve never seen him take. The platform is behind us, somewhere in the dark. He rows with measured movements. I can tell he isn’t rushing this. He doesn’t want to let me go, but he does it anyway. It must be late morning by now, maybe close to noon. He said the tunnel will take me to a ravine. I don’t know how long I’ll have to walk from there to the next city or village, but even if I’ll have to walk all day and night, I’ll make it. I’ll put distance between me and Nivallia and find a way to build a new life.

The island lamps shrink behind us and drop out of sight as the passage narrows around us. The lamp on the bow lights only a little way over the black water. There’s no current I can feel and no wind. Then there’s stone on both sides, wet and streaked with rust where water has run down it. The roof is low enough that Mordred ducks his head. We pass under it and out into a larger cavern. The light falls on columns of pale mineral standing in the water, some of them joined to others that hang from the roof. Some I could close my hand around, others are wider than the boat. Beyond them are ledges, and beyond the ledges, there are openings the lamplight doesn’t reach, holes in the rock that go down farther than I can see.

I hold the edge of the bench and look at all of it. Then I look at him, because I’ll never see him rowing again. I watch the way his shoulders flex, and the way his body twists as he moves the single oar from one side of the boat to the other. I look at his mask, white and smooth in the lamplight. I can’t believe that we spent nearly a month together, that we were intimate last night, and now I’m leaving and I won’t even have seen the whole of him. Can I really say that I know Mordred if I haven’t seen his face?

He keeps rowing. The water never changes, but the caverns do. They widen, narrow, and widen again. The stone is rougher here, and at last, the lamplight reaches a strip of gravel and a wall behind it with a black opening at the height of a man. Mordred turns the boat and runs it up on the gravel until it stops.

He climbs out first. He takes a torch from the boat, lights it, and holds it out to me. I take it. The flame is steady. He motions with his open hand toward the opening in the wall.