[Amber’s POV]
Three days since the border alarm, and the council has swallowed Desmond whole. The connecting door to his rooms has not opened—I press my palm against the oak every morning, testing for vibration, and find only silence.
The bruises on my throat have faded from violet to a sick greenish yellow. I catalog them each evening in the mirror like a cartographer marking hostile territory—coordinates in a geography I did not consent to.
A knock. Three strikes, measured. I cross the room barefoot and open the door to Arthur in the empty corridor, silver eyes doing something catastrophic the moment they find mine.
"Inner patrol was reassigned to the eastern garrison." His voice is low, each word weighed before release. "Corridor's clear since sundown."
"I counted footsteps at the hour mark—none came." My knuckles go white on the handle. "The corridor has been empty for hours."
"You counted." His mouth does something too raw to be called a smile—a cracking-open rather than a softening. "Of course you counted."
His gaze drops to the fading bruises at my collarbone—teeth-shaped, deliberate—and the almost-smile dies. Something behind his eyes goes very still, the way a blade goes still before it falls.
"Tell me to go back to my post." The words come out like a man reciting an oath he no longer believes in.
"No." I step back from the doorway—not an invitation, just the removal of the last barrier between his body and this room. "Come inside, Arthur."
He steps through. The door closes like a seal breaking, and we stand in grey dark three feet apart with the bond screaming between us.
"Three days," I say, my voice dropped to something I barely recognize. "He hasn't come through that door in three days, and I have spent every one of them—"
Arthur's mouth finds mine before I finish. His hands frame my jaw, tilt my head, and the kiss is the structural collapse of weeks—all the sentinel nights detonating at once.
I make a sound against his lips that I will be mortified about later. Later is a country I cannot currently locate on a map.
"Tell me to stop." His mouth moves to my throat—not the bruised side, never the bruised side, tracing unmarked skin with devastating precision. "Tell me and I will."
"If you stop I will find a weapon." My fingers knot in his hair and pull hard enough to make his breath hitch. "That is not a figure of speech."
His hands find my waist, each finger pressing through silk in sequence, learning the architecture of my ribs the way Desmond never bothered to. Desmond grabbed; Arthur maps, and the difference buckles something behind my knees.
He catches me before I lose my footing and lifts me—one arm beneath my thighs, the other across my back. My legs wrap around his waist, his pulse hammering visibly in his throat.
He lowers me onto the bed with devastating slowness, his hands finding mine and pressing them into the sheets above my head. Not restraint—just a way of holding on while the rest of him shakes apart.
"You're trembling." I curl my fingers through his where they pin my wrists, and the tremors run straight through his bones into mine. "Arthur."
"Every night on the other side of that wall." His thumb traces my jaw, my throat, the ridge of collarbone where the worst bruise sits. "I have wanted to touch you every single night."
His mouth follows the path his thumb carved—jaw, throat, collarbone—pressing lips to every point where Desmond left teeth marks. Not to erase them. To answer them.
He finds the deep bruise below my ear and holds his mouth there until the warmth of him overwrites the memory beneath it. My spine arches off the mattress, and my hands twist against his grip.
"Don't let go of those." His voice is rough against my skin, and there is something close to a smile buried in it. "I need you to stay still for this."
"That is the most deranged thing anyone has ever said to me." My hips betray every word of it by pressing upward into his. "In what universe am I staying still?"
Where Desmond was transaction—efficient, indifferent, a body performing a function—Arthur is conversation. His hands ask questions against my skin and wait for answers, tracking what makes my breath catch.
His mouth moves from collarbone to sternum while his hands slide the silk upward, every inch of uncovered skin given the same unhurried attention. The graze of his teeth against my ribs is nothing like the marks on my throat—devotion instead of destruction, written in the same language.
"Arthur." His name comes out wrecked, stripped of every defense I have spent months building. "Please."
"Tell me what you need." His mouth pauses against my ribs, breath hot through the last of the silk between us. "I want to hear you say it."
"You." My fingers break free and find his jaw, pulling his face up to mine. "All of you, now."
The bond sings when he lowers his weight onto me—not the cold silence of Desmond's claim but something enormous that turns my blood to light. He moves with the same unhurried precision, attentive to the point of devastation, adjusting when my breath hitches.
"Stay with me afterward." The words fall out raw, between breaths that have stopped belonging to me. "Stay."
"Try to make me leave." His forehead presses to mine and the space between us ceases to exist as a concept. "See what happens."
He comes undone with my name on his mouth—not conquest but surrender, his whole body curving into mine. The sound he makes is something I will carry in my bones for the rest of my life.
When we both come down, his forehead against mine, breathing the only sound, the bond humming like something alive settling into the space where it has always belonged.
"I will not survive watching you belong to him." The words land against my lips, flat and precise.
"I have never belonged to Desmond." My thumb traces his jaw, his pulse still hammering beneath the skin. "Not once."
"He'll kill me for this." No drama in it—just arithmetic from a man who has weighed the cost and paid it already.
"He can parade me through his court and call it marriage." My voice is steady in a surprising way. "I was yours in that cabin before I knew what the word meant."
Something moves through his expression—a fracture, a surrender. His mouth opens on a breath that sounds like it has been held for weeks.
Then: footsteps in the corridor. The heavy cadence of a guard patrol, boots on stone, growing louder with the inevitability of a fuse burning down.
Arthur goes rigid. His hand covers my mouth—not to silence me but to contain himself, because the breath he is holding sounds like it might carry through oak and iron.
The boots reach the door and pause. One beat, two, three—an eternity compressed between heartbeats while he holds perfectly still and the bond screams into the silence.
The boots move on, fading like a tide retreating from shore. The last echo pulls the breathable air behind it.
Arthur does not breathe until the corridor goes silent. Even then his hand stays over my mouth, and the weight of what we have done settles over us like a sentence neither of us can finish.
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