The Fang Prince's Vow

The chamber had no clock. That was the first thing Dorian took from me, after the door and the daylight and my name for myself.

He gave me a different name. Pet. He said it the way other men said please, like it cost him nothing and meant everything.

I had counted forty nights by the cold of the stone, or maybe thirty, or maybe a hundred. Time bent down here under the mountain the way iron bent in his hands. I sat on the edge of the wide black bed with my wrists still ringed pink from the cuffs he had taken off an hour ago, and I told myself the same thing I told myself every time he came near. I would not look at his mouth.

I looked at his mouth.

The latch lifted. He came in without a candle because he did not need one, and I did, and that was the whole arrangement between us in a single fact. His boots made no sound. His coat was off already, dark shirt open at the throat, and the throat was the worst of him, pale and corded and close enough now that I could see the slow pulse he did not have anymore.

“You moved the chair,” he said.

“I wanted to reach the window.”

“There is no window.”

“I know.” My voice came out smaller than I meant it. “I wanted to want one.”

Something crossed his face that I refused to call patience. He crossed the room and stood over me, and the cold of him reached me before he did, a clean cold like deep water, and my skin rose up to meet it under the thin shift he had left me. That was the betrayal. Always the skin first. My nipples drew tight against the cloth before my brain had even decided to be afraid, and his eyes dropped to them, and the corner of his mouth moved.

Heat dragged up my neck. Not from him. From me, from the fact that he had seen, from the wet pulse that started low in me the second he looked. I pressed my thighs together and that made it worse, a slick clench I could feel, and I hated the small animal in me that had learned his footsteps and started getting ready for him before he even spoke.

“You’re trembling,” he said.

“It’s cold in here.”

“You’re a poor liar, Mara.” He crouched, slow, until his face was level with mine. “You were a good one once. I remember. You told three lords to their faces that you carried no message, and you carried it sewn into your sleeve.” His hand came up and rested on my knee, not gripping. Just weight. “What happened to her.”

You stole her, I wanted to say. You took the part of me that fought and you fed it something and now it lies down for you. But that was not the thought that surfaced. The thought that surfaced, quick and ugly and mine, was this: if I bit through my own tongue right now he would only lick it off my chin and call it a gift. I shut my teeth on nothing.

His thumb moved on my knee. One stroke. My whole body answered it like a struck bell.

“There she is,” he murmured, watching the flush spread down my chest. “There’s my honest girl. Your mouth lies. This never does.”

He pushed my knees apart with one hand and I let him, which was the unforgivable thing, that I let him, that my legs opened like they had been waiting all night for the order. The cool air found me where I was already slick and I made a sound I would have died to take back.

“Say it,” he said.

“No.”

“Say what you are.”

“I’m a prisoner.”

“Yes.” He sounded almost pleased, the way you praise a child for a true answer that is also useless. His hand slid up the inside of my thigh and stopped just short, just short, his fingers a breath from where I was clenching on nothing, and held there. “And what else.”

I bit down on the inside of my cheek until it hurt because the hurt was mine, the only thing in the room that was mine, and even that I wanted to hand him. “Don’t.”

“Don’t stop, or don’t start.” His head tilted. “Be precise. I’m a patient man. I have centuries. You have one wet little cunt and no patience at all, and we both know which of us breaks first.”

The word in his cold mouth went through me like his cold went through me. I should have spat at him. I had spat at him on the first night and he had only smiled with the blood of my lip on his teeth and told me he could wait. He had waited. He had not touched me for what felt like weeks, had only watched, had left me on this bed with my own hand the only mercy and then taken even that away, cuffs and a low even voice telling me no, telling me I would not come until I asked him for it in plain words, and the wanting had grown teeth.

Now his fingers moved that last breath and touched me.

Just two fingertips, flat against my clit, not moving, and my hips bucked up off the bed all on their own and I heard myself whine through my nose like something starved. He held them still and made me grind against him for it, made me do the work, made me see myself doing it, my back arched and my fists in the black sheets and my proud mouth open and useless.

“There,” he breathed. “Look at you ride my hand. The spy. The clever one.” He pressed harder and circled once, slow, and the pleasure was so sharp after so long denied that my eyes filled. “Tell me to stop and I will. Tell me you don’t want it.”

“I don’t,” I gasped, rolling my hips into his fingers, “I don’t want it, I don’t, I don’t.”

“Mm.” He kept the rhythm, that unhurried circle, winding me so tight my thighs started to shake around his wrist. “Then I’ll stop.”

He lifted his hand.

The sound I made was not a word. It was the sound of every wall in me coming down at once. I grabbed his wrist with both of mine, my fingers nowhere near closing around it, and I dragged his hand back down between my legs and held it there against me, shaking, my forehead dropping to his cold shoulder, and the shame of it was a live coal in my chest, hotter than the wet ache, hotter than anything, because I was the one holding him now.

“Please,” I said into his shirt.

The whole room seemed to still. Even the cold of him changed.

“Please what.” His voice had dropped. Not gentle. Lower, rougher, the patience finally thinning, and that thinning was the most frightening and the most thrilling thing I had felt in all my counted nights, because it meant I had reached down past the iron and found something in him that wanted too. “Say all of it. You don’t get half.”

“Please touch me.” The words fell out of me one after another like beads off a cut string. “Please let me come. I’ll ask. I’m asking. I can’t, I can’t anymore, please, Dorian.”

His name in my mouth did it.

He moved faster than I could track, the way only he could move, and then I was on my back in the black sheets with his weight settling over me, cold and immovable, his hand back between my thighs and two fingers pushing into me slow and deep while his thumb found my clit and pressed, and I sobbed at the fullness of it, at being opened after so long empty. His mouth came to my throat. Not biting. Resting. I felt his lips part against the wild jump of my pulse, felt the cool point of one fang drag along the vein without breaking it, a promise, a question.

“This is what you came down here carrying,” he said against my skin, his fingers working me open, my hips chasing every stroke. “Not the message. This. You just hadn’t met the man you’d beg for yet.” He curled his fingers and I cried out and clutched at his back. “Now you have.”

“Don’t bite me,” I breathed, and even as I said it I tilted my head, I gave him the long bare line of my throat, my body arguing with my mouth in front of him, for him, the way it always did, the way he loved. “Please don’t. Please.”

“You don’t mean that either.” His thumb circled harder and I felt the edge rushing up at me, finally, the thing he had kept from me for so long, my whole body drawing tight as a bowstring around his fingers. His fang pressed harder, denting the skin, not through, his other hand fisting in my hair to hold me exactly where he wanted me. “When you come on my hand I am going to drink. You’re going to feel both at once. And after that there is no door for you, pet. Not even the one you came in by. Do you understand what I’m telling you.”

I was right at the edge. One more stroke. His mouth open on my throat, his fingers buried in me, my own hands pulling him down instead of pushing him away, and the last clear thought I had before the wave took me was not a thought at all, only the word yes rising up where no should have been.

He felt me start to break.

He set his teeth.