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It was supposed to stop, after Cardan was crowned.
Not that, out of all the things I’d taken into consideration, that was something I’d planned for. It had just seemed like a natural side effect of betrayal. His desire had been able to survive the pincer attack of my being human and us absolutely loathing each other, but surely the death knell would ring after I’d had my little brother place a crown on his head.
Give me your word, he had said. Like he had the expectation of believing me. Trusting me. He’d never admit it, but there had been a moment there where we had been in league with each other, on the same side for the first time in our lives, and we both knew that on some level it had been his want that had blinded him to the fact that I might be lying to him.
He’d never make that mistake again.
It sent a tremor of fear through my body, and something else I was doing my best not to look at too closely. Because if I knew Cardan’s secrets, he knew mine as well. What I cared about. How far I’d go to protect it. More than that, he knew all of the selfish little bits and pieces the huddled under the shadow of more altruistic wants. The part of me that saw power and went, mine.
I don’t think it had escaped either of our notice that in Faerie, he was power these days. All except for that one tiny, devastating secret.
He’s silent when he slips into my rooms, but he can’t hide the click of the door as it shuts behind him, the snick of the lock. It takes more focus than I’d like to keep my eyes on the note in front of me, word from Ghost abruptly in a much more complicated code than what I’d been reading not five minutes ago.
His feet, bare, are just as noiseless padding towards me, but I know when he’s there. I can picture him behind me, restless gaze on the pin holding up my hair, the bare curve of my neck. My back.
He can’t kill me, but this isn’t the first time I’ve wondered if he thinks about it.
“Were you going to say something,” I ask, picking up a fountain pen. “Or were you just going to loom?”
The shift of silk indicates a shrug. “Loom, mostly. Doesn’t seem as though you’re doing anything interesting enough to interrupt.”
It’s past dawn and I’m sitting at a desk covered in scattered correspondence and he - he’s needling me, I know he is. Enough to be annoying, enough to make me wish he was being worse. There’s a thrumming energy in my veins that picks up whenever Cardan is around, something that drives me to action if only he’ll give me an excuse.
“You wouldn’t know.”
“Something you brought upon yourself.”
I set the pen down, rise with the fluid motion Madoc’s training and my own practice has given me. Cardan’s gaze lags behind; I catch those crow’s eyes at my throat first, before lifting to meet mine. A certain heat sweeps through me, and I’m irritated. He looks perfect, of course, and here I am tired and dishevelled and all too human. It’s nearly enough to make me lash out. To ruin him, just a little.
“I could order you to be useful,” I say, soft.
He steps forward, into my space. Lifts his chin, a challenge written in the clench of his jaw. “Why don’t you?”
There’s heat in him, too. I make a mental catalogue of all my weapons, knowing he can’t hurt me and feeling comfort in the routine anyway. He doesn’t need his freedom to get under my skin. He does that well enough by existing.
“Because some of us are capable of thinking further ahead than where their next drink is coming from,” I bite out. “Because I have to hope that there’s some chance for the future, or I might just go insane.”
He reaches out over my head idly, pinching the hair pin in two fingers and drawing it out. The end of it is sharp enough to cut, but he tests it anyway, pressing it into his thumb, watching as my hair falls about my shoulders.
“You put a prince who didn’t want to be king on the throne and betrayed him in the process. You poisoned yourself in order to disable a general who also killed your mother, and survived that because you had already been dosing yourself with it. You’re a human in the heart of Faerie, and you have less than half a year to convince me to do something I very much don’t want to do, if only because not doing it will frustrate you so much.” We both watch the blood bead on his pale, pale skin, before he lifts his thumb to his mouth and sucks it clean. “You reached insanity a long time ago, Jude.”
My own name on his lips hits me like a curse and a blessing all at once. He raises his eyebrows at me over his hand, and it’s all I can do not to tear it away and replace it with my fist. Bad enough that he’s in here at all; worse if he comes out with the wrong kind of bruising. I’ve had to resign myself to the fact that half of Faerie thinks he green gowned me, there’s no need to add fuel to the fire.
“Five months, twenty-three days, and seven hours.” I bare my teeth at him in something that could be called a smile. “And forty-two minutes.”
Not for one minute more.
“Forty one.”
“I guess we’ll see, won’t we?” I hold my hand out, palm up. “Give me that.”
“Is that a command, my lady?”
Only Cardan could make my lady sound salacious. He does it to needle at me, and I know I should ignore it, but when was the last time that ever worked? I’m overcome, not for the first time, with the need to win. To beat him.
I sit down again at my throne of paperwork, crossing one leg over the other. I am far from an accomplished flirt and I think Locke proved how good I am with any kind of seduction, but I am learning the game of Cardan. It’s not romance and it’s not sex, is barely even, and yet a thrill flickers through me, watching his dark gaze skitter helplessly over my form.
“Did you really want to start talking commands, my lord?” I throw the same emphasis back at him. His expression doesn’t change, but the air between us already has, charged with the promise of danger. For him or me, it’s not clear.
“What happened to planning for the future?”
“Oh, I’m not going to make you do anything you don’t want to. You can even keep the pin, if it means so much to you.”
That wins me a flinch. He does his best to turn it into a sneer, but I’ve grasped the upper hand by the throat here and I’m not letting go.
It does mean something to him.
“You can take what you want,” I say, every fiber of my being bent on keeping my voice level. “Cardan.”
There is a non-zero chance that what he really wants to do is strangle me, but it’s not as though I can’t tell him to stop if I need to. For a second he wavers, and it occurs to me that he may just walk from the room. A victory in the sense that he’ll at least leave me alone, but not the one I’m looking for.
I force myself not to hold my breath, to breathe very, very evenly. I can hear the hitch in his, catch the way his fingers curl in on themselves as he fights between two conflicting urges.
“Anyone would think there's something you want from me,” he mutters, some last attempt at control.
I say nothing. I don't need to. And he curses, moving swifter than my human eyes can track. I feel his hand in my hair, hiss as he wraps his fist in it, yanks my head back, and then his mouth is on mine.
It’s not the first time since that night, but each time is just as violent, just as desperate. I nail my hands to my sides, but his thighs bracket my knees - not an especially erogenous zone, but this is Cardan, and it's Cardan touching me and Cardan’s teeth pulling at my bottom lip, Cardan’s breath mingling with mine for a half second before he drags his mouth over my jaw, leaving biting kisses down the line of it to my throat.
Like a starving man presented with a banquet. Like a fairy who knows how likely it is to all turn to mist. It’s good. It's too good, too much, like everything about him is too much, but I don't push him away. It takes everything in me not to drag him closer, to wrap my legs around his hips and demand everything of him.
Some days, I even think he'd give it.
Maybe that's what prompts me to move. I'm gentler when I touch him, a mockery of intimacy, carding my fingers back through his hair. He pauses, breath shuddering out against my skin, and I let myself shiver. I don't think I could have stopped it.
“You'll always have this,” I murmur. “No matter whether you decide to screw me in the end, no matter what kind of revenge you might be concocting. You'll always know that you choose this. That you wanted it.”
That you wanted me.
I expect it to snap him out of it. Or for him to sna at me, something cutting and poisonous that I won’t admit bites too deep. I’ll pay for this tomorrow either way, in Court or through politics or whatever new obnoxious
He leans into my hand. Just for a heartbeat, barely enough to be noticed. But we both feel it. I’m reminded, bizarrely, of that night before the coronation. Lying next to him under the stars, his fingers tracing the blunt curve of my ear.
“You’re not as clever as you think you are,” he says finally, and straightens. Stands back, letting the weight of my hair slip away from him. I draw my hand back as quickly as I can manage without being obvious, trying to figure out what the hell that means.
He quirks an eyebrow at me, all laconic wit once again. “Am I free to go, oh seneschal of mine?”
I roll my eyes. “It’s not like I made you come here in the first place.”
“If you think about it, though, you really did.”
I order him away, making sure to lift my command from before. It’s only after he’s gone and I’m left to another long night of managing this damn place that it occurs to me that he might not have been able to leave until I did it. He took my pin with him, too.
Life used to be simple.
I wasn’t sure I missed it.