The walled garden in November is all stripped branches and cold patience—chosen deliberately.
Two courtiers drift past within the first ten minutes, their glances sliding across us like light off water—witnesses, precisely as intended. Cecil falls into step with the composure of a woman never once caught off-guard.
"I owe you a candor I've withheld," I begin, without preamble. "I watched you and Alastair at supper. I understand far more than I let on."
Her chin lifts a fraction. She holds her tongue—patient as a woman who knows when silence serves better.
"He told me himself," I continue, in the tone of a woman discussing frost. "Childhood inseparable. His corridors were yours before they were his."
I let a pause settle. "What was expected, for years, never explicitly denied—that is not nothing. I know what it costs."
Something precise moves behind her grey eyes. "My lady is perceptive," she says at last, her voice even and perfectly empty.
"I am," I agree pleasantly. "Which is why I understand precisely what you intend to do about it."
A beat of silence. The faintest tightening at her mouth's corner—barely perceptible, unless one has spent weeks studying that face.
"Marta is loyal," I say. "A good maid. Her account is one woman's word about a bodyguard in a corridor at an unusual hour." My tone stays gentle. "A queen's word, Cecil, weighs considerably more than a courtier's."
She goes very still—the kind of stillness that means something beneath has clenched hard and refuses to move.
"Bringing accusations of adultery against a reigning queen is treason," I continue in the same unhurried voice. "Not misconduct. Not gossip. Treason." I hold her gaze and keep my voice smooth. "Exile, if you are fortunate. Considerably worse, if you are not."
There it is—the crack. One fractured second in that perfect composure, closed almost immediately. But I saw it, and we both know it.
I let the silence breathe, then soften, quite deliberately—because that too is a form of power.
"But you are clever, and this court benefits from clever women. A place of honor—properly formalized. Influence over the eastern administration, which you know better than anyone here."
"Access to the king, every formal avenue the court affords a woman of your standing." I tilt my head, as though this is merely reasonable. "Everything this palace can offer—but the crown."
She holds my gaze. Her throat moves once. The agreement comes tight and bitten-off—barely a breath, but unmistakably yes.
We part with brittle smiles and walk in opposite directions, each carrying precisely what she came for.
I return to my chambers with my blood running dark and strange—the same hungry, commanding energy that rises in me every time Jasper goes to his knees.
The satisfaction of power sated and sharpened at once—it makes my hands restless. I send for him.
He arrives quickly, expression composed. I cross the room toward him before he can arrange it further.
"Cecil is handled," I say. "And you are going nowhere." The look that moves through his eyes—relief, the desperate edge of a man reprieved—I gather it in both hands.
I press my palms to his shoulders, firm and unhesitating. He goes to his knees on the stones with the ease of a man who has always known this is where he belongs.
I thread my fingers through his hair. His breath comes slow and shaking. I wait above him—savoring the deliberate pleasure of this.
"Undress," I tell him quietly. "Then kneel at the foot of the bed, and you will wait." He holds my eyes as he rises. I hold his back.
He obeys—each motion measured, those broad scarred hands moving as though undressing is itself a form of service rendered.
When he kneels again at the bed's foot, head bowed, hands flat on his thighs, I stand over him and let the silence stretch until he feels its full weight.
"Permission to touch me," I say softly, "is something you will ask for." He looks up at me, brown-green eyes full of that terrible, reverent patience.
"Please." Low and rough and immediate. "Please, my lady, may I touch you." I make him ask twice more—once for his hands, once for his mouth.
Each time I watch restraint move through his jaw, his shoulders—the controlled tension of a man who can beg with the same dignity another might use to pray.
When his mouth finds my skin his breath comes ragged and grateful and worshipful. I hold his hair and let him serve until I have taken precisely what I want.
When I finally pull him onto the bed, he rises with the careful intensity of a man handling something he cannot afford to ruin. I pin his wrists above his head, fingers laced through his.
I settle my weight over him and set a punishing pace that leaves no room for softness. His head falls back against the pillow, throat bared, a low sound breaking from him.
Beneath my grip his pulse hammers—rapid and surrendered—the heat of him filling my hands, his hips rising hard to meet mine despite the restraint.
"Say it," I tell him, moving, voice low and even. "What are you?" His jaw tightens, a muscle jumping in his throat, before the words tear loose.
"Your knight," he says, rough and undone. "Your weapon." His hips meet mine and I drive the pace harder, taking what I want.
"And?" I press, holding his wrists down, watching his face.
"Your dog," he answers—without flinching, without shame, as if this word from me is grace.
He gives himself over with a completeness that opens something raw in me alongside the heat—triumphant, terrified, fiercely tender at once.
His wrists flex against my grip. He does not fight it. He has never fought it, not once in all the years of kneeling at the edge of everything I ask.
When it ends, we are both breathing in fragments. I ease off him slowly, and he collapses against the sheets with the surrender of a man entirely spent.
I pull him to me, pressing his head against my chest. His cheek settles over my heartbeat, his hair warm beneath my palm.
The words come out different this time — not desperate, not torn from me like a wound. Simply. Quietly. Like something that has always been true and is finally allowed to breathe.
"I love you," I say into the quiet of the room. Not for the first time—I said it in a corridor at my father's estate, shaking and terrified and certain I was about to lose him. But this is the first time I've said it like this: unhurried, after, with his head on my chest and nowhere either of us needs to be.
He goes still against me—not the stillness of shock, but of a man letting something settle into his bones. His answer forms against my skin, quiet as breath: "I love you." And the words sound different in this room than they did in that corridor. They sound like they might survive.
I hold him there, palm against his hair, then smooth his temple with two deliberate fingers—the gesture he has always understood.
"You need to leave," I tell him steadily. He lifts his head, meets my eyes, and nods—because he has always known the rules of this kingdom, and he trusts me with them.
He dresses in the quiet and goes. The door closes. I lie still and listen until the corridor empties and my heartbeat slows.
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