[Jasper’s POV]
The barracks smell of tallow and iron, and men who sleep without difficulty. I am not among them tonight.
I stare at the ceiling. Twelve stones across, nine deep, one cracked like a river delta in the northeast corner. I have counted them before. Tonight I have counted them four times.
Every time I close my eyes, the wedding night plays behind them. Not the grief of it. The heat.
Vivien's eyes finding mine over Alastair's shoulder. Her lips parting when his hand slid between her thighs. The moan she let spill—louder than necessary, aimed at me like a blade thrown with precision.
The arch of her spine when she came. Her gaze locked on mine across the width of the bedchamber, daring me to look away. I didn't. That was my first mistake, and also the only possible choice.
I have been hard for over an hour. Hating myself for it has produced no results.
I press my fist against my mouth and attempt to redirect. Battle drills. Supply routes. The northern garrison's deficit figures, memorized to the third decimal because memorizing things is what I do when I cannot do anything useful.
It lasts four seconds before the image floods back: her neck thrown back against the white pillows, her fingers twisting the silk into knots, her hips rising to meet a rhythm that was Alastair's and also somehow mine, because I was the one she was looking at when she made that choice.
Her blood on white silk. The proof of what I put there, twelve hours before Alastair knelt between her thighs and received credit for its absence.
And those eyes. Always those eyes, holding mine with an intimacy more indecent than anything his hands were doing to her body.
I shove my hand beneath the blanket and grip myself, jaw locked against any sound. Around me the barracks breathe in the slow rhythm of men who have earned their rest and want nothing more complicated than that.
None of them are thinking about the queen. That particular problem belongs exclusively to me.
I think about the candle in my hand. The weight of the brass holder, the way the flame bent each time my grip tightened. I was supposed to be furniture. Furniture does not grip brass hard enough to leave marks in the palm.
I stroke myself with rough, angry desperation—not slow, not careful, nothing gentle, because gentleness belongs to the night before the wedding, and I have forfeited the right to think about that.
My teeth find my forearm, tasting leather and salt. The bite grounds me for exactly as long as it takes for her voice to surface behind my eyes and swallow every other sensation whole.
The sound she made when Alastair's thumb found the place that dissolves thought. The way it climbed in her throat, shaped by something half genuine and half deliberate, and the difference between those two things is the knife she has been turning in my chest since the ceremony.
She held my gaze when she made that sound. She knows what it costs me to hear it. She made it louder anyway, watching me the entire time, her darkened sapphire eyes fully awake to exactly what she was doing and why.
I think about how her thighs looked in the candlelight, spread across white linen, her hips tilting for him while she watched me watch her. My hand moves faster. I despise myself with a precision that does not stop anything.
The candlelight in that room is still burned into my vision—the amber warmth of it, the way it fell across her skin when she arched upward, the exact shade of her lips parting on a sound she could have swallowed and chose not to.
The spread of her fingers in the silk—trembling and deliberate, showing me every unguarded thing she refused to give Alastair the satisfaction of hiding. The cry that tore out of her throat and didn't need to be as loud as she made it, and she knew that, and she made it anyway.
The way she looked at me through every second of it. Not with an apology. Not with shame. With the dark, commanding certainty she uses when she wants me to understand something she is too careful to say out loud.
Watch, her eyes said. Witness this. Be here, don't look away, I know exactly what this costs you and I am asking for it anyway. I didn't look away. That is the entire problem.
Wax had dripped onto my knuckle earlier—sharp, hot, real. I didn't move. I stood in the doorway and held the candle and watched her come with Alastair inside her, her gaze fixed on mine, and I did not flinch once.
I did not flinch once, and I am paying for that now, alone in the dark with my fist and the slow, burning certainty that given the same night and the same door and the same candle, I would not do a single thing differently.
My forearm muffles the sound when I come. Her name stays caught behind my teeth—not spoken, not breathed out, just pressed there in the dark like something I refuse to give the air permission to carry away.
I lie in the aftermath with the ceiling above me and the shame arriving slow and complete, moving through every part of me with the efficiency of a man who knows the terrain.
The taste of leather sits on my tongue. Somewhere across the barracks a man turns over and mutters something shapeless into his pillow. No one woke. Good.
I stare at the ceiling and tell myself this is the last time. I have told myself this before. I am telling myself again now because repetition is the only available tool.
That I will bury this. That I will be the knight she asked me to be this morning—disciplined, distant, professional, the man who has accepted his function and does not ask for more than that.
That I will not think about the way her body felt beneath mine the night before the wedding. That I will not think about her voice when she commanded me to say it—that I was hers, that I belonged to her, that I surrendered it completely and meant every syllable.
I will be what she named me in the corridor. Her guard. Nothing more. I will mean it this time and it will hold and the wanting will go somewhere it cannot reach me.
In the morning, I am already in position when she opens her door. One pace back, one pace left. I am here for one reason only.
"Your Majesty." The title comes out level, professional. It costs approximately what everything else has cost me in the last twelve hours, which is everything, but the accounting is done now and the ledger closes here.
She does not reach for me. She does not slow her step or shift her posture or offer me a single thing I could mistake for a door left open.
The distance between us stretches down the corridor, step by deliberate step. Neither of us touches it. It is too tender at the edges, too much like a wound that has been left open because closing it would require admitting it exists.
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