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The marble floors of her gilded cage are icy against her bare feet; Alina steps soundlessly through patches of moonlight filtering in from the floor-to-ceiling windows, teeth worrying her bottom lip. It’s imperative she remain unseen, but she also needs to move quickly—Especially if she wants any hope of disappearing before daybreak.
The Grand Palace at night is almost unrecognizable as she scurries out of her royal suite: everything rendered in bleak, grey shadow. A sort of blackness that seemed to absorb the world around it, drawing in the edges like a hungry void.
Much like it’s newest, cruelest occupant.
A different route tonight, Alina decides, ducking a corner as oprichniki march past, unaware of her presence. She’d try the kitchens this time. There was a door she’d glimpsed while doing menu tastings for their next trade ministry summit; and if the old architectural sketches hidden in the false drawer of her desk were correct, it led outside to a small courtyard that housed the palace gardens. To freedom. To—
“This might be the farthest you’ve gotten in these silly escape attempts of yours,” calls a lazy voice from the dark.
Cursing, Alina freezes. Has to force herself to face him: her husband, arms crossed over his chest, leaning against the door frame. There’s an air of amusement in Aleksander’s posture as he surveys the small pack slung over her shoulder, heavy leather sapogi clutched in her hands.
“Farthest I’ve gotten yet,” she corrects primly, smoothing the front of her nightgown.
He hums a sound that is neither agreement nor disagreement.
Aleksander uncoils slowly before crossing the space between them, holding out a hand for her supplies. Suppressing the urge to punch him, Alina drops first her bag—bread and dried meats pilfered from her lunches over the course of a few days—then her winter boots into his waiting arms. He inspects the items briefly, eyebrows arched as he rifles through the contents.
“Less food than last time.”
She shrugs. “Coin seemed more efficient to carry than a week’s worth of rations.”
“A week?” He clicks his tongue. “My darling wife must think poorly of me if she believes it would take that long for me to track her down.”
She does not like how the word wife settles honey-sweet into her middle. “Call me an optimist.”
The silver light of the moon glances off the plane of his cheek, casting the scars she wrought into relief. Unfortunately, he is still handsome as ever, a stray lock of hair fallen across his brow, more dark curls at his ears. Due for another trim, she observes, wondering if he’ll ask her to wield the scissors as he did last time. Remembers tilting his vulnerable neck, the glint of a blade against his pulse.
But it had not been true Grisha steel in her palm, not capable of killing him. A tease on his part, she assumed; to give her almost what she longed for. Another way to exercise control. To show the iron strength of her jail cell.
Just like letting her almost run away each night.
A clock chimes midnight down the hall. Aleksander reaches for her hand, brings it to his cool lips. It’s not simple enough to be called a kiss, worse than the wedding band on her finger.
He presses his mouth to each knuckle with deliberate slowness. “Lucky I found you. There’s supposed to be a cold snap tonight. Perhaps Morozko would’ve whisked you off himself.”
Luck. Alina tries to curtail her childish scowl. She very much doubts luck had anything to do with the way he appeared like a spectre in the night each time she tried to escape this prison: Somehow their mental link enabled him to sense her movements better than any bloodhound. A telepathic tripwire she could not disentangle. It was maddening.
“Morozko the Winter King only takes fair maidens, which—thanks to you—I most definitely am not,” she answers dryly. “And here I thought you studied your fairytales.”
Aleksander cocks his head. “Some people have no taste.”
Despite better judgement, Alina feels her mouth quirk.
The humor breaks something in the steel of her spine; she relaxes a hair, allows him to pull her closer against the warmth of his chest, the bond spreading wide and hopeful in response. She sighs, resting her forehead at his collarbone, slumping rather pathetically into his embrace as her irritation fades.
“Don’t you get tired of chasing me?” She pouts, hidden in the bulk of his chest.
“No,” he strokes her hair, pausing over the antler collar. Like one might tug at a locked door to ensure it was bolted; she feels it when he curls a finger beneath the bone. He uses his grip to tilt her head up. “Do you ever tire of running?”
Yes. “No.”
An indulgent smile flickers across his face. “You have eternity to figure it out, solnishka.”
His hand frames her cheek then, thumb brushing over her lips, distracting her from puzzling the meaning behind those words: figure out what? Tempting instead, to part her mouth as he wishes, taste the salt of his skin. Her tongue presses at her teeth in heated anticipation.
Something pleasant stirs in her belly. Something entirely human. Maybe she is not so far gone yet, into that immeasurable void that immortality would one day call her to. Maybe he isn’t either, if the way his eyes darken means anything at all.
“Come,” he tucks her hand into the crook of his elbow, the same way he does at court, and begins to walk.
Tonight’s bid for escape is long gone, and she’s still too keyed up to sleep; she follows his long strides as they turn down a staircase in companionable silence. His steps even in the dark are sure and purposeful, never faltering, and Alina is caught in the tide, easily following into another wing of the Palace.
She spares a glance at the empty spots on the walls they pass: where the Lantsovs once watched over Os Alta from oil-painted eyes. She makes a note to find a new interior decorator in the morning.
Alina already knows where he means to go, but she asks anyway. Her husband likes theatrics, enjoys playing to an audience. Entertaining that part of Aleksander usually put him in a better mood: “Where are you taking me?”
He shoulders open the throne room entrance with a creak of ancient wood. “After you.”
Like the rest of the palace bathed in starlight, this room looks like it’s playing host to a strange, dark reality. Shadows move like wraiths across the tile flooring, the marble pillars twisting and bowing in the corner of her eye. He was right: Morozko’s pull can be felt in the icy wind battering the palace, whistling at the windows. Winter is finally here.
They descend the entry staircase like peasantry would. Herring and Rye, she muses, pausing as the twin thrones of Ravka come into view on the dias. Both feature carved insignias at the headboard, inlayed with gold leaf: one an eclipse, the other a sun with pointed rays.
She’d stood here once, in another life. Young and afraid, the Darkling at her side, before he taught her to wield power, responsibility. Before he taught her to wear a crown.
“I’ve always thought the designs a bit on the nose, don’t you think?” she leans up on her toes to whisper over the dull roar of the impending storm. “But at least I’ll never forget which one’s mine.”
A laugh huffs out of him before he can stifle it: Alina preens with the satisfaction of catching him off-guard.
He nods towards her empty seat. “Well? Go on.”
Alina wrinkles her nose at the dias. “Really? You know how I hate it.”
“Do you?”
The air has shifted: Alina becomes abruptly aware that they are on his playing field, both of them entwined in night’s shadow. It would be long hours yet before dawn, and she has not yet atoned for her sins.
“I’m not asking, milaya,” he continues when she makes no movement. “Do not mistake my patience for something it isn’t.”
There he is: the Shadow King. The Black Heretic. The Darkling. Her immortal husband, dangerous and cruel and entirely too handsome.
Relenting—only because she’s already tested him as far as she’s willing to tonight—her footsteps are light as she ascends, afraid to disturb the nighttime peace of the throne. Like it was a living thing that required rest, that might snap her in its jaws when it scented fear or worse, ambition.
Even so, she had experience taming monsters.
“I’d like to make a wager,” his voice echoes in the empty room.
“You’re hardly the gambling type,” she scoffs, settling uncomfortably in her golden chair, gazing down at her husband, terrible creature he was. He stood tall and proud, hands behind his back in a neat line. But Alina isn’t fooled by the playful, gaming tone: The Darkling only made bets when he knew the outcome; he lacked the necessary youth to leave things to chance.
It meant she was in trouble. As she so often was.
“You don’t want to hear it?”
“You’re going to tell me regardless. You don’t know how to shut up—“
Alina cuts herself off too late.
Stupid stupid stupid, she groans inwardly as his expression goes black. Alina does not dare breathe, ignoring every screaming instinct to run as a wave of angercuriositydesire floods the teather.
Normally he might tease her for such brazen disrespect—might even enjoy it, in that sly way of his.
But that’s not what tonight is about.
She slinks back in her throne an inch, giving him an apologetic glance. One he does not return.
Frenzied shadows lap at his ankles as he slowly steps up the platform. They must pick up on the quickening of his pulse, his intense concentration—all of which is currently directed at her. When he reaches the top, it is to place his hands on the arms of her throne, leaning down so as to peer into her face. It is intimidating. It is thrilling. Trapped beneath him in this position, exactly where he wants her to be.
“You know how I value your compliance,” he says, the syllables whisper soft, each one spun like glass. “But I think, pet, you have forgotten who’s in charge.”
Her throat bobs, and his eyes flicker briefly towards the movement—predator tracking prey.
She allows a small, deferential nod.
He hums again, mirroring with a nod of his own. “I blame myself, my propensity for...leniency with you, of course,” he reaches up to curl a lock of her hair, the movement almost tender. “You have that marvelous stubborn streak—I don’t mind it, believe me. But I’d hate for it to rot what we’ve built, hm?”
“Yes,” she pauses, calculating. The next words cause her to blush—mostly because she’s never spoken them aloud without a note of heavy sarcasm, and now it sounds filthy without it. “Moi soverenyi.”
Alina dares to look up at him from beneath the fringe of her lashes; he stiffens with realization as the name washes over him, knuckles going white. She doesn’t need to see in the dark to know what an effect it has on him. What effect she has on him.
“Alina,” he says, mostly to himself, as he tips up her jaw. Inspecting her face—for what, she doesn’t know. “My little, disobedient wife. What am I going to do with you?”
Forcing herself to level his gaze, Alina drowns in the slate grey of his eyes.
But It’s not anger in their depths. Not as he sinks to his knees. Or as the hem of her nightgown rises up past her thighs, as he nudges her legs apart to settle between them, one tossed over his shoulder.
“I-I thought you were going to punish me,” Alina blurts, cheeks feeling warm, hands curling into the fabric bunched beneath them, desperate to hold on to something.
Her husband arches a brow, pulling her bare hips to the edge of the throne in one brisk movement.
“I mean,” she quickly amends. “This is fine too.”
“Pleasure and punishment seem to be one in the same, where you’re concerned,” he mutters, nose skimming the inside of her thigh. He has done this countless times, yet she still feels unprepared, bracing for the velvet of his tongue where she’s most vulnerable.
“And I should,” his fingers trace the seam of her cunt in a slow stroke; skimming the tiniest bit of slick, pulling his hand back to inspect the way her arousal glinted in the pale light of the moon. “I should take you over my knee, make it so you can’t sit for a week. And we’ll have time for that. But it’s so...provincial, isn’t it? Too simple for my darling Alinochka,” he draws wet fingertips to his mouth, sucks one clean. “She won’t fall for my tricks.”
She swallows. She’d very much like to fall for his tricks.
“You want to leave me,” he croons, bent forward, licking her core just for the taste, Alina’s gasp lost to the night. “I’ll let you walk out the gate tonight.”
Alina bites down on an impatient noise as the heat of his mouth descends on her for another moment, then two, tongue moving in a slow circle before retreating. When he pulls away, she’s helpless to watch as he places a neat, chaste kiss against her exposed clit.
“All you have to do is...not come.”
She blinks, startled. Trying to make sense of the words. “What?”
“Let’s say an hour. I’m feeling very generous, milaya.”
“I don’t—I don’t understand.”
“This is my bargain,” he flattens a hand on her abdomen. A single finger probes gently at her entrance, seeking more of her arousal as he speaks. “We’re going to stay here until the hour is up—whereupon you can...run off to wherever you like—or until you’ve come on my tongue. But if you come? You stay here with me in the palace.”
Alina shivers. “You’d just. Let me leave? That’s it?”
“My darling girl, I’ve never lied to you,” he says, so earnestly she almost believes it.
The Darkling does not make bets he cannot win. Well, they’d see about that—his arrogance had finally reached it’s apex, only to bite him in the ass. She tries not to let him see her grin; this would be easy, almost too—
The noise that comes out of her could be classified as a squeak, or a moan, or something completely inhuman. Either way it echoes loudly, obscenely into the cavernous hall, until Aleksander is forced to lean back on his heels with a smirk, beard slick at his chin.
“Lapushka,” he chides. “You’ll wake the whole wing,” he does another damnably sinful thing with his tongue. “At least make an effort.”
And oh—she has gravely miscalculated, underestimated his obsession with being one step ahead. Because he has knelt before his little saint many times, but never like this. Never revealed his hand the way he is now, hot mouth teasing and sucking like everything that’s come before this moment was mere practice, a snowflake before the avalanche.
“Ha—Alek-ksander,” her head thumps against the golden sun behind her head. What was it she wanted to say next—admonishment? Encouragement? Apparently she has forgotten the entirety of human language, only capable of another loud moan as he soothes her clit with soft, lavish sucking.
The vibration of his answering hm? shudders through her core: her thighs twitch as she clenches down, spine tense as a bowstring. She hates the sight of her slender leg strewn over the bulk of his shoulders, his large hands holding her hips still as he takes and takes her pleasure. Her small hands buried in that messy hair, the color of ink.
“Something wrong, pet?” He leans back after a particularly loud wail on her part, eyes nearly black, mouth glistening. Replaces the stroke of his tongue with a thick knuckle traced over her clit.
Her toes curl at the new sensation, body ever responsive to his touch. Alina shakes her head furiously, using every ounce of her will not to shove him back down by the hair.
“You’re not going to come already, are you?” He mocks, now pushing that spit-slick finger within her body until the metal of his ring sits at her entrance. He does not break his gaze when he finds that sweet spot, flexing lightly until she whimpers through clenched teeth for him.
“Ah, is that good?” He purrs, triumph shining in his eyes. “Do you like it when I touch you here?” Another slow stroke, another whine. “It’s alright. You can tell me.”
Alina allows a nod, trying to breathe as her muscles coil even tighter, ferrying her along a thread only he can pull.
He tsks, painfully nonchalant. “Use your words, Alina.”
“Yes,” she whispers, feeling the mess beginning to collect beneath her, on the throne. Will it still be damp when morning comes? Will the courtiers know when they look upon the Queen of Ravka, how he made her fall apart?
“Yes what?”
To her credit, Alina does not roll her eyes. “Moi soverenyi.”
Her husband makes a pleased, uncomplicated noise. Another finger joins the first as reward, stretching her open further. “Good girl,” he kisses her thigh, beard rubbing her skin raw. “I know, poor thing. You’re terribly overwhelmed. But you can keep going.”
“No—“
“Drippy little cunt,” he says, delighted, the thrust of fingers accompanied by an embarrassing wet noise, nearly drowning out her angry cry. “I should’ve known.”
Alina squirms, shoving at his shoulders: knows instantly that if his mouth found her center again, her orgasm would no longer be a question of if but rather when. Again she underestimates him: the way he chuckles before pinning her wriggling limbs down, wrenching her legs open with little effort. How his shadows curl at her wrists and ankles to assist, firm shackles borne of that void within his bones.
“Please,” she begs raggedly, not sure what for. Hopes he won’t make her admit the truth, or acknowledge the current of terror that would come with it.
“Shh,” he murmurs, cradling her face in his warm palm. “Stay still. No tears now, liybimaya. You’ll take what you’re given.”
“But—“
“Mercy,” he leans up to kiss her wet cheek, completely remorseless. “Is for saints.”
The shadows hold fast when his mouth returns to her cunt: Alina hiccups, hips bucking helplessly against his face. With his fingers back inside, he strokes the spot he knows intimately—in tune with how his tongue circles over her swollen clit. He seems content to stay on his knees forever, ignoring her continued protests in favor of coaxing out more of her arousal.
And maybe it is a kind of mercy: to take what she can’t give without losing herself too. To play her villain, as he’d promised years ago. Keep her in this palace so she doesn’t have to admit—
“Ah, ah—Aleksander,” she watches his dark head dip between her thighs, free hand splayed over her belly. “I’m—I’m—“
“Mhm,” the squelch of his fingers makes her blush, the words spoken against her skin. “I guess you don’t really want to leave after all.”
She jerks in his grasp. “N-n—that’s—“
“Hush, pet,” he answers slowly, voice fond, unaffected by tears. “You’re going to have a nice little orgasm on this throne I made you, and you’re going to stay. Right. Here. With me.”
An impossibly sweet coil at the base of her spine knots tight; her body is no longer her own, pulled over the crest of climax by his mouth. She twists in her bonds as much as she can, trying to hold back, clenching tightly around his intruding fingers, but it’s useless. The Darkling licks through it until she’s just a mess of a girl, overstimulated and crying for relief, body wracked with tremors.
She hardly even notices when the shadows disperse, when her husband gathers her up in his arms to sit on his twin throne, cock working greedy into her cunt where she sits on his lap. How he licks the salt from her cheeks, cooing at her sniffling, pliant submission.
Alina falls boneless against him as he thrusts, arms around his neck, unable to do much else but agree with the filth streaming from his lips. My sweet little wife, he murmurs, was that all you needed?
Yes, yes, yes, she hiccups.
You need only ask.
Content to press into the fever-warm hands that squeeze her breasts, her waist, tug at her hair to arch her back, Alina only buries her face into his neck. Even now she’s not immune to the power of the teather: every touch makes magic shift beneath her skin, amplified by Aleksander himself.
“Aleksander,” she tries, head lolling as he rocks into her.
“No.”
She bites her lip, too exhausted for frustration. “Moi soveren—“
“Try again, lapushka.”
A man with too many names, her husband. She tries to think of the one that hides the least.
“Sasha,” she clings to him, bucking her hips, feeling the shiver that crawls up his spine. The name unfolds him with deathly precision, ruthless, leaving nothing in it’s wake. His thrusts grow feral, almost punishing.
“Good,” his eyes are glassy as he licks his lips. “Good girl.”
The praise feels like the sun itself, and Alina can feel it’s light from within, from each press of his fingertips as if they were clenched over her heart. “Sasha. Moi Khoroshii. Please, come.”
Shuddering, he releases with a grunt, buried sloppy and wet inside her. There’s that rush of warmth deep in her cunt while he cups the back of her head, cradling her tightly against his chest. More unhurried kisses marked along her shoulder, an endless litany of mineminemine echoing with sated satisfaction in the bond.
He does not let her go until his panting evens out, until his sweat-damp brow has cooled. He does not let her go until the storm outside dies in the morning light.
He does not let her go.
“Alina.”
“Hm?”
“Stay through winter, this time,” he mumbles into her hair, oaky voice soaked with sleep. One heavy arm remains slung over her body. The weight of it is immeasurable.
She stares at him in the dark, and does not answer.