[Desmond’s POV]
I am coming apart at the seams. The study is dim, papers scattered across the desk, and I've been at the window watching for her like a lovesick ward boy. If my father could see this, he'd set the room on fire again.
The door opens. Amber steps through alone—Arthur's silhouette visible for one breath in the corridor behind her before the heavy oak swings shut and seals us in together.
"Amber." I cross toward her. "You're late. I was starting to think my summons had been lost to the considerable bureaucracy of the joint chambers."
"The corridors were busy." Her voice carries the careful neutrality of someone navigating a room full of weapons. "Forgive me, my prince."
"Forgiven. Come here." I reach for her hand—a gesture I've been rehearsing since I wrote the summons, which is pathetic enough to warrant its own sentencing hearing.
Then I stop. My nostrils flare before the thought arrives, and everything in the room rearranges itself around a single, annihilating detail.
Pine. Cold air. Something wild and earthy ground into the hollows of her throat, her wrists—places it could only reach if he—
My hand hovers an inch from hers, and the air between my fingers and her skin hums with a frequency I can feel in my teeth.
"Tell me something, little wife." My voice comes out lower than intended, scraped raw. "How was your afternoon?"
"Uneventful," she says, and her chin lifts with the particular bravery of a woman who has decided to lie to the most dangerous person she knows.
"Uneventful." I taste the word like ash. "Funny. You smell like you've had the most eventful afternoon in the history of this court."
Her throat works around a swallow she can't disguise, and the flush climbing her neck is a confession her mouth refuses to make. "I don't know what you mean."
"Pine." I take a step closer. "Cold air. That particular undertone my brother carries everywhere like a calling card. Shall I keep going, or would you like to stop insulting my intelligence?"
"Desmond, please—"
"That's not a denial." Another step, and we are very close now—close enough to catalogue the way her pulse jumps at the base of her throat. "But it doesn't matter. I can read him on every inch of you."
I cross to the door and open it. Arthur stands exactly where I knew he would—straight-backed, hands clasped behind him, wearing that professional stillness like plate armour.
"Come in." I hold the door wider, pleasant as a host at a dinner party. "Close the door behind you. And stay right there—I want you to watch something."
I turn back to Amber. I frame her face with both hands, thumbs against her jaw, fingers threading into her hair. "Let me make it go away," I say against her mouth, and then I kiss her.
Not calculated. Not the precise punishing kisses I've been dispensing like sentences—this is graceless and starving, my mouth open against hers, teeth catching her lower lip. Underneath the taste of her, the ghost of him—pine and salt and the trace of my brother's skin.
She makes a sound against my mouth, not protest—something lower that vibrates through her chest into mine. Her fists close in my shirt hard enough to pop a button.
I walk her backward until her spine meets the desk. Papers scatter as I lift her onto the surface, and a wine glass rolls off and shatters on the stone floor somewhere beneath our notice.
"You think this changes anything?" she says against my jaw, breathless, nails digging into my shoulders through the fabric.
"It changes everything." I press the words into the pulse hammering at her throat. "That's the problem."
My hands work her dress upward—urgent, graceless, nothing like the deliberate performances I usually conduct. She arches into me and the sound she makes goes straight through my spine.
"Stop thinking," she says, and her steady fingers find my belt while my unsteady ones grip her hips hard enough to bruise. The humiliation of that contrast is something I will catalogue later, when I am capable of cataloguing anything at all.
I bury myself inside her in a single hard thrust, and the noise that leaves me is not a sound a prince should make. She is slick and tight and scorching, the involuntary clench of her body around me unravelling something behind my ribs I will never get back.
The rhythm is punishing, each stroke a reclamation. Her back presses flat against the desk, legs locked around my waist, and the fury in the grip of her thighs matches everything in me that is broken and refusing to beg.
Six feet away, Arthur has not moved. But his breathing is audible—a fractional roughness betraying what his face refuses to. I hear it the way I hear everything about my brother: against my will.
Amber's nails rake down my forearms hard enough to draw blood. Her spine bows off the desk and the climax takes her silently—just a sharp inhalation, eyes going wide, her body clenching around me in rhythmic contractions that drag me over the edge with a groan I couldn't suppress for any audience.
My forehead drops to her collarbone. Her heartbeat races beneath my mouth, and the desk is a ruin of papers and ink and shattered glass catching the last of the dying light.
I stay inside her because the moment I pull away the air will bring his scent back. There is no version of this room where I win.
"Arthur." My voice carries without turning—low, conversational, council-meeting calm. "Did you enjoy the show? Or do you prefer it the other way around?"
Nothing. Not a flinch, not a breath out of rhythm—my brother, carved from the same marble as always.
"No commentary at all?" I straighten, withdrawing from her body, and adjust my clothing with hands I will not permit to shake. "You used to be better at pretending, brother. Look at us—declining in parallel."
He gives me nothing. My mirror, my shadow—the only person alive who wounds me by doing absolutely nothing.
"Get out," I tell Amber, and my voice sounds like something chewed through and swallowed. "Both of you."
She slides off the desk with the composure of someone who has been dismissed by worse men than me, which is impressive given the shortage.
"Goodnight, my prince," she says—each syllable landed with the precision of a woman who has learned exactly where the knife goes. "Sleep well."
"I won't." I say it to the closing door. "But thank you for the performance of caring."
The door shuts, and the study swallows every sound whole. I grip the desk's edge until the grain bites into my palms. My reflection stares from the dark window, immaculate from the collar up—a perfect rendering of a man with everything under control.
Michele never did this. She was wildfire—consumed, burned, left ash and the comfort of knowing I would never need to change. She never made me press my knuckles into mahogany because another man's hands on her made my lungs seize, never made me want to be chosen rather than obeyed.
There is a difference. And the difference has a word that surfaces now like a body from deep water—slow, inevitable, bloated with everything I have spent months refusing to examine. I let it sit on my tongue in the dark, in the ghost of pine that clings beneath her scent on my skin.
Love. It tastes like losing.
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