The storm hits the castle like something personal. Wind drives rain against the window in sheets so thick the glass vibrates, and my chambers drop cold enough to make the silk coverlet useless.
The bond doesn't care about the hour—it pulls toward the door, steady and relentless, a rope around my ribs tightening with every breath. Arthur is ten feet away through stone and oak, and my body knows it—an ache settling low between my hips that has nothing to do with sleep.
Nothing says sound decision-making like getting out of bed at midnight to open a door you have no business opening. I last four more minutes before my feet hit cold stone.
The door swings open and he is right there, silver eyes catching torchlight. His gaze drops down the length of me—thin nightdress, bare legs, nipples visible through silk—and comes back to my face with the discipline of a man who has been fighting this war longer than I have.
"Go back inside, Amber." Low and stripped clean, nothing left but the command. "You shouldn't be standing here."
"Can't sleep." I fold my arms tight against my chest because my body is betraying me in ways the silk does nothing to hide. "The bond gets worse at night."
"I know it does." His throat works once, hard, his jaw set like forged iron. "And that doesn't make this a good idea."
"Come inside." I watch the words land—his shoulders go rigid, his hands curl at his sides, and lower, against the dark fabric of his trousers, the bond is clearly not a one-sided affliction.
"No." No pause, no softness to pad the landing. "I can't touch you—the order is explicit, and the consequences fall on you, not me."
"I know exactly what the consequences are." My voice holds steady, a miracle, because between my thighs the ache has become a pulse matching my heartbeat. "I'm not asking you to touch me."
"Then what are you asking?" His voice drops to something raw, a man halfway over a ledge. "Because standing here is not nothing."
I step backward into the room—one step, then two—and leave the door wide open. He doesn't follow, bracing his shoulder against the doorframe while the three feet of threshold between us fills with something heavier than air.
I lower myself to the edge of the bed, letting the silk ride up my thighs. His eyes track to the mate mark on my forearm—involuntary, absolute—before dropping to my bare legs and staying one beat too long.
"If the order didn't exist." I press my palms flat against the mattress, knees slightly apart. "If nothing stood between you and this room—what would you do?"
"Don't." My name almost starts to leave his mouth, but he swallows it. "Don't ask me that."
"I'm asking." I hold his gaze across the width of the room and let my knees fall open another inch. "Tell me what you'd do."
"I'd close the door behind me." Low, specific, unhesitating—the voice of a man who has imagined this in exact detail. "I'd push your knees apart and kneel between them before you finished breathing."
Every nerve from my skull to the soles of my feet fires at once, and the ache between my legs clenches into something sharp and urgent. "And then?"
"I'd start with my mouth on the inside of your thigh." His hands find the doorframe—both of them, braced wide, knuckles whitening. "I'd work higher until you couldn't hold still, and then I'd hold you down and keep going."
"Keep going." The words leave me raw and unguarded, my skin flushed from my chest to my hairline. "Don't stop."
"I'd taste you until your back came off the bed." His voice has dropped to barely a whisper, scraped clean of every layer of discipline. "Until your thighs shook against my ears and you forgot how to say anything except my name."
My hand moves from the mattress to my knee, fingers trailing along the inside of my thigh. His gaze drops to track it with a focus that makes the air combustible, his chest expanding on a breath that doesn't finish.
"Show me where," I say, and my voice doesn't sound like mine anymore—low, thick, half-wrecked. "Tell me where to put my hands."
"Higher." An instruction, not a suggestion, delivered in a voice rough enough to bruise. "Slower than that—I wouldn't rush you."
My fingers slip beneath the hem of my nightdress, trailing up bare skin, and the sound that escapes me—a soft, open-mouthed exhale—makes his jaw clench hard enough to cast a shadow from across the room.
"There." His breathing has gone ragged, his hips angled forward against the doorframe in a way that makes the state of his body unmistakable. "Now don't stop."
My hand finds the slick heat of my own body and my spine arches off the bed, thighs falling wider. The sound he makes is low and guttural—a groan he tried to swallow and couldn't, his head dropping forward.
"Slower." The word comes out wrecked, barely held together. "I'd hold you right at the edge until you begged me to let you fall."
"Arthur." His name tears out of me half prayer, half curse, my hips rolling against my own hand. "Touch yourself—please."
His hands tighten on the frame until the wood creaks. He shakes his head once—a refusal his body is already overruling, the hard length of him straining visibly against his trousers, every muscle pitched toward me across a distance neither of us can close.
"Please." I say it again—stripped bare, no pride left, my fingers moving in slow, deliberate circles while he watches. His right hand drops from the frame to the front of his trousers, and his eyes never leave mine.
It’s devastation without contact. His hand moves in long, slow strokes while my body answers from across the room—back arching, thighs trembling, the wet sound of my own fingers the only noise beneath our ragged breathing.
He says my name when he comes apart—guttural, broken, his whole body shuddering against the doorframe. The sound detonates at the base of my spine, and I follow him over the edge with my hips lifting off the bed, my free hand fisting the sheets, a cry tearing out of me that I couldn't have stopped.
The silence afterward presses into every corner of the room. My breathing slows in increments, my thighs still trembling. His doesn't.
"This cannot happen again." His voice is destroyed—hoarse, scraped hollow, barely holding the shape of words.
I turn my head to look at him, still braced in the doorway, forehead pressed against wood, his hand returned to the frame. "Do you mean that?"
One breath. Two. His mouth opens, and whatever he almost says dies between his chest and the charged air.
He reaches for the handle. The last thing I see is his face—silver eyes blown dark, scar pulled white, a man who has handed me everything and is already trying to take it back.
The latch clicks shut between us. I press my palm over my mouth because the sound building in my chest is not something I want him to hear through six inches of oak.
His breathing is still there—ragged, uneven, pressed so close to the wood I could trace its rhythm with my fingertips. I close my eyes and listen, and the door between us is the cruelest thing I have ever survived.
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