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For a long while, neither of us moved.

The fire crackled. Beyond the windows, the unfamiliar stars wheeled slowly across a foreign sky. And I lay there, thoroughly wrecked and entirely content, with a king’s heart pounding against my own and his breath warm against my neck.

“If you tell me that was merely adequate,” he murmured eventually, “I will be forced to do it all again until you revise your review.”

A laugh bubbled out of me, weak and helpless.

“Is that a threat or a promise?”

“With you?” He lifted his head, and the smile he gave me was so soft, so unguarded, that it made my chest ache. “I have learned they are very often the same thing.”

He eased away just far enough to gather me to him, rolling us both until I was tucked against his side, my cheek over the steady thunder of his heart and my back, mercifully, turned to the shadows of the wall rather than the man. One arm wrapped around me, holding me close, while his free hand traced slow, idle patterns along my arm. Over the faint silver lines of my scars, as though he couldn’t quite stop touching me now that he was finally allowed.

“Stay awake with me a while,” he said quietly, pressing a kiss to my hair. “I am not yet ready to share you with sleep.”

“You’re the one who exhausted me,” I mumbled, already losing the battle, my eyes sliding shut despite his protest. “Take it up with yourself.”

His chuckle rumbled beneath my ear, warm and low.

“Sleep, then, little bird.” His arm tightened around me, anchoring me against him as though even unconsciousness might try to steal me away. “I’ll be here when you wake. I will always be here.”

And wrapped in his warmth, his heartbeat steady beneath my cheek and his vow soft against my hair, I let myself believe him.

I let myself drift.

And for the first time in longer than I could remember, I slept without dreaming of the dark.

I woke to the sound of knocking.

For a moment I had no idea where I was. The bed was too soft, too vast, the warmth wrapped around me too solid and too alive. Then it all came back in a slow, delicious rush. The throne, the chase, the tearing of silk, the long, devastating hours that had followed. Then I realised the warmth I was curled into was Atlas. I lay facing him, my cheek tucked against the solid heat of his chest and my back turned to the cool, empty stretch of the bed. His arm still locked possessively around my waist and his breath slow and even in my hair.

The knocking came again. Firmer this time.

Atlas groaned.

It was, without question, the most disgruntled sound I had ever heard a grown man make, a low, rumbling noise of pure aristocratic suffering that vibrated straight through me. He tightened his hold and buried his face deeper into my hair, as though he could simply refuse to acknowledge the door’s existence, and it would eventually go away.

“Ignore it,” he muttered, voice rough with sleep. “Kings are permitted to ignore things. I’m fairly certain it’s written down somewhere.”

I bit back a smile.

“I don’t think that’s how being king works.”

“It is precisely how being king works. I make the rules. I have just made that one.” His lips found the curve of my shoulder, lazy and unhurried. “There. Settled.”

The knock sounded a third time.

Atlas said something then, low and vicious, in a language I didn’t recognize, and I didn’t need a translation to know it wasn’t fit for royal company.

“Your kingdom appears to want its king,” I said sweetly, thoroughly enjoying myself now.

“My kingdom,” he growled, “has appalling timing.” But he was already moving, pressing one last kiss to my shoulder before he rolled away with the air of a man being marched to his own execution. “Do not move. Do not get cold. Do not vacate that bed. I will be returning to it, and to you, the very moment I have dispatched whoever is foolish enough to be on the other side of that door.”

“So commanding,” I teased, rolling to watch him.

Which turned out to be an excellent decision, because watching Atlas cross the room gloriously, unselfconsciously naked was rapidly becoming one of my favorite pastimes. He snagged a white robe from a chair and shrugged it on, the fabric pulling taut across those impossible shoulders, and tied it loosely at the waist with all the urgency of a man who fully intended to be out of it again within minutes.

Then he hauled the door open with enough force to make whoever stood behind it think twice about ever knocking again.