The morning light arrives before I am ready for it—pale and indifferent through the high windows, falling across the bed with the impartiality of a judgment that doesn't care what it illuminates.
Alastair's arm lies heavy across my ribs. His breathing is deep, even, the sound of a man who went to bed satisfied and found exactly what he expected there.
He has no idea what the night cost anyone else in this room. He sleeps with the ease of a man unburdened by secrets, and I lie beneath his arm and watch the ceiling pale toward morning.
I carry them both in my body—two men, two kinds of warmth—like twin bruises pressed into the same tender place.
Alastair's weight still lingers across my hips. Jasper's eyes still burn beneath my sternum, fixed and ruinous, the way a brand stays hot long after the iron has cooled and been set aside.
The bath is drawn by the time I untangle myself. I lower into the copper tub with the measured precision of a woman conducting a quiet inventory, moving through warm water that cannot touch the places that actually hurt.
The shame arrives then. Not gradually—suddenly, scalding, the way steam turns against you when you lean too close to something you were never supposed to touch in the first place.
I came with Alastair inside me and Jasper watching from the doorway. I held his gaze through every wave of it. I did not look away once, and I knew exactly what I was doing.
I liked it. That is the thing I cannot drown in this bath, cannot dissolve with lavender and good intentions. The power of holding both of them—king and knight—was unlike anything I have tasted in a life that has given me very little to taste.
That is precisely what terrifies me. Not Cecil and her patient, predatory waiting. What terrifies me is the woman I saw in that bedchamber last night, clear-eyed and deliberate, who understood exactly what she was doing and chose it anyway.
A woman who would use both men and enjoy it stands at the edge of something that has no floor. I have bent without breaking through too many impossible rooms to let my own appetite be the thing that finishes me.
I will not drag Jasper into that darkness. He has given me everything he has, from the moment he first put his cold, bone-thin hand in mine. He deserves far better than to be destroyed by a woman who cannot govern herself.
The maids lace me into something queenly, and the woman in the mirror looks entirely composed—porcelain, purposeful, invented from the ground up. Nobody would know, to look at her, what she was doing six hours ago.
Jasper falls into step the moment I enter the corridor. One pace back, one pace left, the geometry of a man whose body long since memorized its place beside mine. I do not turn around.
"What happened between us—all of it, the night before the wedding and everything that followed in that chamber—cannot continue." I aim the words at the stone ahead of me. "Not because I don't want it. We have both long since stopped pretending I don't want it."
His footsteps do not break their rhythm. Silence stretches the length of two stone arches, and in that silence I feel the full weight of what I have just asked him to carry.
"I saw what I became last night." Each word comes out deliberate and brittle. "A woman who would hold your eyes while another man had me and feel powerful for it."
My voice does not waver, which costs me something I will not name. "A woman one step from burning everything down just to feel the warmth. I won't be her. And I will not make you stand in that doorway again."
"I understand, Your Majesty." His voice is perfectly steady, perfectly formal. The title lands like a door closing—soft, irrevocable, final. "My duty is your safety. Nothing more."
The title stings us both. I feel it, and I am certain he intends me to, and I cannot summon anger at him for it because it is the most honest thing either of us has managed all morning.
We walk in rigid silence. Two people maintaining a careful and excruciating distance, and every step already feels like something that was never built to hold the weight placed on it.
The morning audience chamber is full—long table, grave advisors, stacks of correspondence weighted with beeswax and obligation. Alastair rises when I enter, warm and openly pleased, the face of a man who has decided he likes being married.
"My queen. Come, sit. We were just beginning the garrison reports." He draws out my chair himself, an easy, unpretentious gesture.
An advisor opens a ledger without looking up. "The eastern garrisons have requested additional grain allocations for three consecutive quarters, Your Majesty. The source of the discrepancy remains unclear."
"It isn't unclear," I say. "Commander Aldwick's second holds a private contract with the Dember grain merchant. They've been splitting the surplus since spring."
The advisor's head lifts sharply, and I continue. "The waste isn't in the eastern line—it's in the northern routing. Redirect from Calver and you recover the deficit without touching the crown's reserve."
Silence follows. Not the uncomfortable kind—the kind that means I have said something no one in this room expected a first-day-bride to know.
Alastair's eyebrows lift before he can govern them. By the second hour, advisors address their questions to me directly, and I answer each one without hesitation, and Alastair watches me with the open, growing admiration of a man recalculating something significant.
"My lords," he says during a pause between petitions, voice warm with unmistakable pride, "I have been told my queen has a sharper mind than half this council."
He glances at me with that easy, unguarded look that I am beginning to recognize as his particular form of sincerity. "Today I find that generous." The advisors laugh. I smile, reach for my wine, and let the praise settle without permitting it to mean more than I am prepared for.
Behind my chair, Jasper shifts. Barely an adjustment—the small metallic whisper of redistributed weight. It moves through me like a hand pressed flat between my shoulder blades, warm and specific and entirely unwelcome.
I feel the exact location of him without turning. The heat radiating from three feet away. The stubborn gravitational fact of his presence in every room he has ever occupied beside me.
A fire I have told myself not to touch, still burning with complete indifference to what I have told myself.
I take a slow and deliberate sip of wine. I fix my gaze on the advisor speaking quietly at the far end of the table, and I retain every word he says, and I do not turn around.
The distance between us stretches taut across the polished floor—fragile, deliberate, strained at every seam—and already it feels like a thing that was never built to last the week.
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